Hebi ni piasu

Kanehara Hitomi 金原ひとみ. Hebi ni piasu 蛇にピアス. 2003.

Co-winner of the 130th Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2003.

A nineteen-year-old clubgoing girl, Rui (or Lui), meets a clubgoing punk guy, Ama, and falls in love with his split tongue. She’s really into ear-piercing, and right away decides she has to do a split tongue. It starts with a piercing, and one thread of the plot is following the progress of this piercing as she widens it until she’s ready to split what remains of the end of her tongue. Through Ama she meets Shiba, the piercer and tattooer, and she falls in love with his kirin tattoo; she ends up getting a tattoo on her back of a dragon (like Ama’s) intertwined with a kirin. This mirrors her love life: she’s kind of stumbled into living with Ama, although she can’t decide if she really loves him; meanwhile, she’s having sadomasochistic sex with Shiba, whose S complements her M, and who’s a contrast to Ama’s surprisingly conventional ways. The third plot thread is murder: one day a yakuza type starts to grope Rui in the street, and Ama beats him to death. The cops are looking for Ama, but in the end somebody else gets to him first: he’s found dead in the harbor. At the end of the book, though, the cops conclude that he’d been raped and abused, and some of the clues they found make it seem to Rui highly likely that it was Shiba who did it, either accidentally (maybe Shiba and Ama had been secret lovers) or out of jealousy. This sort of shocks her - in her depression she’s moved in with Shiba by this time - but it snaps her out of her depression, and the story ends ambiguously. She has Shiba paint the eyes in on her tattoo, something she’d asked him not to do earlier, and this sort of symbolizes how she snaps out of her funk and determines to go on living. No signs of leaving Shiba.

Obviously, it has some of the flaws of junbungaku ("pure" or high literature: one of the functions of the A-Prize is to define what is and isn't this) - leaving it unresolved is just as much of a trick as resolving it in some way, and in junbungaku it’s a cliché (sez the Tanuki). On the other hand, it’s well-written - first person (that goes without saying in junbungaku, doesn’t it?), and not as dedicated to reproducing a subculture’s speech patterns as, say, Mobu Norio, but more so than Wataya Risa, and still you get a good sense of this girl’s personality. Which is, she’s kind of in a daze - when Ama is gone she realizes they had been living together for months but never even knew each other’s full names. She’s a borderline alcoholic. She says she has a reasonably good relationship with her parents, but is only fairly sure she knows where they live.

The tattooing and piercing are the key here. She reflects at one point that they’re like a shelter, a cover - they seem like incredibly attention-drawing and public acts, but since people immediately judge her and reject her for them, they create space for her to think and be herself without society’s interference. A way to live outside the law, as Dylan would say. So in a sense we’re back in subculture territory here.

It’s a feminist self-realization quest, too: she’s consciously making over her body how she wants it, she’s constantly being called a gyaru by others and insisting that she’s not, she’s torn between love for these two guys and resistance to their urge to possess her. The unresolved ending is, of course, a resolution of this: by choosing to live, she’s finding her self, finishing her tattoo, taking charge of her life.

The specifics of the subculture are interesting. The S&M stuff isn’t shocking, as it’s been appearing in J-lit for at least a couple of decades now, although Yamada Eimi never won the A-Prize (I wrote a paper in grad school on S&M in the works of Murakami Ryû and Yamada Eimi; maybe I'll summarize it here someday: interesting topic, at least). The piercing might be new to A-Prize level lit, I’m not sure. The tattoo is interesting because of Tanizaki’s old tattoo story; Kanehara seems to be consciously echoing it.

A real good one. By the way, this one's been translated; I haven't read the translation, so I can't comment on it.

Keritai senaka

Wataya Risa 綿矢りさ. Keritai senaka 蹴りたい背中. 2003.

Co-winner of the 130th Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2003.

