Hachigatsu no rojô ni suteru

Itô Takami 伊藤たかみ. Hachigatsu no rojô ni suteru 八月の路上に捨てる. 2006.

This won the 135th Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2006. The book contains two stories. The title story won the prize; the second story is called "Kai kara miru fûkei 貝からみる風景 (The world as seen from inside a shell)."

The title story (title translates to "discarded on the road in August") is about a guy named Atsushi who is going through a divorce. The story takes place during the course of a single day, but involves a lot of flashbacks. He works for a vending-machine company, driving a truck and stocking machines in the Shinjuku area with his partner, a divorced woman named Minashiro-san. It’s her last day in the truck before she transfers into the office section of the company; meanwhile it’s his last day as a married man, as he’s going to turn in his divorce certificate the next day.
They’re confidantes, and as we go through the day we learn about the course of Atsushi’s marriage and the lead-up to the divorce. Here’s where it comes through that the theme of the story is employment as much as anything. Atsushi originally wanted to be a screenwriter, and when he and his wife married not long out of college they were scraping by on little income, then she got a real job while he plugged away at the screenwriting. This of course made him feel a bit threatened, but then she got fired and he got a part-time job (or rather, a full-time job but without benefits—however you translate baito) stocking the machines. This makes her feel threatened, and eventually they can’t stand each other anymore.

This makes two A-Prizes in a row, then, where the protagonist is either unemployed or fringe-employed for most of the story—a friitaa, a paato (part-timer), or a shitsugyôsha (unemployed). Add the omake story in Oki de matsu and you have a mini-trend. The economy has supposedly recovered but you wouldn’t know it by the literature. Anyway, it’s an interesting trend.

The other theme is ennui, for lack of a better word. Atsushi and his wife seem to have been attracted to one another at least as much by a shared negative outlook on life as by anything else - they both had dreams of an ideal, creative career, and both kind of slack around looking for it, and their hobby is judging people they know, on a point system, by how cool they are. It’s not presented as hipsterism, which what it sounds like to me, but they’re definitely kind of societal dropouts. And when work starts to get in the way - both the having of it and the needing of it - they find they really don’t have much in common. They don’t communicate well (a common trick in junbungaku, of course - confused, meaningful silences where a real person might actually try to explain what he or she is feeling - believe it or not, Japanese people do that too), and don’t seem to know what it would mean to try.

So it’s about a society in which marginal employment is becoming the norm, and in which divorce is becoming the norm. Atsushi isn’t a terribly likable character, and I think this is intentional - he’s kind of deluding himself, even with the divorce. He had been having an affair with a hairdresser, but when she finds out he’s getting a divorce she breaks up with him- so he’s alone - and at the end of the story he finds out that Minashiro-san, whose acerbic attitude toward life and romance seems to have had him romanticizing divorce, or at least thinking that in her he had a companion in it, is transferring because she’s getting remarried. He’s really alone at the end - like he’s joined a club to be with someone who just quit it. There’s no hint of a romance between Atsushi and Minashiro, but there’s some sort of connection that leaves him feeling, inarticulately, betrayed at the end.

That aspect was, I thought, really well done, and in Minashiro-san we have a type of female character that I think wouldn’t have been possible a couple of decades ago: tough, employed, independent, and sympathetic for it. I don’t know that the story as a whole cuts quite as deep as it could, but it’s good.

The other story I actually liked a little better. It’s about another marginally-employed type, but younger (Atsushi was about thirty). Jun’ichi does free-lance writing for a small editorial office (not a publisher, but an office that hooks up free-lancers and publications). For most of the story it’s just kind of about him and his girlfriend floating through life; they meet at the local supermarket every evening to plan dinner together, and as he’s waiting Jun’ichi reads the customer-comment cards on the bulletin board and fantasizes about other people’s problems. Then halfway through the story his editorial office goes bankrupt without paying him his last four weeks’ fees. He doesn’t really panic, though. We only follow him through the first few hours after he finds out, his first night with his girlfriend after he finds out, and it’s a curious thing. The story basically just ends on this poetic note where they’re lying on their bed beneath the open window and the curtain blows inward and lands on their faces in such a way that it kind of puts their heads in this curtain-world that he says makes him feel like a shellfish. Kind of a weird image, but it seems to be suggesting how sort of isolated and coccooned he feels in their present life. I guess it’s the upside to the marginally employed life. It makes a good pair with the title story, in that way.

Oki de matsu

Itoyama Akiko 絲山秋子. Oki de matsu 沖で待つ. 2005.

