Tsundoku Reader

A blog on Japanese books, mostly untranslated, that deserve a wider audience outside of Japan

本心

December 9, 2021 / / 5 Comments

With「本心」, Keiichiro Hirano (平野 啓一郎) has written a big, old-fashioned novel of ideas. It is set in the 2040s in a Japan in which a tenuous daily life is dominated by AI, and “voluntary death” has been legalized. Through the efforts of Sakuya, his main character, to create a virtual reality version of his mother, Hirano plays with his theory of “dividualism,” the idea that we are different depending on who we are with and the environment we are in. These unique selves make up who we are, without a single “true” self at our core. But this novel is not simply scaffolding for Hirano’s theories or social concerns—it is also a mystery and a bildungsroman.

And it is also a quest, as Sakuya tries to track down people from his mother’s past, including an elderly author who could be his father, to try and identify his mother’s 本心 (true self), as well as figure out why she had wanted to die a “voluntary death.” She had wanted Sakuya’s blessing and he couldn’t provide that, and in the end, she was killed indirectly by a drone used by a supermarket for grocery delivery. Crows had attacked the drone (a worsening problem), the drone crashed to the ground, and his mother fell into a ditch from the shock (the government has no budget for road repairs). This is representative of the indirect way Hirano describes this future Japan—tantalizing little hints that I collected together to form a scary picture. Society had fallen into a state of learned helplessness when it came to climate change. Every typhoon season, the wealthy fled the country, leaving everyone else to seek refuge at evacuation centers or just burrow in like scared animals, with more and more homes collapsing with every storm. People use virtual reality to escape all of this misery, but time in virtual spaces also provokes discontent and desires that can’t be satisfied.

Sakuya himself works as a real avatar, essentially renting his body out to other people (the client can wear a headset so that they can see everything that Sakuya sees through his camera-equipped goggles). He makes deliveries, and carries out tasks that others can’t or won’t (his workload increases when contagious diseases are going around). Sometimes he feels he’s providing an important service, like when he is hired by a man to be an avatar for his elderly father to visit all the childhood haunts the old man can no longer get to. Overall, however, his job is dangerous and puts him at the mercy of his clients. One day, after a malicious client has sent him chasing around the city on a dangerously hot day searching for the perfect melon, Sakuya stops by a convenient store for water and finds himself defending the young employee from a bully yelling at her to “go back to her own country” if she can’t speak proper Japanese. A video of this incident ends up on the Internet, and changes his life. It leads to his introduction to Iffy, a reclusive and wealthy avatar designer who turns out to be a paralyzed young man in a wheelchair. But ultimately it also gives Sakuya some clarity about what he might want to do with his life, so that the reader is left with a little hope at the end of the novel. (Hirano is very interested in the problem of the children of migrants who grow up without being truly literate in either their “native” language or the language of the country in which they now live, preventing them from communicating well with people around them, and he sees this problem in Japan as well.)

Whatever the implications of Hirano’s theory about our multiple selves might be, Sakuya seems to have a core that he has stayed true to throughout his life. He drops out of middle school after a long and fruitless protest against the expulsion of one of his classmates when the school finds out that she is working as a prostitute to support her family. He invites his mother’s young co-worker to come and live with him when her apartment is destroyed in a typhoon, and when Iffy falls in love with her, he acts as honest middleman even though he is beginning to have feelings for her as well. He stands by his co-worker, who is caught up in a plot to deliver a bomb and blow up government ministers. Sakuya is occasionally naïve—which is actually refreshing in a future in which marriage is seen as just a way to improve your financial outlook—but always acts with integrity, which makes the future Hirano depicts look less uniformly dispiriting.

There are also beautiful, poetic sections in「本心」, as when he describes visiting a waterfall that was meaningful to his mother, or the unworldly experience of being in a virtual space, or the split-identity feeling of having someone control his actions when he works as a real-life avatar. In one very long section of the book, Hirano combines both horror and poetry in his description of Sakuya’s experience with Enki, a virtual reality experience that takes the user through 30 billion years of the universe’s history, starting with the Big Bang. Using his headset, Sakuya floats in the endless black for 100 light years, until he breaks through the atmosphere like a meteorite and falls into the ocean. He sees the strange animals of the Cambria period, the shadows of flying dinosaurs, homo erectus on the savanna. As soon as humans begin to spread across the earth, the landscape changes in a flash. In dizzying series of images, he witnesses the aurora borealis in the far north, an infant after birth, trench warfare, brothels, rock concerts, 9-11, children playing in parks, nuclear warfare, anime, an afternoon at the seashore, a pile of garbage. Then he is in the future, standing in the burning Amazon, then a tiny island submerged in the Pacific, talking to robots indistinguishable from humans. Humanity has gone extinct, and he watches buildings, submerged in greenery, collapsing with a boom. As he floats in space again, Sakuya feels nostalgia for all the people that no longer existed. And it left him asking what his thoughts even meant in the scope of 30 billion years; what did it matter if he lived honestly or committed crimes? And yet he came away with the sense that his fragile existence was a miracle. I still don’t know if this virtual experience was horrifying or beautiful, but it left me feeling that this world can really break your heart.

The “voluntary death” system that Hirano explores in 「本心」was another disquieting part of the book. The phrase has to be enclosed in quotation marks because there are legitimate doubts as to whether it can ever be truly voluntary. Sakuya is convinced that it can’t have been his mother’s 本心 to die in this way because  her generation had been treated as a burden for the future from the time they came of age, and as they reached old age they felt the brunt of society’s hatred. Books, the medical establishment and the government all glorified “voluntary death,” creating a situation in which it was impossible to truly choose for oneself.

This graph shows the poverty rate for elderly women in Japan. The lowest line represents women with spouses, the red line just above represents men in general, the purple line represents women whose spouse has died, and the red line at the top represents women who have never married or are divorced. Source: Asahi Shinbun

And unfortunately, Hirano seems to be a bit of a fortune teller. The Asahi Shimbun’s podcast recently broadcast an interview with the author of an article reporting on the results of a study showing that about half of all single women in Japan aged 65 or older (2.9 million women) would be living below the poverty line in about forty years. These women belong to Japan’s “lost generation” (Sakuya’s mother would have been part of this generation)—people who entered the work force between 1993 and 2005, after the economic bubble collapsed, and struggled to find jobs. Due to Japan’s unique employment system, in which college students are recruited simultaneously straight from university, failure to find a job during this single hiring season can set you back for the rest of your life. This was exacerbated by deregulation during the Koizumi administration that allowed companies to hire people on short-term contracts. Women were more likely than men to end up in these temporary jobs, which don’t qualify them for the employee pension insurance plan. And rather than call for a reform to Japan’s employment system itself, which still assumes that women will be supported by husbands with higher salaries, women wrote into the Asahi Shimbun saying that they hoped Japan would have introduced an assisted suicide system by the time they reach old age (you can read the article summarizing the comments here, and listen to the podcast [in Japanese] here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 [fittingly, the third episode is called “How to Prevent a Dystopian Future for Aging Japan”]).

Sometimes we can read dystopian novels as if they were thrillers, just another creative work of imagination; the plot of「本心」 cannot be comfortably ignored in this way. Read it for the poetry of the writing, to open your mind, and to think about some big philosophical ideas, but don’t dismiss it as fiction.

College students at a job fair at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

This novel has not yet been translated into English, but two of Hirano’s previous novels are available in English: At the End of the Matinee, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, and A Man, translated by Eli K.P. William.

