Yoshimoto Banana: There Is No Lid on the Sea (2003-2004)

This was serialized in the Yomiuri Shinbun in weekly installments from November 2003 to May 2004 as Umi no futa 海のふた, and the translation was serialized simultaneously in their English-language version, The Daily Yomiuri.  That’s a neat idea;  I don’t know if it’s ever been done before.  I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of the newspaper novel, which I always read about in the context of Sōseki and other early writers, but we don’t have such a thing in my country, and so all I could do was imagine what it would be like to read one.  If you decide to hunt down microfilms of the Daily Yomiuri for 2003 and 2004, you can have that experience.  And since, surprisingly, Emmerich’s translation has never come out in book form, and (even more surprisingly) doesn’t seem to be floating around the web, that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to read this in English. 

It’s worth doing, if you can.  Not only is this in the top tier of her translated works, but it’s kind of fun to see the story unfolding in these regular, dated installments (with breaks that don’t always correspond to where she breaks the story in the Japanese book edition), surrounded by ads (some of which have an interesting accidental resonance with the story), and with all the illustrations intact.  Each installment came with a woodcut by NakaBokunen 名嘉睦稔 (unfortunately, microfilm reduces these to murky black and white – to see them in color you have to track down the Japanese original) – beautiful things, even if Bokunen seems to have swallowed Munakata Shikō’s style whole.

It’s about a girl named Mari who, fresh out of college in Tokyo, moves back to her small hometown in Izu and opens a snow-cone shop.  The town is dying, just like the coral in the sea, and Mari wants to do her tiny part to revitalize it.  Of course Banana is drawing a parallel here between economic decay and environmental, and it hits home, if you’ve ever been to one of these disintegrating beach towns.  On that level, too, the story works as an updating of Tsugumi, revisiting the beach-resort milieu twenty years on.

The other character is Hajime, a girl Mari’s age who comes to stay with Mari’s family for the summer (their mothers are friends).  Hajime’s grandmother, to whom she was very close, just died, and Hajime is here to both deal with her grief and escape the family debates about how to carve up her grandmother’s considerable estate.  Hajime also has terrible burns over half her face.  Here, too, there’s a parallel with Tsugumi:  here the disfigurement is physical rather than emotional. 

There’s very little plot, even for Banana.  Somewhat self-consciously, the novel takes the form of the quintessential Japanese summer coming-of-age story.  Lots of swimming, eating snow cones, walking on the beach, staring at sunsets, and thinking nostalgic thoughts.  No romance, though:  very late in the story a couple of boys are introduced, but they can’t hope to compete with the tight relationship Mari has with Hajime.  In fact in one passage the two of them agree that Mari is the man and Hajime is the woman in their relationship – emotionally, although not physically, they’re presented as a couple, and there’s a lot more dwelling on essentialized gender roles than usual here.

Partly that’s because Banana is intent here on creating an elemental world, in evoking Izu as a sort of Age of the Gods primeval paradise, on the edge of extinction, and in painting Hajime and Mari as unconscious shamanesses channeling this paradise.  It’s not as explicitly magical as Taguchi Randy’s work by any means, or even as Banana’s own Hardboiled and Hard Luck, but there’s definitely an overtone of worship here (enhanced by Bokunen’s luminous prints – Munakata’s folk-religion style is quite appropriate here).  In the end Hajime even goes into business making seashell fetishes – she’s starting her own religion, even if she doesn’t realize it.

The problem for me with this story is the nostalgia.  As in her other work from this period, Banana has settled on employing narrators/p.o.v. characters who are the age she was when she first started writing and found an audience of people her age.  Her experiment in letting her characters age with her and her initial audience seems to have ended, and she now (okay, this is ten years old:  but still) seems to be writing for girls, as a girl.  But Mari’s nostalgia is patently that of a 40-year-old, not a 22-year-old.  She describes events of her childhood with far too much distance – and far too many details describing actual changes in the world – for these things to have happened a mere seven or eight years ago.  On the other hand they make perfect sense as the observations of an author remembering things from twenty-five or thirty years ago. 

