April - June 2018: Japan and the Koreas

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April - June 2018: Japan and the Koreas

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1lilisin
Mar 29, 2018, 3:45 am

Welcome to the second quarter theme read: Japan and the Koreas!

Spring has come to Japan and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and now starting to scatter with the wind, leading to showers of pink and white petals blanketing the streets. It's a spectacular view to behold which is what I've been doing for the past week instead of writing this introduction. Or rather, I wrote an introduction, thought it sounded too self-indulgent, and decided to take a nice cherry blossom break to refresh my senses.

So welcome to this very academic thread where I'm not going to post any TBR piles or copied Wikipedia entries or actual book information! I'm leaving it all to you guys to fill this thread (with my help along the way).

2lilisin
Modifié : Mar 29, 2018, 3:52 am


*picture by me of cherry blossoms about 4 days before reaching full bloom

JAPAN

For those who might remember I actually hosted the original Japan theme read in this group 9 years ago!

In the nine years since I hosted the thread, a lot has changed to the members of this group, to the world, and to literature. And these are the changes I would like to emphasize this quarter. While of course those new to the genre of Japanese fiction are welcome to start from the beginning, I want to invite those who participated nine years ago and ask:

For those who started out with geisha, and maybe slipped in a few post-war books, then strolled around with the likes of Tanizaki or Mishima, have you started reading contemporary fiction perhaps? Did Japan once seem like a "land of exotic orientalism" and now its faults are more apparent? How much Japanese fiction have you read throughout the years?

Has your perception of Japanese literature changed?

3lilisin
Modifié : Mar 30, 2018, 3:18 am


*picture by me of the palace in Seoul

KOREA

The first time I went to Korea I was struck by something seemingly lacking. I couldn't pinpoint it but when it finally hit me I couldn't not see it: the lack of bookstores. Especially coming from Tokyo where there seems to be a bookshop on every street corner, I was confounded by the lack of bookstores in Seoul. When I mentioned this to a Korean friend of mine who is a screenwriter for Korean dramas and movies, he told me that while Koreans are highly literate, there is a huge lack of a reading culture and thus very little fiction published.

However, recently abroad in the English publishing world, as we see a push for more translated literature being released (see Pushkin Press, TiltedAxis Press), we are starting to see more Korean names pop up, with Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, being the current Korean literary darling. So let's use this quarter and see what we can discover from the Korean literary world! Perhaps we can make some comparisons with its island neighbor. The two countries have borrowed so much from each other, is that also present in the literature?

I think I'm going to have to find some Japanese fiction about Korea. Sounds interesting!

Can't wait to see what this quarter brings us! So very exciting!

4SassyLassy
Mar 29, 2018, 5:16 pm

Looking forward to this quarter. I wasn't on LT nine years ago; as you say much has changed. I sorry to say I am one of those for whom Japanese literature is an almost completely unknown area, and Korean literature will definitely be new to me. So, as I said, looking forward to it all.

5lilisin
Modifié : Avr 17, 2018, 1:28 am

Being an avid Japan reader I already have quite a few Japanese books on my TBR file which range from literary fiction to mystery to nonfiction. These are all books that I feel that no matter what I choose, it'll end up being a good read. As for Korea I've only read Tongue by Kyung-Ran Jo and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, both books that admittedly I did not enjoy. I am still tempted to read one other book by Han Kang to give her another chance. Otherwise, I recently read the excellent nonfiction, Nothing to Envy about North Korean defectors which lead me to realizing I was lacking knowledge about Japan's colonization of Korea which lead me to ordering a few nonfiction books from Amazon, which I'm supposed to receive today but might come this weekend. (I also snuck in a geisha book in my order as it's been a while since I've read a geisha book.)

Fiction:
Hiromi Kawakami: センセイの鞄 (Strange Weather in Tokyo)
Shusaku Endo: 深い河 (Deep River)
Haruki Murakami: 女のいない男たち (Men Without Women)
Otsuichi: 暗いところで待ち合わせ (Waiting in the Dark)
Otsuichi: ZOO 1
桜木紫乃: ホテルローヤル (Hotel Royal)
羽田 圭介: スクラップ・アンド・ビルド (Scrap and Build)
村田 沙耶香: コンビニ人間
磯崎 憲一郎: 終の住処
Ayako Miura: Au col du mont Shiokari (Shiokari Pass)
Kenzaburo Oe: A Quiet Life
Shusaku Endo: Scandal
Natsume Soseki: The Miner
Haruki Murakami: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Takeshi Kaiko: Darkness In Summer

Nonfiction Japan :
Shohei Ooka: Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story
Ishikawa Tatsuzo: Soldiers Alive
Alan Booth: Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan
Sayo Masuda: Autobiography of a Geisha

Nonfiction Japan/Korea:
Yoshiaki Yoshimi: Comfort Women
C. Sarah Soh: The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan
Todd A. Henry: Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

6Tess_W
Modifié : Mar 30, 2018, 11:07 am

I am afraid that both Korea and Japan are not really places or authors that I normally read. I've read: Memoirs of a Geisha, Silence by Shusaku Endo and Buck's The Living Reed. I loved all of them, but I do realize they are for beginners! (and that's okay) I will commit to this quarter reading at least (from my shelves):

Japan:
The Tale of Genji by Muraski Shikibu (1216 pages, yikes!) 1001 Books

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto 1001 Books

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Nobel Prize

If I have time I may try to pick up lilisin's Autobiography of a Geisha.

Korea:
The Orphan Master's Son which although by an American author, did win the Pulitzer Prize.

I really love how this group and my Reading Through Time group hit totally different periods/eras/topics. While reading about Japan and Korea I will also be reading 19th century American works (but not the old west) such as Stone's Love is Eternal, the Lincoln love-story and James' The Turn of the Screw.

7spiphany
Mar 30, 2018, 1:43 pm

>5 lilisin: ...Japan's colonization of Korea...
This, in turn, contributed to the settlement of substantial numbers of Koreans in the Soviet Union, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising, given Russia's borders in the Far East. However, it's not something I had given much thought to until I came across a Russian-language writer with the very un-Russian surname of Anatoli Kim. Kim was born in Kazakhstan to parents from the Korean community on the island Sakhalin who were deported en masse under Stalin into central Asia. He does apparently thematize the Korean-Russian communities in his fiction to some degree, but unfortunately little of his work seems to be available in English apart from isolated stories in long-out-of-print anthologies. (Readers of German or French may have more luck.)

8thorold
Modifié : Mar 30, 2018, 5:53 pm

I'm looking forward to this one, since I know almost nothing about Japanese literature, and less about Korean... I've read some Mishima and a few stories by Kenzaburō Ōe, but that's just about it, apart from a lot of very strange translations of Japanese technical documents. I've not even read all that much about occidental confrontations with Japanese culture - a couple of books by James Kirkup and Amélie Nothomb, perhaps.

I'm thinking of starting with Kokoro, which looks as though it should be a kind of introduction to modern Japan...

9lilisin
Avr 2, 2018, 3:24 am

>6 Tess_W:, >8 thorold:

Welcome to the world of Japanese and Korean literature then! Can't wait for your thoughts once you've read a few books. I think I'll be starting with The Miner by Natsume Soseki as I just finished reading a Jules Verne book about diamond mines so my brain decided it'd be fun to continue that train of thought.

>7 spiphany:

And just like that every book leads to another. The author you mention sounds interesting and as I do read in French as well that might be an interesting option to look up, thank you.

10SqueakyChu
Avr 2, 2018, 12:05 pm

*lurking quietly*

:)

11ELiz_M
Avr 2, 2018, 3:59 pm

>5 lilisin: This a list of books you are planning to read?

>6 Tess_W: I enjoyed Genji when I read it a few years ago -- it was a perfect subway book, reading a few chapters a day over 8 weeks. It's episodic with a main character, many reoccurring characters and some characters that appear only once. I felt it was structured kind of like Friends, or whatever your long-running standard sitcom of choice is. If you want more footnotes/background info there is a beautiful penguin deluxe edition that, I think, is color-coded.

>8 thorold: I hesitate to recommend this, because for me was only a "good" read, but The Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow 1969, Runaway Horses 1969, The Temple of Dawn 1970, and The Decay of the Angel 1971) takes place from 1912 to 1975, depicting the transitions from Meiji period to Taishō period to Shōwa period.

I have on my shelves Black Rain and Confessions of a Mask, hopefully I will get to one of those. I also really want to read Human Acts as I thought The Vegetarian was astounding.

12lilisin
Modifié : Avr 2, 2018, 9:48 pm

>10 SqueakyChu:

Please feel free to lurk loudly! :)

>11 ELiz_M:

This list is of all the books that apply to this theme that I actually physically own, but I have no delusion of being able to read all of these this quarter. It'd be neat if I could but I know myself too well for that. :)

I even started the first pages of The Miner and it's a little bit more of a deeper and philosophical(?) read than I expected so I've decided not to go ahead and read that one as I just know it'll slow me down when I'm trying to keep my current good pace up.

I brought Assimilating Seoul and Silence to work today to see which tickles my fancy but Seoul will be a slow burner as it's a heavy nonfiction.

Black Rain is a beautiful book so I would highly recommend reading that one.

May I ask what you liked about The Vegetarian?

13ELiz_M
Modifié : Avr 3, 2018, 2:24 pm

>12 lilisin: I liked the structure of The Vegetarian a lot -- I was intrigued by the use of view points other than the protagonist to tell a story about the protagonist's lack of agency. Since I know nothing about Korean culture, I appreciated the glimpses into how their culture/society views the role of women in the family/society. And finally, there was something about the tree imagery in the final section that I found beautiful.

14whymaggiemay
Modifié : Avr 6, 2018, 4:19 pm

I've read two fiction books from Korea: Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin and a fable for children The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang. Both were excellent. I've also read several non=fiction books about North Korea Nothing to Envy, Escape From Camp 14 and The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, the last two of which have to do with escape from the north to the south.

I'm a huge fan of Japanese fiction, especially Haruki Murakami. On my shelves, I have two books from Korean authors and two from Murakami I've yet to read, so I'm set to start this quarter's reading challenge.

15lilisin
Avr 12, 2018, 1:15 am

My first Japanese book, Le convoi de l'eau, for the quarter is unfortunately not available in English but is by one of my favorite authors, Akira Yoshimura.

A troupe of workers go deep into the mountains to survey a mountain valley that is to be turned into a retaining lake. In the valley however, there is a small village, that until that moment has remained secluded from the modern world. The workers are specifically told not to interfere with the villagers and just to focus on the task at hand. However, the workers are naturally curious as to the comings and goings of the villagers whom they only first see when the reverberations of dynamite causes the roof of their homes to fall apart. As the two groups continue to observe each other as the days pass by, it is a wonder as to what will become of this village once the work is over.

And that is really all the plot one gets from the book as Yoshimura delves on the consequences of society intruding on the natural and on the old. What I love about Yoshimura is his always beautiful lyrical writing that allows you to feel the crispness of the mountain air while you feel the silence that emits from rustling leaves. The beauty of his words paired with the tragedy that is the village's future is haunting and dark and you're left with no option but to say "and such is life, I suppose". Adding to this the us vs. them/inside vs outside element that asks us to debate which side is natural leads to a beautiful moment in the woods and memorable procession out of the mountains.

