Worth Wile, PC Wren

1937 Club

I collected PC Wrens in my teens and twenties, old, heavy papered, clothbound editions from John Murray’s “Imperial Library” mostly, though Dad found me a Beau Geste with a dustjacket for one of my birthdays, and have carted them around with me ever since. Now they live on a bottom shelf with my Maigrets, Saints (Simon Templar), and William books.

Last year I reread Beau Ideal, my favourite, for another project, so I was pleased when I decided to take part in the 1937 Club to find that Worth Wile qualified. Though, as I got going, I discovered that the story I thought I remembered belonged to another book altogether.

I was expecting a story about an engaged couple in Pakistan who ‘jump the gun’. The man dies and the woman is left to bring up their son unmarried and alone. Instead, Worth Wile is the story of officers in the British Army stationed in the ‘North West Frontier’ – the mountain country where present day Pakistan borders Afghanistan.

“The two main gateways on the North West Frontier are the Khyber and Bolan Passes. Since ancient times, the Indian subcontinent has been repeatedly invaded through these northwestern routes. With the expansion of the Russian Empire into Central Asia in the twentieth century, stability of the Frontier and control of Afghanistan became cornerstones of defensive strategy for British India.” (wiki)

There is also a love story, of sorts. I’ve said before that Wren isn’t very good at woman stuff.

The first character we meet is John Vere-Vaughan, a flying officer who gets shot down while on a bombing raid over Afghanistan – the shock on rereading Wren is how familiar his 1920s stories sound in the 2020s – is captured and held for ransom.

Glancing around, Vere-Vaughan noted with approval that female suffrage had evidently not reached this part of the Afghan Border; for the ladies who had spat upon him, flung mud and stones at him, and endeavoured to get at him with knife or talon, remained at the compound gate, whence they watched the proceedings with savage eyes

Two of his captors are apparently British officers in disguise living as Afghan tribal fighters. After 100 pages we lose track of Vere-Vaughan for a while.

Part II begins with Richard Wendover, the son and grandson of Generals who have spent their whole careers fighting in India, dreaming of the same for himself; and with his neighbour, Sybil Ffoulkes, “A good kid. Pity she wasn’t a boy”, daughter of another General in India, now retired. Sybil, then 11 or 12, has already proposed marriage to Wendover once (unsuccessfully), and despite their being mostly apart for the next couple of decades, continues in that determination throughout the book.

“Years later ..” a third significant character is introduced. Young Prince Nikolas Bailitzin, nephew of the Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James, proposes to Sybil and is refused. When we meet him again more years later (and on the other side of the Russian Revolution) in Afghanistan he has remade himself as an agent of the Soviet Secret Service.

I can see I am leading myself into just telling you the story, which as you’re unlikely to read it for yourself, is not entirely a bad thing, but I’ll be brief.

Wendover’s promising career is brought to a crashing halt when he is found drunk and asleep in charge of a fort he is meant to be defending. He is summarily court martialled and disappears; much later turning up as an Afghan tribal fighter. Much, much later his friends work out he was drugged by a ‘Eurasian’ – ie. a fellow officer who was NOT WHITE.

Sybil spends years trying to find out what happened; is eventually told Wendover has been seen on the British side of the border in his role as an Afghan; and wrangles an invitation to stay with yet another general, the North West Frontier is teeming with generals, who has a daughter her age.

Wendover gets a job in Afghanistan teaching Indian culture to Russian spies; is recognised, imprisoned and tortured by Bailitzin, but of course escapes the night before he is to be executed.

Veere-Vaughan makes his way back into the narrative; is rescued by Wendover. Wendover’s court martial is shown to have been illegal. Then just when he has been accepted back into the army, and – pretty unwillingly – into the arms of Sybil, he disappears again back into Afghanistan. There’s more, but the reviewers’ code forbids me to discuss endings.

Wren, it must be said, is in favour of British (and French) colonialism, and consequently his books must be read through the twin prisms of Boys Own heroism and the white man’s burden. How much of that rubbed off on teenage/twentyish me? A bit probably, it was after all the culture I was brought up in, in the 1950s and 60s, and that my father and his father were brought up in and wholeheartedly endorsed.

On the other hand, by 1971 I was a draft resister and my father and I were not speaking. And yet I still collected and read these books. It probably took me ten or maybe even twenty years to begin questioning both the sexism and the white man’s burden. And it is one thing to be aware of them theoretically and quite another to root them out.

Wren was employed in the Indian Education Service from 1903 to 1917 (and may have spent up to a year at the beginning of WWI in an Indian regiment). His first posting was in Karachi – ie. at the opposite end of present day Pakistan from the NW Frontier – but I can’t see where he spent subsequent years.

