Tsundoku Reader

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

Author: Erika (Page 2 of 7)

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.

 

 

 

夏物語

May 5, 2020 / / 0 Comments

夏物語、 川上 未映子、文藝春秋、 2019

Summer Story, Mieko Kawakami, Bungeishunju, 2019

[Since I first read this book, an English translation has been published by Europa Press as Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.]

You need to just let yourself go along for the ride with this book. If you get hung up on how fast the “plot” is moving or a lack of “development” (aspects that some reviews have complained about), you will miss so many pleasures in this book. An impatient reader could miss the quirky details that Kawakami adds and jump past the poignant moments when Natsuko, the main character, looks back on her life. These memories are sprinkled throughout the book, so for me the point of the book was not whether Natsuko decides to have a baby or not (which, if you read the book’s summary, is apparently what the book is about), but the picture Kawakami creates throughout of an entire life, a family, and even a small community in a down-and-out area in Osaka.

Kawakami gives us one of the most important details about Natsuko at the beginning of this long novel, when she tells us that Natsuko moved from Osaka to Tokyo in 1998 carrying a large and “ridiculously durable” backpack she’d bought in a used clothing store. It was stuffed with about 10 books by her favorite authors that she couldn’t bear to entrust to the movers because they are her talismans. Knowing that about Natsuko, I was happy to spend the next 543 pages in her company.

Part 1 of this book is a retelling of Kawakami’s Akutagawa-winning “Breast and Eggs,” a story of a few days in the hot summer when Natsuko’s sister Maki and niece Midoriko visit her in Tokyo, where Natsuko is working part-time as she tries to write a novel. Maki has been researching breast augmentation surgery for months now and she plans to visit clinics during this trip. Meanwhile, Midoriko is no longer talking to her mother and records her confused feelings about puberty in a diary. We go back and forth between Midoriko’s journal entries and Maki’s explanations—in rapid-fire Osaka dialect—of the pros and cons of various types of breast augmentation, all interspersed with Natsuko’s recollections of growing up in Osaka.

Natsuko grew up desperately poor with her mother, Grandma Komi and sister Maki in Osaka. Although there wasn’t always enough food and she had to lie about her age so she could start working early, her memories of this family life are happy. And her desire to write novels is somehow tied to her childhood memories: remembering how she learned multiplication with her grandmother, making dumplings when they ran out of rice and laughing over nothing, the summer days when she accompanied her grandmother as she cleaned buildings, newsprint blurred by the watermelon seeds they spit onto it, the smell of the shampoo samples they packed in baggies for extra money, the anxiety when her mother was late coming home and the relief when she finally arrived, all smiles in her factory uniform.

This wasn’t really an environment that left much time for reading, but Natsuko started reading obsessively when she got what seems to have been a bladder infection, and reading was the only thing that distracted her from the discomfort. Noticing her habit, a customer at the bar where she works brought her a bag stuffed with paperback books. In one of Kawakami’s vivid turns of phrase, she describes the stuffed tote bag as looking like a box made of paulownia wood carried home from a funeral by the grieving family. Natsuko still has many of these old paperbacks, each calling up the past for her.

Both in her childhood and now, Natsuko’s world seems to be populated nearly entirely by women: her mother and Grandma Komi (although they have both died, they are still present for her), the women who work at the bar, and the women she observes in her neighborhood. Men are at best negligible presences, and at worst, malignant figures. She makes a neighborhood sento (public bath house) come alive, noting the babies crying as they are dried, toddlers running around unsteadily, the sound of the television mixed with the hum of hair driers, the bright sound of the old lady greeting people at the front desk, the laughter of bent-over old ladies, women sitting stark naked in rattan chairs as they chatted. Kawakami draws a picture full of women’s vitality and energy.

A sento in Osaka; Source: iiofuro.com

Women are still at the center of Natsuko’s life in Part 2, which covers the period from 2016 to 2019. By this point Natsuko has achieved some degree of success as a writer, and is struggling with her second novel. She is now trying to figure out what to do about her desire to have a baby, although she has no partner or any interest in one. As well as her sister and niece, her editor, Ryoko Sengawa, and another author, Rika Yusa, are important presences.

Rika was particularly fun to read about. A popular novelist, she had arrived at the press conference after winning the Naoki prize with a shaved head, carrying her baby. When a reporter asked her if she was making some kind of statement about women’s rights by bringing her baby along, she said she had no choice because she’s a single mother and no one else was around to take care of her. Rika was briefly married to a man who quoted Virginia Woolf and talked about his respect for women, and yet never cleaned the house or went grocery shopping. She is now much happier living alone with her daughter. She feels she was born just to have Kura, her whole life leading up to the moment of her birth. In contrast, Natsuko’s editor is horrified that Natsuko would even consider having a baby as it would interfere with her writing. Natsuko makes a decision for herself by the end of the book, but Kawakami gives a voice to many perspectives in this book, including that of people who were born from sperm donors.

I’ll close with another description of Natsuko’s memories of childhood visits to sento that, for me, shows the way Kawakami captures something so essential in this book:

Way back when, although it didn’t feel so long ago, we used to visit the bathhouse all the time. But did we? I mean when Komi and mom were alive, and Makiko and me were little. We loaded our washbowls with our shampoo, soap, and towels and laughed our way through the night. Water so piping hot it made our cheeks red. We had no money. We had nothing. But we had each other. We had our words, and all the feelings that we never even thought of putting into words. There were always women in the space beyond the steamy air. Babies, girls, and older women. Naked as they sudsed up their hair, sank into the water, heated their bodies. Countless wrinkles, straight backs, sagging breasts, gleaming skin. Stubby little arms and legs, age spots dark and light, articulated shoulder blades—bodies laughed and chattered about the silliest things, airing their frustrations or bottling them up but most importantly surviving, day by day. Where had all those women gone? What had happened to their bodies? Maybe all of them were gone by now. Like Mom and Komi.

