tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51143532194802652592024-02-19T06:55:22.331-08:00Sgt. Tanuki's Lonely Hearts Club BlogBond: It's what keeps me alive.
Natalya: It's what keeps you alone.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.comBlogger696125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-10501757273681068322017-03-29T18:02:00.000-07:002017-03-29T18:02:02.383-07:00Murata Sayaka: Konbini ningen (2016)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:1;
mso-generic-font-family:roman;
mso-font-format:other;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Murata
Sayaka </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">村田沙耶香</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Konbini ningen </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">コンビニ人間</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bungei Shunjū, 2016.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the 155<sup>th</sup> A-Prize, for early 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Murata
(b. 1979) began writing in 2003 and has already won the Mishima Prize;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she’s another well-established writer, a bit
late in her career for the A-Prize, at least as traditionally conceived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may not be that way anymore, really.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
novel is told from the point of view of Keiko, a 36-year-old single woman who
has been working at a convenience store – the same one – her entire adult
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a part-timer (i.e., no benefits
or security, although she works full-time, it seems).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Early on she tried to get something more like
a real job, but couldn’t make it through the interviews, and has settled into
life as a convenience store person:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>thus
the title, which you could play around with if you wanted – “convenient person”
– but which really seems to refer to the fact that Keiko’s personality is
utterly adapted to the routine of convenience store work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
makes the book sound like it’s another meditation on the insecure employment
situation of the post-Bubble generation(s), and it might have started out like
that, but Keiko’s issue is something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We’d probably say she’s somewhere on the autism spectrum, but,
importantly, the book doesn’t use a medical discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Keiko expresses it to herself as just having
an impossible time figuring out what the world expects from her in terms of “normal”
behavior, and understanding why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s
perfectly willing to comply, but she has to have it spelled out for her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A childhood incident that’s related early on
in the book is typical:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the
playground at school a couple of boys get into a fight, and Keiko hears
everybody shouting for teachers and yelling, “Make them stop!” So, very
logically, Keiko picks up a shovel and brains one of the boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes them stop, but of course then the
school has to have a talk with Keiko and her parents – and Keiko never has
quite figured out why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">She
likes the convenience store job because there’s a manual that spells out
everything that needs to be done, when, and how.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s tremendously efficient if given this
kind of program to follow, and as the story goes on it becomes clear that this
is what she needs out of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She feels
like she belongs to the store – is part of the store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s where she feels needed and comfortable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s not just that:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the regimentation of the job provides order
and structure for her life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Late in the book
when she quits (we’ll get to that) she just goes to pieces without that
structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can’t even crawl out of the
closet in the morning (we’ll get to that too). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s
not an emotional attachment to the job, though, at least in part because she
doesn’t seem to have emotions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never
gets angry, sad, whatever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s that she
needs this external input to know how to live her life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is stressed a lot in the area of
language:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she is quite aware that she
ends up talking like her co-workers, picking up phrases, intonations, and
reactions from them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She assumes that this
is how everybody’s personality is formed:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>by osmosis from the people around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She seems to assume that nobody has any agency – certainly she has spent
her life actively trying to suppress hers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">So this
all makes the book sound like it’s an exploration of a psychological issue, and
it may be that, but again:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the book
doesn’t indulge in that kind of terminology, and doesn’t encourage us to think
of Keiko as “ill.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, it frames
things in a discourse of “normal” and “abnormal,” with Keiko failing to
understand why the “normal” people consider her “abnormal” and why they
care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This discourse is primarily
verbalized, however, not by Keiko but by a man who comes into her life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is Shiraha, another person in his 30s
who has been unable to hold a “real” job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He gets a job at Keiko’s convenience store, but his “abnormality” is
much more malignant than Keiko’s, manifesting itself in stalking female
customers, and just generally being a skeevy character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He gets fired and ends up almost homeless
before Keiko encounters him on the street a while later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">She
takes him in and they live together for a while.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s completely a relationship of
convenience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wants somewhere to hide
from the world – from his unpaid bills, but also from everybody who judges him
for being a useless guy, unemployed in his 30s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And Keiko wants her sister, her parents, and her old classmates to stop
giving her the side-eye for being a part-timer, single, and a virgin at
36.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shiraha gives her cover, and she
gives him shelter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But because Shiraha is
so skeevy, he can’t accept this charity without incessantly reminding her of
how gross he finds her, and how horribly unjust the world is for not accepting
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has to keep asserting his
superiority over her, to keep his male pride.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The book is pretty explicity about this;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Shiraha sees human society as essentially unchanged from hunter-gatherer
days, when men had to be productive hunters and women productive child-bearers
and anybody who couldn’t do that was kicked out of the tribe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knows they’re on the verge of being kicked
out of the tribe but still wants to assert his essential maleness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Keiko,
on the other hands, is characteristically emotionless about it all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s pleasantly surprised by how quickly her
family and friends believe she’s successfully scored a man, and she’s happy that
the deception is working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rub comes
when Shiraha insists she start interviewing for “real” (higher-paying) jobs
(because there’s no way she can support both of them on a part-timer’s wages –
that’s why she sleeps in the closet;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
he sleeps in the bathtub), and quit the convenience store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s when, without structure, she falls
completely apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then she steps
into a convenience store and (spoiler alert) realizes where she belongs, and
dumps Shiraha.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Possibly the first time
she’s asserted herself ever, and that’s where the story ends.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">So
there’s a lot going on in this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
sincere and cage-rattling indictment of a society that can’t help but ostracize
people who don’t conform, but an indictment that’s voiced by a thoroughly
repulsive character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Keiko, too, is
suspect – she’s not skeevy or exploitative like Shiraha, and in fact is the
perfect employee, the perfect cog in the machine – but there’s that shovel
incident in her childhood that hovers over the book, reminding you that her
emotional emptiness makes her capable of unblinking violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And all of this in a tone that many readers
will find humorous, as well as creepy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s memorable, that’s for sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-84550375694861345082016-07-15T17:08:00.003-07:002016-07-15T17:08:40.058-07:00Motoya Yukiko: Irui kon'intan (2016)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Motoya
Yukiko </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">本谷有希子</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Irui kon’intan </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">異類婚姻譚</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kōdansha, 2016.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the 154<sup>th</sup> A-Prize, for late 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, it was co-recipient, with Takiguchi
Yūshō’s book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Motoya
was born in 1979.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s been writing
since 2004, and has already won the Mishima Prize;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this is her fourth story to be a finalist for
the A-Prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s a bit of an unusual
choice, being so well established as a writer already…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
title story is the winner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a
first-person narration in the voice of a young housewife we know as
San-chan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The primary relationship it
deals with is that with her husband, unnamed;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>we also meet her younger brother Senta and his girlfriend Hakone, and an
older neighbor lady named Kitae.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Let’s
cut to the chase.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of the
story, San-chan’s husband turns into a peony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To be specific, a yamashakuyaku </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">山芍薬</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">, Paeonia japonica.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turns out to be his fondest wish, and she
takes him and plants him in the forest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some of the committee members compare her stuff (this is all I’ve read)
to medieval setsuwa, the magical transformation here fitting into the same
category as those you find in folktales.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And there certainly is something prodigiously symbolic about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The title nods in the direction of a
traditional mode, too:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Interspecies
marriage story,” a semi-technical literary-history term for a particular
category of setsuwa or other traditional tale.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
interspecies aspect of the marriage begins long before he turns into a flower,
though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We join them when they’ve been
married for about four years, and she’s starting to notice that, when he’s at
home and not thinking about it, his facial features disorganize
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Droop, melt, go funny – as
if he’s no longer human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a story
about marriage anxiety, and pretty clearly San-chan is anxious about who or
what she’s married to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the “not
thinking about it” part that really matters here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the outset, her husband had announced
that he’s the type of guy who doesn’t want to think about anything when he’s at
home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His evening routine is to come
home, sit on the sofa, drink a highball, and watch three hours of comedy on
TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later he gets addicted to an iPad
game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still later, to making deep-fried
foods, which he forces San-chan to eat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The husband is, in a word, a total shlub, but while his behavior is kind
of stereotypical, Motoya’s description of him isn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than rendering him as a kind of sitcom
bad hubby, she has him speaking in strangely soft, feminine language, and
interacting with her in an exaggeratedly nonconfrontational way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s not an authoritarian, but rather a big,
good-natured baby;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s creepy,
intentionally so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so when his
features start to drift, it’s just an outward confirmation of the deep
strangeness at the heart of this guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
don’t expect him to turn into a flower, though;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>an animal, maybe, but a flower is a surprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s appropriate, though, given that he’s
kind of the ultimate expression of the herbivore male trope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">What
scares San-chan more than her husband’s transformation is the possibility that
it’s happening to her, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somebody
comments to her that she and her husband are starting to look alike, and she
becomes mildly obsessed with the possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By the end she starts to feel her features rearranging, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she doesn’t become a flower – instead,
there’s a weird role-reversal passage at the end where she’s drinking a
highball and watching TV, he’s cooking for her, and then the flower.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s marriage anxiety, as I say, and if part
of that is the fear that you’ve married something fundamentally, inalterably,
unknowably different from yourself, another part of it is the fear that you’re
losing your individual identity, being subsumed into your partner’s being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s here, too.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">There’s
an important subplot concerning cats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
neighbor Kitae has a cat that has lost urinary control – it pees all over the
house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No treatment, no change of
environment, no consultation does any good, so eventually she decides to
abandon the cat in the woods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>San-chan
drives her there;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>later she goes back to
leave her husband the peony in the same place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Kitae’s angst over abandoning the cat stands in stark contrast to
San-chan’s emotional distance – Kitae loves her cat more than it seems San-chan
has ever loved her husband.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her husband,
in a rare communicative moment, suggests that she married him because she knew
she could recede into the life of a homemaker, more than anything. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">I was
less plussed about this story than the above summary may suggest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an examination of marriage anxieties it’s
pretty memorably horrifying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
yet…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This particular constellation of
gender relations seems pretty archaic, even for Japan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not that couples like this don’t exist, but the
story’s concerns seem a bit old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if
you’re going to invoke setsuwa, it might be a good idea to make sure your
writing is as pithy and eloquent as setsuwa tend to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">There
are three omake stories in the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
first, “ ‘Inutachi’ </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;"><犬たち></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">” (“ ‘Dogs’ “), has the unnamed narrator spending
the winter in a cabin belonging to a friend, on a mountain above a
village.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator makes friends with
some wild (?) white dogs that visit the cabin regularly, but when she visits
the village she finds that everybody is afraid of dogs – they seem to blame
dogs for local disappearances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later,
during a blizzard, the narrator saves one of the dogs, which has fallen down
her well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As she does, she seems to hear
the dogs saying, “She’s passed.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a
few days, when she goes down to the village, she finds it empty, as if
everybody just disappeared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s not
upset about this – always antisocial by nature, her childhood wish was for
everybody to just disappear like this one morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She goes back up to the cabin and goes on
like before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then she notices that she’s
growing white fur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
second, “Tomoko no baumkuchen </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">トモ子のバウムクーヘン</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">” (Tomoko’s baumkuchen), is very
short.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The titular housewife has a
breakthrough or breakdown while making baumkuchen for her little kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an instant, for no discernible reason, she
flashes onto the essential absurdity of her life – it’s like she’s standing in
a wasteland that used to be a game show, but the host and the audience are all
gone, and the machine just keeps spitting out questions at her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wanders around her house recognizing
nothing, as if it’s all been replaced by simulacra, or always has been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She snaps out of it by going back to her
baking as if nothing was wrong, but the feeling never quite leaves her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The baumkuchen seems meant to suggest
Tomoko’s own layers – as if this knowledge was always there, this anxiety over
her life, but buried beneath other layers of consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a simple story, but deep and intense.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
third, “Wara no otto </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">藁の夫</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">” (Straw husband) also deals with marriage
anxiety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tomoko (written the same; no
indication if it’s the same character) is married to a man made of straw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No explanation of how such a thing is
possible, but a little description of how it works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No face, but he wears clothes (running gear,
in the story), drives, and talks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tomoko’s family and friends warned her against marrying a straw man, but
he was so kind…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story breaks down
into two halves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first half
they’re running in the park – he’s coaching her, as she’s just starting
out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems idyllic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second half, she accidentally maybe
