Category: contemporary literature

Twinkle Twinkle

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twinkle-twinkle

Title: Twinkle Twinkle
Japanese Title: きらきらひかる
Author: Ekuni Kaori (江国香織)
Translator: Emi Shimokawa
Publication Year: 2003 (America); 1991 (Japan)
Pages: 171

About thirty pages into Twinkle Twinkle, I thought to myself, “Are all contemporary Japanese books written by women this depressing?” It’s an interesting literary trend. In America, writers like Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, 2005) and Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees, 2004) craft literary paeans to female sisterhood, hope, and endurance, while contemporary Japanese female authors seem to be losing the struggle to gaman, or to deal with the hardships presented to them by Japanese society until they are able to claim some immaterial reward in the far-off future. In short, the new breed of Japanese women writers seems to be cracking under the strain of contemporary Japanese society, which has been slow to acknowledge new gender roles, even as the economic structures that have supported these gender roles have crumbled. Ekuni Kaori’s novel Twinkle Twinkle perspicuously demonstrates the effects of this societal paradox.

Twinkle Twinkle follows the fortunes of the newlywed couple Shoko and Mutsuki. Mutsuki is gay and quite in love with his boyfriend. Shoko is highly emotionally unstable and is quite open about the fact that she doesn’t want to be in a romantic relationship with anyone. Although the pair lives together, and although they are quite affectionate towards one another, their marriage is nothing more than a legal convenience. In fact, the only reason they agreed to marry in the first place was to escape from the pressure imposed upon them by their parents. Through the first months of their married life, Shoko and Mutsuki make friends and lose friends, battle their respective families, and learn how to live with one another in the strange situation they’ve created.

Because Shoko and Mutsuki take turns narrating the chapters, the reader is able to gain a very interesting perspective into their relationship and their individual personalities. I found myself becoming frustrated with the characters and sympathizing with them in turn. Mutsuki is kind, but passive and somewhat clueless. Shoko displays the classic symptoms of borderline personality disorder, which occasionally devolves into depression and alcoholism, but she is honest, true to her herself, and genuinely means well in her interactions with others. Both of the two main characters, as well as the cast of supporting characters, are expertly realized, and I felt that I came to know them quite well over the course of the novel, as if perhaps they were friends of mine in real life.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Yes, the characters occasionally have fun and enjoy each other’s company, but the challenges they face are quite real, extremely frustrating, and never entirely resolved. Although the novel has something of a happy ending, I found myself fearing for the fate Shoko and Mutsuki several years down the road. Also, I found it hard to accept Shoko’s extreme behavior at times, and the all too accurate portray of her emotional instability was difficult to deal with. The hardheadedness of her traditional Japanese parents was even worse.

Overall, though, I think Twinkle Twinkle provides a welcome antidote to the bubblegum fluff of shōjo manga, “light novels,” and the works of novelists like Yoshimoto Banana. Don’t let the bright cover of this book fool you – Ekuni’s novel contains more insight into the dark side of contemporary Japanese society than you may find comfortable.

Real World

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real-world3

Tile: Real World
Japanese Title: リアル ワールド (Riaru wārudo
Author: Kirino Natsuo (桐野夏生)
Translator: Philip Gabriel
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 2003 (Japan)
Pages: 208

Having already reviewed Rebecca Copeland’s translation of Grotesque, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and write an entry for Philip Gabriel’s new translation of Kirino Natsuo’s novel Real World. Real World is not as long or as grand of a story as Grotesque; and, as a result, it is much less intense. I would argue, however, that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Grotesque is extremely graphic and upsetting for hundreds of pages. Real World is about 250 pages shorter, less graphic, and less upsetting. That being said, it is an extraordinarily dark novel, and just as heartbreaking as Out and Grotesque.