This won the Akutagawa Prize for the second half of 2005.

The book contains two stories. The second, the title story, won the prize; the first is called "Kinrô Kansha no Hi 勤労感謝の日." According to the bio in the book, Itoyama (b. 1966) worked in a home-appliances firm for a while before becoming a writer; judging from the stories, if they’re at all autobiographical (and chances are, they are, this being J-lit), she was a career-track employee, part of the first generation of women to be hired as such. In the stories, she seems to be setting herself up as the literary spokesperson for those women.

"Kinrô Kansha no Hi" covers the negative aspects. The narrator is an unemployed woman in her late 30s. Unemployed because she ran up against a particularly nasty case of sexual harrassment and quit, but without reporting it, so she gets nothing but a bad reputation and a rapidly-disappearing meager unemployment allowance from the government. Over the course of the story she goes on a miai arranged by her neighbor; the guy turns out to be a total dweeb, and quite full of himself as a Company Man. This sets up the story’s central tension, between the Company Man who’s constantly boasting about how wonderful it is to be part of a company, and how thankful everybody should be for what companies do for the nation, and the protagonist, who is completely soured on the company life, both from her own experience and from her view that it’s Company Men who have put Japan in the mess it’s in today, economically and socially. It so happens that the day of the miai is Kinrô Kansha no Hi, Labor Thanksgiving Day, an irony the narrator comments on. In the end, she goes to a rundown local bar that she can always depend on to match her mood, and finds herself grateful that the proprietor keeps it open in spite of little business; so maybe there’s something to be grateful to workers for after all, she thinks.

I liked this story. It really represents a fresh voice, I think, and an important one. The critiques of Japanese company life and society aren’t necessarily new, but they’re well done, and voiced by a character who seems new. Great. But this isn’t the one that won the prize.

The one that won is kind of the flipside of the modern career woman’s experience. It concerns one Oikawa, who also comes into a company as a career-track woman, and her friend Futocchan, a guy who came in the same year. They were immediately transferred together to Fukuoka, and later back to the Kantô area. The story traces their travails as new employees, as coworkers, growing older. No romance between - actually he marries someone from the Fukuoka office - but friendship. Then he dies in an accident, and she’s forced to carry out a promise he once extracted from her to destroy the hard drive on his computer. There are things he doesn’t want anybody to see after he dies - it’s not clear what, but it’s suggested that it’s embarrassingly bad love poetry to his wife (at least that’s what Oikawa ends up thinking). The story begins and ends on a note of magical realism, is I guess what you’d call it, as Oikawa confronts Futocchan’s ghost. But there’s no real epiphany, except for friendship, how much she’ll miss him.

It’s a rather generic and rah-rah look at company life. You join, you go where the firm tells you, you learn from your senpai who seem harsh at first but then wise, you gradually learn to take responsibility yourself and feel endless gratitude toward the company and senpai who helped you grow, and the dôki who helped you survive it. Kind of like one of those photocollages in a high school yearbook - “these are the best years of our lives.” I can hardly believe the same person wrote this and the first story, but that’s why I think she’s trying to set herself up as the Career Woman Writer - covering both extremes of the career woman’s experience. To me the only novelty about this is that it seems to be trying to show male readers that women can feel just as dedicated to their employers and coworkers as men can. In a society that still doesn't fully accept career women, that's probably a valuable message. But coming after the first story, you have to wonder where this enthusiasm for being transformed into a corporate drone comes from.

Oh, right. Maybe it's fiction.

Asatte no hito

Suwa Tetsushi 諏訪哲史. Asatte no hito アサッテの人. 2007.

Winner of the 137th Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2007.

The story has two strands. The first is a sort of character sketch of the author’s unnamed uncle, the titular character. Asatte, in this context, means odd, unexpected, out of left field (literally, it's "the day after tomorrow"), and the uncle is that. He means to be that. As a child he’s a stutterer, and then when this suddenly heals he finds that he misses the stuttering because it gave him a safe abstracted remove from the world. He’s convinced that the world is controlled by a will that’s not his (a Schopenhauerian idea, the narrator posits - Suwa studied philosophy in college), and he’s obsessed with doing things that make him feel he’s escaped this inevitability. To this end he starts adopting little nonsense words that he interjects occasionally. It disconcerts people around him, but helps him feel like he’s putting one over on the intentionality of life. They’re purposeless, so they’re liberating. But his wife starts to think he’s going nuts, and then when she dies in an accident and leaves him alone, he does start to go nuts, feeling that the nonsense words stop functioning as well as they should. He clings to them more and more, until he really can’t interact normally with the world anymore. This strand of the story seems really Murakami Haruki-ish.

