With the new year already a few days old, it's high time for my first review for January in Japan :) I'm kicking off my series of posts with a look at a writer whose work I've tried once before. Today's book, however, is where he made his name, an excellent collection of three works which, for the first time, are now available in one volume in English. Let's take a walk down to the river...
*****
Teru Miyamoto's Rivers (translated by Ralph F. McCarthy and Roger K. Thomas, review copy courtesy of Kurodahan Press) brings together three of the writer's most famous pieces. 'Muddy River' won the Osamu Dazai Prize in 1977, while 'River of Fireflies' was awarded the 78th Akutagawa Prize the following year. These two novellas run to about about fifty pages each, but the third story, 'River of Lights', which also began life as a novella, was later expanded into a 150-page short novel. The three parts of Rivers are unconnected in terms of characters and plot; however, as you'll see, there's a lot which links the stories together and justifies the decision to collect them in one volume.
The first story, 'Muddy River', is set in the mid-1950s, with eight-year-old Nobuo living above a noodle shop by a river close to Osaka Bay. It's a working-class area, fairly removed from the aesthetically-pleasing settings of some well-known Japanese fiction:
"A patch of sunlight fell on one corner of the boat's decaying wooden roof. Nobuo turned his eyes to the river. He'd lived his entire life next to those muddy waters, but now, for the first time ever, they struck him as filthy and repulsive. The horse-dung-littered asphalt, the jumble of sagging gray bridges, the soot-blackened houses - everything seemed hopelessly dismal and dreary."
'Muddy River', p.14 (Kurodahan Press, 2014)
The story focuses on a short period of Nobuo's life, one in which he meets Kiichi, a boy living with his mother and sister on a houseboat. The two boys quickly become friends, but Nobuo gradually comes to realise that Kiichi's circumstances are very different to his own, learning a few lessons about life on the way.
'River of Fireflies' sees us leaving the Kansai region to head to Toyama, on the Sea of Japan coast. It's now 1962, and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, Tatsuo, is coming to terms with the impending death of his ageing father and his growing feelings for childhood friend Eiko. Over the course of a few months, the teenager goes through a pivotal time of his life, facing up to death, responsibility and confused emotions, the story culminating in a summer day to remember - a search for the elusive fireflies...
The final part of the trilogy draws us back to Osaka, but this time the focus has shifted from the bay to downtown. It's 1969, and university student Kunihiko is working at a small coffee shop called 'River' to make ends meet, a café located in the middle of the red-light district:
"All at once crowded, then as if by prior arrangement all at once vacated, River fell quiet as it emptied. The rain that had begun early in the evening was falling harder. A waterlogged drunk went staggering by. With the colors of neon lights reflected in the puddles, the surface of Soemoncho Avenue glistened in various hues. Hostesses plucked up the hems of their dresses as they held umbrellas for customers getting into taxis."
'River of Lights', p.128
Starting slowly, the story gradually reveals the different facets of the Dotonbori area, introducing the reader to drag queens, strippers, billiard halls and the neon lights dominating the quarter.
The greater scope of 'River of Lights' allows Miyamoto to spread his focus, and the second major character of the story is Takeuchi, the owner of the café. He becomes a kind of guardian to the parentless Kunihiko, despite the fact that he has a son of his own, a billiard player working his way up the ranks of the Osaka hustlers. In the floating world of Dotonbori, the café owner eventually decides that it's time for him to intervene in the lives of both young men, either with financial help or with his trusty billiards cue.
While I enjoyed my previous look at Miyamoto's work, the short-story collection Phantom Lights, Rivers is a far better book. All three of the stories provide intriguing glimpses into the Japan of the time, with traces of the post-war poverty evident in each of the pieces. There are old soldiers with visible war wounds, bombed buildings with people setting setting up stalls amongst the rubble and businessmen with an eye for profit taking advantage of the opportunities to make a quick fortune.
It's also hard to avoid the feeling that the three books form a deliberate trilogy, one in which the writer explores his own youth vicariously. While the main characters are different, each time we move on seven years, as do the boys. Each of them is forced to contemplate mortality (with the first death occurring a matter of pages into 'Muddy River'), and we move from a young boy with a sick mother, to a teenager with a dying father and then finally meet a young adult who has lost both parents.
Towards the end of 'River of Lights', Kunihiko looks out over his realm and realises how empty it all is:
"When I walk through Dotonbori at daybreak, I always get so depressed I can't stand it. I feel like some kind of filthy stray dog and don't give a damn about anything."
'River of Lights', p.215
The words come from the mouth of his walking companion, but the sentiment could be his own. Having followed the progress of the youth of the time, the trilogy actually has an open end, where we wonder what will become of Kunihiko, or his next incarnation.
