Matt Treyvaud reads through the stories from Kōdansha Bungei Bunko’s Contemporary Okinawan Literature: A Selection. First up, two-time Naoki Prize nominee Adachi Seiichirō

Introduction: I thought it might be fun to read through Kōdansha Bungei Bunko’s “Contemporary Okinawan Literature: A Selection” (現代沖縄文学作品選), because why not?

Dragged Out to Sea by a Shark by Adachi Seiichirō

Two-time Naoki Prize nominee Adachi Seiichirō’s Dragged Out to Sea by a Shark (鱶に曳きずられて沖へ) has the simplicity and brutality of myth. Set on a small fishing boat, “just before dawn” (夜明け前), its characters are initially identified only as an elder and a younger brother. Their conversation reveals bad blood over a woman, and within seven pages, one of them is dead.

Mishima Yukio’s The Sound of Waves (潮騒) was famously inspired by Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, but Dragged feels closer to Japonic traditions. In the Man’yōshū (one of the poems of which was the source for Mishima’s title), boats tend to be viewed from a distance, preferably from atop a mountain far inland; they were useful as symbols of loneliness and demarcators of dominion’s edge, but the inner lives of those who operated them didn’t really come up. Adachi’s story, set at the edge of the modern state which traces its lineage back to the culture which wrote the Man’yōshū, takes us onto the boat and into the lives of its operators.

The elder brother reeled in the seventh rope with his right hand, looping the slack around his left forearm. The cold water dripping off the rope ran down his bare arms and dampened the thick black hair in his armpits.

“Nothing on this one either,” he said, clicking his tongue in disgust.

The younger brother jerked the oars violently …

But for all the shocking power of the story itself, the final lines feel awkward. The surviving brother had to yell something, I suppose, but did his words have to so artlessly reiterate what has already emerged so satisfactorily from the workings of the story itself? It feels like a cushion, dampening what should come as a terrific, uncompromising blow.

Further reading: Higa Minoru, 祟りなすものの南島的形象: 鱶伝説にみる南島の思想

Was the New Yorker‘s story on keitai shōsetsu (mobile phone novels) really published in 2008? It feels like only yesterday that commentators were either hailing or denouncing the arrival of a new genre — Shōnagon-meets-Chikamatsu, crowd-sourced to a million young women on commuter trains. Where is our god now? (Spoiler: On Twitter.)

While tempting to give the iPhone credit for the fall of the mobile phone novel, clamshell cellphones and carefully managed sub-internets are far from dead in Japan. Despite what was generally perceived as a rocky start in the Japanese market, however, it’s hard to deny that the iPhone is an influential presence here now too. The app-ification of everything is putting serious pressure on 1999-vintage online services, and why labor over yet another tale of high-school agony when you have dozens of Twitter followers waiting to hear about the much more involving topic of yourself? It’s probably too early to declare keitai novels dead altogether — they still have their own section at most bookstores — but they have certainly lost their luster, as has the cousin genre of “manga essays.”

So what were people reading instead? Well, Twitter. Other than that, the usual. Light novels, particularly Hirasaki Yomi’s Boku wa tomodachi ga sukunai series 『僕は友達が少ない』. Health-and-fitness books: the commendable Tanita shokudō series 『体脂肪計タニタの社員食堂 ~500kcalのまんぷく定食~』, although published in 2010, have been strong sellers in 2011 too, and Kashiki Hiromi’s “Curvy Dance” series 『樫木式・カーヴィーダンスで即やせる！』 has been a big hit this year. Drucker-on-management volumes riding the tail end of the MoshiDora boom. Books (in the loosest sense of the word) about AKB48 and Arashi (嵐). A few outliers fueled by media interest, like Kondō Marie’s cleanup manual Jinsei ga tokimeku katazuke no mahō　『人生がときめく片づけの魔法』 and a 1975 translation of George Polya’s How to Solve It (of all things).

The Tohōku earthquake and tsunami — and the aftermath at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Powerplant — sparked a separate mini-boom of disaster books: how to prepare for and survive earthquakes, how nuclear power works and whether Japan needs it, crossovers from the economics section explaining why Japan is doomed.