nicks his new BMW, and he throws a tantrum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As he sulks and scolds her, teeny-tiny musical instruments start
spilling out from inside him, until he’s all empty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he apologizes, she stuffs them back into
him, and they go running again – but not before she has fantasized setting fire
to his straw and watching him burn.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">As
often happens to me, I found the bonus stories to be a little more satisfying
than the prize story;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in this case they
persuaded me to lighten up a bit on Motoya’s choice of theme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pervasive sense of alienation and anxiety
within interpersonal relationships, mainly marriage, is something she really
does well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the surrealist aspects
– I can see what she’s getting at in most cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm not sure I felt that she was getting at
things with surrealism that she couldn’t get at in other ways, or that the
surrealism brought a power that realism couldn’t have brought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know if I felt it was necessary or
particularly delightful…</span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-63686354756792244392016-06-17T17:32:00.003-07:002016-06-17T17:32:32.563-07:00Takiguchi Yūshō: Shinde inai mono (2016)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Takiguchi
Yūshō </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">滝口悠生</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shinde inai mono </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">死んでいない者</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bungei Shunjū, 2016.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the 154<sup>th</sup> A-Prize, for late 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, it was co-recipient, with Motoya
Yukiko’s book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Takiguchi
was born in 1982.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a finalist for
the previous prize;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has been writing
since 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">I want
to translate this title as “The Undead,” but since it’s not about zombies I’d better
refrain;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess “Those Who Haven’t Died”
is most exact;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>maybe “The
Not-Dead-Yet”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or “The Nondead”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyway, it’s a book-length story (it takes up
the whole volume, at about 140 pages) about a funeral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be precise, a wake – it all takes place
during the night of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tsuya</i> </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">通夜</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;"> of an
old man who’s only ever called “the deceased” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kojin</i> </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">故人</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
befits the title, though, it’s not about the deceased, but about the living who
come to the wake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">What
stands out about this book most is the narrative technique, specifically the
point of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There isn’t one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or rather, there is and there isn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So is this the ghost of the
deceased who’s narrating it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But that memory isn’t entirely untethered from the point of view of a
friend of the deceased who is attending the wake…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
Prize Committee’s reactions to the book seemed largely bound up with this
vagueness in the point of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you
have problems with it, you don’t like the book;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>if you’re okay with it, you like the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m okay with it, but it does puzzle me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t seem like it’s an enigma wanting
to be solved, but rather like an experiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">What it
allows is interesting, and that’s the thorough exploration of this whole
extended family, from multiple points of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of course, this could also be accomplished through a traditional
third-person omniscient narrator;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but
then the reader might demand more careful explanation and development than
we’re given.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">There:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that’s what I felt was the flaw in the
book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t find any of the
characters to be developed deeply enough to be satisfying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an absent alcoholic
father and his troubled kids), but not well enough for their stories to really
stand out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">As a
group portrait, though, I found it curiously moving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t think we’re
really meant to;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the characters
themselves have a hard time, as is typical in big extended families.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is one of the aspects of the book that I
really liked:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It all feels <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">normal</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are problems,
such as the alcoholic and the shut-in I mentioned, but they don’t seem out of
proportion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t an exposé of the
modern family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But neither is it the
heart-warming (read: cloying) thing it could have been, either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s dry, in that sense, in a good way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carefully poised;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ambiguous, just like the position of the
narrator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-68024931560286316632015-12-30T14:26:00.001-08:002015-12-30T14:27:06.785-08:00Fujino Chiya: Natsu no yakusoku (1999)<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
</style>
-->
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiya_Fujino">Fujino Chiya</a> </span><a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%97%A4%E9%87%8E%E5%8D%83%E5%A4%9C"><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">藤野千夜</span></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Natsu no yakusoku </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">夏の約束</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kōdansha, 2000.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This was
the co-winner of the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun122FC.htm">122<sup>nd</sup> A-Prize</a>, for late 1999.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other co-winner was Gengetsu </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">玄月</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kage no sumika</i> </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">蔭の棲みか</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Fujino
was born in 1962, making her 37 when she won the Prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’d been writing for four or five
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, she was born a man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe she was the first transsexual to
win the Akutagawa Prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This, of
course, created quite a stir in 2000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s still a well-known writer, and I’m a
bit surprised she’s not better known in English.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Both
the hardback and paperback (I read the latter) printings of “Natsu no yakusoku”
bear the French </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKtpBMjqomMgMOCzBcIG1hBb83hZXpZFxAme85tnUpyXkOKZz9zkCF4lPspnMmWCtKJN6tIjB2HRs4OUmJPUD4KYhj98hChj-_2zhaMSAwYWfud9aljQKhQISoGbw6zpz6Tj-qgfST_4wS/s1600/51EWMPQ5Z5L._SX325_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKtpBMjqomMgMOCzBcIG1hBb83hZXpZFxAme85tnUpyXkOKZz9zkCF4lPspnMmWCtKJN6tIjB2HRs4OUmJPUD4KYhj98hChj-_2zhaMSAwYWfud9aljQKhQISoGbw6zpz6Tj-qgfST_4wS/s200/51EWMPQ5Z5L._SX325_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="137" /></a></div>
translation of the title on the cover:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Une promesse d’été.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess we can translate it into English as
“A summer promise,” although “The promise of summer” seems admissible and more
evocative…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The promise in question is a
vague plan that the main characters have made to go camping once summer comes;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the promise is mentioned by several of them
in various scenes, and while neither the camping trip nor the preparations for
it form any of the action of the book, still the idea that there’s this fun
excursion awaiting them sometime in the near future is significant,
thematically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll spoil it and say they
never go, at least not in the summer that arrives in the story;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>so this summer promise just hovers there as a
vague hope for good times to come, good times that haven’t quite arrived but
might yet, someday.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
story is a group portrait of several characters in their 20s living in
Tokyo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The focus shifts between and
among them over the course of the novella.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At first it seems like we’ll be following the lives of Maruo and Hikaru,
a gay male couple, and seeing them mainly through Maruo’s point of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But soon we meet their transgender friend Tamayo
and her dog Apollon, and then we follow her to a gathering of her girlfriends,
one of whom we later learn knew Hikaru growing up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then we meet Maruo’s downstairs neighbor
Okano, and learn second-hand of her difficult love life…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s not much of a plot, really.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s more a series of vignettes as we see
these characters and a few others in twos and threes, interacting,
relating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">In some
ways the story is a meditation on relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first blush it seems the only real
relationship we see is Maruo’s and Hikaru’s, but that’s almost enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a finely drawn partnership, realized
through two carefully rendered characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Hikaru works for a publisher, which we’re told allows him the freedom to
be open about his sexuality, but Maruo is a salaryman, and has to stay
closeted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of his coworkers guess,
though, and he’s subject to some hazing;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the difficulties of living LGBT in turn-of-the-millennium Tokyo are not
foregrounded in the story, but they’re apparent on the edges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hikaru wants to move in with Maruo;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they already live near each other and are
about as out as they can be in their neighborhood, walking around holding hands,
and Hikaru wants to formalize their relationship as much as it can be in 1999.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maruo is reluctant, and at first we suspect
it might be due to the pressures of the closet;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>later, though, we begin to wonder if he’s just reluctant to commit to
Hikaru to that degree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t cheat,
but there’s some interesting chemistry between him and Tamayo that’s barely
hinted at.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Maruo’s
and Hikaru’s relationship is reflected/refracted in several other relationships
that Fujino slips into the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Almost-relationships, I guess one could call them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tamayo’s emotional attachment to her dog
Apollon is one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This almost seems
comical, or cliché, but it’s the occasion for Tamayo’s comment that to Apollon,
Tamayo constitutes 8/10ths of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s as close to a statement of the theme of the story as Fujino
gets:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the idea that we are each other’s
horizons, especially in relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Human beings in relationships define each other’s universes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s a
very pleasant read, the casual, light, uneventful surface disguising the
careful craft that Fujino puts into delineating her characters and their
situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In terms of significance,
it’s surely an effort to emphasize the sheer normality of her characters:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maruo’s easy-going good humor, his problems
with his weight, his reluctance to commit, Tamayo’s understated longing for
whatever the camping trip represents for her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There’s a warmth and humanity to these characters that’s hard not to be
charmed by.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since Fujino’s not
foregrounding the characters’ sufferings at the hands of straight society (but
those sufferings are there!), the story might fall short for a reader who would
like a more aggressive defense of these characters’ rights to live as they
are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s undeniably well crafted,
though, and certainly drew enough attention in 2000.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">I
believe when this was published in hardback it was alone, but the paperback I
read has an omake story in it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shufu to kōban</i> </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">主婦と交番</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">,
“Housewife and Police Box.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has
been <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4925080881?keywords=tokyo%20fragments&qid=1451514237&ref_=sr_1_2&s=books&sr=1-2">translated</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s about a housewife
named Natsumi and her little girl Mika.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Natsumi’s husband’s job has him living in another city, a common enough
pattern in Japan;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he doesn’t appear in
the story, so for all intents and purposes Natsumi and Mika are alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s an upstairs friend of Natsumi’s named
Yoshiko, and that’s about it for characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The theme is the isolation of the housewife, so the small cast is
key.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
story, too, has a light, even humorous surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One day Mika asks why there are no lady cops in police boxes, those
little neighborhood police ministations one finds everywhere in Japan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Natsumi has never thought about it, and from
then on becomes mildly obsessed with police boxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She scopes out all the ones within walking or
bicycling distance of her home, gives the officers stationed at them little
nicknames, almost turns into a stalker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But her obsession is no worse than her daughter’s – the girl becomes so
hung up on police boxes that one day she steals the stuffed <a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%94%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9D%E3%81%8F%E3%82%93">Piipo mascot</a> from
one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Why
does Natsumi go no farther than she can walk or bicycle?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because she gets intense motion-sickness when
she rides a train.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s suggested that
this might be a phobia as much as a physical thing, and it’s easy to read it as
a metaphor for housewifely desperation, almost agoraphobia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thing is, she almost forgets she has it,
because her world as a mother has shrunk so much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when her daughter wants to tour the
National Police Agency HQ, it causes problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has an attack on the elevator at Police
HQ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole episode ends in
trembling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Narrowed
horizons, worlds defined by significant others, or perhaps by absence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a good pair to the title story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-66600406783061546442015-11-30T17:35:00.001-08:002015-11-30T17:35:51.561-08:00Matayoshi Naoki: Hibana (2015)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Matayoshi
Naoki </span><a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%88%E5%90%89%E7%9B%B4%E6%A8%B9"><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">又吉直樹</span></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hibana </i></span><a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%81%AB%E8%8A%B1_%28%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AC%29"><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">火花</span></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bungei Shunjū, 2015.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun153MN.htm">153<sup>rd</sup> A-Prize</a>, for early 2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, it was co-recipient, with <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2015/11/hada-keisuke-scrap-and-build-2015.html">Hada’s book</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">And so
we come to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s part of why it’s a big deal, why it’s
the most famous of Japan’s literary prizes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We’re in one of those moments right now.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Matayoshi
hardly needs introducing to Japanese readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Born in 1980, he’s a well-known TV personality: specifically, he’s a
manzai comedian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s dabbled in books
before – some essays, some poetry, a couple of short stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is his first full-length work (and it’s
longish:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>150 pages in hardback).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bungakkai</i> early this year, which of course marks it as literary,
from an institutional perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
that issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bungakkai</i> was the first
in the journal’s 80-year history to require an immediate reprint – i.e., it sold
a boatload of copies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Almost Transparent Blue</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s going to be a Netflix Original Series
next spring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, it’s a full-on
mass-media (media-mix, to use the Japanese buzzword) phenomenon – print,
internet, TV. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No surprise, since
Matayoshi belongs to the Yoshimoto agency, who run all the big manzai
stars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0XaZY4lrXDNeUdEh7kd4MJzf8_PtxyDHqqfvvFsujchKPVWexDPyoUJ3P2barLtpvEgw8SEKqWxBgdLQf0ptpwal8s_gF6MP1EhiK6C2OliJzHJIlXwXqJKoUCblSohHuUhnRwnvg1Eqe/s1600/41IUgeZHdNL._SX347_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0XaZY4lrXDNeUdEh7kd4MJzf8_PtxyDHqqfvvFsujchKPVWexDPyoUJ3P2barLtpvEgw8SEKqWxBgdLQf0ptpwal8s_gF6MP1EhiK6C2OliJzHJIlXwXqJKoUCblSohHuUhnRwnvg1Eqe/s200/41IUgeZHdNL._SX347_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="139" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">All of
which inevitably raises suspicions about the work’s literary quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That it has allowed itself to become just
another cog in the Yoshimoto publicity gears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of course, such worries have been around with the prize for 60 years,
since Ishihara Shintarō and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taiyō no
kisetsu</i>…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">In this
essay, of course, I’m not trying to take the measure of the whole Matayoshi
