In The Sea of Fertility, Penguin, 1987, 196 p. Translated from the Japanese 曉の寺 (Akatsuki no Tera) by E Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle.  First published 1970.

This instalment of Mishima’s tetralogy starts in 1940 and follows on from Runaway Horses by featuring now retired judge Shikeguni Honda, still convinced that Isao Iinuma was a reincarnation of Kiyaoki Matsugae, the doomed lover in Spring Snow; a belief mainly due to the presence of three moles on their left sides.

As part of his legal consultancy work protecting Japanese exporters’ interests Honda travels to India via Thailand. He meets a six-year-old Thai princess, Ying Chan, who is convinced she is Japanese but her assertions are, of course, treated by her family and attendants as mental aberrations. Honda believes her and tries unsuccessfully to see if she also has three moles.

On to Benares in India where Honda has an epiphany while Mishima takes the opportunity to impart to us a lengthy treatise on various ideas of reincarnation from around the world. At a waterfall in the Antaji caves Honda also recognises a scene which Matsugae had predicted he would encounter.

The Second World War comes and goes off-stage and the story undergoes a shift in tone when it restarts in occupied Japan where Ying Chan has come to study. Honda becomes obsessed by the idea of seeing her naked to confirm his reincarnation belief. He invites her to his house (but several times she does not turn up on time.) He tries to get the nephew of his neighbour to seduce Ying Chan, on whose intended room he can spy via a peephole, but this plan fails. (I note the recurrence of this peephole scenario in Mishima’s later novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea.)

Honda becomes even more of a voyeur before the novel’s climax during one of his houseparties and there is an odd, almost detached, final chapter set in 1967 where he discovers Ying Chan’s destiny.

Mishima’s unease at Japan’s loss of identity under Western influence is less to the fore here than in the previous two volumes. It is almost as if this instalment is from a different story sequence, despite the reincarnation connection.

Pedant’s corner:- “voices chanting a sutra rose rapidly to a crescendo” (No. The crescendo is the rise, not its culmination,) “plusses and minuses” (pluses and minuses?) “the aureoles around the nipples” (the areolae.)

Phoenix, 2010, 508 p. Translated from the Spanish El Juego del Angél (Editorial Planeta SA 2008) by Lucia Graves.

In this (sort of) prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, David Martín is a struggling writer just about scraping by, writing potboilers set in his home city of Barcelona in the 1920s. A hint of fantasy intrudes when he has a sexually charged encounter with a woman called Chloe – the name of his heroine – in a seedy establishment which he later finds has been abandoned for years. He comes under the influence of better-known writer Pedro Vidal to whose chauffeur’s daughter Cristina he is attracted and in the guise of editing Vidal’s manuscript rewrites his latest novel much for the better.

The proprietor of Sempere and Sons booksellers gives him a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations, a book with which Martín is much taken, and introduces him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books (familiar from The Shadow of the Wind, where Sempere’s son Daniel has a prominent part.) Great Expectations seems to be a kind of template here for Zafón but the parallels are by no means exact.

Out of the blue a French publisher Andreas Corelli asks Martín to write a book inventing a new religion. In return for one hundred thousand francs.

Corelli describes religion as “a moral code expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device, in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society.”

He also has a jaundiced view of humanity, saying, “‘The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.’”

His thoughts on what motivates people to act badly have resonance. “‘When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimised, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbours, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we are acting in self-defence. Evil, menace, those are always the preserve of the other. The first step towards believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match.’”

After his researches into religion Martín opines, “‘The main pillar of every organized religion, with few exceptions, is the subjugation, repression, even the annulment of women in the group.  Woman must accept the role of an ethereal, passive and maternal presence, never of authority or independence, or she will have to take the consequences. She might have a place of honour in the symbolism, but not in the hierarchy.’”