The other strand of the story is the narrator, who’s struggling to find the best way to tell his uncle’s story. This is the framing device, as he frets on paper over what to write, and then gives us a fragment of an “earlier draft” of this novel, or of his uncle’s “journals.” This part of the story seems a little Mori Ôgai-ish (as when he makes Shibue Chûsai as much about the process of evaluating his documentary sources as about the guy) - and his language is even faintly reminiscent of Meiji-era writing, as well.

The overall effect, though, is most like Laurence Sterne, but without as much humor. He keeps telling us he’s going to get to his uncle’s story, but always seems to be deferring it. For example, in the narrator’s present, the uncle has disappeared—he discovers the journals while crating up the uncle’s effects—but the story he tells never explains the disappearance. Throughout he calls what he’s writing a shôsetsu, fiction, and he includes some passages from the wife’s point of view that he, the narrator himself, wrote (rather implausible, too - she’s puzzled enough by the words to go through her husband’s books to try to find what they mean, but she never just comes out and asks him) - he’s not averse to making things up - but then at the end he says it would be too artificial to make up an ending, so things just peter out, along with the uncle’s sanity.

In short, it’s a very self-conscious novel. Self-conscious about the process of writing, about fictionality, about its themes - several passages of philosophical speculation (and name-dropping) make it fairly clear the exact sort of alienation that’s being discussed here.

It was rather engrossing, but I’m not sure how successful I’d judge it. Laurence Sterne without the laughs would be pretty dreary stuff, after all. This is a bit tendentious, and a bit precious. Still, it’s quite imaginative, and nothing like the last few A-Prize winners.

Tsuchi no naka no kodomo

Nakamura Fuminori 中村文則. Tsuchi no naka no kodomo 土の中の子供. 2005.

The title story was the winner of the 133rd Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2005. The volume also includes a shorter, earlier story called "Kumo no koe 蜘蛛の声."

The title story is what I would call a social-issue story, the social issue being what is called in Japanese adaruto chirudoren, or adult children of abuse. The main character was abandoned by his real parents, and raised by abusive relatives who ultimately dropped him from a building and then buried him alive, thinking he was dead. He escaped the grave and was then raised in an orphanage. The story tells us this in flashbacks, while showing us him as an adult dealing with the scars of this childhood.

In structure, it’s a good example of what I’m finally coming to understand (after years of denying the Keenes of the field’s words to this effect) as a typically, perhaps stereotypically, Japanese narrative style. How I would characterize it is as the junbungaku house style: jumping back and forth between inconclusive, suggestive, atmospheric, fragmentary, not-quite-linear present scenes and inconclusive, suggestive, atmospheric, fragmentary, not-quite-linear memory scenes, to create a narrative sequence that is quite intricate while not really letting anything much happen.

We begin with a scene where the narrator picks a fight with some motorcycle punks on purpose, just to get the shit kicked out of himself. We don’t know exactly why, but as we later learn more about his past we come to suppose it’s because he became so accustomed to abuse as a child that he doesn’t quite know how to exist without it.

He’s a taxi driver now, in his early 20s, living with an ex- bar hostess who was raised by an alcoholic mother and who was abandoned, pregnant, by her lover before miscarrying. She’s got issues of her own, in other words, and they don’t love each other, but rather just sort of coexist.
At one point, she gets drunk and falls down some stairs; she’s uninsured, and the narrator vows to raise the money to pay her hospital bills. Then he’s robbed at knifepoint in his taxi; he’s almost killed, but in the climactic moment of the story he stabs the would-be killer and gets away, only to run his taxi off a small cliff. Now he’s hospitalized.

The story ends after he gets out of the hospital, in a scene where he meets his sorta mentor, the head of the orphanage. The head of the orphanage says the narrator’s true father wants to meet him; the narrator says, no thanks, and walks away. End of story.

Again, narratively it’s quintessentially junbungaku. A good example of the form. Stylistically, his writing is just okay. Which leaves us with the subject matter, which is what I presume got the story the prize. It’s hard to feel much about this, since tales of abuse have been so prominent in American culture for a couple of decades now, but I think they’re just hitting Japan. Meh.

