'Revenge' by Yoko Ogawa (Review - IFFP 2014, Number 12)

Well, we've left the Middle-East behind, and today's leg of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize journey takes us to Japan, where we'll be enjoying some carrots, tomatoes and strawberry shortcake.  Don't get too comfortable though - in the hands of today's writer, any meal is likely to leave a bitter aftertaste...

*****
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa - Harvill Secker
(translated by Stephen Snyder)
What's it all about?
Revenge is a collection of eleven stories, beautifully written in Ogawa's (and Snyder's) usual simple, clipped language.  Everything is set out precisely, and yet the reader always has the sense that the serene surface is hiding something:

"You could gaze at this perfect picture all day - an afternoon bathed in light and comfort and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing."
'Afternoon at the Bakery', pp.1/2 (Harvill Secker, 2013)

And right from the start, the writer is mocking us, telling us that something is not quite right.  But let's face it, we should expect that - Ogawa is the queen of the slightly askant...

What follows are a collection of tales where ordinary people going about their daily lives are shown to be somewhat other than normal.  From the woman waiting to buy some strawberry shortcake for her dead son ('Afternoon at the Bakery'), to the bag maker with an obsession for perfection ('Sewing for the Heart'), the writer casually introduces her cast onto the stage, gently setting them off walking, knowing all the while that just around the corner... well, you know.  She must be a *very* cruel woman...

There's a lot more to Revenge than isolated stories of oddballs and psychopaths though - as soon as the reader moves on to the second story ('Fruit Juice'), they realise that Ogawa has a slightly more complex idea in hand.  You see, each of the stories takes something from the previous one and runs with it, with minor characters suddenly appearing in the spotlight, their actions now centre stage.  Even better, the deeper we get into Ogawa's world, the more tangled the web of connections becomes, with people and objects harking back to several earlier stories.  By the time we get to the last of the eleven tales, 'Poison Plants', it's no surprise that the central character leads us back to the start of the book, completing a circle.

With this in mind, the reader is always on the look out for recurring themes, spotting reappearances by former characters and speculating on the significance of such innocent items as carrots, bags, clocks and strawberry shortcake.  Every action has to be analysed for similarities with previous (or future) events:

"When I'm curled up in his arms like this, I can never tell how my body looks to him.  I worry that I seem completely ridiculous, but I have the ability to squeeze into any little space he leaves for me.  I fold my legs until they take up almost no room at all, and curl in my shoulders until they're practically dislocated.  Like a mummy in a tomb.  And when I get like this, I don't care if I never get out; or maybe that's exactly what I hope will happen."
'Welcome to the Museum of Torture', p.82

A sweet description of a lover's embrace?  Hmm.  There are echoes there of a similar, less romantic scene from the very first story...

As with other Ogawa works, the central idea here is that people are strange and that it is impossible to see what lurks beneath a smiling face or within a beautiful body.  The idea of being 'normal' is held up to the light and examined, distorted, until it becomes hideous and unbearable.  Revenge goes one better, though, in the way that it also explores the interconnectedness of our society (one thought that popped into my mind is that it's like a dark, twisted version of The Beatles song 'Penny Lane'!), and one reading is nowhere near enough to uncover all the links between the stories.  This is a book that demands to be reread - possibly backwards ;)

Did it deserve to make the shortlist?
Oh, yes.  This is easily the most impressive of the books I've read since the longlist announcement, one I devoured in a matter of hours (having started it about half an hour after it dropped through my letter box!).  It's a superb book, well written, with an excellent translation (I'm a big fan of Snyder), and another piece of what should become an impressive Ogawa legacy in English - with over twenty books published in Japan, we have a lot of treats yet to come.

Just one thing puzzles me, though - how on earth did The Housekeeper and the Professor get translated before this?!

Why did it make the shortlist
Because it's an excellent book, a clever collection of stories which is more akin to a novel really, and with the IFFP crying out for female writers on the shortlist, it's little wonder that Revenge made it.  And do you know what?  It stands a very good chance of taking out the whole thing too ;)

*****
Next up on the itinerary is Germany, as we head back in time to Berlin in the fifties.  A woman with two children living in the country, a joyful, idyllic tale...

