Reading history - 2019

From one list to another, a quick, albeit a little late,run down of books I managed to read last year, apologies I'll not list translators or publishers, but obviously many thanks to them for their endeavours, happy reading in 2020.


Arthur Rimbaud - Illuminations
Andre Gide - Urien's Voyage
Walter Kempowski - Homeland
Joseph Roth - Flight Without End
Frederic Dard - Bird In A Cage
Robert Aickman - The Inner Room
Roland Topor - Head to Toe Portrait of Suzanne
Guy de Maupassant - Pierre and Jean
Lucy M. Boston - The Sea Egg
Hans Koningsberger - A Walk With Love and Death
Tomas Transtromer - The Half Finished Heaven
Yu Miri - Tokyo Ueno Station
Yukiko Motoya - Picnic In the Storm
Claire Keegan - Foster
Edgardo Franzosini - The Animal Gazer
Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father?
Sadeq Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Yukio Mishima - Star
Henri-Pierre Roche - Jules et Jim
Eric Vuillard - The Order of the Day
Rilke and Betz - Rilke In Paris
Boris Pasternak - The Last Summer
Patrick Modiano - The Sleep of Memory
George Simenon - The Hand
Elio Vittorini - Conversations in Sicily
Merce Rodoreda - Death In Spring
Yukio Mishima - Life For Sale
George Simenon - The Glass Cage
Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police
Arthur Rimbaud - A Season In Hell
Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall
Andre Gide - The Counterfeiters
Jean de la Ville de Mirmont - The Sundays of Jean Dezert
Kentaro Miura -  Berserk vol -1, 2, 3
Andre Naffis-Sahely - The Promised Land
Kenzaburo Oe - J and Seventeen

The Sting of Death and Other Stories

Toshio Shimao an author I've read a lot about but up until now hadn't read many of his stories. The Sting of Death and Other Stories, is a collection of six stories translated by Kathryn Sparling,through her introduction she gives us a biographical portrait of the author, and how his life shaped his literary output. Born in 1917 in Yokohama she tells us that Shimao was a loner and a sickly child but a voracious reader, his family moved a number of times and he saw himself as a bit of a wanderer. As a young man he wrote poetry and contributed to literary magazines, some of these he produced himself, in 1943 he self published his book entitled Yoneki (An Account of Childhood), which Sparling explains Shimao thought at the time, that this would be his valedictory work. In 1944 he volunteered for Naval Officers Candidate School,and at the age of 27, at the end of 1944 he was assigned as commanding officer of a special attack torpedo-boat unit of 183 men, this being a suicide squad, he was stationed at Kakeroma Island, here he also met his future wife, Ohiro Miho. Sparling points to the surrealistic qualities in his work, although it could be said that Shimao doesn't use surrealism simply as a stylistic device, but rather to amplify the experiences felt by his characters. Shimao's work is generally seen as being divided in two groups those that deal with his experience in the war, and those stories that are associated with the relationship with his wife, after the war she suffered a mental breakdown, and Shimao gave up his writing career at this time and accompanied Miho through her treatment, the book by Philip Gabriel: Mad Wives and Island Dreams, being a book I'd very much like to read in the future, examines Toshio Shimao's life and writing. Sparling highlights the complexities faced when reading and translating Shimao's prose, often or not she says, that you'll find yourself re-reading passages in order to comprehend the flow/meaning of the whole piece, also his prose contains 'logical gaps', noting too 'there is no escapism in Shimao's fiction' which has a 'masochism to them'. In her introduction Sparling also examines Shimao's relationship with other early pre and postwar writers, before the war he had met the writers Agawa Hiroyuki and Shono Junzo, and that after the war he was briefly a member of a small group called Koyo/Glittering,another member being Mishima, who would later write an essay on Shimao, although Sparling notes due to his wife's illness, he was distant from literary circles, as after the war they returned to Miho's hometown on Amami Island. Reading Van C. Gessel's introduction to the story With Maya in The Showa Anthology, he highlights the comparison between Shimao's writing and that of Oe Kenzaburo.

