This
won the 152nd A-Prize, for late 2014. I’m
a little late in reading and discussing it.
The
title story is the winner, a hundred-plus page novella. It’s about a woman named Sanae living in a
small fishing town in Kyūshū, a fictionalized version (presumably) of the
author’s home area of Ōita. Sanae is in
her early 30s and is a single mother;
her little boy, Kebin (希敏 – presumably a kanji-ization of
the Japanese pronunciation of Kevin), is the product of a relationship she had
in Tokyo with a Canadian named Frederic, who left her and Kebin. Sanae subsequently moved back in with her
parents in Kyūshū.
Kebin
has unspecified problems. He never seems
to talk, and he breaks into uncontrollable crying at unpredictable
moments. The reader most likely
concludes that he’s somewhere on the autism spectrum, but neither Ono nor Sanae
phrases it like that, and it seems Sanae has never had him diagnosed; we learn that she avoided his three-year-old
checkup, and the Tokyo social worker’s reminders, by moving back home. To herself (the narration is in the third
person, but the narrator’s perspective is Sanae’s) she phrases Kebin’s
condition almost as a form of possession – every once in a while he turns into
a shredded worm
Sanae’s
relationship with Kebin is one of the things this story is concerned with. She’s unable to cope, and has avoided getting
any professional help. She’s constantly
at the end of the rope, we sense (it’s seldom spelled out), and there are hints
that she might have abused him. It’s not
quite clear if she actually pinches or shakes him, or just wants to or
fantasizes about it. Clearly she’s under
a great deal of pressure.
Her
relationship with her parents is another theme.
Her father, a schoolteacher, is a distant presence who appears mainly as
a vaguely sympathetic caretaker of Kebin who is, still, not quite able to deal
with him. Her mother is a dominating
presence, judgmental at every turn – we get the sense that Sanae’s inability to
get help for Kebin is in large part due to her own feelings of guilt, instilled
by her mother, at having done something as unconventional as having a
relationship with a foreigner in the first place. The mother predicted it wouldn’t end well,
and seems to accept Kebin’s problems as an inevitable consequence of Sanae’s
scandalous life choices. Sanae seems to
more or less accept her mother’s verdict.
The
action of the story, such as it is, mostly concerns Sanae taking Kebin to a
nearby island to collect shells that local superstition holds have a healing
effect. Sanae’s mother was born on said
island. The idea is not to collect them
to help Kebin (because, again, everybody’s in denial about him), but rather to
help the son of an old family friend, Mitchan;
Mitchan’s grown son has cancer. Sanae
and her family are planning to visit them in the hospital that afternoon, but
the story doesn’t get that far. Instead
we have a long description of the boat trip to the island, Sanae wandering
around the island, and the boat trip back.
This journey is something mystical;
while on the island, looking for the right beach, Sanae seems to slip
into a dream state in which Mitchan herself is there, and Kebin is gone, or is
being held by Mitchan, and then she has a weird experience at a shrine on the
beach. Then when they arrive back on the
mainland Kebin almost falls off the boat ramp, and drops the precious shells in
the process.
This
storyline is intercut with a parallel one from nine years previous, concerning
a trip Sanae and some local women made to Montreal. The village had a JET teacher from Canada who
organized a trip to his hometown; Sanae
and a group of older women went. While
on the trip Sanae becomes close to Mitchan (decades older than her), but also
meets the JET teacher’s friend Frederic.
It’s through these flashbacks that we learn about Sanae’s past life, but
of course it’s not a love story. The
main storyline of the flashback is how, on a subway trip in Montreal, two of
their number became separated and while the JET went looking for them the rest,
including Sanae and Mitchan, ducked into a church and prayed for them, despite
not being Christian. This storyline too
culminates in something vaguely mystical, with the prayer, and both at the end
seem to contribute to a sense that Sanae is able to separate herself from her
misery – like it’s standing behind her, rather than inhabiting her. The A-Prize committee also notes this, that
the story ends on a hopeful note.
To slip
into critical mode, I’m not sure it’s justified. The story is told in an even more elliptical
fashion than is normal for A-Prize type fiction, and this means that both
Sanae’s experience on the island in the presence and her experience in the
church in the past are left almost entirely unexplained, but more than that
they’re left uncogitated-upon. Sanae is
an utterly passive character who seems to stumble into marriage, pregnancy, motherhood,
and single motherhood, without trying to understand any of it, and so her
experience of mystical comfort is also left un-understood.
The
idea seems to be, as with so many writers, to use a passive main character as a
way of getting at the environment that creates and conditions (in this case)
her. If that’s the aim, it’s effective,
because we get a strong, almost overwhelming sense of the Kyushu village
culture that Sanae was raised in. This
comes in the present from her mother and in the past from the village older
women who go on the trip to Montreal. If
the mother is an almost villainous figure, the other women seem to be meant as
something like comical relief, as we watch their utter inability to deal with
their encounter with a foreign culture.
It’s not even about Japan vs. the West – they’re so closed to any
culture beyond their own village that it’s clear they’d have the same reactions
in Tokyo.
One
last point: Ono’s style. I found it frustrating that he didn’t want to
give us more external-type details about what’s really going on in certain
moments. But his facility with words is
impressive. His “normal” sentences are
fairly straightforward but at key moments he’ll reel off a really baroque piece
of description or metaphor. The shredded
worm is a typical example. Really memorable,
striking stuff.
The
book contains three omake stories (good value for the money!). The first is called “Umigame no yoru ウミガメの夜”
(Night of the sea turtle). It’s set in
the same region as the first: the Saeki
region of Ōita. It concerns three male
friends, college classmates in Tokyo, who have come down for a visit. The story is told in three sections, each of
which takes one of their points of view.
