'Granta 127: Japan', ed. Yuka Igarashi (Review)

As much as I love good writing, literary magazines are a fairly unknown quantity for me (virtually all of my reading is good old-fashioned books, preferably novels).  However, I'm always open to new literary experiences, and receiving things like the work you can see in the photo make it very easy to try something a little different.  Be careful, though - looks can be deceiving ;)

*****
Granta 127: Japan (review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Allen & Unwin) is the latest edition of the quarterly magazine for new writing.  This issue has been released to coincide with the first-ever edition of the Japanese version of the magazine, and for this reason, the content is a hybrid of work from Japanese writers and artists and contributions from Western writers.  Oh, and it's very pretty, too :)

The layout and design are excellent, and (naive as I am) I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a book, not a magazine, with full colour throughout.  There's a mix of genres (stories, poems, non-fiction) plus art and photos, the most memorable of which is the cover, from Yuji Hamada's 'Primal Mountain' series:

"With this work, what is most important is the image of a mountain in the viewer's mind.  In other words, it is not the maker of the images who establishes and delivers what is to be seen; rather, I surrendered the work to the viewer's first impression, which led me to title the series 'Primal Mountain'." (translated by Ivan Vartanian)
'Primal Mountain', p.97 (Granta Publications, 2014)

Oh, and there are some ads too - it is a magazine, after all ;)

Of course, our focus is on the writing, and there are some big names on board.  One of those is Hiromi Kawakami, author of The Briefcase (AKA Strange Weather in Tokyo), and her contribution is 'Blue Moon' (translated by Lucy North), a real(?) story of an agonising wait to see if the writer has cancer.  It's a poignant piece, with haikus in snowy Russia and reflections on death:

"The Universe, I myself, the birds winging through the skies, the snowflakes swirling through Moscow... No one sees the beginning of these things, and no one can predict how they will end.  How precious it is, how precarious it is to be living."
'Blue Moon' (p.113)

The writer's brush with death encourages her to think more about what it means to actually live.

David Mitchell is another of the big guns, and his story 'Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut' is an excellent piece - well, six, actually.  The story looks at a brief moment in time in one of the ubiquitous budget coffee shops, seen by six different people, each of whom has arrived at that moment by a very different path.  The grumpy old man, the hard-working manager, the foreign 'English teacher', the Burberry-clad young woman - a nice cross-section of Japanese society gathered around one shiny counter :)

Perhaps of more interest, though, are the new discoveries to be made, and there are plenty of good writers here who aren't quite so well known in the West.  I enjoyed Kyoko Nakajima's 'Things Remembered and Things Forgotten' (translated by Ian M. McDonald), a clever story about memories of the past (and how they might not always be too accurate).  Another to impress was Hiroko Oyamada's 'Spider Lilies' (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter), another of those odd, slightly off (Ogawaesque!) tales which Japanese writers excel at, this one connecting flowers, breast milk and maternal jealousy...

As can be expected, recent events have made their mark on Japanese writing, and Toshiki Okada's 'Breakfast' (translated by Michael Emmerich) is one which touches on post-Fukushima depression.  In this story, a woman flies back to a Tokyo she denies exists, merely in order to cut her only remaining tie - with her husband:

"An awareness of how impossible it was for her to visit Tokyo without marking out the beginning and end of her stay, anger at the circumstances that made her feel this way, a wrenching sense of guilt toward Tokyo and all the people who lived here, this tangle of emotions bore down on her relentlessly, crushing her."
'Breakfast' (p.35)

It's an excellent story, made better by its elaborate, comma-laden style, wonderfully written - and translated :)

The gloomy outlook isn't confined to Okada's piece, with several of the other writers sharing his sense of pessimism.  Yukiko Motoya's 'The Dogs' (translated by Asa Yoneda) is a strange story set in the mountains in winter, with sinister canine companions and a town slowly disappearing without a trace.  However, when it comes to strange, Tomoyuki Hoshino can always come up with the goods (c.f. We, the Children of Cats and Lonely Hearts Killer), and in 'Pink' (translated by Brian Bergstrom), he describes a freak heatwave which drives people to spin around and around - cooling themselves and speeding up time in the process...

