***REGION 13: Asia III

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***13. Asia III: Japan, Korea, the Phillipines

Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim Translation 2010. Korean

With the saber-rattling on the Korean peninsula, this seemed like a good time to read this book. I have mixed feelings about it, though. On the one hand, it was an interesting look at contemporary South Korea, South Korea 25 years ago, and North Korea, especially at some of the ways that North Korea trains its spies to become moles inside South Korea, and the idea of a long-term mole, with a South Korean life and family, being called back north is intriguing. However, I feel the author was trying to do to much and it didn't all work. Along with the spy story, he mixes in the stories of the protagonist's wife and daughter, as well as a variety of other characters. I believe this is designed to give a fuller picture of contemporary South Korean life (as well as develop the idea that we all have secrets), but it didn't completely work. Also, the author occasionally lapses into almost journalistic sections to inform the reader about different parts of Korea and Korean life. These were jarring.

Nonetheless, I read the book in almost one sitting because I wanted to find out what happened, and I learned a lot about South Korea and a little about North Korea. It was interesting to read this book so soon after Barbara Demick's wonderful Nothing to Envy, a journalistic look at the lives of North Koreans. It had a completely different approach, and for me was a far more compelling work.

I just finished The Innocent by Richard E. Kim. Set in South Korea just after the Korean War, this novel chronicles a fictional South Korean coup d'etat. Kim was a veteran of the South Korean army who fought in the war and had emigrated to the U.S. when he wrote this book in the mid-60s.

I've written at greater length on this fine novel in my 50-Book Challenge thread (post 156): http://www.librarything.com/topic/82681

During 2010 I read the excellent When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Maguerra Brainard, which tells the story of the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines during WW2 through the eyes of a young girl.

I am writing about Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue here, because the author is Japanese, but the story takes place in China and central Asia. It was originally published in 1959, translated into English in 1978, and reissued by NYRB at the end of 2010.

In 1026, Chao Hsing-te falls asleep in a courtyard and misses his call for an all-important examination that will land him a coveted job in the Chinese civil service. With his life plans turned upside down, he wanders aimlessly and then a chance encounter makes him decide to travel westward so he can learn the language of the Hsi-hsias, a neighboring people who are threatening the western boundaries of China. Over the subsequent years, he wanders, frequently changing course on what seems to be spur of the moment: fighting battles with the vanguard Chinese unit of the Hsi-hsia army, falling in love with a princess caught in a captured city, learning to write the Hsi-hsia language and creating a Hsi-hsia - Chinese dictionary, traveling with an arrogant andsuccessful trader, studying and becoming enamored of Buddhism. All of this leads up to his role in an actual historic event, hiding thousands of Buddhist scrolls in the caves at Tun-huang, scrolls that were not rediscovered until the 20th century.

While I found Hsing-te's personality a little difficult to understand and Inoue's focus on the nobility of characters with royal blood a little irritating, I really enjoyed the depiction of the environment, people, and the interactions among warriors, traders, and scholars in the western regions of China and central Asia nearly 1000 years ago. And it is an adventure story too; I definitely kept wanting to find out what was going to happen Inoue's writing is deceptively simple, but well suited to what reads almost like a history, a history with fascinating characters.

Cave and Shadows
by Nick Joaquín

The most mystical Filipino writer is probably Nick Joaquín (1917-2004). In his books characters are seized by visions, the faithless become converts, and the faithful turn into seers. Nick Joaquín is a novelist, poet, dramatist, historian, journalist, and biographer. His significant contribution to Philippine literature in English led to his conferment of the title National Artist for Literature.

He is, as he wrote in his dedication, a "man who has two novels," alluding to his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels. His second novel, Cave and Shadows, deals with a literal cave and some metaphorical shadows. Yet the reference to Plato's cave is not lost.

From its first surreal sentence ("The vision—a crab on a string being walked by a naked girl—occurred in deep-hotel corridor twilight and moreover when he, Jack Henson, was feeling himself in a swoon.") the novel was propelled by the mysterious death of a girl found in a cave that was practically sealed from the outside. The girl was naked, had no sign of any injury or violation on her body, and a scent of flowers seemed to emanate from her. Is she the same crab-walking girl that Jack saw in the hotel corridor? If yes, why is she haunting him?

Jack Henson, 42, divorced, and an American expatriate living in an island in southern Philippines, was asked by his former wife to get to the bottom of the unexplained death of her daughter, Nenita Coogan, the girl found in the cave. A possible explanation for her death, as "folk memory" would have it, would be the sacrificing of youth at planting time so that the harvest of the fields will be more fruitful and abundant. The sweet-smelling body of a "saint" will appease the gods. But then it could also be a crime of passion. Or some other primal offense. No neat explanation was at hand.

As Henson investigates, Joaquín traced the increasingly surreal and mysterious circumstances surrounding the girl. He came to interview a number of quirky characters that were associated with her while still alive. As the story progressed, the present started to play against the insistent echoes of the distant past. Forgotten incidents were projected onto the pages of history, becoming more and more pronounced as they filled narrative gaps. Amid the reverent themes of religious fanaticism and the search for an authentic native god, Joaquín used the genres of the detective story and historical documentary as creative vehicles for exploring the intersection of various spheres of Philippine life: history, politics, religion, activism, and colonialism.

The main thread of the detective story was alternated with chapters that foregrounded the mythical and superstitious elements of the story. These include: a discourse on the origin of the cult of the cave; a documentary investigation into the rise of the religious figures known as the Hermana, the Beatas, and the cave goddess; and an exposition of events sometime in the 17th century, events that go back to the roots of religion and could rewrite the official history on paper and the articles of faith etched in stone. Yet again, as in Joaquín's short stories and his first novel, readers were privy to a subtle battle of the sexes in the book, wherein a feminist revisionist approach to history was enacted. (continued here)

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki (Japan, read in 2010)

Naomi was the first major work by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886-1965), who was one of the leading 20th century Japanese novelists. It was written in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake that decimated Tokyo and Yokohama, where Tanizaki was living, an event which marked a turning point in his life and writing. Before the earthquake Tanizaki was enamored of Western culture, with its modernity and freedom of expression; in its aftermath he began to appreciate the traditional Japanese customs and values of his childhood, which continued throughout the rest of his life.

Full review here.

JAPAN

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

A housekeeper and her son form a bond with her client, a mathematics professor whose memory only lasts 80 minutes. This was a sweet story, very subtle in places.

We are thinking of a holiday in Japan soon. As usual I start to read novels from a country I'm about to visit to to try to learn something about it. I leave the guide books until I'm on the plane. I didn't know where to start but picked up Toyotomi Blades and oldish detective story by Dale Furutani an American of Japanese extraction. It's a pretty formulaic book but it does give some hints of what it's like for a foreigner, and in this case one who might have some reason to expext familiarity, to try to get to grips with a totally different society. I then moved on to The Lady and the Monk; Four Seasons in Kyoto by Pico Iyer an experienced UK based travel writer. He initially went to Kyoto to get some experience of Zen Buddhism met up with a married middle class Japanese lady and had a sort of affair with her which was entirely platonic and friendly. Again it gave some insight into what it's like for a foreigner to arrive in Japan and try to make a life there. But now I want to move on to Japanese authors and am looking for recommendations of contemporary Japanese novels (available in English translation) that might give me some idea of life and culture in Japan. I don't really want the Japanese equivalent of Dickens. So many people arrive in London expecting fog, pickpockets, cobbled streets and horse drawn carriages.

A Riot of Goldfish, Kanoko Okamoto, Japan

Okamoto is considered a minor but important figure in Japanese literature--minor because she only wrote for three years before she died in 1939. A Riot of Goldfish comprises two stories, both set in pre-WWII Japan, both involving lower class men with delusions of grandeur. Look for my full review in the next issue of Belletrista ( www.Belletrista.com)

The Lucky Gourd Shop by Joanne Catherine Scott

I just read this book on the long plane ride to Korea, which is the setting for this beautiful, sorrowful story. The author introduces the main plot with a very brief, perhaps under-developed, tale of an adoptive mother who is unsuccessfully seeking details about the birth family of her 3 children who were adopted from Korea when they were very young. The book then launches into the birth family's story, but does not ever go back to the 3 adoptees. This failure to close the loop of that part of the narrative is my only criticism, however, of what is otherwise an amazing story that drives home the vast cultural differences in Korea (from those of the United States) and generates much empathy and compassion for the family that loses the children. I feel as though I have experienced a wonderful, in some ways disturbing, glance into the culture of poverty in Korea. I couldn't put this one down.

I am now about halfway through with Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, which is a nonfiction work about the real lives of several people who defected from North to South Korea. The stories focus on what their lives were like in North Korea and offers much insight into the closed, rigidly controlled society of communist North Korea. It's one of the most readable nonfiction books I've ever tackled.

JAPAN



Isle of Dreams by Keizo Hino (T 2010, 1985, Japan)

Shozo Sakai, a middle-aged widower and engineer, is enamored with the beauty he sees in modern Tokyo. One day he wanders into another part of the city he is not familiar with, an area of reclaimed land, created by the refuse and trash of the city. He is strangely drawn to this area and finds it beautiful in its own way. It is hear that he is nearly run over by a mysterious, young woman in black leather riding way too fast on a motorcycle. She lures Shozo away from the reclaimed land to another place "far less benign."

I really enjoyed this book, first, because Shozo, on his walks through the city near where he works, really sees modern Tokyo as beautiful and his descriptive thoughts often wax poetic. "Shozo was not indifferent to the charm of the quaint and stately pre-war structures that had survived the air raids, but he was invariably struck by the beauty of contemporary buildings, sharply geometrical in form, devoid of superfluous décor, adroitly bringing to the fore a texture that was both mineral and metallic. Particularly when at dusk, the rain having lifted, he happened to see the clouds suddenly part and the sunlight break through the air like streams of golden arrows to illuminate the walls and windows of the high-rises, row upon row, he found himself, quite involuntarily, trembling with emotion.

So, it is interesting when he comes across the reclaimed land he tells an old friend: "I feel drawn to it, though I myself don't know why. Perhaps one reason is that it reminds me of the burned-out ruins of our childhood. It's just that it's wistfully familiar, as though I were taking a journey home." And even more interesting when he is nearly run down by the speeding motorcycle.

This is a contemplative story, beautifully written, which drifts into magical realism and does so in way that you almost don't notice. The book's back cover calls this a "sinister satire on urban decay" but I think it is saying much more - perhaps commentary about changes in Japanese society - though I feel I am only getting glimpses of it - like seeing the sun through the buildings as you walk down a city street.

Kobo Abe : The Box Man
4.5/5 stars
Japan

This one.
This one was not an easy read.

This is the record of a box man... That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me. A box man, in his box, is recording the chronicle of a box man.

I thought I got it in the beginning. Then the middle I found befuddling. And then the last 20 pages brought the clarity I sought; or at least, the interpretation that seems most relevant to my life and my role in society.

"The nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head... he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman who is determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse given to disrobing, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself." Such is the summary presented on the back of the book.

What I ended up seeing is a man who knows not how to relate to his fellow human beings, particularly women, after a certain encounter in his youth. He loses himself in the physical and the ejaculatory when it comes to the touch of a woman and cannot handle the outside world and its "moral" pressures. A touch, an emission, seem so easy to understand but becomes muddied when standards and rules and regulations try to play a part. What can he do but try to isolate himself from this outward stimulation and simplify his life to the world of a cardboard box; a box to counter the stares of his peers like a window shields its contents from the UV rays of the sun.

Unfortunately, despite your attempt at isolation, the world will still bare down on you and even worse, will try to shock you out of unsocial behavior. Thus, the roles of doctor, the rifleman and the nurse. At the end, I believe the doctor and the rifleman are one in the same with the box man, remnants of his outside-the-box character, trying to bring him back to society as he knows is "right to do". But their threatening nature makes him fear for his life knowing that death must be approaching.

The more I think about it, the more complex and amazing this book is. It really does come down to those last 20 pages. So much to say about this one.

Kudos to E. Dale Saunders for the English translation.

(Cross-posted to my Club Read 2011 thread and my Japanese Literature thread.)

Just read another Japanese book, Le village aux huit tombes by Seishi Yokomizo. My thoughts can be found here or in my Club 2011 thread. Seishi Yokomizo is the creator of the famous character, Detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Everyone in Japan pretty much knows who that is even if they don't know who created him. All in all I really enjoyed reading this. It was great entertainment even though I was surprised that Kindaichi doesn't play much of a role.

avaland -
I bought Isle of Dreams and hope to read it soon. I'll let you know my thoughts when I do.

Read another Japanese book while in Japan.

Michio Takeyama : Harp of Burma
3.5/5 stars
Japan

Read this on the plane coming back from Japan as I've been meaning to read it for quite a while. It takes place during the Japanese occupation of Burma during WWII and reflects on a troop as they try to keep hope alive through music and their refusal to leave a man behind. It's a good story but I can't help but compare it to Fires on the Plain which this book simply cannot compete against. Some of the primary differences:

Fires:
Focuses on despair
Focuses on a single soldier and his struggles
Struggle to keep humanity alive

Harp:
Focuses on hope
Focuses on an entire troop and their struggles
Struggle to leave their humanity and compassion behind

Both books reflected on the struggles of the individual versus society but in slightly different ways. Harp's main concept is the comparison of Burma's way of living versus Japan and which is more correct. A highly civilized advanced society based on military teaching versus a society that sacrifices advancement based on religious training for the sake of a strong sense of religion and community.

"We Japanese have not cared to make strenuous spiritual efforts. We have not even recognized their value. What we stressed was merely a man's abilities, the things he could do -- not what kind of a man he was, how he lived, or the depth of his understanding. Of perfection as a human being, of humility, stoicism, holiness, the capacity to gain salvation and to help others toward it -- of all these virtues we were left ignorant."

It is believed that Japan has lost its moral sense out of greed and that's why they came to lose the war. Men forgot their own independent way of thinking to become patriotic and to conglomerate themselves to a greater sense of unity. But one can't go anywhere with such a group mentality.

This passage along with another debate between two soldiers at the beginning of the book (pg. 46 in the standard copy) are certainly the strongest parts of the book. Although the story of Mizushima is quite heartfelt and admirable.

Overall, a pleasant read but nothing compared to Fires.

I just read another book from Japan with part of my review below. The rest links back to my Japanese lit thread since I read primarily works from Japan and thus don't want to take over this regional thread with just my reads. But this book is a definite recommend.

Shusaku Endo : The Sea and Poison
5/5 stars
Japan

Excellent. Simply excellent.

Endo tackles the difficult prospect of understanding how a group of Japanese doctors went through with performing vivisections on American soldiers. Based on a true account, this book is so full of moral complexities and intrigue that it's very hard to put down.

This book could have been written in any number of ways but the way Endo presents it is just wonderful. It begins with a prologue, a man in a barren outskirt of Tokyo looking for treatment at the office of a Dr. Suguro, a quiet solemn man, too advanced in his craft to be a simple village doctor. After some probing we learn that Suguro was one of the doctors who took part in the vivisections and we were are then thrown into Suguro's life. But we do not stay on Suguro; we follow other participants in the vivisections and see how they got to become active members of what seems to be an easy moral decision not to participate.

This book is like walking through the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima. As a whole, we understand what happened, why it happened and the aftereffects of the bomb that fell. But no matter how much we study, how much we read, we will never be able to fully place ourselves within the mindsets of those who were in the immediate vicinity of that bomb. So like the museum, we walk from artifact to artifact, reading snippets of the lives of the victims; those that died and those that survived. From the pieces of glass melted by radiation to the little lunchbox still containing its scorched rice ball, to the official documents warning against the bomb, to photos of the actual damage. We read, we look, we feel, but nevertheless we will never comprehend the decision to drop the bomb. We will never get the full story.

... Read the rest at my Japanese lit thread.

JAPAN

The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo

I read this after lilisin's fantastic review and recommendation, and I also found it to be stunning and powerful tale of man's inhumanity to man, and the role that societal and peer pressure play in causing decent human beings to commit immoral acts toward those in their care or under their power. Based on a real story, it served as one of the first novels that openly criticized acts committed by Japan in wartime against its citizens, enemies and prisoners of war, and brought to light some of the atrocities that the world would learn about in later years.

My review is here: http://www.librarything.com/review/74889297

The Shooting Gallery by Tsushima Yūko, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt

At least three things define the literary career of Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947). The first is that her real name is Tsushima Satoko. The second is that she is the daughter of the novelist Dazai Osamu who killed himself when she was just one year old. The third, and the most significant, is that she's an accomplished writer herself, a multi-awarded literary figure in Japan. Along with Kōno Taeko, Tsushima is considered the foremost female short story writer in Japan, a prolific and consistent teller of subtle stories concerning human relationships. At least three books of hers have been translated in English so far: two novels and the short story selection The Shooting Gallery. All were handled by translator Geraldine Harcourt.

The eight stories in her one collection in English display a diversity of approaches that are hard to categorize into a single style. They are mostly about the aftermaths of a divorce and they reveal a writer concerned with gender disparities and a woman's search for freedom. Tsushima's female protagonists are confronted with situations they either want to understand or they want to escape from. In their stubbornness and liberal attitudes they can be considered rebels of the time. The characters are often single mothers or divorced women who face their lot in life while dreaming of something better. What is exemplary in Tsushima is the unique chameleon-like style she deploys in story after story. The writing is clear and transparent, without any apparent tricks and obscurities, and yet the whole composition exhibits a strong sense of both familiarity to and estrangement from the narrative intent. Consider the opening of "The Silent Traders" in which a single mother begins her narrative straightforwardly, only to defamiliarize it with her unexplained fear.

There was a cat in the wood. Not such an odd thing, really: wildcats, pumas, and lions all come from the same family and even a tabby shouldn't be out of place. But the sight was unsettling. What was the creature doing there? When I say 'wood', I'm talking about Rikugien, an Edo-period landscape garden in my neighbourhood. Perhaps 'wood' isn't quite the right word, but the old park's trees – relics of the past amid the city's modern buildings – are so overgrown that the pathways skirting its walls are dark and forbidding even by day. It does give the impression of a wood; there's no other word for it. And the cat, I should explain, didn't look wild. It was just a kitten, two or three months old, white with black patches. It didn't look at all ferocious – in fact it was a dear little thing. There was nothing to fear. And yet I was taken aback, and I tensed as the kitten bristled and glared in my direction.

Tsushima tells of a mother's imagined transaction (the 'silent trade') between the narrator's two practically fatherless children and a cat. The children previously met their father six months before but it was a rather awkward reunion. Her concern for her children's lack of a "human father" impels her to enact the silent trade in her mind. She is thinking of a beneficial exchange between her children (who will leave food for the cat) and this same cat who could act as a "father figure" to them whenever it visits to eat his fill.

The children leave food on the balcony. And in return the cat provides them with a father. How's that for a bargain? Once a year, male cats procreate; in other words, they become fathers. They become father (sic) ad nauseam. But these fathers don't care how many children they have – they don't even notice that they are fathers. Yet the existence of offspring makes them so. Fathers who don't know their own children. Among humans, it seems there's an understanding that a man only becomes a father when he recognises the child as his own; but that's a very narrow view. Why do we allow the male to divide children arbitrarily into two kinds, recognised and unrecognised? Wouldn't it be enough for the child to choose a father when necessary from among suitable males? If the children decide that the tom that climbs up to their balcony is their father, it shouldn't cause him any inconvenience. A father looks in on two of his children from the balcony every night. The two human children faithfully leave out food to make it so. He comes late, when they are fast asleep, and they never see him or hear his cries. It's enough that they know in the morning that he's been. In their dreams, the children are hugged to their cat-father's breast.

In the above passage, the mother mentions the word "father" almost a dozen times, as if the very scenario she painted so vividly in her mind already makes it a feasible trade, that the cat would be a substitute for her children's absent father. The other stories in the selection also cling to this idea of looking for suitable substitutes (or metaphors) or of creating ones. The finding of these substitutes-metaphors, usually some kind of animal (mythical or legendary or not), is often the objective of the characters, the very task they are trying to complete.

It can be said that an essential itinerary of these stories, stories of self-discovery in some ways, is teasing out these overt metaphors, underlining the substitutions, the surrogate images that will fully describe the characters' present condition and thus release them from being mystified by their own boredom and discontent. The characters are seeking to unmask their avatars which will bring them to a more complete description of their states and thus toward a diagnosis of their afflictions. Their chosen avatars may or may not save them, the characters, who are somehow aware of their wishful thinking, but at least there is satisfaction to be had in knowing their lives at this point have meanings insofar as metaphors and details, both tangible and mystical, reflect their stories.

Japan
Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura 1982, English translation 1996

This is a beautifully written, haunting book, and yet I didn't love it as much as I hoped to based on lilisin's glowing recommendation. Through the story of a nine-year-old boy, Isaku, whose father, like many others in the village, has sold himself into bondage for three years to provide grain for his family, Yoshimura paints a picture of a small medieval village, perched on the rocky coast of an island off the coast of Japan, isolated from the nearest town by mountains that can only be traversed on foot. His descriptions of the natural world, both its beauty and its harshness, and the villager's dependence on it and the drudgery of their lives, are delicate and illuminating. From early in this slim novel, a sense of danger and even horror intrudes, as the reader learns of a man whose family stopped feeding him because he was dying; in this village, there is a fine line between finding enough food, largely from the sea, and starving to death.

Part of the novel is the beginning of a coming-of-age story. Isaku struggles with going out fishing by himself to provide food for his mother and younger siblings, takes pride in being invited into the company of the adults of the village, misses his father, has complicated feelings about his mother, and starts to notice the attractions of a girl. But the other part of the novel deals with the village's secret way of providing more for itself, by plundering ships that are wrecked on the rocks in stormy winter weather. More than that, they work to attract these ships to danger, and carry out rituals to ensure that they will do so. In the end, this brings unanticipated danger and sorrow to the village.

There are two reasons why I'm not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this book, one having to do with the novel itself and one with the translation. First, even given the fact that children grew up faster and had to take on adult responsibilities earlier in medieval times, I had a difficult time picturing a nine-year-old doing everything Isaku did, although I could envision more of it as he grew older over the approximately three-year span of the book. Secondly, sometimes the translation used contemporary expressions that I found jarring in the context of both the medieval time period and the Japanese location (as has been noted by other reviewers): for example, he uses the terms "tying the knot" and "breadwinner". Additionally, the book uses traditional ways to describe time, for example, the Hour of the Horse; at one point in the middle of the book, the translator parenthetically inserts approximately what time that corresponds to, and it seemed strange to do it in one place but not elsewhere (and I would have preferred it not to be done at all).

Despite these caveats, I really enjoyed this book; I just wish I liked it more.

JAPAN

Stained Glass Elegies by Shusaku Endo

Stained Glass Elegies is a compilation of 11 short stories that Endo wrote between 1959 and 1977, which were largely taken from his earlier short story collections Aika (Elegies) and Juichi no iro garasu (Eleven Stained-Glass Segments). Most of the stories touch on Endo's main themes: chronic illness and death; the indifference and paternalism that patients in the modern hospital are afforded; the effect of barbarism and imperialism on Catholics in feudal and wartime Japan; and the internal struggles of Japanese Catholics, who attempt to reconcile Western religious beliefs in a cultural tradition that is seemingly at odds with it.

Many of the stories, unfortunately, are uneven, repetitive and inferior to the two Endo novels I've read so far, The Sea and Poison and Volcano. The main character of several of the stories was Suguro, which also made subsequent stories more difficult (is this the same Suguro as the one two stories past?). The best stories are A Forty-Year-Old Man (1964), in which (you guessed it) Suguro is a hospitalized invalid with tuberculosis, who faces his own mortality and irrelevance as he undergoes a third major operation which may claim his life; Incredible Voyage (1968), a science fiction tale based on the 1960s American television series Fantastic Voyage, which concerns a newly minted doctor and a team of surgeons, who board a submarine that is shrunken to the size of a flea, in order to perform a life saving operation on a beautiful young woman; and Unzen (1965), in which a tourist from Tokyo visits the site where thousands of Christians were tortured and killed during the 17th century Shimbara Rebellion, which centers on Kichijiro, the main character of Endo's most famous and highly regarded novel Silence.

