Japanese Reading Challenge #4

I read this book for the Japanese Reading Challenge 17.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job – Kikuko Tsumura

Single female, mid-thirties, living with her parents in Tokyo, our Nameless Narrator has experienced a nervous breakdown due to the stress and exhaustion of overwork. So she asks her career consultant to find her a simple job, in which only every now and then something new but not drastic happens, that doesn't involve fraught human relations, and with a minimal commute.  In short, she thinks that she wants a job kind of like being dead only without the grief-stricken relatives and the postmortem guilt that due to your up and dying, some poor galoot has got to take your tasks on top of their own.

Her career consultant, a nice woman in her sixties, asks her canny questions and finds her jobs that fit the bill. The jobs are all unusual, but not implausible. They present unique challenges, miseries, and satisfactions. And over the course of time on task, Nameless comes to realize that she is still exposed to human beings in all their delightful and exasperating glory.

Despite her inclination to keep herself to herself, Nameless is only a human being with a human nature which has an innate tendency to be oriented to other human beings. Being social by nature as we all are, Nameless finds that to some degree she will get involved in the lives of supervisors, colleagues, clients, and just anybody seen regularly. In no job are we delivered over to death to become a ghost, just watching the living do their mundane activities, unable to reach out in the darkness and find a friend.

Our Nameless Narrator is totally relatable.  Like Nameless, we may dream about how much easier it would be to have few responsibilities, distant supervision, and enjoy colleagues and subordinates doing what they ought to be doing, on time, getting it goof-free every time. But we also know while work is an unavoidable necessity and it has its upsides, we must be careful not to have a love-hate relationship with our job. Like us grizzled veterans of toil and moil, she learns to moderate her sense of duty and vocation. She stops aggravating herself emotionally about the alleged badness of her situation.

In her hard-won insight, Nameless suspects, like us hardcore readers, that she is one of the few left in the world with any standards, that so-called normal people have lost any sense of decorum and accept a life full of flavorless red softballs because they have forgotten what tomatoes used to taste like. For instance, Nameless is shocked that ordinary people would write for life advice to a rice-cracker company to print on their packaging. Talk about leading lives of quiet desperation!

And the scandalized tone is hoot, laugh out loud funny in places, subtly comic and indirect in the genuine Japanese manner. The translator Polly Barton grew up in West London and the English dryness and understatement really fit the stance and tone. Barton studied philosophy at Cambridge which will, I trust and hope, instill a respect and care for words.

In conclusion, deceptively plain and readable and well worth it if one likes serious points in a light-hearted style. The writer seems to be making the point that we disgruntled employees have to, for the sake of our own serenity, exercise our judgement. Cultivate a moderate sense of vocation and duty. Wisdom calls for doing what is in our power to make situations more bearable for ourselves and coworkers, not falling into anxiety or depression, not procrastinating, not stamping our foot at the terms and conditions of our hostile universe. Even when sour or half-assed is the outcome, it is better for our own self-respect if we can honestly say to ourselves with the information and resources we were given, we did our best for the job, for other people, for our own sanity.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

·         A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu ·         After Dark - Haruki Murakami ·         Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) ·         Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami ·         I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, ·         Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke ·         Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki ·         Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene ·         Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris ·         Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami ·         Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki ·         The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro ·         The Gate - Natsume Soseki ·         The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami ·         The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata ·         The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima ·         The Tale of Genji ·         There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job – Yukiko Tsumura

·         A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sanso ·         A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom ·         A History of Japan to 1334 – Sir George Sansom ·         Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami ·         Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye ·         Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger ·         Bending Adversity – David Pilling ·         Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn ·         Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker ·         The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh ·         The Western World and Japan  – Sir George Sansom ·         The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris ·         This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku ·         Unbeaten Tracks in Japan:  – Isabella Bird ·         What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

Japanese Reading Challenge #3

I read this book for the Japanese Reading Challenge 17.

Sino-Japanese character Manji 卍 is a symbol for the four lovers in the novel - 谷崎 潤一郎

Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki

Twisted up love, symbolized in the swastika, is felt between Sonoko and her husband Kakiuchi and Sonoko’s beloved Mitsuko and Mitsuko’s BF Watanuki. Despite her history of infatuation, Kakiuchi married Sonoko and kept silent in response to her odd moods and behavior. In a frequent mistake of patient honest people when dealing with deceitful people, he goofs when for too long he pretends nothing is bugging him though he feels unsettled by Sonoko’s friend Mitsuko. It seems as if Tanizaki is taking the stance that when facing so much deceit, honest people don’t know where to turn and deceptive people get so lost in their lies that even their perception of doing wrong dies.

