Just finished this short novel by Ryu Murakami, his first, and Akutagawa Prize-winning novel. The novel’s basically about a guy (named Ryu, just like the author. Well, probably technically Ryuu), aged twenty, who spends time getting wasted in a squalid apartment, shooting up heroin and taking all kinds of substances, hanging out with his dissipated friends (who are just as dissolute as he is, and some of them more violent), going to drug-fueled, bisexual orgies with members of the American military, and other somewhat monotonous activities. There isn’t much of a plot to the book, and aside from Ryu, who seems to have some kind of artistic gift or sensibility, the other characters are difficult to remember. Anyway, what makes the book stand out is the precision of the prose, which rises to beauty even when describing all kinds of disgusting things (I think if you took a shot of whatever your poison is every time a character vomits (described lovingly; this is not a book you want to read while eating), food is rotting, or there’s an act of violence, by the end you’d probably be an addict too); even in the translation, the originality of the prose comes through, and there are moments of great clarity. (In reviews, I see people comparing it to Burroughs and other counterculture writers. I haven’t read the Beats, but at one point, the narrator mentions Genet, and I definitely saw a resemblance.)

For once, I’m reading a Japanese book written during the Edo period, although most of the stories are set in the medieval period (between Heian and Edo). This collection of tales by Akinori Ueda (roughly translated, the title is:  Tales of Rain and Moon) deals mainly with the supernatural and historical. In one tale, a famous monk meets the ghost of a vengeful retired emperor, who explains how his vengefulness led him to become a demon and seek revenge on the Taira clan and Go-shirakawa:  in others, snake spirits seduce young men, cheating men receive supernatural punishment, the spirit of gold discourses on whether Buddhist or Confucianist ideas of destiny determine who is wealthy, a village is terrorized by a gay necrophiliac cannibalistic demon monk, etc. The edition I read was a very scholarly one, with the intro and endnotes individually being as long as the tales themselves. (The problem with the scholarly approach is that it begins to annoy you that you can’t read the stories in the original. They are of course not in modern Japanese, and the translator rhasphodizes about the binding of the first edition…)  These stories are definitely high context and allusive, continually mentioning beautiful places immortalized in poetry, classical poems (although this can’t really come through v. well in translation), and Chinese literature. After awhile, I got tired of flipping and abandoned the endnotes:  most of the stories do work just as well as ghost tales as didactic literature.

This is a short book set in Kyoto in the postwar period, but at times one almost believes it’s Taisho or even Edo-period Kyoto; the heroine, Chieko, is a foundling raised by a traditional fabrics wholesaler, and the social structure surrounding the kimono business has an almost medieval feeling, as one must pick up the delicate threads of the social relations involved. Although her parents construct an elaborate lie about how her birth parents left the infant Chieko out of their site for a moment, and they spontaneously decided to snatch her, in reality, she was a twin, abandoned by her poor woodcutter parents outside the wholesaler’s. (It’s never explicitly explained just why they did this, but I think it was to spare her from the thought that she was abandoned; most of the human relationships in this novel work on a similar principle of understatement) The other twin, Naeko, was kept, but soon after, her parents died, and she is now herself a woodcutter’s apprentice. Naeko has always yearned to meet her twin sister, and one day, they meet at a temple, but now the difference in their social statuses is such that Naeko always refers to her sister as “Miss” (probably ojousan?), although Chieko offers to take her in, but must settle simply for bestowing upon Naeko a magnificent obi and kimono. There’s more to the plot than this, but it’s actually somewhat difficult to summarize.

The main attraction of the novel, though, is its setting. Yes, you guessed it, Kawabata is working somewhat in the elegiac mode. The prosperous shop of Chieko’s eventual fiance sells Sony radios to American tourists along with Japanese fabric souvenirs, and so the story reads like the evocation of a vanishing, anachronistic world. The events take place during the late summer, around the famed Gion festival, and the myriad other festivals following it (the novel does become more vivid if you do look up some info on what exactly takes place during this festival), so although the events of the novel may not sound very explosive, the prose, restrained imagery, and the cultural details manage to retain the reader’s interest. (Indeed, actually, you don’t need to have iconic characters or blockbuster plot to sustain a narrative, but if not, you need to be very good, or drawing from a deep well.) [Also, the general purity of the novel and the wholesomeness of the personages makes me equate this somewhat to Mishima's Sound of the Waves, meaning that both are Japanese novels that don't, as someone of my acquaintance put it, feature horrible and depressing events. Not that Kawabata's fiction contains anything nearly as disturbing as Mishima's, but this novel feels more positive than some of his other works.]

