"Out" by Natsuo Kirino

Out by Natsuo Kirino (520 pages, 2004, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder) is the second work by Natsuo Kirino that I have read.   I  read her shorter Real World and posted on it in August.    I had a pretty good idea what to expect in Out, a cold razor eyed look at the life of  unskilled women working in a factory.   I knew there would be violence, most everybody would be corrupt in one way or another and there would be vivid scenes of sexual abuse.   It is also a book about the rebellion of a woman against her very oppresive husband through the ultimate act of rebellion.

Out centers on four women, just like The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki does.   In The Makioka Sisters the women have problems such as low quality servants, deciding what suitors one of  the sisters should accept and debating over which of the numerous houses the family owns each sister should live in.   In Out the problems center on rent, abusive husbands and dysfunctional children.   If there are servants in their families they are it!   They  may not dress their boyfriends in expensive English Tweeds like Fusako in The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea or be worshiped for their beauty like Mitsuko in Quicksand.    They are kind of throw away women in Japanese society.   They have issues that block them from the world of corporate Japan.   Maybe they are half way acceptable looking to the men in their world (factory workers, security guards, loan sharks, lay- abouts of various sorts) but they are not in any way valued by the men in their lives.   They are interchangeable.   If one quits her job at the box lunch factory where they all work, nobody really cares.   No one is going to go through any elaborate courtship procedure with them for any objective at all.  

Out is  very much a fun crime novel.   It kept my attention all the way through but maybe in part you are waiting to see what terrible thing will happen next.   We get to know the women in this book well.   If you saw them on the subway in Tokyo you would not see anything special about them.    The four women lead characters are kind of friends (work friends) but when things turn nasty they turn on each other.   There is no sisterhood in this world.    The central plot of the book (this is not a spoiler it is on the inside cover!) revolves around the women's joint efforts to cover up the fact that one of the women has murdered her long abusive husband.   A number of characters from the dark side of Tokyo get involved, we get to hang out in some sleazy nightclubs.  Prostitution is seen as a career path worth considering to the women in this world.  They do not do but it enters their minds.   They see that women who sell themselves to rich men seem to have a much better life than women who work the night shift at a box lunch factory.    Maybe this is only in their minds and the long term future of such an occupation is very bleak but it seems a way out at times.  

Out is escapist reading but not just that.   It gives us a look at how real women live in Tokyo.   It is pretty fast paced and a lot happens.   It is easy to follow.   Out sold millions of copies in Japan

To me Out is for sure a good selection for the Women UnBound Challenge.   It completely focuses on the lives of four women of different ages, from their early 20s or so to mid 40s.   It shows the struggles they go through  trying to manage their families.   It gives us a very close hand look at their relationships with the men in their lives.   We feel we knew how these women lived and felt and related to each other.

I endorse Out for those who like crime novels that focus on the seamy seedy side of a big city.   There is very strong sexual violence.   If someone was interested in reading a first Japanese crime novel I would, of the books I have  read, suggest they read her Real World.  It is only half as long as Out.  Out is a better written more exciting book than Real World but it is twice as long and if you are neophyte in the Japanese novel it is too long a  crime work to start with.   If you like Real World (most goodread.com reviewers give both books from 3 to 4 stars) then you will like Out more.

  Kirino is Japan's most celebrated crime novelist.   She has written it looks like about 20 works.   So far four have been translated into English according to Wikipedia and goodreads.com.  (One of her works is not in print)   I will read Grotesque in 2010.  

Mel u

"February Flowers" by Fan Wu

February Flowers by Fan Wu (2006, 239 pages) is set in 21st Century China.    It centers on two women and their relationship to each other.   The central character and narrator, Ming, tells the story as a long flash back to her university days and her relationship with Yan.   Seventeen year old Ming is bookish, driven to succeed, devoted to her parents and naive in the ways of the world.    She has had no romantic experience whatsoever and accepts the official Chinese line that there are no homosexuals in China.    She lives with three other young women in a dormitory.   She is an avid reader of western classics as well as Camus.   She also reads and studies classical Chinese literature.    Her father was a well known scholar before he and her mother were sent for several years to work among agricultural peasants as part of the massive re-education program of Mao.    The father is back to his teaching and his reading now but his potential to be a great scholar was destroyed and you can see her parents live a cautious life.   Yan on the other hand is 24, quite a bit older than the other college students, worldly, attractive and dressed in a fashion that she seemingly cannot afford.   She has a cynical woman of the world wisdom that can dazzle her much young women friends.   (Seven years is a big age gap when you are 17).  