As mentioned, apart from the great translated J-Lit, there's plenty here from outsiders looking in.  Ruth Ozeki's 'Linked' is a short piece looking at her grandfather's life, attempting to understand him and his art.  Another interesting view is from Pico Iyer's 'The Beauty of the Package', in which the writer examines the tacky Japanese wedding 'experience' and wonders if it's actually beautiful after all if you look more closely.  There's also a non-Anglophone view, as Andrés Felipe Solano's 'Pig Skin' (translated by Nick Caistor) was originally written in Spanish.  It's an amusing story about a writer who gets inspiration from a chance encounter on a ferry, a Colombian-Japanese-Korean co-production, brought into English by the excellent Mr. Caistor :)

Sadly, there are limits to my energy (and the length of a review people can be expected to read) - there's just too much here to do justice to.  I haven't even mentioned Sayaka Murata's amusing take on the sexless Japanese in 'A Clean Marriage' (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) or Toh Enjoe's 'Printable' (translated by David G. Boyd), a story set in a post-3D-Printer world.  Well, I have now, obviously ;)

*****
Granta 127: Japan is an excellent addition to my Japanese library, and it's a must have for anyone interested in J- Lit (and with Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 8 starting this month...) - but wait, there's more!  If you go to the Granta website, there's some exclusive online content free of charge, including excerpts of some stories (with comments by the translators) and extra stories, including one by Yoko Ogawa.  What are you waiting for - get over there, now!

It all makes for an intriguing, multi-faceted look at a fascinating country.  As it says on the back cover:

"Everyone knows this country and no one knows it."

That may be very true, but this collection will help you learn just a little more about the land of the rising sun ;)

Review Post 32 - Is David Mitchell mortal after all?!

The David Mitchell readathon has come to an end as I have finally allowed myself to read his fifth, and latest, novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.  This is probably the first time that I have been really excited about the imminent release of a book - being a big fan of classical literature, few of my favourite writers are likely to pen any more bestsellers (or breathe again) -, and I was anxious as to how this book would measure up to the likes of Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten.  The result?  Well, I think the post title gives you a hint...

First things first.  The novel, henceforth to be known as Thousand Autumns, takes place in Japan as the eighteenth century is slowly giving way to its successor.  Young clerk Jacob de Zoet, out in Asia with the Dutch East-Asian Trading Company in the hope of making his fortune, arrives on the artificial island of Dejima, a trade enclave for the only foreigners allowed to communicate with the Japanese Empire.  This extension of Nagasaki, part warehouse, part prison, is where copper reluctantly leaves Japan and where modern ideas quietly creep in.  As de Zoet settles into his post, curious about the environment he finds himself in, he meets a unique woman, a native permitted to study medicine under the auspices of Dejima's Dutch doctor, and this is where events begin to unfold.

Sounds good, so far, so why the slightly negative undertones, you may ask.  Well, I think it starts to go a little wrong at the end of the first of the three major sections.  Having concentrated on life in Dejima (and centred itself on Jacob and the start of his life on the island warehouse/prison), the book then whisks us away to focus on a new, albeit connected part of the story.  This is, as any Mitchell devotee could tell you, nothing new; however, where this dislocation works wonders in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, I feel it falls a little flat here, interrupting the tempo of the book and leaving the reader wondering what exactly the point of the story is.

And that is my main issue with Thousand Autumns; I really don't get what he was driving at, and it doesn't really sit as cohesively as the (ironically, even-more-fractured) Cloud Atlas.  Without the benefit of postgraduate qualifications in Literary Analysis, the best I can come up with is that it is 'bitty'; there were times when I was soothed by his writing into a comfortable state and others where I wondered if I'd inadvertently been given an unfinished draft copy (which I would, of course, immediately have flogged on e-Bay).  Perhaps this is partly because of my expectations of the book.  Aside from the obvious difficulty of following his previous works, Mitchell also set himself the task of writing a book set in Japan, but not in Japan, if you see what I mean.  I was expecting, and hoping, for a wider view of the country, seen through Jacob's eyes, and I was a little disappointed when I didn't really get it.