In any case he appears to have been a close and not always unsympathetic observer of Muslim culture. In this book, as in his North African French Foreign Legion books, his Muslim men can be both heroes and very villainous villains. Let me end with a quote from the one page I remembered to bookmark:

“It’s a sacred and solemn duty of one of these Pathans to kill a man who flirts with his wife as it is to say his prayers. It’s as much his duty to kill the man who has done that, or has killed his father or brother in the blood feud, or has blackened his face in some other way, as it is our duty to feed and clothe and educate our children. How should we like it, if an alien race, who were in a position to do so, hanged us every time we committed the offence of of feeding and clothing and educating our children?”

How should we like it indeed? Still not something we consider enough as we continue to colonise, rather than live alongside, Aboriginal Australians.

.

PC Wren, Worth Wile, John Murray, London, 1937. 420pp (Pictured: First Canadian edition, 1937, with dustjacket)

Desire, Haruki Murakami

I don’t keep a list of Murakami titles in my head, so last time I was in the bookshop I saw this, it looked new, was cheap, $7.99, I bought it, and it was only when I began reading – there’s no table of contents – that I realised it’s a collection of short stories, and extracts according to the small print on the title page, from earlier releases, put out by Vintage in 2107.

I have Murakami’s latest ‘proper’ collection, First Person Singular (2020), which I put down for some reason, but I’ve started Desire now , let’s get it out of the way (there was no first pub. info for each story either, so I’ve looked it up)

The Second Bakery Attack (1985), supposedly a sequel to Bakery Attack (1981), first published in English in Playboy.

Years earlier the narrator and his friend, starving, had gone to rob a bakery, but it had turned weird. Now two weeks married, he is starving again, in the middle of the night. His wife says that he is cursed, and she with him, and there is only one way to lift it…

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, originally published in The Elephant Vanishes (1993)

The narrator passes the 100% perfect-for-him girl in the street, sees her coming, cannot think of the right words to say, they pass without speaking. Days later, he thinks of the story he should have told her.

Birthday Girl, from the anthology Birthday Stories (2002)

“She waited tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday …” She, it turns out, is the narrator’s, wife years later. Something out of the ordinary happens and she gets to make a wish. Now, she has an Audi, two children, a CPA husband, the leisure to play tennis. Did the wish come true? She won’t say.

Samsa in Love, originally published in The New Yorker 28 Oct 2013. I can’t see that it’s been published in an English language collection.

When I was at this point, I re-read to here and thought that’s a pretty bitsy ‘review’, and all the stories the same. First person narrator who ran a Tokyo bar in the 1970s instead of going to college, has or hears a funny experience and over ten or so pages tells us about it. And no, they don’t form a cohesive whole.

Then I got to: “He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” He’s in a bare bedroom, naked, hungry. But the penny (or copek) didn’t drop until a couple of pages later: “Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. how ill-formed it was… a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!) ..”

Samsa finds the house deserted. There’s food on the table which he makes short work of. He’s cold; the best he can manage in the way of clothes is a dressing gown. A locksmith calls, a hunchback girl who must wave her arms about to stop her breasts falling out of her brassiere. She comments on the bulge pushing out his gown; he swears he just wants to talk; she leaves, to brave the troops and tanks in the street. But if she can, she will be back.

A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism, 1989, from the collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“I was born in 1949.” And here we are back with the first person narrator etc, etc. reminiscing about being a student in “the sixties”. “Let me tell you a little bit about the young girls back then. And us fellows with our nearly brand new genitals.” Do I really have to keep going (sigh…)? But it’s not about him, but about a school mate, class captain type who went out with the cheer leader type, and a story the class captain tells him about love and making out, and not really a ‘sixties’ story at all. More fifties really.

And that’s it. The end.

.

Haruki Murakami, Desire, Vintage, London, 2017. 110pp

I wrote this post two or three days ago then set off with an overwidth road train load to Paraburdoo,1500 kms north. Daylight travel only, of which there’s only about 10 hours mid-winter, 11 maybe by the time I reached the tropics. So last night I had to pull up between towns and between phone towers for 13 hours sans internet. Still, I knocked off 100 pages of Praiseworthy.

I have another load booked for as soon as I get back to Perth, so I may be off air for a little while. Depends if I can write something Sunday.

Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami

Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) is the ninth of Murakami’s 15 novels/novellas, coming 20 years after the first, when the author was about 50. And at the height of his powers? I’m not sure. This is certainly not one of my favourites. I like the first three – Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) for their grungieness; and I like the later novels – After Dark (2004) and 1Q84 (2010) for their flights of fancy. Indeed they are probably my favourites.

I’m in no way an expert on Murakami, indeed I came to him late, and in particular I have not read the five novels between A Wild Sheep Chase and Sputnik Sweetheart. Still, the impression I get is that Murakami in this novel was building up to an idea (or ideas) of parallel worlds which he handled much better in later works.

I can barely write “parallel worlds” without thinking/writing “therefore Science Fiction”. Certainly, if Atwood wrote or implied “parallel worlds” (which is all Murakami does) I wouldn’t hesitate. But Atwood writes from firmly within the traditions of English Lit. and Murakami doesn’t. If he fits anywhere well it is within European Surrealism, though of course SF has always had its own surrealist stream. But what streams exist within Japanese Lit, I can only guess.

