In 1983, at age 26, Kyoto University assistant professor Asada Akira published a book called Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics 『構造と力―記号論を超えて』 — a dense examination into the post-modern and post-structuralist philosophy of late 20th century European thinkers. Asada described the work to the New Left Review as Japan’s “first systematic introduction of certain strands in French philosophical thought, starting with a consideration of Lacan and Althusser, and then moving on to an account of Deleuze and Guattari, whose rather crazy re-reading of Marx I enthusiastically set to work in an analysis of contemporary capitalism — especially its patterns of consumption.” Not exactly light reading.

Yet the uncompromisingly-theoretical work moved nearly 80,000 copies in its first few weeks and later went on to be a best-seller with over 150,000 copies sold. The young, bespectacled author — seen here on TV in 1986 explaining the “world of mathematical simulation” — became an overnight media sensation and launched a wider “boom” for intellectual thought called New Academism (ニュー・アカデミズム).

While Japan still today experiences substantial consumer demand for intellectual and pseudo-intellectual books (e.g. multimillion-seller The Dignity of a Nation), Structure and Power‘s mass popularity was a surprise at the time, and when viewed through the prism of 21st century Japanese society, a complete mystery. Compare the book to, say, the best-seller of 2007: Koizora 『恋空』, the yankii confessional “mobile phone novel” written in ultra-simplistic language with heavy dollops of melodrama. Back in the early 1980s, however, Japan’s youth consumers looked to shopping building PARCO’s progressive and internationalist aesthetic worldview, one in which Asada’s European post-structuralist critique made a natural fit. These days works like Structure and Power could not find an adequate consumer context, with the exception of Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals 『動物化するポストモダン　オタクから見た日本社会』 becoming a best-seller thanks to high interest from the otaku themselves.

My PARCO association is not meant to be pejorative. Asada himself explicitly understood the connection between his book and the “Saison Culture” of PARCO’s godfather — Tsutsumi Seiji of Seibu. In his interview with New Left Review, Asada mentioned Tsutsumi’s business as a reason for Structure and Power‘s success:

In the course of the Eighties, Baudrillard became a popular author in Japan, and his ideas were taken up in some unexpected circles. For example, the owner-manager of the Seibu department store, Tsutsumi Seiji, a versifier himself, adopted an explicitly Baudrillardean marketing strategy for his enterprise, renaming his (company) Saison, lecturing stock-holders on the role of simulacra in his business and cultivating parodic advertising styles. He set a trend at a time when Japanese capitalism was coming out of the depressive Seventies, and needed to activate consumption with a certain semiotic mise-en-scène. In this kind of context, there was a predisposition to read an introduction to post-structuralism as a welcome-mat for over-consumption. To the extent that I also dealt with contemporary trends in Japanese society, you could say the object of my analysis tended to recuperate it.

Certainly Asada did not mean to make the book into a runaway bestseller, but he perhaps understood during its writing that the unique era could turn Structure and Power into a consumerist object.

In her essay “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan” (Postmodernism and Japan, 1989), scholar Marilyn Ivy admits that Asada’s difficult work was likely “consumed” as an object more than its contents were actually digested. She writes, “Many people bought Asada’s text and read only the preface and the chart at the end of the book.” She defends this “fragmented reading,” however, as being in line with Asada’s own instructions: the young philospher wanted to liberate knowledge from its institutional roles and turn it into a form of play. Despite this, Ivy cannot completely dismiss the idea that Asada’s phenomenon may have been at least partly superficial. She considers the debate of Japanese critics at the time of whether Asada’s book became popular as an easy-access catalog to modern philosophy, paralleling the consumer instructions of Tanaka Yasuo’s novel Nantonaku, Crystal, or whether Structure and Power was popular precisely because everyone saw something stylish in its rhetorical difficulty.

There is no question that Structure and Power was a stylish product in 1983, but more vexing is the larger query on whether readers actually comprehended the dense text. Did the sudden widespread interest in Deleuze and Guattari actually change the nature of Japanese thought and culture? Aforementioned otaku scholar and postmodern critic Azuma Hiroki is highly skeptical that the book had a lasting impact: “In Japan, [post-modern theory] was acclaimed outside universities in the mid 1980s as a fashionable mode of thought for the younger generation, but then subsequently forgotten together with the era. [...] What is important here is not really the content of the theories of postmodernism but the fact that in Japan this highly complex body of thought turned into a kind of faddish media frenzy.” This would fit the pattern of most Japanese booms, in which consumers adopt products with unprecedented speed and then abandon them just as quickly in order to move on to something else. Critics and trendspotters love to claim deep human needs that drive the embrace of a new signifier or style (“This interest in military wear must be tied to female empowerment!” etc.) but in most cases, consumers buy a new product for its social value — i.e., the fact that everyone else has it — rather than its inherent qualities or content. This is not unique to Japan by any means, but the orderliness of trend adoption in the Japanese consumer market makes it very conspicuous. Structure and Power was a fad of sorts, and faddish buying behavior likely tapered the book’s impact on the Japanese consciousness. But moreover, even when readers were serious about the content, the theoretical abstractness of Asada’s writing inhibited the degree to which readers could “use” or replicate the ideas in their daily lives.

Even if the work can attribute its high sales to a consumer trend, Asada’s stardom was certainly not a fluke. The popularity of Structure and Power in 1983 well demonstrates the degree to which the elite tier of Japanese society — mostly upper-middle class college-educated Tokyo-based white-collar workers or those on their way to being part of that class — almost completely controlled the bully pulpit of proper consumerism. The Japan of today is much more democratic. Consumer culture and media have finally spread to all corners of the Japanese experience, and as a more honest representation of the population distribution, we have seen time and time again that non-urbane values win a democratic plurality in most markets. Unabashed yankii/gyaru magazines Popteen and Koakuma Ageha(which well codify the values of lower middle-class, non-Tokyo Japanese) top circulation lists and are vastly more popular than snobby style bibles like Brutus or Spur. A book that tackles similar topics to Asada’s breakout first work, even with high sales, would surely be drowned out in the wider culture today by Koizora and its lot. PARCO’s über-sophisticated “Saison Culture” had disproportional and highly centralized power in the 1980s. Their trend-setting advice was not just for a specific group but voiced with a broad authority. In 1983, there were few magazines and shopping centers with countervailing cachet to the elite institutions (much like Shibuya109 functions today), and of course, the most influential cultural powers had logical business rationale for targeting upper-middle class consumers: This was the group with the highest disposable incomes. Structure and Power is a book that only appealed to this limited group, and the fact that it could become a wider “phenomenon” suggests that the college-educated were at the helm of Japanese pop culture.

Like other great artists and intellectuals who have been swept into the superficial pageant of celebrity, Asada eventually was able to break free and settle into a quieter position of academic gravitas. The work’s consumer success, however, most likely made a positive impact on Asada’s position within the Ivory Tower. He was a rising star and revered genius in smaller circles before his work became a hit, but this early fame cemented his place as one of Japan’s most important scholars. Structure and Power‘s moment in the sun was in hindsight a historical anomaly, never repeated with the same fanfare for similar cases. But we should not ignore it as an outlying event. The entire phenomenon bookmarks a specific page in the story of Japanese pop culture, a brief moment when consumer culture and academic theory shared the same Zeitgeist.

Well, it’s time again for the Tokyo gubernatorial election, and this year the vote is likely to be a referendum on three-time incumbent Ishihara Shintarō. You may be familiar with a few of the veteran politician’s recent statements. He called the Tohoku earthquake a “divine punishment” for Japan’s moral misdirection. Earlier in the year he made headlines after spewing bigoted comments towards the gay community, demanding publishers censor virtual child pornography in manga (without doing much to outlaw the possession of actual child pornography in his jurisdiction), and slagging on Japanese youth. One of his golden oldies was the statement in 2000 that sankokujin — an outdated and arguably offensive term for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese living in Japan — would cause social unrest in the event of a major Japanese earthquake. There is not a lot to celebrate about the recent natural disaster, but the peaceful aftermath at least proved his prediction wrong.

Based on this kind of rhetoric, we should assume that Ishihara starts his day by standing in front of the mirror and dreaming up outrageous and ire-raising comments. (Or hey, he may, like top comedians, have a room of writers to think up edgy material.) Yet it’s hard to blame Ishihara for this behavior. His own life story has conditioned him to expect reward for malicious rhetoric. Ishihara — long before he became the figurehead of Japan’s grumpy old male contingent — was the legendary Bad Boy of the Post-War. Back in the 1950s, Ishihara was much more Dennis the Menace than Mr. Wilson. So while there may be much hypocrisy in Ishihara’s current call for a return to archaic Japanese values, we should remember that offending people with utmost confidence has always been Ishihara’s bread and butter.

Ishihara grew up in the posh beach community of Shonan, son of a shipbuilding executive. A classic example of the “wealthy furyo” (不良, “no good”), his stable background gave him the economic security to spend years absorbed in artistic appreciation and mild delinquency rather than nose-on-page study. He found his way into the prestigious Law Department at top public school Hitotsubashi University, where apparently “on a whim” he wrote a short novel called Season of the Sun 『太陽の季節』. He won the Akutagawa Prize for the work in 1955, which turned him into an instant literary superstar. The book instantly sold 300,000 copies, but the true full-fledged social phenomenon around Ishihara began when a film adaptation of the work hit theaters in 1956. A cult of personality soon grew around Ishihara and his brother Yujiro, a notoriously delinquent Keio student who made a cameo in Season of the Sun and then starred in the next Ishihara-penned film Crazed Fruit 『狂った果実』. Cultural critic Oya Soichi named the boys and their friends the “Taiyo-zoku” — The Sun Tribe, a pun on their beach-side lifestyle, the book title, and the post-war fallen aristocrats called “Shayo-zoku” (More on the etymology here).

The emergence of the Sun Tribe ran parallel with the birth of the “teenager” in other countries, although the scale and scope in Japan was much less significant than American Graffiti-era teenyboppers in the U.S. The distinction was also more explicitly philosophical than what was happening in the consumer paradise of America. Ishihara and his cohorts were triumphantly eschewing wartime values and embracing a new cultural milieu distinct from their parents. This idea is extremely clear in Season of the Sun.

The main character of the book is Tsugawa Tatsuya — a university student and boxing club member who enjoys womanizing at urban dance clubs and sail-boating out on Shonan Beach. While cruising for babes in Ginza one weekend in his finest suit, he meets the wealthy and intriguingly-decadent Eiko. She ends up stalking him at his boxing match and takes him afterward to the hospital in her own car (which needless to say, was not a “normal” thing for anyone to own at this point in the mid-1950s). Without going into all the gory details, Tatsuya and Eiko go off-and-on again throughout the short novel, pursuing flings to make the other jealous, and being generally mean to each other. The book ends with Tatsuya telling Eiko to end her accidental pregnancy with his child by abortion, but since he has taken so long to make his decision, she goes for a risky late-stage operation — and (spoiler alert) dies. In a fit of self-loathing, Tatsuya storms Eiko’s funeral in the final pages, shattering her portrait on the altar and yelling at Eiko’s family, “None of you understood!”