Included in the collection is The Sting of Death/Shi no toge, which Sparling points out is the second chapter of what would go on to be the much larger full length novel of the same name, the novel was adapted to film by Kohei Oguri,and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Festival. The Russian film director Alexander Sokurov also found inspiration in Toshio Shimao's life in his poetical film Dolce. Also included here is two stories I've wanted to read for a while The Farthest Edge of the Islands/Shima no hate (1948) and also Everyday Life in a Dream/Yume no naka de nichijo also from 1948, the latter, a story set immediately after the war, where a writer who comes to the realization that he has lost his ambitions, and at the the age of thirty notices he has no employable skills, he resolves to join a gang of delinquents, many members ten years his junior. At the gang's meeting he gets called away by a visitor, an old school acquaintance, who has brought him something he claims the writer asked him to get for him.The man has since contracted a horrible disease, and after seeing the writer wash his hands after they were talking explodes with indignant rage, the writer flees, and for some time after he can't escape the anxiety caused through fear of contagion. He heads south to the town of his mother's birth to try and locate her, whilst on the train journey he sees a beautiful young woman in a kimono, whose beauty seems almost to overwhelm him, 'Then as though I had been smoking a little too much,my vision blurred', this encounter is broken abruptly when he finds himself in his mother's house, with his father, who he had picked up on the way, but he had somehow forgotten about. His mother is carrying a baby on her back of mixed blood a 'Eurasian child', the atmosphere grows tense and when his mother confesses her devotion to her Caucasian lover his father explodes with fury, picking up a whip to thrash his mother, the writer intercedes. The story is a harrowing one to read, a tale of a writer losing the will to write, a family disintegrating in the aftermath of the war, the surrealism in it is quite sudden, in contrast to that found in The Farthest Edge of the Island, where it appears more lyrically. Sadly this collection is out of print and hopefully as Kathryn Sparling wrote in 1985 we'll see a full translation of The Sting of Death. There's a lot more to Everyday Life in a Dream than what I've alluded to here, and thanks to a great initiative at Michigan University's Center for Japanese Studies you can read the complete text of this collection, and other out of print texts at their website, many thanks to them for making this collection of stories available online, click to read - The Sting of Death and Other Stories.

Self Portraits

'Self Portraits' is a collection of eighteen semi autobiographical stories by Osamu Dazai, translated by Ralph F. McCarthy, who also provides a great introduction and biographical notes at the start of each of these stories. Dazai is probably best known for his two novels 'No Longer Human' 1948 and 'The Setting Sun' 1947. Dazai is described as the enfant terrible of Japanese Literature, who had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the literary establishment, although he found a mentor in Masuji Ibuse, and had forays with the Communist Party, (illegal in his day). This year is the centenary of Dazai's birth, Osamu Dazai being a pen name, he was actually born Tsushima Shuji, in 1909, into a large, wealthy farming family, but from these stories you get the impression that from an early age he found it difficult to fit in. His father died when he was fourteen, and the death of Akutagawa in 1927 affected him dramatically, he began to neglect his high school studies, spending more time at his story writing. In 'My Elder Brothers', Dazai gives us a glimpse of his childhood with his brothers, their attempts at starting a literary magazine, Bunji, the eldest son, became head of the family after the death of their father, and would control Dazai's financial allowance from the family, which Dazai would usually squander away on booze. Two of Dazai's brother's died early, Reiji died of septicemia and Keiji died of tuberculosis. Dazai returns to his relationship with Bunji in the later story 'Garden', when he had to return to the family home, after the house where he was staying in Kofu was bombed.

Covering the major events in Dazai's life, marriage, betrayals, suicide attempts, evacuation from Tokyo during the bombing raids, the house in Kofu where he and his family was staying, that was hit by a bomb, (Early Light), his plan of burying everyday necessities in the garden proved to be a good plan. It also includes pieces on everyday foibles and experiences, like his fear of dogs, and an account of being invited back to a gathering in his home town, which turned into a drunken disaster. 'Merry Christmas' written in 1946 is a moving story of a chance encounter of bumping into the daughter of woman he used to know, Dazai names his character as 'Kasai'. He relates how during the war it was difficult to find booze and that somehow the girls mother always managed to have something to offer him whenever he called. He used to sit with her and get drunk, the daughter seems evasive when Kasai asks after her mother, he decides that he wants to pay her a visit, and when they reach her apartment he calls out her name. The daughter finally tells Kasai that her mother died in the air raids in Hiroshima, and that before she died she cried out his name.