A tenth-grade girl, Hasegawa Hatsu, narrates her difficult first year of high school. In junior high she had friends, was best friends with Kinuyo, but now she’s mostly estranged from Kinuyo and has no friends. We don’t really get any reason why: just a lot of high school alienation and hatred of the cool kids. Hatsu bonds, kind of accidentally, with this boy named Ninagawa, who’s also unpopular. Ninagawa is obsessed with this model named Ori-chan (or Oli-chan - from "Olivia" - she’s half-foreign), and when he finds out that Hatsu happened to actually meet her one day in a Mujirushi Ryôhin in town, they find they have something to talk about. “Bond” might be too strong a word, as Ninagawa never evinces interest in anything but Ori-chan, but still he’s somebody for Hatsu to talk to, and so they hang out a number of times. She’s not sure if she likes Ninagawa or hates him. One time she kisses him, another time she kicks him in the back (thus the title). She’s kind of got sadistic tendencies, or she’s taking out her unpopularity on him; he's even more of a geek than she is. He’s good-natured, a bit scared of her. The climax, such as there is, comes when they and Kinuyo go to see Ori-chan in concert. All the way through we’ve been wondering just how obsessed Ninagawa is, if he’ll end up doing something psycho, and in fact he does try to crash to the front of the crowd waiting for her behind the club, and has to be chased away by security, but that’s the extent of it, and in the last scene he’s kind of dazedly lamenting that he thought the closer he got to her the better he’d feel, but he felt just as distant from her as ever.

High-school loneliness. The author herself was only nineteen when this got the Prize - youngest ever A-Prize-winner, wunderkind, big bestseller, social phenomenon, etc. Unlike some of the other A-Prize winners in this decade, though, it’s not trying to particularly capture a new mode of language - nothing in Hatsu’s language or the dialogue is at all difficult for an older person to understand. It's not a kogyaru novel, in other words. The whole story feels kind of recognizable and universal, really, although probably the isolation and alienation were supposed, by the Prize committee if not the author, to feel new. (They'll only feel new if you were popular in high school, or if you have allowed yourself to forget how awful high school was, and how awful it was to be that age. In Japan as in the States, an astonishing percentage of adults seem to fall into this trap.)

All that said, it’s a good book. Well-written, first-person but without the worst clichés of the shishôsetsu (a term, I should note, that I use pretty loosely), a sure narrative voice, good depiction of the two main characters. It does what it does really well.

Hariganemushi

Yoshimura Man’ichi 吉村萬壱. Hariganemushi ハリガネムシ. Bungei Shunjû, 2003.

Co-winner of the 129th Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2003.

A high-school teacher gets involved with a prostitute from a soapland, and their unhealthy codependency ends with him almost beating her to death, and then, later, her almost killing him.

It’s a really puzzling book, and I don’t feel like going much more into the details of the plot than that. A hariganemushi (a nematomorph?) by the way, is a kind of worm that’s a parasite in bugs; he finds one in a praying mantis he kills. The metaphor is probably that either the girl’s a parasite on him or the other way around; combine that with the fact that the worm supposedly screws up the insect’s reproductive system, and you get a sexual element to the parasitism, which is certainly there in the book. Beating her up turns him on, something that becomes more and more clear to him as the book goes on.

There are elements of class involved: she’s from a really trashy background, poor, and there’s an implication, either in the narrator’s mind or the author’s, can’t tell, that she’ll never change, she gets involved with dangerous people like the narrator because at root that’s who she is, and she can't (or doesn't believe she can) do any better. From the point of view of the narrator, she's a disposable person. And it's this, precisely, that gets the narrator off—he’s aroused by the fact that he can beat her and she’ll come back.

So I guess you could say the book is trying to depict a dangerously codependent relationship. It has pieces that don’t fit, however, like why it’s so insistently set in 1987, and why we hardly learn anything at all about the narrator’s mental state that would explain the things he does. Half the book is a road trip to her hometown in Shikoku, and along the way he proposes to her, and we think it might be because she has kids in an institution and he feels sorry for her, but then he beats her up—in short the narrator usually just describes, doesn’t comment, even though it’s his own life. Maybe that’s the point—he’s an inveterate journal writer, although what we’re reading isn’t that—maybe we’re supposed to notice his passivity in his own life? Maybe it's an anti-shishôsetsu, a first-person narrative that refuses to get inside the narrator's head? And yet it's not exactly like he's an unreliable narrator. Just a detached one.

Mostly it’s the tone that’s disturbing. There’s a moral ambiguity in the author’s refusal to make the narrator’s voice more unsympathetic—the book made me really uncomfortable, and not in a “this is challenging my preconceptions—it’s Art” kind of way. Just made me feel gross.