...sorry - I lied.  More doom and gloom coming up next week :(

'The Diving Pool' by Yoko Ogawa (Review)

Today's review is a special one as it's a post on the first of the January in Japan readalongs :)  I'll be collecting the thoughts of all participants over at the JiJ blog, but first I'm posting my review here.  The book?  Well...

*****
The Diving Pool (translated by Stephen Snyder) was the first of Yoko Ogawa's works to appear in English, although the word 'work' is a bit of a misnomer.  The book is a collection of three of Ogawa's novellas and is a great introduction to her dark, twisted world...

First up is the title story, 'The Diving Pool', in which we meet, Aya, the daughter of a pastor and his wife who run an orphanage called Light House.  Life isn't so sunny for Aya, who is bitter that she is growing up along with the abandoned kids in the orphanage.  Her main pleasure lies in secretly watching Jun, a fellow resident, as he practises his dives at the school pool, and she cherishes her secret crush...

However, increasingly bitter and neglected, Aya has developed an evil streak, and Ogawa slowly reveals Aya's true nature.  In her treatment of Rie, an eighteen-month-old orphan, she shows unthinking, ruthless cruelty.  It's not only when she's bad that Aya seems a little off though; even the most commonplace discussions can seem not quite right:

"I hurt my wrist today," he said.  "I must have hit the water at a funny angle."
 "Which one?"
 He shook his left wrist to show me.  Because his body was so important to me, I lived in fear that he would injure it.  The flash in his eyes as he was about to dive, the glint of light on his chest, the shapes of his muscles - it all aroused in me a pleasant feeling that usually lay dormant.
'The Diving Pool', p.15 (Harvill Secker, 2008)

We're never quite sure how events will play out in this tale, and there is a great twist to finish the story off...

*****
The middle story, 'Pregnancy Diary', is Ogawa's Akutagawa-prize-winning piece.  A pregnant woman's sister keeps a diary, which as well as documenting the progress of the pregnancy sets the sister's feelings down on paper.  Once again, our narrator is a twisted soul, and the further we get into the pregnancy, the darker the story becomes.

Initially, the focus is on the description of the pregnancy's progress.  We get detailed accounts of the woman's morning sickness and her visits to the psychiatrist.  The writer has little sympathy though, for her sister or her brother-in-law:

"My brother-in-law seems particularly pitiful to me, since he has no reason to feel sick, and I find myself getting angry over his little sighs and whimpers.  It occurs to me that I'd fall in love with a man who could put away a three-course French dinner even when he knew I was paralyzed by morning sickness."
'Pregnancy Diary', p.73

She's really not a very nice person...

Eventually, we see this passive distaste turn into more active anger.  After her sister recovers her appetite, the narrator begins to make jam on a daily basis - but with an ulterior motive.  It's another dark twist to what could be a very straight-forward story, and the word which comes to mind is 'bitter'...

*****
The final story, 'Dormitory', is a little different to the first two.  In this one, a married woman helps her cousin to find a room at her old university dormitory.  Although she enjoyed her time there, it's a strange place - deserted and run-down:

"...and that place was my old college dormitory, a simple, three-story building of reinforced concrete.  The cloudy glass in the windows, the yellowed curtains, and the cracks in the walls all hinted at its advanced age, and though it was meant to house students, there was no sign of student life - no motorbikes, tennis rackets, sneakers, or anything of the kind.  It was, in short, the mere shell of a building."
'Dormitory', p.110

It's run by a man with his own distinguishing features, one prosthetic leg and no arms, and as the narrator comes to visit the dormitory more and more, matters spiral into the surreal.  The dormitory is almost empty, and it's only a matter of time before we find out why.  Why are there so many bees?  What's up with the tulips?  And what is that strange stain on the wall...

