Yoshimoto Banana: Lizard (1993)

Published in Japanese as Tokage とかげ in 1993, translated in 1995 by Ann Sherif as Lizard.

Six short stories, published in a variety of venues between 1991 and 1993, published in book form in 1993. What’s interesting is that Lizard in English consists of the collection Tokage in Japanese, translated straight. It’s extremely rare for a short story collection by a Japanese writer, no matter how carefully sequenced and selected, to be published in English as-is. This didn’t happen for Murakami Haruki, for example, until after the quake. His earlier English collection The Elephant Vanishes was drawn from several different collections in Japanese, as was the more recent Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. That Banana’s Tokage made it into English as-is, preserving the contours of the original, is probably a measure of her huge popularity abroad in the early ‘90s.

That, or maybe it was just the translator’s call. I can't be sure. Either way, it’s nice to see.

The first story, “Newlywed” (新婚さん in the original), has the most interesting provenance. It was serialized in early 1991 on ads hanging from the ceilings of train cars in Tokyo. If you’ve been on trains and subways in Tokyo you know that every surface that can take an ad has an ad; the ones hanging from the ceilings, over the aisles, are called "center-hanging ads" or nakazuri kôkoku 中吊り広告, and back in 1990 and 1991 JR East ran a PR campaign in which they had a number of noted writers serialize stories on these ads, calling them "center-hanging stories" or nakazuri shôsetsu 中吊り小説. Banana was one of them; “Newlywed” was her entry.

Here’s a random coincidence: a few weeks ago I was in my local used book maze, Smith Family, and happened to be looking through their exceedingly random selection of Japanese-language books (basically whatever exchange students bring over from Japan and don’t want to take back), and lo, there was a copy of the Shinchô paperback collection of stories from this campaign, Nakazuri shôsetsu 中吊り小説. What’s cute about this is that it retains the format of the stories as they were displayed on the ads (I can remember seeing some of these on trains – that’s how old I am), complete with illustrations. What’s cool about that is that it ends up preserving the installment divisions within each story – each installment had to fit on one sheet of paper, so it was really short.

Banana’s, for example, ends up being 16 pages as reprinted in Tokage (18 in the translation), but that was stretched out over 10 numbered installments (weekly, I think) in the train ads. Those divisions are eliminated in the story as reprinted Tokage, and as translated in Lizard, and maybe they’re not important – but maybe they are. In any case, it’s interesting to think about, in terms of structure: that’s 9 mini-cliffhangers in one short story. Did Banana think about this while writing it? Did that influence the way she told the story?

What’s “Newlywed” about? It’s about a strange encounter on a train: a newlywed man on his way home from work misses his stop, intentionally, and then encounters a strange, shape-shifting spirit that rides the train observing the people. First it appears as a homeless old guy, then as an alluring woman; in the latter guise it converses with him and helps him work through his anxiety issues over his marriage. Okay, not the most interesting story – but appropriate, surely, for the venue. Cute.

The first three stories in the volume are told from a male perspective. That’s interesting. I’m not sure what else to say about it at this point, though, because I don’t see her making much of an effort to simulate a male voice – no boku or ore here. Maybe that’s interesting in itself, I don’t know. But it is unexpected to get halfway through the book before you encounter the kind of young, female narrator that Banana is known for.

And even when you get female narrators they’re not quite the college girls that she started out with. They’re married, or on the verge of marriage; not mothers, not quite housewives, but women at a slightly more advanced stage of life than the girls in Kitchen and Tsugumi. I guess Banana’s characters are aging along with her (and, presumably, her initial audience).

I have some of the same reservations about this that I did about N/P: I’m not sure the emotional intensity her narrators claim is earned by the events the author depicts. Banana’s method, I think is to have each of her stories work up to some kind of epiphany, which the narrators not only experience but explain to us. But often, to me, it all feels a bit glib – the life-lessons learned seem a bit facile, the emotional intensity a bit too out-of-the-blue. In her best stories, these contrived epiphanies are attributed to characters whose youthfulness allows me, as a reader, to write off their unbelievability as a function of the character, not a deficiency in the writer; and they’re embedded in narratives that provide other pleasures. N/P didn’t give me any of that, and these stories don’t give me much. …That may be my problem, not Banana’s. But there it is.