Lit Professor and blogger Jessica Schad Manuel says (I think !) that Murakami is rendering the products of the unconscious real. Certainly, many aspects of his later fiction work like dreams. What I am saying is that they are not alternative environments for exploring human behaviour, which is how I think of SF.

Sputnik Satellite is dry, and although the character Sumire seems to have slipped out of this world, it has none of the poetry and dreaminess of After Dark. The narrator K is a (male) school teacher whose one divergence from conformity is his platonic friendship with Sumire, a struggling writer

Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel – wild, cool, dissolute. She’d stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-framed Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20/20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversize herringbone coat from a second-hand shop and a pair of rough work boots.

K is in love with Sumire, though she would laugh at him if he said so, and so he sleeps with other women, with the mother of one of his students eventually. K and Sumire have flats in different parts of, I presume, Tokoyo – I miss being able to follow the geography, both for its own sake and for the class clues that are there when a writer uses as his location a city you know well. Sumire’s flat is tiny and full of books, so mostly she comes round to his place and he cooks her meals, which she often forgets to do for herself.

She writes and writes, beginnings of novels, ends of novels, parts of novels, but never beginning, middle, end. Scraps most and brings what’s left to K to read. “My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about.” But somehow she is unable to infuse her scenes with a life that brings them all together.

Sumire meets Mui, a rich, older woman, a wine importer, at a wedding reception and is invited by her to dinner. When Sumire later phones K in the middle of the night, from the phonebox in the street outside her flat, it is to tell him she’s in love and can she come round.

Suumire arrived at my apartment a little before five… Her hair was short in a stylish cut … She wore a light cardigan over a short-sleeve navy blue dress and a pair of enamel, medium-high heels. She even had stockings on

Mui has told her that she, Sumire, is not ready to be a novelist yet, and has offered her a job as her assistant. If I haven’t made it clear, Sumire is in love with Mui, who maybe realises, but does not want/is unable to get physical.

The story potters along, told in K’s dry school teacher style. Sumire does her job, polishes up her languages, reads. Her writing dries up. K helps her to move to another suburb further away, closer to her job. Then he gets a long letter from Rome. Mui and Sumire are in Europe on a business trip. Shorter letters follow as the travellers visit vineyards and attend concerts around Italy and France. In the last, a guy they have met over dinner tells them he has a house on a Greek island and they would be doing him a favour if they stayed in it for a while. I should meet this guy.

A little later K gets a phone call from Mui. She’s on the Greek island. Sumire has disappeared. Will he come. He’s in the last two weeks of summer break. He flies to Greece, makes his way to the island.

We’re at p.90 of 230. For the remainder of the novel K searches the island without success, returns to Tokyo (sleeps with his student’s mother). Sumire has vanished without trace. Murakami manages to imply that Sumire is both gone and not gone. That is his genius. As I said, not my favourite Murakami, but definitely worth reading.

.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, first pub. 1999. English translation, Penguin, London, 2001 by Philip Gabriel. 229pp

My other reviews:
Wind/Pinball (here)
After Dark (here)

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

‘Research’ indicates Yoko Ogawa (1962- ) must be one of Japan’s most accomplished writers. Until I picked this book up I hadn’t heard of her, though quite a number of you obviously had, from your comments when you saw I was reading it, no doubt from its shortlisting for the 2020 Booker.

Wikipedia says Ogawa “has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction” only some of which have been translated into English (9 maybe). I’m most impressed by her co-writing An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics, which sadly doesn’t seem to be one of the ones translated.

My first impression of The Memory Police was that it was both slow and dry, and it may have taken me till halfway to get over that. By the end I was entranced.

Is it Science Fiction? Most of the reviews say it is, and I have very little (ok, no) knowledge of the SF tradition in Japan. It is certainly SF in the way that Murakami is SF; which is to say surreal rather than sciencey. One reviewer draws parallels with 1984 and Brave New World. I guess the Memory Police of the title are a bit Brave New World-ish, but for me the dystopian element was minor.

The basis of the story is that a young woman writer living on one of Japan’s lesser islands, in a small village on the coast, a bus and train ride from the regional centre, is writing a novel about a young woman. We see excerpts from that novel, they are not labelled but are in slightly different type – Courier rather than Times, maybe, and I didn’t pick them up straight away.

The story of the novel we are reading is that things are disappearing, that most people quickly forget what it is that has disappeared, and that those who cannot forget are rounded up and interned by the Memory Police.

The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. When I opened my eyes, I could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The sign of a disappearance. … It took patience to figure out what was gone.

Then I spotted a small brown creature flying high up in the sky. It was plump with what appeared to be a tuft of white feathers at its breast … I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word “bird” – everything.

