Homage to the Golden Age

Murder in a Mummy Case - K.K. Beck

Harken back to the kinder gentler traditions of the Golden Age whodunit. This 1986 effort is charming and delightful, though the author would go on about clothes: “dressed in a smart two-piece golf ensemble, aquamarine wool knit with a band of orange at the neck and in the gores of the skirt.”

Gores? Luckily I married a weaver and sewer, she knows about these things.

Set in the late 1920s, Stanford co-ed Iris Cooper has received permission from her parents to spend Easter Break with gentleman friend Clarence Brockhurst and his wealthy family. The high society setting will bring to mind Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. The characters are wealthy enough to afford eccentric hobbies and maintain wacky hangers-on. Mrs. Brockhurst employs a spiritualist medium and her entourage of assistant Mr. Jones and a lady’s maid who turns out to be The Victim. She has also taken in a poor relation Aunt Laura and a dispossessed White Russian Count Boris. Son Clarence has the resources to indulge his hobby of Egyptology and even keeps a mummy in the house, which the psychic blames for evil emanations.

Mystery fans and fans of B-movies by Poverty Row studios will recognize the stock characters.  Iris is smart and sweet, and plucky in the pinch. Brassy and bold she is not but those are covered by Clarence‘s sister Bunny, a free-spirited flapper. Iris’ other possible BF is a walking checklist of traits of a young newshound: brash, quick witted, wisecracking, and prone to jump to conclusions. Clarence is the huffy pompous mooncalf who woos his lady love with the promise to teach her how to read hieroglyphs.

Beck deals in comic allusions too. The butler, who is assumed to have Done It, is a Chinese named Charles Chan. Even the characters look askance at that. At the beginning, she has Iris say, “Had I but known that my request would lead me into another adventure, my anticipation would have been even greater,” which is a send-up of the standard melodramatic “Had I but known” foreshadowing of mysteries and gothics in the first half of the 20th century. At the end, a character marvels at his luck, “Imagine, I almost invested a fortune in some worthless little town in Southern California, Palm Springs it was called.

Beck must have read her share of cozy puzzlers of bygone days not only to spoof them but also to feel affectionate about the whole genre. Nostalgia buffs will like the dumbwaiter, speakeasy, and chaperones and other such artifacts, institutions and customs that went they way of the dodo before our grandparents checked out of this vale of tears.

Readers on the look-out for a light and entertaining mystery will not go wrong with this one.

Classic Travel Narrative

The Sea and the Jungle – H.M. Tomlinson

In 1910, Tomlinson sailed on the English tramp steamer Capella from Swansea to Porto Velho, Brazil, near the cataracts of the Madeira River.

He was the purser with light duties on the two-thousand ton steamship, which carried supplies for the construction at Porto Velho of the eastern terminus of the new Madeira-Mamore Railway. The steamer went upriver and Tomlinson also took some jaunts into the Brazilian rain forest some distance from the ship.

This classic travel narrative was only one of the author’s 30 book-length works. Tomlinson was one of the most respected writers of the first half of the 20th century, but he is little read nowadays.

My praise cannot possibly do justice to Tomlinson’s prose, such as this, on the rewards of travel:

They are no matter. They are untranslatable from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to sleep on the tumulus where little people dance on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when he tries.

And this:

When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows.

Whole paragraphs and pages feature this kind of writing. By the end, a certain "Nobody who's not done it can imagine what I've seen" tone creeps in, but so what, with prose like this?

Tomlinson went to Brazil on the freighter to get away from the humdrum craziness of working in the city so the reader had better try to avoid reading in the jangled mood that comes after a day at work.

The Nones of Perry Mason 74

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1956 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Portly Prince of Noir.

I Love Trouble
1948 / black and white / 1:35
Tagline: “Five Lovelies Leave a Trail of Perfume … and Murder!”
[internet archive]

Our buddy Burr has two lines in one scene – with shadow covering half his grim visage. His bulk compels our attention as he sizes up with his spellbinding eyes hero Franchot Tone. Burr seems to be measuring Tone for a beating. Tone has been hired by a well-connected LA realtor-politician to identify the blackmailer of his wife. After Tone pursues leads in Portland, the wife’s natal city, he returns to LA to dead bodies, edgy police and thugs that roughly request the information he gathered.

Franchot Tone saves his dignity by delivering noir one-liners with style and grace. He may be feeling that old “coming down in the world” feeling due to having to appear in a B movie, but he’s a true professional. What’s curious about his ambiguous character is that the viewer can’t guess how he is going to approach an interview, especially with women.

Burr’s disheveled partner in crime is John Ireland. He made a career of looking tough and at least half-way down the road to PsychoVille. Though the formidable one, it is Burr’s role to ensure that Ireland doesn't get carried away and kill anybody in the heat of the moment.

For comic relief, we get two wonderful actors. Glenda Farrell cracks wise as the tough city girl, game, canny, reliable as the PI’s ever faithful secretary. Tone asks her, “Ever have the feeling you're being watched or followed, and she replies sourly, “Not nearly enough.” Sid Tomack plays a wise-cracking bistro owner who comes to an unhappy end because he knows too much and wants to monetize his excess of knowledge. Appearing three times on the classic Perry Mason, Tomack was especially great in a satirical scene in The Case of the Envious Editor.

The main draw, however, is the bevy who possess a similar beauty. This feeds into the noir themes of doubleness, identity, and misdirection. Janis Carter and Lynn Merrick both shanghai a movie-goer’s attention wherever they enter a scene.  Janet Blair, a breathtaking pin-up, is the nice girl we’d take home to ma and warn pa to heed his better angels. Adele Jergens is the Jezebel we’d keep secret from the homefolks.

All this but we movie-goers are treated to location shots of Late Forties L.A., with brutal concrete buildings on Hollywood Boulevard. Venice Beach used to have clam chowder shacks where proprietors would say, “You can have clam chowder and clam chowder,” to which you would reply laconically, “I’ll have clam chowder” like a real noir hero. Oil derricks in Santa Monica, so cool. I like mid-century industrial infrastructure probably I grew up in a house a five-minute walk to the Rouge Plant. 

Though complicated, this diverting movie is redeemed by its Chandleresque writing. Caretaker of the mansion, where the kidnapped PI was kidnapped, drugged, beaten, and interrogated, when asked what the place is called, “733, that’s all. Places like this don’t have a name.” PI: “That’s what you think.”

She was a Good Girl in a Bad Joint!

Sensation Hunters
1933 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “THERE WERE PITFALLS AT EVERY STEP ---AND SHE DIDN'T MISS A SINGLE STEP!”
[internet archive]

The “Pre-Code” Era was roughly 1931 to 1934, when American movies were at their most spicy, a time when illicit sex and violence were common themes. The Poverty Row studio Monogram flirted with the exploitation genre. And this odd antique was the result.

It’s not nearly as disposable as silly things like Reefer Madness. It has genuine actors and actresses. The writers worked in character development and a moral with a little heft to placate puritans like me. In his debut, the director Charles Vidor added artistic touches. Vidor was not a hack and went on to have a respectable career. Hey, he was Hungarian so he must have been cool (my grandmother was Hungarian).

The opening sequence, set on a cruise ship from San Francisco to Panama City, features one woman in hot-pants and another in a bathing suit. A middle-aged man with a fake English milord accent and, worse, a travesty of a country shooting outfit tosses a coin on the floor so he can have a cover story if he is busted looking through keyholes. To fulfill the educational purpose of this production, we get a camera shot through a keyhole to see women changing, in case we weren’t quite sure what he was doing.

Due to the pandering content and the poor quality of the print (like sound drop-outs due to lost frames), I, my mother’s uptight son, was tempted to give up about 15 minutes into it. But the characterization got me more interested in the story and less bothered by the blemishes.

Upper-middle-class woman (Marion Burns) for reasons that are not made clear, signs up as singer in a troupe of dancers and b-girls. The troupe works in a notorious cabaret called The Bull Ring in wild, wide-open Panama City. Her working-class roommate, perennial best friend Arline Judge, is puzzled why such an elegant woman as Marion, brought up in affluent circumstances would take up such a job.

The Mama is played by a silent screen heroine Juanita Hansen, a Mack Sennet protege. Not above smacking the girls around to enforce her expectations, she is crude and bossy and all too effective in this role. The male actors, as usual, are nothing to write home about, but Walter Brennan has a small part in which he stutters in that injured voice he was saddled with after he was gassed during World War I. It was an era in which communicative disorders were played for laughs.