No Ordinary Summer

November 30, 2021 / / 3 Comments

I love reading; it’s my favorite thing to do. I know I’m not alone in this—luckily, there is a whole tribe of us out there, people who understand the complicated calculus our brains go through to figure out what book(s) to bring along while we brush our teeth and wash our faces and take baths (it must be light enough to hold but also lie flat). And surely I’m not the only who has hidden from my children, hoping no one will ask for dinner until I finish my book (that book, by the way, was 「ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟」by 東野圭吾, an otherwise forgettable novel but a great example of addictive plot structures). One of my husband’s many lovely qualities is that he never raises an eyebrow when more books appear in the house (although once—only once—he gently suggested that I adopt a “just-in-time” inventory system for books, and was alarmed to find that the linen closets no longer shelve linens). But although I read as much and as widely as I can, in two languages, it is still rare to find a book that truly sparks something—a flicker of recognition, a sense that I have found a perspective or way of looking at the world that slots right into an empty spot in my brain.

I found this in a novel called 『これはただの夏』[Just an Ordinary Summer] by 燃え殻 (Moegara), which I read, appropriately, on a hot summer day in Portland, just when things were (briefly) opening up. I started it in a coffee shop and finished it in a hotel bar, started it all over again, and then ordered everything he had previously published. When it comes down to it, his appeal for me lies in the way he makes sense of the world and finds solace in all of its messiness and sadness. In the introduction to his second book of essays, 『夢に迷って、タクシーを呼んだ』[Got Lost in a Dream, Called a Taxi], Moegara describes a walk he took one day to try and find inspiration ahead of an essay deadline. He found it in a pig’s foot inexplicably lying in the middle of the street in a neighborhood of love hotels. This account perfectly illustrates the appeal of Moegara’s writing: he is endlessly curious about the grotesque and the mundane, and finds interest and even a kind of romance in both.

Moegara; Source: Softbank News

Moegara took a circuitous path to the writing profession. A fairly hopeless student, he went to a third-rate vocational school and then worked in an éclair factory and as cleaning staff at a love hotel, among other jobs, before finding permanent work in a TV production company. He began writing on Twitter under the name “Moegara” (which means “embers” and comes from a song of the same name by Yasuyuki Morigome) and attracted attention for the lyricism and self-deprecating humor of his tweets. As Moegara tells it, Kazuhiro Ozawa, part of the comedy duo Speed Wagon, sent him a message via Twitter and asked if he wanted to meet up at a creperie (I love that detail) to talk. They ended up back at Ozawa’s house, where they began talking books and realized they both liked the author Takehiro Higuchi. Ozawa offered to throw a birthday party for Moegara (this is just hours after they’ve met for the first time), and at this party, Ozawa introduces him to Higuchi as a surprise. Apparently their conversation about novels and pro wrestling was enough to convince Higuchi that Moegara should start writing. So when they get together for drinks later, Higuchi calls his editor (at 2am) to arrange for Moegara to begin writing a weekly serial on cakes (you can still read Moegara’s writing here, including the first chapter of his first novel).

 

The poster for the film version of 『ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった』, which can be found on Netflix as “We Couldn’t Become Adults.”

This became the novel『ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった』[We Never Grew Up], published in 2017 when Moegara was 43. From the vantage point of middle age, the narrator recalls the period in his early 20s when he met someone he came to love more than himself and began working for a scruffy start-up TV production company. Moegara has been dubbed “the Reiwa era’s Murakami,” and while I think this reflects the media’s need to cubbyhole every newly popular author, Norwegian Woods and 『ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった』are similar in that the main character in both have lost someone, and must live with this pain and regret. This novel became a major bestseller (it sold out so quickly that bookshops would issue announcements via Twitter whenever they managed to get new stock in and asked that everyone restrict themselves to a single copy). It was also made into a movie, released in theaters and on Netflix worldwide in November 2021 (I enjoyed it, especially as a chance to see Tokyo in the late 1990s again, but the movie adds a lot that is not in the book and to me, the main character has none of the bumbling charm that he has in the novel).

Moegara mined his own past for this first novel, which is largely autobiographical. In his second,『これはただの夏』[Just an Ordinary Summer], published in July 2021, he picks up with the same narrator several years on, still struggling to perform the role of a “normal” adult, and gives him the chance to experience family life for a brief interlude. Through a strange series of events, Akiyoshi is made responsible for Akina, a little girl in his apartment building who is arguably more mature than he is. Yuka, a woman he met at a wedding who turns out to be a sex worker, rounds out their pseudo-family, and Ozeki, a TV director Akiyoshi works with who has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, provides running commentary from his hospital bed. Akiyoshi has always felt that he is merely (clumsily) acting the role of an adult but, if only to show Akina that adults haven’t made a complete hash of it, Akiyoshi and Yuka begin to take the game a little more seriously.

A poem in a picture; Source: 松本慎一

Beyond these four main characters, Moegara packs a large cast of characters into the 200 pages of this novel, none of whom seem to have traditional jobs and at least three of whom work in the shadier side of the entertainment business. In that sense, Moegara can be read as a successor to Nagai Kafu, who filled his novels with prostitutes, geisha, and cabaret dancers, but Moegara describes the hostesses and sex workers who appear in both of his novels in a matter-of-fact, straightforward way, with no prurient fascination to cloud his depictions. He uses this cast of people living outside of traditional social units to bring into sharper focus his themes of family, death and what it means to be an adult. Some of these characters are part of Akiyoshi’s everyday life, and some surface from his memories, which are as real to him as his physical environment: single mothers, supporting their children by working at snack bars; the outcasts from Saitama, South Korea and Thailand who have washed up on an island to work as hostesses; an elementary school classmate who became a hikikomori (shut-in). Akiyoshi is also tortured by the memory of finding the bodies of a co-worker who died of overwork and a client who killed himself. In that sense, this novel is about two kinds of partings: the absolute divergence brought about by death, and separations that feel as final as a death, with the end of summer marking these partings.

And yet for some reason, this novel is quite funny, with flavors of humor as varied as the characters. Akiyoshi’s phone conversations with his mother, who just wants him to lead a “normal” life, are instantly recognizable as the unintentionally ridiculous monologue of any self-righteous parent. Yuka and Akina are merciless in mocking Akiyoshi, and Ozeki’s bluster adds gusts of energy, even though he is dying. A pair of comedians repeatedly pop up throughout the novel in videos, the radio and TV, effectively playing the role of Shakespeare’s court jesters by propelling the plot along, setting the mood, and revealing secrets within their riffs.

『これはただの夏』is set in summer 2018, two years before the Olympics were scheduled to begin in Tokyo, and Moegara weaves the Olympics into the background, overheard and overseen in the form of radio announcements, comedy routines and posters. The reader also knows that, though Moegara may stress that this is an “ordinary” summer, it is one of the last such summers before the pandemic quashed our idea of “ordinary.” The notion of brevity is implicit in summer; in music and literature, summer is a period of release from quotidian constraints, but always with the understanding that it will end. When the novel begins, we know the ending already, which makes the short-lived ties Akiyoshi forms bitter-sweet.

If you’d like a taste of Moegara’s essays, which deserve a post of their own, you can listen to an actress read several here. Moegara also has a podcast with the adult movie director Hitoshi Nimura (even if you don’t understand Japanese very well, their voices are so soothing that it is like a lullaby).

 

 

 

Finding Tokyo’s soul in sento

October 20, 2021 / / 2 Comments

「メゾン刻の湯」　小野美由紀, 2018

Maison Toki no Yu, by Miyuki Ono, 2018

In my quest for books set at sento or onsen, I ran across 「メゾン刻の湯」by Miyuki Ono. When Ono had a mental health breakdown and had quit her job, she lost out on the human interaction it had provided. She was living in a cheap apartment without a bath at the time, so every day she went to Hachimanyu Sento in her Yoyogi neighborhood. There she found a different kind of society, one in which people from all ranks of life soak in the bath together. Realizing that everyone is the same once they strip off their clothes gave Ono a real sense of security, and she wanted to write a novel about this experience of stepping away from the constraints of society and finding a refuge.