The young woman’s father, an ornithologist, has died. Her mother, a sculptor, is one of those who don’t forget, she shows the then little girl keepsakes, relics long gone, but then she too is gone, or taken by the Police. Her old nanny dies, and so she is alone in the house, her only friend the old man, the nanny’s husband, who lives in a boat stranded on the beach. A ferryman whose ferry has disappeared.

The story of the novel being written is that a girl is in a class learning to type. Lessons are in a church with a clock tower. She becomes the lover of the young man teaching them. Her voice goes away and she can only speak to him by typing. And then the typewriter seizes up. Her lover takes her up to the room behind the clock, a room full of broken, seized typewriters …

A family, friends of the young woman writer’s parents, are rememberers. They come to her, bringing some of her mother’s sculptures, on their way into hiding.

The editor, R, who is working with her on her novel, also remembers. The old man proposes that they hide him, that she hides him, in a space below her study floor. R comes, leaving behind a wife and baby. Every night she brings him food and pages from her writing. They discuss what has disappeared. Her tries to convince her of the importance of remembering even a small part of what has been lost. Of course she is all he sees and they become close.

Then novels disappear. She gives R her manuscript, which already has no meaning for her, and some books selected almost at random. The townsfolk gather to burn books in great bonfires which burn all night. The library itself is torched.

I followed the arc of the last book as it tumbled through the air – and suddenly I realized that long ago, I had stood at this same window with my father and looked out at a similar sight… “A bird.” I remembered. But this memory, too, was soon erased by the flames, leaving nothing behind but the burning night.

Now she cannot write. But R persuades her to keep trying, to write a word, a line, a sentence.

Disappearances continue. Her novel comes to an end. This novel comes to an end.

.

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, first pub. 1994. Translated from the original Japanese, Stephen Snyder, Vintage, London, 2019. 274pp

The Cabuliwallah, Rabindranath Tagore

This post is by way of being a thank you to Brona of This Reading Life. A few days ago she put up a review of a book in the Perveen Mistry murder mystery series which is set in 1920s India, and in the discussion which followed she “highly recommended” I read Rabindranath Tagore.

Not a name I’d ever heard before, so who is he? Brona’s consideration for my ignorance extended to linking to Wikipedia. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian, a Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta, “a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter … Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal.” Ok, enough quoting.

Tagore was well-known world-wide, his works were available in English, and he apparently visited all the world’s (habitable) continents except Australia. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first “non-European” to be so honoured. I wonder if that means the first person not resident in Europe or is just a polite way of saying the first non-white.

Brona’s Perveen Mistry novel was set during the royal tour of India by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) in 1921/22 (another blogger has photographs) and in the context of Ghandi’s ‘passive resistance’ movement. Tagore was apparently a supporter of Independence, but was inclined towards world peace rather than nationalism.

The Cabuliwallah is the first short story from Stories from Tagore (1918) which appears to be an English language reader for Indian students.

The present Indian story-book avoids some at least of these impediments [the unfamiliarity of stories set in England]. The surroundings described in it are those of the students’ everyday life; the sentiments and characters are familiar…

Two of the longest stories in this book—”Master Mashai” and “The Son of Rashmani”—are reproduced in English for the first time. The rest of the stories have been taken, with slight revision, from two English volumes entitled “The Hungry Stones” and “Mashi.” A short paragraph has been added from the original Bengali at the end of the story called “The Postmaster.”

Preface

The Cabuliwallah of the title is an Afghani pedlar, working the streets of Calcutta. He attracts the notice of Mini, the author’s 5 year old daughter, and the author must leave the hero and heroine of the adventure novel he is writing swinging from a rope while he goes out into the street to talk to the pedlar. “I made some small purchases, and a conversation began about Abdurrahman, the Russians, the English, and the Frontier Policy.”

Soon Rahmun (the Cabuliwallah) and Mini are firm friends, to be found at some time every day in conversation. They have a little joke about the phrase “father-in-law’s house” which for a strictly brought up girl, which Mini is not, means the home to which her husband will take her; and which when applied to the pedlar is a slang term for jail.

Sadly, one day the pedlar really is taken off to jail, falsely accused by a customer seeking to avoid their debts. For eight years he is out of the author and his daughter’s thoughts. But at the end of that time he returns, to resume the friendship, only to find it is Mini’s wedding day (at 13!).

She is called, and comes, but is too shy to speak.

I remembered the day when the Cabuliwallah and my Mini had first met, and I felt sad. When she had gone, Rahmun heaved a deep sigh, and sat down on the floor. The idea had suddenly come to him that his daughter too must have grown in this long time, and that he would have to make friends with her anew. Assuredly he would not find her as he used to know her. And besides, what might not have happened to her in these eight years?

The marriage-pipes sounded, and the mild autumn sun streamed round us. But Rahmun sat in the little Calcutta lane, and saw before him the barren mountains of Afghanistan.

This being a reader for schools there is at the end a short list of words to be considered (mostly pointing back to their Latin roots, which gives you some idea of what young Indians were taught. But then I suppose at that time they needed Greek and Latin to get into Oxford and Cambridge).