The second story is similar, vaguely. A young salaryman who’s just earned a promotion wakes up and has a breakdown. He ditches his apartment, his job, his ID cards, and goes to live under a bridge. At the end of the story a spider speaking to him almost convinces him that he never had a job, an apartment, or anything, that he’s in fact always lived under this bridge, ever since he was a kid and attacked a drunk homeless guy and then hid from him. There’s also something about a woman leading him angrily into the woods as a child (echoes of the abusive childhood in Tsuchi, I think), and a cop who thinks the narrator (of course it’s in the first person) is the person who’s been attacking women in this area. In the end, the narrator’s identity is totally fragmented, as he’s not sure if he is the criminal, if he’s who the spider says he is, if he’s maybe a soldier gone AWOL from a war zone, or what.

This one may be a little better than the prize-winner actually. A-Prize stories tend to be novellas - almost never are they either truly short stories, or full-length novels (although they're often published alone between two covers, so you pay full price for a hundred and twenty pages of text, with wide margins and large print). And maybe this writer is better in more concentrated doses. Anyway, the spider story has a little more impact; maybe also because it doesn’t feel so much like a formula - take social issue of the day, apply junbungaku formula, and you get an A-Prize story. (To be fair, in his brief afterword, Nakamura hints that he may have had an abusive childhood himself, so I shouldn’t be cynical about what he’s written. But that’s another issue: it’s hard to judge this kind of story objectively when you learn it’s drawn from the author’s life.)

Grand finale

Abe Kazushige 阿部和重. Gurando finâre グランド・フィナーレ. 2005. Kôdansha Bunko, 2007.

The title story was the winner of the 132nd Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2004. The volume also includes three other stories.

Abe has been around for a while - about ten years, I think, when he won the Prize - I had heard of him, and one or two of his books had been on my get-around-to-reading list since I first heard of him in ’98 or so. I don’t know what made the A-Prize committee decide to recognize him when they did. Certainly he wasn’t a new writer anymore. Maybe it was guilt?

The title story, the Prize-winner, is weird. I don’t know what to think of it. In its outlines, it concerns a middle-aged father of a grade-school girl. He was caught taking nude pictures of her and other girls and selling them to a magazine. His wife divorced him and got a restraining order against him. When the story starts (junbungaku stories seldom at the beginning—extensive use of flashbacks is pretty much de rigeur—the prototypical junbungaku story is a guy drinking alone in his room remembering, and this isn’t far off from that at points), it’s about a year after the divorce, and he’s back in Tokyo trying to get in touch with his daughter to give her a birthday present. He can’t get near her without getting arrested (why he was never prosecuted for kiddie porn is never stated—the story is from his point of view, and he’s very cagey), so he has an old friend deliver a present to her, with a note to come out and meet him and he’ll take her away. The friend delivers the present, but not the note—he reads it first, realizes the scheme would amount to kidnapping, and discards it. In a disco later, the friend tells the narrator off in front of other friends, and then another mutual friend expresses her disgust at what he’s done, and says that a friend of hers killed herself because of childhood abuse.

The second half of the story is after the narrator (Sawami) has gone back to his hometown, Jinmachi, in some unnamed northern prefecture. He’s just kind of slacking, living with his parents and trying to figure out what to do next. An old school chum corners him into helping some sixth-graders do a school play - he used to work directing children’s educational films - and in the process he meets two cute little girls. We think he’s going to molest them, but instead he really tries to help them with the play. They’re taking it very seriously, and he eventually realizes it’s because their families are moving apart, and they have a suicide pact - the play is their last statement to the world of their friendship. The story ends with him determined to intervene and somehow prevent them from killing themselves.

So do we believe this redemption? The narrator has been in denial about his crimes all along - it’s a first-person narration (of course) and he’s your classic unreliable narrator, not telling us why exactly his wife left him, or about his plans for running away with his daughter, or anything really, until it comes out in conversation with others, or is otherwise elicited from him. He really doesn’t seem to think he’s done anything wrong. So why should he suddenly care about saving these girls? Maybe he doesn’t - maybe he just wants to abuse them. Don’t know.

The story has this odd 9/11 overlay, too. The final breach with his wife happens on, would you believe it, 9/11, and they divorce just after Christmas that year. The story is narrated about a year later. During the long conversation in the disco, his friends are talking about various terrorist events that have happened in the meantime - the Russian theater thing, war in the Congo, et cetera - none of which the narrator has heard about, because he’s completely wrapped up in his own problems.