As always, it's a real pleasure to read Yoshimura. For those who can only read in English, I can't highly recommend enough Shipwrecks which follows a similar plotline of a small village by the sea that has its own means of survival but remains mostly unaware of the dangers of the outside world. His descriptions of fishing, and salt collecting, are mesmerizing while being backed by this foreboding darkness like a dark thunder cloud coming up from the horizon after frolicking in blue waters and sunny skies.

Another book of his available in English, On Parole, is also an insight into a man being thrust out into society after having spent years behind bars. In all of Yoshimura's books you can feel the darkness that is looming and that adds onto the horror you feel as you read. A great author.

16thorold
Avr 12, 2018, 5:09 am

My first read for the Japan/Korea thread:

Kokoro (1914; new English translation 2010) by Natsume Sōseki (Japan, 1867-1916), translated by Meredith McKinney (Australia)

  

Sōseki is often cited as the most distinguished modern Japanese novelist. He studied English at Tokyo Imperial University and was one of the first Japanese to get the chance to study abroad, spending two years ("the most unpleasant years in my life") at UCL. After his return, he taught literature at Tokyo University. He first came to prominence as a writer with I am a cat in 1905.

Meredith McKinney teaches at the Australian National University and translates medieval and modern Japanese literature (she's also the daughter of the well-known Australian poet Judith Wright).

I have a feeling that Kokoro is a book that will make more and more sense the more I know about modern Japanese culture. On one level it's a simple story about friendship and betrayal, but on another level it's a working-out of the cultural tensions set up in the minds of Japanese intellectuals who lived through the opening-up of Japan to western ideas during the Meiji period (Sōseki was born in the year of Meiji's accession to the imperial throne). The foreground story of Kokoro takes place in the months around the emperor's death, and its main character, Sensei (teacher), is an older man - a contemporary of the author - whose life has been messed up by his inability to resolve the existential conflict between the demands of the two threads of his upbringing, the requirement to subsume himself into the traditional, collective family values of middle-class Japanese society setting itself against the western need for intellectual self-determination. The narrator of the first part of the book is a man of a younger generation who gets into a similar ethical tangle, but with different dimensions and results.

It's all very carefully, delicately built up, with a lot of everyday detail about the rapidly-changing face of Japan in the decades before 1914 used to reflect and explain the development of the conflicts the characters are dealing with. Very much a book about male friendships (what used to be called "homosocial" relationships in the good old days of literary theory), where the women rarely speak and don't have all that much to do apart from arranging flowers and cooking (is that why Penguin coincidentally put a brush-stroke across the woman's eyes in the cover design?). But that's an accusation that would be equally true of a lot of western novels of the same period.

Very interesting, and McKinnon's translation reads very naturally and transparently.

17thorold
Modifié : Avr 15, 2018, 6:13 am

Slightly off-topic, but I wanted to get the background straight in my mind, so I read Ian Buruma's "pocket history" of modern Japan, Inventing Japan, 1853-1964. Fun to read, and recommended for anyone else who has trouble sorting out their Meiji from their Taisho and Showa. I notice that he also gives Sōseki, and particularly Kokoro, a prominent place on his list of recommended reading.

Review in my CR thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/289441#6449260

18Tess_W
Avr 15, 2018, 11:56 am

>17 thorold: Sounds just like what I need...off to library or Amazon!

19alvaret
Avr 15, 2018, 12:20 pm

I had forgotten about this theme but by pure coincidence my first read in April was Strange Weather in Tokyo by the Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami. In it we follow 38 year old Tsukiko and her former teacher who she keeps calling Sensei. Slowly they start building a fragile friendship and eventually something more. I liked it, Tsukiko and Sensei are both well-drawn characters and I kept wishing that they would manage to finally brake through their loneliness and truly reach each other.

20lilisin
Avr 16, 2018, 2:31 am

>16 thorold:

As a Japanese fiction fan Soseki is an author I should have read more of but I've only read his And Then which I remember being excellent even if I remember nothing else, not even the plot. However, I just can't seem to pick up his books, almost as if it feels too cliche, which is a really silly thought.

>19 alvaret:

I've been reading that one in the Japanese for a year now! It's quite a lovely read, and a quick and easy one too and it's strange I've been reading it for so long but I just keep getting distracted by every other book and tv show.

21lilisin
Avr 16, 2018, 2:54 am

My second book for this quarter theme read is Ayako Miura's Au col du mont Shiokari (Shiokari Pass). I had a strange feeling of having read this book already but I swear it's the first time.

In any case, this is the second book I've ready by Miura who wrote the fantastic Lady Gracia about Christianity in the age of samurai. This book was the same story of Christianity in Japan but in a slightly more modern setting. It's the story of Nagano who is a motherless boy raised by his grandmother and father in a standard Shinto/Buddhist Japanese household. Upon the death of his grandmother, however, he discovers that his mother is very much alive and was only thrown out of the house by his grandmother due to the fact that she was Christian, and would not give up her loyalty to God even to raise her son.

Miura's tale is the coming-of-age story of Nagano as he becomes a man, limbo-ing between the natural religion of Japan, and this other religion that follows a foreign man. His struggles with the concept of death but his devotion to morality leads him to follow a childhood friend to Hokkaido where he vows to marry his friend's crippled sister. But with how far should we stick to our vows being a common theme in this tale, we are left with only one possible ending (that is revealed in the book synopsis on the French version).

A lovely, very easy to read book (mostly dialogue), that led much to ponder about. I still prefer Lady Gracia over this one but still a poignant story and interesting look into the spread of Christianity in Japan.

I know personally, as a non-religious person, that I always look suspiciously on those who stand outside of the stations looking to pass out pamphlets about religion. Or when I saw on a train some foreign missionaries with the younger male of the group talking to a cute girl on the train. At first it seemed like flirtation and I'm sure she perceived it like that as well but then he started selling to her God like some sort of traveling cosmetics salesman. This always feels like deception to me, even as (or maybe because?) a foreigner who was raised in the US and sometimes attended my friend's Bible study class when I slept over at her house. I feel like religion should be something you feel, not sold.

So reading these books that shows how a Japanese person could become swayed by God is always interesting even if I still keep a deceptive eye towards it. Particularly since in this book it makes these religious followers seem like highly moral and perfect people when in reality, most religious followers live in the very sin they are supposed to be against. So it's still a little deceptive but it's an interesting look into this part of history.

22thorold
Modifié : Avr 16, 2018, 4:36 am

>19 alvaret: ...and not quite by coincidence, since I picked it out from the list in >5 lilisin: that happens to be the book I was reading yesterday as well! Another sensei-novel...

Strange weather in Tokyo (2001; English 2012) by Hiromi Kawakami (Japan, 1958- ), translated by Allison Markin Powell (USA)
(original English title: The briefcase)

  

Tsukiko, a Tokyo office-worker in her late thirties, is drawn into conversation by the elderly man drinking sake next to her in a neighbourhood bar - it turns out that he's her former high-school Japanese literature teacher. The two of them don't seem to have much in common - they're thirty years apart in age, and Tsukiko was never a good student and still has a deaf ear for classical poetry. She addresses her old teacher as "Sensei" not so much out of respect but rather because she can't remember his name at first. But they somehow drift into being companionable drinking acquaintances, then friends, then (after many quarrels about unimportant things) discover that they really need each other's company.

This is a very engaging, delicate-but-funny (occasionally even surrealistic) May-to-December romance and a commentary on modern urban loneliness, but I think Kawakami is also enjoying herself pulling the reader's leg a bit - while Tsukiko is to all appearances a classic western chick-lit character, the detail of the story is obsessively Japanese to the point of self-parody - the over-specified food, the discussions about the correct way to pour sake, the activities Tsokiko and Sensei share (mushroom-hunting, a calligraphy exhibition, a vegetable market, a hot-springs inn, a pachinko parlour, a passionate night of octopus-related haiku-composition...). And then there's the odd figure of Sensei's presumably-dead wife, as subversively odd as Sensei is conservatively old-fashioned. There's definitely a bit more going on here than an unlikely love-affair!

23thorold
Avr 16, 2018, 5:27 am

A totally trivial thing, really, but something I find oddly disconcerting is never being quite sure how Asian name conventions work. Probably quite simple once you know the pattern, or if you only encounter Japanese names in Japanese, Chinese names in Chinese, etc., but when they appear in an English context and you sometimes get family name first, sometimes given name first and don't know enough to recognise which is which, it gets quite confusing. I know this confusion applies to Asians dealing with westerners as well - I got quite used to my counterparts from China and Korea addressing me as "Mister Mark" (and the same sort of problem applies to Westerners who have subtly different conventions, e.g. the Spanish, Icelanders, and Hungarians...).

But it gets really silly when the author is referred to on the book jacket as Kansuke Naka and in the introduction as Naka Kansuke...

24alvaret
Avr 16, 2018, 3:21 pm

>22 thorold:
Interesting, I don't know enough about Japanese culture to know what's typically Japanese, let alone when it's over-played but that makes sense.

25thorold
Avr 17, 2018, 3:38 am

>24 alvaret: I'm guessing, of course, but my feeling was that if it all sounds cliché-Japanese to me, it would do so even more to a (present day) Japanese reader.

A couple more I've read over the last day or two:

You could call this another Sensei story, although in this case the Sensei-pupil relationship was not in the book but was instrumental in getting it published...

The silver spoon : memoir of a boyhood in Japan (serial 1913-15, book 1922, English 2015) by Kansuke Naka (Japan, 1885-1965), translated by Hiroaki Sato (Japan, USA, 1948-), illustrated by Sumiko Yano

  

Hiroaki Sato is a distinguished Japanese poet and translator. He's lived mainly in the US since the 1960s and has taught at various American universities.

Kansuke Naka was a student of Natsume Sōseki, and it was Sōseki's influence and support that led to Naka's childhood memoir first being published as a serial in Asahi Shinbun in 1913 (part I) and 1915 (part II). Publication in book form followed in 1922, after Sōseki's death, and from the 1930s on the memoir gradually became established as a Japanese favourite. Sato tells us in his introduction that it reached a cumulative total of a million sales in Japan in 2006. Reading between the lines, it looks as though Sato must be at least partly to blame for the long delay before the appearance of an English translation - he started working on it in the late sixties and first published some excerpts from the work-in-progress in 1972...

Naka writes about his childhood in Meiji-era suburban Tokyo (the 1880s and 90s). His father belonged to the "gentry" class, but was not especially well off - he started off as an estate administrator, and under the new régime went into business with his former feudal lord. Young Kansuke was a sickly child (as he tells us every other page or so, throughout the book), and was obviously rather too much fussed-over by the aunt who acted as his nanny. But he describes very charmingly the life of those times, when popular culture was still struggling to assimilate the changes being imposed on it. There's a lot about Buddhist festivals, fairs, entertainments, street-life, school, and about the normal preoccupations of childhood - toys, games, friends and playmates, etc.

A lot of the emphasis of the book seems to be Naka's desire to undermine the idea that Japaneseness necessarily revolves around nationalism and militarism - we have to laugh at wimpy little Kansuke re-enacting the 16th century sword fights from his story books in desperate hand-to-hand combat with his elderly aunt, and everyone in the book who embodies any kind of macho martial spirit - school bullies, a jingoistic teacher, Kansuke's big brother - is made to seem foolish. Flowers, insects, Buddhism, painting and poetry are clearly much more important. Sumiko Yano's drawings of cute little figures in kimonos flying kites almost manage to push this over into kitsch, but the genuine feeling and modesty of Naka's writing just about manages to save it.