We do not at first know that much about Yan.   Ming wonders how she can afford the fancy clothes.   Ming says she has a part time job but will not say doing what.   Yan reveals that she was molested at 13 and has had a boyfriend.  (We later find out she has had many boyfriends).   Yan slowly begins to probe Ming concerning any sexual feelings she may have.   She asks Ming if she would like to have a boyfriend.   The atmosphere of the university is very puritanical and the university police have a right to raid lover's lane type places.   If  a student is caught there, the university officials may notify her parents.   Slowly Ming begins to develop feelings she does not understand for Yan.   Yan has contrived to undress in front of Ming several times.   The story line unfolds as a coming of age and wondering if I am a lesbian plot.   Keep in mind Ming has been raised to think only decadent foreigners are homosexuals.  

February Flowers is an interesting look at university life in modern China.  It is a credible coming of age story and the internal tension in Ming is well done.   The book is a bit slowly paced.   It is a good account of friendships between women.   We also see how terribly important family is to all the women.   We are made to feel  the attraction of Ming for Yan is real.   In the part of Yan, we sense she uses her ability to sexually attract men and women as a kind of a game, a power matter.    We see the results of the her involvement with numerous men.    In an erotically charged and quite not what I expected scene we see what is sort of Ming's first sexual encounter.    As the flash back ends we see what Ming is making of her life.   We sense she still does not fully understand her sexuality and may be too deeply programmed to accept her desires.  

To me February Flowers fits in well within the themes of the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.   We get a look at the lives of young women-17 to 24-enrolled in a Chinese University.   We see how the expectations for women in terms of family obligations shapes their world more than it does of the male students.  We see how even in 21th century China, a woman is expected to remain relatively naive sexually before marriage whereas there are no such strictures on the male students.   We see how women who cross the line are viewed.   We see the effects of the one child policy on families.  

The official biography of Fan Wu (from her personal web page) reads like a case study of a woman overcoming huge obstacles.   

"Fan Wu was born on a state-run labor farm in mainland China, where her parents were exiled during the Cultural Revolution. Despite poverty and isolation, the farm provided her with boundless freedom and joy. In 1985, her parents left the farm, bringing her four older brothers and her with them, and settled in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province.

In the mid-90s, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Sun Yat-Sen University, she went to work in Shenzhen, the first Special Economy Zone in China, transformed from a fishing village to a bustling metropolis in ten years. During her three years there, she held varied jobs and traveled extensively, witnessing the unprecedented economic boom, as well as the exploitation of workers from poor provinces and the countryside. In 1997, a scholarship from Stanford University brought her to America, and after earning an MA in Mass Media Studies, she joined Yahoo!, a Silicon Valley-based Internet company, where she worked in market research and editorial for more than seven years before devoting herself to writing."

February Flowers is well written (the book did drag a bit).  It is easy to read and follow.  I am glad I read it for the look it gave me at unversity life of young women in modern China and I enjoyed wondering if Ming would ever give in to her feelings for Yan.   I endorse this book (with the reservation it is not "high art" or close to it) for a semi-light read.   It does have one scene of a near x rated nature.   Most Goodreads reviewers gave it three stars and I would also.  

Mel u

"The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915, 207 pages, Barnes and Noble Classic with an introduction by Frank Kermode)

Have you ever wondered what Barnes and Noble Books does with the editions of its classics that they cannot sell in their stores?  ( Ok, I know you have not spent a whole lot of time pondering this issue.)    It seems a lot of them they ship to the Philippines where they are sold once a year in an 80 percent off sale.   I was lucky enough to be in Power Books in Trinoma Mall the day their sale started.   I was able to get several Hardys, three James, a Wharton. two Eliots, some Conrads and The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

I had never read any of Ford's work.   The last he was brought to my mind was a few months ago when I read the introduction to the Oxford Classic edition of A  Sentimental Education by Gustav Flaubert in which Ford is famously quoted as saying you could not consider your self a well educated person until you had read that work at least 14 times.   A Good Soldier has been waiting for a few months now to be read.    I completed it yesterday.   I do not recall being so amazed by the very high intelligence, cultivation, and artistic power of a novel for a very long time.  

