The Sting of Death and Other Stories

Toshio Shimao an author I've read a lot about but up until now hadn't read many of his stories. The Sting of Death and Other Stories, is a collection of six stories translated by Kathryn Sparling,through her introduction she gives us a biographical portrait of the author, and how his life shaped his literary output. Born in 1917 in Yokohama she tells us that Shimao was a loner and a sickly child but a voracious reader, his family moved a number of times and he saw himself as a bit of a wanderer. As a young man he wrote poetry and contributed to literary magazines, some of these he produced himself, in 1943 he self published his book entitled Yoneki (An Account of Childhood), which Sparling explains Shimao thought at the time, that this would be his valedictory work. In 1944 he volunteered for Naval Officers Candidate School,and at the age of 27, at the end of 1944 he was assigned as commanding officer of a special attack torpedo-boat unit of 183 men, this being a suicide squad, he was stationed at Kakeroma Island, here he also met his future wife, Ohiro Miho. Sparling points to the surrealistic qualities in his work, although it could be said that Shimao doesn't use surrealism simply as a stylistic device, but rather to amplify the experiences felt by his characters. Shimao's work is generally seen as being divided in two groups those that deal with his experience in the war, and those stories that are associated with the relationship with his wife, after the war she suffered a mental breakdown, and Shimao gave up his writing career at this time and accompanied Miho through her treatment, the book by Philip Gabriel: Mad Wives and Island Dreams, being a book I'd very much like to read in the future, examines Toshio Shimao's life and writing. Sparling highlights the complexities faced when reading and translating Shimao's prose, often or not she says, that you'll find yourself re-reading passages in order to comprehend the flow/meaning of the whole piece, also his prose contains 'logical gaps', noting too 'there is no escapism in Shimao's fiction' which has a 'masochism to them'. In her introduction Sparling also examines Shimao's relationship with other early pre and postwar writers, before the war he had met the writers Agawa Hiroyuki and Shono Junzo, and that after the war he was briefly a member of a small group called Koyo/Glittering,another member being Mishima, who would later write an essay on Shimao, although Sparling notes due to his wife's illness, he was distant from literary circles, as after the war they returned to Miho's hometown on Amami Island. Reading Van C. Gessel's introduction to the story With Maya in The Showa Anthology, he highlights the comparison between Shimao's writing and that of Oe Kenzaburo.

Included in the collection is The Sting of Death/Shi no toge, which Sparling points out is the second chapter of what would go on to be the much larger full length novel of the same name, the novel was adapted to film by Kohei Oguri,and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Festival. The Russian film director Alexander Sokurov also found inspiration in Toshio Shimao's life in his poetical film Dolce. Also included here is two stories I've wanted to read for a while The Farthest Edge of the Islands/Shima no hate (1948) and also Everyday Life in a Dream/Yume no naka de nichijo also from 1948, the latter, a story set immediately after the war, where a writer who comes to the realization that he has lost his ambitions, and at the the age of thirty notices he has no employable skills, he resolves to join a gang of delinquents, many members ten years his junior. At the gang's meeting he gets called away by a visitor, an old school acquaintance, who has brought him something he claims the writer asked him to get for him.The man has since contracted a horrible disease, and after seeing the writer wash his hands after they were talking explodes with indignant rage, the writer flees, and for some time after he can't escape the anxiety caused through fear of contagion. He heads south to the town of his mother's birth to try and locate her, whilst on the train journey he sees a beautiful young woman in a kimono, whose beauty seems almost to overwhelm him, 'Then as though I had been smoking a little too much,my vision blurred', this encounter is broken abruptly when he finds himself in his mother's house, with his father, who he had picked up on the way, but he had somehow forgotten about. His mother is carrying a baby on her back of mixed blood a 'Eurasian child', the atmosphere grows tense and when his mother confesses her devotion to her Caucasian lover his father explodes with fury, picking up a whip to thrash his mother, the writer intercedes. The story is a harrowing one to read, a tale of a writer losing the will to write, a family disintegrating in the aftermath of the war, the surrealism in it is quite sudden, in contrast to that found in The Farthest Edge of the Island, where it appears more lyrically. Sadly this collection is out of print and hopefully as Kathryn Sparling wrote in 1985 we'll see a full translation of The Sting of Death. There's a lot more to Everyday Life in a Dream than what I've alluded to here, and thanks to a great initiative at Michigan University's Center for Japanese Studies you can read the complete text of this collection, and other out of print texts at their website, many thanks to them for making this collection of stories available online, click to read - The Sting of Death and Other Stories.

