'The Old Capital' by Yasunari Kawabata (Review)

After our trip to Tokyo, it's time for a change of scenery - from the new capital, to the old one.  Today's choice is a book every bit as elegant and calming as its cover would suggest.  It's time to just sit back and watch the cherry blossoms...

*****
The Old Capital (revised 2006 translation by J. Martin Holman) is one of Yasunari Kawabata's masterpieces.  It is set in Kyoto in the 1950s and introduces the reader to Chieko, the adopted daughter of a traditional Kimono wholesaler.  The beautiful young woman has known for some time that her mother and father are not her real parents, but discrepancies in the way they tell the story of her 'kidnapping' make her wonder what really happened.

As Chieko drifts from festival to festival, admiring trees, flowers and hand-crafted kimonos, she begins to think about her future, and three young men begin to come into focus against the crowd of other acquaintances.  Soon though it is her past that starts to influence her life, and a chance encounter is to change everything...

The Old Capital is one of the three works cited by the committee when awarding Kawabata the Nobel Prize, and it is easy to see why.  It is a beautiful novel, typical of Kawabata's work in the way it subtly explores the steady changes to traditional Japanese life.  The story shows how post-war Japan is moving on, leaving certain aspects of its history and tradition behind.  Traditional businesses are starting to fade away as imported business techniques take hold, and artisans struggle to find and train successors; the next generation is not always interested in continuing the traditions.

This story is told against the backdrop of the beautiful city of Kyoto, and The Old Capital is full of luscious descriptions of nature.  Every temple and festival has its own special flower - the weeping willows bow to the ground, the tall cedars tower over gravel walkways, their branches forming an awe-inspiring canopy above the people walking through the park...  Kawabata contrasts the ephemeral nature of the blossoms, and the beauty of young women, with the lasting splendour of the mountains and temples.

Like many Japanese novels, this one is played out against the changing seasons, a story in a year, allowing us to see the city in all its guises - and its many traditional festivals.  While this cycle of life may suggest the idea of permanence though, even here change is evident.  Some of the festivals are being abandoned for lack of money, or interest, and one of the main festivals is shown to be a fairly recent innovation.  Despite the slow pace of change, it is coming, and it is inevitable.  As Chieko's father says when he goes to look at a possible new house, seeing the spread of inns in the area:

"The house itself is all right, but this just won't do," Takichiro whispered as he stood at the gate.  "I wonder if time will turn all of Kyoto into nothing but inns... "
p.128 (Counterpoint Press, 2006)

This prediction of possible change in Kyoto is a prescient one, as anyone who has visited Kansai more recently will know...

Rather than the plot though, the beauty of The Old Capital lies in the way Kawabata sketches the surface of the story, leaving the reader to imagine what lies beneath.  The best word to describe the writing is subtle: conversations are laden with deeper meaning which the reader has to unearth; true feelings are concealed beneath the exterior, requiring us to peel back the layers.  To understand the book, we need to find what is implied, not explicitly stated.  An example of this is a conversation Chieko has with her childhood friend, Shin'ichi:

"Are you completely obedient to your parents?"
"Yes, completely."
"Even when it comes to something like marriage?"
"Yes.  For now I intend to be obedient," Chieko answered without hesitation.
"What about yourself?  Don't you have your own feelings?" Shin'ichi asked.
"Having too many seems to cause trouble."
"So you suppress them... you stifle your feelings?"
"No, not that."
"You're speaking nothing but riddles." (p.17)

It's good to see that, at times, the characters can be as confused as the reader ;)

We are never quite sure what the main impetus of the novel is, whether we are hoping to find out the secret of Chieko's birth or learn who will steal her heart.  In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter (which is a good thing as Kawabata is unlikely to tell us...).  As with other classic J-Lit works, there is no neat end - the reader must make their own judgement...

...or you can just sit and look at the pretty flowers - your choice ;) 

Family Matters

Just over a year ago, Penguin released four books by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata in their Modern Classics editions.  I originally pre-ordered two (Snow Country and Thousand Cranes) and, of course, eventually ended up buying the other two anyway - Beauty and Sadness and, today's offering, The Sound of the Mountain.  Having also read The Master of Go, this then was my fifth book by the old master and yet...