The story itself plays with the excitement of post-war teenage life, but in order to be entirely clear on his intentions, Ishihara provides long narrative paragraphs on his theory of youth mostly unrelated to the main plot:

If the adult world feared [youth] as a dangerous force, second only to communism, this fear was groundless. A new generation brought forth sentiments and a new code of morals, and these youth were growing up in such surroundings. They stood erect, like cactus, without looking down to see that they were blooming in bare soil.

The young unconsciously tried to destroy the morals of their elders — morals which always judged against the new generation. In the young people’s eyes, the reward of virtue was dullness and vanity. While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on.

For all of the setting up adults as the “enemies” of youth, there is very little actual warfare in the novel. The book may have been most shocking in that all the young rich Japanese characters live in their own little world: hitting hostess bars and dance clubs, driving around in cars, sailing boats, staying at resort hotels, getting abortions. Parents do not appear as oppositional forces — actually, they barely appear at all. The single scene of inter-generational conflict happens in a scene at Tatsuya’s home, when the father is showing off his relatively-preserved physique and asks his son to try punching him in the stomach. The boxer Tatsuya delivers a crushing blow, knocking over the dad and making him spit up blood for days. The episode has obvious Oedipal symbolism, but the rest of the novel focuses more around the joyful absence of parental advisory rather than its overbearing shadow.

The idea of youth-gone-wild in Season of the Sun is clearly what made the novel so exciting to other members of Ishihara’s generation. Ironically, student leftists at the time proclaimed the novel as an anti-establishment manifesto, passing Season of the Sun around during the long waiting periods at the 1956 Sunagawa protests against the extension of a U.S. Air Force base. The book was “progressive” in the sense that it defended youth’s role as a key force for social change and generally advocated the dismantling of the prewar value system.

The Ishiharas were also dashing, wealthy playboys who inspired a generation of post-war youth wishing for a return to prosperity. Fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa explained to me: “This was an era when there were no Japanese heroes. The MP and soldiers were good looking guys and stole all the best women. Everyone knew that the Japanese needed Japanese heroes to really bounce back from the war.” The Ishiharas filled that role, proving to their fellow youth through cocksure success that Japan would no longer have to live in the shadow of America.

While this may seem like a very different philosophical background than the current Ishihara, I would argue that he never made a tenko conversion to the right. There are visible traces of conservative ideology even in his early writing.

Most obviously, Ishihara has smug certainty about his world and believes deeply in the myth of individuals fully in control of their own destiny. The characters of Season of the Sun seem completely oblivious to the fact that wealth affords them the freedom to be delinquent and carefree. The Tsugawa brothers maintain their own sail boats out at Shonan Beach in the early 1950s — an era when much of his fellow citizens had just recently stopped wearing their old wartime rags and worrying about where they were going to get the day’s food. The government only declared the apres guerre period over in 1956, a year when the Ishihara’s were already conspicuously living at a level that would be considered posh even today.

Building on this explicit denial of class, main character Tatsuya sees his own successes as triumphs of will against all odds rather than building upon a privileged background. For example, Tatsuya becomes a passable boxer without any real training. It’s his “enthusiasm” and natural skill — rather than hard work — that make him a competitive pugilist. In a similar tone, Ishihara’s younger brother Yujiro quipped to the press about his film career, “Whatever. I can quit doing movies whenever I want.” Ishihara Shintaro is a deep believer in the “myth of natural good taste” — that idea that members of the privileged classes are imbued with greater aesthetics or natural skills without realization of the opportunity and access to cultural capital that come with wealth.

While these ideas stay relatively mild within Season of the Sun, these attitudes have slowly evolved over the last 60 years into something more sinister: Ishihara’s complete lack of sympathy for people unlike himself. He personally overcame difficulty through a minimum of effort, so why can’t everyone else get their act together? Ishihara’s father died suddenly when he was still a student, yet he helped his family make ends meet — in part by becoming a famous writer. Penning an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel took him only a few days. It is exactly Ishihara’s victorious and charmed life — proven at an early age — that make him completely disinterested in those who have to actually work to succeed, or worse, will never succeed at all. He is the classic “self-made man” — who happened to start on a giant pedestal.

Yet this streak of fundamental conservative ideology is of course not what made him so hated in the 1950s. Ishihara was PTA Enemy #1. Together with women’s groups and educational committees, Japan’s Parent-Teacher Association railed publicly against the sexual content of Season of the Sun, which they spun into a broader movement towards stricter censorship on motion pictures. In the book’s most infamous sequence, the main character seduces his girlfriend by punching a hole in a sliding paper door with his erect penis. This did not go down well with the older set.

But it was the third Sun Tribe film The Punishment Room 『処刑の部屋』 that really raised ire. (The novella on which it is based, by the way, is mere sensationalistic violence lacking any literary depth. Avoid.) There is a scene of men spiking girls’ drinks with sedatives to later rape them, and many teenage criminals who attempted similar things told authorities that they got the idea from the movie. Although mild in comparison, the media also devoured a subsequent story about a girl deciding to drop out of high-school after taking up the anti-social message of the film. Parents of all stripes hated Ishihara. While feminists disliked Ishihara’s violent, sexual misogyny, older conservative men had a fit over the Ishihara brothers’ boastful disobedience. They blamed the rise of the Sun Tribe on the formal outlawing of legal prostitution. They argued, if men had a legal sexual outlet for these violent urges, Japan would be free of menacing groups like the Sun Tribe.

But this is Ishihara’s problem today: His outrageous behavior as a youth — which was fresh and probably warranted in the 1950s — still informs his current personality. Shintaro got gray but he never mellowed out nor became self-aware. When he calls for censorship of art, he does not remember that once people much like him now called for the censorship of his own art. But moreover, we should understand him in control of his personality. He is not a “loose cannon,” accidentally saying things he later regrets. He likely thinks that success of his endeavors requires raising the ire of groups to which he does belong.

The question now is whether enough Tokyo voters will decide that Ishihara finally went too far in blaming the earthquake victims. The most likely scenario sadly is that his usual voting bloc will stumble out of JRA Wins en masse and cast some shochu-drenched ballots to make him governor one more time.

Reference works:

Shintaro Ishihara. Season of Violence. Transl. John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, and Ken Tremayne. Rutland & Tokyo: Tuttle, (1966).

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. Sanseido, 1989.

John Nathan. Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Isozaki Ken’ichirô 磯崎憲一郎. Tsui no sumika 『終の住処』. 2009.
Winner of the 141st Akutagawa Prize for early 2009.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated “Final Dwelling.” Personal hobby-horses first: It’s lacking many of the markers of A-Prize bait. It’s not a first-person narrative, and it doesn’t represent a hitherto overlooked subculture. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innovative. The story examines, broadly speaking, the travails of the middle-aged salaryman. In this it feels older than old. So old it’s new? Are oyaji the new gyaru?

None of the characters are named. The story follows kare (“he”) from the point of his marriage to tsuma (“[his] wife”) to, essentially, his retirement. They’re both over thirty when they marry, and they seem to have stumbled into it with no great enthusiasm, because it was time to get on with their lives. Later we figure out it must have been the early 1980s when they married, which explains the greater pressure on over-thirties to marry (it’s still there today, but perhaps not as strong).

Almost immediately, he begins to feel estranged from his wife. She has mysterious mood swings. He never tries too hard to figure them out, and they remain unexplained. He drifts into affairs, and at one point is ready to leave his wife for his mistress when his wife announces she’s pregnant. So they stay together. Not that it anything changes. In fact, at one point they go for eleven years without speaking to each other. Not to mention, he keeps having affairs. Curiously generic affairs, though, even the one with the girl in the sunglasses, who he feels is his perfect woman. She’s his ideal, but this relationship doesn’t go much of anywhere either.

Meanwhile we also follow his career. He works for a pharmaceutical company, in sales at first. We follow his challenges at work — long hours, little success — against a backdrop of the Japanese economy from the ‘80s to the present. From about halfway through the novella, the historical markers get pretty specific, and we go through the Bubble years into the long period of stagnation. The climax of the novel involves the unnamed man, an executive now, going to the U.S. to engineer a hostile takeover of an American pharma firm. It takes him years, but he accomplishes it and finally gets to go home.

The third strain of the novel comes into play now. Before he goes to the U.S. he had decided to build a house for his family. The narration goes into uncharacteristic detail on the process. But then he gets called away. When he comes back, at the end of the novella, he’s finally ready to settle down and enjoy the new house. But when he arrives he finds that his daughter, his only child and reason for living, has grown up and moved away — to America, of all places — without telling him.

So this is the “final dwelling” of the title: an expensive, well-built house inhabited only by himself and his wife, who are all but strangers to each other. Now it’s just them, and as the last paragraph of the story tells us, it’ll be just them until they die. Which won’t be long now. The End.

What’s going on here? Two features of the story, I think, point to its aims.

First, the protagonist’s extreme passivity. The members of the A-Prize committee who supported this story seem to have been impressed by this, that the protagonist just kind of meanders through his life, watching, not participating (that’s how Ikezawa Natsuki put it). You can see this in his relationship with his wife: his only effort to understand her is a half-hearted attempt to find out if she’s having an affair. She’s not, he relaxes, and that’s as far as it goes. He doesn’t try to, you know, talk to her. That said, I’m not sure I agree that he’s totally passive. It’s more like he’s on autopilot, taking action only when it’s demanded of him, like when he has to perform the hostile takeover, or when he reaches the stage in his life and career when it’s appropriate for him to build a house. Then he does act. But never in a way that goes beyond the bounds that have been set for him. He never jumps the tracks, kicks over the traces, ignores the carnavi.

Second, we have the fact that nobody in the story is named. This contributes to the somnambulistic air of the story, but it also makes the protagonist into Generic Salaryman, a stand-in for all the company men of his generation. His wife is not an individual either, but Generic Mrs. Salaryman. Same goes for his boss, his daughter, his mistresses.

To me, the brain-dead pointlessness of the protagonist’s life, combined with his utter facelessness, suggest that what Isozaki’s after here is a good old-fashioned poke at the bourgeoisie. Salaryman = cog in the capitalist machine = alienation from one’s own feelings = mindless consumption to compensate = lingering dissatisfaction = dying alone. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that critique, but it’s hardly a fresh one. It’s been decades since that perspective alone was enough to make a story worth the reader’s while. If this story had appeared in, say, 1959, it would have made sense. But in 2009 it just feels, well, old-fashioned. An oyajiesque critique of oyaji.

