Year End Reading Life Review-Part II-Best Japanese Reads

Before I began the Japanese Literature Challenge 3 on August 9, 2009 I had never in fifty plus years of near compulsive reading read a Japanese novel.   Long ago I read a number of the so called "wisdom texts" of Asian writers so it was not simply a question of my being very Euro-centered in my reading habits.    When I went to school, there were basically no Japanese novels yet translated into English.   The challenge required only that you read one book and it had a big list of suggested reads.   The Japanese Literature 3 challenge became my first ever reading challenge. So far I have read 42 Japanese works.  It will end Jan 31, 2009 at which time I plan now to write two posts.   One will be an attempt to see where the Japanese writers belong in the context of world literature.   There are big questions that can arise.  Is there really a Japanese novel in more a sense than there might be a distinctly Dutch, Canadian or even American novel?   I think there is and will give my thoughts on this then.   I will also write something like "The Reading Life Starter Guide to the Japanese Novel" in which I will list what I think are the first 3, 6 and 12 Japanese novels one should read and why I think it.    Here are my "ten best" -out of 42-Japanese reads for 2009.   (The order is not of import)

Best Japanese Reads 2009

1.      Out  by   Natsuo Kirino 2004-exciting slice of lower life crime novel
2. Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki    1904-beautiful work that teaches us a lot about how to approach literature and art.
3. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe-I love the four stories in this volume. 1969
   
4. The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki.   Centers on the lives of four sister in preWorld War II Osaka-1948
5. The Woman in the Dunes by Kobe Abe-1964-
6. Crazy Iris and other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (stories from eight authors selected and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe)  Most of the authors are atomic bomb survivors.  1985 
7. Quick Sand by Junichiro Tanizaki-an excellent choice for the GLBT challenge for 2010-it does not seem like a nearly 90 year old novel  1928
   
8. The Flower Mat by Sugoro Yamanto -an historical novel of 17th century Samurai life centering around the wife of a samurai   1948
   
9. One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimara-story of a soldier returning home in defeat and disgrace.   A universally applicable story that gives us a good look at conditions in Japan right after WWII. 1978
   
10. Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto-most of those who have posted on this and Kitchen like Kitchen better-you will not go wrong with any of her works. 1989

List of The Reading Life Japanese Posts

I explicitly proclaim myself as a neophyte in terms of the Japanese novel and put this list forth with that understanding.   Japanese novels will be an important part of my reading life (and my blog) from now on.   I will always be grateful to Dolce Bellezza for introducing me to the Japanese novel.   As far as The Reading Life and Japanese literature, please send me any ideas or suggestions as to new directions to go in.   I hope I have only just begun a very long reading relationship. 

I was motivated by a great post on Wuthering Expectations to do a series of best of 2009 posts.   I will do at least one more post, the next will center on the my best reads since I began my blog (less the Japanese works).

Mel u

"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

"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

"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

"Hiroshima Notes" by Kenzaburo Oe

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe (trans. from Japanese by David Swain and Toshi Yenezawa, 1965 and translation 1981, 192 pages) is a collection of essays Oe published after making several visits to Hiroshima in 1965 to attend observations for the 20th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb August 6, 1945.    It also includes a useful introduction by David Swain and two prefaces by Oe.

Hiroshima Notes is a deeply wise book by a man who has thought long and hard on topics most would prefer to move on from.   It is far from a bitter work.    I want  to relay few of the things in the book that stood out for me.

The survivors of the atomic bomb blasts were the very first of the Japanese people to say that the bomb blasts were the fault of the Japanese military government.   Oe feels that the dropping of the bomb was a war crime also.   My first reaction to this was to say that it saved, among other, the lives of millions of Japanese.   (I recall a few years ago I watched a movie from 1944-it was just a very minor movie and I do not recall the name.   Some English school children were looking at a future globe of the world.   They asked the teacher what the big empty space in the Pacific Ocean was.  The teacher laughed and said that was where Japan used to be.)   Oe, agree or not, is suggesting in doing this a force was turned lose on the world that could one day bring an end to human life. Never before could war do this.  It might have been that the Japanese would have surrendered facing a joint American and Russian Invasion (the Japanese knew the Russians would without hesitation send millions of their troops to be killed and that they wanted very much revenge for their defeat in the Russian Japanese Naval War).    Both the Japanese and the Germans were working on Nuclear weapons and clearly would have carpet bombed Australia and England with them and the USA if they could reach it with the planes of the day.   It is also true that the Japanese would have been defeated by nonnuclear warfare.  (I personally feel Truman did what he had to do)  In Hiroshima in 1965 there were 1000s of  women who were children when the bomb went exploded.   They survived but were so badly scarred that they began essentially life long hermits ashamed to go out in public.  No one would marry them as they were thought to be unable to give birth to a healthy child.    There were also in 1965 thousands of older women living alone who were the only survivors of their families.    Some of the young girls who survived did pray daily that no one else ever experience what they did.  Some wanted all the world to go up in a nuclear war.    The Japanese government, aided by American occupation forces, did provide medical care to survivors but they did not provide living expenses so many of the injured had to keep working to support their families so could not take treatment.