phenomenon;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just want to account for
the story itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So in a sense all of
that is irrelevant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course it’s
not;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s one of those books that even
someone relatively insulated from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">owarai</i>
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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s going to be
impossible to judge it completely on its own merits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So if the A-Prize committee couldn’t, I can
hardly blame them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">I like
popular fiction, I like literary fiction, and I like fiction that (like my fave
rave Murakami Haruki) blurs the lines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’m not opposed to that sort of thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wouldn’t dream of doing that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at the same time, I would hate to see
literary fiction disappear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t want market logic to be the only logic
available to a writer, or to a reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All that suggests that I’m going to be torn about this book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Surprise:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m torn about this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">Here’s
the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s narrated by a young
aspiring manzai comedian named Tokunaga, and it traces the ten-year arc of his
career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It begins when he’s scuffling at
the entry level, performing at neighborhood festivals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He meets a slightly older comedian named
Kamiya and is so impressed that he adopts Kamiya as a mentor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the book is scenes from their relationship
as it matures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of these scenes are
Kamiya instructing Tokunaga, or expounding on what’s truly funny, and how the
manzaishi should live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tokunaga gradually rises through the ranks
until he achieves a certain level of fame, but Kamiya never finds much of an
audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead he’s giving us
two kinds of manzai failure to compare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tokunaga retires primarily because his partner Yamashita decides to
retire:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tokunaga can’t imagine performing without Yamashita, since they’ve been
together since middle school, so he retires too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course what they’re both realizing is
that they’re not going to truly succeed at this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they’ve risen about as far as they can hope
to, and it’s not far enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a kind
of failure, but then so is the decision to quit and do something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is suggested by the way Kamiya fails,
which is quite different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s been even
less financially successful than Tokunaga, and as noted, he’s in debt to loan
sharks;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what’s more, for most of the book
he’s letting a quasi-girlfriend support him, but then he lets her get
away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kamiya is a stereotypical
dysfunctional artist, brilliant (in Tokunaga’s eyes) at his art but a complete
screw-up at life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he never gives up,
and never compromises his sense of what’s truly funny to please a crowd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this is what finally alienates
Tokunaga.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Kamiya resurfaces after a
year on the lam, he has breast implants – F-cups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He says he got them on a lark, thinking it
would be funny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But by this point Tokunaga is already
retired, and Kamiya, though abashed, plainly isn’t going to change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So who’s the better manzaishi?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
title refers to two things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The name of
Tokunaga’s manzai duo is Sparks (</span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">スパークス</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">), so Hibana </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">火花</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">
(“sparks” in Japanese) is clearly a reference to that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This last point is worth noting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In style, this is literary fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, Matayoshi’s descriptions are
polished enough and beautiful enough to satisfy those who define literariness
as beautiful writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His narrative
strategies, too, are more literary than popular in the Japanese context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It feels fragmentary in the way
that much serious J-lit does, even if in the end it’s not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This is
a problem, I feel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Matayoshi hasn’t prepared the reader for
either one of these moments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
actually more of a problem with the retirement than with the implants
scene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reflections on the manzaishi partner are
conspicuously minimized for most of the story, in order to play up the
mentor-pupil relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I at least
was not prepared to believe any of this sentimentality about Yamashita at the
end.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
implants scene is problematic for a different reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So we can understand on one level that we’re
meant to see Kamiya’s implants as what Tokunaga interprets them as:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
Tokunaga is not wrong when he explains to Kamiya that this is not a funny joke
these days: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we know enough about gender
and sexuality issues now to see the cruelty in this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is that Matayoshi’s trying to
have his cake and eat it too, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re
supposed (I think) to feel that Tokunaga has a good point, but that Kamiya is
still cool.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">This is
why I’m torn about the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it’s
good, it’s really good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The descriptions
of place and time are vivid, and the evocation of Kamiya’s and Tokunaga’s
relationship is really fine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is fine
stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the ending feels like it was
written with a TV series in mind, frankly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It rings false on many levels, and undercuts much of what came before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.0pt;">But
then, would I feel that way if I didn’t already know it was going to be a TV
series?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-31084805824111423322015-11-30T17:31:00.002-08:002015-11-30T17:38:02.397-08:00Hada Keisuke: Scrap and build (2015)<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
</style><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Hada
Keisuke </span><a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BE%BD%E7%94%B0%E5%9C%AD%E4%BB%8B"><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">羽田圭介</span></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sukurappu ando birudo </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">スクラップ・アンド・ビルド</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bungei Shunjū, 2015.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun153HK.htm">153<sup>rd</sup> A-Prize</a>, for early 2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, it was co-recipient, with
<a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2015/11/matayoshi-naoki-hibana-2015.html">Matayoshi’s book</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Hada
was born in 1985, making him 29 when he won the prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he’s been writing
since he was 17, and had been an A-Prize finalist several times since
2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So he’s moving out of new-writer
territory and into the mid-career zone, which traditionally would make him less
likely to win it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there are no
rules, and they’ve given the prize to a number of mid-career writers
recently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
story is told from point of view of Kento, a 28-year-old out of work man living
with his mother and grandfather.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
mother is working, and the grandfather is slowly dying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s 88 and in need of serious care;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not quite immobile but close to it, not quite
lost to dementia but getting there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
has fallen to Kento’s mother to take care of the old man, but since Kento is
out of work it mostly becomes his job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWdl4e9YVshtexpM8j7aWidheZzGiGG00WNCabLvC42TunnuV3JuKP4rRh1nvRf2B2oCo4vfg5g-1OSEetsXsGzeNEDM9dfc0kUCQC6xvxR8KZTp02D-_qxTxwZOdPVYHJLk0QePzBEubM/s1600/2057506_201508130046278001439406017c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWdl4e9YVshtexpM8j7aWidheZzGiGG00WNCabLvC42TunnuV3JuKP4rRh1nvRf2B2oCo4vfg5g-1OSEetsXsGzeNEDM9dfc0kUCQC6xvxR8KZTp02D-_qxTxwZOdPVYHJLk0QePzBEubM/s200/2057506_201508130046278001439406017c.jpg" width="138" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The old
man hates what’s happening to him, and frequently mutters, “I should just
die.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kento decides to help him
out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s difficult to tell exactly
why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kento feels the burden of caregiving,
but also feels sorry for the old man in the various pains, fears, and indignities
of his condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is in the
third person and goes into less detail about Kento’s thoughts than one might
expect, so we’re kind of left to guess:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>on the surface, Kento’s telling himself that it’s about giving the old
man death with dignity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he’s also
horrified by what’s happening to his grandfather, and so revulsion and fatigue
may be driving his actions as much as love.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">In any
case, he chooses the gentlest possible way of providing death with
dignity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kento’s mother helps her father
as little as possible – forcing him to do as much as possible for himself, on
the theory that every little bit of activity the old man carries out will stave
off the inevitable that much longer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kento
buys this tough-love theory of caregiving, and so concludes that the best way
to hasten his grandfather’s death is to pamper him as much as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When his mother’s around, Kento lets her make
the old man carry his dishes to the kitchen after meals, sort his own clothes,
that sort of thing, but when his mother’s at work, Kento accedes to the old
man’s every request, fully expecting that as a result his grandfather will
hurry into that good night.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">At the
same time Kento’s revulsion at the decay of his grandfather’s mental and
physical faculties leads him to adopt an intense regimen of body-building and
study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The study is an effort to obtain
new qualifications that will help him in his job search (he’s constantly going
for interviews), but the body-building simply seems to be about keeping himself
from declining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kento is presented as a
fairly mediocre average-guy type:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>graduate of a third-rate college, former car salesman, not too smart,
not too handsome, average-looking girlfriend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Seriously in danger of slipping through life’s cracks, if he doesn’t do something
about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus the body (and mind)
building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
book has a happy ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While giving
his grandfather a bath, Kento leaves the room for a little while.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he comes back his grandfather is
struggling, nearly drowning;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as he saves
the old man, Kento realizes that in spite of his frequent statements to the
contrary, his grandfather really does want to live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So he gives up on trying to care him to
death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cut to the last scene, where we
learn that Kento has actually landed a job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
prize committee commented on the humor in this story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I take this to mean that the idea of killing
the grandfather with kindness is a comic conceit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t elicit laughs, but it is kind of
absurd, and therefore gestures toward a satire of the current state of elder
care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s certainly topical, focusing
both on the graying of Japanese society and the failure of the economy to come
through for young people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course,
Mobu Norio addressed the same two topics ten years ago in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaigo nyūmon</i>, but it’s not like the problems have gone away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-no-proof: yes;">Mobu’s book
had a lot more literary flair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This one,
despite the successful ironic conceit at its center, ends up as a rather
mediocre read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The style is kind of
flat, the story drags (it’s 120 pages, and could have made its point in about
half that length;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s the only story in
the book, by the way), and Kento is just narcissistic enough that he’s hard to
really sympathize with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book doesn’t
have much to offer beyond its theme, it seems to me.</span>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-51028690304791856492015-11-30T17:27:00.003-08:002015-11-30T17:37:28.373-08:00Ono Masatsugu: Kyūnen mae no inori (2014)<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:Osaka;
panose-1:2 11 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131219 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@Osaka";
panose-1:2 11 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131219 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:99.25pt 85.05pt 85.05pt 85.05pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
</style> <span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Ono
Masatsugu </span><a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E9%87%8E%E6%AD%A3%E5%97%A3"><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">小野正</span><span lang="JA" style="font-family: "ms 明朝"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-bidi-font-family: Osaka; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family: Osaka;">嗣</span></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kyūnen mae no inori </i></span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">九年前の祈り</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kōdansha, 2014.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
won the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun152OM.htm">152nd A-Prize</a>, for late 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m
a little late in reading and discussing it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
title story is the winner, a hundred-plus page novella.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae is in
her early 30s and is a single mother;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>her little boy, Kebin (</span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">希敏</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> – 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae subsequently moved back in with her
parents in Kyūshū.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Kebin
has unspecified problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never seems
to talk, and he breaks into uncontrollable crying at unpredictable
moments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we learn that she avoided his three-year-old
checkup, and the Tokyo social worker’s reminders, by moving back home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvCRfgXi9R2b2UOcIl5op5HnD8GWjCYDRot0DnDdc7Wz4TLzuI05Qc777G5fCQjoShPj5MtWMkpTAIXDBE-XH7nQBM6-vZ0A-4MDD4nzu4N1seBxpEnCfLNOysfRXSeU4bnZaD5TrIyvE/s1600/51XakxCgNVL._SX339_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvCRfgXi9R2b2UOcIl5op5HnD8GWjCYDRot0DnDdc7Wz4TLzuI05Qc777G5fCQjoShPj5MtWMkpTAIXDBE-XH7nQBM6-vZ0A-4MDD4nzu4N1seBxpEnCfLNOysfRXSeU4bnZaD5TrIyvE/s200/51XakxCgNVL._SX339_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="136" /></a></div>
(<i>hikichigirareta mimizu</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Sanae’s
relationship with Kebin is one of the things this story is concerned with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s unable to cope, and has avoided getting
any professional help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not
quite clear if she actually pinches or shakes him, or just wants to or
fantasizes about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clearly she’s under
a great deal of pressure.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Her
relationship with her parents is another theme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae seems to
more or less accept her mother’s verdict.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae’s mother was born on said
island.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mitchan’s grown son has cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae
and her family are planning to visit them in the hospital that afternoon, but
the story doesn’t get that far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead
we have a long description of the boat trip to the island, Sanae wandering
around the island, and the boat trip back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This journey is something mystical;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then when they arrive back on the
mainland Kebin almost falls off the boat ramp, and drops the precious shells in
the process.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">This
storyline is intercut with a parallel one from nine years previous, concerning
a trip Sanae and some local women made to Montreal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The village had a JET teacher from Canada who
organized a trip to his hometown;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sanae
and a group of older women went.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
on the trip Sanae becomes close to Mitchan (decades older than her), but also
meets the JET teacher’s friend Frederic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s through these flashbacks that we learn about Sanae’s past life, but
of course it’s not a love story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The A-Prize committee also notes this, that
the story ends on a hopeful note.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">To slip
into critical mode, I’m not sure it’s justified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
comes in the present from her mother and in the past from the village older
women who go on the trip to Montreal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">One
last point:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ono’s style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But his facility with words is
impressive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His “normal” sentences are
fairly straightforward but at key moments he’ll reel off a really baroque piece
of description or metaphor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shredded
worm is a typical example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Really memorable,
striking stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
book contains three omake stories (good value for the money!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is called “Umigame no yoru </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">ウミガメの夜</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">”