Miyuki Ono at Kosigiyu, a sento in Tokyo’s Koenji neighborhood

The resulting novel begins on the day Mahiko Minato graduates from college without a job and his apartment lease about to expire. His friend Choko, a half-Malaysian, half-Japanese woman, pushes him to accept a job and accommodations at a dilapidated century-old sento. His roommates/co-workers find it just as hard as Mahiko does to fit in to Japanese society. There is Akira, a former wunderkind in the IT industry who now sleeps in a tiny closet under the stairs; Gospi, a talented software engineer who feels more comfortable in women’s clothing; Ryu, a hair stylist who lost his leg in a childhood accident; and Choko, who has thrown over a prestigious job to become a “courtesan,” as she calls it. The sento’s owner, Totsuta, watches over them all benevolently but offers little practical help. (Typically, when Gospi complains about the noise that Choko and her “clients” make at night, Totsuta’s only comment is that love is the source of creativity, as witness Wagner and Picasso’s masterpieces, inspired by the heartache their mistresses caused.)

The typical smokestack of a sento, in this case the smokestack of Kikusui-yu, a sento in Bunkyo ward that closed in 2015. Source: Bunkyoyouth.com

When Mahiko worries about his future, Totsuta also reminds Mahiko of all the novels written about people who drop out of the real world for a while and then return. Mahiko thinks of society as a monolithic, impregnable world manufactured by people in black suits, but there is an entirely different society at the sento. Looking out at everyone from the bath, Mahiko realizes that there’s not much difference between all the naked bodies, no matter the age, height, skin color, beauty or lack thereof. He had never felt like this in a packed train, where everyone holds their breath and tries to avoid contact, but once he had stripped down and was soaking in the bath, he had a different perspective on his neighbors.

Mahiko also begins to notice his surroundings differently. He takes long walks, initially accompanying Totsuta at his request, but later on his own as well. He notices things that had never entered his field of sight before, particularly discarded wood that would burn well and buildings about to be dismantled (the sento’s baths are heated with a wood fire—if they had to pay for fuel, the sento would have gone under long before). This is reflected in Ono’s writing, which seems to slow down as Mahiko looks outward in a more relaxed way. He has time to notice the way “the angled sun stained half of the living room floor, with the shadow dividing the room into day and night demarcated between Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé on the bookshelf.” Lounging on the engawa (a veranda running along the outside of a traditional Japanese house and something I covet) on an August evening, he listens to a baseball game on an ancient radio, and compares the sound produced by the speakers to the roughness of a cat’s tongue. He notices that “the sunlight lit up the trees and plants in the yard, dissolving all the time in this world and then crystallizing it again to create one perfect moment,” and wonders if perhaps people feast on fleeting moments of beauty like this for the rest of their lives.

Tsuki no Yu, a sento in Tokyo’s Bunkyo ward that opened in 1927 and closed in 2015; Source: Tokyosento.com

These moments punctuate the many dramas that beset Mahiko and his friends. Totsuta’s grandson, Ryota, who is abandoned at the sento by his mother and is then bullied at school. Gospi is outed on social media as a crossdresser, another roommate becomes involved with a cultish company, and as if that weren’t enough, there are other back stories involving parricide, a religious cult, and discrimination. It might sound overdone to pack so much into a single novel, but I think Ono’s point is that a sento and shared house are some of the only places where people who don’t fit into Japanese society, whether because of their age, background, or physical limitations, can find acceptance (there are even sento that set special hours for people with different gender identities).

The author, Miyuki Ono, and Yusuke Hiramatsu, the third-generation owner of Kosugiyu; Source: Livedoor

For the elderly people who frequent the sento, it is one of the few places where they feel comfortable, but they cause an uproar every day. They all seem to be on the verge of dementia (or over the edge) and totter around the sento on legs as skinny as branches, throwing away their dentures in the garbage and then claiming they’d disappeared, leaving the building clad only in their underwear, and fainting from the heat of the baths. One elderly man even begins to wander into their living quarters just in time for dinner. (In a conversation with Ono, Yusuke Hiramatsu, the owner of Kosugiyu, a sento in Koenji, notes that events aimed at getting older people out into the community generally fail to attract men, but the key exception is outings to sento.)

The novel’s main drama involves the tenuous future of the sento. Mahiko finds records showing that about 1,000 people came to the sento on July 20, 1963. Most homes didn’t have baths, making regular visits to the sento an integral part of their lives and guaranteeing profits for sento. The reality is very different now, and when the sento requires expensive repairs to survive, Mahiko and the others marshal their skills and ingenuity to try and save it. The historical value of the building and its value as a community resource meant nothing to Mahiko—the building just looks run-down to him and it was just coincidence that he’d ended up living in this part of Tokyo. But he knew that some places have significance just by existing in this world, and he felt that the time he and countless others had spent there would all be lost when the roof tiles, the plumbing and the smokestack were pulled up.

This painting of Mt. Fuji on the walls of Tsuki no Yu is now in a museum in Fuji. Source: Jibun Magazine

As Mahiko and his friends get the word out about Toki no Yu, they attract visitors from the media, academia and the community. A professor at an art school brings his students to admire the central wooden pillar holding up the roof, and mourns the way old buildings are being thoughtlessly pulled down. “The city will no doubt be more convenient and comfortable for people from outside of Tokyo. But it’s different for people who continue to live here and see the destruction of what they truly need as the city is transformed.” After the war, when sento were at their peak, there were 2,700 sento in Tokyo—more than the current number of Seven-Eleven convenient stores in the city. In 2017, this was down to 561, but still more than the number of McDonald restaurants (349, in case you were wondering). But numbers have fallen more steeply outside of Tokyo and Osaka, and there is only one sento left in Okinawa. There are many creative initiatives aimed at saving sento and making them integral parts of the community again, so there is still hope. I highly recommend this essay by Sam Holden on how “public baths made Tokyo what it is, and are needed to save its soul.”

Otomeyu, a sento that closed in 2013 after 60 years in business; Source: Furoyanoentotsu.com

Koenji Junjo Shotengai

September 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments

高円寺純情商店街　ねじめ正一

Koenji Junjo Shopping Street by Shoichi Nejime

This novel, first published in 1989, won the 101st Naoki Prize that year, and has proved so  popular that the name of the shopping street Nejime wrote about was officially changed from Koenji Ginza Shotengai to Koenji Junjo (Pure Heart) Shotengai after the title of his novel.

The arch at one end of the Koenji Junjo Shotengai Source: kosugiyu.co.jp

Writing in the third person, Nejime describes his parents’ store and their neighbors in Koenji in the early 1960s, and although the six stories are told with great humor, this is not one of those rose-colored recollections of simpler times. In these stories, kittens born to stray cats are drowned, stores battle cockroaches and flies, families intervene when their sons get involved with the wrong women, and the public bathhouse is a place to get clean, not a place to soak.

A map of the Koenji Shotengai in 1959 and 2021. Source: www.kouenji.or.jp

They were also prey to the elements in a way that we are not. Nejime’s family ran a store selling dried goods like katsuobushi (smoked and fermented tuna that his father shaved into thin flakes), konyaku, kombu, salt, dried fish and black sugar. This meant that  Nejime’s mother spent the summer months battling humidity, which was fatal for the sheets of nori (seaweed) that they sold. You knew summer had arrived because the fly paper (bought in bulk) was hung from the ceiling. Mold grew on the katsuobushi—a pretty pink mold on the good quality katsuobushi and a black mold on the lower quality kind (the prettier the mold, the higher quality the katsuobushi). The winter brought relief to Nejime’s family, but meant chilblains and frostbite for the fishmonger and his family next door.

