"What an isolated, unreal world all of them lived in."

. . . A world built on illusions and Technicolor dreams. A world as phony as the films it churned out. She hardly knew a single person outside the film industry. Nor did she have time to get to know the real world - whatever and wherever that was. (138)




Shobhaa Dé (1948-) is an Indian novelist and journalist who got her start as a model in the late '60s. She was the founder, co-founder, and editor of three entertainment magazines, including Stardust, a bilingual monthly specializing in Bollywood news and gossip. Dé is also one of India's bestselling authors and is credited with the creation Hinglish, a lively, informal mix of English and Hindi that features prominently in her works. Her books, written in English, have been the subject of much academic attention in India and Great Britain and are translated into numerous regional languages.

Published in 1991, Bollywood Nights (also known as Starry Nights) was one of Dé's first novels, inspired by real-life love affairs among the heroes and leading ladies of the Indian silver screen. It tells the story of Aasha Rani, a starlet pushed into the industry by her ruthlessly ambitious mother, the mistress of a ruined producer who willfully exploits her daughter to pornographers and lecherous producers. Amma's tactics pay off, however, and Aasha Rani eventually reaches A-list status. She falls in love with reigning heartthrob Akshay Arora only to incur the wrath of his wife Malini. The ensuing scandal, combined with her traumatic past, results in a nervous breakdown that drives Aasha Rani to a new life in New Zealand, where she marries and has a daughter. But, as the Eagles once famously said of Hollywood, "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

Bollywood Nights starts off in media res, immediately pushing ahead at a breakneck speed that echoes the perpetual firestorm surrounding showbiz and its biggest players. The flashbacks that reveal Aasha Rani's painful history blend seamlessly with the present, emphasizing the subordinate role of even the most successful women. Obviously damaged by her mother's actions, Aasha Rani throws herself at producers, directors, other stars, and even underworld dons. I do not mean to deny her sexual agency, but Dé makes it clear that a woman's worth in Bollywood is, above all, her appeal to men, whether it's male audiences or male peers with power over fame and obscurity. There are strong parallels to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, published contemporaneously in the US, which paints a vivid picture of women as commodified sex objects, interchangeable and disposable in their sameness. Patriarchal oppression is also seen in the way women interact with one another. Malini viciously attacks and slut-shames Aasha Rani instead of directing her anger at the misogyny that celebrates her husband's philandering and pressures women like Aasha Rani to essentially prostitute themselves. Bollywood as portrayed by Dé is a bright, gaudy carnival of alternating riches and horror, a jagged jewel box. "We are all just prisoners here of our own device."

Dé also touches on Western Orientalism with Jamie Phillips, Aasha Rani's white New Zealander husband. He is a fan of Bollywood films and all things Indian who refers to Aasha Rani's kinks as "oriental love games" (181) and bemoans the loss of his "exotic, oriental beauty" (187) after Sasha's birth and Aasha Rani's subsequent shift from a siren to a down-to-earth mother who's put on weight. It's racial fetishization, defined as valuing stereotyped features (whether physical traits such as skin color or perceived cultural traits such as "submissive Asian women") over the individual human. When actually confronted with India, Jamie is clearly repulsed by its grubbiness and foreignness, apparently preferring the prepackaged Bollywood version. Fetishization is also another form of exploitation. Despite her considerable resources, Aasha Rani when she met Jamie was an emotionally vulnerable women who had been conditioned to trading her body for favors.

Again, I realize I'm probably erasing Aasha Rani's agency and portraying her as constantly dragged from one bed to another by various external forces. The problem is a serious flaw in Dé's writing. Her characterizations are vague and inconsistent. Akshay Arora, for instance, is both a tender, considerate lover and a sexual sadist who gets off on hardcore porn and at one point rapes and beats Aasha Rani. Yes, people can be two-sided but Akshay's brutality comes out of nowhere. There's nothing to tie the two halves together. It doesn't even have any influence on Aasha Rani's love for him which makes me wonder why Dé included it in the first place. The narration is very shallow, focusing a lot on Aasha Rani's actions and very little on her internal self. Often it's completely impossible to understand why she does the things she does. She makes numerous decisions, particularly in London towards the end, that are just mind-bogglingly stupid considering what she's been through and what she knows of the world. Other times the story gets ahead of itself, choosing to skip to Aasha Rani's next big event rather than showing us the character development that leads to it. She meets Jamie and marries him two pages later. The effect is that of an extended gossip column: various lurid reports of a star's dysfunctional life strung together episodically over 300 pages.

Bollywood Nights is also relentlessly sex-negative. You can't even complain about the book's sole GLBTQ character, the lesbian journalist Linda, being a sexual predator who uses Aasha Rani for the inside scoop because every single last man, all of them straight, is depicted similarly. Even the most fulfilling consensual sex always turns out to have some kind of ulterior motive. It isn't so much that rape and exploitation are bad as sex itself is intrinsically harmful.

I ended up wondering that Shobhaa Dé's point was. Bollywood Nights certainly has the makings of a good protest novel with regards to the ugly underside of Bollywood but Dé sabotages her own arguments through needless sensationalism and the book's very ending, which has Aasha Rani dreaming of Sasha's future in the industry. *headdesk* This after 332 pages of Bollywood depicted as just about the worst place on earth. Obviously, it's meant to be redemptive but actually demonstrates very little personal growth on Aasha Rani's part, especially given the near-destruction of her sister Sudha, who had replaced Aasha Rani during her stay in New Zealand. Does the nightmare never end?

