This may be the last #6Degrees post that I do for the next couple of months, since I will be wandering around in other people’s homes and may have less access to the internet or a laptop, nor have much time to think about blogging. But I couldn’t let this one go by without contributing, although the starting point this month is a book I haven’t even heard about, much less read. It’s Michelle Kretzer’s Theory and Practice, which (despite the very academic title) is apparently an auto-fiction novel about student life in Melbourne in the 1980s/90s.
I’ve often said I’m not a huge fan of autofiction as it is written nowadays, but I make an exception for Dazai Osamu’s Self Portraits, notoriously self-deprecating, with a dark humour all his own.
Dazai’s stories, whether more or less fictional, were published as magazine stories, and I’ll stick to this type of literature with my second link, another firm favourite for the darker pictures lurking beneath the humorous surface, jokes with teeth of Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons.
The best description of Shirley Jackson’s humour stems from a French expression, ‘elle rit jaune’ (she laughs yellow), courtesy of my lovely friend Emma, aka Book Around the Corner. So my next link is to something that literally has ‘yellow’ in the title. Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley doesn’t seem to be much discussed nowadays, but it is a delightful satire of the self-absorption and pretensions of artists and social snobs.
The satire and the bunch of ill-matched people on holiday together reminds me a lot of Mihail Sebastian’s play The Holiday Game, which I’ve translated in its entirety but have yet to see either published or produced on a London stage.
I’ve often compared Sebastian’s plays to Arthur Schnitzler‘s, so the Austrian author will form my next link, with his novella Late Fame, which offers such a great warning about the dangers of believing all the hype about one’s self.
My final link is to yet another story about the downsides of fame, and a book that I should revisit, as it’s been a couple of decades since I read it: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, about a famous actress suffering a mental breakdown.
So this month I’ve travelled to Japan, Vermont, the Cotswolds, the Carpathians, Viennese coffee houses and California… phew! No wonder I feel exhausted! But I’ve generally stuck to authors I know and love, and books that I’ve read.
Is it May and have the bluebells faded already? What better way to celebrate this not-too-shabby Bank Holiday weather than with a new monthly 6 Degrees of Separation, as hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best? This month we start our series of literary links with a book called Rapture by Emily Maguire. I haven’t read it, nor heard of the author, but I believe it tells the story of so-called Pope Joan, which was one of those ‘fake news’ stories of the Middle Ages. A well-educated woman disguised herself as a man and subsequently infiltrated the Catholic Church hierarchy and even became Pope – nowadays it has mostly been debunked as fiction, but wouldn’t it have been fun if it had been true?
I’ll make it easy for myself with the first link in the chain, namely a book that also has ‘rapture’ in its title, but used in a very different way. The Rapture by Liz Jensen also has some religion at its core, but is in fact a mix of speculative fiction and psychological thriller, with a young girl labelled a teenage killer, who claims she can foresee natural disasters. To quote from the blurb: ‘Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator, or could she be the harbinger of imminent global cataclysm on a scale never seen before?’ Creepy and closer to reality than ever before.
My second link is to another book about natural disasters, one written a few years after the major earthquake and tsunami in Japan which led to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima: Tsushima Yuko’s Wildcat Dome, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. I’m currently reading it so can’t say too much about it, other than that the radiation and end of the world feeling is just one strand of a complex story.
I’m sure that if you’ve been reading my blog, you won’t be surprised to see that my next link is to Tsushima’s famous (or should that be ‘notorious’) father, probably my favourite Japanese author Dazai Osamu and his last completed novel Setting Sun (translated by Donald Keene), a cynical sort of family saga, which is not as well-known in the English speaking world as No Longer Human. Part of Dazai’s novel and the character of Kazuko are based on the diaries of Ota Shizuko, with whom he had had an affair (and even a child) around the time of writing the novel. I suppose Ota should consider herself lucky that he only ‘borrowed’ her diaries for inspiration and didn’t invite her to commit double love suicide with him, which he did soon after with another mistress.
Another writer who was inspired by his female partner’s diaries was of course F. Scott Fitzgerald in his first novel The Beautiful and Damned. His wife Zelda commented acerbically: ‘It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.’
Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the ‘Flapper era’ always reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the Bright Young Things of the same period in Britain.
I used to think that Evelyn was a woman writer, since I’d never heard the name used for a man when I was growing up, so my final link will be to an author who may also have confused readers initially with their gender. Jan Morris was born James Morris and published under the masculine name until undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1972. She discusses the complicated and long process and the effect it had on her family in her autobiography Conundrum.
It’s been a criss-crossing of oceans and time periods this month: the United States, Britain and Japan each appearing more than once. Where will your literary travels take you?
Time for the monthly #SixDegreesOfSeparation meme hosted by Kate, and this month the starting point for our random but carefully planned literary associations is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, which won the Booker Prize in 2023, I haven’t read the book, because those of us who have lived through a dystopian dictatorship don’t generally like reading books about fictional dictatorships, which all sound either too tame or too excessive (voyeuristic).
So my first link is to a Czech author who did actually experience living under a dictatorship. His book about a dissident artist forced to become a garbage-collector was banned in his home country until 1989: Ivan Klima’s Love and Garbage, translated into English by Ewald and Oscar Osers (and probably out of print).
