ドナルド・キーンと俳句 (‘Donald Keene And Haiku’)

All writers are travelers, even as all readers are followers. Sometimes the roles are reversed. Us literary disciples stray from the established footsteps on the pre-established, timeworn path, inadvertently or intentionally, thereby making new indentations of our own. Those voyagers that come after us must then decide for themselves which route to emulate, and which they might safely abandon in favor of uncharted trails.

In Marie Mariya’s 2022 book ドナルド・キーンと俳句 (‘Donald Keene And Haiku’), the author follows the celebrated translator and scholar of Japanese literature throughout the course of his long artistic lifetime as he ushers the world of haiku into the modern era.

I, in, turn, followed Mariya’s investigative journey of Keene’s copious amount of creation, criticism, journalism, interviews. You, by reading this review, are, in essence, watching me watch Mariya watch Keene watch Bashō (and other poets).

Whose footsteps came first? Which aesthetic link in the chain is the tightest, the strongest? Knowing what you know now (or will soon know, or perhaps already know) about Keene, and Mariya, and my thoughts on them both, who might you then lead into further exploits of Japanese poetic explorations?

It’s that kind of book, this one.

Makes you think about who came before, and who might be next.

Mariya is nothing if not a genial guide through Donald Keene’s fascination with haiku and its almost infinite form(s). Not to mention an exceedingly gracious and enthusiastic one, too. In her prologue, she starts at the end — in front of Keene’s grave. Taking note, as she does, of the insignia of a golden dog on his tombstone, the 黄色 犬, which might be read as ‘ki’ and ‘inu’, thereby approximating the sound of ‘Keene’. Paying tribute to him in his final resting place, his work an inspiration to her, his ‘travels’ a beacon.

She mentions how she met him only once, in 2016, at a haiku conference also attended by one of Keene’s former students, Janine Beichman (who will reappear in an interview later in this book talking glowingly of her mentor). Mariya, along with her sister, were the co-authors of a (then) soon-to-be-published, modern translation of Arthur Waley’s THE TALE OF GENJI; they reinterpreted his elegant English translation of ancient Japanese into a present-day form of contemporary Japanese.

Clutching a copy of Waley’s work, Mariya was able to share her enthusiasm of the legendary British translator in person with Keene, who eagerly asked her for her favorite scene from GENJI. (His adopted son would later email a picture of the two sisters meeting their idol, much to their mutual delight.) In 2020, their translation would win the Donald Keene Special Award, with Keene’s son informing Mariya that his father was currently smiling in heaven, happy that they had won that prize in his name.

From this introduction, it’s clear that Mariya practically worships the American (and later, officially, Japanese) author, but the book itself is not any kind of hagiography, per se; it’s not strictly a biography of the man, but rather a record of the intellectual journey of his life — although, in Keene’s case, it may, in fact, be difficult to separate his ‘self’ from his calling, from the country that continually beckoned him through its ancient poetry and prose.

Mariya does, however, provide a brief biographical background, at least as it relates to his relationship to the Japanese language.

She notes how he first encountered anything ‘Japanese’ at the age of ten, when, for Christmas, he was gifted with a set of encyclopedias related to ‘countries of the world’, one of which pertained to Japan, and even contained a few haiku, such a strange condensed form!

Later, as a teenager, at the dawn of World War II, a deeper appreciation of Japan would begin when he stumbled upon a two-volume, paperback version of Waley’s THE TALE OF GENJI in a New York bookshop, selling for the tidy sum of forty-nine cents. A lifelong pacifist, Keene was able to find comfort at that troubling time in the ancient Japan that Waley so vividly depicted, where brutal conflict was absent and intimate human relations remained paramount.

Mariya then races ahead, past Keene’s studies at Columbia to his year-long study at the Japanese language school run by the Navy. (For a deeper look at Keene’s Japanese language-study, I’ve included at the bottom of this post a link to my review of a book that delves deep into that time of his life.) If he had to be involved in war, he at least wanted his burgeoning pursuit of Japanese to be front and center.

And it would eventually come in handy, that knowledge. Mariya notes how that American soldiers were forbidden from keeping diaries of any kind, lest stray military details found their way into those (supposedly) private entries, but apparently Japanese enlisted men had no such forbidden provisions. On the island of Guadalcanal, Keene came across the diaries of dead Japanese soldiers; he would also interview captured soldiers about their wartime experiences. His love of the Japanese language was merging with the brutal fragility of life.

Mariya relates how, unlike other world cultures, Japan might be the only country, historically, that has applied true respect, even reverence, to the act of writing diaries, assessing them as bona fide literary art forms in their own right. Through translating these Japanese diaries, Keene was able to experience for himself, via the words of others, how feelings and perceptions might find a firm aesthetic foothold in print.

After the war, back at Columbia, Keene would continue his study of Japanese literature, eventually teaching the subject at Cambridge University and studying in Japan from 1953 to 1955. It is here, in this time, in this place, that Mariya truly begins her exploration of Keene’s work.

She quotes extensively from a 1955 magazine article that Keene wrote for the monthly literary magazine 中央公 , in which he retraced the famous Edo era haiku poet Bashō’s journey depicted in his famous work おくのほそ道 (‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’). This journalistic assignment by Keene depicted his previous year’s trek in those oh-so-modern times of February, 1954.

Keene had no, pardon the pun, keen interest in modern literature, so this type of literary journey quite literally into the past made perfect sense for him.

(Even the deluge of rain mirrored the weather of Bashō’s own trek, making Keene wonder if he was a true 雨男 [‘ameotoko”, an unfortunate soul who was always unlucky with the weather.)

At one point, recounting how he eagerly walked up a particularly mountainous path, feeling perfectly in step with his ancient literary idol, Keene writes how ludicrous it was that people would use a bus to more easily traverse this treacherous terrain; Mariya rather wryly wonders if, when the ninety-one year old Keene would return to this same area decades later, he still held those same rigid sentiments!

After recounting Keene’s magazine article of this following-in-Bashō’s-footstephs, the author details how Keene’s first two works on Japanese literature, published in the mid-1950s, entirely changed the game when it came to the rest of the world finally recognizing Japan as a source of true literary, artistic merit.

Not that this was necessarily a predictable occurrence, however. She mentions how, in 1953, when Keene first started teaching Japanese literature at Cambridge, he had a total of ten students, making him seriously consider taking up the Russian language, by then an academic mainstay; he wondered if it was even possible to make a living in Japanology, a field that did not even feasibly existed?

Yet he persisted, and his book JAPANESE LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION FOR WESTERN READERS, followed two years later by ANTHOLOGY OF JAPANESE LITERATURE, which earned an enormously favorable endorsement by the esteemed SATURDAY REVIEW, paved the way not only for the rest of Keene’s career, but for an entire methodology that would endure for decades to come.

From this point on, Mariya devotes most of her time to analyzing Keene’s own analysis of various individual haiku and chronicling the history of modern haiku itself, including Keene’s impact on the diversity and worldwide development of such a quintessentially ‘Japanese’ art.

Indeed, Mariya writes of how Keene was so apt a translator, and such a perceptive critic of the form, that Yukio Mishima himself (who Keene would later both translate his works and befriend) used the metaphor of Keene catching so many unique fish in Japan that it was a shame that it had to be a foreigner who proved to be such an adept fisherman.

Mariya does a brilliant job of not only analyzing-Keene-analyzing-Bashō, but she also provides wonderful commentary on what makes haiku (and all its attendant offshoots) such a mesmerizing poetic field of expression.

In haiku, the situational and temporal become one; this precise moment and ever-lasting eternity coincide. Keene was able to reinterpret the specific sounds of haiku and somehow find adequate English translations that approximated the aural effect, if not the actual emissions, that each specific character enunciated.

The small moments in haiku need to be revelatory; they also need to artistically incorporate the recognition of those moments, without ostentation.

Keene was able to isolate those moments, then re-establish them in English.

Via Bashō’s poems, Keene could, within the requisite seventeen syllables allowed, identify the exact space between ‘now’ and ‘eternity’.

Finding the perfect English equivalent was the key, the proper alliteration of sound, as in this translation by Keene of Kuniharu Shimizu that Mariya cites:

White, whiter

Than the stones of Stone Mountain —

This autumn wind.

The three ‘w’ sounds in the poem, and the replication of ‘stone’ (in Japanese ‘Ishiyama no ‘Ishi’, with ‘Ishi’ as stone, recited twice), and the use of a ‘dash’, and the period at the end — all Keene ‘inventions’, of a sort, that perfectly encapsulate the Japanese original.

Throughout the book, through Keene’s various haiku translations of different haiku poets, Mariya evokes her appreciation, through concrete examples of Keene’s own, almost overpowering artistic sensibilities.

Yet she also places Keene in a literary context, spending much time — perhaps too much time, one could argue — focusing on who came before him, and who came after, within the wider world of haiku.

She brings up Basil Chamberlain’s 1880 book BASHO AND THE JAPANESE POETICAL EPIGRAMS, and cites Harold Henderson’s early role in bring Japanese literature to the West, then circles back to Lafcadio Hearn, who probably provided the first English translation of Bashō’s ‘frog’ haiku (‘old pond — frogs jumping in sound of water’), and extols upon how the haiku boom in English influenced Rilke and Borges and Pound and the Imagists and even eventually the American Beatniks, before widening her survey even more to discuss, in significant detail, the French, German, and especially Spanish approach to haiku, including how Keene became quite good friends with the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, a particular fan of the form. She also delineates the importance of renka, a kind of linked comic poetic verse in which groups of people might compose a single poem; in the twentieth century, this sort of communal approach to art would find favor among Europeans poets. All of this is historically important, to be sure, but it does, at times, seem a little bit like ‘filler’, edging slightly away from the ostensible subject of Keene himself.

What I found quite interesting was Mariya’s depiction of Keene’s critique of postwar poetry, embodied by the ‘4S’ group of poets who modernized the form by having it tackle certain societal and cultural issues. It seems like Keene was so infatuated with the classical form of haiku — in which the ‘personal’ intercrossed with the ‘seasonal’ — that he had little appreciation for any trendy experimentation with form or content, and he was openly pessimistic about the future of the form.

(A bit of a fuddy-duddy of a view, one could argue, but hey — Keene was equally as incensed about the influx of katakana into the language after the war, a hideous writing-script utilized for the depiction of foreign vocabulary, a form of Japanese that he found blocky and garish, so perhaps it’s no surprise that somebody so attuned to the ancient mode of what Japanese could aesthetically offer would see any artistic or practical modification as intellectually, even morally damaging.)

Mariya ends her book in Keene’s apartment, after his death, as she’s given a tour by his adopted son. She takes note of the two statues of Bashō at the entrance; at the mounds of books and papers in his study; at the sheer, physical proof of the devotion to literature that he had.

(Indeed, so great was his love of the art and the craft that, in a previous chapter, Mariya devotes ample space to some of the two hundred and fifty haiku that Keene himself had composed, his first written on a Chinese island in 1947. He had no special delusions about his own creative ability, and even stated that he usually sketched out a poem when was drunk; even so, his affinity is clear, and moving. Many of these poems seem to have been tossed for friends on special occasions on various-colored paper.)

A final sentiment finds Mariya stating that, in 2022, on what would have been Keene’s 100th birthday, she wants to put a copy of her Waley translation at his gravesite.

I totally get this kind of severe literary adoration.

When I was a university student, I got the chance to meet more than a few of my own literary idols — Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, John Irving (twice), Joyce Carol Oates. You felt like you were in the presence of a force that you had such an almost psychic connection with, considering how much time in your head their own words had occupied. (These in-person encounters were especially potent in the age before You Tube, when one rarely even knew what individual authors actually looked like, sounded like.)

I got the same vibe here from Mariya that I felt myself in those days. We tag along after our favorite authors like puppies chasing their owners. We want to walk where they walked. They travel, we follow. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we travel on our own, inciting our own modest crowds. The whole world ended up following Keene’s own obsession with haiku, as this well-travelled author also spread his own knowledge the form wherever he went, resulting in an abiding fascination with this form of Japanese poetry that has stretched all over the globe.

Mariya’s gentle ode to Donald Keene lets us see her, seeing him; we listen to her, to hear him. One trail leads to another, to the next, from the past to the future. Both of their voices end up humming, vibrating, resonating with their own particular chime, even as they can’t help but influence and echo one another.

****************************************

ドナルド・キーン わたしの日本語修行 (‘Donald Keene: My Japanese Language Training’)

I

テニスボーイの憂鬱 (‘Tennis Boy’s Melancholy’)

Only Ryu Murakami, his maker, calls ‘Tennis Boy’ by that comic book-style moniker. His friends, co-workers and even his lovers refer to him as Aoki-san; his father, by Takahisa (and this only occurs one single time in the entire book). Tennis Boy as an individualized marker is strictly applied via the third-person narrator that Murakami employs to tell the narratively narrow, but emotionally deep — or as deep as his own psyche will enable him to explore — personal saga that unfolds in テニスボーイの憂鬱 (‘Tennis Boy’s Melancholy’). He is not necessarily a hero in his own mind, this Tennis Boy, but he sort of becomes ours, in the same way that people we know in real life seem to gradually elevate their moral stature by merely enduring life’s fickle head-pokes.

This novel, never translated into English, does not appear to be one of Murakami’s most lauded. (The Japanese language Wikipedia page for the author lists the book’s title in the category outlining his fiction but there’s no accompanying link; nobody’s bothered to do a write-up on it, apparently.) Yet this over-four-hundred-page novel — originally serialized in BRUTUS magazine from February 1982 to July 1984 before finally appearing in book-form in 1985 — remains a most compelling, crudely moving story of personal dissatisfaction and reluctant inner growth.