Still, don't go thinking that I'm going to be throwing my copy into my tasteful blue recycling bin (emptied every second Friday morning).  Quite apart from the fact that my elder daughter Emi is fascinated by the beautiful cover design (as usual, I think the British cover beats the North American one hands down...), I did enjoy reading Thousand Autumns, and I suspect that I'll enjoy it a lot more the second time around when my expectations won't be so high.  In addition to a very Murakami-esque scene involving a cat and a tunnel, I enjoyed the continuation of Mitchell's obsession with progress and his slightly pessimistic view of the changes industrialisation and civilisation bring.  Seen in this light, the timing and location are perfect, and the first and last sections could almost be considered book ends to Cloud Atlas.

The most interesting, for me at least, and perhaps most successful feature of this book is the focus on the inherent difficulties in communication.  I have just completed the last unit of my Master's degree, which focused on Intercultural Communication, so it's not surprising that I have been viewing all my reading lately through that prism.  This concept, however, has a lot more to it than the idea that those Japanese are strange and don't think the same as us Dutchies (as I'm sure no-one actually said in the book - although they may well have been thinking it).  In addition to the obvious issues of communicating in a foreign language, there is the difficulty of interpreting the implicit meaning behind the words, even when the words themselves are seemingly straight-forward.  One example from the book is when de Zoet is repeatedly asked in Japanese whether a man retrieved dead from the sea is English.  He senses that there is more to the question than meets the eye but is unable to untangle the hidden message until he asks his interpreter to spell the subtext out for him.

A common misconception is that Intercultural Communication is limited to interactions involving people speaking a different language and coming from different ethnic backgrounds, but Thousand Autumns give several excellent examples of why this is incorrect.  While the Japanese may occasionally be inscrutable, it is with his countrymen (and other fellow Dutch speakers) that our hero has more trouble.  It is this idea of culture in the sense of a group of people with shared interests which de Zoet falls foul of; his failure to realise that Dejima is a long way from either Amsterdam or Batavia leads to his misguided attempt at honesty.  The culture of the marooned Dutch traders is very different to his own...

All in all then, Thousand Autumns is a thoroughly entertaining read, which would be more than enough to expect from most writers.  This however is David Mitchell, so I felt (unreasonably) slightly disappointed on completing the book.  Mitchell obviously spent a lot of time researching the background to this book, writing about a time and a place which obviously fascinate him.  The problem is that I'm not sure this filters through to the reader as much as it should.  Perhaps those expectations of mine really did prevent me from enjoying this work as much as I should have.  Still, I have a suggestion for Mitchell to ponder over if he's looking for ideas for future novels.  The end of Sakoku (Japan's closed nation policy) would make for a more interesting background for a book: why not take a leaf out of Blackadder's book and bring back an illegitimate heir to take centre stage in these historic events?  The Lost Heir of Jacob de Zoet.  I'm willing to listen to offers...

Review Post 21 - The Joys of Youth

On to May, and that means it's time for The Small House at Allington, the fifth book in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Chronicles series. Each rereading of these books leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, and this month's instalment is no exception. Unusually for Trollope, the major event occurs early in the book when country belle Lily Dale captivates London man-about-town Adolphus Crosbie so completely that he decides to propose marriage. However, after an idyllic few weeks in Allington, Crosbie moves on to Courcy Castle, where he is besieged (in the most subtle, delicate and elegant way) by Lady Alexandrina. Despite knowing full well that he would be best served by remaining true to Lily, the snob in him is unable to resist the appeal of marrying into the aristocracy. Thus occurs a jilting which will change lives (at least three) forever...