...If I'm honest, nothing has really hit the spot so far.  Kawabata is the one J-Lit writer I've never quite got, not in the way I've instantly loved Natsume Soseki, Kenzaburo Oe or Yukio Mishima.  Perhaps it's because of the more oblique approach of his works; it might be because of the style of the translator (Howard Hibbett for Beauty and Sadness, Edward Seidensticker for all the others); perhaps I just hadn't found the right book yet.  Luckily, it appears that with Kawabata it's not third, but fifth time lucky...

The Sound of the Mountain is a slow-moving story centring on Shingo Ogata, a businessman in his sixties.  Commuting from his Kamakura home every day to his Tokyo office, Shingo simply wants a quiet life, time to reflect and enjoy the years remaining to him and his wife Yasuko.  Sadly, it appears that a quiet life is not to be his lot.  His son, Shuichi, who (along with his wife) lives with his parents, is having an affair out in Tokyo, and if that is not enough, one day Shingo's daughter, Fusako, arrives with her two children in tow, her marriage evidently on the rocks.

As head of the household, the family looks to Shingo to intervene in both cases, but the old man (despite his affection for his daughter-in-law) decides to let matters take their course, hoping that time will resolves events for him.  Unfortunately, his procrastination actually makes everything much worse than they already were.  For a man slowly starting the gradual slide into senility, it's all too much to take...

Right from the start, The Sound of the Mountain grabbed me a lot more than the Kawabata books I'd previously read.  The novel was specifically mentioned when he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and that's probably because it is the most Western-friendly of his major works.  It's a book which grapples with the problems of family life and the extent to which a patriarch should interfere in the lives of those around him, but it also has a much wider reach, looking at the unstoppable changes wrought on a traditional society by defeat at war and the consequent western influences this brought with it.

There are many such influences highlighted in the story.  Foreigners can be seen strolling around Shinjuku (albeit a more verdant Shinjuku than I remember!), modern electrical appliances are beginning to make their entrance into the Japanese home, and kimonos are beginning to give way to western dresses and suits.  This western dominance even extends to the way in which the method for counting your age changes half-way through the story, with Shingo and Yasuko becoming younger as a result!

However, the effects on the family unit are much more serious.  The pull of family obligations appears to be far weaker, allowing Shuichi to mistreat his wife Kikuko - and giving Fusako the strength to walk out on her husband, Aihara.  It's not only the wives who suffer though - some of Shingo's friends, married men in their sixties, roam the streets of Tokyo every evening, too scared to return home until their wives are safely asleep.

This newfound freedom is also seen in the characters of Ikeda and Kinu, Shuichi's mistress.  The two women are war widows, but instead of returning either to their husband's family or their own, they have decided to take the opportunity to be independent and live by themselves, even starting up their own business.  In fact, Kinu, despite only appearing in one brief chapter (and not actually being seen in person until page 174 of 209!), is a character who overshadows the whole novel, a potential homewrecker and a threat to familial stability.

The Sound of the Mountain reminds me of two novels by another famous Japanese writer, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki.  Shingo is reminiscent of Utsugi, Tanizaki's mad old man, albeit it in a gentler, less-deranged (!) way, his memory lapses showing that he is well on his way towards a second childhood.  The relationship hinted at with his daughter-in-law also links the two works.  However, the novel as a whole also has similarities with Tanizaki's epic family novel, The Makioka Sisters.  While The Makioka Sisters concentrates on the struggles of the younger generation, Kawabata's story, set around the same time, focuses on those of their parents and grandparents, struggles which, though different, are every bit as real.

The title of the novel comes from a scene in which Shingo is startled by a dull, distant roar, a sound he imagines to come from the heart of the mountain visible from his garden.  It is only when he later mentions this to his wife that he recalls the last time he heard it - in his youth, just before the death of his wife's sister...  The sound of the mountain then is a warning of impending disaster, a warning which Shingo is forced to heed if he is to keep his family together.  Will he manage it, despite his lethargy?  Well, there's only one way to find out...