The action moves along briskly, but the real attraction is the setting of the down-at-heels cabaret, the third-rate hotel rooms, and people one does not meet in the normal course of life. Warner Bros had the rep for gritty settings but clearly the Poverty Row studios could render reality in all its romping glory to make us think, “My place is home with mother, but that sure does look fun.”

I’m a Thirties buff so I like anything that gives me a sense of what the time looked and smelled like. I’m also a moralist so I was placated that this movie, while not what I would call prim, was not as saucy as I was fearing. Unless I was reading into (I'm a meaning-seeking animal), I got the message to be careful what kind of people, places, and conditions you settle for since we set bars lower and lower insensibly until one fine day we wake up and realize we’re hanging out with the likes of people Mother wouldn’t have had in the house, I’m sure.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 73

Notes: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. Running pieces more often because many articles are in the can and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner

“The lawyer is like a doctor,” says criminal lawyer Perry Mason to Della Street to open this 1944 mystery, “only for justice.”

Perry Mason sees a parade of iffy clients in his office - but Diana Regis is probably one of the iffiest. She arrives in Mason’s office clad only in a fur coat and a dressing gown, besides the shiner of the title. It turns out that she had been pressured into a date with her employer’s stepson. Not playing the game "put out or walk home" when she refused the stepson’s advances, in the tradition of many players at the time, he tossed her out of the car, forcing her to hike home. Meeting again at the house (she’d been living with her employer’s family), he smacked her when she called him out. On top of this abuse, he colluded with his mother to accuse Diana of theft.

Seeing herself in a vulnerable position, she hoofs it over to the office of Perry Mason. The casual brutality bothers Perry and Della. In court, Perry’s deft questioning shows the stepson to be a lieclops. Everything is quickly resolved – the alleged theft can be explained. Diana Regis receives handsome compensation.

And when - seemingly – the door can be shut on a nasty incident, the plot gets thicker. And poor Diana ends up in in the dock.

This is a good detective story. The twists are intricate, the action doesn’t let you to break away for dinner, and the dueling between the operators of the criminal justice mincing machine and Perry, Della Street and PI Paul Drake is played for high stakes.

European Reading Challenge #2

Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross

The setting is a train trip from Pärnu, Estonia to St. Petersburg. The time is 1909, near the end of the road for Czarist Russia. Professor Martens, diplomat and expert in international law, is doing what thinking people do on long dull train trips: ruminating about personal and professional topics.

In complex yet accessible stream of consciousness, Martens remembers his humble beginnings, struggling student days in law school, and his success as a legal expert and writer of treaties. However, in their arrogance and stupidity about his Estonian origins, his superiors who are Russian aristocrats treat him like the hired help and claim his contributions as their own. He is even disdained when he persuades the West to bail out Russia with the loan and so he wonders about the merit of enabling a brutal, stupid regime to hold on to power.

In monologues addressed to his wife Kati, he confesses infidelities but asserts he always loved his wife. Reading the chapter about the love affair with an art student, I found it incredible how Jaan Kross could write in such detail from the protagonist’s point of view.

The narrator seems self-serving, hypocritical, conservative, and defensive, but overall he’s easy to spend 300 pages with, since his story is the story of many people in the 20th century, people who had to weigh the claims of their conscience and integrity with the service to the state, especially when the state is run by people who have the integrity of gangsters. It was a question especially hard for non-Russian people serving Mean Mother Russia.

Today is The Emperor's Birthday

天皇誕生日 Tennō Tanjōbi. The birthday of the reigning emperor has been a national holiday since 1868. Emperor Naruhito was born on this day in 1960. You know you’re getting up there when Japanese Emperors become younger than you are. Let’s light the candles despite this sobering thought by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Some Japanese Portraits - Donald Keene

Born in 1922, Keene was the perfect age to study Japanese and become an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Postwar he received master’s degrees from Columbia and Cambridge and a doctorate from Columbia. He devoted his long career to studying and teaching Japanese literature.

This book is a collection of essays about Japanese poetry, plays, and fiction from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Originally written in Japanese for a weekly magazine, the articles on unjustly forgotten writers are engrossing, articulate and a delight to read. The only problem I had is that Keene assumes his readers are Japanese and thus know as a matter of course things like the modern name of Bingo Province (備後国 Bingo no kuni).

What's interesting is that Keene delivers incredible factoids. For instance, he says the first contemporary European novel translated into Japanese in 1879 was Bulwer-Lytton's novel Ernest Maltravers about which Thackeray fumed, “We cannot conceive an [author] to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel. He says he will give us the likeness of a genius and it is only the picture of a humbug.”

It's so strange that this inept novel inspired the very first Japanese political novel in which a geisha named “Rights” takes a lover named “Popular Government in Japan” and her other boyfriend is named “Inspiring Instances of Statesmanship.” Probably sounds better with the original Chinese characters.

In conclusion, an excellent book for readers into the more obscure byways of Japanese literature.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #6

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

After the Banquet – Yukio Mishima

The main character of this novel is Kazu Fukuzawa. She grew up during Japan’s early 20^th century when her native snow county was desperately impoverished.

Kazu herself beat the odds against her survival being born poor, female, and rural by sidestepping an early death due to malnutrition, infections, and injuries or wounds. She also avoided the occupational hazard of the water trade, shinjū  心中 suicide of two (or more, see Quicksand) individuals bound by love and unfortunate karma. Not so lucky were the men who went down in the world, pissed away their fortunes or did away with themselves all because of Kazu.

Along with an indomitable will, boundless energy, and a child-like honesty, Kazu has no illusions about herself, her customers, or ordinary people. She became the shrewd and street-wise owner-operator of a high-class Tokyo restaurant called the Setsugoan, where she entertains bigwigs in politics, government, and industry. Taking a daily stroll in her garden (which Mishima describes masterfully) keeps clean her moral compass, simple and practical as it is.

In her fifties in about Showa 35 (1960), Kazu is concerned about that old mortality. Not for the sake of creature comforts in old age (she’s set for those), but she worries about what’s in store for her in the afterlife, given those silly paramours doing away with themselves in her early career and given the torments of Buddhistic Hell. When she meets ex-diplomat Noguchi, she realizes how lonely she’s feeling and they fall in love like giddy teenagers. Kazu also figures being connected to an upright family will count for much come the Judgement Day. She wants to ensure that a Noguchi descendent will tend her tomb so that she doesn’t end up in Hamlet’s “little, little grave, an obscure grave.”

Noguchi and Kazu marry. Only to prove that while opposites will attract, they ought not marry each other, especially not in the flashbang of romantic love. An intellectual with rigid morals, tired and listless Noguchi is the worst kind of clueless male: the man who’s positive he’s got a good bead on things. On the other hand, Kazu remains a cauldron of activity, boiling over with initiative and practical sense. She supports her husband in his bid for the governorship of Tokyo by bankrolling and aggressively working in the campaign. She is supported by political professional Yamazaki, who is her link to party big wheels. Yamazaki also acts as a go-between assigned the task of balancing the opposite styles of the two spouses.

But despite Kazu's hefty expenditures of money, time and energy, the snake pit of politics proves too much even for her. Mishima satirizes political campaigning, noting that Kazu’s terrible speechifying on the hustings is still tolerated by average Japanese voters, who have an amused affection for “inept speakers.”  Calling Orange’s babbling and playacting to mind, Kazu’s transparent attempts to be “just folks” takes in no sensible adult, but voters still feel tender toward a suffering savior who’s willing to act the goat for them.

Mishima is great at description of sensory experience though sometimes the minute details of Kazu’s kimono colors and obi patterns went right over my head. But his eye for nature is up there with Hudson, Tomlinson, and Turgenev, awakening that old sense of wonder. His plotting is near perfect with pace and rhythm. His sense of comedy runs from gross to droll. And he can set a scene: incredible are the set pieces about the Omizutori (the water-drawing festival at Tōdaiji in Nara) and the ghastly rally when Kazu realizes that people are just staring at her as if they believed she were a fiend from hell.

He Killed for Love … And Loved to Kill!

