Japanese Literature Challenge #5

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年  - 2013

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

This coming of age story stars a male Japanese boomer in Tokyo in the middle 1980s. He learns about dealing with the unfairness of the world

The protagonist Tazaki suffered shunning by high school friends. The ostracism, which was never explained at the time, sent him into a six-month trough of depression and anxiety 

All around him, for as far as he could see, lay a rough land strewn with rocks, with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass. Colorless, with no light to speak of. No sun, no moon or stars. No sense of direction, either. At a set time, a mysterious twilight and a bottomless darkness merely exchanged places. A remote border on the edges of consciousness. At the same time, it was a place of strange abundance. At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in the gaps in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.

Oo-ee-oo. Small wonder this period has haunted him for 15 years. As if this experience were not trying enough, a close friend in college also left him, perhaps doing away with himself.

Tazaki has held a good job, gets along with people at work and had love affairs, but he’s afraid to get close to anybody for fear that they will desert him too, when they find out he is a nowhere man. “I can understand how painful it is to be rejected,” author Murakami said in a 2013 interview. “When you get hurt, you may build an emotional wall around your heart. But after a while you can stand up and move on. That’s the kind of story I wanted to write.”

Tazaki is sleepwalking through life, but Sara Kimoto, a woman he is dating, tells him their relationship can't move forward unless he discovers the truth behind the ostracism. Through the miracle of social media and face to face interviews with the principals, he uncovers a painful story. The roots of the injustice done to him by his friends turn out to be deep and dense because each individual had understandable reasons for acting one way or another without necessarily thinking about the consequences. I mean, who does at 18 years old, especially in intricate situations?

Some readers may feel that the story is dragged out unnecessarily with too many moods and too much backtracking. Perhaps lead astray by the whydunnit aspect and the interviews with persons of interest that call to mind a mystery thriller, other readers are put out at the untidy resolution-free ending. Still others may rail, “Ugh, another male late thirties with a stunted personality like Norwegian Wood? Again with females that are little more than sex objects?” And while there’s some surrealism –  see above quotation –  there's only a dab of magical realism - which, to my mind, is a mercy but many readers will disagree.

For my money, however, I’m always up for a quest, as coming of age stories often are. This story is indeed a pilgrimage (as the title implies), a journey to the truth, or at least, as much of the truth as those among the quick can provide. As for literal trips: a story within the story is set at a hot spring in rustic Oita prefecture and our hero goes over the top on a Narita-Helsinki flight to interview one of the high school friends who is now a potter in the Finnish capital. Murakami effectively conveys places, both physical and mental. Well-rendered are the scenes of Tazaki in the Finnish pizzeria and in Shinjuku station watching the trains leave on overnights to Matsumoto. Also very well done was the creepy Nagoya office of his turncoat-friend who became a New Age Business Swami.

Murakami also has a didactic purpose. He wants the reader to sympathize with the characters, to identify their nuances and be tolerant of their decisions, and then to extend this skill into real life, to understand where friends, family and colleagues are coming from. He also discourages getting into ruts, just going through the motions of work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep. His message is be fair, be brave, build your confidence by taking risks, get out of your comfort zone. This advice is nothing new but no less effective just because eternally true.

Lastly, as usual, Murakami is always into music. So to prime yourself for reading this novel, these two pieces: Round Midnight and Franz Liszt's Le mal du pays.

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 Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro The Gate - Natsume Soseki Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima The Tale of Genji

A History of Japan: to 1334 – Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - 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 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: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – 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: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 34

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the Hell of it.

The Case of the Gilded Lily – Erle Stanley Gardner

The typical Perry Mason mystery kicks off in his office with a damsel in distress describing her vulnerable position. But Gardner starts this entry from 1956 with a long set-up. A rich but honest business executive is blackmailed because his trophy wife has a felony arrest on her record. Perry Mason is not called in until the blackmailer has been ushered to his eternal deserts, which hopefully involve pressure parboiling.

The other unusual aspect is that Mason does not do much interviewing of his own. He leaves it to PI Paul Drake and others to investigate. Mason also seems to go off the ethical rails to the extent that even his loyal secretary Della Street, who’s always willing to accept risk, gets alarmed about his falsifying evidence. DA Hamilton Burger does not see Mason coming, however, is flummoxed as usual. Mason relies on his super power of being able to sniff when witnesses are being economical with the truth.

I think Gardner’s decision to have Mason arrive later dampens the compulsion his eager fans usually feel to keep turning the pages. This is still worth reading because Gardner respects his reader’s intelligence enough to expect them to follow an intricate flim-flam by Mason. It’s a neat maneuver with fingerprints that makes us reader almost – that’s almost – feel sorry for DA Hamilton Burger.