Murakami utilizes his trademark crudeness, his blunt approaches to sex and language, his willingness to just show people as they are, to ultimately craft a story of one young man’s gradual journey to what you might call a first-glimpse at maturation. That he only gets there by age thirty, and still seems a wee bit emotionally stunted? Well, we all have to start somewhere. Humans can only do so much with what we’ve been given.

Here’s what he was given:

Tennis Boy, twenty-nine years old and barely hanging on, helps manage a steakhouse in Yokohama, spending what little free time he has on the tennis courts, and occasionally saying hello to his wife and kindergarten-age son.

I’m being a bit flippant, but so is Tennis Boy. He clearly loves his boy, Yoshitake; his wife, well, that’s anybody’s guess.

The thing is, Tennis Boy gets around.

When he’s not on the courts playing against the local ‘homosexualist’ interior designer (which is not to imply that Tennis Boy is altogether homophobic; he admits that seeing lesbians together is a bit of a turn on, but two guys getting it on is absolutely not his thing), or the businessman in his fifties (who often lets his wife tag along, who herself plays a mean game), Tennis Boy is on the prowl.

Yet how can he not be, given the access that he gets?

The novel is primarily about the two sequential, extramarital affairs that Tennis Boy undertakes, each of them getting off the ground through business-related happenstance.

The first one comes about after a commercial is filmed at the steakhouse, and the model who accompanies the shoot wins him over with her beauty, but he’s never quite sure of his effect on her.

Even after they spend a few days in the seaside resort of Izu — playing lots of tennis, and having tons of sex — she tends not to return to his calls. Is evasive when asked what she’s been up to. Doesn’t seem to understand why he gets so worked up about things. He calls her sixteen times in six days and only gets her on the phone three times. He’s sort of obsessed, although he doesn’t quite know why, or to what end.

Even so, he screws around on her during a business trip to Brazil, sleeping with a local hostess. (The mixed-race ones are the prettiest, his co-worker tells him.) Tennis Boy doesn’t feel any guilt, although he does think of his ‘girlfriend’ all the time that he’s there. Still, he, like his colleagues, goes out to discos, scouts the Filipinos and the locals, sleeps with whom they can.

That’s just what Japanese businessman do, or so everybody seems to think.

There’s this almost obligatory kind of amoral nonchalance to Tennis Boy’s whole approach to life, relationships and sex that pervades the whole book, but why wouldn’t it? Tennis Boy is in a working environment where, when business takes you to other parts of the world, you fuck around. Part of making your way in the company, in the world.

So when he breaks up with his first girlfriend, almost by osmosis, rather through any rational, mutually-agreed upon decision, and meets his next one — a young Japanese woman in Saipan that he comes across while on yet another business trip — he finds himself confused by another infatuation.

Is this what ‘love’ is like?

If so, should he, could he, leave his wife and kid for this new shot at a potentially transformative life-long romance?

These inner dilemmas, of course, are bracketed by the sheer fact that Tennis Boy readily recognizes that his entire life is governed entirely by secrets and lies.

From his wife, for starters.

She barely appears in the book, popping up only in a handful of scenes; Tennis Boy often lies to her about the proverbial this, that or the other. Usually the girl that he’s sleeping with is in the same room when he’s on the phone to his wife. He’s mostly kind of a dick to her, to be honest.

With his son, he’s attentive, caring, and their scenes throughout the book mirror the stilted emotional progression that Tennis Boy is unknowingly trying to make for himself.

His boy is at first uninterested in female super-hero dolls; he later overhears, much to his mother’s horror, his father and his friend talking about a girl’s ‘pussy’, and wonders what that‘s all about. (‘It’s a girl’s version of a pee-pee’, he’s told, finding it ridiculous that girls actually have two larger holes located way down there.) The innocence of a child’s minute grasping of the sex differences, his natural puzzlement, is reflected — albeit on a larger, older scale — in his father’s complete cluelessness with how to handle his own multiple (and morally conflicting) interactions with the opposite sex.

Murakami, in his own way, is a strict moralist, or rather he’s an (a)moralist; he allows his characters to think, act, and regret for themselves, without any narrative judgement.

This non-judgemental narrative distancing is reflected in the book’s endlessly crude observations, which narratively and stylistically cement the author’s approach to recognizing humanity’s endless earthy eays.

You can not be a prude and read Murakami.

Tennis Boy screws a girl from behind and doesn’t want to see her turn towards him because it might make him think of his wife and kid; he comes home after a secret assignation and talks to his wife and his son and then goes to the bathroom to find a hair from his lover wedged into his mouth; there is an enormous amount of sexual language — detailed observations on vaginas, urinary acknowledgements and sketches.

Yet here’s where I think Murakami doesn’t get nearly enough credit as an author:

He also can be extraordinarily sentimental.

Near the beginning of the novel, Tennis Boy talks about how, as he a child, he got lost (or ran away) way up on a mountain road somewhere in the boonies, and when he called out his own version of a yodel, he received not answer at all. Eventually, of course, he made his way home, but throughout his life, that’s how he feels — that he calls, and nobody’s there to hear him.

This does not excuse him from being an emotionally stunted, duplicitous prick, of course, but Murakami is willing, even eager, to share the inner anger, shame, puzzlement and resiliency of somebody who can consistently fuck around on his wife and not give her a second thought. (Or a first one, come to think of it.) We are not asked to like Tennis Boy — only witness him.

Near the end, Tennis Boy is forced to grow up when all that sex-on-the-marital-side has serious consequences. His second love gets pregnant. Should she get an abortion? Does she want to have one? Does he even want her to do it?

This is where I circle back to this conviction I have that Murakami is a fierce (a)moralist.

He’s showing one immature man scrape and crawl his way to the land of adulthood. He would rather live his life on the tennis court, between those clearly defined lines. Indeed, as this lengthy novel progresses, we intermittently enter his thoughts as he creates this-or-that analogy comparing the game of tennis to the game of life. On the court, he can sort of at least situate himself; in real life, he drifts from his own family towards the gorgeous girls he finds himself falling in love with. Why can’t both life and love be as streamlined as tennis?

I won’t say what happens vis-a-vis the situation surrounding his girlfriend’s (potential) abortion, but we do get to watch as Tennis Boy approximates a mature response to the whole painful endeavor.

The future of his romantic life remains unclear, but in the book’s final scene, as his son suddenly spots a female classmate and quickly untangles his fingers from his father’s firm grasp to rush towards her and say hello, we do get the sense that another generation’s push towards romance might be getting a sudden head start. And Tennis Boy himself has to realize that one can’t keep on playing tennis forever.

Sometimes the rain can’t help but fall and wash out every court.

Like Tennis Boy’s own inner state, I, too, felt an odd melancholy as I read this novel.

Part of it had to do with Murakami’s deceptively readable style, in which the simple, casual nature of his prose often goes on and on for paragraphs that can last one page (or more), yet also contain within its uncomplicated structure enough emotional incoherence to render a reader emotionally and intellectually breathless by the time the chapter is finally finished.

There’s also the odd temporal lag that occupied my attention throughout the whole span of this read.

The book began to be serialized when I was still only six years old; the cultural references are either to Japanese musicians and actors that I’ve never heard of, or else are endlessly tennis-related shout-outs to John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, Tracy Austin and Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King; and the technological advances stop at telexes and push-button phones. I suddenly found myself wondering, at the end of the novel, what Tennis Boy might be like as a person now, right now. Since the story is set in 1981, and he was almost thirty, he would be well over seventy, and his young son would be around my age, in his late forties. Tennis Boy would no longer be a boy, but a senior citizen. He might not even be alive, or at least it’s likely that he would have undergone a surgery or two, as his own father did in this novel, admonishing his grown boy for spending too much time playing with his son, even as he urged him to simply enjoy life as it comes.

Tennis Boy, in my mind, over the course of the week that it took me to read the novel, has morphed into a real person. I worry for him. I hope he’s still around, doing well. I hope his wife either kicked him out or reconciled her own life with his own. I’m not so sure that I like him all that much, selfish oaf that he was, but boy, did he play his own game or what.

ディープフェイク (‘Deep Fake’)

The frustrating thing about Japanese tropes is that sometimes they are true.

Except when they aren’t.

So the notion that Japanese society exists in its present form as a series of concentric cultural rings, each containing an aspect of one’s life that doesn’t necessarily overlap with the other?

Kind of spot on.

You have your family in one ring, then your company in the next, than ‘culture’ as a whole occupying a much larger ring altogether, like a series of circles in a tree that signify the judgements of society, not the passage of time.

One buzz-sawed tree trunk different from the next, to be sure, but each serving a similar function — to indicate where in the world you might locate your own personal obligations.

Yet what happens when these invisibly calibrated rings overlap or unravel?

Where is the room, if any, for an individual in a group-oriented world where judgement comes swift and the mob feels so right?

Kazuyo Fukuda’s 2021 novel ディープフェイク (‘Deep Fake’) (‘Deep Fake’), revised for its 2024 paperback edition, depicts a Japanese junior high school teacher whose entire world comes undone when a tabloid magazine publishes a picture of him meeting a teenage girl — a former student of his — at a Tokyo business hotel.

Of course, he never met the girl in such a place, or any place for that matter, and certainly nothing sexual ever took place– or so our first-person narrator informs us, and we tend to trust him.

Doesn’t matter, though.

In this age, ‘innocence’ might not be for any individual to decide.

For this novel of, what would you call it, ‘educational suspense’, perhaps, is about how a new era of technology enables pretty much anyone — with the click of a button, with the building of a website, with the clarity of a nasty comment — to destroy somebody else’s life, for sheer revenge or mere sport.

Since we’re led to believe from the get-go that Yukawa-sensei is completely innocent, how can one explain what sure looks like a photo of him with barely fourteen year-old Honoka Moriya?

After all, isn’t that him in the photo, and is not that truly her?

The result is an overall entertaining, yet also exasperating (for Yukawa and the reader) examination of how all of these concentric rings of Yukawa’s life as an ‘ordinary’ Japanese teacher rearrange themselves into a new kind of erratic social order; his bosses, co-workers, former students the media, his estranged wife and child, the unseen public at large — all instantly viewing him differently, literally seeing him in a new, possibly vile way.

And all because of one undoubtedly doctored picture.

What you see is (not) what you get?

The first sentence of the story sets everything up:

“What is this photo, Yukawa-sensei?”

Those words, spoken from the producer at a (fictional) Tokyo television station to him on the other side of his home phone, harshly indicate to Yukawa that something in his life has now gone awry.

Since he knows that this photo is somehow fabricated, and since he certainly did not meet his former student at a hotel, he is certain that he’s being set-up.

By somebody.

For some reason.

The bulk of the novel zeroes in on his quest to discover just who’s out to get him.

During that laborious process, over the course of roughly two weeks, we watch as the principal and vice-principal offer their support; we see TV crews descend on the school; we witness Yukawa seek out secret places to sleep where the press will not possibly find him; we learn about Yukawa’s own past, which, while not sordid, is certainly interesting enough to warrant the possibility that somebody might still hold a great grudge.

Does the fact that Yukawa did, in fact, stay at the hotel in question, but not with the girl, have any significance?

Or how about that, while still a teenager, Yukawa briefly dated that very same girl’s mother?

And what about the odd coincidence that Yukawa had, himself, been the subject of significant press attention once before, only four years ago, when he broke up a stabbing that was about to take place between two disgruntled students?

He’d even been given a ‘Strong Arm’ nickname by the media, gotten a bit of national notoriety. Did either of those students he helped (or thwarted) in that bungled violent act feel somehow permanently embarrassed by his actions, humiliated enough to try and now humiliate him in turn?

Not to mention that almost instantly a website is set up by parents of his school who seek to protect the integrity of their children, with message boards now claiming that Yukawa has previously, violently attacked, and sexually touched, other students, with more photographic evidence as proof.

There are more than enough suspects in this novel to keep one avidly turning the pages. Even as the novel sets up a scenario in which Yukawa must diligently try to piece together how the people from his own past could have infiltrated and affected his current present, it also establishes itself as a contemporary parable for how advances in modern technology — be they photographic, digital or code-written — have enabled almost anybody to instantly be a suspect for any kind of crime.

We are all a protagonist out of Kafka, or else soon might be one.

The strength of the book is its subtle investigations into the intricacies of Japanese social realms, both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. The anxieties of parents and the troubles of teenagers and the loyalties of co-workers and the voracious indifference of the press and the all-too-common romantic relationships formed between girls-under-age and teacher-who-should-damn-well-know-better are all given literary representation through one character or another.

With Yukawa in the middle, of course.

We are all at the apex of our own lives.

At various times throughout the novel Yukawa feels utterly adrift, alone, his old life eradicated; in Japanese society, ‘it’s-all-who-you-know’, but if one can no longer know who one knows, in any valid sense beyond the photographic, how can anybody be expected to co-exist?

Things do get a tad melodramatic, as most popular novels do. As Yukawa’s charges become public, the vice-principal commits suicide; Yukawa’s daughter attempts suicide. Everything is coming undone. For what is essentially a modern mystery, such developments are probably par for the course, but I’m not sure their narrative execution is always so vivid or believable.