In “Midwinter Goldfish,” Nejime describes a fire that breaks out in the neighborhood. Storeowners worked together to put out the fire, and when they finally do arrive, the firemen are greeted with alarm rather than relief. The cracks in these old wooden buildings mean that the water they spray without discrimination could destroy the stock of Nejime’s family’s dried goods store, not to mention the futon shop and clothing shop. Tubs of water kept near the door in case of fire were also home to goldfish, which prevented mosquito larva from proliferating. The goldfish were tossed onto the fire along with the water, and at the end of this vignette, Nejime and his friend try to rescue any that are still alive. In another story, they try to hide the kittens born to a stray cat until they are too old to easily drown.

Inari-yu, a sento in Kita-ku, Tokyo, that dates back to 1915. The organization Sento & Neighborhood is currently working to restore this sento, which has been registered as a national tangible cultural property in Japan and as an endangered cultural site by the World Monuments Fund. Source: Tokyo Sento

“Mt. Fuji’s Sweat” describes Nejime’s very reluctant trip to the sento (public bathhouse). He had managed to avoid bathing for 10 days while the bath at home was being renovated, but finally even he had to recognize that he smelled. This is no romantic picture of a sento—this is a place where people go to get clean in a time when many homes didn’t have baths. Worst of all, this was the sento run by his classmate’s family, and the classmate herself is sitting at the bandai, collecting money, with a clear view into both the men’s and women’s baths. He not only has to avoid her gaze as he strips down, but has to navigate the steamy, slippery bath room filled with naked bodies of all shapes and sizes. It’s so crowded that the water the men toss over their heads splashes against him. Nejime finally finds an empty faucet, only to realize that the reason this place is unoccupied is that the drains run right next to it, sending an endless stream of hair and soap scum over his feet. An old man pushes his way through and removes his dentures to clean in the wash basin at Nejime’s feet, leaving bits of the nori he’d had for dinner behind in the water. Little kids dash in and jump like cannonballs into the paths. I loved this picture of the sento because it reminded me that they are (or at least were) real places and not just historical buildings to be saved from destruction or places where everyone is over 80.

A woman sitting at the bandai at Inari-yu Source: Tokyo Sento

A reviewer of this book recollected that he had moved to Koenji because the poet Chuya Nakahara had lived there (Nejime is also a poet), but after actually living there for himself, he realized that this was hardly a quiet neighborhood of poets. It is now known for its secondhand clothing shops, its bars, its “rock-n-roll” atmosphere. People live, play and work here, with all the messiness that goes with that. The reviewer wrote that if you go to the plaza by the north exit of Koenji Station at night, you will hear old men and teenagers hurling abuse at each other, novice musicians singing about loneliness, and foreigners getting drunk, all to the backdrop of the thud and grind of skateboarders. Judging from Nejime’s book, it has not changed much from his time.

Kosugiyu, a sento in Koenji, has a gorgeous website that is worth a look if only for the photography. They also have in-depth interviews with several people who work in the Koenji area, including Suguru Karino, whose bookstore/izakaya I previously wrote about. There is also an interview with Miho Rayson, who used to be an ordinary company employee but became so besotted with Kosiguyu that she quit her job to work there. And if you want to get involved in saving sento, you can join Sento & Neighborhood, a non-profit organization that restores sento and does other outreach work.

The Mad City

September 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

「出会い系サイトで70人と実際に会ってその人に合いそうな本をすすめまくった1年間のこと」、花田菜々子

My Year of Meeting 70 People in Real Life via an Online Matching Site and Recommending the Perfect Book, by Nanako Hanada

I read this book when it was first published in 2018, drawn by the title and the fluorescent yellow cover, and read it again this year when it was made into a TV drama in Japan. You can read this book on many different levels—as a field journal of one woman’s experience on a matching site, a list of book recommendations, a primer on the bookselling industry—but it’s also just a great story of how roughly 70 strangers gave Nanako the courage to do what she knew all along she wanted to do.

The actress Miori Takimoto reading the book on which the drama is based. Source: WOWOW

The book starts with Nanako at her lowest point: killing time at a family restaurant at 2am, trying to decide where to stay for the night now that she’s left her husband and their home. She’s been essentially homeless for a week, and she chooses her accommodations for the night based on her priority for that day: sleep a full night, do laundry, or save money. Although Nanako does rent an apartment soon after this, this experience forces her to realize how narrow her life had become—she had no friends outside of work colleagues, and her only hobbies were reading and making the rounds of bookstores.

Nanako decided to find a bigger world, which she did through a meet-up site (she refers to it as “X” in the book, but it was the matching site AUxAU). In these relatively early days of matching sites, people used the 30-minute meet-ups to fill time between meetings, build their network, or just share business ideas, not necessarily to find romance or sex. In her profile for X, Nanako wrote that she would make a personal book recommendation to everyone she met up with (she also makes the mistake of describing herself as a “sexy bookseller,” which leads to some unintended consequences). The first two men Nanako met ended up angling for sex, but she still enjoyed talking to them, and once veteran users taught her how to adjust her profile and screen people, she had better experiences. She met people who read her poems, performed magic tricks, lied outrageously and, yes, men who propositioned her, but also a woman who gives her a truly life-changing coaching session. Another man wrote an entire porn novel starring Nanako, which almost convinced her to give up on the site, but she also met a woman who had been abused by her boyfriend and was sheltered and given a new start by women she met through X. She made real friends too, including Endo, with whom she had such an instant rapport that they stayed up nearly all night talking.

Nanako and Endo often miss the last train and end up talking all night. Source: WOWOW

Walking through the city streets after meeting someone new, the streets that had seemed so cold and unforgiving seemed like a “mad city” full of fascinating people. And all these people who did not hesitate to do what they wanted to do gave her a glimpse of freedom. No one was shocked when she said she hated her job and wanted to quit. Nanako was a manager at the Village Vanguard, a job that had been her dream job at first. When she first found the Village Vanguard, she felt like she’d found her tribe. The stores were packed with books, manga, CDs, and creepy and surreal novelty goods. Yellow post-it notes scrawled with comments that seemed aimed at making people laugh rather than to sell anything were slapped onto books and CDs. Nanako loved this chaos, but the company’s culture changed as they opened branches in big suburban malls and consumer preferences changed. Cheap kitsch began to account for a higher percentage of sales than books. Nanako felt like she’d devoted so much time to the Village Vanguard that she didn’t even know how to leave, but through X, she met people who thought nothing of quitting a job after two to three years, and she wanted to become that kind of person.

Nanako got to the point that she no longer felt uncomfortable talking to strangers, and began to think that the same methods that worked with X could work outside in the “real” world. She even got confident enough to just contact people she was interested in—writers, other booksellers—and ask if she could meet them. Ultimately, she even met Kenji Yamashita, a man she had idolized ever since she had first visited Gake Shobo, the bookstore in Kyoto that he ran until 2015.

X wasn’t a place where’d you meet people happy with their jobs, placidly married and content with their current situation. They were all people in the process of going somewhere else—changing jobs, starting companies, getting ready to travel around the world. Nanako describes her experience with X as something like climbing down a rope and then free diving down to the bottom of a lake, where she’d shake hands with a stranger once and then resurface, exhilarated and energized. Reading this book feels somewhat similar, and you might look at the people passing you in the street differently afterward.

