The story is Seisui 聖水, by Seirai Yūichi 青来有一. It was co-winner of the 124th
A-Prize, for late 2000.
The title story is the
winner: a long novella whose title could
be translated “Holy Water.”
The narrator, Hidenobu, is a
single male in his 20s or perhaps early 30s, on his second career. He worked in a bank for a while, but is now
working for Sagari, a friend of his father’s.
Over the course of the story Hidenobu meets and starts a relationship
with Kayano, who also works for Sagari.
Tension in the love affair is provided by the fact that Kayano’s mother
thinks Sagari might be after Kayano, and in fact he kind of is; by Hidenobu’s
passive, charmless approach to wooing her; and most importantly by the fact
that Sagari seems to be on the verge of starting his own religion, and Kayano’s
mother is a charter member. Hidenobu’s
father turns out to be a believer, too, and Hidenobu doesn’t like it.
Belief is the theme of this
story, and boy, I’ve just scratched the surface of how it’s explored. The story is set in a village behind Nagasaki
that overlooks the city, in particular the Urakami Cathedral and Ground Zero; the village itself is defunct, but was once a
hidden-Christian enclave. Hidenobu’s
father grew up there, and now that he’s dying of cancer he moves the family
back there, to a little house he’s had built especially to remind him of the
old days in the village. He spends most
of his time on a lounge in the garden under a magnolia tree.
The village’s history touches
everything in the story. It involves
betrayal as much as it does fidelity; as
the village emerged into the Meiji period one of its sons, Unosuke, betrayed
them to the authorities as Christians.
And yet he’s hailed as an illustrious forebear, even as the village’s
Christian past is also celebrated. That
“Christian” should probably be put in scare-quotes – not my judgment, but the
characters’, as many of them refuse to be assimilated into the new mainstream
Christian churchees that have come into Nagasaki, but instead cling to the
catechism that was passed down in their midst over the centuries, the “oratio,”
even though they readily confess to not understanding more than a few words. They don’t think of themselves as Christians,
but as hidden-Christians. It’s more
about cultural identity than belief.
And yet belief is constantly
problematized in this book. The
narrator’s father, a longtime unbeliever, a practical man of business, asks
that the oratio be recited at his deathbed;
he claims to see the spirits of the dead, or their reincarnated form in
birds and bugs in the garden. And he
starts to believe in Sagari’s new religion.
The narrator’s father runs a
chain of supermarkets, while Sagari runs a chain of thrift shops and a
mineral-water business; a lot of the plot of the story revolves around the
father’s attempt to merge the two business, bringing Sagari in as his
successor, using Hidenobu as a kind of stalking-horse. There’s resistance, not least from Hidenobu,
because of the quasi-religious nature of Sagari’s business. That consists of this. His mineral water is marketed under the name
Holy Water, and comes (but not really) from a grotto that he found in a fishing
village – when he found it he was suffering from lesions in the mouth, and one
drink healed him. He placed a statue of
the Madonna in the grotto, and started selling the water. It has more than a few true believers, and it
started spawning irregularities in his chain of stores: he started issuing scrip based on the water
that could be used in lieu of cash in his stores, or in a flea market that he
starts. Essentially setting up a parallel
secret economy, outside of the real one, getting people to work in his stores
for the scrip, to repair and sell things in the flea market for the scrip. All for the satisfaction of it, or because
they believe. Hidenobu’s father, the
hard-headed man of business, used to scoff, but now that he’s dying of cancer
he believes the water is taking away his pain, and is content to allow his
business to be placed in the service of the holy water.
As if all of that weren’t enough,
the whole thing is set against a hibakusha backdrop. It’s not clear that the father’s cancer is
related (but it’s a safe bet); it’s not
really clear which of the old people in the story have what ties to the
bombing, but it’s always there, and near the end the father attends a memorial
service.
To be honest I’m deeply torn
about this story. It’s packed with
sociohistorical detail, really well grounded in a place and its people. Any one of these threads would make for an
interesting story. But all together it’s
perhaps too much – hidden Christians and
the atomic bombings and a new
religion and dealing with a father’s
death and a family-business successor
dispute and a quasi-love story, all
in a hundred-page story. Oh, yeah, and I
left out Sagari’s shady student-radical past.
