Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Mystery Writers of America Presents

Death do us Part

New stories about Love, Lust and Murder by Jeff Abbot, Lee Child, Jim Fusilli, Laura Lippman, Ridley Pearson, Tom Savage, R.L. Stine and 12 others.

Edited by Harlan Coben

Recently I picked up a copy of “Death do us Part” from the new books section of our local library in Azabujuban. This compilation of marriage and murder short stories features nineteen stories by contemporary United States authors, many of which have never been published before. I must admit I haven’t read many contemporary American mystery short stories, so I had never heard of any of these authors before and as a result I didn’t really have any expectations regarding this book before I got stuck in to it. But overall it was an enjoyable and recommendable read.

Highlights for me included One Shot by P.J. Parish, A Few Small Repairs by Jeff Abbot and Charles Ardai’s The Home Front. The selection as a whole had quite a consistent tone, even though the stories range a lot in the periods they covered and there was a definite Steinbeck feel to a number of the pieces.

One Shot is the story of a university professor returning to the home of his birth to face the “ghosts of his past” and has a wonderful twist at the end - as do many of the stories. A Few Small Repairs deals with the illness of the protagonist’s father, while The Home Front is a delightfully twisted play on fate. I don’t want to give away too much about this collection, as that would spoil the fun.

If you are looking for a good read with some tantalizing surprises, you couldn’t go far wrong with Death do us Part.

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It is a Japanese manga. Pink Tentacle posted it. Therefore it must be good.

It says:

GIRL: Are they really going to do it?
BOY: I’m telling you, they’ll do it. Watch.

Therefore it must be good. Or did it just say that?

Welcome to the Fifth Dimension by Tatsuya Tanaka.

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Dear Alan,

I have just finished reading your Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Your tongue in cheek and at times cynical sense of humour certainly saw you in good stead as you battled your way through the byways and back roads of rural Japan.

Looking for the Lost is divided into three parts, three walks through the hinterland of Japan, and each walk is coupled to an historical tale or series of events which give your story more impact. And the search itself for “Japan” is one that rasies many interesting questions. I think that all of us who come here from other countries (in your case England) are searching for something, something special amongst all the concrete, the castrated rivers, the detritus of advanced (and know semi-retired) capitalism. We may find it, we may not, but the thrill of the adventure drives us on. Perhaps in one of the little liquor stores way up back in the back of beyond, over a bottle or two of beer, chatting to the locals, you found it.

The first of your tales in this book is Tsugaru, a place I have visited a few times, a place where the wilds things are up at the tip of Japan’s main isle of Honshuu, on the Japan Sea coast. You follow the path Osamu Dazai followed in his Tsugaru, a useful vehicle that gives your writing a greater depth, something to bite into and masticate heartily. Dazai has been described as a writer full of irony and possessed of a gloomy wit. A writing style you seem to have taken to heart:

The stretch between Minmaya and Tappi offers an especially good opportunity to compare what Dazai saw with what exists today because it is one of the few stretches of road along which Dazai actually walked and on which he chose to exercise his talent for describing landscape, a talent that was not his forte any more than it is mine …. wrote Dazai, “I could see how serene life can be in the cheerful atmosphere of those trim, well-appointed harbours,” and if any part of that sentence represents an honest description of what Dazai actually found here, then the change wrought upon these pitiful places in the forty-four years between our visits is hardly less than that wrought by an ice age. pp. 22-3.

After Tsugaru, it is a hard slog through the wilds of Kyushu following the roots of that hero much loved by the Japanese: Saigo Takamori. You follow his escape from the overwhelming government forces in 1877 in the last stand of samurai against the coming age. Oh, and how it ruins your feet! Those adders and the wasps. Quite a hike, and quite a story too. Then finally heading up and out of Nagoya from its concrete monstrosities into the mountains and rivers where remnants of the Heike clan may have escaped too after being driven out of Kyoto by their arch enemies the Genji.

The amount of beer you drink is legendary. And even if your feet stink as badly as you make out I would be honoured if one day I run into your ghost in an out of the way liquor store. I’d love to buy you a beer. And then maybe one more for the road.

Yours,

Blizzardboy

Alan Booth’s Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan was published by Kodansha in 1995, two years after he sadly passed away from cancer of the colon at the age of 46. You should be able to find a copy at your local library if you live in Tokyo.

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# Title: Tokyo Underwold: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan
# Author: Robert Whiting
# Publisher: Vintage (September 26, 2000)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0375724893
# ISBN-13: 978-0375724893

No, Tokyo Underwold isn’t an announcment for yet another visit by British electroheads Underwold tour to Japan to play yet another version of Hello Slippy to all their Japanese fans, rather it is a fascinating look at the seedier side of Japanese life and business.