Outsider Artists of Japan

Recently published by Kadokawa, this book profiles the work of seventeen outsider artists, and is edited by the NO-MA Borderless Art Museum , in Omihachiman, Shiga Prefecture, the book is a dual language edition with translations by John Junkerman. The Borderless Art Museum is operated by Shiga Prefectural Social Welfare Organisation, which exhibits the art of people with disabilities alongside those without disabilities, attempting to cross boundaries on a number of levels. The book is divided into six chapters, the largest profiles the art and artists, there's a dialogue between Seizo Tashima, (award winning children's author and artist) and Yoshiko Hata,(the art director of Borderless Art Museum, also an author), they discuss Tashima's involvement with outsider artists and the things he finds inspiration in for his own art. Hata gives a little introduction about outsider art and artists in Japan, citing the art of Kiyoshi Yamashita as perhaps being seen as the first outsider artist in Japan, and Hata also talks about Jean Dubuffet who first used the term Art Brut, (raw art), which was later translated as the term Outsider Art in English. Another chapter of the book is an around the table discussion with Yoshitomo Nara, Kenjiro Hosaka and Tadasu Takamine, in which they talk about their relationships and experiences with outsider art and artists, exploring their own interpretations of outsider art, they also discuss some of the dilemmas facing outsider art and artists.

I first came across outsider art in my middle teens through the artwork of Nick Blinko, although at the time I hadn't really heard of the term outsider art, some years later when I looked at his art again I came across the term of outsider art being used to describe his art, I've not known a great deal about it, this book is richly informative and fascinating to look through. The art and artists in this book is unique, and in the around table discussion they touch upon the purity in the art. The art included here ranges from works in sculpture,that of Shinichi Sawada, inks, represented by works by Takeshi Yoshizawa, Moriya Kishaba, Takanori Herai and Yuji Tsuji, paintings by Akane Kimura, Takashi Shuji, Marie Suzuki and also living/performance art from Eijiro Miyama. Yoshiko Hata mentions the importance of respecting the copyrights, so I won't attempt to take photographs of the art here, but instead urge you to track down a copy and see for yourself.

Outsider Artists of Japan

Outsider Artists of Japan at Kadokawa  (in Japanese)

The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain

Whilst reading various reviews of the recently issued Hotel Iris by Ogawa Yoko, i came across The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain, a short story that is available to read online via The New Yorker magazine, so i thought I'd highlight it here. A soon to be married woman moves into the couple's new house, with their dog Juju. She begins to redecorate the house in preparation for their life together,one day she hears a knock at the door,and encounters a man and his son,this atmospheric short story would have made a great addition to The Diving Pool, translated by Stephen Snyder. Stephen Snyder discusses translating Ogawa,and reads from The Diving Pool in a video that was uploaded by the Words Without Borders site here.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