[quoted from Sam Bett and David Boyd’s translation in Breasts and Eggs]

Chidori Onsen in Osaka; Source: maimai kyoto

I highly recommend listening to Kawakami talk to Robert Campbell, a professor of Japanese literature at University of Tokyo, about her book on the podcast 人生に、文学を. She gives several readings from the book as well.

本屋大賞2020 Japanese Booksellers Award 2020

January 23, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The books nominated for the Booksellers Award were announced this week. Bookstore employees around Japan vote for the books they are most eager to recommend to customers. I used to try and read every book on the list by the time the winner was announced, only to end up disappointed by many of them. After all, there is something for everyone on this list, and even if I don’t get on with every book here, I think that the list is a snapshot of the variety out there in the Japanese literary scene. The winner will be announced on April 7.

砥上裕將『線は、僕を描く』

Hiromasa Togami, “The Lines that Portray Me”

This debut novel won the 59th Mephisto Prize and was initially written as a manga (which can be read here). The main character loses his parents in an accident when he is still in college and is befriended by an ink-wash painter he meets at the gallery where he works. The artist takes him on as an apprentice, but this angers the artist’s granddaughter, who vows to beat him in an art competition. The novel uses ink-wash painting to explore themes of loss and recovery. Reviewers praise the descriptions of this art form (Togami is himself an ink-wash painter), but for some this wasn’t enough to make up for a simplistic plot.

早見和真『店長がバカすぎて』

Kazumasa Hayami, “The Store Manager is Just Too Stupid”

The heroine of this novel works in a bookstore in Kichijoji, where she has to deal with all the problems her idiot manager causes. The only saving grace is her love of books and a co-worker, until one day he suddenly announces he is quitting. Although this sounds light, I will be reading this simply because it’s set in a bookstore (perhaps that explains why it was nominated?) and will serve as a break from some of the heavier books on this list.

川上未映子『夏物語』

Mieko Kawakami, “Summer Story”

Natsuko, a 38 year-old woman born in Osaka and now working as a novelist in Tokyo, begins to realize that she wants to have a child of her own. She begins to look into ways she could have a child without a partner, and encounters people who force her to ask herself whether it is selfish to bring a child into this world. This is a long novel that grapples with the fact that we can’t decide whether to be born ourselves, but can decide whether to have a child.

川越宗一『熱源』

Soichi Kawagoe, “Heat Source”

This book has already received several awards, including the 162nd Naoki Award and the 9th Booksellers’ Historical Novel Award. Set during the Meiji era (1836-1912), it tells the story of Yayomanekuh, an Ainu man born in Sakhalin whose homeland is stolen from him by the Japanese government. After losing his wife and many friends to smallpox and cholera, he takes on a Japanese name, Yasunosuke Yamabe, and resolves to return to Sakhalin. This story is told in parallel with the story of Bronisław Piotr Piłsudski, born in Lithuania but not allowed to speak speak Polish, his mother tongue, due to harsh Russian assimilation policies. He was sentenced to hard labor on Sakhalin for his involvement in a plot to kill the czar, and this is where he meets Yamabe. This novel, based on real events and people, depicts the effects that the Meiji government’s forced “civilization” had on the Ainu.

横山秀夫『ノースライト』

Hideo Yokoyama, “North Light”

In this mystery, an architect discovers that the new house he has designed for a family lies empty, with nothing in it but an old chair and a phone. This is Yokoyama’s first book in six years, since “64” (which has been translated into English as “Six Four” by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies).

青柳碧人『むかしむかしあるところに、死体がありました。』

Aoyagi Aito, “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Corpse”

This book consists of five linked stories in which locked rooms, alibis and deathbed messages are used to retell Japanese folktales like “Urashima Taro,” “Momotaro” and “The Grateful Crane.”

知念実希人『ムゲンのi』（双葉社）

Mikito Chinen, “Infinite i”

Chinen, a practicing doctor, has written another thriller set in a hospital. A young doctor, unable to find a cure for a series of patients who are unable to wake up, consults her grandmother, who is a psychic. Her grandmother tells her that she must try mabuigumi, an Okinawan shamanistic practice in which a shaman calls back spirits that are wandering the world, untethered from the physical body. This is the third straight year that Chinen’s novels have been nominated.

相沢沙呼『medium霊媒探偵城塚翡翠』

Sako Aizawa, “Hisui Jozuka, Psychic Detective”

Shiro Kogetsu, a mystery novelist who has also solved some difficult cases, meets Hisui Jozuka, a medium who can convey the words of the dead. The pair use psychic powers and logic to resolve cases.

小川糸『ライオンのおやつ』

Ito Ogawa, “The Lion’s Snack”

Another author who has been nominated many times for this award, Ogawa tells the story of Shizuku, who is only 33 but has only a short time left to live. She spends her last days at a hospice in the Setouchi islands, where the patients can request a memorable food they want to eat again on Sundays. Unable to choose, Shizuku thinks about what she really wanted to do in her life.

