Tag: Pacific War

The Little House

Kathryn2 Comments

The Little House
Japanese Title: 小さいおうち (Chiisai ouchi)
Author: Kyoko Nakajima (中島 京子)
Translator: Ginny Tapley Takemori
Publication Year: 2010 (Japan); 2019 (United Kingdom)
Publisher: Darf Publishers
Pages: 268

The Little House is a novel that seems prosaic at first but becomes more interesting as mundane events and observations gradually take on a greater sense of weight and meaning. The majority of the story is presented in the form of a diary kept by its narrator, Taki. Taki is writing in the present day, but the events she describes occurred in the 1930s and early 1940s. The Little House is about wartime Japan, but it’s written from the perspective of someone far more invested in keeping a small household running than she is in supporting or celebrating the nation. The war eventually catches up to her, but her story is about resilience, not suffering or victimhood.

At the risk of reducing the novel to its subtext, The Little House is also a queer love story. Taki is employed as a maid in a house in the suburbs of Tokyo, and she enjoys a close friendship with the lady of the house, Tokiko. Tokiko’s son Kyoichi is from a previous marriage, and her current husband is an executive at a toy manufacturing company. He’s a handsome man, but he seems to have no interest in “that sort of relationship” with a woman, which is perhaps why he considers himself lucky to have married someone who already has a child. Kyoichi is bedridden with polio, so Taki has been employed to help Tokiko out around the house. Despite the difference in their ages and social status, they get along marvelously well.

It was clear to me that Taki is in love with Tokiko. I suppose it’s possible that her affection could be read as platonic, but Taki describes Tokiko’s physical appearance with quite a bit more than platonic interest. Taki also delights in her detailed memories of physical contact with Tokiko. These passages may fly under the radar of anyone who’s not attuned to them, but it’s difficult to say that the nature of Taki’s relationship with Tokiko is completely subtextual, especially given that Taki dwells on the fact that one of Tokiko’s closest female friends also had an intense crush on her while they were in school together. To drive the point home, this friend makes direct references to the fiction of Nobuko Yoshiya, who is famous for her stories about young women in intimate relationships.

To Taki’s chagrin, Tokiko is in love with a young artist named Itakura. Under the pretext of arranging a marriage for him, Tokiko meets with Itakura several times, and a romance develops between them. As Japan digs itself deeper into the Pacific War, however, Itakura is drafted. Tokiko is devastated, but Taki prevents her from meeting Itakura a final time before his deployment by means of a small but life-changing act of “housekeeping” that has been foreshadowed from the beginning of the novel.

By March 1944, the Hirai family can no longer afford to employ Taki. She is sent back to her family’s home in rural Ibaraki prefecture, where she becomes a cook and caretaker for a group of children who have been evacuated from Tokyo. This is far less heartwarming than it sounds, and both Taki and the children are utterly miserable.

When the war is over, Taki visits Tokyo again only to find that the Hirai household has been destroyed during the American firebombings. Although she promises to write more about what happened afterward, Taki’s narrative comes to an abrupt end at this point. The reader learns that she stopped keeping her diary because of her declining health, but I suspect that she lost interest in telling a story in which Tokiko could no longer be a central character.

The coda to Taki’s account is provided by her great grand-nephew Takeshi, whom she has mentioned several times, always claiming that he doesn’t believe her story. Takeshi inherits Taki’s diaries after her death, and he ties up several loose ends in the final chapter as he reflects on the nature of the relationships between the various people in Taki’s life. Is it possible, he wonders, that Taki was in love with Tokiko? Takeshi leaves the answer to this question up to the reader’s interpretation, but his careful reevaluation of Taki’s actions in light of this possibility speaks for itself.

Not much happens in The Little House, but the reader is swept along into the family drama of the Itakura household by Taki’s lively and engaging narrative voice. Although Taki’s observations seem trivial at first, the close attention of a patient reader will be rewarded as the details of her story come together to create a portrait of a charming group of people and the historical conflicts that interrupted their lives and relationships. Nakajima handles the legacy of the Pacific War with grace and sensitivity, and The Little House provides a welcome and insightful perspective on the early Shōwa period that is often lost in narratives about wartime Japan.

