male actor outside of Japan?

In this post I was wondering who is the most famous contemporary Japanese male actor known outside of Japan, I read this news via Asahi AJW about accolades heaped upon the film Watashi no otoko directed by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, which was recently awarded the Golden George Prize at the 36th Moscow International Film festival, Asano Tadanobu also received an award for best actor for the film, I'll let you search/google which award he won. This news lead me to contemplate who is the most famous male Japanese actor known outside of Japan?, of course I'd also like to know which female actress is considered the most famous. Asano is an actor whose performances I've deeply enjoyed over the years, although I've not seen all of his films, although each time I've seen one of his films I usually find myself readjusting which of his films is my favourite, for me he is like a mixture between Mifune and Eastwood, in his earlier films the less his dialogue the more he seems to express, which is quite a rarity in contemporary cinema. Who might you think?.

Strange Library/Fushigina tosyukan by Murakami Haruki

Recently stumbled upon the news of the appearance in translation of Murakami Haruki's Fushigina Tosyukan/Strange Library, from 2008 with illustrations from Sasaki Maki. No news yet of the translator's identity, but I think this is due to appear before the end of the year, which I'm presuming will also appear simultaneously in an edition from Knopf.

the book at Random House.

the book at Amazon Japan

Maki Sasaki at J'Lit and Japanese Wiki

the book at Amazon U.K

The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories - by Nishimura Kyotaro

Amongst the latest of titles published by Thames River Press is The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories by Nishimura Kyotaro translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, the collection is selected from the lists of the JLPP, which has now seen nearly all of it's titles listed in English translation published, there remains Alfred Birnbaum's translation of Abe Kazushige's Sinsemillas, and Christopher Belton's translation of Mori Eto's Colorful, Stephen Snyder's translation of Maijo Otaro's Asura Girl is due in December and Paul Warham's translation of Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories by Seirai Yuichi, whose title story was awarded the Tanizaki Prize in 2007, is due in January 2015, all of which makes the demise of the JLPP more lamentable.  

Nishimura was awarded the Edogawa Prize in 1965 for Tenshi no Kizuato/A Scar of an Angel and also the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1981 for Shuchakueki satsujin jiken/The Terminal Murder Case, and is also famous for the character Inspector Totsugawa. The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories contains five stories, the first being the title story, The Isle of South Kamui, which sees a doctor, who after having problems with a woman connected to the yakuza takes a post on a remote island south of the island of Kamui. On the ferry crossing to the island the doctor becomes acquainted with a salesman who appears at various moments throughout the story, in some ways he is the only character that the doctor has to be able to rationalize his observations of the island with, on his arrival the doctor observes the 'harvesting' of one of the local species of birds, the Streaked Shearwater, a protected bird which the islanders are permitted to hunt on one day of the year only, the doctor observes the sweating bodies of the women during the bloodletting and the entrails of the birds whose meat is later served for him at his welcome party, the salesman informs him of the licentiousness of the women of the island which the salesman participates in and which the doctor also falls prey to. In it's remoteness the island's customs appear to be rooted in the past, and out of sync with contemporary society they refer to the mainland with its ancient name of Yamato and the electricity on the island is switched off at eight, for guidance in matters of importance they consult an oracle of a mountain temple, but the crux of the story comes to a head with the outbreak of a contagious disease which can be fatal within twenty four hours after contracting it, knowing that the disease was brought on to the island the islanders suspicions focus on the salesman and doctor. With not enough serum for all the doctor is forced into choosing between saving himself or saving his patient, but his actions result in consequences unforeseen and defies the logical pattern of his sense of morality.

Summer Reverie dips into the infatuated psychology of a 17 year old youth, Shinichi, who finds himself drawn to his step mother, set on the coast of Izu, it has the feeling of the taiyo zoku although being brought more up to date and taken up a notch or two by degree. Shinichi looks up to Yukibe, a girl from his school who dropped out and is living on the streets and was involved in the student protests, he observes that, 'she is fighting against something. But I...', at night he fires his rifle, a gift from his father before he died, into the darkness of the sea. Between Shinichi and his step mother is her potential suitor, Takeda, a novelist who is staying in the house, his presence exacerbates Shinichi's temperament, whilst out swimming Shinichi gets caught in an undercurrent, before loosing consciousness he remembers seeing Takeda walking away leaving him to drown. In an erotic dream Shinichi dreams of his step mother naked and of him shooting her, a spot of red appearing on her chest where the bullet strikes which proves to be portentous. Although Nishimura's narratives feel in places quite plaintive, his stories explore the undersides of his character's psychologies and from them appear well crafted stories of the unexpected with turnabouts unforeseen.  

