“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a natural world that appears, in its very essence, resistant to such a union. Hoshino nevertheless perseveres, and his enduring love of nature proves insightful reading for those chasing, in the author’s own words, “the other time that flows alongside the frantic daily exertions of humankind.”
Japanese
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover a lot of ground. There is therefore a wide variety in the depth of knowledge we bring to the range of subjects we cover. For some, we are genuinely experts and can talk at length with authority; for others we are operating on a much thinner basic level of expertise. It’s not to say that what we say in lectures or classes is necessarily wrong, but rather that we are well aware that there can be less real understanding than we would like of the nuances underlying a single slide and its 3 bullet points. Over time, we can hope to expand the range of our in-depth knowledge and fill in the areas about which we can talk with authority. For me, reading Gregory Smits’s and Takara Kurayoshi’s books on the Ryukyu islands has been such a process.
Yumiko Kurahashi (1935-2005) is celebrated as a pivotal female writer in Japan’s growing post-war break with literary tradition. Informed by European writers and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, “third wave” writers in post-war Japan—Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Minako Oba, Meiko Kanai and dozens of others labeled experimentalists, avant-garde, and absurdists—were interested in the metaphysical, the existential, and the intertextual, rather than depicting the real world. Kurahashi’s work embodies all of these.
In Tokyo’s Himonya district lives Kaede’s grandfather, a former school principal with a love of mystery novels that he has passed down to his granddaughter.
Genpei Akasegawa (whose given name was Katsuhiko Akasegawa) was already famous as Neo-Dadaist artist when he began writing under the name of Katsuhiko Otsuji, and he soon proved himself able to work fruitfully in both domains, earning numerous awards. I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, beautifully translated by Matt Fargo, brings together five of Akasegawa’s short stories, some of them award winners, and all of which follow a narrator (presumably modeled on the author himself) through seemingly banal adventures as a father, professor, and denizen of Tokyo.
Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other art in the room speaks Greek. A deeply lonely human being, Rika quickly falls in love with the marble goddess.
Awarded Japan’s Yomiuri Prize for Literature, The Summer House is Masashi Matsuie’s debut novel. Also published as Summer at Mount Asama, the 2012 work reaches English readers through Margaret Mitsutani’s expert translation. Matsuie constructs the story just as his character Sensei, architect Shunsuke Murai designs buildings: with deceptive ease, creating spaces that beckon people to withdraw from the noise of the outside world. “You don’t want to talk loudly in one of Sensei’s houses,” explains the narrator.
Studio Ghibli’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies has been described as the greatest film someone will only watch once. Deeply emotional, director Isao Takahata’s tale of two Japanese war orphans struggling and failing to survive in the closing days of World War II is almost too painful to bear. But the story isn’t Takahata’s—Grave of the Fireflies is a loosely autobiographical novella by Japanese Renaissance man Akiyuki Nosaka. Available in English-language bookstores for the first time in translation by Ginny Tapely Takemori, the novella isn’t nearly as gut-wrenching as its visual counterpart. Instead, the narrator tells the story with matter-of-fact detachment that stirs up different emotions altogether.
The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38 has long been a shadowy footnote in Japanese history: an uprising of poor farmers and hidden Christians, crushed with such ferocity that 37,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered at Hara Castle. In most textbooks it garners a brief mention, a prelude to the closing of Japan, when the Tokugawa shogunate expelled the Portuguese and turned suspicion of foreign influence into full-blown xenophobia.
Across fifty-odd flash stories (particularly short pieces of fiction) in The Woman Dies, Aoko Matsuda and translator Polly Barton lean into the weird, nitty-gritty world of womanhood. For the most part, there is no immediate throughline connecting the stories—and their rich inner worlds—to each other. Yet eventually, the lines blur enough for images of women, glittery face highlighter, and lingerie frills to appear, blending the stories into a sparkling collection. All the stories play a part in building Matsuda’s world, where girlhood is a state of mind that can never be outgrown; it is at once a curse and blessing, the only thing the world values and despises in equal measure.
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