Note: Gail Patrick’s film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role in this picture. Down the road, in 1938, Patrick landed the role for which we old movie buffs remember her, the mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey. For good or ill, that part typed her as The Haughty One in many of the 60 roles she landed in the coming years, up to her last outing in Two in the Dark in 1948. Retirement bored her, so in 1957 Gail Patrick Jackson created her own full-time job by becoming the executive producer for the greatest courtroom drama TV series ever, Perry Mason. Raymond Burr was to have ups and downs with her in the coming years about workload and quality of scripts, but he reportedly said she was the soul of the series.

Murders in the Zoo
1933 / 65 minutes
Tagline: “DEATH SET FREE! Striking at a Madman's Bidding in a Zoo Full of Pleasure-Seekers!”
[internet archive]

In this inverted mystery, Lionel Atwill plays a philanthropist of contrasts. On the light side, he generously donates animals he captures to the Zoo. On the dark, he selfishly murders men who flirt with his wife Katheleen Burke. To cover his murder of his wife, he has the zoo shut down. Can the nice couple of Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick save the zoo and stop the killer?

But the experienced movie-goer knows trouble is brewing if top billing is Charles Ruggles. He’s a barrel of laughs as the comic relief: he’s probably most fondly remembered as the eccentric big-game hunter in Bringing Up Baby. But here as the lead, his comical voices and fantods are not enough to sustain scenes. And in fact his clowning seems out of place compared with Lionel Atwill’s frowning, glowering, strutting, and forcing on his wife unwanted embraces. But even as he reaches for evil and diabolical, for me, Atwill never manages to deliver the chilly threat that emanates from George Zucco. I realize mine is the minority opinion re Lionel Atwill.

With her marvelous almond eyes, Kathleen Burke has a persuasive scene in which she withdraws into herself, finally deciding to tell her brutal husband she’s outta here. Rarely smiling, she has that melancholy sensuality going for her. Though it’s a welcome change to see strapping Randolph Scott play a toxicologist (they didn’t make him wear glasses!), Scott produces a high-pitched yelp when sneak-attacked by Atwill.  It's comical, inadvertently. Scott and Gail Patrick’s parts, sadly, could have been played by anybody. But as for Gail Patrick’s life-saving injection, let’s have three cheers for women in the sciences and bio-technology, about the only bright spot in this mercifully short movie 

Groteskeries include a guy having his mouth sewn shut and a woman being tossed to the crocodiles, both crimes by the jealous Atwill. These Pre-Code shockers got the movie banned in Germany, Sweden, and Latvia and continue to gross us squeamish movie-goers out in 2025. Also, with zoos so controversial in our day, the distressed bears, chained with rings around their necks, give us post-moderns pause.

The Ides of Perry Mason 72

Note: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity (may their wisdom inspire us), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. So many pieces are in the can, why not release more often? It's not like saving them accrues interest and I'm not exempt from the universal experience of our species. 

Three Perry Masons

Author Michael McDowell has published three Jack and Susan mysteries: Jack and Susan in 1913, Jack and Susan in 1933, and Jack and Susan in 1953. The titular pair are always 27 years old. They always keep a white shaggy dog. And Jack always ends up exonerating Susan when she finds herself accused of murder.

How could agelessness as artistic and marketing choice not bring to mind Our Favorite Lawyer? Perry Mason is always the same age even if the Mason novel is set in the era of depression, wartime, nervous prosperity, or tumultuous change. His sidekicks Paul Drake and Della Street and his nemeses Lt. Arthur Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger are ageless as well. In a 1986 interview, Raymond Burr said, “[Gardner] also feared that making Perry and Della a certain age would date the books, which always remained in print for years. He learned that lesson once when he used the running board of a car as a major plot element—and then cars stopped having running boards.”

A lifelong learner, Gardner did use changing law, forensics, technology, and cultural values in the Mason novels, but as Burr said above, he had the marketing intuition not to age his characters.

And that’s okay.

Despite this agelessness, Gardner’s most famous character changes as three eras come and go. From the early Thirties to the early Forties, the Perry Mason character is true to his pulp roots. Gardner was a professional writer down to his toes. As such, he was committed to give the pulp audience – mainly male – what it expected: non-stop action and a smart-ass hero.  Mason is cocky, outspoken or cagey depending on the situation. His silences resonate. He can speak “tonelessly.” He’s harsh in conversation with crooks and impudent with cops. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He speeds and takes corners at 30 (not easy, I imagine, in giant cars with no power brakes or power steering). He punches bad guys. He throws shyster lawyers out by the seat of their pants. He uses skeleton keys for illegal entry. He pulls shenanigans with evidence.

From the early Forties to the mid-Fifties, determined to appeal to a mass audience in big circulation weekly magazines, Gardner smoothed Mason’s rough edges. Mason began speaking more temperately. He rarely slugged anybody. Gardner teased readers with a love interest between Della and Perry. Mason was less prone to resort to evidentiary hijinks. In public service digressions, Perry counseled readers to drive safely. In brief tangents, Mason takes the role of the life coach, helpfully suggesting that being on time for appointments establishes a professional image.

From the late Fifties to the mid-Sixties, the TV Mason began to influence the Mason of print. For many of us fans born in the Fifties, because we watched episodes in syndication before we read the books, Perry Mason is Raymond Burr when Burr was in his early 40s and at his most lissome in the late 1950s.

Although Burr lost 60 pounds to land the TV part, he steadily put a percentage of it back on as the nine years of the series went by. One disgruntled fan likened a stationary Burr to a refrigerator. On the other hand, the extra weight contributed to that imposing presence and gravitas that contribute to the caliber of Our Favorite Lawyer. As DeLillo had a character observe in White Noise, “I suggested there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount. People trust a certain amount of bulk in others.”

Burr’s Mason of the piercing eyes rarely smiled. He was grave, self-possessed, and ever polite. The only time he was rough was when he zeroed in on the wretched culprit quaking on the stand. “But you couldn't wait. You were tired of being poor. You were tired of playing the nice, clean-cut boy. And once you and Edna were married, you'd wind up with the money in your hands. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

I’ve never taken to watching Burr in his late sixties in the Mason movies produced from 1985 to 1995. The fourth Perry Mason just doesn’t work for me. And not just due to the salt and pepper beard and looking nearly 300 pounds. The stories seemed as far-fetched as an episode of Columbo, not all too plausible like the original series’ plain illustrations of the consequences of letting fear, love, hate, lust, money, property, ambition, vanity, envy, shame, contempt, anger or sheer foolishness shove reason and caution aside.

Lots of people became lawyers because they were inspired by Perry Mason, but uncountable must be the fans who have taken him for a role model of integrity, rationality, resourcefulness, and professional markers like imperturbability and snazzy attire.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #5

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18. 

From Edward Seidensticker's obituary in the New York Times 8/31/07:

"Tanizaki wrote clear, rational sentences," Mr. Seidensticker wrote [in his autobiography Tokyo Central]. "I do not, certainly, wish to suggest that I disapprove of such sentences; but translating them is not very interesting. There was little I felt inclined to ask Tanizaki about."

 Not so with Kawabata. "Do you not, sensei, find this a rather impenetrable passage?" Mr. Seidensticker recalled asking him, ever so gently, during the translation of Snow Country.

 "He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: 'Yes,' " Mr. Seidensticker wrote. "Nothing more."

The Master of Go – Kawabata Yasunari (tr. Edward Seidensticker)

In the late Thirties, Kawabata was hired by the Mainichi newspaper group to cover a championship match between the master of Go, the elderly unwell Shusai, and the younger, lower-ranked Otake. Kawabata uses in this novel some excerpts from his reporting, but adds much fictionalizing, since for Japanese modernists the genre “shosetsu | novel” was all about experimentation with literary techniques.

The Go championship emerges as a great mirror reflecting conflicts between the generations, between tradition and modernity, between East and West, between stoical and expressive. Go, for master Shusai, is a competition in which the old and traditional people can wield their whimsical and arbitrary prerogatives, as they have done for literally centuries. It’s been so long since he lost he can’t imagine not being invincible. Otake does not see Go as a pure and ineffable art form that requires detachment from mundane cares and concerns. He believes in Western gimmicks such as logic and productivity and efficiency. He quibbles about process and tweaks rules to his advantage, because the more rules proliferate, the more ingenuity humans bring to bending them. The master feels and intuits. Otake thinks and schemes.

