Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out, 1993

Tsuyoshi Manase is a haunted World War Two veteran who received his first lesson in geology from a dying Japanese soldier in a cave in the Philippines. After the war ends he indulges his passion for collecting stones, runs a small bookstore, marries unhappily and fathers two sons, but how he struggles with his memories of the war ends up shaping the present and the tragic destiny of his family. This was Okuizumi’s first novel to be translated into English. It’s delicate and sorrowful with elements of strangeness, particularly in how Manase’s memories, dreams and reality all blur in such a way that he never quite gets a grip on his life as his family falls apart. Okuizumi writes elegantly and he’s clearly meditated on the story he’s telling, although he requires a bit of patience from the reader as he ties up Manase’s inner story with his family life and the world beyond. A quietly powerful book.  PY

•  The Stones Cry Out won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 1994.

MORE ON HIKARU OKUIZUMI : WIKIPEDIA

Haruki Murakami, after the quake, 2000

For some enigmatic reason Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be devoid of capital letters and all in lower case. The six stories are all set in February 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the story ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, the rest are very down-to-earth stories and all are told in the third person – again, a departure from previous style. Murakami has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. ‘Landscape with Flatiron’ cleverly parallels a famous Jack London short story, but for me the best of all is the story ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. There are undercurrents of violence present in this collection, much like the seismic dangers that are always present but held at bay in the ground beneath our feet.  PY

MORE ON HARUKI MURAKAMI : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE   |  WIKIPEDIA

Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes and Earrings, 2003

A character study of a young Japanese woman who inexplicably enters into the world of tattoos, body modification and a dysfunctional ménage-à-trois with two murderous male friends, one of whom has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and seems to live for opportunities to inflict pain. While this is a deliberately harsh work about the alienation of Japanese youth culture, whatever big statements are being made somehow get lost in translation, and for my money Kanehara, writing at age 21, only just makes the grade for descriptive writing, at least in English. Snakes and Earrings often feels like a fantasy of what the big bad adult world must be like to a curious teenager, which might explain its cult classic status in Japan. More than actually drawing a foreign reader in, I felt the writing was actually keeping such a reader on the outside of this world, being told a story of a way of being that one does not have the necessary privileges to access on a more sympathetic level. Hence I found the novel somewhat disappointing, but then the closer one lives to this particular counterculture the more meaning it probably takes on.  PY

•  Snakes and Earrings won both the Subaru Literary Prize and the Akutagawa Prize in 2003.

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Jan Blensdorf, My Name is Sei Shonagon, 2004

The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon’s 11th century Pillow Book, it’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It’s a ‘spiegel im spiegel’ of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of ‘Sei’ and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly fearful of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that’s been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not quite as engaging as I’d hoped for.  PY

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Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1963

Thirteen year-old Noboru spies on his widowed mother Fusako with her new lover Ryuji, a rugged sailor on shore leave in Yokohama. Without a father he’s become dispassionate and dysfunctional, part of a sinister group of schoolboys who can’t find meaning in anything and who eventually draw up their own plans for Ryuji, based on the sadistic treatment they’d previously dished out to a harmless kitten. It’s Noboru’s misanthropic world view in one so young that makes this a definitively perverse book, one that exhibits an almost tangible disrespect for those who show no strength, as when Ryuji finally exchanges his rigorous life at sea for a soft life on land and therefore must suffer the consequences. This broadly echoes Mishima’s own tough and exacting expectations of other people, and his ambivalent sexuality finds a quiet voice here too though it doesn’t detract from what is otherwise a well-plotted, lightly atmospheric and economically told story.  PY

MORE ON YUKIO MISHIMA :  WIKIPEDIA

Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988

— In these brief and intense tales, all aimed at some heightened perception or ineffable truth and many based on dreams expressed or implied, we find loneliness, love, the passage of time, and death. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories captures the astonishing variety and complexity of form, setting, character, voice, and tone of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary talents.

Seventy miniature short stories that Kawabata wrote between 1923 and 1972. It’s said the essence of Kawabata’s writing can be found in these brief episodes in Japanese lives more so than in his novels, but in truth they often feel like fragments of larger stories that Kawabata may have discarded then stripped down to their absolute minimum. Many end with a character staring into the distance, perhaps wondering something, or with an unresolved issue still hanging uncomfortably in the reader’s mind, but there’s also a sense of give-and-take here because while Kawabata often goes for the minimalist effect he’s also careful not to remove the points and markers that can give his characters an often luminous form. It’s interesting to read short stories composed differently from the way we are used to experiencing them, though the reader may still be left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with many, although those written nearer the end of Kawabata’s career are rounded off with more depth: best of all is the brief, impressive ghost story ‘Immortality’, the imaginative flourish of ‘Snow’, and ‘Gleanings from Snow Country’, loosely connected to his famous novel Snow Country. Altogether gentle and enjoyable, but frequently too slight.  PY