What I’m saying is that even the reader most sympathetic to Isozaki’s message (if he’s doing what I think he’s doing) is probably going to want more from the story than that. Character, plot, style: some kind of novelistic pleasure. But this story offers very little in that regard. By opting for generic characters rather than specific, the author denies us the opportunity to understand why someone would live like this, or its effects on a real person; we’re always gazing down at kare from above. By adopting passivity as the organizing principle, the author is neutralizing plot as a source of interest. In fact, in the very first paragraph the narrator tells us that the protagonist and his wife are going to stay together for decades in an unchanging relationship, meaning we know the end from the beginning.

And style? This was tricky. By and large, Isozaki’s prose is undistinguished and occasionally awkward. But now and then he lapses into some nice description. (I liked his evocation of the Illinois prairie in winter). And at times he seems to be gesturing toward parody — he throws in exclamation points here and there that made me feel he was trying for a laugh at the main character’s expense, at least.

At those times I found myself wishing he’s gone farther toward humor. It would have been cruel humor, bourgeoisie-baiting, but at least it might have made the story entertaining. As it is, I do think there’s a parodic element here, at least I hope so. The protagonist’s travails — the eleven years he goes without speaking to his wife, the fact that he’s totally unaware that his daughter has moved out of the house, the way his boss tells him to execute the takeover or his life will have been a failure — are too exaggerated to be taken seriously. They have to be a parody of the kind of salaryman concerns you see in things like Shima Kôsaku. But they’re a parody with little humor, in fact little animating emotion of any kind.

That was my first reaction to the main story “Tsui no sumika.” Now, here’s why I liked the extra stories.

“Penanto” (“Pennants”) is the name of the one in this volume. The title refers to an image in the first of the story’s three segments: a boy sneaks into an older boy’s room and sees the walls covered with souvenir pennants. The old fashioned kind, with the careful embroidery. They’re all pointing the same way, and they make him feel like he’s in the midst of a school of fish or something.

It’s an arresting image. This story has a few of them. But they’re in the service of something pretty abstract. That first segment culminates in the boy hearing a noise in the wall, tearing it down (!), and finding a snake’s sloughed-off skin, glowing silver behind the wall.

The second segment concerns a middle-aged salaryman who loses a button from his coat. He finally finds it in a diner he’s never been to before, where an old woman tells him it’s been waiting for him. The last segment concerns a boy (probably different from the first one, but because nobody in this story has names either, we can’t be sure) taking a walk in the woods, encountering another boy, finding an ant-lion.

It’s pretty clear that this story is supposed to work on a semi-abstract level: dream logic or magical realism (Ikezawa invoked Garcia-Marquez in talking about “Tsui no Sumika”). And it almost works. I don’t know what they add up to, if anything, but I think I can see the mood Isozaki’s trying to create.

But in the end, I don’t think this story succeeds. If you’re going to abandon character and plot in favor of poetic imagery, then your images themselves have to be pretty powerful. And it helps if your prose is flawless. Isozaki doesn’t quite have these bases covered yet. The images here aren’t consistently striking, not like they need to be, and while there are some nice passages in this story, his writing doesn’t have the polish and precision this kind of exercise requires.

What’s interesting is that there’s enough commonality of tone with the first story to make me wonder if he wasn’t trying for a dreamier effect there, too. That is, maybe the salaryman-existentialism wasn’t intended to be as overriding as it is. Or maybe I’m making too much of that aspect of the story.

At 1000 yen for 150 quickly-digested pages, Ishii Hiroyuki 石井裕之 and John W. Culver’s book on “black cold-reading,” Aru nise-uranaishi no kokuhaku あるニセ占い師の告白 (“The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic”), was an ironic presence on the shelves earlier this year. A book with the stated purpose of teaching its readers to recognize and resist emotional manipulation, advertised with “Banned from sale?!” (発売禁止！？) in large print plus a tiny “Pick it up before it is!” (になる前に手にとってください！) alongside — not to mention the sister volume on “white cold-reading” released at the same time for the same price — well, you could be forgiven for concluding that the first lesson is to wait for it to turn up on the 105-yen shelves at Book Off.

There’s nothing wrong with the content of the Confessions. The writing is purple but not labored. The account of Culver’s early psychic wood-shedding is pointless fluff, but the sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a sample cold-reading session is a decent introduction to the topic. The most interesting thing about the book, though, is that one of its authors doesn’t exist.

“This book,” Ishii explains in the first sentence of the introduction, “Is in the form of a translation of John W. Culver’s ‘The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic’ [...] but, in fact, this is a work of fiction by myself, Ishii Hiroyuki.” He goes on to explain (or claim) that this was one of his first ideas for writing about cold-reading (a term the katakana version of which, incidentally, Ishii appears to have trademarked), rejected by the publisher for being too “provocative,” but that he has decided to revive the idea in the hopes that it will help shock Japan out of its ongoing susceptibility to fraudulent spiritualists and ore ore scams.

Ishii is not the first Japanese author to fake a foreign nationality. Inukai Yūichi 犬飼裕一 has argued that pretending to be a foreigner in order to criticize Japanese society is “a tradition” in Japan. One of the best-known examples of this trend is Yamamoto Shichihei 山本七平, who used the pen name “Isaiah Ben-Dasan” in the 1970s to publish the Nihonjin to Yudayajin 『日本人とユダヤ人』 (“The Japanese and the Jews”) and attack Honda Katsuichi 本多勝一’s Asahi Shimbun series on the Asia-Pacific War. A few years later, Fujishima Taisuke 藤島泰輔 began his twenty-volume-plus Fushiji no kuni nippon 『不思議の国ニッポン』 (“Wonderland Japan”) series under the name “Paul Bonet.”

There are differences. “John W. Culver” is pure glamour: a fake psychic in the U.S., land of celebrity, and crime is a good if unadventurous hook. “Ben-Dasan” and “Bonet” were partly about glamour too, but more importantly, they were meant to suggest objectivity — “I have no particular stake in any Japanese culture war; here is what I think.” Ishii cheerfully reveals the truth about “Culver” in his introduction, while Yamamoto reportedly did not ever fully admit to being “Ben-Dasan”: one’s show business, the other’s sock puppetry.

Either way, it’s disappointing that Ishii decided to pound on a blue-eyed straw man like that. Surely Japan would have been better served by an exposé on cold-reading within its own borders.

The publication of the magazine Koakuma Ageha in 2005 sent a shock-wave through Japanese society: when did cabaret-club hostesses become socially accepted to the degree that they have their own widely-available fashion magazine? And when did “kyabakura girl” become a glamorous and enviable occupation for young women? The answers to these questions were not apparent. And since the Japanese media is not allowed to talk about trends in terms of socioeconomic class or subculture, Koakuma Ageha‘s popularity gave the impression that all young women, no matter the family background, have suddenly clamored to work nights in Kabukicho.

Enter market researcher Miura Atsushi, who started looking at the why’s of the phenomenon. Back in the 1990s, Miura worked for shopping building PARCO‘s think-tank Across, where his job was to pontificate on the latest consumer trends and social movements to keep corporate clients in touch with the “leading-edge.” Now with the sharp decline of art-infused, cutting-edge consumer culture, Miura has turned his eye to heavier and less optimistic social issues. The popularity of his 2005 book Karyū Shakai (『下流社会』, “Downwardly-Mobile Society”) provided the media sphere with an easy way to bring up the slightly-taboo topic of Japan’s growing income divide. The credibility of Miura’s claims relies on his simple methodology: his conclusions mostly come straight from data analysis, based on his company Cultural Studies‘s large-scale youth surveys. Unlike the other pop cultural theoreticians, Miura is just “reporting the survey results” — an inductive antidote to the wilder and generally-unprovable “latent desire” pontificating of formal sociologists like Miyadai Shinji.

Miura’s latest book is Onna ha naze kyabakurajō ni naritai no ka? 『女はなぜキャバクラ嬢になりたいのか?』 — “Why Do Women Want to Become Kyabajō?” He took interest in the topic after conducting a mobile phone survey in 2007 for the advertising firm Standard Tsushinsha on the topic of “Generation Z” — Japanese aged 15 to 22. The survey asked young women, “What profession do you want to do/which job would you like to try doing?” (「なりたい職業、してみたい仕事」). He was shocked to find that “kyabajō (cabaret club girl) / hostess” ranked at #9 with 22.3%. Thinking this must be some statistical fluke, Miura chartered another survey of the same demographic in 2008, but he got nearly the same result: the kyabajō / hostess category came in at #12 with 20.5%. In short, one-fifth of young Japanese women aged 15 to 22 apparently hoped to work in the mizu shōbai industry. When he took a similar survey of women in “Generation Y” (age 25 to 32) for comparison, he found that only 9.1% had either wanted or still want to try out the hostess profession. Miura came to the conclusion that there has been a recent social shift toward wanting to work in this sector and started on specific research towards the topic.

The premise of the book — that young women have increased desire to become hostesses and kyabajō — is obviously controversial, and there has been some backlash against Miura’s statistical methods, best outlined in the Amazon review section for the book. Most criticism focuses on the fact that women in the survey could freely check as many occupations as they pleased, thus not proving they “want” to become hostesses as much are “would be fine with it.” To Miura’s credit, however, he fleshes out the hard data by interviewing 32 actual kyabajō and kyabajōs-in-training, and nothing about their stories seems to contradict his general conclusions on the phenomenon.

Even taking the possible survey biases into account, Miura’s results do match up with multiple clues in the broader pop culture that the hostess profession has become more socially-acceptable in the last decade. Prime time television dramas like Jotei follow the exploits of hostesses without any moral judgment on their line of work. Popular manga in mass market weekly magazines take up the challenge of young hosts and hostesses aiming to become “#1″ with the same narrative tone as if they were in an amateur band aiming for the top of the pops. Coffee advertisements offer quotes from hosts to convince consumers about the product’s value. The aforementioned popular magazine Koakuma Ageha has transformed real-life kyabajō into elegant fashion leaders and lifestyle models for the gyaru community.

Of course, the actual situation is much more complicated than “all Japanese girls want to become hostesses.” Miura is able to build a very specific demographic and psychographic profile of young kyabajō and kyabajō-wannabes, illustrating exactly which subset of Japanese society is most contributing to this growing labor sector. He found that kyabajō are most likely to have the following characteristics:

• low socioeconomic background
• low level of education
• moved to Tokyo from small villages in outlying prefectures (in the case of Tokyo, most hostesses are from the Tohoku region)
• high rate of parental divorce (double the rate of the total survey sample)
• hate being in their school, their own house, their own room, or their own living room (especially compared to those who want to become government workers)
• are confident about their looks
• strongly dependent on men
• comfortable with traditional gender roles
• hate their moms, like their dads
• read magazines Egg and Koakuma Ageha
• love the music of Hamasaki Ayumi

This list almost perfectly illustrates the profile of a single Japanese socioeconomic class-bound taste culture: namely, the “yankii” taste culture situated in lower-middle and working-class communities outside of Tokyo. Many of the above factors — divorce rate and socioeconomic background, for example — are well-known to be correlated. The embrace of “traditional” values such as gender role division and dependence on males could also be posited to be more associated with a certain social environment and education level. And when Miura asked women in the survey whether they wanted to “break the rules,” the hostess set generally answered in the negative. (Those who want to work in the sex industry, in comparison, were affirmative on the question.) The data’s “typical” kyabajō does not see the profession as a “rebellion” against community mores, but as a logical extension of her teenage lifestyle and limited career opportunities.