The Inugami Clan

Kathryn3 Comments

The Inugami Clan

Title: The Inugami Clan
Japanese Title: 犬神家の一族 (Inugamike no ichizoku)
Author: Yokomizo Seishi (横溝 正史)
Translator: Yumiko Yamazaki
Publication Year: 2003 (America); 1951 (Japan)
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Pages: 309

Reading The Inugami Clan reminded me of sitting in my local public library as a kid in the early nineties and reading crime novels with yellowed pages and crappy covers that were always on the verge of falling off.

This novel is pure pulp. The sentences are short and declarative. The chapters are only a few pages long and always end with cliffhangers. The murders are fantastically improbable. The beautiful young female victim is always fainting. The ugly older women are pure evil. The men regularly walk around with assault weapons. The sexuality on display isn’t overt, but it’s always kinky. Someone gets murdered every five chapters. Even the paper Stone Bridge Press used for its publication of this translation has a deliciously pulpy smell. The pulp dial on this book goes up to eleven.

In other words, The Inugami Clan is both ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining.

The primary point-of-view character of the novel is Detective Kindaichi Kōsuke, an eccentric private investigator of strange appearance and stranger personal habits. (“Physically, he is a stammering, inconsequential fellow with nothing to recommend him, but his remarkable faculty for reasoning and deduction has been attested to,” the narrator says.) Because of the detective’s fame, he has been summoned to the Nasu Lake region (in Tochigi prefecture) by Wakabayashi Toyoichirō, a lawyer associated with the estate of the recently deceased Inugami Sahei, a local silk magnate. Before the lawyer arrives in Kindaich’s hotel room, however, the detective witnesses a beautiful woman going down with a sinking boat on the lake beside the hotel. This woman is Nonomiya Tamayo, who stands to inherit the entire Inugami fortune. Even though Tamayo is saved, Kindaichi returns to the hotel to find Wakabayashi dead from ingesting a poison that had been applied to the filter of one of his cigarettes. Someone is obviously out for blood, and it’s up to Kindaichi to figure out what’s going on before anyone else is killed.

Not that Kindaichi succeeds, of course. The detective’s “razor-sharp deduction skills” are no match for a long-held grudge, and the novel has plenty of time for an additional assortment of gruesome deaths. The Inugami family motto is “yoki koto kiku,” an expression that means “tidings of good fortune” but is also synonymous with the words “axe, koto, chrysanthemum” ( 斧・琴・菊 ), which is as good a set-up as any for a series of themed murders. The “axe” murder happens early on, and the reader is given the pleasure of anticipating what the “koto” and “chrysanthemum” murders will look like. It would be a shame if Kindaichi were to solve the case before the killer could complete the set, right?

Instead of pulling a “just add Sherlock” instant deduction, Kindaichi spends most of his time accompanying the family’s other lawyer, Furudate Kyōzō, to various formal meetings of the Inugami clan, which are full of drama.

It turns out that Inugami Sahei was a bit of an asshole. The man had three consorts who all lived with him, and each of these consorts bore him a daughter, each of whom in turn bore a son. Since none of these consorts was Sahei’s official wife, none of these grandsons is his official heir; and, in his will, Sahei leaves his entire fortune to Nonomiya Tamayo, provided that Tamayo marries one of his grandsons. Tamayo is the granddaughter of Nonomiya Daini, the head priest of Nasu Shrine, who took in Sahei when he was young and starving. Sahei had a very close relationship with Daini, and he had an even closer relationship with Daini’s wife, and he apparently loved Tamayo as if she were his own granddaughter. Sahei also had an (even more) illegitimate son with a much younger woman named Aonuma Kikuno (who apparently looked just like Tamayo); and, if Tamayo for some reason won’t marry one of Sahei’s other sons, then the majority of the fortune goes to this son, a man named Aonuma Shizukuma. Since both Aonuma Shizukuma and Inugami Kiyo, the oldest of Sahei’s grandsons, had problems with repatriation after the war ended, however, there are plenty of opportunities for confused identities.

As things stand, everyone has a motive to kill everyone else. It’s almost as if Sahei were trying to punish his three daughters for something – but for what? It quickly turns out that the Inugami clan is about as dysfunctional as families get, and there are plenty of family secrets for Kindaichi to uncover before he can figure out who’s trying to kill off everyone associated with Sahei’s will.