Yukawa, while distressed by his (estranged) daughter’s suicide attempt, soon continues to be more focused on his own misery. Understandable, given his plight, but after a quick trip to the hospital and a phone call or two to his (estranged) wife (who nevertheless wholeheartedly believes in his innocence), this rather significant story-development is rarely brought up again. Nor does Yukawa think about it all that much. (The dude has got a lot of shit on his mind, I guess.)

This could be seen as depicting a deep-seated character flaw in Yukawa — that he’s simply too overwhelmed to give his hurt daughter the love and affection she deserves — but it feels more like Fukuda, as the originator of this tale, simply got so caught up in the larger issues at play that she didn’t have the space (or the inclination) to adequately flesh out the narrative dynamics required. I

Indeed, by the end of the book, both the daughter and wife remain entirely off-stage, their emotional and physical fates left unresolved, and one gets the impression that Fukuda, plowing towards the end of her story, simply decided to let their own unfortunate life-paths lie metaphorically fallow for a while.

Still, the novel does work. There’s so much stress in Japanese life, and the story finds a way of making timeworn staples — family issues, past occupational success (and trauma), student jealousy, co-worker dilemmas — somehow seem fresh, and its fascination with how a little bit of technical know-how can simultaneously destroy and reveal the machinations of various personal and professional objectives of dubious civilians or media-types remains somewhat spooky.

Even so, despite all of these travails, we might eventually be able to locate at least a little bit of happiness, our new techno-society be damned.

By the end, Yukawa, his travails finally over, his reputation reestablished, and with a genuine smile on his face, is able to put his phone into his pocket and walk into a room filled with real students. Culturally concentric rings are now in their proper place; venerable tropes have once again been restored. A stability to Japanese society — or at his own, singular relationship to it — has been returned. He, as an individual, now knows his own place and is awaiting an audience who also knows theirs. It this sort of certainty — all for one, and one and for all — that Japan tends to covet, yet so rarely achieves, at least on one-to-one level.

If it’s possible to attain for Yukawa, the book seems to be saying, after all that he went through, who knows?

You could be next.

Just takes knowing exactly who you are, with the hope that others know too.

In today’s ‘deep fake’ world, that can’t be so hard, can it?

Can it?

漢語からみえる世界と世間――日本語と中国語はどこでずれるか (‘The World And Society Seen Via Kango: Where Do The Japanese And Chinese Languages Diverge?’)

Japanese as a language is not always the most welcoming of hosts. Part of that reticence (or perceived reluctance) has to do with both the insular nature of the lexicon in attendance at the shindig. Everybody knows each other so well, and has been at the party for so long, and they are speaking about various arcane topics in such an elliptical way that it seems like it might take you most of the whole evening just to get a word in edgewise, let alone express any kind of tangible thought. When foreign wor(l)ds such as these have so genially (or violently) collided for so long, can there be any more room for ourselves anywhere but by the curtains way out in the far corner?

That’s sort of how I felt while reading Masayuki Nakagawa’s fascinating 2005 non-fiction book 漢語からみえる世界と世間――日本語と中国語はどこでずれるか (‘The World And Society Seen Via Kango: Where Do The Japanese And Chinese Languages Diverge?’), which examines the ways in which the Chinese language has affected its Japanese neighbor down through the years of their mutual lexical acquaintance.

(And vice-versa, at least a little bit.)

Although Nakagawa is an academic specializing in the Chinese language, and who first conceived of its ideas while visiting a Chinese research center for Japanese language-teaching research, this book is meant for the masses — a (comparatively) breezy look at linguistic fellowship, you might say, designed for your average Japanese reader who might be interested in how Chinese has influenced, and continues to affect, their own mother tongue.

Despite its mass-market appeal, for a Canadian reader of Japanese — or let’s just say this Canadian reader! — it still, at times, proved to be a little bit obtuse.

After all, here I am, sitting there, kanji dictionary close by, continually trying my best to understand all of these connections-being-made between Chinese and Japanese linguistic history, and in the back of mind I’m attempting to explain, if only to myself, how i will explain, mostly to you, how all of this plays itself out. (Through English, of course.)

Yet the charm of the book is that, by the end, as its title indicates, it becomes about a little bit more than just the oddities and intricacies of language itself, be it Chinese or Japanese, and instead begins to feel more like a subtly coded statement on these diverging — yet constantly interfacing! — mother tongues that also allow us a better understanding of where we all might culturally diverge (and coalesce) on plainly human terms.

The book is mainly (but not exclusively) concerned with how the Chinese language — in aural, spoken and written terms — manifests itself in present-day Japanese. Which explains he inclusion of the word 漢語 (‘kango’) in the title, which is the Japanese word for the kind of Chinese language that is still used in modern-day Japanese — through kanji, pronunciation, etc.

Since Japanese kanji characters are originally derived from Chinese ideographs, it’s no surprise that there are all kinds of ways in which the Chinese language can be rendered n Japanese (which is, admittedly, a hard concept to get your head around.)

However, in terms of the Japanese language, kango is distinct from 漢文 (‘kanbun’), which (in Japanese terms) refers to the kind of classical Chinese writing that Japanese scholars used to do before the prevalence of the phonetic forms of hiragana or katakana (and even afterwards, as kanbun remained an esteemed estimation of one’s own intellectual erudition), which would often utilize Japanese grammar, but employ exclusively Chinese characters.

Kango is also distinct from 漢詩 (‘kanshi’), which usually refers to the Japanese composition of Chinese poetry. (I’ll link at the bottom of this post to my review of a book on Natsume Sosek’s love of kanshi, for those interested.)

For those who can’t read Japanese, even pondering this constant conflux of ancient-Chinese-intermingling-with-modern-day-Japanese can be a bit confusing, and even for those who do read Japanese, it can be a bit bewildering. (I’m speaking for myself here, of course.)

Yet Nakagawa’s approach is not literary or necessarily aesthetic in intent (hence the omission of ‘kanbun’ or ‘kanshi’ references). He wants to show how Japanese has incorporated Chinese, befriended it, and how even, at times, as all good friends do, occasionally begs to differ.

The author does so by focusing on nuances, differences, alterations.

An easy way to do this is in Japanese is by comparing the ‘onyomi’ of a word (the Chinese pronunciation of kanji characters in Japanese) with its corresponding ‘kunyomi’ (the Japanese pronunciation of those same characters). Usually one kanji character will have, or can have, both kinds of pronunciations.

Nakagawa brings up 冷酒,, whose characters mean ‘cold’ and saké. The onyomi (or Chinese) reading can be pronounced ‘reishu’, which gives off a classy, dignified feeling — お洒落 (‘oshare’, or ‘stylish’); the kunyomi (or Japanese) reading is more blunt, with Nakayama stating that it brings to mind an old man drinking alone at a bar, and it also evokes the feelings one associates with drinking itself, its many-varied moods.

In fact, the character for saké — 酒, — gives off this kind of relaxed, solitary, fundamentally ‘drinking’ vibe that is nowhere present in its Chinese alternative. (There is no such nuance difference in the Chinese variant, Nakagawa states.)

He thus introduces a key concept that will recur throughout the book — that kanji characters might very well be the same across Chinese and Japanese, but the nuance will change the meaning, depending on the culture.

Nakagawa takes a close look at two commonplace Japanese words, each referring to the future.

In Japanese, both 将来 (‘shourai’) and 未来 (‘mirai’) indicate that-which-has-yet-to-come-to-pass.

So what’s the big diff?

In Japanese, 将来 (‘shorai’) refers to one’s own, personal future, pertaining, perhaps, to one’s family, work situation, marriage prospects, etc.

However, 未来 (‘mirai) indicates a ‘future’ that is more societal, more global, more mutually-temporal in possibility.

Nakagawa points out that, in Chinese, the word 将来 (‘shourai’), utilizing the same kanji as Japanese, is often used to talk solely about the weather — it has no personal connotations whatsoever.

The same characters are read, are inferred, completely differently between the two tongues.

Another example would be that of 足跡 (‘ashiato’), which, in the Chinese reading, refers strictly to people, whereas a Japanese reading would broaden itself to include that of animals as well.

As you may have noticed, such examples are indications of how Nakagawa’s stated principal of exploring how Chinese roots have maintained themselves in the present-day Japanese language soon gave way to a more direct comparison of the Chinese language, as spoken in China, vis-a-vis the Japanese language, as uttered in Japan, a development in the book which confused me, and perhaps ‘kango’ can also refer to Chinese-as-utilized-in-China (for all that I know), but no more matter — as I always say, Japanese non-fiction tends to veer off the rails at times. At least it’s all under the same linguistic umbrella: J

Japanese, Chinese; melding, meandering.

A fascinating (and funny) topic Nakagawa brings up is the literal way in which Japanese say things, which always surprises the Chinese exchanges students he has taught.

The variations of Japanese ‘surprise’ words, for example, enunciated and drawn-out for differing dramatic effect:

“Haaa…”

“Heeee…” (pronounced ‘heyyyyyy’)

“Hoo….” (pronounced ‘hohhhhh’)

Or what about how Japanese people so often say the actual word for what they’re feeling, to wit:

If a Japanese bumps their head, they usually will mutter:

“痛い! (‘Itai!’, or ‘Hurts!’)

Or if they see something adorable, a Japanese girl will shriek:’

“可愛い!” (‘Kawaii’, or ‘Cute!’)

The popularity of Japanese media in China, Nakagawa notes, means that, even in Chinese ,young people are starting to emulate this style of adjectival articulation, shouting out the equivalent of ‘kawaii’ when they spot something charming.

However, this Japanese habit of spouting out a single adjective, with no surrounding contextualization, can be puzzling, Nakagawa admits.

He cites how a Japanese judo athlete suffered a heartbreaking loss at the 2003 World Championships, with the announcer blurting out:

“悔しい! 悔しい! 悔しい!” (‘Disappointing! Disappointing! Disappointing!’)

Exactly who is ‘disappointed’ here, or ‘regretful’, Nakayama asks.

The athlete?

The announcer?

The spectators?

Everybody?

Everything depends on location.

On one’s point of view.

In Japan, if a student in the classroom says 寒い (‘samui’, or ‘cold’), the implication is: “Please shut the window.”

In China, using the Chinese equivalent, the meaning might be: “Please bring me something warm.”

Japanese adjectives, in general, are more vague and independent, Nakagawa writes. They can act as request, warning, admonishment, plea.

The Japanese style of interaction can therefore come across as ridiculously streamlined. In the James Bond film THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, Nakagawa states how, after 007 points a gun at a female, the woman’s English line of ‘Don’t hurt me!’ was translated into Japanese subtitles as ‘痛い, わ!’ (‘It hurts, you know!’)

Communicating the possibility of pain to others can be rendered in Japanese with one simple word, one measly adjective; わ (‘wa’) is often added on to the end of a sentence to indicate that it’s a female that’s speaking.

A single utterance is all that it takes; we, the listeners, are supposed to understand, or provide, or create, the context.

Again, it’s all location.

In China, if you are dining in a street-stall and the cook brings out some chicken and you say ‘Big!’ in Chinese, the chef will assume that you want a bigger slice of meat.

In Japan, if you are in a clothing store and are presented with a baggy sweater and you blurt out ‘Big!’, the clerk will get the hint that you need something smaller.

In China, ‘big’ is like a child’s request; in Japan, ‘big’ is more of a signal that something is excessive.

Lots of cultural differences such as these, rendered through the means by which language is employed from one human to another, are scattered throughout the book.

If someone in Beijing is lying with their partner in bed and wants them to scoot over a little bit, they might ask them to move ‘north’.

Ayu, in Japanese, could be considered a nice name for a girl, while, in Chinese, the same kanji and its attendant pronunciation would bring to mind the image of a sweetfish, not a nice match for one’s daughter.

The character for 門 (‘mon’, meaning ‘gate’), for Japanese, creates the image of a junior high school entrance, or any kind of building’s exterior port, but for Chinese, a generalized ‘entrance-or-exit’ is evoked by that image.

Images are everything:

Japanese will use only 桜 (‘sakura’) to mean ‘cherry blossom’, but Chinese will add the character for ‘flower’.

Ah, and speaking of flowers:

Nakagawa cites an intriguing example of how, when Chinese students were asked to draw a flower, each drew a different sort of representation, but when Japanese students were given the same task, all but one drew an identical shape.

Contours can therefore be collective, or inherently individual, or sometimes culturally precise.

Placement, too, matters.

Nakagawa provides a list of how many Japanese kanji-combinations are inverted in comparison to their Chinese counterparts: Left/right; rain/wind — one character is above the other, depending on the country.

This even extends to the west, as Nakagawa notes that Americans and Europeans will say ‘ladies and gentleman’, or ‘ladies first’, whereas Japanese would use 男女 — ‘men’ before ‘women’.

And even in Japan there are differences; when the Tokyo Giants play their perpetual Osaka rivals, the Hanshin Tigers, in Osaka newspapers the game will be referred to as the ‘Tigers/Giants’ showdown; in Tokyo, it’s the other way around.

Even single, solitary kanji can be used to evoke different responses:

In Hong Kong, they use 落, the symbol for ‘drop’, when people exit the bus — which would prove a startling sight for most Japanese!

In other words, big shock:

People in different lands react differently to the same visual stimuli.

(Nakagawa remembers how a Chinese exchange student during the Hanshin earthquake remarked that, if it had been thousands of Chinese, not Japanese, crammed together in shelters for days and nights on end, there would have a been a hell of a lot of mahjong going on almost right away!)

It’s all is what we stress on, fixate on.

In Chinese, when somebody bangs their head on the top of a door, they linguistically stress the ‘top’ part, whereas Japanese will emphasize the ‘door’.