Of course nostalgia has always been a central theme of Banana’s, but as better analysts than me have pointed out, when she was young it was nostalgia for things she hadn’t experienced, or things that she was experiencing in the moment;  either way it wasn’t true nostalgia, if you will, but rather the anticipation of nostalgia.  Feeling the present moment so intensely that you can imagine a moment twenty years from now when you’ll look back on this moment with nostalgia:  a kind of vision of the future as radiated from the present moment.

Now she’s old enough to experience real nostalgia – that is, to look back on her life and realize that things really have changed, that modern society is working its ravages on the world in ways that she can bear witness to, rather than just imagine.  And those feelings inform this book in a powerful way – it contains some of her most evocative writing.  But the book is weakened by insisting that we imagine these views as proceeding from these characters.  Banana’s got hold of some good stuff here, but she can’t let go her schtick long enough to figure out exactly what to do with it.

The Who: "Sea And Sand" and "Drowned"

So here's my problem with Quadrophenia.  It's exhausting to listen to, and not in a good way.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that Pete's early rock-opera writing had the virtues of the best pop music, in addition to all its other sterling qualities.  Townshend was always the British Invasion rocker with the deepest appreciation for the conceptual value of a good pop record - the deepest sense that the brevity, the directness, that the formula demanded and encouraged could be the royal road to great art.  And Tommy, for all its length and complexity, all its high-art pretensions, preserved that brevity and directness.  Each separate track is short and punchy.  None overstay their welcome:  they all say what they have to say clearly and concisely and then leave.  The result is a program that inexorably leads the listener on from one track to the next, from the beginning of the story right up to the brilliant end.  The last notes of one track always leave you hungry for more, making you yearn for the first notes of the next.  It's one way in which Tommy is great art. 

Another way of saying this is that Tommy is music of challenging and rewarding complexity, but that this complexity resides in the relationship of the parts to each other and in the overall concept of the work, not in the individual tracks, most of which are fairly straightforward pop songs. 

With the Lifehouse project, however, Pete changed the way he wrote.  He started bringing that complexity into each separate song, so that things like "Baba O'Riley" or "Song Is Over" move through several parts.  They're not typical pop songs.  They're mini-rock-operas, if you will - rather like "Rael," actually.  "Bargain" is my favorite example - it's such a ballsy rocker that you forget how many different moods it encompasses, but it's really a rather complicated song.  A far cry from "Pinball Wizard."

Of course, the Lifehouse project was never completely realized, but was boiled down to Who's Next instead.  And I've always thought that was a good thing.  Who's Next was an attempt to construct, out of the shards of the larger project, a more or less normal rock album, and it succeeds in spades:  the more convoluted material is balanced out by straightforward things like "Going Mobile" and "My Wife," allowing everything to shine.  Start putting the discarded tracks in there - many of which are pretty convoluted - and it begins to feel crowded.  I know:  like most Who fans, I've put together two or three versions of my ideal Lifehouse, and none of them are as effective as Who's Next.

What they sound like, in fact, is Quadrophenia.  A lot of really complex songs all jostling for attention.  The Side Three sequence of "Sea And Sand" and "Drowned" is a perfect example.  Each on its own is a magnificent number, full of creative permutations and orchestrations.  But each is a full-course meal, or an opera in its own right, including everything from overture to finale.  Finish one and you don't want another, not right away.  But Quadrophenia is full of them.  Which is why I can't listen to that record beginning to end.  It's full of brilliant music, but as a program it's too much.

House of Pleasures (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close)

We were in the mood for a movie and this was playing at the Bijou, so we saw it:  House of Pleasures is the title it was playing under here (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close is the original title).

Mrs. Sgt. T and I, discussing it on the way home, decided that it was about 60% a movie with serious artistic aims, and 40% the kind of softcore Europorn that an adolescent boy in the '80s would have stayed up late to try to catch on Cinemax. 