Although Lily is widely acknowledged as the stand-out character, a burned moth unable to trust to her chances of recovery from her scorched attempt at romance, Crosbie, the undisputed villain of the piece, is just as fascinating. In Framley Parsonage, the figure of Nathaniel Sowerby exemplified the gentleman with all possible advantages in life who throws them all away, knowing all the while that the road he is treading leads only to ruin. So it is with Crosbie. He is fully aware that Lily would have made a far better wife than the ice-cold Lady Alexandrina, and he quickly realises that the degenerate assortment of alcoholics, scroungers and old maids who make up the Courcy family cannot hold a candle to the honest gentry surrounding Lily in Allington. So why does he do it?

Crosbie falls victim to his own delusions of grandeur, trading certain plain happiness for potential high status - something which never really comes to pass. Even while flirting at Courcy Castle, he admits to himself the inferiority of the people there, shuddering involuntarily at the ignorance and deceit he sees around him. Alas, his society time in London has become too dear to him, and he is unable to tear himself away from the bright lights; in truth, he is just as much of a moth as Lily is.

The observant reader (and I am sure that you are all observant - and highly intelligent as well) will have noticed that three lives were ruined by Crosbie's caddish behaviour. The third of these unfortunate souls is John Eames, a childhood friend of Lily's who (naturally) worships the very ground she walks on. He is a 'hobbledehoy', neither a child nor a man, and over the course of the novel, he develops socially and mentally until he believes (and is led by others to believe) that he may be the one to repair Crosbie's damage and mend Lily's heart. He is also a thinly-veiled portrait of Trollope himself and gives the author the opportunity to put aspects of his youth into his fiction, including his time as a clumsy clerk in the postal service. Quite whether Trollope would have been willing and able to avenge a lady's honour in the fashion Eames does is another matter entirely...

I'll leave you to find out how it all ends for yourself. As to the series itself, June will bring the review of what is, quite literally, The Last Chronicle of Barset, a glorious swansong for England's most famous fictional county and a chance to catch up with some old friends - some welcome, some not so. See you then!

*****

While we're on the topic of thinly-veiled autobiography, the David Mitchell reminiscence tour stops by the Worcestershire town of Black Swan Green this week. Set in 1982, with a background of Betamax, sherbert bombs and the Falklands War, the novel follows young Jason Taylor, a young secondary school student with a stammer, through one of his most formative years. Despite the simplistic style of the storytelling and the detached nature of the thirteen chapters, Mitchell manages to tie it all into a seamless analysis of both adolescence and a simpler, quieter era.

Let me get the references out of the way now. The style reminds me very much of Mikael Niemi's Popular Music, a Finnish coming-of-age tale, while some of the content matter is reminiscent of Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha, particularly in its treatment of the effect less-than-perfect marriages can have on impressionable children. However, having compared Mitchell to one of his great influences, Murakami, in an earlier post, it would be remiss of me not to mention the parallels with Norwegian Wood, another great tale of past love and loss.

Which is not to say that Black Swan Green is derivative. As usual, Mitchell manages to put his own stamp on an idea that, it's fair to say, is not entirely original. It helps that the setting is not exactly alien to me, born five years later than Jason (and about fifty miles east of his Worcestershire home), yet I suspect that anyone reading his experiences would be drawn irresistibly back to their own childhood, whether that involved first kisses, chases through fields, bullying at school, or playing Space Invaders. We've all been there.

The backdrop of the Falklands War was particularly poignant for me though for a number of reasons. Firstly, the way the children reacted, watching the news coverage as if it were a sporting event, is very similar to the way we followed the first Gulf War at school (with chalk maps of the Middle East drawn on the blackboard at lunchtime). The inability to realise what was actually happening due to a lack of close involvement is now, at a distance of twenty years, slightly embarrassing to recall. Secondly, having been born in Coventry, there are certain things which are part of our shared knowledge, and the moment we learn that one of the locals is a sailor stationed on HMS Coventry, I choke up a little. Every time.

Look, to cut a long story short, Mitchell is brilliant, the book's brilliant, and I can't wait to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (currently reclining resplendently on the bookcase behind me).

