the briefcase

A novel I've been very much looking forward to is Hiromi Kawakami's second appearance into English translation, after greatly enjoying the poeticism of Manazuru, the prose of The Briefcase has again a subtly understated simplicity to it that enables the reader to find themselves almost unawarely placed into the intricacies of the relationship between, Harutsuna Matsumoto, the ageing retired teacher, and Tsukiko Omachi, one of his former students who is now a woman facing middle age. The story is presented episodically, beginning with a chance meeting between the two again when they order exactly the same dish in a bar they both are eating in, the novel is presented through the perspective of Tsukiko, as the two become reacquainted the narrative begins to reveal episodes from her past, although a woman who has far from lived a sheltered life, we get the impression that she still lives in the same neighbourhood that she went to school in, re-meeting sensei, as Matsumoto is referred to by her throughout the novel, has provoked in her the realization that up til now she had been living a slightly oblivious existence, the world begins to appear in a new perspective.

After a few more meetings Tsukiko is invited to sensei's house, and discovers a collection of ceramic teapots from the boxed lunches that he and his wife bought from railway stations on their travels, background details of sensei's life aren't expanded upon greatly which adds a slightly enigmatic quality to him, although we learn that sensei's slightly bohemian wife passed away after leaving him. The little snippets of information about his characteristics we know are given to us through Tsukiko's observations, his dislike of having someone else pour his drink out for him, and throughout a reading of the novel the question of the contents of sensei's briefcase hovers  at the peripheries of our thoughts. Some of their meetings are pre-arranged and some occur by coincidence, as the relationship develops, it's nature is enigmatic, Tsukiko's growing attachment to sensei becomes apparent in her narrative, an episode when in their favourite bar a drunk begins to ask how many times a week they slept together, begins to provoke the reader into questioning the nature of the relationship. Following the two's outings together sees them go on a market excursion, Kawakami's  narrative  captures  Tsukiko's growing sense that the relationship is slightly absurd when she finds herself asking what is she doing? when she finds herself halfway up a mountain on a mushroom hunting trip with sensei and Satoru, the owner of their favourite bar, the novel is full of fantastic descriptions of Japanese dishes that makes you want to eat and drink while reading.

On another meeting she goes with sensei to a cherry blossom viewing party held at their old school, old teachers and old pupils gather for the party, Tsukiko meets Kojima, a fellow student who has since divorced his wife, the pair leave the party early and Kojima  asks Tsukiko for more dates, but she finds that she's not attracted to him. Meeting with Kojima seems to tap into a whole wreath of nostalgic memories for the pair, although never does Tsukiko admit to ever having had a crush on sensei when she was at school, these passages see Tsukiko  acknowledging the passing of time and the tide of it washing her up on an unfamiliar shore, reminiscing and being with Kojima she observes, 'it seemed like we had ended up within a time that didn't exist anymore'. Tsukiko is a fascinating character study, there is ample room to discuss her psychology at length, it could be said that the reason she develops an attachment to sensei is that she sometimes appears to be in a fragile emotional state at finding herself in an onset of spiritual dilemma in the face of approaching her middle age, but in Kawakami's prose the story can also be read with all the innocence of being a simple love story, although albeit being a slightly unconventional one being one  that spans the generation gap, but this is the truer path of love. If this were a movie there are moments where it could be seen that Tsukiko is caught speaking directly into the camera, the narrative speaks out to us and sees Tsukiko ask the same questions the reader will find themselves asking, the answer perhaps lies in reading this fine translation.

The Briefcase/Sensei no kaban is translated by Allison Markin Powell and published by Counterpoint Press, the novel was awarded the Tanizaki Prize in 2001.