(Night of the sea turtle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s set in
the same region as the first:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Saeki
region of Ōita.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It concerns three male
friends, college classmates in Tokyo, who have come down for a visit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is told in three sections, each of
which takes one of their points of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The first is Ippeita, whose father is from Saeki;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now
his mother is dying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the three
friends drive around Ippeita is looking for familiar places and maybe even
relatives;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’s also the only one who
understands the local dialect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
second friend is Tōru, who seems to mostly be comic relief, or at most a bridge
between the other two;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’s from Tokyo,
so a total outsider, and spends most of the story drunk and/or asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The third friend is Yūma, who is from Sendai
– his family home was devastated by the tsunami.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yūma has a stutter, and so mostly observes
quietely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s mostly unstated, but the
Saeki coastline clearly reminds him of the Sendai coastline, and he finds
himself thinking about death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
unifying scene and image is that of a sea turtle that the three friends find on
the beach at night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has just laid
her eggs, and they flip her over and watch her helplessly paddling the
air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s cruel, but also a good
metaphor for rootlessness, for futile striving, and for slowly approaching
death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
second omake story is called “Omimai </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">お見舞い</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">” (Visiting the sick).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s told from the point of view of a
middle-aged man named Shudō Toshiya – Toshi, for short.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Basically all that happens in the present is that he gives rides to a
some people in need and visits other people in trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toshi is the younger son of a wealthy fishing
family – they own a bunch of boats and employ a bunch of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He works for his brother and considers
himself something of a screw-up, not particularly good at anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But over the course of the story he proves
himself something of a saint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s
taking care of a childhood friend and mentor who in adulthood has become a
hopeless alcoholic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s looking in on
another childhood friend who’s in the hospital with a brain tumor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course this is all set in Saeki again, and
when he meets the kids we suddenly realize that these stories are
connected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and we get the strong suspicion that the
alcoholic friend is the father that one of the college kids has come to
find.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s even a minor character in
the first story that shares Toshi’s surname.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This of course lends all of the stories a richness that they wouldn’t
necessarily have individually:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they
become parts of a group portrait of small-town Ōita.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very satisfying. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">The
fourth story, “Aku no hana </span><span lang="JA" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">悪の花</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">” (Flowers of evil) is also
connected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It consists almost entirely
of a stream of consciousness belonging to (but not narrated by) an old woman
named Chiyoko.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chiyoko is distraught over the illness of
Mitchan’s son, who lived next door to her and helped her out in her growing
infirmity;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>specifically he visited the
cemetery daily on her behalf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We realize
that we’ve met Chiyoko before:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Death and mourning rule Chiyoko’s life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Her brother died in the war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her
parents died when she was young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
married a local man, older, whose mother had sent away his first wife for being
unable to bear children;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the wife later
killed herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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);<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As such it brings the volume to a satisfying close.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mitchan’s son
Taikō.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which means that in
a sense, Taikō is the main character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And he’s absent from all of the stories except as an occasional memory,
and he’s only intermittently described.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We feel his impact on all these lives, though, because Ono has done such
a complete job of evoking the interconnectedness of the community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s a
very satisfying book;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>much more
satisfying in toto than the title story is on its own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Ono’s book is less
sensationalistic, and more sociological – more attuned to the way economics and
geography shape this community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of
the strongest A-Prize recipients in years.</span></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-90872339673474923032015-09-10T11:14:00.001-07:002015-09-10T11:14:59.401-07:00Murakami Haruki: The Strange LibraryAs of this writing, this is the most recent English translation of Murakami. The story has a slightly complicated history. It was published, as a short story, in 1982, under the title "Toshokan kitan 図書館奇譚" (Strange tale of a library). In 2005 he published it as a stand-alone picture book, with illustrations by Sasaki Maki; at this point he rewrote the story somewhat and changed the title, to "Fushigi na toshokan 不思議な図書館." The latter version is what has been translated into English as <i>The Strange Library</i>, and published as a stand-alone picture book; the illustrations for the English version are by Chip Kidd. In my <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2015/09/murakami-haruki-panya-o-osou.html">last post</a> I linked to a <a href="http://tazakitsukuru.blogspot.com/2015/04/more-on-translating-images-and-strange.html">blog</a> by some of Murakami's European translators that mentions the Euro edition of this work, which has illustrations by Kat Menschik, like <i>Pan'ya o osou</i>; her version of the library story has also been published in Japanese, and as the blog makes clear, in that edition the earlier title was used. I don't know if that means that (a) the German (and non-English Euro) version of this picture book used the older version of the story or the newer, or (b) if the Japanese edition of the Menschik-illustrated volume (which I haven't seen yet) uses the older or newer version of the story. But it is clear that the English version, translated by Ted Goossen, uses the 2005 revision of the story, the one made for publication as a picture book.<br />
<br />
I suspect that what is happening is that, America always being a little insular, xenophobic, and therefore late to the party, this translation of <i>The Strange Library</i> represents Murakami's English publishers finally deciding to invest in the Murakami picture-book boom that has been taking place on the continent for several years, but also deciding that Menschik's illustrations are less saleable in the US than Kidd's, since Kidd has done Murakami work in the past. I also suspect that a Japanese edition using Kidd's illustrations is going to appear. And won't that be interesting?<br />
<br />
There are two issues I want to briefly talk about in the rest of this post.<br />
<br />
First, the differences between the two versions of the story. I can't think offhand of a way to render the titles that makes the difference clearer in English, but the original title feels old-fashioned, Sinified, and above all grown-up, while the 2005 version's title sounds like the title of a child's picture book. <i>Kitan</i> 奇譚 doesn't actually mean horror, but something approaching the effect might be achieved if you imaged the original title as being "The Library Horror" and the the revised title as being "The Scary Library." <br />
<br />
That pretty well indicates the direction of Murakami's revisions. The revised version is at least masquerading as a picture book for kids, and so he rewrites the story so that it feels like one. Not completely - I doubt anybody would read this to kids, and I'm sure he doubts it too, so instead it's more like a normal Murakami story cosplaying as a kid's story, for normal Murakami readers who want to cosplay as children. But still, he simplifies the language slightly, cuts out a few of the more ornate descriptions, and adds a few more references to the child-narrator's mother in such a way as to make it clear that the narrator <i>is</i> a child. In the original it's not quite so clear - he may be an adult still living with his mother. <br />
<br />
Interestingly, however, the revised version contains more of a sense of loss at the end than the original - in the original, the narrator's pet starling is restored to him at the end. But there's still a palpable sense of loss at the end of the original version, because (splr alrt) the final paragraph, where the narrator says his mother has just died, is already there. That <i>is</i> the original ending of the story, not something added in revision. And, while we're on the subject, I'm disappointed that the English translation prints this final paragraph in a smaller type size, suggesting (with no basis in the original) that it's to be taken as by a different voice, or as referring to a different narrative level, than the rest of the story. I.e., the translation sets this paragraph off in such a way as to imply that it's by an older version of the narrator, or a different version, or by the author himself (as opposed to the narrator); this may be the case, but it's not something indicated in the original. It's an artifact of the translation's book design.<br />
<br />
Which brings us to the second point, the illustrations. I don't see why they didn't just use Sasaki Maki's original illustrations. Murakami and Sasaki go way back, with Sasaki's illustrations appearing on the covers of many of his early works. If you read Murakami in the '80s, Sasaki's vaguely Keith Haring-esque illustrations probably influenced your understanding of Murakami's work. They help to situate him in the realm of pop art, a la Haring. Sasaki's work for the library book is in the same style, cartoony, childlike, fun. Murakami's revisions to the story are obviously made to fit just this kind of illustration.<br />
<br />
They don't fit Chip Kidd's style of illustration. Now, I like Kidd's work, as a rule. His irony-laced appropriative graphic style is great for certain things. I've never thought it very appropriate for Murakami, however; Kidd favors a kind of triple-lutz Orientalism that puts the East Asian subject in so many quotation marks that you can't quite parse it (is it ironic? is it ironizing irony? is it ironizing the ironization of irony?). The problem with this kind of thing is that irony is a fugitive pigment, and can evaporate over time, so that what might have been meant as a daring, meaning-laden appropration of an Orientalist image ends up being just another Orientalist image... The problem with this kind of thing for a Murakami cover is something different: it's that Murakami himself doesn't engage in this kind of thing. He famously, obviously has little time for thinking about "Japaneseness." The issues that Kidd's covers think about have nothing to do with what Murakami writes about - all they relate to is an American reader's cramped inability to forget that this is a Japanese writer, a member of the Other. <br />
<br />
And that's what's going on here. There's nothing in <i>The Strange Library</i> that relates in any way to the found-image arch-ironical Orientalism of the images Kidd provides for the American edition of the story. On their own, they're quite attractive images, and Kidd treats them, crops them, manipulates them, and transforms them in beautiful ways, and then juxtaposes them with the text in intelligent ways. But they strike notes wholly dissonant with the story, unlike Sasaki's wholly consonant original illustrations. And fairly frequently the irony just fails - when you read about an old man and turn the page and see a photo of a noh mask, all the careful photoshopping in the world can't distract from the fundamental equation being made. Japanese old man = noh mask. Reductive, essentialist, bad.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-80003412008124052132015-09-07T21:56:00.000-07:002015-09-07T21:56:52.907-07:00Murakami Haruki: Pan'ya o osouI've been on a Murakami Haruki kick last couple of weeks. Catching up with a couple of recent things I hadn't read yet, and delving into some of his older stuff that I hadn't yet touched.<br />
<br />
One of these was a curious publication from 2013 called <i>Pan'ya o osou</i> <a href="https://www.shinchosha.co.jp/book/353429/">パン屋を襲う</a> (To Raid a Bakery). Murakami fans reading English will know of his short story "The Second Bakery Attack" (Pan'ya saishūgeki パン屋再襲撃), translated in <i>The Elephant Vanishes</i>. They may also know, because it's mentioned in Rubin's book, that there actually was an earlier story called "The Bakery Attack" (Pan'ya shūgeki パン屋襲撃), which hasn't been translated into English. As Rubin notes, the second story summarizes the first story as part of its plot, so if you've read the later one you more or less know the earlier one - but still, I'd like to see it translated someday, for reasons that will become clear below.<br />
<br />
In German, both stories have been published together as a book entitled <a href="http://www.dumont-buchverlag.de/buch/Haruki_Murakami_Die_Baeckereiueberfaelle/10725"><i>Die bäckerieūberfälle</i></a>, with illustrations by Kat Menschik. Since the Japanese Murakami industry loves to keep track of his international reception, this book was recreated in Japanese in 2013. That is, the two stories were published as a single book with Menschik's illustrations. At the same time Murakami decided to revise the two stories slightly, changing the titles (thus "To Raid a Bakery" instead of "The Bakery Attack"). (Menschik has illustrated other Murakami, which you can read about <a href="http://tazakitsukuru.blogspot.com/2015/04/more-on-translating-images-and-strange.html">here</a>.)<br />
<br />
The illustrations are nice. Beautiful, even, all in forest green, gold, and white. Not necessarily the way I imagine the stories, but they add a real stylishness that complements the stories' inventiveness without disrupting them with a contradictory aesthetic (which is the problem with the English version of <i>The Strange Library</i>, which I'll get around to discussing soon, hopefully).<br />
<br />
Murakami's revisions are fairly minor, to the point that if I hadn't been going back and forth between the new versions and the originals I only would have noticed a couple. He adds a descriptive phrase here and subtracts one there, but not really the kind of thing that makes much difference. The substantive changes I noticed seemed to be geared toward (a) making the two stories work together as if the second one was a sequel to the first, and (b) making the second one feel as if it's taking place in the present, rather than in the early '80s. <br />
<br />
The latter is accomplished by changing a few cultural references. The famous Betamax ad at the end of the second story is now an ad for Blu-Ray - a canny change. A Bluebird in the original is now an Accord. Did he have to make the second story take place in the present? Well, sort of. Given that it's supposed to be taking place over a decade after the first bakery attack, and that the first bakery attack is taking place at a moment when "God, Karl Marx, and John Lennon are all dead," the second bakery attack couldn't be taking place in the early '80s.<br />
<br />
Which leads us to the former goal, making the two stories work together as if the second one was a sequel to the first. Because, when you read the originals, you realize that this is <i>not</i> the relationship between them. The time scheme doesn't work, but there are other inconsistent details. In the first bakery attack story we're very specifically told that the baker is listening to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" on a radio cassette player, while in the second story we're told that he had been listening to Wagner overtures (including Tannhauser) on lp. A small inconsistency, but one that tells us that the second story, as originally written, was less a sequel to the first than a rewriting of it, one that moved the events of the first into the past and thereby recontextualized them against the end of the '60s counterculture rather than early '80s malaise.<br />
<br />
Murakami resolves that inconsistency in the new versions of the stories. In both references the baker is listening to "Tristan and Isolde." Which means that this book gets to read like a book, a kind of double coming of age story, the imposition of a curse and its resolution, a comparison of friendship to marriage, and a whole lot of other things. But it also means that the critique of the boomer generation that had been implicit in the original "Second Bakery Attack" ('60s radical compromises his ideals, goes straight, tries to recover some of his outlaw essence with his new wife) is gone, or at least muted, here. An interesting change.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-45510847097191581952015-06-14T13:40:00.000-07:002015-06-14T13:40:45.860-07:00Herman Melville: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850)[So I still can't quite commit to giving up this here blogging thing, so I guess that means I should make another try at committing to blogging.]<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redburn"><i>Redburn</i></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Jacket"><i>White-Jacket</i></a> are what Melville wrote in a hurry after <a href="http://www.sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2014/03/herman-melville-mardi-1849.html"><i>Mardi</i></a> tanked. He was in danger of not being able to make it as a professional writer, but not willing to give up on it. So he wrote a couple of quickie conventional novels. Well, conventional as he could get. They restored his fortunes, commercially, and allowed him to write <i>Moby Dick</i>. So goes the story.<br />
<br />
I read <i>Redburn</i> last summer and can't remember a damn thing about it. I just finished <i>White-Jacket</i> a couple of weeks ago and am in a better position to comment about it; but what I mostly recall about the <i>experience</i> of reading <i>Redburn</i> tallies with what I felt reading its successor. These are bad Melville. <br />
<br />
For one thing, he's milking his seafaring experiences pretty dry by this point - on the evidence of these books I would have advised him to find a new theme; but then he wouldn't have written <i>Moby Dick</i>, so what do I know? But his success-to-come in this genre doesn't really redeem the sense that he's just rewriting the same old observations about life at sea. I'm not familiar enough with early 19th century maritime books to say for absolute certain, but I'd wager a fair amount that most of the detail he gives us in these books was readily available in other books. I doubt there's much new here, in other words, and yet he's presenting it all as if he's chronicling for breathless readers a world never before revealed. Yankee hucksterism, it smacks of. <br />
<br />
For another thing, in both books he's trying his best to restrain his poetry, when in fact his poetry is all he has going for him here. In <i>White-Jacket</i> in particular, he does let himself go from time to time, and it's only there that the book begins to transcend. F'rexample, when he falls off the yardarm into the sea at the end of the book and we get this wonderfully lucid, evocative description of the moment after the plunge:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself, Great God! this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm. Like frost-work that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm. (p. 397, Oxford World's Classics edition)</blockquote>