Sonoko and Mitsuko met at shabby art school for bored women with nothing to do. The two become intimate with Mitsuko posing in the nude for Sonoko’s rendering of Kannon the Goddess of Mercy. The sensual, crafty, reckless Mitsuko drags Sonoko into dangerous love quicksand, with endless intrigues and a tragic ending, which can be sensed from the beginning of the novel.

Sonoko, the paragon of the untrustworthy narrator, tells a story in which everybody is deceiving everybody else. In a narrative of time shifts in the modernist manner, the tangled story is unwound as Sonoko’s unreliable confession to a famous writer who may or may not be Tanizaki, a Tokyo guy commenting on the gaudy unrestrained ways of these wacky Osakans in the late 1920s. Tanizaki is also a modernist in the way he opens boxes usually sealed: decadence, nihilism, eroticism, sadism, and the “I hate myself for loving you” kind of masochism a la Of Human Bondage and A Portrait of Shunkin.

Tanizaki liked to write couple stories as in the shocking Naomi or in A Fool's Love or in the disturbing novel The Key. The female characters are always the strongest elements, if only because of all their whims or attractions with which they hold their male and female slaves in a tight grip. Tanizaki liked to show women lost to dark forces and weird passions and men totally at a loss in the face of quirks and impulses, irrationality and obsession. The reader gets the feeling that Mitsuko is way out of control, way beyond doing terrible things just for fun. Somehow a reader feels if one understood the nature of Mitsuko’s fantasies, one would feel grubby and defiled.

As to cultural background, what is just taken for granted in this novel? What feels Japanese about it? For one, sapphic love is treated as no big deal. As in lots of old melodramas, there is a vindictive servant who steals letters. Desperate couples talk of suicide pacts and people mull doing away with themselves in order to apologize to everybody. The cops raid disorderly houses looking not only for gamblers but cheating couples. The scandal sheets sniff around for salacious gossip that will bring dishonor down on prominent families with wild offspring. Politically radical but culturally conservative, people in Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka pay much attention to the social conventions and take pains to avoid doing what can tarnish one's reputation and bring on shame. Recall how Sachiko and Teinosuke worried about Taeko’s antics getting into the papers in The Makioka Sisters.

In conclusion, short, tangled, readable, shocking, and well worth it if one likes Tanizaki.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

·         A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu ·         After Dark - Haruki Murakami ·         Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) ·         Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami ·         I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, ·         Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke ·         Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki ·         Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene ·         Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris ·         Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami ·         Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki ·         The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro ·         The Gate - Natsume Soseki ·         The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami ·         The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata ·         The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima ·         The Tale of Genji ·         There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job – Yukiko Tsumura

·         A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sanso ·         A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom ·         A History of Japan to 1334 – Sir George Sansom ·         Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami ·         Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye ·         Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger ·         Bending Adversity – David Pilling ·         Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn ·         Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker ·         The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh ·         The Western World and Japan  – Sir George Sansom ·         The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris ·         This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku ·         Unbeaten Tracks in Japan:  – Isabella Bird ·         What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

Japanese Reading Challenge #2

I read this book for the Japanese Reading Challenge 17.

Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival - David Pilling

There is not much to say beyond high praise for this 2013 book by a highly experienced and insightful reporter for the Financial Times. He talks to politicians, bureaucrats, professors, business executives, twenty-somethings, and activists on the ground and its seems he has read everything germane to the topic of modern Japan. Pilling provides solid reporting on the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 when Japan saw earthquake, tidal wave, and nuclear meltdown.

Pilling’s writing style is journalistic in its clarity but it is a pleasure to read, not all flat and gray. He is into presenting both sides of the issue, but he avoids the bane of American journalism, bothsidesism (i.e., the tendency to treat all historical takes and policy debates as if the opposing sides present equally strong arguments).

The only problem, obviously, is that it is now 11 years old. While Pilling’s overviews of Japan’s history and business conditions are still well worth the time and attention, I want to read about the longer-term effects of the triple disaster. I would also like to read an overview of Japan’s experience of the pandemic and the fallout of Abe’s assassination.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

·         A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu ·         After Dark - Haruki Murakami ·         Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) ·         Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami ·         I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, ·         Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke ·         Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki ·         Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene ·         Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris ·         Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami ·         Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki ·         The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro ·         The Gate - Natsume Soseki ·         The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami ·         The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata ·         The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima ·         The Tale of Genji ·         There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job – Yukiko Tsumura

·         A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sanso ·         A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom ·         A History of Japan to 1334 – Sir George Sansom ·         Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami ·         Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye ·         Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger ·         Bending Adversity – David Pilling ·         Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn ·         Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker ·         The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh ·         The Western World and Japan  – Sir George Sansom ·         The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris ·         This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku ·         Unbeaten Tracks in Japan:  – Isabella Bird ·         What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

Japanese Reading Challenge #1

I read this book for the Japanese Reading Challenge 17.