Although Stained Glass Elegies could be considered a good introduction, I would not recommend it to the reader who has not read Endo before. Those who wish to focus on Endo's works, such as the members of this year's Author Theme Reads group, may wish to purchase it, but I suspect that those readers, and novices to Endo, will be better served by reading his translated novels instead.

JAPAN

Botchan (Master Darling) by Natsume Soseki

Botchan was written by Soseki in 1905, and it is widely considered to be one of the most important works of Japanese literature, as it was one of the first modern works that touches on the conflict between traditional values and beliefs found in remote Japanese villages, and the influence of the West and a modern society in a major city such as Tokyo.

The narrator is a young man of slight build but feisty spirit who has recently graduated from university with a degree in physics, who has been hired to teach mathematics in a middle school in a small rural town. Botchan is guided by his personal moral code and sense of duty, which is exceeded only by his self importance and pomposity. Almost immediately he runs afoul of several of the students in his classes, who torment him with blackboard comments and juvenile tricks. He subsequently angers his immediate supervisor, the principal of the school, and several of his fellow teachers, who conspire against him and his supervisor. Botchan strikes out against his accusers and foes, as he longs to return to Tokyo and to the old woman who served as the family maid during his troubled childhood, as she is the only person who nurtured and believed in him.

Despite its short length of 92 pages, Botchan was a tedious read that seemed at least twice as long as it actually was. Not recommended.

JAPAN

Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Rashōmon first published in Japanese 1915, other stories through 1927 (posthumous)
English translation by Jay Rubin 2006



Akutagawa Ryūnosuke--to put his name in proper Japanese order--lived from 1892 to 1926. He was born into poverty, but nonetheless achieved a high level of education, mastering both English and Chinese. His maturation as a writer came during Japan's Taishō Era, 1912-1926, a brief episode of cultural openness and artistic flowering. His writing reflects, on the one hand, the bright but fragile temper of the time, and on the other his own troubled and divided soul.

The stories of Akutagawa are divided thematically in this collection into four groups. The first section, "A World in Decay," includes his most famous story, Rashōmon. These are dark and magical tales of Japan's past that, at the same time, reflect a confidence in the power of a writer's artistic vision. The most memorable of these stories is "Hell Screen," in which an artist commissioned to paint a picture of Hell compulsively, but knowingly, draws himself into the very Hell he is painting.

The second group of stories, subtitled "Under the Sword," continues the historical setting, but in a starkly realistic mode. The theme here is faith and loyalty against a background of religious or political change. Akutagawa's writings were heavily influenced by Christianity, and several of his stories feature Japanese Christians being persecuted for their beliefs. These were written at a time when Japan was politically divided over the issue of Western cultural influence.

Next is a short selection of stories called "Modern Tragicomedy," in which we see Akutagawa at his most cheerful and playful, writing satirically of Japanese life in the 1920s. In "Horse Legs" a clerical error on the part of some bureaucratic divine authority has killed a man before his allotted time. He is brought back to life with apologies, but since his legs had already begun to decompose he is given a pair of horse's legs instead. In "Green Onions" the focus of the story isn't the plot itself, but the author's need to finish it before his deadline.

The final segment is a series of autobiographical stories Akutagawa wrote in his final months, some of which were not published until after his death. These are grim and troubled stories reflecting the author's tragic life. His mother was insane, an insanity he always feared he had inherited. He was raised by foster parents, having little contact with his natural father, and as a sickly child in a society prizing martial virtues he was ostracized by his teachers as well as his fellow students. Yet his early love for literature and his intellectual accomplishments made him contemptuous of others even as he was hurt by their rejection of him. Similar internal conflicts developed over religion and sex, as he flirted with Christianity and had several extra-marital affairs.

Akutagawa's final story, "Slipping Gears," reads like an extended suicide note. He felt himself slipping into madness--parts of the story itself seem deranged--and finished: "--I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?" On 24 July, 1927, Akutagawa took an overdose of sedative and died in his sleep.

Akutagawa read widely in the Western classics, and his works are sprinkled with references to authors such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert, just as to the Japanese and Chinese classics. This, plus his association with Christianity, makes his stories particularly approachable by Western readers. The Penguin edition is abundantly footnoted to provide the necessary background material on Japanese history and Asian literature. This collection is an excellent introduction to modern Japanese literature.

JAPAN
Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki Originally published 1914, my translation 2010

This is a deceptively simple, yet haunting, novel that I've found myself thinking about since finishing it yesterday. On the surface, it is the tale of three students, one narrating his story in a present of around 1912, and another reflecting in 1912 on his days as a student, and his friendship with another student, some decades earlier. The helpful introduction, in my edition, by the translator describes the Meiji period in Japan, from 1868 to 1912, as a time of turmoil in which western ideas were being introduced, transforming the Japanese culture and way of life.

It is a story of deception, betrayal, friendship, family conflict, alienation, illness, and death told in a way that illustrates these without for the most part overtly calling attention to them. From the beginning, there is a sense of foreboding, as the 1912 student meets an older man, whom he calls Sensei, or teacher, who regularly visits the grave of his friend, known as K, but will not share with the student, or even his wife, why this is so important to him. The two get closer, and then the student leaves Tokyo to spend time with his family and dying father. While he is away he gets a long letter from Sensei, which forms the last part of the book, in which he tells the story of his student years, his friendship with K, and how he became the man the student met after K's death.

The reader is filled with apprehension as the story develops, knowing, in a way the student is too immature to realize, that Sensei's secret is grim and that the ending will not be good. The writing is extremely subtle, so that the reader, at least this one, almost has the feeling of experiencing the development of the characters the way they themselves do, yet is propelled through the almost monotony of everyday life to find out what happens. At the same time that the story is in some ways quite modern, it seems very rooted in a particular time and place, and I found it interesting to learn about some of the older Japanese customs and beliefs, some of which feel quite alien, like the practice of letting children (not babies) be adopted by other families who can provide them with greater financial and educational resources, the significance of suicide, and some Confucian (or Buddhist???) ideals.

According to the translator, "kokoro" means "heart," but in a broader sense than we understand it. She explains it means "the thinking and feeling heart" as opposed to "pure intellect," and indeed that is a theme of the book, something the characters struggle with. I read this book for the Author Theme Reads group's Japanese year, and it makes me eager not only to read more by Sōseki but also more by other Japanese authors so I have more of a context for what I'm reading.

JAPAN
Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki Originally published 1909. Translation 2009.

Sanshirō is a young man, about 22 years old, who travels from his country village to Tokyo to enroll in the prestigious university there in about 1909. The novel opens on the train carrying him to Tokyo, on which he has two encounters, one with a woman, one with an older man, that foreshadow much of the rest of the book. Sanshirō is obviously both intelligent and ambitious, but he has a lot to learn about both people, especially women, and the comparative sophistication of Meiji era Tokyo, the period when, as in Kokoro, the other book by Natsume that I've read, Japan was absorbing western ideas.

Very soon after his arrival in Tokyo, Sanshirō meets several people who will be part of his life for the rest of the book: his gregarious fellow student Yojirō, who is always plotting something; a scientist known to his family, Nonomiya; a professor, Hirota, who is somewhat detached from the world; and especially Mineko, an entrancing and yet mysterious young woman. Sanshirō, who is otherwise largely an observer, of people, of the streets and streetcars of Tokyo, of the sky and the clouds moving across it, becomes obsessed with Mineko, although I have to stress I do not mean "obsessed" in the way we think of the word today. He thinks about her, thinks about how he can get to see her -- but when he does see her, he is unable to do the right thing, to say what she would like to hear, to interact with her in a way that could move things forward. He is intimidated by her modernity at the same time that he is fascinated by it.

In addition to the Mineko thread, Sanshirō also becomes involved in an attempt to get a Japanese professor of western literature at the university, receives letters and instructions from his mother, along with information about a girl back home who doesn't interest him, and finds his way around Tokyo and the university.

As in Kokoro, Natsume's writing is very subtle. Just as Sanshirō observes the world, the reader observes Sanshirō and experiences what he is experiencing, even if at times the reader, or this one anyway, just wants to slap him and say "talk to her, already." It would be difficult to call this a coming of age novel, because Sanshirō still has a long way to go at the end of it, but he definitely is learning. I enjoyed this book and found it an excellent tale of a young provincial man gradually getting to know the wider world, as well as an intriguing portrait of a particular time and place. In that sense, it is definitely a classic.

As an aside, my edition had a lovely and informative introduction by Haruki Murakami.

Japan Originally published 1958, English translation 1972
The Sea and Poison by Shūsaku Endō

I am very impressed that Shūsaku Endō wrote this book, not only because it deals with the horrifying vivisection of US prisoners of war by Japanese doctors at the end of World War II, but primarily because he is a Japanese author tackling what must have been, and probably still is, an extremely fraught subject. What he is really addressing is the moral question: how could anyone, but especially doctors who have sworn an oath to protect life, agree to participate in this?

Endo tells the story through the eyes of several of the doctors and nurses who end up participating in the vivisection, but the principal character is Dr. Sugaro, a young intern at the time who, despite reservations, was involved in the "operations," and who, when the book opens, is practicing almost in seclusion in a shabby home office outside Tokyo. Then, through flashbacks, we get a picture of the time and motivations of the other characters, primarily the principal doctors, "the Old Man," Dr. Hashimoto, and his assistant Dr. Shibata; a sickening sycophant, Dr. Asai; another more sophisticated intern, Dr. Toda; and two nurses, the chief nurse Oba and a younger nurse with a difficult past, Ueda.

The end of the war is near and the Americans are bombing the city of Fukuoka day in and day out. It has been reduced nearly to rubble, and the doctors and nurses at the nearby medical school have become numbed to the death and destruction. Most of them are also numb to the suffering of their patients, many of whom have advanced cases of tuberculosis, especially those in the welfare ward, although, despite teasing, Sugaro feels compassion for an elderly woman who is scheduled to undergo unnecessary and probably fatal surgery because the doctors feel she is expendable. At the same time, the internal politics of the hospital lead "the Old Man" to focus his efforts on becoming to become Dean of Medicine and Asai and Toda are scheming with him. Even before the military proposes the vivisection "experiment," the patients are not at the forefront of the doctors' or nurses' minds. Nobody seems that enthused about the war, either.

Through flashbacks to the earlier lives of some of the participants, especially Toda and Ueda, Endō explores their psychological inability to refuse to join in. Toda lacks a conscience and cares only what society thinks and what he can get away with; Ueda has experienced her own traumas (through which we see the Japanese treatment of the Chinese in areas they occupied prior to the war) and has a hard time thinking about the point of view of other people. Throughout, Endō focuses on the idea of what is morality and how we will be judged, as well as some Buddhist perspectives on suffering. He also introduces the idea of the other; Hashimoto has a white (German) wife, who does things the Japanese find unusual for a woman in her position, and the whiteness of the US bomber pilots who are the POWs is also noted.

I have only scratched the surface of this brief but chilling and complex book. The sea is ever-present, a force beyond human control, and the poison of going along with the group is insidious.

Japan Originally published 1962, English translation 1964.
The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abé

I found this Japanese classic extremely difficult to read: so disturbing, so claustrophobic, so infuriating. And yet, I suspect all this is as the author intended. Literally, it is the story of a man unwillingly trapped in a disintegrating house in a sand pit with a woman who has been living there for some time, condemned to continually remove sand so it doesn't overpower the house and then the neighboring village. He struggles, attempts to escape, feels alternately anger at and compassion for the woman, and philosophizes about sand, sex and love, and the meaning of life. Metaphorically, it is an existential look at the lives we all live.

I also found it intriguing to think about why it is called "the woman in the dunes" when the woman is never fully developed as a character, and the male protagonist is the focus of the story. To me the woman was almost symbolic, as it is in a way the woman/the pit/the hole in the ground that traps the man, even though it was the male villagers who put him there. A little Freudian, no?

Finally, I found myself struggling to appreciate this book, and on some levels I could. The world the author creates is believable if bizarre, as are the changing moods, attitudes, and actions of the protagonist. The author's depiction of sand and its movement is fascinating and mind-stretching. The way he develops the plot and makes the reader feel as trapped as the protagonist is masterful. The line illustrations, by his wife, are charming and add to the tale. But overall it is so grim and, as I said, so claustrophobic, that reading it was, for me, an unpleasant experience.