To explain why this specific group of women has embraced the kyabajō profession as a legitimate career, Miura mainly focuses upon structural economic factors. First and foremost, women are no longer able to secure a middle-class existence for themselves solely by marrying a man with a full-time job. During the Lost Decade, writes Miura, the steady dismantling of the corporate safety net meant men could no longer provide economic stability for their wives and girlfriends. Furthermore, even if women want to work themselves, they have had a particularly hard time becoming sei-shain “regular employees” in the recessionary environment. These conditions have created more pressure for women to establish financial independence, but for women with low levels of education and low social capital (both the result of non-urban working-class backgrounds), kyabajō is one of the few jobs that can provide high incomes and independence at a young age.

The women’s economic necessity for hostessing is reflected in their fiduciary behavior. Contrary to popular dismissals of kyabajō as soullessly selling their sexual dignity to buy foreign luxury goods, the kyabajō interviewed by Miura for the book claim they are mostly saving the money for the future. (The average salary seems to be around ¥6,000,000 a year, which is very good for a 20-something but not extravagant.) Most acknowledge that they only have a limited time in this particular industry and are trying to create a nest-egg for the future. Some even send money home to their parents. Although this parallel is a bit loaded, the idea of sending money back to parents almost perfectly echoes the pre-war system of prostitution where poor farmers’ daughters would be sold off to brothels to help their parents pay-off debts. Surely cabaret clubs are not as extreme in terms of labor duties as brothels, but children earning money for the household has been taboo amongst the middle-class for at least the last 100 years.

Miura’s profile of hostesses also clearly delineates the cultural tastes of the profession’s leading demographic group. We receive the rich detail that hostess-wannabes read the magazine Egg — a glimpse into pre-kyabajō cultural affiliation. Egg is the quintessential “deep gyaru” magazine — for the ganguro yankii wing of the fashion movement rather than the part that touches upon middle-class mass style (like Popteen). Egg readers are disproportionally based in places other than Tokyo, so the profile of the kyabajō seems to almost perfectly match that of the female yankii — women with a particular set of cultural and sexual values who mostly live in non-urban prefectures. Girls who read softer fashion magazines like non•no or arty high-fashion magazines like Spur are apparently not hostess material, which makes logical sense. The values of the gyaru subculture — in terms of sexuality, future hopes, and gender dynamics — are much more conducive to mizu shobai than any others.

Miura describes the cabaret club itself quite pithily as “theme park of traditional gender roles.” In an age where men have to actually make an effort in personal presentation and manners to win over possible girlfriends and can no longer sexually harass secretaries in the workplace, the kyabakura provides men with a chance to return to a much simpler time, before women became educated, independent, judgmental, aggressive, and demanding. Kyabakura and hostess clubs offer men increasingly-rare female adulation for a simple payment. They can be drunk, loud, obnoxious, and speak with toxic tobacco-scarred breath, but the hostesses are required to treat them like kings — just like an idealized recreation of the good ol’ days.

Many women, however, consider the hostess job no harder than desk work, and in particular, enjoy the fact that their job allows them to dress up in a glamorous way and find constant “acknowledgment” from the opposite sex. Miura suggests that kyabakura provides these women, who never succeeded at school and had a rough home life, the self-confirmation that they are good at something for the first time. They feel respected by customers and can work towards finding a wealthy spouse in the customer base.

Most hostesses — perhaps in a reflection of classic yankii values — want to marry at a relatively young age, and the pages of Koakuma Ageha are filled with perky confessionals from divorced 20-something mothers with multiple young children who work at kyabakura to support their families. For the hostess looking for a husband at work, however, things are not always so easy. Miura claims that one of the reasons so many mizu shobai girls spend their hard-earned money on host clubs is that hosts are the only men in their lives who will promise to marry them. Of course, promising matrimony is a core duty of the host job, but the hostesses can walk away sated that night at least.

Miura sees this rise in the number of hostesses as part of a broader trend for society: youth’s desire to continue their cultural lifestyle into adulthood. In his survey comparison between Generation Z and Generation Y, he found that the latest crop of young men and women are desperate to become singers, actors, and models. Generation Y was much more realistic and seemed content on more “serious” jobs. In the past, Japanese society’s high toleration of youth culture stemmed directly from the social contract that youth would abandon all cultural activities at employment (usually aged 23 for white collar, earlier for blue collar). Now that companies cannot offer youth the previous level of benefits for “going straight,” most youth without long-term career prospects are choosing to bring their youth style into adulthood. The gyaru pioneered this social change, and now one of the few growth fashion markets is gyaru brand clothing made for mothers and their young children. Oddly, the gyaru still believe in early marriage and early childbirth, but they have abandoned the lack of fun and glamour formerly associated with adult responsibility.

So there is a “kyabajō segment” of young women, mostly corresponding to the gyaru/yankii subculture. Young college students and daughters from “good families” are well-known to work part-time or occasionally at cabaret clubs, but the “career girls” most definitely fit a specific subcultural affiliation. That understood, does this really mean something for society? Haven’t the working and lower classes been historically been the suppliers for the sex industry and the mizu shobai? If we believe the Miura evidence and analysis, economic conditions have deteriorated to the degree that a certain segment of women are electing to work a relatively-degrading job in order to maintain a middle-class level of income. But as the book suggests, the profession itself is not as dire or exploitative as say, the pre-war brothel system. Girls make the choice to join and can essentially quit whenever they want. Prostitution is less ambivalently bad; hostessing can be dangerous and demeaning, but in theory, there are protections in place to keep it from being sexual slavery.

That being said, the high salary for hostessing — in light of low education and no skills — should be our first clue that employers are compensating for something negative in the work duties. First and foremost, the job leads to no long-term career nor builds any portable skills. So while a clerking position pays little in its 20s, women can move up the ladder to a certain degree in their 30s and 40s to make a better salary. Hostesses have at most, a decade at the job and then cannot use that experience for anything else (other than being a “mama” perhaps). And exceptions aside, the hostess work generally degrades the labor and social value of the woman. The stigma has been reduced in recent years, but in most cases, hostessing can be a “scandalous” past background in a way that “secretary” never could. The kyabajō job also does not build strong social capital: working in Kabukicho means running around with yakuza, touts, and pimps, who are low on valuable social capital themselves. (There is also the issue that being a “kept woman” rather than a wife, which we can assume is a common path for many hostesses and kyabajō, means no legal rights to property from their partner.)

These facts tends to discount the “economic empowerment” argument, that the hostess business is a nice welfare system that transfers money from corporations (through entertainment budgets) and middle-class men to working-class women. And even in this model, those with power and capital are abusing their position to win special conditions from the recipients. Women can only receive these funds if they are young and willing to act out a form of sexually-charged subservience. In a more “fair” economic system, there would be high-paying jobs for women not conditional on indulging men. Yes, any job in the hierarchical white collar Japanese corporate system means hiding personal feelings to please the whims of the boss, but in an office atmosphere, this is not predicated on sexual gratification nor strict sexual division (women pleasing men).

But could the popularity of kyabakura amongst men be a good sign? The fact that men must pay high fees in order to receive unconditional treatment from kyabajō means that women are not willing to act accordingly in “real life.” The better solution, of course, would be a mass move away from the kind of childish misogyny that fuels the hostess industry, but Japanese men have shown long-term resistance to the new gender values (or at least tolerance) that have come to be strongly rooted in the rest of the post-industrial world. The word “feminist” in Japan does not even mean “one who believes in gender equality”: it means “one who is nice to women.” It appears that kindness to the second sex is still a radical idea.

Miura’s research has been and will continued to be challenged. Some times for legitimate reasons, but there will always be serious resistance from men to a re-conception of the hostess/kyabakura industry as a site of class exploitation. Flirting is more fun when you don’t think the girls are sending the money back home to support their poor family in some tiny Hokkaido fishing village. The “greedy girls who want Louis Vuitton bags” myth created a comfortable equality of sin: men would go to hostess clubs out of lust, women would work there out of avarice. But nothing about Miura’s research should be surprising or controversial. Japan has a long history of hostess-like institutions — from geisha to the cafe waitresses of the 1920s — and the lower classes have always been the main supply of labor. But now thanks to magazines like Koakuma Ageha, these girls are no longer invisible. They have their own world, own style, and own values. The only thing new is that they are succeeding in making this lifestyle seem appealing for those not predestined to end up there.

The cover of Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée, translated by Alison Anderson for Europa Editions, depicts the only two characters in the novel: the author and the Rising Sun. They sit facing each other; Nothomb looks back over her shoulder at us, and the Rising Sun looms behind her, perfect, opaque, and blotting out everything else.

This artificially narrowed focus does not make the novel a bad one. Nothomb is refreshingly unafraid of the thin line between clever and stupid, leading to such entertainments as this:

I blessed whoever it was who had invented engagements. Life has its share of trials; a mechanism of fluids allows us, all the same, to make our way through them. [...] Yes, I shall irrigate you, lavish you with my riches, refresh you, appease your thirst, but how can I know the course my river shall follow: you shall never bathe twice in the same fiancée.

She also reveals herself to be a perceptive and insightful observer — but only of herself. Every other character in the novel is a cardboard cutout whose personality derives from some essentialist stereotype or other. Nothomb’s fiancé Rinri, for example, literally cannot pour himself a drink without inspiring a Crichton-grade Japanological analysis. When he insists on washing himself at the sink, it is because he is unwilling to “sully the waters of the honorable bathtub”; when we learn that he has “traveled a great deal — and always alone, without a camera” — Nothomb is careful to note that this makes him “not typically Japanese.” Most unfairly of all, she even projects the same attitudes onto Rinri himself, such as in this medievally sparse exchange:

“Have you already brought your lady love here?”

“I have no lady love.”

“Have you ever had a lady love?”

“Yes. I did not bring her here.”

I was thus the first lady to have the honor. It must have been because I was a foreigner.

Before long we come to understand that Tokyo Fiancée is not the intense face-to-face character study you might expect of a novel about getting engaged in a foreign land. Rather, it is a carefully edited slice of one person’s interior life as they sort through some issues of their own. (Note that the action overlaps the period covered by Nothomb’s earlier Fear and Trembling — it’s hard to blame her for being self-indulgent on the weekends if that’s what her weekdays were like.)