凪良ゆう『流浪の月』

Yu Nagira, “The Roving Moon”

After her father dies and her mother disappears, a young girl is sent to live with her aunt. When her cousin sexually abuses her, she resolves to run away, but is instead rescued by a 19 year-old boy who is also uncertain about his place in the world. The calm life they create for themselves is broken up after two months, and the young man is arrested and sent to a juvenile medical treatment facility. They meet again as adults and form a relationship that goes beyond either love or friendship. This novel questions what is “normal” and what families can look like, and I am particularly interested in reading this one.

 

 

 

Misumi Kubo imagines a sexless Japan

January 22, 2020 / / 0 Comments

アカガミ、窪美澄、河出書房新社、2016

Akagami, by Misumi Kubo, Kawade Publishing, 2016

“Akagami” is Misumi Kubo’s vision of what would happen if the trends seen among Japan’s younger generation were to reach an extreme. These trends—a rising suicide rate, a preference for one’s own company and hobbies over social activities, lack of interest in sex and romantic relationships— are both sensationalized and treated with genuine concern by the media, politicians and academics, but Kubo made it come alive for me.

This novel, published in 2016, is set in 2030, and in the 10 years since the Olympics (an event that seems to be used as a turning point or catalyst in many books) the number of suicides among people ages 10 to 20 climbed from 6,000 a year to over 100,000 and 4 million were seeing psychiatrists. Pundits are at a loss, blaming these problems on video games, climate change, a growing withdrawal into virtual reality, or perhaps radioactive materials spewed into the air after the nuclear disaster. Whatever the reason, Shibuya’s scramble crossing might still be lit up with neon, but there is almost no one under the age of 30 there.

Empty Shibya crossing. Photograph by Martin Hladik

The first section of the novel is narrated by Log, a high-end sex worker and researcher who was summoned home by the Japanese government in the hope that her expertise could help resolve the mystery behind young people’s complete indifference to sex. Mitsuki is one of the young women Log interviews, although the setting in this case is a bar, where Log rescued Mitsuiki from a suicide attempt. Mitsuki is a nurse in a geriatric facility and her lack of interest in food, other people, fashion—anything other than keeping any speck of dust and dirt from polluting her apartment—makes her typical among her age group. But she doesn’t show as much revulsion as others do when Log mentions love, and so she recommends Mitsuki for Akagami, a government matchmaking program.

An area of bars and restaurants outside Shinjuku station that is normally packed with people. Photographed by M/k/suke Umeda when a typhoon forced people off the streets.

The next section, narrated by Mitsuki, is a moving—and sometimes very funny—portrayal of the awakening of the senses. The government plays a part in this by teaching the Akagami applicants about love, marriage and family using movies, anime and novels (some of the applicants are so repulsed that they walk out), but it is really her own curiosity that helps her overcome her fears. Once she is matched with Satsuki, who has joined Akagami to provide for his family, they live together in a well-guarded apartment complex, where they are supposed to eventually “procreate” and produce a baby—an end that the nurses and doctors stationed at the complex, the cooks who make their food, and the guards at the gates are all working for. Satsuki and Mitsuki’s slow, tentative moves toward friendship and then love are sweet and sad and funny all at once (Kubo is so good at making readers feel multiple, contradictory emotions all at once).

In one scene, Satsuki has a fever and Mitsuki gives him a bed bath as he sleeps. She realizes that the body of a man in his 20s is nothing like that of the elderly men she cares for at work. Having grown up in a generation that is repulsed by human touch, she is finally figuring out what sexual arousal is, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Kubo also enjoys a little role reversal by having Mitsuki ask Satsuki why he doesn’t seem to want to have sex with her and promises to wait until he’s ready.

Mitsuki, absorbed in her new feelings for Satsuki and then her pregnancy, innocently takes Akagami at face value, and Kubo—for the most part—lets us drift along with her in the middle section of the book, but she yanks us out of this warm cocoon in the last section, narrated by Satsuki. He has never entirely trusted the program, and wonders about the trucks that occasionally drive by the apartment building, yelling and tossing sheets of paper over the fence. He feels like they have been “paired off like animals, encouraged to mate and caged in by fences,” “treated with kid gloves like an endangered species.” As Mitsuki nears the end of her pregnancy, they are moved to a luxurious apartment building deep in the forest. Satsuki realizes that, although the program began in 2020, there are no 10 year-olds here, only babies. He manages to pick up one of the leaflets thrown over the wall that the guards missed, and finds that it reads, “The children born in Akagami become the nation’s property and are used for the nation’s ends.” His disquiet only grows when he learns that “akagami” is shorthand for the draft cards sent out by the military.

An example of the draft notice sent out by the Japanese army in World War II, known colloquially as “akagami” (literally, red paper).

Kubo leaves the reader with some hope, at least on a small scale. She starts out with a large-scale picture of Japan’s future, and then narrows our focus to one couple to make us really care about the potential future she is imagining in “Akagami.” I think that’s why I like novels so much—at their best, they make you care deeply about events and facts we read about in history books and newspapers and then put out of mind. This is perhaps proof of both the small, petty side of human nature and our capacity to excite the imagination and inspire empathy.

*This book has not been translated into English, nor have any of Kubo’s other novels, but part of her novel 「ふがいない僕は空を見た」has been published by Strangers Press as a stand-alone short story entitled “Mikumari,” translated by Polly Barton.

