Archives » Japanese Fiction

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

Pocket, 1973, 376 p. Translated from the Japanese, 春の雪 (Haru no Yuki,) by Michael Gallagher.

I suppose any tale of star-cross’d lovers invites comparisons to Romeo and Juliet. I doubt, though, that most of them will contain references to the Russo-Japanese War, which is still in the recent memory of this novel’s protagonist, Kiyoaki Matsugae. That the book starts with his recollection of a photograph of the memorial services for the war dead is an indicator that the outcome of the novel is not likely to be joyful.

Kiyoaki had been entrusted by his father Marquis Matsugae to be raised in the noble but now relatively impoverished Ayakura family so as to acquire a touch of elegance and hope of advancement. The Ayakuras’ daughter, Satoko, had lavished affection on him and at the book’s start Kiyoaki knows she is in love with him but he is for the most part indifferent  hence it takes a while for the love story to gather momentum. Early parts of the book deal with Kiyoaki’s relationship with his friend Shikeguni Honda and two Siamese princes who are on a diplomatic visit of sorts and attend their school.

An exchange of letters between Satoko and Kiyoaki in which she reveals her feelings for him become central to the plot but his request for Satoko not to read his last one (where he eventually acknowledges his for her) comes too late. At first he does not know this and when he finds out she did read it he is angered and cuts off contact.

In the meantime Satoko, at twenty years old getting close to being on the shelf, is all but forced by her family into a betrothal to Prince Harunori of the Imperial family. Kiyoaki expresses to his father indifference to the engagement but, threatening to expose Satoko’s last letter to him, demands a meeting with her through the agency of her maid Tadeshina. This leads to the consummation of their relationship and further clandestine meetings. An odd aspect of the story is that Count Ayakura had years before instructed Tadeshina that Satoko should lose her virginity before any bridegroom chosen by the Marquis should touch her. Revelation of the affair would therefore reflect badly on him. Satoko’s resultant pregnancy presages disaster. Drastic attempts to avert it are not entirely availing.

While not absolutely following the template of Romeo and Juliet the parallels are unavoidable. Star-cross’d love is a universal theme, in Japan as elsewhere.

Pedant’s corner:- “wracked with sobs” (racked,) “cyprus wood” (cypress wood,) “wracked by her feelings” (racked,) “his amusement was tingled with disgust” (tinged is the usual verb here,) “the lay of the land” (the lie of the land.) “Count Ayakura was a hopeless coward in the face to the Countess at once, and when she in turn handed it quite a disturbance on the morning that Tadeshina did not get up.” (Make of those two sentences what you will. I confess I couldn’t.) There was over to her husband, he opened it at fingertips’ length, as if it were germ-ridden” (needs clarifying,) “from lack to sleep” (lack of sleep,) “the Masugaes” (Matsugaes.)

Snow Country; and, Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Penguin, 1971, 204 p. Translated from the Japanese 雪国 (Yukinugi) and 雪国 (Senbazuru) by Edward G Seidenstecker. First published in English in 1956 and 1958, respectively.

This book contains two of the author’s novels, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. Kawabata is also known as a poet and some of his sentences here are short and enigmatic, as in haiku. The nuances of Japanese culture can perhaps never be properly illuminated by a translation; there is though something ineluctably Japanese about the two tales – at least to someone brought up with no contact with the country – a sort of understanding not fully expressed by the prose.

Snow Country is the story of the relationship between Shimamura, who goes on a trip from the city to the hot springs of the snow country of Western Japan, and Komako, a local part-time geisha. On the train there Shimamura observes the ministrations of a young woman named Yoko to a young man who is obviously ill, returning to his home to die. Yoko is an off-screen presence for most of the novel, though her importance to Shimamura, perhaps as some sort of ideal, is not in doubt. It is his dealings with Komako that take up most of the story though, a liaison never completely spelled out but indicated by implication, yet most likely utterly transparent to a Japanese reader.

Thousand Cranes is a bit more straightforward. As a boy, Kikuji was once brought by his father to a meeting with his mistress, Chikako, when he glimpsed the birthmark on her left breast. Years later, after his father’s death, his mother also being dead, Chikako unwarrantedly assumes loco parentis and tries to inveigle him into marrying Yokiko Inamura, who on introduction to him wore a dress decorated with pictures of cranes. He is not interested. Instead, he becomes briefly involved with Mrs Ota, who had replaced Chikako as his father’s mistress, and friendly with her daughter Fumiko. A lot of their interactions are mediated through the rituals of the tea ceremony and of gifts and usage of various kinds of Japanese pottery.