In 1945 when the Allied forces began their occupation following the surrender of Japan, the country was in a right and utter mess. This left the field wide open to all sorts of dodgy entrepreneurs to set up shop. Tokyo was in ruins after heavy bombing by the allies, and food supplies were very short. The black markets which sprung up within days of the surrender being announced served in many ways to keep the population of Tokyo alive during those very difficult times. Tokyo Underworld starts from this point, and develops by recounting the mindboggling corruption and nefarious goings on in the post war period, including tales of both Japanse gangsters as well as the GI’s of the occupying force who stood to make a great deal of money at this time.

Two characters from Tokyo’s colourful past stood out in particular. First was Rikidozan, a former sumo wrestler who was almost at the top of the sumo ladder when the end of the war brought the sport to a crashing holt. He became a professional wrestler and for many Japanese an icon of the rebuilding as he fought and won against many much larger and stronger American opponents. Little did the populus know, or want to know, that both these fights were fixed, and also of his Korean parentage. Such are the machinations of a defeated nation.

The other character who provides much of the backbone of Robert Whiting’s well-written book, was an American from New York’s Italian East Harlem, Nick Zappeti. An amazing character who was once known as “the King of Roppongi and the Mafia Boss of Harlem” he seems almost to have stepped out of a Martin Scorsese film. Involved heavily in black market trading during the occupation, and then later moving out into more legitimate business Zappeti’s risa and fall, mirrored in an oblique way much of what has befallen Japan in the post-war era.

I particularly enjoyed reading this book and learning a lot about what went on back then, as well as picking a great deal of information about our local areas history. That this is non-fiction, and not fiction, makes it all the more worth reading.

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I picked up a couple of Japanese short story compilations from our local library earlier this week - Autumn Wind and Other Stories selected and translated by Lane Dunlop, and a collection of Japanese detective/crime stories - Japanese Detective Stories edited by American detective fiction icon Ellery Queen.

Before delving into these collections I hadn’t read much in the way of Japanese short stories; although the short story is a genre that I do enjoy. In New Zealand we have a wealth of short story writers from the very famous such as Katherine Mansfield through to excellent contemporary masters of the genre such as Owen Marshall. In fact I would say that New Zealand writers excel at short story writing much more than they do in the field of longer fiction.

Autumn Wind and Other Stories is a curious collection of stories spanning the majority of the 20th century. There are short stories by famous Japanese writers including Kawabata Yasunari and Akutagawa Ryunosuke as well as a number of works by lesser-known authors. Stylistically these stories in general are a little challenging for Western readers as they tend to seem vague and often lack the sense of closure we take for granted in short stories. These short stories on the whole are more like impressionist paintings with the reader having to do much of the work to fill in the gaps in terms “what happens.” I enjoyed Nagai Kafu’s The Fox (1909) the most of the works in this collection. Its strong sense of nostalgia for a “better past” reminded me strongly of Tanizaki’s Naomi (they make a nice contrast I feel).

The other collection, Japanese Detective Stories was more enjoyable, with the detective genre’s plot driven stories much easier and more satisfying to me. Originally published in the late 1970’s the copy I read was a reprint released by Japanese publishing company Tuttle. The original title was Ellery Queen’s Japanese Golden Dozen: The Detective Story World in Japan. Ellery Queen was actually 2 brothers who conspired(;-)) together to create the character / author Ellery Queen. As the longer title would suggest this collection brings together a dozen of the best Japanese detective stories. These stories were all published in the 1970’s and were selected from more then 2500 stories.

If one doesn’t read the Japanese language, then short stories can be hard to find, appearing as they do usually in periodical publications such as magazines. Therefore collections such as Autumn Wind and Japanese Detective Stories serve a valuable purpose, bridging the Japanese and English language worlds.

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The Blue Parrot Bookstore near JR Takadanobaba station on the Yamanote line is currently holding a Giant Half-price Sale! The sale is on until the 23rd of March (Sunday) and they are offering 50% of all used books, DVDs, CDs, magazines, and more!

I have no connection with this bookstore, but it sounds like a great deal:)

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Can you imagine a Kangaroo Notebook? The errant product of a Japanese stationary supplier, endlessly folding in on its marsupial pouchiness? Bounding across a written landscape all the way to hell?

Somewhere between the darkness of Kafka and and the magical lightness of Italo Calvino floats Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook. A novel about an unnamed salary man who wakes one morning to find radish sprouts repulsively growing on his legs and who has miraculous adventures whilst travelling on a psychically controllable hospital bed.

