Tsundoku Reader

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

Category: Harada, Maha

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.

 

 

 

Winner of the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award

April 10, 2018 / / 1 Comment

『かがみの孤城』(The Solitary Castle in the Mirror) by 辻村深月 (Mizuki Tsujimura) won the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award, announced on April 10. Although it wouldn’t have been my choice, it wasn’t a surprise, given the rave reviews from other readers. And it’s always interesting to try and identify the source of a book’s appeal, even if it escapes me personally.

Mizuki Tsujimura at the award ceremony. Source: Jiji Press

I have liked several of Mizuki Tsujimura’s other novels, but at more than 500 pages, this book needed a more aggressive editor—it could have been cut by about half without losing much. I may have not have been her intended audience either, since it seemed to be directed toward young adults. This was in part because her writing seemed more simplistic than in her other novels, and any adult could unravel some of the mysteries about 100 pages before the children did. It was also hard for me to relate to Kokoro, the main character, perhaps because her over-sensitive reactions to every word and look directed at her—while no doubt an entirely accurate depiction of a young girl—became a little tiring.

The description of the book gives the impression that this is an adventure story, with seven children given a year to search in a castle for a key that will grant the finder a wish. However, the actual search for the key was carried out in a half-hearted way –and only mentioned in passing–until the last 50 pages or so. One of the mysteries is why these seven children have been gathered at the castle. All but one have stopped going to school, although they have given up on school for different reasons. None of the children characterized their experiences as “bullying,” and the range of their experiences speaks to the depth of the problem. According to the Ministry of Education’s statistics for the 2014 school year, 26,000 elementary school students and 97,000 middle school students were absent for 30 days or more, the official definition of “school refusal” (the actual figure is certainly higher since the absences of some children are attributed to “medical reasons” to save the child embarrassment and the school its reputation). Both of these figures were up by about 2,000 over the previous year. The reasons given run from bullying to lack of friends and embarrassment over academic performance. The castle gives the seven children a place to feel comfortable and at ease. This search for a sense of belonging is something to which many people, both children and adults, can relate, which probably explains why this book has resonated so much with readers.

My favorite of the books nominated this year was Kotaro Isaka’s “AX”. Kabuto (his nickname among his colleagues on the dark side) is a salesman for a stationery manufacturer by day and a professional assassin by night. He has nerves of steel when it comes to killing, but he is petrified of his wife, and this makes for much of the humor in the book. The book starts with Kabuto talking with his fellow killers-for-hire about the best food to eat when arriving home late after a job. Cup ramen would seem to be the natural choice, but there is a risk of waking up his wife with the sounds he’d make tearing off the plastic wrap, pulling back the lid, and pouring in the boiling water. No, Kabuto informs his respectful disciples, after much trial and error, the only food he has found that is both satisfying and quiet is fish sausage. Kabuto has made such a study of placating his wife that Katsumi, Kabuto’s son, later finds a notebook complete with flow charts that map out possible conversations with his wife and how to respond in a way that will not provoke her.

“AX” is a series of interrelated stories from the time Katsumi is in high school until he is an adult with a son of his own. Kabuto’s attempts to convince the “doctor” who assigns him jobs to let him leave this work, without putting his wife and son at risk, underlie all of these episodes. He is a lonely man, despite his deep love for his family, and almost pathetically grateful for the few friends he makes during the course of this book. However, his profession always gets in the way of these friendships. He makes a friend at a bouldering gym, of all places (they share tips on how to appease their wives), but when they are attacked by a thief on their way to a bar one night, Kabuto is forced to deal with the situation in a way that gives away the fact that he is not just a stationery salesman. This is not exactly a thriller, nor do we get many details about the people he kills and why—his profession is simply a vehicle through which Isaka explores fatherhood and loyalty and sacrifice, with a lot of humor to leaven any heaviness.

I attempted to read 『たゆたえども沈まず』(Fluctuat nec mergitur) by 原田マハ (Maha Harada), but it seemed too formulaic and I gave up after plodding through about 75 pages. I also tried 『百貨の魔法』(The Department Store’s Magic) by 村山早紀 (Saki Murayama), but it was like being trapped in a heavily perfumed room and forced to listen to Muzak versions of classical music.

I quite enjoyed 『キラキラ共和国』 (The Sparkling Republic) by 小川糸 (Ito Ogawa), which sees Hatoko start a new stage in her life with her husband and step-daughter. This is a good one to read in the bath or before bed—nothing prize-worthy here, but a solid comfort read, and there’s always a place for books in that category.

