Having only recently explored the mythical origins of the Japanese people, you would have thought I'd spend the rest of January in Japan looking at more modern books. However, today's post sees me going back in time once more, with a 14th-Century text recounting a series of 12th-Century conflicts. You've all heard about the face that launched a thousand ships, but how about a mirror that did the same? Let me tell you a story...
*****
The Tale of the Heike (translated by Royall Tyler, review copy courtesy of Penguin Classics) is a monumental work, a collection of stories from a period of history which together form something akin to a Japanese Iliad. We begin in the middle of the twelfth century, where under the leadership of the great Tadamori, the Taira (or 'Heike') clan has become the most powerful family in the land, eclipsing the fortunes of the other major clan, the Minamoto (or 'Genji'). The first books of the work chart the rise in the strength of the Taira, who eventually come to possess most of the important imperial positions, in addition to providing a wife for the reigning emperor.
Under the leadership of Tadamori's son, Kiyomori, the Heike reach the zenith of their influence, banishing and executing most of their serious rivals, and when the Empress gives birth to a male heir (later to be made Emperor himself), it appears that their power is unmatchable:
"This, our island land of Japan,
has only sixty-six provinces,
and the Heike ruled over thirty.
Half the realm and more was theirs,
quite apart from all their estates,
their countless fields, paddy and dry."
Book One, p.15 (Penguin Classics, 2014)
Pride, however, is known to come before a fall, and the way in which the Taira clan seize power doesn't please everyone. In the provinces, the exiled Genji are waiting, and in the space of a few short years, the dynasty Kiyomori has built up will be swept away forever...
The Tale of the Heike is a monumental work, seven-hundred pages of poetry, myths, intrigue, battles and noble deaths. It's the foundation of many later Japanese works, not only in literature, but also in Kabuki, Noh and art, and it's a story any self-respecting Japanophile has to read at some point. In many ways, it can be compared to Shakespearean tragedies, with its handling of major historical events enhanced by the psychological insights into the minds of the major protagonists.
The flawed character of the piece, a strong man with none of the doubts of a Hamlet or a Macbeth, is Lord Kiyomori, a nobleman who has rendered great service to the Imperial family over the years, putting down insurrections and removing all threats from the capital. However, in his desire to strengthen his family's position, he is blind to the resentment he is sowing. His son, Shigemori, has a cooler, wiser head than his father and attempts to warn him of the dangers of his actions:
"The deeds of the fathers, good or bad,
clearly touch their descendants' lives.
The house with a rich store of good
will thrive far into times to come;
the one long given to evil ways
faces only calamity -
so I have heard..."
Book Two, p.84
Despite the respect the father has for the son, the overbearing behaviour continues, and when Shigemori passes away, it's inevitable that Kiyomori will continue down his all-or-nothing path.
Eventually, the tide begins to turn, and the enemies of the Heike begin to think seriously about how they can remove the hated family from power. With the tacit acceptance of the cloistered (retired) Emperor Go Shirakawa, exiled members of the Genji, under the leadership of Minamoto no Yoritomo, begin to gather their forces in preparation for the battles to come. The spark comes when a tentative uprising led by an Imperial prince is crushed, leading to the burning of temples in Nara and the removal of the capital to Fukuhara (now Kobe):
One might say that the Heike had now committed their greatest outrage yet.
"Ever since back in the Angen years," people kept saying,
"that man has banished or killed senior nobles and privy gentlemen,
exiled a regent, appointed his own son-in-law regent,
shifted the cloistered emperor to a Seinan Palace,
and murdered his second son, Prince Mochihito.
In short, moving the capital is probably just the last affront he could think of."
Book Five, p.252
With the support of the neutrals wavering, and armies of Genji warriors massed to the East, life in Kyoto is about to get very interesting indeed...
While the writing of The Tale of the Heike is attributed to 14th-Century Buddhist monks, the English-language version is very much Tyler's work (and a wonderful work it is too). From the forbidding picture of Kiyomori on the cover to the detailed maps at the back, the whole book shows how much work has gone into its creation. In addition to the above, the reader is also treated to an introduction setting the scene, family trees, glossaries and copious footnotes for those who want them.