The narrator of The Good Soldier is a simply maddening figure.   English professors teach this work as a classic of unreliable narration.  It is the story of the lives and relationship of two married couples, both wealthy.   The narrator, John Dowell, is an American.   His friend  (if one has friends in the world of The Good Soldier) Edward Ashburnham is English.   He is the good soldier in that he was a regimental officer in the British Army and served in India.   He always did his duty as expected by society, hence the label,  good soldier.   John sees him as quite a fine fellow.    We come to see that John is terribly corrupt and completely self centered.   He deceives everyone around him including John.   He has a long affair with John's wife, a fact that slips John's notice.  Least we think John is an imperceptive man, here is how he describes his wife Florence.

You are to imagine however much her bright personality came from Stamford, Connecticut, she was as yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie.   I never could imagine how she did it-the queer, chattery person that she was.   With that far-away look in here eye-which wasn't in the least romantic-I mean she doesn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly did ever look at you..She would talk about William the Silent, about Gustav the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337.

The narration is not relayed to us in a straightforward fashion though throughout  John tells us he is trying to give a true account of their lives.   At numerous points in the narration a casual remark, almost a slip from the narrator, will undercut our full perception of events he has narrated.   He is nearly half way through his story before he reveals he has a net worth of about Two Million dollars (an utter fortune in 1915) and that he is twenty years older than his wife.   We also find out through the smallest aside that after several years of marriage John and his wife have never had sex and that he may well not know how children are produced.   His wife, he seems to never know this, had faked a heart condition to avoid intimacy with him.  Part of the great pleasure of this work is trying to figure out  the truth about the lives of the characters through the medium of the narration.   A great deal of my enjoyment of the work came through marveling at the writing.    Here is John's part of  his first meeting with his future wife's aunts.

The first question they asked me was not how I did but what I did.   And I did nothing.   I suppose I ought to have done something, but I did not see any call to do it.   Why does one do things?

None of the central characters in this work really do anything in terms of work but for Edward's time in the army.   Edward has an extreme weakness for women.   The book may seem to bear a superficial resemblance to the world of The Great Gatsby but  that is the wrong path to go with this book.

It is funny somehow through the prism of this very unreliable half imperceptive half brilliant narrator we see more than we do in tales where the narrator is omniscient.    Here is a wonderful utterance by our narrator John:

Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event.

As we keep  in mind that the book was published and is set during a terrible world war.  This is seen by Frank Kermode as Ford's way of saying that the events in lives of the  people in the story reflect the events in the world and the conflicts of the characters is meant to be a sort of mirror of the conflicts in the war.    I think this is the as taught in universities reading of the novel.   I think it is terribly missing the point of The Good Soldier   and fails to begin to appreciate the depth of the artistry of Ford.    Looking at the quote with this dictum of Natsume Soseki in mind

The pleasure we gain from a Noh play springs not from any skill at presenting the raw human feeling of the everyday world but from clothing feeling as it is in layer upon layer of art, and in a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not found in the real world

We can see the remark is at least two things.   It is a completely silly remark of a fatuous man who compares the self created problems of four idle rich to the death of millions which can only be a terrible trivialization of what really happens.   It is reflective of the utter corruption and decadence of John and his world.   It is also a remark of transcendent wisdom.   John does not know what it means and really uses it as only a cruise ship type line.   John has a life of slow serenity.   He does not really live in the real world.    The pleasure we can get from The Good Soldier depends on how many layers of art we can peel away.