 

Snakelust

Snakelust was published by Kodansha International back in 1998, and is a translation of seven stories written by Kenji Nakagami by Andrew Rankin. Nakagami's stories depict the harsh world and lives of the burakumin, often incorporating elements and episodes from his own life, he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his short story Misaki/The Cape in 1975, notably Nakagami was the first author born in the post-war period to be given the prize. When moving to Tokyo, unlike many writers Nakagami worked in many manual handling jobs, and would often write in Jazz clubs. Oddly there are more studies of Nakagami in English than there are actual translations of his works. The stories move between the contemporary and the medieval in their setting, his short stories find their expression with a mythic-like quality, and share interconnecting motifs, a reading of the short story The Immortal from his collection The Kumano Collection sees it also set in Nakagami's native Kumano following a holy man wandering through the forest who encounters a woman, and features a fleeing noble cortege, and scenes that are alluded to here in the short story Crimson Waterfall.


The Mountain Ascetic/Shugen follows a man from Kumano as he tries to establish himself in Tokyo, the opening of the story begins with a description of the mountains echoing with the mingling sound of cicadas and Buddhist chant, coming to a close on the decaying corpse of a nameless monk, still the chant emanates from the pile of bones. The narrative leads on to a description of a man, described as being 'more muscle than brains', a man barely able to contain his passions, a drinker, due to his violent temper his marriage falls apart, and he returns to Kumano. Giving up cigarettes and alcohol the man wanders into the mountains in search of finding some form of reconciliation within himself, whilst walking he experiences three visitations, due to his exhaustion he believes that they could be hallucinations, the first is of a ghostly monk, which he identifies as being his dead brother who had committed suicide aged 24, the second is of a picnic scene with a mother, child and grandmother, the mother is crying. The third is of three men stacking stones lamenting about the misfortune that another of them has met, two of the men appear to be disfigured, one man has no hands, he moves the stones with the stumps of his wrists, another has no legs, the third man is dressed in white, perhaps swathed in bandages. Walking further the man finds himself chanting a sutra over and over, the man recalls his brother and a violent episode towards his wife, his frustration reduces him to tears, eventually he succumbs to sleep. In the night he is awoken by the sound of chimes in the darkness, he finds that it's source is from a monk performing an absolution of sorts. The visions that the narrator saw on the mountain seem swathed in enigma, mountains for Nakagami are places inhabited with spirits and have huge significance in these stories, landscapes that are open to a vast imaginative canvass where his characters find deep spiritual expression, each of the scenes the man sees could be representing the culminating scene within their own story.

The Wind and the Light/Somoku, in some ways is a companion piece to The Mountain Ascetic, it opens again in a mountain setting, Nakagami sets it near Odaigahara, with a man suffering from arrow wounds stumbling through the forest, coming across another man, at first it's uncertain to tell from which person the narrative is coming from, or the time period its set in. The man without the arrow wounds begins to assist the wounded man, after sometime the wounded man begs to be thrown off the cliff. Like the previous story the narrative flicks between the narrator recounting episodes from his past, the flashback sequences here sees the man recall a time in his youth when he had kept pet finches, his memory focuses particularly on a blind bird that he would grab in his fist and almost squeeze to death, and another memory sees him mistakenly open an egg with a living chick inside, he becomes rapt with guilt, he identifies himself with a character from Kamo no Chomei's Hosshinshu. Helping the man down from the mountain he begins to feel the man's pain, the wounded man suddenly bursts into tears asking why is it that he's helping him and begging to be left or killed, in the distance voices can be begin to be heard calling the wounded man. As in the The Mountain Ascetic the narrator has a brother who had committed suicide in the past, and the man suddenly comes to the realization that the wounded man is his brother visiting him with a message.

Snakelust/Jain, a story that was adapted to film by Kazuhiko Hasegawa, was released through A.T.G in 1976 under the title Seishun no satsujinsha/ The Youth Killer, Nakagami wrote the screen play which is a close rendering of this disturbing tale of family dysfunction taken to murderous degrees. In the story Kei's intrusion into the family is felt more prominently than in the film, it could be said that  Jun is tormented by his mother's jealousy which unleashes his pent up rage. Makeup/Kessho sees familiar motifs that appear in this collection, the figure of a brother who had committed suicide is mentioned, the narrator works at a timber yard, (the family business in Jain is in lumber), and also the narrator keeps birds, here once he reaches breeding a hundred birds or pairs he then lets them go, watching as they disperse across the neighbourhood. In Kessho the protagonist is a man who is separating from his wife, the narrative is built up with thematically linked observations about the make up worn by key women from his life, his sisters,  mother and wife. The men in Nakagami's stories appear as men with a robust physicality, but as the jacket of the book describes - Again and again Nakagami confronts us with the disturbing fact of man's ultimate helplessness before the power of female sexuality.