The Booksellers Award has apparently come under criticism for not living up to its original purpose of turning more obscure titles into bestsellers, particularly last year, when Riku Onda won both the Booksellers Award and the Naoki Prize for 蜜蜂と遠雷 (Honey Bees and Distant Thunder). This year they seem to be trying to make up for that with their winner in the translated novel category, Stephanie Garber’s Caraval, translated by Kaoru Nishimoto. The Japanese translation has only sold 9,000 copies in Japan so far, but this award will likely change that.

 

 

Nominees for the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award

January 18, 2018 / / 5 Comments

The 10 books nominated for the 2018 Booksellers Award were announced on January 2018. One of the reasons I look forward to this list so much is the sheer variety of the selections. After all, the titles are chosen by bookstore clerks who are eager to promote their favorites, so I think this is as close as we can get to an award given by people who are readers first and foremost. This year the list is as eclectic as ever, with novels about zombies, the intersections between Japanese art and French Impressionism, the struggles of the publishing industry, a murder involving the game of shogi, bullying, a professional assassin, a modern-day scribe, a mysterious brain cancer patient, and a failing department store (with a cat thrown in for good measure).

『AX アックス』、伊坂幸太郎

AX, by Kotaro Isaka

Isaka, a mystery writer who has won many awards, has said that he writes to deal with his constant fear that something horrible is going to happen and that these catastrophes will change Japan irrevocably. “AX” is about a highly skilled professional assassin who continues to take jobs until he has enough money for retirement. In contrast to his professional mien, he cannot stand up to his wife at home and doesn’t even have the respect of his son. While you’re waiting for this to be translated, you could try Isaka’s novel, ゴールデンスランバー, published in an English translation by Stephen Snyder under the title Remote Control, about a young man who is framed for the murder of the Japanese prime minister and tries to escape.

『かがみの孤城』 、辻村深月

The Solitary Castle in the Mirror, by Mizuki Tsujimura

This long novel is about a young girl who has stopped going to school because she is being bullied. One day, she notices that the mirror in her bedroom is glowing, and as she reaches out to touch it, she is pulled through the mirror and into a game, supervised by a young girl wearing a wolf mask. Kokoro and six other children in similar situations have one year to search a castle for a key that will grant the finder a wish. I will read anything Tsujimura writes. I don’t read her books for the plots, I read them for her vivid characters and their relationships with each other. This book is worth reading if only for the back-and-forth between the prickly young girl leading this group and the fragile kids she tries to guide in their search.

『キラキラ共和国』、小川糸

The Sparkling Republic, by Ito Ogawa

This is a sequel to last year’s “Tsubaki Stationery Store,” also nominated for the 2017 Japanese Booksellers Award. This book continues Hatoko’s story and her life in Kamakura, interspersed with the predicaments and letters of the people who come to her for help writing letters.

『崩れる脳を抱きしめて』、知念実希人

Hold Tight to the Collapsing Brain, by Mikito Chinen

Chinen is a practicing doctor who writes mysteries and thrillers set in hospitals. This rather bizarre title is no exception—his other books have titles like “How to Keep a Pet Guardian of Death” (優しい死神の飼い方)and “Hospital Ward: The Masked Bandit” (仮面病棟). This novel is about Usui, a young man completing his medical residency when he meets Yukari, a young girl with brain cancer. They become close, but when he returns to his hometown, he is told that she has died. Billed as a love story wrapped in a mystery, Usui struggles to discover why Yukari has died and whether she ever existed in the first place.

『屍人荘の殺人』、今村昌弘

Murderers at the House of the Living Dead, by Masahiro Imamura

Members of a university’s mystery club travel together to stay at a pension, and find themselves forced to barricade themselves inside on the very first night. The very next morning, one of their members is found dead, in a locked room. This mystery takes some of the elements of a locked-room murder, but adds zombies to the mix. Reviews have been mixed, with my favorite being from someone who wrote that he felt like he had ordered curry rice, and was served with curry udon instead.

『騙し絵の牙』、塩田武士

The Fang in the Trick Picture, by Takeshi Shiota

This novel follows Hayami, a magazine editor at a major publisher, as he desperately tries to keep his magazine from being discontinued. Hayami struggles with internal politics, but also faces the fight within the entertainment industry for our attention. I plan to read this one on the strength of Shiota’s previous novel based on the unsolved Glico-Morinaga case, “The Voice of the Crime” (also shortlisted for the 2017 award).

