'Blue Bamboo' by Osamu Dazai (Review)

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 :)

A Few Odds and Ends

I've already managed to put up a couple of reviews this month (which constitutes a good month at the moment!), so I thought I'd continue my weekly trend, this time with bite-size reviewettes of the other books I've got through in May so far.  Shall we?

*****

Let's start with a Nobel prize winner (just because).  Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (translated by Erdag Göknar) is a mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, involving the beautiful, but fading art of traditional Arabic 'illumination' of literary texts.  One of a group of four master artists has been been murdered,  presumably by one of the other three, and Black, recently returned from a long absence in the East, is charged with finding the guilty culprit.  If he can win the hand of the beautiful Shekure along the way, so much the better :)

The novel consists of many chapters, each having its own voice, told by one of the characters (or a drawing...).  It's an interesting way to tell a story, especially as the murderer actually has two voices - his real character, and that of 'the Murderer'.  It makes for an intriguing tale, but I didn't really love this book.  I was never really able to lose myself in the story, partly because of the, at times, slow pace, but perhaps more due to the unfamiliar setting which (to be honest) didn't really interest me that much.  As a tale of masters of a dying art form struggling to cope with the inevitable overthrow of their way of life, it is a fascinating story - I'll need another example of Pamuk's work before I can really say whether I like his style though.

*****

The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai (translated by Donald Keene) is, as I'm sure you can guess, a little more in my line.  A fairly short novel, it tells the tale of Kazuko and her family, Japanese minor nobility who have descended in the world following the death of the father, and the financial strains caused by the aftermath of the Second World War.  Kazuko and her mother move away from Tokyo in order to stretch out their meagre reserves, but their lives are turned upside down again by the arrival of Kazuko's brother Naoji, believed lost in the Pacific War.  Far from this being a happy family reunion, however, it is merely the start of a final freefall into poverty and distress.

I've read a lot of Japanese fiction over the past few years, but most of it has been set either before or after WWII, and I have the feeling that there isn't as much literature dealing with this time as is the case in Germany (where it's virtually its own genre...).  While it's possible that I just haven't found these books yet, even Mishima's The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy, which spans fifty years between 1920 and 1970, conveniently skips the war years completely.  The Setting Sun then is a welcome insight into post-war Japan and the problems people had in adjusting to a new style of life and government.  The old aristocracy has lost its importance, the Emperor is not longer a deity, and Americans roam the streets of the conquered people (albeit very much in the background).

This leaves people like Kazuko and Naoji with a lot to work through if they want to carry on with their lives, and, in Japanese literature, that 'if' is never a given.  A quick glance at Dazai's Wikipedia page will soon give you an idea of his, shall we say, lack of optimism for the future, a sense of negativity which is shared by his protagonists.  It all makes for an interesting slice of Japanese social history and a very entertaining read - just don't expect many happy endings here...

*****

A while back, I read Andrew McGahan's 1988 and was impressed enough to make a library request for Praise (written before 1988 but set after), where we meet Gordon on his return to Brisbane.  Fed up with his job, he uses a management reshuffle as an excuse to quit, sinking gently into the bludger lifestyle of drink, drugs and trips to Centrelink.  Still paranoid about his lack of sexual prowess, he somehow slips into a relationship with Cynthia, whose appetite for bedroom activities far outstrips his.  When she decides to forgo a move to Darwin to give their nascent relationship a chance, Gordon isn't entirely sure that it's for the best - especially as his high school crush Rachel is back on the scene...

Praise reminds me a little of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, and could be seen as making a similar account of early-nineties Brisbane to the one Garner's novel made of mid-seventies Melbourne.  I'd have to say though that it doesn't do it nearly as well.  I liked 1988, with its subtle, psychological undertones, a story of a city boy stuck in the middle of nowhere and forced to face up to his inadequacies.  On the other hand, Praise just felt like a detailed list of one person's sexual exploits and drug-fuelled indiscretions over a particularly unproductive period of his life.  I got through it fairly quickly, and, although I enjoyed reading it, I was happy to move onto something else - and not much of the book has stuck in my mind.

McGahan went on to win the Miles Franklin award with The White Earth (which I'm planning to read at some point), so I trust that his later books are more similar in vein to 1988 than Praise.  I know it sounds like I really hated this book, but that's not the case; it's just that I was expecting something very different - a progression, both in character and writing - to what I found.  I forgot that what I was reading actually predated what I'd previously read...

Has anyone else read this - and do you have a different opinion?  Please let me know :)