His companions on his adventures are likewise surreal. A hot as hell nurse bent on collecting a record amount of blood in order to (jokingly) win the Dracula’s Daughter medal, an American Karate expert (fluent in Japanese of course) by the name of Hammer Killer, and even a pair of horny as can be squid.

Kobo Abe passed away in 1993, and Kangaroo Notebook was his final novel. The theme of death hovers over the novel, but never darkly. There is a joy here in the horror of the living undead. Calvino wrote about the necessity of lightness in writing, meaning that the story should flow lightly - the translation at times here is heavy and clumsy, but the underlying story shines through. There aren’t many translators of Japanese who come close to Murakami’s translator translators, and it is in this regard that the only weak point of Kangaroo Notebook arises. To translate, one must also be able to write elegantly!

Abe isn’t terribly well known outside of Japan, but within the country he was known as being one of the most creative novelists that came out of Japan in the twentieth century. Adroitly humourous, Kangaroo Notebook is almost impossible to place as a novel - it is difficult to say what happened, or even to say where it happened. But it is a highly enjoyable journey nonetheless!

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Went to the library today - Minato Ward here in Tokyo has an excellent library system especially where foreigners are concerned with a great selection of books that rivals even that of the Tsukuba Library. I used to have a card when I was living in Tokyo before, but that got lost somewhere in all the moving, and they were very friendly and helpful and I soon got a replacement.

I found the book Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara that upstairsforthinking mentioned commenting on a previous post. He said that it was good but didn’t quite measure up to the two Murakamis. He sure hit the kugi on the head with that one.

Weighing in at 120 pages, and at that not very dense pages, Snakes and Earrings is a pretty light book - I polished it off in a bit over an hour. A lot of Japanese books seem to be about that length, ideal as they are at that length for printing in pocket size and reading on the train to work.

The story is dark and debauched, more like Ryu Murakami than Haruki, which I think is the main reason it picked up Japan’s main literary prize - The Akutagawa Prize in 2004. Revolving around three characters - Lui (not named after Louis the Fourteenth, but rather Louis Vuitton), her boyfriend Ama and the tattoo artist and body piercer Shiba.

It is very much a novella of the surface, life lived at the surface, young people trying to find meaning in a society that takes everything at face value, where appearances are everything. And it is amazing how little they end up knowing each other (not wanting to give the plot away), how they don’t even know each others real names, nor even what they do during the day.

Nicely paced, and giving I think an insightful look at the world of Japan’s transient youth world of the freeta, I think Snakes and Earrings is well worth a read. But get it from your library. It isn’t worth reading twice.

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Sometimes concurrences occur in the most unlikely of places. I have just finished reading a couple of books - The Bookseller of Kabul by Norwegian journalist Anse Sierstad and The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi - both of which strangely echoed each other. A novel written in Japan’s Showa period and set around the Meiji era by a Japanese novelist and a piece of ficto-journalism detailing life in current day Afghanistan? Strange as it seems both these books deal with similar themes and highlight interesting similarities despite there great differences.

Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years details the interplay within a powerful upper-class family during the period in Japan’s history when the country was beginning to Westernize. The novel revolves mainly around the character of Tomo who is the wife of powerful bureaucrat Shirakawa. Shirakawa himself is the scion of a minor Samurai family and embodies a set of values which, even at that juncture in time bordered on the anachronistic.

The Waiting Years derives its strength as a novel from the interplay between Tomo and Shirakawa and, as the story develops the relationship between those two as well as that between the other two women Suga and Yumi who become Shirakawa’s lovers. This leaves his first wife Tomo in more the position of a household manager. This is a tragic and at times touching look at life in Japan, as well as sexual relationships during this period.

On the other hand, The Bookseller of Kabul is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan and describes in fascinating detail the family of Sultan Khan, a bookseller from Kabul (as the title would suggest) as he and his family struggle alongside the country of Afghanistan as it tries to find its’ feet again following the destruction caused by first the Soviet invasion, then the Taliban’s ultra-conservative attack on people’s freedoms and after that the ongoing fighting involving the American-led attempts at securing peace, cloyingly known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

A large part of The Bookseller of Kabul looks at the relationships within the Sultan household. The journalist who wrote the book, being a woman, was able to enter both the male and female sides of this Muslim household and as a result was able to bring to the world a balanced view of life in Kabul that would have been impossible for a male journalist to enter.

