The Wild Geese

As is often the case that after a period of reading relatively modern or contemporary books or novels the desire to turn to something older pounces on my reading habits, and vice a versa. Feburary 17th will mark the 150 anniversary of Mori Ogai's birth,  which seems like a great prompt to read some of his works, 2012 also marks the 100th anniversary of Soseki's Kokoro. Gan/The Wild Geese was written between the years 1911-1913, it could be described as being a long novella coming in at around 120 pages long, although it took longer to read than anticipated, theres plenty in here to inspire thought, like Kawabata Yasunari's later novel Koto/The Old Capital the novel is of interest with topographical descriptions of it's setting, here it's in and around Muenzaka near Tokyo University and Shinobazu Pond, this area is also the setting for Kawabata's short story from 1926 Boshi Jiken/The Hat Incident, which can be found in the collection, Palm-of-the-Hand-Stories. Biographical details on Mori are plenty throughout the internet, but a reading of a number of his fictions we can see that he  drew on experiences and episodes from his life to use in his writings, Mori lived and wrote during the Meiji period, and many of the changes that this epochal period caused are witnessed and reacted to by the characters in his books. Like Natsume Soseki, his writing is seen as being anti-naturalist in it's perspective, in Gan the narrative is dotted with asides which can be interpretated to this effect. The story is narrated by an anonymous acquaintance of a student called Okada, who the narrator notes reminds him of Kawakami Bizan, it could be said that the book has four or five distinctive narratives, the opening one introduces us to the two students and of Okada's first contact with Otama by seeing her in the window of a large house he walks by. In the second the story of the money lender Suezo is described, at first a servant to the students of the university, Suezo through being thrifty has also managed to amass a capital of money, and he is reviled in the neighbourhood as a money lender, the narrative set before Okada's  encounter with Otama traces Suezo's fascination and attraction to Otama, which eventually leads him to renting a house in Muenzaka for her as his mistress, and another one to accomodate her father. Mori's narrative moves in and out of the thoughts of his characters, Otama's as she misses  being with her father, Otama's father's thoughts about his daughter, then it passes to Suezo's wife, Otsune, who begins to suspect her husband after hearing rumours,  Otsune comes nearly to breaking point when Otama is pointed out to her in the street with the same parasol that Suezo had given her, confrontations abound. The narrative also following Suezo as he continually tries to put his wife off the scent, these psychological portraits are incredibly well defined insights into the worlds of the characters, Otama's loneliness and sense of entrapment in particular.

Throughout the novel the narratives of Mori's characters observe and note events and people occurring around them, the Namamugi incident is referred to and Suezo picks up on the idiosyncrasies of Fukuchi, the writer who owns a large house next to his - He was supposedly an intelligent man, a writer. But was he? If a clerk did the same kinds of nasty tricks with his pen as Fukuchi did, he would be discharged, reading a line like this makes you think that perhaps Mori had someone particular in mind.  Examples of the changes being brought in with the period can be read too - The wheeled stall vanished from it's set place under the eaves. And the house and it's surroundings, which were always modest, seemed suddenly attacked by what was then fashionably called "civilization",  for new boards over the ditch replaced the broken and warped ones, and a new lattice door had been installed at the entrance. This passage gives the impression that Mori is alluding that the changes that were underway went only as far as appearances, that in an understated way that  underneath things remained pretty much the same, the big changes were perhaps only skin deep. As the narrative progresses  Suezo  acting on a slight impulse buys Otama a pair of linnets which can read as being the first appearance of two metaphors used in the narrative, after Otama has hung the cage up in her house in Muenzaka, the narrative flows into focusing on Okada's perspective, coming to the rescue of the birds when the cage is attacked by a snake. Gan finishes with many threads left unresolved, it leaving it up to the reader to imagine the continuous lives of it's characters.