These two short novels were interesting reading, if a little opaque to my anglophone sensibilities.

Despite this being in translation (albeit into USian) amazingly I found not a single typo or any other possible entrant for Pedant’s corner in this book.

Scandal by Shūsaku Endō

Penguin, 1989, 235 p. Translated from the Japanese (スキャンダル) by Van C Gessel

At an award ceremony, famous writer Suguro, known for his Christianity and clean living, is accosted by a woman who claims to recognise him from his sojourns in Sakura Street in Shinjuku – an area known for its peep-shows and porn shops. Suguro indignantly denies such behaviour, any wider revelation of which would undoubtedly lead to a scandal.

A reporter named Kobari, who was present at the accusation, instinctively believes the woman and, shocked at Suguro’s apparent double standards (at one time frequenting vice dens, at the other portraying the exact opposite in his fiction,) makes it his mission to uncover what he sees as Suguro’s duplicity. The discovery of a portrait apparently of Suguro, painted by one of the women of Sakura Street, confirms Kobari in his pursuit. In one of Kubari’s interviews there a sex-worker tells him, “Sex is awfully deep, sir. All kinds of sensations come bubbling up from the bottom-most part of your body. It’s like a strange new music.” She reveals to him the bizarre enthusiasms and fetishes of the clients of the establishments in Sakura Street, by which Kobari is appalled.

In the meantime Suguro engages a young girl, Mitsu, whose family is in straitened circumstances, to help his (like Suguro himself, ageing) wife with the housework. Mitsu eventually turns out to be untrustworthy but Suguro has by this time, in a first intimation that he may have a darker side, dreamt of her half-naked.

As an exploration of the dark recesses of sexuality the novel is heightened when Suguro strikes up a conversational relationship with Madame Naruse. Her stories of her late husband’s complicity in, indeed instigation of, a wartime atrocity and the erotic charge it gave her trouble Suguro in its contrast with his own staid (it is strongly implied now non-existent) sex life.

The book’s emphasis on human frailty is at times tempered by reflections on writing. In a conversation Suguro is told writers can be divided into two groups, the biophilous (life-loving) and the necrophilous (self-destructive, degenerate, decadent.) Suguro’s work lies in the former category.

Suguro’s certainty that he must be being impersonated (even though he reflects that “Deep in the hearts of men lay a blackness they themselves knew nothing about”) leads him to try to confront his double.

Madame Naruse sets up a meeting in Sakura Street so that Suguro might meet the impostor, during which she tells him people delight in inflicting pain, that perhaps Jesus was murdered because he was too innocent. As he carried his cross the crowd reviled him and threw stones because of the pleasure it gave them. She adds, “… all you’ve written about are men who have betrayed Jesus but then weep tears of regret after the cock crows three times. You’ve always avoided writing about the mob, intoxicated with pleasure as they hurled stones at him.” The only other person present in the love hotel, however, is a comatose Mitsu, upon whom Suguro spies through a peep-hole.

The döppelganger/split personality has long been a wellspring of Scottish fiction. To see the dichotomy examined in a Japanese context was unusual but Endō treats it subtly and convincingly.

Pedant’s corner:- “A magazine reported named Kubari” (reporter.) “He was assigned to a regiment in Chiba” (China, I assume,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “a silver rhinestone broach” (brooch,) “Madame Nearuse” (Naruse.)

When I Whistle by Shūsaku Endō

Quartet, 1979, 275 p, including iv p Preface. Translated from the Japanese, 口笛をふく時, (Kuchibue wo Fuku Toki,) by Van C Gessel.

 When I Whistle cover

A chance encounter on a train with a former schoolmate forces a man called Ozu (I can’t remember being told his first name) to think about a boy at school who was dubbed Flatfish. Flatfish, a new arrival in Ozu’s class (not the top set by any means,) unfortunately had an odour but, because he was seated next to Ozu, by default became his best friend. Ozu had to explain to him all the unwritten rules but Flatfish continually managed to get himself in trouble both by accident and by being himself. The defining moment of Flatfish’s life was an encounter the pair had with two girls from the local girls’ school – with whom they ought not to have had any contact by the strict rules of the time – on the way home one day. Flatfish formed a lasting but doomed attraction to Aiko, the girl who, in an act of compassion, bandaged his injured hand. These schooldays were in the 1930s, Japan was embroiled in China and militaristic attitudes abounded but the nature of schooling (harsh) and the trials of dealing with the opposite sex come over as being not too dissimilar to Western experiences of the time.