The handling of the actual text is also rather interesting. Tyler has chosen to put the book into three differing styles: one is a descriptive prose, one a declarative recitation style and the other reserved for songs or Japanese poetry. This mix of styles lends the text a Homerian air at times, and in addition to the imagery of words, there is also the real thing. The book includes many ink drawings from a 19th-Century Japanese edition of the book (drawn by Tesai Hokuba, a pupil of the famous Hokusai), each detailing a pivotal, and well-known, scene from the story.
None of that would be important, though, if the story was no good, so it's lucky that The Tale of the Heike is a cracking read. Like the Iliad, it's full of stories of heroic warriors and their deeds, with soldiers challenging their enemies and performing miraculous feats of strength and courage. There are sea battles (in which the Genji attempt to recover the boy Emperor and the three treasures of the imperial line - including Amaterasu's mirror...), political intrigue, infighting for positions and even a cast of thousands of warrior monks - what's not to like? ;)
In fairness, I'd have to say that there are a few dull areas. The writers had a tendency to give warriors lengthy back stories after their death, and the repeated descriptions of prayers and lists of warriors on the march can pall after a while. There's also a lot more repetition than is accepted in English (I lost track of how many times a character turned away with 'their sleeves soaked by tears'...), and it would take a very determined reader indeed to absorb every word of the book.
These are minor quibbles, though, and the truth is that I loved it. The Tale of the Heike is a truly epic, spectacular book, a classic of world literature, and Tyler deserves immense praise for making it into a novel that many an Anglophone reader will enjoy. It's a work which underpins Japanese cultural history, and any J-Lit fan who gives it a try will come out of the experience with their knowledge of the area greatly enriched.
So, where to from here? Well, it just so happens that Tyler is also the man who put out a highly-acclaimed version of the all-time Japanese classic, Lady Murasaki's magnum opus, and after reading this, I'm keener than ever to continue my adventures in classic J-Lit. I said it last year, and I'll say it again this year (hopefully, with more accuracy!) - 2015 will be the year of The Tale of Genji ;)
As many of you will know, Penguin Classics have committed themselves to bringing out new translations of all of Georges Simenon's 'Maigret' detective novels/stories over the new few years (and there are a lot of them). However, as someone with little interest in crime novels, I didn't really expect to get involved in reading the Belgian author's work - until, that is, I was tipped off about something a little different. You see, Simenon's work isn't all about Maigret, you know...
*****
The Mahé Circle (translated by Siân Reynolds, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a short novel set on an island in the South of France, and on the first page we meet our 'hero', the good doctor François Mahé, out in a boat, trying to catch fish in the company of one of the locals. It's the first time Mahé has brought his family to the island of Porquerolles, and initially his decision seems to have been a poor one, as both he and his family struggle to adapt to the southern way of life.
However, once he returns to his comfortable bourgeois existence, the doctor realises that he misses the unstructured, chaotic life of the south, and he gradually begins to loathe his daily life. At the age of thirty-five (and tipping the scales at ninety kilos), Mahé slowly comes to think of his world as a conspiracy against him, an identity which has been gradually built around him, without his permission - a stifling circle preventing him from living his own life. It's inevitable that by the time the holidays come around again, Doctor Mahé is itching to pack up the car and head South again...
Simenon's short novel is an excellent portrait of a man whose average, unthinking existence is shattered by the realisation that there's something more to be had from life than Sunday dinners with friends and a spot of fishing at the weekend. While most of the 'action', as it is, happens on the island, much of the psychological drama takes place back at home. It's a place where he should be in his element, an environment of his own, yet this simple truth turns out to be an enormous lie.
The truth is that Mahé, like many people, has been formed by his environment. He lives in the house of his dead father (his mother still lives with him), and his wife is a woman chosen more for her ability to fit into the running of the house rather than from any true feelings of love. Mahé realises that most people would be happy:
"What more could he ask for? He had a quiet life, plenty of free time to go hunting and fishing whenever he wanted to. Good dogs. And anyone from the village would readily keep him company."
p.52 (Penguin Classics, 2014)
For him, though, those village people, many of whom bear the same family name as him, form a tight circle, smothering his hopes of freedom.