Kurenai no taki/Crimson Waterfall and Oni no hanashi/A Tale of a demon are set in old Japan, A Tale of a Demon is a short story of a warrior from Koga deceived by a demon living on the Tatsumi Bridge, which Nakagami sets in the old Province of Omi, (now Shiga Prefecture), who appears to him as beautiful young woman. Crimson Waterfall, a violent tale set in feudal times follows a noble cortege escaping from warring factions through a forest in Kumano, and is told mainly from the perspective of the princesses bodyguard, the group is made up of him, the princess and two ladies in waiting. The story follows the guard as he lusts after the princess, killing the ladies in waiting when they become separated from her, he tells her that they were caught and killed by the pursuing bandits. At night whilst she sleeps he rather gleefully contemplates her vulnerability, the story ends fulfilling the title's implied bloodiness. The last story is Juryoku no miyako/Gravity's Capital, an erotically charged story where the old and the contemporary begin to converge. From it's opening the story had me completely absorbed - She is standing in the doorway bathed in a stream of early morning sunlight when she says she's seen a god come soaring across the sky and land in the zelkova tree in the middle of the field. This story is largely told through the perspective of Yoshiaki, a construction worker who lives in the mountains who moves from site to site, intending to stay just for a night with a girl he meets. In the morning the girl begins to tell of a Prince that visits her during the night, at first he doesn't believe a word, as the story unfolds and the more he becomes involved with the girl, the more he becomes to realize that she is suffering a form of possession from the ancient Prince. He tries to smother the visions and the voices she hears and sees with his own passion, but putting his ear to her chest he too begins to hear a voice emanating from within her.



Studies in English:

Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity
Anne McKnight
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji's Kiseki and the Power of the Tale
Anne Helene Thelle
Iucidicium Verlag, 2010

Out of the Alleyway - Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction
Eve Zimmerman
Harvard University Press, 2008

Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers
Nina Cornyetz
Stanford University Press, 1999

Works in English:

The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
translated by Eve Zimmerman
Stonebridge Press, 2008

Snakelust
translated by Andrew Rankin
Kodansha International, 1998

The Immortal
Short story translated by Mark Harbison in the Showa Anthology
Kodansha International, 1985

Works in French:

Nakagami is more widely translated in French than in English, the publisher Editions Fayard publish five of his novels, and Editions Philippe Picquier publish Misaki/Le Cap and also Kiseki/Miracle. 

Japan Earthquake Charity Literature Part 2

Since posting on this charity project two more short stories and an essay have been added to the Waseda Bungaku webpage. Nakamura Fuminori, whose Kenzaburo Oe Prize winning novel The Thief is due out in March from Soho Press, has the essay and observational piece 'When the Earthquake Hit', translated by Michael Staley, in which he recounts the day of the earthquake. From Jungo Aoki, who has been described as the Japanese Thomas Pynchon, comes the short story, Special Edition - Sack-toting Turtle Spotted in West Ikebukuro, translated by Ian McDonald, and Yoshikawa Yasuhisa's penetrative short story, Snow Dusk, Death Dusk, is translated by Lucy North.

Please remember to donate something via the Japanese Red Cross or through your country's Red Cross Society.

March Was Made of Yarn - Edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke is published by Vintage in the USA in March, and also in the UK by Harvill Secker.