Even though most of action of the novel is generated by Sahei’s three grandsons, the three older Inugami daughters really steal the show. Inugami Matsuko, the reigning matriarch of the clan, is an especially powerful and compelling character. I can’t write too much about her without giving away the story, but let it suffice to say that she is awesome, and the social conflicts and historical crises that she represents add a layer of depth and thematic richness to the novel that it would otherwise have lacked had she been just another ugly and bitter old woman in a pulp mystery about silly murders.

I read The Inugami Clan while re-reading John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, and I found that Dower’s description of the political confusion and cultural liberation of the immediate postwar period in Japan resonated perfectly with the themes and atmosphere of Yokomizo’s novel. Dower’s chapter “Cultures of Defeat” (especially its sections on “Kasutori Culture” and the “Decadence and Authenticity”) was especially interesting in its discussions of postwar pulp magazines, the sexualization of literature, and the re-emergence of “erotic grotesque nonsense” as a mode of storytelling. As is the case with any good pulp novel, The Inugami Clan has its fair share of plot holes and obvious exaggerations, but an understanding of the book’s historical and cultural background goes a long way toward making these plot holes and exaggerations make sense. If you’re interested in classic Japanese mystery fiction, Sari Kawana’s Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture, which was published back in 2008 by University of Minnesota Press, is an excellent cross-cultural study that’s a lot of fun to read (and, for an academic book, it’s actually fairly affordable). Even without all of the secondary literature, though, The Inugami Clan is a lot of fun to read. The novel is currently out of print, but it’s totally worth the effort to track down a copy.

Fires on the Plain

Kathryn5 Comments

Title: Fires on the Plain
Japanese Title: 野火 (Nobi)
Author: Ōoka Shōhei (大岡 昇平)
Translator: Ivan Morris
Publication Year: 1957 (America); 1951 (Japan)
Publisher: Tuttle
Pages: 246

The Pacific War is an uncomfortable subject for me. I don’t like war, and I don’t like watching movies about war, and I don’t like reading about war – especially the Pacific War. I’m also not entirely comfortable recommending a book written about the Pacific War. However, a friend of mine recently confided in me that he’s working on a novel about a Japanese soldier on a small island in the Pacific. The novel would have swords, he told me, and survival, and brilliant military strategies, and cherry blossoms. At the end of his novel, everyone would die a glorious and noble death.

I told my friend to go read Fires on the Plain.

Fires on the Plain is about a soldier named Tamura who is stationed on Leyte, an island in the Philippines. Ōoka himself was drafted and sent to Leyte in 1944, so one can plausibly assume that the novel is somewhat based on the author’s experiences. What distinguishes Fires on the Plain from many other Japanese fictional accounts of the war, however, is that it is not written in the style of proletarian literature or the semi-autobiographical shishōsetsu (“I-novels). Before he was drafted, Ōoka worked at a Franco-Japanese translation agency while working on his own translations of French literature. Far from being preachy or moralistic, Fires on the Plain is a tightly structured psychological novel written in the style of nineteenth-century French novelists such as Stendhal, Ōoka’s favorite author.

Fires on the Plain focuses on the psychological and emotional struggles of Tamura as the soldier is kicked out of his unit, sets off on his own, later rejoins the scattered remnants of the Japanese army still on the island, and then struggles for survival in the company of two men who have turned to cannibalism in order to stay alive. During his time on Leyte, Tamura ponders the nature of humanity, the relationship between God and man, and the workings of free will in the face of an almost certain fate. His primary concern, and the primary concern of every character that appears in the novel, however, is hunger. How long can you live on a handful of potatoes? How can you procure food from the native islanders without getting killed? Where can you find salt? What do you do after all the food is gone? Aside from the ranting of one half-dead and half-crazed man who appears towards the end of the novel, the glory of the Emperor and the nation of Japan have no place in the consciousness of Tamura and his fellow soldiers.

Because the story is recounted by a starving, traumatized, and unreliable narrator, there is little thematic closure in the novel. That being said, there are some lovely descriptive passages reflecting the beautiful tropic setting of the island:

The sun gleamed on the river’s surface, and clouds scudded across the dazzling sky to disappear over the mountain peaks. On the sloping banks of the river bamboos grew luxuriantly, their green leaves wafted by the breeze. Driftwood, which remains from the floods of the rainy season, lay drying on the sand and pebbles of the river’s edge. Now and then the water would strike the banks capriciously, or form deep pools, or spread out into frothy rapids. In the evenings by the shadows of the pools I could hear the river deer cry as they came down to drink, and at dawn the turtledoves cooed high on the river bank.