Where there's a mid-life crisis, there's usually a catalyst to set it off, and while life on Porquerolles is lazy and sunny, it's not just boules and pastis in the evening that have the doctor in a spin. At the start of the novel, he is called to the house of a dying woman in place of the absent local doctor, and a glimpse of her elder daughter, an eleven-year-old girl in a red dress, sets off an explosive chain reaction of thoughts in his head.
"No, it was an obsession, that was the word, a haunting obsession. And it had started that very first day, but faintly, insidiously, like those incurable illnesses that you only become aware of when it is too late for treatment." (p.75)
It's here that his rebellion against 'normal' life begins, and the comparison above is remarkably apt in many ways...
...all of which will undoubtedly trigger Lolita warnings in most readers' minds, but that's not quite the way The Circle of Mahé goes. The young Elizabeth is less a real sexual target than an embodiment of the allure of the South, a representative of the freedom Porquerolles offers in the face of the staid, stifling village of Saint-Hilaire:
"Here men drained the life out of day after day, with tasks that followed the inexorable rhythm of the ploughman's almanac.
There..." (pp.111/2)
The implication here is that in Saint-Hilaire, life is merely a form of serving time, whereas back on Porquerolles life is truly worth living - which sounds suspiciously like a hankering after greener grass.
The Mahé Circle is a brief read, 150 pages (with fairly large type), and you can skip through it at a brisk pace, thanks in part to a nice, breezy translation from Siân Reynolds. By keeping some words in the original French, particularly in the Porquerolles chapters, she gives the book a Mediterranean air, one which would be spoiled by translating absolutely everything into English (don't forget, many of these things are alien to Mahé too). I have absolutely no idea what the English for péquois is, but I suspect that if the fish the doctor is obsessed with catching does have an English name, knowing it would make me none the wiser ;)
While the Lolita comparison doesn't stand up, I was reminded of a few other works over the course of the book (not least Moby Dick, in Mahé's obsession for catching a péquois!). One is Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, particularly in the way Newland Archer's life is skilfully manipulated in Wharton's novel by the women in his family circle. For a more contemporary slant, though, I often thought that Mahé's troubles could see the book fit right into Peirene Press' 'Male Dilemma' series - Simenon's work is a book verging on a novella with a male protagonist at a pivotal point in his life...
In the end, though, The Mahé Circle is an excellent story that stands on its own, a clever work which, in a way, forms its own circle, leaving the good doctor back where he started in more ways than one. It's a book I enjoyed immensely (for more than just the hour or so it took me to read it!), and while I'm still not convinced about crime fiction, I may just be tempted to give Maigret a go. You see, I did get another book along with this one, and... well, it can't hurt, can it? ;)
Maybe/ I don't really wanna know/ how your garden grows/ 'Cos I just wanna fly
While the title of today's book immediately brings a certain band to mind for my generation, we're actually travelling a little further afield than Manchester. Almost twenty years before Liam Gallagher sang those words, in Colombia a young writer was putting pen to paper on a work which was to sear his name into the country's literary history - and yes, it's all about the music...
*****
Andrés Caicedo's short novel Liveforever (translated by Frank Wynne, review copy courtesy of Penguin Classics) is a pulsating, energy-laden work which thrusts the reader into a world of drugs, violence and music (oh yes, lots of music). It's set in Cali, Colombia, between 1973 and 1974, and is the story of a generation doomed to failure. There'll be no fading away here, though - these are the kind of kids who like to burn out, often spectacularly...
Our guide through the world of salsa and rumbas is María del Carmen Huerta, a respectable, intelligent, beautiful middle-class teenager, growing up in Cali. One day, though, she decides it's time to break free of her bourgeois upbringing and explore the world of music. It proves to be a fateful decision:
"Every life hinges on the course we decide to take at one precise, privileged moment. On that Saturday in August I broke with my routine, and the same night I ended up at Skinny Flores's 'rumba'. It was a simple decision, but one that would have extraordinary consequences. One of them is that I now find myself here, safe in this haven of night, telling my story, shorn of all social standing and the crass manners I was raised with. No doubt I'll be held up as an example. 'Peace and goodwill over my land'."
p.29 (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014)
This one night, a frantic escape into music, is to set the course for her future. Once she's made the decision to venture into the night, there's no going back.