I recommend this distinctive Mason novel.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Wild Card Classic. I’ve only read a couple of Wodehouse’s novels, when I taught English in Saudi Arabia and needed all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers I could get. I seem to remember concluding that a little Wodehouse goes a long way. Flash forward 35 years to a recent used book sale where I got the book reviewed below. I figure if a wild card is a person or thing whose qualities are uncertain, then a non-fiction book by a writer who is most famous for fiction must be a wild card.

America, I Like You – P.G. Wodehouse

Widely hailed as the finest comic writer of the twentieth century, Wodehouse looks back at his own life with the keen sense of humor that defined his famous writings about Blandings Castle and the Jeeves-Wooster ménage. After the chapters originally appeared as pieces in the humor magazine Punch, they were collected and published in 1956 under the title above and reprinted as Over Seventy in 2015.

Wodehouse ties the chapters together with a slender thread – he is responding to preliminary questions from a potential interviewer.  In mock-autobiographical fashion, he recounts his beginnings as a writer in the early 1900s and his visits to the United States when such visits were rare for young journalists. But he goes off on various funny tangents full of absurdities and various ridiculous observations.

I laughed out loud throughout reading this book and when I wasn’t laughing I was somehow with a smile on my face, wondering what mad simile or metaphor he was going to pull out of his hat next. Wodehouse has an effortless ability to uncork punch lines. Such incredible timing, such simple vocabulary arrayed in perfect sentences. Wodehouse had a uncommon feeling for language, able to take everyday words, hyperbole, inversion. garbled quotations, etc. and build amazing phrases and sentences. Wodehouse must have read widely in English literature and especially Shakespeare, since his parodies are brilliant. 

Sure, the sense that the writing feels formulaic will creep up awares so just don’t read much in one sitting lest the formula pale. I read only a chapter a day for about three weeks. I had a great time, even if the mood sometimes did not last long, overtaken by the chance intake of news like “As we merrily doff our masks, in what is surely an undercount because our leaders and their minions have lost the ability to count anymore, as many as 1500 souls passed away yesterday from omicron, when at least 1,000 people have been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months.” 

In days like these we need all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers we can get from writers like Wodehouse. If I see any Wodehouse novels at used book sales, I’ll snap them up, cautioning myself that wolfing down too many “musical comedies without music” will feel like eating one too many homemade chocolate chip cookies.

The First Ben Casey

Note: The show was not syndicated (not enough episodes) so it does not loom large in popular memory like Perry Mason. But some episodes are posted to You Tube, by some miracle without commercials. If your schedule is anything like mine, it’s hard to find 50 minutes, but try it, you might like it if a dark medical drama for grown-ups is your cup of tea.

To the Pure - Ben Casey (Season 1, Episode 1)

I was five when this premier episode aired in October, 1961. Of course I don’t remember this particular episode, but I do remember as a little kid I thought as cool beyond belief the show’s opening  of the hand drawing the symbols ♂, ♀, ✳, †, ∞ on a blackboard, as cast member Sam Jaffe recited, “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.” I still think it’s beyond cool, so beware -  some of my critical stances are those of a five-year-old.

Our protagonist is a gifted neurosurgeon at County General Hospital. Dr. Ben Casey is also the colleague from hell. In an intense opening scene of a failed resuscitation, he chews out a fellow doctor for losing an elderly patient: “You probably didn’t kill him but you didn’t do anything to keep him alive.” His mentor Dr. Zorba scolds him for bawling out x-ray technicians and for bullying badly needed nurses so badly that they resign. Casey’s fighting with higher ups on whether to proceed with a risky surgery on a nine-year-old boy with bad blood vessels in his brain.

For 1961, the show is diverse way beyond our post-modern expectations. The nine-year-old patient and his mother are Spanish-speakers named Salazar. Casey has a Japanese-American friend and colleague played by Aki Aleong. The elegant and intelligent Bettye Ackerman plays a female doctor. Sam Jaffe as Dr. Zorba indicates origin with lines like “Maybe I stand on my head and speak to them in Greek” but a Yiddish lilt (especially the high notes) makes clear the character was meant to be Jewish.

The five-minute conversation when old Dr. Zorba upbraids young Dr. Casey is so well-written and well-played that one wonders if the two actors brought a real-life discomfort with each other to the scene. Zorba’s harsh line “Now get out of here, you make me sick to look at you” sounds like it comes straight from his heart.

Which brings us to prickly Vince Edwards. In the anti-hero tradition of the late Fifties and early Sixties, he’s difficult to like but a force of nature like Marlon Brando’s Kowalski or Paul Newman’s Hud. His dark Italian look* contrasts with the hospital whites such that he pops on the monochrome screen, compelling our attention. He gives the part intelligence, skill, dedication and a confident tough strength. Mrs. Salazar says, “You don’t talk like a friend but I trust you.” The kid asks him, “Doctor, how come you never smile? You don’t like me?” The scene with Dr. Maggie (Bettye Ackerman) is totally in character. After awkward silences on their date, his sweet talk:  “Whenever I hold a woman, I take her pulse” and “You’re fairly attractive but you talk too much.”