A very simple and direct link to my next choice, Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, which I read in my teens and found very titillating at the time. Lawrence does tend to go a little wild when describing sexual tensions, very un-British of him. I can imagine that Virginia Woolf felt a bit squeamish about some of those scenes, but her review of another book of his, Sons and Lovers, is quite on-point: ‘Comparing him again with Proust, one feels that he echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past, of the present save as it affects the future. As a writer, this lack of tradition affects him immensely. The thought plumps directly into his mind; up spurt the sentences as round, as hard, as direct as water thrown out in all directions by the impact of a stone. One feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or for its effect upon the architecture of the sentence.’
So of course there is only one way I can go for my next connection. It has been ages since I read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (mostly in French), and I’m tempted to approach the new translation into English by Oxford World’s Classics. The second volume, in the translation of the lovely Charlotte Mandell, is coming out this month.
There is also a Japanese book with a brand-new translation which I haven’t been able to resist buying (but haven’t read yet): Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, although I’ve compared the two previous translations of this book.
But all of the books in this chain so far have been rather dark and obsessive, so let me turn instead to one of my favourite comic novels, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. I have read various books in his Discworld series, but this was my first one and it coincided with a time when I was writing a Ph.D. in religious anthropology, so it was the perfect distraction.
I’ll end the chain with another novel about a religious community, namely The Bell by Iris Murdoch. I feel like it’s been far too long since I last read her, and want to revisit some of her books, including this one.
So my chain has been replete with rather well-known books this month, and it has taken us from Czechoslovakia to Britain to France to Japan to Discworld and back to Gloucestershire in England. Where will your literary travels take you?
I remain very impressed with Susan Osborne’s (better known as A Life in Books) way of summarising her reading year by seasons. You can read her Part One, Part Two, Part Three and even Part Four of her 2024 summary, and I hope she won’t mind that I’ll be stealing (I mean, of course, borrowing) her idea to summarise my own year, both in terms of reading and with other cultural events more generally. I didn’t have a target total number of books in mind, but as it happens, almost every section has roughly six books, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of them have been in translation (or other languages).
Part 1 covers January to March 2024, so of course it will skew heavily towards Japanese and French literature (January in Japan and French February). In fact, all of my favourite reads during this period were in translation, partly because I’ve found books in translation more interesting than the ones published in English and have therefore read far more of them.
My favourite Japanese reads were, unsurprisingly, by two favourite authors: Dazai Osamu’s The Flowers of Buffoonery (one I’d somehow never read before) and Tsushima Yuko’s Territory of Light (just as impactful upon rereading). For French literature, I was amused and exhilarated by the exuberance of Mathias Enard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guildand deeply impressed by the translation acrobatics of Frank Wynne. I also returned to one of my favourite recent women writers from France, Maylis de Kerangal, her novella Eastbound was translated this year but I read it in the French original.
I also got involved in the International Booker Shadow Panel, although most of the books on the longlist did not impress me all that much, but all three of our Shadow Panel winners made it to to the top of my reading list in March. These were: Not a River by Selva Almada, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and White Nights by Urzula Honek.
It was also an extremely busy, happy and productive winter period, watching lots of films and plays, socialised with my sons and other friends, translated my first full-length novel from German, and even attended a memoir writing course, which I greatly enjoyed. Now that I’ve been blessed with a Kasper of my own, I had to rewatch The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, of course, one of Werner Herzog’s great films. My greatest ‘event’, however, was leaving my day job at the university and choosing to work full-time on Corylus Books and other freelance projects. I miss my wonderful colleagues and the iconic building, which has appeared on film many times. It has not been the easiest of times financially (so if you know anyone looking for a translator or editor, or an executive coach or trainer, please point them to my For Hire page), but it has really been worth it in terms of health and stress levels.
Early July means one thing only (in addition to UK elections): it’s time for the monthly 6 Degrees meme, hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best. We all start out with the same book, link to six others and see where we end up!
This month we start withKairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which won the International Booker Prize. It was not my favourite book on the shortlist, but I did like it – and said at the time that I couldn’t be entirely objective about this book, as it is so closely linked to my own experience of East vs. West. I also was invited to talk about Kairos on a podcast and loved every minute of it.
Another book that I’ve opined about exhaustively in a video was my beloved Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (also translated as A Shameful Life), as part of five Wafer Thin Books recommendations.
The first story I ever attempted to translate from Japanese was one of Dazai Osamu’s, so the link is to another author whom I wanted to translate very early on (I must have been about 14), namely Franz Kafka’s Complete Short Stories (‘Der Heizer’ was the first one I attempted). The less said about the results, the better!
A little later I discovered the equally mind-altering drug that is Borges (who also translated Kafka, incidentally) and his Collected Fictions. I was utterly delighted to see my older son discovering and loving him at roughly the same age I did (nineteen).
I may have influenced some of my sons’ reading, but they’ve also influenced me. I’d never previously read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror(nor much else by him) until my younger son got really interested in this author.
My next link is to horror – and the rather contained, something-brewing-beneath-the-surface, unsettling type of horror written by Shirley Jackson, most notably in The Haunting of Hill House, which has one of the best opening paragraphs in the English language.
