“I feel like there must be some way”, ends the title of one story in Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day, “of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories.” Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that features a character, now advanced into middle-age, recollecting a formative experience of their youth. Through these recollections, Shibasaki creates a humanistic chronicle that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality.
Japanese
Who is Shuzo Takiguchi? Neglected and out of print for decades in Japan, ignored by the anglophone world, awareness of his contributions to 20th century Japanese writing and fine arts is long overdue. Profoundly influenced by French surrealism, Takiguchi’s heady mix of mythological rumination and avant-garde modernist poetry has finally been made available to an international audience with the bilingual publication of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, translated by poets Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka. Meticulously harvested from a cache comprising a ten-year period of intense literary composition from 1927-1937, this edition of thirty-five poems gives needed shape to Takiguchi’s wide-ranging legacy as an eclectic visionary—critic, translator, poet, artist, collector, curator.
A young boy cracks open the front door and peers outside. The dark shadows from the roof and the trees give a foreboding sense of something to come. Three umbrellas sit neatly in their holder, right by the door. The boy goes out to play.
At first glance, the premise of Junko Takase’s Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel May You Have Delicious Meals seems like the set-up for a romantic comedy. Nitani, Ashikawa, and Oshio work together in the sales division of a company. Nitani normally dates timid, feminine women like Ashikawa. Nitani and Ashikawa start a relationship. Sometimes Nitani spends his evenings at his apartment with Ashikawa, where she makes him nutritious, homemade meals. He spends other evenings at dive bars with his more brusque and professionally competent female colleague, Oshio.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Haruki Murakami’s fifteenth novel since his first, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979. His most recent is unmistakeably his, unmistakeably an addition to his body of work and his own special brand of magic realism as practiced by the South American writers Jorges Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as Japan’s Kobo Abe and Yoko Ogawa, and writers like Mo Yan, Salman Rushie, and Toni Morrison. Murakami’s approach is metafictional magic realism to the extent to which he explicitly questions the nature of realism and truth throughout the novel. Murakami’s readers will not be surprised.
Several women walk children down a flagstone path to a hot spring in the cozy opening scene of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The children play while the women enjoy the warm water. The narrator has been married for five years to a factory worker. He works while she takes care of the children.
Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170 short stories. Such an impressive tally necessitates variety. However, the last decade of the author’s life—from which editor Stephen Dodd selects all of the stories here—was unified by a virulent patriotism that found its real-life consummation in Mishima’s theatrical suicide, committing seppuku after delivering an impassioned but ill-received speech intended to incite military insurrection. While the stories in Voices feel at first eclectic in nature, it is possible to see Mishima’s burgeoning nationalist sentiment, specifically tied up with a personal fear of ageing, a resentment of those who waste their youth, and the impact of such profligacy on the spiritual purity of the Japanese nation.
Beginning in 2018, a Japanese person might log on to YouTube only to find a video featuring a thin figure clothed entirely in black. A white papier-mache mask—blank, with holes for eyes and mouth and a peak for the suggestion of the nose—provides the only contrast. The figure speaks in an artificially processed, saccharine voice and posts enigmatic, sometimes uncomfortable videos. One shows the figure awkwardly playing music on a child’s toy piano. Another features the figure receiving an odd and disquieting Christmas gift from a barely visible and sinister Santa-san.
That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes little more than a reinforcement of the obvious. We already know what to expect: yet more uninterrupted misery for the unfortunate protagonist, Shiori. And yet, for those willing to endure the relentless tragedy of this young girl’s plight, Mysterious Setting has a lot to say about the dissolution of truth and empathy in the modern world.
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom for the Asian Review of Books, I noted that, “Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.”
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