Honford Star is a small indie publisher of translated East Asian literature (mostly Korean, a growing number of Japanese titles and a sprinkling of Taiwanese). Their books are always exciting and very different, some science fiction, some horror, some a mix of genres, but it would be fair to say that many of them are quite dark. I first encountered them via Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, and have just read two of their recent releases translated from Japanese. Although I didn’t intend to read them together, they have a similar theme: dysfunctional, abusive families, violence, grim sexual relationships and ultimately murder. However, the two books are quite different in style and resolution. (I follow Japanese name convention below for the authors, surname first, given name last).
Tanaka Shinya: Cannibals, transl. Kalau Almony.
The original title in Japanese is ‘tomogui’, which can mean cannibalism or feeding off each other, but also mutual destruction or damage, and this helps in understanding this very graphic, very disturbing novella (just under 80 pages long). It can be read in one sitting, but it will leave a nasty taste in your mouth. It reminded me very much of the Nakagami Kenji’s portrayal of a Burakumin family on the margins of society, both in terms of style and subject matter.
The book was published in Japan in 2012 and won the Akutagawa Prize, but it is set in the last year of the Showa era (1988 – there is a discrepancy there on the first page, the summer of 1989 was no longer the Showa era). For a while I was puzzled why it had to take place then, since the setting often feels like it could be set in the 1950s. In retrospect, however, I think it’s significant that it happens just as Japan is about to experience a change of eras: from the Emperor who had presided over Japan’s militaristic regime and invasion of other countries in the 1930s, then the war and its aftermath, then the economic boom, to the Heisei era, the name meaning ‘universal peace’, but actually bringing economic stagnation (the so-called Lost Decade), political turmoil and multiple natural disasters which devastated many cities. It might not be an exaggeration to see certain parallels with this story about a seventeen-year-old boy who dreads becoming like his violent father and yet finds himself unable to escape that inheritance – or so he believes.
Toma is the seventeen-year-old in question: he lives with his father and his father’s new girlfriend, Kotoko, but frequently visits his mother Jinko, who runs a fishmonger shop on the other side of the river. His mother was ten years older than his father and had lost her right hand during the war, so was considered damaged goods and therefore initially grateful that a man paid attention to her, but after they got married, he started showing both his violent and philandering side, so she left him. Toma goes fishing for eels (unagi in Japanese) with his mother (and sometimes the father joins them as well, since that’s his favourite food – unsurprising, given the phallic symbolism of the fish). He is partly fascinated, partly repulsed by the sight of the unagi on the hook, as well as his mother’s metal prosthetic, which is not shaped like a hand but a cylinder of long, thin stainless-steel rods, looking like a metal cage.
It’s this image of a cage that stayed with me while reading the book. It feels like Toma and the people around are stuck in cages, suspended somewhere next to the foul-smelling river filled with dirt and ever-decreasing quantities of fish. It’s a summer of drought, the river levels are low, all the rubbish is coming to the surface and the rats are coming out. The heat and heavy air seems to be driving everyone crazy. Toma is also in that state of suspension, although his life seems to be on the brink of change: Kotoko is pregnant and his father might throw him out of the house once the baby arrives. His relationship with his girlfriend Chigusa is causing him anxiety, because he doesn’t quite know any other way to express his desire while having sex other than the violence he has seen from his father. He is confused and and steeped in hatred of his father but also himself, so be prepared for some rather uncomfortable scenes, especially in the encounter with a prostitute that his father also visits and abuses.
And then the weather breaks, just as the summer festival is about to take place. Needless to say, something else happens at the same time, a shocking act which forces everybody out of their state of suspended animation. Like the unagi Toma sees in a whirlpool of mud at that crucial moment in the story, it will be a painful struggle to make his way out of the mud:
The earth and rain had mixed together, and emerging from a shallow whirlpool of the resulting mud was a single large unagi with the girth of a grown man’s arm, its pectoral fins spread like the cotyledons of a plant, and its head shaking from left to right. There was a wound on its face. At the edge of the wound its smooth flesh glistened, and from it oozed a golden mucus. At first, the eel extended its long body upwards, then fell diagonally, twisted itself, and pulled its body from the whirlpool of mud. It was so big, and it was hurt, but it looked new. For a moment, it stirred up the mud in a single spot, but eventually began swimming slowly away.