Miyamoto is a contemporary of the two Murakamis, and while he's unlikely to achieve their level of fame and success, it's definitely worth comparing the work of the three writers. In particular, with 'River of Lights' being set in 1969, there's an obvious opportunity to read it alongside Haruki's Norwegian Wood and Ryu's Sixty-Nine. Three men on the cusp of adulthood, three different areas of Japan, three ways of coping with a changing society - these are books which all benefit from being read in a wider context. Here's hoping that more western readers will put the Murakamis aside for a little while and give Miyamoto a try - I can assure you that you won't regret it :)
Kurodahan Press were kind enough to support my January in Japan event earlier this year by offering a few prizes, and while I'd read one of the three offerings, the other two looked quite interesting too... Luckily enough, I was able to get review copies for myself, and - just as importantly - I was also able to snatch a few hours recently to try one :)
*****
Mieko Kanai's Oh, Tama! (translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy) is just another in the long line of Japanese books featuring a cat (I'm sure you all know of at least one writer who likes to do this...). The Tama of the novel is a pregnant black-and-white kitty who is unceremoniously brought to the apartment of Natsuyuki, an unemployed photographer, by Alexandre, the brother of his ex-girlfriend Tsuneko.
The cat belonged to Tsuneko, but she has gone into hiding after using her own pregnancy to fleece several potential fathers of a fair amount of money, so it's up to mild-mannered Natsuyuki to take care of Tama until the kittens come into the world. However, the arrival of the cat in Natsuyuki's life is to cause several other changes, and from being a loner living a peaceful life in a small, quiet apartment, Natsuyuki suddenly finds himself at the centre of a noisy, chaotic social circle...
It would be an understatement to say that Oh, Tama! isn't really plot driven - in fact, there isn't really a plot to speak of. Once the initial set up introduces us to the basic concept, and to the characters of Natsuyuki, Alexandre and Tama, it's simply a series of conversations, meals and friends dropping by for a drink. In that sense, it has a lot in common with more traditional Japanese fare (such as, dare I say it, Natsume Soseki's I am a Cat), but in its tone it's a lot more modern - prostitutes instead of geishas, beer in place of sake.
Typical of this modern taste to the book is the character of Alexandre, an outsider due to his foreign blood (his father was possibly a foreign sailor, but his mother was very vague about this...). He can't help but stand out in a very homogenous society:
"Alexandre, talking in a rather feminine way, opined that, judging from the color of his hair (reddish-brown) and eyes (light gray), his father would seem to have been a Caucasian; but he might have been a light-skinned Negro, or a Jew. He was an unspecified person whose very ethnicty was unclear."
p.16 (Kurodahan Press, 2014)
A restless soul, who pops in and out of Natsuyuki's life randomly, Alexandre makes his living with a series of temporary jobs, the most intriguing of which is porn star...
As the novel progresses, though, we find that Alexandre is actually the norm, rather than an exception. Tsuneko is only his half-sister, and it turns out that Natsuyuki and another of the possible fathers of her unborn (and possibly non-existent) child are related in the same way (this new half-brother becomes one of the occasional visitors to Natsuyuki's tiny flat...). And, of course, if we're talking about absent fathers, it would be remiss of us not to mention the fact that Tama is also bringing up her kittens without a tomcat to help out ;)
Oh, Tama! is a difficult book to analyse in hindsight. To use familiar J-Lit markers, it has a Haruki Murakami protagonist forced to socialise with a few of the nicer characters from a Ryu Murakami novel, and they all sit around and talk rubbish in the vein of Banana Yoshimoto's creations. And nothing much gets done:
"What with thoughts like that swirling through my mind, somehow everything became too much of a bother. The feeling that there was nothing I really wanted to do crept up from the tips of my toes." (p.85)
At times, you begin to wonder if the writer has fallen asleep on the job too...
By the end of the book though, a couple of themes have emerged from the alcohol-fuelled haze. The unemployed photographer, the foreign-blooded porn actor and the confused psychiatrist are all connected in that they are existing outside the notoriously regimented constraints of mainstream Japanese society. They all scrape by on a day-to-day basis and occasionally show that they're not quite as cheerful on the inside as it appears on the outside.
However, what they also have in common is a bond which allows them to seek comfort, and what Kanai does cleverly in Oh, Tama! is construct a cohesive social group from very different parts. While Tama doesn't play a large active role in the story, her arrival in Natsuyuki's life is the catalyst for a change in his relationships with other people. I said earlier that very little happens, and that's true - however, at the end of the novel, this very little is done by many more people. Which is a progression of sorts ;)
I don't think this will be for everyone, but it's a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours, and there is a little more to it than may first meet the eye. And, of course, if you're a cat lover, this may just be a book you'll enjoy spending some time with - whether there's a furry companion on your lap or not!