 

Tokyo Nipper

January 6, 2020 / / 2 Comments

東京の子、藤井 太洋 、Kadokawa 2019

Tokyo Nipper, by Taiyo Fujii

Novels set in the future and other science fiction are often used to express our deepest fears about human nature and technology, but in Tokyo Nipper, Taiyo Fujii focuses on our brighter possibilities. In an interview, Fujii said that he doesn’t think we have to be so pessimistic about the future since, in his eyes, the world has improved in so many ways over the past 30 years. In his novels, he wants to create a sense that there is nothing embarrassing about speaking idealistically.

And his vision of Tokyo in 2023, three years after the Olympics, is very bold and optimistic. The government, left with sports facilities that had become liabilities and would have to be dismantled or repurposed at further taxpayer expense, decided instead to sell the land to the private sector, which then transformed the facilities into shopping malls, huge warehouses, tower condominiums, nursing homes and universities. It was foreigners who provided the labor, allowed in under Japan’s “foreign technician training system” and “highly-skilled professional system.” In Fujii’s version of history, the government had revised the immigration law in 2019 to significantly expand these two programs so that foreigners could work in Japan not only as IT engineers, civil engineers and nurses, but also as supermarket and convenience store staff and garbage collectors. Making the picture even rosier, Fujii writes that Southeast Asia’s economic growth means that foreign workers no longer work for miserable wages, but now expect the same pay as Japanese. This has increased Tokyo’s population from 13 million to 16 million in the three years following the Olympics and foreigners accounted for all three million.

The ruins of the bobsled track used for the Sarajevo Olympics. Source: Getty Images

Fujii also gives us a hero who is just as interesting as the new Tokyo he occupies. Isamu Karibe lives above a Vietnamese restaurant and makes a living by finding foreigners who have stopped showing up for work and convincing them to go back to work. Just like these foreigners, Karibe lacks roots. “Karibe” isn’t even his own name—he bought a family registry so his parents, who neglected him until he nearly starved as a baby, could never find him. The children in the institution he grew up in are given Korean-made smartphones by Okuma, a yakuza looking for new revenue streams (he paid them pocket change for repeatedly reloading websites to increase views and clicking on ads for adult videos). It was Okuma who helped Karibe make parkour videos in the early days of YouTube, making him one of its first stars. Karibe still uses parkour to chase foreigners. The description of parkour moves give the novel a dynamism that Japan’s aging, static society seems to lack in reality.

Photograph by Gabe L’Heureux

This is matched by the verve of the students—they even hold demonstrations and protests!—that Karibe meets at Tokyo Dual, a polytech with 40,000 students that has been built on a former Olympic site. The students study while also working for the “supporter” companies that have offices and factories on site. They earn salaries and can even go on to work fulltime for these companies after graduating. In this brave new world Fujii has created, supporter companies can fire students easily and students can change jobs at will.

Karibe’s assignment at the start of this novel is to find a Vietnamese girl who isn’t showing up for work or classes. In this search, he uncovers allegations of human trafficking and learns of a new law allowing Chinese to be forcibly deported. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this as interesting as Fujii’s world creation, and the parkour and the vitality of this Tokyo weren’t enough to make up for leaden dialogue and some confusing plot developments.

Fujii has said that this future is entirely possible, given that the government did in fact pass a law easing immigration rules for workers in December 2018. The resistance to these modest changes (Japan still prefers migrants who will go home some day over immigrants) makes me skeptical. Still, I think Fujii really just wants to start a conversation about possibilities, and I hope people are listening.

Source: Anouchka Noisillier

The Homeless Go Up in Flames

October 16, 2019 / / 2 Comments

「野良ビトたちの燃え上がる肖像」木村友祐、 新潮社、2016

The Homeless Go Up in Flames, Yusuke Kimura, Shinchosha, 2016

I would say that this book is not for the faint of heart, except that maybe avoiding the uncomfortable is a luxury that we shouldn’t resort to so easily these days. There were times I had to put the book down and take a deep breath, and it certainly shouldn’t be read just after eating. Sometimes, to be honest, I didn’t think I could read anymore—the torturing of cats, the body of a dead man so covered by maggots that it seems to be wriggling—but I felt like I would be putting myself squarely with the residents of the gated communities Kimura writes about if I stopped reading.

Source: Storiediavventura

The central character of this novel is 63 year-old Yanagi, a man with over 20 years experience living on the streets. Injured on the job at a construction site, he could no longer work, but has made a dignified life for himself on the banks of a river (Kimura seems to be describing the Tama River). He has a carefully honed routine, collecting cans at night to sell, charging electronic devices using solar panels during the day, and taking walks with his cat Musubi. There are even a few pastoral scenes in the first half of this book as Yanagi sits in a chair in the sun and watches children playing baseball, or a former chef-turned-homeless roasts fish from the river. But disturbing signs in the neighborhood destroy any serenity here. A large gated community goes up, closely guarded. Security cameras and motion-sensor lights are installed in neighborhoods, and signs warn residents not to leave cans out for homeless people to take. Yanagi begins to find cats that have been tortured to death.

An encampment along the Tama River. Source: Storiediavventura

The book was published in 2016 but set in the future of 2018, when Tokyo was gearing up to host the “Tokyo World Sports Festival” in 2020 with “beautification campaigns as well as harsher anti-terrorism measures. The government even enacts a law banning any claims that the economy is less than robust. Belying the government’s claims, more and more people are seeking refuge in the homeless encampment along the river, including types of people that Yanagi had not seen among the homeless before—a young mother and her child, a woman escaping domestic violence, a man taking care of his elderly father, foreign workers, even refugees. Among them is a young reporter, Kinoshita, who had previously visited Yanagi and other homeless to write their stories. When the magazines he had worked for fold and his girlfriend kicks him out, he has to rely on Yanagi’s hospitality.