The first is Ippeita, whose father is from Saeki; his parents are divorced and he hasn’t seen
his father since he was a child, but he has vague memories of a summer spent
with his grandparents in Saeki. And now
his mother is dying. As the three
friends drive around Ippeita is looking for familiar places and maybe even
relatives; he’s also the only one who
understands the local dialect. The
second friend is Tōru, who seems to mostly be comic relief, or at most a bridge
between the other two; he’s from Tokyo,
so a total outsider, and spends most of the story drunk and/or asleep. The third friend is Yūma, who is from Sendai
– his family home was devastated by the tsunami. Yūma has a stutter, and so mostly observes
quietely. It’s mostly unstated, but the
Saeki coastline clearly reminds him of the Sendai coastline, and he finds
himself thinking about death. The
unifying scene and image is that of a sea turtle that the three friends find on
the beach at night. She has just laid
her eggs, and they flip her over and watch her helplessly paddling the
air. It’s cruel, but also a good
metaphor for rootlessness, for futile striving, and for slowly approaching
death.
The
second omake story is called “Omimai お見舞い” (Visiting the sick). It’s told from the point of view of a
middle-aged man named Shudō Toshiya – Toshi, for short. It’s sort of an afternoon-in-the-life-of
story, although as one might expect there are enough flashbacks and ruminations
to complicate the narrative line considerably.
Basically all that happens in the present is that he gives rides to a
some people in need and visits other people in trouble. Toshi is the younger son of a wealthy fishing
family – they own a bunch of boats and employ a bunch of people. He works for his brother and considers
himself something of a screw-up, not particularly good at anything. But over the course of the story he proves
himself something of a saint. He’s
taking care of a childhood friend and mentor who in adulthood has become a
hopeless alcoholic. He’s looking in on
another childhood friend who’s in the hospital with a brain tumor. On the way back from visiting the friend in
the hospital he gives a ride to a pregnant woman who is the foreign wife of a
local unemployed man. At the end of the
story he encounters three college kids from Tokyo who desperately need to get
back, and drops everything and gives them a ride to the airport. Of course this is all set in Saeki again, and
when he meets the kids we suddenly realize that these stories are
connected. Not only is Ono exploring
this single region in depth, he’s telling the story of a single sprawling
community by focusing in turn on various of its members. We realize (although it’s not really
confirmed) that the friend in the hospital is the son of Mitchan from the title
story, and of course the three college kids are the ones from the second story; and we get the strong suspicion that the
alcoholic friend is the father that one of the college kids has come to
find. There’s even a minor character in
the first story that shares Toshi’s surname.
This of course lends all of the stories a richness that they wouldn’t
necessarily have individually: they
become parts of a group portrait of small-town Ōita. Very satisfying.
The
fourth story, “Aku no hana 悪の花” (Flowers of evil) is also
connected. It consists almost entirely
of a stream of consciousness belonging to (but not narrated by) an old woman
named Chiyoko. There are vestiges of a
present-moment narrative, but it’s not easy to figure out what that is, so
insistent and undifferentiated are the reminiscences. Chiyoko is distraught over the illness of
Mitchan’s son, who lived next door to her and helped her out in her growing
infirmity; specifically he visited the
cemetery daily on her behalf. We realize
that we’ve met Chiyoko before: the three
college kids knocked on her neighbor’s door while looking for Ippeita’s father,
and she told them whose house it really was.
Death and mourning rule Chiyoko’s life.
Her brother died in the war. Her
parents died when she was young. She
married a local man, older, whose mother had sent away his first wife for being
unable to bear children; the wife later
killed herself. Chiyoko was blamed by
the old-fashioned locals for breaking up the marriage and causing the woman’s
suicide, but then Chiyoko herself is sent away when she fails to bear a child
(the idea that it could be the man’s fault very pointedly is never
mentioned); Chiyoko outlives her
ex-husband and mother-in-law, but in old age comes to see the mother-in-law’s
reflection in the mirror, and feel she’s becoming her. Thoughts of these incidents are interspersed
with memories of Mitchan’s son and anxieties over what Chiyoko will do if he
doesn’t return, and guilt over what she fantasizes is her responsibility for
his illness. The “flowers of evil” of
the title are a different species every time Chiyoko sees them, but when she
sees them she always recognizes them as signs of her own guilt and
inadequacy. The last day Mitchan’s son
went to the graveyard on her behalf, Chiyoko thinks flowers of evil must have
been growing on the grave, and that he must have tried to clear them away and
been cursed by them.
This
story is closest to the title story in its theme, as it once again explores the
consciousness of women in rural Ōita, particularly women who have internalized a
misogynistic tradition that oppresses them.
As such it brings the volume to a satisfying close. But it’s also the story that has most to say
about the man whose hospitalization is a key plot point in the first, third,
and fourth stories: Mitchan’s son
Taikō. In interviews (http://hon.bunshun.jp/articles/-/3186)
the author has mentioned that his older brother was dying at the time he was
writing these stories, and it seems to be the common assumption that Ono was
writing about that. Which means that in
a sense, Taikō is the main character.
And he’s absent from all of the stories except as an occasional memory,
and he’s only intermittently described.
We feel his impact on all these lives, though, because Ono has done such
a complete job of evoking the interconnectedness of the community.
It’s a
very satisfying book; much more
satisfying in toto than the title story is on its own. In terms of its place in the literary
landscape it’s obviously akin to Tanaka Shinya from a few years back in its
patient and uncompromising evocation of a particular locale on the margins of
modern Japan. But Ono’s book is less
sensationalistic, and more sociological – more attuned to the way economics and
geography shape this community. One of
the strongest A-Prize recipients in years.
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