Other characters generally feel even more phoned-in than Rinri. Exceptionalist, boorish U.S. expats; Rinri’s patronizing, cruel mother; an undifferentiated mob of gold-toothed classmates from Singapore. At the extreme of this trend are figures such as the one described only as “a Canadian girl” who gravely warns Nothomb that “these marriages” produce “the most awful children”:

“What on earth are you talking about? Eurasians are magnificent.”

“But dreadful. I have a girlfriend who married a Japanese guy. They have two children, six and four years old. They call their mother weewee and their father poop.”

I burst out laughing.

“Maybe they have their reasons,” I said.

“How can you laugh? And what if it happens to you?”

“I don’t think I’ll be having kids.”

“Oh. Why? That’s not normal.”

I walked away humming a song by Georges Brassens in my head: “No, those good folk sure don’t like it / When you head off down a different path…”

Typical Canadian! Always trying to tie down the restless Belgian soul with their rules and regulations. Fortunately, Nothomb has a companion on her smug voyage down that different path: Japan, played here by Mount Fuji itself.

Mute but friendly, the mountain is drawn more vividly than any of Nothomb’s human interlocutors, partly because of its folk-links to her early childhood (spent in Japan, though far to the west). The encounters between writer and mountain are of greater emotional consequence than her entire relationship with Rinri.

Italy’s Corriere della Sera, according to the book’s back cover, praised Nothomb for the “profound relationship she has with Japan, with its symbols, its stereotypes, its archetypes.” But this is also her greatest flaw: she is so invested in archetypes and symbols that she never breaks through to the reality they abbreviate. Some passages seem almost to acknowledge this, like this meditation on Mount Fuji:

The volcano is a sublime invention that you can see from almost everywhere, so much so that at times I took it for a hologram. I’ve lost count of the number of places on Honshu that offer a superb view of Mount Fuji: it would be easier to count the number of places from which you cannot see it. If nationalists had wanted to create a unifying symbol, they would have had to build Mount Fuji. It is impossible to gaze at it without feeling a sacred, mythical tingling: it is too beautiful, too perfect, too ideal.

Except at the foot, where it resembled any old mountain, a sort of shapeless lump.

Similarly, while the notion of koi inspires a mini-essay on varieties of amorous experience (all rooted in national character, natch), more pedestrian words like osshaimasu are casually misspelled. (Seriously — neither Nothomb, nor her editor, not Anderson, nor Anderson’s editor could be bothered checking out how to spell the words they use?)

Ultimately, this extreme disregard for the grain-by-grain trickle of experience precludes any real insight into it. Tokyo Fiancée is pleasant and generous, but never amounts to more than the tale of a European born in Japan and a Japan born in Europe.

Reviewer’s Note: I have tried not to give away too many of 1Q84‘s secrets, but a review must address the content of a novel. If you’re hoping for a carta blanca Murakami experience, better bookmark this and come back in a couple years.

All translations other than the quote from A Wild Sheep Chase are my own.

In 1985, Murakami Haruki was hitting his stride as a writer. Moving away from the characters in the “Rat Trilogy,” he received the Tanizaki Prize for the markedly more ambitious Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, made an “honest literary declaration” of his working definition of fiction (Supplement to Complete Works Vol. 5, xi) in the introduction to his short story collection Kaiten mokuba no deddo hīto 『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』 (“Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round”, discussed previously on Néojaponisme), published his translation of Raymond Carver’s At Night the Salmon Move, and still found time to write most of the stories that would be collected in Pan’ya saishūgeki 『パン屋再襲撃 』 (“The Second Bakery Attack”) the following year. One of these stories, “The Twins and the Sunken Continent” (title translation borrowed from Jay Rubin’s Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words), remains notable today for two reasons: it is the only story from the collection not yet translated into English, and it is the final story using his original boku narrator. Technique and time separate “The Twins” and 1Q84, but they share their major theme: loss.

1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and chronicles a large portion of Japanese history in passing, but the main narrative concerns just a handful of characters over a six-month period in 1984. Murakami uses his favorite device to frame the novel – alternating storylines with separate protagonists that become more closely linked as the plot thickens. These protagonists are Aomame, a fitness and martial arts instructor in Tokyo who grew up in a fictional missionary group called the Shōninkai (証人会, literally “Association of Witnesses”), and Kawana Tengo, a prep school math instructor and aspiring writer who has never met his mother.

In an interview just before publication, Murakami provided a cryptic summary of the work:

A young boy and girl meet. And they fall in love. From that point of view it’s a simple story. But something happens and the two of them go to the dark side of the moon. (Courrier 19)

To a certain extent, 1Q84 is the simple love story that Murakami suggests, centered on the image of the jazz standard “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” But, of course, the book includes an array of other themes, some handled better than others. Murakami’s word choices, specifically a couple of terms he uses with frequency, identify these major themes of the novel and reveal how he uses Aomame and Tengo within the novel.

First, something is rotten in Tokyo in 1984. Numerous intrigues are described as usankusai (胡散臭い): fishy, shady or suspicious. An editor conspires to ghost-write a novel and have it win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious award for up and coming writers. A secret religious cult (loosely based on radical movements of the ’60s and religious cults like Aum Shinrikyo) plots some terrible evil in its Yamanashi Prefecture compound. A wealthy, landed woman wages a covert war on misogyny. The world undergoes abrupt, strange, and highly specific changes, and that trip to the dark side of the moon is more literal than you might expect.

These schemes draw in our protagonists like whirlpools, bringing in another key theme: hikareru (惹かれる) (to be drawn in) and related words make frequent appearances. Tengo is convinced to play ghost writer by his editor Komatsu, but he also admits to being equally drawn in by the book itself, which is titled “Kūki sanagi” 『空気さなぎ』(“The Air Chrysalis”) and written by the quiet 17-year-old storyteller Fukada Eriko. Aomame is recruited by the unnamed wealthy lady and drawn into her conspiracy.

Aomame and Tengo don’t seem to have had much going on their lives before becoming entangled in all this intrigue, but once involved they do not remain passive. Both knowingly withhold information and make decisions that run counter to their employers’ plans. As always with Murakami, the stakes are high, and everyone is looking out for themselves.

Another frequently appearing term is sonawatte iru (具わっている, be equipped/skilled/gifted with). Murakami uses it to describe his characters’ supernatural gifts, “that special something” that differentiates them from others and makes them useful to the conspirators. Aomame is equipped with hypersensitive fingers and an ability to read the layout of people’s bodies. Tengo seems fairly unremarkable to begin with, other than his passion for math – even his writing is clean but uninspired — but he eventually taps into some latent abilities, which are never fully explained.

Other characters include the aforementioned teenage writer Fukada Eriko, known by her pen name “Fukaeri” throughout the work; Ushikawa, a disheveled messenger for a shadowy scholarship company; Tamaru, a gay bodyguard originally from Sakhalin, Russia; Tengo’s married older girlfriend who visits him once a week for therapeutic sex; and Asami, a police officer with a tortured soul who is always looking for a good time… in bed.

Many of the book’s characters can be linked to roles in older Murakami works. Fukaeri seems to suffer from a form of semi-autism, and Tengo plays assistant to her, like Nakata and Hoshino in Kafka on the Shore. The wealthy, middle-aged lady free to pursue her own interests recalls Nutmeg in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The unexplained absence of Tengo’s mother mirrors that of Kafka’s in Kafka on the Shore.

Other familiar Murakami themes make appearances. Sex is, once again, a physical desire that needs occasional quenching but in the end should be saved spiritually for the right person:

During the sex, too, Tengo kept thinking about different things off and on, but that did not diminish the physical pleasure of the sexual act. As always, she deftly drew the week’s worth of sexual desire out of him and briskly disposed of it. (Book 1, 544)

Self-determination is questionable, evidenced by the sheer importance of coincidence and by the way characters feel drawn in to their circumstances:

“But, with food or men or other things, we feel like we are choosing things, but we might not be choosing anything at all. Maybe everything has been decided in advance from the beginning, so we’re just pretending to choose. Free will is just a perception. Sometimes I think that,” said Aomame.

“If that’s the case, then life is pretty bleak.”

“Maybe so.”

“But if you can really love someone with your heart, no matter how terrible that person is, then life isn’t hell. No matter how bleak it is.” (Book 1, 344)

The imagery of warmth, and memory as a type of warmth, plays an important role as it did in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:

“But now I finally understand. She’s not a concept. Not a symbol, nor an allegory. She exists in reality and has an active spirit and a body with warmth. And that warmth and movement is something I shouldn’t lose sight of. It took me twenty years to understand something so basic.” (Book 2, 356)

These ideas all have their moments, some longer than others. The themes that Murakami comes back to in the end, however, are loss and recovery:

Tengo suddenly remembered the fact that people lose 40 million skin cells every day. They’re lost, peel off, turn into a fine dust invisible to the eye, and disappear. To the world, we might be something like skin cells. And if so, there wouldn’t be anything strange about someone up and disappearing some day. (Book 2, 347)

This passage is eerily similar to one from A Wild Sheep Chase:

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.” (167)

Loss in 1Q84 is depicted in various states of permanency. Some people mysteriously disappear — Murakami uses the passive word ushinawarete iru (失われている, “are/have been lost”) rather than an active word like kieta (消えた, “disappeared”) — but memories seem to be more resolute within the characters than in many of Murakami’s previous works.

As Aomame and Tengo get closer and closer, their connection is revealed, and they seem to be fighting for similar objectives. The ending Murakami provides suggests that one of the characters might become “the egg” cracked on “the wall” of the system he referred to in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize earlier this year, while the other may battle on and try to recover the past. By no measure is the action complete within the 1055 pages of these two volumes; the way things are resolved points to the final line of Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Little Dog,” a tale of two lovers who finally resolve to elope at the end of the story: “…it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.”

Though written in 1985, “The Twins and the Sunken Continent” takes place between Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), and explores the shock boku feels when he suddenly remembers his old girlfriends, the eponymous twins with whom he lived in Pinball. As the story opens, they have been gone for six months, and boku has been working. Killing time in a cafe before a meeting with a client, boku is surprised to stumble upon their picture in a magazine:

About half a year had passed since I parted with the twins, when I found them in a picture in a magazine.

The twins in the picture weren’t in their usual cheap sweatshirts — the ones they always wore when they lived with me — embroidered with the numbers “208″ and “209″; they looked much more chic. One was wearing a knit dress, and the other was wearing something that looked like a rough cotton jacket. Their hair was much longer than before, and they even had light makeup on around their eyes.