The final link is to another brilliant opening paragraph in an English novel, this time Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means. And I’m pleased that I managed to link to two women authors as well this time, and it didn’t turn out to be an exclusively male list.
This month I’ve travelled from Berlin to Japan, to (possibly) Prague, to Argentina, Rhode Island and Vermont, and finally post-war London. Without setting out to do so, I also happen to have featured a few of my favourite authors. Where will your Six Degrees take you?
After a rather lacklustre January in Japan last year, I determined I’d stick to tried and tested authors, maybe even rereads this year. So of course I start with my favourite Japanese author of them all: Dazai Osamu. I know I’ve already filled your ears with his praises on multiple occasions: a new translation of his seminal novel Ningen Shikkaku, his memoirs and non-fiction writings, his tongue-in-cheek rewriting of fairytales, even a brief mention of his ‘war’ novel The Setting Sun (which I should reread). I’m running out of books by him that I haven’t read, the two this year are probably the last (although I haven’t reviewed them all, so there’s still some material for future years). [I will refer to author names throughout following the Japanese convention of surname first, first name afterwards.]
The Flowers of Buffoonery(published in 1935, translated by Sam Bett and published by New Directions in 2023).
The main protagonist Ōba Yōzō is the same (or at least shares a name and some of the life history) of the protagonist in No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku), so is often described as a glimpse into the early life of that character (and of course contains autobiographical elements, as with most of his work). It is set in a sanatorium in the seaside town of Kamakura, where the main protagonist is hospitalised after he survives a double suicide attempt. He is in trouble with the police and has severely displeased his older brother, because his lover died in the attempt and he is considered guilty of at the very least abetting, if not murdering her. Yōzō seems to be taking it all quite well, especially when his friends Hida and Kosuge show up and cause a bit of disturbance in the medical establishment with their boisterous spirits, drinking and card-playing.
Although the story is largely told in third person, the author (who appears to be Yōzō himself) makes frequent sly asides, breaking the fourth wall and commenting on what he’s just written, veering from the vainglorious assessment of his work as a masterpiece to completely rubbishing it. This metafictional aspect of the work annoyed many critics at the time, but self-irony is very characteristic of Dazai’s style, the only way that he can address bleak themes. His clear, playful, ostensibly simple style is conveyed very well in Sam Bett’s translation, although according to this article in which Sam talks about his translation choices, Sam’s own style is closer to the more ornate Mishima rather than the pared-down Dazai.
Here is the author mocking his own habit of weaving this direct address to readers into his writing:
Time to face the facts. This pattern of inserting myself as the narrator between scenes, so that I can burden you with endless rants that no one needs to hear, has an ulterior motive. I’ve been exploiting my narrative position to hoodwink readers, using this first-person narrator to infuse the work with idiosyncratic nuance. I was arrogant enough to think that I could be the first Japanese author to employ such a sublimely Western style. And yet I failed. But no, even this confession of failure can be counted as part of the novel’s grand design. So you see, I can’t be trusted. Don’t believe a single word I say.
I rather enjoyed this unconventional style (yes, it has been overdone in recent years in books but especially in film/TV). Contrary to what the author thinks, I don’t think it’s unusual in Japanese literature (Sei Shonagon comes to mind). But it’s good to remind ourselves that all of Dazai’s work features an unreliable narrator, that we are never quite sure what to believe. Nevertheless, in this earlier work, optimism seems to be winning: the younger Yōzō (and Dazai) poke fun at dramatic suicidal impulses or great depressive moments. The novella ends with the friends ascending to the summit of a hill, ‘our one remaining source of hope, however illusory’, even though the supposedly perfect view of Mt Fuji is marred by clouds.
Home to Tsugaru (aka Return to Tsugaru), written in 1944, translated by Shelley Marshall in 2022.
Dazai Osamu chose to stay largely silent during WW2 rather than write war propaganda; however, in 1944 he was commissioned to write a sort of travel guide to the Tsugaru region (where he was born) by the government as part of a series about the different regions of Japan. Set at the northernmost tip of the main island of Honshu, this area was viewed as terribly rural and backward at the time (and is still known mainly for its apples). During the war it was of strategic importance, because of its proximity to Hokkaido via the Tsugaru Strait, so Dazai takes great pleasure in repeatedly stating that he cannot talk about certain things, that it’s classified, that he could not visit a certain area because it was under military control etc.
Tsugaru Strait, with Hokkaido in the distance.
Those who commissioned the work must have been very disappointed with the result, because Dazai describes very little about the geography, history or customs of the region – and what little he does say is largely cobbled together from other works (including his own earlier writing). Instead, he wanders around, trying to reconnect with old friends, drinking an awful lot, eating their food while protesting that he’s not really hungry, exploring his family’s roots and even, quite movingly, seeking out his old nurse (a story that has some similarities yet is markedly different from the reunion with a family maid in his Self-Portraits). He calls this ‘a journey of love’. Yet, although this is funnier, and much more light-hearted than his famous novels, there are some asides that will sound familiar in tone:
As I age, I remember to be a little more reserved… Being grown is miserable… Why is so much discretion required. There is no answer because too much treachery and humiliation abound. The discovery that people are treacherous is the first theme when a youth moves into adulthood. An adult is a youth who has been backstabbed.