The black and white makes the action look starkly realistic. The failed resuscitation of the geezer was probably not so wrenching as real life but it was convincing enough to me (identifying with the geezer and all). In a grisly scene of a lumbar puncture, a young girl with rabies jerks around during the procedure and exposes Casey to the virus. Casey is not a candidate to take any vaccine because of allergies. The 30-day waiting and watching for the emergence of symptoms like fever, headache, anxiety, confusion, and agitation is marked the old-fashioned way, x’ing out days on a wall calendar.

Anybody who's watched a lot of noir knows its look is more than light coming through venetian blinds. It’s impressive how director Moser employs black, white, and grey and lighting to provide contrast and fascination to the settings. The contrasts are emphasized by odd points of view, such as seeing the ceiling go by while lying supine on a gurney (hey, I’ve done that). Such as the disorienting shot of queasily looking down into the operating theater. Such as the black microscope in the foreground with Casey in white in the background. Settings are spellbinding: the nightmarish tunnel connecting the hospitals, Casey’s spartan hospital quarters, the night club where Casey and Maggie dance, Casey’s distorted vision of contracting rabies.

Finally, the setting of the hospital stokes our natural curiosity and jitters about hospitals, medical procedures and caregivers. Casey observes, “Most doctors are like most people – you ask them to trade an old idea for a new one and they jump out of their underwear.” This still feels true. To the ordinary person, instruments and devices still look shiny, delicate, mysterious, and vaguely menacing. To our post-modern eyes, the 60-year-old tech seems coldly metallic and somehow stately. Huge wall units with five-spoke hand wheels, rectangular indicators, and huge dials seem imposing and alien. Not at all like our portable, plastic, touchy electronic devices nowadays. Plus, Casey’s hospital is a lot quieter than our hospitals are now with their continuous beeping, chiming, dinging, droning, humming and buzzing

---

* I remember in the Sixties adults complaining that Casey’s hair was too long. This, of course, made me determined to let my hair get long as soon as I could though how long hair would be consistent with my general policy "pursue my own agenda while keeping a low profile" I didn't reconcile.

Japanese Literature Challenge #4

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること 2007

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

Marathon runner and triathlete Murakami talks about his great passion, aside from writing novels, long distance running. He discusses his determination to overcome his limits in running events in respectable times, but also his ability to get over disappointing physical breakdowns and times that were longer than his optimistic expectations.

Murakami claims that the occupation of writing is not so different from the training for running daunting distances. Writing requires talent of course but it requires the discipline to focus on the writing process and endure siting and thinking for hours at a time. He makes the point that after he changed his job, which required him to be on his feet all the time, to the more sedentary one of literary man, circumstances therefore forced him to move more to keep fit.

But he found the discipline of running and training benefitted his writing process. Running with dedication also kept him away from tobacco, alcohol, over-eating, and late night partying, none of which do writers much good. I think Murakami is on to something with regard to the discipline of running:

Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to wile away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as whole.

The importance of not living in a fog or sleepwalking through life is a commonplace kind of wisdom. But avoiding muddle and living the examined life constitute an eternal verity that certainly resonates with me. It’s why I read so much and why I sleep well, eat well, don’t drink or smoke, and exercise five days a week. It also helped to stir my interest that Murakami didn’t start to run until he was in his early thirties, which was true for me too. I didn’t start to jog until I lived in Okinawa, whose subtropical climate (Taipei, Corpus Christi) makes it ideal for a guy like me who likes humidity for warming up quickly.

Murakami said he trained with serious runners in Okinawa in the Eighties so I wondered if he had ever trained when I was jogging there from 1986 to 1992. In Naha, from Sobe, I’d cross the 221 Bridge, make a right through Onoyama Park, another right across the Tsubogawa bridge and back to Sobe. In Nishihara, I’d just jog around the university and its track. I’d also visit the gym and shoot baskets. The solitary pleasure of shooting baskets in an empty gym is ineffable, not to mention conducive to thinking or, more often, fantasizing about taking passes from Kareem or Magic or Worthy and scoring buzzer beaters to send the Celtics home in defeat.

Murakami is clearly a literary figure who’s a power of the publishing scene, able to publish non-fiction and see it sell in magazines and bookstores. It would be interesting to read his literary criticism or travel narratives.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata The Tale of Genji Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro The Gate - Natsume Soseki

A History of Japan: to 1334 – Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – Sir George Sansom Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger

 

 

 

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Did the ancients describe cancer? What early cancer treatments gave hope that cancer could be beaten? Is “war” the best metaphor when the adversary is cancer? What do cancer patients want to know?

