Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

 Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, so you have to wonder why he is so little known in the West.  It can't be because he is too Oriental, because Mishima can be equally esoteric.  It might be a translation problem (Edward G Seidensticker, who translated this, was undoubtedly a great scholar but that doesn't necessarily make him a great translator), or it might just be that 120-page novellas are not popular here.

I should perhaps point out that 120 pages took me five sessions to read.   I so enjoyed the poetic quality of Kawabata's sparse writing that I wanted to enjoy every paragraph.  It is a leisurely story, and rightly so, as the protagonist Shimamura is a lazy man taking a lazy holiday in the mountains.

He comes to this particular hot springs resort because Komako is there.  Shimamura and Komako have met before and have had an affair, but now Komako has signed a four-year geisha contract to fund care for a young man who she looks after but who is engaged to another woman, Yoko.  Shimamura has encountered Yoko and the sick young man on the train journey north.   His interest has been piqued in more ways than one.

Shimamura is an urbane city man.   He has inherited enough money not to have to work.   He considers himself something of an intellectual and aesthete.  He has cultivated an interest in Japanese dance and collects Chijimi linen cloth.   Komako is not rich.   To get money she has adopted the archaic profession of a geisha.   She fits in a renewed affair with Shimamura between parties at which she drinks too much and filches cigarettes (she doesn't smoke).  In a sense she is flirting with modernity (the novel was written in 1934), but the two lifestyles are always going to clash.   In any event, the casual love affair is never going anywhere.   Shimamura already has a wife and children, who he seemingly doesn't care much about.  Indeed, he doesn't seem to care much about anything.

The allusive, meandering style is deliberately misleading.  The novel in which very little happens is always leading to a tragic climax.  Old and new Japan come together.  An old traditional barn in the mountain resort is acting as a cinema.  The film jams in the projector, sets on fire and burns the place down.  A shocking death finally jars Shimamura into life and Kawabata ends with the most beautiful paragraph of all.

Thirst for Love - Yukio Mishima

 Thirst for Love (1950) was apparently Mishima's third novel.   He is not yet twenty-five and is still experimenting with form and content.   Here he tackles a female protagonist, the newly widowed Etsuko, no longer young but by no means old.   After her husband's horrific death from typhoid she is invited to live with his family, the Sugimoto family, on the farm outside Osaka.   The father, Yakichi, is a retired executive; his son Kensuke a feckless intellectual married to the shewish Cheko.  The wife of the third son, who is working abroad, also lives on the farm with her two young children.   The family keep two young house servants, the housemaid Miyo and the gardener Saburo.

Etsuko's late husband was a faithless and cruel philanderer.   His mistresses visit him on his deathbed at the hospital for infectious diseases.   Etsuko placidly accepts everything and does her duty.   She is the only one present when her husband dies.   She leaves central Tokyo for the rural hinterland of Osaka.   Again, she accepts her fate, accepting Yakichi's hospitality and his overtures.  She becomes mistress of the household in every sense.

Her fantasy is to be loved, not just used.   The object of her fantasy is young Saburo.   But Saburo is enjoying himself with Miyo, who falls pregnant.   After a surreal visit to the local Autumn Festival Etsuko determines to she must have the boy whatever it takes.   The outcome is complex, violent, and for me at least, unexpected.

The novel has its flaws but it also contains many passages of brilliant writing.   It is short, only 200 pages, and the ending more than makes up for any duller patches.  The characters are well-drawn and convincing; they attract and repel as real people do.   It would be going too far to claim I enjoyed Thirst for Love but I am certainly glad I read it.

Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask is Mishima's first major novel, published when he was only 24.  It is a roman a clef, heavily autobiographical, about a young man coming of age in the dying days of the Second World War.  It is different and daring in that it is about the hero's burgeoning homosexuality, which he hides behind a 'mask' of normality by courting a young woman he tries hard to convince himself that he loves.  I hadn't realised before that 'Yukio Mishima' is itself a mask, a pen-name adopted to shield his respectable and strait-laced family.  Nothing Mishima writes is ever likely to be bad.  He is, to my mind, one of the finest writers of the Twentieth Century, the great 'lost' Nobel Laureate.  But personally, he is repellent - moreover, he knows it.  Here there are passages in which you very nearly hate him, yet he saves the situation because you cannot possibly feel more repelled by Mishima than Mishima himself does.  Knowing what he ultimately did makes the frequent references to suicide in this young man's text all the more ominous.  Confessions of a Mask is a masterpiece, no question, but it's not a comfortable one.

The Temple of Dawn - Yukio Mishima

The Temple of Dawn is the third part of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. I would clearly of benefited from reading the preceding two first. All the same, I found The Temple of Dawn fascinating in itself as a chronicle of man in later middle age coming to terms with mortality by means of an extraordinary exploration of reincarnation as envisaged in various forms of Buddhism.

Honda is a distinguished lawyer and former judge. In 1939 he is sent to Bangkok to resolve a commercial dispute. Whilst there he is introduced to Princess Moonshine, a peripheral member of the royal family and a greatly cosseted infant. The strange thing is that she seems to understand Honda, who speaks only Japanese, and seems to suggest that she is a reincarnation of Matsugae, Honda's schoolfriend (this is essentially the plot of the novel sequence - Honda trying to save successive reincarnations of his friend).

