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

Tag: 町屋良平

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds

1R1分34秒、町屋良平、新潮社、2019

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

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

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

Painting by Owen Smith

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

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

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

Stag at Sharkey’s 1901, by George Bellows

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

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

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

Winners of 160th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes

The winners of the 160th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes—the last in the Heisei era—were announced on January 16. I always look forward to reading the winners of the Naoki Prize, which is generally awarded to an “entertainment” novel written with a straightforward, approachable style, but sometimes the Akutagawa Prize seems more like a lens into what Japanese literary critics value in literary fiction today than a guide for my own reading.  This year all three (two novels won the Akutagawa Prize this time) look interesting, and are also quite varied in subject and style.

上田岳弘 (Takehiro Ueda) won the Akutagawa for his novel 「ニムロッド」 (Nimrod). He previously won the Shincho Prize for New Writers with his debut novel, 「太陽」 (Sun), and the Mishima Yukio Award for 「わたしの恋人」(My Lover). “Nimrod” begins when the main character, a man employed at a server maintenance company, is ordered to record bitcoin transaction data. Ueda describes how the entire bitcoin scheme rests on the notion that our existence is verified when our data is recorded, but also incorporates the everyday with scenes between the main character and his girlfriend and his exchanges with co-workers. A novel that one of these co-workers is writing is also skillfully woven in. One of the judges said that Ueda’s novel won for its “skill in linking a bold world view with the everyday.” In this novel, Ueda explores how to best live as individuals in an information society, but he seems to answer this question for himself through his writing: in an interview he stated that “continuing to engage in art, regardless of whether it has any meaning, guarantees our humanity.”

町屋良平 (Ryohei Machida) 「1R1分34秒」(One Round One Minute 34 Seconds) won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel about a professional boxer who has never won a match since winning by knockout in his debut fight. He has lost all sense of his place in the world, both at his boxing gym and his part-time job, but this begins to change when he meets an eccentric trainer. Machida described his feelings on hearing that he’d won the Akutagawa as similar to winning by “technical knockout”—he’d written all out and suddenly it was over.

真藤順丈 (Junjo Shindo) was awarded the Naoki Prize, as well as the Yamada Futaro Award, for his novel 「宝島」 (Treasury Island) about the ties between three close friends living on Okinawa. The novel covers the 20 years from 1952 to 1972, when the US government handed control of Okinawa back to Japan. Shindo has said that as he is not from Okinawa, he hesitated to write this story, but his interest in the demonstrations against the bases in Okinawa and incidents involving US soldiers spurred his interest in Okinawa’s post-war history. In his research, he learned about a gang of Okinawans who looted US bases for food, and was inspired to write about it. Shindo hopes that this novel will be an opportunity for people to think about the problems people face in Okinawa–this may make it sound heavy, but reviews of this book all mention its humor and sense of hope.

From left: Junjo Shindo, Ryohei Machida, Takehiro Ueda. Source: Japan Times

「ニムロッド」and 「1R1分34秒」 will be published later this month. 「宝島」 was published in June but is now on backorder. Hopefully the publishers will catch up with demand soon. For now, you can listen to 荻上チキ discuss all three books with a literary critic on his Session-22 podcast (here).

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