Tag: Kyushu

５２ヘルツのクジラたち

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５２ヘルツのクジラたち is a bestselling novel by Sonoko Machida that won the 2021 Japan Booksellers’ Award Grand Prize. In March 2024, the story was adapted into a feature film directed by Izuru Narushima, who worked with LGBTQ consultants in order to portray a key transgender character with the same compassion and sensitivity expressed by Machida’s novel.

Kiko Mishima has left Tokyo to move to a seaside town near Oita on the eastern coast of Kyushu. She’s inherited a house from her grandmother, and she gets along well with the contractors she hired for renovations. It’s difficult to adjust to life in a small community, however, and Kiko begins to withdraw into her house.

During a trip to the grocery store, Kiko encounters a 13yo boy who can’t speak and seems to have nowhere to go. The nameless boy bears undeniable signs of abuse and neglect, so Kiko invites him home and begins caring for him.

As the novel progresses, the reader learns more about Kiko, who was emotionally abused by her mother and stepfather. Circumstances relating to her stepfather’s health prevent Kiko from escaping from her family after high school, and she’s driven to the verge of suicide by her experience of serving as her stepfather’s primary caregiver.

Kiko is rescued by her high school friend Miharu, who also grew up in an abusive family. Miharu introduces Kiko to her colleague Ango, who sympathizes with Kiko and takes responsibility for her emotional support as he helps her move into a sharehouse and begin a new life.

From the beginning of the novel, the reader is confronted by numerous questions. Given how important Ango was to Kiko, what happened to him? Why did Kiko suddenly move to Kyushu without telling anyone? Where is she getting the money to renovate her house? And, most importantly, what can she do to help the abused boy whom the entire town has decided to ignore?

５２ヘルツのクジラたち takes its title from the story of 52 Blue, a whale of an unidentified species that has never been sighted but only heard via hydrophones. It sings at a frequency 52 hertz, which is much higher than the calls of other migrating whales. Because of the highly unusual sonic signature of its call, the whale migrates alone.

Kiko compares her isolation during her childhood to that of the 52-hertz whale, and she once listened to recordings of its singing to calm and ground herself after she left her family. She shares these recordings with the seemingly wordless boy she takes under her wing, promising that she’ll wait patiently until she can understand his own 52-hertz voice.   

We live in a society, however, and it’s not strictly legal to assume care of a minor without the permission of the child’s guardians. Thankfully, Miharu manages to track down Kiko and pays her a visit in Kyushu. She once again comes to the rescue, helping Kiko to reach out to the community for the support that she and the boy desperately need. 

Make no mistake, ５２ヘルツのクジラたち is an intensely melodramatic novel. Its characters are either saints or devils. It’s never explained why anyone would be abusive toward a child, or why most people who witness child abuse choose to ignore it. In addition, the story’s victims of abuse come off as perfect angels who suffer with dignity and almost never display any of the problematic behavior associated with a history of sustained childhood trauma.

I find this lack of psychological depth frustrating, as it glosses over many of the issues underlying child abuse, which is often known and tacitly tolerated by the larger community. Instead of serving as a meaningful model for how such abuse can be prevented, this novel feels more like a character drama that uses serious social issues for the sole purpose of generating heightened emotions. In addition, although the treatment of the central transgender character is sympathetic, I couldn’t help but shake my head at some of the tired narrative tropes applied to their story.

Still, I can’t deny that ５２ヘルツのクジラたち is a lot of fun to read. The pacing is excellent, and I was swept along by the story’s strong forward momentum. Although bittersweet, the ending is emotionally satisfying, as is the conclusion of Kiko’s character arc. I’d especially recommend this novel to fans of Banana Yoshimoto, as it feels like a progressive development of many of the themes explored in Kitchen, from a universal concern with love and loss to a more specific push for the legal rights of minors and transgender people. 

While the message of ５２ヘルツのクジラたち might have benefitted from more psychological nuance, Sonoko Machida makes a strong and compelling case for mutual aid and community action in which everyone in a society benefits by actively protecting the marginalized.

Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan

Kathryn2 Comments

Chris McMorran’s Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan is an academic monograph about gender and society that’s surprisingly entertaining and enjoyable to read. McMorran is an anthropologist at the National University of Singapore who spent more than a year working at an onsen hotel in the idyllic town of Kurokawa on Japan’s southern island of Kyūshū. His account of how such resorts operate is informed by his own experience, as well as a decade of talking to people with fascinating life stories.

McMorran is discrete and never exploitative, but he uses a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama to illustrate the conflicting views at play in the construction and maintenance of Kurokawa’s fantasy of “traditional Japan.” Not every aspect of these traditions is worth preserving, especially the pressure placed on firstborn sons (and their wives) to inherit the family business, often at the expense of the ambitions of a family’s daughters.