MORE ON YASUNARI KAWABATA :  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled / Hard Luck, 1999

Two novellas that explore how two slightly unconventional Japanese women react to situations after people close to them have died, the first discovering how her awareness of the spiritual world has opened up, the second discovering how the circumstances of her late sister’s life has now given her own a new direction. Yoshimoto focuses on seemingly irrevelant details that at first make the stories feel too mundane until their importance to the development of the story is revealed. The first tale is quietly unsettling, the second an understated gem of quiet observation.  PY

MORE ON BANANA YOSHIMOTO : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Sōseki Natsume, The 210th Day, 1915

Two old friends, Kei and Roku, decide to walk up Mount Aso, a rumbling volcano that is actively spitting out smoke and dust. It’s nothing more than a slightly mad and comic adventure, and one that offers no point other than to provide the lively exchanges of banter as they cajole each other into not chickening out. Sōseki was a giant of Japanese literature, in his time of the same stature as Dickens in England, and of his fourteen novels only a handful are currently in print in English of which this is an entirely new addition. The 210th Day is considered a rather slight work for him, being composed almost entirely of fast and snappy dialogue, but that’s also precisely why it’s so vital and engaging. Very enjoyable.  PY

Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, 1986

In post-war Japan, the successful artist Masuji Ono was a man who once played a small part in the rise of Japanese militarism, but years later, with a more contrite political climate and a daughter looking for an approving husband, he believes that what the Japanese are referring to as ‘the past’ is now casting a shadow over the present. The pivotal events on which this book turns are small, but in those microcosms the receding background of the damaged psyche of an entire nation becomes apparent. Plotwise there is little more to this story, but each page reads like an incremental tightening of the noose as Ono, a rather vain but upright man, believes he must head off the consequences of his past actions as his daughter’s marriage prospects become paramount. With some marvellous and sensitive conversational sequences, this is a masterfully delicate and closely observed book. Recommended.   PY

•  An Artist of the Floating World was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year.

Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine, 2002

Many present day Japanese American families still feel stigmatised and dishonoured by Japan’s attack on their adopted country, and while it may not be Julie Otsuka’s intention to attempt to heal those wounds her clear target instead is the less-than-memorable experience of Japanese immigrants during World War 2, interned in desert camps by a process which included separation of families, with their family names deliberately, and shamefully, being replaced by numbers.

When the Emperor was Divine is fiction but based on Otsuka’s own family history. The focus of the book is the forced displacement from their California home of a Japanese mother, daughter and son, and their dislocated, developing triangular relationship. The story is sparingly told from all their points of view but the family’s own focus is clearly their absent father, previously arrested on no charge and interned elsewhere. Years of isolation roll by with life outside the camp mostly a mystery; telling moments accumulate and are recorded, and with the war over the family is finally reunited in bitterness against those who imprisoned them.

What this book benefits from most is an understated style which fits well with the theme of looking back on two different situations both in their own way far from ideal: this was a time before America could admit its treatment of their innocent Japanese population was excessively harsh, just as it was also a time before Japanese treatment of their PoWs came to light and Emperor Hirohito was forced to admit that he was, after all, a mere mortal. Otsuka’s lack of sentimentality about these unfortunate pasts gives this book much character in its evident restraint, and is a clear window into an unjustifiably forgotten episode in America’s wartime history and the immigrant Japanese experience of it.   PY

Dennis Bock, The Ash Garden, 2001

The Ash Garden is impressive though, it’s fair to say, challenging and certainly not straightforward. It explores a question often posited and explored: what happens when a Hiroshima survivor comes face to face with one of the ‘perpetrators’ of the Bomb? In that respect The Ash Garden is rooted very much in reality, and takes some necessary liberties with actual events, such as the meetings on US television that first explored this idea, and which are revisited in a slightly fictionalised version for this book (John Hersey’s Hiroshima provides the factual version).

There is a twist ahead, however, and one that is so fundamental and unexpected that it might not please every reader – it almost shook the story apart for me, but what held it together was the subsequent and important changes the author makes to the relationships between the three main characters. If that makes the characters sound contrived, that’s because they possibly are, though Bock never loses sight of the inescapable history that drives the people he’s writing about, or their fundamental essence. By the end of the story they feel real enough, though I still can’t decide if the twist to their relationship is entirely justified or necessary. The reader just has to hang on and see where it ends up, though it’s certainly a journey worth taking.   PY

•  The Ash Garden was shortlisted for both the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.