Tag: Japanese literature

‘Newcomer’ by Keigo Higashino

Thanks to Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge, now in its 13th year, I’m introduced to the popular Japanese mystery writer and multiple book award winner Keigo Higashino (東野圭吾), and get to meet the amiable character he created, Detective Kyoichiro Kaga.

Higashino has written two main series of mysteries, one with Detective Kaga, the other Detective Galileo. There are also stand-alone novels. Almost twenty of his books have been turned into movies and TV series in Japan.

I’ve read Malice, and now Newcomer, and become a fan of both Higashino and Detective Kaga. Malice deals with the murder of an author and a possible suspect who’s also a writer; I was drawn to the story right away. However, I find Newcomer even more interesting. Higashino is the accidental tour guide leading his readers to the main roads and side streets of Japanese society.

Newcomer

First off, how do I describe Detective Kaga? Who can I compare him with? As clever as Hercule Poirot, but too sloppily dressed, so, no. As relentless as Harry Bosch, but much gentler and friendlier, so, no. Right, he’s more like Columbo, a young Japanese Columbo, casual in manners, friendly to all, but a gadfly to some. And I did catch him saying, “just one more thing…”

Above all, his very humane way of doing his job is admirable. Here’s a detective with heart. Kaga isn’t only concerned with finding the culprit, but in his own words: “my job as a detective should go beyond that. People who’ve been traumatized by a crime are victims, too. Finding ways to comfort them is also part of my job.” For walking that extra mile, he has made friends but also made himself a nuisance to some, especially those who have reasons to evade him.

The Newcomer in this book refers to Kaga himself, who has just been transferred to the Nihonbashi precinct in Tokyo, a demotion from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Division, something to do with his ‘inappropriate emotional involvement’, an issue that only highlights who Kaga is like. Higashino has dropped a hint for me to find out more from his other books of the Kaga series about what that ’emotional involvement’ is all about. Unfortunately, only Malice and Newcomer have been translated into English in this ten-book series.

Here in Newcomer, a woman newly divorced has been murdered. Kaga not only needs to find the perpetrator of the crime but has to familiarize himself with his new precinct of work, the social geography of the community. We see him following clues to a rice cracker shop, a restaurant, a clock shop and its owner’s dog walking routine, a pastry shop, a theatre company, and a traditional Japanese handcrafts shop. All interesting places to which Higashino leads us to observe the livelihood and human interactions within.

One issue I have with this book, however, is that Higashino introduces a new character close to the end and reveals the denouement with totally new information. Having said that, I’m fascinated by how he weaves together the strands and casually revealing the human tapestry of his society.

I use both the hardcopy and the audiobook, whenever is more convenient. They complement each other perfectly.

 

JLC13

 

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Newcomer by Keigo Higashino, translated by Giles Murray. Minotaur Books, New York. Translation copyright, 2018, 342 pages. Audiobook by MacMillan Audio, narrated by P. J. Ochlan, 2018.

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Other Japanese Literature Challenge posts:

Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

Reading Snow Country in Snow Country

Rashomon and other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

In participation of Japanese Literature Challenge 13 hosted by Bellezza.

Rashomon and Other Stories

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川龍之介 1892 – 1927) was an acclaimed early 20th Century Japanese author of the modernist style. Prolific in his short life, Akutagawa had written more than a hundred short stories upon his death by suicide at age 35. He is cited as “The Father of Japanese Short Stories”. The prestigious Akutagawa Prize established in 1935 was named after him to reward the best work of fiction by a new author. Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe and crime fiction writer Seichō Matsumoto are among the past winners.

Even though written in the early decades of the 20th century, the six stories compiled in this collection are surprisingly modern in their relevance. Further, despite the author’s gloomy outlook, a few of these stories are sprinkled with a touch of lively humour. The collection shows Akutagawa as an incisive depicter of the human condition and an astute observer of the human psyche.

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Here are the stories:

In A Grove –– This story and the next are adapted into the renown film Rashomon (羅生門 1950) directed by the legendary Akira Kurosawa (黑澤明 1910 – 1998). The body of a murdered samurai is found in the forest by a woodcutter. His wife has been raped. What has truly happened, however, can’t be determined as the witnesses all tell very different stories. They are the woodcutter, a beggar, a priest, the wife, and the dead husband speaking through a spirit. Akutagawa presents the multiplicity of subjective point-of-views retrieved from memory. Can objective truth ever be found?

