The Cage of Zeus

The Cage of Zeus/Zeusu no ori is the first full novel by Ueda Sayuri to appear in English translation, (translated by Takami Nieda), with a jacket illustrated by Tatsuyuki Tanaka, (Cannabis Works), it's published by Haikasoru. The novel opens with an almost blink and you'll miss it kidnapping scene, the details of which you just begin to take in before you are transported to Hasukawa's narrative, his daughter sat on his knee, reminiscing about his childhood on Mars, when he was young before the moons of Mars were used for constructing huge elevators that straddle the planets surface, and the city's sky's were covered with huge canopies with an Earth like sky scape projected onto them, he recollects these things for his daughter's history assignment, this process of colonization was going to spread onto the next planet, Jupiter. Hasukawa works for the police department and learns of a terrorist alert, the target, Jupiter-I is a research ship orbiting Jupiter, the terrorist group, The Vessel of Life, who hold rigid bio ethical ideologies are believed to be on their way to the ship, Hasukawa appoints security officers Shirosaki and Harding to take them all out. Jupiter-I contains a research laboratory, and also the special district that houses the Rounds, a species of bio engineered hermaphrodites, created to assist humans in space exploration and colonization. The novel set in an undefined point in the future describes the progressively changing attitudes to sexuality and gender identity, Hasukawa notes that people change their gender as frequently as they do their clothes, surgically changing themselves they become fluid transgenders. Jupiter-I also appears to be in part social experiment, where a society cultivated by complete tolerance to sexual identities and behaviour is an ideal being aimed for - 'A society where we are equals, where only individual differences exist', the assertion by Aristophane's in Plato's Symposium, that humans were originally hermaphrodites with four arms and four legs, the gods tore the humans into two parts, creating man and woman, the beginning of each sex desiring and seeking out it's opposite, acts as a philosophical backdrop to Jupiter-I.

When Shirosaki arrives at Jupiter-I his team are met by Kline and Dr Tei, Dr Tei acts as a go between the Rounds and the Monaurals, the Monaurals being single sex/fixed sex humans, the Rounds occupy the special district and their interaction with the Monaurals is limited. Two members of Shirosaki's team, Arino and Shiohara gain entrance to the special district and meet the Round Veritas who reacts coldly to them, as the novel progresses we learn that Veritas had a bad experience with a Monaural, surprisingly turning out to be Security Officer Harding who at first appearance has an almost pathological hatred of the Rounds. To enter into the notions and themes of the novel the narrative employs the use of non-gender specific pronouns, the English translation here uses Spivak pronouns  which take a little getting used to, but their used to great effect which centres the reader's thinking into the heart of this non-gender specific world. Many different perspectives are explored through the novel's duration, Harding's relationship with Veritas in particular where he is faced with both the male and female desires of Veritas, and in turn the Rounds fascination with the Monaurals fixed sex status is also explored. After the security team has arrived a story is told of another Monaural visitor from Mars who had gone mad  fixating on the the red spot of Jupiter, the narrative reminds us that Jupiter is the Roman name of the Greek god Zeus, Jupiter-I acting as the cage of it's inhabitant's desires. With the arrival of the first unmanned ship from Mars security is at maximum alert, but an explosion in one of the labs diverts attention, bringing the realization that perhaps the terrorists was already working amongst them. The narrative of the novel, as well as being a taught sci-fi thriller, is an explorative inquiry into the ideas of this evolving dystopia,  persuing the ideas and visions it presents with an unflinching eye, I'm looking forward to reading the classic 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse.  

Haikasoru          

Tetsuya Ishida

I remember looking through this book in Kinokuniya, putting it down then moving on to looking through the magazine section, after getting home though I couldn't get the images I'd seen out of my head, and found myself rushing back to the store hoping that they hadn't sold the only copy that they had out on display. It's a book I've been meaning to post on ever since, Tetsuya Ishida Posthumous Works published by Kyuryudo includes 100 of 180 works by Ishida who died in 2005 at the age of just 31, there is some speculation about whether his death was accidental or if he had intended to commit suicide, he died at a level crossing, after his death many of his paintings were discovered in his apartment. The book comes with an appendix and brief biography which is in Japanese, but also comes with a brief  biography in English text, I remember watching the NHK Sunday morning art show special on Ishida some months after buying the book. Kyuryudo have gone on to publish a complete  edition of his paintings - Tetsuya Ishida Complete, Ishida's art involves an imaginative use of surrealism, most of his paintings involve an almost expressionless  young salaryman, which some have interpreted as being based or perhaps representing Ishida himself.

