Monday 24 June 2013

Rain in the Wind - Stories























After posting on the Kawabata Prize recently Rain in the Wind - Stories by Maruya Saiichi seems like an intriguing collection  to turn to, translated by Dennis Keene and published as part of Kodansha's Japan's Modern Writers series, although the collection could've been subtitled as being a novella and three stories as the longest story Rain in the Wind amounts to being close to 125 pages. On the jacket the Times Literary Supplement describe Maruya as, "A fascinating marriage of Borges and Nabokov with Japanese literary tradition", both of these authors are referenced to in the story Tree Shadows, the narrative is one that is relayed and passed between it's numerous characters although the whole is narrated by an unnamed narrator, sometimes interjecting to change its course or to pass and link it between characters. Through this sequence of linked narratives the motif of the shadows of trees invariably flickers in and out of sight. The story opens with the narrator trying to source the start of his obsession with tree shadows in particular he prefers those that appear vertically rather than horizontally, he reflects back to his adolescent viewing of Parisian street scenes painted by Utrillo, although he can't detect them there. Sieving his memories further he begins to realise that it's become a process similar to that of 'the impetus for the creation of fiction' which begins to open the story into another field of enquiry reflecting on the nature of fiction writing and the reliability of memory, there are further occasions in the story where Maruya tentatively explores other notions and themes, among them illegitimacy.

The ruminations continue in that the narrator is confident that he had read a story by Nabokov featuring tree shadows, he searches his collection and consults friends who have translated him but the story remains elusive, perhaps the narrator had written it and abandoned completing it thinking that it was too similar with one of Nabokov's?, the narrator notes remembering the emotional release in writing the story nonetheless. This forgetfulness on the part of the narrator begins to bring into question his reliability, but it reads being more of a case of literary amnesia, these self cross examinations and slight literary detective work lead to the, (fictional), writer Furuya Ippei, whose surname sounds strikingly similar to Maruya's. Furuya came to literature through journalism and teaching French at university level, his style and influence is affected from novelists both East and West from the eighteenth century. The narrative gives a panoramic description of Furuya's study room, unconnected items, the writer searching for scrapbooks for a photograph of the shadow of a tree to assist in writing an intricate subplot of one of his novels featuring the infidelity between a business man and a photographer's wife which the narrative dips into briefly before following Furuya as he begins to further consider tree shadow in his books and the relationship between himself and his characters.

There's further forays into the narratives of a couple more of Furuya's novels, The Ocean Current Bottle, which follows the illegitimate younger brother of a scholar of ancient Japanese literature, who fresh out of prison bungles an attempt at blackmail, a power cut interceding which provides the opportunity for some deeper life reflecting. Also the story Shooting a Butterfly, which follows the affair of a politician who looses consciousness after a fall, seeing the shadow of trees projected onto a wall he initally thinks that he is at an outdoor cinema. Real time reality begins to re-enter the story when Furuya is asked to give a lecture on the occasion of an anniversary of the creation of his hometown being made a municipal borough, Furuya re-edits a lecture contrasting the I - novel with that of the family memoir making a study with French and English books. The lecture includes referencing a Japanese pre-war novel, (the author of which Furuya decides against divulging), whose main protagonist discovers that he is the product of a union between his mother and grandfather, and he recounts a famous folklorist who vehemently believed his mother was someone else, scene by scene it feels that Maruya is pulling us into contemplating the scenario that perhaps that we take the identity of our parents for granted, what if they weren't who we presumed them to be?, these familiar identities exist in a confined framework. Before the lecture Furuya receives a letter from an elderly woman of his hometown, an admirer of his writing who requests a meeting after the lecture, at first he declines but he learns from another letter from the woman's family that she has been taken ill, and in what he suspects is a case of slight emotional bribery he relents to spare half an hour to meet the woman. This is a masterly story, Maruya's inclusion of the tree shadow motif and linking narratives creates a mesh of recollections that his characters find themselves staring into to unlock the truths of their pasts and by degrees their futures. The narratives overlap when Furuya finds himself staring at the shadow of a bonsai zelkova tree in the old woman's antique filled house and learns that perhaps his past was not how he believed it to be.

The narrative of the opening story, The Gentle Downhill Slope, is probably one of the more straightforward out of the four stories, following a young man's initiation into city life and through it, as he has come from the country, an initiation into the wider world, he stays with a cousin who likes to drink and visit brothels, the narrator on the other hand wants to study until he finds himself the attention of a gang of street robbers. The story is set in the immediate aftermath of the war, some of the buildings and cityscapes are described as being burnt. The second story I'll Buy That Dream, has a slight Joycean tinge to it,  narrated by a prostitute/hostess, Rika, it follows her relationship with a professor as she tries to keep her past away from him after telling him that she had plastic surgery. The professor wonders what she looked like previous to her operation and pressurizes her into showing her a picture of herself before.

