Today's post sees my review of the first of the two January in Japan group reads, and while the writer is very familiar, the book itself is perhaps less well known. It's the story of a woman trying to find herself, and looking in one particular place... The weather's nice - let's take a trip to the coast ;)
*****
Hiromi Kawakami's Manazuru (translated by Michael Emmerich) is centred on Kei, a middle-aged woman living with her daughter, Momo, and her mother back in the family home. Twelve years ago, her husband, Rei, vanished without a word, and while her life has stabilised to a certain extent, thanks in part to a relationship with a married man, she certainly has a lot of unfinished business.
One day, on a whim, Kei sets off for the seaside town of Manazuru, hoping to find answers in the course of her travels. It's the first of several visits, and the only one she spends alone. On the next outing, she's accompanied by her daughter; after that, her companion is someone slightly less familiar...
Kawakami is well known for her novel The Briefcase (AKA Strange Weather in Tokyo), and for those who have already tried that one, Manazuru may come as a bit of a surprise. It's certainly a little darker and edgier, with a more surreal style in parts than The Briefcase. Of course, with only the two novels out in English, who's to say which is the more representative of her style.
The main theme explored in the novel is that of letting go and finding closure. Kei, understandably, was shattered by Rei's disappearance, and you get the sense that her daughter and her mother have been tip-toeing around her for a long time - only now are questions being asked about Rei, and the couple's life together. Through fleeting glimpses of a diary in which we see random messages, and Kei's flashbacks to Rei's (imagined) affair, we start to piece together what actually happened. The truth is, though, that we are just as confused as Kei herself is.
One of the coping strategies she uses is her long-term affair with Seiji, a married man, a relationship which definitely feels like a crutch to help her carry on:
"To become involved is not to be close. It isn't exactly to be distant, either. When two people become involved, and also when they do not, there is, always, a little separation."
p.7 (Counterpoint Press, 2010)
While she seems like the clingy one, the truth is that Seiji's stand-offishness is more of a defence mechanism - he senses that Kei still has another man in her life...
A large part of the book is about the relationship between the three women. Having returned to her family home after her husband's disappearance, Kei is now one of three generations of women under the one roof:
"Now that we were living together again, were we close? Three women, our three bodies. Like spheres joined in motion, that is how we are. Not concentric spheres, each sphere cradles its own center, not flat but full, that is how we are." (p.21)
With Momo going though her teens, Kei is trying to hold onto her daughter's love, regretting the loss of the closeness they once shared. Only gradually does she realise that her mother feels the same way about her.
Of course, while the human is important, it's the supernatural that stands out. The striking feature of Manazuru is the spirits that follow Kei around, appearing both at home and in public. While most are indistinct blurs, one eventually coalesces, a woman who keeps drawing Kei back to Manazuru, threatening to pull her across into the other realm:
"I notice, suddenly, that there is no sound at all.
Gripping my half-drunk cup of coffee in one hand, I have been gazing down at the woman's face, reflected in the puddle. The size of a bean at first, it grew to walnut size, then finally assumed the the size of an actual human face." (p.97)
It's in this other realm that she hopes to finally find out what happened to Rei - but is he even there? What if her trips to the coast are all a big mistake?
Manazuru is a book I enjoyed a lot the first time around. It has a subtle style, written in short, clipped sentences, with a cinematic air to the whole story. In typically Japanese fashion, you sense that the important information remains unspoken, with much lying beneath the surface. Each of the main characters, while generally acting calmly, were adrift in a sea of emotions: Kei's rage at Rei's disappearance; Momo's hurt and desperation; the Mother's fury at her son-in-law and desire to help her daughter; and Seiji's hidden desire to get closer to Kei.
However, when I looked at other's comments, not everyone seems to have enjoyed it as much as I did, and on a second reading, a few weeks later, it did appear a little less appealing. The language was more troublesome on the second attempt - deliberately short and confronting, the spiky sentences sometimes get in the way of the reading. I also found Kei a little more annoying at times, and knowing where we were going, I actually found the story a little too vague this time around.
Most readers will prefer The Briefcase, but this is still a good read, one I'd recommend (particularly if you like the understated variety of J-Lit). If you want to see what others thought, check out the dedicated page over at the JiJ blog, and if that's not incentive enough, I've got a few surprises for you. Kawakami may only have two novels translated into English, but the page does have a few other bits and pieces I've managed to dig up.