Note on the drama: I was worried that the drama, which is a WOWOW production, would do disservice to the book because the promotional materials made it seem like the producers had tried to shoehorn the plot into a conventional romance structure. Luckily, the drama sticks very closely to the book, the best change being that we get the visuals that books can’t give us: lots of shots of bookshelves, bookstores, piles of books, and people reading. The recommendations that Nanako makes in the drama are remarkably faithful to those she makes in the book, but there are some updates and all of her choices are provocative and interesting.

Nanako Hanada herself. Source: Woman.excite.co.jp

Spinning while revolving

May 26, 2021 / / 1 Comment

「自転しながら公転する」　山本文緒

Spinning while revolving, by Fumio Yamamoto [no English translation available]

It takes real skill to write a novel that draws the reader (at least this reader) so completely into the preoccupations of a character who is often petty, self-involved and boring—in other words, completely ordinary. Yamamoto succeeds with her creation of Miyako, a person I found so real that she followed me around in my head all day, where we could endlessly hash out her problems. And Miyako certainly has problems. Now in her 30s, she has quit her job managing a high-end clothing store in Tokyo and moved back home at her father’s request to help her mother, who is suffering from a crippling depression brought on with the onset of menopause. Miyako is now working at a clothing store in an outlet mall and accompanying her mother to doctor’s appointments, all the while feeling lost in her own life.

The novel’s title comes from a discussion Miyako has on her first date with Kanichi, a man working at a cheap sushi restaurant in the same mall. Miyako has this rather endearing habit, which she demonstrates throughout the book, of spilling out the contents of her brain, even when it casts her in a bad light. With plenty of alcohol to loosen her tongue, Miyako tells Kanichi that she sometimes feels so resentful at the responsibilities she has been given that she thinks she will explode. She sees women doing a balancing act, juggling four or five different roles at the same time, and is sure that she is not skilled enough to be able to take care of housework and a family while working as well. Kanichi tells her that she’s essentially spinning while rotating, just like the earth. Oblivious to Miyako’s total confusion, he uses a toothpick and duck egg to show her how the earth spins at 465 meters per second and simultaneously moves around the sun, in a circular orbit, at a speed of about 30 kilometers per second. Even the sun doesn’t sit still, and so we never return to exactly the same spot in space Although Kanichi’s explanation is lost on Miyako (academics has never been her forte), this does sum up her situation. She wants time to stand still, but she is at an age where she must decide whether she wants to become a full-time company employee, marry, have children, take care of her mother, move out of the family home to live on her own…

In contrast to Miyako’s indecisiveness and nerves, we have Kanichi, who takes each day as it comes. He lives in a shabby but scrupulously clean apartment with no shower/bath or washing machine. He bathes at a sento, and gets his entertainment from the books he buys at a used bookstore. When he has a pile of them, he ties them up and puts them out for recycling—a minimalist before it became a trend. Since Miyako doesn’t read anything other than manga now and then, he buys a TV for her from the recycling shop. Miyako (and her family and friends) don’t know how to place him. Kanichi quit school after middle school and yet he’s obviously smart; he was a troublemaker when young, part of theヤンキー subculture, but he left a good job prospect to volunteer in areas hit hard by the 2011 earthquake, and a large percentage of his meager income goes to pay for his father’s nursing home care. Miyako has enough self-awareness to know that she uses her time and money exclusively for her own pleasures, so Kanichi gives her a confusing sense of inferiority. And yet, he doesn’t seem like “marriage material.”

A semi-gratuitous picture of a sento; this is Daikoku-yu near Oshiage Station in Tokyo. I imagined Kanichi going somewhere like this. Source: Tabi Labo

If this novel does have a central question, it would perhaps be whether Miyako will end up with Kanichi, but while this question drives the novel’s momentum, I think Yamamoto uses it to explore everything entangled in a woman’s decisions about her future. Miyako’s conversations with her friends were particularly interesting in this respect—long, sometimes painfully honest talks that were one of my favorite parts of the book. One friend is concerned that Miyako is running out of time if she wants to have a home and family and should leave Kanichi since he doesn’t have good job prospects, while another friend thinks Miyako is too narrow-minded and doesn’t see how kind and dependable Kanichi is. Her father firmly believes that there is no point in Miyako working and suggests that she should “grab a man with good earnings and let him take care of her.” He is convinced that she won’t be happy if she doesn’t have kids. Yamamoto seems to have put together a cast of characters large enough to represent all the different ways Miyako can live. But instead of motivating her, the range of options (compared to her mother, who had an arranged marriage and never worked) seems to overwhelm Miyako and push her into a passive stance.

And there is no doubt that these options come with threats. Miyako’s supervisor gets drunk and invites her to his hotel room, grabbing her breast (hard enough to leave bruises) to “sweeten” the invitation. Miyako’s manager, who is sleeping with this supervisor, witnesses the encounter, which adds another difficult dynamic to the situation. Miyako’s self-confidence takes another hit when an acquaintance tells her that men look at her chest, not her face, mocking her for having enough self-regard to actually think she was popular with men for any other reason.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Miyako might have been able to address her problems differently if she had a career that allowed her to make enough money to feel secure. This reminded me of 「うちの子が結婚しないので」(Our daughter isn’t married) by 垣谷美雨 (Miu Kakiya), about a woman who is beginning to think ahead to old age and is worried about her daughter’s future. Her daughter is unmarried, has no siblings or other close relatives, and works at a clothing store, where she doesn’t make enough to support herself. Helping her daughter find a husband is the only way she can think of to give her a secure future, and so she and her husband begin 親婚活 (marriage hunting carried out by the parents). Yamamoto and Kakiya’s novels add some nuance to ideas about “women’s empowerment.”

Sometimes this book made me feel as I were sitting in a coffee shop, surrounded by conversations about career choices, men and marriage, depression, throw-away fashion, sexual harassment, home loans, and Vietnamese cooking. You can read this novel on that level and find it really enjoyable. And I think you will also find that, when the talking dies down, you will be left with a picture of all the messy choices we make to get the life we end up with. As a reader, I find this muddle far more interesting than a false clarity. As Miyako says in the epilogue, set several decades later, “You don’t need to try so hard to be happy. If you’re determined to be happy, you won’t be able to put up with unhappiness. It’s ok to be a little unhappy. Life doesn’t go the way you expect.”

Idol, Burned

March 25, 2021 / / 0 Comments

『推し、燃ゆ』宇佐見りん

Idol, Burned, by Rin Usami

Rin Usami won the Akutagawa Prize for 『推し、燃ゆ』 (“Idol, Burned”) at the age of 21, as a second-year university student. In 2019, she won the Mishima Yukio Prize for her debut novel 『かか』(Kaka), becoming the youngest person ever to win this award. “Idol, Burned” is narrated by Akari, a high school student when the story begins. This first-person narration thrusts the reader into the uncomfortable position of having to see the world through the lens of her fixation on an idol and its mental and even physical effects. But the brilliance of this book is that, in less than 150 pages, Usami is also able to sketch vivid portraits of Akari’s mother and sister, and even the idol himself.

Like the narrators of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt, Akari doesn’t fit in and finds it difficult just to get through the day. A doctor diagnosed her with two conditions, which comforted Akari at first, but she no longer takes the medicine and doesn’t bother going to appointments. Everything seems difficult to her, a weight pushing her down. Talking to someone means you have to exert the muscles that will lift the corners of your mouth into a smile, just going through your day leaves you grimy so you have to take a bath, your nails grow and must be cut. Akari has to gather up all her energy just to accomplish the bare minimum, and yet it’s never enough—her will and physical strength give out before she’s done what she’s supposed to do.