I am grateful to the many 1000s of shoppers in a Barnes and Noble some where who did not want to buy A Good Soldier.  (You can get an e book in a pdf formant for free at the Gutenburg Project)

Ford had an interesting life.    Ford was not his last name at birth.  He changed his name from the Germanic sounding Hueffer (1873 to 1939) as it was felt his birth name would hurt sales of his books.  He edited a very important literary journal.   His father was the music editor of the London Times.  His grandfather was a well known Pre-Raphaelite painter.   Even though he was over the age of mandatory service, he volunteered to fight in WWI and saw extreme combat conditions in France.   He had an affair with the English writer Jean Rhys who published a very unflattering to Ford novel on the affair, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.   He cowrote some books with Joseph Conrad.   He wrote about 80 books.   He was a very important person in the literary circles of his day.   He said A Good Soldier was his best work.   Some on Goodreads.com think that A Good Soldier will ruin the rest of Ford's novels for you.   The only other Ford that seems at all read still is his four part work Parade's End (an 850 or so page work centered on the reflections of a soldier in WWI fighting in France).    The Goodreads and Amazon.com reviewers consensus on Parade's End seems to be it is half brilliant and it is half  never ending.    I think I will read it in 2010.

I endorse The Good Soldier completely.    Like A Sentimental Education it will generously repay the repeat rereader.     Ford Madox Ford was himself totally immersed in the reading life.   As I concluded my vain attempt to convey my feelings for this book I wondered what he had in his rucksack during his war time period in France.   

If anyone has any experience with other Ford books or would be willing to join in a 2010 read along on Parade's End  please let me know.   (I read Kermode's very useful and interesting introduction after I completed the book and suggest others do the same as it does contain spoilers.)

Mel u

"Dance, Dance, Dance" by Haruki Murakami

Dance, Dance, Dance (1995, 392 pages,  trans. from Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum) is my second read of a Haruki Murakami novel.   Murakami's After Dark was the first novel by a Japanese author I had ever read.   I picked it for two simple reasons.   Murakami was the only Japanese author I was familiar with (the book stores in Manila are very stocked in his works) and it was a short book.  I prefer to read a short book by a new author.   I liked After Dark a lot and thought it gave us a good look at part of the Tokyo night world.   Having read around 40 Japanese works since my August 9, 2009 review of After Dark I would suggest it as a good first Japanese novel.   It is often endorsed on the Murakami Goodreads.com group as a suggested first read.  

  I set the book in my TBR area as I wanted to read a diverse range of Japanese authors before reading second works.   I finished Dance, Dance, Dance yesterday.    I found it to be a lot of fun.   It kept my attention throughout.   I felt I understood the central character, a male free lancer writer living in contemporary Tokyo who specializes in restaurant reviews.  

At the start of the book the narrator (it is told in the first person) is thinking about a former sort of girl friend.   She was, in the narrator's words, a high class hooker,  a professional ear model and a proofreader.   He recalls the old hotel where they used to spend time together,  The Dolphin Hotel.   The Dolphin Hotel is a sort  of run down place with a lot of  "character", the kind of a place where nobody there is not quite who they say they are.   (The kind of setting beloved to writers of  stories about the darker side of big cities).   The narrator has not seen his girl friend in a long time so he decides to go back to the Dolphin hotel to see if anyone there has any leads on her.  (He claims he was not her customer but this is an artistically, and otherwise, dubious assertion on the narrator's part.)   To his great shock the hotel has been torn down.   In its place there is an ultramodern tower called the L'Hotel Dauphin.   Nobody there, of course, has ever heard of his ex-girl friend, Kiki.   He is taken by the very attractive female desk clerk in a lovely uniform.  (At the Dolphin Hotel the owner was at the desk.)   He decides to embark on a search for Kiki.  His job gives him a lot of self directed time.   He is a cat lover.
I do not want to give away much of the plot line at all because it very much a fun exciting read.   We get to meet his boyhood friend now a movie star.   We see his developing friendship with a 13 year old girl.  (The narrator seems in his mid thirties).    At times the relationship does cause the narrator to wander into mental images he is not proud about but no lines are crossed in action.   We get to meet a mysterious Sheep Man who may be a dream figure or may be a real figure of some kind somehow controlling the events in the lives of the characters.