In the novel’s present day, Ozu’s son Eiichi is a practitioner at the dispensary of the local hospital and eager to climb the greasy pole of the medical profession so does not demur from the outmoded prescribing and treatment practices of his superiors. He notes, in particular, the habit of telling soothing platitudes to patients. Despite his liaison with a nurse, Keiko, he sets his designs on his boss’s daughter, but has a rival in Doctor Kurihara who also has a nurse on a string. Relations between the sexes in Japan had clearly also undergone a more liberal change post-war. Eiichi then is complicit in administering a new, otherwise untried, cancer treatment devised by a firm owned by Kurihara’s father.

Flatfish not being academic quit school and got a poorly paid job but when war with the Western powers came (the feeling was that Japan would easily defeat them, of course, and at first it seemed so) was swiftly drafted into the miltary and sent to Korea. Nevertheless, he inveigled Ozu to seek out Aiko and give her a pen as a token of his esteem. She in the meantime had married a young naval officer. The reader suspects, rightly, that none of this will come out well. This thread between Aiko, Flatfish and Ozu is what binds the book together.

When I Whistle isn’t one of Endo’s better novels even if it is one of his later ones. There is something about the writing that is sketchy or ill-considered (which doesn’t seem to be because of translation) and more than once information or characters’ thoughts are repeated that have no need to be.

Still, the reflection, “People often wonder when they will die but they rarely wonder where they will die,” is original but, “Now, when all was lost, he felt he understood the meaning they had given to his life,” is a novelistic thought if there ever was one.

The Preface tells us that the author was himself in hospital for a considerable time with various complaints and during one operation his heart stopped. But he survived and continued smoking. It is noticeable that the doctors in this novel all smoke. Then again, it was first published in 1974.

Pedant’s corner:- “if worse came to worst” (if the worst came to the worst,) “None … were” (several times. ‘None …was’.) Opthamology (x 3, Ophthalmology,) knit (knitted, please. Okay the translation is into USian, but still,) “his voice rising to a crescendo” (to a climax; the crescendo is the rise.)

Automatic Eve by Rokurō Inui

Haikasoru, 2019, 315 p. Translated from the Japanese Jidō ibu (自動イブ,) by Matt Treyvaud. Published in Interzone 284, Nov-Dec 2019.

 Automatic Eve cover

How necessary is it to suspend disbelief in order to appreciate, or perhaps persevere with, a work of fiction? Conventional wisdom suggests it is at least a necessary condition. Automatic Eve suggests that might not be the case.

The plot of Inui’s novel hinges on the existence of elaborate automata. Not toys, not merely small things like crickets, but better than android–like simulacra of human beings. Things of convincing, warm, outer human appearance but internally consisting of metal, cogs, gears, wires – each with a pendulum for a heart. Yet the automata here are effectively so realistic that they appear to be completely human to everyone involved, even to the extent of being able to have sex convincingly, to inspire love and devotion, and to experience these things for themselves. Even capable of being convinced that they themselves are human – until, perhaps, they find otherwise. And that’s a leap that’s a big requirement to ask of a reader. (This one always had nagging doubts.) Yet, to carry on, to keep faith with the story, said reader has to take this on trust. (And, maybe, later, write a review.)

It is a mark of Inui’s writing, and his translator’s ability to convey it, that the necessary perseverance isn’t a problem. The story here is engaging enough to keep you turning the pages. It helps that the central concept is introduced fairly gradually.

The setting is a little odd though. The characters know of Chemistry, electricity and clockwork, yet the society in which they are embedded has a mediæval feel. It is obviously closely based on Japan, but not a Japan which ever existed. Yes, we have sake, bathhouses, sumo, cricket fights, meticulous gardening (albeit also a cover for spying,) a certain pleasure in fine objects, finely wrought – not to mention the goings-on in the building known as the Thirteen Floors. There is, too, intrigue between an Imperial court and a shogunate, but the divine figure is an Empress, and the succession goes through the female line, to a female. It is a Japan tweaked just so, to enable the story. A fantasy, then.