As the book goes on, this cultural commentary gets deeper and deeper, especially when it comes to analyzing the phrases included in the book’s title: 世界 (‘sekai’, or ‘the world’ or ‘society’), and 世間 (‘seken’, or ‘the world’ or ‘society’ or ‘people’ or ‘the public’).

The tricky distinction between 世界 and 世間 ends up being how, for Nakagawa, Japanese people distinguish themselves, even distance themselves, from the larger world out there, and their own society right here.

Japanese people are more likely to feel comfortable with one’s own 世間, the bonds between people they know all around them. Nakagawa believes that Japanese have a difficult time wrapping their heads around a common brotherhood centered around 人類 (‘jinrui’), or mankind or humanity in general, as a whole, absent any national identity.

Contrast this notion with the Americans, he states, who have a ‘World Series’ in baseball all for themselves, and who wrote a song that proclaimed ‘We Are The World’ — internationally communal (and simultaneously selfishly grandiose) notions and classifications that are almost unthinkable in Japanese culture.

On morning television in Japan, for instance, in the ‘World Corner’ segment, the ‘World Weather’ does not include Japan. Japan is separate; Japan is its own thing.

They also have a feature called ‘Asia And The World’ — as if, Nakagawa notes with almost palpable printed glee, Asia is somehow separate from the world!

In the Unites States, he believes, there is only 世界 (‘sekai’, or ‘the world’); in Japan, there is 世間 (‘sekan’, or ‘the people’), and then, off in the distance, 世界. One realm is connected to the other, yes, but via a great, great gap.

The author even quotes this English remark about learning foreign languages, and how it was translated into Japanese:

“If we learn foreign languages, we can understand the rest of the world better.”

In Japanese, ‘the rest of the world’ is rendered as ‘世界の残り’ (‘sekai no nokori’, or ‘the remainder/left-over of the world’).

The nuance difference here is not exactly negative, no, but it does give the impression, according to Nakagawa, that ‘the rest of the world’, in Japanese eyes, is a somewhat distant, left-behind — as if one has, if not purposefully, at least haphazardly left it alone, off by itself.

Similarly, in Japanese, there is a distinction between 他人の人 (‘tanin no hito’, or ‘other person/stranger) and 赤の他人 (‘aka no tanin’, or ‘complete stranger); the former could be someone in your general circles who you are not acquainted with, whereas the latter is somebody you do not know at all. In Chinese, there is no such discrepancy, no qualifying terms, indicating that, in Japan, people are labelled based on familiarity, on proximity. You are either close or far, or somewhere in between. (One has to know one’s place — or, at least, I have to know it.)

It’s these kinds of self-critical (or at least self-aware) observations that make this particular book surprisingly deep in its awareness of how language can do so much more than merely offer up facile human platitudes.

The book is filled with numerous comparisons of Chinese-versus-Japanese expressions, which will, of course, be extremely helpful to those who already know, or are learning, Chinese, and also useful for your average Japanese reader, whose extensive knowledge of kanji is such that, when Nakagawa makes a list of native Japanese-versus-kango-versus-contemporary-Chinese-as-used-in-China words, they will be able to suss out what he’s going on about.

For me, it was a bit tougher, since my knowledge of Chinese is nil, and a book focusing on nuance differences between ancient-Chinese-as-used-in-contemporary-Japanese-in-comparison-to-modern-Chinese is not exactly light reading material, but still — it’s a worthwhile reading experience, both for native Japanese readers and foreign consumers of the language.

I like learning what Japanese want to know about their own language. I like finding out what they would deem intriguing about their mother tongue. I enjoy diving into language books for ‘ordinary’ Japanese readers that point out what their language shares with other languages, other cultures.

That the book also ends up being a subtly incisive commentary on how any language can’t help but reflect upon, sidle up to, and often back away from, its nearest neighbor?

This conceptualization makes it one party that I was happy to just float my way through, huddling away in the corner, sipping my drink as I pretended not to listen to what everybody was saying, while secretly hoping that I might at some point eavesdrop on a relevant conversation in which my own point of view might be heard, however foreign or (seemingly) unintelligible.

***************************

漱石と漢詩 (‘Natsume Soseki and Chinese Poetry’)

”

赤い白球 ‘ (‘Red/White Ball’)

Nothing seems to animate the nostalgic impetus of Japanese authors more than baseball or war.

The bats-and-gloves-of-their-youth and the-war-planes-they-once-flew — countless novels have been written about these emblems of bygone days that now merely exist as faded photos in the minds of aging patriots.

There’s a roll-your-eyes element to these sorts of periodic paeons to long-past glories, but it would also be disingenuous to deny that these artistic (albeit cliche) impulses emerge from real, viable human emotions, ones that are perenially ripe for storytelling exploration.

We hang on to the past, long for it, wait for it to somehow inexplicably return. (It never does.)

Baseball in Japan represents ‘innocence’ and ‘youth’, certainly, but also ‘discipline’, ‘breeding’, ‘stoicism’. One’s training as a player inevitably has parallels with what’s requited to be a good solider. Perhaps the intermingling of these two seemingly disparate themes — the molding of young Japanese men through enforced conflict — is not all that peculiar or prosaic?

Ah, and what about if we threw a little narrative wrench into the contraption:

How about if some of the young baseball players longing for their chance to play in Japan’s most prestigious tournament are not, you know, technically Japanese, but Korean — growing up under Japanese occupation in the years leading up to World War II?

What seems like a time-worn, even trite topic suddenly gets thematically tricky.

Masanari Kamiya’s 2019 novel 赤い白球 ‘ (‘Red/White Ball’) just that kind of story, following two baseball-crazy friends growing up in the northern part of Korea in the years leading up to Japan’s entry into the second World War, then tracking their individual movements — from Burma to the Philippines to Okinawa — as they fight for their country and wonder exactly when they might die.

Of course, the question remains:

What, exactly, is their ‘country’ to begin with?

There’s the rub.

This is a baseball novel, a war novel, a coming-of-age novel, and a narrative of remembrance. It’s also a delicate — almost too delicate — examination of what it might mean to be asked to fight for a country you’re not even sure is your own.

The story is fractured into essentially four different narrative streams, all of which converge in and out of each other, repeating themselves throughout the novel, the past and the present inextricably linked.

Here’s the gist of the four segments that recur as the novel progresses:

We sit alongside an elderly woman watching a high school baseball game in Okinawa in present-day 2018;

We read letters from a young girl to her brother-at-war, consistently, essentially asking what life’s all about, and if they’re all going to be okay;

We watch two friends in Korea with the same first name — one Korean-born, one originally from mainland Japan — obsess about one day together qualifying for Japan’s famed Koshien baseball tournament, one in which even colonized Korea gets a chance to participate in;

We witness these two friends go their separate ways when Japan enters the war and they start to fight for Japan.

Each of these narrative strands, and all of these characters, are interlocked; each of their tales, and all of their connections, will eventually be revealed.

There’s so much going on here, so many genres intermingling with each other, that it’s easy to overlook or minimize the craft on display.

Yet, in essence, despite its overlapping dynamics, this is, at base, a war novel.

Our two heroes swiftly move from an existence in which baseball supremacy is primarily all that is on their minds to one in which the survival of the Japanese empire itself becomes steadily more prominent in the fragile nest of their psyches. A bloody ball, stained red, becomes a symbolic totem that is carried throughout the novel, across time, evoking vivid images of the Japanese flag, of sacrifice, of baseball colliding with the real guts of life.

This is a book that is filled, not necessarily with numerous battle scenes (although they are here), but rather with much talk about battle: sacrificing for one’s country, dying for the right reasons. There are those obligatory air strikes and gunplay, to be sure, but ‘war’, as a concept, is the underlying and overarching storytelling currency here.

The startling thing, as a reader, is to gradually understand how baseball nevertheless remains the ideal starting point from which every main character here measures the span and the substance of their entire lives.

This where the sentimental stuff comes out in full force.

The sister writing endless letters during the war — hadn’t her brother promised her that he’d make it out alive so that they’d one day go to Koshien together?

And the old lady, the one in 2018, watching a modern-day Koshien game in Okinawa — isn’t she searching in some way to reclaim some of the innocence of her own past?

Our two main characters, stationed in the Philippines and Burma — don’t they both just want to go back to a time when baseball was all that they worried about?

There’s a nice, disturbing frisson that co-exists between all of these storytelling components, each segment eliding in to the other; this combination of a coming-of-age-story that morphs from baseball-into-war is always simultaneously touching and disturbing.

For, if you think about it a little bit, the notion of ‘soldiers’ that are barely even twenty, and who haven’t even had a real drink yet, for god’s sake, are both longing for their lost youth and planning out how they might die, and what they will leave in their will, and whether their actual death truly means anything at all.

Here’s where the novel gets interesting, in an internally conflicted kind of way. (Internally inside me, maybe, as a foreign reader, and not necessarily with the story — which is why I’m kind of conflicted.)

For a country obsessed with history, both Japanese fiction and non-fiction tend to, not even downplay, but often outright ignore, their whole colonial period.

There are plenty of war novels, but they usually have to do with the battles themselves, or the glories of suicide bombing, leaving any actual moral or political reckoning completely outside of the story.

As for non-fiction, there is a staggering lack of any books truly dealing with the implications and ramifications of what went down during World War II in the numerous countries that Japan occupied, and those books that do exist are usually little more than facile justifications for why Japan did what it did.

What’s so intriguing about this particular novel is that, on the one hand, it does undeniably belong to a certain, I don’t know, unquestioning approach to war-via-fiction that feels very familiar in Japanese literary realms. Meaning, there’s no real exploration of what’s going on, or why, or who-started-what-for-which-reason. As World War II looms, then lengthens, we get detailed information about events in Europe, the situation in the Philippines, the bombings in Burma, but nothing whatsoever undergirding the ideological reasoning behind it all.

Except —

The book is told from the point of view of these characters, one of whom is Park, the born-and-bred-Korean who grew up under Japanese rule, and consistently, throughout the novel, is depicted as a thoughtful, confused lad who is never quite sure to which country he is supposed to support. (Or belong to, for that matter.)

He understands that he’s grown-up in occupied Korea; he knows all too well that he has to fight for Imperial Japan; he realizes that there are those in the Korean resistance movement who feel that he is a traitor for allying with the Japanese army (even though he has no choice); he is more than aware that, if Japan loses the war, as he increasingly realizes is probably the case, that, for his Korean brethren, it will mean the liberation of the region. Shouldn’t he happy about that? Yet shouldn’t he also want Japan to win?

Throughout the novel, its author, Kamiya, provides the reader with the inner anxieties of his characters, which, in this case, are illustrative of a voice that is not all that often expressed in mainstream Japanese fiction — namely, the subjects of colonial rule, those who were forced to fight for a country which, in their heart, they are not all that certain they wish to die for.

These honest, painful confessions from the hearts and minds of nineteen and twenty year-olds, often voiced only to themselves? Korean by blood, yet supposedly ‘Japanese’ by upbringing?

I found these inner tribulations quite moving.

And so while I wish that the novel would have dealt a bit more with the moral dimensions of Japan’s long-term occupation of Korea, I also understand, and appreciate, that the book is being told solely from the point of view of the characters’ themselves, and the anxieties they expressed are pretty much in line with what adolescents and young adults of that era would be thinking about, concerned about.

Park has no vast political or sociological knowledge beyond his own limited ken. He’s a kid whose grown up in Korea under the sway of the Japanese; he loves baseball, wants to make it to Koshien; he’s forced to fight, and understands at a base level that he feels kind of fucked up, wondering if he’s truly ‘Japanese’ or entirely ‘Korean’.

These are the thoughts that this character would have; anything more that I ask from this novel is, perhaps, not what it’s built to deliver.

(And, since most young Japanese people have no idea about the extent of Japan’s colonial rule, I actually think that this might be the kind of novel that would be a good entry-point for them; it would let them into the head of a kid their own age who questions the morality of fighting for, and dying for, a country that has superimposed itself on his own country. That vey notion, alone, might be a good, safe start for Japanese youth to start intellectually investigating for themselves how complex their relationship with the rest of Asia remains, or should remain.)

Give credit, too, for Kamiya setting the present-day baseball scenes at a game in Okinawa — another region that Japan kind of co-opted for itself. The author seems to be very aware of Japan’s complicated relationship with own colonial past — how the integration of various communities has been the end result of complicated wartime tragedy.

Japanese authors tend to tip-toe into ideas that western authors might plunge into head-first. At the very least, having one of the main heroes of a book set before, during and after World War II be a Korean, one raised in a country occupied by Japan; who questions the validity of dying-for-a-country; who consistently questions where, culturally, he’s supposed to fit in — all of that is, to some extent, modestly astonishing for a work of popular military fiction.

There’s even a blunt statement near the end where a character muses that nationality is ultimately irrelevant — how we live as a human is ultimately the most important the thing about life itself.

Kind of a cliche, true, but in the delicate world of racial machinations in Japanese fiction? This notion comes across as almost revelatory.

There’s a lot of war in this novel. A lot of baseball. A lot of mourning for the past, worrying about the future. It’s a battle book and a sports book and an epistolatory book and a family saga. Maybe a bit much, all of it. (And there’s definitely too many military terms in Japanese for this second-language reader! The lengthy glossary of various ranks at the beginning was enough to almost dissuade me from even turning to the first page.)