With the master’s defeat and subsequent death, magnificently rendered by Kawabata, traditional Japan passes from the scene, withering due to contact with the West. Like Kawabata’s other novels, this is an elegy. Seidensticker points out in the introduction that while Kawabata didn’t give much thought to wartime xenophobia and austerities, he didn’t think much of democracy and science either.

And reading it in 2025 the reader confronts the remote. A tournament for a board game being covered by a major national newspaper. The rarefied world of professional Go where fans notice in silent consensus both spectacular moves and outrageous gaffes. People born in the Meiji Era who are not only traditional but feudal, with disciple-students that live with the master’s family, like apprentices in the Tokugawa era.

About a lost, elusive world. We think we are getting a bead on how life is, but conditions change, we age, other people don't stay the same and in all this flux the old ways gradually fade from memory. Kinds of products vanish and so do kinds of people and the way they thought and acted.

Today is National Foundation Day

建国記念の日 Kenkoku Kinen no Hi. From 1872 to 1948, on February 11 the Japanese observed Kigen-setsu 紀元節, a holiday commemorating the day on which the legendary Emperor Jimmu is said by Nihon Shoki to have acceded the throne in 660 BCE. Due to such ultra-nationalistic associations, the modern form of the holiday was established in 1966 as a day to encourage a more contemporary sense of wholesome patriotism. Let’s celebrate by reading a nonfiction book about Japan.

Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress – Junko Kitanaka

In a world where young women catch Tourette’s Syndrome from TikTok influencers, it is not hard to accept the fact that elements in our culture shape our thinking about and experience of mental health and mental illness. Up to the 1990s, many Japanese people were unfamiliar with the word utsubyo, depression, and didn’t associate their “feeling down” with a clinical diagnosis of “depression” that might ever be applied to them. Medical anthropologist Kitanaka narrates how all that changed in Japan.

In the first part of this fascinating book, Dr. Kitanaka gives a history of the concept of utsubyo in Japan. In the 1700s, symptoms were explained away as caused by mental and physical laziness. Due to a young girl’s or dissipated man’s sluggish reluctance to do anything, their vital force of ki stagnated in the body. This condition was not seen in what us post-moderns could call medical terms. After all, the Buddha said life was full of suffering and what sane person would pathologize a fact? And poetry and prose were shot through with mono no aware, the sweet melancholy dwelling on the transience of all things. Furthermore, pre-modern Japanese didn’t see suicidal ideation as pathological either. Instead, in many cases they saw doing away with one’s self as a moral and social act of free will that preserved honor, atoned for wrong-doing, or cast blame on survivors to serve them right and fix their wagon but good.

Part 2 reports Kitanaka’s ethnographic research in the psychiatric department of a Japanese medical school circa the 2010’s. She observes the treatment of depression in a clinical setting and finds, oddly to my mind, that the psychiatrists resolutely avoid talking about “psychological” concepts with clients. Instead, the doctors prescribe meds and urge the patients to realize their blues and jitters come out of their sheer physical exhaustion brought on by overwork. If they just worked fewer hours, slept more, had better diets with less alcohol, and managed stress more effectively, they would feel more energetic and stronger and not feel so listless and not want to commit suicide anymore. Unbelievably, the docs saw between 30 and 60 patients a day. It boggles the mind.

Part 3 examines with the economic downturn of the 1990s and spreading knowledge about the symptoms of depression, by the year 2000, the Japanese were widely discussing depression and suicide as results of the stress and exhaustion of overwork. The web of course provided many listicles and quizzes so that people could self-diagnose.

The author discusses how depression in Japan became medicalized, shifting from being seen as a personal issue to a bio-social disease caused by work stress. The landmark Dentsū case in 2000, where an advertising agency admitted responsibility for an employee’s suicide due to overwork, marked a significant change in how such cases were viewed legally. The government and corporations became liable for workers’ suicides, prompting new policies to address mental health. Companies now monitor employees’ psychological well-being and offer resilience training, though taking sick leave remains stigmatized.

Pharmaceutical companies marketed SSRIs heavily, leading to a surge in diagnoses and prescriptions. However, the effectiveness of these medications was later questioned, and many patients did not improve, with some even experiencing worsened symptoms.

Despite the complex social science jargon, the book provides an intriguing exploration of cross-cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and Japanese studies. It has received multiple awards, including the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #4

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto 

The narrator Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother. Mikage attends college. Before she died, Mikage’s grandmother sang the praises of a college-aged boy, Yuichi, who totes and lifts in the neighborhood flower shop. After granny died, Yuichi called Mikage and invited her to stay with his mother Eriko and him until Mikage felt better.

A heavy and bittersweet story unfolds quietly. Mikage and Yuichi both seem to be too alone for their age. They don’t seem to have friends they can talk to, so the death of a family member feels to them like being pushed to the edge of despair. In deep depression and anxiety due to grief, Mikage is rescued by Yuichi. Later Yuichi has to deal with a senseless sudden death, and Mikage helps him. The mutual support between the two characters is reassuring and full of hope.

The author matter-of-factly uses magic realism in terms of dreams. A good novice cook, Mikage works for a celebrity chef so the content about food is done, well, deliciously,  bringing to mind and tastebuds that other 1980s love letter to eating Tampopo. Another reference that plunged me into nostalgia was to okonomiyaki, literally “your favorite yaki,” rendered as “egg and vegetable pancakes.” In a cute climax, when she finds out that Yuichi is suffering at a retreat that serves only tofu dishes, she scales walls to deliver to him take-away katsudon.

One wonders if this novel is one written with university-aged readers as the target audience. The author deals with the theme of ` young people dealing with grief' in an unflinching way, maybe in a revealing way for young readers but maybe less than novel to older readers who have buried parents but also have had to say sudden goodbyes to friends and colleagues taken too soon in their forties and fifties.

The Nones of Perry Mason 71

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1957 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Prince of Noir.

Please Murder Me
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “You Are Going to Commit Another Murder...”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr unexpectedly takes the lead role as a good guy, trustworthy and warm, though a movie-goer has to grant everybody has their shortcomings, since he’s got to tell his fellow Marine and war buddy, “My brother, your wife and I are in love.” His battle companion ends up shot dead by the wife Angela Lansbury. During her trial criminal lawyer Burr argues self-defense.

But the wife’s innocence is called into question. Burr is persuasive as he gradually realizes he’s being played for a fool. As fine an actress as she is, Lansbury still can’t do much with an underwritten part; the lines don’t allow her to be as persuasive compared to what she conjured up for The Worst Mother in the World in The Manchurian Candidate.

This is an entertaining way to wile away 80 minutes on a cold winter’s evening. The gritty streets and the opening sequence of “preparing the gun” fulfill our noirish expectations. Oddly enough, the poor quality of the print adds to the movie watching experience. The monochrome murkiness gives a feeling that we are watching the struggles of wretches abandoned by their Creator in a corrupt world of deception.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, veteran actors are Robert Griffin (perp twice) and Denver Pyle (victim once, accused twice, perp thrice).

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #3

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

Set in about 1913, obviously in Tokyo, in a refined milieu of idle aristocrats and hyperactive parvenues. This poetic and wonderful novel is a tragic story of young love between Kiyoaki and Satoko told partly from the point of Kiyoaki’s best school friend Honda. The two young men are decidedly different though they attend the same school for sons of the elite. Honda is studious and serious, most comfortable when books are within reach, while Kiyoaki is dominated by his raw emotions and Heian esteem for elegance. The difference between the two is emphasized throughout the novel, highlighting how their choices are influenced by a sense of ethics or a sense of melancholy.

Decidedly not a quick read, the background is a relatively obscure period, Japan during the Taisho era, i.e., the transition period between the Meiji determination to modernize and the Showa determination to eradicate the language and culture of Taiwan, Korea and Okinawa and transform East and Southeast Asia into a vast slave labor camp. Mishima describes the feelings of the characters in flowery metaphors, which, while attractive, drive the reader outside for a walk to escape the overpowering scents. The pace picks up in the last quarter – so much so that it becomes un-put-down-able - and ends with a ruefully sad, inevitable resolution.

With brilliant characterization, plotting, and pace, Mishima is ambitious in this novel. He inserts tiny essays on philosophy, both Western and Buddhistic. He depicts the reality of the characters and their transgressive love as charged with risk, hazard and tension, but always with a feeling of transience and melancholy.