The doctors who lived in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded soon became the first authorities on the medical effects of the bomb.   They also suffered the effects.   Rates of leukemia went way up as did other forms of cancer.   Suicides went way up throughout the lives of the survivors.    Oe tells us a very moving story.   A twenty six year old man, age six when the bomb exploded, is advised he has two years to live as a result of leukemia.   He can live out his remaining time in a charity hospital ward.   He chooses to work at hard labor (he has no skills) so he can live on his own and be with his 19 year old fiance, not yet born when bomb exploded.   When he died she took an overdose of sleeping pills stating that her death was also a result of the bomb blast.   There are other equally moving stories.   We see the wisdom and power of the doctors.   We feel a little ashamed when we see different groups fight over who should run the 20 year anniversary memorial but we are also moved by seeing good people from all over the world come together.    

Oe says the greatest gift of the bombing is the wisdom of the survivors.  Oe is clearly humbled by his task of bringing their stories to life.  

The youngest survivors of the bomb are now in their middle sixties.   There are ninety year old survivors that still bear the scars.

I know I do not have the ability to convey the power of this book.   I know most people do not want to dwell on these matters.   I am pretty sure my daughters and children throughout the world can graduate from college and never be told of them by a teacher.    As I read the book, I hope this remark bothers no one, I thought that Oe was the kind of man who could have written the wisdom books of the Old Testament.   At one point he has a long conversation with an elderly woman.   He says her wisdom is so strong that she is able to live a life scarred since her middle years by the blast without a belief in any authoritarian creed.   Oe does not say  that wars are started by those who follow authoritative codes, much of his wisdom is in what he knows he cannot say.

Hiroshima Notes deeply effected me.  I felt an almost Oceanic Feeling come over me as I thought about the book and what I could attempt to say about it.


Mel u

"Kusamakura" by Natsume Soseki

Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki (1906, trans. from Japanese 2008 by Meredith Mckinney, 146 pages) is the oldest Japanese work I have so far read.   It has recently been published as a lovely Penguin Classic in a brand new translation by Meredith Mckinney of the Japan Center in Canberra Australia.  

Nasume Soseki's (1867-1916)  most famous literary work is I Am a Cat.   He taught English Literature  at the University of Tokyo until he became a professional writer in 1908.   In addition to 14 novels he wrote a large number of haiku poems.  

Kusamakura' plot line is fairly simple.   A young artist, whose name we never learn ( I have noticed that there are a lot of unnamed persons in Japanese novels) embarks on a walk into the mountains in order to find suitable subjects for his painting.   He stays at a resort and meets the beautiful daughter of the resort owner.   He has a number of conversations with her and others people he encounters.    In the background of the story is the Japanese Russian War.   There is not a lot of "action" in Kusumakura.  The bulk of the novel consists of the thoughts of  the young artist on painting, reading, nature and beauty.

I quickly and happily discovered that the novel is very much a meditation on the reading life and a contrast of Japanese and Western Literature as seen through the eyes of the narrator.   The narrator is drawn to the finest of English poetry, Wordsworth and Shelley.   The work is almost readable as a companion to Shelley's "The Skylark" and the nature poetry of Wordsworth.

When I hear the skylark's voice, my soul grows clear and vivid within me.  It is with its whole soul that the skylarks sings, not merely with its throat.   Surely there is no expression of the soul's motion in voice more vivacious and spirited than this.   Ah, joy!   And to think these thoughts, to taste this joy, this is poetry.   Shelley's poem about the skylark immediately leaps to my mind.   I a reciting it to myself, but I can remember only two or three verses. 

The artist has reflected deeply on the role of suffering in poetry.   He reads the landscape as poetry 

I see this scenery as a picture, I read it as a set of poems.

  

To him the novel is of interest as you can leave yourself  behind as you read.  He sees western poetry as based largely on human affairs and preoccupied with issues right and wrong whereas

Happily in the poetry of the Orient there are works that transcend such a state

                By the eastern hedge,  I pluck crysanthemums

                 Gazing serenely out at the southern hills.

Here we have purely and simply a scene in which  the world of men is utterly cast aside and forgotten....Reading it, you get the feel that you have been washed clean of all the sweat of worldly self interest, of profit and loss, in a transcendental sense.

The narrator sees the poetry of transcendence as a necessity if Japanese literary culture is to avoid corruption by a half understood imitation of western poetry.   Soseki is writing for a small potential audience of highly cultivated people deeply into the reading life just as he was.

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.

This reinforced my security in my reinterpretation of Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From the Sea as a drama to be seen precisely through layers of art.   If you do this, the work is a very powerful work of art, if you do not it is a silly cliched ridden novel.   Think of the deeply cultivated father in law in Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki who sees the world in terms of puppet plays.

