In a gentle dystopian future entire countries disappear, Japan has vanished into the sea. How this has happened, it does not tell you. Hiruko is, however, a refugee, a survivor working and living in Denmark. She still longs to meet a fellow countryman or woman. To speak her own language once more. In the meantime she speaks Panksa a hybrid abbreviated language she's made up.
We are introduced to a number of characters all of whom are dispossessed, or misaligned in someway. A general air of dislocation permeates what is left of the world, which tries to carry on as if nothing has really changed at all. Meanwhile lost cultures, in an attempt to keep them alive, are being misremembered or reduced to a travesty of their original meaning or purpose. A bit like Chinese Whispers the further they are away from a lived way of being, the more it diverts from cultural fidelity.
There is Tenzo/Nanook, in reality a man born in Greenland, who by some quirk of fate, and conscious misrepresentation, has become a renowned sushi chef in Norway. His Eskimo features being mistaken for Japanese. Though the name Eskimo itself could be construed as an insult, he prefers it to Inuit, which is a specific tribe he doesn't belong to. So he finds himself constantly perpetrating a fictitious persona on one level or another.
Akash, originates from India. Once a boy, but now lives in Denmark as a woman. Living very much on her street wise wits in order to survive. Afraid of being discovered for who she is or was, and thrown out of the country. Indian food in Denmark has in one restaurant become an odd fusion of Indian and Italian, producing Lotus Pizzas etc. Eventually these two characters encounter Hiruko, and they set off on a mission to locate another person, reputedly a surviving Japanese speaker - Susanoo.
Like many a contemporary Japanese writer Yoko Tamara wears her authorial eccentricities lightly. This maybe a translation issue, but modern Japanese authors have a slightly plain, if not bland character to their writing style. There is little by way of an authors presence. It is all in the content, the story. Similar to traditional Japanese block printing that has a flattened picture plane, however richly decoratived. Devoid of perspective or depth, its all about a play of shapes and patterns moving across a surface.
Yet beneath this stories emotional coolness, the context of it, is an exterior world, a civilisation that is in crisis. Its soft cheerfully undramatic nature explores what the nature of identity is, and how language relates to it. How much can we artificially tangle our sense of ourselves up in the nationalism of a specific place and the language spoken there? What we see as our identity is often quite arbitrary and changeable. What happens to cultural authenticity when it no longer has a homeland? How then do we present our sense of our selves to the world, when we become dispossessed?. Its a book which obviously has a lot to say, and does so delicately and entertainingly. But it can, at times, be a bit devoid of feeling and passion, which I found tested my engagement. I wanted more emotionally from it, each time it successfully repressed its own expressive range. Ah! those Japanese.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
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