Japan Originally published 1973. English translation 1974.
The Box Man by Kōbō Abe

This is almost certainly the most mystifying book I have ever read! At the start of it, the narrator (or one of them) describes what a box man is (a man who lives with a box over his head that reaches to his hips and that contains the various items he needs for daily life) and says: at this juncture, the box man is me. It gets less clear from there.

In the first part of the novel, the box man describes how to make a box, his life as a box man, how someone else (?) became a box man, being attacked with an air gun, and so on. I found this section even more claustrophobic than I found Abe's The Woman in the Dunes and was almost ready to give up. Then more characters enter the novel including a woman who acts as a nurse and a doctor who may be the person who shot him and may be a fake box man and may be a figment of the box man's imagination. The narrator box man believes, or dreams, or writes, or fantasizes that the nurse has made a deal with him to pay him for the box, but he wants to return the money she has given him. The scene switches to the hospital and its housing area where the doctor and nurse work and live -- either it really shifts or it shifts in the box man's imagination.

There the box man's feelings about sex and love start to emerge. He seems to want contact with the nurse, but mainly just to see her naked. He was formerly a photographer and the idea of seeing without being seen is threaded through the novel in various ways, from taking pictures, to living in a box, to turning out the light, to hiding and looking, and more.

Later we learn a little more about the history of the doctor and the nurse (and another doctor who the doctor is pretending to be and who became addicted to morphine, and who may or not be the same doctor, or even the box man himself), and then there is a box man corpse too. Although some of this is told in a more realistic tone, it is unclear who the narrator is. At the very end, there is a revelation about an event in the box man's childhood that may shed light on his sexual psychology and psychology in general. In fact, there is a lot about sex in the book, including the narrator box man's idea that the legs are the most erotic part of a woman because they enclose her sexual parts (and I note that the box of a box man stops at his hips, so just his legs are exposed). In addition, the book includes grainy dark photographs with captions that are seemingly unrelated to the story.

I've read other reviews of this book, but I still really don't know what to make of it. It is clear that Abe is commenting in some way on how we try to hide ourselves, how repression eventually expresses itself, how we avoid looking at some people and long to look at others. But what this all means, and how to sort out the confusion of characters, narrators, real box men, fake box men, and so on, and whether in fact this is all some sort of drug-induced dream, or all the male characters are aspects of one character, is beyond me.

Japan Building Waves, Taeko Tomioka, 1983, translated 2012 (Louise Heal Kawai)

I'm reviewing this for the next issue of Belletrista so I won't say much. Actually, I'm going to have to think about this one for a bit anyway. But here is the blurb from the back cover:

"It is the early eighties, and the housing industry is booming. Previously unpopulated mountainous areas of the Japanese countryside are being leveled to accommodate new waves of people. Similarly, a new wave of feminism, particularly a change in attitudes toward marriage and child-rearing, is growing among the women of Japan. Both the physical an social landscapes are in flux....."

Definitely interesting, rather odd. Although I was often perplexed and sometimes annoyed when reading it, a day later it's sitting with me rather nicely.

JAPAN
Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami (1976, English translation 1977)

Cross posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads

As I was reading this book, which I read for the Author Theme Reads group, I thought that the only thing I could say about it is that if I had ever wanted to lead a completely dissolute life this book would have dissuaded me. Page after page of impersonal and sometimes violent sex, drugs of all sorts, rotting food, and a variety of bodily fluids and bodily reactions. Who of my generation would have thought sex, drugs, and rock and roll could be so disgusting? But, on reflection, I realized that towards the end of this mercifully brief novel, the narrator, Ryū, reveals a remarkable observational and imaginative capability (although what is hallucination and what is real is hard to say), and some of the characters exhibit some fond feelings for their families or home regions. So maybe there's a glimmer of hope.

As an added note, I found the treatment of the African-American soldiers from the nearby US air base quite stereotypical.

JAPAN

Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryū Murakami (1994, English translation 2011)

This is an absurd comic novel and cultural satire set just after the completion of the Showa Era, which refers to the reign of Emperor Hirohito from 1926-1989. The first set of main characters are six young men, who are each nihilistic misfits that have been largely abandoned by their families and the larger society, but find common ground in each other and a shared interest in mindless violence and an elaborate and somewhat disturbing karaoke ritual. If you can visualize a group of Beavis & Butthead clones on steroids, you've got them pegged. They have little emotional connection to anyone, and they harbor an inexplicably deep hatred of Oba-sans, or aunties, the seemingly ubiquitous dowdy women past their prime period of attractiveness. As one of them says, "They always say that when human beings are extinct, the only living thing left will be the cockroach, but that's bullshit. It's the Oba-san."

One of the young men, filled with unfocused rage and vengeance, approaches an Oba-san who is unknown to him, and murders her in broad daylight. The woman is one of the members of the Midori Society, consisting of six thirtysomething women who all share the same last name and the same fate as unmarried, undesirable, purposeless and unfulfilled women who are equally as nihilistic and amoral as the young men. They learn who the killer is and take their revenge on him, which sets off a war between the two factions that is a cross between a bizarrely funny Looney Tunes cartoon and a mindlessly and increasingly violent B movie.

Despite all of this, I actually enjoyed this novel, which I found to be a biting critique of the nihilism, crassness and commercialization of contemporary Japanese pop culture, one in which its admirers seek instant gratification and bear no concern for the consequences of their behaviors or actions.

JAPAN

Silence by Shūsaku Endō (originally published 1960, English translation 1978)
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is an intense and penetrating look at the travails of a Catholic missionary in 17th century Japan, after Christianity has been outlawed and its believers subjected to torture, and a deep and thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of faith. It is also beautifully written, and provides a vivid portrait of Japan as seen through Portuguese eyes as written by a Japanese author.

On the other hand . . . I not only have difficulty comprehending this depth of faith but also, as a non-Christian, I have never been able to understand the extensive, if not extreme, proselytizing of Christianity, the need to convert as many others as possible to its beliefs. It seems patronizing to me: "we know what's best for you." These feelings colored my reading of the book because, while I was appalled by the Japanese methods of torture (although torture has certainly been practiced by those professing to be Christians too), I could understand why they wanted to keep such a foreign (and colonizing) religion out of their country. Nor do I understand the appeal of martyrdom. I also found a little peculiar the way the protagonist, Father Rodrigues, seems to compare his suffering to that of Jesus, and his betrayer to Judas. Perhaps this would not be disturbing to someone who is Christian, so perhaps this reflects a lack of understanding on my part, but it seems a little self-aggrandizing to me.

The overall question, of the silence of God, is more interesting. The 20th century, when this book was written, was a century of evil and suffering on a huge scale, and therefore this question is of even more import now than it was when Father Rodrigues traveled to Japan. Additionally, Endō, himself a devoted Catholic, alludes to the issue of how a western religion like Christianity can adapt itself to an eastern culture like that of Japan. Had he explored this more, I might have found more to like about the book.

As it is, I can only think that, throughout the centuries, not only have people of various religions persecuted and killed people of other religions but, as my grandfather liked to say, more wars have been fought over religion than for any other reason (not sure if this is strictly true). I wish I could say this book helped me understand faith more, but it left me just as puzzled.

JAPAN

Silence by Shusaku Endo

This brilliant novel, which is widely considered to be Endo's masterpiece, describes the persecution and fate of Japanese Christians and Portuguese Catholic priests in the years during the 17th century Shimabara Rebellion and its aftermath.

First, a little bit of historical background. Christianity in Japan began in the 1540s, soon after Portugal began to trade goods with that country. The first Jesuit missionaries were met with resistance in their first efforts to convert the Japanese to Catholicism, but soon a unique form of Christianity, which combined the teachings of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism, took hold. By the late 1570s there were over 100,000 active Christians in Japan throughout all social strata, primarily in and around the coastal regions of southwestern Japan.

In the late 1580s Toyotomi Hideyoshi assumed power over a newly unified Japan. As part of his effort to control the country, and fearing that the missionaries were a first step toward colonization of Japan by the Portuguese, Hideyoshi, an avowed Buddhist, banned Catholicism and cracked down on the missionaries and the daimyos, the territorial lords who oversaw the sometimes forcible conversion of their people to the Western religion. After Hideyoshi's death Christianity in Japan experienced moderate growth, with intermittent periods of persecution by the shogunate. Following the Great Genna Martyrdom of 1632, Catholicism was officially banned in Japan. In the following year the Tokugawa shogunate began to institute sakoku ("locked country"), a national seclusion policy which forbade foreigners from entering the country or Japanese citizens from leaving it.

In 1637 peasants in Shimbara, located in modern day Nagasaki Prefecture, rebelled against the feudal lord of the region, who taxed them to the point of starvation in order to pay for a new castle that was built in his honor. These peasants, who were mainly Christian villagers, attacked the castle, but were successfully rebelled by forces of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1638. In the aftermath of the Shimabara Rebellion, sakoku was enforced more strictly, and Christians were actively pursued and forced to renounce their religion once they were captured. Most were obligated to step on a fumie, a wooden or stone likeness of Jesus or Mary. Most of those who did so willingly were released, but anyone who refused or hesitated before doing so was brutally tortured and ultimately killed, along with their families. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese Christians and Portuguese missionaries died in this manner during the 17th century.

Silence begins in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1638, as Father Sebastian Rodrigues and two of his fellow priests seek to travel to Japan. Their beloved teacher, Father Christovao Ferriera, has not been heard from since 1633, after he reportedly committed apostasy by stepping on a fumie in Nagasaki once he was captured and tortured. The Roman Catholic church leadership in Portugal is initially reluctant to grant permission to the priests to travel there, as they are aware of the persecution of Christians in Japan and the refusal of the shogunate to allow any commercial relationship with the Portuguese. Eventually the three are given the blessing of the church, and months later they arrive in the port city of Macao. There they are introduced to Kichijiro, a rather dodgy Japanese resident of the city, who wishes to return to his home country and agrees to accompany two of the priests there. The junk boat lands under cover of darkness near Nagasaki, and the priests make their way to the hills above Nagasaki. There they meet a group of hidden Christians in a nearby village, who are overjoyed to meet a Catholic priest. However, the Christians are soon uncovered by the local samurai, and Father Rodrigues is forced to flee to the surrounding woods, where he is eventually betrayed and captured, in a similar manner to Jesus' betrayal by Judas.

The novel begins as a series of letters by Rodrigues to Portuguese church officials, but then switches to a third person narrative after he is forced to flee. Unlike the Japanese Christians and the missionaries who preceded him, he is not physically tortured, but he is repeatedly encouraged to apostatize in order to save the lives of the captured villagers and his colleague, who was also taken into custody. Rodrigues experiences almost unbearable turmoil and a crisis of faith, as he cannot reconcile how a merciful God can stand by silently while His believers are willing to undergo extreme physical pain and death in support of their beliefs:

I knew well, of course, that the greatest sin against God was despair; but the silence of God was something I could not fathom. 'The Lord preserved the just man when godless folk were perishing all around him. Escape he should when fire came down upon the Cities of the Plain.' Yet now, when the barren land was already emitting smoke while the fruit on the trees was still unripe, surely he should speak but a word for the Christians.

I ran, slipping down the slope. Whenever I slowed down, the ugly thought would come bubbling up into consciousness bringing an awful dread. If I consented to this thought, then my whole past to this very day was washed away in silence.

Rodrigues' psychological torment intensifies, and he is eventually forced by the head samurai Inoue to make a decision: apostatize and betray his religion, in order to spare his life and the remaining villagers who have stepped on the fumie, or refuse, and condemn the villagers and himself to a long and painful death by torture.

Silence is a most fitting title to this fantastic novel, as it can refer to the silence of God while His believers suffer oppression, physical pain and death; the silence of the community while others are being persecuted; and the internal silence experienced by the individual who is forcibly isolated for his beliefs. The novel is ripe for interpretation and serious discussion, by Christians or believers of other faiths, and by those who would stand by idly and in comfort while others are forced to suffer due to poverty, religious belief or minority status. Beyond that, Silence is a very well written and compelling drama, which would be an enjoyable read on a much more superficial level. It is easily the best book I've read by Endo to date, and certainly one of finest 20th century Japanese novels I've ever read.

