Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse - Otsuichi

 

Otsuichi (Hirotaka Adachi) is a master of Japanese Horror.  The origins of the form lie in the 19th century when traditional Japanese ghost stories became a fad in the West.  Nowadays it means horror stories arising from everyday contemporary life.  Thus, for example, Black Fairy Tale, Otsuichi's first novel and the longest item in this collection, is fundamentally about transplant surgery.

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse was his debut, a novella written when he was only 18 and still in high school, which went on to be nominated for the prestigious Shirley Jackson Award.  That is about nine-year-old Satsuki who dies in a childish accident but whose death is covered up by her playmate Yayoi and her slightly older brother Ken.  The action is narrated by Satsuki, even after death, which is a fascinating device and I did not see the final twist coming.

Next is 'Yuko', a short story about a widow who gets a job with keeping house with a wealthy writer and his invalid second wife Yuko.  Only the housekeeper is never allowed to see Yuko and naturally begins to suspect that she doesn't exist.  The story, set shortly after Japanese defeat in World War II, is beautifully elusive and I'm not entirely sure what happens at the end, which is fine by me.

Then we have Black Fairy Tale, in which teenager Nami receives a donated left eye to replace the one she lost in an accident which also cost her her memory.  She is not the same Nami she was before the accident and her parents and schoolfriends cannot accept the change.  She starts having visions in the transplanted eye and realises they are things seen by the donor.  She sets out to track him down and finds he was a young man killed in a hit and run accident.  She goes to his home town to investigate further and blunders into a real horror.

The great thing about Otsuichi, especially in Black Fairy Tale, is his layering.  For example, who is the author of the Black Fairy Tale collection of stories, one of which - 'The Eye's Memory' - is included here.  In that story a talking raven steals human eyes which it gives to an eyeless girl.  When she puts them in her sockets she has dreams of what the eyes had seen.  Thus the parallels seep over into the main narrative and, when we look back after reading the novel, provide key clues.

I really enjoyed this collection - it's the perfect way to plunge into Otsuichi's grim world as well as a useful introduction to the genre.  I certainly want to try more of both.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

Having discovered Murakami in a roundabout sort of way by happening on the third volume of his magnum opus 1Q84, I was naturally keen to try more.  Tsukuru Tazaki is a more recent (2013), much shorter work. It is equally good.

The story is this: Tsukuru and four other high school students do voluntary work one summer and become the closest of friends for the rest of their secondary education.  The four others, two boys and two girls, happen to have references to colour in their names, hence the 'color' part of the book's title. Tsukuru doesn't; his name means 'builder of things'. As such, he has to go to university in Tokyo because only Tokyo offers a course in his specialism, the building of railway stations.  He comes home for the vacations and, to begin with, everything as it was before he left. His friends are delighted to see him, desperate to hear news of the big city.  But then, for reasons unknown, they cut him dead. They refuse to take his phone calls. When one does finally speak to Tsukuru it is only to tell him that they have all agreed they want nothing more to do with him.

For five months thereafter Tsukuru thinks only of dying.  His life, without his friends, has thus become 'colorless'.  He recovers, graduates, gets the job of his dreams and stays in Tokyo. Sixteen years later he starts dating a woman whom he can at last envisage a future with. She tells him he seems blocked by what happened with his friends.  She convinces him that they only have a future together if he can relieve himself of the burden of his past.  With her help, he tracks down his friends. One of the girls, Shiro, has been murdered.  The other lives with her husband in Finland.  The two boys, Aka and Ao, are still in their home city.

Tsukuru visits them all, even making the trip to Finland to track down Kuru.  They are all pleased to see him.  They all regret having cut him off like they did.  But what else could they do when Shiro told them what Tsukuru had done?  Naturally, I'm not going to reveal what that was.  The important thing is the way Murakami handles the revelation.  Did Tsukuru do it?  Did he later go back and murder Shiro.  If he didn't do either, who did?  And the beauty - the mastery - of his technique is that we never find out.  It's four or five days since I finished the book and the questions are still rattling round in my head.  High art - downright brilliant.

Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino

I really am in two minds about this book.  On the one hand I read all 467 pages and never thought about packing it in.  On the other, it never gripped me.  The end neither surprised or disappointed me - yet I can't get Grotesque out of my mind and on balance that has to mean Kirino is doing something right.

The blurb on the back tells us Kirino (a pseudonym) is a leading Japanese crime writer.  This seems to be the case, but Grotesque is not really a crime novel.  Our unnamed principal narrator is neither the victim nor the perpetrator.  She is merely a dispassionate observer of the effect the crime has on others.  This is strange and unsettling, given that she is the sister of one victim and a purported friend of the other.  The strange and unsettling tenor of the book is actually what keeps you reading.

It is no secret who killed the sister, Yuriko, but he flatly denies murdering the second, Kazue.  In Japan, apparently, the defendant is expected to write a pre-trial statement, explaining himself and either justifying his legal arguments.  He - the Chinese illegal immigrant Zhang thus becomes the least reliable of our unreliable narrators.  Both Yuriko and Kazue tell their versions through their journals: Yuriko became a prostitute to monetarise her beauty, Kazue does it as a hobby - she is otherwise a successful professional career-woman.  Both do unspeakable things.  That's the kind of novel this is - even the beautiful blind Yurio, Yuriko's abandoned son, is manipulative and utterly bound up in self-interest.