In talking about The Club Dumas a few days ago I characterized it, in a parody of the term "Chick Lit", as belonging to the category of  "bookish boys lit".   By this I mean a book that plays into the fantasies of bookish teenage boys (and the adult versions of that.)   Examples of quality writers who fall in this category are Pynchon, Hemingway, and Dumas.    To me Dance, Dance, Dance is squarely in this category.   (This is not a pejorative label-really it is not-Gravity's Rainbow is on my list of ten best novels ever and it is for sure in this genre.)   One of the characteristic of the genre is the exploration of hidden or darker sides of things, secret knowledge of worlds unknown to ordinary people.    Male characters in works in this genre have uneasy relationships with women.   There is a preoccupation, this is the books expression, with high class hookers.   The narrator of this book reads Jack London and listens all the time to American pop music.   Your bookish boy reads Call of The Wild and The Count of Monte Cristo.   The narrator of Dance, Dance, Dance best friend charges high class prostitutes to his expense account.   He was a customer of Kiki.   One night he and the narrator are bored so they order in two girls from a very expensive super discreet agency that the movie star is an important customer off.   The movie star pays for it all.    The narrator goes to Hawaii with the 13 year old girl he is friends with and somebody else pays the bill.   He stays a hotel in a room alone and the girl does stay else where.   A beautiful woman knocks on his door one night, she is described as "South Asian".  She is a high class prostitute that his movie star friend has hired for him.   Not just for one night but for three nights in a row.   The girl provides him with a great services, very erotically described.  

The action picks up.   A number people are killed including several of the prostitutes.   We meet some hard  boiled detectives, your standard seen it all homicide detectives who know enough not to question the owners of expensive call girl rings too much given the level of protection they have paid for.    We get to go along for some fancy meals, paid for by the movie star friend with a lot of  issues in his life, of course.   We get to know some call girls,  a one armed American Vietnam veteran, the 13 year old girl's mother
and a very respectable and nice girl who works at the fancy hotel.   She, of course, is quite beautiful and ends up in love with and in bed with the narrator. 
There are lots of clever plot lines and surprises.   The role of the Sheep Man is meant to baffle us, I think.   There are Science Fiction aspects to the book if the role of the Sheep Man is not seen as a dream or hallucinatory episode

  Dance, Dance, Dance was, to me, a fun read.   It is in the bookish boy genre and one should know that before reading it.    In my classification, a book can be a work of very high quality and be a bookish boy's novel.   Murakami has written a lot of novels.   People who have read them all pretty much put Dance Dance Dance in the middle rank of his books.   Most goodreads.com readers give it four or five stars and every one says it is not his best work.   I guess I would give it four at least.    I look forward to reading his most highly regarded works.  

I read in a few places on the net that Kenzaburo Oe has been very critical of Murakami.   I wanted to know why so I did a bit of research.   Basically Oe feels Murakami  gives too much emphasis to American culture in his works.
This, of course, is a political value judgment (Murakami for sure is the best know Japanese writer internationally) that has nothing to do with the merit of the work of Murakami.   Dance, Dance, Dance does have many references to American pop music, books and even food.   There is one small thing in the novel that did annoy me.   The narrator and the movie star are talking about the prostitute that the movie star sent to the hotel in Hawaii.   They call the agency and the agency asks where she is from.   They say "Oh she is probably from the Philippines".   

Mel u

"The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Youssoupov" by Greg King

The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Youssoupov and the Murder That Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire  by Greg King (297 pages, 1995)-nonfiction

I have long been interested in the final years of the Romanov reign.   Years ago  I read all the standard books on them.   I have a special interest in secondary royal figures and read a number of biographies of Russian Grand Dukes, Duchesses, as well as works on lesser figures.   I recall one very interesting book on the English tutor of the Romanov children, Sydney Gibbs.    I was able to buy most of the books used via Amazon.