Fans of fragmented narratives will appreciate the structure of Real World, which is divided into eight different chapters, each narrated by a different character. The characters in question are Worm, an underachieving student at an elite high school who “snaps” and murders his mother, and a group of four high school girls who help him run from the law. Of these five characters, Worm is the least interesting. Yuzan is a lesbian from the wrong side of the tracks who has tried to find love in Tokyo but failed, leaving her disillusioned with life. Kirarin is a perfect princess in school but leads a shady side life of compensated dating in Tokyo. Terauchi is smart kid with a bright future, but she has been deeply scarred by her mother’s extramarital affair. The “main” narrator, who narrates the first and last of the eight chapters, is Ninna Hori. Ninna is perhaps the most normal of the five, but she too is more than a little jaded with the social roles she is expected to fill, and her comments about herself and her friends are full of insight. She is also the only character left to pick up the pieces at the end of the novel.

I found Real World to be not only an engrossing read but also a refreshing look into Japanese youth culture, which is so often glimpsed through rose-tinted anime sunglasses in America. Being a high school student is no more glamorous in Japan than it is in America, and Japanese students have just as many problems as America students (and perhaps more). Moreover, Japan is not just a country of cherry blossoms and vermillion torii gates but also of ugly convenience stores and crappy train station cram schools. Kirino’s novel is superlatively anti-romantic. Please don’t let the topic of high school students allow you to think for a moment that Real World is a novel for kids; it doesn’t get much more “adult” than this. Each narrative voice is realistic, mature, and fully-realized, and, even though the subject matter is undeniably gloomy, the quality of Kirino’s writing (and Gabriel’s translation) makes this book and extremely interesting and enjoyable read.

The Story of a Single Woman

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the-story-of-a-single-woman1

Title: The Story of a Single Woman
Japanese Title: 或る一人の女の話
Author: Uno Chiyo (宇野千代)
Translator: Rebecca Copeland
Publication Year: 1992 (America); 1971 (Japan)
Pages: 132

Translator Rebecca Copeland aptly remarks in her introduction to The Story of a Single Woman that this novella “is the Uno Chiyo story, the story she has told countless times before in earlier works.” Indeed, this semi-confessional narrative of love pursued against overwhelming societal resistance runs not just through Uno’s oeuvre but through the work of pre-bubble women writers in general, at least as it is portrayed in anthologies like Noriko Mizuta Lippet and Kyoko Iriye Selden’s Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction. What is special about The Story of a Single Woman, however, is how Uno is able to recount her narrative in a dashing and gallant narrative voice with a minimum of self-pity.

The novella’s heroine, Kazue, is born and grows up in a tiny mountain village named Takamori (not to be confused with the city on the island of Kyūshū) in the early twentieth century. Her mother dies when she is still an infant, and her father, a sake brewer of some renown, quickly remarries himself to a young woman. Oddly enough, it is not Kazue’s stepmother who harasses the child, but rather her father, who controls the family with an iron will and forces everyone to behave with perfect decorum, even as his fortunes decline. At the behest of her father, Kazue is married off to one of her cousins while still in her early teens; but, because her young husband is not yet interested in girls, Kazue walks back home and never looks back. When her father dies, she takes a job as a teacher in a larger town. Perhaps her newfound independence goes to her head, because she soon starts visiting a young male teacher at his residence, unchaperoned. The malicious gossip created by this affair forces Kazue to resign her job. She retaliates by moving to the newly colonized state of Korea to launch a career as a journalist.

This is merely the start of Kazue’s amorous adventures. Throughout the novel, she is brave and cheerful and never defeated, even though her many lovers, who also must yield to the social constraints of the time, abandon her one after the other. Scattered throughout the account of Kazue’s attempts to establish herself as a serious author while following her heart from one relationship to the next are vivid and lovely descriptions of life in the Japanese countryside and cities that would be forever shattered by the Pacific War and its legacy.

Overall, The Story of a Single Woman is a quick and enjoyable read. Even though its tone carries the somewhat Victorian literary flavor of the immediate postwar period, it manages to be quite erotic at times. Very occasionally, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. What I found interesting about this book is that, although the real-life Uno Chiyo is infamous as a femme fatale, her literary avatar Kazue comes across mainly as a brave young woman who cannot help but suffer from her insistence on playing a man’s game in a man’s world. Although this story doesn’t have a happy ending (although I should add that it doesn’t have a sad ending, either), it is remarkably true to life and even a little uplifting in its honesty.