Liveforever could be described as the story of María's descent into an underworld of drugs and debauchery. Caicedo, using the voice of María herself, relates detailed descriptions of drug use, hedonism and week-long parties, and we see the youths of the street crumble into pieces, drained by music and drugs:
"Music that feeds on live flesh, music that leaves you with nothing but blisters, music hot off the wax, that's what I want, what I live for; bring it on, sap my energy if you can, turn my values on their head, let me founder, abandon me to criminality, because I don't know anything any more..." (p.115)
This is a generation that will most definitely die before it gets old...
When night falls
(as it does, suddenly and brutally, at 6 p.m.), the languid behaviour of
the hot day gives way to an outpouring of carnal energy, a situation María quickly comes to terms with:
"So
what if I grabbed the night by the balls, so what if I broke its
spirit, wore it out and drained it dry? At least I was still standing:
not like the men, who drop like flies." (p.5)
It's
then that we see the city come to life, as María pulls us in her
magical wake from rumba to rumba, looking for parties, hunting down the
music. Sure, we get to dance, but death and destruction is left in our wake.
Yet that's not how it is for María herself. Beautiful and vibrant, with the face (and hair) of a goddess, she becomes a focal point of the nocturnal community, the heart of the dance. She looks damned good on the dancefloor, and she knows it (so does everyone else); in fact, there's something, magical, mystical about her. In the blonde-haired dancing diva from the right side of town, the street boys find someone to worship.
Worship of this kind is not without its dangers, though, and María is a goddess of the most pagan kind; the music may feed on live flesh, but so does our María. She's a dangerous woman, a Colombian femme fatale, the flame into which the moth-like youths who surround her at the rumbas cannot help but fly. Like a Latina Medusa, or siren, she inflicts wounds on men, her hair slicing cuts in the soul of any man who moves into her orbit, cuts they cherish when they're coming down after the long night. Each man that she encounters is entranced by her spell, but ends up wasted, worn, spat out and humbled - she sucks their spirit dry, then moves onto the next. One night in Cali can make any man humble, hard or otherwise.
The whole book is like one long, pulsating dance, a hypnotic, spell-binding, energy-sapping tribute to music. María needs music, she senses it, hunts it down, then, when she finds a worthy gathering, a rumba with feeling, she uses the men she meets to absorb it. From her childhood friend Ricardito, she receives the gift of translated English lyrics, from the red-headed gringo Leopoldo Brook, live music, pulsing and throbbing, from Rubén Paces, lessons in the history of salsa...
...and they all come to a sad end (just stayin' alive is a feat in the underworld of Cali...). María seems less a woman at times than a force of nature, the goddess of the dark dance, music incarnate. With Colombian music interfused with African rhythms and pagan language, it's tempting to see her as something otherworldly, a succubus, a wraith...
As you might have realised, this is a book I loved, devouring it in a matter of hours. The writing is wonderful, with the frantic energy of the voices and the ceaseless, constant twisting of direction, the language is heavily descriptive, attacking the reader's senses with colours, textures, emotions - we can feel the rhythm, smell the sweat, hear the music... The text is intermingled with song lyrics, half prose, half music, our journey through the world of salsa...
Spare a thought then for the poor translator... In addition to having to transport Caicedo's dazzling words into English, Wynne also had to identify the lyrics embedded in the prose and make it clear for the Anglophone readers who (as he points out in his Translator's Note) are hardly "...likely to have an in-depth knowledge of salsa and the many related styles of Afro-Cuban music..." (p.xviii). Poor Frank - I can imagine the time and energy that must have gone into this translation. Perhaps his wonderful rendering into English comes at the cost of becoming María's latest victim...
In short, Liveforever is a wonderful book - I'd say I'm surprised that it hasn't appeared in English before, but, let's face it, I'm not (I've been in the game of reviewing translated fiction for far too long for things like that to surprise me...). For those who want to know more about Caicedo though, this, sadly, is just about it. On the day, he received a copy of the book, he killed himself, overdosing on pills, a sad post-script to his work.
The story, though, lives on, as does the music, and while I prefer the poignant English title, the original is probably a little more apt. You see, in Spanish the book is called ¡Que viva la música!, which translates to something like 'Long Live Music!'. This seems a fitting epitaph for the book as we leave María to her life in Cali, with the music beating on into eternity. You see, you simply can't stop the music - nobody can stop the music...