Vegetable beds cultivated by homeless people along the Tama River (despite signs put up by the government banning such guerrilla gardening). Source: Livedoor

This disparate group of people is increasingly desperate as their usual ways of making a little money are closed off, and run-ins with nearby residents become more common. Fences are put up on the bank, essentially trapping them in, and they lose access to water. But the standoff is not a straightforward conflict between the residents and the homeless people—the homeless blame the foreigners living among them for a terrible fire that breaks out in their encampment. Needless to say, Kimura doesn’t hand out any comfort at the end.

The Tama River after Typhoon Hagibis; Source: Mainichi Shimbun

In the afterword to スクエア (Square), a collection of four dystopian novels, 星野智幸 (Tomoyuki Hoshino) asks why Japanese literature denies and avoids political issues, and calls for “new political novels” that will pursue this question. Hoshino would object to a description of his novels as “dystopian”– he claims they simply depict reality. And Kimura’s book, unfortunately, does seem to reflect reality, or at least a possible future that we can’t dismiss. Just a few days ago, homeless encampments that once lined the Tama River were swept away by Typhoon Hagibis. Taito ward in Tokyo refused to accept homeless people in its shelter, and a Google search brings up a depressingly long list of cases in which homeless people have been attacked (and yes, even set on fire) and police have done nothing.

On the other hand, protests about Taito ward’s heartless behavior has led to a promise to change the policy requiring anyone seeking shelter to provide an address, and Setagaya ward handed out information about shelters to people living along the Tama River before the typhoon. But it is easy to look past the homeless people we see on the streets, so if nothing else, read this book! And if you can’t read it in Japanese, I can recommend Tokyo Ueno Station, a haunting novel about a homeless man by Yu Miri and translated by Morgan Giles.

A note about the title:

Rather than using one of the more customary words for the homeless, like路上生活者 (literally, “people living on the streets”), 野宿者 (people sleeping outdoors) or ホームレス (“homeless” written in katakana), the residents living around the homeless encampments in this book coin a new word that dehumanizes the homeless by using the same term, 野良, that is used for stray or feral cats and dogs. “Person” is not even written in kanji or hiragana (人 orひと)—by using katakana here (ビト), they are further isolated from the human community. My very rough translation of the title doesn’t even begin to get at everything Kimura was trying to convey.

Misumi Kubo’s Trinity

September 5, 2019 / / 2 Comments

トリニティ、窪美澄、新潮社、2019 (Trinity, by Misumi Kubo, published by Shinchosha in 2019)

In an essay entitled「五十歳の私」 (“Myself at 50;” published in 2016), Misumi Kubo writes that she was surprised when her first book was published at age 44, but is equally surprised to find herself alone at age 50. She took her child and left her husband when her child was 15, and having successfully steered this child through school and finalized her divorce in 2014, she is now truly on her own. Perhaps this sense that one part of her life has been completed, and with it the tug-of-war between family demands and her own work, inspired Kubo to write this novel, which illustrates the struggle between the desire for work, love, children and marriage through the lives of three women—Suzuko, Taeko and Tokiko. As the title “trinity” suggests, the characters discover that you can only have three of these at best, and might lose all of them in the fight to hold on to one ambition.

Source: 竹久夢二《デザイン》 モダンガールの宝箱, 石川桂子/著

The novel begins in the present day, when Suzuko gets a phone call telling her that Taeko had died. Suzuko attends the funeral with her granddaughter Naho, an aspiring writer who has always been intrigued with Suzuko’s brief career at a famous magazine. Naho was only able to find a job at a “black” publishing company, known for working its employees into the ground. Having suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork, even leaving the house for this funeral is a major step for Naho. After Suzuko introduces Naho to Tokiko at the funeral, Naho begins visiting Tokiko every week to hear the story of these three women and their careers at the magazine.

Source: Official Olympic Book

Suzuko, Taeko and Tokiko meet in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. They had grown up when disabled war veterans were a common sight on street corners, but now these relics of the past are being swept away by a wave of new consumer goods and the sense that Japan is heading confidently into the future. The three women all feel that their work at a cutting-edge magazine is in some way creating this new atmosphere in Tokyo.

Taeko, the magazine’s chief illustrator, was born to an unwed mother and then farmed out to a childless woman in the same town, until her mother was able to save enough to bring her to live with her in Tokyo. After art school, she trudged around Tokyo with her portfolio until someone recognized her talent. Of the three woman, Taeko is the one who makes a name for herself as an artist, and yet she finds that her attempt to have it all—love, marriage, a child and work—leaves her, in the end, bereft of all four.

Source: Akihisa Sawada

Tokiko works as a freelance writer for the same magazine. Her mother and grandmother had also been freelance writers who had supported their families singlehandedly with this work, and Tokiko grew up in relative luxury. She is a straight-talking, intimidating woman with her own unique fashion sense who can write fluently on command, but ultimately gets fed up as she realizes that even the supposedly cutting-edge magazine she works for always runs stories about male politicians, male artists, and male authors, nearly all written and edited by men, and always with nude pictures of women inserted in the middle.