Japan Earthquake Charity Literature at Waseda Bungaku Department

The Wild Geese

As is often the case that after a period of reading relatively modern or contemporary books or novels the desire to turn to something older pounces on my reading habits, and vice a versa. Feburary 17th will mark the 150 anniversary of Mori Ogai's birth,  which seems like a great prompt to read some of his works, 2012 also marks the 100th anniversary of Soseki's Kokoro. Gan/The Wild Geese was written between the years 1911-1913, it could be described as being a long novella coming in at around 120 pages long, although it took longer to read than anticipated, theres plenty in here to inspire thought, like Kawabata Yasunari's later novel Koto/The Old Capital the novel is of interest with topographical descriptions of it's setting, here it's in and around Muenzaka near Tokyo University and Shinobazu Pond, this area is also the setting for Kawabata's short story from 1926 Boshi Jiken/The Hat Incident, which can be found in the collection, Palm-of-the-Hand-Stories. Biographical details on Mori are plenty throughout the internet, but a reading of a number of his fictions we can see that he  drew on experiences and episodes from his life to use in his writings, Mori lived and wrote during the Meiji period, and many of the changes that this epochal period caused are witnessed and reacted to by the characters in his books. Like Natsume Soseki, his writing is seen as being anti-naturalist in it's perspective, in Gan the narrative is dotted with asides which can be interpretated to this effect. The story is narrated by an anonymous acquaintance of a student called Okada, who the narrator notes reminds him of Kawakami Bizan, it could be said that the book has four or five distinctive narratives, the opening one introduces us to the two students and of Okada's first contact with Otama by seeing her in the window of a large house he walks by. In the second the story of the money lender Suezo is described, at first a servant to the students of the university, Suezo through being thrifty has also managed to amass a capital of money, and he is reviled in the neighbourhood as a money lender, the narrative set before Okada's  encounter with Otama traces Suezo's fascination and attraction to Otama, which eventually leads him to renting a house in Muenzaka for her as his mistress, and another one to accomodate her father. Mori's narrative moves in and out of the thoughts of his characters, Otama's as she misses  being with her father, Otama's father's thoughts about his daughter, then it passes to Suezo's wife, Otsune, who begins to suspect her husband after hearing rumours,  Otsune comes nearly to breaking point when Otama is pointed out to her in the street with the same parasol that Suezo had given her, confrontations abound. The narrative also following Suezo as he continually tries to put his wife off the scent, these psychological portraits are incredibly well defined insights into the worlds of the characters, Otama's loneliness and sense of entrapment in particular.

Throughout the novel the narratives of Mori's characters observe and note events and people occurring around them, the Namamugi incident is referred to and Suezo picks up on the idiosyncrasies of Fukuchi, the writer who owns a large house next to his - He was supposedly an intelligent man, a writer. But was he? If a clerk did the same kinds of nasty tricks with his pen as Fukuchi did, he would be discharged, reading a line like this makes you think that perhaps Mori had someone particular in mind.  Examples of the changes being brought in with the period can be read too - The wheeled stall vanished from it's set place under the eaves. And the house and it's surroundings, which were always modest, seemed suddenly attacked by what was then fashionably called "civilization",  for new boards over the ditch replaced the broken and warped ones, and a new lattice door had been installed at the entrance. This passage gives the impression that Mori is alluding that the changes that were underway went only as far as appearances, that in an understated way that  underneath things remained pretty much the same, the big changes were perhaps only skin deep. As the narrative progresses  Suezo  acting on a slight impulse buys Otama a pair of linnets which can read as being the first appearance of two metaphors used in the narrative, after Otama has hung the cage up in her house in Muenzaka, the narrative flows into focusing on Okada's perspective, coming to the rescue of the birds when the cage is attacked by a snake. Gan finishes with many threads left unresolved, it leaving it up to the reader to imagine the continuous lives of it's characters.