 

One of the most striking aspects of Ishida's paintings is the juxtaposition of the young man in relationship to the situations Ishida places him in, his blank expression conveys a look that could be seen by the viewer as being both compliant and also at the same time  disguising a subtle forbearance, the expression could also be interpreted as expressing a resigned submissiveness. The images are sometimes graphic but on a first viewing the viewer's thoughts are primarily occupied with putting the images into some kind of order, to work out what is occurring in them, the graphic element of them seems to linger on afterwards, giving the images an added power. All of these paintings include something that make them stand out, but an underlying theme in Ishida's art is that it conveys a bereft spirituality in a world where almost every physical object around it has a price tag stuck on it, many carry a message on the shallow world of commercialisation, a row of ATMs being used as toilets by a group of the identical blank salaryman, is this use of this same man a comment on the demise of individuality in the commercial world?. Some are set in supermarkets, where the expressionless salaryman is seen in a number of different situations, another aspect is that the salaryman often mutates and co-joins with solid objects, in one he is crouched on all fours, his back acting as a sink, another is a scene where roadworks are being carried out, underneath segments of torn up tarmac the salaryman's face stares out in duplication, this blankness seems to be something that is in the ground beneath our feet covered and hidden by layers of concrete.

 

This physical relationship between the salaryman and his external world, (sometimes he mutates with whole buildings), offers up striking and thought provoking images, where the inanimate objects are imbued with and take on a living existence, and by turns the salaryman appears to have traded a living element of his being, forming an ambivalent balance between the two. As far as I'm aware there hasn't been a book published on Ishida outside of Japan as of yet, hopefully it'll only be a matter of time, but in the mean time most of his paintings are available to view via his webpage, click on the galleries page, select one of the eleven albums and click through the paintings.

http://www.tetsuyaishida.jp/gallery/

Kyuryudo Art Publishing Co Ltd

A Room Where The Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard

Perhaps the significance of this novel, the first translation of Levy Hideo to appear in English may pass by the general reader, I hope it doesn't, Ian Hideo Levy is an American born writer who writes primarily in Japanese, his novel Tiananmen/ Ten'anmon, from 1996 was nominated for the Akutagwa Prize. A Room Where The Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard/Seijoki no kikoenai heya, was first published in Japan by Kodansha in 1992 and won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, recently it has been published in an English translation by Christopher D. Scott by Columbia University Press. The jacket of the novel comes with quotes from Oe Kenzaburo, Tawada Yoko and Ann Sherif, who likens the novel to Oe's novel A Personal Matter. Opening at the end of 1967 the novel follows Ben Isaac, the son of Jacob Issac, (who works at the American consulate in Tokyo), Ben spent most of his youth living in consulates in Taiwan, Phnom Penn, Shanghai, the American consulate building overlooks Yamashita Park, the Stars and Stripes flag blows in the breeze outside of Ben's window, the consulate building also attracts groups of Japanese protesters, shouting out, Yankee go home!, angry at the Anpo and the Vietnam War. The novel comes to us in three parts, the middle one, The End of November, mainly charts Ben's time back in the U.S, living with his mother who had divorced from Ben's father, who had married again to a Chinese woman, Gui-lan, producing another son, Ben's younger brother, Jeffrey. In The End of November the narrative recollects the funeral of J.F.K, Ben's memories of his mother's plight as she succumbs to the doctors sedatives, sent to her presumably form his father, and of an informing view of a memorial of the rising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. Over the course of the three parts of the novel the narrative dips in and out of moments from Ben's past and present lives, the pictures of his life in Japan and his American life contrast and merge with one another.