After Dark

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Title: After Dark
Japanese Title: アフターダーク
Author: Murakami Haruki (村上春樹)
Translator: Jay Rubin
Publication Year: 2007 (America); 2004 (Japan)
Pages: 244

I honestly can’t decide whether I like After Dark. With a few major exceptions (like “Barn Burning”), I don’t like Murakami’s short stories. According to several interviews, Murakami considers himself a novelist and primarily uses short stories as practice. Although his short stories are more polished than he gives himself credit for, I can understand why Murakami would say that. Compared to the huge imagination and forceful imagery of his novels, Murakami’s short stories tend to feel somewhat shallow.

To me, After Dark felt more like a short story than a novel. Perhaps the problem is the length of the book. Weighing in at approximately 250 double-spaced pages, Murakami’s latest novel should perhaps be more properly considered a novella. Another consideration might be the novel’s timeframe. The main action of After Dark takes place in the span of seven hours. To be precise, it starts 11:59pm and ends at 6:52am, as the chapter headings (each labeled by hours and minutes) inform us. Within this short period, the reader learns a great deal about the book’s protagonists, including a brief outline of the more sordid highlights of their pasts. Unfortunately, I was so entranced by these characters that I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to see them in action, I wanted to hear their voices, and I wanted to see them standing around cooking spaghetti. I wanted to learn their life histories slowly, and not in bullet points.

My main concern with the book, however, was the treatment of what I like to call the “Murakami myth.” A recurring theme throughout almost every Murakami novel is the woman who disappears into the neverland of her unconscious. After Dark’s disappearing woman takes the form of Eri Asai, the older sister of one of the two protagonists. Eri, who has fallen into a deep sleep from which she will not wake, is the subject of the novel’s even-numbered chapters, which detail the uncanny events which befall her during the night. Although Murakami never resolves the mysteries surrounding his disappearing women, I felt that After Dark’s Eri subplot was more undeveloped than usual. In fact, it left me quite frustrated, and it felt almost randomly thrown into the main action of the story. Although the Murakami myth generally adds a wonderful level of depth to his novels, I felt that, in this case, it was a misguided attempt to flesh out a novella that perhaps should have more properly been a short story.

That being said, the main action of After Dark is more than interesting enough to justify the existence of the book. In short, two lost souls manage to connect in the late night / early morning hours of Shinjuku. Several passages, such as the description of a Japanese Denny’s and the interactions between the employees of a love hotel, stand out like gems. The vast majority of this book doesn’t sparkle, though; it glows softly like street lamps, or eerily like the static on a TV screen. In other words, this isn’t one of Murakami’s masterworks, but it does have a quiet charm that should appeal even to those of you who aren’t necessarily Murakami fans.

Grotesque

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Title: Grotesque
Japanese Title: グロテスク
Author: Kirino Natsuo (桐野夏生)
Translator: Rebecca Copeland
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 2003 (Japan)
Pages:467

First of all, I would like to say that Grotesque is a very, very dark novel. It’s also filled with descriptions of all sorts of physical and emotional abuse, as well as numerous scenes of disgusting, extremely upsetting sex. In short, this novel is not for the faint of heart.

The novel essentially consists of the nameless narrator’s account of the murder of her younger sister, Yuriko, and her pseudo-friend from high school, Kazue, each of whom were marred by deep psychological imperfections. These emotional deficiencies were exacerbated by the harsh and competitive nature of the exclusive private high school that the two attended. In the end, both Yuriko and Kazue became prostitutes and were both ultimately murdered by the same unsavory client.

Putting the sensationalism of the novel aside, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Grotesque is the voice of the narrator. The reader quickly becomes inured to the sex and violence, but the cold and bitter tone of the narrator, as well as her pronounced disgust with her fellow human beings, continue to add a tinge of horror to the novel until the very last page. The narrator occasionally interrupts herself to present “evidence” concerning the two murder cases: the diary of her sister, the testimony of the murder suspect, and a letter from her old classmate. These stories within the story allow the reader to experience the voices of the novel’s other main characters, each of whom is just as disturbing as the main narrator.