There are also harrowing passages describing the horrors of war:

How could I have failed to notice the objects lying at the foot of those steps – objects that must have been in my field of vision for some time? My sense of perception must have already changed during the weeks since I had left my company. Clearly the link between my consciousness and the outer world was greatly attenuated. A solitary alien in an enemy land, I had by this time come to notice only objects that warned me of immediate danger, or, as in this case, objects on which I literally stumbled.

I thought of them as “objects” though some might call them “people.” In one sense, to be sure, they were people, but their bodies had already become dehumanized objects. What lay below those steps were corpses.

Having been corpses for some time, they had lost all the individual conformations of their past lives. Only their army trousers revealed some slight trace of the time when their owners had belonged to humankind; yet even these were so discolored by mud and carrion slime that they no longer seemed like human clothing and were, indeed, barely distinguishable from the surrounding earth.

In the end, though, having been abandoned on Leyte and left to fend for himself during the closing days of the Pacific War, and having witnessed death and killed people himself, and having starved and eaten the flesh of his fellow soldiers, Tamura is no closer to solving the great mysteries of life than he was when at the beginning of the novel. The confusion of the narrator becomes the confusion of the reader; and, despite its brilliant imagery and powerful symbolism, it is difficult to draw any clear philosophical message from the novel – besides the painfully obvious.

Anyone interested in the Pacific War in any capacity should read Fires on the Plain. Ōoka demonstrates that the reality of the war was anything but honorable and glorious, but he does so through the vehicle of a disturbing yet highly readable novel that feels no need to shove its “war is evil” message into the reader’s face.

Little Boy

Kathryn6 Comments

Title: Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subcultures
Editor: Takashi Murakami
Publisher: Japan Society Gallery
Publication Year: 2005
Pages: 300

Little Boy is most definitely the contemporary Japanese art exhibition catalog to end all art exhibition catalogs. It quickly sold out when it was first released, and secondhand copies now sell for ridiculous amounts of money. The Japan Society of New York has finally released a softcover edition, which it sells in its headquarters in New York City. The new edition is just as gorgeous and well put together as the original hardcover version; so, if it’s at all possible for you to acquire one, go for it! Quickly! Do it now! Before you even start reading this review! Yes, it’s that good.

The first one hundred or so pages of this catalog feature full color plates of various artworks, photographs, and screen stills. Through these plates, pop artist extraordinaire Murakami Takashi attempts to demonstrate in images the thesis of his introductory essay “Earth in my Window.” Murakami’s main argument can be summarized in two points. First, the Pacific War, especially the two atomic bombs that ended it, left an indelible scar on the Japanese psyche. Second, the experience of having been defeated in war and thereafter occupied by America has turned multiple generations of Japanese people into perpetual children. The first point is illustrated by plates demonstrating recurring nuclear imagery in films and television serials such as Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion and various tokusatsu (“special effects”) films released by Tōhō Studios, as well as in the artistic output of artists like Yanobe Kenji and Murakami himself. The second point is easily demonstrable by the overtly cartoonish and childlike work of artists such as Nara Yoshitomo, Ban Chinatsu, and Mr., as well as by the designs of popular and festishized kyara (“characters”) like Hello Kitty. Following these images and explanatory essay is a short manifesto penned by Murakami to support his superflat art movement, which is apparently based on the idea that contemporary Japan needs art that reflects its current cultural status of being awash in meaningless junk.

Next up is a transcription of a conversation between Okada Toshio and Morikawa Kaichirō (two self-proclaimed experts of “otakuology”) moderated by Murakami. Morikawa in particular states that otaku are characterized by an obsession with things that are dame (absolutely useless), whether it’s collecting antique model kits or falling in love with moe (young and innocent) characters. Okada seems to have a somewhat more optimistic view of otaku, who he thinks are simply resorting to childish things in order to escape a meaningless and unforgiving life. This conversation is superbly illustrated by images of the cultural paraphernalia the two men mention, and it also includes several dozen footnotes explaining their various obscure otaku references.