One major issue that I had with this book, however, and which impaired my reading enjoyment, is the translation. I don’t like criticizing translators’ work in general, because it can be a matter of personal taste (and because I’m grateful that they enable me to read books to which I’d otherwise have no access), but I thought this translation did not reflect Dazai’s limpid, witty and carefully-crafted (but deceptively simple) style. It felt convoluted and unclear, and I’ll have to go back to this book in a different translation to see if I understand and appreciate it more. There is an excellent review of this book (albeit in a translation by James Westerhoven) on this blog.
I so much enjoyed my foray into Dazai’s work that I couldn’t resist continuing it in an entertaining format, namely via the Bungo Stray Dogs light novel (aka YA novels) series.
Asagiri Kafka is a Japanese manga writer and novelist who is clearly passionate about literature (both Japanese and Western, as his assumed first name demonstrates – Kafka). His most famous creation is Bungo Stray Dogs, about the Armed Detective Agency (all featuring famous authors as detectives such as Tanizaki, Akutgawa, Yosano Akiko) who are protecting Yokohama from the ruthless Port Mafia and other villains (including Dostoevsky, F.S. Fitzgerald, and many others). Dazai Osamu is one of the most interesting and mysterious of the detectives and the two ‘light’ novels (equivalent to YA novels) that I read are prequels to the manga series and show his back story.
In the first book Osamu Dazai’s Entrance Exam, the strait-laced, serious and diligent detective Kunikida Doppo (author and poet who in real life died a year before Dazai was born) is partnered with newbie Dazai and at first they seem like chalk and cheese. Kunikida even suspects him of being a traitor or at the very least profoundly unserious, but Dazai shows remarkable detective skills and psychological insights. His ‘supernatural’ power is that he is able to neutralise other people’s abilities, but he remains an enigma throughout, never revealing more than he has to, although he always seems very voluble, sociable, a womaniser and a drinker. There are lots of clever little allusions to both authors’ work and life, and these become even more satisfying in the next novel.
In the second novel,Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era, we go back even further in time and discover that Dazai was once an executive in the Port Mafia. This book makes much of the real-life friendship between three authors who were contemporaries and often grouped together as the ‘Decadent School’ in Japan: Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango and Oda Sakunosuke, but it also shows how Dazai goes from the dark side to the side of those fighting crime at his friend’s dying behest. It’s all a bit of fun, and of course, we can’t take the characterisation of these ‘author-detectives’ too seriously, but there are so many delicious little details which a bibliophile will just love.
Oda really did die just a year before Dazai, who blamed the literary establishment and critics for his death. Oda really did love curry rice and mentions it in his writing, and a restaurant in Osaka boasts about his connection to their most famous dish. And let’s not forget that famous photo of Dazai propped up on a chair at Bar Lupin, where the three friends liked to meet. You can still visit Bar Lupin nowadays (off Ginza in Tokyo) – it’s been renovated, but they kept the chair and counter where Dazai sat and it’s a favourite place with punters for taking pictures (perhaps more Bungo Stray Dog fans rather than Dazai fans, but hey, I’ll take that!)
Hasn’t this been the longest month ever? Cold, dark, busy at work, but not quite as miserable as the months preceding it because at least we have all been healthy. I’ve mostly snuggled in my burrow and read – even more than usual, now that I’ve decided not to worry about reviewing every book. 18 books this month, of which 7 fit with the January in Japan challenge (although one of the seven was not written by a Japanese author, but was a non-fiction book about the Japanese criminal world). Nine books in translation, three non-fiction books, ten by women writers, four that could fit under the crime fiction label. A good mix that I can live with.
Here are the books that I have reviewed this month (I am putting the Japanese author names in the Japanese order – surname first):
Kawakami Mieko: All the Lovers in the Night, Miura Shion: The Great Passage, Miyashita Natsu: The Forest of Wool and Steel, Lee Wei-Jing: The Mermaid’s Tale in one post on loneliness, alienation and finding connection through a passion for something
I don’t usually rush after the hyped books, but I was intrigued by Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and the ‘acceptable’ picture of female anger that it presented
And here are very brief thoughts on the others I read:
Charlie Higson: Whatever Gets You Through the Night– entertaining, madcap, quick read, made for the screen – as so many current thriller books seem to be. This one is perhaps slightly funnier and slyer than most, fits a bit into the Knives Out/Glass Onion universe.
Percival Everett: The Trees – this one I regret not reviewing properly, as it is a quite unforgettable, excoriating view of the South of the United States and its history of lynching. By taking an almost absurd premise and bringing in lots of fierce humour, it brings this dark story to a wider audience. A surprising novel, with moments of true poignancy, although perhaps a few too many repetitive descriptions of crime scenes (deliberate, no doubt, and I can understand why).