Yoko Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize with The Bridegroom Was a Dog/ Inumukoiri in 1993, this volume, published by Kodansha and translated by Margaret Mitsutani, also collects together two other novellas Missing Heels/Kakato o nakushite, (1992), which won the Gunzo Literature Prize, and the third story being The Gotthard Railway/Gotthard tetsudo, from 1996, Tawada's other writings have earned many prizes, including the Goethe Medal. Tawada's prose has a very unpredictable style, and often throws the occasional curve ball, sometimes it is fantastical and also uses magical realism, and at other times it can be very surreal, but to confine it to any one thing would be an inadequate description, the lines between metaphor, fantasy and the descriptive can sometimes be difficult to discern. In Inumukoiri, the central character, Mitsuko Kitamura runs a slightly unconventional cram school in a non eventful neighbourhood. She tells her pupils stories of humans that marry animals, from the folktale of The Crane Wife to that of a princess who promises her hand in marriage to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean, this is arranged through the princess's lazy nanny, this strange little story casts a shadow over the rest of the story, as one day the strange, (and dog-like), Taro appears at Mitsuko's house, the history of their relationship remains a mystery. Her house is often the object of curiosity for many of the school children who spy on her goings on through the garden fence. At a house party that Mitsuko throws, one of her neighbours thinks that Taro could be the husband of one of her friends who went missing some time ago, she phones the friend, Ryoko, to arrange a time for her to come and check to see if Taro is her husband, between them the mystery around Taro begins to be partially explained, this story has one of the longest opening sentences I've come across in a while.

The second story Missing Heels was the one I enjoyed the most and out of the three this one seemed to demonstrate the Escher like effect of Tawada's prose, that sometimes also carries a slight Kafka rationale or sensibility about it. A mail order bride arrives at a city to begin her married life with her new husband, the disorientating images of the city are presented when she watches a man tearing off different layers of posters on an advertising board revealing an array of different images. Added to this the streets appear to be sliding, which unbalances the people walking along, and cause them to cling onto their belongings. After finding her new husband's house, she heads for the ambiguously entitled 'General Training School for Beginners' where she encounters a teacher who smells of sleeping pills. She asks if she can be taught about various things like 'bathing' and later 'shopping'. After discussing marriage she tells the teacher about her decision on getting married 'I gave this decision a lot of thought,and came here of my own free will', the teacher replies adroitly,'Poor people have no will of their own'. Her husband is rarely seen, he's usual heard running away (escaping footsteps), or what we learn of him is through the woman's strange dreams of him, in the mornings she finds that he has left money for her on the side table. Her husband arranges a hospital appointment for her, the reason is not too clear, the episode is a surreal one, the doctor's diagnosis is unexpected and she observes that the nurse, 'had the vague aura of a photograph taken in the last century, sitting there frozen with a rubber stamp in her hand'. The last story being, 'The Gotthard Railway', is told by a Japanese journalist whose is sent to write a piece on the Gotthard railway, although we learn that she's only doing it by proxy as the original Japanese writer who was meant to do it is far too busy, she travels with an engineer who used to work on the line, this story also works free from it's simple plot. Tawada's prose is multi faceted and is open to many interpretations, her most recently translated book is the The Naked Eye.

Kodansha-Intl

Edit:  Here's a video from 2006 of Tawada Yoko recently found via Little Otsu Publishing blog.

Shot by Both Sides

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watching the river flowing under Ochanomizu Bridge, we read as Akaki, (our narrator), muses on bridges mentioned in the works of Kafu, and also that of Gogol, another of his favourite authors. He's on the bridge waiting to meet a man called Yamakawa, we follow his thoughts on Gogol and that he had a khaki overcoat, where is it now?, lost, mislaid?. As his story begins we learn that he's forty years old and has two children, married for twelve years, and that he leads a vigil like existence, a vigil for what were not sure. Arising early that morning the phrases, 'The early bird catches the worm' and the Japanese equivalent, 'Early rising is three pence/mon to the good', echo in his thoughts, and thinking about his old overcoat leads him to think over Gogol's story 'The Overcoat', his name resembles that of the hero too, Akaky Akakievich. His fascination with Gogol is touched upon again, 'To me, Gogol wasn't just some Russian guy who lived over one hundred years ago. And he wasn't just a 'great writer of 'Russian Literature', nor the founder of realism. You might say he was my fate'. Thinking back on the overcoat he had worn some twenty years ago, Akaki begins to recall his childhood. The details of his memories appear to be difficult to grasp, but it's as if he were turning the dial on the lens of a microscope, trying to focus in to get the clearest image possible of these past events, his thought patterns sometime seem to arrive randomly too, 'What on earth have I been thinking about all this time?, true I've stayed alive this whole time so I must have thought about things.' he reflects on the nature of his thinking.