Perhaps the reason why I am so ambivalent about this conception of the Third Artist is that I don’t like the elevation of SF above other genres. As I said in my discussion with Limyaael, all genres need to change and revitalize, otherwise they risk irrelevancy. Mystery, Romance, and Fantasy are also, in their modern forms, relatively ‘new’ as publishing categories/genres. In fact, even though mystery is maligned as formulaic, it is perhaps one of the newest genres, depending on how you define it. Obviously crime has always existed, as well as the need to control it, but there is obviously a reason that the genre burst upon the scene and became massively popular. And it’s not as if mystery, either, has remained static: just as in the fantasy genre, there are imitators and innovaters. The problem of the Third Artist is endemnic to genre. Perhaps the commentators feel that it is especially relevant to science fiction, though, because hard, realist SF is the ‘ideal’ form of the genre, and such realism is supposed to be highly mimetic, perhaps even journalistic or pseudo-historical, not deliberately ‘fiction-like’ or intertextual, whereas one can say that fantasy is supposed to be inherently ‘intertextual’ if you count mythology and folklore (ancient or modern) as texts. And so with fantasy, it’s a more ambiguous matter to differentiate unoriginal, boring referentiality from transformative, original referentiality. However, I think this is more a quantitative than a qualitative difference. Read the rest of this entry »

I actually really like wordpress. I like the interface, I like the themes, and I love the customizability. I’m just not really sure, though, how to promote my blog, because currently it seems more like a collection of random things. I can’t really remember how I used to do it in the old days; when I joined, people had extensive blogrolls and such. So there was a visible audience.

Also, someone was suggesting that some people perhaps get together a group blog and post  their greatest hits, but why not instead just post excerpts and link back to their respective blogs? That seems to be a much more efficient way to build a hub of readership.

There’s a book going around now that alleges that Web 2.0 is socially destructive because blogs undermine traditional media and Wikipedia is oft inaccurate and prone to abuse. Some parts of this argument, as regards news and information, do have some validity, I think, although generally the book is not being embraced, unsurprisingly, by the blogosphere. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuation of previous post. You should consider both of them one big post that just spoils the heck out of the entire novel, as I discuss some things that aren’t revealed till the end in the beginning of the first post.

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Well, I finally finished this book. Now onto Gaiden 2. This book struck me as a bit overly long, and some of the points about Eigetsu were a bit hammered in. And although I like Ryuuren and like his character development here, the current significance of his inclusion here escapes me; the main events of the plot wouldn’t have changed if he hadn’t been here. Like previous Saiunkoku novels, somewhat irritatingly, what actually goes down seems to be less important to the overall plot than what is revealed, again raising the question of where the storyline is going. (much is revealed about the mystical/supernatural overplot here). Also, caveats: I don’t have perfect knowledge of Japanese, I may have misunderstood some things, and also I’m biased and write the most about the parts that interest me. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always odd to read a book or watch a movie about a sport or game I have no idea how to play. Somehow I managed to watch twenty-six episodes of Akagi while only having the slightest inkling of how to play mahjong. Perhaps it is also shameful to confess that I also don’t really even understand the basic idea behind cricket. Anyway, this is the third novel by Kawabata that I’ve read, the others being Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes, but the others I read for a class; perhaps what is intimidating about Kawabata is that despite, or because of the apparent simplicity of his style and diction, the ‘clean, transparent feeling’ (as one character says of the Go in this novel) is somewhat enigmatic. Like many writers of the 20th century Kawabata focuses on aesthetics and the distinction between the traditional and modern. (Sort of like Mishima, whom I’m trying to read in the Japanese now, of course, the focus on this kind of purity is perhaps exactly the opposite of the shocking and visceral within Mishima’s works.)

The novel is partially based off of real events. Kawabata covered a match between a Master of Go (in the novel, Shusai), and a representative of the younger forces (in the novel, Otake). The Master’s career has spanned three Imperial reigns; he is written as having simultaneously a vague and focused character, representing the artistic and traditionalistic form of Go. Throughout the marathon match, his health is failing, and there is at one point a months-long recess during which he convalesces. The opponent, Otake, while seeming at some points to be insensitive and taking advantage of the rules, is also likeably portrayed as the representative of the modern methods (characterized by the rigidity of the rules and contracts, and practice of sealed play.) The narrator also plays an important role in the plot, at one point giving a long speech to Otake in which he insists the match must continue because of its historical importance. Even, like me, if you do not understand the subtleties of Go, the descriptions of the surroundings, the drama surrounding the play, and above all, the atmosphere make this worth reading. (Also, FWIW, it’s much more straightforward than A Thousand Cranes or Snow Country.)

1. BTW, posted reviews of Kappa and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders to my blog.

2. Have also as a result of Tari’s post gotten a goodreads account.

The jpg is supposed to dynamically update. So far I have only those two books.

3. I was considering joining library thing, but although someone I know (Meril) is an early adopter on that service (people there seem somewhat odd. Several people asked her to review… the Tale of Genji? I just don’t understand why people would clamor for that to be reviewed, because it’s not as if there’s a lack of opinions on the work), I wanted to be able to store an unlimited number of books for free. If I can break two hundred, my decision will be rational. XD In any event, I don’t really need to be recommended new books by a search engine. I have lots of people who are willing to rec to me.

