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 first Akutagawa Prize of 2008 went to Yang Yi (楊逸) for 『時が滲む朝』Toki ga nijumu asa (“The mornings when time bleeds”).

The hype at the time claimed that Toki dared to explore the soul of modern China: Patriotism! Tiananmen! Diaspora! Mixed emotions regarding Japan! As a Chinese citizen who writes in Japanese, despite it not being her native language, Yang was positioned as naturally hip to such topics and uniquely placed to explain them to a Japanese audience.

And you have to remember that this was during the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, when a string of torch relay-related incidents reminded the Chinese people that they were neither universally loved nor considered the good guys in re Tibet or Falun Gong, and reminded the rest of the world that whatever disagreements the Chinese people had with their government, they were fiercely patriotic and did not in any respect consider themselves the bad guys in re Tibet, Falun Gong, or anything else. Despite the flood of long, pompous pieces in the English and Japanese presses about China and its people, folks just couldn’t wrap their heads around the journey from democracy-or-death in 1989 to respect-the-torch-or-STFU twenty years later. Clearly the standard narrative about China had been wrong. What a relief that this new author Yang was here to explain it to us!

But in reality, as reviewer upon reviewer noted, the book deals with these political issues only obliquely and superficially. It is a tale about post-Tiananmen China and its diaspora, but the story is told from the perspective of someone whose involvement was fairly minor and who isn’t prone to much self-reflection anyway. Right from the start, we know that the main character Haoyuan’s family has a history of being screwed over by the government. Does this bother Haoyuan? Does it affect his budding patriotism or shape his later passion for democracy? We never really find out. And this is apparently the part most closely based on Yang’s own life!

The entire first half of the book reads like a fairy tale, clear and smooth; Haoyuan’s move to Japan is like a prism which splits the pure white light of the China story into the moral rainbow of the Japan story, where Haoyuan finally begins to meet people who are capable of telling a lie. The story does get more interesting at this point, but we still get frustratingly little information about how Haoyuan feels about meeting folks who are using the democracy movement for personal gain instead of Serving the People. In the end everything is tied together with a moral: Haoyuan’s child calls Japan home, and maybe Haoyuan does too. To the extent that Yang wanted to tell a mellow story about how family is what’s really important in the end, she is successful, but the chorus of voices complaining that it wasn’t exactly the story they wanted to hear is understandable too.

The other objection to Toki was that it was insufficiently “pure” — as in junbungaku, “pure literature”. Some analyses attributed this to Yang’s being a non-native speaker of Japanese. However, arguments about clunky sentence structure and the like aside, it seems more likely to me that the naive and unsophisticated style in Toki is a conscious approach to the characters and their own political activities. Certainly Yang’s earlier works Wang-chan『ワンちゃん』 and Rōshojo (『老処女』, “Old maid”) demonstrate her ability to write a story about an isolated person tortured and finally driven insane by the unfairness of society, as the requirements of pure literature dictate. (In all seriousness, Wang-chan had far more rounded characters than Toki and was more enjoyable on all fronts. Recommended.)

Popular and critical response to Toki aside, Yang’s achievement as the first-non-native speaker to win the award is significant and will be remembered. The countdown to Japan’s Nabokov has begun.

Kawakami Mieko took home the 138th Akutagawa Prize last month for her novel Chichi to Ran (『乳と卵』, “Breasts and Eggs”). At its core, the work is a simple story about a crisis in the relationship between Makiko, an Osaka hostess and single mother in her late thirties, and Midoriko, her 12- or 13-year-old daughter. Makiko feels that life has quite literally used her up and has decided that breast augmentation surgery is the only way to recharge her body, and therefore, her life; Midoriko is standing at the edge of puberty, terrified that it will make her life her mother’s.

Natsuko, our narrator, is Makiko’s thirty-something younger sister who lives in Tokyo. Makiko and Midoriko have come to visit for a long weekend, and she relates the events that transpire in a stream of Osaka dialect that, as Kawakami readily acknowledges in interviews, owes much to Higuchi Ichiyō‘s writing: “sights, sounds, feelings … all knitted together without any quotes or punctuation marks.” In fact, Chichi pays homage to Higuchi’s most celebrated work Takekurabe on a number of levels. Chichi‘s character names are all borrowed from Takekurabe (except for Natsuko, who is named after Ichiyō herself), and the work relies on the same melancholy view that the end of childhood means an irreversible loss of control.

We get this view more or less directly from the young Midoriko: the novel uses short, determined essays from her notebooks that periodically interrupt Natsuko to rail against menstruation and childbirth. Self-consciously written, they stand in opposition to Natsuko’s purely verbal presence as shaman-narrator. Natsuko is generous and free-wheeling, while Midoriko is wary of committing too much of herself to anything unknown. Many of Midoriko’s essays take words themselves as their theme — the kanji etymology of shochō (初潮, “menarche“), the -shi (子, “child”) in ranshi (卵子, “ovum”). Before long we learn that Midoriko only uses writing to communicate with her mother because, she explains, talking always leads to fighting.

Midoriko and Natsuko share one main topic, of course: Makiko. Midoriko, preoccupied by her attempts to erect a coherent philosophy that can protect her from adulthood, uses her mother as a sort of anti-role model: “I love her, but I don’t want to become her”, she says. Her writing is shot through with helpless guilt over having played a part in making her mother’s life and body what they are now.

Natsuko has no such agenda, and so her Makiko is vivid and human, so clearly delineated by her words and deeds that she is by far the most believable character of the three. Midoriko is serious, almost Buddhist in her determination to break the cycle of birth. Natsuko is neutral, rarely making her opinions explicit. Makiko therefore supplies basically all of the comedy and most of the pathos that brings Chichi to Ran to life.

Kawakami’s self-imposed literary restrictions do limit the structure to a certain extent. Natsuko’s in-story narration is really just a linear chain of jo-ha-kyū, bouncing off Midoriko’s self-exposition — which is in turn immature and fragmentary by design. Even working together, these two voices don’t work up quite enough steam to drive the final climax. The denouement is plenty entertaining, but its believable aspects don’t come as a surprise, and its surprises feel a little forced. Refreshing as it is to read a work of character-based fiction that doesn’t use withheld closure as a cheap substitute for realism or depth, Kawakami goes so far in the other direction that she ends up dangerously close to a pat conclusion. (Perhaps this is a reflection of her other career as singer-songwriter?)

Still, these faults in the last few pages don’t detract from the rest of the book. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn about breast augmentation surgery. Just follow Kawakami’s lead, enjoy the characters, and let the symbolism take care of itself. (Aside to non-native, non-Kansai-based readers: You really don’t need to know more Osaka dialect than you can pick up from a few hours of TV in the evening. Think Huckleberry Finn, not Trainspotting.)