Yet I keep coming back to this cross-genre mix. In Japan, baseball has always been less about sport, and more about instilling moral values. Here we have boys dreaming of making Japan’s most fabled tournament who are then recruited into war and are worried about the best way to die. This confabulation of sports-dreams and battle-reality is a tough story to swallow. I don’t mean it’s unrealistic, but the opposite — it’s too real. (Indeed, I counted what must have been dozens of times in the book when the characters ‘swallow’ their breath — it’s tough for them, too.)

Hard to take in.

Baseball represents a time in their lives when all that they had to worry about was the next pitch or next hit. No wonder everybody in the book is so nostalgic for its innocent charms. Yet it was also, undeniably preparing them for war — the coaches, the discipline, the never-say-die attitude. The sweet always enmeshed with the sour. I realized while reading the novel that therefore nostalgia itself is an invention; we tend to forget the real stuff that was always embedded in between are fanciful recollections.

Avoiding the complexity of their own disastrous attempt at Asian colonization, a lot of Japanese stories tend to shift the gaze and glorify the sacrifices of the soldiers themselves. Here, by contrast, despite its faults and various historical omissions, is a novel that showcases a Korean kid fighting for Japan who doesn’t want to die at all, who just wants to make it home, who remains perpetually torn between one country and another, and who, all things considered, would rather just be playing baseball.

For a Japanese novel about World War II, that’s saying something.

ニッポンの闇 (‘Japan’s Darkness’)

Figuring out what ails a country other than one’s own often comes to feel like a self-diagnosis of sorts. You notice this societal trend, or observe that odd pop cultural phenomenon, and just when you think that you’ve finally sorted out why-it’s-happening-right-now-in-the-precise-manner-in-which-it-appears, you see something that seems to contradict everything you’d finally assumed to be sacrosanct, leading you back to the inside of your own psyche. Perhaps you don’t know everything you thought you did about this place. Maybe it’s all in your own head.

The 2023 book ニッポンの闇 (”Japan’s Darkness’) remains, despite its rather dire and portentous title, an ultimately entertaining conversation between two people who know a hell of a lot about Japan, casually covering a wide range of topics, from linguistics to culture, scandal to religion, in such a way that Japanese readers will be able to think about their society in ways that will probably both confirm and confront their own sacred cows, while also allowing foreign readers and residents to get a little more insight into a country that seems to get more difficult for outsiders to comprehend with each passing year.

(Unless that, too, is simply a trope that resides only in our individual skulls?)

Japanese publishing has a long history of putting out 対談 (‘taidan’, or ‘conversation’ ) books at fairly regular intervals, of which is this is one.

The format:

Usually two prominent people in Japanese society, each from different fields of interest, are thrown together in a room to chat about a topic that is not specifically related to their own professional purview.

Here we have Nobuko Nakano, a Japanese neuroscientist and author, and Dave Spector, an American television タレント (‘talent’).

In this book-length, chat, not all that much personal or professional information is provided about Nakano, other than the fact that she specializes in neuroscience, and has written a previous book dealing with the psychology behind, and ethics surrounding, infidelity. She provides the ‘intellectual’ or ‘academic’ side of the conversational equation here; Spector is the media-face that almost every Japanese viewer instantly recognizes, as he has dominated the morning talk show circuit for a good forty years, in addition to running his own production company.

I used to think that Spector’s main talent was simply that he spoke phenomenal Japanese. (When he first came to prominence, in the early 1980s, such a communicative, telegenic skill for a foreigner was still relatively rare in the Japanese media market.) Check out his Twitter page to see the onslaught of genuinely clever Japanese-language puns he jots down on a continuous basis and you’ll quickly understand how agile he is with his second-tongue. However, language-ability aside, he also always has, in between goofy hi-jinks, some interesting (to me, anyways) takes on whatever is happening in Japan or the world.

(A minor linguistic factoid: Throughout the book, when Nakano speaks, they identify her by her last name; when Spector gives his two takes, he’s given the first-name heading デーブ (‘Dave’). I don’t think this is meant to be disrespectful (although I think it sort of is), but rather an indication of how foreigners in Japan in the media are often, almost unthinkingly, placed in sort a safe, friendly, familiar pocket; Patrick Harlan, another notable American commentator with excellent Japanese, is usually introduced as パックン (‘Pakkun’), making him sound oh-so-cuddly and unthreatening.)

In his introduction, Spector admits that the title is a rather a grim one, albeit suitable, he believes, for the conversation to follow, as the book will get into such topics as タブー (‘taboos’) and コンプライアンス (‘compliance’) –the former referencing those tricky things that the Japanese public are not supposed to talk about, and the latter referring to the manner in which many citizens automatically obey what they are told to obey.

These are much weightier topics, Spector admits, than his previous book from a decade ago, which was a collection of his humorous tweets. Since the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear meltdown of 2011, he’s felt the need for a more substantial book in which he might explore more enlightening topics than a good pun will allow. People now are not as 元気 (‘genki’, or ‘energetic’), he feels. Such widespread malaise needs some intellectual massage.

One such topic of concern has to do with the scandal behind the mammoth Japanese entertainment company known as ‘Johnny’s’, in which it was revealed that the president of the organization, Johnny Kitagawa, had been forcing his clients — all of them males, and many of them underage — to engage in sexual favors in order to ‘help’ their music careers stay afloat.

Nakano and Spector discuss how these recent ‘revelations’, which came to light in a BBC documentary, were not exactly new; specific accusations and lawsuits had been brewing for over two decades, but the mainstream press would never report about it to any great depth. (Investigative reporting itself is almost non-existent in Japan, at least compared to western journalism.) However, the BBC expose, widely viewed on YouTube, forced the Japanese media to finally confront the issue, head-on, but the whole sordid situation is an example of how Japan tends to sweep controversial situations under the proverbial rug if they coincide and conflict with the financially powerful; in Japan, entertainment companies have far more power than their clients, unlike in Hollywood, where the inverse is true, and no wants to cross them — not even news organizations.

This sort of passive ‘compliance’ is indicative of how much broader meaning the world itself wields in the Japanese language, how much more wide-ranging the nuance. In discussing the Japanese language, our two conversationalists both note how the Japanese public tend to take for granted the words that they use, but Spector, as a foreigner learner of Japanese, and Nakano, as a female researcher into the brain’s inner workings, are both, in a sense, outsiders in Japanese society; they are not part of the everyday, ‘salaryman’ norm. They are willing, and required, to gaze deeper.

So it’s no surprise that so much of their conversation is simply about language itself.

Spector explains how he learned Japanese from his Japanese childhood friend while growing up in Chicago as they both pored over manga ever day, the Japanese child teaching the American lad what every word mean. As a boy, Spector visited Japan with his friend’s family; in 1973, he would live there for a year on a student exchange. In the early 1980s, after marrying a Japanese woman and working as a television producer in Los Angeles, Spector, by then fluent in Japanese, often travelled to Japan to report on their gonzo variety shows for American news programs, eventually realizing that he could make his own space in that very same market.

An unabashed lover of the Japanese language, Spector states that he used to memorize thirty new words a day; now he’s down to three. He reads around fifty books a year, and can always spot fellow commentators who don’t read much at all. They are not as quick-on-the-fly as Spector is, one assumes.

(Indeed, in her afterward, Nakano remarks how pleasant their conversation was, but also how challenging it was, given that Spector is such a fast speaker, over such wide-ranging topics — all the more remarkable, Nakano marvels, given that Japanese is his second language! Of course, one has to take this high praise with more than a few grains of salt, as the Japanese are notorious for praising any foreigner who speaks even one of Japanese as being better speakers than they themselves are.)

The two of them discuss the roots of the word 馬鹿 (‘bakka, or ‘idiot’), and precisely why the characters for ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ came together to represent ‘moron’; Spector explains why he so loves the word ‘love’ (恋愛, or ‘renai’); they analyze how common it’s become for katakana words to replace their original kanji-compositions, citing in the media how often ホームレス (‘homeless’) is used, but rarely 浮浪者 (‘furousha’), though both mean the same thing; and they also delve into how some individual words (and, by extension, concepts) are so culturally specific, bringing up 社会人 (‘shakaijin’, or ‘member of society’) as an example of a word that has no strict counterpart in English.

I might add that this kind of conversation does not come across as merely another minor intellectual offshoot of the sort of Japanese non-fiction devoted to extolling the ‘specialness’ of Japan, its language, and its people — often referred to, somewhat mockingly by western Japanologists, as 日本人論 (‘nihonjinron’) — but rather a way of, almost nonchalantly, pointing out how how language is used to classify concepts in western countries that often have no one-to-one counterpart in Japan. (And vice-versa, of course.)

It’s (obviously) not only the language that’s different, though.

Circling back to the notion of ‘compliance’, the two of them talk about the lack of any widespread, meaningful protest culture in Japan. It hasn’t been non-existent, they admit, but the last time it had any societal oomph was during the student protests of the Vietnam War, over fifty years ago. There’s no equivalent, they say, of the emphatic Stonewall activism for gay rights that occurred in the U.S. in the Seventies, or even of the ongoing manner in which the French seem perfectly willing to protest any injustice (and industry) that they see fit for upheaval.

Perhaps, our authors think, this lack of civic engagement has to do with an overall reticence in Japan to speak out, stand out.

Spector states how Americans have no trouble asking each other which political party they support — and they have no hesitation in answering. (Unheard of, in Japan!)

In discussing the lack of bona fide religious belief in Japan (which Spector, as a non-believer, finds quite amenable), Nakano states that, in a country with multiple gods, nobody feels comfortable talking about their own beliefs in religion, especially entertainers. (I’m reminded of a former of a student of mine, a retired executive in his seventies, who told me that it was only when attending the funeral of his co-worker of fifty years and seeing the style of the ceremony did he realize that the man had been a Christian.) In the west, Spector says, a commitment to organized religion has traditionally been something that requires what I guess you could call ‘proof-of-spiritual-purchase’ — weekly attendance, observance, etc. In Japan, as Nakano reminds him, any ongoing religious feelings have been integrated into daily life, via ritual, customs, ceremonies.

Their strongest feelings in this entire discussion have to do with the interconnectedness of Japanese life itself, or rather the disconnect that seems to be pretty much the norm.

Spector (half-jokingly, I think) blames Steve Jobs and his creation of the iPhone. They both lament the fact that everybody now finds eternal refuge, not in religion or family, but in their own electronic cocoon.

Nobody wants to date, let alone have a relationship; given the ubiquity of apps for any desire one might possibly possess, a sex-partner-for-the-night is much easier to arrange. There is now no longer any kind of communal place where people can get together, assemble, speak freely to another. (Spector says he’ll talk to anybody on the elevator, but that’s not a skill that most people, in Japan or elsewhere, readily wield!) People just want to, by and large, be by themselves, just ‘Nextflix and chill’.

No wonder the birthrate is dropping, they lament; it’s not that nobody wants to have kids — it’s that everybody wants to be alone.

Still, I can’t help but think that free-flowing, wide-ranging conversations like these are, at the very least, some kind of a start. The format here resembles what a podcast has become, you could say (although podcasts as a whole are still not all that popular in Japan). Just two people talking, getting sidelined.

(I especially liked the rather grim, offroad-subject of Spector speculating on how he’ll be cremated, and where he’ll be interred — in the famous Yokohama Foreigners’ Cemetery, perhaps, or maybe nicely sprinkled in the ocean, as he did with his mother’s remains in the Florida sea a few years back. Will anyone come to my funeral, Spector wonders, and Nakano quickly asserts that for sure she will go. Bring potato chips, he tells her, in lieu of flowers. This joke is a call-back to an earlier point in the conversation where they talked about how religion defers satisfaction until some immeasurably distant afterlife, whereas they both feel it’s better to find joy wherever, and whenever can, right in front of one. Hence the potato chips.)

By the end of the book, we’ve eavesdropped on all kinds of anxieties and affirmations regarding language and media and religion and society. Sometimes the book zigs when you think it’ll zag, but Japanese conversation (not to mention non-fiction books) often makes room for a little more leeway; you can roam around a fair bit.

I’ve often said that English requires us to narrow all of our thoughts down into a bullet-point style of this-is-what-I-think-now form of intellectual address, whereas Japanese instead seeks to extract all of the free-ranging thoughts swirling around in her head and present them out into the world willy-nilly, letting the ideas land where they may.

That’s an overstatement, of course, and even though I’m sure this conversation has been edited for clarity and overall entertainment-value, it still has an elastic, organic feel. Some of the ideas I’d heard before, and many were quite new, but I’m satisfied to discover that some of my own long-held opinions on Japan are no longer merely in my head alone. Other people think them, say them. Refute them, even.

It’s all good.

There may, indeed, be a kind of deep darkness that Japan finds itself steadily etching to eradicate, but words passed from one to the other can’t help give off their own light. If we would simply in engage with one another on a semi-regular basis, occasionally throwing into the conversation our own two cents (or yen) on the topic, we might even discover that, at least for now, the visible human aura around all of us is a little less dim.

幸福号出帆 ‘[Happiness] Sails Away’

Esoteric concepts like ‘art’ and ‘reality’ have (supposedly) little in common.

The former allows our fancies to soar into the heavens, our imaginations unleashed; the latter (unfortunately) enables us only to dwell right here on earth, tethered to the ground by our own fragile flesh. Yet sometimes they can seem to coincide. (Briefly, at that.)

Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel 幸福号出帆 ([Happiness] Sails Away’), not yet translated into English, explicitly examines that ever-present clash between what our heart longs to explore and what the real world will accept.

