Real World

  



Before posting on a new translation that's due out next month, (Murakami's From the Fatherland with Love - although it appears to be available now), thought I'd read a couple of older titles that I've been intending to read. Real World, translated by Philip Gabriel is the first of Natsuo Kirino' novels that I've read, the most recent title of hers to appear in translation is The Goddess Chronicle which I'd like to read in the future. Reading Nakagami Kenji's story Jain/Snakelust the reader might find themselves contemplating what might have happened to Jun after he went on the run after committing patricide, in Real World we are given the full sequence of events and consequences of a similar crime. The chapters of the book narrate the unfolding of the story as it progresses each told from differing perspectives from different characters, one of the main characters, Toshi, sometimes uses a fake name, so chapters/perspectives also appear from her under her adoptive name, Ninna Hori. Toshi adopts this name to wrong foot the leaders of her cram class, to see them get something wrong when ticking her off their lists, her feeling prevails throughout the novel that young people are there to be used and exploited to substantiate the adults Raison d'être. The event at the centre of the novel is a matricide committed by Toshi's neighbour Ryo, or Worm as she has nicknamed him, stealing Toshi's bike with her mobile phone in the basket brings Worm into contact with the small tightknit group of Toshi's friends, as each member of her friends responds differently to Worm the groups relationship and understanding of each other is explored and depicted in detail.

 

The scope of Real World is much broader than that of being a straight forward crime story, it examines the way parents relate and communicate with their children, the pressures they are under and endure, through each portrait or observation of the students that any of the characters describe there usually comes with it descriptions of copious amounts of cramming study to improve their chances of getting into the desired or most elite university. The book also delves deeply into examining the psychology of the murderer, on the run cycling around in the intense heat, Worm begins to take on the psychology of a wartime soldier, as at the beginning of his narrative he recounts seeing on t.v a Japanese soldier being beaten for suspectedly participating in war crimes, later when he attempts to kidnap one of the gang he associates with Mishima, but even these adopted psychological states malfunction, when Kirarin reveals his true weaknesses to him.

 

Reading the novel at various points I couldn't help from contemplating it in other ways, as the main characters are largely a group of high school girls, the temptation to reconfigure the characters and switch the main, (?, it could be said that the main protagonist shifts from chapter to chapter), protagonist, Worm, into a woman and then switch the girls to boys threw up a lot of different thoughts and alternative perspectives. At each turn in the story and through each of the chapters the groups members found themselves constantly reassessing their knowledge of each other and at the novels end saw them addressing and appropriating the potential guilt and blame that each of them felt, for two of the group meet a tragic end. Locating the real world in the book is a difficult endeavour, the characters in turn find themselves either exiting it or through the novel's sequences arriving at it, reading the novel felt like submerging yourself temporarily into a pressurized chamber. It's a book that grabs you by the lapels, the way in which the murder and murderer is discussed in a matter of fact manner was unsettling and initially Worm is revered, his crime seems to represent a perforation in the desensitised world that the students exist in, the novel sees it's characters revaluate themselves and each other at each turn of events that spin out beyond their control, a disturbing and painful rite of passage.  

 

Real World at Random House 

 

 

2013 Readings

Thought it was about time again to catch up with listing some of my readings outside of Japanese literature, at the beginning of the year I was tempted to compile a list of predicted reads but find that when I compile these lists for myself I find that my reading veers off on a completely different course, so perhaps I'll list what I've read so far and then list some books that are potential reads.

 

 

Read so far -

 

Ernst Junger - The Glass Bees

Adalbert Stifter - The Recluse

Gustave Flaubert - Three Tales

Alfred Jarry - The Supermale

Paul Farley - The Dark Film

Otto dov Kulka - Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Jens Peter Jacobsen - Mogens and Other Stories

Guillame Apollinaire - The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories

Rawi Hage - Cockroach

Gerbrand Bakker - The Detour

Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn and Child

Elie Wiesel - Night

Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

Joseph Brodsky - Watermark - An Essay on Venice

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm

Joseph Brodsky - So Forth

Philippe Besson - His Brother

Potential reads -

 