The novel follows the narrator in his attempt to track down his missing overcoat, which he likens to a pilgrimage of sorts, he makes the contrast to Kobo-Daishi (Kukai), with a slight humour. Revisiting the places of his youth, we return with him to the old three mat room he used to rent from the Ishida family, when he lived with the Koga brothers when he first arrived in Tokyo to study at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, the same university in which the novelist Futabatei Shimei studied Russian. Chapter by chapter we go back further into Akaki's past, born in northern Korea in the early thirties, where he stayed until Japan's defeat, the things that he encounters as he retraces the places he went to twenty years ago in his student days searching for his coat reignite memories of his childhood, the layered narrative of Sebald isn't too far away, although this novel was first originally published in Japan in 1973, under the name Hasamiuchi. Akaki navigates along the Keihin-Tohoku train line revisiting places and people from twenty years back, revisiting his old pawn shop - pursuing his coat, and seeing a cinema poster and hearing an old song provoke memories of his formative years in Korea, - the ondol  underfloor heating in their old house, his old schools, bombing raids as the Soviets advanced, he looks back as himself as a boy sensing something much larger than himself coming to an end. Listening in on what he thinks could be the Emperor's muffled broadcast through a neighbours wall he recounts the night he and his brother burn their collection of magazines and records of Japanese ballads, singing the songs as the flames engulf the albums, clinging onto his father's army beret, but that too gets consigned to the flames. His grandmother had died in a concentration camp, and their house impounded by the Korean civil guard, 'take what you can in your hands, leave in thirty minutes', his story of repatriation changes to that of a confession of a kind, of his inner feelings and thoughts addressed to his elder brother. The narrative interweaves between flowing points in time and history, a history not perceived in the grand scale, but seen in the eyes of a boy who's watching history move as if on an opposite shore, or parallel.

This novel is many things, informative, moving, enigmatic, literary and at times has a subtle philosophical humour to it, Goto Meisei incorporated the auto-biographical in telling Akaki's history. Tom Gill's translation in this, I hope the first of many translations of Goto's into English, is seamless.

 

Counterpoint Press

 

 

Air Doll

Air Doll/Kuki Ningyo, is a film directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu, it was initally screened during the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009 and then released in cinemas in Japan in September,it's recently had its release on dvd.The film is an adaption of the manga from Yoshiie Goda,and stars Korean actress Bae Doona as the doll, Nozomi,it's the first adaption of a book that Kore-eda has directed.His films have a spatial quality to them,watching his films i get the impression that the camera is taking in the events of the film as if by itself, 'Nobody Knows' an earlier film of his, although based on a true story of child neglect has a documentary feel to it. Air Doll opens with Hideo a middle aged man who works as a waiter in a fast food restaurant returning home conversing with his inflatable partner who he has named Nozomi,they eat dinner together and then Hideo sleeps with her.In the morning after Hideo has gone to work Nozomi twitches into life,first a blink of the eyes and movement of her limbs.She dresses into her apron outfit and ventures forth into the outside world of the city.'I found myself with a heart,a heart i wasn't supposed to have'. She gets a job working in a video/DVD rental store,and she befriends and eventually falls for her colleague Junichi, played by Arata, who one day,after she has accidentally punctured herself,finds himself re inflating her by blowing life giving air into her valve/belly button. Many of Kore-eda's films explore life's meaning and the emptiness of modern existence,at many points in the film as Nozomi encounters people of the city her thoughts about her own sense of emptiness,(in Nozomi's case literally air!) are confused with their feelings of spiritual emptiness.

　
Reading the wiki entry of the film some critics have mentioned that the film has a 'weak narrative core',but i think it only takes a small leap of the imagination to get the most out of this film. The soundtrack is by World's End Girlfriend and compliments Pin Bing Lee's fantastic cinematography,the cast is an excellent mix of some big names from Japanese cinema including Arata as Junichi,Susmu Terajima as Todoroki,and Jo Odagiri as the doll maker.

Air Doll/Kuki Ningyo

Kore-Eda Hirokazu