Kusamakura is densely written.   It is commonly referred to as a haiku novel.   I am a bit vague on precisely what that means and I suspect those who use that use expression do so in the knowledge  that no one will quite know what they mean but will pretend they do.   A haiku is very roughly a poem  in a fixed format replete with natural images in which thought is compressed.   That the poem may mean  different things to each reader is part of the point.  

The plot or action of the book is basically the narrator talking with people and his interior meditations on art, poetry, novels, plays, nature, painting and beauty.   He has an interest in the beautiful daughter of the owner of the inn but he simply talks to her, almost in circles.   I think he does not see her as a person so much as a figure in an internal drama.   For better or worse, if she were a plain or drab looking woman our artist would have no interest in conversing deeply with her.   We learn about the attitude of the Japanese toward their impending war with Russia.   (I could not help but flash forward to the shocked reaction at the court of Czar Nicholas when the news of the crushing defeat of the Russian navy arrived.  Nicholas made a tour of Japan prior to his marriage to Alexandra in the company of very rich young Russian nobles.  They made visits to very high class homosexual brothels-it was said the Czar only went in-the Czar was then convinced that all Japanese men were totally effeminate and did not take them seriously as opponents.  I base this on the writings of Prince Yussoupov whose autobiography is not nearly as  read  as it should be)   I could not help but think that at the great American and English Universities in 1906 there were no courses in Japanese literature.   

I completely endorse this novel to anyone interested in the development of the Japanese novel with the understanding that it is about sixty percent an interior monologue of a philosophical nature and assumes an interest in Romantic era western poetry and classical forms of Japanese literature.   It is beautifully expressed and the translation seems without jarring infelicities.   It is only 146 pages long and has an interesting introduction.   I think anyone who would start this book having read what I have written (I did a Google book blog search and this is the first post on Kusamakura ever done) about it will really like it.   

There is an excellant very recent post on In The Spring it is the Dawn by Tanabata in which she gives us some very interesting and informative background information on Natsume Soseki.   There is currently a read along on Soseki's best known work I Am a Cat on her blog.   Her blog is a great source of  reading insight and inspiration for those interested in Japanese literature and beyond.

"Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness" by Kenzaburo Oe

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe (1969, translated from Japanese by John Nathan 1977-50 pages) is included in the collection of the same name introduced  by John Nathan.   There are four novellas in this collection.   I have already posted on three of them.   I loved each of these works.   Kenzaburo Oe is now on my "Read everything they have written list" along with Junichiro Tanizaki and Banana Yoshimoto.

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness is perhaps the strangest novella in the collection and this is saying a great deal!   I was so struck by the opening few lines that I had to read them several times.

In the winter of 196-, an outlandishly fat man came close to being thrown to a polar bear bathing in a filthy pool below him and had the experience of very nearly going mad.   As a result, the fat man was liberated from the fetters of an old obsession, but the minute he found himself free  a miserable loneliness rose in him and withered his already slender spirit.   Thereupon, he resolved, for no logical reason..to cast off still another heavy restraint;  he vowed to free himself entirely and let the sky tilt if need be, and when he had taken his oath and a reckless courage was boiling in his body..he telephoned his mother in the middle of the night and said to her,   ---you give me back the manuscript you stole from me, I'm fed up, do you hear!   I have known all along what your are up to!.

As Oe has explained in his Nobel Lecture, 1994, the most important event in his adult life was the birth of a son with an incurable brain defect that would leave him severely handicapped for life.   (In this lecture Oe also talks about his literary influences, his reaction to the atomic bomb blasts,  the birth of his handicapped son and his feelings about modern Japan.   If you at all interested in Oe you really should read this speech.)

The lead character was once slender.   When his brain damaged son is born he begins to eat and eat and becomes immensely fat.   He refers over and over to his son as an "idiot".  (More than one source has verified that the Japanese term in the original text is just as  harsh a label as "idiot" is for a brain damaged person.)    I think the narrator wants to avoid hiding from himself the nature of his son's handicap.   He is being starkly honest.   The jarring nature of the word "idiot" in this context seems to be the narrator's attempt to remove the world's ability to use a label to hurt him or his son.   He becomes hugely fat in order to share a handicap with his son and to seem like an idiot to those who see him.   In a way he is telling the world he cares nothing for them.   His son also becomes very very fat.   Through his weight, the narrator has made himself handicapped and the ignorant  see him as mentally slow.   The world wants to throw him into a polar bear pit.   The narrator's father went into an extreme period of withdrawal from the world.   His mother knows why he did this and eventually the father dies as a result of this.   It is explained in the stolen manuscript.  

I am not normally into the use of the life of a writer as an artistic  explanation for his works but Oe himself has said that the birth and life of his handicapped son in the most important personal factor in shaping his work.   (The son, though never escaping his brain damage, became a very famous composer of music.   The story is explained in the Nobel Lecture.)    Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, like the other works in  the collection of that name, are not just stories but the direct creation of wisdom.   

I read for the 3rd time the Nobel Speech of Oe as I was writing this post.   Here is how he sees himself as a novelist.