And at the end of the book there are notes, beginning –

“The Cabuliwallah” is one of the most famous of the Poet’s “Short Stories.” It has been often translated. The present translation is by the late Sister Nivedita, and her simple, vivid style should be noticed by the Indian student reader. It is a good example of modern English, with its short sentences, its careful choice of words, and its luminous clearness of meaning.

Cabuliwallah. A man from Cabul or Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

.

Rabindranath Tagore, Stories from Tagore, Macmillan, London, 1918. [Project Gutenberg]

An I-Novel, Minae Mizumura

Why did I pick up/purchase – with my birthday gift voucher – this book? Because it was shelved next to Murakami? Well, that is how I came to see it; because it looked exotic, maybe; because I responded to the advertising on the back cover –

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists, acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skillful storytelling

probably; because it brought to mind Jessica Gaitán Johannesson’s How We Are Translated, which I very much enjoyed, definitely.

An I-Novel was originally published in 1995 under the title Shishōsetsu from left to right. The word shishōsetsu designates a confessional autobiographical genre – the I-novel – that has played a key role in modern Japanese literature. The original, based on the author’s experiences growing up in the United States and Japan, freely mixes natural American English with Japanese.

Translator’s note

According to Wikipedia “the first I-novels are believed to be The Broken Commandment, written in 1906 by Tōson Shimazaki, and Futon (The Quilt) written by Katai Tayama in 1907.”

At the time the novel is set, the 1990s, Minae, in her thirties, and her sister Nanae, two years older, have been living in the US, in and around New York and various university towns, since they were 10 and 12, when their father’s work as a manager for a Japanese company took him there and he subsequently transitioned to “local hire”. Much of the novel consists of Minae and Nanae talking, on the phone, in Japanese, but quite often using American expressions, which are rendered in a different typeface.

“Right? Mother could dress up all she liked to go to the Metropolitan Opera, and for all we knew the whole time people were looking at her and thinking, Oh dear, here’s another Oriental, ruining the atmosphere.” I opened my mouth to speak, but Nanae went on, “How would that woman know the first thing about opera? …”

Mizumura collaborated on the translation, but it is necessarily different from the original as we have much less Japanese than the Japanese have English. If you look at the page from the Japanese edition below, you’ll see that the original was more or less 50/50.. What I haven’t shown is that every now and then there is a black and white illustration, full page, with a cryptic caption – ‘University campus’, ‘Suburban house’, and so on. A Japanese thing?

Page from the original Japanese edition. You can see that the Japanese ideographs are a mixture of kanji (dense) and hiragana which apparently is phonetic. (Minae is speaking to Big Mac, an American who lectures in Japanese).

---

… other times I wrote a mixture of kanji and hiragana. [gives examples] The rounded soft loveliness of hiragana was like the shape of a beautiful woman now reaching up, now bending down as she went about her work in the home.

My experience of Japanese in literature is limited to early William Gibson, Murakami and Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings), all of whom have a certain edginess. Minae Mizumura on the other hand, for all the experimentation in her writing, is decidedly middle class, in her life, in her attitudes. So at one level this is the story of a studious, relatively lonely girl at school; never fully engaging with life in the US, reading all the Japanese classics at home; always planning to return to a Japan which seems less familiar each time she visits; moving on to college and then to grad school and working in a less than motivated fashion towards a PhD in … French!

She has various, mostly Japanese boyfriends, but even the most recent and most constant has returned to begin ascending the corporate ladder back home; and she is left with university life (she’s at an unnamed Ivy League university outside New York) which she avoids; her sister on the end of a telephone, at a time when long distance calls cost money, from her artist’s loft in SoHo; her mother run off with a younger man to Singapore; and her father in a home on Long Island, declining into senility.

And she finds that she, the youngest, has ended up head of the family.

Nanae is superficially more rebellious, wearing bright clothes, short skirts, coloured hair, becoming promiscuous, taking up sculpture. But as they talk and talk and talk Minae becomes aware that Nanae is, like her, both unhappy and dreaming of a return to life in Japan.

However, it is the other side of this work which makes it especially interesting – the discussions of writing in Japanese and English; Minae’s life-long engagement with the Japanese canon; elements of Japanese writing that an outsider can only suspect: the conflict between duty and feeling (giri and ninjō) – she references (Japanese author) Sōseki; the traditions of the I-novel, which in English may be considered autofiction, but which may also contain elements of “aspects of society”.

Aspects of society indeed. Minae and Nanae work their way down to what it is that makes America so uncomfortable for them, and the answer is, as it always is, race. The Japanese see themselves as special, but Americans are unable to distinguish them from Koreans or Chinese, they are ‘Oriental’ and in the end, they are ‘colored’.

Shouldn’t Japanese people at least be aware of what the West thought of us historically – as much as the West had ever bothered to think of us in return? Wouldn’t we then no longer be so self-deluded, telling ourselves that we, unlike other Asians, were essentially Western?

