“Still laying in bed, I reached out and tried to turn on the stereo at my side.”

Thus begins Tanaka Yasuo (田中康夫)’s debut novel Nantonaku, Crystal 『なんとなく、クリスタル』. Although not a literary treasure by any stretch of the imagination, the short work immediately became a cultural phenomena upon its debut. After winning the Bungei Prize in autumn 1980, Nantonaku, Crystal attracted a storm of media attention for the unabashedly consumerist and materialist nature of the writing. When the book finally hit bookstores in January 1981, the initial printing sold out on the first day and eventually became a “million seller.”

The plot of Nantonaku, Crystal nominally concerns the ultra-chic Tokyo lifestyle of a young college student and part-time model named Yuri. Just as Moby Dick introduces the reader to overwhelming minutia about cetacean biology, Tanaka provides 442 footnotes in 213 pages to explain the brand names, restaurants, neighborhoods, private schools, and clubs that constitute the lexical environment for his protagonist. This technique is not particularly subtle: the book is printed with the novel text on the right page and the numbered notes on the left page. Japanese conservatives had a field day with the book’s obsession with proper nouns: Aha! Proof at last that prosperous post-war society has reduced youth to a bunch of empty materialists! Tanaka rebutted these charges by drawing obvious parallels between youth brand mania and the traditional Japanese tendency to desperately associate oneself with prestigious companies and universities. Really, isn’t the reluctance to recruit anybody outside of Tokyo University for the national bureaucracy also an example of brand loyalty?

Almost every proper noun in Nantonaku, Crystal is marked with a numerical footnote, giving Tanaka (or otherwise omniscient narrator) a chance to explain the item’s cultural significance to those who aren’t in the know. Some notes are essentially straight-forward encyclopedia entries: “29• Salem – American cigarette brand, menthol. They also make a longer size.” Others can be snobby social commentary: “117• Aoyama – Don’t say ‘I want to live in Minami Aoyama San-chome’ in front of people you don’t really know. It’s embarrassing.” Tanaka also provides a footnote in the middle of a sex scene to let us know that Yuri’s euphemism “my little mound” is code for her clitoris. Thanks.

At least half the reason for Nantonaku, Crystal‘s popularity was that readers — especially those outside of Japan’s capital — could functionally use the book and its notes as a style bible for Tokyo and as a primer on the latest trends in music and fashion. Tanaka may have been a sort-of-snotty, 24 year-old professor’s son and elite Hitotsubashi law student, but the immediate success of the book strongly suggests that his tastes reflected the more fashionable pockets of consumer culture at the time. And fitting with the oft-repeated claim that Japanese kids before the late ’90s exhausted allowances solely on music and clothes, Tanaka spends most of the book name-dropping the soundtrack.

Tanaka’s music choices, however, have greatly suffered from later redirections in musical historiography. The impact of punk rock upon future streams completely transformed our linear understanding of rock development, and Nantonaku, Crystal is frozen in time as a tribute to the now-forgotten dominance of Yacht Rock on the entire decade of the ’70s. Objectively-speaking, AOR was a huge force in Anglo music for a good while, and Tanaka’s book demonstrates how much this genre set the standards for proto-hipster snobs in Japan back in the day. Punk and grunge eventually relegated Tanaka’s beloved “smooth music” to footnotes, but Nantonaku, Crystal hit the market right before New Wave and the “London Night” scene started to win more power in setting the o-share agenda in Tokyo, eventually bringing a darker and more rebellious edge to musical sensibilities. The book now perfectly embodies a forgotten aesthetic era — like the last promenade of distinguished young Neo-Classicist painters before Monet threw open the doors to the Bastille.

Besides his parody-worthy devotion to “smooth music,” there are few clear fundamentals of Tanaka’s tastes that are useful for understanding the nature of the cool hierarchy in late 1970s/early 1980s Japan:

(1) Tanaka gains a mean advantage over the average youth from being able to read/understand English. This not only gives him a higher position in the educational hierarchy but means he has greater access to the latest trend information coming out of the Anglo world without being filtered through the Japanese media, and therefore, automatically accessible to a mass audience. Those individuals able to leverage linguistic ability as cultural arbitrage easily rose above “normal” Japanese who still relied on translation only at the time of formal importation. English ability was essential to taste-makers and style leaders of a certain sophisticated urban cultural strain: from Murakami Haruki to Hosono Haruomi to Ozawa Kenji. Needless to say, this particular skill is correlated with socioeconomic class.
(2) Tanaka apparently does not listen to domestic Japanese music and only references popular local musicians in the novel to disparage them. Here again, Anglo culture is automatically seen as vastly superior to Japanese homegrown culture — at least in the realm of pop music.
(3) Tanaka sees Japanese folk music and “nostalgic” magazines like An•An and Non•no as dwelling in an inauthentic “poverty chic.” To him, Japan’s economy has outgrown this kind of melancholy.
(4) Tanaka seems to know about punk rock and new wave, but essentially ignores these genres. He does not show any antagonism, however, leading me to think they had yet to gain enough footing within Japan to require Tanaka to muster up an opinion of solidarity or rejection.
(5) In Note 415, Tanaka explicitly casts himself as the literary equivalent of singer Rupert Holmes and notes that people of “exclusive” class are more reserved in demonstrating self-confidence to the outside world. Tanaka appears to be associating the use of Holmes’ literary technique as part of his own privileged class background.

In order to relay a sense of Tanaka’s work, and more broadly, his particular style moment, I have translated all the references to music in Nantonaku, Crystal‘s Notes. This is “fashionable music” in Tokyo, circa 1980.

(The individual entries for song titles may seem superfluous in English, but in Japanese, the katakana name for the song is used in the text, requiring the note to reveal the proper English title.)

2• FEN – Abbreviation for “Far East Network.” It’s good background music for those who don’t know English. Those who understand English jokes can enjoy it on a higher level.
4• Willie Nelson – Singer born in Texas who introduced lots of new elements previously unknown to country & western music.
5• “Moon Light in Vermont” – Standard number written in 1927 by Karl Suessdorf.
10• Stephen Bishop – Singer-songwriter who did a pretty good job as an actor in Kentucky Fried Movie.
11• “On and On” [Stephen Bishop song]
14• Kenny Loggins – Originally one half of the duo Loggins and Messina. Currently working solo. The Bob James-produced album Nightwatch is especially good for waking up in the morning.
Continued »