It leaves you exhausted. Especially
as, for all that plotting, the narrator is a maddeningly passive
character. We never learn much about his
feelings, only that he’s not particularly well-disposed to Sagari and his
religion; and he never does or says a
whole lot. He’s a cipher, and so rather
than discovering this complex world through him as he navigates or explores it,
we just feel it pressing in on us. Maybe
that says something about the weight of culture and the paralysis of incipient
grief. But I’m not sure it does justice
to everything else that’s trying to go on in this story.
The language, too, leaves me ambivalent. Seirai’s style is dense and demanding, not
particularly graceful, but at times can be quite striking in the specificity of
its descriptions – at what feel like regular intervals he describes the
vegetation in the garden, or the rooftops of Nagasaki below, with
extraordinarily vivid detail. And yet in
other ways he employs a curiously limited vocabulary – people never stand (tatsu) but always loiter (tatazumu), for
example. Slightly unusual words used
frequently enough to be quite noticeable.
I’m not quite sure of the point, but it calls attention to itself.
It’s interesting to me that this
won back-to-back with Chūin no hana –
it reinforces my suspicion with that one that there was some kind of perception
that it was a post-Aum moment, and therefore one in which literature that
expressed both anxieties about religion and an attraction to belief, or best of
all anxieties about the attraction to belief, was perceived as particuarly
appropriate.
Update 6/2/14:
I got around to reading the omake stories.
Update 6/2/14:
I got around to reading the omake stories.
"Jeronimo no jūjika ジェロニモの十字架" (Geronimo’s
Cross). Earlier than the title
story; Seirai’s first story, in
fact. It suffers a little from the same
surfeit of thematic matter, but not from a surfeit of plot. Very little happens, in fact, and most of
that is in flashback.
The narrator, who has the same
name as the author, is a guy in his 30s who has recently had his larynx removed
– cancer – so he’s mute. That’s not the
main thread of the story, but it’s important.
The main thread concerns an uncle of his, Akiteru, who Yūichi thinks of
by his baptismal name, Geronimo. The
family aren’t Christians now, but were for a little while.
This story, like the title story,
is very concerned with family history, and since it’s also set in Nagasaki, in
Urakami, that means a family history intertwined both with the atomic bomb and
with the hidden Christians. Yūichi’s
(the narrator’s) grandmother was a survivor who lost her husband and a son to
the bomb; after the war she remarried to
a Christian, and converted, but then he turned out to be a con man and a
bigamist who left her, so she left the church.
Geronimo was his son, and in adulthood he is the black sheep of the family. The present moment of the story is Bon, and
Geronimo shows up at his eldest brother’s home with everyone else, and is given
the cold shoulder as he always is.
Geronimo has a checkered
history. Among other things, he found an
antique iron cross one day while helping move the family grave site and
concluded, with no other evidence, that the family was once Christian, hundreds
of years ago; he reverts to the religion
of his birth and in fact for a little while ends up running his own sect, or
cult – really just himself and three cronies who use it, the other family
members think, as an excuse for sponging off strangers. He’s a skeevy guy, and the narrator recalls
seeing him once as a homeless guy, or seeing a homeless guy who looked exactly
like him, in Tokyo staring lecherously at high school girls in short skirts.
The climax of the story comes
when, in the present moment, Geronimo whips out his cross, puts it on the
Buddhist altar during Bon ceremonies, prays, and then challenges the narrator
to pray. Promises a miracle. The narrator feels bullied, the narrator’s
mother gets into an argument with Geronimo, and then Geronimo seems momentarily
transfigured, and then he has a seizure, and when he wakes up he has forgotten
what happened. He says his humanity is
disappearing – whether this means he’s going insane or become a deity is never
explained.
Time passes and Geronimo has
disappeared; in the last scene the
narrator, riding the city trolley during Bon, imagines he’s riding together
with all the spirits of the dead tormented Christians and bomb victims…
It’s a very intense story, and
I’m coming to like Seirai. There’s a
whole lot in here to sink your teeth into.
The writing is precise and rich, if demanding and sometimes
repetitive. The setting and characters
are so fully realized, or perhaps I should say so thoroughly grounded in
history (I’m not sure they’re fully realized as characters), that they really stick with you. And the themes are important and intriguing
ones.
