In the shadow of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and occupation by the Americans, a young boy becomes an acolyte of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. His mother is close to destitute, as were so many in the smoking ruins of the country and he must rely on the benevolence of the abbot who will take him under his wing.
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Modern Japanese literature so often seems to be concerned primarily with a search for something that is authentic, perhaps in the sense of providing a transcendental escape from mundane reality or perhaps just to banish the lies and myth-making of the past. Japan’s rapid change from legendary home to emperor and heroes to post-modern wasteland mediated by the violence of nuclear explosions and military defeat seems to have destroyed fundamental beliefs in the fundamental verities of society.
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In South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami tells the tale of a young man growing up in contemporary Japan and his relationship with several women who have significant impact on his life. Three in particular affect his progress: a childhood friend, a secondary school girlfriend and the woman he marries once come to man’s estate. His relationships with these women are intertwined with the progress of his career, which begins in obscurity in the educational system, leads to a decade of largely non-productive labour in the editing department of a company dealing with textbooks for school children and, then, after marriage gives him the opportunity to borrow capital from his father-in-law, the boss of two chic bars in which jazz is played.
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The prolific Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui has only had a few works translated into English and published internationally, notably the novels Hell and Paprika, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this site. Salmonella Men on Planet Porno offers non-Japanese reading readers the opportunity to sample Tsutsui’s short fiction for the first time. The 13 stories included, nicely translated by Andrew Driver, represent what appears to be the most commonly recurring themes in Tsutsui’s work, which include sex, fantastic worlds, the pressures of the bourgeois lifestyle in contemporary Japanese society and more sex.
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Based in 1927, between the end of the First World War and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (Korea was already occupied and colonized), Quicksand concerns a Japan at a time of considerable change and dislocation. At every turn of the book, there are contrasts between what might be expected from a traditional Japanese tale of people behaving according to longstanding cultural norms and those whose actions are considered ‘modern’ in one way or another.
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The Meiji Period of Japanese history (1868-1912) saw both the development of industry and modernization and, also, the raising to the heights of many Japanese artistic endeavours. With the restoration of the Imperial Household to the capital city of Edo (Tokyo), it must have seemed at least to some extent to have been a golden age, as well as a bridge between the semi-mythic past and the ultimate defeat and humiliation of the future.
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For most of those involved, particularly the conscripts, the experience of Japanese troops in World War II was not a happy one. Apart from the incredible successes of the early years, life settled into deprivation, personal misery, the constant threat of tropical diseases, the resentment of most of those whose communities were being occupied and suppressed and the inequities, often expressed in violence, of the Japanese class system.
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The Japan of Murakami is suffering from the blight of advanced capitalism: everything that was authentic has been replaced by commoditized substitutes and items once of value have been sliced into virtually meaningless fragments for which people may, nevertheless, be persuaded to pay money. Such is the lot of the author, who is 34 but unburdened by a name and resorts to “shoveling cultural snow” for a living–that is, writing copy for a range of magazines, PR sheets and whatever else yields a yen or two.
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The defining characteristic of an unnamed narrator and her sister Yuriko is that they are “half”–not “half-Japanese” or “half-foreign” by virtue of a Japanese mother and a Swiss father but just “half.” In this rather disturbing but fascinating book, the two girls, along with the other principal protagonists, spend most of their lives searching (mostly disastrously) for the missing half that will make them whole.
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The haiku is a traditional Japanese form of poetry known for its preciseness of form and its brevity. It must, by custom, consist of exactly three lines with the first lines consisting of five syllables, the second of seven syllables and the final line of five syllables with a total of seventeen syllables.
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