It is an interesting aspect of this book that it was written when Japan was at the height of its economic power – as were the William Gibson cyberpunk novels – and that Minae is conscious of this and discusses it. With China now so prominent it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall that there ever was such a time.

Both as a coming of age in a strange land, and as writing about writing, this is a striking work; and yes I enjoyed it and recommend it.

.

Minae Mizumura, An I-Novel, Columbia University Press, New York, 2021 (first pub. in Japanese, 1995). Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 325 pp.

---

August is being is being celebrated by some lit.bloggers as Women in Translation Month. I did a search and came up with this from Scribe (here).

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

 

Convenience Store Woman made a bit of a sensation when the English translation was released a couple of years ago, and what was said about it was sufficiently intriguing that when I saw it in a bookshop the other day I promptly bought it. This is the story, told in the first person, of a woman, Keiko Furukura, who aspires to be ‘normal’, is never sure of the rules, but thinks that she has found a niche where she won’t be noticeable, working in a convenience store, for 18 years from when she was 18 years old.

I’m a bit dubious about writers using the voice of someone ‘on the spectrum’ to query the way unspoken rules govern social interaction, basically by showing us the ridiculousness of ‘working to rule’. But I think Murata has a serious purpose, and carries it out quite well. We of course have to decide whether what the author says about rules in her, Japanese society apply more generally. Clive James in his unlamented TV show mocked Japanese for being different, and it would be interesting to know how much self-mockery the author intended in her description of start-of-shift rituals, practising greetings and sales spiels (and yes, I’ve been a trainee Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door salesman, and the rituals were not much different).

The novella, charts a month or so in Keiko’s life when she is made to realise that she is not as normal-seeming as she had thought. The catalyst for this realisation is a meeting of her girlfriends, and I must say the most unlikely aspect of this story was that Keiko kept up with her married school friends., and that they chose to keep up with her.

Keiko’s younger sister has given Keiko some stock responses to questions about why she is unmarried, why she continues after all these years in her student job as a part-time convenience store worker. She cites fragile health, but for once a friend’s husband calls bullshit

He stared at me as though I were some kind of alien. “What, you never …? I mean, if finding a job is so hard, then at least you should get married. Look, these days there are always things like online marriage sites, you know,” he spluttered….

The next thing I knew, just like that time in elementary school, they all turned their backs on me and started edging away, staring curiously at me over their shoulders as though contemplating some ghastly life form. Oh, I thought absently, I’ve become a foreign object.

Keiko loves the structured environment of the convenience store. There are rules, rules which she can see the purpose for, there’s a manual for heaven’s sake. She eats to be fit to work. Goes to bed early. Feels the rhythms of the store even when she’s away. She dreams the store. But if her friends had never accepted her ‘normalcy’ then she must try something new.

Her current store manager, store manager #8, has trouble retaining staff. He hires a misfit, Shiraha, a guy about Keiko’s age who should have been a salaryman years ago, who kicks against the rules, comes late, doesn’t restack the shelves with product in orderly rows, complains constantly

“Everyone here is a stupid loser. It’s the same in any convenience store. You’ll only find housewives who can’t get by on their husband’s salary, job-hoppers without plans for the future, and the crappiest students who can’t get better jobs like being a home tutor. Or foreigners who send money home. All losers.”

He wants a wife, a wife with money who will enable him to stay home and set up an on-line business. As is the way with all these jobs, he doesn’t get the sack, he’s just given zero hours. One night Keiko sees him hanging around outside the store and on the spur of the moment she proposes that he come home with her. Her sister, her parents, her friends, her workmates are ecstatic, Keiko is normal after all, she’s living with a guy.

In the one room apartment Keiko and Shiraha barely interact. He sleeps on a futon in the bath – so that they must use the public coin-operated shower – watches movies on his tablet, she feeds him boiled veg and rice. He never goes out and she is mostly at work. He wants her to get a real job. She quits the store!

At uni I studied existentialism, I read lots of Sartre, I regarded myself as a existentialist. Murata seems to me to be asking the question: if we act a role are we in bad faith? Sartre says yes. But I think Murata is saying that Keiko constantly questions the role that she knows she is playing, that is, she is in good faith. Convenience Store Woman starts slowly but quickly becomes a thoughtful, yes sometimes funny, but always rivetting read.

 

Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman, first pub. in Japanese, 2016. English ed., Granta, London, 2018. Translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Kim at Reading Matters (here) enjoyed it too, for different reasons probably. Melanie at Grab The Lapels (here) was troubled by CSW and found Shiraha’s relationship with Keiko abusive. I think Keiko knowingly used Shiraha, but what would be the fun in always being in agreement.

 

 

Running, Swimming: Me and Murakami

This is a book about which many of you have expressed positive feelings, not just because Murakami is a great writer – though that is not so much in evidence here – but because his dedication to running strikes a chord. I’m not a runner and unlike Murakami, I enjoyed team sports, playing football, hockey, cricket, baseball and basketball in my last year at school (none of them well!), but I am (or was) a competitive swimmer, both at school and for more than twenty years from my late thirties.