In America, Kirino is mainly known for her first translated work, a massive chunk of a murder novel called Out (アウト, translated by Stephen Snyder). Like Out, Grotesque is long and depressing, and it would be a stretch to call any of the characters sympathetic. Unlike Out, however, Grotesque has a much smoother style, courtesy of translator Rebecca Copeland, and is therefore much easier to read. Also, compared to Out, the characters of Grotesque are much more artistically presented. Namely, in this novel, Kirino chooses to explore her characters’ depravity instead of merely wallowing in it. Moreover, I found the portion of the book that concerns the narrators’ experiences at their high school to be extremely entertaining. As I said earlier, Grotesque is not for the squeamish, but those readers who can deal with the darkness will be pleased to find an occasional glimmer of good writing and entrancing character study.

I should note that the version of Grotesque I reviewed is the British version, which I purchased in Japan. The American version of the book has been edited to remove all references to male child prostitution. Don’t let this deter you from reading the novel, though – the passages that were cut aren’t particularly riveting or important.

Keritai Senaka

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Keritai Senaka by Wataya Risa

Title: 蹴りたい背中
English Title: “The Back I’d Like To Kick”
Author: 綿矢りさ (Wataya Risa)
Publication Year: 2003 (Japan)
Pages: 140

Wataya Risa made waves in 2001 when she became the youngest writer to win the Bungei Prize (文藝賞), a prestigious award managed by the literary magazine Bungei. She won the award for her debut novel Install (インストール), written while she was a senior in high school. After graduating from high school, Wataya entered Waseda University and began work on her second novel, Keritai Senaka. This novel would win her the Akutagawa Prize (芥川賞), the single most prestigious literary award in Japan. At the age of nineteen, Wataya became the youngest author ever to receive this award.

So, what’s all the fuss about? In a market dominated by pop fad writers like Yoshimoto Banana and Yamada Amy, it’s easy to be skeptical. You’ll have to take my word for it, though, when I say that Wataya is the real deal. Her prose reflects the background and personality of her high school aged narrator while still managing to maintain a definite literary tone. Her descriptions of people and places are vivid and artistic, and her introspective examination of memory and interpersonal dynamics are sure to resonate with anyone who’s old and yet young enough to be able to look back on high school with both bitterness and nostalgia.

The novel’s plot centers around the lone wolf narrator Hachi, her changing relationship with her best friend Kinuyo, and her developing relationship with a strange boy named Ninagawa. Hachi and Kinuyo have just graduated from middle school, and Hachi is disappointed that Kinuyo has become popular with a new group of friends in high school. Left to her own devices, Hachi is drawn to Ninagawa, a fellow outcast who steadfastly refuses to have anything to do with other people. When Hachi mentions that she’s met the fashion model with whom Ninagawa is obsessed, he latches on to her, and she finds herself introduced to his strange otaku fantasy world, which ultimately provides a means for her to re-affirm her relationship with Kinuyo.

Although it’s debatable whose back Hachi wants to kick, the back that she does kick (twice) belongs to Ninagawa. Don’t let yourself think for one second, however, that this book is about a high school romance between the two. The somewhat twisted relationship between the them is exquisitely complicated and yet imminently understandable, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why. One of the main appeals of this novel, in fact, is the challenge of decoding Hachi’s feelings towards Ninagawa. Perhaps the other main appeal is trying to understand one’s own feelings, as the reader, concerning Hachi (and, by extension, oneself at her age).

Unfortunately, this novel has yet to be translated. For those of you studying Japanese, however, you will be pleased to find that Wataya’s prose is very accessible. The book can easily be finished in three or four sittings. If you’ve been looking for a book to serve as a gateway into Japanese literature, please allow me to recommend Keritai Senaka.

69

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69 by Murakami Ryū

Title: 69
Japanese Title: 69 (シクスティナイン)
Author: Ryu Murakami (村上龍; Murakami Ryū)
Translator: Ralph F. McCarthy
Publication Year: 1993 (America); 1987 (Japan)
Pages: 191

Who wrote Holden Caulfield? The truth is, many aspiring young writers have given it a shot, and the infamous literary bad boy Murakami Ryū is not exempt from their numbers. Murakami’s early novels, such as Almost Transparent Blue (限りなく透明に近いブルー) and Coin Locker Babies (コインロッカー・ベイビーズ) are filled with dissatisfied young men violently striving to bring meaning into their lives, so what makes 69 special?