Two of the stories have narratives from detectives trying to solve their case, although at the same time Nishimura delves into the psychologies of both the criminals and detectives alike, especially in the final story entitled The Detective, where a six year old boy is reported as having committed suicide after swallowing rat poison, the child's mother is an aspiring actress and the case has ramifications for the detective's own history and echoes of the accidental death of his own son on the day that he and his wife separated. House of Cards follows a detective on the case of a murdered bar girl and a dissolute poet. The narrative in The Monkey That Clapped It's Hands comes from a journalist, Sawaki, investigating the suicide of a young man, Shinkichi, who had travelled from Hokkaido to Hokuriku for work, discovering that before his suicide Shinkichi had written three letters to three different people, Sawaki tracks out the three to find out if the contents of the letters will offer any clue for the motive of Shinkichi's suicide. The story has a soulful quality to it, reading like a distant portrait of a young man's dislocation from nature, from the rural to the city and subtle connections could be made between the wind up toy monkey at it's centre and the loneliness of the mannequin like life Shinkichi finds himself in. During his investigations Sawaki is accompanied by Shinkichi's mother, Toku whose grieving is subdued until the end of the story, the story turns over some subtle themes , the recruitment and assimilation of rural workers into the loneliness of city life, which also surfaces in another story, and also of the media's searching manipulation of the unfolding story to get a saleable angle on events, which again is a theme apparent that features in a number of the stories in this interesting collection.

The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories at Thames River Press

          

Last Words From Montmartre - Qiu Miaojin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Reading Last Words from Montmartre has been a profound experience, although an epistolary novel in it's presentation, Qiu directs us at the beginning that we can read the letters in any sequence, over varying perspectives it begins to become difficult to separate the voice of the author with that of the novel's narrator, in relation to Japanese literary terms perhaps it wouldn't be far off in likening it to being in the style of a Watakushi shōsetsu. this is the impression I have after reading it. Situated in Paris the setting does switch at times, to Taipei then to Tokyo, briefly to London?, like Qiu herself the narrator is fascinated with Dazai, Mishima and other Japanese authors are referenced, Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki as well as the films of Theodoros Angelopoulous and briefly the sculptor Paul Landowski. Initially the letters explain a break up between the narrator and Xu, her lover, the panoramic scope of vision of the narrative spins around glimpsing lives of those in proximity to the narrator, the central point of the narrative shifts, so an uncertainty remains, although fragmentary it's lucidity is piercing, it's intimacy and honesty unflinching, it's poignancy totally disarming. The novel is translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich who also gives an afterword which gives a sociological and historical background to the literary scene in Taiwan leading up to the book's first publication in 1996, the year after Qiu Miaojin's suicide in Paris.

Undoubtedly Last Words From Montmartre is a novel that will attract a great deal of discussion, I'm still reeling from reading it, and at the moment all I feel I could say about it would be in some ways to reiterate the description of it over at it's page at nyrb, so for now I'll just redirect you there and recommend the book without reservation, hopefully I'll be more articulate after reading Notes of A Crocodile, which was awarded a posthumous China Times Honorary Prize for Literature in 1995, and is also forthcoming from nyrb in a translation by Bonnie Huie, an excerpt and introduction of which is available via Kyoto Journal, but no doubt Last Words of Montmartre will be re-read before that time. Finishing his afterword Ari Larissa Heinrich observes that 'Perhaps no writer since Mishima has so mercilessly ripped the mask off the writer's true self.', it's really difficult to disagree, a landmark and monumental book.

Last Words from Montmartre at nyrb

at amazon

  

The Miner - Natsume Sōseki

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Kōfu/The Miner first appeared in serialization in 1908 in the pages of the Asahi Shimbun, the narration is from a nineteen year old youth who after being caught between two women, Tsuyako and Sumie, finds himself wandering out of Tokyo through a forest of endless pine trees with the looming intention of throwing himself into a crater at Mt. Asama, or alternatively off Kegon Falls, in his afterword Jay Rubin mentions of the true character whose story Sōseki used as source material for aspects of the book, reading this is in some ways to be reminded of Kusamakura and of Fujimura Misao, finishing The Miner reiterates the hope for an explorative biography of Sōseki which would shed further insights into the stories behind his novels. In some descriptions of The Miner the book has been described as a precursor to Beckett and Joyce including sections which incorporate a stream of conscious style, this is probably mostly evident in the first two thirds of the book, although the reflective nature of the narrator's thoughts are never distant from the course of his describing the unfolding events of the novel, some of these reflections concern his evolving consciousness of his place in society, or more broadly the nature and follies of man, many of these instances of reflection here project over a number of pages and are prompted in a number of differing ways and scenarios, the line of a mountain that dissolves and blurs with that of the sky, the narrator observes that he finds himself in an 'out of focus world', a moment disembarking from a train, another theme that appears in the novel, reiterated by the narrator is the notion of the undefinable character of man and of the concluding observation that there is nothing more unreliable than man.