Martín moves into an old mansion which once belonged to Diego Marlasca – a man with a mysterious death whose ramifications will dog Martín’s future. (There are echoes here of a similar building in The Shadow of the Wind.)

In the meantime Martín has become plagued by Isabella, a fan of his writing, and come to the attention of Police Inspector Grandes as suspect in a mysterious fire at his former publisher not to mention the disappearance of Cristina.

He is saddened by Sempere’s decline in health and vigour. The bookseller complains that, “‘At my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows’ necks.’”

What could have been an insight into the importance of books in the lives of bibliophiles, however, degenerates in its latter stages into an overdose of unlikely happenings more akin to a thriller. Again, as in The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón flatters to deceive.

Pedant’s corner:-  “my father took me El Indio” (took me to El Indio,) shrunk (shrank.) “‘You don’t looked convinced’” (You don’t look convinced.)

Penguin, 2019, 126 p. Translated from the Japanese 光の領分 (Hikari no ryōbun,) by Geraldine Harcourt. First published in 1978-1979 as a series in the literary monthly Gunzō.

The book outlines in first person narration the life of an unnamed woman recently separated from her husband, Fujino, in the year following his leaving. They have a two-year-old daughter, also unnamed, who begins to react badly to her new life after mother and daughter move into an apartment on the fourth floor of a building which has mostly offices below. Its large windows flood the interior with light, hence the book’s title.

Over the course of the year we see the daughter’s behaviour deteriorate; she throws objects out of the window onto a roof below and gets into trouble at her daycare centre.

This is paralleled by her mother’s increasingly difficulty to cope with her life, turning up late for her job in a library, having a one-night stand with the father of another child at daycare.

There are parallels here with the other of Tsushima’s novels I have read, Child of Fortune.  whose protagonist is also separated from her husband (but in her case divorced.) The absence of Fujino, like that of Hatanaka in Child of Fortune, is core to the narrator’s sense of drift. This is an indictment of the men involved, though, not of the women they have left.

The book’s origins as a series of twelve monthly instalments in the magazine Gunzō (群像) lead to some repetitions in later chapters of information the reader already knows and which would have been unnecessary to include in a novel per se.

I note as an aside that the living space in Japanese dwellings is described in terms of how many tatami mats the rooms can accommodate.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) a similar missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence.

American University of Cairo Press, 1987, 256 p, including vii p Introduction by Trevor le Gassick. Translated from the Arabic Zuqāq al-Midaq by Trevor le Gassick. First published in 1947.

The back cover blurb describes this as probably Mahfouz’s most popular work. Set during the Second World War – there are mentions of air-raids and the British Army – it depicts life in the titular alley, in a poor area of Cairo, and features a variety of colourful characters each with a distinctive trait and several of whom have chapters devoted to them, some several chapters. It occurred to me while reading it that this may have had an influence on Mahfouz’s fellow Egyptian Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.

Perhaps the main character is Hamida, an orphan who was adopted by Umm Hamida but suckled by the wife of café owner Kirsha, whose son Hussain she was nursing at the time. Kirsha himself has a taste for teenage boys. Umm Hamida arranges marriages and her landlady Saniya Afify makes use of her service in this regard. Dr Booshy isn’t (a doctor that is) but has parlayed his reputation into providing dentistry, sourcing the gold teeth he offers his clients (but unbeknownst to them) from the mouths of the recently buried dead. The unkempt and filthy Zaita makes his supplicants into cripples so that they can make a living through begging and thereafter exacts a toll from them. Retired teacher Sheikh Darwish is fond of quoting English words and spelling them out. Abbas, the young barber, wants to marry Hamida but doesn’t have the money so takes himself off to work for the British Army. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman getting on a bit who imbibes a special concoction to stimulate his sexual appetite. Tiring of his wife, he proposes marriage to Hamida but has a heart attack before any arrangement can be made

Then Hamida comes to the attention of one Ibrahim Faraj, who habitually gazes on her from a seat in the café. At once attracted and repelled, Hamida eventually falls under his spell but his intentions for her are far from honourable.