Source: Junichi Nakahara

In contrast to Tokiko and Taeko, Suzuko poured tea and did odd jobs at the magazine, and only worked there a few years before she married. Suzuko understood that for women to live lives of freedom, they needed impressive talents, like Tokiko and Taeko had, that could be translated into money. She had no such talents, but she had seen how hard her mother had to work in the family shop selling 佃煮(food boiled in soy sauce), and had grown up with the smell of concentrated soy sauce and the stench of the drainage channel running by her house. Suzuko craved stability, which she felt she could get by marrying a salaryman and living in one of the new apartment blocks.

The night when the three women go together to the demonstrations in Shinjuku commemorating International Anti-War Day, on October 21, 1968, seems to be the high point of their lives. At the demo, the students around them yell anti-war slogans, but Suzuko, Taeko and Tokiko scream out their own frustrations (Kobo, born in 1965, said in an interview that she remembers these demos very clearly, and recalls thinking that surely not all of the protestors were protesting the Vietnam War. She was particularly interested in what the women were thinking, and this section of the book seems to be her attempt to answers= that question.) Suzuko encourages Taeko and Tokiko to draw the girls at the demo and get their stories, leading to a night of frenzied but inspired work as they dodge the police.

Infuriatingly, the three are scolded by their male bosses for having taken the unconscionable risk of joining the demonstrations, particularly as their prize illustrator could have been injured (and thus rob the magazine of her unique pictures of men and boys that gave the magazine its style). This seemed like a harbinger of the forces, both historical and personal, that began to pressure these women.

History is always present in the margins of this book, sometimes benign (the glossy white washing machines and vacuum cleaners promising to make women’s lives a little easier), sometimes threatening. As Suzuko suffers through her first pregnancy, she watches Yukio Mishima on TV talking about his Tatenokai (Shield Society), a private militia he had founded. A few years later, as she pastes family photos into albums, she watches, astounded, as Mishima commits suicide on TV. Kubo seems to include these historical details into the larger storyline as a reminder that, while our lives may be temporarily subsumed by our personal concerns, history is always happening around us.

These historical forces don’t remain confined to the margins for long. Tokiko senses a major historical shift in 1995, the year that began with the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, followed by the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in March. The small company that had published her essays collapsed, and gradually the magazines she had written for folded. After nursing her husband through a long illness, she was left with nothing but her pension. The sense of limitless possibility was gone by the time Naho was born. Reading this made me feel like history had let these women down. Although women have made progress in so many ways, in other ways things don’t seem so promising in the present day, as highlighted by Naho’s problems finding a job at anything other than a black company and Tokiko’s penury in old age.

Reading Misumi Kubo’s books feels like a full contact sport. 「ふがいない僕は空を見た」 (The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky) left me physically exhausted but also completely exhilarated. She hits you in the gut, makes your heart hurt, and yet makes you feel more alive, all at the same time. Trinity is more of a slow burn than her other books, which just shows the extent of her range.

Unfortunately, none of Kubo’s novels have been translated into English yet, but Polly Barton has translated “Mikumari,” the first section of The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky, as a stand-alone short story, published by Strangers Press.

Natsuko Imamura’s “Purple Skirt Lady”

August 16, 2019 / / 3 Comments

「むらさきのスカートの女」、今村夏子

Purple Skirt Lady, by Natsuko Imamura

*Since this post was written, the English translation has been published as The Woman in the Purple Skirt, translated by Lucy North.

After being nominated three times, Nastuko Imamura won the 161st Akutagawa Prize for 「むらさきのスカートの女」(Purple Skirt Lady). Sometimes Akutagawa Prize-winning books seem to take themselves too seriously, but that is definitely not true of this playful (but creepy) novel. It can be read in a few hours, but I’m still thinking about it, trying to figure out what kind of game Imamura was playing.

This novel is narrated in the first person, leaving the reader with no choice but to rely on what the narrator chooses to tell us. And our footing as readers feels increasingly unstable. Initially, we know next to nothing about the narrator, other than that she is essentially stalking this woman that “everyone knows” as the Purple Skirt Lady (the narrator would like to be known as the “Yellow Cardigan Lady” but it hasn’t caught on yet…). And at first, I watched the narrator stalking the Purple Skirt Lady, but by the end, I was watching the narrator.

The narrator keeps track of how often the Purple Skirt Lady changes jobs, what stores she frequents, and exactly how she eats her cream-filled roll. We are told that a bench in the park is reserved for the exclusive use of the Purple Skirt Lady, and we have no reason to doubt this (but doubts creep in later). The narrator seems quite protective of the Purple Skirt Lady. She chases away people who have the nerve to sit on her bench, and when the narrator notices that she has been out of work for quite a while, compared to her previous work history, begins leaving job information magazines on her park bench. The narrator even helpfully circles the job she wants her to apply for. It takes quite a while before the Purple Skirt Lady gets the message and finally applies for the job cleaning at a hotel where, not coincidentally, the narrator works. The narrator even hangs a bag with shampoo samples on her apartment door to make sure that, for once, the Purple Skirt Lady washes her unkempt hair before the interview.

I had assumed that the Purple Skirt Lady was quite odd—after all, children in the park play a game in which they tap her on the shoulder and run away—but she adapts so quickly to the work culture that I began questioning the narrator instead. Her colleagues find the Purple Skirt Lady charming and quick to learn, and her superiors at the hotel think she shows promise, even talking of promotions. She even has an affair with her boss.