And yes, I still hate him ;)

Review Post 17 - A GPS For The Soul

Often, when reflecting on a book you’ve just finished, you ask yourself (quietly; otherwise people start looking at you funnily and debating whether or not to call the police) whether it was any good and, if so, exactly how good it was. With others (and hopefully this doesn’t happen to you very often), you simply toss them aside, warning friends and family never to let this particular writer darken their door (or bookcase). Then, there are those exceedingly rare occasions where you read the last few lines, lay the book down, and quietly wonder: is this a great book?

When I say great, I’m not referring to something well written, humorous or insightful, something which touches a nerve or heartstrings, something everyone seems to like. Great refers to those precious works which change lives, transcend genres, unite readers of differing opinions and speak to us about the world we live in (and the people who live here with us). Hamlet is great. Crime and Punishment is great. The Trial is great. Is Cloud Atlas?

Cloud Atlas, for those among you who don’t know (and I would be surprised if there were any such people among the discerning readers of my little blog), is a mind-blowing novel written in six seemingly disparate stories. Each part is set not only in a different location and with a different cast, but also in a different time, ranging from a Pacific trading ship in the 1850s to a post-apocalyptic pastoral society in Hawaii sometime in the far future. Each section is related by the principal character in a different literary genre, and, with the exception of the central story, each is cut off half-way through, only to be completed later in the book in reverse order. The effect is a Russian-Doll structure, starting with the earliest story, gradually accelerating through time before coming to a halt and reversing back through time to finish (almost) back where we started (incidentally, a structure mirrored in Cloud Atlas Sextet, a composition by one of the characters). It’s certainly an interesting way of writing a book.

So how can this be called a novel? Believe it or not, David Mitchell (whose brilliance I have already expounded upon recently) manages to use this structure to transfer a message about life, the universe and just about bloody everything (to paraphrase Douglas Adams). The central theme is civilisation, progress and where it is taking us, and Mitchell skilfully convinces us that it is dragging us forward into a very nasty place indeed. He also shows us that this is not a recent phenomenon; the negative traits of human nature, greed and envy, exploitation and an unending desire for more, are repeated throughout the ages – with ever more serious consequences. As a certain Welsh diva once sang, “It’s all just a little bit of history repeating”…

…literally, in some cases. As in Ghostwritten, Mitchell expertly inserts references forward and backward in time, between stories (and indeed books), but he also manages to create telling parallels between the sections here. When Luisa and Joe Napier are fleeing from thugs in the illegal sweatshop harbouring hundreds of low-paid foreign workers, we are reminded instantly of Sonmi’s illicit visit to the Ark taking hundreds of fabricants to their ‘salvation’. Likewise, Robert Frobisher’s last sight of the sleeping Vyvyan Ayres, as he appropriates his mentor’s Luger pistol, can be contrasted with Zach’ry, knife in hand, stumbling across the sleeping Kona warrior.

Not only are there parallels between the stories, there are also direct links between them. Robert Frobisher leafs through Adam Ewing’s journal in between composing and adultering; Luisa Rey reads Frobisher’s letters to Rufus Sixsmith, and her story is, in turn, read by Timothy Cavendish on his flight out of London; Sonmi sees Cavendish’s tale on the big screen, but Zach’ry experiences Sonmi in a slightly more technologically advanced format. While each of the stories seems vivid at the time, the next person down the chain experiences them as entertainment or amusement (at times, even as fictional). It’s a depressing thought that our present, real and urgent as we think it is, is just tomorrow’s stories and fantasies…

The use of different genres for each of the sections is almost Joycean in its daring, and Mitchell’s whole approach to language in Cloud Atlas can be best compared to Joyce’s work in Ulysses (if on a slightly more restrained scale). Writing in six different voices can’t be easy, especially when you are essentially inventing a couple of them, but Mitchell doesn’t put a foot wrong in his attempts to show variations in time, space and class through language. One of the best examples is the language used in Sonmi’s story where, in addition to the orthographical changes time has wrought (ph >f, ight > ite, ex >x), Mitchell has chosen brand names to become new concrete nouns. Consumers drive fords, work on sonys (call people on hand sonys) and capture images on kodaks. It’s a shame there’s no mention of Apple or the letter ‘i’, but even Mitchell can’t get it right all the time.