But I knew right away that those were the twins. (125)

In Pinball, the twins just hole up in boku’s apartment for most of the book. Other than a surprising encounter with a repairman, they interact only with boku and almost seem like figments of his imagination (Rubin 54-55). Seeing them photographed out in the real world with real world clothes and makeup on, interacting with real other men, predictably confuses boku who returns to his office and examines the photograph closely with a magnifying glass.

The twins were photographed at The Glass Cage — the newest, most fashionable club in Tokyo. The club combines the natural and the unnatural: it is made almost entirely of glass, described as “an aquarium” (126) and “a transparent labyrinth” (127), but it also functions like “a precise, transparent anatomical model of the body. All the parts functioned properly according to their different principles” (126).

Boku looks closer at one of the twins and the man she is talking to:

The twin who was facing the young man and telling him something in his ear — I will never be able to tell the difference between the two — had a smile so faint floating around the edge of her mouth that you might accidentally overlook it. …

In contrast to her, the man she was talking to had a somewhat dark look on his face. He was a thin, handsome man. He was wearing a fashionable dark blue shirt and had a skinny silver bracelet around his right wrist. He had both of his hands on the table and was staring at the tall glass in front of him. It seemed almost as though the drink’s existence was so important that it was going to change his life; and he was being wracked by some kind of decision with the drink. I could see white smoke rising in the shape of some incantation from the ashtray placed next to the drink. (131-132)

Boku claims not to feel jealousy, or anything at all for that matter, but he seems at least nostalgic toward the twins and shows signs of empathy for the man:

One thing that interested me slightly was the unpleasant dark look on the man’s face. You’ve got no reason to be making a dark face, I thought. You’ve got the twins, I don’t. I lost the twins, you haven’t yet. You might end up losing them at some point, but that’s some point in the future, and for the time being you aren’t even thinking that you might lose them. Well, I guess you are a little confused. I feel like I can understand that much. But the confusion you’re experiencing right now isn’t a lethal variety. And you’ll understand that yourself at some point.

But having thought that, there was no way for me to relay it to the man. They were in a distant land in a distant time. Like a floating continent, they were wandering aimlessly in a dark universe unknown to me. (133-134)

Eventually five o’clock rolls around and boku does what Murakami narrators normally do when confused: roam the city in search of alcohol and sex. He ends up in a small bar where he “sometimes goes to drink alone” (142), thinking about loss:

I tried to convince myself that everything was something that had been lost. Everything is something that had been lost and should continue to be lost. Once something has been ruined, no one can return it to its original state. That’s why the Earth continues to revolve around the Sun.

In the end, what I needed was a dose of reality. The Earth revolves around the Sun. The moon revolves around the Earth. That kind of reality. (142-143)

The story then cuts to boku naked, in bed with a woman. He starts to tell her the dream that’s been tormenting him in predawn hours. The story is long and somewhat haunting. He is walking around the city and happens upon a building under construction. Inside, a man is building a wall, and boku stops to watch him work:

“Behind the bricks the man was stacking was the original wall of the building. Just your plain old, smooth concrete wall. So basically the man was making a new, ornamental wall in front of the original wall. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? [...]

“… If you looked hard, you could see a space about 40 centimeters wide between the original wall and the new wall. I didn’t know why he was going to the trouble to leave that space. Doing that would make the room much more narrow. I thought that was strange and strained my eyes a little more to see what the worker was doing. When I did, I gradually started to see what looked like people. It was almost like the people had come floating up like on a photograph in developing fluid. The figures were stuck between in the space between the new wall and the old wall.

“It was twins,” I continued. “Twin girls. About 19 or 20, maybe 21. The two of them were wearing my clothes. One was wearing a tweed jacket, and the other was wearing a windbreaker. Both were my clothes. They were being closed into that gap of 40 centimeters or so in uncomfortable positions, but despite that, they seemed to be completely unaware that they were being sealed into a wall and just chatted away like they always do. The worker, too, didn’t seem to realize that he was gradually sealing the twins in. He just stacked the bricks in silence. I seemed to be the only one who realized what was happening.” (148-149)

The twins, once part of boku’s real world and later an important element of his memory, have now been locked away from him completely. Ironically, seeing them as real people makes them, to boku, less real.

Boku pays the woman — who has turned out to be a prostitute — extra for listening to the story and is left alone with his thoughts.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about the ancient, legendary continent that sank under the sea. I have no idea why I thought about something like that. Maybe it was because I didn’t bring my umbrella with me on a cold, rainy November night. Or maybe it was because I’d held the body of a woman — I couldn’t remember what kind of body it was — whose name I didn’t know with my hands still chill from a dawn dream. That’s probably exactly why I thought about the legendary continent that I’d submerged to the ocean floor long ago. The light was faintly blurred, sound was muzzled, and the air was heavy and humid.

How many years had it been since it was lost?

But I couldn’t remember when it had been lost. Most likely it had already been lost long before the twins left me. The twins only made me aware of that fact. When something is lost, the only certainty we have is not when we lost it, but when we realized we lost it.

Which I guess is fine. Let’s go from there.

Three years.

That three year period brought me to this rainy November evening.

But maybe I’ll get used to this new world little by little. It might take time, but little by little I’ll burrow my body and bones into the faults of this heavy, humid universe. In the end, people are able to assimilate themselves into any situation. No matter how vivid their dreams may be, they are swallowed up by the blur of reality and disappear. And at some point, I probably won’t be able to remember that the dream even existed.

I turned off the light next to my pillow, closed my eyes, and slowly stretched out on the bed. Then I began to sink my consciousness into a dreamless sleep. Rain hit the window, and dark ocean currents washed forgotten mountain ranges. (153-154)

The image of Atlantis is contrasted with the floating continent from earlier in the story. The twins have flown off, leaving boku in a fuzzy and depressing world that can, at best, be gotten used to. Loss is part of life, and while the tone of the story is dark and apathetic, Murakami’s last moments with his boku narrator focus on hope — the thought that he will be able to live on in this world.

Murakami continued to write first-person narratives for years to come, but “The Twins” is his last true boku. Two years later, he would name his narrator “Toru Watanabe” in Norwegian Wood. After writing Norwegian Wood, Murakami wanted to revisit the characters from A Wild Sheep Chase (Rubin 168-169), but Dance Dance Dance, the result of seeing those characters again, feels different from previous bokus; it shows us that boku on an expense account is no boku at all. South of the Border, West of the Sun has anonymous first-person narration, but other characters are named and the narrator, while older, is not the same person. Subsequent works for Shinchō such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore are told largely in the first person, but with extensive third-person sections; the stories in After the Quake are all in the third person. 1Q84, a 1055-page work told completely in the third person, completes the transition. The reader, however, only shadows two characters (other than one notable scene), so the distance between character and narrator is not much more than that between character and player in a third-person shooter.

Parts of 1Q84 rival Murakami’s best writing. The tale of Tengo’s father, who tried his luck as a settler in Manchuria before returning to Japan to work as a collection man for NHK; Tengo’s married girlfriend’s ominous dream she relates to him in bed at the end of Book 1 (remarkably similar in style and feel to boku’s dream in “The Twins and the Sunken Continent”); and a story within the story about a town run completely by cats from a book that Tengo reads, are three notable examples. But overall, the book feels long, inconsistent, and occasionally repetitive. Over the course of 1,000 pages, characters and themes both float in and out of the narrative, many of them seemingly forgotten by the end of Book 2. Religious cults are discussed in depth in Book 1 only to be left out of Book 2. Tengo’s father is an important part of the whole book, but it is unclear how his past is connected to the rest of the book. Ebisuno-sensei, Fukaeri’s foster father, has most of his action offstage, and we never even meet Azami, Fukaeri’s foster sister. Most of the book is spent going over the past of the characters, so much so that plot discussion more extensive than that given above would start to reveal some of the only development in the novel’s present — plot that Murakami made no secret of trying to keep a secret in the run up to the publishing date.

Aomame’s personality seems to be the most inconsistent part of the work. She is calm and collected at parts and then loud and aggressive at other times, especially when it involves getting balding men into bed. Take these two passages from Book 1 Chapter 15 about Aomame who, as a child, was determined to escape the severe minimalism of life as a Christian missionary:

However, as an adult, Aomame discovered the fact that she was most comfortable living a moderate, austere lifestyle. She preferred wearing sweats and spending time by herself in her room to dressing up nicely and going out somewhere with someone. (Book 1, 328)

Six pages later she’s out on the town with a friend:

Aomame had on a blue-gray short-sleeved dress with a small, white cardigan on over it, and Ferragamo high-heeled shoes. She wore earrings and a thin, gold bracelet. She left her usual shoulder bag at home…and had a small La Bagagerie purse. (Book 1, 334)

Shortly after this section, the characters are in a French restaurant ordering moules soup, three-onion salad, cervelle de veau in a red wine sauce, lentil soup, and angler roasted in a paper bag with polenta.

Although this might be an isolated incident, clothing choices, especially Aomame’s, are given all through the novel, almost always with brand names included. In the Courrier interview, Murakami claims that this can’t be helped: “When I write about life in the city, lots of those kind of modern cultural icons appear. People eat Dunkin Donuts and wear Armani. It’s unavoidable” (Courrier 19). And, to be fair, in 1Q84, some of this partly seems to be an attempt to place the novel firmly in 1984. There are references to Michael Jackson songs, fashion, and pink telephones. There are lots of forced phone conversations and characters who, for the convenience of the plot, either pick up or don’t pick up, and many times there seems to be an implied “because there aren’t cell phones yet” to the circumstances. Still, the strange juxtaposition of donuts and name-brand fashion from the interview suggests that Murakami has left behind the days when all that was necessary was an anonymous worn tweed jacket and khaki pants as in “The Twins and the Sunken Continent.”

1Q84‘s biggest problem, though, is pacing. Very little seems to actually happen, despite the work’s prodigious length (ironic given that Tengo spends the first few chapters of the book editing down Fukaeri’s story!). Some chapters pass very quickly, but others feel drawn out. Finally, at the end of Book 1, some interesting questions are raised, and some of Book 2 is as suspenseful as Dance Dance Dance‘s scenes with the Sheep Man in the dark passages of the Dolphin Hotel — but Murakami then proceeds to ruin this by dragging out the resolution. This is largely due to the tendency he has developed to expound at length on philosophy, art, and music. In his early works, characters would drop a name or quote a single line (the switch panel’s Kantian funeral in Pinball, 1973 comes to mind), and the rest was left up to the reader; in 1Q84, we get extended discussion of Anton Chehkov’s trip to Sakhalin, The Brothers Karamazov, Carl Jung, Aristotle, and Leos Janacek among others.

These pacing problems also defeat Murakami’s attempts to create a mythology for his universe as he did in Hard-boiled Wonderland and, to a lesser extent, in Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Without going into detail, he spends less time developing these ideas than he did in either of these works, and the details we finally get towards the end of Book 2 feel scattered and intangible — certainly no match for the golden flocks of unicorns, their life-cycle in the Town, and their relationship to the watashi of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the boku of the End of the World.