Well written. But I don't know why it got the Prize (which, of course, could have been due to factors having nothing to do with what I've written here).

Note: all of the above I wrote right after I read the book, back in July. Now, posting this, I find that the book is still there in my head, pretty vividly. That says something; not sure what. Probably that what I said at the end about it being well written is true: a really vividly expressed, cunningly constructed book. It stays with you, and not necessarily just the lurid parts. As a portrait of an unhealthy relationship, it's brilliant. I still don't know what to do with the tone, though.

Dylan: "Dreamin' Of You," "Mississippi"

You may have heard - Dylan's coming out with a new installment of The Bootleg Series. This one's subtitled Tell-Tale Signs, and it concentrates on the years 1989-2006. To drum up interest, Sony has unleashed free mp3s of a couple of tracks from the album. They're currently bouncing around the interwebs; this site has download links for both.

I'll try to spare you the superlatives. "Dreamin' Of You" is like a brand-new song. It's a Time Out Of Mind outtake, and supposedly it's an early version of "Million Miles," or some such, but it bears little relation to that song. Really nice. And "Mississippi" - this is a solo acoustic demo of that song.

It's just as breath-taking as you'd expect.

Bob is God.

Everything Must Go (Steely Dan)

They wrote this one right after Enron. Good lord, who would've dreamed it'd only get more relevant? I was reminded of it seeing Burn After Reading last night, but for personal reasons, as well as the impending meltdown of, you know, the global financial system and whatever.

Me, just back from Japan, seeing a Coen Brothers movie within a week or so of its opening - "keep in mind we got a lot / the sky the moon good food and the weather / first-run movies."

Dark, very dark.

Burn After Reading

Some thoughts on Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' newest.

1. The Coen Brothers almost always set their movies in a very specific time. Think of The Big Lebowski, set just as the (first) Gulf War was about to start ("this will not stand, this aggression"). Think of The Ladykillers, which I suspected was meant to take place no later than 1999, or else the final joke (a black lady gives her windfall to Bob Jones University) wouldn't work (after the 2000 Republican primary, most likely she would have known that Bob Jones University was a racist institution).

Burn After Reading is set right now. It's a commentary on the present moment, on how everything's run by idiots today. This post on Digby nails that aspect of it, which is articulated in the film by John Malkovich's character, Cox. Cox is as much an idiot as everyone else in the film, of course, but he also represents the kind of old-fashioned patrician strain in American government, State and CIA, that shows up as a trope in spy movies, X-Files (with Mulder's family house on Martha's Vineyard), etc. God only knows if it has any basis in reality, but the Coens seem to be using it as an example of the kind of professional competence we're losing in the current cronyocracy. Cox is an idiot, but at least he knows his job. Or does he? After all, before getting the ax he was on the Balkans desk, and we see how well that's gone... Cox is better than his successors (Clooney's character, in Homeland Security), but worse, we can only assume, than his father, whose near-comatose state might as well be caused by shock at how far things have fallen...

In its merciless take on 2008, Burn After Reading might just be the Coens' darkest movie yet. And that's saying a lot.

2. The Coen Brothers almost always set their movies in a very specific place. Miller's Crossing is the exception in never telling us exactly where it's happening, but aside from that, their movies form a sort of travelogue of a certain vision of America, and a commentary (snide, to be sure, but dead on) about each place. As the Coen Brothers' D.C. movie, Burn After Reading shows us a totally bifurcated city, an elite class of people who run the country and a not-so-elite class of people who are run by the country. Both, in this film, are idiots: the blind leading the stupid, or vice versa. And of course everybody's spying on everybody. The Security State. Report any suspicious packages, or neighbors. Bush's America.

3. The Coen Brothers' films almost always have one character who represents pure evil. (I'm not sure who first articulated this; a former roommate pointed it out to me after Fargo. I doubt he's the one who thought of it.) Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo, Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. This time I think they reverse the formula: there's only one character in this film who isn't evil, Linda's boss, the ex-Orthodox priest. And even he ends up breaking and entering. Like I said, dark.

