This
won the 153rd A-Prize, for early 2015. Actually, it was co-recipient, with Hada’s book.
And so
we come to it. Every so often the
awarding of the A-Prize becomes big news, spilling out beyond the rarefied
precincts of literature and into the wrestling ring of popular culture. It’s part of why it’s a big deal, why it’s
the most famous of Japan’s literary prizes.
We’re in one of those moments right now.
Matayoshi
hardly needs introducing to Japanese readers.
Born in 1980, he’s a well-known TV personality: specifically, he’s a
manzai comedian. He’s dabbled in books
before – some essays, some poetry, a couple of short stories. This is his first full-length work (and it’s
longish: 150 pages in hardback). It was published in Bungakkai early this year, which of course marks it as literary,
from an institutional perspective. And
that issue of Bungakkai was the first
in the journal’s 80-year history to require an immediate reprint – i.e., it sold
a boatload of copies. When the book was
published it immediately became a best-seller, and when it got the A-Prize in
the summer it was the best-selling recipient in history, surpassing Murakami Ryū’s
1976 Almost Transparent Blue. It’s going to be a Netflix Original Series
next spring. In short, it’s a full-on
mass-media (media-mix, to use the Japanese buzzword) phenomenon – print,
internet, TV. No surprise, since
Matayoshi belongs to the Yoshimoto agency, who run all the big manzai
stars.
All of
which inevitably raises suspicions about the work’s literary quality. There’s not much of an old guard left to
natter on about the blurring of the lines between serious and popular fiction,
but you don’t have to be a pure-lit elitist to feel a twinge of regret at the
possibility that the Prize has totally capitulated to mass-market forces. That it has allowed itself to become just
another cog in the Yoshimoto publicity gears.
Of course, such worries have been around with the prize for 60 years,
since Ishihara Shintarō and Taiyō no
kisetsu…
In this
essay, of course, I’m not trying to take the measure of the whole Matayoshi
phenomenon; I just want to account for
the story itself. So in a sense all of
that is irrelevant. But of course it’s
not; it’s one of those books that even
someone relatively insulated from the owarai
boom like myself (living in the States, only visiting Japan once a year, mostly
ignoring TV when I’m there) is going to be unable to read in isolation. Everybody’s going to have an opinion on it,
and that opinion is going to be at least half-formed before reading a single
word of the book. It’s going to be
impossible to judge it completely on its own merits. So if the A-Prize committee couldn’t, I can
hardly blame them. I’m going to try, of
course (like I’m sure they tried), but I might as well lay out my biases here,
although they’re probably pretty apparent already.
I like
popular fiction, I like literary fiction, and I like fiction that (like my fave
rave Murakami Haruki) blurs the lines.
I’m not opposed to that sort of thing.
That means that I’m not the kind of elitist who would reject a work
simply because it’s popular – simply because it’s written by a comedian. I wouldn’t dream of doing that. But at the same time, I would hate to see
literary fiction disappear. I’m not so
much a pop-culture triumphalist that I am comfortable with the idea of the
islands of pure-lit disappearing beneath a tsunami of cash. I don’t want market logic to be the only logic
available to a writer, or to a reader.
All that suggests that I’m going to be torn about this book.
Surprise: I’m torn about this book.
Here’s
the story. It’s narrated by a young
aspiring manzai comedian named Tokunaga, and it traces the ten-year arc of his
career. It begins when he’s scuffling at
the entry level, performing at neighborhood festivals. He meets a slightly older comedian named
Kamiya and is so impressed that he adopts Kamiya as a mentor. Most of the book is scenes from their relationship
as it matures. Some of these scenes are
Kamiya instructing Tokunaga, or expounding on what’s truly funny, and how the
manzaishi should live. Other scenes
explore the complicated emotions that Tokunaga experiences as he watches his
mentor live and perform with much more dedication than Tokunaga himself can
muster, but then enjoy less success than Tokunaga. Tokunaga gradually rises through the ranks
until he achieves a certain level of fame, but Kamiya never finds much of an
audience. At the end of the book
Tokunaga retires, but he’s been estranged from Kamiya for a while by that time
– the latter disappears in order to flee debt collectors, than reappears but in
such a way as to alienate Tokunaga almost completely (more on that later).
No
doubt much of the book is drawn from Matayoshi’s own experiences as a
manzaishi, but the arc is plainly not autobiographical, since Matayoshi is
still performing. Instead he’s giving us
two kinds of manzai failure to compare.
Tokunaga retires primarily because his partner Yamashita decides to
retire: Yamashita is getting married and
wants to start a family, and it’s clear he’s not going to be able to support
them on his earnings as a manzaishi.