The only thing Akari has energy for her is her “oshi” (the 推し of the title, referring to the idol she supports), the singer/songwriter Masaki Ueno who is a member of the group Mazama-za. Her first memory is of watching Masaki Ueno play Peter Pan when she was four. Her life seemed to start the moment he flew above her head, suspended on wires. But she didn’t become a fan until much later, when she was in high school and found an old DVD with the Peter Pan recording on it. She related to his desire to never grow up; his urging to escape to Neverland resonated with her.

Since then, Akari has accumulated over 20 files full of everything he has said on the radio, TV and elsewhere, all carefully transcribed and written down. She analyzes every word he says and posts her thoughts on her blog. This gives her a community of sorts. These fans live in different places and are different ages, but they greet each other when they wake up, complain about Mondays as they commute to work or school, and have online gatherings on Fridays when they post pictures of their idol and comment until late into the night.

Usami has spoken in interviews about the research she has done on fans, reading blogs and comments in chat rooms to learn about fandom in Japan. As she describes through Akari, some fans fawn over every action their idol makes, others say a true fan must know when to criticize. Some have romantic feelings for their idol and don’t care about their artistic work, while others venerate their idol’s work and don’t care about scandals; many just love the community that fandom gives them. Akari doesn’t want anything in return for her adulation. In fact, being separated by the screen on her TV or cell phone or the distance to the stage was gentle and forgiving. Nothing she could do could either hurt the relationship or draw them closer.

Akari has to work because being a devoted fan is expensive (for one thing, she always buys three sets of all Mazama-za’s cds—one to save, one to listen to and one to loan), but it is torture for her. Akari can’t process sudden changes or do more than one thing at a time, so working at a busy izakaya is just one obstacle after another. For example, when her boss isn’t around, a customer asks for a little extra in his drink on the house, but she can’t adapt on the spot; instead, she checks the price list and tells him the cost for a larger serving. And the more her boss tells her to calm down, the more flustered she gets, until eventually she feels like her circuit breaker is overloading and shutting down.

The first-person narrative style means that we see events through Akari’s eyes and have to guess at the other characters’ feelings based solely on her throwaway observations and other “clues” she accidentally gives us. From Akari’s perspective, her sister goes from understanding and protective to fed-up and angry in one disorienting instant, but the amazing thing about reading is that you can hold on to multiple viewpoints at the same time–we are not trapped in Akari’s head, but can merge her viewpoint with our own independent perspective to imagine how her family and boss may feel. Akari’s sister had tried to coach her through homework and shelter her from their mother’s anger, but becomes frustrated when Akari insists she is doing her best when the only thing she works hard at is following her idol. It gets to the point that she can no longer even bear to live with Akari anymore.

Akari’s mother initially seems unfeeling and cold toward her daughter, but Usami fills out the picture to create a more complex character, deserving of sympathy. Her own mother had constantly rejected her, and yet had demanded that she stay in Japan instead of going with her husband when he was posted overseas. She is dealing with a querulous, selfish mother in poor health and a troubled daughter with an obsession she can’t understand. Akari may offhandedly mention her mother’s debilitating headaches and late-night conversations with her older daughter, but it is clear to the reader that the entire family is struggling, while Akari lives in her fantasy world. Usami’s laundry list of all the sources of the mother’s stress—Akari quitting school, the increase in electricity rates, her aging mother’s deteriorating health, a new doctor who is not friendly enough, her employee’s inconvenient pregnancy, the plants on the verandah next door growing onto her own verandah, her husband’s infrequent visits home, the handle that had fallen off of a pot she had just bought—is almost funny in its pairing of the quotidian with the serious, but it left a clear picture of an overwhelmed woman with no one to lean on.

Usami explores the loneliness of the pop idol too. In an interview, Masaki relates how he realized from a young age that most people couldn’t differentiate between his fake laugh and a real laugh, and what he was thinking didn’t seem to get through at all. Not only did fans not understand, but the people in his immediate environment didn’t understand him. And so he writes songs, in the hope that maybe someone out there will get it.

Things that were easy for others are hard for Akari, but supporting Masaki has become her core, her backbone. But when Masaki hits a fan and faces criticism and rage online, Akari begins to fall apart. She desperately strips herself of physical strength, money and time to devote herself to her cause. It is almost an act of purification, and in exchange for pain, she is given a reason for existing, but even this is now at risk.

It seems inevitable that the band will fall apart, but while Masaki might be ready to leave Neverland, I couldn’t imagine how Akari would survive it. By the night of the last concert,

Akari’s grandmother has died and she is living alone in her house. Returning home after she has finally realized that Masaki is no longer available to her, she is able to see the mess she has created—clothes, hair bands, chargers, empty tissue boxes and ramen cups.

Ending the novel with an episode freighted with symbolism, Usami leaves us with a shocking scene but one that might hint at a little hope for Akari. Confronted by the mess she has made in her house, she begins by picking up the cotton swabs spilled all over the floor. She is on all fours, head down, picking them up carefully just as family members pick out bone fragments from the ashes after the cremation of a relative. She reflects that being on all fours seems to suit her—she doesn’t seem able to stand on her own two feet so for now she will crawl.

Source: Asahi Shimbun

Rin Usami gave a long interview to the Asahi Shimbun‘s book page, which can be read here.

Japanese Booksellers Award 2021

January 26, 2021 / / 0 Comments

The end of the Christmas and New Years holidays don’t seem such a letdown because I have both the announcement of the Naoki and Akutagawa Awards and the nominees for the Japanese Booksellers Award to look forward to. This year, I woke up to the news of the Naoki and Akutagawa awards and waited up for the Booksellers Award announcement, with the US presidential inauguration sandwiched in between, so it was a banner day. As one bookseller said, bookstore employees are supposed to nominate books that are not necessarily selling well but deserve more readers. This year, I would happily read just about every book on this list.

『犬がいた季節』伊吹有喜

Seasons with a Dog, by Yuki Ibuki

In late summer 1988, a puppy finds his way into a high school, and for the next 12 years, students take care of the dog at the school. In a series of linked short stories that start in the Showa era, go through the Heisei era and end in the Reiwa era, several generations of high school students are depicted as they worry about their home lives and their futures. Ibuki writes novels that can best be described as “heartwarming,” and you’re pretty much guaranteed happy endings with her books.

『お探し物は図書室まで』青山美智子

Searching at the Library, Michiko Aoyama

Another “heartwarming” novel, this is made up of five short stories about people who find their way by accident to a small library in a community house. The rather perfunctory reference librarian there gives them a book list that matches their requests, but there’s always an extra book on the list (for example, the children’s book “Guri to Gura” along with books on computer basics), which help to solve their problems. The librarian’s message is that it’s not the book itself that is so miraculous—the value comes from the way in which the reader interprets it.

『推し、燃ゆ』宇佐見りん

Idol, Burned, by Rin Usami

This novella just won the 164th Akutagawa Prize, so it is bound to get a lot of attention even without this additional push from booksellers. Rin Usami is currently in her second year of university (majoring in Japanese literature of course), but has already won the Bungei Prize and the Yukio Mishima Prize for her debut novel, “Kaka.” “Idol, Burned” tells the story of Akari, a high school student who has a hard time knowing how to behave both within her family and at school. She finds purpose and some relief from the lassitude and heaviness she always seems to feel by supporting a male idol. Akari’s life begins to fall apart when he hits a female fan and comes under harsh criticism on social media. I’m reading this now and Usami is particularly brilliant at showing why people become so obsessed with a particular entertainer.