This odd, possibly incestuous love story between a brother and sister, a tale that straddles the unconventional bridge between the upper-class world of the post-World War II opera scene in Tokyo and the booming, illegal maritime smuggling business operating mere streets away is one of Mishima’s less celebrated works. It doesn’t have the philosophical or dramatic weight of his more celebrated books, but it nevertheless possesses an underlying, almost timeless heft in its at times painful examination of what love, and dreams, and ambition, can-and-can’t do.

In the book’s afterward, literary scholar Mitsuo Fujita adds some insight and commentary into Yukio Mishima’s mindset when composing the novel.

Originally serialized in newspaper form via the Yomiuri Shimbum from June to November of 1955, before being released as a book the following year, the novel is an example of what is now referred to in Japan as an エンタメ (‘entame’, or ‘entertainment’) novel, as opposed to 純文学 (‘junbungaku’, or ‘pure literature’) novel, although most modern readers, Fujita almost mourns, tend to just separate books into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories. He points out that, at this stage in Mishima’s budding literary career, this book, given its newspaper serialization, was clearly not one of the ‘major’ novels he was also working on; those more refined works would be serialized as well, but always in the more prestigious literary magazines that are the very same ones, to this day, that authors turn to when publishing their more ‘serious’ works.

Fujita discusses how Mishima could often hammer out the bulk of these ‘entertainments’ in ten days to two weeks, and also relates how, as with so many of his novels, this one was drawn from real-life events.

According to Fujita, after Mishima’s death, the contents of the author’s own copious notes when writing this novel were released, revealing numerous clippings of newspaper stories related to boats and smuggling and illegal enterprises underway in the aquatic areas linking Tokyo and Yokohama (and the rest of the marine world, not to mention the larger world).

Indeed, these sorts of crimes form one half of the strange whole that makes up the bulk of the book, the other half centering around the more elegant world of opera and its upper-class aficionados and diligent practitioners.

For here we have the unusual story of a young woman named Mitsuko, who works in the socks section of a Tokyo department story; we also have the tale of her half-brother, Fumio, who finds himself enmeshed in an illegal smuggling ring that deals with contraband watches and diamonds and other assorted fine goods shipped in and out of Japan via boats, with Hong Kong criminal syndicates as the prime partners.

Their lives, while overlapping each other, also diverge: Mitsuko longs to be an opera singer, eventually getting training from a music world associate of her mother; Fumio, while still occupying the same social circuit as his sister, also secretly minds his own business, purchasing a boat called 幸福 (‘Happiness’) to do his less-than-legal endeavors. The boat called ‘Happiness’ never seems to sail very far; it spends most of its time in and around the watery bays of Tokyo and Yokohama — storing goods, trading goods.

And ‘happiness’ is, indeed, what both Fumio and his sister seek — from their professions, certainly, but also from each other, dangerously.

Here is where we get into how deceptively complex and multi-layered this story is, despite its popularized, newspaper serialization, and in comparison with Mishima’s much more acclaimed, significantly more philosophically complex work.

Let’s just look at the literal background of the story to assess how truly multi-layered it might be:

On the one side, we have the world that Mitsuko so longs to enter — the upper-class world of opera singers, a high-class group of performers, and clientele, that aim for the highest sort of vocal sophistication and appreciation that music might offer. Given this locale, and taking place barely a decade after the end of the war, the novel therefore exists in a realm in which any mention of wartime hardships usually refers to the state of buildings left in disrepair after airborne bombings of Tokyo, or else refers merely to districts of the city that have more foreigners than others, more American-controlled remnants that bear the legacy of their former dominion.

It’s an exceedingly privileged world of what we might now call aesthetes and debutantes, with Mitsuko — who eventually drops out of her opera-training, unable to handle the actual act of performing — being pursued by other artistic gentlemen who long to form a lasting union with her of some sorts.

It’s all very privileged and insulated, and not unlike, one can infer, the same sort of social realm that Mishima himself — growing up under his real name, Kimitake Hiraoka, the child of enormous familial prestige — knew all too well.

Yet there’s another side to Tokyo, to Japan, to reality, and Mishima unabashedly explores that darker realm too.

Mitsuko’s brother, Fumio, is of mixed parentage, being the child of a noble, wealthy Italian (or so we are led to believe?) and a Japanese mother. This biracial aspect of his heritage simultaneously makes him feel unlike a ‘whole’ Japanese, but also one whose facial features unmistakably make him enormously attractive to the opposite sex — ‘like a dog in the world of cats’, Mishima writes.

Nevertheless, as a youth, in the private schools of Japan, he was teased mercilessly, even accused of being a traitor when the war broke out. Although the author never comes out and says it, we can sense that Fumio’s alienation from himself and the rest of Japanese society is one of the main reasons, if not the reason, why he turns to a life of illegal skullduggery.

Which brings up the notion of how ‘complex’ this novel is, and why it’s more humble origins don’t align with the aesthetic plaudits given out to his much more celebrated works. (And also why, like his other entertainments, the book has never made its way into an English version.)

At the back of the book, there’s a page explaining that the book contains many outdated, derogatory references to children of mixed-parentage (eg 間の子,, which could be considered insensitive), and 第三国人 (which usually referred to Koreans or Chinese nationals living in Japan). The author did not mean to offend anyone, the apology assures us, and they have been retained in the book for literary purposes, we are informed.

Of course, one could argue as to whether or not Mishima’s own personal views regarding both biracial children and Asian residents of Japan are even relevant here, or if an explanation such as the one in the previous paragraph is actually necessary, but for a novel serialized in 1955, I would argue that it’s remarkably sympathetic to all of the characters involved. It’s also, in its own modest way, incredibly observant as to how two different strata of Japanese society co-exist with other — the ‘criminal’ and the ‘aesthetic’ weaving in and out of each other. Mishima keenly understood that Japan, that human beings, always had the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, the ‘front’ and the ‘back’.

As much as the story is about Mitsuko’s failed attempts at romance with this-or-that-suitor and her dashed dreams of opera glory distinguished before they had even truly begun, it’s also, in its own subterranean way, about the direction that postwar Japan was headed, one in which its postwar economy is dependent on illegal trade even as its denizens of the arts remain oblivious to the undertow that exists right beneath their pampered feet, where beautiful waterways are occupied by ships being stolen wares.

Which is a long way of saying:

This novel has depth.

Mishima constantly wrote about the clash between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’, and this novel, I would argue, contains one of his bluntest, most dangerous explorations of that idea, as it’s clear that Mitsuko and her half-brother are completely in love.

Now, whether or not that abiding affection ever becomes sexual in nature is not, as far as I could tell, explicitly spelled out one way or the other. Yet she does run away with him, choosing to live by his side, neither she nor her brother telling her mother where they are actually living. She willingly joins him on his illegal schemes, and they sail off into the sunset when the legal going-gets-rough. The reality is that their relationship in the novel is most certainly considered odd by almost everyone they know, and these friends, too, wonder just what the heck is going on between them.

That Mishima published this ‘entertainment’ in regular installments in a newspaper in 1955 — a story in which a brother-and-sister who are possibly lovers get caught up in smuggling activities with Hong Kong sailors — seems to me to be rather astonishing, evidence of how willing Mishima was to challenge societal norms even as a young writer.

Yet the siblings’ love and the stolen goods and the passion for opera are all widgets in the larger contraption that Mishima is constructing here, one in which ‘reality’ must always pale to the comforts that ‘fantasy’ affords.

Characters here are constantly pining for love, for an ascension into the perfection of the blue sky up above — a thematic prelude, perhaps, to the earthly heavens that Mishima would later return to in his autobiographical work SUN AND STEEL, in which a ride in a military plane heading straight up leads to a rapturous response and mini-treatise on the virtues of flight.

Opera, on every level, is where the characters all want to be, to live; happiness, in some form, is what everybody desperately craves. That ‘happiness’ here in this novel is finally a ramshackle boat that mostly stays moored in its harbor is indicative of how ironically subversive Mishima could be in his symbolic contraptions.

it’s doubtful, I would think, that this book will ever seen an English translation, just like the other ‘entertainments’ of his that I’ve reviewed recently (see links to those reviews below). They are all ‘slight’, but only in the sense that they are considerably easier to read in Japanese (although still filled with difficult vocabulary, using furigana for readers in 1956 to understand for themselves) than his later works, and their stories all center around the ‘modern’ difficulties of male-female relationships, since these stories were all published in weekly magazines, women’s magazines, daily newspapers, where the readers would primarily be female.

This book, in particular, seems to be rather narratively ramshackle, weaving here and there, up and down, as If Mishima was never quite sure where his story was headed, which harbor it sought, but its insights (as with his other ‘minor’ works) into the nature of art, of idealism, of a Japan caught between two diverging eras eliding and eclipsing one another, are always pointed and precise.

What I’ll take away from this book is this enduring, almost irreverent image of a young Japanese woman and her half-Italian brother sailing away together on a boat called ‘Happiness’. (Escaping from the law, but still.) She oh-so-wished that life could be like an opera. So did Mishima. At one point he said he wanted to make his life like a poem. His characters often yearned for that very same thing — an embrace of an ideal that the humdrum could never coincide with or fulfill.

When you love your brother so much, and your own singing dreams have been thwarted, what other choice do you have but to head out to the sea? As Mishima understood at the end of his own life — as a man who ultimately became lost, one could argue, in his own heightened fantasy — sometimes a voluntary exile from reality is all that we reasonably have left to embrace.

**********************************

純白の夜 (‘Pure White Nights’)

https://nihongobookreview.wordpress.com/2023/07/08/%e8%a4%87%e9%9b%91%e3%81%aa%e5%bd%bc-a-complicated-boyfriend/

木曜日の子ども (‘Thursday’s Children’)

Nuanced articulations of empathy are unnecessary when kids are in peril. (Let alone killed!) Anytime children are put in fictional positions where they have been slighted, harmed, abused, murdered — you’ve automatically hooked even the least sympathetic of readers. I mean, who wants to witness the weakest among us be cut down by adults and not feel a thing? The artistic danger is one of exploitation; with such an obviously manipulative aesthetic starting point, you run the risk of shoddy character development and hackneyed narrative twists, letting whatever natural sympathy we have for hurt kids (albeit entirely imaginary ones) ruin any kind of lasting satisfaction from the read.

Kiyoshi Shigematsu is one of my favorite Japanese writers, often penning openly emotional books about growing up, dealing with school, and somehow just managing becoming an adolescents. (All the really early stuff of life, you could say.) His books aren’t ‘Young Adult’, officially, but they mostly deal with young adults, from a mature, grown-up point of view.

His 2019 novel 木曜日の子ども (‘Thursday’s Children’) chronicles the aftermath, seven years later, of a mass class-poisoning at a junior high school by a disturbed student (and his ally). When our middle-aged narrator and his (relatively) new wife and (mostly) new stepson move into the neighborhood where the tragedy took place, when said stepson starts classes at that very same school, when the dark specter of the past pushes its way into the present, the horrors of the past restlessly, relentlessly burrow their way right into the present.

The first third of the book felt sort of like Shigematsu’s other work that I’ve read, albeit significantly more morose — delicate examinations of familial and social situations, with the children being centered. The rest of the book certainly continues these themes, but becomes definitely (even defiantly) more suspense-oriented, thriller-esque, which makes for somewhat gripping reading, but I was nevertheless constantly wondering:

Is this the right manner in which this particular story should be told?

(Incidentally, the novel’s publishing history is an interesting one. A note at the back of the book — entirely in English for some reason — notifies the reader that it was originally serialized in YASEJIDAI magazine from February 2007 to January 2009. The hardcover edition was then published almost ten years later, in 2019, with the paperback version (the one that I read) coming out in January of 2022. Japanese novels are often initially published in serialized form, so that’s nothing new, and the three year gap between the hardcover and the paperback is also not unusual in Japan, a wait-it-out publishing ploy I’ve never truly understood, but the ten year wait between its initial appearance in magazine form and its hardcover release feels a bit odd, especially for an author as popular, and prolific, as Shigematsu.)

Our narrator lets us know right at the beginning of the novel the backstory of the book. The colloquial name of this incident in the town (Asahigaoka) that he’s moving to is one that was familiar to him due to the extensive media coverage of the horrific crime that was committed seven years ago by one of its youngest residents. A second-year junior high school student (along with an accomplice?) poisoned the vegetable soup being eagerly consumed by his classmates, leaving nine dead, two hospitalized. The children were dubbed ‘Thursday’s Children) by the killer and media in relation to a Mother’s Goose rhyme which uses the days of the week to describe various attributes of kids born on each particular day; ‘Thursday’s child has far to go’, according to the old chant. The young murderer was apprehended, sent to a psychiatric facility, and rumor has it that, seven years on, he’s now been released.

Out there, now.

Somewhere.

Our narrator, however, is more worried about his own family’s issues.

That he even has a family is an issue all its own. As he informs us right away, when that terrible ‘incident’ occurred, he was thirty-five, single, on his own. Now he’s forty-two, married to Kanae (who left her previous husband after years of abuse) and stepfather to Haruhiko (who recently tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in the bath). Life is not easy, no, but it is getting better. Getting settled into their new digs in Asahigaoka, he hopes the area’s past trauma won’t affect his new family’s own happiness.

Good luck with that.

Disturbing incidents accumulate quickly, as tends to happen in novels, if not in life.

Moving into their new house — after a lifetime of apartment-living for all of them — they learn that their house was once inhabited by the family of one of the incident’s survivors, a girl who seems to have been purposely spared by the killer. The attention, the memories, was too much — the family split.