The 40% I won't bore you with - we're old enough and mature enough to take that for what it's worth, which isn't quite nothing.  The 60% is worth mentioning:  beautiful sets and art direction, fine acting and writing, and some quite effective formal experimentation.  Reviews all mention the use of late 20th century pop in the soundtrack, but it's much less intrusive here than in, say, a Baz Luhrmann film.  They also all mention the splitscreen photography - sometimes the screen is divided into quadrants - but what they don't mention is that this doesn't feel gimmicky at all, but rather quite effective in an almost documentary way, telescoping a lot of information about how this kind of business is run into a short time.

The Tanuki and his Mrs. can't be quite objective about this film, however, because both of us are specialists in traditional Japanese culture, with a particular interest in Edo pleasure district culture.  And it was astonishing how familiar the world of l'Apollonide felt to the world of the Yoshiwara.  Same kinds of financial arrangements between the girls and their owners, same kind of decorative and architectural strategies employed to make the interior of the brothel feel like a fantasy world, some of the same narrative tropes used to explore the world.  Not all:  the kind of jealousy that drives Sakuran, for instance, isn't really part of this film. 

Anyway, I know nothing at all about turn-of-the-century French brothel culture, so I have no idea if Bonello's film is true to it, or if he's adopting geisha stereotypes (he cleverly works in geisha imagery in one scene, but it's authentic enough to the great days of japonisme that I'm not sure if it means he's drawing a parallel, or just that his characters are).  But it worked.  And the fact that we've spent years working through our issues with this kind of milieu probably explains how easy it was for us to connect with the 60%, whereas many viewers might see only the 40%.

The Who: A Quick One (While He's Away)

So, another observation that was made the other day in that conversation about the Who is that their real heirs, the sector of rock where you can most see their influence, was prog, and since prog was very quickly discredited, there aren't as many musicians out there sticking up for the Who as you might expect.  This one I stand by.

That is, I don't think the Who's formal ambitions, their artistic aspirations, are necessarily the most satisfying thing about them, but I do think that they constitute the Who's most important legacy to 20th century music.  If you take rock seriously as music (rather than as a vehicle for street poetry or as a manifestation of social phenomena), it's because the Who did it first.

And some of their operatic stuff I do find incredibly satisfying.  Quadrophenia has some fatal flaws (maybe I'll write about them another time), but Tommy is everything it's cracked up to be (maybe I'll write about it another time, too).

But my favorites are their first two rock operas, neither of which is long enough to merit the name in retrospect, but each of which was billed as such at the time.  The first was "A Quick One (While He's Away)," and it's the more important of the two.  In fact I think it's one of the Who's most impressive songs of any persuasion, and quite the best integrated of their ambitious works.  At nine minutes it's not a second too long, taking the listener on a musical and lyrical journey in which each stage proceeds naturally but inventively from the last.  It's not just a medley of short bits (which is, be honest, what Tommy feels like much of the time), but a truly through-composed piece.  And it rocks.  And it has great jokes ("cello cello cello cello").  And, in true Who fashion, it's either as cheap and trashy ("we have a remedy," heh heh) or as spiritually deep as you want it to be (the ending must be one of the most grace-filled moments in popular song:  "you are forgiven").

The other is "Rael," which, at less than six minutes, really is too short to merit consideration in this category.  But it does move, if very quickly, through a number of movements, and it does tell a story in musical form.  And it does have that bittersweet ending, with the listener knowing the hero has been bitterly betrayed, with his contracted saviors deserting him, and wondering if it matters, if he needs saving, or not.

What's most fun about it, of course, is that it contains a passage that they'd later recycle and expand as "Underture" on Tommy.  It's probably more effective here, but that might just be because, if you come to "Rael" having familiarized yourself with the later work, you can't help but feel a thrill as that noble bassline wells up, as that guitar shakes its regal mane.