Gan has been translated into English twice, as The Wild Geese by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, published by Tuttle Publishing, and again by Burton Watson as The Wild Goose published by Center for Japanese Studies Publications, University of Michigan      

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

At the moment it seems that my reading is not complete without having at hand a manga to read, and after reading Mitsuse Ryu, Moto Hagio seems like a logical choice, with the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Hagio's shojo classic The Heart of Thomas/ Toma no shinzo I thought I'd better catch up with their previous book by her. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories collects ten stories that spans thirty years, 1977-2007, the stories are translated by Matt Thorn and includes the essay The Magnificent Forty-Niners, in which he introduces the artists that made up the  influential manga group, all commonly believed to have being born in 1949, although as it turns out Hagio was the only one actually born in this year. I'd have to admit being torn between either posting solely on  Iguana Girl or posting on the collection as a whole, although reading through the stories in this selection, they seemed to get better and better as they went along that not to post on any of the others seemed like a little of an injustice. The narratives in Hagio's stories are quite simply conveyed, most of these stories are brief but everyone leaves a resonance with the reader after finishing them, most are largely told from the perspective of a child who is caught at the moment as they are beginning to interpret and awaken to the machinations of the adult world, or are caught responding to some distant tragedy that has taken place in their past,  Hagio's  use of metaphor in her stories adds another dimension to them. A predominant theme that appears is that of societal conceptions of the normal, well adjusted  child as opposed to those that are seen as being ugly or not fitting in, as in Hanshin: Half God from 1985 a story about a pair of conjoined twins, one beautiful, who is brash but also has a limp and is therefore carried by the other twin who is not as beautiful but is studious and takes care of her sister, it's also implied in the story that the beautiful twin is sapping the uglier twin's good health. The story explores her feelings of resentment with her beautiful twin, and Hagio's ability to examine the motives and perceptions of the reasoning process in her characters is both exacting and moving to read, the moral table is turned many times in this story when the doctors come to the conclusion that they should be separated,  although it will be the case that one of them will die in the operation, Hagio leaves it to the last pages in adding the unexpected twist that changes the perspectives held by her characters. 


The title story A Drunken Dream/Suimu, also from 1985, stands out from the others as it's setting is on a space station, it's a fantastic love story that spans across dream and reality, as well as shifting between time periods. The story is seen through the narrator, an androgyne, who has a reoccurring dream of a love unfulfilled, a mysterious person inhabits these dreams and when a group of new recruits arrive at the station the narrator excitedly  discovers that among them is the person in the dream.  At first reality seems to intervene on the dream, although Hagio has a knack of pulling the rug from beneath your feet at precisely the right moment which ends most of her stories in an enigmatic way, things come to a conclusion but a sense lingers that things are far from being resolved, which leaves the reader contemplating again what has occurred in her stories. The two longest stories Angel Mimic and Iguana Girl, (both from 2008),  see Hagio exploring the traits of her characters to a greater degree, Iguana Girl is a story that explores the neurosis between a mother and daughter, (and sister?), the use of metaphor leads the reader into perceiving the narrative one way, but then Hagio turns the story in an unexpected direction which leaves you wondering which of the characters the metaphor is being applied to or which of them it is being perceived by. Angel Mimic/Tenshi no gitai follows the complex relationship between a young high school teacher and one of his pupils whose irrational behaviour hides an episode from her past, at the same time she harbours a fascination for angels which is another enigma to the teacher. The selection also comes with an interview between Hagio and the translator Matt Thorn where they discuss her beginnings and influences as a manga artist.   

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories at Fantagraphics

Coming Closer and Getting Further Away

I first came across the photography of Asako Narahashi through the book Heavy Light and then again of her exhibition Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water,  Narahashi's photographs are a heady evocation of disorientation, that  question our sense of proximity and balance in a spatial perspective, in them Narahashi would wade out into the sea and then turn her back and would photograph from the perspective of the sea looking back inland. Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water, Nazraeli Press is a book that I've still not managed to get a copy, but I've kept an eye out for other publications featuring her work, a recent publication is Coming Closer and Getting Further Away a booklet size collection which features a selection of photographs from the exhibition, Asako Narahashi 2009/1989: Coming Closer and Getting Further Away, Tokyo Art Museum, 2009, the text is in Japanese and English and comes with an additionally essay on Asako Narahashi entitled The Form of Water by art critic Shino Kuraishi, (translated by Franz K. Prichard), in which he traces Narahashi's photographs through her previous exhibitions and the books NU-E (1997), Funiculi Funicula, (2003) and also Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water. Kuraishi explores the concept of nue in Narahashi's photography, here the term nue is derived from describing the mythical creature but is also used to represent the sense of an un-identifiable person or an ambiguous indeterminate attitude. The booklet contains some photographs of the exhibition by Takashi Yasumura and also thumbnail images of all the photographs exhibited as well as full page selections of the photographs, which include construction shots of skyscrapers and express ways from Dubai and also photographs similar to those seen in Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water taken in Jindo in South Korea.