So is this an allegory? Is America a child abuser getting punished for its insensitivity to others? Is Japan a child abuser who doesn’t care what’s happening in the rest of the world? I don’t think it’s that simple, but I don’t really know what else he’s doing putting the 9/11 references in there. The possibility of an American allegory is compounded by the story's obvious parallels with Lolita, which is often read as a gloss on America corrupting Europe or vice-versa.

Overall, I have to say the story just doesn’t quite click for me, but on the other hand it's intriguing as hell. Plus, Abe’s a fine writer: clearly a post-Murakamis stylist, closer to Ryû than Haruki, certainly in subject matter but also in terms of prose, too, I think.

The other stories show this more clearly. “Umagoya no otome 馬小屋の乙女” was also published in 2004, and concerns a nisei, Thomas Iguchi, going to Jinmachi, or a town nearby, to make a particular purchase - he gets to the store and is put off by the owner when a yakuza type arrives and starts an argument; while waiting, Iguchi gets into a conversation with another customer, a guy looking after an old lady who’s not his mother. At the end everybody turns to Iguchi and tells him they’re now going to initiate him into their circle. This is a great little story. Iguchi is a finicky, smooth character, and when we finally realize what he’s here to buy - it’s only revealed late in the story - it’s good for a real laugh. He’s a collector of these things, it turns out. And we don’t know what kind of circle these people are going to initiate him into, and we’re not sure we want to know. But the whole thing has this perfect timing and use of language. Kind of like a weird-sex Twilight Zone or something. I have no idea what the title signifies - "the virgin in the stable." Yeah, but what does Mary have to do with anything?

The third story, “Shinjuku Yodobashi Kamera 新宿　ヨドバシカメラ,” doesn’t have a date (Japanese publishers can be surprisingly sloppy about things like that), but was written to accompany a magazine spread of some photographer’s work. It’s not really a story so much as an essay, in which the narrator is describing the geography and ecology of Shinjuku using his pubic area as a metaphor - City Hall is his erect penis, his intestines are the subways and underground arcades, and Yodobashi Camera, the pioneer of big-box electronics discounters, is this mole he has…

The final story, “20 seiki 20世紀,” was published on Sony’s website in five installments in 2000 to plug five designs of CDR that Sony was debuting (it's not on the website anymore, and I think they've changed CDR designs, too). Each section of the story is given the title of one of the designs (they’re given in English: Future, Traditional, Form, Arrangement, and Feminine); they actually sort of work as subtitles to the story, too. The story has the narrator going to Jinmachi (written God Town 神町) because for ten years he’s been obsessed with the metaphorical possibilities of this place. Over the course of the story, talking to a young woman shopkeeper there, he learns the history of why it’s named what it is (originally Shinmachi 新町, New Town, and the dialect just shifted), etc. He’s disappointed, but still keeps trying to find ways to keep believing the town might be something special. He gets his/the world’s fortune told (vague); learns that the prefecture is shaped like a face and Jinmachi is the ear; falls in love with the woman shopkeeper. Entertaining, and an interesting example of postmodern literary output - is it literature or ad copy? You be the judge.

All in all, a mixed bag of stories, very entertaining. Abe's one to watch.

Chichi to ran

Kawakami Mieko 川上未映子. Chichi to ran 乳と卵. 2007.

Winner of the 138th Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2007.

The story concerns the unnamed narrator, an adult Osaka woman living in Tokyo; her 39-year-older sister Makiko, visiting Tokyo; and Makiko’s almost-pubescent daughter Midoriko. Makiko is a single mom, works as a bar hostess, and is thinking about getting breast enlargement surgery; Midoriko is a moody child, in the middle of a vow of silence. The two of them go to visit Makiko’s sister, the narrator, in Tokyo, and the story takes place over the course of the three or so days of their visit. The narration is interspersed with excerpts from Midoriko’s diary.

It’s kind of like The Vagina Monologues with an Osaka accent. That is, the theme of the book is (very obviously) women and how they feel about their bodies. We never get to the bottom of why Makiko wants her breasts enlarged, but the debate is certainly aired over whether she’s doing it for herself or for men. Meanwhile, Midoriko, who hasn’t started her period yet, is terrified of it, and is obsessed with ovulation, and what a curse it is for women- she hates the thought of it, hates that it dooms her to having to fear reproduction, hates the thought of reproducing. Hates/pities her mother, and wishes her mother had never had her. Meanwhile the narrator almost never tells us what she’s thinking - we learn very little about her - but in the course of the story her period surprises her and we watch her washing her underwear and the futon and musing about how she’s been irregular lately, and how this is another lost opportunity to get pregnant.