The last story, “A Strange Tale from Down by the River” 大川端奇譚 sounds like it should be inspired by Nagai Kafû (and I half suspect it was), but in her afterword she claims it was inspired by British punk band The Tights. Lately I’ve started to assume, without much justification I guess, that Banana’s “all I read are manga and punk lyrics” deal is mostly a pose; I find that her career makes just as much and perhaps more sense if we think of her as a canny self-presenter perfectly aware of the po-mo concepts she’s trying to embody. But I could be wrong.

In any case, this is the most interesting story in the book. It’s told by a young woman who spent her early twenties as a sexual adventuress, doing anything and everything she could think of with anybody she could; a (non-sex-related) illness took her out of the game, and now she’s settling down with a guy. Partly the story is about the past coming back to haunt one – in some ways predictably (yes, there’s an envelope with some photos) and in some ways not so much (no, her guy doesn’t particularly care) – and in this respect the story benefits from some uncharacteristically careful positioning in the immediate post-Bubble adult world. That is, in a period in which everybody is trying to forget the excesses of a few years before, so is this character.

But the story is also about finding one’s place in the world, a place that is perhaps destined to be related to things deep inside oneself that one has no memory of – gawd, that sounds like a Yoshimoto Banana sentence. Here’s the deal: she falls in love with her fiancé as much for his apartment as for his personality: he has a great view of a river out his window. Much later she learns that her mother dropped her into a river when she was a newborn, and that her father rescued her. So on a subconscious level we’re meant to see that her attraction to the river as an adult was dictated by events in her childhood, and that in the present it represents a kind of thanatos. I’m not saying it’s handled all that elegantly, but it’s there. And it’s at least a little more developed than most of her themes.

Yoshimoto Banana: Tsugumi (1989)

In English the title of this book has been rendered Goodbye Tsugumi. The “Goodbye” has no basis in the original title; presumably it’s been added to tip the reader of the English off to the fact that “Tsugumi” is a person’s name. In Japanese the title is simply Tsugumi – actually TUGUMI, in Japanese school romanization, which in standard romanization would be Tsugumi.

It was serialized in the now-defunct Japanese edition of Marie Claire in 1988 and 1989 before being published as a hardcover in 1989. Mrs. Sgt. T suggests that this is important: we should it expect it to be a light, youth-oriented love story. And indeed it is, sort of. It’s a classic seishun story – it hits hard the themes of youth passing away, fleeting summer as a symbol of youth passing away, love and loss as rites of the passage-away of youth, and the picturesquely dilapidated beach towns in which these stories always seem to take place. It’s a great example of the genre.

And it might be the best novel of Yoshimoto’s I’ve read so far. That is, it displays a novelistic craft I hadn’t suspected she possessed: rounded, varied characters (not just the narrator); interesting story, tightly told; vivid evocation of place and season; and a pleasing tone, ranging from bittersweet comedy to tragedy narrowly averted.

The narrator’s name is Maria – she was, she says, named after the Virgin – and she’s the daughter of a woman whose lover is a married man in Tokyo. Maria and her mother live in an unnamed beach resort town, with her mother’s sister, whose family runs a ryokan. Maria’s mother helps out, and lives for the day when her lover (Maria’s father) will divorce his wife and marry her.

You think that’ll never happen, but this isn’t that kind of cynical love story: in fact, it happens early on, and they move to Tokyo. That’s what sets up the action: right after moving to Tokyo they get news that the sister’s family is selling the ryokan and moving out of the beach town to run a B&B in the mountains, so Maria goes back to spend one last idyllic summer at the ryokan. She’s 19 and just finished her first year in college: cue nostalgia.

Maria has two cousins roughly her age, living in the ryokan: Yôko, a year older than her, and Tsugumi, a year younger. Tsugumi is a problem child: physically weak since infancy, plagued with a number of unnamed, vaguely described ailments – in this she seems, no doubt on purpose, like a character from a 19th century novel, and you’d be justified in suspecting that she’s Not Long For This World. (But you’d be wrong: it’s not that kind of book.)

Tsugumi’s weak, all but an invalid; she’s also (as is the way of these things) startlingly, ethereally beautiful; she’s also (and this is where the comedy comes in) a bratty, bitchy pain in the ass. Tsugumi compensates for her physical helplessness by verbally abusing everybody around her. But they all love her anyway – Maria and Yoko and the rest of the bunch know the score, and are never seriously hurt by Tsugumi’s excoriations. That’s the kind of book it is.