JAPAN

Deep River by Shūsako Endō
Originally published 1994, and translation 1994
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads

Like Silence by the same author, this novel explores religious belief, this time taking a group of more or less contemporary Japanese men and women on a trip to the Ganges where, for varying reasons, they hope to fill some of the holes and resolve the darkness they feel in their lives. Interestingly, the title comes from an African-American spiritual which Endō uses as an epigram for the book.

Much of the novel focuses on Christianity, and it is filled with what I take to be Christian imagery and Christ figures (in the sense of dying for others), but Endō definitely explores, in this later work, the question of how a western religion like Christianity can or cannot be adapted to an eastern Asian sensibility. There is a lot about Hindu gods (and especially goddesses) and how they incorporate both good and evil, and about mother figures and how Hindu goddesses who are mother figures, especially one known as Chamunda, exemplify giving despite unspeakable suffering in a way that Mary, in Christianity, does not. A recurring character, not one of the travelers, is a Japanese man who traveled to Europe to become a Christian priest, was rejected because he had too many (Asian) ideas which were troubling to his superiors, and ends up, still a Christian in his mind, living near the banks of the Ganges and helping dying people reach it; in this work, he explicitly compares himself to Jesus, who in this book is noted primarily for taking on the suffering of others. Poverty and class also play a role.

I had a little difficulty getting into this book, as I found some of the initial portraits of the Japanese travelers a little schematic, and it was clear that each of the main characters would be changed in some way by the trip, although not necessarily in the way he or she expected. As I read more, I realized this was not so much a book about the characters but a book about different approaches to life, suffering, and death. The Ganges is, both literally and symbolically, the embodiment of both life and death As Endō writes:

The river took in his cry and silently flowed away. But he felt a power of some kind in that silvery silence. Just as the river had embraced the deaths of countless people over the centuries and carried them into the next world, so too it picked up and carried away the cry of life from this man sitting on a rock on its bank. p. 189

In the end, I found the novel thought-provoking, although I'm not sure exactly what Endō hoped readers would take away from it.

JAPAN

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
Originally published 1956; English translation 1959.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

This book, which takes a real incident as its starting point, gave me the claustrophobic feeling of entering into the extremely disturbed mind of an extremely unstable young man, Mizoguchi, a student both in a Zen temple and in a Buddhist university who is obsessed by the beauty of the Golden Temple where he studies. On one level, the novel is the story of how he progressively becomes more disturbed, both more detached from reality and more willing to do things that are clearly wrong (and that on some level he knows are wrong -- in fact, sometimes he wants to do them just because they are wrong), until he commits a terrible deed because he believes it will release him from his obsession. (And, in fact, at the end, it seems to.)

And yet, I had a feeling there was a lot more going on in this book than I could grasp. There are beautiful descriptions of the natural world, and of Japanese and especially Zen traditions, but they are intercut with stark and still shocking scenes of violent behavior. The relationship of Mizoguchi to his mother (whom he detests) also seems important, but it wasn't completely clear to me how, as do his confused feelings about women and sexual relationships. He has a "good" friend and a "bad" friend, and yet things are not always what they seem to be. The bulk of the novel takes place just before and just after the end of the second world war, and the Japanese surrender, and this too seems to figure into the novel. In a sense, the Japanese surrender was an abrupt end to centuries of tradition, as is the destruction that results from Mizoguchi's final act, but that seems a little too obvious. I do think Mishima was aiming at more than the tale of a crazy young man but perhaps I am not sensitive enough to Japanese themes and ideas to understand all he was trying to do. I found the book cold and disturbing, and couldn't really get a handle on it.

JAPAN

Scandal by Shūsaku Endō
Originally published 1986. English translation 1988.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

Suguro is an aging, and not too healthy, respectable Christian novelist, the recipient of writing awards, when he is unexpectedly confronted by a young drunk woman who accuses him of hypocrisy for spending time in Tokyo's red light district and engaging in what he would consider to be sinful sexual activities. And thus begins Endō's exploration of the dark side of human nature, of the dark side of his own nature, of the desires we keep hidden inside us.

At first Suguro's discomfort at the idea that he has a double who is mocking and embarrassing him seems real to the reader. Ahead of a reporter who is trying to gain fame by exposing the famous author, Suguro ventures into some of the haunts of the woman who supposedly painted a portrait of him, trying to discover who the imposter is. As he does so, the novel exposes some of the constraints of his marriage and some of his uncomfortably sexual feelings about a teenage girl who comes to clean his office and a widowed nursing volunteer who confronts him about the restraint he exhibits in his novels when it comes to sex and the messier parts of human feelings. Specifically, this nursing volunteer describes the pleasures of sado-masochism. Suguro is both horrified and intrigued.

Throughout the novel, Suguro has dreams, and engages in conversation with people in the writing world, and in this other world, as well as specialists in both western psychology and Buddhist beliefs. The reader comes to see that Suguro (aka Endō?) is exploring his own psyche as much as he is trying to solve the mystery of the imposter. I found this complex book fascinating, but I'm sure I would have gotten even more out of this book if I had been able to read more consistently; because I've been so busy lately, I read it a little bit at a time and I think it lost some of its power because of this.

JAPAN

When I Whistle by Shūsaku Endō
Originally published 1974. English translation 1979.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

This novel was easier to read than most of the other works by Endō that I've read, and was extremely moving, perhaps more so for me than the more overtly religiously themed novels. Nonetheless, it deals with the issue that should be at the heart of any religion -- how we treat each other.

The novel contrasts a father and a son, in more or less alternating chapters. As the story begins, a chance encounter with a former schoolmate on a train reminds middle-aged Ozu, the father, of his years in semi-rural Nada Middle School (which was really what we would call a high school) just before World War II began, and in particular of a strange boy who became his best friend, nicknamed Flatfish. This part of the novel then consists of Ozu and Flatfish's experiences in school, where they were in a class for less motivated students, continuing after their graduation when Ozu goes to college and Flatfish to work, and then into the years when both are drafted into the Japanese army. At the same time, Flatfish becomes enamored of a girl he cannot bring himself to talk to, Aiko. He yearns to impress her, and remains touchingly devoted to her, from afar, after he moves away and goes to war. He even entrusts Ozu with a mission to bring her money when he learns that she is married and pregnant. The story of the lifelong friendship between these two boys and then young men not only captures a time in Japanese history but also vividly depicts the values of friendship and loyalty.

Contrasted with this is the story of Ozu's son, Eiichi, a doctor at a hospital (called a dispensary) in presumably 1970s Tokyo. Although Eiichi still lives with his family, he stays away from home as much as possible. He is eager to get ahead at all costs, schemes constantly, uses people to meet his own needs, and resents his father for not being ambitious and successful and helping him out, as the father of one of his colleagues has done. He doesn't hesitate to follow the orders and perceived wishes of his superiors, who have ulterior financial and professional motives, even when these clearly interfere with the needs of the patients. In fact, he doesn't care about the patients at all, and belittles and plots against a doctor who does; he cares only about his own success. I must say I found him an extremely unpleasant character.

In the end, the two strands of the novel intersect in what is perhaps a difficult-to-believe plot point. Nonetheless, I found this a lovely novel. Like The Sea and Poison, it deals with medical ethics, but not in nearly so horrific a way. More importantly, it illustrates what Endō may have believed were lost values: respect and love for our fellow human beings.

4. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, v. 1 by Keiji Nakazawa

In his fictionalized memoir, artist Keiji Nakazawa tells the story of his childhood during WWII and his survival of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In this first volume of ten, Nakazawa depicts the hardships of life in Japan during the war with mandatory homeland defense training, near starvation, and constant bombing. Gen's father is outspoken about his anti-war views and he serves time in jail, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Gen's mother is pregnant, and falls ill due to malnutrition and overwork. Gen, his younger brother, and older sister live at home and are treated abominably by the neighbors for being related to a anti-war traitor. Gen and his brother retaliate violently, but it often backfires and brings down more trouble. One of Gen's older brothers joins the Naval Air Corps to be a kamikaze pilot and bring honor to the family, much against his family's wishes. The other, a third grader, is evacuated with his school class to the countryside where he works in the fields in harsh conditions. When Gen's father returns home, the family rejoices, but is also subject to his casual violence as he tries to beat his values into his children.

The fate of Gen's family when the bomb falls on August 6, 1945 is harrowing and true to life, with the exception that in the book Gen returns home in time to witness the events that Nakazawa actually learns later that day from his mother. Although the author describes these events in the introduction, and thus it's not really a spoiler, I am going to avoid relating what happens as the impact of reading Nakazawa words cannot be replicated.

After finishing the book, I had very mixed feelings. The memoir itself is exceptional, if difficult to read, but I had a hard time with the stylized grimacing and sweating faces of the characters. I am not familiar with manga and found the art off-putting. I also found the casual brutality depicted in the book, both within Gen's family and within the larger community, to be very disturbing, especially the violence to and by children. (Although, of course, this violence is nothing compared to the horror of the atomic bombing.) In his introduction, Art Spiegelman addresses both of these issues, and I found his explanations helpful, if not palliative. In short, according to Spiegelman, both violence and the stylized faces are typical of manga of the time and would not be seen as out of place to a Japanese audience. Nor would the length of the entire Barefoot Gen series, which runs to almost 2000 pages. Although I am glad that I read the first volume, I am going to cancel my interlibrary loan of the next two volumes, at least for now. For me, it's a story best digested in small chunks.

North Korea:
Graphic novel by French Canadian Guy Delisle - Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea.
This is a few years old now and is Delisle's "graphic"account of his time spent in Pyongyang working for a French animation company outsourcing the "inbetweens" of a production to North Korea. It's very much an outsider's bewildered reaction to the city and to the political culture of North Korea but I enjoyed it.

The Philippines

Banana Heart Summer by Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is a poet, and this book - a young girl's description of her street and neighbours in a small town in the Philippines - is a very poetic one.

It's full of symbolism - the street itself is described more than once as sitting between a church and a volcano, "between two gods. The smoking peak and the soaring cross faced each other in a perpetual stand-off, as if blocked for a duel".

If the volcano represents uncontrollable human passions, for most of the book you might think that it's not much of a competition. A young man elopes with his mother's greatest rival. The beauty of the street breaks several hearts. Nining (our narrator) nurses a crush on the son of the street's wealthiest family. "None of us could move before the perfect teeth at the other side. His preening and our ogling crossed and recrossed the road, and better sense was ambushed by hormones."

But the church is represented in smaller, darker ways, such as the shame the narrator's mother feels towards her first-born, the symbol of her romance with a labourer which got her thrown out of her wealthy family's house.

Nining gets a job as a maid and cook in a neighbour's house, and the majority of the book's symbolism is around food. Nearly every chapter heading is the name of a dish which features in the chapter, and nearly every person's story is told through references to food. Lovers give each other sweets, poor families argue over the price of a basic dish, a recluse lives self-sufficiently on the vegetables from his garden.

I know that this food-oriented magical-realist approach has been done many times before, and occasionally the symbolism was a little too obvious (when the handsome boy puts his hand on Nining's arm, she thinks, "Perhaps this is how fruit awakens to its ripening"). But I enjoyed the book a lot - and after all, it explains clearly how in a culture like the Philippines', food is tremendously symbolic of social relations and family circumstances; so why not make use of that with some mouth-watering writing?

My only real criticism is that although the book plays a lot with the idea of the contrast between heart and spleen (which medically is supposed to clean the blood, but symbolically represents anger), the writing is so lovely and charming that it's hard to realise the genuine pain in the relationship between Nining and her mother, until a rather shocking scene part-way through the book. But maybe next time I read the book it will come through more clearly.

A fiesta is a gustatory tour. It is a lesson in eating your fill through strategic moderation. You do not feast in only one house, but tour the tables of the whole street, sometimes eating multiple breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and taking home wrapped portions of the feast, forced on you by generous hosts. Best to have only a modest helping in every house, or perhaps just the best dishes, in order to accommodate everyone's generosity. And space these feastings, making sure your stomach settles down after a meal in one house before you proceed to the next.

