Best of the Year: Delving Deeper

I just can’t seem to stop reading this year – more than 160 books this year! So obviously, a simple Top Ten List won’t do for me. This is yet another of my posts by categories, this time of authors that I have enjoyed in the past and finally got a chance to read more.

Yuko Tsushima: The Shooting Gallery and Of Dogs and Walls, transl. Geraldine Harcourt

Not just the daughter of my favourite Japanese writer, but an astounding writer in her own right. It’s a puzzle to me why she is not better known in the English-speaking world, even though she had been translated in the 1980s, but wondered if it was…

 … perhaps she did not fit in well with the narrative of the Japanese economic miracle and boom years. She was not ‘exotic’ enough, not ‘other’ enough. She was not writing about cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums (although she does write about a chrysanthemum beetle). Her protagonists were usually single mothers, struggling to bring up children in a society that was often belittling and marginalising them. Perhaps too relatable the world over… although with additional pressures in Japan.

I was very moved to read her rather personal stories (or are they really all that autobiographical?) about her own family, which are especially poignant in the two stories Of Dogs and Walls.

A mother who hated and feared the outside world as she held her children tight, and who faced that world with disdain, adamant that no one was going to look down on her: that’s who raised me. I grew up tutored in what happened if you trusted outsiders, taught that solitude was the only weapon of defence.

Shirley Jackson: Hangsaman

One of my absolute favourite writers. I have all her books on my bedside table, but there are still one or two of her novels that I haven’t read (because they were out of print for a long while). Now, thanks to the Penguin Classic reprint, I had the opportunity to read this tale of claustrophobia and manipulation, of growing up and trying to fit in.

I remain constantly stunned by how much Shirley Jackson was ‘of her time’, describing the claustrophobic environment for housewives and the limited possibilities for women in the 1950s, and yet how utterly contemporary she still feels in style, at once sly and sinister, detached yet capable of getting fully under your skin and never quite letting you go.

Marlen Haushofer: We Kill Stella

Despite my love of Austrian literature, I only discovered Haushofer last year, when The Wall seemed the perfect companion piece to a pandemic. I have since made an effort to acquire most of her work in German and this novella bears all the hallmarks of her disquieting style, a quietly simmering surface hiding real horrors beneath.

It is incredible how much the author manages to fit into very few pages, how complex the thought processes are, and how much there is to read between the lines. Every word counts with Marlen Haushofer. This is tightrope walking on the very edge of the precipice (or the verge of a mental breakdown) and you keep reading to see just how the narrator can pull it off.

Javier Marias: The Infatuations, transl. Margaret Jull Costa

Another author whose books I instantly acquired upon first discovering him, but never quite got around to reading more. This year I finally cracked open the less intimidating standalone The Infatuations and once more allowed myself to be lulled by that apparently meandering, baroque style.

Marias is a master at playing with the readers, misleading them and then pulling the rug from under their feet. Yet, underneath all that mischief and apparently aimlessly meandering style, there are some very serious questions being asked (and no clear answers being given) about what sort of world we live in – where the strongest and most ruthless seem destined to win – and whether the truth will indeed set us free.

David Peace: Tokyo Redux

The final part in the Tokyo trilogy has been a long time coming, so I simply had to get hold of it as soon as it came out this year. David Peace is a bit of a marmite author – and I have to admit that his style can get occasionally grating at times, with its excessive use of repetitions and oral effects. However, this book is a triumph, striking just the right balance of mystery and self-unravelling, of conspiracy and societal transformation.

You can see how easy it is to mock this style or the solemnity of the author. But he manages to convey a sense of the melancholy complexity and unresolvedness of life which always grips and fascinates me. This is Tokyo in black-and-white film setting, a Kurosawa film with a jazz improv soundtrack, a world-weary Cowboy Bebop space cowboy vibe (it’s hard to believe that David Peace won’t have been influenced by that classic anime), and I have to admit I rather love it and admire his willingness to experiment and go his own path.

Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude, transl. Michael Henry Heim

A slim volume, but containing so many layers, so many ideas that I will no doubt have to reread it many times to fully grasp it. Quite unforgettable, this story of a humble paper-compactor who has learnt so much from the books he is pulping, and whose work is about to become automated.