So, during this final summer Tsugumi falls in love with a young man named Kyôichi, the scion of the family that’s building the big modern hotel in town that’s displacing the ryokan business and driving Tsugumi’s family out of town. So there’s some classic rivalry potential here, but it’s really soft-pedaled in favor of the cute love story. Tsugumi doesn’t spare Kyôichi her shrewish tongue (not that the story is about the taming of her), but he quickly becomes devoted to her.

Part of the charm of the story is that because it’s narrated by a third character, we don’t get an inside view of Tsugumi and Kyôichi’s courtship: Maria is present for some of it, but not all of it. The actual nature and development of their love is a mystery, as love always is. This is nicely handled.

Along the way there’s some business with some neighborhood bullies and Kyôichi’s dog, and Tsugumi’s revenge (digging a pit to trap a bully in – and the discourse on the pit and Tsugumi’s feelings while digging it seems to resonate with some other famous pits in modern J-lit, such as Ôe’s in The Silent Cry and Murakami Haruki’s in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – discuss). This, too, is nicely handled: it’s a fictional device, well deployed to reveal character and move the plot along. Precisely the kind of craft that, I confess, I don’t always look for in serious literature, particularly in Japanese, and precisely where the Marie Claire audience-expectations influence may come in.

In other words, I’m prepared to theorize that writing for Marie Claire allowed Yoshimoto to give herself license to write something that employs genre formula (romantic comedy, seishun story) more thoroughly than is usual for her. And as far as I’m concerned it was good for her. This is a much more satisfying book than N/P. It’s less original, less experimental – but I’m not sure it’s less deep, because I’m not sure that N/P had any depths.

It’s a great read. And translator Michael Emmerich, who took over the Banana desk in 2000, deserves a shout-out: this reads better in English than any Banana I’ve yet looked at. It’s accurate, but more than that (Sherif is accurate too) it has a sense of style. I particularly like his creative solutions to the problem of how to make Tsugumi’s speech sound suitably rude, given that rudeness in Japanese consists of very different things than rudeness in English.

Yoshimoto Banana: NP (1990)

This was published in Japanese in 1990 (as, don't forget the dot, N・P), and here in an English translation by Ann Sherif in 1994 (as NP, no dot*).

Evidently this book is unusually popular in Japanese – in an interview somewhere Banana talks about people who are fans of just this book, nothing else. I’m not sure I get that.

I’m not sure I get this book. It’s narrated by Kazami, a young woman whose dead boyfriend Shôji had been translating a book of short stories called N.P. by a Japanese-born US-based writer named Takase. The book had 97 stories in it, but there was manuscript for a 98th that Shôji had obtained. Shôji killed himself while translating it. Takase himself committed suicide.

The narrator invokes the old tradition of “100 stories” ghost-story telling, suggesting that if all the stories connected with NP were gathered they’d add up to 100. And in fact, not only is there a 98th, but there are hints at a 99th. Which leaves the reader wondering: where’s the 100th? Of course you’re holding it in your hands, right? The implication (of giving the real-world book the title of the book-within-the-book, among other things) is that Banana’s NP is the 100th story in Takase’s.

The 98th concerns a writer who meets his adult daughter without realizing they’re related (he was estranged from her mother long ago), falls in love with her, has sex with her, and only then realizes their relationship. And in fact that’s what happened in real life, too: Takase fell unwittingly into an incestuous relationship with his daughter Sui, kept it up after realizing who she was, and ultimately killed himself.

He left behind not only Sui, but her half-siblings Otohiko and Saki. And, wouldn’t you know it, Otohiko also has an incestuous relationship with Sui. A few years after Shoji’s death, in the present of the narration, Kazami enters the orbit of the three Takase kids, becoming in different ways best friends with all of them.

There are the makings here of a nice literary mystery or literary ghost story (by that I don’t mean a mystery or ghost story that happens to be literature, but one that takes literature and literariness as its subtext)(it’s a thing). But Banana downplays those aspects of the story, instead playing up the romance of it. Which, okay, I find quite icky. Maybe that’s why I could never connect with this book.

I don’t think it goes much of anywhere, is the problem. It’s a lot of loosely connected scenes, set-pieces, rather than a plot-driven thing – which is fine for romances, but then why introduce the notes of horror and mystery, which tend to demand resolution, which this book refuses? I dunno. Nor do I find that Banana really does too much with the intriguing questions raised by the idea of translating into Japanese the English-language writings of a Japanese-born, Japanese-speaking author. She nods in that direction, but there's a lot more to be explored there, I feel.