A Nobel Pursuit

Nobel time has come and gone for another year, and (alas) Haruki Murakami still hasn't brought home the prize.  While the committee (hopefully) has many years yet to rectify this, it means that there are still only two Japanese Nobel laureates in the literature section - Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe.  So, while we wait for 1Q84 to arrive on our doorsteps (and ponder what might have been), I thought it might be nice to have a look at a couple of works from the writers Murakami is hoping to emulate...

*****
Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness is a novella centred on Toshio Oki, a middle-aged novelist, and Otoko Ueno, an artist whom Oki (while already married) seduced at an early age, and whose life he altered dramatically.  Decades after their affair was brought to an end, the writer decides to visit his former love in Kyoto to hear the New Year bells ringing, and on this trip he meets Keiko Sakami, a young woman who has become Otoko's protégée - and perhaps a whole lot more...

Otoko greets Oki warmly, if warily, and it is actually Keiko who shows more of an interest in the writer (whose most famous work is a novel based on his relationship with Otoko).  It soon becomes clear that the stunning and vibrant Keiko knows all about Otoko and Oki's affair, and while, on the surface at least, she appears to want to respect her teacher's wishes to treat her old flame with respect, the reader soon suspects that she has another motive for her interest in Oki - revenge.

My first thought on reading this (aided by memories of several other J-Lit classics) was that if you are to believe fiction, Japanese women are most definitely not to be crossed.  It's not giving much away to say that the most interesting character in the novella is Keiko, a femme fatale in the vein of Mitsuko (the memorable character in Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's Quicksand).  It's not just her scheming against Oki and his family which is so disturbing, it's also her behaviour when she is with Otoko.  Urgent, pouting, aggressive, meek, flirty... she is anything but predictable.

As is so often the case with Japanese literature though, nature itself is just as important as the people who move through it.  Kawabata is a master of painting pictures with words in his works, and Beauty and Sadness is no exception.  The reader is treated to sumptuous descriptions of Arashiyama and the other mountains surrounding Kyoto; we walk with Oki through the hills of Kamakura; and we gaze out over the beautiful Lake Biwa, still unaware of what is to happen there.  There certainly is a lot of beauty in Kawabata's writing - if you read this book, you'll see that behind the beauty, there is often a fair amount of sadness too...

*****
If Kawabata is the traditional, aesthetic Yin of modern Japanese literature though, Kenzaburo Oe is most definitely the foreign-influenced, hard-nosed Yang.  In contrast to the understated elegance of Beauty and Sadness, A Personal Matter, one of Oe's earliest works, is a rather modern and realistic affair.

The short novel introduces us to Bird, a twenty-seven-year-old cram-school teacher, who is hanging around in Tokyo, waiting for news on the birth of his first child.  When the call finally comes, he senses that not all is well, and on arriving at the hospital, his fears are confirmed.  His son has been born with a large lump on his head, which the doctors describe as a brain hernia.  Faced with a situation where his son will either die in a matter of days or grow up severely mentally disabled,  Bird leaves the hospital and quickly begins to unravel...

Bird's trial of character as he deliberates whether to make an effort to save his son's life, a decision which will result in him giving up his life's dream of travelling to Africa, may seem grotesque (and more than a little over the top), but it is actually a slightly exaggerated metaphor for the sense of a loss of freedom which accompanies the joy of welcoming a child into the world.  The problems his son is facing allow Bird to consider running away from his responsibilities, throwing away his career and falling into the arms of a former girlfriend in an attempt to regain his freedom.  It isn't until the last few pages, after many tortuous episodes, that we are told the decision Bird has come to.

A Personal Matter is a thought-provoking book, but in a gritty, unflinching way.  It is reminiscent of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (written four years earlier) in both its content and its style, very different indeed to Beauty and Sadness.  Where Kawabata's works are steeped in tea houses and temples, Oe shows us the underbelly of Japanese life - tenements, amusement arcades, gay bars, dodgy clinics - and doesn't shy away from explicit sex, alcoholism and violence.  Slammed by many critics at the time for his sullying of pure Japanese writing, Oe is obviously an influence on several contemporary Japanese writers.  Haruki Murakami is, of course, one that comes to mind, but it's safe to say that writers such as Ryu Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto and Natsuo Kirino were also nudged into their writing paths by Oe's Westernised style.

