The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui

The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui  (1972, 205 pages, translated by Adam Kabat)

The Maid is the second novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui I have recently read.  Prior to this I posted on his interesting The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.   Just like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Maid is a work in the paranormal genre with a bit of science fiction about a young woman with special powers that set her very much apart from most people.   Of the two works. I prefer The Maid.


Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934, Osaka) is considered one of the leading writers of science fiction in the Japanese language.   He has received numerous awards and has several well regarded novels including Hell and Paprika. 


Not too surprisingly, The Maid, set in contemporary Japan,  is about a maid.   What is special about this maid is that she can read minds.   Based on these two novels, Tsutsui seems to develop one concept and work it in various situations.   The maid is only 18 when we first meet her and the story is told by her in the first person.   Nanase has always been able to read minds, she does not even think it is an unusual ability.    The fun in this novel is seeing into the lives of the people who she works for as she moves from job to job.   Through her perceptions, we see below the masks of civility worn in contemporary Japan into the darker recesses of the lives her employers.   We see children with contempt for their parents, wives and husbands planning affairs and we listen in as one of her male employers wonders whether he could get away with raping her.   Most of the time people are thinking about sex, their standing in the world and brooding about how bad their lives are.   None of the employers comes off very well.

She works for a total of eight families, each one with their own chapter.   I thought the most interesting parts of the book were in her first encounters with the members of the families when she was sort of sizing them up.  She works for all sort of people, from professors to artists to retired businessmen but it is the women who run the families in most cases.   She is attractive and that causes her problems.   Some of the employers try to be nice and some do not even acknowledge she is a person but over all the employers come off looking bad.   The Maid never seems to find any good or morally sound thoughts in anyone or any family or marital  love.   There is a sort of a feel to this book of  "OK let us expose how evil people really are".   I enjoyed reading  about the different families and the concept was interesting.



In the interests of full disclosure I was provided a free copy of the is book.    The publisher, Alma Books, has a very interesting and quite diversified catalog.  


This is my forth year to participate in Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge.   There are lots of great reading suggestions on her web page and among the many reviews that will be done by participants.


The next Japanese novel I will read is Okei by Mitsugu Saotome, set in late 19th century Japan among warring clans of Samurais. 








Mel u

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui   (1967, 107 pages)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui (translated by David Karashima-English translation 2011 from Alma Books) is a very original and interesting work of science fiction.

Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934, Osaka) is considered one of the leading writers of science fiction in the Japanese language.   He has received numerous awards and has several well regarded novels including Hell and Paprika.   I have previously posted on one of his short stories "The Dabba Dabba Tree" which is also a fascinating work of science fiction.  


The Girl Who Leapt Through Time centers on a school girl who has somehow acquired the ability to time travel, over a limited range of a few days.  The way it starts Kazuko is in the science lab at school and she smells something that reminds her of lavender.   Shortly after that she faints.   Strange events begin to transpire around her including an earthquake where a friend's house is burnt and a car accident in which she would have surely been killed had she not transported back in time just before the impact.  When she tries to tell people what is happening no one believes her at first, and she does not really have faith in her own perception of her experience.   Her science teacher deduces she has somehow developed the ability to time travel.   Of course the primary question of this very interesting novel is how did this happen and why did it happen particularly to her.


I thought the novel was an interesting character study and account of the life of school children in Japan in the 1960s at this point.    It became totally fascinating when the story of how she came to be able to time travel is skillfully revealed to us by Tsutsui.   I do  not want to spoil this portion of the novel but it involves one of the best (and most optimistic) accounts of what life on earth will be like in the 27th century.


I totally enjoyed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  There is a second shorter work The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made Of also by Yasutaka Tsutsui included in the same volume.   I will be posting on it also soon. 






In the interests of full disclosure I was provided a free copy of the is book.    The publisher, Alma Books, has a very interesting and quite diversified catalog.  


This is my forth year to participate in Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge.   There are lots of great reading suggestions on her web page and among the many reviews that will be done by participants.




Mel u

"The Dabba Dabba Tree" by Yasutaka Tsutsui

"The Dabba Dabba Tree" by Yasutaka Tsutsui (2010, 20 pages)

Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934, Osaka) is considered one of the leading writers of science fiction in the Japanese language.   He has received numerous awards and has several well regarded novels including Hell and Paprika.   




"The Dabba Dabba Tree" is the lead story in Tsutsui's recently published collection of his short stories, Salmonella Man on Planet Porno.    Making use of the sample feature on the Ipad Kindle store at Amazon I was able to download this story for free.   I mentioned before Amazon lets people down load a sample of Kindle edition books.   This works great for short story collections as you seem to always get from one to three stories plus any introduction to the collection.   


In the quotes about the book included with the sample, we are told that his style will be favorably received by fans of the work of Hurakami Murkami and I can for sure see this based on this one small sample.   

As the story opens we meet a childless married couple who seem to be in their late twenties to early thirties.   The father of the husband, the story is told in the first person by the husband, gives him a strange cedar bonsai tree, a dabba dabba tree.   The father tells his son to put the tree in the bedroom as it said to produce erotic dreams and the father in law hopes somehow this will stimulate his son and daughter in law to have sex and hopefully produce a grandchild for him.   



One of the common themes of the work of Tsutsui and Murakami is the blurring of the lines between the so called real world and alternative universes like dream worlds.   


To compress the plot a lot, the man in what he think is his dream, decides to go to the red light district to find a woman.   He rejects the hard looking street women and ends up back at a love hotel with a very preppy young woman.   They are told to wait in the lobby for a few minutes and a room should be available.   Then another couple enters the room.   It his wife and the man who lives right next door to them!    He then thinks he has woken from his dream and is back in his bed.   He hears a knock on the door.   It is the neighbor who tells him he is in the midst of a dream and asks his permission to have sex with his wife, offering his own wife in trade for the evening.   Thinking this must also be part of the dream, he agrees.  At this point I found it very hard to tell what was real and what was a dream.  There are more things in this story but I will leave them untold.


This was a fun story and an enjoyable read.   I would consider purchasing one of his longer works but I also might stop at this sample.   


Please share your experience with Tsutsui or other Japanese science fiction writers with us.


Mel u