Last year, when I was lucky enough to review two books by Japanese writer Tomoyuki Hoshino, the publishers (PM Press) were kind enough to slip in one more piece of translated fiction, a slim novella which has been... shall we say 'resting' on my shelves for a good while? Anyway, it was high time to give it a go - and it turned out to be a great little read :)
*****
Calling All Heroes - A Manifesto for Taking Power (translated by Gregory Nipper) is a short work by Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II in which he works through his frustration at the failure of the 1968 student protests. Although short, it's an action-packed read, a book that looks at what might have been and then tries to make it so...
We start off in January 1970 with our central character Nestor, a journalist recovering in hospital after being attacked by a knife-wielding murderer. With time to think, he decides that the moment has come to make the government and the police pay for the atrocities committed during the Tlatelolco crackdown (or massacre...), and to this end he dictates a series of letters, summoning an army of legendary freedom fighters to Mexico City to carry out his quixotic mission. The actions of a deluded invalid? Perhaps... But what if all these heroes actually came?
Calling All Heroes is a chaotic, adrenaline-charged story, initially confusing, but eventually simply exhilarating. The book consists of thirty-one short parts, alternating between two strands. In the first, an unknown narrator addresses Nestor in the second person, describing the events as the bitter journalist plots his attack on the unsuspecting authorities; in the second, letters to Nestor (letters he has requested) describe his character and history, also hinting at what happened in the crazy few days at the end of January 1970.
Taibo's book is effective as an historical novel, looking at the disappointment felt by students after the government crackdowns of 1968, and several of the letters portray the feelings of helplessness and loss that followed the defeat. What is described is a city attempting to recover from a traumatic battle:
"In the city the tanks had been replaced by solitude, with similar effects. The wounds would seem not to have closed. We would belong to a generation of idiot princes, hemophiliacs, whose skin the blood flowed down at the slightest cut."
p.15 (PM Press, 2010)
In fact, we later see examples of this in the story of a worker who one day decides, in the middle of the street, to set fire to himself in the hope of raising awareness of the plight of the workers...
...which may all sound like grim reading. However, Calling All Heroes is anything but, sweeping the reader along with a story straight out of an adventure book. You see, the band of mercenaries Nestor is summoning from around the world is not an anonymous band of guns for hire - there are some very familar names amongst these soldiers of fortune:
"The next sign that the conspiracy was thriving came on Friday, when the doctor, after pointing out that with a period of pleasant convalescence you would be in the clear, took from the pocket of his hospital coat a telegram from Dick Turpin, which gave the number of the Braniff International flight on which he would arrive in Mexico." (p.52)
Yep, that's right - Mr. Stand-and-Deliver himself.
The legendary English highwayman is just the first of many legendary figures to enter the fray, and many of them are not even real. Still with Sherlock Holmes, Winnetou and the Light Brigade (who do a fair bit of charging) on your side, things are bound to be very interesting - and even when things do get hairy, there's always another legend of classic literature (or four) to save the day ;)
It all makes for a wonderfully-entertaining and (more importantly) well-written story, a personal catharsis disguised as a Boys-Own yarn. The different strands work well, and a whole variety of voices come through in the letters Nestor receives from his friends. It won't take you very long to finish Taibo's book (an hour if you're a quick reader), but it'll stay with you a lot longer than that - revolution and comic-book carnage: what's not to like?
*****
Before I leave you, I just thought I'd draw your attention to some similarities with another famous Latin-American writer, a certain Roberto Bolaño. Last year, I read a couple of his works, including The Savage Detectives, and after finishing Calling All Heroes I couldn't help but compare the two. The setting is the same, of course, and the letters to Nestor act in the same way as the interviews people give describing the enigmatic Lima and Belano. The two books also contain their fair share of artists - and wry humour:
"...and René Cabrera, who wrote brilliant poems and then used the paper to fill the holes in his shoes so the rain wouldn't get his socks too wet." (p.25)
Given then that this appeared in English in 2010, a clear example of strong influences and jumping on Bolaño's coat-tails, no? Not exactly... You see, Taibo actually got there first - in 1982. In the words of the writer:
"Under these deplorable conditions, this shortest of novels was created. brewed in the midst of a premature divorce, following a premature marriage, of a political crisis, of an era of hunger and underemployment, the novel became a pretext, a vendetta, dealing with Power by other means.
Then it was put away in a drawer and rewritten three times during the following twelve years." (Appendix Two, p.118)
I'm not an expert on Latin-American literature by any means, but it seems possible that Bolaño may have had a quick read of this one at some point ;)
*****
To finish today, a bit of music (something Stu, of Winstonsdad's Blog likes to do from time to time). I was wondering what could possibly suit a crazy story like this, when it appeared of its own accord, unbidden - and it became clear that there was only one choice...
After the previous success of Tomoyuki Hoshino's short-story collection, We, the Children of Cats (from PM Press), I was eager to try another of the writer's books. Today's choice is a novel, which makes a nice contrast, allowing me to see which genre suits him better. So, how does Hoshino fare in the longer form?