The main narrative follows Ben in Japan, and unable to handle his father's overbearing and remonstrating temperament Ben runs away from him and also of the protection of the consulate. After enrolling at a Center of International Studies he meets Ando Yoshiharu, a student who takes Ben under his wing and puts him up. Ben begins to succumb to the gravitational pull of Shinjuku, and he begins to decode the Kana and Kanji characters appearing all around him, which will provide the means to communicate his way out of his frustrated linguistic isolation. Ben seems to be in awe of Ando, he studies the contents of his 4 and a half tatami studio flat, the books he reads, the authors he reads, the image torn from a magazine of a muscled writer pinned to Ando's wall appears at various points in the novel, Ben identifies with the stuttering Mizoguchi of Mishima's novel Kinkakuji, as he struggles to master his new language. As the novel progresses Ben's assimilation grows deeper and deeper, casting off his gaijin identity, with this fading of his gaijin identity, his gaijin perspective also begins to recede. Ben takes the rather definitive step of burning his consulate Id card and with Ando acting as his guarantor Ben finds work in a small restaurant as a waiter. The novel begins from the disorientated perspective of a gaijin and follows Ben as he slowly assimilates into Japanese culture and language, some of the scenes I thought at first could be construed as making imaginative leaps, but contemplating on them further they seemed to reflect accurately the thoughts of a teenage mind, compounded by Ben's situation of finding himself in an unfamiliar culture, which in turn made me contemplate the novel from the perspective of someone who has no experience of visiting or living in Japan. In his introduction Christopher D. Scott reflects of Levy - It would be more accurate to say that Levy's work is about the struggle or productive tension between writing in Japanese and not being Japanese, or the dilemma of being a writer of Japanese but not a Japanese writer. Here lies the real power and significance of his literary project: it demonstrates that one does not have to be Japanese in order to write or have a voice in Japanese. Christopher D. Scott also points out other writers of border-crossing literature, (ekkyo bungaku); Tawada Yoko, Mizumura Minae, Yang Yin among others whose writings challenge perspectives of national identity and of national literatures. The novel is brief, just over a hundred pages, and at it's end we get the impression that Ben's story is at the beginning of a much longer journey.

A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard at Columbia Uinversity Press



  

Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai

Recently published by One Peace Books comes this early novella by Osamu Dazai translated by Allison Markin Powell who has also translated Hiromi Kawakami, (a translation of Kawakami's Tanizaki Prize winner, Sensei no kaban/The Briefcase is forthcoming in March 2012), and has also translated Motoyuki Shibata, and Kaho Nakayama. The narration here is set in the war years and comes from a young girl whose family has recently lost their father, within many of Dazai's narratives, whether they're male or female, the presence of Dazai's voice can often be detected somewhere within, much of Dazai's craft with his fiction is his ability to disguise this fact. Many of his stories and novels are peopled with figures who are not swimming in the same direction as the rest of society, or hold contrary beliefs or visions. The details of the girls background  are slight and the focus of the novella is in capturing the girls stream of thinking which we follow over the course of a day. She takes a train to school, getting off at Ochanomizu, perhaps a more thorough student of Japanese Literature could write a small tome on the appearance of Ochanomizu in Japanese novels, as the place is mentioned in a few I've recently come across. At school we read her observations on her teachers Miss Kosugi and art teacher Mr Ito, she has been told off as she embroidered a flower pattern on her underclothes, something inappropriate in the austere times. The narrative captures really well the nuances of thinking of the young girl and the flaws that she observes in others often bounce back at her ending in self recriminating reflections on her self. When she returns from school, she finds her mother has house guests, the Imaidas, she observes - While surely there's something to be said for suppressing your own feelings for the sake of others, if everyday from now on I was forced to nod and smile at people like the Imaidas, I would probably go mad. As with much of Dazai's fiction there is a brittle melancholy to the piece, sitting at the porch in the evening washing out her things she imagines another girl like herself sat in a flat of a Parisian backstreet, sharing her sadness with this imagined figure - Nobody in the world understood our suffering. In time, when we became adults. we might look back on this pain and loneliness as a funny thing, perfectly ordinary, but - but how were we expected to get by, to get through this interminable period of time until that point when we were adults?. The novella catches this moment of transience, what is remarkable about the piece is the absence of the commotion of the external world, only events linked  directly to the immediate family are touched upon, and amongst these events she still ponders on the good things that humans can do, there are pointers of the age of the novellas setting, the actor Jushiro Konoe, a reading of Kafu Nagai.     

The book has been fantastically presented with a bit of a refreshing contemporary twist which works really well, Allison Markin Powell's translation flows really well, to read this translation is to experience this girl's thoughts and observations with a clarity that tugs effectively at the reader's empathy. A passage at the beginning of the book that stood out is when she takes off her glasses, looking at the world she prefers to see things slightly blurred and out of focus - I like to take my glasses off and look out into the distance. Everything goes hazy, as in a dream, or like a zoetrope - it's wonderful. The novella has a contemplative tone, capturing her reflections on her family, the change in her mother since the death of her father, her thoughts on her sister, briefly she remembers them living together in their previous house, and she receives a letter from her cousin Junji being transferred to a regiment in Maebashi. I only hope that this is the first in a series of Modern Japanese Classics from One Peace Books.

One Peace Books