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. What kind of identity as a Japanese should I seek? W.H. Auden once defined the novelist as follows:

..., among the dust

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

And in his own weak person, if he can,

Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

('The Novelist', 11-14)

The full text of W. H. Auden's The Novelist can be read here

Mel u

"The Makioka Sisters" by Junichiro Tanizaki

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (1948, 530 pages, translated by Edward Seidensticker) is the

longest work I have read so far for The Japanese Literature 3 Challenge.  It is the fifth book by Tanizaki  that I have read.   Vintage press has twelve of his works in translation in print and I will read them all.  

The Makioka Sisters gives us a very intimate look at the lives of four sisters living in Osaka Japan.   It is set from 1936 to 1940.   Tanizaki is said to have written it during WWII to distract himself from the war.   The book is considered his master work.    The basic plot is simple.   It is the story of a merchant family whose fortunes are not quite what they once were.   They decide to remedy the problem by finding a wealthy husband for the second youngest sister, thirty year old Yukiko.
She has  two older sisters.  Tsurko the eldest has traditionally authority over her sisters now that their parents have passed away.   Her husband took her last name when he was adopted by her family and he is, in theory, the head of the family.   Sachiko is the second oldest and is considered to have the most gentle and warmest nature.   Her two younger sisters live with her most of the time.   Yukiko also has  younger sister who is portrayed as distinctly more modern than her very traditional older sisters.   She has a man in her life that she very much wants to marry, and everyone in the family likes the match as he is from a very good family.   The problem is she is not allowed to marry until all of her older sisters have married.   The fun of the plot turns on a husband hunt for Yukiko.   Yukiko acts like the totally obedient sister she is supposed to be but some how every suitor presented ends up being rejected.   One is simply way to old, one has six children, one has a mentally ill mother and one is simply too ugly.   Along the way we get a very detailed look at life in an upper class family in Osaka.   One sees in the work that there was a lot of regional conflict in Japan.   People from Osaka looked at those from Tokyo as very ill mannered and money driven, people from the Nagasaki area were simply too country and so on.  Of course people from Tokyo looked at those from Osaka as living in the past.   One of the saddest moments in the book is when the older sister and her husband most move to Tokyo to pursue a business opportunity.   We see what the sisters eat, how they feel about their husbands and how they exert control over their families.  A very fun part of  the book for me was when the sisters became friends with a White Russian Family who fled to Japan after the Czar was displaced.   The sisters are amazed by the vitality of the grandmother of the family.   When the Russia family invites them all over for dinner I could not help but laugh as we see them trying to cope with the food.   I was happy to see the sisters said they had all read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.   When the Russian family expressed surprise at this they said that all educated Japanese had read them.  The sisters also become friends with some German neighbors.   One of the best moments in the book was when the Germans, who returned because of political events in 1939, sent them a letter.   There are several letters in the novel and each is marvelously done.   One oddity, to me at least, was the pride of the sisters in their ability to drink alcohol, mostly sake.    In fact it was sort of agreed that if a man was not a drinker at all he would not be considered an acceptable husband as he would simply be too dull.   The sisters hire private investigators to check out the back grounds of possible spouses.   A big issue seems to be how much time the men had spent in the pleasure quarters.   Too much and he was considered a reprobate but no visits there also was a point to ponder.   The sisters father was a habitual frequenter of gieshas after their mother died at an early age.   This seems to be a sort of socially acceptable as long as you do not talk about it.   We really are shown a lot about day to day life.    Each sister has her own  well defined personality and we really feel we know them.   I liked all the sisters.  One of the most suspenseful elements in the book concerned a dark spot that would come and go over the eye of Yukiko.   We get a good look at child rearing practices.   We hear a lot of gossip.   There is conflict among the sisters,  of course.   It was interesting that the husbands of the older sisters had both taken the family name.   Marriages were mostly arranged at the time and we get to see how that business works and meet the marriage broker.  (She knows the in the closet secrets of every well off family in Osaka.   Of course she is very discrete and only tells these secrets to the clients of her beauty parlor!)

Most goodreads commentators on this book have given it four or five stars.   I gave it five.   Some did say it was simply to dry and that it was boring. Those who disliked the novel seemed to feel it was too detailed in its treatment of the conversations and interior lives of  the sisters and their friends.  To me it was a wonderful book that took me into another world very much unlike my own.  Only a few passing references are made in  the novel to political events (the novel period is 1936 to 1940).   I wanted to believe the family would some how survive World War II without terrible suffering.  

This is my 3rd post for the Women Unbound Challenge.    The Makioka Sisters is a very closely observed look at four Japanese women, their families and their relationships with their husbands and how they raised their children.   We see how an unwanted pregnancy is dealt with.  We see the sisters having a great time just being sisters.   I could not help but smile when we slowly began to realize that maybe Yukiko did not want a husband to be picked for her by her older sisters or maybe she does not want one at all.  

