Two Japanese, Please
An interesting activity, sometimes, is to alternate reading between two short story collections by different authors who are similar but not the same. A good activity for a holiday afternoon when the weather outside is too dreary for other pursuits, and most places are closed down anyway. A day like today, in other words.
Today I’m alternating between Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata and Mieko Manai’s The Word Book. Both Japanese and mostly unfamiliar to me, up to now. Both worthy of future deep dives.
Kawabata, who died in 1972, is known for novelistic work, but he believed the essence of his art to be a series of very short stories written over the span of his career, starting in 1923 and continuing to the year of his death. And “very short” is the key here, since few of these stories stretch longer than four pages and many are just a couple of pages, barely more than a fragment really. As such, they exist almost as photographs of a moment rather than what Western readers might recognize as the standard 5-part story structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. In two pages, who has time for all that? Still, within these literary distillations, an awful lot can be conveyed–even through the imperfect medium of translating from Japanese into English.
Take, for example, “The Incident of the Dead Face” (1923), wherein a husband has been called in to the home of his inlaws to view his dead wife’s body. He was unable to arrive from the train in time for her death. They usher him in and he asks for some time alone with her recently-departed corpse.
There follows a short description of her “ugly, dead face” which he does his best to revive, alone in the room, with trembling hands. His palms grow hot as he feverishly works at restoring her stiffening visage.
After a time, his mother-in-law and sister-in-law return to the room, tearfully. They are stricken with the transformation, the mother attributing her daughter’s newly-relaxed face to the husband’s delayed presence at last. For her part, the younger sister, “her eyes clear with an unearthly beauty, looked into his eyes, which were tinged with madness. Then she, too, burst into tears.”
All this is accomplished in a page and a half. The memory of the story will linger much longer than the actual reading of it.
Mieko Kanai is a new fascination for me, stemming from the discovery of a 1997-penned (but not translated into English until 2023) novelette called Mild Vertigo. This book completely upended my expectations for my previous perception of the “Japanese voice”, which I had equated with short unadorned sentences propelling a simple-seeming narrative. Indeed, the very first sentence is of a length reminiscent of John Dos Passos, and equally stream-of-consciousness, but with a very different consciousness obviously. And the entirety of the book follows suit, with no voice other than the narrator’s proffered.
So I had to find more of her. It turns out this is easier wished for than accomplished. Still, we do live in the Information Age, and through some Internet sleuthing and InterLibrary Loan, I did manage to track down five of her titles–no small feat, because even though she has written many stories, only a relatively few have found their way out of Japan. Maybe that is beginning to change, so ask for her!
Kanai was born almost a half-century after Kawabata, and as near as I can ascertain, is still crafting sentences in her native land. And the experience of an author born two years after Hiroshima will be a very different animal than someone like Kawabata, in his 40s when atomic bombs dropped by our country fell on his country.
The Word Book is a compilation of Kanai short stories originally published in Japanese during the years up to 1979 but not translated into English until 2009 (again with the maddening lagtime!). The stories herein are not all that long, but certainly longer than Kawabata’s minimalist constructs. As I alternate my reading, I can generally hit about three Kawabatas for each Kanai, for those of you keeping score at home.
There is not necessarily a consistent theme at play with Kanai’s stories, perhaps because they have been composed over a longer period of time rather than being churned out, Stephen King-style, to hook successive generations of readers. They read more like one-offs. Here she writes about the act of writing itself, here a story about a young street tough idolizing the macho of a skilled fighter/dancer of tango until he discovers that said fighter really yearns to be a poet, here a tale of a photographer who spends 20 years taking the same nondescript photo of a decaying industrial building, from the same perspective, until he eventually strings them all together into a 5-minute slide presentation that leaves him ultimately unsatisfied. From my meager sampling of her work so far, photography does seem to be a theme of some fascination, as it keeps cropping up in different works. Maybe it’s the permanence of the recorded image, contrasted with the ever-changing world that it inhabits, that provides the source of that fascination.
The same can be said, of course, of anything recorded or written down. As should be readily apparent, I blog for my own amusement, and revisiting things I wrote almost fifteen years ago is a case study in how much one’s perspectives, interests, and goals can change over time–or not.
Hopefully, my half-dozen readers, including various friends and relations, may see things they recognize and relate to. I know I do!
saxsalon 