Would-be Sumo wrestler, Geiemon Tentoku, has fallen in love with the Eve of the title and selflessly seeks to release her from her indenture in the Thirteen Floors to restore her to the man he thinks she loves. Kyuzo Kugimiya learned all he knows about the construction of automata from Keian Higa, who had plotted the overthrow of the system before being executed after his plans were betrayed to the authorities. Under the instructions of the Imperial Gardener (really a spymaster) Kihachi Umekawa, the shogun’s spy, Jinnai, is investigating Kigimiya’s activities. All these are actors in the overall plot, which concerns the contents of the Sacred Vessel, a sealed container within the Imperial Palace.

The existence of convincing automata leads a couple of characters to question the nature of humanity. Kyuzo thinks, “A pregnant woman’s body was home to not one soul but two. Where did the life in her womb come from, and when? If souls came from elsewhere to reside in the human body, was it not possible that one might take up residence in the infant automaton they were building?” Later, Jinnai wonders, “Where did the soul come from? Where, in the body or brain, did it conceal itself while a human still lived? …. Automata like Eve showed human behavior [sic] as a response to the care and love they received from humans.”

Such metaphysical considerations are invited by the subject matter – and are arguably the raison d’être of literary fiction – but Inui doesn’t let them bother the thrust of his story for too long.

There is a slight flaw to the book’s structure, however. Rather than a novel it is a succession of seven shortish novellas, albeit featuring ongoing characters. That the narrative viewpoint changes between these sections is not a problem but certain repetitions of information suggest that they may not have been conceived or written as a whole but subject to a later fix-up. And Automatic Eve herself is more like an absence than a protagonist. Though she does appear in them all she is neither the focus nor viewpoint character in any of the seven segments.

None of that, however, takes away from the overall effect. It may lack innovation in its central idea but Automatic Eve is still a well-written, solid piece of fiction.

The following did not appear in the published review:-

Pedant’s corner:- “none were too explicit” (none was too explicit.) “The master of accounts were responsible for” (the master … was responsible.) “None of these new revelations were the answers Kakita sought..” (None of these new revelations was the answer ..) “none of them understand the situation” (none of them understands the situation.) “None of the spies were supposed to know” (None … was supposed to know.) “The attendant’s quarters” (attendants’ quarters.) “The group made their way…” (The group made its way,) “‘I gather that neither of those fates await those who are careless?’” (neither of those fates awaits those, plus the sentence isn’t really a question.) “Mounts of leftover soil and worktools ..” (‘Mounds’ makes more sense.) “‘The palace has decided to keep the news to themselves for now’” (to itself is more grammatical,) “for this automata” (for this automaton.) “These question had always bothered Jinnai.” (These questions.)

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

King Penguin, 1987, 141 p. Translated from the Japanese 午後の曳航 (Gogo no Eikō) byJohn Nathan.

 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea cover

Mishima, seemingly at the height of his literary powers and success, cut short his own life by committing seppuku in 1970, apparently in protest at the erosion of Japan’s values due to Western influence.

In this short novel, the first of his I have read, Fusako Kuroda has been widowed for five years. Unknown to her, her son Noboru has discovered a hole in the wainscotting between their bedrooms through which he can witness her bedtime routines. After a visit with Noboru to a tramp merchant steamer she takes up with the sailor, Ryuji Tzukazaki, who was attentive to Noboru but who it is revealed considers sex as a secret yearning for death. Their relationship is then consummated under the eyes of a not best pleased Noboru. Noboru is also number three in a group of schoolboys who enact nefarious rituals in their secret den. Boys have always tended to the wanton; as Shakespeare well knew.

Here is set the scene for an odd tale of love, alienation, dehumanisation and revenge. Things come to a head when after a final voyage away Ryuji decides to give up sailing and marry Fusako. Noboru presents his list of charges against Ryuji to his gang’s chief.

The tension between Japan’s past and present, which Mishima felt all too keenly, is reflected in the different attitudes of the characters. Fusako, with her job in a luxury goods shop, represents modernity, Ryuji a connection to Japan’s former seafaring glories, the boys a reminder of the insular past.

Pedant’s corner:- louvered swinging doors (louvred,) an unneeded indent of one space at one new line with a larger line spacing than usual below it.

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