I bought Greg King's book maybe six years ago.   I somehow never got around to reading it.   A few days ago I read Katsumura  (1906) by Natsume Soseki set in Japan at the start of the Japanese and Russian War.   The total defeat of the Russian navy by the Japanese was seen by many as the mark of the complete incompetency of the rulers of Russia.   Prince Youssoupov (there are variations in the spelling of his last name) may have played a role in developing the mind set of Czar Nicholas II toward the Japanese.   Felix and Nicholas II were close friends and before Nicholas's marriage the two of them, along with  an army of helpers and other young noble men went on a world tour.    One of the stops was in Japan.    The public purpose of the tour was to meet world leaders and create trade opportunities.   The real purpose in the mind of the young noble men was to visit the most expensive brothels where ever they went.   Felix was a frequenter of the highest level of brothels in St Petersburg and Moscow.   He was well known to divide his time between women and male prostitutes.   In Tokyo he and Nicholas went to a very elite brothel were the workers were men dressed as very high ranking geishas.   Felix and others in the group, of course, indulged themselves in the services of the establishment.   The public statement by all is that Czar Nicholas merely observed.   However, he took from this one visit the impression that all Japanese men were basically like the ones he saw in the brothel and laughed off the Japanese as a military threat. 

The book focuses on two figure, Rasputin and Felix and tells the biographies of each.   That of Rasputin is well known so I read that part of the book rapidly.  The biography section on Felix was much more interesting to me.  His family had very ancient Tatar roots.   For close to 800 years they were allies of the Czars.   Unlike many rich families, they kept their money in tact and stayed friends with the rulers.   By 1900 the Youssoupov's were the richest family in Russia.   They had so many estates in Russia that they actually forgot some of the properties they owned.   Felix's mother was hoping for a girl so she dressed him in the clothes for a royal princess, grew his hair in the style of a Russian girl and treated him as if he were a girl.   Not to surprisingly this had some lasting  effects on Felix.   At the age of 12 he and a friend dressed as girls and roamed the streets of St Petersburg.   Felix began a life time of dressing up as a woman and seeking out male partners.   He knew he was expected to produce an heir, his older brother had been killed in a dual so he was due to become an ultra rich man.   His mother, and her sister the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, thought he was just "going through a phase" and found him a suitable bride.   They married, had children and did have a life long deeply bonded marriage.   Felix continue his side activities and his wife pretended she did  not know about it.   The book has a lot of  very interesting detail about the life of Russian nobles in contrast to the utter poverty of the masses.   There are a lot of interesting details including a fascinating look at a visit Felix made to a very wretched slum in St Petersburg (his Aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth had a charitable organization).   Felix for a while had a Buddha like awaking in which he realized not everyone has 100 servants and decided to give all his money away but quickly reconsidered when advised when his wife and mother told that meant he would have to dress himself and told him to stop being silly.

Felix felt Rasputin was a terrible influence on the royal family because of his seeming ability to cure the heir to the throne when he had a hemophiliac episode.   The Czar's wife, Alexandra, was completely under the sway of Rasputin.   Felix decided Rasputin must die.  (Before then Felix was assisted in deciding what shoe to wear by servants whose only job was to maintain his shoes collection.)  The story is well know.   Rasputin is murdered.   Alexandra is outraged.  Czar Nicholas, basically as clueless as monarch as you might find, was leading his army against the Germans.    When the dust of the Russian Revolution settles, Felix and his wife are in Paris.   Felix was smart enough to have property in London and Paris so he was welcome in London whereas most exiled Romanovs had to stay in Paris.   He also smuggled out a small fortune in diamonds. 

He and his wife lived well for a number of years.   He was generous with other White Russians.   King tells us some interesting things about the general situation of many Russian emigrants of the time.   Most had no job skills at all and if they had any training it was to be a military officer.   His account of their adjustments was fascinating to me.   Felix, as you could guess, was not a great money manager.   He decided he could perhaps make some money by telling his story in a book, many others had already done it.   He published three books all of which did pretty well.  He was fairly open about his sexual proclivities in his books. Hollywood  movies about the murder of  Rasputin were made Felix was depicted in these movies without his permission and in a quite unflattering way.  He decided to sue and won a judgment that would be equivalent to about five million dollars today.   After fees he and wife ended up with about half of this money.   By now his wife had taken over full management of the family funds and the two of them lived out their days in high society in New York and London.   They spent the WWII years in New York City.