 

One of the larger pieces is 'One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji', the same name as Hokusai's famous series of pictures. It mainly covers the period when Dazai stayed at Tenka Chaya, a tea house near Mt Fuji, in a series of vignettes Dazai offers up moments when the mountain appeared to him, sitting up all night drinking sake, after a 'certain persons' shocking confession, at dawn he went to relieve himself, and through the mesh covering the window he saw a pure white Fuji, standing in the dark little room, stroking the mesh screen and weeping with despair, he recounts. Also after drinking with a group of students, walking home he looses his coin purse, irrate at first, Fuji soon works it's magic on him, and calmly he retraces his steps and finds his purse.

At the beginning of the short piece 'I Can Speak' there's a little question that seemed to stick with me as soon as I had read it, Dazai, or his character asks, 'What is life-the struggle to surrender?, The endurance of misery?', particularly the first bit ' - the struggle to surrender', it seems to capture, for me anyway, how Dazai may have lived his life which is caught in this collection. Dazai is one of those writers that manages to write down any aspect of life's experience and imbue it with something utterly original, through his own struggling, he seems to point to just how important individuality is, no experience is wasted in his writing, as indeed it should be in life.

Recently Aomori Art Museum held an exhibition, celebrating the centenary of Dazai's birth, download the pdf of the handbill to see some examples of Dazai's painting. Also a film to watch out for is 'Villon's Wife' based on one of his short stories, starring Asano Tadanobu and Matsu Takako, you can see a trailer at the film's website.

Contents of Self Portraits -


My Elder Brothers
Train
Female
Seascape with Figures in Gold
No Kidding
A Promise Fulfilled
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
I Can Speak
A Little Beauty
Canis Familiaris
Thinking of Zenzo
Eight Scenes from Tokyo
Early Light
Garden
Two Little Words
Merry Christmas
Handsome Devils and Cigarettes
Cherries

Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude

Recently bought this, a little pocket edition, (although in Japan paperbacks are pocket size), of poetry by Shuntaro Tanikawa. 'Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude' first published in 1952, (it's been in print ever since), written between 1949-1951 and translated by William I.Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura, brought out by Shueisha Bunko . I think another collection of his sonnets has also been recently re-issued in an edition very much like this one. It also contains a small section of facsimiles of Shuntaro Tanikawa's original notebooks. This, so far, is one of the most rewarding book purchases I made this year, as stated in another post, Shuntaro Tanikawa has been the subject of speculation over the Nobel Prize, not really sure how true these speculations are, but reading through this collection, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

A theme that seems to me to be prominent in Tanikawa's poems, well in this collection, is the passing of time, some of the titles of the poems are the names of the seasons, and another re-occurring subject is the weather, mentions of the rainy season, downpours, cloudy days, quiet rainy nights, but mainly Tanikawa makes us consider time and how we perceive it, prompting us to question our interpretation of what 'now' actually means to us and to maybe re-evaluate our sense of our position in time, I think Tanikawa acknowledges that we are here for such a small fraction of time, but not for a moment considering it meaningless. The poems are in modern style, and still retain their modern feel, 'Impromptu Poems On The Desk' has an experimental feel, the poems are observational, non-judgemental, with a certain optimism to them, although many are tinged with sadness, as if the narrator has been abandoned/lost in time, but seeming not to fall into despair. Few of them mention God, in some the narrator will talk of just watching God, not believing, and others include prayer, but they don't have much of a religious tone to them,they do have a very humanistic sentiment. Others encapsulate a world whilst stirring a cream soda, the underlying theme most prominent is solitude, and most of these poems talk about solitude in a universal scale, but although they pinpoint to a certain moment, they also have a timeless quality to them, I think that's why their appeal is long lasting. He has a great way of tackling something like a sense of solitude or loneliness and address it in a way that everyone can relate to. I think the poem that stands out for me at the moment is one called 'Sadness' and the title poem, which I keep returning to at the moment, and 'The Surroundings' with it's billions of years in front and behind us.

In 1989 he won an American Book Award for his collection 'Floating the River in Melancholy' also translated by William I.Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura, which is out of print for the moment.

Some other available collections of his poetry-


A Chagall and a Tree Leaf - University of Hawaii Press
On Love - University of Hawaii Press
Giving People Poems - available at Small Press Distribution
Selected Poems - available at Carcanet Press