Not only that, but young Haruhiko — who had been bullied at his previous school, directly leading to the suicide attempt, and who took a semester off formal education altogether to emotionally and physically recuperate — soon discovers that he kinda/sorta/a little bit looks a hell of a lot like the adolescent killer from seven years in the past. A teacher at his new school recoils in shock when he sees the boy’s face, so close is the resemblance. (Not exactly a good start for a new scholastic adventure.)

And, to top it all off, copies of the boys’ magazine SHONEN FIRE around town have had some disturbing handwritten messages found in some copies, with expressions like ‘I’m back’ creating more than a little unease.

Having said all that, there is also room for at least a little bit of hope.

After all, the new neighbors are quite nice — a married couple with two kids, a boy and a girl. The father cheerful, constantly inviting the narrator over a barbeque on the weekends.

And Kanae, Harukio’s mother — she feels some hope, too. A new domestic life for her has begun, and she’s told her husband that she just wants to putter away in the kitchen and hear the gentle sounds of her husband and boy chattering away in the other room.

That would be so nice.

Maybe enough, even.

All of these overlapping disturbing and domestic elements felt to me somewhat like a ‘traditional’ kind of ‘Kiyoshi Shigematsu’ novel. Like it or not, we tend to think of our favorite authors as brands, so it’s all on me for expecting the story to have featured the same kind of narrative-development I’d so loved in his other books.

All of the usual elements are here, the social and familial investigations, especially as it felt particularly, if not timely, at least relevant to modern Japan.

The country has had its own fair share of violent school incidents in recent years, and our narrator’s personal predicament, a new stepfather adjusting to his uncertain role, highlights an aspect of Japanese society that might be commonplace in other countries, but is still relatively rare in Japan, where divorce is not nearly as prevalent as elsewhere, and blended families not all that widespread. He’s so earnest in his new role, so torn up about his stepson’s unhappiness, so determined to make things better. The contrast between his own familial ambitions for the future and and the collective darkness of the community they’d moved into seemed like a fascinating thematic and narrative clash, the mass-killing a ripe metaphor for generalized adolescent unease, a ripe allegorical place for some of the author’s trademark sensitive commentary on the conflict between ‘society’ and ‘family’ that he so often writes about.

Yet the story tilts on its axis in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

A dog gets poisoned.

The kindly next-door-neighbor drops dead.

A threatening letter to the school is sent.

It seems like the adolescent killer, now released from the mental hospital, is back on the prowl.

With allies, no less.

The story becomes much more of a ‘tale of a suspense’ than the ‘family drama’ I was expecting. Things get a little unlikely, slightly grotesque, sometimes ludicrous. There are suicides and murders, or maybe both, or perhaps neither. Dark sides of good folks are revealed. Our narrator must race against time to prevent his son from being sucked into another dark plot.

Truth be told, I still enjoyed the story, but it’s just not the one that I was expecting.

In my mind, Shigematsu has always straddled the Japanese literary line between 純文学 (‘junbungaku’, or ‘pure literature’) and エンタメ (‘entame’, or ‘entertainment’), two somewhat strictly defined genres of Japanese fiction. His stories always possess a fairly smooth, readable style; they deal with common people, fighting ordinary battles. This particular novel’s dark charm has to do with how it infuses his usual motifs with various thriller-tropes, so it feels like a fresh blend between (so-called) literary and popular fiction.

I think he ultimately pulls it all off, but boy does it get dark.

And that darkness is exaggerated all the more because we are taking about kids here — their attraction to death, their hopelessness about the future — and the ongoing anxieties of the adults who have sworn to protect them.

Japanese novels and films often put-kids-in-danger in vivid ways that western storytellers don’t usually attempt. Think of BATTLE ROYALE compared to THE HUNGER GAMES (which clearly aped its narrative outline), in which kids must compete against each for survival itself. In the film version of BATTLE ROYALE, unlike THE HUNGER GAMES, we actually see adolescents — who are played by real teenagers, unlike American movies which often substitute adult actors — get brutally shot, stabbed, killed. It’s jarring, seeing kids in pain. Japanese artists seem unafraid to place children in peril.

(Ironically, however, Koushu Takami, the writer of BATTLE ROYALE, the novel, admitted in a foreword to a new edition of his book that he got the idea for his story from Stephen King’s novel THE LONG WALK, written under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’, in which a group of teenagers in a dystopian future must walk in a forced race at a certain pace for as long as they can, and after three violations they will get promptly shot to death. There is film version in the works of that novel, so it will be interesting to see if it will be as gory as BATTLE ROYALE, its progeny, turned out to be.)

It’s this kind of ghoulish intermingling of deep emotional themes with more traditional genre elements that make the book work as a thriller. There’s another novel Shigematsu could have written here, one that explored the same themes of a stepfather and his new family helping his son get over his own suicide attempt in a community itself recently ravaged by tragedy — but that’s not this book. It’s partly this book, sure, but not entirely. We do get some deep discussions about the nature of fate, of the arbitrary nature of death, about the temptations of suicide, about the adolescent thrill regarding ‘the end of the world’, and how an individual’s world is ultimately the only world, all things considered, so isn’t suicide the only, self-made viable option, all of which feel both existentially weighty in addition to being simply the rationale of just-plain-scared-kids.

What resonates the most is the underlying thread that Shigematsu , to his credit, never overlooks nor undermines — a stepfather’s love for his son and his wife.

That’s finally where the book lands, with this emotional assertion that he, a man with no blood connection to his new son, will do anything to preserve and transform this new connection to his hurt boy. In Japan, where family lineage is so important, a vow such as this can come across as novel, and nobel.

‘Thursday’s Children’ may have a long way to go, our narrator acknowledges, but he will be there for that child, and the underlying assumption is that, in Japan, and anywhere else, all children are ‘Thursday’s Children’ — that each as a long way to go, as its platitude insists.

As emotionally reserved as the Japanese can be publicly, their art often insists on an emotionality, a sheer sentimentality, that I find refreshing. There can a direct, open sincerity in Japanese literature (and life) that I appreciate. Sometimes sappy, sure, but when faced with adolescents hurting each other, and harming themselves, what else can we do but let our kids know that we’re always here for them?

This kind of blunt emotional stroke of affection may come off as rather heavy-handed, but, in this world, where life is precarious and perpetual darkness oh-so-attractive, any kind of touch can be more than enough.

うちの父が運転をやめません (‘Our Dad Won’t Stop Driving’)

Japan can often seem like a country consumed by, and even composed of, rules.

Do this, Don’t do that. Step here. Don’t step there. Stay back. Move forward. Thank you for your understanding, now steadily move along.

Yet it’s also a nation, like any nation, dominated by mere humans who bristle at incessantly being told what they must always do.

Enough, already!

In Miu Kakiya’s 2020 novel うちの父が運転をやめません (‘Our Dad Won’t Stop Driving’), the main character’s father — who, well into his late seventies, balks at the suggestion that he should, maybe, perhaps, consider permanently settling in to life’s literal and figurative passenger seat — is an example of our innate need not to give in to unspoken, unwritten assumptions about what-we-should-and-should-not-do, and the story as a whole symbolically represents the changing nature of a society in which one begins to question the path already laid out before you long ago by who-knows-who.

The novel begins with a bust-up. Middle-aged salaryman Masashi Inokari watches a news report on television about a seventy-eight year old driver who gets into an accident near a school crossing. Same age as his dad, this driver was, which reminds Masashi once again how his father should probably consider putting his keys down for good.

Yet how do you tell your father that he’s getting too old to drive?

A simple question, but it’s one that’s indicative of author Kakiya’s approach to so much of her fiction, in which the prosaic aspects of daily life are revealed to be full of basic, emotional conundrums that vex us even as we attempt to simply get on with with our jobs and our families.

Somehow.

In addition to worrying about his pop, Masashi also finds himself living a sort of standard Tokyo-businessman-life — commuting all the time, working all hours, not seeing his wife or kid very much. The work is not fun anymore; his wife, while doing well at her own job, is busy with her own life; his son, who Masashi had rather late, at age thirty-seven, and will soon enter high school, always seems sort of glum, if not totally depressed.

And, to top it all off, his dad, who still lives with Masashi’s mum back in his hometown, doesn’t want to stop driving.

The mundane stuff of life, which is actually the actual stuff of life.

Soon the novel reveals itself to be an examination of rural-versus-urban living, while also existing as a narrative speculation of how we might somehow meld a better future for ourselves and our families if we throw away certain presumptions that could be holding us back.

Kakiya, as the author, takes Masashi back, with his wife and son, to his rural hometown, allowing us to see the contrast between the way he was raised, out in the boondocks, a public school kid, versus his wife’s urban upbringing, a private school-Tokyo-bred gal.

Masashi keenly understands that there’s something — actually a lot of somethings! — about countryside living that resists any kind of modern adaptation to life’s aging routes, a knowledge that you can’t really ‘get’ unless you grew up way out in the sticks.

In small towns, for example, one’s car is everything: a sign of status; a means of transport; a tangible example of one’s own physical agility and mental independence. It’s how you gather your goods and visit your friends. Bus service is scattershot, at best. How, then, to tell your dad to just stop driving. It’s the equivalent, in his mind, of telling him to stop living, period. Yet realistically, at the same time, what’s he going to do — keep driving well into his eighties or nineties?

(Which, Kaikya points out near the end of story, is actually kind of a thing in Japan — people still driving as they get closer and closer to the century-mark, dealing with ‘kids’ that are, themselves, already in their seventies and eighties.)

As his father gets more irritable, his mum more concerned, Masashi’s life (like all lives) takes unexpected small detours, ending up in destinations that are not altogether necessarily all bad.

This extended visit to the countryside makes his son suddenly happier, less sullen, more open to the idea of non-city living; an attempt at having his parents live in the Tokyo area ends up being slightly disastrous; a childhood friend’s own father’s driving accidents seem like a dire harbinger for his own family’s troubles; a hospital visit with his mum’s over-eighty relative leads to some homespun wisdom on aging. (“Fifty is young to me,” the elderly invalid advises him. “You have lots left to do.”) Life seems full of pain-in-the-ass events, but co-existing alongside you-never-know possibilities.

More than anything, and this might sound contradictory to everything I’ve just said about the story’s realistic, slice-of-life details, this book feels like a fantasy, a specifically Japanese fantasy. In other novels I’ve read by Kakiya — including ones in which a sixty-something woman runs for political office in her husband’s hometown, or an unhappy housewife finally gathers the courage after decades to finally just leave — Kakiya excels at originating scenarios that would be familiar to any number of different aging Japanese readers, then providing her fans with an inspirational means by which these troublesome confinements might somehow be alleviated. In real life, people often stay stuck, but sometimes that’s why we turn to fiction — to see how alternate possibilities could be actualized.

Here, real change starts to happen when Masashi leaves his salaryman life behind (at least for a spell) and moves back to his hometown. He starts his own kind of Ubereats sort of service, delivering groceries by car to people who, for one reason or another, can’t make it themselves to the local supermarket.

In the process, he acts, in a limited way, as a sort of small-town pied piper. He makes people happy.

People are surprised to see him back in his hometown after a long time away, but they are also glad that he’s here, helping them get on with their day.

Unexpected side-effects from this employment gig also emerge. Masashi starts to relay messages between an estranged mother and daughter. Even his grumpy father starts to come along for the ride on his daily-delivery rounds, riding shotgun. Almost content to ride shotgun. Not only that, after his dad’s rural exodus back home, Masashi’s son wants to move out here as well and attend to the local farming high school. (When Masashi asks him what his mother said about this rather unorthodox educational scenario for a Tokyo-bred boy, the son jokingly says that she had no absolutely no problem with it, he should follow his dreams, you only live once — a humorous indictment of the current Japanese fixation on academic achievement.)

Masashi begins to realize that, perhaps, he, too, can substantially change his life, that it’s not too late, that almost-fifty implies a lot more life left on this earth; he can once again feel at home in the region that raised him, while, simultaneously, his pop can start to come to grips with the fact that there’s still a way that an almost-eighty old-timer might be of use to his community, even though he can’t drive on his own anymore. The fact that this utility might be attained by helping his son make his daily food-delivery rounds by car? The implication is: If one has to quite driving, this is not a bad compromise, all things considered.

Of course, in real life, how many Japanese salaryman can make such drastic changes? Move back home to the hinterlands, have your son take up farming-studies in the same area that you grew up in, see your wife basically okay with the whole deal, and, to top it all off, finally convince your old man to do what’s best for himself and his family — I mean, who does that?

Not many people, true, but some do, or some can, is what Kakiya is saying.

Is narratively nudging, I would argue.

As with Kakiya’s other novels, there are so many daily details and societal observations crammed into the story that the amount of narrator-exposition can be a bit overwhelming. and there’s also the tendency for some of the characters to seem like ‘types’, rather than fully-fleshed out humans, but these are ultimately minor quibbles. What I like about her stuff is that here stories are so specific to modern-day Japanese anxieties. There’s a western tendency to view a lot of present-day Japanese literature as being quite heady and philosophical, or quirky and fantastical, or quaint and comfy, or spooky and thrilleresque, but Kakiya’s stories are merely about ordinary, ever-aging people trying to make sense of it all. Her protagonists deal with the big questions, yes, but they do so while entrapped by their parents, children, workmates. Her modest genius is to consistently provide logical, emotional reasons for her characters to eventually understand that all the long-established, perpetually stringent rules of Japanese society might be loosened, then tossed.

Difficult to do, yes, and emotionally draining, but never impossible.