He’s also a modernist in the way he challenges the reader with the main character. Very young, Kiyoaki is selfish and self-centered. He has an inferiority complex which pushes him to take everything immoderately, or in a twisted way, even the most neutral observations. He treats Satoko as badly as Richard Ellsworth Savage treats Texas idealist Anne Trent in 1919. And even when Kiyoaki evolves in the course of the novel, we readers can’t shake the feeling that everything he does is only for his own benefit, without worrying about the dire consequences to others.

Such is Mishima and his translator’s sureness of touch, though, the tone never feels grim or bleak or over the top. At the end of the novel in which there is no shortage of anxiety and death, the reader feels becalmed by the atmosphere of melancholy that spreads over the entire work. It’s almost as if even the strongest emotions and the most dramatic situations were filtered through the sense that all we have to do is wait a little time and we will all be nobody and nowhere, and all will be gone.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 70

Note: In the Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three days that marked the month's counting period. In a hat tip to those tough old Romans (may their example inspire our courage), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, I will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's contributions to the mystery genre (Perry Mason is mostly Late Stoic). Fact is, so many articles are in the can, I figure why not release more often? Saving them doesn't earn interest and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

Your friends may not help you much, but they can do you a lot of harm if you offend them.

In the classic TV series, now and then Mason and Pals visit a small California town, maybe a market town or mountain resort or a mining town past its halcyon days. Following the traditional noir stereotype, small towns are anything but quaint and cozy, with covetousness, profligacy, and anger seething beneath the surface, the folks a mix of nice, naughty, crafty, and prone to gossip, secrets, and felony.

Logan City: The Case of the Drowning Duck (October 12, 1957)

Scene after scene emphasizes how frickin’ hot Logan City is in the late summer. It would be, located in the desert east of L.A. near the Nevada border. No wonder our Woman With A Past, Lois Reed, looks blissful when she chug-a-lugs a Pabst from the can, while her sexy blouse and silk drawers hang to dry in the kitchenette of her motel room. Small-town cronyism has allowed an innocent man to be executed for murder eighteen years before this story. Then, at the behest of the village potentate, the cops and DA dutifully build a case against the innocent’s son on the flimsiest of motives and skimpiest of evidence.

Logan City: The Case of the Perjured Parrot (December 20, 1958)

In the past year since Drowning Duck, Logan City has miraculously grown a lake that looks suspiciously like Malibou Lake between Malibu and Agoura, CA. Thus, the flora makes no sense as desert flora and the squirrel Della tries to feed is not of the species that lives in the desert. Ecological boo-boos aside, this is a great episode. Joseph Kearns – Mr. Wilson on Dennis the Menace – plays a self-styled criminologist nervous that his imposter syndrome will be exposed by the city lawyer. To exonerate the innocent librarian, Perry calmly uses logic to blow up the circumstantial evidence submitted by the big fish in the small pond.

Piñon City: The Case of the Barefaced Witness (March 18, 1961)

Iris has grown up in the small town. You’d think she’d have friends that would stick by her when tongues wag and accusing fingers point at her for being in on an embezzling scheme. But no, the smarmy hypocrites kick her to the curb when the going gets rough. Since in a small town there’s no escaping one’s past, she has to leave for the big city with her reputation in tatters. And Iris’ Aunt Sarah is so scared of small-minded public opinion that she pays blackmail to keep a common law marriage secret. Sheesh, give me the alienation from society and self and an anonymous death in the city anytime.

Outcast: The Case of the Ominous Outcast (May 21, 1961)

The corrupt small-town setting and theme of the past haunting the present are about as noir as it gets. A bearded stranger shows up in town. You'd expect in 1960 in a hot dusty California village the beard would be enough to provoke the vigilance committee to ready the rope and drag the stranger to the old oak tree with the yellow ribbons. Worse, the stranger is the spit and image of a man that committed a terrible crime against the town 20 years before. Now the dear hearts and gentle people don’t know if the stranger is the son of the criminal nor do they care the stranger was only a toddler when the atrocity went down. The peasants go crazy anyway, taking the stranger for a fiend from the past that going to drag them to the searing hell their consciences know they richly deserve.

Placer Hill: The Case of the Lurid Letter (December 6, 1962)

I'm not a keen fan of the 1960s episodes whose relevance and preaching have not worn well. This episode, however, examines problems in high school education that have hardly gone away: bullying of teachers by students, teen sexuality and mental health, alcohol abuse among minors, unsafe school climate, hysterical parental involvement, and lack of respect for teachers among the public. Like in wealthy suburban counties today, in this small town the high school’s female teachers are subject to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and threats of violence from the boys whose impunity is coddled by parent-pleasing principals.  Perry Mason takes the moral high ground against small-town in-group favoritism and mobocracy, scolding the whole town in a public meeting in the climax. But the ending in which the victimized teacher makes nice-nice with the weak-brained and narrow-minded parent-victimizers is kind of sickening.

Burgess: The Case of the Reckless Rockhound (November 26, 1964)

An ex-business partner returns to a small mining town, waving around a contract that he claims makes him entitled to half the mine’s profits for the years he was away. He ends up murdered, his corpse deposited in a sluice for separating gold from gravel. It is a grisly, grotesque touch, unusual for TV at the time. The small-town aspect feels convincing due to the fine acting from the likes of Elisha Cook Jr. (The Maltese Falcon), Bruce Bennett (The Treasure of Sierra Madre), Audrey Totter (The Lady in the Lake) and Ted de Corsia (The Enforcer). They portray tough people who take for granted helping themselves means helping each other and circling the wagons when outsiders threaten their interests. It’s an episode that for once esteems the venerable small-town virtues of self-reliance blending with loyalty to one’s own, especially when one’s own are hardly saints.

Note: The green-highlighted title is from Country Town Sayings. Check 'em out for thems that are true, half true, and no longer true.

European Reading Challenge #1

Note: At used book sales, sometimes I just take a chance with an author I never heard of though in this case it’s not really risky since the New York Review of Books is so well-known for giving neglected books new life that if they publish a book, it’s safe to assume it’s worth reading. In this case they commissioned a translation of the most famous work of a four-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, now little read, even in his native France.

Malicroix  - Henri Bosco (tr. Joyce Zonana)

The Camargue is a coastal region in southern France located south of the city of Arles, between the Mediterranean Sea and the two arms of the Rhône river delta. It is wetland, now known for its bulls, horses, flamingoes, leisurely bicycling and nature walks. But back in the early 19^th century, when this novel is set, it was a remote austere environment, vulnerable to storms and floods that come late in the year. This novel is worth reading just for the nature writing. Bosco, a poet, writes flowing prose that captures the heavy eerie atmosphere that reigns on the island that the Rhône erodes every day it is in flood.

The tale stars young Martial de Mégremut. He heads to La Redousse where notary Dromiols has summoned him to collect the inheritance of his great-uncle Cornelius de Malicroix. The notary is not there yet and Martial waits for him for a whole week in the lonely farmhouse assailed by a storm, with only Balandran, Cornelius' taciturn house-man, and the briard Bréquille for company. When he finally shows up, Dromiols has disturbing manner and style of talking and so does his assistant Uncle Rat.

Dromiols wants to give the desolation of the site and the wildness of the elements time to wear down young Martial, because a clause in the will stipulates that the young man will inherit only if he resides on the island for three months without leaving. Dromiols expects the gentle Martial to flee this stern country back to his hothouse flowers and loving relatives. He is wrong: seduced by the wild Camargue, Martial will survive against all odds the quest planned for him by the last of the Malicroix.

One take: This story is the first-person narration of how young Martial becomes a hostage to heritage. A young man takes himself out of his familiar surroundings, cosseted by loving paternal relatives who suffocate him with gentle love and middle-class comforts and trepidation about his health. Alone in a harsh environment, without anybody to tell him he is getting weird, he gradually loses his bearings. He sees himself as the fruit of the soil of a harsh environment and the blood of his rough untamed maternal side. Blood and soil mysticism unbalances him to the point where he sees himself as the guardian of his heritage, the next in a long line of manly men who did it their own manly way. Manlily: vindictive and violent. Writing after the horror of WWII, Bosco may be writing about how young men naturally seek adventures and are thus attracted, mislead, and wrecked by blood and soil nationalism and Spencerian woo-woo like the race-ghost.