26lilisin
Modifié : Jan 13, 2020, 12:44 am

>24 alvaret:, >25 thorold:

But the fact of the matter is that the activities in the book are not cliche in terms of the Japanese reader. TV programs here are very education-oriented and very look-at-how-wonderful-Japan-is-oriented which means constant shows traveling around Japan investigating it's traditions, it's food and it's "natural beauty". So while these tasks might seem cliche, they are still activities that the modern Japanese person might do and focus on. It is very important to know how to correctly pour sake to avoid rudeness; Japanese are constantly spending their weekend vacations at onsen (hot springs); mushroom picking is a great activity for kids; and while modern Japanese might no longer do haiku compositions (I haven't reached that part of the book - I'm just at them arriving at the inn), they might spend a fun moment making puns around the word octopus. So when I'm reading this book it seems all very much like a very plausible romance here.

>23 thorold:

Fortunately a lot of current translations have a translator's note now where the translator will state preferred name order and will note whether or not they have decided to leave in Japanese words.

27thorold
Avr 17, 2018, 4:29 am

>26 lilisin: Thanks - I was hoping you'd comment. So I was probably imagining it.

A Mishima I hadn't read that I spotted in the library:

After the banquet (1960, English 1963) by Yukio Mishima (Japan, 1925-1970), translated by Donald Keene (US, Japan, 1922-)

  

Mishima was of course the Japanese writer best known outside Japan before Murakami came along, far eclipsing the two Nobel laureates. I've taken a lot of pleasure from those of his books that I've read so far (Forbidden colours, Confessions of a mask, The sailor who fell from grace with the sea), but I'm a little queasy about enjoying the work of a writer who dedicated himself to martial arts and ended his career in a futile attempt at a right-wing coup directly after putting the finishing touch to his magnum opus. I think I need to read more about him before getting into that discussion, though...

Donald Keene is a noted Japanese scholar and an emeritus professor at Columbia, where he taught for 50 years. He moved to Japan and took on Japanese citizenship in 2011.

After the banquet (1960) falls about a third of the way through Mishima's impressively-long list of books - the fact that it appeared in English only a couple of years after its original Japanese publication is an indication of Mishima's reputation at the time. It's basically a political satire in form: a self-made businesswoman marries a gentlemanly, old-style politician and engages herself on his behalf in an election campaign full of dirty tricks on both sides. Mishima evidently made it a little too realistic, as the former foreign minister Hachiro Arita (who had just fought an election in rather similar circumstances) successfully sued him for invasion of privacy.

It feels rather old-fashioned as a novel, because of the way Mishima keeps his distance from both the main characters, showing us what they are thinking and feeling indirectly and mostly through externals - clothes, physical settings, food, weather. We aren't allowed to sympathise too closely either with Kazu's frenetic need to drive events or with Noguchi's self-deceiving ethical stance, but we do get to see how they fail to communicate with each other almost from the beginning of the story. We do very clearly see Mishima's absolute contempt for the way Japan's post-war political machine operated in an environment free of any sort of ideological commitment, driven only by self-interest, cronyism and hard cash. He doesn't really need to spell out where they learnt that from, but there are a couple of significant passing mentions of US military bases. Probably the closest we come to a genuine emotion in the book is in Kazu's (doomed) desire to anchor her anomalous life within the norms of Japanese society, as symbolised by her aspiration to be buried in Noguchi's family tomb.

Probably not a major work, but interesting, anyway.

28lilisin
Avr 19, 2018, 3:58 am

>27 thorold:

At the rate you are reading you'll be an expert in Japanese literature before the rest of us have a chance to read another book!

Mishima is an author I can't seem to form an opinion on. I also enjoyed The Sailor to an extent but couldn't finish Sun and Steel, although I find that men tend to prefer that book over women.

Since you mention Donald Keane, I do recommend another Donald, Donald Richie's The Inland Sea as a great travelogue of 1970s (or so) Japan. (I get Keane and Richie confused all the time; I swear they are the same person.) And since I'm recommending a travelogue, I can't not also recommend Alan Booth's The Road to Sata. If you want insight into rural Japan, you get it all with that book! And such humor and splendid writing.

29thorold
Avr 19, 2018, 9:08 am

>28 lilisin: Don’t worry, I’ll have exhausted our library’s selection of Japanese authors in English soon enough...

I’d already taken note of The roads to Sata from the old thread. Sounds very interesting.

30thorold
Avr 20, 2018, 8:32 am

And another modern classic:

The sound of the mountain (serialised 1949-1954; English 1970) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972), translated by Edward Seidensticker (US, 1921-2007)

  

Kawabata was the first Japanese Nobel laureate in literature. He was associated with the "Shinkankakuha" (new impressions) movement of the inter-war years, reacting against both naturalism and politically-inspired writing. He was also a close friend of Mishima.

Seidensticker was another great Japanese scholar from the US. He was associated with various Japanese and US universities; towards the end of his career he taught at Columbia together with Donald Keene. (I have to be careful what I say here, because I remember Seidensticker's name chiefly from one of the bloodiest battles in the Great Geisha War that took up so much of the first RG Japan thread...)

The sound of the mountain is a slow-moving, lyrical account of a couple of years in the life of a middle-class family living in the historic small town of Kamakura a few years after the end of the war. Shingo, a businessman in his early sixties, is watching rather helplessly whilst just about everything he counts on is slowly crumbling away around him. His mind and body aren’t what they used to be, his son and daughter are both going through difficult patches in their marriages, his own marriage has gone stale, his friends are gradually dying off, and he can’t even take the same pleasure in nature, poetry and the harmonies of Japanese society and religion that he used to. Even the one thing that really does give him pleasure — his close friendship with his daughter-in-law — is a source of guilt to him when he sees that he may be holding her back from resolving the problems she has with her wayward husband.

Despite its very restrained, formal Japanese style, it’s not difficult to identify with Kawabata’s account of the fears and uncertainties that go with approaching old age in a time of destabilised social conditions. Kawabata isn’t known as political and historical writer, but the story here clearly is centred in the particular historical moment when he was writing, with frequent references to current newspaper stories or to people who have been damaged by the war in one way or another.

31Dilara86
Avr 20, 2018, 10:55 am

Les deux épouses by Chung So-Sung, also spelled Jung Soseong and Jeong So-seong, translated by Kim Jin-Young and Jean-Paul Desgoutte



Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: South-Korean
Original language: Korean
Translated into: French
Location: North and South Korea


Although Chung So-Sung is a prolific author and seems fairly well-known in Korea, I’d never heard of him before stumbling upon Les deux épouses at the library the other day. As far as I can see, this is his only novel available in translation. You can even read it (or skim it) online, on the translator’s website, if you are so inclined: link

There’s something very old-fashioned about this book. It could have been written in the nineteenth century rather than in 1999. It’s a straightforward novel with a very linear plot and a single point of view. Things happen to the hero and the secondary characters, they make their way across a country in the throes of a deadly civil war, they are separated, then their paths cross again... The two wives of the title are transparently North and South Korea. They get jostled from man to man – or should I say owner to owner? (it’s quite grim in a lot of places) – and are both loved by the book’s main character, Chul Woo. One stays in the North, one ends up in the South, having failed to reach Japan. Despite the title, the wives are definitely not main characters: they’re ciphers and have no psychological depth. You read the book for its descriptions of Korean culture, history and geography, or because you’re taken in by this rollercoaster of an adventure. I feel it was a good primer on Korea, and wonder whether some of the information was put in for Western readers: there was quite a bit of background historical information, complete with names, explanations and dates, which I assume Koreans would not need. It was a bit didactic, but I was very grateful for it and for the map on the inside front cover. They were very useful to me and a lot less disruptive than looking stuff up on Wikepedia, which I would have had to do otherwise.

32thorold
Avr 23, 2018, 4:08 am

Technically a book by a Japanese writer, but not a very obviously Japanese one:

Etüden im Schnee (2014; Memoirs of a polar bear) by Yōko Tawada (Japan, Germany, 1960- )

  

Poet, novelist and literary critic Yōko Tawada grew up in Tokyo. She studied Russian and German literature in Tokyo, Hamburg and Zürich, and has lived in Germany, where she has won numerous literary awards, since 1982. She writes in both German (as in the case of this book) and Japanese, with a long list of publications in both languages. Several of her books, including this one, have been translated into English.

Etüden im Schnee is - amongst other things - a book about three (polar) bears and a little girl. But it's the magic-realist three bears novel that you might imagine Günter Grass, Angela Carter and Richard Adams getting together to write. Part one is narrated by the grandmother bear, who is writing her memoirs in between riding a tricycle in a Russian circus; part two is a joint effort by the East German mother bear Toska and her circus trainer Barbara, and part three is again a bear's-eye-view narrated by a slightly-fictionalised version of the greatest real polar-bear-celebrity of our times, Knut of the Berlin Zoo. There's also a guest appearance by a well-known US musician. Although it touches on World War II, the division and reunification of Germany, climate change, and other big topics, this isn't really a political novel - its real focus is on the relationship between people and animals. Tawada tries to get past the anthropomorphism and sentimentality to dig into what is really going on when people interact with animals. Interesting, beautifully written, and technically very ingenious, but I don't know if the result is really worth the effort.

The only obviously Japanese thing about this book was the use of coloured printed paper (with Arctic motifs) for dividers between the chapters, which I thought was a rather nice touch. Less successful was the idea of setting the entire text in Futura. I can't see what that was supposed to achieve - it is a typeface that really doesn't look good when it's packed together to fill a page.

33thorold
Avr 23, 2018, 11:44 am

Another bit of background: Five modern Japanese novelists (2003) by Donald Keene - handy thumbnail bios of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Kōbō Abe and Ryutaro Shiba, all of whom he knew personally. Review in my CR thread.

34thorold
Avr 24, 2018, 4:02 am

...and another very quick read:

The housekeeper and the professor (2003) by Yōko Ogawa (Japan, 1962- ) translated by Stephen Snyder (USA)

  

Yōko Ogawa has won a number of major Japanese literary prizes since the 1990s. Several of her books have been made into films and/or translated.

Stephen Snyder has translated books by a number of important Japanese writers, including Kenzaburo Oe and Ryu Murakami.

A charming, subtle, little story about a young single mother who finds herself looking after a retired professor of number theory. As a result of a car accident, the professor has lost his short-term memory, and is unable to recall anything since 1976 if it happened more than eighty minutes ago. Despite this, the woman and her ten-year-old son somehow become close to the old man and learn to share his passion for numbers and for baseball.

Ogawa's butterfly-technique makes this book very attractive to read, but you come out at the end feeling that you haven't really learnt very much about any of the big themes of the book. The maths is what you already know about popular themes like prime numbers and Fermat's last theorem, the baseball probably only makes sense if you're a sports fan, and all you discover about the professor's peculiar mental condition is that it must be very distressing not to be able to recognise the people who matter to you in life: Empathy-lite.