Off you go, then ;)
As much as I love good writing, literary magazines are a fairly unknown quantity for me (virtually all of my reading is good old-fashioned books, preferably novels). However, I'm always open to new literary experiences, and receiving things like the work you can see in the photo make it very easy to try something a little different. Be careful, though - looks can be deceiving ;)
*****
Granta 127: Japan (review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Allen & Unwin) is the latest edition of the quarterly magazine for new writing. This issue has been released to coincide with the first-ever edition of the Japanese version of the magazine, and for this reason, the content is a hybrid of work from Japanese writers and artists and contributions from Western writers. Oh, and it's very pretty, too :)
The layout and design are excellent, and (naive as I am) I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a book, not a magazine, with full colour throughout. There's a mix of genres (stories, poems, non-fiction) plus art and photos, the most memorable of which is the cover, from Yuji Hamada's 'Primal Mountain' series:
"With this work, what is most important is the image of a mountain in the viewer's mind. In other words, it is not the maker of the images who establishes and delivers what is to be seen; rather, I surrendered the work to the viewer's first impression, which led me to title the series 'Primal Mountain'." (translated by Ivan Vartanian)
'Primal Mountain', p.97 (Granta Publications, 2014)
Oh, and there are some ads too - it is a magazine, after all ;)
Of course, our focus is on the writing, and there are some big names on board. One of those is Hiromi Kawakami, author of The Briefcase (AKA Strange Weather in Tokyo), and her contribution is 'Blue Moon' (translated by Lucy North), a real(?) story of an agonising wait to see if the writer has cancer. It's a poignant piece, with haikus in snowy Russia and reflections on death:
"The Universe, I myself, the birds winging through the skies, the snowflakes swirling through Moscow... No one sees the beginning of these things, and no one can predict how they will end. How precious it is, how precarious it is to be living."
'Blue Moon' (p.113)
The writer's brush with death encourages her to think more about what it means to actually live.
David Mitchell is another of the big guns, and his story 'Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut' is an excellent piece - well, six, actually. The story looks at a brief moment in time in one of the ubiquitous budget coffee shops, seen by six different people, each of whom has arrived at that moment by a very different path. The grumpy old man, the hard-working manager, the foreign 'English teacher', the Burberry-clad young woman - a nice cross-section of Japanese society gathered around one shiny counter :)
Perhaps of more interest, though, are the new discoveries to be made, and there are plenty of good writers here who aren't quite so well known in the West. I enjoyed Kyoko Nakajima's 'Things Remembered and Things Forgotten' (translated by Ian M. McDonald), a clever story about memories of the past (and how they might not always be too accurate). Another to impress was Hiroko Oyamada's 'Spider Lilies' (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter), another of those odd, slightly off (Ogawaesque!) tales which Japanese writers excel at, this one connecting flowers, breast milk and maternal jealousy...
As can be expected, recent events have made their mark on Japanese writing, and Toshiki Okada's 'Breakfast' (translated by Michael Emmerich) is one which touches on post-Fukushima depression. In this story, a woman flies back to a Tokyo she denies exists, merely in order to cut her only remaining tie - with her husband:
"An awareness of how impossible it was for her to visit Tokyo without marking out the beginning and end of her stay, anger at the circumstances that made her feel this way, a wrenching sense of guilt toward Tokyo and all the people who lived here, this tangle of emotions bore down on her relentlessly, crushing her."
'Breakfast' (p.35)
It's an excellent story, made better by its elaborate, comma-laden style, wonderfully written - and translated :)
The gloomy outlook isn't confined to Okada's piece, with several of the other writers sharing his sense of pessimism. Yukiko Motoya's 'The Dogs' (translated by Asa Yoneda) is a strange story set in the mountains in winter, with sinister canine companions and a town slowly disappearing without a trace. However, when it comes to strange, Tomoyuki Hoshino can always come up with the goods (c.f. We, the Children of Cats and Lonely Hearts Killer), and in 'Pink' (translated by Brian Bergstrom), he describes a freak heatwave which drives people to spin around and around - cooling themselves and speeding up time in the process...
As mentioned, apart from the great translated J-Lit, there's plenty here from outsiders looking in. Ruth Ozeki's 'Linked' is a short piece looking at her grandfather's life, attempting to understand him and his art. Another interesting view is from Pico Iyer's 'The Beauty of the Package', in which the writer examines the tacky Japanese wedding 'experience' and wonders if it's actually beautiful after all if you look more closely. There's also a non-Anglophone view, as Andrés Felipe Solano's 'Pig Skin' (translated by Nick Caistor) was originally written in Spanish. It's an amusing story about a writer who gets inspiration from a chance encounter on a ferry, a Colombian-Japanese-Korean co-production, brought into English by the excellent Mr. Caistor :)
Sadly, there are limits to my energy (and the length of a review people can be expected to read) - there's just too much here to do justice to. I haven't even mentioned Sayaka Murata's amusing take on the sexless Japanese in 'A Clean Marriage' (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) or Toh Enjoe's 'Printable' (translated by David G. Boyd), a story set in a post-3D-Printer world. Well, I have now, obviously ;)
*****
Granta 127: Japan is an excellent addition to my Japanese library, and it's a must have for anyone interested in J- Lit (and with Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 8 starting this month...) - but wait, there's more! If you go to the Granta website, there's some exclusive online content free of charge, including excerpts of some stories (with comments by the translators) and extra stories, including one by Yoko Ogawa. What are you waiting for - get over there, now!