『たゆたえども沈まず』、原田マハ

“Fluctuat nec mergitur,” by Maha Harada

(The title refers to the Latin phrase used by Paris as its motto since 1358, meaning something like “tossed by the waves but never sunk.”)

In this novel, Harada has used the historical figure Tadamasa Hayashi, a Japanese art dealer who went on to introduce ukiyo-e, woodblock prints and other forms of Japanese art to Europe, as a way to explore the question of why Japan is so fascinated with Vincent van Gogh. Harada believes that the explanation lies in elements of ukiyo-e in van Gogh’s paintings, and although there is no evidence that Hayashi and van Gogh ever met, this novel imagines a friendship between Hayashi and and Theo and Vincent van Gogh that changed Impressionism.

Harada was also nominated last year for『暗幕のゲルニカ』(Guernica Undercover), about Picasso’s Guernica painting.

『盤上の向日葵』、柚月裕子

“The Sunflower on the Shogi Board,” by Yuko Yuzuki

The book starts in 1994 with the discovery of skeletal remains buried with a piece from a famous shogi set (shogi is a Japanese game similar to chess). Naoya Sano, a policeman who had aspired to be a professional shogi player, and veteran detective Tsuyoshi Ishiba try to identify the body. Their search alternates with the story of Keisuke, starting in 1971. Keisuke’s mother has died and his father abuses him, but a former teacher recognizes his unusual talent for shogi and encourages him to leave for Tokyo and become a professional.

This book is especially timely as shogi has been in the headlines a lot lately thanks to the amazing wins of fifteen-year-old Sota Fujii, Japan’s youngest professional shogi player. There has actually been a run on shogi sets, which has to be a first!

『百貨の魔法』、村山早紀

The Department Store’s Magic, by Saki Murayama

This book is a series of interlinked stories about the people who work at a local department store: the elevator girl, the concierge, the jewelry department’s floor manager and the founder’s family. As rumors about the store’s impending closure begin to go around, they all come together to try and save the store—with the help of the white cat who lives there. Murayama’s The Story of Ofudo (about a bookstore, and also involving a cat) was nominated for last year’s award, and I’ve been reading it when I need a respite from my current read, Fuminori Nakamura’s R帝国 (Empire R)—its fairytale atmosphere is a welcome contrast to Nakamura’s dark vision.

『星の子』、今村夏子

Child of the Stars, Natsuko Imamura

The narrator of this novel (which was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize) is a third-year middle school student, Chihiro. She was born premature and began suffering from eczema when she was a baby. Her parents tried every treatment recommended, but with no effect. Finally, her father’s co-worker gives them a bottle of water labeled “Blessings of the Evening Star,” with instructions to wash her with it. This completely cures her, and her parents become wrapped up in this co-worker’s cult as a result. Although Chihiro’s older sister runs away, Chihiro is able to separate her home life from life outside—at least until she reaches adolescence.

And there you have it. The booksellers have spoken, and now we must do our part and get reading.

God of Cinema

February 18, 2016 / / 1 Comment

キネマの神様

原田マハ

文藝春秋, 2013

 

God of the Cinema

Maha Harada

Bungeishunju, 2013

[No English translation available]

 

One reviewer of this book said she become so caught up in this book that she started reading it at 11pm, read it until she heard the sound of the motorbike delivering the morning newspaper, slept a few hours and then read to the end. But what convinced me to pull this book off my shelves was her comment that this book made her glad that she was born Japanese so that she could read this book.

The story centers on Ayumi Maruyama and her father, known as Go. When the story begins, Ayumi has just quit her high-ranking position at a development company, rather than accepting a transfer that is essentially a demotion, and Go is recovering from heart surgery.

Ayumi has always followed her father’s advice to find what you love and stick to it, no matter how hard it is, and as a result she was able to work at a large company developing theater complexes. At the same time, her single-mindedness made her enemies at work and left her single at age 40.