Rene Daumal - Mount Analogue

Erich Kastner - Going to the Dogs

Erich Kastner - Let's Face It - Poems

Herbert Rosendorfer - Architect of Ruins

Javias Marias - Dark Back of Time

Charles Brockden Brown - Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker

Bruno Schulz - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Gabriele D'Annunzio - Pleasure - (Forthcoming in Penguin Classics)

Manuel Puig - Pubis Angelical

Jens Peter Jacobsen - Niels Lyhne

James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Gaito Gazdanov - The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

Laszlo Krasznahorkai - Satantango

Jean Echenoz - I'm Off

David Gascoyne - Collected Poems

Marc Auge - No Fixed Abode

Alexander Kluge - Air Raid

 

I hope among all the other books that I'd like to read that I manage to get to these, out of the contemporary books that I've read recently Hawthorn and Child probably stands out as being the one that impressed the most, I've read that it'll be published in September by New Directions, it is everything that it's been hyped to be, although in truth it's a book that really doesn't need to be hyped at all, it impresses entirely on it's own merits. I greatly enjoyed Rawi Hage's Cockroach, his IMPAC prize winning novel De Niro's Game is being reissued in the near future by Penguin, and I'd very much like to read it. Otto dov Kulka's book was a book not easily forgotten, which led to a reading of Night by Elie Wiesel which I've been meaning to read for a long time, another being Fateless by Imre Kertész which I've had a copy put aside to read longer than I care to contemplate. Kurt Tucholsky's only full novel - Castle Gripsholm is a novel that deserves a reprint/reissue, it looks like it could make an ideal candidate for a NYRB classics title, which reminded me of Erich Kastner's novel Going to the Dogs which seems like an ideal novel to head for after reading Castle Gripsholm. I'm not too sure what to expect of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly which is half of the allure, the title alone attracted my attention, other than Sky-Walk or The Man Unknown to Himself which I think at the moment is a little more harder to come by, his fascination with somnambulism seems very curious. Among my reading at the moment I'm just about starting out on Premendra Mitra's Mosquito and Other Stories, Penguin India - and also perhaps Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, but these lists are always subject to, (constant), change.

 

The Stones Cry Out

Although a brief novel the perspectives in The Stones Cry Out/Ishi no Raireki carry an extraordinary depth and resonance, Hikaru Okuizumi was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for it back in 1994 and translated into English by James Westerhoven. The events in this short novel are given to us from Manase a soldier in hiding  after fighting in the Battle of Leyte, the remaining soldiers find themselves regrouping in caves preparing to reorganise themselves for their final battle, many of the soldiers are suffering from malnutrition and malaria. Manase finds himself next to an emaciated Lance Corporeal who is near death, over and over the man talks of stones and Geology - Even the smallest stone in a riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed upon it - these are the book's opening lines they begin to take on the form of a mantra that echoes around the events in Manase's life and the novel. In command of the soldiers is a ruthless Captain, suffering from gangrene himself, he orders that all those near death kill themselves or be killed, after they refuse to carry out his orders he does it himself, Manase hears their pleas and these scenes as well of the Captain ordering them to kill reoccur throughout the novel as the events in the cave are revisited throughout the novel as Manase reflects back on them. The soldiers are malnourished and there is a suggestion as Manase suspects of cannibalism, Manase himself seems to show signs of malnutrition, his memories begin to blank out until he finds himself as a prisoner held in the Philippines.  

Following the events of the war, Manase returns home, his parents initially from Tokyo left the city for Chichibu, after his father's death Manase sells the family's books, this small second hand business eventually grows into being a fully fledged book store, all the while Manase's obsession with stones and Geology begins to blossom, although an amateur Manase travels into the mountains to complete his collection, he's assisted by a local Geology teacher who offers expert advice, whilst collecting and polishing his collection Manase reflects on the war, the events in the cave and the Lance Corporeal whose talk of stones inspired Manase to look into stones to unfathom the secret and history of what they may contain. The narrative works in a number of subtle ways, after he is married it begins to evolve to take on the form of a family drama, throughout this though it takes on a broader panorama after one of his sons, the estranged Takaaki, becomes involved in the student upheavals later in the novel, but Manase's experiences in the war are present in the background, at times within the narrative the impression that as Manase is trying to come to terms with the nihilism and horror of his past Takaaki is beginning to enter a deadly political world.