4. Yes, I realize that the Coens themselves would deny all of this.

5. By the way, I loved this movie.

Typee; Omoo

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville (1846)
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas by Herman Melville (1847)

I read Typee many years ago as part of a brief infatuation with Polynesia (never went) as depicted in literature. Now I read it again as part of a new interest in Melville, spurred by finally reading Moby Dick last spring and realizing that it’s the best novel ever written. (I mean, like, duh.)

Well, Typee’s not Moby Dick. Nothing is. It’s good, though. Well-written, with beautiful prose that every so often shows a flash of the pugnacious brilliance of his later masterpiece. Nicely fuses ethnographic pretense with a determination to shock staid New Englanders. It’s a bit disappointing, though, that he allowed his bitterest critiques of what missionaries do to South Pacific cultures to be expurgated from the American edition. Wimp.

Basically, the narrator, Tom, or Tommo, a lightly fictionalized version of Melville (these are true stories, more or less), is a whaler who jumps ship on the island of Nuku Hiva, one of the Marquesas, because he can’t take the captain’s cruelty anymore. He and his buddy Toby wander the island for a while until they fall in with the Typee people, who are reputed to be ferocious cannibals. Of course they turn out to be thoroughly charming innocent savages living an idyllic life. Very Rousseauian. Most of the book is Tommo’s account of their life and culture, what he can make out (he never really learns the language—he’s only there a couple of months, and in real life a couple of weeks). It all sort of leads up to the horrifying revelation that yes, they are cannibals—but only as a sort of religious ritual as they consume defeated enemies to partake of their valor or something. Still gross, but Melville succeeds in making us see this as only an isolated unfortunate custom in the midst of an otherwise admirable lifestyle, rather than as the excuse for colonization that other Westerners would see it as.

That’s what lasts about this book, I think, is Melville’s determination to escape, at least in his own mind, the hypocrisy and repression of his own society. Sexual, mental, emotional freedom is what he finds in the Typee; honesty, affection, and a deep morality. Maybe it was really there, maybe not, but his willingness to see that in them, and see that as a reproach to his own society—that doesn’t die. Although, he never went back…he wasn’t a Gauguin.

Two months later (and that ought to tell you something), I finally got around to finishing Melville’s sequel to Typee. Omoo picks up where that left off, with Tommo (here he gets nicknamed “Typee”—Melville’s wishful thinking?—but basically doesn’t use a name) being rescued from Nuku Hiva. Unfortunately, the whaler that picks him up is a losing proposition—incompetent captain, tyrant of a first mate, crew utterly lacking in morale. Before long a mutiny is in the works, and the narrator takes part, somewhat reluctantly, and in the aftermath ends up staying in Tahiti when his ship sails. He’s imprisoned, but after a while the local consul basically loses interest, and the narrator ends up just wandering around Tahiti and the neighboring island of Imeeo (now spelled Eimeo) for a while, before finally, at the end, getting back on a whaler and (presumably) setting out for home.

This is kind of a mirror image of the first book. There we were basically stationary for the whole time, static, the book unfolding sideways with Tommo’s account of Typee society, rather than providing us with a strong linear narrative (although it does build up to the climax of Tommo’s escape). This one is mostly movement, both through space (sailing on the ill-starred Julia, then traversing Imeeo) and events, as the narrator chronicles the progress of the mutiny and its aftermath, then his stay in a Tahitian prison, and finally his adventures on Imeeo as he tries to find pleasant employment on the island (first with some foreign planters, then with the Tahitian queen).

Also, and more importantly: the first book took place in a Polynesia mostly untouched by European civilization, allowing Melville to present his romantic vision of the superiority of the supposedly primitive native Polynesian ways to those of his own so-called civilization. This book takes place in a Tahiti that has been under the sway of English missionaries for a couple of generations, and has just been claimed by the French. Typee contained several digressions in which Melville told of the disastrous effects of European contact elsewhere in Polynesia, by way of celebrating the Typee valley’s blessed freedom from same; Omoo is an up-close look at just those disastrous effects, as we see the degraded lives of the sailors, then the collapsed and demoralized Tahitian society under the missionaries’ thumbs. The first book finds humanity in a close to paradisiacal state in untouched Polynesia; the second book finds humanity in a close to infernal state, in the societies of Europeans and the parts of Polynesia they control. A mirror image, as I say.