The Makioka Sisters is to me a great joy and a master novel.   Readers of Jane Austin will at once relate to the themes of the book.   I would suggest that those wanting to get to know Tanizaki first read The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot, if you like that read Quicksand, then Some Prefer Nettles. if you like these three works then read The Makioka Sisters.   Tanizaki had an interesting life.   For a brief period he was a dramatist in silent films.   I could not help but think when I read this that if were with us now (1886 to 1965) he would be an ultra rich novelist whose every work is sold to Hollywood for millions.  

A WOMAN in the Dunes-by Kobo Abe-a second look

In my post on A Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe I talked almost exclusively about what the novel seems to be saying or manifesting about the man.   We know the man's name, we know his job and we know a lot about his life passion entomology.   The man has a place in society,  he fits in and is valued for what he does and what he knows.   In most posts on the novel on Goodreads and elsewhere the focus is entirely on the man.   Then I started to rethink the book a bit.   It is not called Man in the Dunes.  

We first meet the woman when the male protagonist of the novel seeks a place to stay for a night and gets trapped in a giant hole in  the ground.   The hole in the ground is the home of a woman.   We find out that her husband and child were killed in a typhoon.   We only have a vague idea how she got there.   She has sex with the man or more bluntly said she allows the man to mate with her.   She shows herself naked to the man but it is not clear if this part of a seductive routine or if she like an insect without self consciousness at all.   We are given no insights into her thoughts other than that she has a foreknowledge of the fate of  man and that her life goal is to have a radio.   She does not wish to escape her circumstances.   She seems to see her existence as natural to her species.   Her essence is to be a woman used as bait to keep a man in a hole in the ground shoveling out sand that forever comes back.   In my initial comments on Woman in The Dunes   I went into existentialist interpretations of the novel,   focusing on the man trapped in an absurd meaningless situation.  Now, thanks to the stimulus of the Woman Unbound Reading Challenge I want to talk about the woman in the dunes.  The woman is the existential anti-heroine.   She, with no sense of doing it, is  utterly trapped by an essence, an essential nature that she is no more is aware of than a fish is aware of water.   She is used by the micro society  of the dune who,  not by conscious design, have fashioned her consciousness in such a way that she is useful mainly as bait for a man.   She does not question it.   If she was reflective enough to ponder the issue she would probably say something along the lines of "this what was meant to be" or see it as part of a supernatural design.   The woman maybe seen as evoking the fate of women in rural Japanese society.    Just as in Japanese society prior to the end of World War II, women and men were taught that there role in life, the essence of  their being, was to serve their overlords and their Imperial God, so the woman in the dunes sees no alternative to her life in a hole in the ground.   Expanded beyond this, the  WOMAN in the Dunes, is any woman (or man) bound by what she things is her essence when that essence is just a choice made for her by some one else to impose this on her.   Of course it regresses back.   

"The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi" by Junichiro Tanizaki

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi by Junichiro Tanizaki (1935, 138 pages-trans. by Anthony Chambers) is simply an amazing work of art.   Written nearly 75 years ago, it is my first preWWII Japanese novel, it feels like it could have been written last week or in the 18th century by someone with a very strange sense of humor and amazing talent.   I simply loved this work.   It is darkly hilarious.   An acute psychological insight is shown throughout.   The book opens with a very deeply nuanced interpertation of a portrait of the samurai lord who is  the central character in the book.    I do not think Henry James or Gustav Flaubert could have produced anything better.   The Secret History of the Lord of  Musashi is written as if were a biography done by a traditional Confucian historian who is writing a tale of heroic days gone by to inspire readers to good deeds.    Tanizaki is considered the first Japanese author to give complete portrayals of
female characters in a literary work.

Tanizaki felt that the values of traditional Confucian writings had hampered the development of  Japanese literature.    Characters were not whole persons but stereo types and any narrative prose about the past tended to be simply hymns to the greatness of old leaders.   Confucian teaching regarded  fiction as the product of an effete and decadent mentality and would be horrified by anything that suggested an imperfection in the character of a samurai lord.    The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is a parody of this tradition.    It centers on how a great samurai developed a strange sexual fetish and how this fetish came to be the secret ruling passion of his life.

The narrative is set in the 16th century.    Our hero, for that is who he is, is a royal hostage in a castle under siege by an opposing warlord.   (It was the practice in 16th century Japan, just as it had long been in Europe and China,  to place royal children in the hands of  potential enemies as a kind of peace keeping device.)    Our hero is 12 years old and very excited by the battle outside the castle.   He begs his attendant, a low ranking samurai to let him join the fighting.    His request is denied.   He then asks an older servant woman to help him slip out of the castle.   She knows if he gets killed her life will be lost so she says ok I will let you see something you will find interesting.   She takes him to a room where the women of  the castle are "dressing heads".    In samurai battles it was customary to cut off the head of an opposing samurai you killed and bring it back as a trophy to present to your over lord.    Of course a bloody head would make a poor show so a ritualized procedure for cleaning up heads developed over time.   