Masao Miyoshi wrote (in Off Center) that he thought he had read everything of Banana’s, but he couldn’t be sure because none of them made the slightest impression. I’ve always thought that was one of the cattier things ever said about an author, but lo and behold, when I sat down to read this a few weeks ago I found all sorts of marginal notes made by myself. And I don’t know when I made them, because I don’t remember having read this book before. And in another ten years, I probably won’t remember having read it now. (Thus, the blog.)

*How would one render the dot in English? It's usually used in Japanese (where it's called the nakaguro) to separate loanwords written in katakana. There are no word breaks in Japanese sentences, but editors figure readers need some indication of word breaks when dealing with foreign words, so, voila, the dot. It's explained very early in the novel that NP, the book-within-a-book title, stands for "North Point." Which in Japanese takes a dot when spelled out; it doesn't necessarily need one when reduced to initials, but, cutely, it's retained here. It makes sense to drop it in translation, but still the translator in me would like to have seen something done with it. N.P. maybe? Or why not get real provacative (which the presence of that dot in the Japanese, between those initials, I think is) and try the Barthesy N/P?

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011)

(I used to be a big Woody Allen fan. I was trying to see all his films, and I think I got about halfway there. Then about ten years ago I just lost interest. It wasn't the Soon-Yi Previn business. And it wasn't any particular film that turned me off; I just got tired of him, I guess. That, and Mrs. Sgt T really doesn't like his films, so we almost never watched them together.

We went to see his new one, Midnight in Paris, last night with a friend. The friend, too, isn't a real Woody Allen fan, but is professionally interested in the whole '20s Paris milieu that the film recreates; the Mrs. and I are good little intellectuals, and are at least passingly familiar with the figures that populate it.

Which is to say that we weren't going to see it because it's a Woody Allen film, but perhaps in spite of it being one. I was, though, quite curious to see what he was up to these days, because I know I've missed a few quite acclaimed films from him.

It was at first comforting to find that nothing has really changed. Same typeface for the credits, same Sidney Bechet-heavy soundtrack, same loving picture-postcard establishing shots of a Great City [now it's Paris, because Allen's in his Americans-don't-appreciate-me-but-Europeans-do phase]. Same trick of having his leading man do his best Woody Allen impression [I think I was the only person in the world who thought that was genius and not schtick when he had Kenneth Branagh do it in Celebrity - but with Owen Wilson it's clearly schtick, and that means it might have been that with Branagh, too].

Some of the less salubrious things have remained unchanged, too, and I surprised myself by being bothered by them. He still insists on showing his purportedly lovably leading man being tormented by a lover who is nothing but a castrating mother-figure who doesn't get him and insists that he grow up. At 75, Allen's still obsessed with this? At 75, he still thinks about women that way? Good God.

And that same autodidact's hostility toward accredited academics. I thought that was hilarious and dead-on when he did it with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, but again: at 75, he still feels the need to caricature as pompous people who have decided to make a career out of studying and teaching things that Allen himself clearly loves and makes far more money out of addressing than they ever will? Like, what does Allen have to fear from any professor anywhere?

But in spite of all that, I enjoyed every frame of the film, and it almost convinces me I need to finish my old project of seeing all of his films. Because)

The scenes of this movie that take the protagonist (splrlrt) back to 1920s Paris are some of the most delightful I've seen on screen in years. We were snorting with laughter watching Adrian Brody do Dali, and Corey Stoll do Hemingway. The evocations of the period were perfect, and the realizations of all these larger-than-life figures were amazing. Sure they were flattering to the audience who knows who these people were (there were a couple I hadn't heard of), but even with your guard up you don't really feel like you're being pandered to, because Allen himself so clearly loves this milieu.

And it's that that fuels the movie, at least in these scenes. The comic timing and writing is marvelous - a reminder of Allen's true gifts, is I guess what I'm supposed to write at this point. But it's really his insider's understanding of the power of nostalgia that this movie captures - and nostalgia isn't really a strong enough word for it. Like R. Crumb, Allen has built an entire worldview out of the sense that the present day world is not his home. Those of us who share that feeling can sense in Allen a guy who gets it. What does 2011 have to offer that can compete with a Sidney Bechet solo, a Fitzgerald sentence, Dali's mustache?

