The title story is the
winner: a novella whose title could be
translated “A Tour of Hell,” or maybe, “Running Around in the Afterlife.” Or, in a more Gothic mode, “The Darkling Land
and Its Rounds.” The author has been
writing since 1998; this was her fourth
time as a finalist for the A-Prize, and she won the Mishima Prize in 2004. In other words, she’s hardly a newcomer, and
on that score alone it’s a somewhat mystifying choice.
The story itself feels almost too
perfect for the A-Prize. It’s not
first-person, but it is a typical A-Prize mix of semi-epiphanic present and
endless, aimless reminiscence. And the
point of view character, Natsuko, is so laden down with misery and frustration,
and so inarticulate and emotionally paralyzed in response, that the story reads
almost as a parody of serious literature.
She’s mired in a low-paying part-time job, caring for a husband with a
brain illness; her father also died
young of a brain injury, leaving her mother and brother and her in
poverty; her mother, a former
stewardess, and her brother are irresponsible with money and leeches on
Natsuko’s income and time. Any one of
these situations would be enough, but Kashimada throws them all in. By the time we learn that Natsuko’s first job
ended when sexual harrassment at work forced her to quit, the whole thing
starts to feel a little Dickensian. I
guess that’s where the title comes in:
the story is kind of a tour of Hell, cira 2012.
Most of the story takes place on
a Sentimental Journey. One day Natsuko
sees a notice advertising a special low rate at a hot-springs hotel that the
ward uses as a public retreat. They can
afford it at that rate, so Natsuko takes her husband, Taiichi. It so happens that this hotel once knew
better days. Natsuko’s mother had gone
there as a child when it was a true luxury hotel, and then she once took
Natsuko and her brother. Yes, a
dilapidated hot springs hotel by the sea – Atami isn’t named, but could it be
anywhere else? And this, too, is rather
a cliché…
The family’s awfulness is well
evoked. The former-stewardess mother is
obsessed with luxury, despite being poor – she tasted luxury as a stewardess,
and as a child, and constantly puts on airs.
She explicitly expected Natsuko, who we gather is good-looking, to marry
a rich man and support her mother in the style she’s not accustomed to but
pretends she is. Meanwhile the younger
brother takes after his mother. Wastes
any money he gets his hands on. No
sooner gets his first job out of college than he gets into debt trouble
drinking and carousing, and his mother has to sell their condo to pay it
off; the rest of the money they seem to
spend entirley on expensive restaurants.
The payout from Natsuko’s sexual harrassment lawsuit likewise goes
straight into their hands, and out again.
Neither of them work regularly.
Natsuko seems to have lived her
life in rebellion against her mother and brother’s insatiable greed and
laziness. Rather than becoming a
stewardess and/or marrying a doctor like her mother wanted, she gets a
part-time job at the local community center and marries a kind, simple man she
met there, Taiichi. Her mother and
brother behave abominably toward him – a local government worker’s salary isn’t
going to buy them fancy French meals – but he doesn’t notice. And then he has his strokes, and Natsuko
spends all her time nursing him. This
seems to suit her, too, as being the utter opposite of her mother’s
values. Self-negating sacrifice seems to
be what Natsuko craves.
Then again, she seems more
emotionally dead for most of the story than emotionally fulfilled by her life
of service. At least that seems to be
the point of the epiphany near the end of the story, when she realizes that her
husband, despite all his debilities, has a clearer bead on what he wants and
enjoys in life than she does…
The prose is clear but not
particularly striking. The protagonist’s
travails, as described here, seem like they might offer interesting subtext – a
critique of consumption-obsessed modern life, or something – but if so,
Kashimada is content to suggest it, without particular emphasis. Rather, the subtext she seems most interested
in us picking up on is that of the title.
If this is a tour of Hell, then Hell is family.
Which makes this story a very
strange and clever contrast with the other novella in the book, “99 no seppun ９９の接吻,” or “99 Kisses.”
Which is by far the better story – that’s not rarely the case, I’m
finding, with the bonus stories in Akutagawa-Prize books, but I’ve never seen a
more drastic disparity than this.
The story is narrated by Nanako,
the youngest of four adult daughters who live with their mother near Yanaka in
Tokyo. A lot of the story turns on
perceptions of Tokyo’s shitamachi –
expectations that everybody will be earthy, laid-back, and (particularly the
girls) loose, contrasted with Nanako’s insistence that their neighborhood’s
residents, at least, have a kind of purity and nobility and pride that nobody
knows. As an exploration of a particular
kind of Tokyo localism it’s a successful story, working in playful references
to the literary traditions of that side of the city (she name-checks figures as
disparate as Kawabata Yasunari and Hiratsuka Raichō).
But the main literary antecedent
for this story is Tanizaki Jun’ichirō.
This is evident first and foremost in the glowing descriptions of the
older three sisters, reminiscent of several strong and intensely feminine
characters in his ouevre. But it’s also
there in the strange sexuality at the heart of the story. Simply put, Nanako loves her three older
sisters with a love that verges on, and at times seems to actually be,
sexual. Yes, sisterly incest is
contemplated here, and presented to the reader for erotic delectation. But in true Tanizakian fashion it’s handled
with such verve and passion that the reader buys it as more than perversion, as
a beauty and a love that’s just too pure to be contained…wink wink, nudge
nudge.
It’s amazing that both of these
stories are products of the same pen, really.
And that, more than the Prize-winning story itself, makes me want to
know more about this author.
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