The narrator is still a bit of a
cipher, though. His feelings are more
foregrounded here than those of the title story’s, but still, given his
suffering, and the way he’s put on the spot in the climactic scene, you might
expect him to stand out a little more clearly than he does. Geronimo is the real focus here. He’s reminiscent of some of Endō Shūsaku’s
characters – he liked to make his intellectuals skeptical of true faith, while
situating belief in abject sinners and peasants, people weak in every respect,
with a weakness that itself leads to the divine. Geronimo does offer some sort of godliness,
even if it may be a scam, or may be the product of insanity; there’s something about him that suggests to
the narrator the possibility of transcendence, or at least escape from self.
“Doroumi
no kyōdai 泥海の兄弟” (Mud-sea brothers) is a little different. It’s also first person, but the present-day
action is limited to a mere frame: the
narrator visits a small fishing village in Kyushu where he used to live as a
boy, and then we get a flashback to his first year there as a middle
schooler. At the end we flash forward
again to the present day, but just to close the story: nothing happens.
So the
story proper is the flashback, and what’s more it’s told in strict
chronological order, from when the narrator moves to the town and on the first
day of school meets his new best friend, Yutaka, to the first day of school
after summer break that same year, when Yutaka has transferred to another
school.
The
narrator’s father is a researcher of sorts who has moved to this town to study
the mudflats. Yutaka’s father is a
local, an ex-yakuza who has reformed and works manual labor jobs around the
town. Yutaka and the narrator become
best friends for a trifling reason – on the first day of school they both have
bandaids on their foreheads in the shape of a cross. Outsiders both, they bond and spend the
spring and summer playing in the extensive mudflats and reed beds on the edge
of town.
The plot
largely concerns Yutaka’s father, the ex-yakuza. Nicknamed Onigen (“demon,” for a tattoo on
his back and his lawless behavior, plus “gen” from his given name), he has a
younger brother nicknamed Kinrō who joined the mob with him, and who never
quite reformed. Onigen married, had a
son, went to prison, and his wife died while he was in the joint, so now he’s
gone straight. Kinrō is making that hard
for him. You can kind of guess where
this is going: Kinrō crosses the local
mob, gets killed for his troubles, and Onigen has to choose between staying straight
and avenging his brother. He tries to
stay straight, but it’s clear he’s lost Yutaka’s respect, so he tries
vengeance, botches it, and is killed.
This
subplot is straight out of any number of gangster movies, East and West (“they
pull me back in…”), and I guess the only thing surprising about it is how
predictable it is. How surprising it is
that Seirai, having chosen to employ a genre-fiction plot, employs it with so
little modification.
But of
course he puts a literary slant on it.
It’s all in the treatment, after all, it always is, and the treatment
here is as careful and stubbornly literary as anything else in the book. It’s all told from the point of view of the
adolescent narrator, who’s an observer more than anything. Yutaka doesn’t even tell him much – most of
the back story we learn from An-san, a retired fisherman and distant relative
of Onigen’s who spends most of his time puttering around on the mudflats
now. So the boys are insulated from most
of it, and as much time is spent describing their adventures on the mudflats as
on detailing the vendetta.
Even
there, the focus is on Yutaka’s feelings.
He’s presented as a kind of primitive.
His mother was a kind of naïve religionist who taught him that people’s
souls went straight into animals, such as the shellfish who live in the
mudflats, when they did. And his father
has clearly, in spite of himself, passed on his atavistic code of honor. Yutaka wants his father to avenge his uncle,
and has to be talked out of avenging his father when he dies. In fact we don’t know what happened to Yutaka
in the end – the narrator thinks he’s talked Yutaka out of it, but then Yutaka
is taken in by a relative in Kumamoto and moves, and that’s the last the
narrator hears of him.
How
does the narrator feel about all this?
It’s not quite clear. So much is
left unsaid. There’s an obvious parallel
being drawn between Onigen’s loyalty to his brother Kinrō and the relationship
between Yutaka and the narrator. They
even call each other “brother,” and when Yutaka picks a fight with some older
boys who are making fun of his father for not seeking revenge, the narrator is
right there with him. They both get a
brutal beat-down. And the narrator,
being less of a fighter by nature, gets the worst of it. So with both sets of brothers we have loyalty
to a brother in distress dragging the other down into the mud. Literally, in the boys’ case: the fight happens on the mudflats.