These are the questions that Mukherjee tries to answer in this long chronicle of research and treatment defeats, dead-ends, and progress against this relentless disease. It can also be read as the story of women who were injured, disabled, disfigured, and killed by not only cancer itself but by aggressive treatments  against it by doctors, surgeons, and chemotherapists. The main thing that I took away from this book is that a memorial should be erected to the women that died during treatment and in clinical trials that compared treatments for cancer. A plaque in a garden would be the least we could do in order to commemorate their courage and patience in the face of unimaginable suffering.

But Mukherjee tells stories about selfless researchers, too. For example, in 1984 Dr. Barry Marshall experimented on himself to convince skeptics that H. pylori was the cause of gastritis and peptic ulcers. No animal study had proved the point and Institutional Review Boards would never have approved the study be conducted on living human beings (I know: I've worked on such a board for 10 years).

Marshall decided to establish the disease in his own body.  He reduced his stomach acid with an alkaline cocktail, drank a bacterial culture, and fasted for the rest of the day. He developed bloating, nausea and vomiting with night sweats and halitosis after three days. The subsequent biopsy clearly and indisputably established the bacterial presence on stains and cultures. After 14 days, his own immune response successfully fought the symptoms. Marshall had fulfilled the standards for identifying the causative agent of a disease and proven that the bacterium was a cause of gastric inflammation. And this is only one hero discussed in this book.

Mukherjee also narrates tales of victories, goals and courage among doctors, researchers, and patients in the wards of the children's hospitals, university laboratories and even basement labs, where great scientific revolutions sometimes take place. So, this is a serious book, sometimes frightening and sometimes demanding on the non-expert reader. But the style is very readable with clear terminology, explanations and digressions that makes it generally accessible to the lay audience.

This book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. It should be read by any reader who wants to understand why, after billions of dollars and five decades of (mostly) well-designed research, there is still no single cure for all forms of cancer and why, even while increasing the effectiveness of the treatments, more and more people will continue to get sick in the years to come.

Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Nonfiction. I taught English in Riga, Latvia from 1994 to 1997. I worked with local English teachers, mainly female, in their late 20s to late 30s. Having studied the enemy language of English from their teens, they had established their rebellious, defiant stances early on; as just a high school student, one had actively joined demonstrations for independence. They had things to say about Latvian intellectuals who had toed the line in order to secure nice apartments, travel opportunities, access to top-notch medical care, prestigious schools for their kids, and sweet jobs suddenly finding themselves scrambling when freedom-loving Latvians restored their independence in 1990.

The Captive Mind – Czeslaw Milosz

This excellent collection of essays analyzes the process of mental enslavement of society (especially writers) in a totalitarian state. Milosz extensively and aptly describes the mental contortions of ketman - the act of paying lip service to The System while concealing secret opposition. Ketman is dressed up in reasons national, artistic, professional, skeptical, metaphysical, and ethical. There’s even a ketman dolled up like revolutionary purity. It’s not simply hypocrisy – it works so well that the deceiver slides into a really weird mental space:

To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one) – these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.

Milosz devotes chapters to four writers in an attempt to present their motivations for active compliance with the communist authorities in postwar Poland. Recall that Poland was the most devastated country to stagger out of WWII. Lots of people felt that the Polish people could not just pick up where the left off in the 1939. 

Besides, the subjects of the four case studies -- Jerzy “Alpha” Andrzejewski (Ashes and Diamonds), Tadeusz “Beta” Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), Jerzy “Gamma” Putrament (poet, man of letters) and Konstanty Ildefons “Delta” Gałczyński (poet, humorist) -- stand as examples of the hundreds of surviving intellectuals who collaborated with Moscow to advance their careers and publish books. People were not presented with a lot of choices: get with the program or endure limited access to jobs, apartments, education, medical care, good prospects, etc.     

Miłosz mixes criticism and sympathy to show the gradual enslavement of minds by communist buzzing about History, Dialectical Materialism, Contradictions and all that lifeless gobbledygook about the new social and political reality and rosy future it’s supposed to usher. The alternative – exile, emigration, and a whole lot worse - was a sterile vacuum for creative writers  - especially poets - not able to stay in their own country, write in their own language, for their natural audiences.

This is a thought-provoking and still relevant book worth reading as a warning against totalitarian systems of thought. It can also be read as a work more about cognitive psychology than politics. People will believe in anything - anything! from Bigfoot to Nazis in Ukraine to mind-controlling chips in vaccines - and twisted are the mental hoops they'll jump through to establish and maintain a belief. 

It should be read by anyone who is or aspires to be an intellectual, even if they are an American, i.e., a person who would say out loud “I want to be an intellectual” only under the most excruciating torture.  Like fiction, the question that this non-fiction work makes us ask ourselves is, “What would we do in such situations ourselves?”