Tag: #JanuaryinJapan

#JanuaryinJapan: At the Edge of the Wood

Ono Masatsugu: At the Edge of the Wood, transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Strangers Press, 2017

In my Keshiki-New Voices from Japan collection from Strangers Press, a lovely selection of chapbooks with short stories or novellas by contemporary Japanese authors, I found one that suited my desire to read one more Japanese book in Japan but also travel lightly to Romania. Ono is a professor of French literature at Waseda University in Tokyo and his key research area is the influence of French literature and thought on the process of (literary and other cultural) modernisation in Japan.

This chapbook features two linked short stories ‘A Breast’ and ‘The Pastry Shop at the Edge of the Wood’, but I was not aware that they were later Americanised and published together with two more linked stories (also translated by the wonderful Juliet Winters Carpenter) in 2022 by Two Lines Press in the States as ‘At the Edge of the Woods’ (plural). This perhaps explains why the chapbook I read felt somewhat incomplete, almost too enigmatic and opaque, yet the reviewers of the entire novel also seem to struggle to decipher its meaning.

A father and a son are living in a house on the edge of the woods, in a foreign, unnamed country. The wife and mother has gone back to her parents’ home in another country to give birth to the second child. Left to their own devices, the father and son seem to stumble through everyday life, unsettled by the dark forest on their doorstep and the strange sounds that could be coming from there or from the father’s own mind. Mysterious human beings appear in and out of the woods: a half-undressed, confused old woman that his son has brought home and adopted as a grandma; dwarves that could be refugees living in the woods or mischievous imps ready to kidnap children; a pregnant woman lying dead in the woods; a pastry chef and her oversized daughter; another mother and daughter pair that they see in the supermarket car park. The encounters they have with these people are odd, seemingly pointless, half-remembered, like scenes you are unsure whether they were dreams or reality upon awakening.

Two Lines Press marketed this novel as being about climate catastrophe (which is one way to interpret the refugees in the woods). Matt Matros in his excellent review believes it is more about the dizzying contradictions of parenthood. Reading it as I did, when I was recovering from minor sedation (possibly the best way to read this, without worrying too much about trying to make sense), it felt like all the things you start worrying about once you have children: the small things (like getting candles for a birthday cake or whether they are watching too much TV) to complex global issues. Most of the time this fear is diffuse, hard to explain – the minute you try to pin it down and examine it closely, you start rationalising it, you start searching for solutions or signs that it is misplaced or exaggerated. Yet the fear remains: the heart heavy, the reptilian mind in a state of alert, so much remains unknowable. How to keep a child safe and happy under these circumstances?

The language owes something to the simple yet heavily symbolic style espoused by so many French writers since Camus. I loved it for its poetry, for the half-formed images and thoughts it put in my head, and for the ache it left in my heart, even when I wasn’t sure I ‘got’ it. The description of the forest was particularly memorable.

[The trees] pat each other familiarly on the shoulders and back and sometimes wriggle their hips as they hurried ahead… Their whispers spread through the woods like the sound of distant waves. As they traveled, the whispers blotted out not only gaps in consciousness but also the interstices between trees, between branches. Unable to penetrate into the depths of the woods, we would come to a standstill.

But the (imaginary?) sound that so disturbs the narrator is also unforgettable:

The sound that came from the wood, piercing the night, was trying to strange my heart, too. It was echoing in the dreams of my son, asleep in the same bed. […] For an instant, the coughing from the night wood splits the sound of the television, Perhaps I should sneak through that cleft. I look outside. In the smooth windowpane without flaw or distortion, my son, hidden by the sofa, cannot be seen. My reflection in the window, though shaken by the lingering echo of coughing and seemingly on the point of fading away, goes on being there, alone, in the living room.

I always found Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translations supremely elegant and lyrical, and she certainly suits this author perfectly. This is my final review for the Japanese Literature Challenge for this month, although I will no doubt read many, many more Japanese books this year.

#JanuaryinJapan: Underdogs and Warlords

Joining both Tony in his January in Japan venture and Meredith in her Japanese Literature Challenge, because it’s always about Japan with me (and Romania and Germany and Austria and France and… you get the picture, but Japan does have a special place in my heart). Unfortunately, since I’ll be away in Romania for a week without internet access or laptop, I probably won’t get another chance to post something for January in Japan, so here are two in one go.

Ko Kyota: Underdogs of Japanese History: 11 tales of iconic characters who prevailed against the odds… or didn’t, 2023

I came across Kyota (that’s his first name, I’m using the Japanese convention as always, with surname first) on Instagram, where he gives very funny but also useful snippets of information about Japanese history and culture under the name @themetroclassic (I believe he is also on YouTube and perhaps Tiktok). I bought this e-book as an excuse to delve deeper into some of the characters he talks about, and found it really informative as well as witty. Although it can’t quite capture the full charisma of his video performances (I kept hearing his voice as I was reading it), but of course there is considerably more historical detail here.

