The Life of an Amorous Woman, by Ihara Saikaku

 

0811201872

New Directions, 1963

translated by Ivan Morris

402 pp

paperback

There are several different works encompassed in this volume, and the main reason I picked up this book was because I had decided one day not too long ago that I wanted to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel called The Life of Oharu (1952), and as I started doing a bit of pre-viewing research, I discovered that it was adapted from one of the stories in this book. Next step: I bought a copy.  While I actually read all of the pieces included here, my main focus was the story that  Saikaku wrote as Kōshoku Ichidai Onna (1686), or as the title translates it, Life of an Amorous Woman.  

Just a bit about the writing itself: according to the introduction to this book, Saikaku Ihara was the "originator and greatest exponent" of a genre of writing called ukiyo-zōshi  or tales of the floating world.  We are told here that it was a "bourgeois literature written mainly for the amusement and instruction of townsmen in the large commercial cities," first written in the vernacular kana language, (kana-zōshi) meaning that it was more available to and more widely understood by the literate masses.  As Wikipedia notes, it emerged as a "distinctly plebian form of literature," with its readership consisting "mostly of non-aristocratic residents of Japan's growing cities."    The content of  ukiyo-zōshi, according to the book's introduction, was generally full of  descriptions of the "colourful life of the cities and accounts of the popular actors and courtesans who inhabited the Floating World."  It also, "on occasion" tended to include "highly erotic content" as well as describing what went on in the licensed pleasure quarters of the time and other things of audience interest. 

from my copy of the book; caption reads "A Street in the gay quarters of seventeenth-century Kyoto."

Kōshoku Ichidai Onna begins with the arrival of two men at a hermitage, not the home of any sort of priest but rather "an old lady of noble visage... bent double with age."  The narrator has followed them there, and he hears the woman ask why they've come.   It seems that both are "hard put to understand love in all its divers aspects," and after hearing of her "great repute," they have come to "learn these mysteries." They ask her to recall her life story, "with all its wanton doings" and she obliges. Her story begins with her having been born into a life of privilege and having a presence at court, and the love affair that got her banished and her low-ranking lover executed.  As she gets older she must somehow navigate through a life that lands her in a variety of different roles including courtesan, concubine, servant, hairdresser and others up through the present moment, each a step down from the last.   

Using her story, Saikaku examines the transient nature of fortune, the rigidity of social structures and a society that both profits from and punishes women's sexuality.  The narrator here also has to find some way to maintain her own survival not only while she is young and healthy, but even more so as her beauty begins to fade and she grows older.   The irony runs deep throughout this episodic tale, and while the author offers his readers humor and wit, there is a true sadness at its core that makes this woman's story even more poignant.  There are times, however, that it is entirely cringeworthy; for instance,  at the court, our narrator is only ten when she begins to discover her own sexual feelings and twelve when she loses her virginity, and there are other descriptions of the same sort of thing here and there that made for difficult reading.   When all is said and done however, I couldn't stop reading, although someone should do a newer translation because this one is incomplete, with only fourteen stories selected from Kōshoku Ichidai Onna presented here.  Evidently at the time, the reasoning was that the "translator's aim" was evidently to provide a sort of "wide view" of Saikaku's writing and to offer a "better idea of his scope than would the translation of a single work."  Aarrgh. 

**********

from Criterion 

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, The Life of Oharu (1952) is described at the Criterion website as "an epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace,"  with the main character an "imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution."   Needless to say, it's as bleak as the novel and the director lets you feel every bit of the pain this woman endures for the length of the film.   It opens a bit differently than the book, with the narrator (here known as Oharu) out in the cold night trying to ply her trade as prostitute with no takers.  She eventually makes her way to shelter at a small temple where there are hundreds of images of arhats on display all around; there is one in particular that catches her eye, transposing into her first love at the time she had served as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court and the banishment of Oharu and her family.     From there her story begins, taking her through the many twists in circumstance she will endure throughout her life before the action returns to the temple at the end.  While things do change from the book in the film,  what doesn't is that  she makes it to several points where she might actually be happy, only to have each  chance snatched away by fate or by someone else's interference.  As in the novel, she is both exploited and subjugated, heartbreakingly so, and yet somehow her inner strength continues.    I have to say, The Life of Oharu was a bit of a tear-jerker.  

I can certainly recommend both the book (although it is incomplete, there is enough there for coherence) and film, but bring a tissue for the latter. 

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa

9781101870600
Pantheon, 2019
274 pp
translated by Stephen Snyder

hardcover

It wasn't too long after starting this book before I noticed something strange about it.  By page 98, it hit me that for a story  labeled as "Orwellian,"  it was written in a surprisingly quiet tone.  Without discounting the bizarre events recounted in this book, the understated style alone was actually disturbing in its own right, and I experienced a sort of weird off-kilteredness throughout the story.

As the novel opens, the narrator finds herself wondering

"what was disappeared first -- among all the things that have vanished from the island."

A curious beginning, and by the time you reach the ending, it becomes all that much more curious given the fact that the novel is written in the first person.  (Cryptic I know, but cryptic in terms of this novel seems par for the course.)    I said somewhere that the book has a surreal feel to it, and I don't use the term lightly here.