Tokunaga can’t imagine performing without Yamashita, since they’ve been
together since middle school, so he retires too. But of course what they’re both realizing is
that they’re not going to truly succeed at this: they’ve risen about as far as they can hope
to, and it’s not far enough. It’s a kind
of failure, but then so is the decision to quit and do something else. This is suggested by the way Kamiya fails,
which is quite different. He’s been even
less financially successful than Tokunaga, and as noted, he’s in debt to loan
sharks; what’s more, for most of the book
he’s letting a quasi-girlfriend support him, but then he lets her get
away. Kamiya is a stereotypical
dysfunctional artist, brilliant (in Tokunaga’s eyes) at his art but a complete
screw-up at life. But he never gives up,
and never compromises his sense of what’s truly funny to please a crowd. And this is what finally alienates
Tokunaga. When Kamiya resurfaces after a
year on the lam, he has breast implants – F-cups. He says he got them on a lark, thinking it
would be funny. But it’s a bridge too
far for Tokunaga, who lectures Tokunaga on how audiences aren’t going to get
this, are going to think he’s being cruel to transgender people, and how it’s
not wrong to think of your audience once in a while. But by this point Tokunaga is already
retired, and Kamiya, though abashed, plainly isn’t going to change. So who’s the better manzaishi?
The
title refers to two things. The name of
Tokunaga’s manzai duo is Sparks (スパークス), so Hibana 火花
(“sparks” in Japanese) is clearly a reference to that. But the first and last scenes in the book are
set in Atami during fireworks displays, and Matayoshi lingers on the poetic
beauty and resonance of fireworks sparks in his descriptions of those scenes. This last point is worth noting. In style, this is literary fiction. That is, Matayoshi’s descriptions are
polished enough and beautiful enough to satisfy those who define literariness
as beautiful writing. His narrative
strategies, too, are more literary than popular in the Japanese context. The story he’s telling ends up having a tight
narrative arc (it’s gonna be a natural TV series), but that kind of takes you
by surprise because for most of the book he’s giving us vignettes,
impressionistic descriptions of moments in Tokunaga’s relatinship with
Kamiya. It feels fragmentary in the way
that much serious J-lit does, even if in the end it’s not.
This is
a problem, I feel. The book’s ending,
with the two powerful dramatic moments of Tokunaga’s retirement and Kamiya’s
body-modification revelation coming one after the other, is seriously jarring
after the reflective mood of the rest of the book. Matayoshi hasn’t prepared the reader for
either one of these moments. This is
actually more of a problem with the retirement than with the implants
scene. This is because when it comes
time to retire, Matayoshi lets Tokunaga go on for about ten pages about how
much his partner Yamashita has meant to him through his life and career. It gets really, really sentimental in here,
which might have been fitting and expected if it wasn’t for the fact that
Tokunaga has barely mentioned Yamashita up to this point. Reflections on the manzaishi partner are
conspicuously minimized for most of the story, in order to play up the
mentor-pupil relationship. So I at least
was not prepared to believe any of this sentimentality about Yamashita at the
end.
The
implants scene is problematic for a different reason. We’ve realized for a while that Kamiya’s
career isn’t going to go anywhere, that this story is following the
pupil-surpassing-the-master pattern, subcategory
but-pupil-knows-he-can-never-really-surpass-the-master. So we can understand on one level that we’re
meant to see Kamiya’s implants as what Tokunaga interprets them as: a sign that this guy will sacrifice anything
and everything for his art, but that this is precisely what’s going to keep
most people from getting him. But
Tokunaga is not wrong when he explains to Kamiya that this is not a funny joke
these days: we know enough about gender
and sexuality issues now to see the cruelty in this. The problem is that Matayoshi’s trying to
have his cake and eat it too, right?
Because the end of the book depends on us still admiring Kamiya on some
level for being willing to take it that far – meaning Matayoshi expects us to
be able to see this as a joke. We’re
supposed (I think) to feel that Tokunaga has a good point, but that Kamiya is
still cool.
This is
why I’m torn about the book. When it’s
good, it’s really good. The descriptions
of place and time are vivid, and the evocation of Kamiya’s and Tokunaga’s
relationship is really fine. Not so much
the reflections on What’s Funny – those I could take or leave – but the nuanced
depiction of how tiring and downright annoying a funny person can be, balanced
with Tokunaga’s self-doubt. This is fine
stuff. But the ending feels like it was
written with a TV series in mind, frankly.
It rings false on many levels, and undercuts much of what came before.
But
then, would I feel that way if I didn’t already know it was going to be a TV
series? I don’t know.
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