Here the allegory (plunge into the water at the end of the voyage as metaphor for death at the end of life) comes so close to the surface narrative line that the two merge, and I think that's part of what looses Melville's tongue here.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, as in <i>Mardi</i>, he's dedicated to maintaining the proper relationship between surface narrative and allegorical significance, and the results are as cloying here as they were there. It's not that he ever really submerges the allegory - far from it. He likes to just keep it floating alongside, so he can point to it at any time and say, see? This is what this means. But the meanings are so obvious that you just want him to stop pointing it out; not to mention, they're so pedestrian that you wish he wouldn't work so hard to bring them up. Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-13090635745763374352015-02-01T12:40:00.004-08:002015-02-01T12:40:32.374-08:00Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #5Is it possible I never wrote the last post in <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2014/02/bob-dylan-another-self-portrait-post-4.html">that</a> series? I had it written in my mind... Oh well, they say blogging is dead anyway. <br />
<br />
<i>Another Self Portrait</i> is at its strongest in its look at Dylan's 1970 sessions. One could argue that it would have been stronger had it just focused on them, but it gestures toward a look back at 1969 (and 1968). And it also gestures toward a look forward, at 1971. This makes sense. <i>New Morning</i> didn't signal a new direction in Dylan's songwriting; in fact, in retrospect it marks the first time his muse and he would take some time off from each other. No album of new songs in 1971, none in 1972, and only a soundtrack for 1973. Only at the very end of '73, with the <i>Planet Waves</i> sessions, would he find his way back into a songwriting groove.<br />
<br />
But 1971 was not an unproductive year for Bob. He released two new non-album singles, and his second greatest-hits album, released at the end of the year, contained a few new recordings. A few more studio or at least non-live things have filtered out over the decades since, and <i>ASP</i> adds three key recordings to this cache. Total it all up and you have a vinyl lp's worth of material. I've always heard it like that, scattered though it is, and the newly released tracks round out this imaginary album nicely.<br />
<br />What is there?<br />
<br />
1. "East Virginia," a traditional number recorded in a home-jam setting with Earl Scruggs and his sons in December 1970 for broadcast on a public television documentary in January 1971. This is the scarcest track, never having been released on CD, but it's worth seeking out on youtube. It's the only trad number from this year (counting it with '71), and a nice coda to Dylan's collaborations with the Band, Johnny Cash, and others from this period.<br />
<br />
2. Three tracks recorded in March '71 with a bunch of people Dylan knew through the George Harrison/Shelter connection: Leon Russell, Jesse Ed Davis, etc. "Watching The River Flow" was a non-album single side, a full-band version of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" was released on <i>GH2</i>, and <i>ASP</i> adds an alternate version of "Masterpiece," Dylan at the piano with some different lyrics. "Watching" is fun, but "Masterpiece" is one of Dylan's most important compositions. The alternate version is one of the really worthwhile things about <i>ASP</i>.<br />
<br />
3. Yet another take on "If Not For You," this being the second with George Harrison, taken from the soundcheck for the Bangladesh concert in August. It's on the DVD.<br />
<br />
4. Four tracks recorded with Happy Traum for <i>GH2</i>. This is a very significant session because three of the tracks were Basement numbers: "I Shall Be Released," "Down In The Flood," and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." For a few years there (two decades in the case of "Released") these were the only officially available Dylan versions of these songs. Seems like it wouldn't be a fair trade but in fact he's in fine form here, and this version of "Released" is an amazing rethink of the song. <i>ASP</i> adds "Only A Hobo," long a tantalizing absence from the bootleg circuit. It's a welcome release.<br />
<br />
5. Four tracks recorded in November. The main purpose of the session was the "George Jackson" non-album single, Dylan's first foray into protest song in many years. One side was a solo acoustic version, the other a small band version (labeled "Big Band" but really just a country combo with gospel singers). The electric version was released on CD back in the '80s on the Australian-only <i>Masterpieces</i> set, and was rereleased on iTunes for a while in the mid '00s. For many years the acoustic version was available only on vinyl or bootleg, but it's now on <i>Side Tracks</i>. Both versions are essential. The other two tracks are two versions of the original "Wallflower," one of which wasn't released until 1991, and the other of which is new to <i>ASP</i>. It's a minor composition, but very nicely realized - a perfect little genre exercise, one of the strongest pure-country songs he ever wrote. <br />
<br />
As this summary makes clear, <i>ASP</i> adds three key tracks that round out our understanding of Dylan's '71 very nicely. It was a year when he seems to have had only fitful inspiration as a songwriter, but the few things he came up with were gems, every one of them. And his singing - well, the songwriting drought is a tragedy, because he was in really fine voice this year. His vocals on the Traum sessions are agile, sensitive, and masterful; all through the year he's in a backwoods-country-soul mode that's distinct from what he'd done in '69 and anytime in '70. It's one of my favorite periods in terms of Dylan's vocals, and I've always wished there was more. Now there is, a little bit.<br />
<br />
Sure, one might wish for a release that presented these sessions together, something resembling what's outlined above. And that's my general take on <i>ASP</i>. It's full of revelations, minor masterpieces, interesting dead ends, and welcome details. And it's comprehensive enough to feel like it's intended to be the last word on this era. But one hopes it isn't, because a closer look reveals that it's nothing approaching comprehensive. It's a patchwork, very much like the <i>Self Portrait</i> album itself. Cute idea, but I'm still not sure it does any of the sessions justice. <br />
<br />
Except the Isle of Wight show, which is complete, and therefore definitive. There's a lesson there, which luckily the Bootleg Series czars learned in time for the next installment. Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-17017205674646646032015-01-17T15:23:00.000-08:002015-01-17T15:23:03.432-08:00Shiriagari Kotobuki: YajiKita in DEEPThe author is Shiriagari Kotobuki <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%97%E3%82%8A%E3%81%82%E3%81%8C%E3%82%8A%E5%AF%BF">しりあがり寿</a>, and the title is <i>YajiKita in DEEP</i> (<a href="https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E5%BC%A5%E6%AC%A1%E5%96%9C%E5%A4%9Ain+deep&lr=lang_ja&safe=off&hl=ja&tbs=lr:lang_1ja&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=I-26VLrDF5OlyASAn4KYDQ&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=595">弥次喜多in DEEP</a>). It was serialized from 1997 to 2002; I read it in a 2005 book edition. It won prizes. I don't think it's been translated.<br />
<br />
For the first half, I thought it was very amusing, even charming. For the second half, I alternated between feeling it was brilliant and finding it maddening. I think I ended on brilliant.<br />
<br />
I think it can be mostly summed up by the convenient word <i>hetauma</i>. Google it. Good-bad, (un)skilled, pick your own rendering. The art style fits the label perfectly: on the surface it's artless, amateurish, school-desk graffiti level, but after you've read a couple of pages you realize nothing's accidental, nothing's drawn the way it is because of lack of control. And sure enough by the time you've reached the end you've encountered panels and passages of beautiful near-photo realism, nuanced effects of tone and line and shading, skilled pastiches of other artists' styles, and all manner of effective variations on the author's basic style. So it's obvious that the bad is an aesthetic choice, an embrace of amateurishness that opens the door to all kinds of experimentation. It unhooks the art from realism, so that anything's possible - including occasional realism.<br />
<br />
Usually hetauma is used to describe the art style, but I would apply it to every dimension, every level, of this work. F'rexample, the adaptational aspect of it. As the title suggests, it's a riff on the old chestnut <i>Shank's Mare</i>, with two Edoites, Yaji and Kita, tramping down the old Tōkaidō to visit Ise. But it lowers your expectations immediately by having Our Heroes ignore a warning and take a right turn onto the new still-under-construction Super Dream Tōkaidō: we're given to expect that nothing is going to be like the original. And indeed there are precious few correspondences with the original, but it's not like the author is just using Kita and Yaji as an excuse for dreamlike happenings. He sticks closer to the frame than you might expect. He never totally abandons the early 19th-century setting, for example (despite all kinds of sly anachronism). And most of the surrealism is grounded in Edo-era fantasies, or at least <i>jidaigeki</i> renderings of them. The village full of religious fanatics at the end, for example, is clearly informed by an awareness of medieval <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikk%C5%8D-ikki"><i>ikkō-ikki</i></a>. Indeed, the mystical symbolic significance Ise takes on from about halfway through the story is a kind of Godot-like existentialism that doesn't have to be, but really is, grounded in the source material. <br />
<br />
Halfway through. Yes, it changes around then. For the first half it's (like the original) highly episodic. The moods of the various episodes range from nonsensically comic to quite horrific, and so the author has already succeeded in transcending the gag-a-page promise he seemed to be making at the beginning. But in the second half he goes somewhere completely different. The episodes all connect, and we start to get secondary characters, and then Kita and Yaji are transformed into a cross between Hindu myth-monsters and tokusatsu kaijū, and then they battle for a hundred pages straight, and then they drop out of the story entirely... It gets weird, dark, and super-violent, and the early episodes' flirtation with myth and religion reveals an obsession with the mechanics of messianic cults. And then we learn that maybe, just maybe, the whole second half was a dream, and/or an allegory of a boy's fears on entering puberty. <br />
<br />
There's a whole documentary on it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r96rnJptXn4">here</a>, which I may someday have the patience to watch. Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-38953456996704501782015-01-11T12:44:00.000-08:002015-01-11T12:44:02.704-08:00Jimi Hendrix: March 1969 collaborationsSo here's what you do. You take "Let Me Move You" from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People,_Hell_and_Angels"><i>People, Hell And Angels</i></a>, "Georgia Blues" and "Blue Window" from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Scorsese_Presents_the_Blues:_Jimi_Hendrix"><i>Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues</i></a>, and "Jimi/Jimmy Jam" from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear_My_Music"><i>Hear My Music</i></a> and you put them all together in that order. What you've got is a good forty-five minute look at Jimi Hendrix in non-Experience musical settings in the final weeks of the Experience. Jimi with horns and another singer, Jimi with another guitarist. And, right, it's all brilliant.<br />
<br />
I love Jimi enough to have collected almost everything that's been released. But there are issues, man... One is that the official releases, although they've mostly been pretty conscientious in the last couple of decades in how they treat the individual recordings, have been real chaotic in how they compile them. You never get anything like an orderly look at any given set of studio sessions or period of his career - it's always just thrown together. And only part of this is the record companies' fault: after he broke with Chas Chandler, Jimi's studio work itself was chaotic. As everybody knows he spent two years trying to come up with a follow-up to <i>Electric Ladyland</i>, and instead came up with a mountain of semi-finished, or maybe over-finished, recordings. He worked so much on a lot of it that it gets hard to figure out where one song ends and another begins. It's all good, but it's all real confusing.<br />
<br />
Every once in a while I dive back in and try to make sense of it again. Right now my strategy is to break it down into manageable clusters of recordings, not only dating from the same general period but maybe linked by some secondary factor, like what might have been on an album if he'd been forced to submit one that month, or something like that. <br />
<br />
Anyway, that's how I arrived at putting these four tunes together. In early '69 he was still working with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding as the Experience, but he was getting restless. He'd dissolve the group in June, but in fact early/mid April saw their last studio sessions together. In late April and May he'd be recording with Mitchell and Billy Cox, rather than Redding: a different bag. But as these four recordings show, Jimi was already taking tentative steps outside the experience in March.<br />
<br />
"Let Me Move You" and "Georgia Blues" see Jimi reunited with R&B singer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Youngblood">Lonnie Youngblood</a>, with whom he had recorded as a sideman back in 1966. Youngblood and his band, as evidenced by these recordings, were tight, professional, and very soulful. The first track is a driving, up-tempo hard soul number, and Youngblood's Otis Redding-ish vocals prove a good match for Jimi's juiced-up R&B guitar. Lonnie's saxophone and John Winfield's organ keep things much tighter than the average Experience recording from this period, and to good effect. Jimi reveled in freedom, but a few musical restrictions often seem to have focused his playing in salutary ways. This is a great record and it's hard to believe it stayed in the vaults for over forty years. "Georgia Blues" is slightly less revelatory, if only because this kind of slow blues is familiar to Hendrix fans, but it's just as masterful. Again the crowded musical setting forces Jimi to focus his playing, and he sounds like a comfortable and authoritative member of a strong ensemble here. In both cases Jimi is credited as the songwriter, which suggests that he had something in mind with these sessions, rather than that he just dropped in on old friend. Wonder what kept him from pursuing this direction.<br />
<br />
"Blue Window" was recorded with the Buddy Miles Express, minus their guitarist. Jimi sings on this one, another original; Buddy scats a little late in the jam. Once again it's a big band performance: this time multiple horn players, plus keyboards and a very assertive drummer. Miles would of course go on to play a big part in Jimi's music over the next few months (and Jimi had already played producer for him), but always in a trio format. This revue-style thing was not something Jimi would revisit. But this record is wonderful. It's a beautiful groove they lay down, and Jimi sounds comfortable and, again, like part of the band. Even though it's a totally different lineup, this complements the two Youngblood tracks nicely.<br />
<br />
The last one is a slight change of pace: no horns, no keyboards. It's a jam between Jimi, Mitch, bassist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Holland">Dave Holland</a>, and Buddy Miles's guitarist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_McCarty_%28guitarist%29">Jim McCarty</a> (not the Yardbird of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_McCarty">same name</a>). It's much looser, unsurprisingly much more of a jam, but still really interesting. It cycles through several different moods and grooves, and both Holland and (more surprisingly) McCarty are wonderfully assertive. McCarty takes a long, satisfying solo late in the recording, and his tone and moods are wonderfully different from Jimi's - nice contrast, and technically able to stand in the same room as Jimi, if not on the same platform. They even do some dual-guitar lines near the end, conjuring up shades of the Allmans. <br />
<br />
There's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcjivCDdqs">more</a> from this session, and no doubt it'll be released in some form someday, but I don't find it nearly as interesting. Both the McLaughlin/Hendrix jam and the "Jimi/Jimmy" jam meander, but whereas I find the latter consistently interesting, always changing, and always going somewhere (even if it is at a pretty leisurely pace), the McLaughlin one seems pretty repetitive to me.<br />
<br />
Thus, these four tracks. They work well together. There's your Jimi for the afternoon.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-60835403033787165852015-01-08T00:12:00.002-08:002015-01-08T00:12:45.529-08:00Robert Hunter: Jack O' Roses (1980)The Grateful Dead were the best, the quintessential, American band. This is so obvious that I won't discuss it.<br />
<br />
What surprises me is that, even so, there's a lot of Dead that's obscure and poorly understood. Like, I've never understood why the Hunter/Garcia partnership wasted away at the end of the '70s. Really after <i>Terrapin</i> it just kind of dried up, even though the band kept trying to make records for a couple more years. And since Hunter was never a performing member of the Dead, what does that mean for him as part of the Dead family in the early '80s? It's easy to consider him all but a member (and records even listed him as one for a while) in the '70s. But what's his relationship to the Dead in the '80s?<br />
<br />
What raises this question for me is that I just recently listened to his 1980 record <a href="http://www.deaddisc.com/disc/Jack_O_Roses.htm"><i>Jack O' Roses</i></a> for the first time. Previously I'd only heard <i>Rum Runners</i> and <i>Tiger Rose</i>, and to be honest I wasn't too impressed. They're valiant attempts at records, but it was easy to see that while he's one of the music's great lyricists, he just wasn't that great a singer or player. <br />
<br />
But <i>Jack O' Roses</i> is <i>brilliant</i>. <br />
<br />
Among those who've heard of it it's best known for having the full (or at least a fuller) realization of <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRSkN0-2axqx9uH67cxKoop9K1RXbkZQG7417clTngZncJXw7PWB5BVY0i313qHgbn_YtsWpzmWA3fJ9b4kCx_RSb4gxrbugA_StD-2EqIpjZHJY1XwXGoU-MOy-anhXClwq9Wl_1jFi_I/s1600/hunter+jack+o+roses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRSkN0-2axqx9uH67cxKoop9K1RXbkZQG7417clTngZncJXw7PWB5BVY0i313qHgbn_YtsWpzmWA3fJ9b4kCx_RSb4gxrbugA_StD-2EqIpjZHJY1XwXGoU-MOy-anhXClwq9Wl_1jFi_I/s1600/hunter+jack+o+roses.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
the "Terrapin" lyric. But that's not all. He surrounds it with a number of other tunes that are tied to it lyrically: his version of "Stagger Lee," which seems like it should be the wrong movie but makes sense with the expanded "Terrapin"; the traditional "Lady Of Carlisle," which is the matrix out of which "Terrapin" was born; and the original "Book Of Daniel," which retells the older version of the lion's den story. Those seem to be the key ones (although they're not the only songs on the record). And heard together like this they're a masterful examination of folk song idiom, a demonstration of the folk process. You can hear how this singer/writer found his way into the old songs and came out with something new; you can hear "Terrapin" now as a deeper meditation on the strange courtship and faith-testing rituals of the old songs, on the archetypes of soldier, sailor, prophet, lover, on the meaning of the throwaway motif of the fan, and on everything that connects Old Testament time with Old England time and Old South time. <br />
<br />
So it's smart and eloquent. But we knew that about Hunter. What floored me about this record was how beautiful it is. It's just him and an acoustic guitar and a bit of echo, and he sounds comfortable and authoritative. His guitar work is very capable in a folk-revival mode, and at times really powerful. And his voice, as he approaches middle age, no longer sounds like a weird castoff of the psychedelic movement: it sounds like that guy at the bar who, when he starts to speak, you shut up and listen. Not 'cause he's mean or loud, but because he's got something to say. <br />
<br />
And so naturally this is among the most obscure and scarce records in the Dead's extended family. Didn't even get a US release until four years after it was recorded. But it belongs on any short list of essential Dead records.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-12324470135039478152015-01-01T19:52:00.000-08:002015-01-01T19:52:02.280-08:00New Year's Eve opera: Elixir of Love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaaXgbOl070vQtndy55ymL5GhNrEX0zFOqZH-pfrKr55q2RkYeHAjCh1GxOX94_opM5Z-xftn5EuoWObjyJ1UkHtH1wdYZgJvNSM09JkOEu5gYJCTYVz98YXfzSg_H4EW8Ljwq5JaPldM6/s1600/10415705_10153194569957306_8441964650120992924_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaaXgbOl070vQtndy55ymL5GhNrEX0zFOqZH-pfrKr55q2RkYeHAjCh1GxOX94_opM5Z-xftn5EuoWObjyJ1UkHtH1wdYZgJvNSM09JkOEu5gYJCTYVz98YXfzSg_H4EW8Ljwq5JaPldM6/s1600/10415705_10153194569957306_8441964650120992924_n.jpg" height="106" width="320" /></a></div>
For the third year <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2013/01/eugene-opera-pirates-of-penzance.html">in a</a> <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2014/01/eugene-opera-la-traviata.html">row</a> we rang out the old year at the <a href="http://eugeneopera.com/">opera</a>. This time it was Donizetti's <i>L'elisir d'amore</i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27elisir_d%27amore">Elixir of Love</a>). <br />
<br />