I’m
definitely changing my mind about this author.
It’s a very different story from the other two I’ve read, sharing only a
setting (Kyushu) and the general theme of family. But what a setting – you can feel the
mudflats, smell the reed-bed. I’m not
sure that idea-wise the story delivers much, but in terms of intensity of
feeling, it packs a punch.
“Nobunaga no shugoshin 信長の守護神”
(Nobunaga’s Guardian Deities) is the joker in the deck in two ways. First, it’s utterly different from the others
in terms of its themes and its style. Second,
and not unrelatedly, I think it’s supposed to be a comedy.
It’s
about a college-aged kid named Uichirō who is an extra in a film being made
about Oda Nobunaga. They’re filming
battle sequences in Kyushu, near Mt. Aso, and Uichirō is playing a footsoldier. Many footsoldiers, actually – he dies any
number of times.
The
Kyushu setting of course connects it with the other stories, but it’s not
Nagasaki; the whole story takes place in the mountains, and the kid himself is
from Fukuoka. The other commonality is
that it’s heavily plotted, while the main character is curiously passive.
Uichirō
is between schooling – couldn’t get into his first choice, and is doing the
film-extra thing as a break from prep school.
He’s thinking about film school, and this is his first brush with the
industry. He’s also got a Family Situation. His mom and stepdad’s marriage is falling
apart, and over the course of the story his stepdad turns violent. Uichirō’s not so sad to be out of the house
for a while, staying in cheap inns with the rest of the extras.
The
film is a mess; this is where the comedy
comes in. The director is a video-game
designer who had a hit with an RPG about Nobunaga; the studio hired him to film it, but it’s
clear that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Later we learn that the video game itself wasn’t all his doing – a team
of hackers put out pirate versions that were better than the original, and that
fueled its popularity.
The
stars, the guys playing Nobunaga and his Guardian Deities (a group of
super-samurai tough guys who surround him in battle), are non-actors. This is one of the Comic Situations: pros in supporting roles (secondary actors,
production staff) surrounding amateurs in positions of authority. Nobunaga and his crew are being played by
gigolo-types from Kabuki-chō; also a
drag queen, and an African-American former K-1 fighter named Anton.
Uichirō
hooks up with Koroku, another extra. The
reader notices that something’s wrong with Koroku before Uichirō does. Koroku has an unhealthy obsession with Anton –
knows suspicious amounts about him, and seems to have been following him
around. At the same time wherever the
film crew goes there are suspicious attacks on local people by a guy in a cape
and Darth Vader helmet. It’s obvious to
the reader that this is somebody dressed in a Nobunaga-era samurai costume, and
pretty soon we start to suspect it’s Koroku, because he’s so creepy. But Uichirō doesn’t notice until the end,
when Koroku confronts him, club in hand, and confesses – before turning himself
in…
This
happens in the aftermath of a strange party that Uichirō and Koroku go to. They somehow wangle an invite to hang out
with Nobunaga and his crew at their inn (which is much nicer than the one where
the extras stay, of course), and once there the warlord starts passing around
funny cigarettes. Things get strange,
and Uichirō remembers nothing about the rest of the night. But Koroku later tells him, with
barely-disguised jealousy, that Anton tried to rape him. The stress of this is what leads Koroku, in
what seems like a hallucinatory state, to confess – and not just to the recent
attacks, but to what may be murders going way back.
And
then, like I say, he turns himself in.
And Uichirō goes home.
It’s
not a great story. In fact it’s a pretty
resounding failure. The funny parts
aren’t funny, and they don’t sit well with the crime-and-trauma parts. And the long party scene is actually
offensive. It’s pretty clear that Seirai
is inspired here by Murakami Ryū’s Almost
Transparent Blue, but he doesn’t have that author’s self-awareness or
irony. It’s also obvious that he doesn’t
have much idea of what marijuana does. And,
by far the worst, he indulges in horrible stereotypes about African-Americans. Right down to the fucking watermelon.
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