For more information and images please check out the publisher's page.


The booklet is published by Osiris an imprint based in Shibuya in Tokyo who publish an interesting selection of books on photography, often in dual text editions, including; Nakahira Takuma's 1970 book For a Language to Come and Kanemura Osamu's My Name is Shockhammer and also a DVD collection of poet Yoshimasu Gozo's films Ki-Se-Ki:gozo cine, (trailer below), and many more, an imprint well worth exploring.

OSIRIS

Asako Narahashi's webpages

10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

SF is a genre that is open to so many interpretations, and then once you start to explore the genre further you discover that there exists  further sub genres to it, 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights, is a novel whose scope takes in thousands of years, and fictionally  links together some sizable enigmas in it's path. Originally published in 1967, and then again in a revised edition in 1973, the novel must stand as being one of the earliest examples of Japanese SF in translation, the current edition in Japan is published by Hayakawa  Publishing, who also publish a large selection of classic SF titles in Japanese translation. The novel opens at the creation of the earth, the cosmic event is described in prose full of scientific terminology, which continues sporadically throughout the rest of the novel, passages of text journey over thousands, millions of years of evolution, the tide of time going in and out, Mitsuse layers the time periods arriving at what the reader presumes will be the permanent setting of the novel. In three chapters we are introduced to the main characters through historical episodes related to them, Plato travelling through  the remote town of Elcasia, the period of events are meant to be those of his writing Timaeus and Critias and his fascination for the doomed civilisation of Atlantis.


The novel is dotted with descriptions of domed buildings and of objects made from curious unknown materials, whilst in Elcasia Plato comes into contact with the strange building material of glaes and also the material orichalcum, and speaks with the suzerain, a strange oracle like entity, the room in which Plato and his servant stay in is fitted with electric lights, which at first terrifies then rouses their curiosity. At night during a sandstorm Plato is overcome by a vision that he is Orionae witnessing the end of Atlantis. The setting of the second chapter takes us to the besieged city of Sakya and the scene of Siddartha's departure from the city at the beginning of his spiritual quest. Accompanied with his Brahmins the journey begins to take on a celestial path, Siddartha encounters the warring Asura and the malevolent Maitreya, whose identity and origins are clouded with uncertainty. The third of the introductory chapters arrives at the trial and crucifiction of Jesus Christ, with Pilate being harangued into sentencing the Nazarene to death, in much of these chapters Mitsuse is setting the scene, re-illustrating the stories that we are familiar with, (or partially familiar with), but at the same time ending them with a hint or a clue of the novel's real plot.


The novel is published by Haikasoru and translated by Alexander O.Smith and Elye J. Alexander and comes with an afterword from Mitsuse from the 1973 edition and also a commentary from Mamoru Oshii who recounts meeting the author. Reading the novel is like discovering a classic episode from Japanese SF history, Ryu Mitsuse was one of the first SF writers to be translated into English. The novel's scope is gargantuan but as it progresses Mitsuse refocuses the action into following the main characters as they hunt down and try to decipher the cause and motive of the destruction they encounter  in a bout of civilisation hopping, the clues pointing to the Planetary Development Committee, although who is controlling the organisation?. Siddartha finds himself in a destroyed city which he discovers is the remains of Tokyo of 2092 and encounters some survivors,  much of the last half takes place within the landscapes of destroyed civilisations, the characters travel through thousands of years, their abilities and the appearance of their armies are somewhat suddenly introduced to the reader, but this is the way in which things happen in the world of anime and manga, (Mitsuse's Andromeda series was illustrated by manga artist Keiko Takemiya), and it lends the novel a great sense of cinematic immediacy.


An excerpt is at Haikasoru's page.