In summary, not an easy or pleasant book to read, but undeniably powerful. The book has been adapted into an arthouse film directed by Aoyama Shinji entitled The Backwater.
Shimamoto Rio: First Love, transl. Louise Heal Kawai.
Winner of the Naoki Literary Prize in 2018 (awarded to ‘popular’, i.e. commercial literature rather than more esoteric literary efforts of the Akutagawa Prize), and I think we can see the differences between the two prizes clearly if we compare the two novels. This book was also adapted for film in 2021, directed by Tsutsumi Yukihiko, but both the film and the book follow a more conventional format of melodrama – part psychological thriller, part courtroom drama.
Kanna is a university student who, on the day of the second interview for a TV announcer job, suddenly stabs her father to death without any apparent motive, other than that he was against her applying for that kind of job. Assigned to write a book on the crime and the mental state of the perpetrator, clinical psychologist Yuki begins a series of face-to-face sessions with Kanna in prison. Working together with Yuki’s lawyer, Kasho, who happens to be Yuki’s own brother-in-law, she seeks to understand the motivations for the murder and begins to suspect there are deeper causes for Kanna’s actions and emotional state. Yet, in the process of delving into Kanna’s family’s past, Yuki’s own repressed memories resurface.
The book is written in the first person from the perspective of Yuki the psychologist and perhaps a third person narration would have worked better, for I felt it was initially withholding too much (about the relationship between Kasho and Yuki for example), and too emotionally distant, although that could be deliberate, to show the numbness that comes from not processing trauma properly. Yet, as a psychologist in her thirties working with victims of domestic abuse, I’d have expected Yuki to have worked through some of her personal issues with a psychiatrist herself.
The book differs in tone, the prose is quite matter-of-fact, sometimes feeling a little flat, compared to the poetic, occasionally overwrought style of Cannibals. Yet, although it is marketed (in Japan at least) more overtly as a thriller, it is in fact an exploration of topics that are still somewhat taboo in Japanese society: sexual abuse and exploitation (whether direct or indirect), mothers choosing to ignore or disbelieve it for the sake of family ‘harmony’, and the long-term impact this can have on survivors of such situations. Alongside the two main female characters, there are also other stories of women feeling they do not deserve or must not expect better from men, or who are so desperate for affection that they want to believe that sex equals love.
But… he did like me a little bit, didn’t he? He must have done. I mean, a man wouldn’t do something like that if he had no feelings at all, right?’
‘Do you know what love is? I think it’s all about valuing and respecting someone, and trust.’
‘But there’s nothing about me to be respected.’
The book also shows just how complex and problematic the issue of ‘consent’ is:
‘Kanna, have you ever refused a man who approached you for a physical relationship?’
She hesitated. ‘Hardly ever.’
‘And was that what you wanted?’
‘Sometimes I may have wanted it, and sometimes I felt responsible that I’d made them feel that way, so I felt I had to do it.’
It feels like quite a sad book in that respect, but also an angry one. With one exception, Yuki’s husband Gamon, all the men in the book are highly problematic, even the ones dismissed in one paragraph:
I’d met that male presenter several times previously, but he’d never once made eye contact with me. There were men like that everywhere in the television industry – men who wouldn’t engage in conversation with women they’d give less than an eight out of ten on looks. Men who thought nobody would notice this behavior. Or maybe they just thought it didn’t matter. These were men who had never suffered a single setback in their lives.
A lot of the anger is also directed at parents who are blind to their children’s suffering or try to normalise situations that shouldn’t be acceptable. Or any people in positions of authority over younger, more impressionable people. ‘Comply with his wishes. Live up to adults’ expectations. Pretend you feel no discomfort or fear.’
Although it raises many important issues, the book did feel a little too on-the-nose and preachy, more suitable perhaps for a book club discussion rather than appealing through its prose or subtlety.
Anyway, although I sometimes laugh at the English reticence to show sex scenes in books, after reading the two books above I felt I needed a good long shower to wash away the misery and dirt. I’d be quite happy now to retreat to those kinds of stories where sex is more implied than explicit, and perhaps relationships in general are a bit healthier and happier. But does that make for a good story?
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