For one thing, it might have actually happened. The plot concerns nothing more than the vitally important matter of the protagonist’s budding attraction for the lovely “Lady Jane,” a member of his high school’s prestigious English Drama Club. For a high school student living in the boondocks of Japan, the means at his disposal at first seem to be limited. The year is 1969, however, and anything can happen. Considering Murakami’s well-publicized admission of the autobiographical nature of this work, some of it more than likely did happen. The nature of this work as being well-grounded in reality not only gives it an interesting historical flavor but also exacerbates the outrageousness of the lengths to which the protagonist will go to get laid. Simply put, this book is hilarious.

Translator Ralph McCarthy renders the narrator’s young yet jaded voice into perfect English idiom, and the translated slang doesn’t feel dated in the least. My favorite aspect of the translation is the way that McCarthy chose to emphasize some of the novel’s key phrases in huge bold print. For example:

It’s also a fact, however, that in 1969 there was a convenient tendency to describe people who studied for college entrance exams as capitalist lackeys.

“Look, you fucking asshole, we’re here on a sacred mission, and you want to peek in the girls’ changing room? If that’s where your head’s at, man, the whole thing’s a failure before we’ve even started.”

Although 69 seems somewhat juvenile and inane compared to Murakami’s later work, such as In the Miso Soup (インザ・ミソスープ), I feel that it’s almost required reading for anyone interested the background behind the insane and disturbing world of Murakami Ryū.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

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Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Title: Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Japanese Title: 掌の小説
Author: Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成; Kawabata Yasunari)
Translators: Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman
Publication Year: 1988 (America)
Pages: 259

This book gathers Nobel Prize winning author Kawabata’s famous short shorts, or “palm of the hand (tenohira) stories.” These stories average about two and a half pages each, although some are a little longer, and some are much shorter. Most of these stories deal with the intricacies of male-female relationships, dreams, and fragmented memories of childhood. Even though some of the stories have a bittersweet sentimentality, Kawabata’s style is mainly realistic, especially in his portrayal of relationships crippled by words left unsaid and small, but meaningful, actions.

Some of Kawabata’s short stories are lyrical in their depictions of time, place, and nature, but many strike the reader as small mysteries to be pondered and unlocked. Who said what to whom? What significance did that have? Why would this person do that? What exactly is the relationship between these characters? The extreme brevity of these stories boils down life stories into a few irreversible moments and leaves the reader to read between the lines. This aspects of the works is rewarding but can be occasionally frustrating.

These stories were written over a period spanning between 1923 and 1972. Read individually, they can be unsatisfying; but, if the reader reads one story after another in a smooth, unbroken stream, the major themes and concerns of Kawabata’s career begin to gain a greater clarity, and the stories meld seamlessly into a greater whole.

I have read several of these stories in Japanese, as they are quite famous, and I have found that the translations are not only accurate but successfully convey the tone of the originals. The stories translated by Lane Dunlop (Shiga Naoya’s The Paper Door and Other Stories) tend to be a bit dry, but they are balanced nicely by Holman’s more experimental style.

The Diving Pool

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The Diving Pool

Title: The Diving Pool
Japanese Title: ダイヴィング・プール
Author: Yoko Ogawa (小川洋子; Ogawa Yōko)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 1991 (Japan)
Pages: 176

This is the first collection of Ogawa’s fiction to be translated into English, and veteran translator Stephen Snyder (Murakami Ryū’s Coin Locker Babies, Kirino Natsuo’s Out) does Ogawa’s sparse and poetic style justice with his smooth and intelligent translation. This volume includes three short stories: “The Diving Pool,” “Pregnancy Diary,” and “Dormitory.” Although each of these stories is firmly grounded in reality, I don’t think it would be too far-fetched to call them ghost stories. These eerie stories, although aesthetically beautiful and highly reminiscent of their setting in modern, urban Japan, derive their main appeal from an insightful portrayal of the small cruelties that people inflict on each other. The fact that all of Ogawa’s characters are eminently sympathetic, combined with the lovely details of their daily lives, gives the subtle yet bizarre twist at the end of each story all the more impact.

I really cannot recommend this book enough, not just to people interested in Japanese literature, but to anyone who loves to read. It gives me great pleasure to start off this blog with this wonderful book!