I cannot take you to the battlefield, but if you want to see some heads I can arrange it for you...She explained in a whisper that almost every night five or six of the women had been selected to attend to the enemy heads taken in battle.   They would check the heads against a list, label them and wash off the blood stains...The women would dress the hair, touch up the dye on the teeth and even apply some light cosmetics to make the head presentable...Dressing heads, as it was called, was considered women's work, and  their being a shortage of women in the castle, some of the hostages had been ordered to help.

Our 12 year old hero begins to feel his first sexual stirrings.

The heads themselves do not make a strong impression on him.   It is the contrast between the heads and the women working on them that somehow excites new feelings in him.   He fixates on the hands of the women as they dress the heads.  

This seemed to enhance the strange beauty of their hands, especially as he saw them braiding the hair of the heads.   He was fascinated by the tender care and love they seemed to give to the heads.   He begins to have fantasies. 

His fantasy, therefore--the pleasure he would feel if he were a head placed before the girl-was illogical.   It was the fantasy itself that gave him pleasure.   He indulged in the fantasy that he could become a head without losing consciousness.   He tried to imagine that one of the heads brought to the women was his own.   When the girl tapped a head with the ridge of her comb, he imagined that he himself was being tapped, and this brought his pleasure to the summit:   his brain grew numb and his body trembled.    Among the many different heads, he would concentrate on the ugliest...and say to himself, "That is me".   This gave him far greater pleasure that identifying with the head of a splendid young warrior.   In short, he envied the pitiable, repulsive heads more than the beautiful ones.

Then he notices one of the heads is without a nose.    It was the custom on the battleground at that time to cut off the nose from any head of a samurai you killed if you did not have time to cut the head of  in the heat of  battle.   After the battle was over, you could then use the nose (which the killer kept) as proof the head of the fallen warrior was your trophy.   To have your nose removed and then never to have to reunited with the head was a great shame to the warrior and might cause a disgrace in the afterlife.    Heads without a nose are called "women's heads".

In a  series of bizare events, one night our 12 year old hero sneaks into the enemy camp.  He enters the tent of the opposing general and he kills him with a stab through the throat.   As he was trying to cut off his head he is interupted by two of general's pages.   He kills both of pages, he knows he must run for his life so he cuts of the nose of the general and takes it back to the castle with him.    The general has been "denosed".   If word of this gets out it will be a great humiliation for the entire clan and a horrible shame on his family.   The attacking army declares that their general is ill and leaves the battlefield.   Our hero wants to tell everyone what he has done but he knows if he does no one will believe him.

We next meet our hero maybe six or seven  years in the future.   He has already developed into a fearful warrior, terrifying even to those he leads.    He is a second son so he has no hope of inheriting clan leadership as long as his older but weak in character brother lives.    His father is worried as he does not want our hero to become clan leader as he knows he will bring on horrible wars just for the joy of battle.   Now things start to get a bit stranger.    The narrative is done is a completely straightforward fashion as if this is all part of an inspiring tale of heroism.   His older brother is married to the 14 year old daughter of the man whose nose he took when he was twelve.  She is, of course, a great, delicate beauty

A man who has masochistic sexual appetites, as did the Lord of Musashi, is apt to construct fantasies in which his female partner conforms to his own perverse specifications.

Exciting and mysterious events put out her right in front of the castle where his brother and his wife live.   He notices one of the stones in the wall is loose.    He notices there is no moss on that section of the castle wall.   He removes the stone, it is much thinner  than all the other stones.   It leads into a very long upper slopping tunnel.   Our hero

squeezed through the opening, just as one does in the Buddhist purification rite known as "passing through the womb"...At this point, I hope to be forgiven for raising a rather indelicate subject, the design of toilets used by arisocratic ladies of the time...ladies born into a daimyo family never allowed anyone to see their  excretory matter, nor did they ever see it themselves.   Such delicacy was accomplished by digging under the toilet a deep shaft which was filled for eternity when the lady died...In other words, Tereutasu found himself deep in the earth directly below Lady Kikyo's toilet.

I do not want to give away much more of the plot as a lot of the fun of this novel is in the crazy events that take place.   The plot is devilishly clever, hilarious and just flat out wonderfully told.   The hero of this Confucian panegyric can obtain sexual gratification only if he can somehow imagine that the woman he is with is dressing his head.   He even goes so far as to build in Lady Kikyo's bed chamber a hole in the floor with a platform under it so a man can stand on it with only his head sticking out of the floor.   The servant doing this is then advised if he does anything that make him seem living, Lady Kikyo will cut off his nose.   Various melodramas of a sadomasochistic nature played out, with Lady Kikyo the willing partner.   In time our hero's relationship with her ends, how this happens is a great story also.   On the surface, the rest of our hero's life was one of great glory.   Great warlords prostrated themselves at his feet.   Under it all known only to his women and his  servants, the ruling passion of his life was having intimate contact with women in circumstances that would allow him to imagine the woman is ritualistically dressing his severed head.   It is suggested by the narrator, that terrible things happened behind closed doors in pursuit of our hero's needs.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is a weird and wonderful work.   It is a bit of a wicked book and it for sure mocks Confucian traditions as well as Buddhist rituals.    The image of a great samurai leader crawling up a toilet has to be seen as subverting history as taught in Japanese schools.   The female lead in the story is wonderfully realized as a whole person, not a character in a stock history written to instruct elite school boys.   I am trying to imagine an English or American writer of the 1930s who might have produced a story like this but so far I cannot.   I was so happy when I found out Vintage Press has eight other works by Tanizaki in print.   I should also note that this work is beautifully written.   Of course I do not know if it is well translated or not but there are none of the "false notes" that readers have found in the work of other translators.

