Three Japanese Novels
In the past couple of months I have read three Japanese novels in translation, a statement about the recent past that in an earlier stage of my life would have carried effectively no independent semantic value—the way “the sun set in the west this evening” carries none—and that even now is not exactly remarkable. The one that I liked best was also the first one I read, The Emissary by Tawada Yōko. British readers got this book as The Last Children of Tokyo, but The Emissary has the virtue of actually attempting to translate the Japanese title, Kentoshi. The Emissary is a science fiction novel that at points reminds one of something like On the Beach or a hypothetical prequel to The Chrysalids, a quiet look at the day-to-day in a dying world, or at least a dying Japan. The tone is laid-back and almost cheerful, and one hopes that this book’s popularity in translation—Margaret Mitsutani won the National Book Award for it—finally killed off the wisdom once conventional in the West that Yokohoma Kaidashi Kikō’s pace, tone, and structure are impressive achievements. To be sure, The Emissary and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō in fact both are impressive, I might even dare to say “great,” books, but not because those aspects are unique or even particularly unusual for Japanese science fiction of this school. Also like many of these kinds of books, The Emissary abruptly picks up narrative steam at the end, then abruptly stops. I still find this jarring whenever I encounter it, and it helps me to think of Japanese science fiction novels that do this as if the last few pages were ghostwritten by Neal Stephenson. Sometimes, as with Ōhara Mariko’s Hybrid Child, this doesn’t help, but that is because Hybrid Child does this for the first time a hundred pages or so in and then does it every twenty or thirty more pages until the book finally ends. Its page count is over twice The Emissary’s and it, in my opinion, sucks. The Emissary pointedly does not suck, which is why my mother, not much of a science fiction reader to say the least, read it on my recommendation and absolutely loved it as well.
After The Emissary I read Woman Running in the Mountains by Tsushima Yūko. Tsushima, who was Dazai Osamu’s daughter but did not like to trade on this fact during her career, wrote a lot of social realist fiction about morally and psychologically complicated women navigating single motherhood in late-twentieth-century Japan. Woman Running in the Mountains belongs to this corpus, as does A Bed of Grass, one of my favorite novellas (Japanese or otherwise). For most of Woman Running in the Mountains I wished I was rereading A Bed of Grass instead, but in the second-to-last chapter Tsushima makes a brash, intriguing, counterintuitive plot and character decision that greatly impressed me. I am glad to have read it and I would probably read it again. It was also nice to read a book where someone from Tokyo relishes psychic landscapes of boundless snowfields and bright alpine meadows. I finally listened to Stick Season recently and it was one of the least relatable albums I’ve listened to in a very long time. It’s good music, because Noah Kahan wasn’t put in this world so that I personally could find him relatable, but as someone who intimately recognizes most of what he’s singing about but assigns a very different emotional valence to most of it, I usually think that people who talk about rural New England like that are crybabies. The woman running in the mountains from Woman Running in the Mountains is absolutely not a crybaby, although I do not think the book would suffer if she complained more. The women in A Bed of Grass certainly do.
After Woman Running in the Mountains I skimmed I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki. I do not like Natsume. I think that he’s mean-spirited; the kind of East-meets-West cultural analysis that he does seems geared towards demonstrating that he is smarter and morally better than the reader. That last “and” is the real problem; it’s not that he thinks that he’s smarter, that he thinks that he’s morally better, or even that he thinks both things at once, but that he seems to think these facts are connected to each other. This fell into place for me when I made the mistake of looking at his approach to translating the Hōjōki into English. I have translated the Hōjōki into English as well and my thoughts on Natsume’s thoughts on it can be found in my self-commentary on that translation. To be fair to Natsume, I used to have similar problems with Ambrose Bierce and even Douglas Adams, so it’s possible I’ll one day develop a taste for I Am a Cat just as I did for The Devil’s Dictionary and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’d like to; I love cats.
It’s all better now and nothing hurts because now I am finally reading The Betrothed and having a great time. Apparently in Italy it has a reputation for self-aware heftiness and pompous sermonizing, but I am someone who genuinely enjoys both Melville and Hugo, so I have a high tolerance for that. (Manzoni is nowhere close to that level anyway. A lot of this book is hilarious.) After this I think I will try some nonfiction—perhaps Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, which I have been assured is a hyper-nostalgist Russian psyop to make me want to kill myself. I do not mean this unkindly. I am an easy mark for that feeling, and I get it a lot; I have gotten it, at least intermittently, from the Dylan Thomas poem from which the book gets its title, and from the Don Henley song that gets its title from the book. (I like the First Aid Kit cover; I have a hard time taking Henley’s voice seriously, and besides, according to Islamic law, Don Henley for all his other virtues should be parted from his intellectual property in all cases.) I have gotten it from everything from Anne of Green Gables to War and Remembrance to Dandelion Wine to A Child’s Christmas in Wales to Calvin and Hobbes to Empire Records to “White Christmas” (the song) to White Christmas (the movie) to That’s Entertainment! (the movie) to Making Movies (the Dire Straits album) to Synthetica (the Metric album) to Simoun (the mid-2000s anime) to some but not all of The Lord of the Rings to a clip of a now-fifty-eight-year-old Vanilla Ice advertising something called the “I Love the 90s Tour” before my hometown movie theater’s thirty-fifth-anniversary screening of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. I’m not pulling any of those examples out of thin air, either. I see Vanilla Ice in his ruin lay the gold tithings barren, setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; I do not leave him out of the sadness of things. He, too, has come where the dim tides are hurled upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring the bell that calls us on.
After the tribulations of Renzo and Lucia, and those of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, the sky is the limit. Maybe this will be the summer I reread Moby-Dick, or attempt Carmen Miranda’s Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three.