Trigger warning for graphic sexual violence.

"For some reason there's always death around us."

". . . My parents, my grandfather, my grandmother . . . your real mother, even Eriko. My god - in this gigantic universe there can't be a pair like us. The fact that we're friends is amazing. All this death . . . all this death."





Banana Yoshimoto (1964-) is the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto. Her father is the famed poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto, while sister Haruno Yoiko is a well-known cartoonist. Yoshimoto describes her favorite motifs as "the exhaustion of young people in contemporary Japan" and "the way in which terrible experiences shape a person's life." Kitchen, her debut novel, was released in 1988 and 1993 in English translation by Megan Backus.

Kitchen actually consists of two works: the novella Kitchen itself and a companion short story called "Moonlight Shadow" featuring different characters but exploring similar themes. In the former, a student named Mikage Sakurai has just lost her grandmother. Already orphaned in early childhood, she finds herself alone in the world until she receives an unexpected invitation. Mikage subsequently moves in with Yuichi and his father, a trans woman named Eriko, and spends several happy months with a new family. Shortly after moving out, however, she hears of Eriko's death at the hands of a stalker and Yuichi's ensuing depression. Kitchen is ultimately a coming-of-age story about the process of overcoming tragedy. For Mikage, this is carried out through the her love of cooking. She had long been fond of kitchens as centers of the home, but has now gained a greater respect for food as both nourishment and a vital aspect of social life. The time and care that go into preparation and the immediate appeal to the senses communicate volumes in a simple, tangible manner. It is through food that Mikage expresses her concern for Yuichi and eventually draws them closer. Kitchen ends on a wiser, hopeful note.

"Moonlight Shadow" centers more on the issue of closure. Satsuki has lost her boyfriend Hitoshi in a car accident that also killed Yumiko, the girlfriend of his brother Hiiragi. Jogging over Hitoshi's favorite bridge one morning Satsuki encounters Urara and is intrigued by both the depth of pain in Urara's face and her promise to show her something wonderful. Unlike Mikage's gradual development, Satsuki's experiences, as befitting the short story format, are revelatory and more immediately transformative. The added element of fate in the meeting between Satsuki and Urara gives the "Moonlight Shadow" a mystical quality that compliments the more down-to-earth feel of Kitchen.

With their straightforward prose and quiet settings, both Kitchen and "Moonlight Shadow" leave an impression of that airiness and precision common to Japanese prose. Unfortunately, Megan Backus's translation reveals the potential only, not Yoshimoto's actual delivery. Not only are her syntax and word choice clunky but several Amazon reviews familiar with the original claim she cut out entire sentences. There are two poignant stories here but they've been underserved. Still, each is short and sweet and easily relatable as expressions of a universal dilemma: how to break the emotional paralysis of grief and continue on.

Banana Yoshimoto's website, including her English journal, may be found here.

Excerpts from Vertical Motion

By Can Xue
Translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Open Letter Books

Because this book of bleak urban surrealism is impossible to explain.

"Vertical Motion"
When we stop digging, we don't move. We're like pupae as we dream in the black earth. We know that our dreams are similar, but our dreams have never been strung together. Each of us has his or her own dreams. During those long dreams, I can bore deep into the earth and fuse into a single body with the earth. In the end, my dreams are about only the earth. Long dreams are great, for they are sheer relaxation. But if this goes on for a long time, I feel vaguely discontented, because a dream of earth can never give me the joy I most want to experience.

"Red Leaves"
After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn't made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.

He waited awhile longer, but the worker didn't do anything, he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco shreds. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn't seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.

"Rainscape"
It could be said that I had "turned a blind eye" to this building for years. The granite wall was very old with dark watermarks on it. This was a deserted building. I heard a key turn twice in the lock, and the door opened with a creak. I went inside without a second thought.

A person with his back to me was standing in the empty corridor. In the dim light, I couldn't get a good look at his face. I thought he was crying.

"On the 18th of April, you saw the beginning and the end of the matter," he said, his bare head gleaming and closing in on me. I still couldn't see his face well. I waited for him to go on talking, but he didn't: it was as if something had struck him. Bending over, he began to sob softly.

"Papercuts"
Wumei told her that the last time she went to the market to sell papercuts, a group of women had surrounded her. They wanted a hundred of her works. Those countrified women seemed to come from a remote mountain area. There were two blind people among them.

"Did they buy your interlinked rings?" asked Mrs. Yun.

"Yes. They wanted to take them home and learn how to make the rings. When I asked them where they came from, they just mentioned a strange place name. It definitely isn't in our province, and yet I could understand their accent. One of the older ones told me that the sun shines there all year long, so they like black and they like circles."

Mrs. Yun took stock of Wumei's bathroom wall. Now there were no longer black rings pasted there, but many yellow ants. Looking at them was nauseating. Wumei was truly spirited and skillful. Such tiny ants: she could cut them out they were so lifelike. But why didn't she cut some pleasant things?

---

Review Copy

"My posting to China has taught me what greatness and what misery a soldier can know:"

. . . on orders he moves from one place to the next without knowing where he is going or why. A pawn among many others. He lives and dies anonymously in the name of a greater victory. The game of go is changing me into a senior officer who uses his men coldly and with calculation: the stones make their steady progress, many condemned to die for the sake of a wider strategy.