That's why I don't buy the ending of this movie. Gil doesn't wise up and choose the present day world anymore than Marky Mark chooses Estella Warren over Helena B-C in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. Odd comparison, I know, but in both cases you have directors ending their movies by basically lying through their teeth.

Yoshimoto Banana: Kitchen (1988)

I've read this book any number of times, in both the original and English translation; I've even taught it a couple of times, and that's what brought me back to it this time. In my mid-20s I went through a bit of a Yoshimoto phase, but got burned out on her. But every time I come back to Kitchen, I'm surprised by how well it holds up for me, and so this summer I'm giving her another chance.

So: Kitchen (Jp. Kitchin キッチン), by Yoshimoto Banana 吉本ばなな (now よしもとばなな). Contrary to how it may appear in English, this book contains three short stories, all written in 1987.

Yoshimoto's first published short story comes last in the book: "Moonlight Shadow" (Mûnraito shadô ムーンライト・シャドウ). It's the typical o-make story, and in true o-make fashion it almost overshadows (no pun intended) the feature: it's an admitted (the story makes it explicit) retelling of the Tanabata legend, wherein the young narrator meets the spirit of her dead lover with a river running between them. With its longing for the dead, its playful invocation of alternative sexualities, and its tone of (almost) self-consciously earnest young love, it's a concentrated dose of what "Kitchen" the novella offers at somewhat greater length. It's quite nice."

Kitchen" itself is a novella, but only in an after-the-fact sort of way, and I really wish the English translation had made this clear. So here's the deal: "Moonlight Shadow" won her a college literary prize at Nihon Daigaku in 1987; it was her first work of fiction (I believe). Later that year she wrote "Kitchen" (what is now the first half of the novella) and it won the Kaien 海燕 New Writers' Prize, and was published in the magazine of that name. In January 1988 the book Kitchen was published, including "Moonlight Shadow" and "Kitchen" and adding "Full Moon - Kitchen 2" (Mangetsu - Kicchin 2 満月ーキッチン２), which was simultaneously published in the February issue of Kaien. If you look at the table of contents of the Japanese version of the book, you'll see that "Kitchen," "Full Moon - Kitchen 2," and "Moonlight Shadow" are all listed as if they're separate stories - because they are. In the English TOC, what you see listed is just "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow."

I go into this detail because I've always liked the structure of Kitchen the novella, and I think in that regard it's worth asking if it is indeed a novella at all, or just two short stories. A short story and its sequel, is how they were originally published, see.

And in a way, of course, they read like that. "Kitchen" proper is almost more of a zuihitsu than a narrative - it's very essayistic, with the narrator constantly interrupting the flow of the story to muse on her feelings and the nature of Love, Loss, and Life. Meanwhile, "Full Moon" is very much a story, one damn thing after another, as they say, working toward a climactic scene with an emotional payoff.

In sum, they're very different animals. They work on different logics. And either one would probably be quite effective on its own - "Kitchen" as a semi-abstract musing upon its themes, and "Full Moon" as a great little piece of rom-com lit. But, they can never really be experienced on their own now, because they're yoked together in the same book - and especially in English, where they're presented as one novella, and "Full Moon" isn't even mentioned separately on the TOC.

Which is actually fine by me, because I've always felt that as two halves of one novella they work splendidly - the shift in mode creates a wonderful contrast between them, a yin-yang, stillness-motion, loss-love kind of dialectic, intensifying the romantic payoff of the whole thing. I just wish the English edition had made it clear what was going on, so readers could think about this...

I've always liked Kitchen. It was one of the first Japanese books I ever read in translation, and one of the first that I tried reading in the original, too. In fact, in my early 20s, which is when it appeared in translation, I went through quite a Yoshimoto Banana phase, feeling in this book at least a kindred spirit. It's that brash, unquenchable volubility of the literary soul in its early 20s, when it's feeling that it's starting to really get Life, hard knocks and soft landings and all, and when it's still young enough to think that the insights you have in your early 20s can't help but be valid for everybody at all times, places, and stages of life...

It wasn't long, of course, before I burned out on Yoshimoto. It was Amrita that did it. But, as I say, I've had occasion to return to Kitchen several times since then, and it always does it for me. It did it again this time. We'll see if her others do.