古道具 中野商店 川上 弘美, trans. Allison Markin Powell

The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami

This slice of life novel features ordinary Tokyoites looking for simple smooth relationships in the early 2000s. The setting is second-hand goods store, definitely not an antique store. This, the owner-operator Mr. Haruo Nakano takes pains to make clear when he hires twenty-something Hitomi, our narrator in a small world of people who are slightly outside the mainstream of society.

With his other employee young Takeo, Mr. Nakano scours western Tokyo and hauls away the unwanted stuff of the recently deceased and walking wounded of family breakups. For twenty-five years, ever since he bailed out of salary-man boredom and humiliation, Mr. Nakano has been selling closet clutter that was accumulated by members of a modern consumer society but now cast off for a token amount to avoid having to pay to have it hauled away as over-sized garbage.

The customers are all kinds of people, from university students in need of cheap furniture to financially pressed dads who need a kotatsu for the family to collectors of pop culture artifacts to connoisseurs looking for finds from the Taisho or early Showa eras. It shows how even Japan changes: when I lived there from 1986 to 1992, I caught the feeling of a mild aversion against second-hand stuff (not books, but especially clothes), but now thrifting seems a no-brainer in Japan.

Thankfully, Japan’s shockingly honest culture has not changed. Displaying the most attractive objects on a bench outside the thrift gives Mr. Nakano a kick after the shutter goes up just before noon. Mr. Nakano's elder sister Masayo draws customers into the shop, as if by charisma, during the hours she helps. She’s an artist of dolls, candid in the way fifty-something women often are, unmarried, having man trouble. With her brother Haruo she shares a gift of gab, producing cascades of words that the perplex the reserved Hitomi who contrasts Masayo with the taciturn Takeo. Mr. Nakano, Masayo, Hitomi, and Takeo sometimes have tempura soba delivered straight to the shop and they eat together.

The days in the shop follow one another lazily and always seem the same. Objects arrive in boxes and depart in little bags that Hitomi creates. Mr. Nakano regularly visits "the bank" but everyone knows that it is just an excuse to meet his lover pretty Sakiko, who run a high-class antique emporium. Mr. Nakano, despite or because of his inscrutable way with words, is a heartthrob with a past dotted with myriad relationships and three wives. Who would have thought seeing him now: a middle-aged dude with verbal tics, wearing a knitted hat with pom-poms that reminds Hitomi of the manga character Sho-chan.

The store is a lab of human behavior where characters meet and grow close, according to their preferences, choices and desires. With delicacy and grace and a quiet sense of comedy, Kawakami evokes those mysterious bonds that form among us, when we often don’t know where we are or what to do. Her novel resonates with little joys and hurts which come with the vagaries of fortune and our own incomprehensions.

Hitomi falls for Takeo. He’s been hurt and like Hitomi can’t seem to get over being afraid of people because he doesn’t trust them. For the author, people grow closer only little by little, in a frustrating protracted process of mutual misunderstanding, lack of communication, needless distress and trivial anger. A relationship is always in flux, take it for granted at your peril, it won’t stay the same, so be attentive. Time is passing, what is inevitable will occur, don’t be surprised at loss when it comes, even the memory of faces of those we thought we loved will fade. Remind yourself why other people are important to you, right now, because they may not - will not - always be around. As Masayo observes, people keel over.

The writing of this novel resembles life, not the spectacle of births, deaths, and marriages but more as a succession of small satisfactions, bizarre incidents, and fleeting disappointments. Many moments of sensations: the wind that moves a curtain, the ruffles in the fabric of clothing, walking home at night with a crescent moon, binging on a mayo-flavored fried squid snack…. Kawakami, like Austen, excels at distilling eternity down to everyday instants. Yessir, give me a novel that connects my nose to the Logos, with scents no more insistent than somebody smelling of soap or rain. No drama, neither the narrator nor the author are divas. Nothing happens, but an intimacy, a gentleness, a tenacity to live, to hurt and to live on.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

·         A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu ·         After Dark - Haruki Murakami ·         Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) ·         Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami ·         I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, ·         Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke ·         Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki ·         Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene ·         Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris ·         Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami ·         Quicksand – Junichiro Tanizaki ·         The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro ·         The Gate - Natsume Soseki ·         The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami ·         The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata ·         The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima ·         The Tale of Genji ·         There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job – Yukiko Tsumura

·         A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sanso ·         A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom ·         A History of Japan to 1334 – Sir George Sansom ·         Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami ·         Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye ·         Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger ·         Bending Adversity – David Pilling ·         Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn ·         Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker ·         The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh ·         The Western World and Japan  – Sir George Sansom ·         The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris ·         This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku ·         Unbeaten Tracks in Japan:  – Isabella Bird ·         What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami