FINISHED READING - The Housekeeper & The Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Though published relatively recently in 2003 Yoko Ogawa's book is being republished as a companion for four other books by Japanese authors. Each different in subject matter, either capture aspects of the period when they were written in, or represent innovations in the development of the Japanese novel. There are works by Murakami,1994, Mishima 1963, Tanizaki 1936 and Kirino 1997 published by Vintage in there Japan Classics Series. Ogawa is one of a new generation of female writers that started to emerge in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The Housekeeper & The Professor is an example of a particular form of contemporary Japanese novel, where a touching relationship develops between two people from entirely different classes of society. Brought together despite odd circumstances and the evident impediment of eccentricity. Another novel similarly written in this style from 2001 is Hiromi Kawakami's Strange Weather in Tokyo.

Here we have The Professor, a mathematics genius, who, due to a car collision many years ago, has lost most of his ability to remember the present day short term details. He can only hold things for about eighty minutes before these slip away from recollection. Everyone who comes to know him has to deal with daily having to reintroduce themselves to him. The Professor wears an old bedraggled suit with numerous notes and pictures pinned to it. To help remind or prompt him to recollect.

The Housekeeper is employed through her agency to do just that, look after the house and The Professor's general wellbeing. There have been many housekeepers previous who have not been able to hack the job for long. It can be repetitive and taxing to ones patience. This particular housekeeper, however, starts to actively engage with the Professor through his primary means of communication, mathematics and analysis of statistics. The Housekeeper has a son, who The Professor calls Root, because of the shape of his head. Both become increasingly fond of the Professor, his eccentricities, his love of maths and begin to plan events and trips to broaden what he can experience every day.

This novel, like many contemporary Japanese novels, has no great dramatic story arc. It simply opens a window onto a strange world and unusual relationship. Ogawa's writing, whilst very modern in its choice of  subject matter, bears a style that is the epitome of the classic Japanese novel. An unfussy clean use of grammar and sentence structure, with no extraneous words or literary flourishes. Little by way of lengthy exposition or description. The writing, though economical, contains sufficient information to communicate feeling or move the story on. Extensive use of internal dialogue or cathartic emoting isn't employed, passions are kept distinctly low key and restrained. 

Despite this contained form, one is gently led into a world and atmosphere that you can identify with and feel for. Though we are never told who the Housekeeper, Professor or Root are, what their real names might be, they are not ciphers. Its a quintessentially human story, composed with a light touch and sense of care for the integrity of her characters. A study in how you connect with another person's world and viewpoint  However remote, or from a different class, culture or life experience they may seem. No one is that cut off that their humanity cannot be still reached on some level, in small yet significant ways.

Without trying too hard to impress, Ogawa's novel does, nonetheless, do so.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

FEATURE - Three Dogen Mountain Poems

These three short poems are each written by Dogen, they arose from his reflections on the Lotus Sutra. They capture something of what he was trying to convey through his own Mountains and Waters Sutra; that an intimate connection with reality in its true state is right in front of our eyes.

In the valley, vibrating sounds
On the peak, monkeys' intermittent chattering,
I hear them as they are exquisitely expounding this sutra.

Grasping the heart of this sutra
even the voices of selling and buying
in the world are expounding the Dharma.

Colours of the mountain peak and echoes of the valley stream
all of them as they are, are nothing other
than my Shakyamuni's voice and appearance.

Eihei Dogen

BOOK REVIEW ~ Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata knows intimately the ins and outs of a convenience store workers lifestyle, before taking up writing full time, she worked as one. Its there in all the small incidental details of daily stock promotions and the formulaic prescription of its customer service inserted into the narrative or the observations of customer's behaviour that her character Keiko makes. Here is a seemingly soulless job that somehow Keiko has found great meaning and purpose in. For her this job is not a dead end

Keiko is the quirky outsider, yet also quite a lovably human character. As a child Keiko was prone to behaving really oddly, in a socially unacceptable manner. Its never really clear what mental status she has, is it some type of autism, or does she simply not fit into some standard behavioural profile? Her family have signed off, resigned to her being constantly an embarrassment, they quietly despair she'll make anything of her life that they understand as being normal.

Fast forward to Keiko as an adult, now in her mid thirties, she's found it useful to adopt a number of coping strategies simply to get by without any revealing or disruptive incident. She's chosen to work in a convenience store, a regimented tightly structured work style, one she can easily understand and comply with, to do whatever is expected of her. After eighteen years working in a convenience store she's become the ideal worker. It also gives her opportunities to see other staff members manner of talking, behaving and dressing and adopts aspects of these into her own. In this way she can disguise herself, it eases her relations with others, ensuring her behaviour is socially correct, because left to her own devices she knows her own judgement is unreliable, and she'll be exposed for who she really is, maybe even cast out.