*****
I've now read four of Kawabata's works, while A Personal Matter is my second of Oe's novels.  Oe may verge on the disturbing at some points, but I enjoy the way he dissects the issues facing normal modern Japanese families, ones without homes overlooking the valleys of Kamakura.  Perhaps though that's why the two works reviewed here complement each other so well: the delicate and the crude, the subdued and the brash, the inside and the outside...

...the Yin and the Yang.

More than Black and White

It's that time of year again :)  Belezza, of Dolce Belezza, has sent out the invitation to participate in her fifth Japanese Literature Challenge, and, for the third year in a row, I will be participating.  To complete the challenge, you only need to read one Japanese book, but as this is one of my specialist areas, I would imagine that I'll be looking to complete a dozen or so before the end of the challenge (the 31st of January, 2012).  And, entirely (un)coincidentally, here's a review I made earlier...

*****
The Master of Go (translated by Edward Seidensticker) is Yasunari Kawabata's semi-fictional account of a true event, a championship match of Go (an Oriental game played on a board with black and white counters) between the Master and a younger, more aggressive opponent.  The match took place in 1938, and Kawabata actually covered the match for a Japanese newspaper, later turning his heavily descriptive reports into a book.

The result of the match, and the Master's subsequent death, are revealed at the very start of the book, and it is clear that the story has little to do with the details of the match, or even the result.  Rather, the novel is a magnificent detailed psychological portrayal of a person obsessed with the game, a man whose life has been spent improving his understanding of the tactics and the more intangible essence of the art.

The Master is a frail old man, at times taciturn and grumpy, at others garrulous and in need of company, obsessed with spending his free time playing all kinds of games with anyone (un)fortunate enough to be around.  His total focus while at the board, and his 'vagueness' away from it, are in contrast to the challenger's constant chatter during play.  This clash is to be his swansong, his final match at the top level, and the tense atmosphere in the resort where the two players find themselves sealed off from the outside world gradually becomes unbearable, both for the players and the observers.  Mind you, if you were watching - or playing - a game for six months, your nerves would be slightly frayed too.

The match is actually more than a battle between two individuals; it is a changing of the guard, a passing away of the old and an attempt to usher in a new, more democratic age of Go.  Rather than deferring to the Master's wishes on rules, as has traditionally been the case, the association sets down stringent conditions, treating both players as equals.  As the game progresses, however, you begin to wonder whether the conditions are so equal after all - perhaps they have been loaded against the Master...

It is the narrator, a thinly disguised Kawabata, who points us in this direction.  In the vein of one of Kazuo Ishiguro's less than trustworthy speakers, he muses, considers and suggests, all without committing himself, pointing out irregularities in proceedings, hinting at events happening beneath the surface, but always letting the reader decipher the meaning he is half concealing.  Has the schedule been designed to grind down the old man's health?  Is the Master more concerned with the spirit of the game than the actual result?  That's up to you, dear reader, to decide.

Most readers who consider starting this novel are a little daunted by the subject matter, and this is probably the one drawback of this book.  While the details are, for the most part, of little relevance, there are a few sections where the game takes over (and where my attention levels abruptly dropped).  For Western readers, a more fictional approach would probably have worked better, with even more focus on the players, especially during the breaks between sessions, and less emphasis on the play.  Of course, it wasn't produced for our benefit, so we'll just have to take it as it was written :)

All in all, The Master of Go is another wonderful piece of J-Lit and a worthy addition to my quickly expanding Japanese mini-library (the Chinese have been expelled from the top shelf, and an invasion of the Russian-held middle shelves is only a matter of time).  Despite the minor quibbles noted in the previous paragraph, this has probably been my favourite long Kawabata work so far (my favourite work would probably still be the long short story The Izu Dancer), and I'm keen to move on to the next one.  So, when are the Book Depository and Abe Books having their next 10% off sale?