Other notes:

I love the covers that this has been issued under in English. The first copy I bought was the British edition, from Faber and Faber, and it was a prize piece of Orientalism, with the sexy back-neck shot of the geisha... The American edition from Grove/Atlantic is better, although it still sees fit to put a cute chick on the front. I always wonder how many people think that's Banana on the cover (it's not, right?). I think the meaning of the cute chick is a little different - the UK edition was emphasizing the exotic and the erotic. The US edition is going for a girl-next-door idea - if the girl next door is Japanese. And let's not forget that this was appearing in an age when Asian-American lit, particularly by women, was really becoming established. Was Grove hoping to position this right alongside Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Cynthia Kadohata? Did it work?

Translation. This was translated by Megan Backus, and what the hell, I'll talk a little about it. On the plus side, I think she does a good job of catching Banana's voice. On the minus side, there are some accuracy issues. On p. 6, for example, she writes, "I couldn't take my eyes off him. I think I heard a spirit call my name." In the original this is "目が離せなかった。ふいに名を呼ばれたせいもあると思う." No spirit: she's saying "I couldn't take my eyes off him - I think partly because he called my name all of a sudden." Which, indeed, he has - in the original (in the translation the direct address is just rendered as "you").

Here's the error: if written 精, the word could be "spirit," but as is, written せい, and especially in this grammatical context, it's undoubtedly "reason, cause, fault." It's a pity, because I like the image of an imaginary spirit calling her name, even if it is an artifact of the translation: it kind of fits the emotionally supercharged nature of the narration. But it's an error. It's not the only one.

Last thoughts on the Moody Blues

I got in a cab the other night, here in the 'Gene, and inside it was like a time warp. It was an old Lincoln, I think, with red leather interior, and the driver, a shaggy guy in his '50s, was playing an honest-to-god cassette. It was the Moody Blues - '80s Moodies. The stuff I grew up listening to, before I discovered their first-run stuff: "The Voice," "Gemini Dream," "Sitting At The Wheel." The band played here a few weeks ago - I skipped them out of lack of interest; the cabby skipped them out of lack of money, he said. We talked about the band for a while, and it was apparent he wasn't a sick music geek - he didn't know that the band today only includes three of the guys who were in it in its prime. He was just somebody who loved that tape, hiss and all, and had done for twenty years or more.

There are a lot of hippies in Eugene. Young ones, too, but in particular lots of aging, or aged, hippies. Sometimes it disconcerts me how much I feel at home here: like in that guy's cab, humming along to "Blue World."

I don't know how my wife can stand me sometimes.

*

So, the Moody Blues were basically an album band, and so I've only been looking at their original studio albums. But they had a few significant non-album tracks, and a couple of live things worth mentioning.

Live work: The Moody Blues got in on the archival thing early. In preparation for their 1978 comeback they released a double-lp called Caught Live + 5. Wrapped in a Hipgnosis cover so that it looked more like a Pink Floyd record than a Moodies disc, it contained three sides of the band live at the Royal Albert Hall on 12/12/69, plus a fourth side of stray studio tracks.

The concert is taken from the Children's Children's tour, but the only song from that record they perform is the opener, "Gypsy." The rest is from their first three records; a nice cross-section of their work up to that point.

Unfortunately, the sound quality isn't very good, and the performance is dicey. The Mellotron is out of tune for much of it, as was wont to happen to those beasts; worse, the singing goes in and out of tune. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to approximate their studio discs' pristine harmonies in the chaos of a live setting; nevertheless, it makes for a less than stellar listening experience. It's interesting to hear how much of their records they could and couldn't pull off live, and some of the songs gain a certain transformative energy (I find "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume" actually listenable here - it turns into a psychedelic hoedown).

But overall it's strictly for the faithful. So much so that I haven't even bothered to hear the other complete live disc they've released, from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Nor have I picked up the obligatory BBC Sessions disc; a few of these sessions are on the 2008 remasters I have, and they don't really interest me.

What do interest me are the small cache of non-album studio tracks the band has released over the years. Not alternate takes, but actual songs that slipped through the cracks. The Moody Blues, like most of their peers in psychedelic/serious pop/prog, approached their music in the album unit, but (like more than a few of their peers) might have done better to think in terms of singles. The ur-Moodies were a singles band, and even in their prime the Moodies were seldom truly consistent across a whole album; meanwhile, isolated cuts could always deliver.