It’s hard not to wonder if Murakami realized he was raising more questions than he answers with this book. The title choice is explained by Aomame once she realizes she’s left her old world:

1Q84 — that’s what I’ll call this new world, decided Aomame. Q is the Q from ‘question mark.’ That which creates a question.” (Book 1, 202)

And later in the novel, one of the reviewers of Kūki sanagi says that after reading that novel they felt as though they had been “left stranded in a mysterious pool of question marks” (Book 2, 124). Those who have finished 1Q84 might be experiencing a similar sensation, especially readers who are familiar with his older, more minimalist works.

Jay Rubin’s comment regarding Kafka on the Shore can be quoted verbatim to describe how readers will likely receive 1Q84:

One’s reception of Kafka on the Shore, then, depends heavily on the degree of one’s willingness to “go with the flow” of the story. To a reader less willing, Murakami seems to be relying far too heavily on contrivance and coincidence, and he too easily overlooks inconsistencies on the realistic pane (Rubin 288).

In “The Twins and the Sunken Continent,” the twins are a vital memory within the mind of the narrator, and seeing them in Roppongi as different individuals jars him, making him realize that the twins he once knew have been lost to memory and even that will eventually dissipate. In 1Q84, there is much that is lost to memory and even some things that become lost in a frighteningly literal sense of the word. Like boku, some of the characters keep memories so deep within themselves that it becomes a defining point of their existence.

The ending of “The Twins” is typical ’80s Murakami: cool, detached, but with a new glimmer of hope. In a way, it is a summation of Murakami’s early work — a final break with tales of boku bumbling through love, loss, and life, passing on his experiences to readers. Twenty years later, in 1Q84, Murakami’s narrators have become more proactive: they fight for what is lost, although it is worth noting that “Fukaeri,” the name of the elfish storyteller, is a homonym for “no return.” Some are speculating that, as with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, there may be a third volume on the way, so we may have to wait for Murakami to work things out for us.

In the end, much of your opinion of 1Q84 will, like your opinion on Murakami in general, depend on the first novel of his that you read. If your boyfriend gave you Norwegian Wood as a birthday present, you probably expected his other books to be realistic love stories with tones of the mysterious. If you discovered The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in The Hipster’s Handbook, you might have expected giant, postmodern epics that cover a wide variety of topics in many different narrative forms. If you found a first edition of A Wild Sheep Chase in a used bookstore in Tokyo, you would be expecting more of his offbeat and boozy narrator and that narrator’s “What, me worry?” take on the hijinks he gets sucked into. If you’re one of the fortunate ones like me and stumbled upon Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World sitting enshrined in a halo of awesomeness in a dark corner of a bookstore in New Orleans, you might be expecting quirky, science fiction explorations of the mind, memory and modern society.

Some unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) souls will choose 1Q84 as their very first Murakami novel. As they follow Aomame and Tengo through the confusion of the novel and experience a Murakami world for the first time, they too will likely be drawn in by the dialogue, by the pregnant pauses, by the temple rubbing and lack of responses to important questions. By the music references, some of the lofty overtones in the first chapter, and the hints of warmth and connection implied in the final chapter. If new readers like the book, they still have the strongest part of his catalog left to enjoy. On the other hand, they might be expecting more of the same. Experienced Murakami readers will recognize connections with his old works, and if they strain their eyes hard enough, they might even be able to see flashes of the old boku as he is bricked in for good by the third-person narrative in 1Q84.

Works Cited

1Q84 Book 1, (Shinchōsha, 2009).

1Q84 Book 2, (Shinchōsha, 2009).

Jesus Ruiz Mantilla, “Murakami Haruki: boku no shōsetsu wa, konton to shita jida ni motomerareru,” Kōdansha, Courrier Jul. 2009: 17-19.

A Wild Sheep Chase, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (Kodansha International, 1989).

“Futago to shizunda tairiku,” Pan’ya saishūgeki, (1989; Bungeishunju, 2002) 125-154.

“Jisaku o kataru — Hosoku Monogatari-gun.” Supplement to Murakami Haruki Zensakuhin 1979 – 1989 Vol. 5, xi. Kōdansha, 1991.

Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, (2003; Harvill Press: London, 2005).

Fujoshi kanojo 腐女子 (“Fujoshi girlfriend”) is a new movie based on a blog by “Pentabu” that rode the original post-moe fujoshi boom to bestselling book status a few years ago. (Pentabu is currently blogging part 2.) I don’t have anything in particular to say about the movie itself, but the way it is being marketed is an excellent example of how the media misunderstands — or at least misrepresents — fujoshi.

Media treatment of the fujoshi concept has always been problematic. The root of the problem is, as usual, otaku culture. When the Akiban hordes first spread across the steppes of the mass media, triumphant cat emoticons unfurled, they brought their own women with them: maids, underground idols, voice actresses, cosplayers, and underage cartoon characters. That virtually all of these women were either personae played for cash or entirely imaginary did not prevent these ideals of womanhood establishing themselves in the public mind as a badly-needed feminine yin to Akibacentric otaku culture’s hypertrophied yanginess.

As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids.

But no. As you might expect, although fujoshi and otaku often turn to the same texts for raw cultural material, they have very little to do with each other as cultural actors. There are fujoshi stores in Akihabara, but the main fujoshi center is in Ikebukuro — and it developed around a core of bookstores, not transistor hustlers.

“fujoshi syndicate”, a group of self-described “fujoshi OLs” from Tokyo (the only named member is one Ōta Maki 大田真樹) address this exact point in their recent book Naze, fujoshi wa danson-johi na no ka?『なぜ、腐女子は男尊女卑なのか？』 (“Why are fujoshi male chauvinists?”), discussing the cover of another book from 2007: Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi 『僕たちの気になる腐女子』 (“Those fascinating fujoshi”), which also featured maid imagery on the cover.

Let’s start with the “face” of the book, its cover. The cover of Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi is a girl in a maid outfit. — So at this point, it’s already failed. It’s true that there are a few fujoshi among the girls working in Akihabara’s maid cafes, but most of the staff there are not fujoshi but “Akiba girls” (アキバ系女子).

What are “Akiba girls”? By this we mean girls who love the anime and manga subcultures, but who also go to Akihabara to be made a fuss of. [...] They are otaku, but they don’t do the earthy “Let’s party, just us girls!” thing; they’re on good terms with male otaku too. One representative example would be Nakagawa Shōko (Shokotan).

In other words, otaku girls who wear maid outfits are not part of fujoshi culture, but rather Akiba culture. [...]

The syndicate then relate an apparently true story about how they once asked a maid cafe employee where they could find Messe Sanoh, a specialist retailer of woman’s video games, and that maid didn’t know: incontrovertible proof that she, at least, was no fujoshi.

The fujoshi syndicate actually spend more of Naze, fujoshi wa on this and other misconceptions of fujoshi by non-fujoshi (especially men) than they do on the title question. One argument they keep returning to is that the cosplaying, go-shujin-sama-ing media fujoshi addresses a deep psychological need within post-Bubble men. High salary, highly respected alma mater, and physical height: two of these three Bubble-traditional status markers are much harder to obtain than they used to be, and the idea of a secret caste of women — maybe there are some right there in your office! — who prefer the company of low-status, sensitive, intellectual types, and will even play along with their fantasies — this is bound to have appeal.

(Ironically, argue fujoshi syndicate, real fujoshi are just as status-conscious as ever, and have no interest in otaku as a rule. The syndicate traces this state of affairs to fujoshi reading material and its emphasis on status and power differentials as a source of eroticism.)

The argument here is not that there aren’t any otaku women who genuinely enjoy cosplay and Akiba culture, or that this is somehow inauthentic. Arguments about terminology and authenticity are a dead end. The question is to what extent the prominence given to these individuals impedes understanding of broader “fujoshi culture.” There is also arguably a political element involved: you can see this as the co-option of the idea of the fujoshi to reinforce sociosexual norms, the replacement of a uniquely female culture identity with one defined only in relation to male interests.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not a fair fight. As long as keen interests in fancifully-depicted gay romance and other distinguishing features of non-Akiba fujoshi don’t show up in photos, the media will always prefer the women dressed as frilly maids.

Tsumura Kikuko 津村記久子 – 『ポトスライムの舟』 (Potosu Raimu no Fune, The Lime Pothos Boat). 2009. Winner of the 140th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2008.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated as “The Lime Pothos Boat.” This title (despite sounding like something Angel Investigations might have fought in Season 2) combines two of the key motifs in the book: a lime pothos plant the narrator has growing in her garden and a Papuan outrigger canoe she sees in a travel poster.

The protagonist — rarity of rarities, an Akutagawa Prize-winner written in the third person — is a thirtyish woman named Nagase. She’s working four jobs, all of them low-paying and part-time, taken after quitting a corporate career due to harassment from her boss. Neither the details of this harassment nor the trauma it inflicted on her are ever quite spelled out, but it still affects Nagase several years later when the book begins, and not just because the event ruined her chances to make it as a career woman. In fact, we come to suspect that she works four jobs not just to make ends meet, but also because she’s made herself a workaholic, trying to escape the thoughts that come to her when she’s idle.

This idea puts the story into the stream of recent Prize-winners examining the lives of women in the workplace (see Aoyama Nanae, Itoyama Akiko, even, in a way, Kawakami Mieko and Daidō Tamaki). But it goes in a different direction from those stories, partly in that the book is not entirely focused on the protagonist Nagase.

One of the things Tsumura gains by breaking away from the first-person fixation of most A-Prize bait is the chance to create more than one actual character. The story is seen through Nagase’s eyes, but we get to know several of the women around her, including her mother, three of her college friends, and one of her coworkers. The result is a sort of composite portrait of two generations of women living in the age of divorce and more-or-less full female participation in the economy.

They show a diversity of experiences when it comes to love life. Nagase and her college friend are single. Nagase’s mother is divorced, and another of her college friends separates from her husband in the course of the story. A coworker is contemplating divorce. The third friend stays silent, but is clearly feeling trapped as a full-time homemaker. Everybody but the last-mentioned is working. But Nagase is really working.

We follow Nagase for a whole year. As the story starts she sees the aforementioned travel poster — an advertisement for an around-the-world cruise that catches her imagination. She works out that it would cost the equivalent of a year’s wages from one of her jobs, so she decides to save those earnings and live on what she makes from the other three. If she can save the money in a year, she’ll take the voyage, she tells herself, although it’s likely that the trip itself is less important than the idea of having something to work for.

In the meantime, one of her college friends, Ritsuko, leaves her husband and brings her kindergarten-age daughter to live with Nagase and Nagase’s mother in their large Nara home. Much of the story concerns Ritsuko working through her problems, and Nagase’s mother bonding with Ritsuko and her daughter. A lot of this happens just out of Nagase’s ken, as she’s always working and is therefore somewhat shut out of the lives of the other people in her house. These sections of the novella are deftly handled, conveying Ritsuko’s situation without weakening our sense of Nagase’s work-imposed fog.

