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This novel is quite similar in format to the short stories in Lou-Lan, except, obviously, it’s longer. Tun-huang, located in what is today China, but was in olden times on the Chinese frontier, on the Silk Road. During the 20th century, priceless Buddhist scrolls and historical records were found in the Buddhist caves near the city. Inoue imagines the events which might have led up to this. The main character arrives from China, and through a complex series of events, joins the Hsi-Hsian army, fighting against various other groups. As in Lou-lan, the political events are quite confusing. Seen from today’s perspective, the lands and peoples depicted are obscure, and their finery and victories vanished under the sand. Perhaps because I read the author’s short story collection on similar themes, and also because there was far less discussion of Buddhism than I thought there would be, I didn’t read this book with as much gusto as I did his short story collection, but it is still worth reading for the unusual setting.
Finished This Scheming World, by Saikaku Ihara, but now I want to read it again. I have always meant to read Saikaku, but have never known where to start out. So I grabbed this book because it looked short. If I read a long book, I would feel compelled to finish it, even if I disliked it. This book not really like a novel as we traditionally understand it, but more of a set of short sketches and episodes featuring various sorts of townspeople during the Edo period in the 1600s, on New Year’s day. I read this in translation (I would be unable to read this in the original, because it’s not modern Japanese), but even there, a strong, strangely light-hearted (even when describing rather depressing things) voice emanates from the work. It feels in a way quite medieval, as it describes a world full of, well, worldliness, the vicissitudes of fortune, and folly. Now, when you think Japanese New Year’s, you envision the stack of mochi topped with an orange, visits to the shrine, snow and chill, ozoni soup, osechi-ryori, kadomatsu, mochi pounding, family visits, and in general, a mood of reflection, somber and cheerful at once.
Well, actually that mood comes through a bit in This Scheming World (there are some interesting details, like the fact that it was traditional for people to put Ise lobsters out with the mochi to welcome the gods. A lobster is mentioned as lasting two weeks, which confuses me; there are also many fascinating details of daily life), but during the Edo Period, the New Year had another meaning: it was the time when debt collectors came pounding on their door, because (I gather) it was their last chance to collect debts, and otherwise they would often just cancel them. So while the rich spent this time squabbling over their social obligations (as New Year’s is also a time to give gifts to people), the poor and financially struggling spent their time scheming to avoid bill collectors and thinking up schemes for making money. So in the end, actually many of the stories revolve around money, appropriate for the world of the townspeople, where money was how one climbed to the top of the ladder. (Rather than artistic refinement or military valour).
Finished reading this collection by Takashi Atoda. These short stories have a decidedly more contemporary air to them than most of the other books I’ve been reading lately; most are Showa era, and even then, the stories set in the past are moved there via reminiscence. (A frequent theme is a character recalling their childhood vividly, reflecting on what is lost from the past, and accepting its transience) The settings are generally realistic, although there are some horror-esque twist endings, which I cannot give away for fear of spoiling them, and a few fanciful tales, although IMHO, these are the weaker stories. On the back cover, Atoda is described as a “popular” novelist, and I suppose this means that his stories are not exceedingly enigmatic, although a few stories end on a deliberately open note, and many are more straightfowardly and wholesomely emotional than certain high literature works. Although the note also says that the stories do have more “human warmth” than Kawabata, I suppose I’d characterize them more as being (as far as I can feel style in translation) much more stylistically subdued than Kawabata, although the writer does move in some stories towards heavy aesthetic description. (extreme austerity sometimes becomes almost ostentatious?)
I rather like the opening of this novel, by Natsume Soseki: “if one lives by the intellect, one grows harsh. If one lives by one’s feelings, one is swept away, and by pride, one is confined, in any case, it is not easy to live in the human world.”
I read it in English, but maybe I should have stretched and tried the Japanese: “智に働けば角が立つ。情に棹させば流される。意地を通せば窮屈だ。とかくに人の世は住みにくい。
I expected the rest of the novel to be an illustration of this, but unfortunately (okay, not really), it’s mostly a meditation about aesthetics, in which the narrator (a painter wandering around in the Japanese countryside) stays at a hot springs inn near a temple and a village in 1906; the Japanese-Russo War is in the background. He converses frequently with the strange and individual daughter of the landlord. The narrator insists that art must remain objective, and praises the objectivity of nature (so this reminded me of Doi’s Anatomy of Dependence, in that the charm of nature is located partially in its inhumanity), which interested me because I was reading something about John Gardner, who insists that literature where we don’t enter in the feelings of the characters suffers from the flaw of frigidity. Indeed, although the narrator insists that the novel is a low form because it’s gossipy and concerned with the self-interests of the characters, there’s nothing like that for getting people interested in reading a story. Anyway, this book probably isn’t a good way to start out Soseki, as it is largely devoid of incident, although quite well-written, and filled with outstanding natural descriptions; I suggest Kokoro if you want to be depressed, and Botchan, if you want to be somewhat more amused.