Shan Sa (1972-) was born in Beijing. She moved to Paris in 1990 and studied art for two years under the painter Balthus. Her debut novel Les quatre vies du saule won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 1998, which was followed by the 2001 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for La Joueuse de Go (The Girl Who Played Go). Sa is also a painter who has exhibited in Paris, New York, and Shanghai.

The Girl Who Played Go (translated from French by Adriana Hunter) is a star-crossed love story set in occupied Manchuria in the late 1930s. Its voices alternate between two nameless protagonists born worlds apart but destined to collide in a cruel gesture of fate. The first is a Chinese schoolgirl from a worldly but faded aristocratic family. Nearing her sixteenth birthday, her typical teenaged pastimes take a dangerous edge as her newfound sexuality pulls her into a love triangle with two resistance fighters. The second is a Japanese soldier in his early twenties whose relentless focus on honor and national glory is turning him into a war criminal. In an effort to flush out underground "terrorist" cells, the soldier's Captain has ordered him to pose as a Chinese civilian and infiltrate the go square, which the Captain believes is "just a camouflage: it's there on that square, as they pretend to play their war game, that our enemies are putting together their twisted strategies." Both narrators are skilled at this ancient contest of will and intellect and commence a long, drawn-out game that has them seeing one another with greater frequency, even as the situation around them steadily worsens.

Sa is one of those rare authors able to speak volumes with deft, sparse prose. Every word is chosen carefully with none wasted on extraneous exposition or flowery description. Her unflinching portrayal of war cuts like a razor. Most writers would have turned this scenario into a treacly (and not to mention offensive) BRING ME TOOO LIIIIIIIFE story of a Darth Vader type who "still has good in him" and the Love of a Virtuous Woman. Sa brings us instead a pair of complex and often unsympathetic characters whose relationship is never anything grander than two strangers making hesitant contact. Indeed, the love story is actually secondary to the war itself in fitting with the game of go as a metaphor for the insignificance of the individual in life-and-death struggles for conquest and freedom. Sa sacrifices none of her realism to starry-eyed fantasy and the ending is inevitable from the beginning.

The Girl Who Played Go is a powerful work. Though not marketed as YA, older teens will relate to the girl's adolescent struggle for self-realization, which, along with the Marxist idealism of the Chinese resistance, foreshadows the upheavals of Maoism and its attacks on tradition. In fact, she is one of the strongest and most memorable female protagonists I have come across in some time. Her male counterpart is no cardboard cutout either. His chapters reveal a growing dissonance between his patriotic values and the brutalities regularly committed by his comrades. The Girl Who Played Go is a study in contrasts: the dehumanization of war revealed through a highly intimate look into the hearts and minds of two individuals. Highly recommended.

Trigger warning for sexual violence and a graphic torture scene.

Note on the translation: This is the second French novel translated by Adriana Hunter I have read and once again, her work is flawless. The first was Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea, another dark story that will haunt its reader afterward. I will definitely keep my eye out for more Hunter translations in the future.

"How can this be?"

The Moon Over the Mountain
By Atsushi Nakajima
Translated from Japanese by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner
165 pages
Autumn Hill Books
March 1, 2011




People seemed to concede that evil might prosper for a time, but in the end there would be just retribution. Of course that might occur, but would that not merely confirm the truth that human beings were doomed? . . . What was the reason for this sad state of affairs? . . . "What is this Heaven people talk about? Doesn't Heaven see what's going on? And if Heaven decides men's fates like this, how am I supposed to keep from rebelling against it? Does Heaven fail to distinguish between the good and the bad, just as it ignores the distinction between men and beasts? Is everything - even righteousness and wickedness - relative, with man alone the measure of all things?" ("The Disciple")

He may have died in obscurity, but today Atsushi Nakajima (1909-1942) is both a cult figure and a canonized literary great. He is standard reading in high schools and colleges, and there is even a festival held annually in his honor. More recently, a young actor named Nomura Mansai produced a dramatic performance of several Nakajima stories in the classical Kyôgen style, which developed in the medieval era as comic shorts inserted between serious dramas. The stories themselves, however, are not Japanese but Chinese in setting and inspiration. Nakajima is regarded as a master of a sub-genre popular in Japan for generations: that of the fictional work set in ancient China.

The relationship of Chinese culture to Japan is analogous to Graeco-Roman influence in the West, down to the Japanese adaptation of Chinese characters, which has intriguing parallels to use of the Latin alphabet in modern European languages. For centuries the educated Japanese man would be expected to know such Chinese classics as the texts of Confucius, The Historical Record (Shiji) by Sima Qian (145-86 BCE), The Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Daoist works of Laozi and Zhuangzi. In finding inspiration from Chinese history, mythology, folklore, and philosophy, Atsushi Nakajima was part of a tradition stretching back millennia. Writers in this particular area are afforded great respect in Japan, yet Nakajima's stories have never until now appeared in English.

Released by Autumn Hill Books in March, The Moon Over the Mountain (translated by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner) consists of the following:

"The Moon Over the Mountain"
"The Master"
"The Bull Man"
"Forebodings"
"The Disciple"
"The Rebirth of Wujing"
"Waxing and Waning"
"Li Ling"
"On Admiration: Notes by Monk Wujing"

Though comparable to the contemporary development of existentialism in the West, Nakajima's works tend to take a holistic stance and place the protagonist in the context of a vast universe ruled by fate.