The story climaxes with Nagase collapsing from overwork, which forces her to take time off for the first time in years. We might expect that this would also force her to confront her own reasons for overworking, but she does not really dwell on the issue. She does begin to despair about saving enough for the cruise, but eventually gets a couple of lucky breaks, allowing the story to end on a note of hope. (Although we don’t find out if she actually goes on the cruise.)

What about that lime pothos? As I mentioned, this and the boat motif tie the work together — the story works on the renga logic of Kawabata as well as on the teleology of plot. The boat motif clearly comes from the travel poster and reminds us of what the narrator desires. The pothos is harder to identify. It’s an extremely hardy plant: you can clip off stems and put them in a jar of water and they’ll just keep growing. Nagase does this repeatedly, until there are pothos clippings at two of her workplaces as well as all over the house. I think this hardiness is the key: like Nagase, her mother, Ritsuko, and many of the other women in the book, the pothos can thrive without much encouragement.

They’re survivors, in other words, although that makes the story sound more clichéd, and in fact, more decisive than it is. Nagase, at the end, may or may not actually be thriving. Maybe having enough money will allow her to take that trip — but will it do her any good, if she can’t get over whatever trauma was driving her to work herself half to death?

As I wrote earlier, the story ends on a note of hope, but also on a note of irresolution — a typical strategy for Japanese Serious Literature. This, however, works in Tsumura’s case: The story captures a snapshot of its characters at a certain moment, with only bare hints of what comes before or after. These hints, however, are carefully chosen, highly suggestive, and aesthetically rich.

But “Potosuraimu no fune” significantly differs from the typical A-Prize story in other ways. The plot is more linear than most, with fewer flashbacks and far more plot events. In fact, this story offers a variety of novelistic pleasures we don’t always expect to find in Japanese fiction — vividly realized secondary characters and carefully constructed scenes — as well as pleasures we do expect to find there — delicately modulated moods and intriguingly open-ended use of poetic motifs. In fact, this the best written Akutagawa story in some years. All the way through, you feel as if you’re in the hands of a master writer of fiction, somebody who knows precisely what she’s doing.

The omake story in the volume, “Jûnigatsu no madobe 十二月の窓辺” (At the Window in December), is quite complementary. It’s about a woman named Tsugawa working in a company for a difficult boss, and how she decides to quit. There’s no formal connection with “Potosuraimu,” but we might as well be reading about how Nagase ended up where she is in that story.

Like “Potosuraimu,” “Junigatsu no madobe” is third-person, long on plot, and short on flashbacks, with several neatly suggested characters (almost all of them female). It feels very timely, given the renewed interest so-called popular culture has taken in the last few years in exploring the work environment — particularly from a female point of view and often with an eye toward revealing the bullying and abuses that take place there. Think Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman.

“Junigatsu no madobe” is closer to the former than the latter, with none of the suck-it-up-it’s-good-for-ya of Hatarakiman. Rather, it’s a gripping exploration of the bruised psyche of a bullied employee. What does it do to her? What does she do about it? The focus is always so tight on Tsugawa that we never get any distancing perspective. We don’t know, for example, if she’s really incompetent at her job, or if her boss is really unreasonable, or both; we only know how it makes Tsugawa feel to have to face this situation day after day. It gets claustrophobic; it gets painful. That’s the point.

As with “Potosuraimu,” Tsumura gets her point across through carefully constructed scenes and a plot that features far more suspense than you might have thought proper in junbungaku. There’s a subplot about a series of assaults taking place in the area around Tsugawa’s office, and while the story never quite turns into a mystery, the violence in the background serves nicely to enhance the depressed, desperate mood of the story.

The piece is ostensibly about women in the workplace: Tsugawa’s a would-be career woman, and her boss, the bully, is a woman too — real Devil Wears Prada stuff. But really, this story is universal, just like Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman. Men have to put up with their psyches being systematically crushed by the company hierarchy, too. Maybe it just takes a fresh perspective to see it.

Both stories make a strong case overall that Tsumura’s one to watch.

The thing about translating haiku into English is that almost none of the original haiku form survives the journey unscathed. Seventeen Japanese morae usually break down to half as many English syllables. Most editors prefer line breaks to authentic one-long-line renditions. And kireji like ya and kana have no obvious English equivalent at all.

This is awkward. Kireji are old and worn, with no particular meanings of their own, but as the links above explain they really tie the ku together. To ignore them entirely will not stand.¹ But what to do with them instead?

There have been many approaches. Punctuation is popular: em dashes for mid-haiku kireji, exclamation marks for haiku-final ones, and so on. Flat denial is another option: some argue that there is no way to simulate the effect in English and no need either. Some take the middle ground, believing that line breaks/phrasing/etc. will do the job without any special attention required.

In his Shiki collection Peonies Kana, though, Harold J. Isaacson showcases a unique solution, which you may already have guessed from the title: wave the kireji through exactly as they are. Here are two typical examples of Isaacson’s work, with originals added by me for comparison:

The caged insects
all start to cry,
Fine rain kana

[籠の虫皆啼きたつる小雨哉 = kago no mushi/ mina nakitatsuru/ kosame kana]

The coolness ya
Wind-bejumbled
rope curtain.

[涼しさや風にさばける繩簾 = suzushisa ya/ kaze ni sabakeru/ nawasudare]

The book’s blurb explains that Isaacson felt that haiku had, in previous translations, been

prettified [...] losing much of the power of the original. To try to rectify this he has worked long in the mountains of Shikoku to present the work of Shiki, the last great haiku master [...] in its thorniness and immensity as well as its beauty; and he has transferred into English the haiku particles, left out by previous translators.

“Left out” is a provocative way to put it. I am sure that the previous (and subsequent) translators here slandered would prefer “translated.” But Isaacson makes his position quite clear in his introduction:

As it is impossible to accurately understand a haiku unless one knows whether a particle was used in it or not, and if used, which particle and where placed, it will be seen that this is the first time that Englished haiku have ever been set before the Western reader.

Of course Isaacson also recognizes the need to provide an explanation of these “haiku particles,” and does:

They are three in number, “ya,” “kana,” and “keri.” They were originally Japanese grammatical components, but are used n a special way in the haiku [...] In brief they have not exactly any meaning, or rather they have the meaning that lies in themselves as sounds, and in that way are as meaningful when set in the English translation as they are in the Japanese.

Setting aside the issue of number, which is irresolvable, these claims about “meaning” are dubious at best. Ya, kana, and keri cannot be “as meaningful” in English as they are in Japanese, because they are not English.

A Japanese reader may not know the long and storied history of kana and keri, but at the very least they are known to be Japanese words often found in haiku. They are not jarring to a Japanese reader. An Anglophone reader, on the other hand, cannot but be jarred upon encountering these words. They aren’t even in the italics that signal “foreign word coming through” in modern English orthography. And knowing Japanese only aggravates the situation: the spark of recognition impedes acceptance of Isaacson’s innovations as new loanwords. (Archaic English interjections — “Lo!” “Alas!” “O!” — would arguably have gotten Isaacson much closer to the effect he claims to be seeking.)

Transliterated kireji are only a symptom of a deeper idiosyncracy in Isaacson’s technique. Consider these two examples, original asterisks included:

From the water* dropper
water is poured out to
the fukujusō*.

[入の水をやりけり福壽艸]

Year’s* Day ya
All the remembered
crests*.

[元朝や皆見覺えの紋處]

To readers who don’t know the Japanese word fukujusō or at least enough Japanese to guess that -sō ending means that it’s some sort of plant, the first haiku turns entirely opaque at the most frustrating possible moment. (And shouldn’t a “keri” be in there somewhere too?)

The second one isn’t quite as obscure, but it does require that the reader be familiar enough with Japanese culture to realize that “Year’s Day” and “crests” must refer to the old tradition (now almost entirely replaced by nengajō) of paying New Year’s Day visits in formal crested kimono.

As the asterisks show, Isaacson does provide endnotes for “Year’s Day”, “crests,” and “fukujusō,” and these endnotes explain all. But for the casual reader the damage has already been done. This style of translating is almost passive-aggressive in its demands on the reader. Shiki is serious business, it says. If you want to read him, there will be homework. There is some truth in this, but it is also possible to lose sight of the forest here. In Isaacson’s own analysis, Shiki’s is a subtle œuvre, one heavily reliant on allusion. Strapping it into a hulking exoskeleton covered in blinking lights might be the only way to get it through the alien territory of English, but the effect on the reader will obviously not be the same. Isaacson’s attempts to preserve Shiki’s elegance and wit as perfectly as possible have made a Dalek of him instead.

Perversely, the ideal target audience for Peonies Kana is exactly those readers who do not need it: those who can read Shiki in the original, and appreciate Isaacson’s versions as covers produced under Oulipoic constraints. As an introduction to or universalization of Shiki, Isaacson’s book fails — but as an expression of what Shiki’s work meant to Isaacson personally, it is a glorious success. The sketches of transcendence in Isaacson’s commentary (“‘ya’ has a hard force like a concentrated bolt of out-going power, and ‘kana’ has a soft force, diffusing and thus pervading”), the attribution on the cover of the haiku within to “the Upasaka Shiki”; and the inclusion in the book of Isaacson’s translation of the Noh play Tōgan koji³ all suggest that this was the real goal of the work anyway.

Today, Isaacson probably would have just put his work online, awaiting those who had proved their worthiness by digging deeply enough in the Google results for “shiki translation” to find it. We are fortunate that he managed to find a publisher to back his idiosyncrasies back in those days before the web had lengthened literature’s tail.

¹ By “haiku” throughout this post I mean “haikoid works from both before and after the word haiku was invented” in accordance with standard English usage.

² On the other hand, one should never forget the typically farcical argument in the Kyorai shō (去来抄) between Bashō’s disciples over the master’s use of nite to end Karasaki no/ matsu wa hana yori/ oboro nite:

Some troll: Ending with nite sucks.
Kikaku: Nite is the same as kana. That’s why when the first verse in a chain ends with kana, the third shouldn’t end with nite. But using kana here would have sounded rushed, so it’s nite instead.
Romaru: I agree with Kikaku. Also, this is the third verse in a chain. Why are people thinking it’s the first?
Kyorai: This is a spontaneous expression of feeling, so it can only be the first verse in a chain. If it was the third in a chain, it would lose points for not being thoughtful enough.
Bashō: You guys are all overthinking this. I just thought it was cool that the pines were hazier than the flowers.

³ “Partly to throw more light on the character of the term Koji [the source of Isaacson's 'Upasaka'], but also because it makes clearer whatever Shiki was trying to do.”