Another take: Solitude and silence induce states of mind that may exist in modern bourgeois life only in extraordinary settings. We ourselves discovered in 2020 that in isolating situations, human beings lack social contact that we need for stable mental health. Alone, we begin to feel anxiety, over-estimating threats and under-estimating our ability to cope. In our boredom, uncertainty and fear, we revert to pre-modern ways of explaining and responding to the world. We start thinking ghosts might be behind those thumps in our dark house. In his loneliness, from an extramundane plane, young Martial starts to examine the basics of shelter, fire, warmth, simple food, coffee, dogs, and the superior-retainer relationship.

Bosco, a professor of classics, is dealing in religious and mythical symbols, deeper and more complex than feeling dead chuffed with a membership card in a race. Blind ferryman. Bulls pursuing maidens. Revenge and blood feuds. Harsh truths coming out in dreams. Dromiols as Beelzebub. Dropping into the realm of the dead and returning a la Theseus and Orpheus. Martial’s love interest and nurse in his delirium reminded me of the fox spirits turned nice women who comforted Pu Songling (蒲松齡)'s lonely mandarins and needy Confucian scholars.

 And those are only the symbols and states of mind that I understood. Kind of. There’s much more that was over my head after two readings. 

Comparisons are odious but Bosco reminded me of Faulkner. Strong sense of place - check: the atmosphere of Provence reminded me of Yoknapatawpha’s remoteness, lush climate, unpredictable weather, quiet stoical peasants and their unchanging ways. Lyrical captivating passages nearly unintelligible – check. Bosco’s prose is challenging, requiring quiet and focus to immerse yourself in the experience of reading -  though the grammar isn’t convoluted (unlike Faulkner's) and the vocabulary isn’t difficult. 

It’s that Bosco’s ideas are so mysterious and strange.

Drama Writ in the Gold of Mad Millions

Note: The movie below was Gail Patrick’s first part. She plays the just hired secretary in the assisted living facility now owned and operated by newly rich May Robson. Down the road, in 1938, Patrick landed the role for which old movie buffs remember her, the mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey. For good or ill, that part typed her as The Haughty One for about 60 roles in the coming years, up to her last outing in Two in the Dark in 1948. Retirement drove her crazy, so in 1957 Gail Patrick Jackson created her own full-time job by becoming the executive producer for the greatest courtroom drama TV series ever, Perry Mason. Raymond Burr was to have ups and downs with her in the coming years about work loads and quality of scripts, but he reportedly said she was the soul of the series.

If I Had a Million
1932 / 1:18
Tagline: “POVERTY AT DAWN...AND A MILLION AT DUSK!”
[internet archive]

John Glidden is a captain of industry that detests his relatives so much that he hatches a nutty plan to disburse his estate. He draws names at random out of the phone book. He makes out a check for a million dollars. Then he delivers the check to the lucky duckies in person. “I want to give somebody a chance at happiness,” he says. “I don't care who - I just want somebody to have something worthwhile out of what I spent my life to accumulate.”

Whether the theme of “frustration vented” was witting or not, we don’t know, but one wonders about the year 1932. It was the worst year of the Depression. People were feeling sour with Prohibition, dust storms, the economic doldrums (the jobless rate was still 33%) and shocked at the kidnapping and killing of the Lindbergh’s baby son. If people wanted to blow off some steam, who could blame them?

Mr. Peabody is a brow-beaten husband who is now rich enough to take out his job dissatisfactions on the store’s inventory. Charles Ruggles is perfectly cast as the nebbish.

On the getting the check in a rowdy sailor’s bar, Violet Smith’s idea of happiness is to rent a hotel room and sleep alone, with only one pillow on the bed. In a Pre-Code gesture, she doffs her nylons and garters for the camera. It seems reasonable for a lady of the evening not to want to sleep in fishnets, for once.

Emily LaRue and her husband (W.C. Fields) can’t stand road hogs so they finance and command a fleet of jalopies to run road hogs off the road. This one, I daresay, will resonate with us post-moderns who endure a daily commute.

John Wallace, inmate of death row, receives his $1,000,000 on day of his execution. He mistakenly thinks the money will save him, but takes comfort in the fact his wife will inherit the fortune.

Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper, perfectly cast) plays a marine who doesn’t believe the check is real. He signs the check over to a guy that runs a dog wagon who says, “I can't read or write but I can make marks nobody else can read.” The marines are shocked later when they see the guy well-dressed, with a new car, and stepping out with the waitress they were all interested in.

Mary Walker is an elderly woman tyrannized in an old folks institution by the supervisor who makes the inmates wear drab uniforms and ensures they have no privacy. Mrs. Walker gets her own back against tyranny with her million dollars. John Glidden, the captain of industry, is happy to give away the money because it enables him to make friends among Mary Walker’s elderly companions.

As we would expect in an anthology movie, the quality varies from segment to segment. For my money, W.C. Fields driving like the devil himself was funny and May Robson brought energy to the part of Mary Walker. Playing the millionaire, Richard Bennett has a lot of gusto and a voice that can shake rafters.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #2

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Convenience Store Woman: A Novel - Sayaka Murata

This story is set in Tokyo in the 2010’s. Due to unfortunate incidents in her childhood, the narrator Keiko Furukura feels she is strange, not normal, having only little insight into what other people are thinking and expecting of themselves and others.

From childhood, Keiko maintains radio silence, fearing the consequences if normal people realize that she is not like them. Consequently, Keiko never makes any friends, which raises red flags though adults are also relieved she never complains and never takes initiative to do anything. Her younger sister provides her with bland catchphrases to provide non-answers to the nosy questions of inquiring minds as to why Keiko is still unmarried in her middle thirties or why she works part-time in a convenience store, hardly a suitable job for a single woman her age. After all, it is only normal for normal people to be curious as to why somebody is so weird and to suggest advice to remedy their weird situations.

Perhaps it is just as well that people don’t know her very well, that Keiko is unforthcoming with what is going through her mind. Reticence maybe keeps her out of jail or an institution. When she visits her sister, her new nephew squalls and cries as babies are prone to do. Keiko observes in a brief aside how easily a knife could be used to quiet the infant down.

Woh-ee-oh.

The narrator’s employer, however, finds Keiko a model employee of a chain convenience store. Because our narrator does not know how to pick up on or get across social cues, she is fine with the store putting her through training on catchwords for customers and smiles for her face. Keiko talks and dresses like her fellow employees and adapts their ways and views. She eagerly participates in the corporation’s sales and pep talks. Since the job gives her a sense of purpose and connection, Keiko dutifully eats and sleeps to maintain her health so she can do her job. She’s always on time, never misses a shift, and makes herself available to work over New Year’s even though working means not seeing her parents. She is appalled when her fellow employees gossip about her instead of re-stocking shelves and preparing for a sale.

Keiko doesn’t think of romance, she resents people prying. She fears:

The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.

Keiko questions the arbitrary assumption of normal people that happiness hinges on marriage, kids, position, property, respect, a future. But under the pressure of other people’s curiosity and concern and her own feeling of being in a rut, she allows a lazy, abusive, smelly incel to move into her apartment.

Shiraha’s got enough angry misfit tendencies for two women-haters, but he’s normal in that he knows what is going on in the minds of normal people and knows what to say to placate and con them. The normal folks applaud that Keiko takes in Shiraha, without even knowing whether the incel will be good to her or not, without being concerned whether Keiko can defend herself in a relationship. To our relief, Keiko is impervious to the incel’s manipulations because she’s oblivious to his gaslighting and sarcasms.

Is Keiko normal with a lot of problems (as her family hopes) or could Keiko be diagnosed with – who knows? I sure don’t -  a disorder like autism or ADHD? We are kept in suspense about the outcome of Keiko’s descent into unemployment and the resulting agoraphobia and depression till the end of this unsettling novel.

Murata possess a striking ability to create an atmosphere of disquiet in deadpan prose. It’s painful and eerie in spots, but also funny as hell – who the frick do normal people think they are, prone to crooked thinking and nonsensical bias as they are, to think their arbitrary conventions and capricious prejudices are the way it ought to be? It raises questions on the behalf of people someplace on the neurodivergent spectrum and their struggle to become a telepath like everybody else, whereas neuro-typical adults find mind-reading and play-acting as natural as popping open an umbrella, confidently believing that coffee stunts your growth, no innocent people are behind bars, and growing older with more experiences will make you more mature. 