Thus it's not at all surprising to find that, before embarking on Days Of Future Passed, they cut a couple of singles as calling cards, and that these were left off the album. They're on the remastered version, and they're a big reason why it's worth picking that up, even if you already have the record.

The first single was "Fly Me High" c/w "I Really Haven't Got The Time," released in May 1967. The a-side, a Hayward number, is key, if you care about this band: it's the real missing link between the old beat group and the new symphonic-pop outfit. The entire rhythmic underpinning - tambourine, funky piano, bluesy acoustic-guitar fills - is very 1966 London r&b. But the vocals - not just the harmonies on the refrain but the soaring "ahs" in the middle section and the outro - are classic Moody Blues. Very nice. The b-side is by Pinder, and it's, well, a b-side. Very vaudeville-y. Best forgotten.

The second single, released in September 1967, was Pinder's "Love And Beauty" c/w Hayward's "Leave This Man Alone." The a-side introduces the mellotron, and the band's trademark moodiness; it's not half bad, but not as immediately winning as the first a-side. Plus, it has way too much bad echo. Sounds like it was recorded in an empty ice rink. The b-side is Hayward at his most agressive - not saying much, I know, but this is almost a garage-rock track, despite the harmonies.

The band's third single was "Nights In White Satin," and we know how that goes. The b-side was a non-album track, though, and it also shows up on the remaster. "Cities," it's called, and it's another Hayward number. It's a product of the sessions for the second single, though, and sounds like it; the distance between what they could do in June and what they learned to do during the Days sessions is considerable. This is why I love hearing obscure tracks by bands I like.

Two more tracks have emerged from those summer '67 sessions: Hayward's "Long Summer Days" and Pinder's "Please Think About It." Both were among the studio tracks on the fourth side of Caught Live + 5. They're striking in that both sound a great deal like prime-era Moodys, but they were passed over for the single. They sound ahead of their time, in other words.

The other big concentration of non-album tracks is associated with their second album. In early '68 they recorded the three tracks that fill out Caught Live + 5: Hayward's "What Am I Doing Here" and "King And Queen" and Lodge's "Gimme A Little Somethin'." The liner notes to the remastered In Search Of The Lost Chord imply that these were the first sessions for that album, and maybe they were, but according to the dates in those notes, it seems more likely that the album sessions proper didn't start until later in the spring, and that the January and February sessions that resulted in these three tracks were meant to produce an interim non-album single, as was still the practice in England at that time. It didn't happen, but at least one of these tracks is worthy.

"King And Queen" is probably a little close in feel (not to mention lyrical subject matter) to "Nights In White Satin" to have been acceptable, but "What Am I Doing Here" is brilliant, better than a half-dozen album cuts I could think of right off hand. It's an anti-war number, about a dead soldier - even though it's couched in fairy-tale terms, the relevance to 1968 is unmistakeable, and it gives Hayward's trademark melancholy some heft for a change. The lyric is married to one of his best melodies, and some excellent playing - Edge's drumwork is fantastically sensitive, lending of urgency and tension at just the right moments, and Pinder makes his mellotron outmuscle any orchestra.

That should have been an a-side, and the b-side could have been "Gimme A Little Something." Hayward sings it, but it has a poppy sunniness that marks it as Lodge's - it's really a nifty number, with a catchy little piano-flute riff underpinning the verse.

The last time they'd do any studio sessions not directly related to an album project was at the end of 1968, months after the release of In Search Of. A session in October produced Pinder's "A Simple Game," which, all hyperbole aside, belongs on any short list of the Moody Blues' best songs. It appeared on the flip side of the "Ride My See-Saw" single, but it deserved better. It would have overpowered any of their albums, though: in one cut it concentrates all the epic emotion of their best work and weds it to the always-lurking r&b sensibilities they had once traded on. It's easily Pinder's best song.

Once they got going, the Moody Blues don't seem to have generated much in the way of unused material. Very few outtakes - at least, the remasters only include a grand total of three unused songs for the band's last five albums. A Question Of Balance didn't include (but now does) Pinder's "Mike's Number One," while Every Good Boy Deserves Favour gave (and now gives) the same treatment to the Hayward/Thomas composition "The Dreamer." Both deserved their fates.

