Vibrator by Mari Akasaka

Originally published in 1999 in Japan by Kodansha, the translation by Michael Emmerich was published by Faber & Faber (U.K) in 2005,and then by Soft Skull Press (U.S) in 2007. I read the Faber edition when it came out, and then recently after seeing the film directed by Ryuichi Hiroki I wanted to re-read this novella. The first time I read it I sped through it too quickly, and although being only 130 pages it didn't take too long this time around, but this time I took my time. Hearing a tangle of voices in her head, Rei browses through the products of a convenience store on a snowy Tokyo night, thinking over her job as a journalist, Rei seems to be caught between her feelings of being completely alienated with all that she sees around her with that of wanting to find some release from the loops of voices she hears in her head, the swirling of the voices are silenced when her thoughts turn to a man in the shop. Leaving the shop, she soon finds herself in the cabin of the man's truck, 'Being here is like being in this man's womb'.

The relationship between Rei and Okabe, (the truck driver) is full of perplexities, their relationship doesn't seem to advance from their first meeting, although they have sex, there's not much of the confessional between them during their conversations, Akasaka seems to evoke the emotional territory between the two without probing it in detail, much could be read in the unwritten. Okabe talks of a stalker he had attracted, he got a call from an ambulance when the woman had attempted suicide,she had given them his number, Rei being a journalist records what he says on a tape recorder, which she relistens to. Rei finds herself sometimes smiling incredulously at what she's doing, other times she scans the cabin for exit routes if need be, but her attraction to Okabe over rides her fears, as she enters the world of the long distance trucker, the constantly changing landscape which she watches almost like the images of a film, listening in on the static and random voices over the radio, which parallel with her earlier world of voices, she listens as the voices seem to be reduced to morse code.Memories from an experience with a school teacher seem to unbalance Rei further after finding a brief respite from her voices 'Suddenly I understood why the voices were silent - it was because they felt safe.The vibrations had broken them down into the elements out of which they were originally composed;they no longer existed in the form of language'. The film has a different ending to the book, the novel finishes with Rei finding a slight control, although the feeling that this brief episode in her life is transitory.   

Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako

 

Forest of Eyes recently published by University of California Press won Jeffrey Angles the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, awarded from the Donald Keene Center, these poems have been selected from works that span from 1956 through to 2005, some from posthumous collections compiled by Tada's friend and fellow poet Takahashi Mutsuo after Tada's death in 2003, Jeffrey Angles has presented us with a fantastically translated selection, accompanied by an introduction on Tada's life and also detailed explanatory notes illuminating nuances in the translation process that may not be apparent in the finished English texts, and also adding a comprehensive bibliography of both original works of Tada's that appeared in Japan, and also details of previous English translations of her poetry.

Tada's poetry is full of transformations, where acute observations of events and things that appear in the everyday are reshaped, touched by her readings of Chinese and Greek classics they have a mythic quality to them that could be said to border somewhere between surrealism and magical realism. Settling into her married life in Kobe away from the literary scene of Tokyo, there's a slight sense of isolation and loneliness to some of the poems, in the title poem The Town of Mirrors, or Forest of Eyes, (1968), Tada gives us a portrait of a desolate existence tinged with surrealistic imagery, a life which seems to be entwined with the uncontrolled force of nature, This is my town, the town of my eyes, The people planted alongside the walls, Grow tender tendrils of age beneath the ground. Tada's poetry has something of the visionary, but stem from the experiences and places of the everyday, a visit from a mysterious cat is subtlety turned to questioned how we perceive the possible and by turns the impossible, and again in Horrors of the Kitchen, (1980), where the chef performs his ritualistic duties beneath a knife perceived as the dangling sword of Damocles. The selection includes short prose pieces to longer pieces, also including selections from Tada's tanka, appearing in both English and Japanese texts. A prose piece from Tada's collection, Along the Riverbank from 1998 called Chewing on a Eucalyptus Leaf again takes on surrealistic dimensions, where the narrative maps out an existence lived out amongst an Eucalyptus plant. From the same collection is the poem called Labyrinth, which at times brought slightly to mind the world of Kobo Abe perhaps with it's hint at a hospital setting.

Was I in a huge hospital?