Keiko is the classic misfit character, but one we all can find a way of relating to. Murata's first person narrative cleverly utilises an emotionally neutered deadpan humour, Keiko's world view can seem quite rational. But is she the classic unreliable narrator? We only ever see the world through Keiko's perceptions, so we hear only how she thinks other people are seeing her. But its clear from what she reports that she is quite clearly seen as odd, its just no one says it to her face. She isn't hiding in plain sight. There is a universality to her as a character, we all pretend to some extent simply in order to get by, to get on with others. We conform to stave off criticism, to negate the pressure of having to make your own decisions. These pressures to fulfil societies and her families expectations for her, are recognisable.

Convenience Store Woman is very dryly witty as it subtly pokes fun at the conventions of conformity that become unquestionable. Keiko thinks she has her life flawlessly under her control until she takes one step out of her comfort zone and suddenly she's barraged with other people's views and misinterpretations of why she's doing what she's doing. She discovers she is actually happier and more fulfilled by being a convenience store worker, despite everyone else's view that she cannot possibly be. It creates a space for her to be her own woman, to have a sense of independence and agency within society. Convenience Store Woman is an often moving, funny and a really enjoyable read. Whilst exhibiting many things which we've come to know as inimitably Japanese in tone and character, this is not a conventional novel, its as delightfully odd in its narrative as is its lead character. 

BOOK REVIEW - Junichiro Tanazaki - The Makioka Sisters

I'm reaching the end of my year of Japanese novel reading. Its been a mixture of the inspiring, the informative and the frankly infuriating. When it comes to the latter The Makioka Sisters is a perfect example of a cetain type of mid-twentieth century Japanese novel.  Everything is described by its surface, emotions are restrained and reserved. Its as if the human tendency towards melodrama had flatlined. Previous works by Tanazaki I've greatly enjoyed. He has a mischievous, dry and ironic sense of the absurdities, as well as the beauties, of traditional 'Old Japan'. So if you were to skim the storyline of The Makioka Sisters you'd think this might be fertile ground for Tanazaki to find gold in. That it isn't, leaves this novel as nearly five hundred pages devoid of wit, humour, or in fact much happening at all.

Whilst not being imitative of Chekov, its clear that The Makioka Sisters is something of a Japanese homage to the spirit of The Three Sisters. Because here we too have three provincial sisters, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko. except everyone wants to stay in Osaka, no one wants to go to the big city, to dreary, dirty Tokyo.  The Makioka family used to have standing socially but has fallen on harder times. Though they are no longer able to cut the social mustard, they behave as if they still do. The modern world is passing them by, as they try not to play catch up. Of the three, only Sachiko is married, but as the eldest it falls to her to ensure the traditional process is followed and that the second eldest Yukiko is next to get married.

Unfortunately, Yukiko is now in her early thirties and they worry that she is a bit old to still be in the marraige market. If they don't find a suitable match soon, the shame of perpetual spinsterhood and dependency on the family will descend. Yukiko, has all the presence of someone who is constantly absent, her feelings and motives remaining essentially unknowable for the entire length of the novel. You neither love or hate her. Its as though she's become this empty vessel, a blank pawn in a very long game of chess. Her younger sister Taeko, by comparison is a free spirit who wants to make her own way in life, chose her own lovers and resist playing the marriage game. There are, however, tragic consequences to the choices that she makes.

That is it really as far as the storyline goes. There are passages of brilliant descriptive writing, such as the torrential rain and flooding in the centre of the story, and (spoiler alert ) a couple of death scenes. But these are brief blips, amid acres of not a lot going on of any import. I suspect there is much that could be labelled 'metaphor' in this novel, but this has not been heightened enough. The period the novel is set in is in the years leading up to Pearl Harbour.  The China Incident where Japan stages a proto-invasion of the Chinese mainland is a brief passing reference. The closeness of Nippon-Nazi relations is seen obliquely through the Stoltz family who live next door. That none of this impinges upon the Makioka obsessive pursuit of marrying Yukiko off, speaks volumes about Japanese insularity at this time.  They are literally living in another world to everyone else.

There are also countless incidences of someone in the family falling ill, or they suspect to be ill, or is a bit off colour, who then cossets themselves away until the often vaguely identified malady passes. Then there is the constant worry about that small spot above Yukiko's eye, will the appearance of this blemish spoil her marriage chances? To be followed by weeks of costly injections to eliminate, or at least reduce it in size. The body and the body politic have both become dis-eased.