Robert Thorogood: Death Comes to Marlow – my son goes to school in Marlow, so I go there nearly every day and I can see a big splash being made with this book in the local bookshop. I’m always going to read a book set in a place I know well, although I was disconcerted to discover that I know the real vicar’s wife (the mother of one of my son’s best friends) and she is nothing like the one featured in the book. Although I appreciated having three middle-aged women investigators, I couldn’t help feeling that their quirks are being exaggerated for comic effect, that the secondary characters are rather one-dimensional, so all the book really has going for it is the puzzle element. Of course I will continue to read this series, even if I complain about it, simply because of its familiar location.
Elin Cullhed: Euphoria, transl. Jennifer Hayashida – just like I will always read something about Sylvia Plath. This novel is a fictional account of the last difficult year of Sylvia’s life, sticking quite closely to the known facts and trying to combine elements of Sylvia’s real voice from the letters and diaries with a speculation of what must have really been going on in her mind. I am familiar with this kind of fictional recreation of an artistic life from France, where this is a much more common type of literature, but I am not sure what it adds to our knowledge of Plath. Instead, I see this more as the universal portrait of a marriage and a clash of two very strong and creative personalities, two tremendous artistic egos, particularly at a time when it seemed harder to accept equality within married couples.
He loved me as a motif. He loved the picture of me. He loved the type. The American, the emotional one, the poet. He loved my high demands (and hated them). He loved having a thinking wife. He loved having a wife. He loved that I was thinking and grinding my own thoughts, then there was nothing left of them later in teh writing. He loved that I tried by failed. That I got up and was stabbed, like a goat. That I was not who I wanted to be. He loved my imperfections, and I stood in the middle of it and tried to be perfect.
Fiona Spargo-Mabbs: Talking the Tough Stuff with Teens – trying to educate myself and not talk too much, yet encourage a rather silent teenager to open up. An encouraging, non-judgemental book, with many real-life examples.
Bec Evans & Chris Smith: Written – I’ve been following the authors on their Prolifiko website and subscribing to their newsletters, and this is a book about finding the writing routines and habits that work for you, instead of slavishly imitating others. Encouraging, friendly, with lots of good exercises and suggestions for further exploration.
Sara Gran: The Book of the Most Precious Substance– impossible to categorise this book, no wonder the author struggled to get it published and so created her own publishing house for it. It is not as chilling as Come Closer, but you can see elements of anger and grief here too, as well as the quirkiness and humour of the Claire DeWitt crime series. Although touted as a sex magic book (and it certainly contains elements of eroticism and supernatural), it probably won’t fully satisfy fantasy or erotica fans. I like the underlying ‘normalness’ of it, which keeps it somewhat grounded even when we are off travelling in a world of unimaginable luxury. Basically, it is a story of grief, of clinging to a sense of injustice, of the wisdom (and ability) to move on, and the hunger for power and money.
The trick isn’t to protect yourself. It’s to accept life. Not push it away when it gets messy.
The past is over and done. You have no choice but to live with it. There’s no getting over, there’s no making up for. But there;s a chance to see and create something new. That’s the only chance…
…a wall I’d built around something too broken to trust the world with it. But that wall had never kept me safe. It only locked me in with my pain, leaving it to fester and spoil. I’d locked out all hope, all pleasure, and now, with a force like th eocean, the wall had crumbled, and my protection had gone.
Antoine Wilson: Mouth to Mouth – a story within a story, with a supposedly neutral account of the wild tale told by an acquaintance. Another novel about the hunger for power and money, full of self-justification. Quite clever but nor terribly memorable. On the plane to Switzerland I read another book like it translated from French (not featured above, as I will present it as part of my personal French February reading initiative).
I read Balzac’s Lost Illusions for the winter long read for London Reads the World Book Club, and will review it of course during my French February. I still haven’t seen the film, which apparently is only available to stream in Canada. However, I have watched (and rewatched) quite a few good films this month – more than usual by my standards, partly because my older son the film buff was around for 9 days at the start of the month.
I really enjoyed rewatching My Neighbour Totoro for the nth time (especially after seeing the very innovative, delightful staging of it at the Barbican) and the beautiful, warm Portrait of a Lady on Fire, although I was perhaps somewhat less mesmerised by The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction this time round. I was moved by the Korean film Memories of Murder but even more so by the very recent Aftersun (which cut a little too close to home, so there were floods of tears). Stellar performances by Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio.
By the way, I’ve had some friends asking who is hosting the #FrenchFebruary initiative – and the answer is no one, I just created this personal challenge for myself because I like alliteration and reading French language books. But if you would like to join in and read some books from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Quebec, French-speaking Africa etc. then please do! The more the merrier! Always happy to expand my understanding in this area.
Dazai Osamu: Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu, transl. Ralf F. McCarthy, Kurodahan Press, 2011.
How can I have a January in Japan/Japanese Literature Challenge 16 without sneaking in at least one book by my favourite Japanese author Dazai Osamu? I may have mentioned him once or twice before… Anyway, this year I dug out this slim volume of ‘retold’ fairy tales by Dazai, which was pretty much the only way that he could publish during the Second World War. In1945, as the air raids were destroying much of Tokyo (including his own house), he played around with four of the best-known Japanese folk tales, retelling them not just for children, but particularly for grown ups.