As I dissociated the joints of language

I distorted meaning,left and left again

I clung to bandages unfurling through great white margins

Or to spools of string that someone had given me

There are many juxtapositions of myth and folklore to contemplate within this exceptional collection that will continue to enrich after many re-readings.

Manazuru

Manazuru, Hiromi Kawakami's first novel to appear in English, is translated by Michael Emmerich whose previous translations include novels from Yoshimoto Banana, Kawabata Yasunari and Yamada Taichi to name but a few, and is published by Counterpoint Press. It opens by following the observations of a woman who has travelled from Tokyo to a remote cape, (Manazuru), she checks in at an inn by the coast run by a mother and son, the son she estimates could be in his forties. In her room her thoughts turn to Seiji back in Tokyo. Inquiring about booking her room she has the feeling that the son's voice reminds her of someone, although she can't pinpoint exactly who. She hadn't actually intentionally travelled to this place, but finishing dinner with someone, on impulse she got on a train and got off at Manazuru. As she starts to piece together the ambiguous fragments of her situation, her history begins to unfurl, she has a daughter, Momo, at High School age, her husband, Rei, went missing twelve years ago, she lives with her widowed mother, and sometime starting in the recent past she has been in a relationship with Seiji, although she's kept their relationship a secret from the rest of her family.

 

As she sets off to walk to the cape, she gets the feeling that she's being followed, the present tense is punctured by recollections of her relationship with her husband, of watching silent movies together, his love of the sea, 'It's strange when his presence used to be so thick, when his sudden departure only made his presence thicker', she realizes of him. The prose reverses back to when Momo was a child and explores the relationship between mother daughter, she contemplated taking down the family name plate, Yanagimoto, after some years after her husband disappeared. Kawakami's prose through Emmerich's translation captures Kei's emotional fragility, her thoughts seem to follow lines caught within an undefined polarity, 'When the path ahead is still unformed, we loose all sense of our location', her uncertainty is defined again with her stating, 'The fear in me resembled the inability to tell upstream from downstream, to perceive the direction the water was going'. As Kei examines the effects of her husband's disappearance Kawakami's concerns come to the fore, the substance of the present, desire, love, memory, motherhood, the effects of recollection, loss, and the study of human relations between both, mother and daughter, wife and man. Kawakami seems to dismantle her prose, reducing it to near poetry, near the beginning of the book in a descriptive passage we're offered as a complete sentence, 'Chrysanthemum leaves and Shiitake.', taken by themselves they summon up exacting imagery, this allows her characters to unglue themselves from their circumstances to explore a much wider terrain, and later sentences are further reduced to sometimes consisting of one word, lending the prose a blend of stream of consciousness/ stream of recollection effect, but allowing us to sometimes pause to reflect as Kei pieces together her path to coming to a conclusion of what possibly drove her husband to disappear.

Kei seems reluctant to let go of her husband, or even the memory of him, 'I've heard that when you start to dream of what you have lost, it means the hurt is healing', she appears to be happy to endure this pain rather than let him go. Although Seiji knows about Rei, Kei's feelings for her vanished husband at times threaten to overspill into her relationship with Seiji, he manages to contain his feelings despite her fragility, 'When we embrace, I feel as though I am only the outline of my body... Two outlines almost fusing but without dissolving', she observes when they are together. What Kei felt as a presence following her at the beginning of the novel, takes the form of woman who she suspects maybe connected to Rei's disappearance, she begins to talk with this woman, although it's unclear what this ghostly woman represents, possibly the woman is a symptom of her loss?, but the two women grow a fondness for each other. Despite her sometimes erudite nature the woman guides Kei back to Manazuru, where an accident occurs, a boat being used for the local festival is engulfed by the chaos caused by a typhoon, and after what could be a brief sighting of Rei, there's a pursuit and dilemma of sorts arises. On her return the narrative skips between her relationship with Seiji and recollections of Momo as a child and the difference in Momo as she shows signs of growing up. A letter arrives from Rei's father informing her that he's resigned to the fact that Rei is dead, but for Kei his lingering presence is harder to free herself from. The novel's a mixture of startling abrupt imagery and questioning meditation on the nature of remembrance of things past and passing, losing and loss.

Manazuru at Counterpoint Press