Much of the action takes place in cellars, underground, there is a lot of dirt and danger, there is even sacrifice, for example the small mice that regularly get compacted together with the paper. But there is also indifference to that sacrifice. The author repeatedly refers to the sewers of Prague, the scene of a senseless war between two armies of rats. He often shows university-educated men who are doing back-breaking manual labour, even refers to them as ‘Prague’s fallen angels… who have lost a battle they never fought’

Now that I see all my favourites in this category listed together, I realise they all have the common theme of the solitary protagonist, often an outsider, a person who is a little uncomfortable with society as it is, who questions things, who is often crushed, but very, very occasionally might rise – maybe not triumphant, but at least surviving.

#JanuaryinJapan: Yuko Tsushima again

Yuko Tsushima: Of Dogs and Walls, trans. Geraldine Harcourt, Penguin Modern 43, 2018.

I’ve spent a very happy January in Japan (virtually), revisiting old favourites and making some new favourites. Above all, I seem to have fallen into a research black hole regarding the remarkable Tsushima family: father and daughter. I have reviewed a book of short stories by Tsushima Yuko and Dazai Osamu’s last novel. I am now delving in some academic research about Dazai and also some of his more autobiographical short stories.

When I heard that there are two further recently translated autobiographical short stories by Yuko Tsushima, I could not resist. These two were translated in 2018 (touchingly, by the much-missed translator to whom we owe most of Tsushima’s work available in English) and published in the tiny chapbook series of numbered Penguin Modern Classics. It contains two stories: Suifu – The Watery Realm and Inu to Hei ni tsuite – Of Dogs and Walls, and they are the most openly and painfully personal stories I have yet read by this author. They are decades apart – the first was published in 1982, when Tsushima was establishing herself as an author, while the second was published in 2014, two years before her death.

In the first story, Tsushima must have hoped that by taking on her father’s legacy head-on, she might be able to put it to rest. Both for herself and for the Japanese reading public, who continued to be obsessed by all things related to Dazai’s life and writings. She was probably also keen to establish her own reputation as a talented author, entirely separate from him.

She certainly achieved that in Japan, leaving behind a legacy of 35 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them prize-winning. From the mid 1980s she moved away from the stories inspired by her own life as a single mother, and took on a wider subject matter, often writing about ecological matters or Japan as a colonial oppressor or marginalised people such as the Ainu or the plight of interracial children born from American soldier fathers and Japanese mothers after the war. Sadly, these later works have not yet been translated into English, which may give us a rather one-dimensional view of her writing. In fact, when I wrote my previous reviews about her work, I was not fully aware of the richness of her legacy.

‘The Watery Realm’ moves delicately and confidently, like water, between three generations, via a loop of folkloric and personal associations. First, we have the five-year-old boy who is saving up all his pocket money to buy a castle-shaped decoration for the aquarium. His mother the narrator is reminded of the Dragon Palace from the Urashimataroo story, wonders pragmatically if she can afford it when they don’t even have a proper aquarium or goldfish, and remembers her own chaotic childish thoughts when told that her father had drowned himself.

Finally, we have the narrator’s mother, the boy’s grandmother, who was left a young widow with three children and has always felt superstitious about Suijin, the Shinto Water God. Suijin is actually the generic name given to any kind of water spirits (which can manifest as fish, eels, snakes, dragons) to be found in the many, many bodies of water all around Japan. Some of them are benign (after all, they help irrigate the land), but there is always more than a hint of malice or danger about them. The most famous of these are the Kappa (half-human, half-frogs or turtles), who appear in many folk tales and in a novella by Akutagawa.

In Tsushima’s story, the woman’s struggle to cook, clean and raise children in a house with no running water makes her feel as though she is battling against gravity itself as well as the greedy, evil spirit of Suijin. There are moments when she wonders why humans have evolved into land animals at all:

Sometimes I thought what fools we humans are – it’s living on land that causes all these woes; if we need water so badly then we should just return to it… Then, one day, my husband did return to the water.’

The water spirit crows in triumph at the harm she has caused and continues to torture the woman, taunting her that she will never recover from the loss of her husband.

Grieve all you like… wail until your throat is on fire. You can’t escape water… There’s nothing else here. The place is awash. Your husband is water now. You are married to water. You will be deafened by its voice, shattered by its weight.

However, the woman is determined not to allow herself to be defeated by this prediction. As she remembers it, she has not allowed herself to become a burden on others, has done a good job of living independently and providing a good life and home environment for her children, even when their family is struck down by a second tragedy, the early death of the middle child. [Tsushima’s brother did indeed die in his early teens of a sudden fever.] At a family meal, however, when the five-year-old grandson innocently asks her why she is not as scary as his mother said she was, it turns out that what she is describing is not a world that her daughter recognises. The instinct for survival might have come at a price. This is how her daughter remembers things:

A mother who hated and feared the outside world as she held her children tight, and who faced that world with disdain, adamant that no one was going to look down on her: that’s who raised me. I grew up tutored in what happened if you trusted outsiders, taught that solitude was the only weapon of defence.