So what is Cloud Atlas actually about? Well, just about everything. It’s about humanity, our strengths and our weaknesses, our ingenuity and our greed. The reader may not pick everything up on first reading, but there are a myriad of references to the way we live our lives and the things we do to improve them. Technology can be a wonderful thing, and progress is not necessarily an evil if we tread carefully. The problem with a no-holds-barred thrust for progress though is that for every winner there is a loser. Whether it is the poor peaceful Moriori, routed by the Maori (who are looking to make up for the losses they suffered at the hands of the British) or the futuristic Valley people, trying to defend themselves against the warlike Kona, it seems as if those who seek merely to exist peacefully will inevitably go under. As Adam Ewing reflects, if we persist with a devil-take-the-hindmost approach, one day there will be no more hindmost to be taken; survival of the fittest, taken to its extreme, leads to the destruction of us all.

Towards the middle of the book, we look on in horror as the future societies Mitchell has sketched out take advantage of weaker beings in ruthless fashion. Yet as we start to move back in time again, we realise that these nightmarish visions of the future are merely mirror images of the present and past. The treatment of the fabricants in Nea So Copros is no different to that of the sweatshop workers in Buenas Yerbas or the aboriginal Polynesians on the island visited by The Prophetess. Even the chemical soap the fabricants require to survive has its equivalent in the tobacco the colonists attempt to teach the islanders to crave (or the opium which the Western powers introduced to China in order to make its people interested in what they had to offer…).

Some would argue that it is religion which we should turn to in order to stave off this kind of savagery. However, religion does not come off too well in the few instances it is alluded to in Cloud Atlas. The above-mentioned tobacco lessons are actually held by the south-sea missionaries hoping to convert the locals; unless the indigenous people develop needs, the churchmen will have no bait with which to reel them in. The missionaries, as well as trying to create a generation of addicts, separate the locals from their own religion by forbidding them to set foot in their sacred place, or ‘marae’. This works so well that after a few years the younger members of the community have forgotten what it was actually for. However, the established religions do not get the last laugh; the later stories show us forgotten statues of Buddha and long-vacant churches used for marketplaces. Religions come and religions go…

It’s rare that a book can contain so much about our world in so few pages and even rarer for it to have a lasting effect on the reader. Over the past few days, I have been reading the newspaper and watching the evening news, and virtually every story makes me think of Cloud Atlas and the lessons it tells. Climate change sceptics, the Global Financial Crisis, population growth, asylum seekers – everything. To return to the question I started this lengthy review with: is Cloud Atlas great? Posterity’s answer is going to have to wait a few decades (at least), but mine is fairly unequivocal: yes. Cloud Atlas belongs on every list of books you should read; more than that, if you’re looking for some words to live your life by, there are worse places to look than the last few pages of this book. Please read it; I promise you won't regret it.

Review Post 12 - The Master versus The Apprentice

This week we are off to Tokyo, a sprawling, seamy metropolis of salaryman drone armies on trains by day, and Cadillac-driving Yakuza by night; and it is the night which especially interests us, a night interrupted by neon lights advertising pachinko parlours, karaoke bars and places nice people like you and I would never dream of entering (Starbucks). And who better to guide us through this vision of the future today than not one, but two (TWO!) of our favourite authors?

Ladies and gentlemen: in the Red Corner, the outsider, the challenger, the master of the multiple perspective, all the way from England, let's hear it for DAVID MITCHELL! And in the Blue Corner, the king of the surreal, the undisputed heavyweight champion of mixing the mundane with the magical, the man with the plan (and usually a cat or two too), from the other side of the barrier, put your hands together for HARUKI MURAKAMI!

But I digress...