There is no authorial voice to give us a neutral view of events, although the narrator reports conversations and scenes that are hard to imagine she could have witnessed without either invisibility or some other form of magic. The Purple Skirt Lady never even notices her until the very end. I was alternately scared about where this was going and amused—a very unsettling reading experience. The narrator depicts all the comforting details of daily life—bus schedules, bakeries, parks and children, shopping for daily necessities—but they are all reflected through the filter of her obsession.

The narrator’s most unhinged behavior makes for the funniest scenes in the book. She is particularly impressed with the Purple Skirt Lady’s effortless stride through crowds of people, and in an effort to break her stride that goes completely wrong, the narrator crashes into a glass counter. The damages she then has to pay put her in such straitened circumstances that she can no longer pay her rent and other bills. In another ridiculous scene, the narrator is so desperate for the Purple Skirt Lady to notice her that she grabs her nose in a crowded bus, and is then extremely miffed when she doesn’t seem to even notice. Instead, just as the narrator is about to grab her nose again, the Purple Skirt Lady announces that she has been molested by a man on the bus, angry passengers secure the offender, and the bus driver makes an emergency stop at the police station.

This novel has some similarities to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman that might help its chances of publication in English translation. Just as Murata made me question socially-ingrained assumptions, the supposedly “normal” employees at the hotel at which both the narrator and the Purple Skirt Lady work bully other new employees, steal from the hotel as if they deserve it, and are so quick to turn on the Purple Skirt Lady that they were easily the most despicable characters in the book. And the narrator, like Keiko in Convenience Store Woman, is unintentionally funny in her inability to figure out how to fit in. However, Imamura’s novel feels darker. There are plenty of funny scenes that relax the tension for a while, but toward the end, events seem to take a very dark turn until, once again, Imamura showed that we can’t assume anything while we are in her hands.

Tokyo bookstores

August 8, 2019 / / 5 Comments

A book I bought entitled “Japan’s Small Bookstores” which I would like to plan an entire trip around

On my recent trip to Tokyo, I visited as many bookstores as I could but didn’t even scrape the surface. There’s something special about any city that has as many bookstores as Tokyo—small kiosks just outside the train station, cat-themed bookstores (with cats in residence), bookstores that you can stay overnight in, mammoth bookstores that will have everything on your list, curated bookstores, a whole neighborhood dedicated to used bookstores… And Japanese authors seem to love writing about books and bookstores, if the shelves of books on this theme are anything to go by. Although my city is home to Powell’s, which purports to be the world’s largest independent bookstore, that claim seems less impressive after my week in Tokyo.

The first bookstore I went to was B&B (which stands for beer and books) in Shimo-Kitazawa, a small bookstore in

B&B in Shimo-Kitazawa; Source: Shimirubon

which everything seems to have been carefully selected—the perfect place to find books and zines you won’t find elsewhere. They also had a shelf dedicated to Banana Yoshimoto, who has lived in Shimo-Kitazawa for decades and describes it with great affection in her novels and essays.

I also visited the bookstore just down the street from the house we had rented, not expecting much, but I was reminded that unassuming neighborhood bookstores here are far better than the chain bookstores that are all most suburbs in the US have (if they’re lucky). I found Kyoko Nakamura’s latest book, a novel in which the Imperial Library is the main character (of course), and also the latest edition of the magazine 自遊人, which just happened to be a special edition on books.

Tired after traipsing through parks and crowded streets one day, my friend led me to Wired Tokyo 1999, a café on the seventh floor of a building just across the street from Shibuya Station. The walls are covered with records, books and magazines, and best of all, once your legs have recovered, you can walk down from the café straight into Tsutaya Books. My assumptions about chain bookstores were again debunked because, among other finds (including a book of essays called 「オタク中年女性のすすめ」, recommending that middle-aged women find themselves an obsessive hobby), I scored a signed copy of Misumi Kubo’s latest book of short stories.

Not ready to get back on the crowded trains late one night, I checked to see what bookstores might be nearby, and found Maruzen & Junkodo just a few blocks away. Although totally lacking in atmosphere, it was still open at 10pm (not at all unusual for bookstores in Tokyo) and actually had the elusive copy of 文藝 (Bungei) I’d been searching for ever since my plane landed. This edition, which is about 500 pages of essays, interviews and stories based on the theme of “South Korea, feminism and Japan,” sold out so rapidly that the publisher ordered a reprint, only for all copies to be sold out before they even arrived in stores. A second reprint was then ordered, the first time this has happened in over 80 years.

I also managed to nab a copy of the latest Akutagawa Prize-winning novel (むらさきスカートの女by 今村夏子), which had been sold out in most stores, when I just happened to walk past Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. I do realize that Tokyo is one of the most population-dense cities in the world, but surely the ratio of bookstores to people is unusually high?

“Afternoons are for Walking, Nights are for Reading” by Atsushi Miura

I visited Bunkitsu early one morning when I needed to work and figured working while surrounded by books would take the sting out of it. This bookstore has gotten quite a bit of press since it opened because you are charged a 1,500 yen fee just to enter, but they have free drinks and great places to read or work—everything from bean bags and sofas to tables and desks with lamps. Bunkitsu only has one copy of each book, which might sound intriguing in theory but is quite annoying in practice when you set something aside only for it to disappear. The selection is small but deep, and I made some really good finds, including a book of letters written by a couple (both writers) who begin writing letters recommending books to each other in the hope that this will help them understand each other better (「読書で離婚を考えた」). I also found a book of essays (「昼は散歩、夜は読書」 by三浦展 ; “Afternoon is for Walks, Nights are for Reading” by Atsushi Miura) that I bought based on the cover and the title. In the preface, the author, a journalist, describes his day: “These days I start work at 7am, deal with visitors at 11am, have lunch, and then go out to do research. My research basically consists of going to some neighborhood and walking around. And in my ideal day, in the evening I go to the neighborhood’s public bath and have a drink at an izakaya.” I figured I couldn’t go wrong in the hands of an author like that.