Manase has two sons, Hiroaki shares his father's fascination with stones and they take trips into the mountains collecting them together, Manase is astonished how quickly Hiroaki picks up on the subject when he quizzes him on verifying stone types, in many instances the prose dips into reading like poetical geological descriptions of the stone's history and formation , Manase becomes slightly concerned about his son's solitariness,  not playing together with other children, they spend an almost dreamlike summer together collecting when Hiroaki is discovered murdered at the entrance of a quarry, he has been stabbed. After the murder the family begins to fall apart, his wife starts to drink heavily and blames him for Hiroaki's death, she makes him promise to leave Takaaki alone, the deteriorating relationship arrives at breaking point when Manase tries to take his wife to hospital in an attempt to cure her of her alcoholism, but the attempt goes badly, Takaaki ends up being moved to Manase's sister in laws. After his wife's hospitalization they divorce, on his own Manase's finds himself talking to the shadow he sees of Hiroaki, in his feverish dreams he goes to the quarry where Hiroaki was murdered, looking in between the fence he can see a light inside, looking more closely he makes out a fire and a man sitting next to it, he begins to hear the Captain's voice making his demands to kill the dying men, he wakes in desperation. As the novel reaches it's end the convergence of the two narratives begin to increasingly merge in the quarry where Hiroaki was murdered with that of the cave in Leyte, to try and describe how Okuizumi links the two together would be to deny it of some of it's redemptive power, but it displays something of the miraculous in galvanising the past with the present, and reversely the present with the past, a novel well recommended to seek out.

 

Finishing the novel, through it's name I was reminded of Jim Crace's novel The Gift of Stones, which in turn made me think of Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain and the recent prize winning The Garden of Evening Mists, which I think I might head to in the near future.              

More on Hikaru Okuizumi at J'Lit 

In Mourning for the Summer by Tachihara Michizō

Reading through some of the blogs that I follow and other places on the net, I couldn't help but notice that April is national poetry month, I'd have to admit that I've not looked very thoroughly into this, I was going to but then I remembered reading Simon Armitage, in his book All Points North, that on the occasion of national poetry day the first thing he did was leave the country and take his mother shopping in Reykjavik, I think it was - I read it many years ago, like him I usually find myself being slightly suspicious of national or international events like these. To know that somewhere April has been deemed to be poetry month is enough for me, but here is a poem that I've been thinking about quite a lot recently - In Mourning for the Summer by  Michizō Tachihara , 立原道造, , a collection of his poetry has appeared in English translation in Of Dawn, Of Dusk - The Poetry of   Michizō Tachihara, translated by Robert Epp and Iida Gakuji, published by Yakusha in 2001, I suppose you'd be fortunate if you find an affordable copy.

At the beginning of last month I couldn't help read this poem, although some of it's meanings derive from other times and aspects of it reference different events, I couldn't help from feeling that in parts it felt poignantly relevant. This poem can be found in the anthology From the Country of Eight Islands translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson.   





In Mourning for the Summer

My times that passed away
have turned my heart to gold. So as not to be wounded, so wounds
        may be cured soon,
between yesterday and tomorrow
a deep indigo gulf has been made.

What I tossed away
was a small piece of paper stained with tears.
Amid foamy white waves, one evening,
all, everything, vanished! Following the story line

then I became a traveller and passed many
villages on the moonlit capes, many
hot, dry fields.

If I could remember! I'd like to return once again.
Where? To that place (I have a memory of,
that I waited for and quietly gave up -)





Michizō Tachihara at Ginza via Wikkicommons

Terayama Shuji - Gekkan Taiyō

Gekkan Taiyo is a monthly magazine published by Heibon-sha devoted to profiling figures from the world of Japanese Arts and Literature, issues include illustrative biographies and writings and paintings, in the past it has devoted issues to such writers as; Dazai Osamu, Nakaharu Chuya, and Kyoka Izumi among others. Also past issues have covered subjects as religious art as well as movements within architecture and architectural history. The most recent issue is dedicated to Terayama Shuji, 寺山 修司,  filmmaker, poet, theatre director, this May marks the 30th anniversary of his death in 1983, and also features photography by Moriyama Daido. You can get a preview over at Heibon sha's blog, (in Japanese), this post serves in part as a reminder to myself.