*****

Mitchell's second novel, number9dream, follows nineteen-year-old Kyushu native Eiji Miyake to Tokyo on his quest to find the father he has never met. While this seems to be a more straight-forward narrative after the jumping around of Ghostwritten, it is actually anything but: from the very start, we are thrown around in the whirlpool of Mitchell's imagination as we experience Eiji's daydreams and fantasies, as well as diary entries and slightly-strange short stories. In a taste of things to come from Mitchell, the timeline of the book is anything but stable and linear, and, in a style vaguely reminiscent of The God of Small Things, we leap back and forth through Eiji's life, learning about the fate of his twin sister, Anju, and his strangely absent mother.

While it is Eiji's search for his father that drives the narrative on, it eventually becomes clear that this is more of a search for himself than his father. Leaving his home environment for the first time, our young hero is forced to come to terms with the real world and step out of the dreams he has been living. A bit like Kafka on the Shore in reverse...

The Murakami influences don't stop there. It's difficult to see Eiji and his cat without thinking of Haruki and his love for all things feline while the book Eiji regrets not finishing during one of his surprisingly frequent Yakuza encounters (I mean that while expecting to be bludgeoned to death he was regretting not having finished the book, not that he wanted to read it while being beaten from pillar to post - that would just be weird) features a familiar tale about a man down a well. And where do you think the Mongolian comes from, hmm? Let's just say that I have my suspicions...

*****

When reading After Dark, it would be quite easy to imagine Eiji Miyake somewhere in the background (probably being dragged into a den of iniquity by Yuzu Daimon), but the atmosphere of this work is a lot slower. Number9dream channels the adrenalin of a city that never sleeps; Murakami shows us the few hours when Tokyo's pulse is barely ticking over. Over the course of one night, we follow Mari Asai and the friendly musician Takahashi through a choice selection of late-night cafes, jazz bars and love hotels. Meanwhile, back at Mari's house, her beautiful sister Eri is lost in an unnaturally-long sleep, for all intents and purposes dead to the world. And then the television in the corner starts to flicker...

A lot of people have trouble liking After Dark, and it's the Eri part which is usually to blame. It is perhaps a little too out-there and forces the reader to search for connections to the other strand, ideas which may or may not have anything to do with Murakami's true intentions. If, however, we look at Eri's story more metaphorically than literally, we uncover typical Murakami themes, albeit in a slightly different version. Just as his usual 'Toru' characters struggle (in a very relaxed fashion) against the strains and stresses of modern life, Eri is fighting against the role the world has made for her. Groomed to be a model and sex symbol from an early age, she feels trapped and needs a way to escape to a normal life, something Mari has painstakingly created for herself. Admittedly, you don't get many televisions that work without being plugged in in normal life, but that's Murakami for you.

Despite the familiar themes, After Dark is a rather experimental work for Murakami. The writing is several degrees more detached than his previous novels, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that this was originally meant to be a play, or maybe even a screenplay. Were it not for the danger of alienating the audience with Eri's slumbering dramas, I would suggest that this is a perfect book to be filmed once Norwegian Wood has come and gone. In fact, if we pitch it at the art-house french-film-loving public, we may just have an idea...

Having read the book for a second time now, I have to confess that it has grown on me. Yes, it's different from the usual Murakami fare, but it can only be a good thing for authors to experiment, especially Murakami (who really could just phone it in if he couldn't be bothered - as shown with the hype over the still-not-available-in-English 1Q84, he can sell a million copies without anyone knowing anything about the book). If we enjoy it for what it is, a minor experimental work from a great writer, then nobody will be disappointed - just don't go expecting Norwegian Wood.

Let us finish by returning to the rather laboured boxing metaphor. If I were the referee, I'd have to give the decision to number9dream (unanimous points verdict). Mind you, I'd probably have been predicting an early KO before the fight. Of course, one caveat I'd introduce is that this was a slight mismatch; After Dark was definitely fighting out of its weight class. Now Cloud Atlas v The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: that would be a genuine clash of the heavyweights. Tickets, anyone?

Review Post 6 - It's All David Mitchell's Fault...