35thorold
Avr 25, 2018, 11:09 am

Tanizaki sounded like the most interesting of Keene's five novelists that I hadn't got to yet. I read two of the three (short) novels he wrote as newspaper serials in the productive year 1928:

Some prefer nettles (serial 1928-9; English 1955) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965), translated by Edward Seidensticker (US, 1921-2007)

In black and white (serial 1928; English 2017) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965), translated by Phyllis I. Lyons (US)


   

Phyllis Lyons is an emeritus professor in Asian languages at Northwestern University. See above for Edward Seidensticker.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki started out as a real bad-boy writer, dropping out of Tokyo University and financing his exploration of Tokyo's bars and brothels by whatever he could make by dashing off a story here and there. He was besotted with all things western, and - as both Keene and Seidensticker note - furiously pursuing his sexual fantasy of an ideal (un-Japanese) cruel and dominating mistress. After the 1923 earthquake he moved out of Tokyo to live in the Kansai region (Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka), where he started to (re-)discover and learn to appreciate the Japanese cultural values he'd been urging people to sweep away only a few years before. By the time Keene and Seidensticker met him in the fifties, he had become a respected model of the cultured, conservative, Japanese old gentleman.

Some prefer nettles is one of the best-known of Tanizaki's pre-war works. Kaname and Misako feel that their marriage has run its course - Misako is having an affair, Kaname visits "western" brothels - but they can't quite make themselves take the decision to divorce. They both cultivate a westernised, "Tokyo" attitude to life, and are mildly amused by the way Misako's widowed father is immersing himself and his compliant young mistress, O-Hisa in every kind of tradition. But Kaname is captivated, despite himself, when his father-in-law invites them to an Osaka puppet theatre, to the extent that he later goes with him and O-Hisa to an even more authentic (and uncomfortable) performance on Awaji island.

Witty, complicated, and very engaging, even if the unresolved ending is a bit frustrating for anyone used to the way well-plotted western novels work. It would be fun to read this side-by-side with Evelyn Waugh's A handful of dust, written at about the same time and with a very similar plot situation, and a parallel sort of tug-of-war between the modern and the traditional, but resolved in quite a different way.

In black and white, also written in 1928, ran as a successful serial a few months before Some prefer nettles and Quicksand, but for some reason was never re-issued in book form until it appeared in Tanizaki's collected works. It seems to have been largely overlooked until the recent appearance of Phyllis Lyons's English translation.

Mizuno is a struggling young writer living in a Tokyo boarding house and in debt with every bar, whore-house and pawnbroker in the area. He's already sabotaged his marriage by writing a string of wife-murder stories, and now another story, just sent off to the magazine at the last possible moment, looks likely to get him into worse trouble.

His first-person narrator in the story describes getting away with the perfect crime, the motiveless murder of Codama, a man whose link to the narrator is so distant that no-one would suspect his involvement. Unfortunately, in his haste Mizuno has written "Cojima" in several places where he meant "Codama", and he realises that Cojima is in fact a slight acquaintance he must have had in mind whilst he was describing Codama. This mistake will obviously cause embarrassment to him and the magazine if the story is read by anyone who knows Cojima, but Mizuno is worried about something else - what if there's a "Shadow Man" out there somewhere who is out to get him? If Cojima is now murdered, suspicion will automatically fall on Mizuno.

To forestall this, Mizuno works out when the murder would have to take place, and puts in place a comically complex plan to ensure that he is not left without a convincing alibi. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong...

Apparently Tanizaki wrote this story in part as a follow-up to a high-profile debate he had had in 1927 with the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about the relative merits of modernist stream-of-consciousness "I-novels" and tightly-structured plots - it's a kind of literary pastiche in which Mizuno's position as a stream-of-consciousness antihero forces him to craft the literary tools for his own destruction. But it also works well as a crime thriller in its own right, albeit with a rather black kind of humour.

36lilisin
Avr 25, 2018, 9:09 pm

I've been sick this week (had a fever yesterday that forced me to sleep from 6pm to 6am this morning) and I leave tomorrow for Hawaii on vacation so continue to read without me and I'll be back in two weeks to comment although I doubt I will have read anything as it's a family vacation. :)

37thorold
Modifié : Avr 29, 2018, 9:34 am

While we're without adult supervision, I'll slip in two more books by western writers about Japan...

Mishima : ou la vision du vide (1980; Mishima: a vision of the void) by Marguerite Yourcenar (France, Belgium, US, 1903-1987)

  

Novelist and essayist Marguerite Yourcenar was a distinguished French intellectual and all-round LGBT icon, probably best remembered for her historical novel Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951 - "often bought and rarely finished"). She was born in Belgium, with a French father, and moved to the US (Maine) with her partner Grace Frick in the 1930s (she became a US citizen in 1947). In 1980, the same year as her Mishima essay was published, she became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française - there have only been 7 others since.

Yourcenar's novella-length essay on Mishima is largely an attempt to answer the question "why did he kill himself?" in a way that would make sense to a western reader. She gives a brief sketch of Mishima's background and upbringing (covering much the same ground as Keene), then looks in some detail at a number of his works, in particular The Golden Pavilion, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy and the 1966 film Patriotism, based on his story of the same title, in which Mishima played an officer who commits seppuku after the failed 1936 army coup. Yourcenar discusses Mishima's own "attempted coup" in rather more detail than Keene does and makes it fairly clear that we should understand it as an aesthetic rather than a political gesture - from the way she describes it, Mishima can't have had any serious belief that he would be able to convince the Japanese army to mutiny and restore imperial power, but for reasons of his own, he needed to be seen making the gesture. However, she reminds us that equally quixotic acts of revolution have succeeded in overturning apparently stable governments elsewhere (at the time of writing she must have been thinking of Iran).

This often reads more as a literary work than as a critical essay - Yourcenar's instinct as a story-teller gets the better of her sometimes, and the plot-summaries of Mishima's works almost turn into full-scale re-imaginings. And she seems to have been almost as turned on as Mishima by the gruesome details of disembowelment and decapitation. In the final section she contrasts the fine Buddhist aesthetic of the closing image of the Tetralogy, the vision of the empty sky, with the physical reality of a photograph of Mishima's and Morita's detached heads. A clear and brutal reminder of the unromantic ugliness of death, but somehow I couldn't help thinking of the imagined decapitation in The Mikado, where Pooh-Bah relates that the detached head "...stood on its neck, with a smile well-bred, / And bowed three times to me." Yourcenar probably wasn't a G&S buff.

38thorold
Modifié : Avr 29, 2018, 7:28 am

...and on a much-needed lighter note:
(This book was favourably mentioned by two or three people in the original 2008 Japan thread)

The roads to Sata (1985) by Alan Booth (UK, Japan, 1946-1993)

  

(Sorry about the disembodied hand! This was the only half-decent photo of Booth that Google could find, the hand belongs to the even-drunker writer Timothy Harris who had to be cropped out of it...)

Alan Booth grew up in Leytonstone in the East End of London. An early love of Shakespeare led him to embark on a career as a stage director, but this was derailed when he went on a study-visit to Japan in 1970 and was so captivated by Japanese culture that he never came back. He reinvented himself as a writer and journalist in Tokyo, working mostly for English-language media, acquired a Japanese wife and a very good knowledge of Japanese language and literature. Sadly, he died very young, in 1993. Apart from The Roads to Sata, he wrote one other travel book, the posthumously published Looking for the lost, about a journey in search of two Japanese poets. A collection of Booth's journalism, edited by his friend Timothy Harris, has recently been published in Japan as This great stage of fools.

The Roads to Sata describes a journey Booth made in the summer and autumn of 1977, walking from Cape Soya in the north of Hokkaido to Cape Sata at the southern extreme of the Japanese archipelago, a distance of some 3000 km, which he covered in the space of about four months. Which probably makes this one of the longest pub-crawls in history - the quantity of alcohol consumed in the course of the journey is quite impressive, even by 1970s standards. You often have to wonder how he managed to get up in the morning and carry on walking...

Boozing apart, this is an interesting and very entertaining account of the bits of Japan you normally don't hear very much about.
Booth is a contemporary of people like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, and he shares something of their habit of commenting acerbically on the things he doesn't like. But he is far from being an ignorant gaijin who has parachuted in from elsewhere to make fun of the locals - after seven years in the country he understands Japanese history and culture and knows what he's looking at, and he's more than capable of holding an intelligent conversation with the people he meets - even if he is liable to start singing Japanese folksongs at them at the smallest provocation. His irritation at the thoughtless xenophobia he keeps encountering (the people who assume he can't understand Japanese even when they are talking to him in that language; the schoolboys who treat him as a circus freak; the inns that are mysteriously fully-booked when he appears) is always tempered by his assurances that not all Japanese are like that, and that even the ones who are like that can often be won over after a couple of beers...

This probably isn't a very useful guidebook in practical terms, but it does help you get Japanese geography straight in your mind. Obviously, it's all describing how things were forty years ago, much will have changed in the meantime, but some things (like the climate and the stark contrast between rural and city life) probably haven't. Booth's type of walking, mostly over motor roads and covering distances of around 30km a day, isn't something you would necessarily want to reproduce either. On the whole, when you find yourself trudging along over mile after mile of asphalt with cars roaring past you, you start asking yourself why you aren't at least on a bicycle...

39chlorine
Avr 29, 2018, 3:57 pm

Count me among the Japanese illiterates!

I've read a few japanese books over the years but I mostly found them to be hard to relate to. Exceptions are 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami which I really liked. Also, earlier this year I read Cristallisation secrète by Yoko Ogawa and I was captured by the atmosphere. Interestingly (at least for me ;) both novels have a magical realism aspect. For French listeners, Yoko Ogawa was very recently interviewed on RFI and the podcast is still available.

I have one book on my TBR fitting this quarter's theme, also by Ogawa: Les paupières (the eyelids), a short story collection.

I've also read one Corean book in 2016: Monsieur Han by Sok-Yong Hwang but I didn't really like it.

>23 thorold: Regarding Asian names: I was in Vietnam the last two weeks and I gave a presentation about some work that was in collaboration with (among others) a vietnamese colleague (who was present at the talk) and a colleague who was born in Vietnam, has a vietnamese name but is French. I saw that the vietnamese speakers at the conference placed the family name first when they referenced vietnamese colleagues. I asked about it to my colleague who was present at the conference and she said that I should place her family name first because she's vietnamese, but place it last for our other colleague, because he's French. That felt a bit strange to me! :)

40thorold
Mai 1, 2018, 6:33 am

This is another one where RebeccaNYC went before me, and I don't really have anything of substance to add to her review:

Sanshirō (Serial 1908; new translation 2009) by Natsume Sōseki (Japan, 1867-1916), translated by Jay Rubin (USA, 1941- )

  

Jay Rubin is another American Japanese scholar, who taught at various institutions, most recently Harvard - amongst other things, he is the main English translator of Haruki Murakami's books.