Its a small fading world they live in, which is at times extremely petty, which Tanazaki relishes describing in minute detail. That the Makioka's are in some way cyphers for the Japanese malaise pre-war is pretty clear. There is, however, a difficulty for the Western reader of Japanese novels, there is frequently no sense of his characters engaging in any internal reflection.  'Internal dialogue' just doesn't happen, so you don't understand and hence never reach either hatred or empathy for these people. They are all a bit bland and featureless, with little sense for a mood or period. What's really going on within this family remains a disinteresting puzzle.

One has to remain wary when reading any Japanese novel in translation, as your impressions of its value are entirely dependent upon the skill or otherwise of the translator. Converting an ideographic script into coherent English sentence structures must be inherently an unfeasible task. Murakami, when he reads the translation of his novels writes to the translator congratulating them on the book they've written, he no longer sees it as being composed by him anymore. Tanazaki's writing style I sense may have been let down by Edward G. Seidensticker's translation of it. I may of course be wrong and this really is one of the most tedious books I've ever read. But that it maybe the translation that is at fault is, for me, indicated by the last line of The Makioka Sisters, where Yukiko has finally found herself a husband and is travelling to Tokyo for her future marriage and life. This disingenuous sentence bears something of Tanazaki's trademark wryness and sense for irony. More like this and I'd have found this an enjoyable thing to read, instead of a bit of a drag.

'Yukiko's diarrhoea persisted through the twentieth-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.'

What a way to end a novel! 

BOOK REVIEW ~ Natsume Soseki ~ Kusamakura

Kusamakura means literally 'Pillow Grass' and in Japanese this has intimations of travel, often with an underlying spiritual purpose. Soseki uses it as a reference to Basho's book -Narrow Road to the Interior, which is a similar journey accompanied by philosophical and poetic discourse. Kusa grass is also traditionally what the Buddha made his meditation seat out of before he became enlightened. So the novel's title has many inferences hinting at what Soeseki's intention is.

The central character is a nameless young artist and poet who escapes the rapidly urbanising Tokyo to embark on a journey through rural Japan. He has set himself the task of viewing whatever he sees with dispassion, to observe the world simply as it is. He believes this requires him to be 'nonemotional', which is not the same as 'unemotional'. Though he tries to be this dispassionate calm observer he is unable to find a subject matter he wants to paint, or be satisfied he can capture the mood of a moment in a haiku.

Then he starts to hear about a woman through local gossip, and then encounters that woman, Nami, a name meaning beauty in Japanese. She appears as a uniquely independent free spirit, whom the artist becomes increasingly intrigued by. There is something about her that he's looking for, something in the way she chooses to live that he also wants. What he seeks is not sex or her love, but the solution to an existential longing.  He frequently encounters her by accident, such as one time where they end up discussing what the best way to read a book is. The artist thinks its following the storyline, to connect with the characters triumphs and dilemmas from the start of the book in sequence through to the end. Nami, however, reads novels by opening them at random in a different place everyday, entering into the scene in the book and responding cleanly to whatever is happening. Being able to make something of it that's not completely bound by an author's narrative diktat.

Soseki wrote Kusamakura in 1906, as the Westernisation of Japan proceeded at a pace and the older style culture of Japan was rapidly disappearing. This rupture in the continuity of Japanese culture and society appears, from my limited reading of Japanese authors, to be like a festering wound in the countries psyche, that even now they are still searching for a way to heal. For Soseki his reaction was the desire to write a truly Japanese form of literature, drawn from its own cultural traditions. With Kusamakura he set out with the aim of producing a 'haiku' style novel. Whilst its arguable that he didn't entirely succeed in this, plus he never wrote in this style again, it is nevertheless a lyrically compelling and beautifully imagined book. The storyline though minimal is never what this novel is about. It frequently, and at length, enters into philosophical ruminations on the role of beauty, the artist, aesthetics, the nature of objective and subjective experience, and how these help one live a purposeful meaningful life. I found it thoroughly engaging, thought provoking and a joy to read.

Few books capture your attention right from their first few paragraphs. Once I read the first page I immediately planned to set aside time for reading it, I didn't want to skimp and risk missing something. Soseki writes with such precision and insight he holds you simply through the eloquence of his ( abeit translated ) sentences. So just as a taster to wet your appetite, here are the first two opening paragraphs.

' As I climb the mountain path, I ponder ~

If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentiment's stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.

And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one - and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.'