Just like her son’s longing for the Dragon Palace in the fish tank, which doesn’t quite live up to expectations, so the narrator see her mother yearning to cast a beautiful sheen on their past. All the unspoken resentments and fears between mother and daughter quiver in the air between them… but it is too late to address them. I cannot help but wonder how the author’s mother reacted to this story (she was still alive when it was published and may have seen too many parallels to her own life in it).

This story is full of raw emotion and becomes all the more poignant when you know that Tsushima’s son, who did indeed have a passion for aquariums and keeping fish, died a couple of years after this story was published, drowning in his bathtub while his mother was in the other room.

This third family tragedy might have given her a deeper understanding of her mother’s suffering and determination to keep going. In the later story, Of Dogs and Walls, the mother-daughter relationship is calmer, although still unknowable and tense. The story is focused on the sudden loss of the narrator’s brother, who was a couple of years older than her, but whom she babied and protected, because he had a developmental disability. However, the emotions in this story are kept on a tight leash. The grief is described and possibly partly attenuated by listing the dogs her mother kept in the yard, while the walls are perhaps the symbols of the protective scaffolding we try to erect around ourselves. Yet, for a brief moment in the story, a gate was opened in the walls separating their house from that of their neighbours’. Could the author be telling us that these fleeting moments of connection, of comfort, are all that we can expect in life?

Tsushima Yuko in 2011, from INK Literary Monthy in Taiwan.

Tshushima’s surviving child is a playwright, writing under the name Ishihara Nen. When reading this outstanding essay about her mother and her childhood, I was suddenly struck how similar her sentiments are to those of the narrator in The Watery Realm, how she feared her mother and struggled to understand and cope with her anger (directed at other people rather than at her, thank goodness, unlike in the story). Tsushima did not try to gloss over her life and rewrite it in a rosy fictional light. Nor, despite the unflinching honesty of her descriptions of single motherhood, did she become overwhelmed by self-hatred and nihilism like her father. Instead, she learnt to come to terms with her own grief and anger by listening and giving voice to others who had been struck by personal or collective tragedy. I might be reaching here, but it seems to me that she finally triumphed over her family’s painful legacy.

I have dug deep into Tsushima’s life, and yet all this is not at all necessary to read and appreciate her work. When I read Territory of Light two years ago, I knew nothing at all about all this, and yet it spoke to me with a great immediacy. So I will end with Ishihara’s words about just how much of her mother’s work is ‘confessional’.

When I was born into this world, my mother was already a novelist. In her writings, a character who it seemed could only be my mother lived with children who seemed like me and my younger brother, in the same town where we lived. Thanks to that, until I was almost fully grown I thought my mother’s early works were all about our household exactly as it was. Even now, looking at the pieces written when I was little, if you were to ask me how much of it is true I couldn’t possibly tell you. All of it comes across as real, and then again it doesn’t.

Ishihara Nen: People’s Voices, Mother’s Song

January in Japan: Yuko Tsushima’s Short Stories

A pleasure to take part once more in Meredith’s Japanese Literature Challenge 14. My favourite way to start the year, with January in Japan.

Tsushima Yūko: The Shooting Gallery and other stories. (transl. Geraldine Harcourt), The Women’s Press, 1988.

It’s a puzzle to me why Yūko Tsushima is not better known to the English-speaking world. During her life she won pretty much all of the major Japanese literary prizes. She did not produce a huge body of work, but wrote steadily throughout her life. Quite a bit of her earlier work was translated into English in the 1970s and 80s by respected New Zealand translator Geraldine Harcourt, who had a personal connection with the author. Tsushima also fitted in with the feminist preoccupations of the Western world during that period (the time of Spare Rib magazine and Virago Press) – although perhaps she did not fit in well with the narrative of the Japanese economic miracle and boom years. She was not ‘exotic’ enough, not ‘other’ enough. She was not writing about cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums (although she does write about a chrysanthemum beetle). Her protagonists were usually single mothers, struggling to bring up children in a society that was often belittling and marginalising them. Perhaps too relatable the world over… although with additional pressures in Japan.

I am hopeful, however, that after the success in recent years of her novel Territory of Light (which was reissued in 2018 in the Penguin Classics edition), the rest of her work might be discovered. Like her father, she does not have an enormous range in terms of subject matter or stylistics, but what she does write is magnificent, just like her father’s work.