Gan has been translated into English twice, as The Wild Geese by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, published by Tuttle Publishing, and again by Burton Watson as The Wild Goose published by Center for Japanese Studies Publications, University of Michigan      

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

At the moment it seems that my reading is not complete without having at hand a manga to read, and after reading Mitsuse Ryu, Moto Hagio seems like a logical choice, with the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Hagio's shojo classic The Heart of Thomas/ Toma no shinzo I thought I'd better catch up with their previous book by her. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories collects ten stories that spans thirty years, 1977-2007, the stories are translated by Matt Thorn and includes the essay The Magnificent Forty-Niners, in which he introduces the artists that made up the  influential manga group, all commonly believed to have being born in 1949, although as it turns out Hagio was the only one actually born in this year. I'd have to admit being torn between either posting solely on  Iguana Girl or posting on the collection as a whole, although reading through the stories in this selection, they seemed to get better and better as they went along that not to post on any of the others seemed like a little of an injustice. The narratives in Hagio's stories are quite simply conveyed, most of these stories are brief but everyone leaves a resonance with the reader after finishing them, most are largely told from the perspective of a child who is caught at the moment as they are beginning to interpret and awaken to the machinations of the adult world, or are caught responding to some distant tragedy that has taken place in their past,  Hagio's  use of metaphor in her stories adds another dimension to them. A predominant theme that appears is that of societal conceptions of the normal, well adjusted  child as opposed to those that are seen as being ugly or not fitting in, as in Hanshin: Half God from 1985 a story about a pair of conjoined twins, one beautiful, who is brash but also has a limp and is therefore carried by the other twin who is not as beautiful but is studious and takes care of her sister, it's also implied in the story that the beautiful twin is sapping the uglier twin's good health. The story explores her feelings of resentment with her beautiful twin, and Hagio's ability to examine the motives and perceptions of the reasoning process in her characters is both exacting and moving to read, the moral table is turned many times in this story when the doctors come to the conclusion that they should be separated,  although it will be the case that one of them will die in the operation, Hagio leaves it to the last pages in adding the unexpected twist that changes the perspectives held by her characters. 


The title story A Drunken Dream/Suimu, also from 1985, stands out from the others as it's setting is on a space station, it's a fantastic love story that spans across dream and reality, as well as shifting between time periods. The story is seen through the narrator, an androgyne, who has a reoccurring dream of a love unfulfilled, a mysterious person inhabits these dreams and when a group of new recruits arrive at the station the narrator excitedly  discovers that among them is the person in the dream.  At first reality seems to intervene on the dream, although Hagio has a knack of pulling the rug from beneath your feet at precisely the right moment which ends most of her stories in an enigmatic way, things come to a conclusion but a sense lingers that things are far from being resolved, which leaves the reader contemplating again what has occurred in her stories. The two longest stories Angel Mimic and Iguana Girl, (both from 2008),  see Hagio exploring the traits of her characters to a greater degree, Iguana Girl is a story that explores the neurosis between a mother and daughter, (and sister?), the use of metaphor leads the reader into perceiving the narrative one way, but then Hagio turns the story in an unexpected direction which leaves you wondering which of the characters the metaphor is being applied to or which of them it is being perceived by. Angel Mimic/Tenshi no gitai follows the complex relationship between a young high school teacher and one of his pupils whose irrational behaviour hides an episode from her past, at the same time she harbours a fascination for angels which is another enigma to the teacher. The selection also comes with an interview between Hagio and the translator Matt Thorn where they discuss her beginnings and influences as a manga artist.   

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories at Fantagraphics

Coming Closer and Getting Further Away

I first came across the photography of Asako Narahashi through the book Heavy Light and then again of her exhibition Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water,  Narahashi's photographs are a heady evocation of disorientation, that  question our sense of proximity and balance in a spatial perspective, in them Narahashi would wade out into the sea and then turn her back and would photograph from the perspective of the sea looking back inland. Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water, Nazraeli Press is a book that I've still not managed to get a copy, but I've kept an eye out for other publications featuring her work, a recent publication is Coming Closer and Getting Further Away a booklet size collection which features a selection of photographs from the exhibition, Asako Narahashi 2009/1989: Coming Closer and Getting Further Away, Tokyo Art Museum, 2009, the text is in Japanese and English and comes with an additionally essay on Asako Narahashi entitled The Form of Water by art critic Shino Kuraishi, (translated by Franz K. Prichard), in which he traces Narahashi's photographs through her previous exhibitions and the books NU-E (1997), Funiculi Funicula, (2003) and also Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water. Kuraishi explores the concept of nue in Narahashi's photography, here the term nue is derived from describing the mythical creature but is also used to represent the sense of an un-identifiable person or an ambiguous indeterminate attitude. The booklet contains some photographs of the exhibition by Takashi Yasumura and also thumbnail images of all the photographs exhibited as well as full page selections of the photographs, which include construction shots of skyscrapers and express ways from Dubai and also photographs similar to those seen in Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water taken in Jindo in South Korea.


