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.

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.

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.

In New Zealand we don’t have much in the way of Israeli restaurants (at least not that I am aware of), but we do have a lot of food from that area, particularly Lebanese restaurants – and these have long been a favourite of mine. It wasn’t until we moved to the Kansai area in 2001 and discovered a great little Israeli felafel place in Nara (which I have heard has since moved to Kyoto) and I was very happy to discover that they served wonderful food much like I was used to in New Zealand. I suppose it should have been obvious that Israeli food would be very similar to Lebanese food, but my image was more of New York deli style grub.

So we rode the Oedo line from Azabujuban station out to ShinEgota station which took a bit under half an hour. After getting out of the station we had a nice stroll through the streets of Nerima ward. That area is very Haruki Murakami – peaceful semi-urban Tokyo and it wouldn’t seem so strange to stumble upon a character from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

After a bit of a walk we found the restaurant. The area it is in has a pachinko parlour, a book store, and even what looked suspiciously like a bia hoi (sp?). From the outside Shamaim didn’t look like much, still we were hungry, hungry as polar bears as we went up the stairs. Once inside we were pleasantly surprised – the decour was nice and homely and would have been fine in any half decent cafe in New Zealand.

We ordered the all you can eat 2100 yen vegetarian special and dug in. It was damn good. Nice veggie soup to kick things off and then a great selection of dishes to dip our pita bread in. The all you can eat special lasts 2 hours – but we didn’t. After an hour or so, and a couple of extra orders we were as full as could be and very sleepy! Too much food A mighty fine repast.

Shamaim is highly recommended. If you click here, you can get a map to the restaurant as well as a coupon you can print out to get free Shamaim special dessert “Marabi”, or free Arabian spicy coffee, or free mint tea – the choice is yours.

One thing that stood out was the music. A lot of restaurants like this try to play traditional local / ethnic music. Shamaim didnt – some great beats to keep the dining kicking along. Gotta appreciate that!

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!

Fountains pens are one of those little luxuries which I particularly enjoy. Feeling the smooth flow of ink across the page is a very pleasurable experience, that despite advances in writing technology over the past 100 years, has still not been replaced. I still remember being terribly proud when my teacher at primary school judged my penmanship good enough to graduate from the humble pencil to a fountain pen. I wonder if children in New Zealand still enjoy this? Or do they go straight from pencil to myspace?

Last weekend we were going book shopping in Yaesu, near Tokyo Station when we stumbled upon the Pilot Pen Museum. There are so many little museums scattered around Tokyo that it can be fun to see what finds when out for a wander. The Pilot Pen Station is a Museum and Cafe with a neat display of writing implements – both produced by Pilot as well as outlining the development of writing instruments through out the ages.

There is a cafe on the first floor, non-smoking through-out. It looked pretty standard for a Japanese cafe and we didn’t try what they had on offer. The museum itself is on the second floor – up a staircase which quite ingeniously traces the history of the Pilot Corporation up each of the steps. One of the highlights of the museum was their collection of maki-e fountain pens. I had seen these before in department stores around Tokyo but didn’t know too much about them. They are made using a special lacquer coating process and then have very beautiful individual designs drawn on them. Very Japanese and beautiful to look at.

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5pm and Saturdays 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and National Holidays. Admission is free and they also accept Pilot brand fountain pens and the more exclusive Namiki brand pens for repairs. The museum is easy to get to – one minute from the Ginza Line Kyobashi Station (if coming from Shibuya), 3 minutes from the Takaracho Station on the Asakusa Line (if coming from Ueno / Asakusa) and 8 minutes walk from the Yaesu Exit of JR Tokyo station.

Having visited the Pilot Pen Station museum I had a bit of a poke around on the internet to see what I could find. Pilot themselves don’t have much of an English website. But I found an interesting interview over at the perennial purveyors of pulsating missives – pingmag – with The God of Fountain Pens. As well as that, I found an informative page about the pen museum at Tokyo Fountain Pen Scene (complete with map). The person responsible for that site also sells fountain pens on ebay – here is his page. He seems to have a good selection of pens for sale. (I have no relation with what he is selling btw).