Sanshirō seems to be one of Sōseki's most popular novels, to the extent that its protagonist now has a pond at Tokyo University and a Kyushu railway station named after him (which presumably makes him the Japanese Waverley!). It's not hard to see why people like it - it's a warm, affectionate account of a provincial young man's first term as a student in the big city. Not a coming-of-age novel, more a putting-off-growing-up story, really, but full of charming detail and a very convincing account of what it's like to be a shy young man suddenly confronted with the choices of adult life (none of which Sanshirō chooses to take, of course...). He almost falls in love, he almost gets into money problems, he almost gets involved in campus politics, but he's still somehow protected from all those things by a cloud of youthful innocence. Much less twee than it sounds, and very enjoyable.
Sanshirō went to the joint lecture for all literature students from five to six o'clock. It was too dark for taking notes, too early to turn on the lights. This was the hour when the depths of the great zelkova tree outside the high, narrow windows began to turn black. Inside the hall, the faces of the students and the lecturer were equally indistinct, which made everything somehow mystical, like eating a bean jam bun in the dark. He found it strangely pleasant that he could not understand the lecture. As he listened, cheek in hand, his senses became dulled, and he began to drift off. This was the very thing, he felt, that made lectures worthwhile.

One interesting feature of the Rubin translation is that it marks the breaks between the instalments from when the novel was originally published as a newspaper serial - it makes you realise how different it must have been experiencing this 230-page novel over a period of four months in chunks of 2-3 pages, rather than galloping through it in a couple of days as most modern readers would.

Haruki Murakami's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition is a warm and charming account of Murakami's time as a struggling young writer, so poor that at times he was even obliged to resort to reading books from his wife's shelves, but doesn't actually tell us anything relevant about Sanshirō. Fortunately Rubin compensates for this lacuna in a "Translator's Note" that serves as the real introduction, filling us in on the historical background and the real campus politics behind the story.

41Dilara86
Modifié : Mai 1, 2018, 2:56 pm

Tableau de Sabbat (The Shaman Sorceress in English) by Kim Dong-Ni/ Kim Tong-ni, translated by Jean-Paul Desgoutte and Kim Jin-Young






When googling Tableau de Sabbat to see whether I’d like it, I found that I could read the whole novella online, on the translator’s website: http://jean-paul.desgoutte.pagesperso-orange.fr/livres/sabbat/sabbat.htm. So I did!

The author, Kim Tong-ni (I’m using this spelling because according to Wikipedia, it is the author’s preferred transliteration) was a Korean writer from an impoverished aristocratic family in Gyeongju, in South-East Korea. He was married to another writer/poet called Son Sohui, who I’d very much like to read, if only her work was available in translation. His mother was a Christian of Confucean background. He had a strong interest in all the spiritual paths he encountered: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and traditional Korean Shamanism.

The Shaman Sorceress of the title is a traditional village witch/healer. She lives with her mute daughter, a painter, in a derelict cottage. One day, her first-born who had been sent away to a Buddhist monastery comes back. He has converted to Christianity. As you can well imagine, things do not go well.

The novella’s plot could have been more subtle and better developed, I suppose, but I enjoyed Kim Tong-ni’s poetic style and his beautiful descriptions. I’ll probably be looking for more of his work, especially if they’re also translated by Jean-Paul Desgoutte and Kim Jin-Young.

42chlorine
Modifié : Mai 5, 2018, 2:34 am

>41 Dilara86: I currently need good writing style after several books not so well written, so I may check this novella out. Thanks for the link!

I have a question after noticing that Yôko Ogawa's books seem to be much more translated to French than to English: does anybody have an intuition on how much of Japanese literature is translated to other languages? Are some countries more eager to read it than others, and if so, why? Or if some specific authors' audience varies from country to country, is it indicative of differences between these authors, or just caused by flukes in editorial choices?

43thorold
Modifié : Mai 6, 2018, 10:51 am

>42 chlorine: does anybody have an intuition on how much of Japanese literature is translated to other languages?

I was wondering about that, as well. It's pretty hard to compare accurately, but the general opinion seems to be that French, German, Scandinavian and Dutch publishers and readers are a lot more open to translations than (mainstream) British and American ones. But you get little temporary peaks of interest generated by very popular writers, Nobel awards, successful films, and the like. There was obviously a peak like that for Japanese authors in America in the 50s and 60s, started by people like Keene and Seidensticker who learnt Japanese in the military, and kept going into the early 70s by Kawabata's Nobel and the Mishima effect. (But only Mishima really had much impact in the UK.) And there looks to be a bit of spin-off at the moment from Murakami's success.

---

This was the first of the Japanese books I've read so far where I felt that the translation was really getting in the way.

Masks (1958; English 1983) by Fumiko Enchi (Japan, 1905-1986), translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (US, 1948- )

  

Fumiko Enchi was recognised rather late in life as one of the most important Japanese women authors of the 20th century, but before the 1950s she had a hard time getting her work published. As well as fiction, she's known for her plays and for a modern Japanese version of The tale of Genji.

Juliet Winters Carpenter teaches at a women's college in Kyoto and has translated books by many important Japanese writers.

Masks is a tricky book to get to grips with, and I'm not sure that I really did it justice reading it during a long train journey. The present-day (i.e. 1950s) foreground middle-class adultery plot seems to be a reworking of an episode from The tale of Genji (the story of the Rokujō lady), as carefully explained in a scholarly essay by one of the characters, and there are all kinds of undercurrents of spiritualism and of shamanism-as-matriarchal-power going on.

I found the language of the book, as translated by Carpenter, flat and unappealing (tone-deaf, even), rather in the idiom of a very forgettable modern American novel, without much sense that this was Japan in the 1950s, and this made it harder to take the leap into engaging with the supernatural side of the story, which takes away a lot of the point of the book. But there obviously is a lot of interesting stuff to dig out if you can get past the dull language, in particular the complex characters of the two women at the centre of the story.

44cindydavid4
Modifié : Mai 7, 2018, 2:47 am

Somehow missed the start of this thread. Ive always been interested in Japanese culture, but my knowlege of it comes from what I have learned in movies and from travelogues or tangently from my reading of Chinese history.
I have read some books (Shogun) but I don't remember reading work by Japanese authors. However I am a collector of children's illustrated books from 1890-1929, and years ago discovered the amazing work of Hasegawa Takejirō and his collection of Japanese Fairy Tales. These are exquisite books, hand printed on rice paper. The stories themselves are a great door into the culture.

One fiction that might work here is by a favorite author David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Jacob De Zoet has been sent to a Dutch trade outpost in 1800's Japan. The story's description of the culture clash between the two peoples, and the secret society that existed in that time period in Japan was very interesting

I really know nothing about Korean culture, just a little of the history picked up here and there. I'd love to read some good general histories, and a novel or two by a Korean author. I need to go back to the beginning and see what I can find!

45cindydavid4
Mai 6, 2018, 10:12 pm

Oh another one in my collection is Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales ed Grace James, illus Warwich Goble

46Tess_W
Modifié : Mai 7, 2018, 8:11 am

My first real read in this category was Aoko Matsuda's The Girl Who is Getting Married. (Translated by Angus Turvill. This book was a short novella (39 pages) and takes place within the time it takes a person to walk up five flights of stairs. An unknown narrator reminisces about their relationship with the girl that is getting married (never referred to as anything else). The further up the stairs she goes the more the story falls apart! Very clever! This novella was part of the collection of Eight New Voices of Japan.


47vpfluke
Modifié : Juin 5, 2018, 12:31 am

I forgot that we are reading Japanese books this quarter, and just wrote down the 7 Japanese novels I have read over the years for a person in my yoga class who grew up in Japan as an expatriate. Maybe I should post my list.
I just started an 8th novel, The Great Passage by Shion Miura, which is excellent. It is set in a publishing company, which among other books developes new dictionaries. This is a somewhat low-key book, but I see myself in the chief character, so I have to follow it through to see how he turns out. Most of the characters love words, and do discuss meanings and shades of meaning of Japanese words. I have this book in a Kindle version wheb it was free for about 3 days.

48Dilara86
Mai 14, 2018, 2:44 pm

Histoire couleur terre Vol.1 (The Color of Earth) by Kim Dong-Hwa, translated by Kette Amoruso





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Korean
Original language: Korean
Translated into: French
Location: A village in Korea


This is a coming-of-age story. Ihwa (Ehwa in the English version, I think) is a young girl growing up with her widowed mother in the Korean countryside, in – I would guess – the first half of the twentieth century. This beautifully-drawn manhwa (Korean manga) is an homage to the author’s mother and grandmother. The landscapes, and the backgrounds in general, are exquisitely detailed. The author is clearly on the side of gender equality: he shows how women are the victims of sexual double standards, for example. Having said that, I am slightly uneasy about his “lense”. It feels a bit inauthentic, voyeuristic and dare I say creepy? He might be projecting his sexual feelings and fantasies onto his characters. And of course, the parallel between nature (flowers in particular) and the character’s romantic/sexual awakening is a bit of a cliché. As is too often the case in graphic novels, the art is great, but the content lacks depth and subtlety. While I didn’t regret the time spent reading this book, I will not be borrowing the other two in the trilogy.

49Dilara86
Mai 14, 2018, 4:10 pm

Poissons en eaux troubles by Susumu Katsumata, translated by Miyako Slocombe





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Japanese
Original language: Japanese
Translated into: French
Location: Japan


This book is a collection of Susumu Katsumata’s mangas. They were written in the seventies and the eighties. The first two are about workers (and a giant squid) in a nuclear power station. The next ones feature Japanese supernatural beings called kappa and tanuki. Finally, there is a series of semi-autobiographical stories about the author’s youth and his mother’s life (she had him out of wedlock and died when he was 6). I must say that I nearly gave up about a third of the way through, but I’m glad I pushed on because I liked the autobiographical stuff better. If you like dark, depressing stories about the environment and heroes who lose the will to live, this is a book for you. It wasn’t entirely my cup of tea, but I definitely recognise Susumu Katsumata’s artistry and distinctive voice and vision.

50thorold
Mai 17, 2018, 7:03 am

Kawabata is a writer I probably wouldn't have got around to without this theme-read, and I'm very glad I did.

Beauty and Sadness (1964; English 1975) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972) translated by Howard S. Hibbett (US, 1920-)

  

Howard Hibbett is yet another American scholar who came to Japanese literature through military service in World War II. He's an emeritus professor of Japanese literature at Harvard and has translated many major Japanese authors, including Tanizaki and Kawabata.

Beauty and sadness was Kawabata's last novel. The situation is a little bit like a Japanese version of Lotte in Weimar in reverse - twenty years ago, Oki published what has become his best loved and most famous novel, telling the story of a tragic, destructive love-affair between a married man and a sixteen-year-old girl. In the meantime, it's become an open secret that the girl in the story was based on Otoko, who is now a well-known painter living in Kyoto. Otoko is in a relationship with her pupil, a younger woman called Keiko. Oki spontaneously decides to visit Kyoto and look up his former lover for the first time since they broke up, and of course stirs up a lot of old and new passions in the process.

There's a lot of beautifully serene evocation of Japanese tradition and history, unexpectedly - but very effectively - set against a story of boiling passions and the unhealed harm people do to each other. And some very interesting glimpses at the complex ways that art and life intersect, both for writers and for visual artists. I particularly liked the little digressions into the physicality of the writing process, and the differences between the effect of manuscript, typescript, woodblock and movable type. And the well where the 12th century writer Fujiwara Teika is said to have drawn water for his inkstone.