For more information and images please check out the publisher's page.


The booklet is published by Osiris an imprint based in Shibuya in Tokyo who publish an interesting selection of books on photography, often in dual text editions, including; Nakahira Takuma's 1970 book For a Language to Come and Kanemura Osamu's My Name is Shockhammer and also a DVD collection of poet Yoshimasu Gozo's films Ki-Se-Ki:gozo cine, (trailer below), and many more, an imprint well worth exploring.

OSIRIS

Asako Narahashi's webpages

10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

 

SF is a genre that is open to so many interpretations, and then once you start to explore the genre further you discover that there exists  further sub genres to it, 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights, is a novel whose scope takes in thousands of years, and fictionally  links together some sizable enigmas in it's path. Originally published in 1967, and then again in a revised edition in 1973, the novel must stand as being one of the earliest examples of Japanese SF in translation, the current edition in Japan is published by Hayakawa  Publishing, who also publish a large selection of classic SF titles in Japanese translation. The novel opens at the creation of the earth, the cosmic event is described in prose full of scientific terminology, which continues sporadically throughout the rest of the novel, passages of text journey over thousands, millions of years of evolution, the tide of time going in and out, Mitsuse layers the time periods arriving at what the reader presumes will be the permanent setting of the novel. In three chapters we are introduced to the main characters through historical episodes related to them, Plato travelling through  the remote town of Elcasia, the period of events are meant to be those of his writing Timaeus and Critias and his fascination for the doomed civilisation of Atlantis.

 

The novel is dotted with descriptions of domed buildings and of objects made from curious unknown materials, whilst in Elcasia Plato comes into contact with the strange building material of glaes and also the material orichalcum, and speaks with the suzerain, a strange oracle like entity, the room in which Plato and his servant stay in is fitted with electric lights, which at first terrifies then rouses their curiosity. At night during a sandstorm Plato is overcome by a vision that he is Orionae witnessing the end of Atlantis. The setting of the second chapter takes us to the besieged city of Sakya and the scene of Siddartha's departure from the city at the beginning of his spiritual quest. Accompanied with his Brahmins the journey begins to take on a celestial path, Siddartha encounters the warring Asura and the malevolent Maitreya, whose identity and origins are clouded with uncertainty. The third of the introductory chapters arrives at the trial and crucifiction of Jesus Christ, with Pilate being harangued into sentencing the Nazarene to death, in much of these chapters Mitsuse is setting the scene, re-illustrating the stories that we are familiar with, (or partially familiar with), but at the same time ending them with a hint or a clue of the novel's real plot.
 

The novel is published by Haikasoru and translated by Alexander O.Smith and Elye J. Alexander and comes with an afterword from Mitsuse from the 1973 edition and also a commentary from Mamoru Oshii who recounts meeting the author. Reading the novel is like discovering a classic episode from Japanese SF history, Ryu Mitsuse was one of the first SF writers to be translated into English. The novel's scope is gargantuan but as it progresses Mitsuse refocuses the action into following the main characters as they hunt down and try to decipher the cause and motive of the destruction they encounter  in a bout of civilisation hopping, the clues pointing to the Planetary Development Committee, although who is controlling the organisation?. Siddartha finds himself in a destroyed city which he discovers is the remains of Tokyo of 2092 and encounters some survivors,  much of the last half takes place within the landscapes of destroyed civilisations, the characters travel through thousands of years, their abilities and the appearance of their armies are somewhat suddenly introduced to the reader, but this is the way in which things happen in the world of anime and manga, (Mitsuse's Andromeda series was illustrated by manga artist Keiko Takemiya), and it lends the novel a great sense of cinematic immediacy.