World War II Diary

Naples ‘44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy - Norman Lewis

Lewis attended London's Enfield Grammar School among whose alumni are Boris Karloff and many other distinguished musicians, scholars, clerics, and scientists. Born in 1908, Lewis served in World War II and this is a chronicle of his service during the Allied occupation of Naples

Although intelligence work was his main area of activity, his office was assigned a wide variety of tasks from policing the black market to assessing damage caused by an eruption of Vesuvius in March 1944 (“the most majestic and terrible sight I've ever seen or expect to see,” he writes). The varied assignments gave him a chance to meet all kinds of people from down at heel aristocrats, starving intellectuals, and the salt of the earth whose instincts for survival seem from the Middle Ages.

Lewis spoke Italian and could handle its regional dialects so he could get the truth more quickly and accurately than his fellow agents. He describes ugly and depressing scenes of people struggling just to eat and survive. His terse prose is angry, mordant, and blistering with regard to Italian gangsterism and corruption, snotty British muddling, American stupidity, and Canadian sadism (don't often see those words together).

He's not prejudiced as nobody gets off the hook. But one understands Lewis when he says if he got to live his life all over again, he would choose to grow up and live in Naples.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #1

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyo - Robert Lyons Danly

Higuchi Ichiyo (born Natsuko) was the first woman professional writer of Japan’s modern era. Her formidable visage was on the ¥5000 note until July, 2024. Dying of TB at only 24 years of age, she left only a long diary, some poetry, and a handful of stories. The Japanese, at least up to about 50 years ago, liked her diary for its wistful tone and attention to the details of everyday life. But Higuchi’s reputation has been high among literary scholars and Danly claims that she

…cut a wide swath through Meiji letters. Her grasp of high Heian, her love of low Edo were almost legendary, but she was still sui generis. In her bold and idiosyncratic style, she had rediscovered a way to be serious in fiction, something nearly two-hundred years' worth of writers had forgotten. She returned the novel to the province of the heart.

The first section of this book is a short critical biography. She was an extremely bright child and avid reader. In the very early Meiji period her father enrolled her in schools that gave her an extensive grounding in the Chinese and Japanese classics.  After dramatic personal struggles and artistic wrong turns, she forged a voice that combined the resources of traditional literature with themes related to modern Japan.

The book also presents Danly’s translations of nine of her stories. The characters are people in adversity, excluded from advantages and stability. Because of their precarity, they have a strong sense of the transience and fragility of their own existence. The stories are annotated clearly with notes for readers who don’t know what the Yoshiwara was.

European Reading Challenge 2025

I sign up for this Challenge at the level of Five Star (Deluxe Entourage), but may go to six or seven. I won't compete for the Jet Setter Prize.

Malicroix  - Henri Bosco - France

Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross - Estonia

Sharks and Little Fish: A Novel of German Submarine Warfare - Wolfgang Ott - Germany

Visas for Life – Yukiko Sugihara - Lithuania

Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution - Anna Geifman - Russia

The Ides of Perry Mason 69

Note: In the Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the month's counting period. In a hat tip to those tough old Romans (may their example inspire our endurance), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, I will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's contributions to the mystery genre (Perry Mason is mostly Late Stoic). Fact is, so many articles are in the can, I figure why not release more often? Saving them doesn't earn interest and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Crying Swallow - Erle Stanley Gardner

Collected in 1971 after the author’s death in 1970, the centerpiece is a Perry Mason novelette but it also  presents three short stories. All the tales involve stolen jewelry. 

In The Case of the Crying Swallow, a distraught husband seeks lawyer Perry Mason’s assistance in locating his missing wife. The search uncovers rummy characters up to no good, blackmail, and murder. Mason uncovers clues with his sidekicks Della Street and Paul Drake. Interesting is Gardner using a different length for a Mason story, but this experiment is just OK.

Gardner learned to write in the 1920s and 1930s by churning out hundreds of novellas and short stories for weekly magazines.  The Candy Kid was published on March 14, 1931 in Detective Fiction Weekly. It stars Lester Leith, who played a gentleman crook, a stock character in those bygone days, such a remote time that there actually existed a market of working-class males that read genre fiction.  It’s a comic story, in fact, that narrates Leith's scheme to recover stolen rubies. Like one of Gardner’s other pulp series heroes Ed Jenkins, Phantom Crook, Leith pulls cons on other crooks and donates the proceeds to charity, after he deducts expenses to support his opulent lifestyle.

Sidney Zoom was another independently wealthy advocate for the underdog. With the assistance of his police dog Rip, he aids the police to enmesh crooks in his web of deceit in a good cause. The story The Vanishing Corpse first appeared on August 15, 1931 in Detective Fiction Weekly. A murder occurs and then the corpus vanishes.

Lest the gritty settings of the worst years of the Depression get us down, the final story is in 1949, as post-war prosperity was starting to rock and roll. The Affair of the Reluctant Witness features Jerry Bane and his assistant with the prodigious memory, ex-copper Mugs Magoo (got to work in an alliteration somewhere). Jerry is a trust-fund kid, with the spendthrift account managed by a stingy family lawyer that is prone to lecture him about the virtues of penny-pinching and hard work. This doesn’t sit well with Jerry. With two years of malnutrition and abuse in a Japanese POW camp under his belt, he feels entitled to a little fun. The story is pretty straightforward: Jerry constructs a counter-con to undermine a real con by a real bad guy.

A snappy collection of short stories. All the stories were interesting. A fast tempo, concise narrative, tight mystery makes this book a light and frothy read.

Today is Coming of Age Day

成人の日 Seijin no Hi (literally Adult’s Day). This Japanese national holiday was established in 1948 as a day to congratulate people who have reached the age of legal adulthood (20) at any point during the year. On Coming of Age Day local governments all over the country hold morning ceremonies for these new voters. Women tend to dress up. When I was in Japan (1986-92) it was held on January 15, but in 2000 it was changed to a Monday holiday, to make additional three-day weekends. Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan - Margaret M. Lock

A McGill University anthropologist conducted fieldwork in Japan from 1973 to 1974 to describe how ordinary Japanese people viewed and obtained treatment from practitioners of traditional East Asian medicine. The setting was Kyoto, a decidedly conservative place, culturally speaking (though radical, politically speaking). She also interviewed the practitioners of kanpo (traditional Chinese medicine), herbal pharmacists, and providers of acupuncture, moxibustion, and massage techniques such as shiatsu.

The writing is very clear even for the non-specialist reader and covers interesting topics such as the historical development of East Asian medicine; Japanese attitudes relative to health, illness, and individual responsibility to keep well; description of different clinics that deliver different care and how their atmosphere and interactions range from the cool and formal for upper class patients to the relaxed and matter-of-fact mood for working class customers. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine have MD degrees and don’t pay attention to classical Chinese medical texts and have no truck with notions of yin/yang and meridians. They also tend to treat patients who are apparently just beginning to feel sick or discomfort or those who are suffering only mild symptoms.

The final section of the book covers the doctor-patient relationship in the Western-style doctor’s office, which she calls “cosmopolitan.” The national health care system delivers low fees in its array of programs so to generate income physicians see up to a hundred patients a day. This works out to about five minutes a client. One wonders about the number of misdiagnoses and late diagnoses in such conditions and if this is still the situation 50 years down the pike.

I gather that this was a well-regarded and seminal book when it was released. I was engaged by the book because since the pandemic I’ve been absorbed by books about medicine and pharmacy, epidemiology and medical anthropology. Other readers may be tantalized, wondering how much the patient and doctor experience has changed in urban Japan in the last 50 years. It’s a long time but I would guess Japanese doctors still see tens and tens of patients in a day.

 

Literary Mystery

The Hammersmith Maggot - William Mole

The sleuth in this outstanding literary mystery is Casson, rich wine-merchant and amateur detective. Motivated by an itch to explore the margins of crime, he closely observes his fellow dwellers of London in the middle 1950s. Onto Casson’s radar appears the Hammersmith Maggot. As a consummate blackmailer, the Maggot stalks his victims, armed with information that he’s wormed out of a bank. He then levels false allegations that are impossible to refute without gross damage to one’s reputation. Collecting his cash, he disappears and never taps the same victim twice. 