The new Daikanyama Tsutaya is also worth a visit, especially because it opens at 7am and closes at 2am and

Source: Village Vanguard

has great cafes and other reading spaces. I found the layout a bit confusing because it is spread out through three separate buildings, which makes browsing difficult. This was a very sophisticated, glossy bookstore, but I felt more at home at the Village Vanguard in Shimo-Kitazawa, where the staff all seemed to have angular haircuts in impossible colors. The shop is bright and packed with kitsch and character goods, with books of all sorts lining the shelves in between to create a sort of mad confusion. The staff write enthusiastic recommendations on yellow cards and attach them to books, so this is another bookstore that is perfect for unlikely discoveries.

All in all, if you only have time to go to a few bookstores, just head to Shimo-Kitazawa and go to the B&B and Village Vanguard. But if you have a long list of books you’re searching for, you can’t go wrong with Junkudo in Ikeburo—10 whole floors of books!

 

Some of the books I bought while in Japan

Nimrod

April 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

ニムロッド、上田岳大、講談社、2019

Nimrod, by Takehiro Ueda, Kodansha, 2019

In Nimrod, which won the 160th Akutagawa Award (shared with Ryohei Machida for his 1R1分34秒), Takehiro Ueda experiments with several different narrative techniques to look at bitcoin and some of the questions that this cryptocurrency raises. Although he doesn’t answer all these questions, he sure seems to have fun trying, and as an executive at an IT security company and an award-winning novelist, he is better placed than most to do so.

Ueda names his hero after the bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, although his Satoshi works at a mid-sized IT company with responsibilities that are neither particularly taxing nor interesting. He is a very ordinary, upright man, perhaps lacking in curiosity but always kind. He runs when his girlfriend summons him, carries out his boss’s capricious instructions, and is unquestioningly loyal to his friend Nimrod. When the book begins, he has just been promoted to head a new department (in which he will be the only employee) that will mine bitcoin, and he learns the software in much the same way one would follow a recipe for a stodgy casserole. The questioning and philosophizing in this novel are mostly delegated to his girlfriend Noriko and his friend Nimrod, a former colleague who now works in another city.

In interviews (such as on Session 22), Ueda has said he became interested in bitcoin when its price soared to a record high in late 2017, and was even more intrigued to learn that the person who developed bitcoin goes under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and yet no one knew who he was (or even whether he was actually Japanese). Ueda was also fascinated by the life of Shoichi Ota, who came up with the idea for the Ohka (cherry blossom), a manned flying bomb that pilots used in WWII in what were essentially suicide missions. Ueda saw parallels between the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto and Shoichi Ota, who took a plane out three days after the war ended and disappeared, but was later discovered living under another name. Ueda began writing Nimrod to explore these two motifs.

France’s C.450 Coléoptère; Source: Wikipedia

The novel consists of Satoshi’s narration, interspersed with emails from Nimrod, who used to work with Satoshi at the same company but was transferred to a branch in his hometown when he became seriously depressed (at least partly because he failed to win new writer awards three times in a row). Now he sends Satoshi long emails that describe “useless airplanes”—experimental airplanes that were designed and built but never worked. Nimrod is fascinated by these planes because of the leap of faith in the face of logic (or science, for that matter) that they represent. In addition to the Ohka, Nimrod writes about the Convair NB-36H, a nuclear-powered plane that had a section for the crew that was lined with lead and rubber to protect them from radiation, the SNECMA C.450 Coléoptère, a French aircraft that was designed to take off and land vertically so that it needed no runway, and the British Aerospace Nimrod AEW3, a hugely expensive attempt to develop a plane equipped with a radar system to provide early warning for the UK. Nimrod feels that these planes, even if they were expensive mistakes, are still a symbol of a cheeky insouciance that allowed people to flout logic and invent something new. This is often how human advances are achieved, but the Ohka was different since it was in the service of death. After relating its history, Nimrod seems to tire of these planes and begins sending Satoshi excerpts from his novel, about a King Nimrod living in a distant future who collects these useless airplanes.

Ueda depicts a normal person living in a world in which bitcoin—something that is not based on anything tangible—can reach incredible prices. This is not a dark, dystopian vision—Satoshi’s girlfriend loves to hear stories about Nimrod because they reassure her that the world is essentially gentle if a person so obviously different has a secure place in the world. When I finished Nimrod, I didn’t feel like I knew what Ueda was trying to say, and in fact I have no idea what the end meant. I even questioned why it had won the Akutagawa Prize. But I think the judges are trying to recognize works that try something a little different and maybe even start conversations, and I think Ueda did that with a novel that bumps technology down to the mundane everyday level with an ordinary salaryman working for a completely unremarkable tech company, while still asking how we grapple with our dependence on something whose inner workings we don’t understand. And while the book didn’t offer any coherent “message,” Ueda surely gave his novel and a key character the name “Nimrod” for a reason. Reading this, it’s impossible to forget that it was Nimrod that, according to Jewish and Christian tradition, led the work to build the Tower of Babel in a desire to reach heaven, and this hubris resulted in the end of linguistic unity and the start of our inability to understand one another.

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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