An excerpt is at Haikasoru's page.   

Akutagawa Prize Winner announced

News of the  winners of the 146th Akutagwa Prize  -

EnJoe Toh for Dokeshi no cho (Clown's Butterfly), and Tanaka Shinya for Tomogui (Cannibalism) 


Naoki Prize winner -

Hamuro Rin for Higurashi no ki (Chronicle of Cicada)


Read more at Junbungaku.com and of course at bunshun.co.jp

Japan Earthquake Charity Literature Project

As it approaches being nearly a year since the events of the March Tsunami last year it's still difficult to comprehend and take in the scale of the disaster. Waseda Bungaku Department have organised the Japan Eartquake Literature Project and compiled a collection of stories by contemporary Japanese writers giving voice to their reactions and reflections, offered free to download in English translation as PDF's, but please remember to make a donation!. The stories will be published in book format edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke in the U.S and in the U.K. under the title of, March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown of 2011, some of the stories featured are avilable to read through the Department's web page, please read through the introduction by Makoto Ichikawa, (director of Waseda Bugaku), to these stories and author profiles and make a donation to the Japan Red Cross or alternatively through your own country's Red Cross Society, and please remember to purchase a copy of the book when it is published.




The stories featured -




Ride on Time by Abe Kazushige, translated by Michael Emmerich


Poola's Return by  Hideo Furukawa, translated by Satoshi Katagiri


March Yarn by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Michael Emmerich


Almost Everything in the World by Shin Fukunaga, translated by Michael Emmerich


Silverpoint by EnJoe Toh, translated by Jocelyne Allen


Planting by Aoko Matsuda translated by Angus Turvill


The Day the World Ends, We...2011 by Akio Nakamori translated by David Boyd


Signals by Mayuko Makita translated by Allison Markin Powell


Japan Earthquake Charity Literature Project


Japanese Red Cross Society


Many thanks to the editor of Waseda Bungaku for allowing me to post a link to these stories and their webpage.

The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada

The most recent translation of Tawada Yoko, (The Naked Eye, New Directions 2009, translated from the German Das Nackte Aug, Konkursbuch Verlag, 2004 by Susan Bernofsky), again witnesses her narrative traversing across many borders, the protagonist, a young Vietnamese student who has travelled from Vietnam to Berlin to speak at an international  conference is kidnapped the evening before she is due to present her lecture. The novel opens with a swirling description of a room, the scene as if seen by a digital camera whose operator is unaware of the fact that it's actually recording, presents a sequence of unrelated objects, the narrator concludes; It isn't possible to reconstruct a story from this landscape of ruins.

 

The young woman's geographical knowledge of Europe is slight, it being the first time she has travelled, although fluent in Russian her kidnapper is a German student who smuggles her back to his apartment in his car. At an attempt at entrapping her to stay with him permanently  her kidnapper, Jorg, tries to convince her that she is pregnant, as time passes she begins to take walks and she learns the location of the town's train station. Through a series of events she manages to board the train which she assumes will take her to Moscow, but it is in fact making it's way to Paris, on board she is fortunate in finding a Vietnamese woman who gives her the address of her sister in Paris who'll be able to help her. Through the  novel's narrator, (who later gives the false name of Anh), we too become spectators to a familiar world where meanings and interpretations have become slightly adrift from positions and relationships that are taken for granted, in a sense that they revert back to presenting themselves as existing only partially comprehended, we begin to reinterpret and re-associate images and behaviours of people and events, being viewed without being bound to their original language or culture leaves them prone to being interpreted with a sense of slight surreality and ambiguity, they shift between context and contextlessness, or in as much they form a new context, the form of Tawada's prose often transforms from prose to the poetical, passages sometimes linking thematically.