Casson extracts a detail from a victim that is reluctant to be interviewed. The detail enables Casson to identify the Maggot, whom he puts under surveillance. Casson also enlists the official assistance in the form of the gruff Inspector Strutt.

Mystery writer Frank Gruber said that an outstanding mystery must have a theme and invention. The theme in this mystery is the sheer villainy of the blackmailer. Casson, Strutt, and the reader feel sorry for the victims and feel so disgusted at the Maggot’s motivation and actions that we want to pound the Maggot down through the ground all the way to hell. Mole’s invention is copious. Though we know the identity of the Maggot by the half-way point, Mole builds suspense as to how Casson is going to nail him.

William Mole Younger (1917 – 1961) was a long-serving officer in the British anti-terrorism and counter-espionage agency. Educated at Christ College Oxford, he began his writing career with three volumes of poetry and a travel narrative Blue Moon in Portugal. He wrote three mysteries. Released in 1955, The Hammersmith Maggot was a best-seller, won the approval of Queen Elizabeth, and was listed as “a best mystery” in Barzun and Taylor’s “Classic Crime Novels 1908 – 1975.”

Happy Birthday Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Victorian era novelist Collins (1824 – 1889) is known for two long novels that were originally published in installments in a weekly magazine.  The Woman in White, say some critics, was one of the first mysteries, published in 1859, and The Moonstone, published in 1868, is considered – by no less than T.S. Eliot – the first police procedural.

In The Woman in White, a young drawing master is unfortunate enough to fall in love with a young woman who has been promised by her father to a milord. After the marriage, the milord turns out to be neither rich nor a gentleman in any sense. Mystery revolves around the milord’s secret, known to a furtive lady dressed in white, who roams, forlornly but conveniently for the plot, near our main characters. I cannot give away an inexplicable death, which adds to the whydunnit aspect of the story.

True, there are slow spots, since we are, after all, in the world of the Victorian novel whose audiences liked drawn-out scenes and situations. Also true, in a couple of places Collins over-uses indirect speech, in which one character merely reports to another character what was said in a conversation with a third character. Overall, however, the various narrative techniques hold interest. The story unfolds from different points of view, thus forming a chain of evidence that is at once plausible and engrossing. A contemporary critic said Collins’ special merit is “that he treats a labyrinthine story in an apparently simple manner, and that the language in which he writes is plain English.”

And what characters! Sir Percival Glyde is an exasperated and desperate villain. His henchman Count Fosco is oily, cold, cautious, and ruthless. Hollywood well cast Sydney Greenstreet – the heavy in The Maltese Falcon – in the worthless 1948 movie version of this novel. The drawing master writes of the startling and ingenious Fosco, “Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself.” 

Lady Fosco is a malign influence.  Laura, the love interest of the artist, is ineffectual, inept, weepy, and subject to the vapors. But her weaknesses are balanced by the brave and reliable Marian Halcombe. As it was published as a serial, Collins reports that single male readers wrote to him, asking who was the living model on which Marian’s character was based, so that the writers could presume to ask her for her hand. No stones cast by this reviewer, who had a crush on Zelda Gilroy when a boy and fell for Elizabeth Benett at the age of 61.

For its riveting plot, memorable characters, enthralling narrative techniques, and ominous atmosphere, this novel has never been out of print since its first publication 150 years ago. Collins wrote about 30 novels, but he considered this novel to be his best. So much so that he had inscribed on his tombstone the epitaph “Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.”

The Nones of Perry Mason 68

Note: In the Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the month's counting period. In a hat tip to those tough old Romans (may their example inspire our endurance), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, I will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's contributions to the mystery genre (Perry Mason is mostly Late Stoic). Fact is, so many articles are in the can, I figure why not release more often? Saving them doesn't accrue interest and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

Bats Fly at Dusk – ESG writing as A.A. Fair

This story from 1942 kicks off when a blind man hires PI Bertha Cool in a complex case. It involves a hit and run on a young secretary, her employer that met an untimely demise, the division of the inheritance of his estate among his staff and a venal nephew, nervous insurance companies, and an impersonation by a cruel roommate.

Bertha's nitty-gritty concern with her question “How much moolah is in it for me” distracts her from identifying the pith of the case. Though her realism is the best thing about her, she misses the intuition of her partner Donald Lam (serving in the Navy) and his ability to home in on the essential. Her police force nemesis, Sgt. Sellars, puts in a worthy turn in which he is not as astute as Perry Mason’s worthy antagonist Lt. Tragg but not nearly as dumb as Sgt. Holcomb.

Gardner turns stereotypes on their head, making Lam the intuitive and sympathetic one while Bertha is the hard-charging one getting down to brass tacks. Though Bertha does all the legwork, she is bested by the absent Donald Lam who solves the case through brainpower alone. She is also snookered by Sgt. Sellars who gives her an unwanted kiss.

Gardner makes a point, however: Bertha Cool is decidedly not the gruff softie that hides her kindly soul under a cross shell. Bertha is in fact obnoxious, profane, and greedy. Her impulses must be anticipated by secretary Elsie Brand so she can warn Bertha to dial it down. Her partiality for going to strong-arm tactics from the get-go has to be countered by Donald Lam, who knows that compassion and tact with witnesses will get Cool and Lam closer to the solution sooner.

Most readers may miss the "real" detective Donald Lam. Long-time readers of the series will miss the interplay of the two “Cool without Lam” novels (the other is Cats Prowl at Night). hilarious when Bertha and Donald each on in conflict with each other, clients, and the cops.

Gardner’s stories nearly never indicate when they are taking place, because he thought dating content would hurt sales. But in this outing he mentions exact dates in 1942. Giving a feel for the wartime era in California, Gardner points out how dim-out regulations forced people to use blue flashlights, which gave off a weird light. The new regs also compelled drivers to drive as slow as 15 mph to decrease the risks of night driving with dimmed headlights. No wonder blackouts caused so many accidents, increased the incidence of crime, and lowered home front morale.

Alan Grant #6

The Singing Sands – Josephine Tey

Tey didn’t follow the usual rules and conventions of mystery writers during Golden Era of whodunnits from 1920 to 1950. For one, her series hero is not an aristocrat and he ends up in hospitals fairly often.

This mystery, released in 1952, is the last one starring the series hero Yard Inspector Alan Grant. Down with anxiety and depression, Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard goes on vacation to visit cousins in Scotland to recover himself. Understandably, he wants to get over the panic attacks that occur when he finds himself in an enclosed space like a bedroom, train compartment, or in the cabin of an auto. His superior is utterly unsympathetic, wondering why Grant can’t just shake it off, an attitude people with mental health issues must deal with today.

On the train to Scotland, he is a witness when the conductor discovers dead man, apparently the victim of a drunken fall. Tey’s focus is not on the departed one, but on Grant's inner thought processes, his motivations and his fears. That makes him, compared to characters such as Poirot and other thinking machines, a character distinctive and human.

Thanks to that dead man in the train, he recovers from his strained state of mind by investigating the death, getting a clue in the poetry that the young victim wrote on the margin of a newspaper. With the aid of fishing excursions with a six-year-old cousin, a professional Scotch patriot, as well as a friend of the dead man, Grant manages to shed light on a murder that had been considered an accident.

This also belongs to the class of detective novels that doubles as a travel narrative; Patricia Moyes springs to mind, setting her stories in rural England, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Tey has Grant take a side-trip to the Hebrides archipelago, specifically Cladda, a fictional island with miles of deserted beaches with the Atlantic slamming into it. 

While there, Grant gets no further with his investigation but he relaxes enough to cure himself of his anxiety with long walks and philosophical ruminating. The atmosphere is rendered vividly, besides advocating the restorative powers of travel, especially to places where where’s nothing to do in the classic vacation sense.  Oddly, on the other hand, Tey looks down on Scottish identity and independence; born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Inverness, she seems to have been a staunch Unionist.

Tey may have been dying when she was working on this novel. The manuscript was found in her papers after she passed away in 1952. So we don’t know if it was in its final form. Suffice to say, the ending breaks so many conventions that even mystery fans looking for something different will be dissatisfied with the ending. Still I recommend it to Tey fans, especially if they liked her unusual novels like immortal The Daughter of Time or well-regarded Miss Pym Disposes or Brat Farrar.