Junichiro Tanizaki had a very interesting life history.  I will talk a bit about it when I post on his long short story "Arrowroot", which is included as a companion piece by Vintage in the same book as  The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.   

"The Empty Can" by Kyoto Hayashi

Welcome to our Guests from U C L A
Please share your thoughts on
This story with us

Other Stories of the Atomic Age edited and introduced by

Kenzaburo Oe. I have already posted on two stories from this
collection, “The Crazy Iris” by Masuji Ibuse and “Summer Flowers” by
Tamiki Flowers. After reading “Summer Flowers”, about the first few
days after the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, I said to myself this is
the saddest story I have ever read. Now I think “The Empty Can”, a
gentle and beautiful tale of memory by a woman who was in Nagasaki when the second atom bomb exploded may well be a sadder tale.

Hayashi was a young woman in her late teens that had been moblized by the government along with a number of her classmates in an exclusive girl’s school in Nagasaki to work in a munitions factory. She and her classmates were at work August 9, 1945 when the bomb exploded.   They all survived.   Thirty years later she and four of her classmates meet for a reunion at the old school.   "The Empty Can" tells us what happen to the women in the thirty years since the bomb exploded.    The reunion conjures up memories of the day the A Bomb exploded.




The school the girls attended had been turned into a munitions factory. At first the women recall how the blast broke all the window panes and bent the frames. After the war the building went back to being a school

but in the remaining two years of Kyoko’s schooling there were no window panes in the school. The replaced windows are the first thing they talk about. (The women have not seen each other for many years.)


As they enter the school auditorium old memories come to the fore. On October 1, 1945 the school held a memorial service for the students who died in the blast.


They had both survived but many others had died on the floor under the watchful eye of teachers and friends.   Out of a student body of nearly 1300 300 had died  between that day and October 1, 1945. Some had been recruited to work in the munitions factory, some had died in their own homes a few days later.   As the names of each student was read, there was a stirring among the students who survived….The parents of the students who had survived...The parents of the students who had died sat along the three walls.  The parents were in tears before the service began.  The tears turned to sobs and the sobs drifted toward the center of the room.


During the memorial service Oki’s name had been read as one of the dead. She had in fact survived.   She had been terribly hurt in he blast and her parents came to get her and no one heard from her after that so it was assumed she was dead.   She has never been well since that day and is now scheduled thirty years later to have fragments of glass that were embedded in her back that day removed.    There is a huge waiting list for public hospitals at the time to treat bomb survivors.    All of the women live on in fear of radiation sickness which can occur many years after exposure.    Of the three women in "The Empty Can" three have  never married and seemingly have never had a relationship.   (Atomic bomb survivors were very unwanted as spouses as it was felt they could not produce healthy children.)


There are several heart breaking stories relayed by the women as they recall old friends.

They all suddenly recall Kimuko and the empty can she always had with her.



“Remember Kimuko’s empty can? …she put her father and mother’s bones in an empty can and brought it her every day…I remember the girl who came to school every day with the bones of her parents in her school bag.   The girl kept the bones in  lidless can that had been searedred by the flames.   To keep the bones from falling out, she had covered the top with newspaper, and she tied it with red string.  When the girl arrived at her seat she took the empty can, picking it up carefully with both hands, and placed it on the right side of her desk.   At first none of us had known what was in the empty can. And the girl did not show any sign of wanting to tell us, either.   No one questioned her about it.   The love  that could be  seen in the girl's fingertips when she handled the can made us feel all the more reluctant to ask.  One day their new calligraphy teacher, recently discharged from the military and returned to his prewar job, asked her what was in the can she always put on her desk.


“The girl hung her head and held the can on the knees of her work pants. The she began to cry. The teacher
asked her why. “It is my parents. Then she began to cry. The teacher took the can from the girl's hands, and placed it in the center of the desk on the platform.  May your parents rest in peace. Let us have a moment of
silent prayer in their memory”, he said and closed his eyes. After a long silence, the teacher handed the can back to the girl and said, "After this leave it at home.   Your parents will be there waiting for you when.   It is better that way."


“The Empty Can” is only seventeen pages long.   It has more power to move than many works 30 times longer.   We feel we know the people in the story and in some small way can feel how the bomb stole the lives of the living as well as the dead.    "The Empty Can (first published in 1978) is not a bitter work.   It is sadder and wiser for that.