Another Taste of Japan

I have been avoiding writing posts for a while now, but I thought I might just do the occasional one to catch you all up on certain books I've been reading, and what better way to kick that off than to look at some of the Japanese literature I've encountered over the past couple of months?  None, that's what ;)

*****

After the understated beauty of Snow Country, it's back to the Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, this time with the (very) slim novella A Thousand Cranes (translated by Edward Seidensticker).  Kikuji, the son of a tea ceremony master, is invited to a ceremony by one of his dead father's mistresses.  This seemingly innocuous event is the start of a tangled web of relationships involving another of the mistresses, her daughter Fumiko, and Yukiko, a beautiful young woman who has been suggested as a future bride for Kikuji.  Oh yes, and we mustn't forget the first mistress, the sinister Chikako...

It is Chikako who is planning events from the background, constantly interfering with Kikuji, pushing women in his direction and then pulling them away from him.  First, the young man falls for Mrs. Ota; then events conspire to bring Fumiko into his life.  For an experienced reader of Japanese fiction, a happy ending is far from expected, and Kawabata doesn't fail to satisfy (or disappoint!).

Thousand Cranes is another beautifully-constructed tale, but that's all it is - in the sense that it is deceptively short.  My beautiful new Penguin Classics edition is just over 100-pages long, with fairly large print, and I raced through it in an evening.  I enjoyed it, just as I did Snow Country, drinking in the elegant, sparse prose, but I was left wanting something a little more substantial, more than a three-act play of a novella.  I have The Master of Go winging its way to me from England as we speak, so we'll see if that scratches the itch ;)

*****

Moving from one end of the J-Lit spectrum to (pretty much) the other, one of the good things to come out of the collapse of Angus & Robertson was my $2.50 purchase of Hitomi Kanehara's Autofiction (translated by David James Karashima).  I'm ashamed to say that even at that price, I still almost decided to leave it as I was a little concerned that it was going to be a bit of a gory slasher book (a lot of contemporary Japanese fiction can be a little... well, let's just say aesthetically unpleasing).  However, I took the plunge, and I was pleasantly surprised :)

Autofiction, as the title suggests, is loosely based on Kanehara's own life.  In the first section of four, we meet Shin, a young, recently-married woman on her way back to Japan with her husband.  He goes to the toilet, she has a panic attack, thinking he is having a good time in there with another woman, and that is how we find out that she is a bit of a... shall we say a nutter?

Of course, where there is stress and angst, there is usually a very good reason for it, and Shin is no exception.  The reader follows her back in time, to when she was 18, 16 and 15, learning gradually what she has experienced and suffered though, and what exactly has made her so damaged.  By the time we make it to the end, or perhaps the start, of the story, we understand, and sympathise, with her feelings a little more.

As mentioned above, I had my reservations about this book as I have heard a lot about writers such as Ryu Murakami and Natsuo Kirino (who don't sound like my cup of tea), and Kanehara is often lumped in with them.  However, I was pleasantly surprised by Autofiction.  There are some graphic scenes, and some mind-boggling attitudes displayed (including a very blasé attitude towards an impending rape...), but on the whole the book is very well written, presenting Shin as a sympathetic character who has been toughened up by life's trials and tribulations.  The more we learn about her ordeals, the more we understand and condone her later erratic behaviour.  If written in reverse (i.e. in chronological order), it would all make more sense, but the effect would definitely be spoiled :)

Autofiction is Kanehara's second novel, and her first, Snakes and Earrings, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.  It's one that I may well end up buying one day...

*****
All for now, but not for this topic - look out for another J-Lit round-up in a few days :)

Fire and Ice

After 120 minutes of action at the weekend in the Asian Cup Final, Australia's national team, the hapless Socceroos (after dominating play and chances), went down 1-0 to Japan's national selection, the Blue Samurai.  Some would say that this post presenting some literature from both countries is a timely homage to the event: others, more cynical, might argue that it was complete coincidence that I read an Australian book and a Japanese book around this time.  Whatever your thoughts, here it is :)

*****

We'll start with the Australian contender, and my second read for this year's Aussie Author Challenge is Tim Winton's debut novel An Open Swimmer.  Set in Perth and on the West Australian coast south of the capital, it focuses on Jerra, a young twenty-something who has recently dropped out of uni and is on a camping trip with his best mate Sean (note: using the word 'friend' in reviews of Australian books is frowned upon - 'mate' is the preferred expression).  A chance encounter with an old bloke living near the beach (note: as above, 'bloke' not 'man') has repercussions for Jerra, for whom the trip is less of a holiday than an attempt to run away from the past.