Go was dealt a lucky hand of cards when he was born. He was born to parents who lost their house but survived the Kanto earthquake, spent his childhood in Manchuria, made it through WWII without a scratch, married a dependable woman, and was always able to rely on his wife and friends to bail him out from his gambling debts. However, his heart surgery and his wife’s discovery that he has the equivalent of about $30,000 in debt from playing mahjong and gambling on horse races seem to suggest that his luck has run out. Ayumi and her mother consult experts on gambling addiction, and are told that by always paying off his debt, they have been enabling him and must cut him off from any source of money. They sequester his pension and, left with only enough money for a few visits to the movie theater and DVD rentals, Go falls into a depression.

Despite all of his failings, Go’s enthusiasm for life has earned him a few constant friends. Terashin, the owner of a meigaza theater that shows classic films and holds retrospectives, loves Go as he is. Telling Ayumi that he knows Go has used the money he loaned him to play mahjong, he says, “I like that about him. He may be a bit of a charlatan, but he’s big-hearted. These days, there aren’t many people who are that joyfully irresponsible. … When I see how dogged he is in living life his own way, it makes me feel that as long as there are movies in this world, there’s a reason for me to keep this theater going. The God of the Cinema hasn’t abandoned me yet.”

It was Go that told Terashin about this “God of the Cinema.” He writes,

Movie theaters are actually temples to entertainment. One step into these temples and you have entered a sacred area occupying a different dimension. Movies are an offering to the gods living in this temple. Ever since I was a child, I have sensed the presence of the god of cinema watching the movie together with me somewhere in the theater. This god might enjoy the movie, but more than anything else, he finds joy in the pleasure of all the people watching the movies. … I keep talking about these gods, but in reality I’m not a religious person. And yet still, I sense a strength that I cannot see with my own eyes and a presence that is beyond human knowledge. When I watch a truly great movie, this feeling is particularly strong.

While Go is in the hospital, Ayumi finds stacks and stacks of notebooks that her father has filled with notes on the movies that he has seen. Although he writes in an unsophisticated way, it is his frank pleasure in movies that draws her in. On a whim, Ayumi scribbles an entry of her own on a piece of scratch paper and tucks it into his notebooks. Inspired by a recent visit to Terashin’s meigaza, she likens these meigaza to village temples:

Snug, simple places with a good atmosphere. No gaudy shrines or showy events here, just the kind of temple that hosts a quiet summer festival with cotton candy and cold soda and goldfish catching games. That girl you’ve had your eye on will come in her yukata. Those short summers have a poignancy so sharp it makes your heart ache. And yet these places are dying out, one by one.

It is these hastily scribbled words that finally result in a new job for Ayumi at Eiyu, a movie magazine. Hoping to keep her father away from the temptations of mahjong and horse races, Ayumi had taught her father to use the Internet to read movie blogs and check on theater showings (he even keeps a glass of sake by his computer, just as you would leave an offering in front of a shrine). Finding her notes in his notebook, he posts it on Eiyu’s blog. This magazine was originally just one of the assets of a large company, one of the first companies to obtain distribution rights for Western movies in Japan. Now only the magazine is left, and it is also on its last legs. The editor is hoping that Ayumi will be a fresh new voice for the magazine.

However, it is really Go that rescues the magazine. He becomes the main blogger for the magazine’s website, given the title “apostle of the God of Cinema.” His posts bring in comments from all over Japan, and they even post English translations with help from Ayumi’s former colleague. And this is where the storyline takes another turn. Somebody only identifying himself as “Rosebud” begins responding to Go’s movie reviews on the English site, and his erudition and deep knowledge of movies reveals that he is not your usual blog commentator. The back-and-forth between Go and Rosebud draw in large audiences, and their arguments about the merits and shortcomings of “A Field of Dreams,” “Roman Holiday” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” are part of the pleasure of this novel. We finally learn Rosebud’s identity when Go asks for his help in saving Terashin’s movie theater, which has been threatened by the construction of large movie complex nearby.

This book could easily have become maudlin and marred by a series of convenient turns in the characters’ fortunes, but luckily (for the reader), Go’s failings and Ayumi’s prickliness always stand in the way of tidy resolutions. And as Terashin says, “The God of Cinema does not grant miracles that easily. Gods are actually quite heartless, you know.”

In the end, though, Maha Harada gives us an ending worthy of all those great movies Go and Rosebud discuss, bringing the characters together in a movie theater. Because after all, “no matter what the movie is, if you are watching it with the person you love in a theater you love, that is the best movie of your life.”

(To see a favorite scene from the movie they watch, click here.)

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© 2016 Erika Tsugawa All rights reserved. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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