Finally Pentrace East has quite an indepth guide to fountain pen culture in Tokyo. I didn’t realise there was so much to do related to fountain pens in Tokyo – that page has recommendations for a couple of days of pen related sightseeing in the capital alone!

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.

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.

The Man Booker Prize is the world’s leading book award and has been won previously by a New Zealander with South Island author Keri Hulme picking up the prize in 1985 for her classic novel The Bone People. Unlike the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Man Booker Prize focuses on choosing the greatest novel of the year, so if Mr. Jones were to pick it up for Mr. Pip it would be an honour indeed.

Mr. Pip is a delightful read. It is a story told through the world of Matilda, a child growing up on the Papua New Guinean Island of Bouganville. Named by the Australians who controlled the extremely valuable and productive copper mines on the islands, Matilda’s story brings us right down to earth at the very juncture between many different memes. During the period the story is set in – the 1990’s – the island was blockaded by the Papua New Guinea government as the island was rollicked by war.

Themes of innocence versus power, the effects of industry on an island people, intelligence versus christianity drive this book in a delicate and informed way that both intrigues and stimulates the mind. It would be easy given the themes that this book deals with to drop into glibbly patronizing the characters but Lloyd deals with the themes in an elegant manner that inspires the reader.

Those of you familiar with English dinosaurs may recognize the character from the title – Mr. Pip – as being drawn from Dickens’ Great Expectations. Mr Pip as a novel works in layers and the Dickensian Mr. Pip is several of these. On the island there is only one white man – a certain Mr. Watts who ends up teaching the children. Untrained as a teacher he teaches in a ‘novel’ way – by reading Mr. Pip to the kids. But in a sense he also becomes Mr. Pip. I really enjoyed the way this layering creates a sort of palimpsest enticing the reader to dig between the layers to create their own meanings and interpretations.

This book conjures up images of author such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being’s Milan Kundera. It does, very slightly miss the lightness that makes A Hundred Years of Solitude such a magnificent read. I think Jones is on the verge of greatness – perhaps just one novel away from creating his own masterpiece.

For a rating I will give it nine carriages of drunken salary-men on the Yamanote line out of ten.

There is a nice review from Australia’s The Age here (thats where I got the photo) and if you want to pick up a copy from Amazon then click here.

Today in New Zealand there is a huge variety of food as well as wine and alcohol available, and indeed some of the worlds greatest wines are produced in the land of the long white cloud. Immigration has played a large part in this, as have the significant number of refugees that New Zealand opens its’ doors to. So from the standard Italian and Indian fare to Malaysian and Somali restaurants, through to my favourite – Lebanese – New Zealand offers some great gastronomic experiences. I heard a news report recently that Maori cooking is undergoing a resurgence – a delight I am yet to explore.

Lebanese food has always been a favourite – and I must admit to being a died in the wool, one-eyed humus and felafel fan. So when I read about the existance of an Iranian restaurant in the Tsukuba / Tsuchiura area I was over the moon. And then some.

They have felafel on the menu, and it is really, really delicious. When it is available. We have been there 4 times now and Ali’s Kebab’s has a batting average of .250. Having been there with a couple of meat eaters (yes, they do still exist) the carnivore options are varied and apparently delicious. We always seem to end up having pizza when we go there. Old school Japanese pizza. And if you have been in Japan for a while then you will know what I mean by that. I know the main target market for the restaurant are Japanese people, more specifically Ibaraki citizens, and that is why the chili sauce is about as hot as my jokes, and why MTV seems to be incessantly blaring from the very nice flat screen TV they have installed on one wall.

That aside Ali’s Kebab is a nice place to visit, with great, friendly service and I would highly recommend it, especially if you are, or have Muslim friends to entertain as the restaurant serves حلال (halal) food (yes, they do serve alcohol, but this place is about as one gets in Japan).

If you want directions here is a map (in Japanese unfortunately) which is one page on Ali’s Kebabs website.