Following this conversation are two academic essays by Japanese scholars, Sawaragi Noi and Matsui Midori. Sawaragi discusses how the Pacific War has filtered through Japanese pop culture in movies like the Godzilla and Space Battleship Yamato series, and Matsui discusses the subculture of kawaii (“cute”) in postwar Japan, especially in terms of how it is connected to art depicting women and art by women artists like Takano Aya and Mizuno Junko. Following these two essays by Japanese authors are two essays by American authors, Alexandra Munroe and Tom Eccles. Munroe offers a history of otaku subculture from the perspective of a Western observer, and Eccles attempts to situate the superflat movement with the history of Western pop art. All of these essays (as well as everything else in the catalog) are presented in both English and Japanese, with a column of English text on the left and a column of Japanese text on the right. Finally, the “Further Readings” section at the end of the book is an invaluable six-page bibliography of related works in both English and Japanese.

In short, Little Boy is gorgeous, fun, and intelligent. The dual language presentation is unobtrusive for readers of one language but wonderful for readers of both. Murakami’s presentation of Japanese culture itself is both extremely interesting and highly controversial. This catalog is a work of art and an object of culture in and of itself. No matter what your field of interest is, I highly recommend picking up a copy before they’re all gone.

The Makioka Sisters

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Title: The Makioka Sisters
Japanese Title: 細雪 (Sasameyuki)
Author: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (谷崎潤一郎)
Translator: Edward G. Seidensticker
Publication Year: 1948 (Japan); 1957 (America)
Publisher: Vintage International
Pages: 530

In his introduction to Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (破壊), translator Kenneth Strong lists Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters as one of the five most famous works of Japanese literature in the West (along with Kawabata’s Snow Country, Sōseki’s Kokoro, Abe’s Woman of the Dunes, and Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Strong wrote this essay in 1972, and, since then, I would say that Naomi has replaced The Makioka Sisters as the Tanizaki text that is most frequently taught. The formation of national identity in the pre-war period is a hot topic in Japan-focused scholarship these days, especially when the evils of modernity are represented by a sexy young woman. Regardless, The Makioka Sisters is still an excellent novel.

As the English title suggests, the novel is about four sisters who live in a suburb of Osaka. Tsuruko and Sachiko, the two older sisters, are married, but the two younger sisters, Yukiko and Taeko, are not, and therein lies the main conflict of the novel. Eldest sister Tsuruko moves to Tokyo after her husband gets transferred, so the task of marrying off third sister Yukiko falls to second sister Sachiko and her (Tanizaki stand-in) husband Teinosuke, who remain in Osaka. The problem is that they can’t find a suitable husband for the shy traditional beauty, who has entered her thirties under the shadow of rebellious youngest sister Taeko, who cares nothing for the family’s reputation.

After Tsuruko and her family move to Tokyo, they all but disappear from the story, which is fine, since the author has more than enough material to work with concerning the three sisters who stay behind. Each of the three is an interesting and fully developed personality in her own right, and they have plenty of floods, illnesses, and secret love affairs to keep them busy. Taeko especially falls into the role of Tanizaki’s trademark femme fatale, with her modern clothing, flirtatious attitude, lies, ridiculous expenditures, and so on. Although the reader can’t help but share her sisters’ attitude of frustration towards her, Taeko adds spice to the novel and generally drives the plot forward.

Not that the novel has much of a plot. Nothing grand happens, no one important dies, no major secrets are revealed, and all conflicts are eventually resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Instead of focusing on dramatic action, Tanizaki has instead created a world within his novel and invited the reader to visit it for five hundred pages. Although I wasn’t able to read the book for long stretches at a time, I was happy with its length and would have even been happy if it were longer. Even though the story takes place during the opening years of the Pacific War, the characters occupy a comfortable environment rich with detail, culture, and tradition. In other words, this is a novel not to be enjoyed for its forward impetus but rather for its description of a family outing to Kyoto to see the cherry blossoms. Any fan of traditional Japanese culture, and especially the tension between tradition and the modern lifestyle, should enjoy this novel – there’s a reason why an earlier generation of Japan scholars considered The Makioka Sisters to be one the defining works of modern Japanese literature.