There is - probably inevitably - an element of male voyeurism in the way Kawabata writes about the relationship between the two women, with rather more discussion of breasts than we really need, but there's also an intriguingly offbeat fascination with body odour (male as well as female) that you probably wouldn't find in a western novel. And - just like The sound of the mountain - we shouldn't allow all the obi-tying and bath-running to distract us from the way the story is driven by strong female characters. Another superb miniature.

51thorold
Mai 22, 2018, 9:40 am

More Kawabata (whatever happened to my good intentions to switch to Korean books at some point?):

Snow country (1935-1948; English 1956) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972) translated by Edward Seidensticker (US, 1921-2007)

  

Snow country has a complex writing history - Kawabata tinkered with it over a lengthy period from 1935 onwards, publishing bits of the story in a least five different journals in the process. It didn't appear as a complete book in its present form until 1948. (Kawabata returned to it once more at the end of his life, reworking it as one of his "palm-of-the-hand" micro-stories.)

The book relates a series of visits by an urban dilettante, Shimamura, to an obscure mountain hot-springs resort in the west of Honshu. As Seidensticker delicately explains: "The Japanese seldom goes to a hot spring for his health, and he never goes for 'the season,' as people once went to Bath or Saratoga. He may ski or view maple leaves or cherry blossoms, but his wife is usually not with him. The special delights of the hot spring are for the unaccompanied gentleman. No prosperous hot spring is without its geisha and its compliant hotel maids."

Shimamura, true to type, has left his wife and child in Tokyo (they are mentioned a couple of times in the book, but we never get to meet them) and orders up a geisha. It turns out to be a busy time, and what he gets is Komako, who when they first meet is a kind of semi-professional, "a girl who was not a geisha but who was sometimes asked to help at large parties". Shimamura is captivated by her aura of old-fashioned Japanese virtue and cleanness - "The impression the woman gave was a wonderfully clean and fresh one. It seemed to Shimamura that she must be clean to the hollows under her toes" - and starts to fall in love with his image of Komako as a simple country girl at the same time as he is physically attracted and aesthetically repelled by her occupation. The story is complicated by Shimamura's glimpses of another young woman, Yoko, whom he also instantly idealises, especially when he discovers she is in mourning for her lost lover.

Kawabata keeps feeding us little bits of description that echo Shimamura's erotic confusion: on the one side the beauty of nature and the changing seasons; on the other the hardships of life under the snow for the local people, the economic uncertainties of tourism, traditional crafts and the geisha profession. Even the insects are made to remind us that they only have the briefest of spells of being beautiful before their lives end.

This may be a geisha romance, but it's a distinctly unromantic one.

52thorold
Mai 22, 2018, 9:40 am

...and more Japanese lit "for dummies":

The pleasures of Japanese literature (1988) by Donald Keene (USA, Japan, 1922- )

  

An attractive little book, based on five extramural lectures about traditional (i.e. pre-Meiji) Japanese literature Keene gave in New York and Los Angeles in 1986-1987. They cover aesthetics, poetry (two lectures), fiction and theatre, in a very straightforward and accessible way, giving a kind of crash-course in what you really need to know about the most important forms, styles, and contexts from the 8th to the 19th century.

I picked up quite a few fairly basic concepts that I should have known about but didn't, in particular the the importance of the distinction between the roles of vernacular and Chinese writing, which has some rough parallels to the role of Latin in European literature, but had an even more direct effect in medieval Japan: the high-status language was reserved for male use, so writing in the vernacular was dominated by texts either addressed to or written by women, in particular love poetry and narrative prose, a distinction that became so entrenched that for a long time no-one felt able to write anything else in Japanese. Also, Keene digs into the way the shape of the Japanese language itself meant that only syllabic form could be used for structuring poetry - there are no stresses, only five word-endings that could make rhymes, and classical Japanese did not have long and short vowels - and how syllabic structure only really works effectively for very short forms (waka, haiku).

I didn't get quite so much out of the lecture on drama - it's probably too complex a subject even to introduce in such a short space - but at least you come out with a slightly clearer idea of what distinguishes Nō, Kabuki and Bunraku.

Useful, and very agreeable to read.

53SqueakyChu
Mai 23, 2018, 10:10 am

...delurking a bit to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread. I’ve read quite a few of these books, count contemporary Japanese fiction as my favorite reads, have dipped into contemporary Korean literature which I also like, but I’m unable to express in words what many of you do so well here. I have this thread starred to be part of my future Reading List! :)

54Dilara86
Mai 23, 2018, 12:14 pm

La péninsule aux 24 saisons (The Peninsula with 24 Seasons) by Inaba Mayumi, translated by Elisabeth Suetsugu





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Japanese
Original language: Japanese
Translated into: French
Location: A hamlet in the Shima Peninsula, Japan


This is a slow, contemplative novel about a year in a life of a middle-aged, single woman in search of a simpler life near the sea, in a small hamlet peopled by retirees and the odd holiday-home owner, in the Shima Peninsula. “Why 24 seasons?”, you might ask. The main character is given an almanac that divides the year into 24 seasons of two weeks each. This gives a good idea of the level of detail with which the narrator observes her natural surroundings, especially plants, seasons and the weather. This first-person narrative is very descriptive and evocative. The premise is not particularly original, but this was a charming novel all the same.

55lilisin
Mai 25, 2018, 2:52 am

Sorry for not being around. Since coming back from my vacation it has been particularly busy at work and as I usually only LT during work hours, I was unable to comment. The reviews have been beautiful and thoughtful and I love seeing everyone's reactions to these works.

I'm currently reading a book in Japanese called コンビニ人間 (conbini ningen) which is set to come out in English on June 12th in English as Convenience Store Woman. I'm halfway through it and really enjoying and look forward to recommending it to people if the book continues in this direction.

My vacation was in Hawaii so when I knew I'd be visiting what turned out to be the excellent Pearl Harbor memorial, I was excited at the thought of the gift shop having lots of nonfiction books and I was not disappointed. I came out with with these Japan-related ones:

Gordon W. Prange : At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
Gordon W. Prange : God's Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor
Kazuo Sakamaki : I Attacked Pearl Harbor

Since I was vacationing with my family who came in from the mainland I asked them to bring some of the unread books I left behind which included two Japanese books in translation:

Natsume Soseki : Kokoro
Kenzaburo Oe : A Personal Matter

And then at the airport book shop I stumbled upon the one Korean book I had wanted to buy but since I hadn't visited a book store I was lucky to find it in the book shop.

Han Kang : Human Acts

I'm very excited with this haul. With only a month and a week left however in the quarter read, I would be delusional to think I could read this all in that time but I'm looking forward to getting to these when the right moment comes.

56thorold
Mai 30, 2018, 11:07 am

>55 lilisin: Seven books, five weeks? Should be easy :-)
(No, I know, it's not that simple. Even I occasionally have other things to do that prevent me from reading.)

--

After the geisha-novel (>51 thorold:), what could possibly follow except a tea-ceremony-novel?

Thousand cranes (1952; English 1958) by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1899-1972), translated by Edward Seidensticker

  

Another lovely (but not exactly cheerful) Kawabata miniature, a book you can read in the time it takes to sip a couple of mugs of good strong Yorkshire tea, but will leave you sitting there a long time afterwards trying to work out what it was about...

After his parents' death, Mitani Kikuji is disconcerted to find his father's discarded ex-mistress Chikako trying to take their place and run his life for him. Especially when another, more recent ex-mistress turns up, the widow of old Mr Mitani's fellow tea-ceremony enthusiast, Mr Ota. The action of the story takes place over the course of a series of tea-drinkings, each a little less dignified and tranquil than the one before, and everything is played out in the symbolism of centuries-old drinking cups, water jugs, and other paraphernalia. The underlying theme again seems to be the alarming moral and cultural emptiness of a post-war world where it isn't possible to take refuge in the continuity of traditions any more.

57chlorine
Juin 2, 2018, 5:52 am

>56 thorold: This one seems interesting!

58chlorine
Juin 2, 2018, 5:55 am

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick was stationed as a journalist in South Korea, and documented about North Korea by travelling there (which did not bring much insight because the trips were completely controlled by the regime) and by interviewing at length North Korean escapees who came to South Korea.

She does a very good job of describing how strongly brainwashing from childhood on can influence people, and what living in an oppressive regime can be like. The book is heart-rending as a large part of it is devoted to the terrible famine of the mid-1990s. The title, Nothing to envy, comes from a patriotic song telling how North Koreans are a great nation and have nothing to envy from other countries. Mi-Ran, one of the six interviewees, was a school teacher in North Korea and sang this song to her pupils, while they were slowly starving to death around her.
It was also very interesting to read how it can be difficult for North Koreans who have escaped to the South to adapt to their new lives.

The fact that the book is centered around the lives of six people from North Korea is a very good idea: the fact that it consists of personal stories makes it compelling to read and helps the reader to relate to the feelings of the people involved, and succeeds much better IMO in giving a good insight on what living in North Korea may be like than a more impersonal book may have done.

Rating: 4*

59chlorine
Juin 2, 2018, 5:56 am

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (read in French)

This was a chore to finish. I liked the beginning, which has some magical realism elements in the style that I liked so much in 1Q84. However, this story seems to be going nowhere and I lost interest at the middle, and wanted to quit when I had only less than a hundred pages left. The only reason I didn't quit was that I take the Goodreads challenge to read 50 books a year, and since I had so few pages left I completed it for the challenge's sake. Which is admittedly not a good reason to finish this book, maybe I should drop this challenge.

Rating: 2 1/2 * (for the beginning).

60lilisin
Modifié : Juin 3, 2018, 10:35 pm

I just read my first in Japanese book this year and loved it.

This book won the famous Akutagawa Prize for new authors in 2016 and is a prize I follow with enthusiasm. I haven't yet been dissappointed with a prize winner I've read and really hope to read more. As two authors are rewarded every year (spring and fall), I have much to catch up on especially at my reading pace. The (current) jury is made of famous names that I have almost all read and are highly cherished in Japan and in translation so it makes sense that the selections are always wonderful reads.

Toshiyuki Horie
Hiromi Kawakami
Ryu Murakami
Teru Miyamoto
Yoko Ogawa
Hikaru Okuizumi
Masahiko Shimada
Nobuko Takagi
Amy Yamada

村田 沙耶香 : コンビニ人間
(Sayaka Murata: Convenience Store Woman)

This is the story of Keiko Furukura, who due to her oversimplified way of seeing the world around her realizes she is not like the others. She doesn't fit into society and doesn't understand her role. She ends up spending 18 years working at the same convenience store she joined as a part-timer in college -- and she is perfectly happy with her life there. She has a purpose there, as a working cog in human society, making sure the convenience store is run to perfection. While the employees have come and gone, she is now on store manager number 8, and the items they sell, while they are always the same, the stock has changed over the years, but she remains a constant.

However, as she has hit her mid 30s, while her coworkers praise her consistency and dedication the store, her sister Mami's (her sister's name has two potential readings and the author does not clarify which it is in the book so Mami is just one possible reading) concern for her sister's wellbeing continues to put pressure on Keiko: will Keiko not find another job; can't she be normal; won't she get married; what about children? Keiko is running out of excused to tell people as an excuse for her still working at a part-time job so when a new employee arrives at the store, she thinks she might have found a solution.