Sultan, head of the household, early in The Bookseller of Kabul decides his first wife is getting a bit past it and that he wants to take a second, and much younger wife, and it is this point that really brings the two books together. Despite their differing nationalities, religions and the different periods they are found inhabiting, Sultan and Shirakawa share surprisingly similar attitudes to both life and women. Their elevated social positions allow them certain “freedoms” within their societies even if these “freedoms” are frowned upon by segments of their societies and certainly in most of the Western world.

Both books offer insightful windows into parts of the world impossible to visit (at least in the case of The Waiting Years) or bordering on the insane (in the case of present-day Afghanistan). Read together they provide an interesting comparison of what it is to be human, and to remind us that despite differences in religion, nationality and even temporal location there are similarities both positive and negative within that experience.

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There is nothing like snuggling up with a nice hot cup of Milo and good read as a way to relax during ones’ nights away from the bars and clubs of Roppongi, Kawabata and Ame-mura.

If you are in Japan, or are interested in this country you will probably want to read some of the delightful fiction produced on these isles. Top of your list would have to be Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto who offer deep and revealing perspectives on contemporary life in Japan. Ryu Murakami is a good place to start if you are looking for Japan’s darker side. For crime and detective fans, Seichi Matsumoto and Miyuki Miyabe will leave you turning pages till late into the night and for fans of horror fiction the eery works of Koji Suzuki will send a shiver down your spine.

Here is the list of 69 contemporary Japanese novels:

Haruki Murakami

1. Pinball, 1973
2. A Wild Sheep Chase
3. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
4. In a Norwegian Wood
5. Dance Dance Dance
6. South of the Border, West of the Sun
7. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
8. Sputnik Sweetheart
9. Kafka on the Shore
10. After Dark
11. The Elephant Vanishes

Banana Yoshimoto

12. Kitchen
13. Asleep
14. Goodbye Tsugumi
15. NP
16. Lizard
17. Amrita
18. Moonlight Shadow
19. Hardboiled & Hard Luck

Genichiro Takahashi

20. Sayonara Gangsters

Kenzo Kitakata

21. Ashes
22. Winter Sleep
23. The Cage
24. City of Refuge (forthcoming)

Taichi Yamada

25. Strangers
26. In Search of a Distant Voice

Kaori Ekuni

27. Twinkle Twinkle

Keigo Higashino

28. Naoko
29. Malice (forthcoming)

Mari Akasaka

30: Vibrator: A Novel

Natsuo Kirino

31. Out: A Novel
32. Grotesque

Miyuki Miyabe

33. The Devil’s Whisper
34. Brave Story
35. Shadow Family
36. Crossfire
37. All She was Worth

Mariko Hayashi

38. Green Green Grapes of Home

Akimitsu Takagi

39. The Informer
40. The Tattoo Murder Case (Soho Crime)
41. Honeymoon to Nowhere (Soho Crime)
42. No Patent on Murder

Randy Taguchi

43. Outlet

Seicho Matsumoto

44. Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Soho Crime)
45. Pro Bono
46. Points and Lines

Asa Nonami

47. The Hunter
48. Now You’re One of Us

Ami Sakurai

49. Innocent World

Seishi Yokomizo

50. The Inugamui Clan (Stone Bridge Fiction)

Yusuke Kishi

51. The Crimson Labyrinth

Hitomi Kanehara

52. Snakes and Earrings

Koji Suzuki

53. Birthday
54. Dark Water
55. Death and the Flower
56. Paradise
57. Ring: The Ring Trilogy - 1
58. Spiral: The Ring Trilogy - 2
59. Loop: The Ring Trilogy - 3

Kenzaburo Oe

60. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
61. The Silent Cry
62. Somersault
63. The Changeling
64. A Quiet Life

Ryu Murakami

65. In the Miso Soup
66. Coin Locker Babies
67. A Paler Shade of Blue
68. Piercing
69. Sixty-Nine

The list is in no particular order, although I started with my favourite Japanese author Haruki Murakami and worked my way down to his namesake Ryu Murakami with his novel Sixty-Nine being a nice place to end a list of 69 Japanese contemporary novels. I would say I have read about half of the books on the list - and it was quite nice to find some new names while I was researching this list - Mari Akasaka and Hitomi Kanehara being two new finds I will have to track down.

I wonder if I missed any contemporary Japanese authors? Japan does have a huge publishing industry - and those authors who make it to translation into English are the cream of the crop. I left off authors such as Konno Abe, whose work, despite being post-modern in nature doesn’t fit into the realm of the contemporary.

This list was inspired by upstairsforthinking’s list of books from the Guardian’s List of Top 100 Books of All Time that he hasn’t read.

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