JAPAN

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

This book is about relationships and how they shape you, often in ways you're not even aware of. In the case of Tsukuru Tazaki it is the relationships he had in high school and college which had such a profound affect on him. At 36 years old he is suddenly forced to go back and examine those relationships and reconnect with ol friends in order to to understand what happened and to begin healing, so that his future relationships, most especially his romantic relationships, can grow. The reader has the joy of examining Tsukuru's formative life and following him on his courageous quest for understanding.

The cover design of this book is wonderful. Until you've read a few pages of the book, it is meaningless to you. Once you've put all the pieces together, it is revealed as a very clever depiction of Tsukuru's high school relationships.

I suspect that this book is only the first of two or three about Tsukuru Tazaki. The ending was a bit abrupt and unfinished. Not the polished ending one expects from Murakami.

NORTH KOREA

The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwang
Translator: Pierre Rigolout

I read this non-fiction account of the author's formative years spent in a North Korean internment camp at the same time as North Korea: A State of Paranoia by Paul French, which provided a solid background to this personal account. The allure of North Korea lays in its overwhelming isolation and mystery so a first hand account of the life for individuals who spend significant portions of their lives in concentration/internment camps for perceived slights against the state has great appeal. This book was an interesting window on that. The compelling nature of the subject matter went someway to balancing out the less exciting prose. That said, it wasn't a tough read at all. Definitely worth a look if this part of the world intrigues you.

I am having a bit of a Japanese year this year, reading-wise, so I thought I would start sharing and reviewing again. I have just finished The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. It's a slim autobiographical novel set in the 1980s, when Hiraide and his wife moved into a new house. They are visited daily by a cat, who they name Chibi. The book follows the relationship of the couple with the cat, over the course of a few months. I was very hesitant to book this book up, because it looks, frankly, cutesy and light. The story that emerges is actually beautiful, powerful and thought provoking. The book is not so much about the couple's relationship with Chibi, but about their relationship with their house, their environment and with each other. Chibi is a cipher by which Hiraide, a poet more often than novelist, struggles to interpret his own understanding of his life. The novel was put together from a series of essays Hiraide was writing, and the result is something that feels more like reportage than a straightforward narrative, and it services the books purposes very well. If, like me, you have wavered about reading this book, then I would encourage you to dive in.

JAPAN

Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, 1947, translated from Japanese by Edward G Seidensticker, 1956


Cover comments: I had never heard of this book when I was drawn to this cover at the library. I didn't have time to read it but ordered a copy. I continue to think it's attractive, but I find the bottom third too disconnected from the top part to give it high praise. The two parts on their own are lovely though.

Comments: In Snow Country, a Tokyo businessman pays several visits to a vacation village on the west coast of Japan, which is one of the snowiest spots on earth. There he has a relationship with a spa geisha, and also another woman named Yoko. The language in the book is clean and simple, but comes together to say something nuanced and complex.

What I Liked About Snow Country: Kawabata paints a fabulous image of winter in this snowy area of Japan, and the book is highly atmospheric. It makes me want to read more Japanese literature and also visit Japan.

What I didn't like: I admit I didn't get a lot of this book. It lacked context for me -- I just don't know enough about 1930s Japanese culture or geishas to fully understand what was going on. This would have been an excellent novel to study in a university class.

Snow Country was cited as helping Kawabata win the Nobel Prize for literature.

There is an excellent 6 page introduction by "E.G.S." It contains spoilers, but this is not a book that you read for plot, so I think it's irrelevant.

Why I Read This Now: we are having unusual snow in Vancouver and I thought this would fit the mood.

Recommended for: going by reader reviews, most people like this better than I did, so if it interests you, give it a try.

Rating: 3 stars

>44 Nickelini:

When first dabbing into Japanese literature, Kawabata is probably one of the most difficult authors if you don't have significant knowledge of the culture.

>45 lilisin: indeed! I figured that out pretty fast. His language is deceptively simple so the first sentence fools you though.

13.2 SOUTH KOREA

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

This is a tough one to rate. Told from 3 different perspectives, it is a bleak little book that details the mental deterioration of a woman, enacted through her withdrawal from reality and her descent into an extreme vegetarian lifestyle which is contrary to all cultural norms. It was a very well-written book and I can see why the author made stylistic choices she did but I really didn't like this book. There wasn't a single character I liked or empathised with. For me, this meant it was more of a technical exercise in reading (of which is was an exemplary example) than a pleasurable experience.

JAPAN

THE TALE OF GENJI by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler



The Tale of Genji, thought by many to be the first novel in the history of world literature, was written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu, in the eleventh century. Lady Murasaki lived during the Heian Period (794-1185). Reading a general description of this era, it is known for the writing of poetry, diaries, and fiction produced by court ladies for court ladies. Themes often included the love of nature as well as the art of love within the court.

This is the tale of “Prince” Genji, a son to a second concubine and thus his status is relegated to a glorified commoner. With no real duties or status, Genji embarks upon making the ladies happy with poetry, song, and lovemaking. His first “love” is a concubine of his father, Fujitsubo. Fujitsubo is the niece of the deceased Kiritsubo consort which she highly resembles. For the remainder of the story Genji will pursue women who resemble his mother; Freud would have a heyday.

While this book does give us important history and cultural information,my personal take is that it reads like a soap opera; maybe a pre-cursor to Don Juan. But then, give the people what they want, eh? Because of the longevity of this book, I rated it 3 stars, but I didn’t really care for it. 1001 BYMRBYD

JAPAN

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Firstly, to read this book you must suspend everything you know about reality. Secondly, if you like lots of characters like blips on a screen (not fully developed), then this book is for you! Much of the locale are wells, both dry and with water. All of the women in this book are helpless and need saved. Many of the same character's actions are repetitive. The title? The wind up bird is an invisible bird sitting in a tree that "springs" the world. There is everything but the kitchen sink in this book: skinning of people alive, mind sex with physical ramifications, and baseball bats with human skin and hair on them. Not my cup of tea! No more Murakami for me; magic realism is not my thing. 623 pages 2 1/2 stars. 1001 BYMRBYD

For completeness, a quick summary of the Japan-related books I read this year. Most of them are covered in the Japan/Korea theme-read thread, so I won't add any detail here:

Kokoro (1914) by Natsume Sōseki (Japan, 1867-1916)
Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 (2003) by Ian Buruma (Netherlands, 1951- ) (history)
Strange weather in Tokyo (2001) by Hiromi Kawakami (Japan, 1958- )
After the banquet (1960) by Yukio Mishima (Japan, 1925-1970)
The silver spoon : memoir of a boyhood in Japan (1922) by Kansuke Naka (Japan, 1885-1965) (memoir)
The sound of the mountain (1954) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972)
Etüden im Schnee (2014) by Yōko Tawada (Japan, Germany, 1960- ) (set in Germany and written in German by an expat Japanese writer)
Five modern Japanese novelists (2003) by Donald Keene (USA, Japan, 1922- ) (secondary literature)
The housekeeper and the professor (2003) by Yōko Ogawa (Japan, 1962- )
In black and white (1929) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965)
Some prefer nettles (1929) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965)
Mishima : ou la vision du vide (1980) by Marguerite Yourcenar (France, 1903-1987) (secondary literature)
The roads to Sata (1985) by Alan Booth (UK, Japan, 1946-1993) (travel)
Sanshirō (1908) by Natsume Sōseki (Japan, 1867-1916)
Masks (1958) by Fumiko Enchi (Japan, 1905-1986)
Beauty and Sadness (1964) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972)
Snow country (1947) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972)
The pleasures of Japanese literature (1988) by Donald Keene (USA, Japan, 1922- ) (secondary literature)
Thousand cranes (1952) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972)
The Makioka sisters (1948) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965)
A Tokyo romance (2018) by Ian Buruma (Netherlands, 1951- ) (memoir)

- Absolute highlight: the Makioka sisters. But Yasunari Kawabata was pretty amazing too!

JAPAN



The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Originally published 1994, English translation 2019. 274 p.

If you want clarity or fast action, this is not the dystopian novel for you. The premise seems to promise conflict and the potential for rebellion. Inhabitants of an island wake up periodically to discover that something has disappeared: birds, roses, boats. But not really. Physically the items are still there, but people's memories of the items begin to disappear. They gather up all the "disappeared" items and burn them or return them to nature. The Memory Police are on hand to ensure that the items are destroyed and that nobody remembers them. Our protagonist is a young orphaned novelist, and she seems ripe for resistance. After all, her mother had been taken away by the Memory Police, and she herself decides to hide someone who still has memories. But that's as far as it goes. She accepts the loss of memories and passively makes do as the things around her disappear.

While the lack of agency didn't particularly bother me, the lack of internal logic did. Not everything disappeared the same way: sometimes there was a supernatural aspect to the disappearance, sometimes not; sometimes people seem to forget even the word for the disappeared object, sometimes not. It seemed as though the author handled each one ad hoc.

I thought that the novel was going to delve into the effects of a surveillance state on memory, but it was more about one woman's experiences with the disappearances and how they effected her relationships with the two people remaining in her life: one who remembers and one who doesn't. I did like the excerpts from the novel she was writing. It too dealt with loss and stagnation, but in a tighter way.

All in all an odd novel that I suspect will disappear from my memory sooner rather than later.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker
Published 1956, translation 1984, 175 p.

Yasunari Kawabata's early life was marked by loss. He was born in 1899 and orphaned as a toddler. He was taken in by his grandparents, but his grandmother died when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen. His only sister died when he was ten. These early losses were compounded by rejection by his first love after she was raped by a monk. Kawabata became well-respected for his short stories while still in college and with other young writers started a literary movement called "Shinkankakuha," with the meaning of "new impressions or sensations." Snow Country was written in installments between 1934 and 1937 and is considered one of his best works. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese person to do so. Four years later, he died by gassing, probably suicide, in the wake of his friend and fellow writer Mishima's own suicide.

Snow Country refers to the area west of the central mountains where there is heavy snowfall, in excess of fifteen feet at times. The area is also known for it's hot springs and hot spring geishas. In his informative introduction, the translator, Seidensticker, writes that at the time men would travel to the snow country to ski or see the leaves or cherry blossoms, but without their wives and families. The hot spring geishas were provincial and little better than prostitutes, as opposed to their urban counterparts. In this short novel, the emotionally stunted dilettante, Shimamura, seduces a young girl without family, then returns two more times over the course of three years. The girl, Komako, is initially described as clean and pure, but inevitably becomes a geisha and begins to decay. Unable to love, Shimamura, can only admire women then move on, both literally and figuratively. Komako, meanwhile, is rooted to the place by her obligations and burdens.

Shimamura is not devoid of self-awareness and the descriptions of him are both beautiful and ugly. He is wealthy enough not to need to work, but amuses himself by publishing articles about western ballet, despite never having seen one himself.

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. Off on a trip, he saw no need to hurry himself.

He spent much of his time watching insects in their death agonies.

The moths that litter his room on his last visit are symbolic of the decay that surrounds him and his own degenerate state.

As he picked up a dead insect to throw it out, he sometimes thought for an instant of the children he had left in Tokyo.

Yet he is also moved by their dead beauty and loneliness.

Although short, this novel needs reflective reading. Much like poetry, it's the images that drive the story forward, not necessarily the plot. On the train, Shimamura spends hours looking at the reflections created by the light from inside the carriage on the window. Although the nature outside is still visible, another surreal world is superimposed, and creates the sort of hazy reality that appeals to him. He falls in love with a woman's face he can barely make out.

Another similarity with poetry, particularly haiku, is Kawabata's use of opposing images in juxtaposition to reflect beauty. For instance,

Black though the mountains were, they seemed at that moment brilliant with the color of snow.

The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily.

Black but brilliant with color and snow burning icily are but two of the many such descriptions that I savored.

Quiet, understated, gem-like, all words I could use to describe Kawabata's writing. I have a collection of his short stories, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, and I look forward to more of the same.

JAPAN



The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath edited by Kenzaburō Ōe
Published 1985, 204 p.