Back at the start of the year, during my January in Japan event, Patrick of my so-called research wrote a J-Lit Giants piece on Osamu Dazai. Having only read The Setting Sun and a couple of short stories, I was naturally keen to try some more of the books Patrick talked about in his piece. The opportunity to do this soon came about when Kurodahan Press sent me a review copy of a short story collection - which turned out to be a little different to what I'd read before...
*****
Blue Bamboo was originally released by Kodansha USA, but was recently reissued by Kurodahan Press. It's a collection of short stories from Dazai's middle period of writing, and this reissue gave the original translator, Ralph McCarthy, the opportunity to give his work a bit of a face-lift. Its 200 pages comprise seven stories, and while Dazai's longer work is steeped in depressing realism, these tales have a much lighter, other-worldly focus.
Two of the stories ('The Chrysanthemum Spirit' and 'Blue Bamboo') are loose adaptations of old Chinese folk tales. In the first, a stubborn, cantankerous old man, with a passion for growing chrysanthemums, encounters an unusual brother and sister combination on his way home. What follows is an amusing little story involving pretty flowers and the supernatural, not a sentence I find myself writing often!
In the title story, one which keeps you guessing as to whether it is to be a tragedy or a comedy, a poetic soul, with no aptitude for civil service entrance exams, is at his wits' end. Observing a flock of ravens outside a temple, he wishes to become one of the sacred birds - and has his wish granted. What follows is a tale exploring the ups and downs of getting what you want...
Another fairy-tale story is 'The Mermaid and the Samurai', an adaptation of a famous Japanese short story from the seventeenth century. Konnai Chudo, an exemplary samurai, kills a mermaid which is threatening to sink a boat he is travelling on. However, when news of the event gets out, a courtier laughs at him, forcing Konnai to seek evidence of his feat - a quest which will end in tears for most involved... It's a story which emphasises the importance of trust and belief, underlining its pivotal place in Bushido, the way of the samurai:
"To a true samurai, trust is everything. He who will not believe without seeing is a pitiful excuse for a man. Without trust, how can one know what is real and what is not? Indeed, one may see and yet not believe - is this not the same as never seeing? Is not everything, then, no more than an immaterial dream? The recognition of any reality begins with trust. And the source of all trust is love for one's fellow man. But you - you have not a speck of love in your miserable heart, nor of faith."
p.55, 'The Mermaid and the Samurai' (Kurodahan Press, 2012)
Then again, if someone told me they'd just taken out a mermaid, I'm not sure I'd believe them either ;)
'Romanesque' is an earlier piece, again verging on the surreal, as Dazai outlines the lives of three absurd characters (a wizard, a fighter and a liar) in order to... well, I'm not really sure. This story is then mentioned in 'Alt Heidelberg', an autobiographical sketch of a youthful, drunken summer spent at a friend's house trying to write a story. It's well written and humorous, and, in its more realistic tone, a welcome contrast to some of the other stories in the collection.
My favourites though are the two which bookend the collection. The first story, 'On Love and Beauty', introduces us to a family of five unusual siblings, whose characters are sketched out for us by the writer. They too tell stories, so Dazai is telling us a story within a story - one which works very well. There's a lot more to the idea than mere storytelling, and Dazai uses his meta-fictional idea nicely. As the eldest son muses:
"The description of physical appearance is extremely important in a work of fiction. By describing what a character looks like, you bring him alive and remind people of someone close to them, thereby lending intimacy to the tale and involving the audience, so that they cease to be mere passive observers."
(pp.22/3, 'On Love and Beauty')
This is exactly what Dazai does, and the story works wonderfully precisely because the reader has a clear mental image of the family members.
The family are back for the last story, 'Lanterns of Romance', which takes up sixty of the two-hundred pages. This time the five spend the first days of the new year spinning a longer story, to be written down, then performed. It starts with a happily-ever-after fairytale, but goes on to become something both more realistic and grotesque. Dazai also extends his portrait of the characters narrating the tale, adding new members to the family and fleshing out the personality of the mother. While he uses a Hans Christian Andersen story to kick off the family's effort, the style is all Dazai's own :)
When I read The Setting Sun and Dazai's other stories, the impression I was left with was one of wasted lives, squalor and depression. This collection is much lighter, comical and humorous, but just as enjoyable. Dazai shows a deft touch in his humour, and McCarthy has done a good job in bringing it across into English. There are dozens of examples like the following:
"People in the neighborhood were wont to remark that it was just like a scholar to be so perverse as to name his only son Saburo, which is of course a name normally reserved for third sons. The fact that no one could explain what it was that made that particular act so typical of scholarly perversity was, it was said, precisely what made it so."