Tawada's novels truly have an international scope to them, spanning continents and countries, political and gender ideologies, through the narrator of The Naked Eye we look into the lives of the characters that she encounters, Marie, the prostitute, Ai Van and her French husband Jean, Charles who she meets at the cinema, the Vietnamese doctor, Tuong Linh. The novel has a cinematic quality to it, when she makes it to Paris the narrator finds a sanctuary in the cinema and becomes obsessed by the films of Catherine Deneuve, the chapter  titles of the book begin to take on the name of her films, Indochine, Drole d'endroit pour une rencontre, Dancer in the Dark, and many more, in each of them we are given a synopsis of scenes and scenarios, the segments of those which the narrator doesn't fully comprehend are described in a circumspect way, as the novel progresses the narrative of the synopsis and the actual narrative sometimes subtly cross paths. It could be said that suspicions are slightly roused in the plausibility to some of the connections of the segments of the novel, but they can be easily overlooked, as the novel convincingly paints a picture of the easiness for people to slip out of sight when moving between borders, the scope and inventiveness of Tawada's prose is always something to be in awe of. Tawada has been awarded nearly all of the major awards in Japan most recently the Noma Prize. 

Yoko Tawada.de

The Naked Eye at New Directions Publishing

Das Nackte Aug at Konkursbuch Verlag

                           

The Lake

The Lake/Mizuumi, originally published by Foil Tokyo, back in 2005 was published recently by Melville House in a translation by Yoshimoto's mainstay translator Michael Emmerich, the novel has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the shortlist of which will be announced imminently. Yoshimoto's characters speak in a lucid and simple language which effortlessly catch the complexities of the heart. The novel's central characters both have in common the fact that their mothers have passed away, the first part of the novel is taken up mainly with the novel's main narrator, Chihiro, reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of her mother and father, Nakajima, the enigmatic young man who becomes the object of her affection is seen by her in the window of the apartment block opposite hers. As Chihiro gets to know more about Nakajima slowly the details of his troubled passed are revealed, Chihiro's narrative is full of passages of her rationalising her thoughts about her feelings for him and about her observations of his behaviour, she at times considers him to be suicidal, his aversion to having sex with her makes her suspect that he could be gay, but at the same time her rationalising is punctuated with moments where she catches herself being overawed by her feelings for him, in simple things about him, the way he stands. 

A sideline story that flows along whilst Chihiro slowly unlocks the enigma of Nakajima is that Chihiro has been employed to paint a mural for a school under threat of closure, the two threads of the story begin to subtly entwine as the novel progresses. Although there is a lot of crying in the novel the prose never seems to read as being over wrought, the characters in many of Yoshimoto's novels always have the ability to give free reign to their emotions, whilst also  in-habiting worlds which they appear to be experiencing either for the first or last time, which imbues her prose with a freshening aspect, an example is when Chihiro and Nakajima walk back from their visit to Nakajima's friends, the brother and sister, Mino and Chii, who live in their makeshift house by the lake in the forest, Chihiro asumes that she'll never relive the experience.  Chii is bed bound and speaks to Nakajima and Chihiro through Mino in a way which hints that they posses a telepathic connection, the pair exhibit a supernatural aura,  they live an ethereal life, beyond the peripheries of society, out in the countryside, at a point Chihiro considers that they could have been a figment, and when she returns to them she is taken aback by their actuality, Mino explains to her that he rarely needs to venture back out into town.   

Seeing a picture on the wall in Mino and Chii's house offers the clue for Chihiro to realize the enigma of Nakajima that has been up to now beyond him being able to rationalize and relate to her. Through Chihiro's narration Yoshimoto's prose conveys a sense of the emotional journey that Chihiro and Nakajima have taken through the course of the novel, which is a common motif in Yoshimoto's narratives, finishing her novels always leaves me with an affinity for her characters and their plight, theres always a lucid sense of a before and after and a re-evaluation between these two places, also an impression of coming full circle with her characters. Yoshimoto's use of an ellipsis finds a perfect vehicle in Nakajima's repressed trauma, almost passing undetected, The Lake has been unsurprisingly a much blogged about book so there's little need to divulge anymore of the plot, only to add that to read it I feel again a certain reaffirmation.