'Dormitory' is a little different from the first two stories as the protagonist is not bitter, but lost.  With her husband overseas, she feels detached from daily life and is unable to concentrate on anything.  She's very reminiscent of the style of Haruki Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto (the dormitory especially reminded me of Dolphin Hotel in A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance).  Rather than following a dark character here, the darkness is provided by the eerie setting and the fear of the unknown...

*****
The Diving Pool is a great book, one I enjoyed immensely.  The publishers have chosen three superb stories, all with great writing and a dark undertone, and Snyder's translation is excellent.  The narrative flows smoothly and never jars - it's clear, elegant and simple.  I'm very happy I chose this for the readalong (and Ogawa as our first female J-Lit giant) - I wonder if everyone else agrees ;)

It's All Under Control...

Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was written in 1996, but it took until 2010 for an English translation (courtesy of Stephen Snyder) to appear.  While this is just another indictment of the lack of adventure in Anglophone publishing (I recall that Caroline told me she read it - in German - about ten years ago...), it's still a surprise.  This is an excellent novel, one which should have been translated a lot earlier.

Anyone expecting another gentle, heart-warming tale in the vein of The Housekeeper and The Professor is, however, in for a bit of a shock.  Hotel Iris is an erotically-charged, breath-taking and, at times, extremely disturbing book, definitely not one for the nervous among you.  If this doesn't put you off though, then you'll certainly be rewarded for your bravery ;)

The novel begins in the hotel of the title, a run-down, ramshackle place, set a little back from the main beach of a Japanese seaside town.  Mari, the teenage daughter of the hotel owner, leads a boring existence behind the front desk, checking in the guests and helping out with the cleaning and cooking when required.  One night, there is a disturbance in one of the rooms when a prostitute runs out, screaming at the man inside.  As she flees, the man booms out a command - words which turn Mari's world upside down.

It's not giving away much to say that Mari eventually becomes involved with the man, who turns out to be a translator, one claiming to be working on an obscure Russian novel.  This is no ordinary summer fling though; not only is the translator about forty years older than Mari, he also has some rather specific sexual preferences - and a very murky past...

Hotel Iris is a fairly short novel, only 164-pages long in my version, yet it is incredibly deeply written.  All of the handful of major characters have been skilfully brought to life, each of them adding their nuances to the overall picture: Mari's over-controlling mother with her obsession with her daughter's hair; the kleptomaniac maid, who may suspect Mari's secret; Mari's father, long dead, but a potential source of some of her issues.  Even the hotel itself seems to be a part of the plot, with the 'R' of 'Iris' in the hotel's name-sign hanging ominously askew.

Mari herself is a wonderfully-complicated person, switching from a sweet, obedient mother's girl to a secretive, self-destructive wreck at the drop of a hat.  Her deep need to be controlled and debased, stemming perhaps from events in her childhood, soon gets out of control.   She's the perfect find for the sinister translator, an empty vessel to be filled as he wishes...

...and yet, we have to wonder at times who is using whom.  The story is told from Mari's point of view, and there is no attempt to make excuses for herself or to shift the blame for matters fully onto the shoulders of the older man.  While no secret is made of the translator's deep-seated rage and his need to control every element of his life, things never appear forced in his treatment of Mari - at least, not more than she wants.

Ogawa's novel can be extremely unsettling, but that's definitely not a bad thing.  This is a book where even inanimate objects can appear dark and slightly unnerving.  The fountain in the hotel courtyard, poisoned by waste from Mari's grandfather's illness, decays just as Mari's innocence does, and the story the translator is working on, a romance with a heroine called Marie, has parallels with Mari's own life.  Pay attention while reading this book as there is definitely more to what happens in the small seaside town than meets the eye.

As I suggested above, this is not one of those pure, aesthetically-pleasing, Japanese novels westerners love to read, so it may not be to everyone's liking.  However, if you're ready to try something a little darker, why not check in at the Hotel Iris?  Its length means it'll only be an overnight stay; which is just as well - I wouldn't want to be in Ogawa's world for too long...