Having noted that, of course we have to mention the other musical bit of Tommy that shows up in those last few months before they made that album, which is in the song "Glow Girl."  The song itself doesn't have anything much to do with Tommy, but then the plane goes down and suddenly, "it's a girl, Mrs. Walker, it's a girl."  It gives me goosebumps every time.

The Who: "Daily Records" and other late masterpieces

So I was talking to some friends yesterday and said something about the Who that I don't really believe.  I said, apropos of a discussion we'd been having about artists who remain active past their prime, that the Who were one band who really should have hung it up after their classic lineup was no longer viable.  I.e., after Keith Moon bit it.

And I do believe that, I guess, but only with one big honking caveat.  Which is that I think their initial post-Moon run (as distinct from their many and endless later reunions, none of which I have any use for) had enough good and, more importantly, interesting music to make an argument that staying together was the right thing to do. 

I'm talking specifically here about the two post-Moon studio albums:  Face Dances and It's Hard.  Which, when taken together with Pete Townshend's two contemporary solo records, Empty Glass and All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, make a conceptual and musical whole that I find just as satisfying as any other period in the 'Oo's history. 

See, what happened was that Pete was hitting middle age right at the moment when Moon died.  The rise of punk and the death of Moon and the inevitable indignities that your body and mind visit upon you when you approach 40 all combined to give him, on the evidence of the lyrics at least, one hell of a righteous midlife crisis.  And he could still write, to paraphrase a lyric from "You Better You Bet," write a razor line - and, as the song says, Daltrey could still sing it, and Entwistle could still play it.  In other words, he still had most of one of the supplest rock bands in the world at his disposal.  So why not stay together, at least long enough to explore the crashing waves of self-doubt that would inevitably attend upon the decision to stay together?

In short I see the decision to stay together, but hedge his bets by releasing his two best (and most Who-ish) solo albums at the same time, as a decision (perhaps not realized at the time) to end the Who with some of the most intensely ironic gestures of their career.  Yes, the man who'd written "I hope I die before I get old" was now writing about getting old, and he appreciated the irony, thank you very much.  Again, I don't have much use for either Pete's or the erstwhile Who's later stuff, but not because they hung on too long:  I just think somehow that Pete lost it in the mid '80s.  But he still had it up through '82.

And so he gives us beautiful, bittersweet bombs like "Daily Records."  The musical setting alone should have shut up any detractors:  it was the Who at their cod-classical best, bomping and chirping in Gilbert and Sullivan drag.  Tight and silly and uplifting and muscly all at once:  classic Who, this is.  And the lyric:  a guy who still feels like he knows the score trying to cope with the fact that the younger generation, his own kids, think he's old-fashioned.  It's an immutable law of the world that once you pass 35, teenagers are going to think you're an old fogey, and this is true even if you're Pete fucking Townshend:  and you may know that they're just snotty teens and don't know their heads from their asses, but you also know (and they know) that it doesn't matter, because they're young, and so they win.  The end.  And so the best you can do is denounce them cleverly, elegantly, but in the end weakly, in song:  "When you are eleven, the whole world's out to lunch."  Brilliant line.  

And he gives us a more somber, introspective take on the same theme (of course part of the brilliant complexity of this last period of Who history is how Pete amps up the already well-established tension between his own lead vocals and Daltrey's, introspection versus extroversion, and stretches it out over whole albums set in dialogue against each other) in "Slit Skirts."  If the speaker in "Daily Records" or "You Better You Bet" was content to assert that he still had the goods, the speaker here is facing up to the dark truth that he doesn't:  "Slit skirts - Jeannie never wears those slit skirts / And I don't ever wear no ripped shirts / Can't pretend that growing older never hurts / Knee pants - Jeannie never wears no knee pants / We have to be so drunk to try a new dance / So afraid of every new romance."

Even the art is great.  Look at the cover of It's Hard.  Now remember that this is the band that built their careers on an album about pinball.  Now catch the look on Pete's face.

Happy New Year.

The Who: Live At Leeds

Everything good you've heard about Live At Leeds is true;  everything bad you've heard is a lie.  It's essential.

