Japanese nonfiction – Contemporary Japanese Literature

Yōko Ogawa’s 2023 collection からだの美 brings together sixteen short essays on the theme of bodies and physicality. The three primary topics are sports, performing arts, and animals.

The essays about sports were mostly lost on me, but I loved Ogawa’s discussions of animals, especially naked mole rats. As Ogawa reflects on their odd appearance and rigorously structured society, she writes that the world is an infinitely strange place, and that she couldn’t invent creatures like this from imagination even if she wanted to.

My favorite essay is レース編みをする人の指先, which is a meditation on how our lives and bodies are shaped by creative practice. Even though crafts such as embroidery and sewing lace seem to have no practical purpose in modern society, we continue to make things by hand just for the joy of it.

The Japanese literary tradition of essay writing is a bit different than what many of us have come to expect from English-language essays. To make a generalization, Japanese literary essays tend not to include anything overly personal about the author or lay bare any sort of trauma. It’s not a given that an essay will address political topics or attempt to persuade or educate the reader. Rather, reading a Japanese essay is often like engaging in a gentle conversation. I find this lo-fi style of writing to be quite relaxing to read, but your mileage may vary on whether the essays in からだの美 come off as pleasantly chill or somewhat flat and underwhelming.

To me, からだの美 is an interesting companion to Ogawa’s 2022 short story collection 掌に眠る舞台, which also explores the relationship between art and the body. Ogawa’s fiction follows strange people who inhabit a twilight world that feels slightly removed from our own, so I found it amusing to read her perfectly normal nonfiction essays about the brighter side of topics she’s explored in her recent stories.

Title: March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on
the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown
Editors: Elmer Luke and David Karashima
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 216

As the March 11 anniversary of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami draws closer, Japanese bookstores have begun to promote retrospective magazine-books. These publications are filled with huge glossy photographs of destruction, and the number of people killed is printed in bold characters across their covers. Although such disaster porn is disturbing, it helps to illustrate a definite aspect of the reality of what happened a year ago in Japan.

March Was Made of Yarn helps to illustrate another aspect of the reality of the earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear crisis. If pictures and body counts inform the physical reality, then this collection of fiction and nonfiction offers insight into the emotional reality. Thankfully, March Was Made of Yarn is infinitely more gentle and subtle than sensationalist reporting and sentimental recollections of heroism and despair.

Even though all of the short pieces brought together by this collection address the events of last year in some fashion, many do so obliquely, and the themes of the pieces are universal. What is it like to live through a crisis? What is it like to know that other people are living through a crisis? What does it feel like to worry about the future? What does it feel like when science fiction becomes reality? What happens when you’re so sick with worry that you can’t fall asleep at night? What happens when words can no longer express truth or meaning?

March Was Made of Yarn features the work of internationally renowned Japanese writers such as Ogawa Yōko, Murakami Ryū, Kakuta Mitsuyo, Furukawa Hideo, and Tawada Yōko. These writers don’t cut corners in their craft simply because they happen to be responding to a topical issue; and, although none of them are writing “happy” stories or essays, their work is a pleasure to read. Kawakami Hiromi, who rewrote her debut story “Kami-sama” (translated as “God Bless You”) to address the incidents at the Fukushima reactor, reminds us that, even though we live in a world shadowed by the fear of radiation and environmental poisoning, we still need to eat, and we still want to go outside. The title story, Kawakami Mieko’s “March Yarn,” deals with the strange ways in which people process their memories and their understanding of their relationships with each other. Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poem “Words,” which opens the book, poses the question of how we can even write about things for which there are no words (yet still “Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble”). The translators who contributed to this volume are among the best in the field, and their skill illuminates the entirety of the collection.

March Was Made of Yarn isn’t just an excellent anthology of work related to the Tōhoku disasters; it’s an excellent Japanese literary anthology period. The range of authors represented by the book has the most even distribution of gender, generation, and genre I’ve ever encountered, and the English-language contributors, such as David Peace and John Burnham Schwartz, bring an added level of flavor and diversity. This collection is also accessible to casual readers, as few of the stories are any longer than twenty pages, and it has been beautifully published by Vintage. I don’t know how so many good things were able to come together to create this amazing book, but I am extraordinarily grateful that it exits.

March Was Made of Yarn should be available at all major bookstores in North America, Britain, Australia, and Japan, and it’s available on the Kindle Store as well.

If you don’t mind reading entirely in PDF digital format, please consider checking out Waseda University’s Japan Earthquake Charity Literature Project, which has some overlap with March Was Made of Yarn. It’s free to download and read the PDF versions of the stories and essays on the website, and the reader is encouraged to make a donation to disaster relief efforts afterwards.