Wednesday 29 July 2009

Enjo















Short piece on Kon Ichikawa's film version of Mishima's 'Temple Of The Golden Pavilion' entitled 'Enjo', it was released in 1958, two years after Mishima's novel was published. Ichikawa adapted many stories from the big names of Japanese Literature, like Soseki, Tanizaki, Toson. It's been some years since I read Mishima's novel, and it was good to reacquaint myself with the story, although the film only touches on key elements of the novel, I guess if Ichikawa wanted to delve deeper into the book, we would have had a film that went on for alot longer, which would have been no bad thing. Mishima's novel was based on the true incident of Hayashi Yoken, a Buddhist acolyte who burnt down Kinkaku-ji , in Kyoto, July 1950, and then attempted to commit suicide.Ichikawa's film seems to present some of the sequences a little out of order to the book, if I remember rightly, but still it makes for very interesting viewing. I seem to be increasingly enjoying black and white films of the 50's and 60's.

The film has Raizo Ichikawa playing the lead as Goichi Mizoguchi, the monk who becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple, and eventually burns it down. Raizo Ichikawa also went on to appear in Kenji Misumi's 1964 film 'Ken', (excellent synopsis here.),which was an adaption of Mishima's short story 'Sword'. I liked the cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, who was the cinematographer for Kurosawa's, 'Rashomon' and also worked with Mizoguchi, Naruse, Shinoda, and also Masumura. The cremation on the beach is a scene that'll remain in my mind for a while, also at the end when Goichi watches the embers of the burning temple being blown around in the swirl of the heat was captured brilliantly. Also I don't remember the novel ending the same way that the film did, as I think the novel finishes with Goichi sitting on the hill after setting the temple ablaze, if Hayashi Yoken actually met his end in the way depicted in the film, I don't know.
 
There's not too many Kon Ichikawa films available with English subtitles, which is a great pity, it would be great to see alot more of his films like 'Her Brother', 'Punishment Room' , 'The Hole' and 'Odd Obsession' which was based on Tanizaki's novel 'The Key'. 'Odd Obsession' won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes film festival, so it's hard to believe that these films aren't readily available on DVD outside of Japan.



Thursday 16 July 2009

Mandarins














Much to my shame I'd not read any of Akutagawa's stories before picking up this collection, I'd seen 'Rashomon', the Kurosawa film which was based on two Akutagawa stories, 'Rashomon' and 'In A Grove' and I'd been meaning to explore Akutagawa ever since. These 15 stories capture Akutagawa's great talent as a master of short story writing. Akutagawa was mainly writing in the Taisho period (1912-1926), and was a pupil of the great Meiji novelist Soseki Natsume, whom he greatly admired. Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927 by taking an overdose of Veronal, an early form of barbiturate, at the age of 35. This collection covers stories that span his entire career, 'The Handkerchief' an early story from 1916, to later stories like 'The Life Of A Fool' and 'Cogwheels' from 1927. Also this collection includes 3 stories published in English for the first time. 'An Evening Conversation', 'An Enlightened Husband' and 'Winter'. After reading a story like 'The Handkerchief ' where a professor's sense of bushido is questioned after receiving a visit from the mother of one of his students who had recently died, Akutagawa's inclusion of details, like the Gifu lantern really places you in the professor's company, when contemplating that Akutagawa was about 24 when he wrote this story, you can see why Soseki was so taken with Akutagawa.

Another story that stood out for me, was 'An Enlightened Husband', largely narrated by Viscount Honda, who's lament at the passing of the early Meiji era seemed to strike a chord, it seems that most of the characters in this collection, and maybe Akutagawa's stories as a whole, speak about a world now lost to them, although the stories in this collection are set in different time periods. I found so much in the detail included in these stories about an array of things I've not come across before, from the mention of the novel 'Nanso Satomi Hakken' to Shiki-shima cigarettes. Along with his seamless translation, Charles De Wolf's notes at the back of the book, are a great source of biographical and historical information on each of the stories, and it was interesting to learn that Akutagawa collaborated with Tanizaki Junichiro, I knew that they both had connections to Tsukiji, I think being there roughly at the same time, but didn't know that they had actually worked together.

Akutagawa's stories have a melancholic streak about them, and a supernatural element, something which is hinted at in 'At The Seashore', with a mysterious voice and the mention of a ghost, maybe the two are related?, and also in 'Cogwheels'. Akutagawa studied English literature, writing a piece on William Morris, and he travelled in Russia and China, it would be nice to think that one day maybe a collection of Akutagawa's non-fiction/essays would be published. Indeed names from European and Russian Literature are mentioned throughout the collection, not only Goethe, Strindberg, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, but also authors who were Akutagawa's contemporaries, Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet. In the story 'O'er Withered Moor', Akutagawa explores the thoughts of those assembled around the great poet Basho, as he lays out on his death bed. The story 'Winter' has a very Russian feel to it, maybe due to the narrators mention of his astrakhan hat. A story I've heard the name mentioned many times before is 'Life of a Fool', which for me overshadowed the rest in this collection, along with 'Cogwheels' published posthumously 3 months after his death. 'The Life of a Fool' is 51 short fragments each with a different subtitle, each a little snapshot concerning episodes of the authors life, that ends with noting the brief relative lucidity after taking the dose of Veronal.