*****
Lonely Hearts Killer (translated by Adrienne Carey Hurley, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a novel which could almost be called dystopian in a detached, literary way. After the death of the young Emperor (called Majesty throughout the novel), the 'Island Nation' nosedives into a communal depression, with many people unable to even get out of bed. While many of those 'spirited away' had no strong feelings about the royal family, it seems that the event has acted as a catalyst, causing people all over the country to collapse under the stress of their everyday lives.
Although Shoji Inoue, a young unemployed filmmaker, wasn't affected by the event, he becomes fascinated by the reasons behind the nationwide downward spiral. He gets to know one of the 'spirited away', his friend's partner, Miko, and becomes obsessed with his thoughts on the phenomenon. It's a phase which may simply have passed away into history, if only Inoue hadn't made sure that nobody would be moving on with their lives in a hurry...
Lonely Hearts Killer is told in three parts and voices. In the first,we learn about the death of his young Majesty, and the aftermath of the traumatic event, through Shoji's eyes. In the middle section, his friend Iroha continues the story, trying to come to terms with Shoji and Miko's deaths and the chaotic situation Japan finds itself in as a result. Finally, Mokuren, Iroha's friend, finishes off the story after Iroha does something foolish. Both Iroha and Mokuren comment on the actions and thoughts of the previous part; in his introduction, Hoshino invites the reader to speculate in turn about Mokuren...
It's a frightening story, but one which is eminently believable. A depressing event triggers mass depression and soul-searching in a country which is already in the grip of a downward spiral. With an ageing population and a depressed economy, there is little hope for the future - and in a society where suicide is not as stigmatised as it is in Christian countries, death is always an enticing option. Even the weather joins in, cherry blossoms blasted off the trees by giant dust storms (perhaps symbolic of Hoshino's rejection of 'typical' J-lit conventions), and the reader is treated to the eery sight of Tokyo as a ghost town, with the streets emptied of people.
In deciding to take their lives, Inoue and Miko spark a revolution. Death suddenly seems preferable to hanging around in a grey country waiting to die - and if you're going to go, why not take someone else with you? Suddenly, everyone needs to be careful out on the streets:
"People were overreacting if someone just brushed up against their shoulder or arm on the train. They would shove or even brandish a weapon at whoever had inadvertently done the touching, and the number of such cases resulting in bloody brawls had increased. And sometimes simply walking in the same direction as another person even in a residential neighborhood would end in trouble. The upshot of all this was a widespread aversion to other people and rampant paranoid hostility in crowded places."
p.128 (PM press, 2009)
All of a sudden, it seems that nowhere is safe, and no-one can be trusted.
A major theme involves films, with Shoji and Iroha obsessed with reproducing what they see on camera, putting layer upon layer, copy upon copy until the original is distorted, unrecognisable (an irony in a country where the traditional idea of reproduction has virtually come to a halt). Shoji's existence has, fairly literally, been a life on film, a fact which doesn't always please him:
"Accompanying the growth of my catalogue of filmed images are occasional moments when I feel very sad at the thought that the substance of my worth, what matters about me is contained in the volume of a disc." (p.13)
Iroha is also obsessed with filming wherever she goes, and it is her film of Miko, films of films, an endless hall of digital mirrors, which causes the initial cracks in Shoji's facade.
And what are the 'love suicides' plaguing the country if not a series of copies...
Of course, this copy-cat culture is a distorted one, and the people need a strong leader to stand up and tell them to get on with their lives and stop worrying about death. Initially, however, the royal successor (Her Majesty) is unable to do so. In a worrying power vacuum, the gap is then filled by a politician - one who has shown himself to be a bit of an opportunist and, perhaps, morally suspect. Just like real life then...
What's it all about? Good question :) It's certainly, in part at least, a stand against ultra-nationalism (something which is always a concern in Japan - I remember the men in black vans with loudspeakers distinctly...). It's also a reflection (no pun intended) of a real sense of depression in Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun has been eclipsed by close-to-zero economic growth and a rapidly ageing population. In the book, few children are being born - the 'one child' policy which is introduced is meant to *stimulate* the birth rate, not control it! The novel also highlights the danger of group-think, showing that there are risks in marginalising minorities in a culture of nationalistic homogenisation. Then again, it might be about something else entirely :)
Once you've finished the novel (as in We, the Children of Cats), there are some added extras. There's a great Q & A between the author and the translator, and a translator's introduction which provides background information about the novel. This contains some useful analysis of the book (which certainly makes it easier to write a convincing review!). Now, if only more publishers could find the time to do this...