Essential, but oddly enough, I think pretty much any version would do.  I haven't sprung for the recent 4-disc Leeds'n'Hull binge, and I probably won't.  I never got the old 2-disc "complete" Leeds, either.  I find that the 1995 expanded 1-disc set is brilliant, but even then, the tracks I always go back to were (mostly) on the original vinyl.

And they're mostly the covers.  "Young Man Blues," which - if hard flexed cord-tight muscle had a sound, it would be it.  It's a perfect example of how the Who could punch you in the face harder than any metal or punk group could.  It's not about volume so much as it is about rhythm and attitude.  (Love the sonic ambiance on this record, too:  you can just feel the cavernous space of the hall, the draft coming in through the doors, the heat of the spotlights.)

And "Shakin' All Over," which proves that, well, maybe it is about volume as much as it is about rhythm and attitude, but only if volume is made not by turning the amps up to 10, but by pounding your instruments as hard as you can.  Like, Entwistle mashes his bass strings so hard that his notes have the percussive power of a piano.  His fingers are hammers. 

And throughout - to continue the muscle idea - the instrumentalists play with the suppleness and unity of a single limb, bones muscle and sinew all working together.  Not mechanically, but biologically - the Who's sound, live, was incredibly human.

Asabuki Mariko: KikoTowa

This is the book that shared the 144th A-Prize with Nishimura Kenta's Kueki ressha:  KikoTowa きことわ by Asabuki Mariko 朝吹真理子.  Why do I do this funny thing with the capitals in the romaji?  Because the book comes complete with its predetermined foreign-language title, in small print on the cover:  Kiko et Towa.  That is, the two main characters' names, Kiko and Towako, have been combined into one cutesy noun:  they are, collectively, KikoTowa.

That's never made explicit in the book, actually, but thematically that's certainly part of it:  Towako especially keeps having dreams or half-dreams in which she sees her hair and Kiko's merging into one, connecting them.  Symbolically the frontier between them is constantly threatening to dissolve, allowing their identities to merge.

So, the book is about two women who were friends as children, twenty-five years before.  Towako grew up and still lives in Hayama, a beach-town south of Tokyo known as a retreat for the wealthy;  Kiko's family owns a summer house there and used to visit every year.  Towako and Kiko were constant companions every summer, and then Kiko's mother died and they stopped visiting Hayama.  Now, 25 years on, Kiko comes back down to oversee the dismantling of the house - they're selling it.  Kiko and Towako are reunited and share their memories of childhood.

Is all that really happens in this book.  It's uneventful, to say the least.  Which is not in itself a damning circumstance:  there's a lot of potential there for poetic reveries on aging, on summer beach-resorts, on girlhood and womanhood.  And Asabuki tries - her language leaves me cold, but I can imagine how many others might find it evocative.

But somehow the whole thing falls flat for me.  Just now, writing what I did about the motif of identity-merging, and the setting, and Hayama (nice place:  I've been there), I felt a glimmer of interest.  Like, I might want to read that book.  But in fact I have read it, and it's... Well, it made me feel like I did when I was reading the last two Ishiguro books I read:  like maybe this whole literature thing just isn't for me.  Like maybe I don't even like books.

I think part of the problem might be that the thing just needed an editor.  It goes on far too long.  At 141 pages in hardback, it's on the long end for an A-Prize story, but more importantly I think that all the length makes problems out of what would have been non-issues, or even strengths, in a shorter work.  Nothing happens:  fine, this is J-lit, we expect that.  But it's easier to deal with nothing happening for 20 or 40 pages than for 140.  Dreamlike time-confusion, carefully constructed wispy poetical atmosphere, interplay between reminiscence and right-now:  all of this is easier to sustain in a short story than a novel.  And if the author is determined to draw this out over a longer work, than it needs (I think) some sort of deeper structure to hold it up - some kind of subtext (I didn't detect much in this book), or a variation in tone, some sort of darkness or tension or something.

Then again, I never got past the first 114 pages of Proust, either.