Midaq Alley is one of those books which represents the world in microcosm. If not all human life is depicted in its pages then certainly a good deal of it is.

Sensitivity note. A character uses the phrase “nigger-black face.”

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Mahfouz’ (x 5, Mahfouz’s.) Elsewhere; translated into USian, “piaster” (several times, piastre,) “reflexion” (reflection, used later,) “Tell-el-Kebir” (several times, usually spelled Tel-el-Kebir,) “struck a responsive cord in the boy” (responsive chord,) “Abbas’ face” (Abbas’s,) a missing comma after a piece of dialogue embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) such a comma placed after the end quotation mark not immediately before, similar placing of a question mark – and of a full stop, “abcess” (abscess,) both “jewelry” and “jewellery” appear in the text, “and bid them welcome” (bade them welcome,) a missing opening quotation mark on a piece of dialogue, “by her sexuals instincts” (sexual,) “Hedjaz” (usually spelled ‘Hijaz’.)

Harvill Press, 2000, 268 p. Translated by Derek Coltman from the French Le Générale de l’armée mort, itself translated from the Albanian, Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur, first published in Albania in 1963.

Twenty years after the Second World War an Italian general is sent to Albania to retrieve for repatriation the bodies of soldiers who had been killed in the conflict there. He is accompanied by a priest. They are working with lists of the dead containing their particulars – height, dentition and so on, plus the probable location of the grave – provided by the Italian Government. The actual exhumations are largely carried out by local Albanians of course.

Prior to the expedition the general had been visited by various relatives of the deceased with specific requests and information about the individuals concerned. Foremost in his mind though, is finding the remains of Colonel Z of the infamous “Blue Battalion,” whose wife the general finds still attractive but suspects may have some sort of relationship with the priest.

The whole situation is awkward for the general; though their tradition is one of hospitality, the locals are in many ways suspicious, the expedition’s presence triggering unpleasant memories and resentments – and the task is arduous. The difficulties of working in such an environment, the sensibilities to be navigated are beyond him. The discovery of the particulars of Colonel Z’s fate (and of his bones) arise from this disparity.

This is the sort of novel – and subject matter – which I suspect no Anglophone writer would contemplate. I know the circumstances surrounding the undertakings would be less problematic but can you, for example, imagine an extended fictional narrative – or even a short story – about the work of the Commonweath War Graves Commission? A non-fiction book, yes; but never a novel.

That Kadare was working under the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha makes the fact that he could examine any aspect of Albanian society remarkable. It was subtle of him to choose such an oblique angle to do so.

There were occasional points at which the language of the text seemed a bit strained – possibly due to the fact that the book has undergone successive translations – but this did not impact on its readability.

Pedant’s corner:- “withlittle” (with little,) “the generalasked” (the general asked,) “even asemblance” (even a semblance,) “bothvery” (both very,) a missing full stop at the end of a piece of dialogue, a misplaced line break, “anylonger” (any longer.) “Those are the sort of things” (Those are the sorts of things,) “dark,gentle eyes” (dark, gentle eyes,) a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech where the sentence it was embedded in continued, a missing comma in a list, “would all departin various directions” (would all depart in,) span (spun.) “Then,fighting free” (Then, fighting free.) “Six or seven oundsat the most” (Six or seven pounds at the most.) “There were a number of” (There was a number of.)  “‘You wantto be able’” (want to.)

Faber and Faber, 2023, p. Translated from the Turkish, Veba Geceleri, by Rekin Oklap.

This is not a typical Pamuk novel. For a start it’s not set in Istanbul which has been pretty much a major character in most of his books. Instead, it deals with the fictional Mediterranean island of Mingheria during a 1901 outbreak of bubonic plague which provided the opportunity for its revolt against Ottoman rule. Also, unlike most Pamuk novels. it’s largely told rather than shown. Part of this is that the narration is couched partly as a historical record of the revolution.

