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.

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.

Suwa Tetsushi’s Asatte no hito (『アサッテの人』, “Day-after-tomorrow Man”) comes wrapped in a screaming green cover and obi copy to match: “Double winner! An achievement unmatched since Murakami Ryū 30 years ago!” It’s hype, sure, but the facts back it up: Asatte no hito is the first novel since Murakami’s Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū (Almost Transparent Blue) in 1976 to win both the Akutagawa and the Gunzō Prize.

That being said, Murakami — who is now an Akutagawa Prize selection committee member himself — didn’t think it deserved to win because, as he bluntly stated: “It was a boring novel.” Miyamoto Teru also deemed it unworthy of the prize, and Ishihara Shintarō called Suwa’s technique “obscure and annoying.”

Counterbalancing their complaints were the pro-Suwa side, which included Yamada Eimi (who claimed that it was the first Akutagawa Prize nominee to make her laugh since she had joined the committee), Kuroi Senji, and the newly appointed Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi. The latter praised Suwa’s quiet portrayal of “the awkwardness that in reality many people feel about having to live and interact with people using words.”

So Asatte is divisive, and it is a novel about words. Not only the work itself but every character within it, from the narrator on down, concerns themselves primarily with the struggle against a common enemy: language. Indeed, the narrator ends the first chapter with an admission of defeat:

The most vexing point is this: is the novel Asatte no hito itself, emerging as it does from a collage of drafts and diaries, in the end a finished product or another draft? This is the question, and of course I do not at the present time have the skills required to answer it. I shall simply rearrange events into their proper order, and what emerges from that shall define itself as the finished product.

This is the frame through which we enter the world of Asatte, in which language manifests itself as a physical as well as emotional presence. The narrator, charged with the task of clearing out his uncle Akira’s apartment after the latter’s mysterious disappearance, arrives to find it full of junk — including a “mountain of books” that fills two-thirds of the upstairs floor and seems to mock his assertion of authority over it:

Most of the books were already in cardboard boxes. But now it was the cardboard boxes that took up space, and the room did not become any less uncomfortable a place to be in.

The narrator’s world is cramped and claustrophobic, and moreover, deserted; the only way out is to dig deeper. So he slips into the earnest, innocent voice of his aunt — “a recreation based on my notes from conversations with Tomoko herself” — and, later, a collage of his uncle’s diaries and his own family memories. Layer upon layer of story is wound around the mysterious absence of his uncle until the shape of his life emerges, defined by his struggles with language and its “artifice” as he gropes towards the titular “day after tomorrow.”

What surprised me was the realization that the words Yukihiko had spoken [in his madness] had been nothing more than clusters of sounds. Once words, they had become empty husks, floating around him like dust. And he himself did not realize how unusual this was… This was a way of being that was as close to death as you could get.

As noted above, Asatte no hito has been criticized for its self-conscious intellectualism, and much of it is indeed artfully ambiguous, distorted by viewpoint and implication. The reader must find their own way through, and every reader’s will be unique. The meaning of the exercise remains unspoken; hidden behind the omnipresent first-person voice of the narrator, Suwa remains unseen and unheard. It is no coincidence that some of Asatte‘s most intense, exhilarating scenes are relayed to us through closed-circuit television — fragmented, grainy, uncannily silent.