It's all David Mitchell's fault. Well, him and Murakami. You see, as well as being a part-time blogger, full-time worker, occasional student and stressed out father, I harbour ambitions of one day actually getting a little book out there myself (first, wobbly baby steps towards that goal can be seen here). But then, whenever I start thinking that I might be able to knock off something half-decent, something other people may like to spend their time casting an eye over, I read one of David Mitchell's books and scream out, "Crap, that's exactly the kind of book I want to write!!!". Which probably explains why nobody wants to sit next to me on the train in the morning.

But I digress. What I actually want to do today is have a little chat about Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten, a frankly brilliant piece of work (his debut novel too! I hate him). There are definite tinges of Murakami in this book, quite apart from the parts set in Japan. The foregrounding of the issue of the pace of progress, the highlighting of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the jazz... All these things leave the reader thinking that Mr. Mitchell has a fair few of Haruki's novels tucked away somewhere. However, Ghostwritten takes some of these aspects and runs off into the distance with them, often in several directions at once.

The book is divided into nine parts which would, in most books, be wholly unrelated. Starting in Okinawa and gradually winding its way westward around the world, the book explores how technology and consumerism have changed our world both for better and for worse. While we are now able to travel and expand our cultural horizons, some are also free to use this privilege to attack those they disapprove of or take advantage of the riches available.

One of the most prominent ideas set out is that of inter-connectedness and the way we are all linked to what happens on Earth. Just as a butterfly's wings may cause a typhoon on the other side of the world, tiny, seemingly unimportant actions can have enormous implications on humanity. Can saving a woman from being run over by a taxi lead to the end of the world? Quite possibly... The writer lays out the disparate events unfolding with a unifying plot in mind, forcing both the characters and reader to consider carefully what they believe in: are we buffeted by the winds of chance or manipulated by the hand of destiny?

One of the things I admire about Mitchell is an ability to tightly plot his books, despite an apparent lack of connections. Throughout Ghostwritten, there are a wealth of both anaphoric and cataphoric references as people, places, events, books and songs pop up repeatedly, both after and before our first sight of them. Young Satoru from the Tokyo section is later mentioned on the radio show in the Night Train section as a successful jazz musician; Mo Muntevary appears at least three times in different sections (twice before we know who she is!). For the die-hard Mitchell fans, there are also some exophoric references as we are told of information which will occur in some of his other books. Ingenious (still hate him).

Mitchell also writes about the inexorable rise, or rather spread, of consumerism and progress, and our attempts to either run away from it or create our own way of dealing with it. Satoru hides from the bustling Tokyo outside by listening to the jazz records in his shop; Caspar and Sherri are wandering nomads, seekers of civilisations lost (with huge backpacks and water purification tablets); Quasar finds his sanctuary in simply abdicating individual responsibility for his actions and turning his mind, and possessions, over to a cult. This advancement has, you see, come at a cost - a loss of connection with family and cultural roots. It is no coincidence that the majority of the characters (like an increasing number of people today) have uncertain, heterogeneous backgrounds. This contributes to the feeling of unease which they live with and which forces them to seek new connections.

There are differences in the extent to which the world has changed within the nine scenes. In the Asian sections, the world has become so crowded that it is only inside your own head that you can map out a little piece of the universe for you alone. On Clear Island, off Ireland's Atlantic Coast, life is still relatively simple and unchanged, yet even here (in the shape of Mo's pursuers) progress is slowly catching up.

Of course, by the end of the book, with the emergence of the Zookeeper, Mitchell shows us where his world of infinite interconnections is heading. Artificial Intelligence, designed to protect us (or, at least, those of us with the right skin colour) turns out to be more intelligent than those who created it. As mankind spreads over the planet, destroying and devouring (reminiscent of Agent Smith's description of humanity as a 'virus' in The Matrix), it becomes more and more difficult to save us from ourselves. We are left with a warning of the consequences of mankind's technological achievements outstripping its capacity to ethically consider whether they really are achievements.

Ghostwritten is brilliant. David Mitchell has created a stunning, thought-provoking piece of work. And for that, as you already know, I hate his guts.