Far more interesting is the song "Island," which graces the Seventh Sojourn remaster. It's not an outtake from that album; rather, it is (the notes say) the only finished product of an early-1973 attempt at recording another album with the classic lineup. It's unclear why they didn't go any farther; they kept touring together with this lineup until early 1974. And "Island" is a strong number. It doesn't break anything even resembling new ground - it's a standard Hayward sigh-fest. But it's quite nice, with its Chamberlin polish and harpsichord touches.

What's so intriguing about it is that the chord progression under the refrain is a quote from the James Bond theme. Uncredited, but unmissable. And, Bond aficionado that I am, I can't help but wonder: was this an attempt to actually record a theme song for a Bond movie? In early 1973, that would have been Live And Let Die - which, let's not forget, was the first 007 to sport a theme song by a rock artist. And which, let's also recall, was set in part on an island...

It's not as far-fetched as it may sound. We know that through the years the Bond producers have commissioned theme-song candidates from multiple artists: Dionne Warwick famously recorded one for Thunderball that was never used, and it seems more than likely that the Pretenders songs buried beneath the action in The Living Daylights were written with a more prominent placement in mind.

And the Moody Blues might well have seemed, to some producers older than the rock generation, to be the "acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff" (as REM once described themselves) - their symphonic polish, their undeniable pop songcraft, and their lack of interest in the more in-your-face elements of the counterculture may have made them look like good candidates for Bond's rapprochement with the music he once disparaged.

Anyway, I'd like to think so. It makes my interest in the Moody Blues slightly less indefensible. (Alright, it really doesn't. Two dweebs don't make a hipster.)

Taguchi Randy, Enkiri jinja (2001)

One more by Taguchi: Enkiri jinja 縁切り神社 ("Breakup Shrine," maybe?). Also 2001, also from Gentôsha.

This is a book of 12 short stories, a paperback original from Gentôsha. The stories were first published in “Webmagazine Gentôsha” Vol. 1-12 (dates unspecified in the book, but still available on Gentosha’s website: March through September 2000, every two weeks). The series title there was “Watashi to anata o tsunagu mono” (What connects me and you).

Since Konsento was published in June 2000, that means these stories started to appear just before her official debut as a fiction writer. It seems pretty likely that the project was part of Gentôsha’s publicity push for her (I have to admit I wasn’t paying attention at the time, so I can’t say for sure).

The stories are all pretty short – ideal for an e-zine – and they all deal with love and/or sex. Relationships. In that hard-boiled, sexually explicit way that made Konsento leave such an impression. However they no more than barely hint at the occult obsessions that would inform that novel and dominate her next two.

Unsurprisingly, I find it the more satisfying because of that: the stories are grounded, limited to the here-and-now, the real. They’re concerned with exploring the jagged edges of contemporary relationships, from a defiantly female (if not always doctrinally feminist) point of view. She’s good at that: these are good stories. Not always great, but good.

The title story has the narrator (different narrator in each story) stumbling across a “Breakup Shrine” in Kyoto where people have written wishes on votive plaques and hung them up as offerings to the gods. Only, instead of the usual “let our love last forever” or “let Kôji-kun notice me,” these are praying for a love to end – “let Kôji-kun break up with Megumi” or whatever. That’s curious enough (and a characteristically tart reminder that love not infrequently involves ill-wishing and schadenfreude), but then the narrator finds a plaque with her name on it. Someone wanted her to break up with her boyfriend – and, coincidentally, she just has. The Twilight-Zone-esque discovery isn’t the point, though – it’s that her lover had someone who felt that strongly about the narrator, the “other woman.” Love’s complicated.

Other stories involve a woman who only sleeps with AIDS patients – and is bummed when one falls in love with her; a woman whose married lover’s wife dies, and she (the narrator) decides to go the funeral, to see what her lover looks like mourning; a woman who gets back together with an old boyfriend and is embarrassed by how sexually experienced she’s become in the meantime, and how dull she now finds him in bed.

I’m not sure quite where I’d place these in the pantheon. Her frank and liberated way of dealing with sex is not new in the history of J-lit – lots of women writers were doing this in the ‘60s and ‘70s (Setouchi Jakuchô, Tomioka Taeko, even Enchi Fumiko come to mind). But they tended to be Serious Writers, writing for Serious Readers – a minority then and now, and what’s more an audience that, one can assume, was more receptive to the idea of the sexually liberated woman than society as a whole might have been. That Taguchi is writing like this in 2000 might not be new; that she was doing it for a mass audience might have been. Although she certainly wasn’t alone.