This is usually manifested by society, in the actions of other people. In "Li Ling," the war between Han China and the Huns becomes a study in the unpredictability of high politics, which operates not unlike Kafka's concept of bureaucracy. Brave and noble men such as the general Li Ling and the Court Historian Sima Qian are unjustly ensnared and chewed out by the caprices of a despotic emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. "Forebodings" is downright sexist, as a reserved woman named Xiaji becomes a pawn in various power struggles merely by existing. She is a passive character, a complete non-being in fact, yet is somehow to blame for the downfall of several prominent men. Kuai Kui, Duke of Wei, is unusual in that he is both the protagonist of "Waxing and Waning" and the puppetmaster of people's fates himself. The story follows the twists and turns of his exile, return, and rise to dominance, throughout which he also punishes loyal subjects and becomes a tyrant. In doing so, however, he only learns that for all his might, he is still nothing more than a cog in the vast political machine, which has very much a life of its own.

Injustice and corruption arise from excess, which is defined as the overwhelming focus on one aspect of one's being to the neglect of others. It is a deformity of character that grows monstrous. The titular story tells of an aspiring poet whose egotism and obsession with his craft, to the detriment of his family's welfare, transformed him into a man-eating tiger whose humanity is increasingly submerged. In "The Rebirth of Wujing," there are literal monsters at the bottom of the River of Flowing Sand who are "gluttons; therefore, their mouths and stomachs were inordinately large. Others were lascivious, and so their genitalia had developed obscenely. There were others who prided themselves on intellectual purity, to the point that, aside from their heads, their bodies had atrophied." Figurative monsters appear in the more realistic tales. Among the aristocracy, violent power struggles are the norm. Men caught up in the fore are castrated or executed by being tied to two chariots and pulled apart, often for unjust or trivial reasons, in an ongoing cycle of death that even the wisdom of Confucius cannot penetrate. The catastrophic events of "Li Ling" eventually force both the reader and title character to wonder at the definition of "barbarian": "At times he would suddenly feel himself to be a mere speck between earth and sky, and wonder why in heaven's name there were such distinctions as Han and Hun." A poignant question considering the tumultuous era in which Nakajima was writing and the actions perpetuated by cultures proclaiming themselves the superior.

Atsushi Nakajima died of an asthma attack as World War II raged, having arisen from a previous bloodbath whose scale forced a reconsideration of the individual and their place in society. In Japan as elsewhere, literature at this time was censored and writers were pressured to extol the virtues of the Japanese government. Nakajima's soul-searching found refuge in a distant time and place, his years of classical study forming the basis of delicately-crafted tales of art, learning, loneliness, cruelty, honor, metamorphosis, and the perpetual quest to find one's place in the universe. The translators' Afterword states that the original Japanese is a "classical, erudite style" that can make for difficult reading, but their English rendition is clear, unadorned, and accessible across cultures. Nakajima's themes are not uniquely Chinese or Japanese but universal, and The Moon Over the Mountain comes recommended.

---

I do have to say a word about Nakajima's portrayal of women. The only two female characters in the whole book are Xiaji in "Forebodings" and Old Madam Perch in "The Rebirth of Wujing," whose entire philosophy of life consists of fucking her male harem to death. Other women are mentioned only briefly in connection with "licentiousness" or "immoral relations." As such, Nakajima's ancient China is a world of men. They may be evil men or corrupt men, but they are nevertheless permitted a broad range of roles and personalities denied to women. For all his skill elsewhere, Atsushi Nakajima was quite the misogynist.

---

---

Review Copy

---

"Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return"

In my long novel The Contemporary Game, I named the patriarch who comes back to life time after time "Man who deconstructs." In this fallen, contemporary world which corresponds to Blake's real world, the body of Man who deconstructs has been separated into small pieces and is buried in the forest; in a passionate and painful dream, a young boy gathers up the pieces one by one and attempts to bring them back to life and to restore the Age to life as well but is finally unable to accomplish his task and grieves.

This post is rambling and disorganized. I didn't like this book and had a hard time thinking of what to write. I probably should've scrapped everything and started over but I had already spent too long on it and just wanted to end it already.

This month's selection for the Unstructured Reading Group was Kenzaburo Ōe's A Personal Matter (1964). Unfortunately, our local library system didn't have a copy so I had to choose another Ōe work. (Although they did have The Book Which Henceforth Shall Not Be Named in several locations!) I decided on the fictionalized memoir Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (1986), about the relationship between a renown author, K, and his brain-damaged son nicknamed Eeyore. In fact, Rouse Up. . . can be thought of as the sequel to A Personal Matter. Both books are translated by John Nathan.

K has returned from an international trip to a tense family situation. His wife explains to him that nineteen-year-old Eeyore had been exhibiting violent behavior made even more threatening by his large, powerful build. When told that his father would hear of this when he got back, Eeyore shocked his mother by declaring that "Papa is dead!" It occurs to K that Eeyore lacks a definition of death, as he has never had it explained to him in a comprehensible manner. With Eeyore's limited capacity in mind, K had long intended to write a book of definitions that would be accessible to handicapped children. But in attempting to start the project, K found that he could never grasp the easily evocative language that such an undertaking would require, and that furthermore, such a thing would be ultimately subjective anyway. Rouse Up. . . can be thought of as a book of definitions for K/Ōe himself. It is a non-linear collection of seven loosely-connected chapters that detail a father's attempt to accept his disabled son and understand their relationship. The language K chooses for himself is the poetry of William Blake; hence the title, which comes from Milton.