Mingheria is supposedly located somewhere northeast of Crete. Its main city, Arkaz, is dominated by a castle on a hill at one side of the harbour entrance but there isn’t adequate anchorage for large modern ships and landfall has to be made by rowing boat.

The present Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid, who was installed as Sultan by a palace coup in which he replaced his brother Murad V, has sent Bonkowski Pasha to combat the outbreak. On the same ship but en route to China as envoys are Murad’s daughter (and therefore Abdul Hamid’s niece) Princess Pakize, until recently kept in seclusion in Istanbul until she married the husband Abdul Hamid procured for her, Doctor Nuri. Hence Nuri is often referred to in the text as “the Doctor and Prince Consort.”

A few days later, after Bonkowski Pasha is murdered having inadvisedly gone walkabout, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri are ordered back to Mingheria to investigate his death using the methods of Sherlock Holmes. (Abdul Hamid is an avid consumer of detective fiction.)

Many locals, especially devout Muslims, resist the attempts by the authorities to enforce quarantine. The ensuing confusion allows a Major Kâmil to institute a revolution which overthrows Ottoman rule. The Major (soon Commander) becomes the first leader of independent Mingheria.

Much of the supposed history here is said to be taken from the letters of Princess Pakize to her sister Princess Hatice back in Istanbul, letters which she wrote daily even when the postal service had been suspended. An emphasis on the relationships between Princess Hatice and Nuri and Major Kâmil and his wife Zeynep (nostalgic legends in Mingheria) are a corollary to this.

Several narratorial interpolations reveal that this retrospective history of the founding of the Mingherian state has been written by a descendant of Princess Hatice and Nuri. The final chapter is an envoi from that point of view.

The means by which a new state establishes itself and the myths it comes to believe are subtly portrayed (as are the parallels with the decline of the Ottoman state,) but like most revolutions the Mingherian one soon begins to eat itself. In short order Kâmil and Zeynep are dead due to plague; his successor, the Muslim sect leader and quarantine opposer Sheik Hamdullah, also succumbs to the disease; Princess Hatice is made Mingheria’s Queen but pushed into the background by Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat; and so on. Relations with the Great Powers, who blockade the island to prevent the plague reaching Europe, are critical to Mingheria’s future.

Pamuk is consummate and always in control but to my mind in Nights of Plague, though there is plenty of story (you could almost say too much) some of the rewards of reading fiction are missing. There is not much here to allow the exploration of character, most of whom are sketched rather than fleshed out, or indeed character development. It is certainly unusually structured for a novel. It is however an exemplary way of writing a critique of Turkish society without going at it head-on; an approach arguably necessary for a writer from a state sensitive to any hint of criticism.

Since he started writing this book in 2016 it is also unlikely to be a reflection on the Covid pandemic, though of course that does now hang over any reading.

Mention of football (albeit only in one sentence) and of the author Orhan Pamuk as being an acquaintance of the narrator – both are museum enthusiasts – are typical Pamuk touches.

It is of course essential reading for Pamuk completists but has enough to recommend it to the merely curious.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. “the hoi polloi” (hoi means ‘the’; it’s just ‘hoi polloi’, then, no ‘the’,) enormity (employed here to mean ‘hugeness’. It doesn’t; it means ‘monstrousness’,) “off of” (no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “a particularly tough contingent who was known to mistrust” (a particularly tough contingent which was known to mistrust,) “that he was going be punished” (going to be punished,) a chapter beginning with a sentence of dialogue with no starting quotation mark (I know this is a publisher’s convention but it annoys me,) “the Halifiye sect were being goaded” (the Halifiye sect was being goaded,) “landscapes …. that Sami Pasha had hanged on the walls” (I doubt this meant they were executed: ‘had hung on the walls’,) “arrival to the island” (arrival on the island,) Cretian (Cretan,) “moored to the docks” (moored at the docks,) “was I was finally” (the second ‘was’ is superfluous.)