Finished reading this short story collection by Yasushi Inoue, and I liked it quite a bit. It’s fairly traditional in style, historically based, and the prose in many of them doesn’t have that overt “this was translated from the Japanese” feel, perhaps because many of the stories don’t take place in Japan. The doorway to the past in these stories is archaeological and historical: each story contains artifacts, or is written from the perspective of the present day, so the gap in time is tangible. The first story, Lou-Lan (楼蘭）, is written in the style of a history, dramatizing the sad history of the tiny city state on the shores of the Lop-Nur, caught between the Hsiang-nu (a powerful nomadic confederation. I think they’re also known as the Huns) and Han dynasty China. Loulan is forced to throw in its lot with one or the other, and suffers greatly in the process; the fluctuations of the desert eventually bury the lush lakeside city in sand, until the present day, when it is rediscovered. The most powerful story, I felt, was the last one, set in 1600s Japan, which tells of the “tradition” of abbots sailing to Fudaraku (a divine isle in the Pure Land), which reads almost like a horror story.
Just finished this short novel by Ryu Murakami, his first, and Akutagawa Prize-winning novel. The novel’s basically about a guy (named Ryu, just like the author. Well, probably technically Ryuu), aged twenty, who spends time getting wasted in a squalid apartment, shooting up heroin and taking all kinds of substances, hanging out with his dissipated friends (who are just as dissolute as he is, and some of them more violent), going to drug-fueled, bisexual orgies with members of the American military, and other somewhat monotonous activities. There isn’t much of a plot to the book, and aside from Ryu, who seems to have some kind of artistic gift or sensibility, the other characters are difficult to remember. Anyway, what makes the book stand out is the precision of the prose, which rises to beauty even when describing all kinds of disgusting things (I think if you took a shot of whatever your poison is every time a character vomits (described lovingly; this is not a book you want to read while eating), food is rotting, or there’s an act of violence, by the end you’d probably be an addict too); even in the translation, the originality of the prose comes through, and there are moments of great clarity. (In reviews, I see people comparing it to Burroughs and other counterculture writers. I haven’t read the Beats, but at one point, the narrator mentions Genet, and I definitely saw a resemblance.)
For once, I’m reading a Japanese book written during the Edo period, although most of the stories are set in the medieval period (between Heian and Edo). This collection of tales by Akinori Ueda (roughly translated, the title is: Tales of Rain and Moon) deals mainly with the supernatural and historical. In one tale, a famous monk meets the ghost of a vengeful retired emperor, who explains how his vengefulness led him to become a demon and seek revenge on the Taira clan and Go-shirakawa: in others, snake spirits seduce young men, cheating men receive supernatural punishment, the spirit of gold discourses on whether Buddhist or Confucianist ideas of destiny determine who is wealthy, a village is terrorized by a gay necrophiliac cannibalistic demon monk, etc. The edition I read was a very scholarly one, with the intro and endnotes individually being as long as the tales themselves. (The problem with the scholarly approach is that it begins to annoy you that you can’t read the stories in the original. They are of course not in modern Japanese, and the translator rhasphodizes about the binding of the first edition…) These stories are definitely high context and allusive, continually mentioning beautiful places immortalized in poetry, classical poems (although this can’t really come through v. well in translation), and Chinese literature. After awhile, I got tired of flipping and abandoned the endnotes: most of the stories do work just as well as ghost tales as didactic literature.
This is a short book set in Kyoto in the postwar period, but at times one almost believes it’s Taisho or even Edo-period Kyoto; the heroine, Chieko, is a foundling raised by a traditional fabrics wholesaler, and the social structure surrounding the kimono business has an almost medieval feeling, as one must pick up the delicate threads of the social relations involved. Although her parents construct an elaborate lie about how her birth parents left the infant Chieko out of their site for a moment, and they spontaneously decided to snatch her, in reality, she was a twin, abandoned by her poor woodcutter parents outside the wholesaler’s. (It’s never explicitly explained just why they did this, but I think it was to spare her from the thought that she was abandoned; most of the human relationships in this novel work on a similar principle of understatement) The other twin, Naeko, was kept, but soon after, her parents died, and she is now herself a woodcutter’s apprentice. Naeko has always yearned to meet her twin sister, and one day, they meet at a temple, but now the difference in their social statuses is such that Naeko always refers to her sister as “Miss” (probably ojousan?), although Chieko offers to take her in, but must settle simply for bestowing upon Naeko a magnificent obi and kimono. There’s more to the plot than this, but it’s actually somewhat difficult to summarize.