Blake's poetry had been a profound influence on K since college, when he inadvertently stumbled across the following lines from The Four Zoas:

That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return
To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.

Having grown up in a valley which he left as a young man, K often pondered how these verses could be applied to his own life. From this starting point, he gradually builds up a perception of human bonds based on Blake's "tree of life." Similar to Emerson's Over-soul, K perceives each individual human as a fragment detached from the World of Eternity and fallen to the mortal realm for a brief physical existence. Kathleen Raine, a Blake scholar K reads, calls this "divine humanity" and links it to Blake's conception of Imagination as "Infinite & Eternal." K/Ōe refers back to another one of his novels, The Contemporary Game, and his use of the metaphor of The man who deconstructs, "a corpse dismembered but still pristine, undecayed" (which also has overtones of Osiris, Dionysus, and Orpheus). The attempt to reassemble the scattered body is an attempt to touch eternity by bringing together what belongs together.

Entering into old age after a lifetime with a disabled son, K moves ever closer to that transcendental unification in the immortal plane from which we all came. Eeyore will be there as well and their relationship will be renewed.

That's Rouse Up. . . in a nutshell. The bulk of K/Ōe's metaphysical ruminations occur in the last chapter which shares its title with the boo and is intended as an intellectual climax to twenty years of struggle, hardship, success, and setbacks. Though marketed as fiction, Rouse Up. . . probably fits better in the memoir genre. Names are either unchanged or shortened to a single letter and every event in K's life comes from Ōe's life. K's other novels are Ōe's other novels. "The first time I quoted Blake was in a novel I wrote just after Eeyore was born with a handicap and which I based on my actual experience at the time, A Personal Matter," he says at one point.

From the so-called Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I took the line, "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. . . ." The fact that I replaced the period that belongs at the end with an ellipses, as if I were abbreviating a passage that followed, suggests to me that I had not actually read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Moreover, in translating the line, shifting responsibility to the young woman in the novel by having the translation come from her, I rendered it appropriate to my story. "Better kill the infant in its cradle! Rather than ending up nursing unacted desires. . . ."

Looking back from my more comprehensive vantage of Blake's work today, I understand that unrealized desires represented a mode of living that Blake condemned violently, and that his emphasis was accordingly on the second half of the line. Clearly I should have rendered it as an impassioned appeal: "Compared to nurturing unrealized desires, even murdering an infant in its cradle is the lesser evil." There is no question that my translation is incorrect; what is unclear to me all these years later is whether I twisted Blake to meet the requirements of a scene in my novel, giving the line to the young woman in the story, or whether the experience of the birth of a son with brain damage was controlling my reading of the line.

Emily's post on A Personal Matter discusses the violent, forbidden fantasies indulged in by main character Bird, which also include killing his mistress and then raping her body. This motif of repressed rage continues in Rouse Up. . ., usually in response to some cruelty directed at Eeyore, such as the time he was kidnapped by a radical who hated K/Ōe's politics, and then abandoned at a distant railroad station. The radical in question had previously accused K/Ōe of being too stuck on his disabled son to contribute anything meaningful to political discourse, a position which, despite his anger, K/Ōe nevertheless admits to finding some truth in. Japan's atmosphere of alienation and disillusionment, as depicted in A Personal Matter as a response to the loss of World War II and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has evolved into K/Ōe's preoccupation with anti-nuclear proliferation.

(The mistress A Personal Matter, it is later revealed in Rouse Up. . . is actually a Korean-Japanese woman nicknamed Ki-ko, with whom K/Ōe continues to have a contentious but platonic relationship. Of their past, K/Ōe recalls that sex with her always felt "incestuous," as though she was his sister, which unleashed something "grotesque" in him "that resembled, in the poet Homei's words, 'a desperate savageness.'" When Ki-ko wonders aloud what K/Ōe will do when Eeyore "goes must," he comes close to violence yet again.)

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the first Ōe book I've read and quite frankly, I'm not sure if I'll be reading Ōe again for some time. It was mentioned somewhere that Japanese literature tends to blur fiction and memoir/autobiography more than we're usually comfortable with in the West but I don't think that had much to do with it. I think my mostly negative reaction was a combination of little interest in the subject matter and a dislike of Ōe's prose (or Nathan's translation thereof), which felt awkward and convoluted and seemed to lack any aesthetic value. The publisher's copy describes K as "a highly cerebral man who often retreats from real life into abstraction," and I think therein lays the problem. The prose is . . . left-brained, more like Ōe was writing an academic article than a story. The aspects dealing with Blake and metaphysics were certainly interesting and I got a lot out those parts but unfortunately, that still doesn't make up for the rest.

---

Kenzaburo Ōe's A Personal Matter (for which I substituted Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!) was our Unstructured Group Read for the month of July. Please feel free to join us at any time! You can find a complete book list here.

Other July participants include:

Amy
Belleza
Claire
Emily
Frances
Iris
Richard
Sarah

Past selections:

March: Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
April: Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
May: Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
June: Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak

---

The Sound of Water (A Review)

The Sound of Water
By Sanjay Bahadur
Atria Books (Simon & Schuster)
216 pages
June 30, 2009






It is so dark now that Raimoti can barely discern the features of the strange creature that was once a sturdy young man. He tries to get closer to the dim form, but it hears him and lops off. . . Ahead is a black lake, and the creature is hunched over the edge. He glares back at Raimoti and swiftly slips into the still waters. There are no ripples. . . Suddenly, the level of the lake rises so rapidly that he leaps back. The cavern echoes with manic laughter, and a watery shape gushes out to lunge at him.