There aren’t any overt criticisms of the Japanese war strategy, or even much mention of the dire situation the country was in by that point. However, the war is included, because the stories start off with a short prologue in which the author/narrator (always a tricky matter to distinguish the two with Dazai) starts telling stories to his children while they are seeking refuge in an air raid shelter. Additionally, the narrator keeps interrupting the flow of his narrative to comment that he cannot ascertain a particular detail because he doesn’t have a dictionary or encyclopedia handy, or that he cannot recount the most famous story of them all Momotaro (which had been used for propaganda purposes by the Japanese government), because ‘an author who has never been number one in Japan – or even number two or three – can hardly be expected to produce an adequate picture of Japan’s foremost young man’. His sarcasm extends to samurai warriors and their ideology, to landed gentry (such as his own family) and the heroic interpretations of Japanese history.
Traditional representations of Urashima Taro.
For example, here he is having a pop at Urashima Tarō, who is rewarded for rescuing a turtle by being taken to the Dragon Palace deep underneath the sea and meeting the Sea Princess, and generally having a great time there. When he returns on land, he discovers he has been away for a hundred years. The story is so well known that it has been a set text for elementary school in Japan for over a hundred years. Urashima Tarō is generally portrayed as a simple fisherman devoted to his mother, but in Dazai’s eponymous story he becomes the eldest son of an old and respected family with many servants.
Among second and third sons one often finds that variety of prodigal who overindulges in liquor and pursues women of lowly birth, muddying his own family’s name in the process, but the number one son… comes naturally to acquire a certain steadfast stodginess…
You can’t help but feel he is remembering some of his altercations with his older brothers! His rather cynical views of married life and suffocating families also find their way in other tales, such as the farcical ‘The Stolen Wen’ (aka ‘How an old man lost his wen/boil/lump’). The old man in the folktale is not a drunkard, but Dazai was, so he can’t resist giving him this trait.
In short, this family of Oji-san is nothing if not respectable and upstanding. And yet the fact remains that he is depressed. He wants to be considerate of his family but feels he cannot help but drink.
Throughout, there are a few digs at people’s behaviour, uttered by some of the characters, for instance, the tendency to gossip about one’s neighbors (which I can imagine a lot of people had been doing about Dazai all his life). Here is another husband complaining to his wife in ‘The sparrow who lost her tongue’:
Who do you think made me such a taciturn man chatting and laughing about what over dinner? I’ll tell you what – their neighbors. Criticizing. Tearing others down. Nothing but backbiting, malicious gossip…The only thing people like you can see is other people’s faults and you’re oblivious to the horror in your own hearts. You people terrify me.
It’s hard to demonstrate Dazai’s humour unless you know the original folk tales, for he takes great pleasure in subverting them, adding a running commentary as the storyteller. His Oni ogres are anything but terrifying, and he makes the link with the literary world of his time:
We use the word [Oni] to describe hateful people, murderers and even vampire, and one might therefore feel safe in assuming that these beings possess, in general, fairly despicable personality traits. But then one spies in the New Books column of the newspaper a headline reading ‘The Latest Masterpiece from the Ogre-like Genius of So-and-So-sensei’ and one is perplexed. One wonders if the article is an attempt to alert the public to So-and-So-sensei’s wicked influence or evil machinations… One would think that the great sensei himself would react angrily to being called such nasty and insulting names, but apparently that isn’t the case. One even hears rumors to the effect that he secretly encourages their use…
‘Monstre sacre’ indeed, as the French would say!
If you want to discover the lighter side of Dazai Osamu, the brilliant conversationalist he undoubtedly was (despite donning the mantle of grumpiness whenever it suited him), then I would recommend starting with his short stories, and these retold folk tales fall into that category, showing how much he could achieve even working within formal constraints. It’s not easy to find though…
I have read over 150 books this year, and there is no way I am going to be able to select just ten for a ‘Best Of’ list, especially since I enjoy so many different genres of books. So I will break my list down into categories (some might call it cheating, but I call it ‘very organised’). The first category is one that I haven’t had much track with over the past few years. I have been too busy reading newly discovered authors or recently published books, and have sighed sentimentally about how much I would love to reread old favourites… but then done very little about it.
This year, however, I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole with rereading for January in Japan… and that tendency has continued throughout the year.It has convinced me that I should do a lot more rereading every year, because they are amongst the best, most memorable reads. I reread some other works this year (Arthur Schnitzler plays and novellas, Horvath’s and Noel Coward’s plays, Gogol’s short stories) and they were all very much worth the while. However, the five below were the ones that gave me the most joy.
I fell in love with Dazai Osamu’s prose ever since I read my first short story by him as a student of Japanese, painfully having to translate every third word with a dictionary or trying to figure out some obscure kanji. I started out the month by rereading his final, possibly greatest novel in a new translation, but then couldn’t resist continuing with a reread of several of his ‘first person stories‘ – often described as memoirs, but that is a slippery concept with this author. This also tempted me to reread another of my favourites when I was a student, a book that fits in well with Dazai Osamu’s outsiders: Yukio Mishima’sTemple of the Golden Pavilion.