In some ways it feels that The Miner could be in part a bildungsroman due to the young age of the narrator, there is a sense we're sharing his rite of passage, early in the novel he reveals the fact that his period at the mine was only temporary, so the narrative comes partially from a perspective of hindsight, another aspect that remains slightly obscure is the nature and true scenario of his problem with the two women, Tsuyako and Sumie, it feels very much that perhaps he is the guilty party. In his afterword Jay Rubin observes that there were two Sōseki's, one humorous, the other an intellectual tragedian, and there is a little of both to be found in The Miner, perhaps more of the latter with an added percentage of being of a philosophical and sociological enquiry, with an emphasis on the absurd, it feels a little incredulous to contemplate that this translation has just passed being over a quarter of century old, there is the inclusion of phrases like; highfalutin, and in another scene where the boss of the mine, Mr Hara, instructs the narrator's guide, Hatsu, when after returning with the narrator from a tour of the dark depths of the mine, to sit down and 'take a load off', it feels slightly difficult to reconcile these phrases to a novel from 1908, Rubin's afterword and notes throughout the text remain greatly enlightening and informative.

It's tempting to read The Miner with the idea that  Sōseki is using the mine as a metaphor as the narrator explores his thoughts about the meaning of his existence and future, it feels like we are briefly visiting a darker or baser denizen of humanity amongst the squalid conditions and ways of the miners, another aspect is of the narrator's metropolitan background experiencing for the first time the provincial life, in some ways this is a common scenario that appears in a number of other of Sōseki's novels, of the main character or protagonist relating their experiences when travelling to a new location or surrounding, it occurs in Botchan and also in Sanshiro. Reading The Miner is to be reminded that although there are a number of similar themes usually running through Sōseki's novels, the narrative styles used in his novels are markedly different, in his introduction to Light and Dark John Nathan observes of the scale of interiority that the novel incorporates, but there remains a feeling that in The Miner that this is more so, it feels that The Miner is more allegorical than metaphor in parts it feels like it could be veering into a Kafkaesque landscape, the mine, it appears could be viewed as Sōseki's Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, the narrator can't move forward until he has journeyed through the darkness of the mine, there is a hybrid of different motives to his narrative, a sense that the narrator is assuaging his guilt and of his on going interpretation of the nature of the world at large, but the novel offers no redemptive quality, the narrator does not turn to the mine as an alternative to suicide, it's not until he encounters an older miner in the darkness, Yasu, when he becomes lost after Hatsu, his guide, scurries away from him that his thoughts begin to formulate into a concrete coherent course of action. In Yasu, the narrator sees a projected mirror image of himself older, one learnt from experience, Yasu too had come from a comfortable and educated Tokyo family and with a crime in his past a feeling that he is unable to leave the mine and the fate he has chosen, the narrator contemplates Yasu and the possibility of his sacrificed future in the outside world - 'Had society killed Yasu, or had Yasu done something that society could not forgive?'. Yasu offers to pay the narrator's return fare to Tokyo, but the narrator is reprieved from working in the depths of the mine due to a slight of fate, already we know from earlier in the novel that he won't spend the rest of his days at the mine, reading Sōseki often feels like experiencing the narrative unroll perhaps as in a modern emakimono.

Another more experimental aspect of this novel which surfaces from time to time is the narrator's scepticism of the literary worthiness of the events occurring in the novel, this also overspills in relating aspects of the literary worthiness of his own character and actions, and by turns in an equal number of places he expresses his scepticism with learned academia, which he often sees as expressing itself with a lot of 'hot air', was this perhaps included in reaction to the disdain Sōseki received after choosing to give up his university post and write for the Asahi?. In some ways it's none too surprising to see how The Miner is one of Murakami Haruki's favourite novels, as literary worthiness, (or junbungaku-ness?), appears to be a bone of contention that many critics often level with Murakami's writing, much of Rubin's afterword is taken up discussing the criticism levelled at Sōseki's writings at the time of their appearance. As 2016 and then 2017 approaches no doubt hopefully this will see an increase of interest in Sōseki, perhaps this too will also see an increase with the availability of all of his works.