Japanese romance – Contemporary Japanese Literature

Title: The Lake
Japanese Title: みずうみ (Mizuumi)
Author: Banana Yoshimoto (吉本ばなな)
Translator: Michael Emmerich
Publication Year: 2011 (America); 2005 (Japan)
Publisher: Melville House
Pages:188

I have been waiting for this book to come out for months. When it finally did, I read it in one sitting. As with many of Yoshimoto’s novels, it was occasionally frustrating, but I liked it. I guess one could say that The Lake is typical Yoshimoto. Allow me to explain.

The novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Chihiro, comes from a non-traditional family, works in a non-traditional profession, never worries about material things like money or the future even though she’s almost thirty, and seems to float through life, although she has hidden depths:

It’s like when you decide to build a house: some people want to go and find the land first, then hire an architect to help them draw up plans, and then choose the materials for the walls and everything on their own. I’m not like that. I prefer to wander around until I stumble across something, then I do the best I can with it, scrutinizing this thing I’ve discovered, getting to know it for what it is.

The heroine meets her love interest in an offbeat and untraditional way – in this case, he lives across the street from her, and they wave to each other from their respective windows until he talks to her on the street and casually starts showing up in her apartment. This love interest, Nakajima, is a grad student (first warning sign) and a stereotypical herbivore male:

I got the sense that he wasn’t really into sex, and he was shockingly thin, and although there were days when he would consume an astonishing amount, ordinarily he ate almost nothing, so overall he didn’t seem very energetic.

Nakajima is a little weird. Besides not having any friends and never wanting to sleep with our protagonist, he also exhibits behavioral quirks, such as his insistence on keeping detailed tallies of the money he owes Chihiro for using water and electricity when he stays over at her place. But Chihiro is still in love with him:

Whenever Nakajima said my name, every single time, it sparkled like a treasure. I had no idea why. Wow – did you see how that flashed? Say it again for me, please!

Chihiro gradually comes to realize that there is something seriously wrong with Nakajima; but, since she’s become attached to him, she decides to take it slow. As she ever so articulately explains to a friend:

“Anyway, he’s not like other people at all, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it, like he’s living in the clouds, maybe. Like when people talk about someone having transcended it all – he’s like that, I guess. So part of me thinks it’s just in his makeup, and he would have been this way even if nothing had happened. For the time being I’ll just keep watching, I won’t rush it.”

Finally, Nakajima asks Chihiro to go with him to visit two old acquaintances who live in a cottage by a lake. Chihiro has been worried that Nakajima will leave her, either physically (by suddenly disappearing from her apartment) or psychically (by entering a long-term catatonic trance). She’s also bothered by his plans to leave Japan and study in Paris, which don’t seem to include her at all. She thinks about her anxieties as she walks around the lake with a trembling and profusely sweating Nakajima, but she still supports him, because:

He was an adult, perhaps thirty-five or so, and yet he was extremely small, like a child. His face seemed kind of shrunken, giving him the look of a bulldog. His eyes were sparkling, though, and there was something noble in the way he carried himself.

Do you feel like you’re reading a shōjo manga yet?

The narrative is driven forward by a twinned pair of mysteries: who are the people who live on the lake, and what is Nakajima’s damage? Both mysteries are solved when Chihiro returns to the lake on her own around thirty pages before the book ends; and, to give the author credit, they are resolved quite nicely and sufficiently satisfied my morbid, look-at-the-car-wreck curiosity. Still, I wasn’t too terribly invested in figuring out what was going on (the blurb on the book jacket sort of spoils it with its overt mention of religious cults), and I didn’t really care about the relationship between Chihiro and Nakajima, which was more hurt/comfort than actual romance.

What was interesting to me were the descriptions of small-town politics. The majority of the story is set in Tokyo, but Chihiro comes from a small town where her father wasn’t allowed to marry her mother, who worked as the mama-san of a small bar. Chihiro’s assessment of her father’s family, the patrons of her mother’s bar, and the atmosphere of the town in general are acerbic and insightful. Also, Chihiro works as a muralist, and one of her friends commissions her to create a mural on one of the walls of a run-down community center in a small neighborhood in Tokyo in an effort to save the structure from being demolished. The interplay between Chihiro, the community center, the local government, and a potential sponsor of the project is dramatic in a quiet sort of way, and Chihiro’s explanations of her creative process as she interacts with the people who watch her work are also interesting.

If you like Banana Yoshimoto for her quirky characters, fragmented yet loving families, and universes almost like our own but one step closer to the supernatural, then you’ll like The Lake. If you dislike Banana Yoshimoto for the lack of adult judgment in her characters and her rambling, juvenile prose (which is tight like a handful of squirming hamsters), then you probably won’t like The Lake. For the record, I like the book, and I also think Michael Emmerich did an excellent job of translating it.

Title: Translucent Tree
Japanese Title: 投光の樹 (Tōkō no ki)
Author: Takagi Nobuko (高樹のぶ子)
Translator: Deborah Iwabuchi
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 1999 (Japan)
Publisher: Vertical
Pages: 188

My past experiences with romance novels have been few and far between. My grandmother used to keep a few around her house back in the early nineties, and they were mostly period pieces with titles like “Master and Maid” and “Forbidden Tryst” (my favorite was “The Pirate Slave;” the cover art was epic). I’ve never actually read a romance novel all the way through, but I’ve always been curious about them (especially after finishing Loving with a Vengeance a few days ago). I’ve heard that Takagi Nobuko is a famous and prolific romance novelist in Japan, so I figured that a translation of her award-winning novel Translucent Tree would be as good of a place as any to begin a foray into the magical world of bodice rippers. If nothing else, I was drawn by the cover, which displays a super-phallic pinecone superimposed over a triangular spray of pine needles, which are suggestively cleft down the middle under the dust jacket. Classy, right?