The association of the word kizuna with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami feels so natural now that it comes as no surprise to see 絆, the kanji spelling of kizuna, acclaimed as 2011’s kanji of the year. The negative expression of the same year-view, 災 wazawai, had less than half as many votes, so where did the association for kizuna come from, and how did it become so meaningful to so many?

One of the earliest high-profile promoters of the “kizuna” concept was Watanabe Ken and Koyama Kundō’s kizuna311 site, launched less than a week after the earthquake with an English statement introducing the word to the world:

In the past few days, the media has brought attention to the world of earthquake and devastation, much foreign press has warmly applauded our orderliness and solidarity under the catastrophic circumstances, and has encouraged us to recuperate from the calamity.

And from reading these reports, we have come to realize that we have great assets. We Japanese can take pride in our kizuna, the solidarity that binds us.

To overcome this painful catastrophe, we must find a way to unite and find our kizuna among people.

By April 11 Prime Minister Kan used “kizuna – the bonds of friendship” as the title for his letter of thanks to the international community (note that the English phrasing appears in the Japanese version of the letter) without referring to or explaining the concept in the text at all.

Simple, powerful, and easy to pronounce worldwide, the word “kizuna” became a sort of anti-brand: an explicitly inclusive and community-oriented identity open to anyone. Everything from charity drives for orphans to Nadeshiko Japan‘s World Cup victory was celebrated as an expression of “kizuna.” The word itself will no doubt fade back into obscurity in time, but, in retrospect, it may turn out to have been the banner under which another facet of Japanese identity was polished up and turned to face the world.

Happy New Year! What’s more exciting for 2011 than a few remaining lookbacks at 2010.

The official-as-these-things-get Kanji of the Year for 2010, unveiled on December 12 with about as much fanfare as you would expect, was 暑, “hot”. Hypothermia Hyperthermia deaths in summer and production troubles at farms and fisheries, widely interpreted as a playable demo of global warming’s effects… Chilean miners trapped underground where it’s, uh, hot… the heat of Hayabusa‘s re-entry, and the burning courage to face the future it inspired… all of these things, it seems, inspired the people’s choice.

Only five per cent of the vote was required for 暑’s victory, but this was still more than twice the percentage scored by the closest runner-up, 中, as in 中国, China, but also as in 中途半端, “half-baked, incomplete,” as in Hatoyama Yukio’s prime ministership (as one voter apparently put it).

The top 20 is pretty bleak overall: heat, nationalism, war, uncertainty… oh, and 嵐, “Arashi,” as in the boy band (although one voter graciously offered to share some glory with KARA), which made it to number 8 with 1.39%. (Since less than 300,000 votes are cast in all, any fanbase could probably put their group on top if they were sufficiently dedicated. Unfortunately for AKB48, their name contains no kanji.)

The Kanji Kentei Kabal are not the only ones who can choose a character of the year, of course. Japanese government members seized the opportunity for messaging: 行 (“go,” “perform”) from the Prime Minister, 拓 (“open,” but often in a high-level metaphorical sense, like 拓 (“open”, but often in the metaphorical sense e.g. 拓殖, “colonize”) from Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito, and the surprisingly frank 滞 (“stagnate”) from Finance Minister Kaieda Banri. Meanwhile, Defence Minister Kitazawa Toshimi chose 島 (“island”), referencing in his statement the many controversies and incidents that flared up in 2010 over islands and sovereignty over them.

In the private sector, @nifty’s Word of the Year 2010 [pdf] was also 暑, but as they break their results down by prefecture one can see that, for example, Arashi have a lot of fans in Shiga, and people in Saitama are suffering. At their press conference, idol Yūki Maomi declared that her kanji of the year was 体, body, ingeniously deconcretizing the alienating metaphors of time-as-object and year-as-chapter by recentering the discourse on the individual as actualized through immediate, physical perception and expression.

In closing, allow me to announce Néojaponisme’s Kanji of the Year for 2010:

Momme. A unit of weight (and, by extension, of currency), last fixed at 3.75 grams by the Meiji government in 1891. A character born in Japan as a compressed version of 文メ, the word itself an abbreviation for ichi-mon sen no mekata (“weight of a one-mon coin”). A word used in the modern age only to quantify pearls and silk.

And now, as one of the five kanji removed from the jōyō list in 2010, a concept that schoolchildren will no longer be required even to feign familiarity with, let alone write.

… Nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
traditia sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, momme, ave atque vale.