Rashomon –– “The Rashōmon” is the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It was constructed in the year 789. When this story takes place, the gate is dilapidated and has become the hideout for thieves and robbers, what more, corpses are left there unclaimed. A servant who has just been let go is standing under the gate waiting for a break in the pouring rain. With no employment now, he struggles with the moral dilemma of becoming a thief or face the consequence of poverty, starving to death. What Akutagawa depicts after this is a dark reality of survival. Kudos to Kurosawa, he turns a chilling story into a film with a hopeful ending.

Yam Gruel –– Reads like a cautionary tale about the satiation of desire, but with whimsical touches and acerbic humour. Goi, a plain-looking samurai suffering from low self-esteem is the laughing stock of everyone, but he learns to live with the ridicules he faces everyday. Goi has one longing, the delicious yam gruel which his boss treats the samurais once a year. What follows is like a dream come true. He’s led to a long distance away on horseback by his boss to a place where he can have limitless yam gruel. But the result isn’t as he has expected. Why, when you have unlimited supply of what you desire, they will soon upset your appetite. Be careful what you wish for.

The Martyr ––  Christianity had a substantial influence in Japan during the 16th Century. With The Martyr, Akutagawa spins a tale about a boy named Lorenzo who is adopted by the Jesuits. Time passes and as he emerges into manhood, Lorenzo is wrongly accused of getting a village girl pregnant, resulting in his exile away from society. Later in a moment of crisis, Lorenzo’s real character prompts him to act by offering the ultimate sacrifice.

Kesa and Morito –– An early version of the popular genre we have now, psychological murder mystery as told by different narrators, again, multiplicity of POVs. The substance and motive for the crime is similar to “In A Grove”, adultery, love, hate, and lust, two internal monologues revealing Akutagawa’s grasp of the darkness lodged in the human soul.

The Dragon –– An ingenious take on fake news. Here’s the post the priest Hanazō makes up to play a trick on his colleagues, sticking a message board by the pond, it can well be a tweet today: “On March third a dragon shall ascend from this pond.” Retweets follow. Words soon spread, first local people then out to the whole province and finally to other provinces. So on March third, a humongous crowd gathers by the pond waiting to see the dragon king rise up. Here’s what Hanazō learns afterwards: if you have enough likes and followers, what’s fake will become true. Even when you confess you made it all up to begin with, nobody will believe you.

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Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Translated by Takashi Kojima. Tuttle Publishing, Singapore, 1952.

 

JLC13

 

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My previous Japanese Literature Challenge posts:

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

Reading Snow Country in Snow Country

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

The Sound of the Mountain (山の音) is my book for Japanese Literature Challenge 5 at Dolce Bellezza, the only one this time and posting it before the Challenge ends this month. It is the first book I finished in 2012, at 1 a.m. January 1st. Truth is, I wanted to finish it by the end of last year, but couldn’t. I’ve been reading it for weeks in December. It’s a book that I had to read ever so slowly.

Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成, 14 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) is the first of two Japanese Nobel laureates in literature, receiving the honor in 1968 (Kenzaburo Oe in 1994). So far I’ve only read two of Kawabata’s books, Snow Country and The Sound of the Mountain. But from this limited experience, I’ve found that reading Kawabata is like watching an Ozu film. The camera is set low and mostly stationary to depict quiet expressions and gestures. Viewers are engaged by the nuanced dialogues as the director explores in depth thematic materials rather than presents plot-driven sequences. Both masters deal with intimate relationships, their characterization sensitive , their imagery poetic.

Ogata Shingo is in his early sixties, beginning to show signs of old age. Ever introspective and sensitive, he can almost hear the beckoning of death as sound that comes from the mountain to the rear of his house in Kamakura. As he lies in bed at night, beside his oblivious, snoring wife Yasuko, he can distinctly hear that sound:

It was like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth… The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death was approaching.

At most, Shingo feels a duty towards his wife Yasuko. His heart though is drawn to two women, one is his wife Yasuko’s older sister who passed away from an illness some time ago. Yet Shingo still cherishes memories of her. The other is his son Shuichi’s wife, his own daughter-in-law Kikuko, who lives in his house. Nurturing a crush on two women who are not his wife has troubled Shingo deeply.

But the guilt he wrestles with is only a part of the distress he faces so late in life. Shingo has to face the marital problems of both his son Shuichi’s and his daughter Fusako’s.  Shuichi, who lives with his wife Kikuko in the house of his parents, has been seeing another woman, Kinu. And Shingo’s daughter Fusako has recently returned to her parent’s home with her two young children after her husband has deserted them.  Despite their being adults now, Shingo feels responsible for the failure of his children’s marriage.