Picked this up on a whim in the library; I had never heard of the author. It’s interesting that this genre novel was translated, because in many respects, it’s not an especially innovative detective novel (in retrospect, I should have foreseen the big twist, because this exact trick was used in a detective manga:  so therefore I find it bizarre in a forty-year old case which was the center of so much obsession, no one ), and it is openly written as a puzzle plot, complete with ‘and now can you solve the crime, dear reader?’ letters from the author, and the amateur detective and his would-be Watson (a detective story addict), while amusing, don’t really fascinate as characters because we don’t get that much background on them. (Although there is a hilarious part where the detective (who is BTW a fortune-teller) rips on Holmes, but says that he loves him because he showed us what a human was.) In any case, I never read detective stories as puzzle plots. I don’t bother reading them strictly in materialist views, as a puzzle, because the author is always trying to fool us, and therefore the narrator is not playing entirely fair. So I made no serious attempts to solve the crime, although I did have many suspicions.

Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. So what is the crime anyway? In Tokyo, in 1936, a painter, Heikichi Umezawa, was murdered in his studio. A note was found at the crime scene, in which the painter outlined a deranged occult plan to create Azoth, the perfect woman from the body parts of the six young women, his daughters, step-daughters and nieces, who lived with him. The plans included many complex astrological calculations, geomancy, bizarre references to the alchemical correspondences of the planets and the elements, as well as attempts to link the idea of Azoth to the legend of the shamanist-empress Himiko of Yamatai. In any event, after Heikichi’s death, his eldest stepdaughter, who was divorced and lived outside of the house, and was not mentioned in the note, is raped and murdered, and more shockingly, the six young women disappear, and later their dismembered corpses, each missing the part which the note specified would be taken to summon Azoth, are found in mines corresponding to the element of the missing part. For forty years afterwards, this crime becomes an obsession, but the motives and the identity of the killer remain obscure. That is, until the daughter of a police officer brings some shocking evidence to the heroes in 1979.

 Anyway, if you really really want to know what went down, you can read the wikipedia entry, which thoroughly spoils the case. I did feel the appearance of a certain minor character was suspicious, as was the note itself and the disposition of the money. What kept me reading the book until the wee hours of the morning was the atmosphere of occult dread, the psychotic specifications of the creation of Azoth, the maddened attempts of later sleuths to calculate her birthplace. The seemingly meaningless obscenity of the crimes (although in the end a mystification:  which is what is interesting, how geniunely creepy and unnerving even the red herrings in the case are, the asides about obsessions with mannequins and dolls) is more redolent of the thriller genre than the classical fair-play mystery it structurally is.

I wish I hadn’t read the introduction before reading this book, because knowing of Akutagawa’s mental problems and morbid preoccupations inevitably colors one’s interpretations of the text. The absurdist bleakness of the land of the Kappas, while being an obvious parody of Meiji Japan, seems to be at times more of a projection of the author’s own psyche, and thus one feels a bit constrained in interpretation. So while I thought this was going to be in the ‘literary fable’ genre, the actual experience of the book edges more into an enigmatic psychological horror, especially because life among the Kappas seems to be rather wretched (well, all those declarations that ‘a Kappa’s life is an evil thing.’) Not much relieves the nihilistic tone, other than perhaps art, although the bohemian world is also satirized here; I enjoyed it, but I think I’d recommend the short work Hell Screen if you are interested in an introduction to the writing of Akutagawa.

A post argues that in the U.S., Chinese language courses overly emphasize hanzi. I found someone linking to this post saying that he thought the anecdote rather proved the opposite, that maybe the problem was that rather than too much hanzi, there was too little. In any event, I have to say that after three years of college Japanese, I think I did know more than 500 characters, and that you probably need to know much more to reach an equivalent level in Chinese, but this was because I studied outside of the classroom. Also, for students in a third year course to be moderately fluent for speaking and functional for literacy, when dealing with a language like Chinese, seems to be normal.  It only appears strange in this instance because these students had experience in Chinese before beginning the university courses.

IMHO there just are limitations to how much speaking/listening improvement can occur in a classroom setting, because improvements in this area seem to be mostly dependent on time spent speaking and listening. Personally, I think if a student wants to live or study in a foreign country, literacy is important, because otherwise they’ll be unable to read signs or fill out forms. They’ll be unable to read newspapers or books. It will be difficult for them to build vocabulary, because they are cut off from this method of learning new words.

Note that I’m not talking about events in the order in which they appear in the book. The book jumps back and forth in time and between various in a rather irritating way, if you’re trying to blog it, and I don’t include all the details, just the ones that interest me.
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This novel covers the part where Shuurei and Tei Yuushun, along with Sai Rin and Sa Kokujun go to Kiyou for New Year’s. So, read on ONLY if you want to be spoiled for both current events in the anime. ^_^ (Actually, it covers quite a bit of the stuff from the ending part of last season: IMHO, there actually are quite a bit of changes, although probably they don’t make that much of a difference, in terms of the general plot)

Something I was wondering: do the seven great families predate the founding of the nation?

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