In his outstanding introduction, Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe writes about the treatment of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in literature. Not only survivor stories, but the "second-generation survivors" (children of survivors), and other writers who struggle with the import to humanity. In choosing the stories for inclusion in this anthology, Ōe tried to include writers from all three categories as well as covering a range of topics: the large number of Koreans killed in the bombings, discrimination against survivors, and the future of the world as long as there are nuclear weapons.

"The Crazy Iris" by Masuji Ibuse. Ibuse did not experience the bombings directly, but is the author of the highly acclaimed novel Black Rain. In "The Crazy Iris" he addresses the bombing of Hiroshima from the prospective of the provinces, specifically Fukuyama, about 100 miles outside the city.

"Summer Flower" and "The Land of Heart's Desire" by Tamiki Hara. Hara is a well-known intellectual who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima. He fought the censorship of the Allied Occupation to publish "Summer Flower" and other accounts. He was so distraught by American President Truman's statements regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War that he committed suicide.

"Human Ashes" by Katsuzō Oda. Oda is one of the survivors who felt compelled to document their experiences, despite not being a professional writer. He was a student when he and his parents fled to Hiroshima from the bombings in Osaka.

"Fireflies" by Yōko Ōta. Already a published author by the time she survived the Hiroshima bombing, she turned all her attentions to writing about the aftermath and particularly the physical and mental anguish of survivors. In this story, she meets a young woman horribly disfigured by keloid scars. It begins at the monument to Tamiki Hara.

"The Colorless Paintings" by Ineko Sata. Although she was not a survivor, Sata lived in Nagasaki and wrote about the victims. In this story, she writes about a survivor-painter whose depression is reflected in his artwork.

"The Empty Can" by Kyōko Hayashi. Hayashi survived the bombing of Nagasaki as a young girl. In "The Empty Can" she writes about her classmates, particularly one girl who brings the bones of her parents to school in an empty can.

"The House of Hands" by Mitsuharu Inoue. Inoue was not a survivor, but wrote extensively about the discrimination faced by survivors. In this story, he writes about four women who are ostracized because they had come to the village orphanage after the bombing and now cannot bear children. The village unites against them fearing that their community will become buraku, an outcast community, if word gets out that their women "bleed".

"The Rite" by Hiroko Takenishi. Takenishi is a survivor and intellectual who, in this story, wrote about the inner life of a young woman who pushes away her lover because of fears about how the radiation might have effected her ability to have children. She reflects that although there are rites that help ease the passing of people, there aren't rites suitable for the loss caused by the bombings.

I read this collection on this the 77th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the difficult topic, many of the stories were beautifully expressed, and I learned a lot about the lived experience of Japanese survivors.

A Riot of Goldfish by Kanoko Okamoto, translated from the Japanese by J. Keith Vincent
PUblished 1937, English translation 2010, 113 p.

This volume is comprised of two stories. I read the first, eponymous one and declined to read the second. Far more interesting than the story is the life of the author.

Kanoko Okamoto was born in 1889, the daughter of a very wealthy family and grew up in privilege, though sickly. She married a poor cartoonist, who with the first blush of success, spent his days with geisha. He came around, however, and devoted himself to his wife's writing career. When Kanoko fell in love with a tubercular young man, her husband invited him to live with them until he died three years later. Husband and wife then turned to the study of religion, and Kanoko became well-known as a speaker and writer on Buddhism. They then took a three year tour of Europe, bringing with them two more of Kanoko's lovers and their son. When they returned, they set up house with one of the men acting as her physician, the other as the maid, and the husband as (celibate) secretary and research assistant. Although many were scandalized by her lifestyle, others compared it to a successful male writer who might have had a wife, maid, and mistress. During her life, Kanoko moved from writing poetry to short fiction, and had she lived longer (she died at 49), she might have written novels as well.

In the introduction, David Mitchell writes that Japanese critics often call her writing "overwrought," and with that I would agree. Here is a passage from early in "A Riot of Goldfish":

It was as if she were allowing the pain caused by the sharp thorns of his words to fill her heart until it overflowed as tears. Soon her face would tremble violently and a single, pearl-coloured tear would emerge from her lower eyelid like the rising moon.

And yet, I kept reading drawn in by the story of the unrequited love held by a goldfish breeder with his patron's daughter. Although Mataichi had known Masako since they were children, it wasn't until a single act of defiance on her part that he fell in love with her. He became obsessed with her, even after she married, and yet had a poor opinion of her.

It was something to do with her lack of personality. She was an unstoppable woman who simply blossomed like a beautiful butterfly. She overflowed with charm, and yet her charm was only of a physiological sort. She sometimes said clever things, but one was left with the impression of a mechanical doll that spoke through a special talking apparatus; or of an ineffable, far-off, and eerie creature.

He goes on to compare her to a mannequin. Yet he cannot stop thinking of her. She had once expressed a desire to see him breed a new type of goldfish, and Mataichi makes that his life's goal. As the years pass, the mythical goldfish he attempts to create becomes a stand-in for Masako herself. The aesthetic becomes his reality.

JAPAN



Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Published 2014, 386 p.

In high school, Tsukuru Tazaki is in a tight-knit group of five friends, the other four of whom all have names that reflect a color: red, blue, white, and black. Only Tsukuru is "colorless," and he feels that it is an accurate description of his personality as well. He goes to Tokyo to college⁠—he has always wanted to build train stations⁠—whereas the other four remain in their hometown. On one trip home his sophomore year, he is abruptly cut off from all contact with his friends. They want nothing more to do with him, and it cuts him deeply. Now, sixteen years later, he is encouraged by his girlfriend to track down his friends and resolve the mystery of why he was ostracized, and perhaps heal the pain that he has lived with for so long.

I loved this novel: the writing, the characters, the tone, and even the book design (the cover overlays a map of Japanese train stations). The other two books that I have read by Murakami were representative of his magical-surrealist style, and while I enjoyed them, I found them difficult reading. This one is completely different. There are no talking cats or parallel universes, just characters that I could relate to and empathize with, dealing with problems of belonging, self-awareness, and the unfathomable nature of relationships.

JAPAN



The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Published 2012, Translation 2021, 197 p.

Yoki Hirano graduates from high school with no plans for his future. His parents, absorbed with their first grandchild, bundle him off to a remote village to learn forestry. Astonished at his banishment to the backwoods, Yoki is at first resentful and tries to run back to Yokohama. But slowly the villagers, the lovely Nao, and the forest itself become reasons to stay.

This was the first time I have read a Japanese young adult novel, and I might not have read it had I known. I'm glad I did, however. The author researched forestry and interviewed dozens of loggers in the course of writing the book, and I found the descriptions of the forest, the work the foresters do, and the Shinto rituals they practice to be fascinating. I'm inspired to do a little more research of my own.

The novel is rather male-centric, although given the nature of the job in the patriarchal society, it's not surprising. The women are portrayed as strong and, in the case of Nao, daring, but their stories are not explored. The village and the work is romanticized, rather like an ode to the life there. Social issues such as the aging of the rural population, the decline of the forestry industry, and the problems inherent in patriarchy are there, lurking in the subtext, but not unpackaged. I think this could have been a very interesting novel for adults if they had been.

KOREA



Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
Published 2017, English translation 2019, 478 p.

Korean graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim spent three years researching and writing Grass. Originally she wanted to write about social class during the Japanese occupation from a feminist perspective, but after meeting survivor Granny Lee Ok-sun, she decided to write her story instead.

Like many Korean farming families under Japanese occupation in the 1930s, Lee Ok-sun's family was starving. After her father was hurt at work, Ok-sun was basically sold to an udon restaurant owner in another city. She was told that she would finally get to go to school and would have plenty to eat. The reality was she was slave labor. Then in 1942 on her way back from running an errand, Ok-sun was abducted and taken to China to a "comfort station." These stations were brothels where sexual slaves, usually young Korean girls, were forced to service Japanese soldiers. At the time, Ok-sun was fifteen years old.

This is not an easy novel to read. Fortunately the narrative is broken up between the present, where the author is interviewing Lee Ok-sun, and her past. I think if it had been written in a chronological fashion, it would have been overwhelmingly dark. At least this way, the reader could escape to the present occasionally. It's a technique that I have often seen in graphic novels such as Maus and Second Generation.

The artwork alternates between frames with heavy brushstrokes, often nature scenes, and more traditional outlined characters. The soldiers are faceless, because Ok-sun says they were all the same. There is a heft to the book and to the drawings that suit the topic. The only color is on the cover. The author does some interesting things with overlays and fadeouts, but my favorite drawings were those of nature.

Although it was a difficult to read, I found the book compelling and the artwork interesting. I'm glad her books are being translated into English and reaching a wider audience.

KOREA



Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim
Published 2008, English translation 2011, 237 p.

Kyung-sook Shin is a prolific and extremely popular South Korean author. Please Look After Mom was her first novel to be translated into English, and was the first novel by a South Korean and a woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. For these reasons, I was looking forward to reading the book, but I had a hard time getting into it. Fortunately I persevered, as I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

The novel opens with a family trying to create a missing persons flyer for their mother/wife. In the process they realize that none of them truly knew her. In the months that follow, memories surface, relationships are reflected upon, and a myriad of feelings emerge. Although the book is narrated in the second person, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person: the daughters, the oldest son, and the father. There is even a chapter by the mother, and it is only at this point that we learn the woman's name. As each perspective is layered atop the previous ones, the character of the woman they called Mom is developed further.

My initial difficultly in connecting with the book stems in large part from the second person narration. At first I had trouble tracking who "you" was, and it sounded forced to my inner ear. But as I became more engaged, I ceased to notice it as much, and when I finished, I realized why the author chose to use this technique. By inundated the reader with "you", the distinction between reader and character is less clear, and it's impossible not to reflect on one's own family relationships.

The life of the woman at the center of the story is a difficult one. Poor, illiterate, and ignored, she nonetheless sacrifices to ensure that her children succeed in life. Although in her children's eyes, her absence and their guilt combine to beatify her, even going so far as to invoke images of the Pieta, Park So-nyo is a multi-faceted character with some interesting secrets and dimensions.

Please Look After Mom can be read as a universal story of mother-child relationships, or as a South Korean one, with particular emphasis on the tension between the responsibility to care for one's parents and the desire to live independently, and the importance of birth order and gender in sibling relationships. After reading a short biography of the author, I wonder if there are autobiographical elements as well. Like the oldest daughter in the book, Kyung-sook Shin was born into a large family in a rural village but moved as a teenager to Seoul to live with her elder brother and became a successful author.

>58 labfs39: I read Please Look After Mom when it was published and it stands as one of my all time most hated books. I found it grossly manipulative. I finished it because I was reviewing it for Belletrista, and I wasn't allowed to trash it in my review. So I read it again to see if I could find anything at all positive about it. Nope! I think it was in the New York Times that I found a scathing review of it, but all the other published reviews I found for it were glowing.

>58 labfs39:
>59 Nickelini:
I fall between you. Based on all the glowing reviews, I picked it up. It sat for too long so I finally read it. I thought it achieved much more in intention than in execution. The writing was fine (insofar as I can tell through translation, which seemed fluid) but neither the plot nor, in the end, the overall quality of the writing lived up to the promise of the book. Disappointing at best.

>59 Nickelini: Wow. At least it made an impression on you? Lol. I can understand your perspective. During the mother's life, everyone took advantage of her (at best) or treated her horribly (at worst), but glorified her as a self-sacrificing madonna in hindsight. What I found interesting was the life of the woman and the secrets she had. Despite her relationships with her children and horrible husband, she did have her own life and internal thoughts that she kept for herself. I liked that.

>60 Gypsy_Boy: I hadn't read any reviews, but I did see it listed as a Man Asian Literary Award winner and borrowed it through the library. Although I could see why the author chose to use second person narration, I disliked it and found it cumbersome. That was my biggest gripe with the book. I wrote the review right after reading it, as is my wont, but the rosy feeling I had upon finishing it has been tarnished with even a few days time. I don't think it's a book that will stay with me very long.

>61 labfs39: You have a valid point. I was too offended to see that at the time, but you're right.