Penguin, 2023, 182 p. Translated from the Japanese, 寵児, (Choji,) Kawada Shobo Shinsha, 1978, by Geraldine Harcourt

Kōko is a divorced mother of eleven-year-old daughter Kayako. She is struggling with her life and her job giving piano lessons is not really enough to sustain them both. For this and other reasons Kayako has moved in with her Aunt Shōko, Kōko’s sister, who thinks of herself as the responsible sibling. Kōko’s memories of her handicapped brother who died when he was twelve colour her feelings towards both Kayako and Shōko. Since her relationship with Kayako’s father, Hatanaka, ended, she has had a long-standing (but now finished) affair with Doi, with whom she also became pregnant but aborted the child. She now feels she would have liked a child to Doi but has embarked on an on-off liaison with Hatanaka’s friend Osada, who acted as intermediary between him and her.

Child of Fortune is a portrait of a woman pulled and pushed between her past and present, and the future she devoutly wishes but is somehow unable to grasp, acutely conscious of the way in which society views women like her. The signs of pregnancy she notices precipitate her crisis.

The novel, though unmistakably Japanese, is not specific to Japan. Kōko’s troubles could be those of a woman anywhere in a judgemental world.

Pedant’s corner:- Dialogue which Kōko remembers is indicated by dashes, in the novel’s “present” (written in the past tense) it is rendered in the usual way. There was also a missing comma before one piece of direct speech.

Only twelve works are on my best list this year; eight by women, four by men. Five were in translation – plus two more if you count Elif Shafak.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Hex by Jenni Fagan

Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Shanghai Nights by Juan Marsé

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

Harvill Press, 2001, 234 p. Translated from the Russian Смерть постороннего (Smert’ postoronnego; Death of a Stranger) by George Bird

This book is an example of why I find translated fiction so attractive. It is difficult to see its premise appearing in a book by an Anglophone author.

Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov lives alone – except for a king penguin named Misha. The local zoo in Kyiv had been giving animals away to anyone who could feed them and Viktor obliged (with fish he keeps in his freezer.) Misha has an enigmatic existence in the book, wandering about the flat lugubriously. But his presence is treated matter-of-factly. No-one bats an eyelid at him: all accept the situation as normal.

Viktor has aspirations to being a writer or at least to seeing his writings in print. Opportunity comes his way through a man called Misha (to prevent confusion referred to as Misha-non-penguin.) This Misha has a murky background but puts Viktor in touch with the editor of a paper for whom he is to write obituaries of people of VIP calibre, from State Deputies to Ministers and factory managers, people who were shady in some way but not liable to normal justice – either through immunity or corrupt judges. After a few of the subjects have died it becomes clear to Viktor that his pieces are the basis for a hit list by an organisation he has no clue about.

Then he is left in charge of Misha-non-penguin’s daughter Sonya, after her father has to disappear for a while, leaving Sonya a large sum of money. Eventually Viktor hires a nanny, Nina, for the child, and she, Viktor and Sonya in effect become a family.

Warnings come from the paper’s editor to lie low for a while and as a result Viktor thinks he may be being followed: Sonya and Nina definitely are. Viktor’s reactions to this read as a hangover from the Soviet era. He knows instinctively what to look for to discern someone  tailing him.

In the meantime he is prevailed on to attend the funerals of some of his obituary victims. Accompanied by Misha, he does so. Soon Misha becomes a desirable accessory at burial ceremonies. Where in an Anglophone novel would anything so bizarre as this appear?

A touch of meta fiction intrudes when Viktor confronts the “fat man” who has been following Sonya and Nina, and he is given his own obituary to read. “His contribution to the political history of Ukraine may well become a subject for research not only by a Committee of Deputies, but by his fellow writers also. And who knows, a novel on that theme may enjoy a longer and more successful life than that of Viktor Zolotaryov.” Is this an invitation to assume that Death and the Penguin is that novel?