Not much happens. Basically it’s tensions between Makiko and Midoriko, and these finally erupt (predictably) with Midoriko breaking her silence and yelling at her (remind you of this moment?); they break down and both start smashing eggs into their faces—their own faces...symbolic, a little? Kind of a typical junbungaku scenario, in which people refuse to even try to communicate, all the better to create significant and resonant scenes impressing us with the complexity or hopelessness of whatever issue is being discussed, and/or life in general. In real life, if someone wanted to know why her sister was getting a boob job, wouldn’t she just ask? If she wanted to know why her sister and niece weren’t speaking, wouldn’t she ask one of them? If her sister came home eight hours late, drunk, and said she’d gone to see her daughter’s daddy, and you wanted to know if she succeeded in seeing him, and why she’d gone to see him in the first place, wouldn’t you just ask? Sure we can imagine families so alienated from each other that they could never broach such subjects—but in junbungaku, they’re all so alienated that they can’t even imagine what it would be like to actually communicate. So in that sense, the story is clichéd, I thought.

On the other hand, even at this late date the story’s frank look at women’s bodies and how they feel about them, and its unapologetic, completely open adoption of a female point of view on these issues, still seems fresh and daring, at least in a Japanese context. These parts of the novel worked - and Midoriko’s journal excerpts really worked - by which I mean they felt authentic, and powerful, and necessary. For these reasons, I could well imagine using the novel in a class someday.

So why did it get the prize? I can never answer that question. The committee comments on the obi talk about the assuredness and vividness of the Osaka dialect in which the story is narrated; but right now all comedy on Japanese TV has a Kansai accent - the Yoshimoto clique has taken over - so in the culture at large using Osaka-ben seems to be the norm now rather than an exception, and kind of a shorthand signifier for authenticity (to be fair, it's been used like that in literature for a long time).

[edited 11/17/09 to add the rest of the review, which somehow escaped my original cut and paste job]

The book also includes an o-make story, “Anatatachi no ren’ai wa hinshi あなたたちの恋愛は瀕死” ("Your love is on its last legs") about an unnamed woman who wanders the department stores of Shinjuku one Saturday afternoon, lonely, and eventually tries to pick up a guy handing out tissues on a street corner, only to run into his frustration over his dead-end job; he punches her out without thinking about it. Kind of a nonplussing story, but at least it’s not in Osaka-ben.

Kaigo nyûmon

Mobu Norio モブ・ノリオ. Kaigo nyûmon 介護入門. 2004.

Winner of the 131st Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2004.

A hip-hop dude ends up taking care of his invalid grandmother, and narrates it as a shishôsetsu. That tells you everything. It’s classic A-Prize bait: a rambling, stream-of-consciousness non-narrative focusing on a Previously Unrecognized Voice (in this case, hip-hop boys), discussing a Pressing Social Issue (in this case, elder care).

And that’s basically all it is.

You can tell I didn’t think too much of it. Partly that’s because, I admit, I had a hard time with the language - lots of hip-hop affectations. These are only marginally effective: I don’t really dig hip-hop as music, but I can appreciate the complex verbal play, and Japanese hip-hop has been really creative in bringing that wordplay into Japanese. This does some of that, but not on nearly the level of complexity of some of the actual artists (I once translated these lyrics by Rhymester and Scha Dara Parr for a class I was involved with, and they were massively impressive - the lyrics that is, not the translations). This guy’s a wannabe - maybe that’s intentional, or maybe he’s a literary boy slumming or posing (he puts his photo in the book to convince us he’s authentic - he must be: he bleaches his hair!) - and his hip-hop affectations go about as far as calling the reader hôbai (comrade, fellow) and glossing it “nigga,” or throwing an occasional romaji YO.

The elder-care part is very predictable: he’s in his early 20s, has dropped out of the company life, and ends up taking the night shift on caring for his invalid grandmother. He’s rambling on about how he changes her diapers, feeds her, and puts up with his relatives’ lack of understanding of how much work this is. He only gets a couple of hours of sleep at a time, and is always tired and stressed. His mother takes the day shift and understands, but everybody else sees him living at home jobless and thinks he’s just a slob. Meanwhile he had dreams of being a musician, and about all that’s left of them is a dependence on marijuana. Grass is big in this book, but certain things he attributes to it make you wonder if the author’s ever really smoked any…

It’s okay. I’d be happy to read a student paper someday comparing this to Ariyoshi Sawako’s Kokkei na hito (translated as The Twilight Years). But I didn’t think it was a great novel.