Despite stubbornly persistent gendered expectations, one aspect of these onsen hotels that seems almost utopian is their willingness to employ women who might otherwise be in danger of falling through the cracks of society, such as divorcées and single mothers with small children. Even though McMorran tackles serious social issues, his approach is always sympathetic and accessible, and his writing is so crisp and clear that this study often feels remarkably akin to a literary memoir.

Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan has the potential to be an entertaining read for fans of Japanese pop culture interested in indulging in a bit of armchair tourism while gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary Japanese society. To enhance the experience, I’d also recommend the gorgeous travel guide Onsen of Japan: Japan’s Best Hot Springs and Bath Houses, which perhaps might be enjoyed alongside a viewing of the beautiful slice-of-life anime movie Okko’s Inn.

Tree Spirits Grass Spirits

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Tree Spirits Grass Spirits collects twenty-one autobiographical stories about plants by the celebrated Japanese-American poet Hiromi Ito. As the translator, Jon L Pitt, explains in the book’s preface, these stories were originally serialized from 2012 to 2013 in a highbrow Japanese literary magazine, but Ito’s prose is lively and accessible. Each of the stand-alone stories in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is gentle and thoughtful, and the collection is a breath of fresh and green summer air.

Ito divides her time between the cities of Encinitas in southern California and Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan. Each region has a unique climate and ecosystem, and Ito is fascinated by the plants that grow in both environments, from yucca and agave to camelia and hydrangeas to grass and mold. Ito’s stories touch on botany and natural history, but their primary focus is on humans, especially the humans in Ito’s own family.

Among my favorite of the stories is “Baobab Dream,” which recounts a challenge that many people have experienced with houseplants. As Ito puts it: “They are at their most beautiful when you first purchase them, and they get progressively shabbier and shabbier, even if you take care of them. And then, at some point, they wither away and die.” 

And then, when you go to a garden store to get new plants to replace the old ones, it can be a challenge to identify what you’ve purchased. This is how Ito came into the possession of a mystery tree that she and her daughters resorted to calling “the baobab tree.”

While conducting research on what the tree might actually be, Ito considers the Latin names of various plants and arrives at the conclusion that botanical categorizations of plants often don’t make much practical sense. How are tulips and green onions members of the same botanical family, for instance? This confusion of taxonomy yields to broader meditations on how certain species are categorized as “invasive” as opposed to “naturalized,” and how this reflects Ito’s own experiences as someone who moves between cultures. In the end, however, such abstract concerns are secondary to the beauty of the plants themselves:

In the park next door, the mountain lilacs were at their peak. The peach trees and plum trees and cherry trees were blooming in folks’ yards. The roadsides were bright yellow from the acacias. The bushes of sweet-scented geranium in my own garden, too, had suddenly grown dense and were so thick that they seemed to be sweating, steeped in a green that surrounded one or two pink buds – swelling with each coming day and trying to open up any minute now.

Ito’s vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections regarding how it feels to be a human moving through the environment. This is one of the many reasons why I love the story “Kudzu-san,” which is about the kudzu growing in the neighborhood around Ito’s house in Kumamoto. As anyone who’s encountered the aggressively leafy vines can attest, kudzu is filled with vitality. If you cut it down, it will grow back twice as quickly, and its fuzzy tendrils are constantly creeping into unexpected places.

Ito remarks that there’s a certain lasciviousness to kudzu, so she searches for references to the plant in literary sources such as the Man’yōshū poetry anthology and the Tale of Genji. Such references are scarce, but Ito is intrigued by a chance mention of the famous Heian-period court magician Abe no Seimei, whose mother was supposedly a fox. In Japanese folklore, foxes are shapeshifters known for their sexual allure, so it seems only fitting that Seimei’s mother is poetically associated with the visual motif of kudzu. Ito’s own encounters with kudzu are likewise filled with startling physicality:

The vines we crushed in the morning lay as they were, and stood back up erect in the evening, swaying their stems and moving in on women – I had seen this, as well. They were more like snakes than plants. Even more than snakes, they resembled those eels that sway in the ocean. There are stories in old books about snakes that enter women’s bedchambers at night, and one about a snake that slid into a woman’s vagina after she had climbed a tree. Couldn’t all those stories be about kudzu?

What I admire about Ito’s stories is that, despite the poetic beauty of her writing, her meditations often progress in strange and unexpected directions without forcing symbolism or allegory onto the natural world. Ito observes her environment closely and looks inward as she describes what she sees, but the mycelial networks between her associations expand unseen below the surface of her writing. Just as autobiography often inspires self-reflection in the reader, Ito’s “phyto-autobiography” inspires an observation of ourselves in a larger context that doesn’t always follow human logic.

Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is a welcome companion to anyone interested in going outside and seeing the world around them from a fresh perspective. Jon Pitt’s translation gracefully conveys Ito’s casual style by allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph is a joy to read. Almost all of the stories are less than ten pages long, and it’s a pleasure to dip into the collection whenever you’re in the mood to open your eyes and shift your viewpoint to a less anthropocentric frame of reference.

Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is published by Nightboat Books, and you can check out the book’s page (here).