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter



 

 

This year Studio Ghibli are releasing two films, one of them incorporating Hori Tatsuo's short story The Wind Has Risen, the other is an adaption of the 10th century folk story Kaguya hime monogatari, the film will be directed by Isao Takahata who has previously directed other films for Studio Ghibli including one of my favourites - Grave of the Fireflies. Kaguya hime monogatari is also known in English as The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter/Taketori monogatari,竹取物語, like many other folktales and early stories, the identity of the original author of this folktale has never been fully or officially ascertained. Kodansha International published this edition, in it's Illustrated Japanese Classics series back in 1998, a modern rendering by Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Donald Keene with accompanying illustrations by Miyata Masayuki, the book is dual text.

 

The tale begins with the old bamboo cutter walking in the woods, he sees a light coming from one of the stems of bamboo, exploring further he discovers a young woman only three inches high, he also discovers that some surrounding stems are crammed with gold, he takes her home to be raised by his wife and becomes a wealthy man, the couple appear to be childless similar to the couple to be seen in the folktale Momotarō, the woman also seems to be imbued with a strange power, whenever the old man is in pain looking at her dissipates his discomfort, and also he finds that just the vision of her dissolves his angry temperament. After some time with her adoptive parents the woman grows to a normal size and the old bamboo cutter asks a diviner from Mimuroto to name her, he decides on Nayotake no Kaguya-hime, The Shining Princess of the Supple Bamboo. Over time the rumour of Kaguya-hime's radiant beauty begins to circulate and a number of suitors begin to make themselves known, among five of them are Princes and men of high rank. The old bamboo cutter getting more advanced in his age and thinking of her future implores Kaguya-hime to consider some of their proposals, although understanding that she is not his natural daughter she is not obliged to obey his wishes and she appears reluctant to acquiesce. She sets an almost near impossible challenge that; 'If one of the five will show me some special thing I wish to see, I shall know his affections are the noblest and become his wife' , Kaguya-hime's requested five objects include - from India the stone begging bowl of the Buddha, from the sea of Horai the branch from the tree with roots of silver and a trunk of gold, a robe of fur of rats from China, a jewel that shines five colours found in a dragon's neck and lastly; a swallows easy delivery charm.

 

The narrative begins to describe each man's quest in hunting out each of the requested items, each account ending in failure and marking the creation of a particular proverb. As these stories unfold a messenger from the Emperor has been dispatched to the bamboo cutter's house, as he too has heard about Kaguya-hime, but again she refuses to go to the palace, it's arranged that the Emperor will go to the bamboo cutter's house under the pretext that he is hunting in the area just to catch a glimpse of her. Slipping inside the house he grabs Kaguya-hime but she turns to a shadow, she laments that if she were born of this world she would go with him, the two have to be content with a relationship of exchanging letters and poetry.

 

The tale has often been referred to as an early science fiction tale, which maybe taking a slight leap in imagination, although after  Kaguya-hime explains to the old bamboo cutter of her origins from the moon and that soon she will be departing to make her return there, the thought arises that perhaps when it was written the moon may not have carried the same connotations as it might do in today's science riddled world, perhaps more of a celestial one rather than an extraterrestrial one, it'll be interesting to see how the ending appears in the film. Taketori monogatari is an evocative tale, one that ends on a truly monumental fashion that manages to work in an explanation of the naming of one of Japan's most iconic landmarks.

 

some related links ~

 

The World of Masayuki Miyata   (video for akafuji)

 

川端 康成,

 

Kaguya-hime monogatari 

 

online text from the version in Yei Theodora Ozaki's Japanese Fairy Tales

 

 

 

  

 

         

William F. Sibley translation Prize 2012-2013

The winners for this years William F. Sibley award have recently been announced, - Annika A. Culver - Heading for Moscow/Mosukuwa sashite by Nakano Shigeharu and also Andrew Murakami-Smith - Skin of the Pike Conger Eel/Hamo no kawa by Kamizukasa Shoken.

You can read the translations along with introductions at the prize's website.