Tsundoku Reader

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

Category: Japanese authors discussed on Tsundoku Reader (Page 1 of 5)

本心

December 9, 2021 / / 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Tokyo’s soul in sento

October 20, 2021 / / 2 Comments

「メゾン刻の湯」　小野美由紀, 2018

Maison Toki no Yu, by Miyuki Ono, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spinning while revolving

May 26, 2021 / / 1 Comment

「自転しながら公転する」　山本文緒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idol, Burned

March 25, 2021 / / 0 Comments

『推し、燃ゆ』宇佐見りん

Idol, Burned, by Rin Usami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Asahi Shimbun

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

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.

 

 

 

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.

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