Long ago I heard somebody make a comparison between kabuki and opera. At the time I knew nothing of either. Now I know a fair bit about kabuki; more than I know about opera, at least. And I know enough in general to know that comparisons are, yes, odious, but sometimes useful, and often interesting.<br />
<br />
This opera reminded me of kabuki. Obviously, the music's different: more precisely, kabuki music is pretty rudimentary, compared to opera, where the music's the essence. But: they share an attitude toward emotion, toward drama. They both go for broad strokes. There are infinite subtleties in both, but those subtleties come in the context of emotions that are depicted in as much intensity as they can be. Sadness, joy, love, hatred are reduced to their essences. Primary colors. They're both really simple, once you get that: all the weirdness of staging and acting, all the unnaturalness, is there to heighten the effect of the emotional presentation. <br />
<br />
It's totally ahistorical to think this way, but it really puts me in mind of a kind of global 19th century. Dulcamara, with his showy medicine-show patter, would have made perfect sense to an Edo audience. It's <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%96%E9%83%8E%E5%A3%B2"><i>Uirouri</i></a>. Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-46783295373707935972014-09-13T20:17:00.002-07:002014-09-13T20:17:56.194-07:00The death of the iPodI mean that in two senses. I dropped my iPod Classic on the concrete floor of McCarran Airport in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. Broke the hard drive. Not repairable. It felt like a part of me had died, plus then I had to listen to insufferable modern country music while waiting for the plane. That felt like all of me was dying...<br />
<br />
I replaced it immediately, because I had a long plane ride to Japan ahead of me, followed by six weeks there, and then a long plane ride back. I needed an iPod, and since I love music, and own a great deal of it, it had to be another Classic. I debated switching to a Nano or a Touch, but to be honest I don't give a fuck about album art - it just wastes space - and so the big screen and the swipe function are just useless, and a bad trade for more disc space. I want the disc space.<br />
<br />
I'm glad I bought the machine when I did, now, because I learn that Apple has discontinued the Classic.<br />
<br />
This is typical Apple behavior, and why I hate being a Mac user in exact equal proportion to how much I love being a Mac user. I'm only a Mac user in the first place by accident - at the moment I finally had enough money to buy my own computer, and was starting grad school so I needed one, it was still much easier to do Japanese in an English environment on a Mac than on a Windows machine, so I bought a Mac. (This was back in the Kotoeri days.) Then about three months later Windows figured it out. If I'd waited three months I probably would have gone the cheaper route... <br />
<br />
My Apple love/hate is intimately connected to the big part Japan has played in my life. I was born in 1969: my formative experiences with cars and electronics were all in the '80s, when American cars sucked, and Japanese cars didn't. My parents had American cars up to about 1985, and they were all lemons, every single one of them. Always breaking down, not to mention guzzling gas and taking up far too much space. I learned to drive on one of these boats. My parents finally got sick of it, like so many Americans did in that period, and started buying Japanese cars. Reliable, well-designed, compact, economical. <br />
<br />
In other words, my formative experience with any machine that mattered was this: America could only make shit. Japan made good stuff. The Walkman? A godsend. Then I went to Japan in the late '80s, and got used to the idea that pretty much everything could be reliable, economical, and attractively-designed. Not that you can't find cheap disposable shit in Japan, too, but even the cheap disposable shit does what it's supposed to do. <br />
<br />
The only exception, as far as I'm concerned, has been Apple. Apple stuff is well made, does what it's supposed to do, is reliable, and is economical when you take the long run into consideration (certainly not cheap up front). And it's attractive. Which should be standard, but usually isn't. That's why I've stayed a Mac user all these years. Mac stuff feels to me like Japanese quality and design sense. Computer use (not tech obsession) is a huge part of my life, and it's nice to have that kind of peace in that area. Every time I have to use a Windows machine it's like I'm back in the worst, most American situation: it may be cheaper, but it's chaotic, jury-rigged, and buggy. Like our economy, our infrastructure, our politics. We pay for cheap in all sorts of ways.<br />
<br />
That's what I like about Apple. What I hate is just as persuasive, though. I hate the attitude - the hipster arrogance, the young snottiness, the design-journal aesthetic absolutism. In 1999 when I bought my first computer Apple had convinced us all that color was the answer, that the whole world was blooming, and that boring white was the enemy. Then a couple of years later color was gauche, pure white was the thing, and let's just forget we ever thought any different. Still have a grape iMac? What's wrong with you? And don't get me started on those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials - those alone were almost enough to make me switch to Windows.<br />
<br />
Part of the absolutism is their policy of making old stuff obsolete. As a Mac user I've had to learn to live with the sneers of young Mac store tech personnel - if your laptop is more than four years old you might be told that "we don't work on vintage machines." Like, crawl off and die, you cheap old fart. <br />
<br />
The iPod Classic is now an example of this. A great product, great enough to become an important part of your life. Indispensable. I could wish it were a little sturdier against concrete airport floors, but still, all things considered, it's pretty reliable. But it doesn't fit with their <i>vision</i> of what we should be doing, so fuck it. Apple invented the portable mp3 player, but now they don't want us to own our music anymore. That's passé. They want us to cloudstream it.<br />
<br />
Never mind the fact that if I was using a cloud stream philosophy, I'd be SOL for the six weeks I'm in Japan. And never mind the fact that when I'm not moving, I still like CDs, still like to have physical copies of my albums, with the liner notes and art and stuff. I'm certainly not the only one.<br />
<br />
In short, the Classic fits my life the way I want to live it. Apple has decided, however, that they're no longer interested in people who live their lives the way I live mine. They're only interested in people who live their lives the way Apple wants them to live them. <i>That's</i> the thing that bugs me about Apple.<br />
<br />
They're kind of totalitarian. I guess we knew that back in 1984, though.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-39867184504629038142014-08-16T18:48:00.001-07:002014-08-16T18:48:34.229-07:00Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises)Ghibli's had a productive couple of years, and now they're taking a little break, I read. We're still catching up. <i>Kaze tachinu</i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises"><i>The Wind Rises</i></a>) came out just after we left Japan last summer, and I hadn't seen it in the States. I've been looking forward to seeing it with a mixture of anticipation and dread.<br />
<br />
The dread came as soon as I learned what it's about: the early life of Horikoshi Jirō, the guy who designed the Zero fighter plane for Mitsubishi, the one that became so
notorious during WWII. I'll note here that I'm not at all familiar with
Horikoshi's life story; but the theme alone made me worry that in his
old age (he's announced that this is his last film, but didn't he say
that about <i>Ponyo</i>? I'm not actually too sure he's totally retiring) Miyazaki was going to turn to nationalism. Under the Abe administration Japan has been swerving to the right to a worrisome degree, and a rightward, nostalgic turn in old age is a known issue with Japanese artists, so I half expected this; but Miyazaki has always had such a multicultural, all-embracing aesthetic that I particularly didn't want to see <i>him</i> go in that direction.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqb2I_L2Bsl1ysexoxtxJeZ6uHAf1fmhewCC5hIQNr_STYXupLjGqctiLn82-3yofGy9q6fq-Hs0KPfgyt_W8fV7pFvHYRr4Eg-V1081SoWT7IDQTPBHQ7p9DNrmS2QGPGUA7d1S7-z6-6/s1600/kazetachinu+poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqb2I_L2Bsl1ysexoxtxJeZ6uHAf1fmhewCC5hIQNr_STYXupLjGqctiLn82-3yofGy9q6fq-Hs0KPfgyt_W8fV7pFvHYRr4Eg-V1081SoWT7IDQTPBHQ7p9DNrmS2QGPGUA7d1S7-z6-6/s1600/kazetachinu+poster.jpg" height="200" width="143" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
On that score, the film isn't nearly as bad as I'd expected. It makes Horikoshi into practically a saint in his personal life: impossibly virtuous, in a Traditional Values sort of way, which is a typical strategy for rehabilitating right wing nasties ("but he loved dogs and cherry blossoms, so how could he be evil?"). But the movie resolutely avoids the political issues surrounding the war. It's not an apology for Japan's actions. It doesn't condemn them either, and that's a problem if you're looking for one. <br />
<br />
But it seems that what Miyazaki's aiming for is a portrait of a guy who's essentially apolitical, who just wants to make airplanes, and not think about what they'll be used for. Jiro in the film is actually disturbed by the knowledge that his planes will be used for war (which is a certainty, given that his company is working on military contracts). This comes up a couple of times. I wish it had come up more. That's the theme this film could have centered on: the conscience of an artist or inventor who can't control the uses to which his work will be put. Or who can control them, but only at the expense of the work itself. There's a deep ethical issue there, but Miyazaki raises it only to essentially shrug it off. So while the film isn't the nationalist thing I was afraid it would be, it does mostly dodge the moral issues raised by its subject matter.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, it's not as good as I'd expected either. It's a film about airplanes, about flying, intended (ostensibly) as a final statement by an animator who has made fantastic films about flying in the past. Think of how integral the imagination of flight is to <i>Nausicaa</i>, <i>Laputa</i>, <i>Spirited Away</i>. Think of <i>Porco Rosso</i> (my favorite Miyazaki film of all), which isn't just about flight but, like <i>The Wind Rises</i>, about airplanes as machines. Think of all that flying and you're bound to expect this film to be, if nothing else, a triumph of glorious visuals. But it's not. It's pretty enough, and there are certainly some wonderful moments. But really nothing we haven't seen Miyazaki do before, and often better. <br />
<br />Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-59102084876880529572014-08-15T18:26:00.002-07:002014-08-15T18:26:32.389-07:00Shibasaki Tomoka: Haru no niwa (2014)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun151ST.htm">151<sup>st</sup></a> Akutagawa Prize, for early 2014, went
to Shibasaki Tomoka <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9F%B4%E5%B4%8E%E5%8F%8B%E9%A6%99"><span lang="JA" style="font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">柴崎友香</span></a>,
for “Haru no niwa <span lang="JA" style="font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">春の庭</span>”
(Spring gardens).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shibasaki was born in 1973, and debuted as a writer in
1999;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this was her fourth time as a
finalist for the A-Prize, and the first time was in 2006.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, she’s not a new writer, not
by a long shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She already has quite a
following, so as with <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.jp/2012/12/kashimada-maki-meido-meguri-2012.html">Kashimada Maki</a>, this is a case of the Prize machinery
recognizing an established writer rather than launching a new one.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhQ8TL9eNF-eAcLYQPyISqXhpu6TaiV1ImXsnBBQ3PcFpwaRO1ns9mbZycxlGwfYgGFpejYRpVt9am6EkgEU2gYpYii01McU7-dL8Ggbfo6jvl12MfLRv_djWEZXJzlkR68ZRN3IlMRvn_/s1600/shibasaki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhQ8TL9eNF-eAcLYQPyISqXhpu6TaiV1ImXsnBBQ3PcFpwaRO1ns9mbZycxlGwfYgGFpejYRpVt9am6EkgEU2gYpYii01McU7-dL8Ggbfo6jvl12MfLRv_djWEZXJzlkR68ZRN3IlMRvn_/s1600/shibasaki.jpg" height="200" width="138" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a longish story, 140 pages in book form, long enough
that the book doesn’t need a bonus story to fill it out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s told mostly in the third person, and
mostly from the point of view of a thirty-something guy named Tarō.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For long stretches, though, we’re actually
inhabiting the point of view of his neighbor, Nishi, as she narrates episodes
from her life with minimal interruption from Tarō.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, at the end, Tarō’s elder sister comes
in and starts narrating in the first person, so smoothly that it makes you
wonder if we are supposed to understand everything that went before as being
the sister’s account of Tarō’s life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
then Tarō, we’re made to understand, doesn’t say much, and there’s no
indication that he tells his sister most of what we learn through the
narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So what’s really happening is
that the narrative point of view is shifting without warning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And retrospectively that encourages us to
think of Nishi’s stories not as reported speech (they’re not set off in
quotation marks) so much as just another shift in point of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel is experimental in that sense, but
not in a confusing way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reader is
never lost in personlessness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tarō lives in an old, tiny apartment in a wealthy section of
Setagaya-ku, Tokyo;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>his building is
surrounded by large old houses, many built in a Western style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tarō’s building is going to be torn down soon
– his lease is almost up, and he won’t be allowed to renew it, and one by one
the other tenants are leaving, and their units are left empty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a picture of a neighborhood in constant
renewal, in a city that’s in constant renewal – there’s always something being
torn down, always something new being put up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Everything’s temporary, and therefore everything’s superficial,
including relationships.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tarō is divorced and living in a very detached manner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His interactions with his coworkers and
neighbors are kept at the level of good manners, meaning arm’s length.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s constantly exchanging gifts with them,
but on his part at least they’re never particularly heartfelt;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they’re usually regiftings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s been divorced for three years, and it’s
clear that he still has the scars;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>his
father, meanwhile, died ten years ago, and he’s plainly still grieving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He keeps the mortar and pestle, with which he
ceremonially ground his father’s bones at the funeral, in his kitchen
cupboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tarō gets to know two of his neighbors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is Nishi, a single woman the age of
Tarō’s older sister who lives on the second floor of his building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other is known only as “Mi” or Snake –
the units in this building aren’t numbered, they’re labelled according to the
Chinese zodiac, a hint at the depersonalization that city living brings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Nishi is “Dragon” and Tarō is “Boar.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mi is the age Tarō’s father would have been,
so Tarō, who’s from Osaka, is in Tokyo surrounded by surrogate family
members.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who he keeps at arm’s length.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nishi is the source of most of the action in the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s a mangaka and book illustrator, and has
a sort of mischievous side to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s
obsessed, it turns out, with a large Western-style house that she can see from
her veranda.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a typical Setagaya
mansion (in the English sense, not the Japanese) from the postwar years:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wrought iron gates, stained glass windows,
all the pretenses at Western-style fine living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of course it’s a glaring contrast to the tiny rooms she and Tarō live
in, but it’s more than that to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
gradually learn that she has been aware of this house since her high school
years in Nagoya, because it was once inhabited by a famous director of TV
commercials and his stage-actress wife, who published a coffee-table book of
photos of the house and themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
Nishi moved to Tokyo she ran across the house listed on a real-estate site, and
while of course she couldn’t afford to buy it she managed to find an apartment
overlooking it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s stage one of her obsession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stage two is creepier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A young family moves in, parents and two
small kids, and Nishi finds the daughter in the street one day crying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She returns the kid to the house, and uses
that as an opportunity to make friends with the family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mom is from Sapporo and doesn’t know
anybody in the city, so she’s happy to meet Nishi, but Nishi is really only
interested in exploring the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
of course she doesn’t tell them this – she only tells Tarō, over long drinking
sessions at a local bar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He limits
himself to one, she has seven or eight at a time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To say she’s stalkerish is fair, although she never does
anything particularly dangerous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s
just a little creepy about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tarō
doesn’t call her out on it, and in fact even allows himself to be dragged along
in her obsession, visiting the family for dinner one night with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And at the end of the story, when Nishi has
moved out of the condemned apartment building and the family in the Western
house have suddenly been transferred to Kyushu, Tarō sneaks into the backyard
and buries his father’s mortar and pestle in the garden…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Set out like this, a few clear themes emerge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First is Tarō’s wounded state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His divorce has left him damaged enough that
when Nishi makes a clear offer of friendship (and perhaps more), he hardly
pursues it, but then again can’t be bothered to reject her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And his grief over his father’s death – well,
it really only manifests itself in his reminiscences of his father, but then he
goes and buries the mortar and pestle, and we realize that all this time maybe
he’s been looking for closure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>…This
theme is clear, but it’s presented in a very muted way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We get Tarō’s thoughts, but never his
feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that, of course, is a
tried and true literary technique, but it works best when the power of the
unspoken feelings is transferred onto something else, as in Kawabata’s
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poetry, scenery, something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That doesn’t really happen here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s no outlet for Tarō’s emotions, and no
back access to them for the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe that’s the point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it
means that this work, which could have great emotional depth, stays mostly at
the surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think of it as iyashi-kei
in a way:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s clearly dealing with
wounds, but not in such a way as to disturb the reader’s placidity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s calming.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another theme is the transiency and anonymity of life in
Tokyo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially for the
non-wealthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read Tarō’s choice to