『オルタネート』加藤シゲアキ

Alternate, by Shigeaki Kato

The author is a member of the J-pop group NEWS, part of the Johnny’s stable of performers (apparently when he finally got around to telling the other members of his group that he had written a novel, one said that he didn’t know what to think since he doesn’t read). “Alternate” was also nominated for the Naoki Prize. Kato’s novel is set at a high school in Tokyo, where Alternate, a matching app specifically for high school students, is widely used. The story of three high school students explores the meaning of family, friendship and the connections between people.

『逆ソクラテス』伊坂幸太郎

“Reverse Socrates,” Kotaro Isaka

Many readers are claiming that this is Isaka’s best novel so far. Set in an elementary school, in each of the five linked stories the children have to solve problems without easy answers. In one, students try to make their teacher realize his own biases and assumptions, and in another two boys look for evidence to prove that their classmate is being abused by his step-father.

『この本を盗む者は』深緑野分

“Who Stole This Book,” Nowaki Fukamidori

In this fantasy, Mifuyu, a high school student, hates books but her great-grandfather is a book collector and her father manages his massive warehouse of books. Anyone who steals a book will set a curse into motion, pulling the entire town into the world of that book. That’s exactly what happens, and Mifuyu has to search for the thief before her town is entirely subsumed. This town sounds like a booklover’s dream: it has a privately-run library, many bookstores, and a temple dedicated to the god of books!

『52ヘルツのクジラたち』町田そのこ

The 52-hertz Whales, by Sonoko Machida

The “52-hertz whale” is the name that scientists gave to a whale that was first detected in the 1980s that calls at the frequency of 52 hertz. This is so much higher than the frequency used by other whale species that this whale cannot communicate with other whales and is thus known as the “world’s loneliest whale.” In this book, the main character, Kiko, has been abused by her parents for many years until finally someone helps her break away from her family. She cuts off all ties and moves to the country, but hadn’t realized that she would be subjected to intense curiosity in this atmosphere. She encounters a young boy who doesn’t talk and begins to wonder if he is being abused by his parents as she was. In addition to abused children, there are also characters dealing with domestic violence and transgender issues—people who feel like they’re screaming to get the world’s attention and yet not being heard.

『自転しながら公転する』山本文緒

Spinning while revolving, by Fumio Yamamoto

This is Yamamoto’s first book in seven years so I am really looking forward to it. Miyako is a 32 year-old who moves from Tokyo back to Ibaraki to care for her parents. With limited options for work, she takes a job working at a store in an outlet mall on a contract basis. All of her friends are getting married or have boyfriends, but Miyako ends up dating a man who is clearly not “marriage material.” Her parents’ health worsens, as does their financial situation, and Miyako experiences sexual harassment and power harassment at work. Yamamoto wrote that she has always felt that everyone but herself is skillful and able to juggle while dancing gracefully, whereas she is constantly beating herself up for being unable to do more. But recently she realized that behind the scenes, everyone is probably struggling. Yamamoto wanted to write a novel that reflected the way we are always rushing about with no time to stand still, leading busy lives and yet unexpectedly bored inside.

『八月の銀の雪』伊与原新

Silver Snow in August, by Shin Iyohara

This is a collection of five short stories, including one about an encounter between a Vietnamese employee at a convenience store and a university student struggling to find a job. Another is about a middle-aged man who has quit his job and is traveling alone, and encounters an older man whose father had been a meteorologist in WWII. All of these stories are about our relationship with the environment and nature, whether that is a pigeon’s homing instinct or the jet stream across the Pacific.

『滅びの前のシャングリラ』凪良ゆう

Shangri-La Before the End, Yu Nagira

Nagira certainly doesn’t mess around with light and comforting topics! Her previous book, 『流浪の月』(The Roving Moon), which won last year’s Booksellers Award, was about a neglected, sexually abused girl who finds temporary refuge with a young man who is accused of being a pedophile and kidnapper when she is found. Her latest novel is about four people who have never been able to figure out their lives, and now have to learn how to live when they learn that an asteroid will destroy the Earth in one month. The characters are wide-ranging, including a boy who is being bulled in school, a yakuza who has killed people, and a young woman carefully raised in a wealthy home but left unfulfilled. The world is about to end, and yet these four interlinked stories are about individuals rebuilding their lives.

Books & Sake

January 21, 2021 / / 1 Comment

「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊

Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino

The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and guided it through several transformations until it reached its current status as a combination bookstore, izakaya and event space.

The first part of the book consists of diary entries in which Karino describes his working days, which often seem to be more about massive amounts of alcohol and his tendency to skip out on work than actual day-to-day operations. The reader could be forgiven for wondering if he even has many customers (or wants any). One diary entry is simply a notice of the bar’s closure for a holiday, which he begins by saying that he hasn’t been able to read books recently because he hasn’t had the time (which he admits is a well-worn excuse), and all he wants is a quiet, civilized life in which he can drink Shiranami sake (a cheap brand of sake) from the morning without getting falling-down drunk. And so he is closing the bar for a summer break during which he will “sleep, think, and when I get tired of that, walk around town, go to an izakaya in the evening, shed the alcohol from my body, sleep again, wake up and walk.” Karino never seems to have much problem justifying random days off; in another entry, he describes how he’ll often close the shop to go walking in places like Kichijoji and Mitaka. His rest stops during these walks are sento (public bath), which he finds by walking with his gaze directed up toward the sky so he can spot the tell-tale smokestack of a sento.

Karino describes one night when there were few customers so he closed early, turned the lights low and sat by the 囲炉裏 (an open charcoal hearth) and drank by himself. The amp was broken so the only sounds were the rain and the popping sound of the charcoal. He rode home in the cold on his bike with a beer in one hand, wishing that instead he was holding whiskey watered down with hot water. One night near the end of the year, Karino writes about drinking whisky in hot water by himself, listening to John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” He hasn’t gone to any year-end parties, and prefers this way of wrapping up the year. He describes his day as resembling a tea room or a miniature garden, which brings to mind something self-contained and small in scale but perfect.

Lest we should make the mistaken assumption that running a bookstore/izakaya is too idyllic, Karino follows up these diary entries with three essays on how he came to start his bookstore and his subsequent moves. After working for two years at a secondhand bookstore, this store closed due to poor sales, so he somehow decided that the logical thing to do was to open his own store. He chose Kunitachi as a location simply because his girlfriend lived there and there were plenty of izakaya, as well as a famous roast giblet restaurant, in the neighborhood, so he figured he could have fun after work. He didn’t even look into whether there were other secondhand bookstores in the area. Karino also had no idea how to get financing for his venture, but went to the bookstore (naturally) to research this and learned about the National Finance Corporation, which made loans to individuals and small companies starting businesses. The biggest difficulty in getting a loan was finding a co-signer (normally a family member). In the article he read, the author used an agency that found him a proxy, so Karino decided to go this route too. The agencies he called all seemed dodgy and charged steep fees, but he finally found an agency that seemed more trustworthy, and although the man initially said they didn’t take on loans for such low amounts (Karino wanted to borrow ¥2,000,000, or roughly $19,312 at the current exchange rate), when he heard it was for a bookstore, he made an exception because his father had run a bookstore. This is the kind of lucky break that so frequently seems to save Karino from his rather casual attitude toward business. Karino ended up getting the loan with this broker’s help, but several years later, he was watching the news when he saw his face on the TV screen—he had been arrested for fraud.

In another typical predicament, the night before Karino was supposed to open his bookstore, all the shelves were in place, but they were barely full. He didn’t have enough stock, even though he had grudgingly used all of his own books and his girlfriend had contributed hers as well. Luckily, they realized that the next day was the recyclable garbage collection day, so people would be putting out books. Cans of beer in one hand, they pushed a cart through the Kunitachi neighborhood and collected books and magazines (imagine the surprise of customers who find the very same books they had put out with the garbage now on a bookstore’s shelves!).