No, that's not Gollum. It is the Beast of the mines, a furious, subterranean wraith that haunts the imagination of Raimoti, an old, experienced miner and part-time mystic. The Beast is the one thing that plagues the otherwise ethereal Raimoti: it is the fear all miners share as they daily enter their dangerous workplace. No hazard is greater than the lake above them, with the everpresent threat that it will burst through the walls and ceiling and flash-flood the underground labyrinths of the Bagdihi coal mine. Safety standards certainly exist, but the distant Powers That Be are more than willing to shave a bit here and there in an effort to conserve costs and increase production. Near the Indian city of Dhanbad, engineers at Bagdihi - with the approval of their superiors - naturally saw fit to narrow the barriers that held back the waters in an effort to extract more coal. The result was a calamity that claimed thirty lives.

Witnessing the disaster and the aftermath first-hand, as well as the bureaucratic callousness that preceded it, was Sanjay Bahadur, director of the Indian Ministry of Coal from 2000 to 2004. His debut novel The Sound of Water (released today) is a fictionalized account of the events that unfolded at Bagdihi in 2001, told from myriad individual perspectives. It opens up with a passage from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." I knew right then that I was going to like this book.

That bit of Eliot also indicated from the start that The Sound of Water would not be what I had expected. I had thought it would be more of an immediate, hard-hitting retelling of the facts as they occurred, akin to what you would receive from a journalist reporting from the scene. Instead, it is a genuine novel that explores themes of humanity and transcendence, and features a strong cast of distinct characters. It begins with Raimoti's visions of life and metamorphosis and ends with a pampered lobbyist who glances briefly at a faxed report on mine conditions in Bagdihi. Along the way, the story is told through Bibhash Mukherjee, a burned-out district manager estranged from his family and resigned to his lot in the coal country boondocks; Dolly, Raimoti's vain and voluptuous sister-in-law, best described as the Indian equivalent of "white trash"; Birsa and Arif, miners with similarly violent pasts who are far too alike to ever get along; Pandeyji, Bibhahs's simpering, sycophantic boss; and assorted others. The mine disaster itself functions more as a common thread binding together these representatives of the different strata of modern Indian society.

In other words, The Sound of Water is not simply the fictional recreation of a real-life event. It is a study in humanity and how we interact with, and are shaped by, our external surroundings. Fiction dealing with protagonists in brutal environments - such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, and Dan Simmons's The Terror - have often dealt with humans confronting alien terrain; here, however, Bahadur depicts people in their own native land and asks us instead to consider the psychological effects of an exploitative system in which men can force other men deep into the darkest pits of the earth for long hours and low pay. According to Bibhash,

These mines are incubators for spawns of the devil. They breed dark thoughts, nurture anger, and spit out men - more creatures than men, more bestial than creatures - of suppressed violence. What dreadful power causes this? What twisted hands - what squirming brain? With what angry intent? Bibhash wonders hysterically, his mind fast losing its grip on reality. Metaphysical questions of some dead poet flit around randomly in his head like burning fireflies. Who is the Beast that forges such things?

Of course, there was violence and barely-repressed rage already in Birsa and Arif's lives, long before the mines, resulting from a combination of poverty, political upheaval, and overall helplessness in the face of catastrophes such as bad crop seasons, rapacious moneylenders, and abusive home situations. The willful blindness of Pandeyji and Karna sahib (a Hindi/Bengali term of respect), on the other hand, illustrates the mind-numbing narcissism that can grow out of having too much power. Raimoti's spirituality may offer a kind of alternative to fury and apathy, but not necessarily a good one. At the end of the day, he is basically a burnout with a gift for eloquence and finding uses for herbs. Even Ghosh da, avowed Leftist labor leader, is really just a political farce seeking the worship of the miners he barely respects, exploiting, in his own way, their already-difficult lives.

Both the psychological aspect of The Sound of Water and the religious component greatly enrich what could have easily been a straightforward disaster story. The back-and-forth between Raimoti and Arif in chapter seven is a worthy read on its own. The novel is not without its flaws, however. Bahadur's vivid, descriptive prose occasionally gets a bit purple, while his literary influences (much as I love Eliot) are sometimes too apparent ("There's only water. And waiting pearls. Or are they eyes?"), and I feel he could have been a bit more original. Mostly I was slightly put off by the character Dolly, the only prominent female other than the brief snippets of Raimoti's niece Tina. Although Bahadur attempts to give Dolly a fully-drawn background to explain her present personality, she nevertheless comes across as a mere caricature. She is loud, crass, materialistic, and highly sexualized, using men only to suit her needs. Dolly is said to be from a matriarchial culture, and her grandmother, it is mentioned, actually hated men due to a past love affair gone bad. Yes, several male characters come across as thoroughly unlikeable, but I felt Dolly's character bordered on sexist. Or am I just being too sensitive? Tina is portrayed sympathetically, but Dolly bothered me.?