Our narrator also recalls a conversation she had with her mother as a child, in which she was told that

"...that's just the way it is on this island. Things go disappearing, one by one..."

Continuing, her mother tells her that losing a memory "doesn't hurt," that

"One morning you'll simply wake up and it will be over, before you've even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you'll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you'll know that you've lost something, that something has disappeared from the island."

As just one example of things that were "disappeared from the island" among many,  her mother explains to her about perfume:

"In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time -- but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant.  The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had been disappeared from their heads." 

At some point things get "back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it is that disappeared." 

One never knows what will disappear next -- various types of food, birds, hats, roses, photos, etc., --  but not all people lose the memories of what was, however, and to ensure that their dictates are followed, the Memory Police try to round up these people and take them away to some unknown location, the fate of the narrator's mother.   They are "men who are determined to see things disappear,"  and

"from their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable.  So they force it to disappear with their own hands."

 The narrator is a novelist, despite the fact that on the island, few people seem to have need for novels; interspersed throughout her story are pieces of the unsettling but telling story she is currently writing.  She works closely with her editor known only as R, and as the blurb notes, she discovers that because he is one of the people whose memories haven't disappeared, he is at risk of being taken away by the Memory Police.  She hits on a plan to hide him, and builds a secret space in her home where he can live in relative safety.  In the meantime, things on the island continue to disappear ...

  As author Silvia Moreno-Garcia says in her NPR review of this novel,

"If you view The Memory Police as one big, fat metaphor for state control -- and I'm sure many people will see it as that -- you'll probably find more pleasure in it than if you attempt to consider it in other terms."

While the Orwellian tag is beyond appropriate (I was downright haunted by the thought of what the Memory Police might cause to disappear next, and also by the matter of  complicity) there is most certainly much more going on here in terms of  isolation, memory, loss, and the self.  In this world, to forget is to survive,  but at what cost?


While I was at first curious about the island's backstory, hoping it would be explained, eventually  it just became easier to  accept that things are the way they are here, making the reading of this book much more of an experience in the long run.   I finished it well over a week ago one morning about 2 a.m., laid there thinking about it for another two hours, and it hasn't left my head yet.   It is one of the strangest books I've read, but honestly, for me, that's part of the appeal.

Recommended with the caveat that this is a novel that will likely leave readers with more questions than answers;  there is no explanation as to the why of things, described here as "the laws of the island;"  they just are.  It also has an ending that  might just leave people scratching their heads with a big WHAT? standing out in their minds, as so many readers have noted.   While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I loved this book; then again, I'm very much drawn to novels that I've labeled "strange with purpose," so I'm not surprised.

****

real reviews
Silvia Moreno-Garcia,  NPR
Michael A. Morrison, World Literature Today

The Stones Cry Out, by Hikaru Okuizumi

9780156011839
Harvest/Harcourt, 1999
originally published as Ishi no Raireki, 1993
translated by James Westerhoven
138 pp

paperback

"They would all die in this dark cave. They were dead already." 

Another random choice and another winner -- my lucky streak continues.  I'm sure that one of these days I'll go to my shelves, pick a book completely arbitrarily and find one that not's so hot, but for now, the good luck continues.

The author of this book won Japan's prestigious Akutagwa Prize for this novel, and after reading it, I can see why.  Its short 138-page length might tempt people into thinking it's an easy, breezy read, but really, it is anything but.  In this short space, as the review blurb from The Detroit Free Press says, the author has managed to

 "create the most vivid of fictional realms, the inner world of an Everyman battered by the cruel and seemingly random hand of fate..." 

and has effectively "magnified" the horror of this "Everyman's" story in "the quietness of its telling."  If I could organize words around my thoughts like this reviewer, I would be saying the same thing.

The Stones Cry Out recounts the story of Tsuyoshi Manase, who, as we learn at the outset had become a "fanatic collector of stones."  Before realizing what would become his passion,  Manase had been a soldier during World War II, and had found himself wandering through the jungle before finding a remote cave in Northern Leyte.   When we first meet Manase, we are told that he remembers very little about his experiences in that cave or about how he came to find himself in a POW camp after having been captured.  After a year and a half Manase was repatriated and had started on the road to becoming a successful businessman, during which time his "recollections of war began to fade."   He began to view his war memories as a " brief glance into a dark hole through a window."  But what he does not forget  is a terrible fear of isolation, and more importantly,  the words once spoken by a lance corporal who had been in the cave with him, telling Manase that the "tiny pebble you pick up during a walk is a cross-section of a drama that began some five billion years ago." What stuck with Manase was what the lance corporal had said next:

"That little pebble is a condensed history of the universe that keeps the eternal cycle of matter locked in its ephemeral form." 

