Takiguchi
Yūshō 滝口悠生. Shinde inai mono 死んでいない者. Bungei Shunjū, 2016.
This
won the 154th A-Prize, for late 2016. Actually, it was co-recipient, with Motoya
Yukiko’s book.
Takiguchi
was born in 1982. He was a finalist for
the previous prize; has been writing
since 2011.
I want
to translate this title as “The Undead,” but since it’s not about zombies I’d better
refrain; I guess “Those Who Haven’t Died”
is most exact; maybe “The
Not-Dead-Yet”? Or “The Nondead”? Anyway, it’s a book-length story (it takes up
the whole volume, at about 140 pages) about a funeral. To be precise, a wake – it all takes place
during the night of the tsuya 通夜 of an
old man who’s only ever called “the deceased” (kojin 故人). As
befits the title, though, it’s not about the deceased, but about the living who
come to the wake. Specifically, it’s
about a large extended family – his five kids, their numerous kids and their
kids’ kids, plus assorted spouses and a couple of friends of the family.
What
stands out about this book most is the narrative technique, specifically the
point of view. There isn’t one. Or rather, there is and there isn’t. The narration shifts focus from person to
person frequently, moving freely up and down the generations and in and out of the
characters’ heads, memories, imaginations.
And yet it’s not quite an omniscient narrator – sometimes characters’
actions are described in the speculative manner of someone who’s observing and
drawing conclusions, and sometimes descriptions are given along with subjective
judgment or sensation. But if this is a
first-person narration, there’s no hint of whose it might be, no indication of
an actual subjectivity we’re inhabiting, and then of course there’s the way the
narration slips into the past, and into the deep consciousness of many of the
characters. So is this the ghost of the
deceased who’s narrating it? Are we
experiencing these people’s lives with the freedom of the newly dead, someone
who is freed from the bounds of subjectivity but not entirely shorn of it? Perhaps – there are the barest nods in that
direction, including a memory late in the book that concerns nobody but the
deceased and his wife (who died much earlier).
But that memory isn’t entirely untethered from the point of view of a
friend of the deceased who is attending the wake…
The
Prize Committee’s reactions to the book seemed largely bound up with this
vagueness in the point of view. If you
have problems with it, you don’t like the book;
if you’re okay with it, you like the book. I’m okay with it, but it does puzzle me. It doesn’t seem like it’s an enigma wanting
to be solved, but rather like an experiment.
What it
allows is interesting, and that’s the thorough exploration of this whole
extended family, from multiple points of view.
Of course, this could also be accomplished through a traditional
third-person omniscient narrator; but
then the reader might demand more careful explanation and development than
we’re given. The oddly floating
semi-subjective nature of this narrator forestalls (for some readers, at any
rate) objections when it randomly moves on to a different character.
There: that’s what I felt was the flaw in the
book. I didn’t find any of the
characters to be developed deeply enough to be satisfying. By the end we do find that we’ve gotten to
know some of them better than others (a 17-year-old girl and her 27-year-old
shut-in brother; an absent alcoholic
father and his troubled kids), but not well enough for their stories to really
stand out. Just when we seem to be
getting to the bottom of one, the narration will drift off to someone else,
either a new character or someone we’ve met before, as if to remind us that the
point is the group portrait, not the individual.
As a
group portrait, though, I found it curiously moving. There are so many characters that even though
they’re listed carefully a number of times, with their relations to each other
spelled out, I found it next to impossible to keep track of who was related to
who and how. But I don’t think we’re
really meant to; the characters
themselves have a hard time, as is typical in big extended families. This is one of the aspects of the book that I
really liked: the texture of the family,
some of whom are close, others of whom see each other only at occasions like
funerals, all of whom are basically aware of each other, but each of whom has
her or his own problems that do and don’t impinge on the others’ lives. It all feels normal. There are problems,
such as the alcoholic and the shut-in I mentioned, but they don’t seem out of
proportion. This isn’t an exposé of the
modern family. But neither is it the
heart-warming (read: cloying) thing it could have been, either. It’s dry, in that sense, in a good way. Carefully poised; ambiguous, just like the position of the
narrator.