I loved so many aspects of the book that was filled with so many details and nuances that we all recognize in Japanese convenience stores, whether that be Lawson, Family Mart, 7-11, etc... And don't think this is the gas station connected 7-11 of the United States. While 7-11 is originally American, in the 80s the stores was in serious debt and was mostly bought by a Japanese investor who improved the 7-11 business model and improved on it drastically back in Japan. And since then Japan bought the rest of the American 7-11.

So while yes, you can buy food and snacks and drinks at a Japanese 7-11, you can also pay your bills, get concert tickets, pick up your delivery packages, eat healthy lunches and all done with remarkable efficiency as the employees cry out "welcome to our store" when they hear the chime of the door opening and thanking you for your purchase upon giving your change back, always over the receipt which they place in the palm of your hand. And it's of no surprise that the details of the convenience store are so perfectly portrayed as the author herself also worked in a convenience store.

But most remarkable is the book's reflections on Japanese society: the different expectations placed on men and women; how being a part of society is much more valuable than being an individual even if being an individual leads to greater happiness; how individuality is squashed early during school; society trumps happiness; age discrimination and the waste of an unused uterus. It's all there and it's all well told through the eyes of Keiko's frank and brunt manner of speaking.

All highly recommended. And it makes me happy to see that early reviews on the English book are already coming in high as the book is conveniently coming out on June 12th! Oh how I would have loved to have translated this one myself!

And on an amusing note, a new 7-11 had just opened up in my neighborhood while reading this so here's a picture.

61lilisin
Juin 3, 2018, 10:34 pm

But can we discuss the covers for a bit? The book cover selections for the Convenience Store Woman book, not a single edition to date, including the Japanese version, makes sense!

- -

American edition:
With the bright blue and pink theme, using the cute onigiri rice ball to lure potential readers in, this cover looks like it belongs to the book "Easy Japanese home cooking recipes for non-Japanese!!".

German edition:
Beautiful cover with the bright red and the very Japanese fugu blow fish but I'm not sure how it relates to the story of the individual vs Japanese society with a convenience store as the focus.

Japanese edition:
The Japanese edition I can hardly tell what it is. I can only assume the brick wall with all the weird things (for lack of another word) coming out of it is supposed to reflect the mind of the main character as it battles against the brick wall that is Japanese society but it's just not a very engaging cover and gives you no clue as to the content inside.

Call me very puzzled.

62lilisin
Juin 3, 2018, 10:58 pm

Another detail I forgot to mention.

I also really enjoyed the little detail of two of the newer employees at the convenient store having Vietnamese names and the last soon to come in employee being from Myanmar, reflecting the current immigration situation in Japan where many from Southeast Asian are coming to Japan to go to Japanese language schools and are working at convenient stores as part time jobs. This huge influx has created an abundance of articles related to the topic and it's true that every time I walk into a convenience store I'm often greeted by someone with a Chinese, Vietnamese, or Nepalese name. These details might be glossed over by people reading in translation not knowing what these little references are.

Foreign part-timers at Japan’s convenience stores rising

Debate grows over the plight of foreign staff at convenience stores in Japan

How Japan’s service industry is trying to adapt to the worst labor crunch in 25 years

The number of non-Japanese workers at convenience chains has also surged. Around 44,000 foreign nationals, including many students, were working at three major convenience store chains — Seven Eleven Japan Co. Ltd., FamilyMart Co. and Lawson Inc. — as of August, accounting for about 6 percent of all part-timers at their outlets.

It shows that “service sectors are no longer sustainable without help from foreign workers,” said Hisashi Yamada, chief senior economist at Japan Research Institute.

“The problem is that many companies see foreign workers merely as a source of cheap labor,” he added.

Japan is reluctant to accept such people officially as “immigrants.” Unskilled foreign workers in Japan often join the labor force through the back door — for example, as technical intern trainees or foreign students. And some trainees have been forced to work under harsh conditions at extremely low wages.

“Japan’s service sectors tend to think it’s always good to provide their services as cheaply as possible, and they have done so by cutting labor costs,” Yamada said. “But it’s more important to increase prices if they are confident in their services, and give the profits back to their employees.”

63Dilara86
Juin 9, 2018, 3:24 pm

Le convoi de l'eau by Akira Yoshimura, translated by Yutaka Makino





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Japanese
Original language: Japanese
Translated into: French
Location: A small, isolated village in Japan


This first-person narrative is told by a man who, when he discovers his wife was unfaithful, kills her by bashing her on the head with a log. When he gets out prison, he finds it impossible to live in the city and to resume a normal social life. He decides to work as a construction worker in an itinerant team tasked with building a dam in a remote mountainous area. They set up camp in a place overlooking an old village whose cottages have roofs that are thatched and covered with a thick layer of moss and whose people keep to themselves to an uncanny degree. Once the dam is built, the village will be at the bottom of a lake.
Harsh and violent, but also strangely poetic, just like Shipwrecks by the same author.

64lilisin
Modifié : Juin 11, 2018, 3:19 am

Sayo Masuda : Autobiography of a Geisha

I've read a few geisha books now and this was the first time visiting the onsen geisha; unlike the geisha of Kyoto who lean further to the arts side, an onsen geisha is more or less a glorified prostitute but is more interesting than a prostitute as she can also provide a bit of entertainment and flirtation. But Masuda actually doesn't spend so much time in the geisha world and instead writes a lot about her life after leaving, where she is thrust into the real world and poverty.

What makes the book interesting is Masuda herself, rather than the world of geisha, as she had to make it in life despite her illiteracy. Her strength and determination is note-worthy but I was ready to leave the book at an average three stars but bumped it up a half star due to the epilogue which allowed us to revisit Masuda in her 70s.

A good book, a fun perspective, but I wanted more insight on the onsen geisha and their customers.

Going back to >51 thorold: when thorold read Kawabata's book about onsen geisha and rereading the review, it seems like Kawabata greatly romanticizes the onsen geisha and wants to believe in their purity when Masuda's book reveals all but the contrary. I haven't read this Kawabata but it seems he almost puts the onsen geisha at the same level as Kyoto geisha. Is that just my impression or was the book really like that? Kawabata's book is even mentioned in Masuda's (although I believe it is mentioned in the translator's introduction; as Masuda was illiterate I doubt she would have read Kawabata).

65thorold
Juin 11, 2018, 2:54 pm

>64 lilisin: No, I think Kawabata has a pretty clear idea that the life of the geisha in that kind of resort is sordid, poorly rewarded, and without any kind of long-term job security. It’s the visitor Shimamura who projects the romantic ideal onto Komako, and shuts his eyes as far as he can to any evidence that it’s not really like that, the reader isn’t meant to share that romantic view.

66lilisin
Juin 11, 2018, 10:08 pm

>65 thorold:

Thanks for the reply. Reading over my comment I actually left out a few words meaning to write "Kawabata's characters greatly romanticizes the onsen geisha". A critical and fatal typing mistake! :)

I really would like to read this Kawabata now. I've only read Thousand Cranes and that was 15 years ago!

67lilisin
Juin 12, 2018, 12:43 am

For my first and probably only Korean book of this quarter, I read Han Kang's Human Acts.

This was a mesmerizing book about the Guangju Uprising in 1980s South Korea, where democratization protests turned deadly. The book centers on one boy killed during the protests and the people surrounding him as the perspective shifts from character to character as they relate their experiences. Although the descriptions of the brutality are indeed brutal, Han Kang does a wonderful job of getting you to keep turning the page with her skillful writing. This is a skill I had noticed in The Vegetarian but thought was wasted on the plot of that book so I was happy to see it used on this new topic. The book takes you on a journey that ends up in Han Kang's hands as she debates the word "humanity".

An excellent read.

It's interesting to see the similarities between this uprising and others the student uprisings in Japan and Tienanmen Square in China. Although there were many Korean-specific parts of the book such as the Korean rites of burial, it is all a very familiar story.

68lilisin
Juin 18, 2018, 3:21 am

Kenzaburo Oe : A Personal Matter

This will not be a book for everyone but I loved it but I don't know too well how to describe it and there are much more brilliant reviews on LT even if they didn't even like the book.

Oe is a writer who likes to look at the natural instincts behind humanity when faced with a difficult situation and his characters never take the gallant moral side. Instead Oe puts you in a situation where you can understand and feel for the miserable main character even if you don't wish to admit it.

Here, Bird is a raspy male in his late twenties who takes the form of a roadkill picking vulture rather than a plump songbird. He is, however, an intellectual of sorts and dreams of spreading his wings and exploring the plains of Africa. However, his plans are put on hold when his wife gives birth to a baby. A former ruffian in his youth who has turned into a meak, alcohol-guzzling, selfish excuse of a man, he has little of the qualities required of a father. Even less so when the doctor tells him the baby has a brain hernia and has very little chance of living, and if it did live, it would likely be a vegetable for the rest of its life.

Frantic at the idea of being encumbered by such a poor example of human life, and followed by encouragement from others around him that believe such a life would be better off dead than have to suffer through life where they would provide no benefit to society, Bird, in agreement with a doctor, decides to let the baby die instead of giving it an operation.

As his baby is left behind being fed a sugar water diet instead of milk, Bird runs of and escapes into the arms of a former college girlfriend and bottle of whiskey as he tries to process his past life, his current life, and his future life.

All bound up in some of the most colorful writing I've read in a long time, I was captivated and couldn't take my eyes off the whisky-smelling, vomit-inducing text before me. Beautifully translated (kudos!) not a word was in excess in this frantic look into the world of a man in fear of his vegetable child. This book wasn't afraid of delving deep into the deepest fears an individual can have as they loose their freedom and must be responsible for the reactions, and a parent who has been given the worst possible fate for their child.

Fantastic read.

69Tess_W
Juin 18, 2018, 10:18 am

>68 lilisin: I'm also reading an Oe, The Silent Cry. Interesting that a "vegetable" child also figures in this book, also. Will write a review when I finish it.

70lilisin
Juin 18, 2018, 9:44 pm

>69 Tess_W:

That's because Kenzaburo Oe had a disabled son himself so he explores the subject a few times in his novels. I also have The Silent Cry and am torn between reading it immediately or waiting till A Personal Matter has had time to sizzle.

In the meantime I've switched over to a war book about the Japanese in Nanking while I also started dabbling in a nonfiction about comfort women. I wonder how many more books I can fit in before the end of the quarter (especially now that I have the World Cup to distract me).

71Tess_W
Modifié : Juin 24, 2018, 12:21 pm

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe. I've thought long and hard about what to say concerning this modern Japanese novel. I ought to have loved it or at least admired it because it was written by a prominent Nobel prize winner, praised by many. However, the book left me ambivalent. I cared not for the writing, which seemed to me to be a stream of consciousness with no purpose. I cared not for the story nor the characters. I probably "missed" the entire point of the novel although there are some simplistic themes: are the old days really better than modern day? can one really go home again? My question: will this book ever end? After 394 pages, it did end; wrapped up in a tiny neat little package like 75% of other novels. 394 pages 2 1/2 stars

72lilisin
Juin 25, 2018, 3:11 am

Only one week left in this quarter so this is your final chance to get in those Japanese and Korean reads! I have two more books that I want to and definitely could get squeezed in if it weren't for the World Cup distracting me while I have also ramped up my violin practice. I'll try to get them in though!

Any reflections on the quarter as we start to wind down the final week?