If you have read his first two works (Wind/Pinball) you will probably be aware that in his twenties Murakami ran a jazz bar, until he had an epiphany at a baseball game and decided that he should be a writer. Shortly after, he decided that he should also be a runner.

I started running in the fall of 1982 and have been running since then for nearly twenty-three years. Over this period I’ve jogged almost every day, run in at least one marathon every year – twenty-three up till now – and participated in more long distance races all around the world than I care to count.

I resumed swimming because I was taking my kids to Nunawading pool for lessons and, well, because I still thought of myself as a swimmer despite 20 years out of the water. Started with 8 (50m) laps on Saturdays and it grew. I joined the Nunawading adult squad, under my old club mate and later Olympic coach Leigh Nugent, for 3 morning sessions of 3km each per week and was soon a member of Doncaster AUSSI masters club, training with them some evenings and competing at weekends.

Two or three years ago in a review WG, I think, was talking about elite sportsmen being winners, but by definition most of the people in any competition don’t win. Of course they’re often very good, but what motivates them, what motivates Murakami, what motivates me, is the race against an internal standard, to do the very best of which you are capable.

Marathon runners will understand what I mean. we don’t really care whether we beat any other particular runner. World-class runners, of course, want to outdo their closest rivals, but for your average, everyday runner individual rivalry isn’t a major issue.

I’m much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself.

Early on, while AUSSI sets a whole heap of tasks, like five 400m and five 800m butterfly swims per year, my personal objective was in the freestyle sprint, to get my 50m time below 30 sec. Sadly, my best recorded time is 30.01. If only the timekeepers had pressed their stopwatches 2 one hundredths of a second earlier, I would have been able to boast 29 point something.

… the hour or so I spend running, maintaining my own, silent, private time, is important to help me keep my mental well-being. When I’m running I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody… I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I am running? I don’t have a clue.

A 3km swim training set is about an hour too. This is what I think about “cold, god it’s cold, and wet. 1.” Over I go, heading the other way, “1, that was 1, 1, 1. 2” Over I go, heading the other way. “2 … 2, don’t forget, 2” and so on to 20, 40, 100. If I think about anything else, then I do forget, and must try and recall which number I was chanting last.

As well as his philosophy of running, Murakami discusses in detail his preparation for and running of, three or four emblematic races, including a run early in his career, uphill! from Athens to Marathon.

Looking back at my running log, I think I’ve been able to prepare for the race [a Boston marathon] at a decent pace:

June   156 miles
July    186 miles
Aug.   217 miles
Sept   186 miles

The log forms a nice pyramid. The weekly distance averages out in June to thirty-six miles, then forty-three miles, then fifty, then back to forty-three.

The marathon of Australian swimming is the Rottnest Channel Crossing, from Cottesloe beach to Rottnest Island, a distance of 19.6 kms across the Fremantle shipping channel.

2015. Cottesloe, pre-dawn start

When I moved back to Perth in 2002 my swimming was already dropping back from the peaks I – like Murakami – had achieved in my mid 40s, and anyway trucking was cutting into my opportunities for training. I joined my local AUSSI club, and in 2005 did a Rotto swim in a 4 person relay. Lots of fun and a really luxurious cabin cruiser as our support boat, but I didn’t have the money or the contacts to organize the support team for a solo. And it was another ten years, and I was well into my 60s, before the opportunity came up. O’Neal, one of my 2005 relay partners, offered to train with and coach me, O’Neal’s husband Ben agreed to kayak alongside me – a decision he both regretted and repeated on two more occasions – a mate had a boat, I hired accommodation on the island for the weekend, we were all set. All I had to do was train.

I swam between and during trips (at Port Hedland), sets of three, five and seven thousand metres three, four times a week, building not in Murakami’s smooth pyramid, but building nevertheless through ten, fifteen, twenty kilometres a week over the second half of 2014, peaking at twenty five in January then tapering to the swim in late Feb.

During January there were three 10 km races, completion (within four hours I think) of any one of which was required as a qualifying swim. I made a mess of the first, missing one of the bouys – I actually don’t like ocean swimming very much, and my stroke is not suited to it. But I aced the second, on the shallow, muddy rowing course at Champion Lakes.

On the day I was up at 4.00, round to O’Neal’s and down to Cottosloe. Launch kayak, grease swimmer (Gee’s job, then she raced off to get the kids and her sister and catch the ferry to see me finish). At 6.00 we’re off, high-stepping into the freezing water, dive, stumble, dive, settle into a stroke amidst the kicking of a hundred others, out to the first marker, look for Ben’s bright blue wig (he feels like a git, but he has to be recognisable) we meet and settle down for the long haul. I am at the 10 km mark in a bit over 3 hours, aiming to finish in 7.