Translucent Tree is a story of star-crossed lovers. Following the conventions of a tale as old as time (or at least as old as 1949, when Harlequin established its basic formula for romance), the man is wealthy and a bit of a jerk, and the woman is struggling financially and a bit immature. The man, Go, lives in Tokyo, and the woman, Chigiri, lives in a town close to the Japan Sea called Tsurugi (which actually exists). Go, who makes his living as a documentary filmmaker, had once worked on a piece featuring Chigiri’s father, a metalworker knowledgeable about traditional sword-smithing techniques. During the filming, Go met Chigiri. Chigiri was a child at the time, but the two left strong impressions on each other.

Years later, Chigiri has divorced her husband and moved back to Tsurugi with her daughter to take care of her bedridden father. Go returns to Tsurugi on a whim in order to revisit a famous cedar tree and ends up running into Chigiri. The sparks fly, and the two enter into a strained long-distance relationship in which neither can be completely honest with the other. Go offers money to Chigiri in an attempt to help her father, to whom he still feels a debt of gratitude, and Chigiri tries to compensate Go by sleeping with him. Since they love each other but can’t bring themselves to admit it, their brief encounters are fraught with sexual and emotional tension.

Takagi’s portrayal of Go and Chigiri’s relationship is heartbreakingly honest at times. Their inane phone conversations are painfully awkward, and their inability to communicate is endearing, as is the emotional blackmail to which they subject themselves. Neither Go nor Chigiri is portrayed as being particularly attractive, and both of them have legitimate personality flaws. Go can be an asshole, and Chigiri can be annoyingly dense. Despite this, they’re attracted to each other in what strikes me as a very human and realistic way.

What I didn’t appreciate, however, were Takagi’s attempts to add an element of timelessness to the narrative by characterizing Go as some sort of Eternal Man and Chigiri as an Eternal Woman. Translucent Tree is filled with overgeneralizing sexist statements, like:

What she hadn’t counted on was the inability of men to understand the depth of a woman’s resolution. Women are determined and tenacious when men are of precious little use merely because women lack adaptability; it’s impossible for them to take a step or speak a work unless they have thought things over thoroughly and adopted a plan of action.

Really? No one taught me that when I was going to woman school. I had no idea I was supposed to lack adaptability. There are similar statements on subjects such as how men and women lie differently (apparently, women reveal information selectively while men just make things up) and why men travel but women don’t (women are roots and men are branches, you see). The utterly non-ironic way in which these pronouncements are made grated on my nerves every time I encountered one.

Another aspect of Takagi’s writing that hit slightly off the mark was her pillow talk. Being a romance novel, Translucent Tree has its fair share of eight-page sex scenes. Fun sexytimes are always a welcome addition to any narrative; but, unfortunately, each of Translucent Tree’s bedroom shots is more awkward and stilted than the last. It’s possible that this awkwardness is largely the fault of the translator, who apparently never got the memo on how not to write sex, but I am still going to have to point my finger at Takagi herself for her descriptions that read like something out of bad fanfiction:

They were both thinking about the same thing, but from different positions. Chigiri was at the top of the mountain peering down at the deep valley between her legs and, beyond that, at her slippered feet, which felt oddly detached from the rest of her body. Go was standing at the foot of the mountain gazing deep inside the valley, waiting for the right moment to start the trek in.

I use this particular passage as an example because it’s a paragraph of self-contained awkwardness instead of two pages of gradually building awkwardness, but I think it’s also useful to illustrate not only what is merely amusing about Translucent Tree but also what is genuinely interesting. The numerous nature and geography metaphors throughout the text posit Go and Chigiri not just as the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman but also as New Japan and Old Japan. Romantic conceits relating to nostalgia for an imagined Japanese tradition have been embodied in female characters before, but I think Takagi handles this device remarkably well. Chigiri’s hometown of Tsurugi is an appealing mix of old-style sushi shops and historic trees in the middle of rice fields. Chigiri herself is less of an idealization of well-bred Japanese femininity and more of a portrait of an earthier type of woman who has weathered the blows of misfortune yet still maintains the passionate core of her being. Go’s Tokyo is not a steampunk wonderland of trains and tall buildings but rather a shabby place where the human relationships are shallow, the food is all takeout, and the old pinup calendar on the wall is slowly turning yellow.

Go’s attempts to capture and preserve Old Japan through the lens of a camera are ultimately meaningless, while Chigiri’s charm is wasted as she slowly goes to seed out in the boondocks. It’s only through their relationship with each other that the two really come alive, and their first tryst is perhaps the most memorable scene in the book, if only because of its setting in a beautiful, “traditionally” Japanese estate in the countryside. In this scene, cultural imagery and sexual imagery are reflected back on one another repeatedly. Through its interaction with New Japan, then, Old Japan is both refreshed and refreshing. In the impact of its use of geography as metaphor, Translucent Tree is just as brilliant as As I Lay Dying or Deliverance. I can see why the book has won awards, even though the “romance” aspects of the novel are somewhat lacking. Although its gender politics tended to rub me the wrong way, I enjoyed Translucent Tree, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys Japan fantasies of the sort written by Kawabata Yasunari or Muriel Barbery.

Speaking of geography, I’m sure that by now everyone has heard about how Japan survived its most recent encounter with subterranean catfish tremors and walls of liquid death marching toward the coast. Not to lessen or belittle the tragedy, but I think the country handled the situation remarkably well, and I hope that the governments of other countries (*cough* such as my own *cough*) were paying attention. That being said, there are still many people who are evacuated and homeless. If you’re interested in making a donation but skeptical of the Red Cross, Global Giving is the site that everyone seems to be vetting, for what it’s worth.