Having won the lawsuit, Honda is rewarded with an expenses-paid tour of India, where he investigates the reincarnation belief. This is done in extraordinary detail and again, I suspect that this is the culmination of previous theorising in earlier books; in this book, considered alone, it goes on too long. Certainly a disproportionately tiny amount of space is given here to World War 2, which can't be right.

After the war, fifteen years after their first meeting, Honda meets the princess again. Now known as Ying Chan, she is studying in Japan. Honda's mission now is to find out if she has Matsugae's telltale triangle of moles on her side, beneath her arm. He goes to ludicrous, even perverse lengths - a man pursuing his obsession.

There is masterly writing here. We encounter Mishima at the height of his powers - and he was a great writer to begin with. I shall certainly track down the other three volumes of The Sea of Fertility, but perhaps something a little less demanding first.

1Q84 Book One - Haruki Murakami

I do so many things backwards. Reading 1Q84 was one such. I read it out of sequence. I knew how it ended before I knew how it began. It made no difference whatsoever. I enjoyed every second of it and discovering 1Q84 introduced me to Murakami's other work, of which I have now read a good deal.


Here we get everything we need to know about Tengo, Aomame and, perhaps most importantly, Fuka-Eri, the seventeen year old genius behind Air Chrysalis and the Sakigake cult from which she has escaped. It's an interesting link - Aomame left the Witnesses at about the same age. Akebono, which I don't remember from the later books, was a militant sub-sect of Sakigake, and their shootout with the police (very 1980s) is why the police (in 1Q84) are armed. This is the first discrepancy which Aomame notices when she crosses into the parallel world. Tengo doesn't actually cross over in this first book. We learn the full details of the very tenuous connection between our two protagonists and - for what I suspect is the one and only time - why the book is called 1Q84. Aomame comes up with the name to reinforce the idea that she is no longer in her 'real' 1984; whatever this is, it isn't that, so the Q stands for question mark. I can't even imagine how this worked in the original Japanese.


The style - leisurely, straightforward prose rolling gently out - is there to smooth the edges of the ideas which are often incredibly complex. I feel sure we get most if not all of Murakami's world view across the trilogy, but it so gently, so persuasively done that nothing jars, nothing seems at all unacceptable. For example, we see what Aomame does for a living right at the beginning of the book. We are later given suggestions why she does it. In lesser hands it would repel us or at least warn us we are tackling a noir world. But here it doesn't repel. Here the two-moon world is far from noir.


1Q84 is what it was instantly recognised as being - a classic of world literature. That's a beautiful thing.

Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

This is Murakami's 1987 breakout novel, the one that made him a bestseller in Japan and successful around the world. This was because of its universality - ostensibly your basic rite of passage story - its apparent simplicity and its slightly offbeat characters. Typically for Murakami, the protagonists are welded in sexless love. Watanabe loves Naoko. Naoko loves Watanabe but cannot have penetrative sex with him (though they have plenty of non-penetrative) because she is still mourning her childhood sweetheart Kizuki, who also happened to be Watanabe's best friend. Kizuki killed himself at 17. Watanabe and Naoke have both gone to university in Tokyo, although they attend different ones. Watanabe loses Naoke when she enters a sanatorium to try and get over her grief. Left to his own devices Watanabe trails along in the wake of the dormitory Lothario Nagasawa, who picks up girls for them both, has sex with them and dumps them. Nagasawa is fully aware of his shortcomings, but accepts the way he is. After all, he is open with his longtanding girlfriend Hatsumi - there is no deceit involved with her or with the pick-up girls. Hatsumi quite likes Watanabe and would have sex with him, were it not for Nagasawa.  Meanwhile Watanabe visits Naoko at the sanatorium and meets her room-mate, the forty-year-old musician Rieko, who has been there seven years. Naoko and Rieko sleep together. Watanabe has sex with neither. Back at university, he meets a fellow drama student, the ultra-cute Midori, who would like to have sex with him but....

So it's not quite your usual rite of passage scenario. More a case of - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy has lots of girls, boy meets two more girls and a woman, boy cannot have any of them, but he finally loses the first girl, has sex with the woman, and decides to take up with the girl he should have focused on all along. Typical Murakami after all.

The beauty is the simplicity. Like the song, which Watanabe hears many years later in Hamburg (which then provokes his memory of Naoke, whose favourite song it was), the writing is incredibly simple yet exceptionally captivating. The translation here, by Jay Rubin, strikes what is surely the right note. The chronology seems to be straightforward but in fact a vast amount of backstory is sneaked in, even for comparatively minor characters. There is a regular use of letters between the principals in which they can reveal truths to one another which they could not say in person. Truth and untruth is one of the themes of the novel - Nagasawa is the extreme example of someone who is brutally honest about his actions whilst fooling himself that admitting his betrayals somehow legitimises them. Reiko is his opposite; again painfully honest about her past life, she excoriates herself unnecessarily. Nobody ever seems to tell the whole truth to Naoke and Watanabe  does his best but has no real idea about his true feelings. Discovering them, embracing them, is his coming of age (he is still only twenty-one at the novel's end). The exquisite final paragraph suggests that he has just for him the real journey is only just beginning.

Because I have come at Murakami the wrong way round, reading his most recent and ambitious work first, I was initially slightly disappointed with Norwegian Wood because it seemed so simple and unambitious. But I stuck with it and discovered the true depth and complexity. I cannot pick favourites. Read them all is my advice.

OTHER MURAKAMI NOVELS DISCUSSED ON THIS BLOG:

1Q84 Book 3
COLORLESS TUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE

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.