Most of the eleven underdogs presented here naturally are warriors or warlords or samurai, since there was a LOT of fighting in Japanese history, especially during the Sengoku jidai (Warring States period). But a few women are also represented, although their powers were largely dependent on whom they married, which family they belonged to or whose harem they joined. My old favourite Murasaki Shikibu (author of Genji Monogatari) is also presented, from a social and historical rather than a literary perspective, which made it feel fresh, as someone who used the power of storytelling to ensure a more secure position for herself at court. Some of the interpretations are debatable (for example, that Oda Ujiharu was determined to protect his people rather than merely an incompetent or hot-headed warrior), but with old texts and the notorious Japanese propensity for obliqueness, who’s to say that it isn’t possible?

An enjoyable, painless way to learn more about Japan – far better than the history books I had to read in a rush so I could take over my colleague’s course on Japanese history during her maternity leave – and I was rather pleased to see that Kyota doesn’t like the great unifier Oda Nobunaga much either. (Toyotomi Hideyoshi is my man, especially because he rose from humble beginnings and was less slippery and wily than Tokugawa Ieyasu, but he really shouldn’t have attacked Korea!)

The chapter I was particularly interested in, because I knew very little about it, was the Satsuma Samurai. I only learnt the official summarised and sanitised version about the end of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but after visiting the Ryozen History Museum in Kyoto, which is dedicated to that period (because it was more than just a year!), I became interested in finding out more about the great turmoil surrounding that transition.

Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai, transl. Dennis Washburn, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2001.

This was a really difficult book to read, I kept having to pause it. Not because of the writing, which is often very beautiful and evocative. Nor because of its setting: Shanghai in the 1920s, yet again a period and place I know little about, other than that it was at a confluence of Eastern and Western influences and trade, and that those were troubled times, with a lot of anti-foreign sentiment, strikes and violent clashes which ultimately led to a civil war starting in 1927. This dragged on and on, and the declining economic influence of Japan in China at that time provided of course the pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria a few years later.

Yokomitsu wrote this novel in 1929, having visited Shanghai only briefly in 1928, but he does an excellent job of describing the city in all its beauty, diversity, ugliness and messiness. He was very much influenced by Western literature and art, and attempted to unite the various European currents (realism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, symbolism) under one flexible, all-encompassing umbrella called New Sensation. He is one of the leading modernist writers in Japan and was hugely influential at the time. For me, his descriptions of the city of Shanghai owe something to journalism and reportage, but are heavily indebted to painting, revealing almost a Pointillist technique: short sentences adding up to a coherent and colourful (not necessarily enticing) picture.

A district of crumbling brick buildings. Some Chinese, wearing long-sleeved black robes that were swollen and stagnant like kelp in the depth of the ocean, crowded together on a narrow street. A beggar groveled on the pebble-covered road. In a shop window above him hung fish bladders and bloody torsos of carp. In the fruit stand next door piles of bananas and mangos spilled out onto the pavement. And next to that a pork butcher. Skinned carcasses, suspended hoof-down, formed a flesh-colored grotto with a vague, dark recess from which the white point of a clock face sparkled like an eye.

What I struggled with in this book are the characters: the Japanese expats Sanki and Koya, who behave like entitled misogynists, and treat the women they come across, Russian, Chinese or Japanese, as objects not as real people (whether they use and discard them, or admire an idealised image of them from a distance). They also express nationalistic sentiments which mirror Yokomitsu’s own at the time. The translator’s afterword examines these controversial beliefs: while it would be fair to say that many in Asia at the time believed they were being subjugated by the great Western powers and deeply resented it, Yokomitsu’s solution to that is Japanese militarism and ascendancy (less obviousl in the novel, but expressed in essays he wrote at the time).

The drifting and nihilistic characters reminded me of several characters in 19th century Russian novels, so that often annoying (and hurtful to others) psychology is present here as well. While I don’t need my fictional characters to be flawless, I found their motivation rather impenetrable or aimless. It’s hard to tell if the racism and misogyny depicted are condoned by the author, but they are certainly reflective of their time. I did enjoy some of the political jabs at the British Empire’s craftiness though, which we seldom see in English language books covering that period. Yet at the same time, this passage stood out to me (and I wonder if that is any longer the case):

…the British have been more successful in Singapore than in other countries because they make use of young men who have been trained thoroughly in the language, customs and capacities of the Chinese. That’s something other foreigners can’t do very well.

Where Yokomitsu succeeds best is at the vivid crowd scenes: if there were nothing else but that, it would still make the book worthwhile in my eyes:

Sanki was forced back into the sunken entrance of a shop and could see only a pivoting transom opened horizontally above his head. The rioting crowd was reflected upside down in the transom glass. It was like being on the floor of an ocean that had lost its watery sky. Countless heads beneath shoulders, shoulders beneath feet. They described a weird, suspended canopy on the verge of falling, swaying like seaweed that drifted out, then drew back and drifted out again.

Two interesting perspectives on Japanese history, one more fun than the other, but both quite educational and eye-opening.