The main attraction of the novel, though, is its setting. Yes, you guessed it, Kawabata is working somewhat in the elegiac mode. The prosperous shop of Chieko’s eventual fiance sells Sony radios to American tourists along with Japanese fabric souvenirs, and so the story reads like the evocation of a vanishing, anachronistic world. The events take place during the late summer, around the famed Gion festival, and the myriad other festivals following it (the novel does become more vivid if you do look up some info on what exactly takes place during this festival), so although the events of the novel may not sound very explosive, the prose, restrained imagery, and the cultural details manage to retain the reader’s interest. (Indeed, actually, you don’t need to have iconic characters or blockbuster plot to sustain a narrative, but if not, you need to be very good, or drawing from a deep well.) [Also, the general purity of the novel and the wholesomeness of the personages makes me equate this somewhat to Mishima's Sound of the Waves, meaning that both are Japanese novels that don't, as someone of my acquaintance put it, feature horrible and depressing events. Not that Kawabata's fiction contains anything nearly as disturbing as Mishima's, but this novel feels more positive than some of his other works.]
It’s always odd to read a book or watch a movie about a sport or game I have no idea how to play. Somehow I managed to watch twenty-six episodes of Akagi while only having the slightest inkling of how to play mahjong. Perhaps it is also shameful to confess that I also don’t really even understand the basic idea behind cricket. Anyway, this is the third novel by Kawabata that I’ve read, the others being Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes, but the others I read for a class; perhaps what is intimidating about Kawabata is that despite, or because of the apparent simplicity of his style and diction, the ‘clean, transparent feeling’ (as one character says of the Go in this novel) is somewhat enigmatic. Like many writers of the 20th century Kawabata focuses on aesthetics and the distinction between the traditional and modern. (Sort of like Mishima, whom I’m trying to read in the Japanese now, of course, the focus on this kind of purity is perhaps exactly the opposite of the shocking and visceral within Mishima’s works.)
The novel is partially based off of real events. Kawabata covered a match between a Master of Go (in the novel, Shusai), and a representative of the younger forces (in the novel, Otake). The Master’s career has spanned three Imperial reigns; he is written as having simultaneously a vague and focused character, representing the artistic and traditionalistic form of Go. Throughout the marathon match, his health is failing, and there is at one point a months-long recess during which he convalesces. The opponent, Otake, while seeming at some points to be insensitive and taking advantage of the rules, is also likeably portrayed as the representative of the modern methods (characterized by the rigidity of the rules and contracts, and practice of sealed play.) The narrator also plays an important role in the plot, at one point giving a long speech to Otake in which he insists the match must continue because of its historical importance. Even, like me, if you do not understand the subtleties of Go, the descriptions of the surroundings, the drama surrounding the play, and above all, the atmosphere make this worth reading. (Also, FWIW, it’s much more straightforward than A Thousand Cranes or Snow Country.)
Picked this up on a whim in the library; I had never heard of the author. It’s interesting that this genre novel was translated, because in many respects, it’s not an especially innovative detective novel (in retrospect, I should have foreseen the big twist, because this exact trick was used in a detective manga: so therefore I find it bizarre in a forty-year old case which was the center of so much obsession, no one ), and it is openly written as a puzzle plot, complete with ‘and now can you solve the crime, dear reader?’ letters from the author, and the amateur detective and his would-be Watson (a detective story addict), while amusing, don’t really fascinate as characters because we don’t get that much background on them. (Although there is a hilarious part where the detective (who is BTW a fortune-teller) rips on Holmes, but says that he loves him because he showed us what a human was.) In any case, I never read detective stories as puzzle plots. I don’t bother reading them strictly in materialist views, as a puzzle, because the author is always trying to fool us, and therefore the narrator is not playing entirely fair. So I made no serious attempts to solve the crime, although I did have many suspicions.
Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. So what is the crime anyway? In Tokyo, in 1936, a painter, Heikichi Umezawa, was murdered in his studio. A note was found at the crime scene, in which the painter outlined a deranged occult plan to create Azoth, the perfect woman from the body parts of the six young women, his daughters, step-daughters and nieces, who lived with him. The plans included many complex astrological calculations, geomancy, bizarre references to the alchemical correspondences of the planets and the elements, as well as attempts to link the idea of Azoth to the legend of the shamanist-empress Himiko of Yamatai. In any event, after Heikichi’s death, his eldest stepdaughter, who was divorced and lived outside of the house, and was not mentioned in the note, is raped and murdered, and more shockingly, the six young women disappear, and later their dismembered corpses, each missing the part which the note specified would be taken to summon Azoth, are found in mines corresponding to the element of the missing part. For forty years afterwards, this crime becomes an obsession, but the motives and the identity of the killer remain obscure. That is, until the daughter of a police officer brings some shocking evidence to the heroes in 1979.
Anyway, if you really really want to know what went down, you can read the wikipedia entry, which thoroughly spoils the case. I did feel the appearance of a certain minor character was suspicious, as was the note itself and the disposition of the money. What kept me reading the book until the wee hours of the morning was the atmosphere of occult dread, the psychotic specifications of the creation of Azoth, the maddened attempts of later sleuths to calculate her birthplace. The seemingly meaningless obscenity of the crimes (although in the end a mystification: which is what is interesting, how geniunely creepy and unnerving even the red herrings in the case are, the asides about obsessions with mannequins and dolls) is more redolent of the thriller genre than the classical fair-play mystery it structurally is.