bury his father’s mortar and pestle in the garden of the Western house as being
a way for him to give his father a little bit of permanence (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> house won’t be torn down), as well
as a little bit of glamor and beauty that would otherwise be unattainable for
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile Tarō himself remains as
anonymous as his name, and the little community of Snake, Boar, and Dragon is
totally dispersed at the end of the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But this theme, too, is handled with such calmness that it leaves the
surface of the reader’s emotions wholly undisturbed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re not encouraged to be angry about this,
or even particularly saddened – anonymity and transience might be precisely
what Tarō wants and needs in life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I found it a bit of a puzzling book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not sure what level it’s supposed to work
on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t seem to connect to any contemporary
social issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its portrait of urban
anomie is hardly new, and not particularly powerful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its treatment of grief is determined, but not
particularly eloquent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book reads as
assured, the work of an author who knows what she wants to do;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but it didn’t really move me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your mileage may vary.</div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-55671424179253902952014-08-14T20:12:00.002-07:002014-08-14T20:12:32.140-07:00Tezuka Osamu: Message To AdolfThe last of my summer Tezuka reading, I think. Another one I read in English, because we had it around in English, because Mrs. Sgt. T taught it.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7kG6s008t3Q6Ce52AG9YkRfu1VWonpKhlAIe0RTpP3wCZv9KjLZTxdR-RZpSxVgmIllWnLKCePmKyW7xLb6zYi29KPBJSpAtvnOeArJ-XS5MM37qkUXqPMGIwYu7D8zu7FzIAz-gmo882/s1600/message+to+adolf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7kG6s008t3Q6Ce52AG9YkRfu1VWonpKhlAIe0RTpP3wCZv9KjLZTxdR-RZpSxVgmIllWnLKCePmKyW7xLb6zYi29KPBJSpAtvnOeArJ-XS5MM37qkUXqPMGIwYu7D8zu7FzIAz-gmo882/s1600/message+to+adolf.jpg" height="320" width="237" /></a></div>
I'm trying to think deep thoughts about this stuff, trying to give it the intellectual attention it deserves, when really I know, deep down inside, that Tezuka isn't holding my interest. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_to_Adolf"><i>Message to Adolf </i></a>was better than most, though. It's really his best argument to be taken seriously. If you only read one Tezuka, make it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_boy"><i>Atom</i></a>; if you read two, this should be the second.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Mrs. Sgt. T likes to compare Tezuka to Steven Spielberg. The first time she said this I felt a light go on. It's a great comparison. <br />
<br />
Both are artists who started out in fields that got no critical respect: they were purely popular art forms. Already there are problems with the comparison, because Tezuka's field as a whole (manga) got no respect when he started, while Spielberg's field as a whole (movies) already got a lot of respect; but he was working in the most popular end of that field, so I think the comparison holds up if you don't get too nitpicky about it.<br />
<br />
And both proved to be extraordinarily gifted in those fields: innovative craftsmen, inspired storytellers, raising what they were doing as close to the level of art as it could get, within the constraints of a totally popular art form. Tezuka's influence on every genre of manga (and anime) is legendary, while Spielberg is usually said to have essentially invented the summer blockbuster action movie.<br />
<br />
And then they wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started changing their art, making art for grown-ups. Tezuka started drawing things like <i>Ayako</i>, <i>Buddha</i>, and <i>Adolf</i>; Spielberg made <i>The Color Purple</i>, <i>Schindler's List</i>, <i>Munich</i>. And that's where the trouble began, because it's never been clear that either has all that much to say. They can bring tremendous craft (art in the sense of skilled work) to bear on their subjects, and through that they can make work of great emotional power, but the ideas behind that work are often simple and/or a bit confused. And so in spite of all their aspirations to be taken truly seriously, they'll always be remembered best for their lighthearted early work. (And, the missus notes, it's a coincidence but also maybe inevitable that in their bids for seriosity they both turned to WWII/Holocaust themes - loading the dice, really.)<br />
<br />
They're both tremendous entertainers, maybe the best ever at that. And many of us have no problem calling that art. But they had this itch to please more demanding critics than I usually am, and they weren't as successful at that. Although, to be fair, I seem to be in a very small minority in thinking that about Tezuka. <br />
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-91494572373575905022014-08-12T05:41:00.001-07:002014-08-12T05:42:59.506-07:00Tezuka Osamu: Princess KnightSo, more Tezuka. This too I read in English because it was around. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Knight"><i>Princess Knight</i></a> (<i>Ribon no kishi</i> リボンの騎士) is one of the classics - and as hard as I am on Tezuka, I should note that I'm really glad that so much of his work is being published in translation. It's important that this stuff is made available, so fans and scholars can start to understand the history of manga, not just the contemporary stuff. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABMKRZqBIwwZkJWwn_eLVIW51Nwlcw33EFzZecOyOMpE6xjvi0Pgffet0HbNUixylguimsSh2FZPfS3RU4WUWE_gZcfuimPJXf2JJ5Jvm1DAEJi2H0EkS61JE9Unik2rHQproVS4thV-Q/s1600/PrincessKnight1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABMKRZqBIwwZkJWwn_eLVIW51Nwlcw33EFzZecOyOMpE6xjvi0Pgffet0HbNUixylguimsSh2FZPfS3RU4WUWE_gZcfuimPJXf2JJ5Jvm1DAEJi2H0EkS61JE9Unik2rHQproVS4thV-Q/s1600/PrincessKnight1.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></div>
<br />
This is entertaining, but to a fault. It's one of those patented Tezuka frenetic plots, with a new twist on every page. That keeps it moving, but curiously it doesn't exactly keep it from getting static. Stasis is boring, and constant movement is just as static as constant stillness. The plot twists are exhausting. Sometimes the reader might wish to be a little less entertained. But that's Tezuka. I've come to expect this.<br />
<br />
But chances are you don't read this today for pure entertainment. You read it for its tremendous influence on girls' comics in Japan. You read it for its still daring, still hard to completely process gender-bending. You read it for the deliriously girly art - it's like a constant sugar rush. There's so much that's important and interesting here on a conceptual level, in terms of influence and significance, that it's almost churlish to criticize it for not working better on the pure reading level. It's an essential manga. How can one ask for more?<br />
<br />
The Takarazuka-style androgyny and critique of gender roles is the best-appreciated aspect of this work. Certainly the most important aspect of it. To that I'd add that it's also a great example of Japanese Occidentalism.<br />
<br />
It's Occidentalist in the sense that it's appropriating its story materials entirely from the Western fairy-tale tradition. Mostly (and this is particularly obvious in the art) from Western fairy-tales as popularized by Walt Disney, of course. But it's not just a pastiche of Disney, because it goes places Disney would never go; not just the gender thing, but also Tezuka's decision to include both God and the Devil as characters. Right alongside Greco-Roman deities. Theologically it's a mess, and that's a perfect example of Occidentalism: to Tezuka, the Christian god and devil are on the same level as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. They're colorful, exotic myths, and he uses them to colorize and exoticize his story, just like Western writers will appropriate Eastern religious imagery with little sense of the weight of meaning and association attached to it. Those of us who care about such things are sensitized - have tried to become sensitized, and rightly so - to Orientalism by Western artists. But there's an equivalent Occidentalism in Japan that doesn't get talked about quite as much. The power differential being so different both within and without Japan, it's not fair to say that Occidentalism is an equal and opposite thing to Orientalism, and they certainly don't cancel each other out. But Occidentalism is a definite thing. And <i>Princess Knight</i> is a perfect demonstration of it.<br />
<br />
Which makes it kind of a strange read. Because for long stretches it's so Western looking and feeling that it's easy to forget that it's Japanese in origin. But then Satan will pop in with his curly mustache, and he'll turn out not to be a scenery-chewing villain but rather a Father Knows Best kind of paterfamilias, and you remember, oh yeah. This isn't Disney.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-59130902510089262152014-08-09T16:16:00.001-07:002014-08-09T16:16:07.055-07:00Matsuura Hisaki: Hana kutashi (2000)
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-link:"Body Text Char";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-align:justify;
text-justify:inter-ideograph;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
span.BodyTextChar
{mso-style-name:"Body Text Char";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-locked:yes;
mso-style-link:"Body Text";
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-ascii-font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-hansi-font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-language:JA;
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Matsuura Hisaki<a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%BE%E6%B5%A6%E5%AF%BF%E8%BC%9D"><span lang="JA">松浦寿輝</span></a>’s
story <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hana kutashi</i> <span lang="JA">花腐し</span>
(“Flowers Fade,” perhaps; the grammar is old, since it’s a quote from an
ancient poem) shared the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun123MH.htm">123<sup>rd</sup> Akutagawa Prize</a>, for early 2000, with
<a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.jp/2014/07/machida-ko-kiregire.html">Machida Kō</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This is more like it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The main character, Kutani, is a middle-aged
guy who runs a small<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s been asked, by a shady creditor, to do
an odd job as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jiageya</i>, a kind of
small-time thug employed by landlords to scare off recalcitrant tenants so the
landlords can redevelop the property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Itami Jūzō lampooned the species memorably in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Minbō no onna.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story
takes place in a seedy back street of Kabukichō, where he supposed to lean on a
guy named Iseki, the last tenant in an apartment building.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ8foZ60CG6aSe3KUM81gZqIJg9pPS7_BGqO2Dlhl-B4ZRLqYUkIMoHYcaMUdkDGMmKXFlyH7tGF8_humPsz09XgTWKToj0jHYLkkqStO0xsWoWJmMpgxerpNRyisPmRN3Heiojk5ANhLp/s1600/hana+kutashi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ8foZ60CG6aSe3KUM81gZqIJg9pPS7_BGqO2Dlhl-B4ZRLqYUkIMoHYcaMUdkDGMmKXFlyH7tGF8_humPsz09XgTWKToj0jHYLkkqStO0xsWoWJmMpgxerpNRyisPmRN3Heiojk5ANhLp/s1600/hana+kutashi.jpg" /></a></div>
design firm that’s on the edge of bankruptcy because his
partner and friend cheated him and then ran off.<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Iseki resists, and there’s a
shoving match, but then things go a different direction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They end up having a drink, and then
basically they spend the rest of the story talking – over beers in Iseki’s
apartment, over whiskey at a bar, while walking the mean streets of Shinjuku in
the rain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Iseki’s a wonderfully dicey
character – we meet him, at night, an old guy lounging around his apartment in
a track suit and sunglasses, and while supposedly the phone service and
utilities have been cut off for the whole building, he’s got electricity,
water, and internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kutani eventually
figures out that he’s growing psychedelic mushrooms in the apartment and
selling them on-line;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in fact, there’s a
local Kabukichō prostitute in the next room, tripping.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What follows is a little Murakami
Haruki and a little Hunter Thompson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Kutani is having a midlife crisis – not only has his friend betrayed him
and his business slipped out from under him, but he’s suddenly being assailed
by memories of a girl he used to live with, who betrayed him (with his friend
and business partner) and then drowned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He’s down on his luck and crowded by bad memories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Matsuura is careful to make all this resonate
with the national situation at the turn of the century:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kutani’s situation is held up as symbolic of
an economy, a nation, that has never recovered from the bursting of the bubble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Iseki, meanwhile, is a total
cynic, whose prescription is essentially turn on and drop out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Friendship, business, striving, straight
society:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s all a mug’s game, a waste
of energy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not take a little mental
vacation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Psilocybin is what Japan needs
right now, he says.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This story boils down, then, to
the seeker-guru pattern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kutani’s got a
problem, Iseki’s got a solution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
just drugs – in fact Kutani never trips, he just rapes the girl who is tripping
(bummer) – but more than that his bracingly nihilistic take on contemporary
Japan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As committee member Kōno Taeko
observed, though, this makes the story feel about thirty years old – like a
post-Ampo college student’s dorm-room rap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In terms of message, then, the reader’s take on this story will depend
on how well the reader feels a 1967 solution fits a 1999 problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Some things never change, says I…)</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
As a narrative it’s somewhat
redeemed, though, by good writing and decent plotting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kutani’s a pretty passive character (shades
of Murakami) but his reminiscences of his dead girlfriend are well written,
with nice detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the way Matsuura
parcels out information gives the story more suspense than it should have – at
first we just think Kutani’s a jiageya, and it takes a while for us to realize
it’s his first assignment, and that he’s not really a punk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s just trying to get by.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The omake story is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hitahita to</i> <span lang="JA">ひたひたと</span>
(“Pitter-Patter,” as of little feet).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
more experimental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hana kutashi</i> is told in the third person, while this one switches
back and forth between third and first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In fact, the indeterminability of the protagonist goes beyond that:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s a middle-aged guy named Enokida, but he
slips around between various stages in his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is set in a dilapidated old part of
Tokyo called Susaki, which once housed a famous pleasure district;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the protagonist is now wandering around the
neighborhood, which it seems he has a life connection with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At some points he’s a man in late middle age,
reflecting back on everything, but at other times he’s a young boy living there
with his father and a bunch of caged birds, at other times he’s a young man
living there with a prostitute girlfriend, and at other times he’s a man in
early middle age, revisiting the area as a photojournalist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not even clear if these are all the same
guy, or if any of this really happened, because as the story is presented,
these aren’t memories, but actual things happening now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protagonist is actually slipping back and
forth between these moments/selves in real time.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hana kutashi</i>, there’s a prolix side to this, wherein Matsuura
spells out his message pretty clearly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here it’s the idea that time doesn’t flow, doesn’t go by, but is
actually omnipresent:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>our past is always
there to be seen and re-experienced, if we just notice it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as with the other story, he’s a cagey
enough writer that he only says this – only makes it clear that these are all
the experiences of a single character, reliving various stages of his life in a
kind of kaleidoscopic sentimental journey – near the end, after we’ve already
been intrigued by the postmodern decenteredness of his individual
consciousness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-14144749719021936072014-07-31T16:59:00.000-07:002014-07-31T16:59:24.514-07:00Machida Kō: Kiregire
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:Osaka;
panose-1:2 11 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131219 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@Osaka";
panose-1:2 11 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131219 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:平成明朝;
mso-font-alt:"Optima ExtraBlack";
mso-font-charset:128;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:16777216 1800 268435456 0 131072 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"\@平成明朝";
mso-font-charset:128;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:16777216 1800 268435456 0 131072 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-name:"Normal\,err";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-link:"Body Text Char";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-align:justify;
text-justify:inter-ideograph;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
span.BodyTextChar
{mso-style-name:"Body Text Char";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-locked:yes;
mso-style-link:"Body Text";
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-ascii-font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-hansi-font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-language:JA;
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Osaka;">Machida Kō</span><span style="font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;"> <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%BA%E7%94%B0%E5%BA%B7"><span lang="JA">町田康</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Osaka; mso-hansi-font-family: Times;">.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiregire</i> <span lang="JA" style="font-family: 平成明朝;">きれぎれ</span><span style="font-family: Osaka; mso-hansi-font-family: Times;">.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2000. Co-winner of the <a href="http://homepage1.nifty.com/naokiaward/akutagawa/jugun/jugun123MK.htm">123rdA-Prize</a>, for early 2000.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The title
story was the winner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The title could be
translated as “Fragments,” and rarely was a story more aptly titled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kind of painfully obvious, actually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the only thing painful about this story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is
one that, I think, makes best sense in terms of authorial biography.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The author, in 2000, was already a
celebrity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an ex-punk rocker who had
gone solo and branched out into acting (TV, film, commercials) and then
writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He published a couple of books
of poems before turning to literary fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He wasn’t necessarily a youth-culture figure in 2000 – he was 38 – but
he was already a cult figure, and his prose was, evidently, building up
something of a buzz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now’s the time
to confess that I never noticed any of this personally:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with my spotty-at-best knowledge of Japanese
rock history, I never heard of him, and never read him until my A-Prize