These kinds of revelations arise when those sorts of characters realize that ‘change’, as a concept, might actually do some good, for you and those around you.

Stop driving. Move back home. Study something new and unusual. Make yourself of use.

Society is stubborn, yes, but it will bend when we bend. Kakiya is, in her own way, persistent in her fiction about the abiding human need for assuming new personal positions. Aches and pains from such exertions and unexpected stretching are inevitable as we age, but the new physical and mental forms we find ourselves experiencing can seem like a small private boon that also, almost invisibly, alter the ‘rules’ of what’s possible for all those around us.

私たちの隣人、レイモンド・カーヴ (“Our Neighbor, Raymond Carver”)

One good thing about dead writers is that they don’t become relics. The work they leave behind keeps their intellectual and emotional and artistic spirits alive, and the people who knew them, for better or for worse, quite often spill their guts out about what kind of people they were outside of their prose. I never feel like authors are gone, only perpetually absent, occupying places unknown, but somehow still available.

In Haruki Murakami’s 2009 non-fiction work 私たちの隣人、レイモンド・カーヴ (“Our Neighbor, Raymond Carver”) — part of the Haruki Murakami Translation Library series, which collects his translated work under a single publishing banner — he edits and translates a series of essays from friends and contemporaries of Raymond Carver, the celebrated American author whose entire oeuvre has been translated into Japanese by Murakami himself.

In this collection, compiled and translated (Murakami tells us in his introduction) from the eighth volume of Carver’s collected works, various people who interacted with a master of the American short story tell us just what they thought of him. How he affected them. What changes he wrought in their lives.

There are those who don’t give a shit about the private lives of authors. I’m not one of them. I like to know a little bit about everything when it comes to the writers that I respect. This book gives us a series of humorous and thoughtful anecdotes about what kind of a guy Carver was, and, based on these testimonies, it sure sounds like he was a good one.

Murakami only met Carver once in the flesh, but the American’s influence on Japan’s most popular modern writer is clearly manifold. So much so, in fact, that this is the second book of reflections-on-Raymond-Carver that Murakami has translated into Japanese, the other one consisting of a series of interviews from people that he knew. This one, in contrast, is made up of seven essays, filled, Murakami tells us in the introduction, with posthumous memories and impressions of Carver’s lasting impact on those who knew him via varying degrees of professional and personal intimacy.

Carver, Murakami points out, had been a hurt kid who, not surprisingly, as an adult, also hurt others, but he was also a deeply empathetic writer who wrote from the bottom of his stomach. (There’s an abidingly gritty earthiness to Carver’s work, focused as it was on the ‘ordinary’ angst of working-class Americans.)

Dying at fifty, when Murakami was forty, the latter admits in this introduction that, having never been fifty, he didn’t know how to feel about that fact. Was fifty too young to die? Now, having passed the age of fifty himself, Murakami acknowledges: Yes, fifty was far too young for Ray to pass away.

Murakami has written elsewhere about the one time that he met with Ray and his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher, at their home in the United States shortly before his death, but this brief introduction is all we get here from Murakami (in terms of personal asides) about his affection for Carver.

Yet I choose to believe that the very act of translating all of these essays is, in and of itself, quite a confession on Murakami’s part. He wanted his Japanese readers to know what Carver meant to others, which, in a way, is proof-positive of what he surely must have also meant to Murakami. (The act of translation, after all, is also an act of endless empathy.)

As for the book’s readers, you don’t have to be a fan of Carver’s works to get something out of these essays, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Throughout the collection there are scattered references to the author’s styles and themes, but no grand, overarching summary of his artistic approach. I think I’ve read almost all of Carver’s short stories, as well as Carol Sklenicka’s fantastic 2009 biography, but I’m by no means an expert, so I’m not going to pretend that I can summarize all that he represented and embodied as an author. I do feel safe in saying, however, that Carver specialized in the short story; that his characters were inevitably down-on-their-luck, broke, struggling with their relationships, endlessly scrounging for money; and that he had a spare, lean, stripped-down style that was (as is made clear in a few of these essays) in stark contrast to the literary fashion of the times (those times being mostly the late 1960s to the late 1980s).

What’s not discussed in any of these reminiscences is the revelation in recent years — and pretty much definitively proven in Sklenicka’s biography — that Carver’s signature style was, in large part, a result of cuts made by his editor, Gordon Lish, who insisted on a brevity that Carver himself did not necessarily advocate.

Fair enough, this omission, because this book is not truly about the work.

It’s about the man.

And what a man he seems to have been.

The first essay — written by that literary wunderkind Jay McInery, part of that infomral literary brat pack of the 1980s that also included Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz — was composed a year after Carver’s death, and delves into the impact Carver had on McInery as a friend and a teacher.

The thing was, according to McInerney, Carver was a very unteacher-like teacher. Perhaps this was because he came to teaching in a rather slipshod fashion, having had multiple other odd jobs before writing, and talking about writing, began to pay some bills.

It could also be due to the fact that Carver was part of an artistic renaissance that resembled Hemingway’s experience in the Paris of the Twenties, only Carver-in-the-Seventies was no romantic egoist. He was writing about impoverished people, trailer-park people. McInerney admits that he, himself, has never even been in a trailer park, but he recognized the people that Carver wrote about. Depressed people. Actual people. In an era of metafiction, here was Raymond Carver writing truthfully about folks who had never heard of metafiction, let alone read it.

In McInerney’s eyes, Carver was exceedingly kind as a teacher, and genuinely interested in what his students had to say. In the early 1980s, in Syracuse, Carver taught a fiction class centered on ‘form’ and ‘theory’, although McInerney doesn’t really remember those topics actually being discussed. Instead, Carver would assign nineteenth century Russian authors, read students’ own work, talk about various translated writers. Writing was exceedingly serious to him, and he wanted it to be serious for his students as well. Carver was a literary disciple of John Gardner, and it seemed to McInerney that it was important to Carver that he be respected by his former teacher — that he be seen worthy of the literary crown that had been placed upon him.

This kind of dedication was quite obvious in the classroom, too. Dissecting one of McInerney’s short stories, Carver wondered questioned McInerney as to why he had used the word ‘earth’ (大地) and not ‘ground’ (地面). Murakami includes the English version of these words here in this translation, emphasizing, perhaps, the precision, the distinction, that Carver himself was highlighting.

He was also a nice guy. McInerney would chat about baseball with him, use his office for his own writing. Carver changed his life, McInerney says, and he can still here his voice.

I’ve included so many of the above details from McInerney’s recollection because this is the sort of stuff that is present throughout each essay in the collection — highly personalized, unusually affectionate moments in time, preserved.

Celebrated author Tobias Wolff states, similar to McInerney, that he also continues to feel Ray’s presence. The two of them had been good friends. Had roomed together for two weeks while teaching at a university in Vermont. They also had kids around the same age, were teachers together; Ray helped him get a job at Syracuse, helped him find a house. They aged alongside each other.

Wolff had read Carver, the writer, before he ever knew Carver, the person. Instantly recognized from this prose that this was an important new voice in American fiction. Unlike McInerney, Wolff knew Ray, the man, in his ‘drinking era’; many parties, many bottles. Yet he believes that Carver’s writing became stronger, more mysterious, after he quit drinking. The man merged with his writing in new, striking ways.

He won’t reveal the last words he had with Ray as his friend lay dying, but Wolff confirms that Ray was a hero in his final few months, continuing his huge appetite for life right up until its premature end.

Each subsequent essay offers similarly warm and admirable praise of Carver (the artist), and Ray (the chum).

Martin Marcus, a poet who knew Ray from 1966 to 1977, at the height of his alcoholism, and who Carver dedicated a book to, believed that Ray’s own poetry was written with a small ‘p’. No arrogance, no pride, no chest-thumpin’. Carver though poets were special people (even though he didn’t consider himself ‘special’).

Marcus and Ray differed on their recollections of how they first met — the former feeling it was at the apartment of mutual friend John Hitchock, the latter believing it to be at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa — but no matter. That’s part of what makes friendship fun, the lack of past-cohesion.

This was the era when Carver went from being a textbook editor to teaching his first writing class. He was sensitive, nervous, in a new social and occupational realm. When Charles Bukowski came to the University of Santa Cruz to do a reading alongside Ray in 1973, chaos erupted. Bukowski was drunk, berating students. Ray, too, ended up having a few too many. It was all a bit much, but that was Ray’s new world now, it seems to me: a lot of writing, some teaching, a few offshoots of literary fame, some mutual drinking. It all held together, somehow, until it didn’t.

Essay after essay ends up cohering into a common portrait of a good man who went off the rails for a bit before finally getting his act together just as it was ultimately too late; essay after essay casually illustrates the parties, the classes, the writing and the drinking that filled up Carver’s days and cornered out his brain.

In between, as James D. Houston relates, are extended car trips, wherein we learn that Carver was a fan of dining-and-dashing-without-paying at roadside diners (which he never fully trusted, those omnipresent American small-town eateries); that he felt a kinship to Chekhov, who was another outsider of sorts; that he would sell you a car for fifty dollars, even though he couldn’t find you the proper paperwork.

Famous names are dropped, yes — John Cheever and John Irving among them — and yet we also have a delightful essay in which we see Carver come up to the University of Saskatoon to deliver a lecture alongside his friend Richard Ford, a piece which not only delves into Carver’s writing style in relation to current Saskatchewan and Albertan authors (and therefore music to this particular Canadian’s literary ears), but we also learn about Ray’s fondness for hunting, and the dedicated way he would practice and practice to get the pronunciation of ‘Saskatoon’ just write in order to pretend to be a local and not be fined for illegal shooting.

Sort of trivial stuff, maybe, but I do like me some trivia.

Another essay, by Michiko Miyamoto — which is also the only one here not translated by Murakami, as it was originally written in Japanese by Miyamoto and given to Murakami by his good friend Motoyuki Shibata, another celebrated translator — is filled with these kinds of amiable trivia, discussing Carver’s kind cordiality when she went to interview him at the tony Carlyle Hotel in New York City, and how he told her that his children were his biggest influence on his style, simply because he had no time, with them constantly hanging around, requiring his attention, to ever write a full novel. Noting that he had quit drinking, Miyamoto suggested that ‘writing’ and ‘drinking’ were never a good mix. Carver agreed. Easier to drink than write, he admitted.

Taken together, these essays kind of collectively show how scattershot a modern writer’s life is, how filled with friends and booze and work and teaching. They become, together, a portrait of a life that is also, at times, a microcosmic representation of how unglamorous, but personally satisfying, the ‘writing life’ might be. (At least for some.)

There are also some other, unexpected linguistic pleasures to the collection; given that this is a translated book, it was fascinating to see Murakami, in Japanese, add his own special touch here and there.

One of Carver’s most famous short stories is called ‘Neighbors’; the title of this collection (which I think Murakami himself coined) contains the word ‘neighbor’, which seems like a slight nod to that prominent work.

Also with regards to the title, Murakami uses the word 私たち (‘watashitachi’, with a formal meaning of ‘us’ or ‘our’), but in certain essays he uses 俺たち (‘oretachi’, with a casual, male meaning of ‘us’ or ‘our’) when the author is talking about he and his buddies’ mutual friendship with Ray. In English, we’re stuck with ‘I’; in Japanese, Murakami has a wee bit more leeway to play around with the formality of ‘I’ amongst friends in different situations.

At another point, poems, or 詩, are talked about, but the way to ‘read’ that kanji character is written alongside it using the furigana for ‘poetry’, but written in katana — an impossible-to-replicate effect in English, but one which, in Japanese, stresses, I think, the ‘English’ feel of the word ‘poetry’. (It’s such a common character, 詩, that the furigana is not necessary to ‘read’ that word, but Murakami, like many authors, is therefore simply having some fun by finding a creative, unorthodox way of furigana-izing the kanji.)

There are also a few changes to some of the essay’s English titles. Often, Murakami will directly translate them, word for word into Japanese; at other times, he’ll make up a new title, or subtly change it. For example, James D. Houston’s essay THE DAYS WITH RAY becomes, in Japanese, ‘Memories Of Ray’; Morton Marcus’s ALL-AMERICAN NIGHTMARE shifts in Japanese to the equivalent ‘Our American Nightmare’. (Colloquialisms in English do always have a one-to-one equivalent in Japanese.)

Fun aside, there is still a certain, unavoidable sadness to this collection. Dead by the age of fifty from lung cancer, a few of these essays do, indeed, reference his final days, but this is not a morbid book. Nor is it a comprehensive one. It gives you a few of the flavors of Ray Carver, enough to satisfy his fans and perhaps induce those unfamiliar with his work to give it a try.

Indeed, I suspect that Murakami’s secret motive for translating this book was to entice Japanese readers into sampling some of Carver’s work. (That he, himself, is Carver’s primary translator would also make this a good business decision!) I also feel that he does a great service here, to the Japanese literary world; this collection is such a cool time capsule of literary Americana (for lack of a better term), and, as with Murakami’s other, multiple translations, its sheer existence ensures that western literary figures are allowed entry into Japan’s own mainstream reading culture.

Of course, given Murakami’s own penchant for stories which inhabit strange and fantastical worlds, his overwhelming affection for Carver’s kitchen-sink, mundane-realism mode of short stories might seem sort of odd, but Murakami has always insisted that he tries to be simple and clear in his writing, and Carver’s own prose is nothing if not that.

And, just as Murakami’s own characters are often ‘ordinary’, so, too, are Carver’s. They are just people, doing their thing. I can sort of see what I think Murakami sees in Carver — a tiny bit of himself, subdued.