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

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Risa Wataya’s Charming Eccentrics

「嫌いなら呼ぶなよ」 綿矢りさ、 河出書房新社、2022

“Don’t Invite Me If You Dislike Me!” by Risa Wataya, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2022

In an interview, Risa Wataya said that she did not set out to write short stories about the pandemic or masks or social media, but when she put the characters she had thought up into our present, these aspects just naturally pushed their way through. Her characters are all self-centered and strong personalities who go after what they want, even if those around them do not understand or even reject them. Sometimes I wanted to cover my eyes so I didn’t have to see the car wreck that I felt sure lay ahead for people so impervious to social norms, but Wataya’s combination of farce and black humor keeps these stories from ever becoming dark. And each story ends with a well-aimed punch that I never saw coming.

The first story,『眼帯のミニーマウス』(“Minnie Mouse’s Eye Patch”) is about Rina, a young woman who has always loved anything “cute” and spends her time posting pictures of her manicures and elaborate face masks on Instagram. When she readily admits to a coworker that she has had work done on her face (“just” hyaluronic acid fillers, for the most part, not actual surgery), the news quickly spreads through the office. One coworker in particular won’t let it go. For the most part, Rina doesn’t let their needling bother her; her attitude is that her 10 centimeter high heels (equivalent to her strong pride) will keep her from being soiled by any vomit or garbage on her path. Besides, she is able to get revenge (and a date) in a most satisfying way.

Wataya juxtaposes Rina with her smart and successful friend who, in the eyes of society, would be deemed “normal,” but who struggles with crippling stress and anxiety. Rina’s advice to her friend is to imagine that her work colleagues  live on a different planet—the only way to get by is to split oneself off from the rest of the world. At work, she just focuses on how much she can slack off without anyone noticing so she can earn her salary without much effort. She finds that only being able to see half of someone’s face also gives her more emotional distance from people, which is soothing, and she uses hand sanitizer and spray less as a way to kill germs than as a substitute for salt or holy water, sprinkled on her hands or tossed into the air to reset her mood and forget unpleasant subjects.

Wataya wrote the second story,『神田タ』, to see what would happen if a YouTuber and fan actually met in real life. Poyan-chan’s cute nickname is a stark contrast to her obsession with Kanda, an up-and-coming YouTuber. She craves Kanda’s recognition, but also obsessively criticizes him in the comment section if she doesn’t like his videos. When Poyan-chan eavesdrops on Kanda and his friends at a restaurant, she learns that he doesn’t even read the comments and intends to follow his own artistic impulses, rather than take advice from fans. Poyan-chan boils over and tries to get revenge, but in the end, it is Kanda who has the last word.

In the title story,『嫌いなら呼ぶなよ』, a serial adulterer is called to account by a mini court made up of his wife and her friends, but he gives them no satisfaction. His self-pity and total lack of remorse are depicted in such a comical way that I almost sided with him. While his wife is detailing all of his crimes against her, he is lost in a daydream in which an interviewer (a young woman, of course) asks him why women are so attracted to him. He attributes his allure to his nailcare routine and the exercises he does to maintain the ab muscles his wife likes so much. Confronted with photographic evidence from a detective his wife’s friends have hired, he spouts out the right words, but always sees himself as the real victim. And yet even this narcissist bends to social pressures when it comes to masks: “When was it that he realized that doing the opposite when everyone else was wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, took as much courage as throwing up in the middle of a glitzy party hall? He thought he had been living just as he liked all this time, but it turned out that he had just been faithfully playing his assigned role in this mundane world.”

In「老は害で若も輩」(“The Old are a Nuisance and the Young Aren’t Much Better”), a 42 year-old freelance writer and 36 year-old author (named Risa Wataya, of course) engage in a furious battle over email. The freelance writer has written a draft of a magazine story based on an interview with Wataya, but Wataya rewrote the entire article. The writer refuses to accept these changes, even if it means that she never gets any commissions again, while Wataya insists that, as the youngest winner of the Akutagawa Award, she should have the last word. The young 26 year-old editor, Uchida, tries to stay on the sidelines, but they drag him into their arguments, and ultimately only unite when they both turn on him. When Uchida gets drunk and emails the two women to tell them how he really feels, the gloves come off.

Everyone is being judged and judging in Wataya’s stories, creating a suffocating atmosphere that is exacerbated by the pandemic’s restrictions. You might not like all of these characters, but there is something admirable about their gutsiness and thick skins. For the most part, these characters are so caught up in the worlds of their own making that they are essentially impervious to the outside stresses and peer pressure that makes life so hard for some, especially during the pandemic. Maybe we could all benefit from some healthy self-absorption?