73ELiz_M
Modifié : Juin 25, 2018, 5:19 pm

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, pub 1965




First published in a magazine serialization, this novel documents the aftereffects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The novel begins with a framing device: Yasuko, the niece of Shizuma Shigematsu and Shigeko, has been approached by a matchmaker. However, their are persistent rumors that Yasuko was in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped and that she is (or soon will be) suffering from radiation sickness. In order to forestall the concerns of the hoped-for fiance and the family, Shigematsu asks his wife to copy out Yasuko's diary entries for that fateful week in August 1945. To further bolster her story, Shigematsu also begins transcribing his diary for the same period.

These two diaries depict, in excruciating detail, the horror of war and destruction. At first no one understood what had happened -- the ordinary citizens of Hiroshima did not know or soon learn about this new weapon that was unleashed on their city. They just experienced the almost complete devastation. In the story, this small nuclear family was able to find each other in their suburban neighborhood soon after the incident, but the destruction of the houses, infrastructure, and severe injuries of so many people soon made it apparent that they needed to find food and shelter elsewhere. They travel, mostly walking, to a factory Shigematsu supervised, where they stayed for several weeks, until they were able to return home.

Through this framing device, the author portrays both the immediate hardships and the lingering effects. In1945, the day-to-day life, traveling through the now-barren land and witnessing the horrifying and peculiarities of death, the struggle to find food and coal to keep the factory running and the many different survivor stories are included due to Shigematsu's detailed diary (it seems he couldn't walk anywhere without running into an acquaintance and transcribing their story into his diary as well). In the present tense, several years after the end of the war, the author shows the lingering suspicion and stigma of those harmed -- Shigematsu suffers from a mild radiation sickness, which he treats by eating healthy and resting a lot while his neighbors shame him for not working hard to provide for his family. Meanwhile Yasuko hides her sudden and worsening sickness until it becomes all too-apparent that she, too, has radiation poisoning. In her family's attempts to give her hope, they seek out stories of (and diaries written by) people with miraculous recoveries.

The amount of detail and the distancing effect of "diary" entries gives this book a documentary, non-fiction feel. Plus, the manner in which a variety of different histories are shoe-horned into the frame story results in a slow plodding pace. While an important work that should be more widely read, I have to say it was not a pleasant experience.

74lilisin
Juin 25, 2018, 7:07 pm

>73 ELiz_M:

Black Rain is a superb book and definitely one that should be read more readily.

75Tess_W
Juin 25, 2018, 9:50 pm

>73 ELiz_M: I use excerpts from Black Rain when I'm teaching about WWII.

76lilisin
Juil 1, 2018, 7:57 pm

And that is the end of this quarter and theme read. Below is a summary of the participating members and what they read. As a group we read 37 individual books with Strange Weather in Tokyo the only book shared amongst the members (although I still haven't gotten through it despite starting it years ago).

alvaret
Hiromi Kawakami : Strange Weather in Tokyo

chlorine
Barbara Demick : Nothing to Envy
Haruki Murakami : Kafka on the Shore

cindydavid4
Grace James : Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales

Dilara86
Chung So-Sung (Jung Soseong/Jeong So-seong) : Les deux epouses
Kim Dong-Ni (Kim Tong-ni) : Tableau de Sabbat (The Shaman Sorceress)
Kim Dong-Hwa : Histoire couleur terre Vol.1 (The Color of Earth)
Susumu Katsumata : Poissons en eaux troubles (Fish in Troubled Waters)
Inaba Mayumi : La peninsule aux 24 saisons (The Peninsula with 24 Seasons)
Akira Yoshimura : Le convoi de l'eau

Eliz_M
Masuji Ibuse : Black Rain

lilisin
Akira Yoshimura : Le convoi de l'eau
Ayako Miura : Au col du mont Shiokari (Shiokari Pass)
村田 沙耶香 (Sayaka Murata) : コンビニ人間 (Convenience Store Woman)
Sayo Masuda : Autobiography of a Geisha
Han Kang : Human Acts
Kenzaburo Oe : A Personal Matter
Tatsuzo Ishikawa : Soldiers Alive

tess_schoolmarm
Aoko Matsuda : The Girl Who is Getting Married
Kenzaburo Oe : The Silent Cry

thorold
Hiromi Kawakami : Strange Weather in Tokyo
Sumiko Yano : The silver spoon : memoir of a boyhood in Japan
Yukio Mishima : After the banquet
Yasunari Kawabata : The sound of the mountain
Yoko Tawada : Etuden im Schnee (Memoirs of a polar bear)
Yoko Ogawa : The housekeeper and the professor
Marguerite Yourcenar : Mishima : ou la vision du vide
Alan Booth : The roads to Sata
Fumiko Enchi : Masks
Yasunari Kawabata : Beauty and Sadness
Yasunari Kawabata : Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata : Thousand cranes
Donald Keene : The pleasures of Japanese literature
Donald Keene : Five modern Japanese novelists
Junichiro Tanizaki : Some prefer nettles
Junichiro Tanizaki : In black and white
Natsume Soseki : Kokoro
Natsume Soseki : Sanshiro

vpfluke
Shion Miura : The Great Passage

77cindydavid4
Juil 1, 2018, 11:50 pm

I enjoyed reading the posts here - got some very interesting additions to my TBR list!! Thanks for the discussion

78thorold
Juil 4, 2018, 5:45 am

>76 lilisin: Thanks for curating the thread and compiling the summary!

I'm all too well aware that I didn't really stick to the idea of discovering current Japanese writing (and never got around to Korea at all), but I've enjoyed catching up with some of the big 20th century Japanese authors I should have read years ago.

I've still got The Makioka sisters to finish and Palm-of-the-hand stories and The temple of the Golden Pavilion on the TBR, so I'm not quite finished with Japanese modern classics yet...

79thorold
Juil 8, 2018, 3:08 pm

...and it turns out that this one is probably going to be my favourite of all those I've read for this theme!

The Makioka sisters (serial 1943-1948; English 1958) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (Japan, 1886-1965), translated by Edward Seidensticker

  

Whilst most of the Japanese novels I've been reading over the past couple of months are more like novellas in scale, this is a hefty tome with the length and pace of a European nineteenth-century triple-decker novel. And it even has a central plot device that could be straight out of Tolstoy or Jane Austen: sister no.4 (Taeko) can't get married because repeated attempts by the Makioka family to marry off sister no.3 (Yukiko) have come to nothing. What's more, Taeko has already tried once to elope with the man who loves her, and she goes on to have a fling with his disgraced protegé, so it's difficult to avoid thinking about empire frocks and minuets at the Assembly Rooms...

But, however much it references European fiction, this isn't a mere pastiche. The Makiokas are not living in Regency Bath or 1812 Moscow, but in the Osaka and Tokyo of the late 1930s. Tanizaki immerses us in all the tiny domestic problems - what shall we wear? what shall we eat? can the servants deal with it? - of running a lifestyle of leisurely marriage negotiations and miai, visits to the cherry blossom, firefly-hunting, dance and koto practice, visits to relatives, friendships with expat neighbours, major and minor illness, pregnant cats, etc., etc. And in the background we notice - dimly at first, but more and more clearly as the book goes on - how the whole social order that frames all these things is collapsing around the family as the world plunges into war. And we realise that this is not going to be a plot that can be resolved, by a marriage or by anything else.

Delicate, beautiful, complex, a constant fight between the randomness of actual life and the order that the reader tries to impose on a narrative. A book that's full of small, intensely memorable incidents that don't seem to have any obvious relevance to the "story", but which are still clearly enormously important to what Tanizaki wants to tell us.

80Steve38
Juil 13, 2018, 10:02 am

I enjoyed this recently. But what struck me in it were not the major events of marriage and death but the small every day observations of the main character. His mind seems to give him time to notice things in the world around him, to contemplate on them and to consider how they influence him, or not. Even though he has concerns and difficulties his mind seems to be clear and undistracted. It made me take more notice of the things that surround me everyday.

81thorold
Fév 24, 2019, 2:37 am

Postscript: Donald Keene, referenced many times in the thread above as a translator and commentator, probably one of the people who did most to make Japanese literature accessible to English readers, has died, aged 96.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/donald-keene-renowned-scholar-of-j...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-scholar-and-translator-d...

82Dilara86
Oct 14, 2019, 11:29 am

Chant de l'étoile du nord : Carnet de Iboshi Hokuto by Iboshi Hokuto, translated by Fumi Tsukuhara and Patrick Blanche





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Japanese
Original language: Japanese
Translated into: French
Location: Japan and Hokkaido in particular
Written between 1924 and 1929



This was a chance find on my local library’s poetry shelves. Iboshi Hokuto was an Ainu poet and activist. Ainus are the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands, predating the Japanese majority. Like many indigenous peoples around the world, they were pushed to the less hospitable parts of their country - in this case, Hokkaido - and suffered from the effect of acculturation and discrimination.

Iboshi wrote tankas and haikus in Japanese, some of which were published in various magazines. This was not enough to make a living. He therefore worked as a fisherman and a peddler selling hemorrhoid ointments (yes, really! And he wrote poetry about it.) This peripatetic life means he was able to visit many Ainu villages, collect anthropological data and spread his ideas. He died in his twenties from TB, exhaustion and malnutrition. Despite his short life, Iboshi is considered to be one of the greatest Ainu poets.

A lot of thought and care went into this slim book. It’s a collection of Iboshi’s tankas and of some of his haikus, in the original Japanese and in French, preceded by two introductions and a short biography. These were extremely useful and interesting, and I found the poetry moving, but it really is difficult to judge the quality of poetry in translation. One quibble: footnotes were replaced by “free” notes placed in the margins, which was not terribly user-friendly.


I am extremely happy to have found and bought this book.

83Dilara86
Oct 14, 2019, 11:37 am

En beauté by Kim Hoon, translated by Han Yumi and Hervé Péjaudier





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: South Korean
Original language: Korean
Translated into: French
Location: Korea
First published in Korea in 2004 (?), published in France in 2018


The middle-aged chief sales officer of a cosmetics company has just lost his wife to cancer. He had to balance looking after his ailing wife and holding down a very demanding job, not to mention his crush of almost teenage proportions on a younger employee. Now, he has a funeral to organize and attend, and there’s an advertising campaign to launch. This slim novel describes failing bodies, bodily functions, cosmetic surgery, medical interventions, pain, death and illness so candidly, matter-of-factly and thoroughly it’s almost unbearable. But it’s not just the physical aspect that’s starkly described: Korean customs regarding work and family, the cosmetics industry’s questionable ethics, everyday hypocrisies and empty conventions are also laid out in a prose that is all the more powerful for being almost affect-free, as the wife’s funeral rites and the husband’s advertising campaign collide, in a culture where private and professional spheres overlap in a way that I find very shocking. This slim novel is honest, brave and pretty dark.

84SqueakyChu
Jan 13, 2020, 12:16 am

>60 lilisin: I know this is an old thread, but I came here specifically looking for your review of Convenience Store Woman which I just finished reading tonight. After reading your review (which was excellent), I think I got what I needed out of this story which I liked very much. Thank you for all of the added detail you included about convenience stores, particularly the 7-11, in Japan.

Here's my review

My son is headed this week to Tokyo for a one week vacation because he won a music concert lottery and could not pass up the opportunity to attend. I can't wait to hear about his trip.