In a restrained bickering between father and son, Shingo is put on the spot:

I’ve been thinking a little,” muttered Shuichi. “About Father’s life.”
“About my life?”
“Oh, nothing very definite. But if I had to summarize my speculations, I suppose they would go something like this: has Father been a success or a failure?

…..

But whether or not a parent is a success would seem to have something to do with whether or not his children’s marriages are successful. There I haven’t done too well.

As I was reading this book, I thought of Ozu’s films. Like Ozu, Kawabata is bold to expose the breakdown of the traditional family and the threat to paternal authority in post WWII Japan. He depicts the shift from a parent-child emphasis to one between husband and wife. He is honest in revealing the common cracks of unfaithfulness which can destroy marriages. In the book, he openly describes the strain and alienation between generations and within a marriage.

Besides relationships, Shingo has to battle with something more inherent and spiritual. His son Shuichi neglects his wife Kikuko and often goes to his mistress, Kinu, who later becomes pregnant. Shingo not only takes upon himself to deal with Kinu, but is drawn into something even more difficult to confront, for in Shuichi, he sees himself:

Shingo was astonished at his son’s spiritual paralysis and decay, but it seemed to him that he was caught in the same filthy slough. Dark terror swept over him.

Shingo is a man afflicted on severals fronts, guilt, responsibility, spiritual decay. Author Kawabata instills relief for his protagonist as well as his readers by means of Nature.

Gingko Tree in Japan

Shingo is superbly in tune with the natural world, and in turn, nature is a mirror from which he sees himself clearly. The temperamental sky reflects his moods; the typhoon, his inner turmoil; stalks of bamboo broken off by the storm parallel the broken family relationships he lives with; the noise of locust wings spells restlessness; and yet the unseasonable buds on the great gingko tree splashes hope in a troubled time:

The gingko has a sort of strength that the cherry doesn’t,” he said. “I’ve been thinking the ones that live long are different from the others. It must take a great deal of strength for an old tree like that to put out leaves in the fall.

And thus comes the turning point in Shuichi and Kikuko’s marriage, though fragile, still a glimmer of hope, while Fasuko’s marriage comes to an abrupt end like an overnight storm. As for Shingo, we wish him well, like the unseasonable buds on the great gingko tree.

The Sound of the Mountain requires slow reading and quiet contemplation. Like a good film, I know I will go back to it as time goes by.

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The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, published by Vintage International, NY., 1996, 276 pages.

Note: ‘gingko’ in this book is spelt differently from our common spelling nowadays ‘ginkgo’

Ginkgo Tree photo from Wikimedia Commons

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Other related posts on Japanese Literature and Films:

Reading Snow Country in Snow Country

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Oe

Yasujiro Ozu and the Art of Aloneness 

Notes on the Synthesis of Film, Art… Life?

Reading Snow Country in Snow Country

The first ‘Snow Country’ in the title refers to the 1968 Japanese Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s (川端 康成 1899-1972) seminal novel Snow Country (雪鄉); the second refers to Arti’s neck of the woods here north of the 49th parallel in mid December.

Written in the 1930’s through to the 1940’s, Snow Country was later translated into English and published in 1956.  It is probably Kawabata’s most well-known work.  Translator Edward G. Seidensticker had been credited for leading Kawabata’s work to the ultimate accolade, the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1968, a first for a Japanese writer.

The haiku-like simplicity so pervasive in the book is most apt for the Season. Firstly, its meditative descriptions and imagery offer a respite in the midst of our frantic pace.  And secondly, it points to certain relevance during this Christmas time, which I find surprising.

Translator Seidensticker writes in the introduction that the haiku is a juxtaposition of incongruous terms, such as motion and stillness. Within such contradictions sparks “a sudden awareness of beauty.”  Relax in the following poetic imageries:

They came out of the cedar grove, where the quiet seemed to fall in chilly drops.

or this:

[Her voice] seemed to come back like an echo of distilled love.

or this:

The field of white flowers on red stems was quietness itself.

Or savor the interplay of light and shadow, which evokes the poignancy of decayed beauty. This could well be the summing up of the human condition in Kawabata’s novel.

The sky was clouding over.  Mountains still in the sunlight stood out against shadowed mountains.  The play of light and shade changed from moment to moment, sketching a chilly landscape.  Presently the ski grounds too were in shadow.  Below the window Shimamura could see little needles of frost like ising-glass among the withered chrysanthemums, though water was still dripping from the snow on the roof.