Some video footage of Akutagawa can be found here.





Monday 13 July 2009

Post- War Japanese Poetry



This is one of the first books I bought about Japan, I bought it in a charity shop, pretty sure it's out of print now. A collection of Post-War Japanese Poetry, edited by Harry and Lynn Guest and Kajima Shozo, first printed by Penguin Books in 1972. It includes some recognisible names and some not so well known names, and I think thats one of the reasons I like it so much, some poems seem not to be written in any grand scale but they perfectly convey what the author is trying to put across. Some are cryptic and some are more straight to the point. One of the bigger names in this collection is that of Niikuni Seiichi, who has six pieces in this book, he was a leading figure in Japan's Concrete poetry movement, his poems are made up of patterns and blocks of repeated Kanji characters, I was lucky enough to catch an exhibition of his poems in Osaka at nmao recently. Another notable name is Ayukawa Nobuo, who in 1947 helped found the magazine Arechi, (The Wasteland). Yamanaka Ryojiro , Yoshizawa Shoji and Ishii Yutaka also used repeated Kanji characters in their work, here's examples of Ishii's work.


Another well known poet included is Shuntaro Tanikawa, who has four pieces, one short poem and also three short pieces of prose, one being 'The Poem Man I Didn't Know', a cryptic piece featuring a poet with walnuts for eyes , with words on his back, which bleed a little. Tanikawa has collaborated in the past with film director Kon Ichikawa on a number of projects, and has been sometimes tipped for the Nobel Prize.


The subjects covered in this collection are multifarious, everything from love, family, drowning, memory, poets & poetry, holidays,hope, despair, some poems are about the poets concerns about the direction Japan was heading at the time, so some have a historic intrest, and as Harry Guest points out in his preface alot of the poems deal with what it means to exist in modern society, and how the influence of modern poetry from abroad was begining to affect Japanese poets, especially poets who were begining to make the break from the more traditional forms of poetry, although that was a process started in the pre-war period with poets like Sakutaro Hagiwara and Akiko Yosano. Some of my favorite poems in this collection are Yamazaki Eiji's 'The Sods!',where a man instead of being rescued is photographed whilst drowning, think this is a poem about the Japanese obsession of photographing everything, the man's drowning is seconded to getting a good picture. Another favourite is Kuroda Saburo's 'The Stake' aka 'The Bet',which uses the scenario of a man contemplating a marriage based only on the size of the dowry but devoid of love, which Harry Guest in his preface, mentions is a meditation on Japan's economic expansion. Another poem that grabbed my attention is Nakagiri Masao's 'This Bloody-Awful Country', a poem about isolation and not joining or fitting in. But all these poems have a uniqeness about them.


Penguin are about to reprint 'The Penguin Book Of Japanese Verse' edited by Geoffrey Bownas & Anthony Thwaite, a book I keep meaning to buy. My copy of 'Post War Japanese Poetry' has some pages getting loose, I might have to get another copy, it's going for silly money on abe books at the moment, I mean single figures, not triple figures!.


Edit: Looking back over this first post, I have come to notice that maybe Niikuni Seiichi might not be as well known as some of the other poets featured in this collection, I guess after seeing an exhibition on him, I came to this rushed conclusion, some of the poets names you can see are on the cover, but I thought I'd list all the poets included in this book here -


AMANO Tadashi
AMAZAWA Taijiro
AYUKAWA Nobuo
FUJITOMO Yasuo
HASEGAWA Ryusei
HORIKAWA Masami
IBARAGI Noriko
IIJIMA Koichi
IRISAWA Yasuo
ISHIHARA Yoshiro
ISHII Yutaka
IWATA Hiroshi
KAJINO Hideo
KAMIMURA Hajime
KAMIMURA Hiro
KISARAGI Makoto
KITAMURA Taro
KURODA Kio
KURODA Saburo
MIYOSHI Toyoichiro
NAKA Taro
NAKAGIRI Masao
Niikuni Seiichi
OOKA Makoto
SEKINE Hiroshi
SUZUKI Shiroyasu
TAKAHASHI Mutsuo
TAKANO Kikuo
TAMURA Ryuichi
TANABU Hiroshi
TANIGAWA Gan
TANIKAWA Shuntaro
TOMIOKA Taeko
WATANABE Takenobou
YAMAMOTO Taro
YAMANAKA Ryojiro
YAMAZAKI Eiji
YOSHIMASU Gozo
YOSHINO Hiroshi
YOSHIOKA Minoru
YOSHIZAWA Shoji








Greetings....













This blog will be mainly about Japanese things I'm into,
mainly books, film, some places I've visited. I used to work
at a bookshop, but since leaving my interest in books has
not changed, especially in modern Japanese fiction,
i sometimes dip into Japanese classical Literature.
Here I'll feature some older books that may have
slipped out of print, and post about books that are forthcoming.
Also from time to time maybe feature Japanese authors
who have yet to be translated. I hope you find something
that might interest you, and if you have any reading
suggestions I'd like to hear them, so please leave a comment.
I try to track permissions for images, but if you see any that
you think should'nt be here, leave a comment and I'll remove it.