BTW - I talked to a literature professor about this "second person voice" that everyone uses to describe this form (and in other books too that use this) and it's NOT second person. Second person is used for me speaking to you, and this book isn't that. Which was one of the things that really angered me. When the author wrote crap like "you treated her poorly", I, as the reader, screamed back "I've never met this fictional character. Stop telling me about something I did that never happened!" It drove me bananas. Apparently what she is doing is actually "first person imperative". Which makes more sense to me. But when this literary style is used, most reviewers just call it second person. So that's just another thing that irritates me about this book. I've seen this technique used elsewhere and I dislike it, but it never grates me as much as it did here.

>62 Nickelini: Ah, thank you for clarifying. First person imperative, hm. It was hard for me to keep track of who "you" was, although as you say, I knew it wasn't me! Although I think that may have been part of her intention. It sort of forces us to consider our own familial relationships.

I'm not sure how it would sound in Korean. I know that that Koreans often speak of themselves in the third person, "Father is sorry he did that (instead of I'm sorry I did that)." So maybe first person imperative would come across differently to a native speaker. I don't know.

The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
Published 2021, English translation 2021, 247 p.

After the Korean war, the peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel. Thousands of refugees who had fled the fighting in the north were now stranded south of the demilitarized zone. Since the 1980s, there have been periodic family reunification meetings, but they are subject to the vagaries of political will and manipulation. In South Korea, families are chosen by lottery. Although over 133,000 South Koreans have applied since 1988, over 60% have already passed away. 20,000 people have been able to participate in a family reunion meeting. The rest wait.

The author's mother is one of those waiting to be allowed to meet her sister. This book arose from the author's interviews with her mother and two other elderly Koreans who were separated from family during the war. The result is a novel based on the anguish of the original separation, the desperation of not knowing if your loved ones have survived, and the repeatedly dashed hopes of not being chosen for the sporadically arranged meetings.

Although I liked The Waiting, I felt it didn't have quite the power of her first graphic novel, Grass. I also missed the nature imagery that permeated Grass. Still a worthwhile read, however.

>62 Nickelini: A whole novel told in imperative? I can see why someone would use it (subtly critiquing its own characters while telling the story for example) but it is not natural to any of the languages I usually read in so it probably will sound weird. Not unheard of though... if only I can remember where I've seen it before. Makes me want to read the book though (I like your review above but add the linguistics detail and now I want it).

>63 labfs39: Although I think that may have been part of her intention. It sort of forces us to consider our own familial relationships. - I think so too, but it didn't work for me because my familial relationships were not reflected in this book

I'm not sure how it would sound in Korean: Yes, that is an interesting point. Since reading this book I've learned that Korean mothers are stereotypically off-the-charts people who like to guilt their children. So that fits the tone of this novel

>65 AnnieMod: If you read it, please come back and tell us what you think. Most readers liked Please Look After Mom. I think the narrative approach was the most manipulative thing I've ever read in fiction, but others find the style unique. And I guess they like someone trying to guilt them about something they didn't do? ;-)

I do think that this most recent discussion raises a valuable point: the cultural perspective. Those of us commenting, to the best of my knowledge, are neither Korean nor do we live there. Our knowledge of the culture undoubtedly varies but I wonder if any of us have much knowledge of day-to-day life in the country much less intrafamily dynamics and customs. To that extent, the book may "read" very differently to a Korean. That doesn't, of course, account for its positive reception generally but it may play a role in how some of us individually are having so much trouble with it.

>67 Gypsy_Boy: Cultural perspective is an important consideration. I read translated literature in part to broaden my perspective, but I know that I miss things that would be obvious to someone more familiar with the culture. When in my review I wrote

Please Look After Mom can be read as a universal story of mother-child relationships, or as a South Korean one, with particular emphasis on the tension between the responsibility to care for one's parents and the desire to live independently, and the importance of birth order and gender in sibling relationships.

I was trying to point to some of the cultural aspects that I think I was only marginally understanding. When an American (such as myself) speaks of caring for elderly parents, it means something quite different than when a South Korean does. So while the guilt that the characters felt toward their mother might seem heavy-handed and overwrought to Americans, I think it would seem appropriate to many Asian readers. They did after all lose their mother who suffered from dementia.

At the same time, there is a universal element as well. I think most adult children realize that they underestimated, took advantage of, and sporadically clung to and ignored their parents. After all, that is what children do. It's part of the development and differentiation of the self from the parent. I'm reminded of this fact every time I try and get my two year old niece to do something she doesn't want to do, or when my teenager rolls her eyes at my hard-earned tidbit of wisdom!

>67 Gypsy_Boy: hmmm, maybe there’s something there, but I read a lot of translated fiction and I found this book singular. My problem with it can be summed up as not liking an author making such a blatant attempt at manipulating her reader. Some subtly may have helped her case.

>68 labfs39:
>69 Nickelini:
Thank you both. I read fiction in translation almost exclusively and I only wanted to make explicit something that seemed to me implicit in the discussion. I think the illustration/topic of caring for elderly parents is particularly apt. And while the quality of translations certainly varies, on balance it's generally pretty high...but even the best translation can't address things like this. And, as Nickelini suggests, sometimes--even accounting for all the things beyond the author's control--we just don't like a book for very good reasons.

JAPAN



Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot
Published 2015, English translation 2020, 272 p.

The Funiculi Funicula is a small underground café that has been in operation for over a hundred years, almost since coffee has been in Japan. It had a moment of fame when an urban legend spread that people could travel through time when at the café, but the furor quickly died when people learned that even if they travelled back in time, they wouldn't be able to change the present. What's the point? But occasionally someone is desperate enough to put up with all the rules (have to sit in a certain chair, can't leave the chair, have to return by drinking the coffee before it gets cold, etc.) to try it. This book is the story of four people who attempt to time travel from the café.

Quiet and sweet, the book has little wisdom to impart, but it's gentle stories of everyday people facing loss of various types is comforting. It's not hardcore sci-fi/fantasy, rather it's about relationships and what people would do with a limited do-over. The author has gone on to write two more books about the café's employees and customers. Although I enjoyed this volume well enough, I'm not sure I'll seek out the others.

The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
Published 2003, English translation 2019, 172 p.

I read and was utterly charmed by The Nakano Thrift Shop last year, so I was eager to read something else by this author. Unfortunately, Ten Loves of Nishino was disappointing in comparison. The idea is interesting enough, depict a man through the lenses of ten of the women he has dated. The relationships occur throughout his life, from the time he was a teenager until his death. The relationships were of different types: more or less sexual, older women, younger women, love, friendship. Nishino is self-centered and rather boring, and the women's voices are so similar as to blur into one (although translation may have effected this as well). Although I appreciated the concept, I felt that it was not executed as well as it might have been.

JAPAN


Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka, translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris
Originally published 1952, this translation 2001, 246 p., 4*

Tamura is a conscripted Japanese soldier on the island of Leyte in the Philippines late in World War II. When the novel opens, he has been discharged from the field hospital because he can no longer supply his own food, and rejected by his unit because he is too weak to forage. He wanders the forests, starving and lonely. At one point he sees the cross on the top of a Filipino church and begins reflecting on his youthful belief in God and later adult rejection of religion as childish illusions. Rather than the existence of evil, his focus is on his personal relationship with God and God's wishes for him. Eventually he meets up with other Japanese stragglers and joins them in making a push for the coast, where rumor has it they are to be evacuated. But the American army has cut off their escape route, and Tamura finds himself wandering alone again. As starvation and madness set in, he must confront both practical and philosophical questions about death, sin, and the role of chance in human destiny.

Like his protagonist, Shohei Ooka was a conscript sent to the Philippines late in the war. He was a student and translator of French literature and after the war was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale. He kept a journal during the war and began writing and publishing postwar. Several of his books won prominent awards, and in his Nobel acceptance speech, Kenzaburo Oe credits Ooka as an influence on his own writing.

I read Fires on the Plain in two sittings, unable to stop turning pages to see what would happen. The writing is clear and clean, with detailed descriptions of nature, but what I found most compelling was Tamura's struggles with survival, not only of his body, but of his Self. How do you remain true to yourself during the horrors of war, the degradation of the body, and the effects of starvation, loneliness, and guilt on the mind?

Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) was an important, if not particularly prolific, writer. His best-known work, A Dark Night’s Passing, is his only novel. Although he had critics (including, among others, Dazai Osamu), both Akutagawa and Tanizaki were fans. The Paper Door is a collection of seventeen short stories has a couple stories that I liked less than others but what surprised me was how strong the collection was. I thought the translation excellent and found Shiga’s writing elegant in a very understated way. His writing is straightforward, spare, and quite evocative. I enjoyed the stories, which varied substantially in plot and topic, enormously and felt that they had what I would consider a very Japanese sensibility—an awareness of and sensitivity to nature, to things, to people that is delicate and nuanced. Very highly recommended.

Japan: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa - 2,5 stars

On an island, all kinds of objects disappear one by one. They are banned, destroyed and most people forget about them. But some people are genetically different so they don't forget things. They are prosecuted and arrested by the memory police, after which they are never heard from again. Some manage to go into hiding, but that becomes increasingly difficult as more and more things disappear.
The story builds up nicely, the atmosphere becomes more and more oppressive and seems to lead to a climax, but turned out to be an anti-climax for me. Perhaps this is inherent in dystopias and at the same time the reason why I rarely find them interesting. As with otjher dystopias, I think more could have been done with it.

NORTH KOREA/JAPAN



A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa, translated from the Japanese by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown
Originally published 2000, English translation 2017, 159 p., 4*

During the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945), Koreans were conscripted as laborers or emigrated to Japan in search of jobs after losing their land to the Japanese. By 1945 two million Koreans lived in Japan. These Zainichi found conditions to be little better for them in Japan, due to intense discrimination. Beginning in 1956, the Japanese Red Cross began repatriating ethnic Koreans to North Korea. The Communists wanted labor, and the Japanese wanted to get rid of a potential source of social unrest. The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan convinced many that life in North Korea would be a paradise of socialist humanitarianism and that returnees would be home again (despite the fact that most were from the southern part of Korea). Between 1960 and 1961 alone, 70,000 Zainichi were shipped to North Korea. Masaji Ishikawa was one of those.

Ishikawa's father was Zainichi, but his mother was Japanese. He was thirteen years old when he left Japan with his parents and two younger sisters. From the moment they landed in North Korea, however, they learned that everything they had been told was a lie. North Korea was far from paradise, and, equally devastating, the Zainichi were treated as badly in North Korea as they had been in Japan. His family was ostracized for being Japanese, and from the moment they arrived, they never had enough food. When Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 and his inept son took over, hunger became starvation. In 1996, Ishikawa decided that the only hope for his family to survive was if he escaped back to Japan, got a job, and sent them money until he could bring them to Japan as well.

I found this memoir mesmerizing from his descriptions of life in 1950s Japan to his life under the harsh North Korean regime to his reception after his escape. His writing is straightforward and plain, but his words pack a punch. It's not an easy book to read as things go from bad to worse, but it is invaluable for it's depictions of the Zainichi in North Korea.

Good afternoon everyone,

I was pleased earlier to find my favorite used bookstore had quite a bit of Mishima. I've been excited to engage more with him after having read Sun and Steel and watching the Schrader movie scored by Philip Glass, both of which I highly recommend.

I hate those popular covers from the sea of fertility tetralogy; temple of the dawn has the woman's face, runaway horses with the seppuku. I will say they had a great copy of The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, some 70s paperback from Berkley publishing, that I got. Not sure when I will return to Japan, and I think that Oe or Kawabata may take precedence. Even Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa has been looming over me. I can't wait to read it and rewatch the Gauche the Cellist movie.

I hope everyone can enjoy the remainder of their weekend. Cheers,
Troy

The Japanese novelist Morio Kita (1927-2011) acknowledged the inspiration of book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family|80890 for his massive family saga book:The House of Nire|2858363 (765 pages in the paperback edition; the translation originally took up two hardcovers). Even early on, that affinity is obvious, but Kita’s tone is more dryly humorous. Another novel about the decline of a prominent family that Kita might have known is The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber).

I've been in Japan for the past seven years, but I had no idea there were English books available for check-out at public libraries. Granted, this is uncommon outside of major cities like Tokyo or Osaka. In my case, I came across a copy of Legends of Nara during a visit to a library in Osaka. I think this book would be a pleasant addition to the library of anyone interested in Japanese folklore.