*****
And that brings down the curtain on the current Japanese Literature Challenge, the fifth in the series.  Thanks again to Belezza for organising the event - as always, it has motivated me to get out there and discover lots of wonderful new writers (and spend time with some old friends).  Hopefully, it won't be too long until JLC6 comes around :)  Until then, ja mata - ki o tsukete ne ;)

62 - 'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa

Apologies to the numerous participants in the 'Japanese Literature Challenge' who have already reviewed Ms. Ogawa's book for not reading your comments yet; I wanted to come to this book with a clear mind, and I promise that I'll read all the other reviews once this has been posted. Well, fairly soon afterwards anyway (family duties permitting, I'm a very busy person, you know).

Anyway, my second book in recent weeks with a housekeeper at the centre of the tale was slightly less murderous than the first, but just as well constructed. Ogawa's short novel tells the tale of a housekeeper employed to clean up for a mathematics professor who lost his long-term memory after a car crash. The housekeeper's son, whom the Professor nicknames 'Root' as his head is flat like the square root sign (and with whom I share a birthday!), strikes up an unlikely friendship with the old man, and in the course of the 11 chapters, spread over 180 pages, the three of them form a strange kind of family unit.

One of the things which bind Root and the Professor together is baseball, a sport which is especially fond of numbers and statistics. With his memory stuck firmly in 1975, the Professor frequently asks about his favourite player, Enatsu (a legendary pitcher who wore the perfect number 28 on his back). Through white lies and evasive tactics, Root and his mother share their hobby with the professor without alerting him to the fact that the times he remembers have long passed.

In this rather sparse work, Ogawa looks at the theme of family, in particular what makes a family. Root's eager adoption of the Professor as a friend can be traced back to the absence of a father figure in his life, and the Housekeeper may also be looking for someone to fill this role. In the film version, there is apparently a stronger sense of attachment to the Professor shown by the Housekeeper, but in the novel this is more implicit than described.

The role of mathematics is also important in this book as it serves as a metaphor for the situations the characters find themselves in. The Professor tells the Housekeeper that numbers underpin and support the real world; however, knowing this does not help you to understand that world. The Housekeeper realises the truth of this when going about her daily chores; knowing that the serial number of a fridge is a prime number will not stop the ice-cream inside from melting... In another example, the Professor explains how important triangles are to the complex formulae of further mathematics - a further parallel to the triangle of characters at the forefront of this story.

Parallels with Murakami are unavoidable; anonymous characters, chance meetings which change lives... The brevity of this novel reminded me somewhat of 'After Dark. However, I don't feel that the author quite succeeded with what she set out to achieve. The maths parts were very interesting (and, as someone who used to love pure maths at school, I relished the challenge of the Professor's simple puzzles!), but they became more of a gimmick as the book progressed. I also thought that too much was left unsaid. Much more needed to be made of the Housekeeper, by far the least developed of the three characters, and while I understand that the style was meant to leave many things unspoken, just because things are unspoken, doesn't mean they are actually there...

Despite these shortcomings, Ogawa's novel is well worth a read, and I would like to flick through her collection of novellas, 'The Diving Pool', when I get the chance. I think that knowing more about Ogawa's world will help me appreciate more what she is trying to say in her work, just as having read the weightier Murakami novels helps you to appreciate his shorter pieces. Before I go though, I just thought I'd make one last comment on the mathematics side of the story. As Root and the Housekeeper learn from the Professor, numbers are beautiful, and finding patterns in those numbers is even better. When browsing through some of the numbers from my review, I noticed the following: if you take my (and Root's) birthday (11th of September, or 119) minus the number of chapters (11) multiplied by Root's age (10), subtract my age on my upcoming birthday (35), add the Number of pages (180) divided by the number of major characters (3), and add Enatsu's perfect shirt number (28)...

119 - (11 x 10) - 35 + (180/3) + 28 = 62

But what' so special about 62 you may ask?

Look at the heading for this post...

Aren't numbers wonderful ;)