Mel u

"The Flower Mat" by Sugoro Yamamoto

The Flower Mat by Shugoro Yamamoto (translated by Mihoko Inoue and Eileen Hennessy) was first published in 1948.    This makes it the oldest work I have yet read for  The Japanese Literature Challenge 3 and the first Japanese historical novel I have read.   One of my objectives for the challenge is to read novels of different types so I was happy to come across this work on sale last week.

The Flower Mat is set in 1760s in Japan .    Our central character is Ichi, a daughter of a samuri and also a wife of a samuri.   In this period in Japanese history the samuri were transitioning from warriors to businessmen and governnment functionaries.    Some samuri familes are very rich while others struggle to keep up the apperances that go with their social rank.    Your place in society is

determined by  birth, clientage relationships and codified by tradition.  

Ichi's husband, by an arranged marriage calculated to advantage both clans, is a high ranking official for the Shogun.    Ichi begins to blossom in the marriage.

Since she had become a member of the Kugata family she was enjoying every day;   her life was full of high spiritied cheerful atmosphere, and she could feel her body and her mind were unfettered.   She felt as if something that had not budded while she was still with her parents had suddenly begun to blossom.

Ichi, with her husband's permission of course, decides to return to her family home for a visit.   She senses that something is seriously wrong.

Ichi had detected a subtle change in the atmosphere of this house.   Her mother and brothers had not asked her about the Kugata family and very plainly indicated that they wished to avoid the subject when Ichi was about to tell them about her in-laws.

From this beautifully crafted description of of Ichi's family home we gain a sense of the life of an affluent samuri family

It is said that the Okumura family belonged to the rich families among the roshoku or chief vassals.   Since the Okumuras were samurai, their everyday life was humble, and their wealth could not have been dtetected from their way of life.    But their stone garden, believed to have been copied from the garden of the Ryoan Temple in Kyoto, and the construction of the house, which gave the impression of being palatial, seemed to be indicative of wealth...the same good taste was visible in their paintings and vases for incense, tea, and flowers, and in their furniture.   Every object was carefully chosen, dignified, and expensive, and there was not a single thing which did not have an interesting history...the house had an atmosphere of quiet dignity everywhere and in every object.

Two of the novels I have read for the challenge  are rather sexually explicit,  Snakes and Earring by Hitomi Kanchara  and Real World by Natsuo Kirino.   Neither work comes close to capturing the real passion embodied in the The Flower Mat one cold night when Ichi goes from her room to that of her husband.

How thankful she was later that she had the power in her body to do this at that time!   She had been able to experience a feeling which hitherto had not been awakened in her.   It overwhelmed her with a powerful

ecstasy, with convulsions not unlike those which accompany death, and it penetrated to the very depths of her body and mind.   This sensation was so overwhelming that her whole mental outlook changed.   A great urge of self-confidence, pleasure, and pride swept over her-pride in being Shinzo's wife.

Things begin to change in Ichi's household.   Her husband becomes totally preoccupied with his work and begins for the first time to be away from home for long period.   Ichi, in accord with the marriage customs of her time is not comfortable with asking her husband any questions.   She discovers she is pregnant.   I found the passages that deal with prenatal care and birth routines of samuri wives very interesting.   We are being given  get an insight into the dynamics of 18th century Samuri marriages and family life.

Throughout the first half of The Flower Mat a feeling for forboding disaster is created.    We care about Ichi and her family from the very start.   I would say  there was more suspense in this work than either of the two horror novels I have read for the challenge, Ring by Koji Suzuki or The Crimson Labyrinth by Yusuke Kishi.

I have do not like spoilers in posts on novels so I will say only a bit more about what happens next.  (This is not really a spoiler as once you read the back cover you will know something terrible is going to happen to Ichi.)    Ichi is forced out of her husband's house in the middle of the night.   Her way of life  is completely destroyed and she must find and make her own way in life.   How she does this takes up the second part of the book and beautifully told.

Throughout The Flower Mat  we get a sense of the place natural beauty and art play in the lives of the Samuri families.   There is abundent use of flower images in the novels as is common in Japanese literature.

(Flower symbolism plays a storng role in the Japanese novel.   Their is a traditional meaning to each flower and their mention evokes this.   Sometimes it is used to celebrate tradition some times as kind of iconocraphic shorthand which assumes a certain knowing on the part of the reader.   Some times images are used  in a new way such as the floweristic references to the A Bomb blast in the works of many Japanese writers.  This is done with great genius in Kenzaburo Oe's The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears.)

The Flower Mart is a wonderful novel.   It is a pure delight to read and we learn a lot about 18th Century Samuri family life along the way.   It contains wonderful descriptions of nature, some of which seem evocative of Animistic traditions from a much more ancient period of Japanese history.   We see how the death of a child is dealt with emotionally.    The book makes us think about the nature of marriage.   We see the Samuri in transition from fuedal lords and warriors to business men and government administrators. 

I really enjoyed this novel.   There are a lot of plot lines I have not talked about as I do not like to reveal too much about plots.    I will say the ending of the book was very gratifying.   This is a beautiful story, told by a writer who respects the intelligence of his readers.    I endorse it without reservation.