Note: As of this writing, Wataya’s only novel translated into English is  『蹴りたい背中』(translated as I Want to Kick You In the Back by Julianne Neville), the novel for which she won the Akutagawa Award, at age 19, in 2004 .

本心

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

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).

 

 

 

Koenji Junjo Shotengai

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.

Japanese Booksellers Award 2021

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

「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

夏物語

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.

Tokyo bookstores

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

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds

1R1分34秒、町屋良平、新潮社、2019

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds, by Ryohei Machiya; published by Shinchosha in 2019

The brief description of this book found on the publisher’s website gives the impression that this is a story about an athlete overcoming the odds and making a comeback. That is not quite what this novel delivers. Both the writing style and the narrator himself give us an uncomfortable reading experience that mimics the rhythm of boxing and the discomfort our boxer experiences in his training.

When the book begins, our boxer has lost a match and in short order also loses his trainer and his part-time job in a pachinko parlor. We are never given his name, and in fact the boxer’s lack of a name seems appropriate because his identity is so shaky. In the first half of the novel, he can no longer even believe in his body, he is tired of his physical and mental weakness, and no longer knows whether he even wants to fight anymore. In the second half, he has committed to another fight but his weight-cutting regime makes him nearly delirious and the reader cannot always distinguish between mirage and reality.

Painting by Owen Smith

The new trainer that his gym assigns him, Umekichi, is the only character in this novel whose name we are given. A boxer himself, he hasn’t ever trained another boxer, but our boxer decides to try his unconventional methods. This is no heartwarming story of trust developing between two people—our boxer merely decides to try on “trust” for size and see if this “system” or “game” will work for him. In between training, our boxer goes on outings to museums and movies with his (only) friend, spends time with his “sex friend” (whom he kicks out without remorse when his training regime becomes too stringent for such diversions), and obsessively researches his next opponent. He even imagines hanging out with the opponent, watching a couple having sex in the bushes at a park or reading porn at the convenient store together. Yes, our narrator is a little strange…

Machiya makes this reading experience even more disjointed by writing words that would typically be written in kanji in hiragana instead, creating a staccato rhythm. He also occasionally threw in some difficult kanji that are no longer used, or used kanji for words not typically written in kanji (like 軟派instead of ナンパ). He almost seemed to be mirroring the boxer’s mental breakdown as he cuts weight.

There was one particularly striking scene that has stuck with me. His friend takes him on a “trip” when his next fight is scheduled, which is a tradition of theirs. They take a late train to the last stop, eat lots of meat at a Denny’s restaurant, and go down to the river, where his friend uses his iPhone to film him shadow boxing. His friend becomes almost delirious with excitement, and runs along the beach filming the rising sun and the boxer until he falls and nearly loses his iPhone. The phone is undamaged, but he has a bad cut on his hand. On the train on the way home, the boxer drips disinfectant onto his friend’s injured hand as he sleeps. He lays a towel underneath his friend’s hand (the only sign of gentleness we ever see from him in the novel). Then he pours the whole bottle of disinfectant on his friend’s hand in an effort to clean it, but forgets his intention as becomes entranced by the way the disinfectant traces tiny diamond shapes on his skin and reveals the cut, bleeding in spurts almost as if breathing.  This oddly soothes the boxer so that he is finally able to fall asleep. For me, this summed up the boxer’s intensity and odd perspective on things.

Stag at Sharkey’s 1901, by George Bellows

The title refers to the last sentence of this book, when rigorous training and weight-cutting is robbing him of his sense of self:

“I’ll win; I’ll definitely win.” …Every 30 seconds he’d lose this resolve and then repeat it again. He had to go through two more of these nights, just for an unexpectedly easy win by TKO in one round, one minute and 34 seconds three days from now.

This expresses the frustration of putting so much time and work into preparing for a fight that can be decided in as little time as one minute and 34 seconds. Machiya marshals both writing style and content to show us that boxing has such a tight hold on this boxer that he cannot give up on this harsh sport.

Empire R

R帝国、中村文則、中央公論新社、2017

Empire R, Fuminori Nakamura’s most recent book, starts with a quote from Adolf Hitler: “The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Nakamura starts as he means to go on—he doesn’t pull any punches in this novel, nor does he let the reader get comfortable. There are shades here of Aldoux Huxley, George Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, as well as stories that could have been taken from our morning newspaper. On one level, this novel can be read simply as a thriller, but I think most of us will be unable to get through this novel with our complacency intact.

