Category: Yamamoto Fumio

「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.”