How can actual, real-life beauty ever live up to the beauty in our imaginations? Are the creation and destruction of beauty our only possible responses to an indifferent, cruel world? Does the artist have to sacrifice everything for the sake of beauty – is that the only thing that gives art authenticity? Can we ever really understand and fully appreciate beauty until we feel its loss? And doesn’t darkness or ugliness make the beauty stand out all the more?
While I have always been a Virginia Woolf fan, in my youth I had never completely warmed to her most famous novel To the Lighthouse. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age to appreciate the passing of time more? This time I learnt to appreciate its subtlety in characterisation and its wonderful lyricism – it really is a masterpiece!
This novella about murderous jealousy, social privilege, class difference, guilt and psychological breakdown is now available in English thanks to the work of Gabi Reigh. This time I was much less interested in the ‘love story’ and far more observant of the social critique.
This was pure self-indulgent nostalgia, rereading a family saga that had been a childhood favourite, after I had finished the Cazalet Chronicles.
It is almost impossible to overstate how much of an influence the Medeleni trilogy had on our childhood in 1980s Romania, although it was a book published in the early 1920s, depicting a period just before and just after the First World War (without actually talking much about that war at all). Maybe we were starved of nostalgic, escapist types of literature and depictions of children who could be lively, naughty, rebellious. Maybe we were just at that blushingly adolescent stage of writing bad poetry and falling in love with the wrong people. For me, as for many others of my age, it must have been the casual acceptance of travelling, living and studying abroad presented in the book, and the openness to foreign languages, literature and music, at a time when we were forcibly cut off from the rest of the world.
However, I was far more critical of the author’s stylistic shortcomings this time round, as I make clear in the second post devoted to the saga.
The problem is that the book tries to be too many things at once. It is a family saga as well as a Bildungsroman, it is also an opportunity for the author to air his opinions about literature, art and music, or the shortcomings of politics and the justice system. There are far too many tangential topics thrown in, which have little bearing on the main story or even in conferring depth upon certain characters, such as the first case Dan has to defend as a lawyer (a controversial case of incest). It might be interesting (if uncomfortable from a contemporary woman’s perspective), but it just goes on for far too long. Same with the endless excerpts of ‘prose poetry’ from Dan’s notebooks. Stop, we get it, no need to insist…
Osamu Dazai: Self Portraits: Tales from the life of Japan’s great decadent romantic, transl. and introduced by Ralph F. McCarthy, Kodansha International, 1991.
Once I reconnected with my old flame, Dazai Osamu, it was difficult to stop at just the new translation of his final novel Ningen Shikkaku. One of my book blogging friends, whom you might know as @Kaggsy59 from Twitter, mentioned that she had a collection of his autobiographical stories in roughly chronological order, with sympathetic introductions to each story by McCarthy. Somehow, I did not manage to get my hands on this book back in the 1990s and it is now out of print and prohibitively expensive. So maybe I shouldn’t recommend it to you. But if you can get hold of it, it is probably the best introduction to Dazai’s work, as there is great variety and much more humour here than in some of his better-known work.
As the translator says, some of the stories are clearly more fictional than others, and there is a tendency to exaggerate for effect. Let’s not forget that most of these were stories for magazines, published during the writer’s lifetime, and that he had to produce work to earn a living. He injects humour into situations, often at his own expense, but also has the ability to turn from comedy to tragedy within the same paragraph, even the same sentence. This style – and the more domestic stories – remind me of Shirley Jackson’s family-inspired stories collected in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Except that Shirley Jackson does not mention directly her fury at her husband’s affairs, or her agoraphobia or her many health problems, while Dazai has no such qualms.
Dazai at around the time of the first double suicide attempt.
In his quite experimental story written in dialogue form ‘Mesu ni tsuite’ (translated here as Female, elsewhere as Of Women), we initially seem to witnessing one of those games that old friends might play late at night, after a bout of drinking. The narrator and his friend vie with each other to describe the ideal woman, in terms of looks, occupation, clothes, behaviour and speech. This may come across as crude masculine banter, but they then go on to create the scenario of a spa break. Yet even in this best of all possible imaginary worlds, things don’t go according to plan and the romantic dinner for two becomes increasingly awkward. The man seems to avoid intimacy by pretending he’s got a writing deadline, but then spends endless minutes copying out the Iroha poem repeatedly (used as a kind of alphabet ordering for the Japanese syllabary). It seems that even in his imagination, the narrator cannot rid himself of his fears and complexes. It all seems quite funny in a very ‘cringe comedy’ sort of way (which makes Dazai so modern, to my mind), but then both the friend and the reader realise, to their horror, that the story takes a sinister turn (apologies for spoiling the ending for you, but then, if you’ve read my previous post about Dazai’s life, you will know that only one ending is possible):
‘I heard a sound like water flowing behind me. It was only a faint sound, but a chill ran down my spine. The woman had quietly turned over in bed.’
‘What happened?’
‘”Let’s die,” I said. She too…’
‘Stop right there. You’re not just making this up.’
He was right. The following afternoon the woman and I attempted suicide. She was neither a geisha nor a painter. She was a girl from a poor background who’d been a maid in my home. She was killed simply because she turned over in bed. I didn’t die. Seven years have passed and I’m still alive.