As the novel starts, Yazaki wakes up and learns that his country, Empire R, has bombed Country B in “self-defense” after discovering that the country was preparing to launch nuclear weapons. In an echo of Orwell’s 1984 (“Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country has not been at war”), Yazaki has a vague sense that there was a war just two months ago. This is a world in which everyone carries HP (human phone), artificial intelligence terminals that give the user all the information they need. They talk in human voices, and gradually acquire personalities based on their owner’s personality and their Internet search propensities. They can start conversations on their own, and even interact with other HP online. AI has already reached the point at which it can learn independently and program itself, so that it can surpass human intelligence.

Shinjuku, by Carl Randall

When the government suspends Internet access due to the war, Yazaki notices that his fellow train passengers panic—even their breathing becomes erratic—because HP have become such an extension of their bodies that they cannot imagine doing without them (luckily, they remember that they can still play games on their HP). In a telling detail, railings have been installed on the train station platform to keep people walking safely in single file so that they can keep their eyes glued to their HP.

Automatic Ticket Gate, by Satoru Imatake

This is the country that squadrons of soldiers from Republic Y land attack, chanting “God is everything, death to the infidels.” Yazaki’s HP guides him to relative safety in a library basement, but his usual blind acceptance of his surroundings crumbles as he is forced to question the motives of his fellow escapees. His trusting nature is shaken even more when he is rescued by Alpha, a female soldier from Republic Y, and learns her story.

Yazaki’s adventures are interspersed with the story of Kurihara, the secretary to a politician in the opposition party. They have no influence, but the ruling party insists that Empire R is a democracy, and this façade cannot be maintained without an opposition party. After the horrors of the street fighting (this book requires a strong stomach), it is a relief when Nakamura turns to Kurihara’s story and what seems—at first—to be a less bloody battle. It is a relief to find that he is an essentially good person—he cannot stand the live feed of an execution playing in the taxi and has to jump out and throw up on the side of the road, and he refuses to rely on his HP.

In fact, for all of the dystopian elements of this novel, Nakamura’s two main characters, Yazaki and Kurihara, seem to fit the mold of traditonal heroes. They have their weaknesses and flaws (Yazaki more overtly so than Kurihara), but they are consistently brave and willing to make sacrifices. The two ancillary female characters, Alpha and Saki, also share these characteristics. Empire R also has many of the tropes you would find in thriller novels: double agents, targeted viruses, underground resistance groups, kidnappings, pills that erase your memory and betrayal.

However, unlike the usual thriller, I wasn’t able to dismiss the story when I set it down. The details that Nakamura casually drops show up resemblances between this dystopian world and our own, effectively skewering our self-regard. The oceans are crowded with small boats full of immigrants, and if they are lucky they will be rescued by large companies in exchange for their labor. There are now 800 nuclear plants in Empire R, with the fourth nuclear accident occurring just after Yazaki was born. Commercials and ads are everywhere, but all are focused on children as part of the government’s push to raise the birth rate. 1% of the population is ultra-wealthy, 15% are wealthy, and 84% are poor. Wars are fought over oil and also to sustain the munitions industry, which is equivalent to a public utility now.

Sachiko Kazama, Nonhuman crossing 2013

Nakamura also shakes up the reader by identifying countries only by a single letter, which effectively strips them of the history and identity often embedded in a country’s name. Countries G and Y, both following the Yoma religion but different sects, are later consolidated and become Country GY. Even the shadowy resistance group is known simply as “L,” which seems to rob it of uniqueness and also any hope of succeeding.

Some 10 years earlier, novels with titles like “Auschwitz,” “9/11” and “The Rwanda Genocide” had appeared on the Internet. No one knew where they had come from or who had written them, but people theorized that an Internet bug was responsible, or that perhaps they had been created by artificial intelligence. Similarly, there were rumors that the revolutionary group L had tried to overthrow Empire R and establish a dictatorship. Even if one wanted to learn the truth of it, all of the original news articles had been erased from the Internet and replaced with massive amounts of conflicting information so that it was no longer possible to find the “truth.”

In Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” Hubl, a historian about to be sent to prison, says, “The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” Kundera went into exile, but the characters in Empire R do not have that option—the entire world seems to have gone in the same direction, but few seem to notice or care.

Kaga, the shadowy figure behind the Party, insists that people don’t want the truth, they want the kind of happiness that can be found on a screen. He believes that people are tired—tired of having to be intellectual, independent, charitable, cooperative. The scariest part of this book—far more than the horrific war scenes—is the possibility that Kaga might be right, and that Saki and her fellow dissidents’ efforts to reveal the “truth” will not penetrate the minds of people addicted to immediate gratification. Things have not changed much since 1949, when Orwell published 1984 and wrote, “The choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and…for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”

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