The story is divided into three parts: the first describes Jerra and Sean's short camping trip; the second follows Jerra's attempts to create a normal life for himself back in Perth; the third sees Jerra taking off again in the vain hope of finding some answers back where he started.  It's a short work, and if you were expecting all the answers to be set out for you by the end of it, you'll be sadly disappointed.

Winton is very adept at revealing his stories little by little, teasing the reader with half-sentences thrown away, hinting at a dark secret buried in the past (but liable to surface, rising up from the deep, at any minute).  We slowly find out that Jerra's drifting is connected with several events: a pearl found in the head of a large fish; his relationship with Sean; and a connection with Sean's mother, Jewel.

The prose, what little of it there is, switches between elegant, poetical descriptions of the sea and short, stark simple sentences, one per action, focusing the reader's attention in on Jerra. A lot of the text, however, is dialogue, real, spoken Australian, jumping around, using slang, something which contributes to the sometimes maddening feeling that there's something happening beneath the surface which the reader can't quite fathom.  Along with the constant fishing jargon, the use of local idiom makes this a book which non-natives would probably struggle a little with unless they are willing to go with the flow.  If this book ever made it into an American edition, I suspect that it was a fairly gutted, unrecognisable version of the original...

For a first novel (written at uni!), it's a stunning effort, but I suspect that it's not for everyone.  An Open Swimmer requires a lot of thought and concentration, and it's not the sort of book that gives up all its secrets in one reading.  If that sounds like your kind of read though (and especially if you've already tried - and liked - some of Winton's other works), I heartily recommend it.  Just get a dictionary of fish names handy first...

*****

Opaque as it is though, An Open Swimmer could have its themes written ten-feet high in purple crayon in comparison with my next book.  Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, one of the works cited by the Nobel Prize committee in bestowing that award, is a typically beautiful piece of Japanese writing, meaning (of course) that the majority of the sub-text went floating far over my head.  But I digress.

Shimamura, an idle Tokyoite, takes a train journey to the mountains in the north, returning to a small village where he met the intriguing Komako, a geisha in training, earlier in the year.  On the train, he sees another beautiful young woman, caring for an unwell fellow passenger, and when he arrives at his destination, he learns that the young woman (Yoko) lives in the same house as Komako.  Throughout the rest of the short novel, he crosses paths with Yoko, never quite spending time together, always on the periphery of genuine communication.

I'd talk more about the plot if there was one; the book consists merely of Shimamura's two visits to the mountains (his married life in Tokyo is largely ignored...) and the time he spends there with the irascible but charming Komako.  It's all about the pictures Kawabata paints with his words, the portraits of the vivacious Komako and the reserved Yoko, the images he puts in our mind of the stark, wintry landscape - effortless and enjoyable to read.

However, I feel that this one is a little too sub-textual for my liking.  I felt myself constantly sensing that there was something there, something I should be getting, grasping around for some little allusion, some point the writer is making (and concealing).  While part of the beauty of Japanese literature is this sense of the unstated (and understated), Snow Country was a little too much of a good thing in this regard.

I was also comparing it in my mind with another Japanese book I read not long ago, Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura, and, unfortunately, Kawabata's book by no means came off best.  Kusamakura could be a summer version of Snow Country (without geishas), and it's a book I enjoyed more, combining the elegance of style with a disarming humour and frequent quotable bon-mots.

Before you all get the wrong impression, I did enjoy Snow Country, but I think (and hope) that his later work will impress me more (this was his debut novel, if you can stretch these pages out to a novel).  Of the two Japanese Nobel Laureates, Oe has impressed me more - so far: there's a lot more to read before that decision is final though ;)

*****

This was my final review for Belezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 4.  I managed to read twelve Japanese books in the time allotted, well more than the single required work!  My collection of Japanese literature, which has become a bit of a hobby, now almost stretches across one whole three-foot shelf, and before long, it will have colonised the whole space for itself.  This challenge saw me read numerous works by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki, and I have just scraped the surface with Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata.  Thanks again to Belezza for hosting this wonderful challenge, and I'll definitely be joining in the next one, whenever that may be :)