I do realise that perhaps I shouldn’t be allowing her father to enter the conversation, really, even if he is Dazai Osamu, a writer greatly revered in Japan (perhaps less well known abroad, because he too presents too gloomy a view of Japan and of mankind more generally). I certainly don’t think they can or should be compared to each other. After all, Tsushima was just a baby when her father died. However, her father’s highly publicised double suicide with his lover and abandonment of his family clearly had an enormous impact on Tsushima’s worldview and on her work. (She confronts this situation and imagines her mother’s reaction in a short story called ‘The Watery Realm’ which is not part of this collection, but has also been translated by Geraldine Harcourt).

So when Tsushima explores the life of single mothers, she is not only mining her own experiences as a single mother, but also memories of herself growing up in a single parent household. She was bemused by the ‘feminist’ label that often got stuck on her, and it’s perhaps the age-old truth that if a man writes about the very heart of loneliness and lack of communication, even (or perhaps especially) within a family, they are perceived as addressing the great universals of human experience, while if a woman does it, then it’s a domestic theme or less important women’s fiction.

Set against a backdrop of harsh realism, of dirty dishes piled high in the sink, cramped flats, whining children, fluorescent lights with insect corpses piled high, Tsushima’s protagonists, most of them mothers, but some of them young girls or boys, try to escape into their dreamworlds. But reality often comes chasing after them, crushing their carefully constructed alternative worlds.

In the title story, an exhausted mother tries to find the magical seaside memories of her youth once more and recreate them for her sons.

The thought of the sea had come to her suddenly the night before… She’d made up her mind to take the two children to the beach. There she had been, hemmed in by the cracker crumbs, plastic blocks, empty juice cans, underwear and socks that littered the room, the sinkful of dirty dishes, the washing hanging from the ceiling, the sound of the TV, the younger child’s crying, her own voice talking at the office, and the weariness – a weariness that turned her body to a desiccated old sponge. Unable to lie down, she was sitting having a cigarette with her elbows resting on the table when a transparent blue gleam streaked before her eyes… It could only be the sea. It had completely slipped her mind.

Needless to say, once they get to the sea, it does not live up to their expectations at all. No cool, beautiful blue – the sea is grey, the light dull, the beach full of concrete and rubbish and dog poo, the children complain that they are tired, they have to pee, they can’t walk any longer… She closes her eyes and dreams of some sort of release:

… one day my back will sprout a pair of lance-shaped wings which will begin to beat, my body will visibly expand, and when the metamorphosis is complete I’ll be a dragon that ascends spiralling to the heavens. I’ll leave everyone watching astounded on the earth below as I soar aloft. my golden scales gleaming. Refreshed.

In another moving story ‘The Silent Traders’, a walled park in the middle of the city becomes a place for abandoning unwanted animals and develops its own microcosm, becoming a fantasy land for the lonely children growing up around it. People thoughtlessly or casually hurting and neglecting animals is a recurrent motif – undoubtedly a parallel with the way they marginalise and overlook certain people. Another theme that crops up time and again is that of feeling invisible. In ‘Clearing the Thickets’ we seamlessly move from a young woman relinquishing her lover to a woman in a bright red dress and wondering if she is visible at all, to a scene where the wayward daughter returns home to help with clearing the weeds in the family garden and, seemingly out of sight and mind of her mother and older sister, she overhears them viciously gossiping about her.

Yūko Tsushima author photo from The New Yorker.

The mother-daughter relationship in particular is often fraught with problems. All of the characters are flawed, and yet we cannot help but empathise with the yearning of many of them for escape from the everyday worries, their need to be loved and understood and appreciated. But to what extent do they weaken themselves by relying too much on others to be rescued? And when they understand that rescue is not forthcoming, how can they not despair and fnd the strength to carry on? It’s this wonderful rich complexity of each character, this understanding of the contradictory impulses in every one of us, that I find so satisfying in Tsushima’s work.

These are stories to read carefully and savour every word. They move effortlessly between the bland everyday and daydreams or even pure fantasy. I hesitate to call them magical realism, but there is often a strong reliance on symbolism. Stories that will make you uneasy, that will lodge themselves into your mind and never quite leave you.

You can read an excellent review of this story collection here, and thank you also to this blogger for referring me to this very revealing autobiographical essay by Tsushima published in the Chicago Tribune. I will leave you to read it for yourselves, but this paragraph in particular describes her subject matter perfectly:

I have never written about happy women. This is not because I like unhappiness, but it comes from my firm belief that misfortune is not always bad. Happiness can spoil people. Happy people can lose sensitivity, and as a result they become poor in terms of human qualities.