However, Misha has become ill and needs a heart transplant. For which the heart of a three to four year old child would apparently be suitable. Viktor arranges for the operation and also to transport Misha to the Ukrainian research station on Antarctica.

Kurkov’s treatment of this surreal scenario is resolutely straightforward; there are no flights of fancy, no purple prose. This, of course, only heightens the surreality of the scenario. Or is the perception of that surreality a result of being a reader from a country whose history has not been authoritarian nor overtly corrupt?

Note: this edition uses the pre-Russian invasion spellings Kyev, Kharkov, Odessa, Donyetsk and Lvov rather than the now preferred Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Donetsk and Lviv.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, a missing end quotation mark after a piece of direct speech, two new paragraphs were unindented, “where he came from and he was after” (where he came from and what he was after,)

In The Sea of Fertility, Penguin, 1987, 247 p. Translated from the Japanese 奔馬 (Homba,) Shinchosha Company, 1960, by Michael Gallagher.

It is the early 1930s, a time of political uncertainty and assassination in Japan. Thirty-eight year old judge Shikeguni Honda comes to believe Isao Iinuma, a promising practitioner of kendo and also the son of a former tutor of Honda’s teenage friend Kiyaoki Matsugae whose unfortunate life was portrayed in Snow Country, is in fact Kiyaoki reincarnated. This is a thought Honda keeps to himself, though.

Nevertheless he takes an interest in the young man, who after one conversation gives him a booklet titled The League of the Divine Wind. This chronicles a failed revolt in the eighteenth century of a group of that name who felt the Western influence on Japan was inimical and ought to be overturned. Unfortunately, they believed only swords were suitably condign weapons to enact the divine will and so fell to defeat. In that revolt’s aftermath one of its leaders is said to have given voice to the spirit of the Samurai: “Were we to have acted like frail women?”

This incident is an illustration of the tension that existed in Japan between the traditional and the modern and which was in many ways Mishima’s overriding concern. At one point a minor character says, “‘That’s just how things are here in Japan. All one has to do is plunge one’s hand in, intent only on a bit of amusement, and there’s a poisonous snake in there waiting.’”Iinuma also hatches a plot, this time to kill the men whom he believes are leading Japan to ruin, or at least to a neglect of the old ways. When this, too, fails due to the authorities getting wind of it (not through one of the co-conspirators though) Honda gives up his judge’s job to defend Iinuma.

The political background appears from time to time in conversations but is never foregrounded but still the forces which would propel Japan into conquest – and ultimate disaster – are in evidence. The adventure in Manchuria, about which some of the characters have misgivings, is about to begin.

Mishima’s sympathies seem to lie with the traditionalists and Iinuma’s desire for purity and unease at the Japan in which he lives perhaps matches the author’s own.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. “In 1933, the third year of the Genko era” (the third year of the Genko era was in 1333,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘one should keep them until lay them reverently on the family altar’” (is missing some words between ‘until’ and ‘lay’,) “the cry of cicadas” (cries of cicadas surely?) “England’s going off the gold standard” (Britain that would be, not England,) hiccough (there’s no such thing. It’s a hiccup,) “it’s being not all likely” (it’s being not at all likely,) “a green finch” (a greenfinch,) “scarlet-leafed forest” (scarlet-leaved.) Benzine (petrol,) “somewhat tasteless” (somewhat distasteful,) “having spent the New Year’s in a police cell” (having spent the New Year in a police cell.) “The whistle of a freight passing through Ichigaya Station” (of a freight train – though in British English that’s ‘goods train’,) “the groans … had nothing of kendo about it” (the groans … had nothing of kendo about them,) “but these was limited to” (these were limited to,) “none of those … were” (none … was,) “with his fingertips of his left hand” (with the fingertips of his left hand.)