Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

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.