Despite these drawbacks, The Sound of Water is a powerful but quick read with broad appeal. I liked it and can imagine most readers enjoying it as well. Bahadur is eloquent and multifaceted, touching on a variety of themes within a rather short book, making for an absorbing, well-rounded story. Currently long-listed for the Man Asian Prize, The Sound of Water is a worthy debut novel that comes recommended.

At first I wasn't sure if The Sound of Water was translated or not, but apparently Bahadur did write it in English. I initially thought that was rather odd, since he was apparently aiming at an Indian readership as well as an international one. But then I remembered my buddy Arjun from college, a second-generation Indian-American who grew up speaking only English because it was the sole language his parents, who hailed from two different parts of India, had in common.

(Also: I know I shouldn't be lumping Israel, Japan, and India all together under the blanket term "Asian literature," but I'm trying to avoid having a huge category list.)

Weird, Wild, Wacky Wind-Up Birds

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos.

I had promised to take about Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Instead, I posted an odd little story I wrote when I was twelve.

I had a blast writing it. Every day at the beginning of seventh grade English class, during the 1998-1999 school year, my teacher would give us five to ten minutes to write in our journals. What we wrote was always kept confidential, and you didn't actually have to write anything if you didn't feel like it. In fact, there were multiple entries in a row in which I simply stated "(I can't think of anything today)." But that October, there was nothing more I loved to do during school than continue my tale of "The Day the Bus Didn't Come." I enjoyed setting the atmosphere and making it stranger and stranger and seeing just what my imagination, fueled as it was by the twin muses of Star Trek and The X-Files, would come up with next. It didn't matter that the only reader - that is, until I posted it on the Internet yesterday - was my teacher. I wanted to keep my phantom audience guessing. Of course, today it's a rather groan-worthy piece that's more an X-Files parody than it is a genuine thriller. But I would imagine that delight in weirdness is similar to what H.P. Lovecraft and Dean Koontz must have felt.

Haruki Murakami, too, must have enjoyed writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Published in 1997 and translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Murakami himself, this epic novel is akin to peeling a Day-Glo fuchsia onion: multilayered and surreal. The mundane and the fantastic rub against each other uncomfortably, casting an aura of creepiness over daily life in a Tokyo suburb in the mid-1980s. Characters frequently speak of there being two levels of reality and two versions of truth. One is the surface world even the most shallow of us believe in; the other is a dark, threatening place that occasionally intrudes into our shared existence.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle actually reminded me strongly of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which I am currently in the middle of, right down to the sense of menace, disjointedness, and even that shocking moment of brutal, unexpected violence. Whereas 2666 tends to stay more on the realistic side, however, Murakami is wholly unpredictable, introducing one bizarre element after another and constantly throwing the reader off track. What I especially liked about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is Murakami's vivid depiction of the dual realms of reality and dream-reality. For example, this blatantly real moment of postmodern girlhood:

. . . I walked into May Kasahara's yard. The oak tree cast a cool-looking shadow over the lawn, but May Kasahara had obviously avoided that, to stretch out in the harsh sunlight. She lay on her back in a deck chair, wearing an incredibly tiny chocolate-colored bikini, its little cloth patches held in place by bits of string. I couldn't help wondering if a person could actually swim in a thing like that. She wore the same sunglasses she had on when we first met, and large beads of sweat dotted her face. Under her deck chair she had a white beach towel, a container of suntan cream, and a few magazines. Two empty Sprite cans lay nearby, one apparently serving as an ashtray. A plastic hose with a sprinkler lay out on the lawn, where no one had bothered to reel it in after its last use.

Before and after this little island of the Globalized Teenager in the Universal Suburb, we've had the psychic sisters with outlandish fashion sense, mysterious sexy phone calls, a powerful brother-in-law who just isn't right, ongoing dream sequences involving a darkened room in an anonymous urban hotel, a bruise-like mark that grants the protagonist special healing powers, and the intermittent call of an unseen bird that sounds like a wound-up spring. Sixteen-year-old May Kasahara lives right across the street from an abandoned house, widely believed to be cursed since the violent deaths of its last owners, that also has a dried well in the backyard that may contain supernatural properties. It's a neighborhood tableaux that stands for the story as a whole: the parallel flow of two worlds, one of which can be reached only by a few individuals of a heightened, finely-tuned sensitivity.

"Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated," Joseph Conrad says in Heart of Darkness. "It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw . . . the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror - of an intense and hopeless despair." For all its disparate components - from wartime memories to marital woes - a common thread running through them all (in addition to protagonist and narrator Toru Okada) is the persistence of evil in all its many manifestations. The torture-death of an intelligence officer. The massacre of prisoners and helpless zoo animals. Smooth-talking sociopathic politicians. Rape. Abuse. Self-destruction. The thing trying to break down the door in the dreamworld hotel room. All of this falling on the shoulders of Toru Okada, a painfully ordinary young man who has quite his job and whose wife has mysteriously left him. Whose life was also painfully ordinary until the wind-up bird began its freakish cry and Okada finds himself glimpsing what lies beyond - renting the veil, so to speak, and uncovering both the depths of what humanity is capable of and the possibilities that exist beneath the surface.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is in many respects a great book that I enjoyed reading. But it also ended up bugging the hell out of me. On the one hand, I do kind of understand what Murakami was getting at: the reality of evil, which the affluent classes of the First World are often oblivious to, and the acceptance of that aspect of reality, which corresponds to the acceptance of yet another reality. (Am I making sense?) Still, what irked me was the unexplained weirdness of it all. Bizarre stuff occurs, and you think there's going to be at least a hint of explanation, but it never comes. Murakami repeatedly calls the reader's attention to what seem like important details - such as Creta Kano's absurd red felt hat or the classified letter Lieutenant Mamiya recalls in his World War II story. And yet such details never turn out to mean anything. Then there's the moments in the narrative that seem significant, like the flashbacks to when Hazel's son Cinnamon loses his voice, yet the only thing that ties it to the rest of the novel is the call of the wind-up bird. So why is it even there? What's the point of Cinnamon even having no voice in the first place?