The protagonist Shimamura, ‘who lived a life of idleness’ from inherited wealth, would leave his wife and children in Tokyo and go alone to the snow country every year, the mountain region of central Japan, to meet Komako, a young geisha at a hot spring village.  The love affair between the two is starkly off-balanced.  Despite her work in the pleasure quarters, entertaining parties of men, Komako is deeply devoted to Shimamura. Like her meager dwelling in the shabbiness of all, her room is spotlessly clean: “I want to be as clean and neat as the place will let me…”

Sadly, Komako realizes it is but a doomed unrequited love that she has invested in.  Shimamura too is aware of his own coldness.  Even though he is drawn back to Komako by making these trips to the snow country, he feels no obligation at all:

All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her.

Of course, it could well be guilt and a sense of moral ground, albeit his loyalty to his wife and children rarely comes to mind.

Shimamura does not understand the purity Komako seeks in her love for him, and her desire not to be treated as a geisha.  And that is why his nonchalant statement hits Komako so hard. In the climatic scene of the story, he utters, though not without affection: “You are a good woman.”

Instead of taking his words as an endearment, Komako is deeply hurt. Despite having to work as a geisha due to her circumstance, thus selling herself as an outcast, she longs to be removed from her predicament and be transported to a new life. Shimamura’s repeated words “You are a good woman” fall upon her like the gavel of final judgement laden with biting sarcasm.

Kawabata’s characters cry out for redemption, to be delivered from their precarious state. Komako is seeking saving grace in Shimamura, and desperately hoping for a way out of the “indefinable air of loneliness” shrouding her.  But her search is in vain for the man is incapable of love:

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin.  He pitied her, and he pitied himself.

Shimamura knows deep down that he needs cleansing as much as or even more than Komako.

The snow country of Japan is also the land of the Chijimi.  It is an old folk art of weaving where a certain kind of long grass is cut and treated, finally transformed into pure white thread.  The whole process of spinning, weaving, washing and bleaching is done in the snow.  As the saying goes, “There is Chijimi linen because there is snow.”  After the linen is made into kimonos, people still send them back to the mountain regions to have the maidens who made them rebleach them each year.  And this is where the universal appeal of snow as a metaphor for purity and cleansing so powerfully depicted by Kawabata, as Shimamura ponders:

The thought of the white linen, spread out on the deep snow, the cloth and the snow glowing scarlet in the rising sun, was enough to make him feel that the dirt of the summer had been washed away, even that he himself had been bleached clean.

When I came to this description towards the end of the book, a starkly similar image conjured up in my mind:

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”              —- Isaiah 1:18

And like the doomed ending of their love affair, death comes as a certainty to all, insects or humans alike.  Shimamura has observed how a moth “fell like a leaf from a tree… dragonflies bobbing about in countless swarms, like dandelion floss in the wind.”  The poetic descriptions do not make death any more appealing.  Kawabata uses insects as a metaphor for the frailty of life and the chilling finality awaiting:

Each day, as the autumn grew colder, insects died on the floor of his room.  Stiff-winged insects fell on their backs and were unable to get to their feet again.  A bee walked a little and collapsed, walked a little and collapsed.  It was a quiet death that came with the change of seasons.  Looking closely, however, Shimamura could see that the legs and feelers were trembling in the struggle to live.

It is pure serendipity that I picked up this book to read at this time of the year.  The Christmas story too has also cast a vivid interplay between darkness and light.  I was reminded of this reference:

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”            — Isaiah 9:2

There is reason to rejoice, for the Able Deliverer had come… He too had lived a life of paradoxes and contradictions: born to die, life through death, strength through weakness.  And beneath the surface of jollity of the Season and the superficial exchanges of good will, there lies deep and quiet, the source of joy and inner fulfillment, and Life’s ultimate triumph over death.

I heard a small voice echo as I treaded on the snowy path alone in my snow country.

It said: “For this reason I came.”

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Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. Published by Vintage International, 1996. 175 pages.

This concludes my final entry to meet Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge 4 before the end of 2010.

My other JLC posts:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

Thanks to Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge 4, I have the chance to explore the intricate world of Kenzaburo Oe (pronounced ‘oh-ay’, 大江 健三郎 ), Japan’s second Nobel Laureate for Literature (1994), after Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) received the Prize in 1968.

Like his earlier work A Personal Matter*, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is an autobiographical novel dealing with the author’s experiences of raising a handicapped child.  A Personal Matter was written when Oe was young, describing an ordeal still raw from the initial shock of the birth of his brain-damaged child. Rouse Up was published in 1983, almost twenty years after A Personal Matter.