Lonely Hearts Killer is a fascinating story with a good translation, and it's a book that is well worth checking out. It's not always easy to get your head around what Hoshino is trying to say, but it's certainly a welcome change to some of the cherry-blossom-tinted (or blood-soaked) J-Lit around at the moment. Do try it :)
This year was a bad one for J-Lit in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with no Japanese book on the longlist for 2013. Over in the US though, one Japanese work did make it onto the (very) longlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the American equivalent of the IFFP, so with Japanese Literature Challenge 7 upon us, I thought it would be a good chance to check it out - mainly to see if the BTBA judges knew what they were doing :)
*****
Tomoyuki Hoshino's We, the Children of Cats (translated by Brian Bergstrom and Lucy Fraser, review copy from publisher PM Press) is a collection of the writer's assorted short works. It offers us five short stories and three novellas (although one of the novellas is only 32 pages long), enough for the reader to get a good overview of Hoshino's style and themes.
The first story, 'Paper Woman', gives us an insight into Hoshino the writer, right from the very start:
"As I've continued my professional writing career, I've come to think of it as an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible. One could say that a novel's words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between those two feelings. Which is why a novel should never be seen as a simple expression of an author's self."
p.1 'Paper Woman' (PM Press, 2012)
This idea of transformations is an important one for Hoshino. In fact, in this story, the transformation is a very unusual and literal one...
Another thing we find out about Hoshino from this collection is his fascination with all things Latin-American. Whether it's a privileged tourist searching for something worth living for ('Chino'), a dangerous teen sent to Peru to avoid trouble with the law ('Treason Diary'), or a bizarre, tango-influenced novella in an unnamed, imaginary city ('A Milonga for the Melted Moon'), the writer returns to stories of tropical lands, with guerillas, dancing, poverty and football of the round-ball variety. While it would be easy to ascribe Murakami influences to Hoshino's stories, in this case García Marquez is probably a more likely source.
Many of the stories look at outsiders fleeing from rigid, dull Japanese society, and a couple look at the idea of 'Japaneseness'. The young man in 'Chino' knows that his attempts to transform into a Latino freedom fighter are doomed from the start:
"No matter how dirty I might look, I knew my travels were buoyed on that lighter-than-air aluminum one-yen coin. A mode of travel little better than drifting and staring: never to touch down, never to make contact with other worlds, never to dive right in. I knew my body stank of yen, and would show me up as an outsider wherever I went."
'Chino' (p.37)
On the whole though, Hoshino is more interested in minorities than bored rich kids. 'Air' takes a magical look at gender identity, describing a man and a woman who both fall somewhere in the middle of traditional binary gender descriptions. Forced to keep their 'irregularities' secret, they eventually find each other (at a GLBT Mardi-Gras-type event), culminating in a gender-bending climax which leaves both in a new state.
Interestingly, several of the stories are based (rather loosely) on real-life incidents, with Hoshino providing an alternative take on facts. The novella 'Sand Planet', the longest piece in the collection, uses the story of Japanese settlers in the Dominican Republic, and a mass curry poisoning at an elementary school (a news event I remember very well from my time in Japan!), to create a fabulous story of a journalist attempting to make sense of his life. The events of 'Treason Diary' are also based in fact, as the two main characters were suggested by two teen criminals whose families spirited them out of the country...
As fascinating as the true(ish) stories are though, it is Hoshino's imagination and style which catch your attention. From the frankly bizarre 'The No Fathers Club', a piece in which the eponymous club is suggested by a strange sport called no-ball soccer, to the mind- (and gender-) bending events of 'A Milonga for the Melted Moon', the writer creates incredible, uncanny landscapes. The latter story is the strangest (and best) in the collection, and it is a difficult tale to follow at times, mainly because of the constant switch in perspective between the two main characters, a man and a woman who switch clothes, viewpoints and bodily fluids (and if you think you know what that means, you don't...).
It really is a question of where one person ends and the other begins, and the language used reflects this. At times, words and sentences melt into one another, and the image created is of a slightly off-kilter world, recognisable but foreign:
"You and I both, as we walk this earth, are nothing more than shadow sculptures carved from light. Everyone here is just light thrown by the city in the sky as it shines in the night. This city is so filled with light the night shines like the midday sun, the silver from the sky as it falls on the surface of the river builds up and combines with the new light falling from the sky, the proof is in the way the light comes not just from the sky but from the ground beneath our feet: no shadows trouble the surfaces of this city. Instead they hang suspended, unmoored from the ground, and eventually turn back into birds, back into people."
'A Milonga for the Melted Moon' (p.186)
The final story of the collection is fifty pages of elegant confusion and madness, and it's brilliant :)
While two translators are listed, Brian Bergstrom does most of the heavy lifting (Lucy Fraser's 'Chino' is the exception), and he also provides a wonderful thirty-page essay on the stories to complete the book. This afterword discusses Hoshino's influences and fascination with Latin America, and also examines each of the stories in turn, teasing out common themes. It's an addition which helps the reader to understand where Hoshino is coming from, and another example of the kind of extras which can make a great book even better (if only all publishers of translated fiction did this...).
I loved this collection, and I'm very glad I decided to check it out. Having also received a copy of Hoshino's novel, Lonely Hearts Killer, from the publisher, he might well turn out to be my next new favourite J-Lit writer. If you're in the market for well-written, fantastical literary fiction, this one is for you :)