There were almost no months in which sales exceeded ¥200,000 ($1,931), and from that he had to pay ¥80,000 ($772) in rent for his store and ¥60,000 ($579) for his apartment. Karino knew he was poor, but every night he gathered with friends and people he met in the neighborhood to drink, although it was never clear to him where the money came from. That was the origin of the idea to make his bookstore a bar as well. This change didn’t make him a great living, but at least he no longer had to trawl through recyclable garbage for clothes. In an approach to reading he called すけべな読書, he was always on the lookout for recipe ideas as he read, recreating the menus that Yuriko Takeda wrote down in her famous Fuji Nikki.

Karino behind the bar

But running an izakaya posed difficulties for Karino. He’d always been an introvert, and managed to get through the forced interactions with people he didn’t know by drinking. At one point, he fell into a deep depression during which he had no energy to do anything but watch historical dramas all day with a glass of alcohol always in hand. Finally, after his bar had been closed for two months and he had nearly pickled himself with alcohol, a friend in the book trade managed to snap him out of this bad spell. This was also what made him decide to hold events at his bar, starting with a talk by Takeshi Okazaki (who I wrote about here), who had been bringing people to this book café and introducing Karino to people for years. The novelist Yamazaki Naocola has given talks at his bar, as well as the essayist Sen Ishida and many others who would be familiar to anyone who hangs out at Japanese bookstores.

Source: cowcamo MAGAZINE

It might seem cruel to write about a book telling the story of a bar that combines everything many of us love (good cocktails and sake, conviviality and atmosphere) when we can’t experience it for ourselves at the moment, but Karino also writes so well of quiet and books that it wasn’t frustrating to read about someplace out of reach (for now). He also relates one episode that made me think of our current moment. Karino had forgotten to pay his telephone bill and service was cut off, but after paying the bill, he catches the very moment when his phone is reconnected. The noise coming from the receiver changes from a cold, synthetic tone to a warm burr, giving him a rush of happiness at having witnessed the very moment when his shop is linked to the world again. We will have that moment too, and until then, we have books like this!

Karino serves curry on Sunday and Monday nights Source: Tokyo Shimbun

コクテイル

東京都杉並区高円寺北3-8-13 北中通り商店街

Cocktail

3-8-13 Kita Naka-dori, Koenji Kita, Suginami-ku, Tokyo

Comfort Reading in Japanese

May 26, 2020 / / 7 Comments

I was in the middle of reading 「熱源」, which won the most recent Naoki Prize, when the coronavirus began spreading, and suddenly reading a book in which the main character watches his community die of the smallpox was beyond me. But although I might reach for a different type of book, I still have to go on reading. Although I wish the circumstances were different, the closure of libraries and bookstores surely makes all of us who have piles of unread books (the very meaning of tsundoku) feel justified. My mother, looking for blankets one day, discovered that my linen closets are used instead as bookshelves, and told me in all seriousness that I needed to see a professional about this “obsession.” But these shelves have certainly preserved my calm over the past few weeks, and in the hope that books might help all of you, I thought I would list the books that I have been reading.

The books we turn to for comfort are different for everyone—some people turn to history, others are re-reading old favorites—and I find that books artificially assigned to this category can be too cloyingly sweet. I want a little bite to my books, even if there is a happy ending. The linked short stories in 「彼女のこんだて帖」(The Women’s Recipe Book) by 角田光代 (Mitsuyo Kakuta) were a little close to this line, but their short length is perfect when your attention is scattered. The stories, which are all accompanied by a recipe, are about people facing difficulties and making things a little better by cooking. A woman who breaks up with her boyfriend recovers her interest in life by learning to cook for one with special ingredients, a widowed man goes to cooking classes to learn how to recreate a dish his wife had made him, a young man learns to make pizza to entice his anorexic sister. The recipes are wide-ranging, from Thai omelets and steamed kabocha to pizza and meatball and tomato stew.

「生きるぼくら」(We are alive) by 原田マハ (Maha Harada) was too far along the Hallmark movie end of the scale for my taste—the kind of book that introduces seemingly insurmountable difficulties one after the other, only for each to be overcome thanks to hard work and the community coming together. Twenty-four year-old Jinsei Akira has been a hiki-komori (shut-in) for four years when his mother suddenly disappears, leaving nothing but a little cash and a bundle of new year’s cards. He finds his grandmother’s card among these and decides to visit her for the first time since he was small. Somehow he is able to not only go outside for the first time in four years, but ask for directions and take a long train ride from Tokyo to his grandmother’s home in the country. Thanks to the kindness of strangers and a few coincidences, he arrives in Tateshina, only to find that his grandmother is suffering from dementia. Jinsei and a newfound half-sister rally around and resolve to take care of their grandmother and her rice fields. I’m glad I read this book if only for the descriptions of her biodynamic method of farming and the slow life they lead, with all the hard work that entails, but serious problems were resolved so quickly and easily that I was left feeling unsatisfied.

「天国はまだ遠く」, a short novel by　瀬尾まいこ　(Maiko Seo) was more satisfying and complex. With both work and personal relationships going badly, Chizuru decides to commit suicide, and sets off to find an inn in a remote coastal town where she can overdose on sleeping pills. She ends up at an inn that has not had guests in about two years, but the young man who runs it welcomes her anyway. The sleeping pills do no more than knock her out for 36 hours, but the sleep clears her head and Chizuru begins to find an interest in life again. There are no life-changing revelations here, no sudden romances, no easy comfort. The young innkeeper takes her out on a boat and she suffers seasickness; he encourages her to help with the chickens and she is overwhelmed by the terrible smell; she tries to draw the scenery and realizes she has no talent. This more realistic story, complete with prickly characters, felt more satisfying than a novel that tries to wrap everything up with a neat bow.

The novel was made into a film starring Rosa Kato and Yoshimi Tokui.

Being stuck at home without any of the daily interactions that give life variety made me want to experience other people’s lives more, and 「スーパーマーケットでは人生を考えさせられる」 (The supermarket makes me think about life) by 銀色夏生 (Natsuo Giniro) and 「そして私は一人になった」(And then I was alone) by 山本文緒 (Fumio Yamamoto) gave me that. Giniro writes about her nearly daily trips to the supermarket and food stalls in the basement of a nearby department store, describing the dogs tied up outside, the attitudes of the staff and what she cooks and eats. There is nothing profound enough here to merit the title, but it was entertaining in small amounts.

「そして私は一人になった」is novelist Fumio Yamamoto’s diary about living alone for the first time in her life, after going through a divorce. So much has changed since it was published in 1997 that her daily life seems familiar and nostalgic but also inaccessibly distant. She writes about the novelty of a service that allows her to buy a book with just one phone call, about having a “word processor” but being too intimidated to get a modem, and coming home to find paper three meters in length trailing from the fax machine. Yamamoto is the type of person who merely laughs when she gets a phone call in the middle of the night from a young man randomly calling numbers because he once got lucky and got to have “telephone sex” (she does not oblige). And she is very likable—she returns piles of library books to reduce the clutter in her apartment, only to check out just as many all over again, and she wryly notes that, even though she is a writer, she spends far more time reading every day than she does writing. I really enjoyed spending time in her company.

And a little dose of the Moomintrolls, either in Japanese or English, before bed always helps. Tove Jansson began writing the Moomintroll books during WWII “when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely,” so this seems like the right time to read them. They face dangers and go on adventures, but Moominmamma is always there with comfort, baking a cake even as a comet comes barreling toward Moominvalley.

 

 

 

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