April Has Ended: Reading Summary

12 books, 8 countries, 5 women writers, 4 translated books – that is the summary for April 2018. It’s been a good month, with only 1 DNF (Brian Aldiss in non sci-fi mode) and no average reads at all! Perhaps I am getting better at picking books, thanks to all the great recommendations I get from your blogs.

I’ve already mentioned five thrilling crime novels that I read in a row and I had another excellent one to add to that list, although I don’t really consider it crime fiction, namely Sébastien Japrisot’s One Deadly Summer, transl. Alan Sheridan. This last one builds tension up gradually but is quite explosive in subject matter and characterisation. The textbook shifts in points of view show us how much more complex everything is than it first appears. A masterclass in slow-burn, simmering, sultry drama, like the land before a thunderstorm.

The other two books in translation I read were Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, transl. Geraldine Harcourt, and Domenico Starnone’s Trick, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (courtesy of Asymptote Book Club). There are some similarities between the two books: both are narrated by a reasonably self-centred person who is somehow stuck in a groove or on the brink of an abyss and is trying to find themselves again, partly with the help (sometimes with the hindrance) of a child. Of course, in Territory of Light it is a young mother on the cusp of divorce, while in Trick it is an elderly artistic grandfather. Both of these deserve a more detailed review – if I get round to it.

Two other books were at least partially set abroad, although written in English. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London still sounds uncomfortably current, while Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You sounds like it should be set in the 19th century, but is unfortunately something which can be seen in contemporary India still (and not only there). A well-educated, artistic and academic young woman is seduced by the intellect of a university professor and marries him, but gradually has all ambition, hope and trust crushed out of her through physical and mental violence. He also seeks to justify his brutality through his socialist ideology, which leads to some horrifying yet funny statements. It is a story which has been told before, but the style is original and the emotions raw. I’ve had this book for a long time, since Naomi Frisby recommended it, but it is now shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction.

The final book also deserves a more extensive review: Elmet by Fiona Mozley, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Perhaps I will have time to do a vlog review soon for those I haven’t reviewed yet.

If you promise not to laugh, I promise to turn a new leaf in May and not leave it so long after reading a book before I review it. Also, to restart the submission game. Also, to revitalise my #EU27Project, as time is running out…

 

WWWednesday 18th April, 2018

Let’s try once more to do the spring season then and hope that this time it’s here to stay. My April turn to take part in the meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. It’s open for anyone to join in and is a great way to share what you’ve been reading! All you have to do is answer three questions and share a link to your blog in the comments section of Sam’s blog.

The three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?

What did you recently finish reading?

What do you think you’ll read next?

A similar meme is run by Lipsyy Lost and Found where bloggers share This Week in Books #TWiB.

I seem to be travelling quite extensively in this week’s selection of books: Germany, France, Japan and Iran.

Current:

Philip Kerr: Prussian Blue

I’d forgotten how much fun Berliner Bernie Gunther is, especially across two timelines – on the brink of war in 1939 in Berchtesgaden and in 1956 France. Second World War and Cold War collide in spectacular fashion, with each crime having endless ramifications. 1939: A sniper assassinates a construction engineer on the very terrace of Hitler’s villa on the mountaintop in Bavaria. 1956: Bernie is on the run as he refuses to collaborate with the Stasi and fears for his life. Good old-fashioned suspense, wit, well-developed characters and attention to period detail – I will miss Kerr!

Just read: 

Yuko Tsushima: Territory of Light, transl. Geraldine Harcourt

A book initially published in monthly instalments in a literary magazine in 1978-79, which explains why in the story it is still so difficult for a woman to demand a divorce and live successfully as a single mother (especially in conservative Japan). There is no story as such, merely a succession of thematic snapshots of coming to terms with a new way of life. Light crops up both as an actual detail (they live on the top floor of an apartment block, bathed in light, which is what attracted the narrator to the location), and of course metaphorically.

Next: 

Négar Djavadi: Disoriental, transl. Tina Kover

In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic Kimiâ Sadr is preparing for fertility treatment. She is the only one there without a partner, but she has more than enough family (both immediate and extended, alive and remembered over generations) surrounding and influencing her, and she tells the saga of her family like a modern-day Scheherazade, as she straddles that uncomfortable border between her ‘homeland’ Iran and her feeling of ‘disorientalisation’ as she grew up in France.