Writing strange fiction is fun. I totally understand that. I'm not saying that you have to tie everything together in a neat little package with a neat little ribbon, but sooner or later you're going to have to come up with some explanation for what's been happening. You can't just keep throwing craziness at us and then . . . walk away. At the risk of sounding supremely self-important, I will point out that, in my seventh-grade schoolbus tale, that I did end up explaining the the compulsion to walk, the enigmatic stuff about "judgment," and the surreal landscape. It was a rather lame explanation, true, but I don't think I left my reader hanging. Murakami . . . does. And that places a dent in what could have been a truly grand opus of a novel.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a worthy read. But expect some disappointment.

WTF?

You're going to have to excuse me a moment. I just finished Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. It was very . . . odd?

On . . . Peasants!

Unfortunately, whenever I hear the word "peasant" I think of an article I read in The Onion called "Peasant Wedding Gets Out of Hand," in which "a drunken melee . . . [leaves] several dead and the town's butter churn overturned." It's very amusing in its depiction of medieval peasants as a ribald and absurdly picaresque lot whose lives are marked by periodic violence on the scale of the ridiculous, much like the farcical marriage of Perseus and Andromeda in Book V of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I know it's wrong but I've never had much opportunity to amend this position owing to the lack of peasant-related material in my life. In studying American history I have come across sailors, slaves, and commoners – particularly in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – but, as John Berger notes in his introduction to his 1979 novel Pig Earth (first in the Into Their Labors trilogy), the United States has never had actual peasants due to "the rate of economic development based on monetary exchange was too rapid and too total."

Some might argue that the Jeffersonian yeoman farmers might be approximated to peasants, but these self-confident republicans, in my view, are far removed from the rather passive class of "survivors" described by Berger. There are two definitions of the word "survivor," he asserts. The first is someone who has lived through a one-time ordeal. The second "denotes a person who has continued to live when others have disappeared or vanished." Peasants, he continues have survived famine, plague, drought, sociopolitical upheaval, and, most recently, the pressures on their way of life from modernization and the rise of industry and wage-earning. Their subsequent "culture of survival" envisions a perpetual series of repeated acts of survival where a modern "culture of progress" sees growth and expansion.

Early American farmers certainly belonged to this latter group. In fact, it was argued in both the Revolutionary and Jacksonian periods that it was independent farmers who were the true guardians of liberty, as they were beholden to no man but themselves. They were neither passive nor resigned to their lot and were instead fiercely proud of their freedom and constitutional rights, foreseeing their descendants as proud heirs of these gifts. Daniel Feller's The Jacksonian Promise: America 1815-1840, for example, depicts the early nineteenth century as an era of ecstatic hope as Americans witnessed "the waves of revolutions in Latin America and the struggle for independence in Greece [which] seemed to herald the remaking of the world in America's image foretold by patriots a half-century before." Rapid technological and material advance, such as the completion of the Erie Canal and the introduction of the steamship and railroad only deepened a sense of imminent American greatness. Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity, meanwhile, discusses the sense of millennialism imparted by radical evangelical sects during the Second Great Awakening that foresaw the growth of Jeffersonian democracy as a precursor to the return of Christ's Kingdom to Earth. In other words, then, the difference between the independent American farmer and a peasant are largely psychological. "Peasant life is a life committed completely to survival," Berger immediately asserts.

(When I mentioned Pig Earth to one of my history professors, however, he raised the issue of differentiating between peasants and sharecroppers.)

Pig Earth strongly reminded me of another book I had read from another culture. I actually had a genuine sense of déjà vu. Berger's peasants are mid-century French; those in Takashi Nagatsuka's 1911 novel The Soil are late nineteenth-century Japanese. Other than that, with the exception of some narrative differences (The Soil focuses on one family and lacks the magic realism that appears at the end of Pig Earth), the two books seemed virtually the same. Both authors wrote from experience: Nagatsuka was a rural landlord who based his characters on real people, while Berger lived among the French peasants he wrote about. And both authors also include extensive anthropological detail and utilize a similar limited third-person narrator who concentrates on one person and then another (though I don't know how much of that can be attributed to translation). Of course, Berger argues, the peasant class is a pan-cultural phenomenon. "Their implements, their crops, their earth, their masters may be different, but whether they labour within a capitalist society, a feudal one or others . . . whether they grow rice in Java, wheat in Scandinavia or maize in South America, the peasantry everywhere can be defined as a class of survivors." If the hierarchical structure of an Asian or feudal society can be conceived as a pyramid, Berger goes on to say, "the peasants were on the base frontier of the triangle." Though both Pig Earth and The Soil each concern only one particular group of peasants, perhaps they can be seen as speaking for all of them.

I would only recommend these books for people interested in peasants or anthropology, by the way. I personally found them both rather dull (had to read'em for college).