The title story Rain in the Wind/Yokoshigure appeared originally in 1988 and if you are interested at all in Japanese poetry perhaps you might feel in some way that this story has been lying in wait for you, especially if your interests are in the free verse haiku of Taneda Santōka, the narrator is a scholar of medieval Japanese poetry who is told a story by his father who on his death bed recalls an encounter he had when travelling to Dōgo, (also the location for Soseki's Botchan), in Shikoku with a friend, Kurokawa, and a meeting with a mendicant priest. After reading a selection of free verse haiku and learning of the appearance of Taneda and of his movements around 1939 the narrator pieces together that perhaps that the poet and the priest his father and Kurokawa had met were the same man. The narrator although not at first interested in free verse haiku begins to find himself immersed in the poems searching amongst them to locate any reference to the meeting in Dōgo. After his father and then Kurokawa pass away the narrator only has the poems and studies of Taneda to rely upon for his detective work, in particular the narrators curiosity falls on the phrase yokoshigure, wind driven rain, which seems to stand out as being a cryptic clue. The story reads as a detailed piece of literary detective fiction exploring many associated themes, in particular those associated with Taneda Santōka, exploring his suicidal aspirations, the narrator constantly shifts his perspectives in the reading of his poems searching for clues.


Saiichi Maruya was born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1925 and won many of Japan's most prestigious literary awards including the Akutagawa, Tanizaki and Noma Prizes, he passed away in October of 2012.

     



       

Monday 17 June 2013

Kobayashi Issa - Oraga Haru/The Year of My Life

15.06.2013 marked the 250th birthday of Kobayashi Issa, although I wanted to mark the day by posting on the actual day, the opportunity passed me by in the blink of an eye.

Kobayashi Issa's Oraga Haru - The Year of My Life in a translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa, (translator of the Penguin edition of Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches), is available to read in streaming format over at the out of print titles page at University of California Press.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

Strange Tale of Panorama Island

 
 
 
The reviews that I've seen of Strange Tale of Panorama Island have managed to steer away from divulging plot details, as it's novella size in length it makes it difficult not to give one thing away without giving away another, then another, so perhaps this post will be kept to leaning towards the impressionistic. Strange Tale of Panorama Island is translated by Elaine Kazu Gerbert who also provides an introduction that contextualizes many aspects that the novella features and looks also at the stories that inspired Ranpo, as you'd expect Poe features largely and in particular the story The Domain of Arnheim from 1847. Although I'm uncertain when it first appeared in Japanese translation a part of me was expecting to see mentioned The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G Wells but perhaps the only relation to these two works is in name only, The Island of Doctor Moreau deals perhaps with a philosophy and enquiry which is heading in an altogether different direction, although it could be said there is some overlap of ideas and themes, the human manipulation of the natural world, where in The Island of Doctor Moreau the initial horror is in the physical aberrations in Strange Tale of Panorama Island it tends to lean more to the psychological, that said there are moments of distilled horror here.
 
Strange Tale of Panorarma Island reads very sequentially, the book opens in describing the present state of a little known island that the locals name as Okinoshima which has been the site of a construction project somewhat resembling an entertainment park that has fallen in to a state of abandoned decay, with this description set up Ranpo begins to work his way back in telling how this has come to be. The main protagonist is the dissolute student/writer Hirosuke Hitomi who dreams that if he were to come into a fortune he would one day work on constructing his own utopia and bring it in to being and through a devious and dark deception he manages to have a fortune at his disposal as head of the very wealthy Komoda family. Hirosuke seems to have succeeded in his plan although Chiyoko, the wife of the head of the Komoda family, Genzaburo, who has recently passed away is the only person who'll maybe put his scheme into jeopardy. 
 
The plot line is a relatively simple one, as the novella comes into it's own the reader is taken on a phantasmagorical journey towards it's inevitable and horrifying culmination, the reader senses that it'll finish on a grizzly note, but the way that it does is spectacular in it's abruptness and originality. On it's way, via underwater kaleidoscopic viewing tunnels and rides aboard swans that perhaps aren't real swans the narrative threatens to displace our faith and confidence in the dimensions of the external world, Hirosuke's creation distorts natural laws of perception which could be interpreted as reflecting his own warped personality, at points throughout the narrative Ranpo describes imagery and events that might potentially provoke abnormal desires of his characters and also as he hints within the reader. The novella was originally published in 1926 and it's interesting to contemplate the plethora of reactions that it would have provoked in the readers of its day, Ranpo's narrative voice is one whose influence arches across a broad spectrum of Japanese fiction, not only of horror but also in detective fiction, all underscored with forays into penetrating psychological explorations of a darker hue, here it could be said that among other concerns portrays the notion of adoptive identities as well as exploring the meaning of the transposition of the artistic impulse into the physical world and its consequences, and operating on another level a tale of megalomania that veers onto a path far off the ordinary.
 
Elaine Kazu Gerbert's introduction is both informative as well as provoking, prompting the reader to delve further into reading more extensively from the era.
    
           
 
Strange Tale of Panorama Island at University of Hawai'i Press  
 
          

Monday 3 June 2013

Japanese Literature in English

Via Three Percent - translator Allison Markin Powell, has recently launched Japanese Literature in English, a website that features a searchable database of translations, searches are available via author and book title and also ingeniously by subject, along with this the site also looks like it will feature book and translation news.

Japanese Literature in English