spelunking took me back to early 2000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWKe_fyuCYaPbVxPIwFLz_d4L7NcTieRyUJKuSDnK7VAQa_mtvfBL3PA2L6fI-tZe9Boa2UEVIDrocRy6CCgubuvBhnR_MwbbPLLuwbDj_fcBaYM-aGUzEW1RcarPGidCPNMCAHVP5WJzo/s1600/machida+kiregire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWKe_fyuCYaPbVxPIwFLz_d4L7NcTieRyUJKuSDnK7VAQa_mtvfBL3PA2L6fI-tZe9Boa2UEVIDrocRy6CCgubuvBhnR_MwbbPLLuwbDj_fcBaYM-aGUzEW1RcarPGidCPNMCAHVP5WJzo/s1600/machida+kiregire.jpg" height="320" width="218" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
cynical to say that giving the prize to him was an attempt by the Prize
committee to stay relevant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I’m not
going to state that categorically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I
will say that this is the only way I can wrap my head around it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because (echoing what some of the committee
members themselves said) I can’t see the attraction of this story otherwise.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, it’s
fragmented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plot summary is not going to
be real helpful here, but it basically seems to be about a failed/failing
painter and the mess that is his personal life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Poverty, unhappy marriage, dissolution, rivalry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s hard to make sense of it all on a plot
level, though, because it’s narrated (by the painter) in such a, well,
fragmented, stream-of-consciousness way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not in and of itself a bad thing, or a good thing, just a thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all in what you do with it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What
Machida does with it is, essentially, indulge his fondness for wordplay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Wordplay” seems to promise too much,
though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s amusing himself with words,
surely;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but as a reader (one who normally
delights in wordplay, I assure you!), I seldom felt much joy in it, much sense
of play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wasn’t amused, dammit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all very clever, smart, whatever, but
the reading experience – hacking through this writer’s digressive,
distractable, attention-grabbing style to try to get a handle on what the hell
he’s actually trying to say – was dreary where it should have been fun.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe it
didn’t have to be fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wordplay isn’t
always about pleasure, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kuroda
Natsuko gave me similar headaches through her relentlessly
inventive/destructive use of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But as hard as I found it to admire Kuroda I could at least see, or
imagine, what she was aiming at.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could
recognize something worthwhile there, and occasionally appreciate some of her
more baroque constructions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I’ve taught
her, in small doses, a few times since writing my review, and I’ve mellowed on
her considerably in the process.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I don’t
see anything like that with Machida.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He’s not fun, but neither does all his language-twisting seem to be
aiming at some radically new mode of expression, so that he can get out
something that needs to be gotten out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The loser failed artist who makes life miserable for himself and those
around him is a pretty hackneyed literary trope, after all – a Naturalist
chestnut, really, but he doesn’t seem interested in any of the edifying
excoriation of self that they brought to the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The impression is of a bored narrator playing
with the reader’s head for no reason other than because he can.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reading
that makes it all sound very punk, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But no:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s far too
self-indulgent for that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Self-indulgent” is a word I try not to throw around lightly:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe most art is profound
self-indulgence, and that’s a good thing, since the road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But self-indulgence
was one of the critical terms that punk (and its champions) used to define
itself against the stuff that had come before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘70s classic rock was about excess, about self-exploration, about drama,
while punk was supposed to be a return to basics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Discipline was at the heart of it, even at its
most corrosively antisocial:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>attitude as
a weapon, musical fun subordinated to power of statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t get that here:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>no big artistic statement, no rebellion
against society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just boredom, and
wanking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Punk is supposed to be
anti-wanking.</div>
<br />
Anyway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t get this story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I don’t
get the other one in the volume, either:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jinsei no hijiri</i> <span lang="JA">人生の聖</span> (“Saint of Life”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s
no point in summarizing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s more of
the same, essentially.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This one revolves
more around worklife;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at some points the
narrator seems to be working, or remembering working, as a salaryman, while at
other points he’s a janitor, and then sometimes he’s begging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But like the first story it displays a
combination of wilful pointlessness and resolute tediousness:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it’s literary nonsense, but with none of the
delight that term promises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your mileage
may vary, as they say.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-84525644020603811562014-07-11T13:15:00.002-07:002014-08-12T05:42:39.957-07:00Tezuka Osamu: AyakoI've been reading some more Tezuka. I teach him, he's major, and I should read more of his stuff. I always feel that way, even though by this point I've probably read more by him than any other mangaka: I've read Phoenix, Buddha, Jungle taitei Leo, Dororo, Shin Takarajima, all complete, plus several volumes of Black Jack and Mighty Atom. That's enough to know more or less what I think of him, but of course there's always more, and since I teach him (in small doses), I should know it. So, more Tezuka.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayako_%28manga%29"><i>Ayako</i></a> <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A5%87%E5%AD%90">奇子</a> was serialized in 1972-1973, and was, like Dororo, part of Tezuka's response to the more mature, adult-oriented manga that had appeared over the course of the
'60s. Even more than Dororo this one tries to escape the kiddie-comic
ghetto that Tezuka had owned for so long. This one's even more
ambitious: Dororo was working in established manga genres, while <i>Ayako</i> is a bid for comics-as-literature. I.e., no samurai, no spaceships, no monsters; a few gangsters, but mostly this is an attempt at realism. Multi-generational family drama, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Japan.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ21SIKBF98RO3asBWPXTsV3c8yxlzu8j70XpMjJGi6a8ml8-9_RhhlrW0C5X0_BEf4OYvICiJQnDniBpuTfIby6coPE7P2Ul6JalQxHJoGwOUkrVJLQ_HLTNEtR-Ii2f58jVYB1kYqS5F/s1600/tezuka+ayako.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ21SIKBF98RO3asBWPXTsV3c8yxlzu8j70XpMjJGi6a8ml8-9_RhhlrW0C5X0_BEf4OYvICiJQnDniBpuTfIby6coPE7P2Ul6JalQxHJoGwOUkrVJLQ_HLTNEtR-Ii2f58jVYB1kYqS5F/s1600/tezuka+ayako.jpg" height="320" width="242" /></a></div>
<br />
Dirty realism, or naturalism in the sense of dealing with humanity in a state of nature, unreconstructed, filthy and mean. He's telling the story of a wealthy rural family in northern Japan that's resisting postwar land reform, and all kinds of democratic reform, by becoming more and more insular and inbred. Literally. It's a family at war with itself - we get murder, incest, rape, all sorts of nasty stuff. All of this Tezuka ties to larger political things - not only the question of rural landownership, but also Occupation politics, spying, political corruption, and the Economic Miracle. Whew.<br />
<br />
I kind of wanted to love it. I love the ambition. But I didn't feel like Tezuka's heart was in it. I know he loved the Russian novelists, and that this is supposed to have their grand scale, but the particulars of the story are largely drawn from contemporary Japanese film and/or fiction - Kurosawa's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot_%281951_film%29"><i>The Idiot</i></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Sleep_Well"><i>The Bad Sleep Well</i></a> come to mind, along with Yokomizu Seishi's <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8A%AC%E7%A5%9E%E5%AE%B6%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%80%E6%97%8F"><i>Inugami-ke no ichizoku</i></a>. And the lurid details of the family's degradation feel tossed in just for cheap thrills. It all hangs together plot-wise, and Tezuka's smart enough that it's all nicely integrated in terms of subtext, but the nihilism feels unearned, adopted from early '70s underground manga because that's what the revolutionaries liked. <br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
I read this in English. I almost never read manga in translation, because, well, I can read them in the original. But we happened to have this in English lying around, and I had a bout of insomnia, and I read it straight through in a day. Interesting experience. I read manga in Japanese, but not as fast as a native reader of Japanese can, which means that while I may be getting the same verbal experience, I'm not getting the same visual-verbal experience. That is, I'm not apprehending the visual-verbal synergy at the pace at which it's designed to be apprehended. That picture-and-text-at-a-glance thing that, really, comics as a medium is all about, I'm just a step too slow to really get when I'm reading in Japanese. So it was interesting to read <i>Ayako</i> in English. I kept wanting to check the original for language, of course, but meanwhile I felt like I was getting a more direct take on the comicsness of the thing than I sometimes do...Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-43846050271978394862014-06-25T09:35:00.001-07:002014-06-25T09:35:04.743-07:00Anno Moyoco: Kantoku fuyukitodokiAnno Moyoco 安野モヨコ initially serialized this between 2002 and 2004, and the book came out in 2005. <i>Kantoku fuyukitodoki</i> 監督不行届 - it's been translated as <a href="http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/03/03/insufficient-direction-chronicle-of-an-otaku-marriage-look-it-moves-by-adi-tantimedh/"><i>Insufficient Direction</i></a>, which is a great handling of the title. <br />
<br />
Anno is best known as an author of women's and or girls' comics, <a href="http://sgttanuki.blogspot.com/2011/01/anno-moyoco-sakuran-2001-2003.html">often</a> with a really sexy flavor; this is a little different. It's about her first year or so of marriage, and it just so happens that she's married to Anno Hideaki, director of <i>Evangelion</i>, etc. etc. So this is a celebrity marriage memoir in manga form. The subtext is that since Hideaki is Lord God King of otaku, for Moyoco the first year of marriage was a crash course in otakudom; but the punch line is that she's constantly realizing how fundamentally otakkii she is herself, so it's not a big leap for her. <br />
<br />
This manga works perfectly on every level. As a gag manga about newly-married life it's funny and <br />
sad and wise in all the right places - it hits all its marks. As a meditation on otaku and their ways, from inside the citadel, it's thoughtful and perceptive (and it does its homework - it's accompanied by an exhaustive glossary of the titles and terms that come up in the comic). And as a piece of manga art it's brilliant.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yiS5tewVlXCBv-4PdT11yZEJ4up9WGgLPeIq8mlA3JJTBfaGYnBxxoyR3g8ui3WhmADQslckrhQK5PN_egAgNlO6SA5Qq3TwHVcHfBI6HLU5au7jvxaJbeJ8XQobpTJJAHFw8D7-D55V/s1600/fc_free_kantoku-01-03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yiS5tewVlXCBv-4PdT11yZEJ4up9WGgLPeIq8mlA3JJTBfaGYnBxxoyR3g8ui3WhmADQslckrhQK5PN_egAgNlO6SA5Qq3TwHVcHfBI6HLU5au7jvxaJbeJ8XQobpTJJAHFw8D7-D55V/s1600/fc_free_kantoku-01-03.jpg" height="200" width="130" /></a><br />That's what I enjoyed most about it, I think: the art. Particularly the way she's chosen to draw herself and her husband. In the manga she calls him kantoku-kun - Director-boy - and she draws him with a wickedly accurate but inexcapably affectionate caricature. It's recognizably him, with the wispy beard and the glasses and the Ultraman poses, so it has all the specificity needed to make an effective parody of an individual, but it's also abstracted enough to make him everyotaku, and in some ways everymiddleageddoofus. I.e., there's universality there. And it's funny: she's such an expert artist that even though he's drawn in a really cartoony way every gesture, every pose, every facial expression communicates. It's <i>human</i>.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile she draws herself as a big baby in a onesie and a bib; she calls herself Rompers. This is the genius, the fascinating bit. There's a weird and wonderful disconnect between the two characters: he's cartoony, but as I say realistic enough to be recognizable as a middle-aged dude, while she's much more cartoony, and as a big baby who's nevertheless introduced as a 30-year-old professional comics artist, she's pure sign. There's no indication that the other characters see Rompers as a baby - no baby jokes at all. There's no way in which Rompers can be taken as a physical representation of the author, no attempt at self-portraiture here on an external level. And yet in nearly every frame we have the two of them side-by-side, interacting as a married couple. It's gleefully surreal. Here's Rompers trying on wedding dresses, here's Rompers having a beer, here's Rompers lying in bed with Director-boy. <br />
<br />
It's surreal, and it's funny, but it's also tremendously effective. What it's doing is giving us, in the same visual field, an external view of her husband and an internal view of herself. We see her husband as she sees him, and we see her as she sees herself. It's first-person in a way that I've seldom seen in a comic - it's a wonderful device. And it's made possible, again, by Moyoco's tremendous drafting skill - even though Rompers is as cartoony as a Peanuts character in terms of line and level of detail, Moyoco achieves a tremendous nuance of expression with her, somehow conveying totally adult mannerisms, reactions, emotions. <br />
<br />
Essential.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-9725943700990037062014-06-24T09:42:00.002-07:002014-06-24T09:42:43.007-07:00Igarashi Daisuke: Kaiju no kodomoIgarashi Daisuke 五十嵐大介, <i>Kaijū no kodomo</i> 海獣の子供 (Sea-creature children, although the official title of the translation is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Sea_%28manga%29">Children of the Sea</a>, and I can see why). It was published in five volumes between 2007 and 2012. I read the first two when they first came out, and here are the notes I made for myself then:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:Times;
panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-link:"Body Text Char";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-align:justify;
text-justify:inter-ideograph;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-no-proof:yes;}
span.BodyTextChar
{mso-style-name:"Body Text Char";
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-locked:yes;
mso-style-link:"Body Text";
mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-fareast-font-family:Times;
mso-no-proof:yes;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Times;
mso-ascii-font-family:Times;
mso-hansi-font-family:Times;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
This is still in progress, but I’ve read as much as has
been published, and I can’t wait for more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span>It’s
about an adolescent girl names Ruka who lives in a fictionalized version of
Enoshima/Kamakura, and two boys, Umi and Sora, who have been raised by dugongs
and have mysterious powers in the ocean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sounds hokey, very girly, but somehow it works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The writing is good—a mix of myth, science,
science-fiction, environmentalism, and adolescent angst—but the art is superb,
and carries it.<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span>Ruka’s
father works at the aquarium, while she lives with her mother (parents
divorced).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other characters include a
foreigner named Jim Cusack who also works at the aquarium, and is Umi and Sora’s
guardian, although he can’t really control them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ruka is independent-minded but dreamy and
moody.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her father is kind of bland,
always working;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>her mother is clearly a
beach bum who got pregnant too young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jim is fascinating:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tattooed all
over with traditional designs from each island culture he’s lived with;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>speaks Japanese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Umi and Sora are enigmas, constantly
disappearing from the story, going off to speak with fish, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The plot is moving kind of slowly—something
about fish vanishing, usually in a cloud of phosphorescence;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sora just disappeared at the end of Vol. 2,
although we don’t know if it’s forever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are vague hints of climate disturbances (an echo of global
warming), and international research bodies with unknown agendas who want to
examine the boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span>But
what you really read it for is the art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Igarashi has possibly the best draughtsmanship of any manga artist I’ve
read, certainly recently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All his
shapes—people, buildings, landscapes—feel really solid and real, like he really
understands the principles of sketching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But they’re all rendered in this shaky, impressionistic style—if there’s
a pen equivalent to watercolor, this is it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It gives the whole thing a dreamy, gauzy quality that perfectly fits the
aquatic themes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what really makes it
work is that his tone, which could have been cloying, especially with this kind
of art, is actually quite dry and reserved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anyway, it’s a masterpiece of visual tone. </div>
</blockquote>
<br />
Well, I guess I could wait to read more. I didn't get around to finishing it until now. Partly that was intentional - I have a bad memory for plots, so as much as I love serialized fiction I don't really enjoy reading it in real time, because I've always forgotten what's going on by the time a new installment appears. So when I get hooked on a current title I tend to put it aside until it finishes, or at least until enough volumes pile up to make it worth coming back to. That's what I did with this.<br />
<br />
Then it took the author an extraordinarily long time to come up with the last volume - 4 came out in 2009, and 5 not until 2012. And I can see why - he obviously had trouble with the ending. And in this case my plot-centric reading strategy kind of didn't pay off. The ending is a letdown. That is, it's hardly an ending at all. Things go along pretty well through Vol. 4 - we learn more about Ruka's mother (she's not a beach bum at all), and about Cusack, and a couple more interesting secondary characters are introduced. But Igarashi can't seem to figure out how to wrap it all up. He keeps adding new layers of subtext - the aquatic sea is the cosmic sea, science is recapitulating myth, death is rebirth, the microcosm is the macrocosm - until the only way he can end it is with page after page after page of wonder-filled, text-less illustrations of Ruka cavorting with sea creatures. And then it all resets - summer vacation ends and Ruka goes back to school.<br />
<br />
So, yeah, I was right, but I forgot I was right. You read it for the art. Which is impeccable, all the way through. The long textless passages of Vol. 5 remind me of some of the flights of fancy in Tezuka's <i>Phoenix</i> for sheer wordless eloquence.Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.com0