This is an interesting book and will, I think, be enjoyed by those interested in the last years of the Romanovs and the post Czarist experience of White Russian nobles.   A lot of people will speed read the sections on Rasputin, this being common knowledge and enjoy more the sections of the book devoted to Felix.   Most goodreads.com reviewers give it a high rating (keep in mind that no one will read this book who is not already quite interested in the topic).   It has one annoying flaw in that it makes claims  of factuality without support for Rasputin having mystical powers.   The section on the tradition of wandering holy men in Russia was very interesting.   King also says that at the time of his marriage Felix was  the most handsome man in all of Russia.  This is a completely unsupported and almost foolish sounding assertion that might put some readers off on the book.

If you are interested in the period, I think you will like this book.   It seems not to be in print but Amazon.com has it on sale used for about $2.50

Mel u

"The "Old Capital" by Yasunari Kawabata-a second reading

I first posted on The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata on September 13,

2009 for the Japanese Literature Challenge 3.   Tanabata of In Spring it is the Dawn is hosting a discussion group on the book in her JLit Book Group of which I am a member.   I decided to read the book a second time.   I pretty much  stand by what I wrote about the book 2.5 months ago.    Since I read it for the first time I have also read about 25 additional Japanese literary works and taken some time to study symbolic motifs in Japanese literature.

I have decided to take as my guide in rereading the book this line from this line from  Katsamakusa by Nasume Soseki

The pleasure we get gain from a Noh play springs not from any skill at presenting the raw human feeling of the everyday world but from clothing feeling as it is in layer upon layer of art, and in a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not found in the real world.

As I began to reread the first chapter of The Old Capital I was struck by the large number of references to floral and garden images.   In the first chapter (17 pages) there are 92 references to flowers (mostly violets), trees, leaves and garden images.   I did not count the number of images in the remainder of the book but I think it is about 900, in this 182 page book.  
 
The basic story of the book (this post assumes you have read the book) deals with a young woman who is the adopted daughter stolen at birth by her parents from her real parents, her attempt to reunite with her twin sister and discover her true roots.   It is also a story of the conflict of tradition and modern, west and Japanese values, old and young, art and commerce and other pairings.
 
In order to go very far into the layers of art in a novel that maybe a bit culturallly remote from us, we need to ponder what the assumed base of symbolic references the author could assume in his audience.   When I read  "Crazy Iris" by Masuji Ibuse I saw that flowers have symbolic meaning in Japanese literature, art and even tattoos.   Any one among the assumed audience for The Old Capital could be assumed understand this language.  Given this I think the first few pages of the book tells nearly the whole story in terms of symbolic garden imagery.   The shortness of the book is also a factor in  understanding some of the layers  of art.   The book can be "held in your head" easily and read in just a few hours.  
 

Chiceko discovered the violets flowering on the trunk of the old maple tree.  "Ah, They've bloomed again this year", she said as she encountered the gentleness of spring...The trunk of the tree twisted slightly..and just her head it bent even further.  Above the bend the limbs extended outward, dominating the garden, the ends of the longer branches dropping with their own weight

The maple tree in the symbolism assumed by Kawabata stands for practicality  balanced with art, love and beauty.   It is seen as a protective sheltering tree that grows in a cultivated defined atmosphere.   The conflict between practicality and art is one of the centers of the book.   Chiceko's parents love and shelter her but they also stole her from her parents.   The trunk of the tree twists itself to go over the head of Chiceko.   The tree dominates the garden just as Chiceko's father dominates her life.   The branches dropping with their own weight indicate the inability of Chiceko's mother and father to deal with the evil act that founded their family life.   Chiceko is a bit surprised the flowers have bloomed again this year.   She knows some how that there may come a time soon when they will not, when the underpinning of her family life if destroyed when she finds out her adoptive parents stole her from real parents.

Just below the large bend were two hollow places with violets growing in each.  Every spring they would put forth flowers.   The two violets had been on the tree ever since Chieko could remember.

The upper violet and the lower violet were separated by about a foot.  "Do the upper and lower violets ever meet?   Do they know each other"?  Chieko mused.   What could it mean to say that violets "meet" or "know" one another.