 It will be these words, which "lodged themselves in his heart," that will drive Manase to begin collecting stones.  As the years go by he marries, becomes very successful and has two sons; however, he finds himself becoming more isolated and more detached from his wife and children because of his passion for collecting. He also begins to find himself in situations that sort of trigger nightmares and memories and in this way, we learn little by little what actually happened to him in that cave.  When tragedy strikes his family, Manase will have to come to terms with the fact that not only does the darkness of his own personal trauma often return "like phantoms to the surface of his memory" but that it also has the potential to be passed on to take root in the physical  present, sort of infecting all of those around him in different ways.   Consider this idea in human terms and it makes for one hell of tragic story.

 Obviously I'm just sort of outlining basic plot here,  but what happens in The Stones Cry Out is best experienced rather than simply read about. This book moves well beyond simply plot to explore how memories of trauma are never really "frozen" or "locked," but rather like the crystals in the rocks that Manase studies so intently, seem to have  "an inner urge to grow," even though the "urge had been forcibly repressed by some sort of magic keeping them locked inside this narrow space."   The question is this: "if that spell was somehow broken, would not the minerals burst into movement?"  How that plays out I won't reveal, but if ever there was a book to read that highlights the human psychological costs of war, it's this one.

It's a sad but beautiful book and one I recommend.

*Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki

9780143106036
Penguin Classics, 2010
originally published as こころ, 1914
translated by Meredith McKinney
238 pp

paperback

This novel would probably still be languishing on my shelves had it not been for an online friend who, reading it with a group,  suggested I read it along with her. Great idea, because it also gave me the opportunity to read yet one more book I've owned forever that's just been languishing on my shelves unread. 

  Kokoro is,as I discovered, one of those novels where a second reading and a bit of research can completely change what you thought about it after the first time through. The second read was spurred by 1) discovering that a scholarly controversy had arisen over this book and 2) deciding to pick up and read another translation along with an introduction that explained said controversy. After much time to focus, think and absorb, well, the second time around actually clarified things I had trouble zooming in on after the first time. 



(the second time through): trans. Edwin McClellan
Peter Owen Publishers, 2007
9780720612974

Structured in three parts, the novel opens with the narrator meeting and attaching himself to an elder man he calls Sensei, and is soon "yearning for the possibilities of all he had to offer." However, Sensei, who reveals that he distrusts humanity, is reticent to open up about himself, and our narrator often finds himself frustrated when, as he says, "I failed to gain what I sought from him in matters of the mind." However, Sensei also reveals that while he is "suspicious" of most people, he realizes that the narrator seems "too straightforward and open for that," and that Sensei, before he dies, wants to "have trusted just one person." If the younger man could "be that person, ... sincerely in earnest," from his heart, then he will reveal to him the story of his past and leave nothing out, but not right away, since "It requires a suitable moment." What he wants in return is left unspoken for the moment. Eventually the narrator will learn all, but not before part two, which finds him back home with his parents. While there because his father's health is failing, he abandons his own family at a critical moment due to some disturbing news from Sensei, which sets up part three, where all is revealed. Sadly, since everything sort of turns on the revelations in part three, I have to keep silent, since to tell would be to spoil, but this is actually the part where we come to understand Sensei and where we learn exactly what it is he expects from the narrator -- it isn't expressly stated in so many words, but trust me, it's there. 

I wish I could make this post less cryptic, but there's a lot happening in this novel that a reader really needs to experience and sort out on his/her own. Look for thematic elements such as the formation of bonds, relationships, betrayal, individual vs. social responsibility, love, and above all, what it really means to bare or entrust one's soul/psyche to an outsider. What I will say is that after the second reading, Kokoro became an even darker book than it was the first time through, which I didn't think was possible.  Interesting factoid: the use of hiragana for the word kokoro (こころ)  rather than the kanji (心;) has,  according to Tony Rayns, who wrote the liner notes for the dvd,

"the effect of diffusing the meaning, making it seem less clear-cut and more open to semantic and philosophical nuances. For Soseki, this was related to the sense that the Japanese national psyche was changing; he saw an emptiness in Japan's kokoro brought on by external pressures from the West and internal pressures to assimilate them."  

Highly recommended for people who enjoy Japanese literature or for people who want to start reading Japanese fiction; it probably won't take everyone two readings, but I got a lot more out of it by doing it that way. 

So, having read the novel I had to see the film as well. Big differences abound here, which are covered a bit in the dvd liner notes. As just one example,  the movie "simplifies" Soseki's novel, "reorders its plot and eliminates some of its subtext while playing up the homosexual implications that are merely latent in the original."  I have to say that since the subject doesn't actually come up labeled as such in the novel, I was surprised to see a scene in this movie where Shizu (Mrs. Sensei) starts wondering out loud whether or not there's some sort of attraction between her husband and Hioki  (the novel's narrator, given a name here) which Hioki quickly denies with an "it's not what your thinking!" response.  Much of the story is revealed through flashbacks, which I think really is the best way to have done it, since so much of the novel turns on what happened in the past.  I've seen people criticize this approach used here, but I really don't see how else it could have been done. To tell it in a linear-narrative, chronological style would have wrecked things (as it would have in the novel as well).   While the movie is certainly  worth watching, the book is much, much better. There are movie critiques everywhere so I'll leave it there. 

book & movie -- definite yesses, but definitely read the book first.  

fiction from Japan