Dazai does not come out well from most of these stories, as you might expect, but he can also be quite cutting about the people closest to him for comedic effect. For example, in the story ‘Trains’ he feels sorry for a country girl who has been spurned by one of his friends and impulsively decides to say goodbye to her as she leaves from Tokyo Ueno station. He takes his wife along for moral support, believing that she might have more social skills than him. As you might expect, however, everyone just hangs around, looking and sounding very awkward.
Three minutes or so still remained before departure time. I couldn’t stand it… nothing is more confounding than those last three minutes. You’ve said all there is to say and can do nothing but gaze helplessly at each other. And in this case it was even worse, because I hadn’t been able to come up with a single thing to say in the first place. If my wife had been a bit more competent, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but look at her: standing there with her mouth clamped shut and a sullen look on her face.
Yet each story has layers: beneath the comedy there is something much more serious. While they are at the station, they also see ‘an ashen-faced fellow leaning out a window of the third class coach, bidding a faltering farewell’ and we realise that it is a young man being mobilised during the war. In ‘Female’, reference is made to a failed coup in 1936 (the so-called February 26 Incident) to reinstate the power and glory of the Emperor – an attempt that Mishima admired and Dazai completely despised.
Dazai was emphatically against the war, but, given his arrest because of his involvement with the Communist Party, he is careful not to upset the censors and only mentions war in passing in his work of the 1930s. His downbeat, fatalistic stories were increasingly frowned upon by the censors, so he reverted mostly to retellings of Japanese folk tale or older stories during the war.
Yet, for all his appreciation of traditional Japanese literature and history, he stubbornly refused to accept the established narratives or clichés. In a very funny scene in his story ‘One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji’, he and one elderly woman are the only ones in a bus full of tourists who steadfastly refuse to crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the mythical mountain, but look in the opposite direction.
Perhaps Dazai is at his best when he focuses on others rather than on himself. He has a great eye for detail and proves a good observer of people and situations. There is much warmth and humanity in his descriptions, even when he almost churlishly tries to undermine his own kind impulses, as if afraid that he might be accused of sentimentalism. The tenderness and hope of spring and marital love in a story like ‘A Promise Fulfilled’. The way he keeps assuring readers that he hates dogs, yet takes in a stray puppy in the comical tale ‘Canis familiaris’. Believing a rose-seller is an imposter and yet nevertheless buying the roses from her in ‘Thinking of Zenso’. The affection and admiration with which he describes his older brothers, who all had some literary talent (even though he clearly had a troubled relationship with them). In ‘Two Little Words’ he helps an old man fill in the withdrawal slip from his saving passbook and finds out that it is in the name of his daughter who died in the air raids. When sent by journalists for a photo feature with the vagrants in Ueno Park, he is able to relate to them and treat them like real human beings, observing much more within a few minutes of walking there than any of the reporters who accompany him. Perhaps most touchingly, in ‘Seascape with Figures in Gold’, he feels guilty about the way he used to treat one of the family maids, yet years later, when she comes to visit him with her family, she remembers things very differently and he ends up being almost envious of her peaceful, serene life.
In one of the last stories he ever wrote, ‘Cherries’, we are participating in an evening meal with his family and Dazai says something that reminds us of the main character in Ningen Shikkaku:
When I’m at home, I’m forever making jokes. Let’s say it’s a case of needing to wear Dante’s mask of merriment precisely because there are so many things that trigger the anguish in the heart… Whenever I’m with people, no matter how great my mental or physical suffering, I try desperately to create a happy atmosphere. It’s only after parting with company that I stagger away exhausted to think about money and morality and suicide.
I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey the flavour of this author without making you feel he is too self-indulgent. Mishima described him as ‘an invalid who does not wish to recover’ and therefore does not qualify as a true invalid. The thing with Dazai is that you cannot hate or criticise him more than he does himself. You have the feeling that it was not a pose. He handled the fame that came along after the publication of The Setting Sun just as badly as he had handled poverty and obscurity in his youth. He was ever the one to rebel against rules, and the tyranny of ‘should’, decrying what he perceived to be the hypocrisy and opportunism of the Japanese society during and after the war. His is a manifesto of constantly inspecting, never accepting at face value, opposing any facile answers: ‘I’m a libertine – buraiha [the so-called Decadent School in Japanese arts and literature]. I rebel against constraints. I jeer at the opportunists.’ He refused to join any clique and could be quite spiteful about what he perceived as arrogance in others. But for those who were truly poor, downtrodden, outcast or sad, he had endless compassion. He was always able to forgive weaknesses in others (probably because of all the weaknesses he could see in himself).
In the academic study I was reading in parallel with this, The Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu, the scholar Alan Wolfe argues that Dazai does not really fall into the romantic suicidal hero vein. Dazai is ‘simultaneously victim and victimizer’, and his texts resist our interpretation of him. Dazai becomes slippery, impossible to pin down to a single interpretation, teasing readers from beyond the grave. He constantly casts doubt on the veracity and consistency of the narrator – a technique that Mishima also uses in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Dazai would never be content with a final narrative, a theory set in stone, any effort to enclose thought once and for all. Everything is fluid, and the real meaning of things escapes us, or is only briefly glimpsed in the corner of one’s eye.
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