That much is admirable: Melville has constructed his book with a lot of art, and I can certainly applaud his message. The problem is, it’s not really new. He already said what he had to say about the missionaries and their treatment of the Polynesians in Typee: here we get to to see why he said that, but the fact remains, he’s already said it. That may be part of what keeps this book from ever really taking flight. It’s just not as enjoyable, not as readable, despite being more densely plotted, and written with a fine ironic tone.

Still, if you read one you should read the other, and it’s worth reading both (if you clicked on the Wikipedia links above you've probably realized that nobody reads Omoo, which is a shame). They both have fine moments. In Typee it’s the golden descriptions of the island; in Omoo it’s the intriguing character of the narrator’s companion, Doctor Long Ghost, an Australian ship’s physician who flees the Julia with the narrator and stays with him until the end of the book. He’s not quite fully-realized as a character, but nonetheless he’s intriguing—tall, sardonic, independent-minded. The editor of the Penguin edition (Mary K. Bercaw Edwards) compares him (and the narrator) to characters from Cannery Row or On the Road; for some reason the Doctor reminded me more of Dr. Gonzo. But don’t expect too much: as I say, he’s not really a fully-realized character. He’s just a sketch.

Besides the mirroring, the other thing that really strikes me about these books is Melville’s employment of terms like “savage” and “cannibal” when he describes the natives. As in, he’s doing it with an irony that I’m not sure I can quite enunciate. Clearly it starts with his awareness that his own society tells him the Marquesans and the Tahitians are savages and/or cannibals, an inferior order of humanity because they lack Christian civilization. This is combined with Melville’s own sense that it’s Christian civilization that is, if not always than all too often, savage, and the Polynesians, at least in their original state, who really know how to live like human beings. So when he calls them “savages” it’s a reproach to “civilization” itself. That much is pretty obvious.

It goes beyond merely bandying about loaded words like “savage,” though, and this is where it gets a little complicated. Take a fairly minor passage like this one, from Chapter 75 of Omoo:

“As we sauntered along, the people we met, saluted us pleasantly, and invited us into their houses; and in this way we made a good many brief morning calls. But the hour could not have been the fashionable one in Partoowye; since the ladies were invariably in deshabille.”

The ladies in question are, of course, native Imeeose (as he calls them), so what he’s doing here is making a funny. Imagine a “fashionable hour” in a place like Partoowye, as if it were Boston or London! And, hey, aren’t the native “ladies” always “in deshabille?” He does this a lot in these books, imputing familiar Euro-American ways to islanders for comic effect. In spite of his very real sympathy for Polynesian ways, Melville’s not above making fun of them for his readers back in New and Old England. To that extent, they may still be to him, without any saving irony, “savages.”

But I’m not entirely sure about that. The other way to read this is as Melville assuming that, no doubt, Tahitian society does indeed have its “fashionable hour,” and that Polynesian women do have gradations in dress, even if neither are immediately discernible to the outsider. I’m not sure if he’s actually suggesting that in this particular passage, but let’s look at another, from Chapter 67, describing an old couple he meets on Imeeo:
“While employed among the calabashes, the strange, antiquated fondness between these old semi-savages was really amusing. I made no doubt, that they were saying to each other, ‘yes, my love’—‘no, my life,’ just in the same way that some young couples do, at home.”

He’s laughing at the couple, sure, but mainly because in old age they’re acting like newlyweds—a delightful thing, to be sure. And a recognizable thing—he calls them Darby and Joan—the point being that he finds in their behavior something universal. There’s humor in him conflating them with “young couples…at home,” but also a recognition of common humanity. Even as he calls them “semi-savages.”

Melville does this kind of thing a lot in these books—it’s kind of his default mode of describing native ways. That’s why it interests me. I’m not trying to judge his degree of political correctness or anything: I’m just trying to figure out what his language can tell me about exactly how he felt about the people he was describing. It’s not a simple thing. I think both of these things (and probably more) are going on—he’s trying to make it as a writer, trying to sell books, and after all he’s a creature of his society, so I’m sure he is having some laughs, and hell, why not? But at the same time I do think he’s on a bit of a crusade to show that terms like “savage” and “civilized” don’t really mean much, when we can recognize common patterns of human behavior anywhere. Anyway, it's worth a think.

Good books. There’s more to Melville than the white whale.