Rouse Up chronicles a more mature protagonist, the writer K, who has gone past the stage of denial and escape, to come to terms with the reality of fathering a handicapped child. Through the arduous journey, the writer has gained insights and pleasure from his relationship with his son Hikari, whom he nicknamed Eeyore in his novels.

Oe starts off the book with K’s plan to write a dictionary of terms for his now maturing son, to prepare him for his entry into the real, adult world.  This turns out to be a learning task in itself.  How do you explain to a brain-damaged person what the word ‘foot’ means?  Or ‘river’, ‘life’, or ‘death’?  He needs to deconstruct the realities of his everyday life before he can grasp the essence and meaning of his encounters.

It’s interesting to see how K get through to his son in defining ‘foot’. Eeyore understands it in relation to ‘gout’ from which his father once suffered. After the healing of the pain and swelling of the gout, it has turned into ‘a nice foot’.  So, the understanding of ‘foot’ comes in light of the pain it had experienced. K soon realizes that the definitions are more for himself as for Eeyore.

The author’s long journey of acceptance and self-discovery owes mostly to his love for the works of William Blake.  Rouse Up is a smorgasbord of selections if you are a Blake scholar. So admittedly, I have had a hard time ploughing through Oe’s use of parallels from Blake’s poetic and artistic symbolisms to reflect on his own predicament.  In certain parts, Oe’s writing is just as esoteric as Blake’s mythical depictions.  However, one thing is clear.  My enjoyment of this novel is no less, and the poignancy of a father-son relationship no weaker as I find my way through the Blake maze.  The book requires and deserves multiple reading.

Despite its complexity and denseness, the essence filters through Oe’s meticulous descriptions.  Further, John Nathan’s translation navigates effectively through Oe’s nuanced and sensitive narratives.  I’m just curious as to what the original Japanese version looks like since there are numerous references and quotes from Blake.  Are they in English or in Japanese translation?

Two lines from The Four Zoas seem to have outlined K’s personal journey:

“That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return
To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.”

It’s a perpetual striving, not unlike Sisyphus’s effort, and yet still leads from one path to the next, prompting a renewed acceptance and offering novel discoveries on the way.

Aside from the esoteric passages of Blake’s visions, some very simple lines shine through, and they are the ones that are most moving for me:

… healing the rift with my son, I became aware of his grief through the agency of a Blake poem, “On Another’s Sorrow,” which includes this stanza:

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d.

One of the “Songs of Innocence,” the poem concludes with the following verse:

O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

In his attempt to know more about Eeyore, K explores the power of dreams and the imagination. Using Blake’s mythological poetry and artwork, he tries to understand Eeyore’s internal world. Both he and his wife know Eeyore does not dream, but that does not preclude he does not have imagination.

Subscribing to Blake’s conviction that: “The Imagination is not a State:  It is the Human Existence itself.”, K strives in earnest to cultivate Eeyore’s imagination. Eeyore has an almost instinctive response to bird calls, distinguishing them even before he adopts human language.  As he grows older, he is drawn towards the music of Bach and Mozart.  His imagination soon finds a channel of expression in composing, an amazing accomplishment nurtured by a highly supportive and loving family.  In real life, Oe’s son Hikari is a composer.

Adopting Blake’s vision, K sees a future for father and son together in a state of grace, from Blake’s Jerusalem:

“Jesus replied Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live
But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me
This is friendship & Brotherhood without it Man is Not

So Jesus spoke! The Covering Cherub coming on in darkness
Overshadowed them & Jesus and Thus do Men in Eternity
One for another to put off by forgiveness, every sin.”

From coming to terms with the tragic reality of fathering a brain-damaged child, to ultimately, almost symbiotically, sharing his life with his son, is a process not short of a personal epiphany.  At the end of the novel, Eyeore has grown to be a twenty-year-old man. While still having a limited mental capacity, Eeyore has his way of exuding his own humor, love and care for those around him.  The story is a poignant tapestry weaving real-life and the visionary, through which an imagined world of reality is beautifully conceived.

As for the source of the book title, it comes as a moving episode at the end of the book.  I should keep that for you to discover.  A heart-warming finish to a poignant chronicle.

John Nathan’s Afterword is an eloquent tribute to the father, son, and the nurturing family. It is also a helpful annotation of the novel.

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan, published by Grove Press, NY, 2002.  259 pages.

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* A touching review of A Personal Matter has been posted recently by Claire at Kiss A Cloud.  Also, Mel U’s A Reading Life has posted extensively on Oe and other Japanese writers.  Of course, there’s Bellezza at Dolce Bellezza, who has hosted Japanese Literature Challenge all these years, now in its fourth term.  I thank them all for their inspiration.