The violet is assumed to mean faithfulness, bashfulness, fragility, beauty accepted but not worshiped.   The violet is the emblem of Chieko and her missing sister.   Her parents took from her the history she might have had with her lost to her sister when they abducted her.   Of course now we know they will meet and this meet and the meeting of other pairs is an artistic center of the book.   As we admire Chieko's father for his devotion to his daughter and ponder the beautiful kimono's that are his work and in part his life we can see him as a twisted maple tree sheltering a family created in a moment of great evil.   Just as the branches begin to droop with their own weight, maybe the weight of guilt of the father will bring the tree down one day thus destroying the potential for the violets, both sisters, to develop.   One impulsive act of evil is the unseen root of the sheltering maple tree.

I think part of the artistic points of The Old Capital is to teach us that life cannot just be seen just like a book cannot really be read if we are to gain value from it.   We need to learn to see through the layers of art that we use in building up the myths of our lives.    In the first few lines of the book the full story is compressed into naturalistic descriptions codified for those who wish to read them.  

I will take a look at a couple of other ways of looking through the layers of art in The Old Capital  in  my next post on the book.  I think this book is assumed by the author to be reread as we need to know the whole story to really read the first page with any depth.   It is  meant to be like a poem that we can see all on the page at once.  

  

Mel u

November 2009 Monthly Reading Life Review

November 2009 was a very good Reading Life month for me.   I blogged on all of the works I read in November with one very notable exception.   I will list below first the book I did not blog on and some comments on it, then the books I have already posted on with a short additional comment in most case, then a few random observations and such.

Book I Read but did not Post On
1.   Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.   Gravity's Rainbow is firmly in my list of twenty greatest novels of all times.   I first read it about a month after it was published.    I still in fact have the hardback I read many years ago.  I have reread the work numerous times.  I see it as a wonderful near inexhaustible work.   I know this is now a minority opinion and that is ok.   When I heard Inherent Vice was coming out I was excited but worried as it sounded too much like Vineland.  I had to force myself to finish Vineland.  Perhaps I am missing something, but if a new to me author had written Inherent Vice I am not sure I would have completed it.   I will give it a second change in 2010 and I am sure there are dissertations already being started on the book.   I cannot endorse this book to any one who is not really into Pynchon, as  I still am.  First time Pynchon Readers should start with The Crying of Lot 49.   I kind of hope Pynchon will get the Nobel prize one day (odds makers put this at about 500 to one last year) just to see who he would send to pick up the award for him.

Books I Posted About in November
2.  The Thirteenth Tale-by Diane Satterfield-a fun very bookish work.
3.   The Handmaiden's Tale by Margaret Atwood-liked it a lot
3.   The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood-very imaginative myth retelling
4.   Leaving Home by Anita Brookner-typical very well written Brookner
5.   People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks-good Reading Life book
6.   The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte-fantasy for bookish  boys?
7.   My Life by Anton Chekhov (novella)-wonderful work
8.   Shamela by Henry Fielding-Novella-still very funny after 200 plus years

Japanese works I posted about in November
8.  Hardboiled by Banana Yoshimoto-a novella
9.  Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto-a novella
10. Shame in the Blood by Tetsuo Miura-collection of short stories marketed as a novel
11. Mandrians by Ryunosuke Akutagawa-a collection of short stories
12.  Woman of the Dunes  by Kobo Abe-my first Abe-there will be more
13.  The Makioka Sisters by Juniciro Tanizaki-considered his master work
14.  Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki-a beautiful meditative novel
15.  Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath edited by Kenzaburo Oe-read four of the nine short stories in the collection of 9 this month
16.  Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe-nonfiction-collections of essays
17.  Teach Us to Out Grow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe -novella


Reading Challenges

Women Unbound Challenge-completed the fiction segment
Japanese Challenge-will continue to read for this
Chinese  Challenge-3 of 5 read
November Novella Challenge-completed-four novellas

I like reading challenges.  They are fun for me, can open up new reading areas and by joining in and participating we help support the book blog community.  I will be joining a number of challenges as 2010 begins.  My book blog started in July 2009 so  I could not properly do a lot of challenges.   I will do a number of challenges in 2010.

Some bloggers have asked if others have year end reading plans.   I hope to read my 3rd Atwood in December, my second Murakami, two Oe Novels, and Naomi by Tanizaki.   I will be posting shortly my second reading review of The Old Capitol.   

All in all November 2009 was a very good Reading Life month for me.  As always I thank and appreciate my readers and commentators. 

Mel u