It all makes for an intriguing, multi-faceted look at a fascinating country. As it says on the back cover:
"Everyone knows this country and no one knows it."
That may be very true, but this collection will help you learn just a little more about the land of the rising sun ;)
Well, we've just about made it to the end of our month of Japanese delights, but there is one more stop before we say farewell to the land of the rising sun. The last day of January brings the reviews of our chosen group readalong, and happily it is a good one. Don't believe me? Well, the judges for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize (who chose it for their short-list) beg to differ ;)
*****
Hiromi Kawakami's The Briefcase (translated by Allison Markin Powell) is a brief but powerful novel about the development of a rather unusual relationship. Set in present-day Tokyo (largely in a Japanese bar, or 'izakaya'), it tells of a chance meeting between Tsukiko, a single woman closing in on forty, and her old Japanese teacher Harutsuna Matsumoto - the man she simply calls 'Sensei'.
What begins as occasional drunken conversations in the bar turns into a much closer friendship. The odd couple go for long walks, embark on shopping trips, have dinner together, and later even go mushroom hunting. The two enjoy their friendship, but with an age gap like theirs, surely there can't be romance here - can there?
The Briefcase is a bitter-sweet love story, a development of the rather unorthodox relationship between two people who stand out a little from the crowd. Sensei is retired and divorced, an old man, but one who is always dapper in his suit (and with his briefcase ever in hand). Beginning as a figure of fun, his character is sketched out a little more with each appearance, allowing the reader to get to know him just as Tsukiko does.
Tsukiko though is very different from the good-natured former teacher. She is reclusive, spiky, and adept at avoiding affection. Her life is empty, virtually devoid of meaningful relationships, as she realises when she tries to analyse her connection to Sensei:
"When I tried to think whom I spent time with before I became friendly with Sensei, no-one came to mind. I had been alone. I rode the bus alone, I walked around the city alone, I did my shopping alone, and I drank alone."
p.25 (Counterpoint Press, 2012)
In fact, while the reader initially struggles to accept the May-to-December nature of the relationship, later on it is Tsukiko's (in)ability to surrender her independence which is of more interest. Can she even allow herself to enter into a real, mature relationship?
The Briefcase is an enjoyable novel to read due to the episodic nature of the text. The story is divided into seventeen chapters of fairly equal length, taking us unhurriedly through the build-up of the relationship (in fact, it is very similar to The Old Capital in this regard...). There are three two-chapter sections (Mushroom Hunting, The Cherry Blossom Party, The Island) spaced out over the novel, each one a turning point in the relationship. It all makes for a very smooth read.
Of course, the success of the novel hangs entirely on how believable Sensei and Tsukiko's relationship is, and Kawakami handles this very well. Before starting, I thought it might be a little like Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor (a book I liked but didn't find particularly special), but that wasn't the case. The relationship progresses naturally, convincing us not only that it is possible, but also that it is natural, and the addition of a catalyst in the shape of Kojima, Tsukiko's old classmate, helps to push the story along when it is in danger of drifting.
The way the story is written means that the reader experiences events through the eyes of Tsukiko (Sensei, even as we learn more about his past, remains fairly enigmatic to the end). It is tempting to look at Tsukiko and wonder why she is so attracted to spending time with Sensei - and why she is so alone in the first place. She drifts by without analysing the relationship much, at least until the stay on the island:
"Since
when had Sensei and I become close like this? At first, Sensei had
been a distant stranger. An old, unfamiliar man who in the far-away
beyond had been a high school teacher of mine. Even once we began
chatting now and then, I still barely ever looked at his face. He was
just an abstract presence, quietly drinking his saké in the seat next to
mine at the counter." p.126
In many ways, she is rather childish and immature, often blurting out the first thing that comes into her head. Of course, there is another, more disturbing way to account for her behaviour. Perhaps she is merely unable to sacrifice her personality for a partner in the way the patriarchal Japanese society demands...
All in all, The Briefcase is an excellent book, well drawn out and thoroughly believable. There are a few moments of kitch, and a little melodrama towards the close of the novel, but Kawakami rescues it nicely with the ending. I'll certainly be getting myself a copy of Manazuru at some point, and I'm already looking forward to the new one in English (Strange Weather from Tokyo), out from Portobello Books later this year - as you may have gathered, this was just a retitled UK version of The Briefcase :(. All that remains to say is that if you haven't read this, you could do worse than give it a try...
...oh, and good luck to Kawakami for the Man Asian Literary Prize :)
*****
You've read my thoughts on the book - why not see how others found it?
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