The fact that none of the characters are in any way likeable is what makes Grotesque as book hard to like.  The title is absolutely correct - everyone here is grotesque in one way or another, indeed less than fully human.  What is it actually about?  Well, I suppose in one aspect it is about the dehumanising effect of modern cross-cultural life, particularly on woman.  It is certainly not about the methods women use to carve out an identity for themselves because everyone here has an identity imposed on them by others.  If I had to plump for a single definition it would have to be 'a novel about perversion in the widest sense - social, cultural, psychological.'

Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard

Jim Ballard was born in Shanghai and interned by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945.  The pubescent hero of Empire of the Sun is also called Jim, also born in the English enclave in China, also interned.  It would be wrong, though, to confuse the two.  Empire of the Sun is only autobiographical in its setting and background.  The real Ballard was interned with his parents, the fictional Jim isn't.  He spends the Japanese occupation alone, initially trying to be reunited with his parents, later afraid of the reunion.  Empire of the Sun is therefore what might have happened to Ballard had he been separated from his parents, based on the occasional adventures he had as a child cycling round Shanghai on his own.

It is a classic of war literature and effectively unique - I know of no other coming of age story set in a Japanese prison camp in China.  Indeed the brutal Sino-Japanese war is scarcely mentioned in postwar western literature and for most, I suspect, the Rape of Nanking is thought of as a single personal sexual attack.  It startles us that Jim, China-born and never having lived elsewhere, harbours hopes of a Japanese victory.  It startles and engages us.

Ballard's problem in his speculative fiction is often the inability to explore character amid the high concept of his idea.  That is in no sense a problem here.  Jim takes us with him on the journey.  We understand the disturbing things he feels compelled to do, the often wrong decisions he makes based on the limited information available to him, the ghastly friends he makes in order to survive.  Paramount among the latter is the appalling Basie, American cabin steward, thief, and corrupter. He is a monster equal in my mind to Fagin or Mr Hyde.  His use of lady's talcum powder is a signature as chilling as Ernst Blofeld stroking his white Persian cat.

I have seen Spielberg's film and cannot remember a moment of it.  It is dull and worthy, like so much later Spielberg.  It will be a long time before I forget the original novel.  It is a work of genius. I recommend the Harper Perennial edition because of the excellent extra material at the end, a practice I usually deplore.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea -Yukio Mishima

Perhaps Mishima's best known novel in the West, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is set in the era of the post-defeat reconstruction.  It is a novel of the early Sixties.  The characters, even the children too young to remember, are touched by the aftermath of the war and the subjugation of their nation.  The peephole in Noboru's bedroom and the 'dry dock' where the gruesome denouement takes place, are both relics of US occupation.

The focus is kept tight on Noboru, his widowed mother Fusako, and the new man in Fusako's life Ryuji, the titular sailor.  Aside from the actress Yoriko and the assistant manager Shibuya, who represent the two sides of Fusako's character, passion and punctiliousness, other key characters are not named.  Noboru's schoolmates - his gang - are simply the chief and number one, number two, and so on.  Noboru is number three.  They are all good students from good families, but we soon discover there is very little good about them.  They consider themselves superior.  They disdain their inferiors.  They set their own rules.  The chief has a book of Japanese law.  He knows time is running out for them.  Consequences will be different when they turn fourteen.

Mishima is such a genius in his structure.  We get drawn in to the nob of the story via the gang.  Noboru finds the peephole and watches his mother naked and masturbating.  Soon after he watches Fusako and Ryuji having sex.  As romance blossoms, sex turns to love, and their lovemaking becomes more private.  Noboru starts listing Ryuji's offences, perceived slights to the boy's elite status.  All of this he shares with his gang, the first intimation we have that these children are not normal.  In the middle of the book Mishima shows us just how abnormal they are, setting us up for the ending which he brilliantly doesn't show because what we imagine is so horrible.

In many ways this is Japanese noir.  The tension, the torrid atmosphere - literally, the fall from grace.  A modern masterpiece without any doubt.  My only criticism is that translator John Nathan (admittedly doing the work in 1965) is too quick with American colloquialisms.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima

Mishima's story is based on a real-life incident.  In July 1950 the novice monk Hayashi Yoken burned down the Zen Buddhist temple of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto.  The temple was rebuilt and Yoken survived his suicide attempt (only to die in 1956, the year the literary world's most spectacular suicide published his fictionalised version).

Mishima changes the Yoken's name to Mizoguchi and ends with his flight into the hills after starting the fire.  The real novice was insane, Mizoguchi is not.  That would be too easy.  Mishima's is an existentialist quest to explain the act of atrocious vandalism.  Mizoguchi's journey turns into a quest for beauty and freedom.

Mishima is one of the greatest 20th century novelists.  His failed coup and ritual suicide in November 1970, when he was only forty-five, has probably eclipsed his literary output.  It certainly meant his achievement was never marked by the Nobel Prize, although he almost won in 1968.  Of course the life of a Buddhist monk is alien to the western reader but Mishima knows that (he had spent time in America) and explains in more detail than I suspect the Japanese reader needs.  In this he is assisted by Ivan Morris's beautifully lucid translation.

The result is a novel of enormous power.  Alien though it is, Mizoguchi's narration draws us in.  His action is appalling, his motives (despite Mishima's efforts) inexplicable save as a form of offensively selfish performance art, and yet we can never hate him because he is so entirely human.

I truly love everything about this book - EXCEPT the trite and patronising introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross, an expert, apparently, on Eastern religion.  This she may well have been, and we have to indulge her because she was writing before literature went truly international.  But the problem is, this is not a novel about religion.  Take my tip and skip the intro.