(p.134, 'Romanesque')
Obviously, I haven't read McCarthy's original translation, but I'm sure that whatever he did was for the better!
Entertaining stories, a good translation and a brief introduction with information about the background of the stories make this a book well worth reading. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in J-Lit (or in tall tales!). Give it a go - I doubt you'll be disappointed :)
One of the books which reached me too late for January in Japan was a review copy from Kurodahan Press, a small publisher based in Japan which, as well as publishing new translations, also brings out-of-print works back into English. While I was originally interested in a collection of stories by Osamu Dazai, one book which caught my eye was another short-story collection, one by a writer I hadn't heard of before.
*****
Teru Miyamoto is a writer from the Kansai region of Japan, and Phantom Lights (translated by Roger K. Thomas) is a collection of some of his more popular shorter works. Having won the Akutagawa Prize, Miyamoto is a well-known name in Japan, but there is little of his work available in English, apart from a novella (Kinshu: Autumn Brocade).
Like many Japanese authors, there is a strong autobiographical nature to his writing (made clearer to the reader by the excellent introduction, courtesy of the translator). 'The Stairs', a story about a young boy living with an alcoholic mother in a dank apartment building, is a typical example. Drawn from Miyamoto's own memories of life after his father's death, it is a stark picture of the effects of poverty and alcoholism on an impressionable child. He describes leaving the apartment (to buy alcohol for the first time):
"Here and there lay the rusty remains of children's tricycles, and a voice could be heard chanting a sutra to the accompaniment of wooden clappers. Kamei Manor had its own peculiar stench. And the Kikuya Apartments next door and the Matsuba Manor across the alley each had their own peculiar stench that enveloped their tenants day and night, depriving them of all hope, draining them of strength, provoking anger, and turning their energy into irritability and despair."
p.85, 'The Stairs' (Kurodahan Press, 2011)
In such an environment, it is little wonder that the future (and the story) is fairly bleak.
The theme of poverty is continued in 'The Lift', where the main character attempts to sell a classic lighter in order to find money to eat. When he fails in his quest and sets off on a long walk home, he is offered a lift by a man on a bicycle - a character who has existential issues of his own. In Japanese, the title reads something like 'Five Thousand Times Life or Death', which may give you more of an idea of what the story is about. Or not ;)
The writer also looks back to his childhood, reminiscing about his school days. As you might imagine though, he rarely wears rose-tinted spectacles when thinking back to his youth. 'Strength' is a frame narrative in which an exhausted salaryman sitting on a park bench is reminded of his first school day by the sight of an elementary school student walking past with a bag on his back. In a fairly brief tale, the reader is shown not only the man's first school day, but also a glimpse of his home life, one which may explain the situation he finds himself in today.
'Vengeance', on the other hand, puts the blame for the protagonist's failure squarely on the shoulders of a sadistic judo teacher. Gradually, we learn just how cruel and horrific the poor boy's treatment was. Luckily though, one of the boy's school friends just happens to have grown up to be a high-ranking Yakuza member...
Phantom Lights is an interesting collection, even if not all the stories are of the same quality. However, there were a couple of things that felt off. One was that the translation tended to be a little formal and stiff. The Kansai region is famed
for its brashness and direct way of speaking, and while I agree with the
translator (in his introduction) that this is impossible to get across completely, I'm not sure that the tone he adopted always worked. A lot of the stories were literally stories, told from one character to another, and the more conversational tone you would expect just didn't happen.
I also felt that, at times, it felt a little too autobiographical. Many of the stories were variations on a theme, examining Miyamoto's early life from various angles, and while I have frequently read that this can be a trait of Japanese writing, it did get old a little quickly. In fact, where Miyamoto moved away from his own experiences more, the writing was often better.
The best example of this was the title story, 'Phantom Lights', the longest piece in the collection, and one that stands out for its quality and its difference. Narrated by a young widow who has moved to a remote seaside town to remarry, it tells of her struggle to understand why her first husband committed suicide, leaving her and their young son behind. The slower pace, and the different voice of the young widow, made for an enjoyable read, and it leads me to think that Miyamoto might actually be better enjoyed in a longer form.
In short, Phantom Lights is an enjoyable read for readers who have tried a lot of J-Lit, but I'm not sure that it is for everyone. In any case, I saw enough here to suggest that Kinshu: Autumn Brocade would be a worth a try - time to add one more to the ever-growing wishlist...