Then it all goes to shit. The boat skipper has aimed us straight at the island, but the current in  the shipping channel is sweeping strongly out to sea. I spend an hour swimming back to the line, making almost no progress. I’m ill, I want to get out. What am I thinking? I’m thinking that if I stop moving my arms I will sink straight down. The support boat pulls alongside and they all shout at me to keep going. In the end O’Neal passes me a sea-sickness pill and I promise to do one more kilometre. They lie to me about which mark I’m up to. Slowly I come good. At ten hours and ten minutes I struggle up on to the beach. Gee and Psyche wrap me in towels and escort me to a shower and then to a gin and tonic. I think Psyche thought she was going to lose me. We party quietly into the night. Ben goes to bed early, his back agony after 10 hours of slow paddling.

And how was my time? Truth be told, not so great. At least, not as good as I’d secretly been hoping for. If possible, I was hoping to be able to wind up this book with a powerful statement like, “Thanks to all the great training I did I was able to post a great time at the New York City marathon [2005]. When I finished I was really moved.”

2016. Rottnest Is. finish line

The following year O’Neal and I kept training, though without the same determination, and we did Rotto as a duo, following a perfect line and finishing in 7 hours 20 min. In 2017 I fronted up again solo, but hadn’t put in the training. Again we got caught in the channel, and by the 17 km mark I wasn’t going to make the cut-off and the officials called time. I love the idea of doing another but I haven’t swum since.

If you haven’t read this already don’t be misled by my ‘review’. In the course of this memoir of his life as a runner Murakami talks constantly about whole heaps of things. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is an important insight into an important writer.

 

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Vintage, 2009. Translated by the author.

see also:
Liz Dexter’s reviews (here) and (here)
Sue/Whispering Gums (here)

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

I know I came to Murakami late, but now I’m coming to know him I enjoy his work, a blend of literature, grunge, and SF bordering on (dreaded!) magic realism. Murakami’s first three works make up the Trilogy of the Rat. I reviewed the first two, Wind/Pinball (here) some time ago and gave teacher son the third, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) this Christmas, expecting him to have it finished on Boxing Day as usual. Inconsiderately, he took it with him to Morocco from whence he wrote –

I thought you despised magical realism. I liked most of it. The psychic girlfriend, and the historic davinci-code of a mystery, and the banality of everyday life- I expected him to stop by Nighthawks, or find a flatmate dead with a falafel on any given page. The symbolic sheep was exposed in a way that made it a genuine wonder. Not sure about meeting the Rat, though. I felt cheated when even the almost explicable mystical became brazenly magical.

Not all of this makes sense so, in the library for audiobooks this week, I thought to borrow a copy for myself but there wasn’t one and I borrowed The Strange Library (2005) instead. The Strange Library is a strange and beautiful book, seemingly a novella for children/YAs. I think I would read it to Mr 8 and Ms 7, my younger grandkids, and yet I enjoyed it well enough myself. It’s in that rarefied territory occupied by Lewis Carroll, The Magic Pudding and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and there are the most wonderful illustrations throughout taken “from old books in the London Library”.

The protagonist, a schoolboy, enters his local library and is ushered downstairs to a strange basement area he never knew existed nor thought the local council could afford.

A little old man asks him “the manner of books that he seeks” and the boy is flustered into answering ‘tax collection in the Ottoman Empire’ which has just popped into his head. The old man ducks through a heavy steel door and returns with three terribly old books, The Ottoman Tax System, The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector and Tax Revolts and Their Suppression in the Ottoman-Turkish Empire. I might have to explain to the grandkids what an ottoman is (when it’s not being a couch).

The boy is fearful of being late home to his mother, who has been in a state of nerves since he was attacked by a big black dog with green eyes and a jewel-encrusted collar, and anyway she may, she will forget to feed his pet starling, but the old man is insistent the books must be read on site and straight away.

Are you planning to read this for yourself, then Spoiler Alert. The boy is led away through a maze of corridors, to a prison cell. A warder clad only in a sheepskin attaches a ball and chain to his ankle and warns him that when he is finished reading the old man will remove the top of his head and eat his knowledge-rich brains.

Despite this, The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector comes alive as he reads it.

The old man came to check on me that evening. He was delighted to find me lost in my book. Seeing how happy he was made me feel a little happier. No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

A pretty girl brings him meals. The sheep man bakes him doughnuts. In the darkness of the night of a new moon they escape together only to find their last exit barred by the old man. And the big black hound.

The starling, or it might be the girl, comes to their rescue. The boy goes home where his mother seems not to have noticed that he has been gone.

To be honest, I was worried before writing this review that I might have missed the point, so I have since been making my way through the reviews I could find on the net. This from the Independent:

It is an odd and beautiful thing – a thing more than a book, whose design doesn’t just adorn but penetrates the story, melting into it with its dainty, surreal and haunting images that almost, at times, seem to finish Murakami’s sentences.

It had me enthralled, a pretty artefact that was a story of childhood, death and reading, drawn in both words and pictures, like a fairytale, yet there was nothing childish about it. (Arifa Akbar, 27 Nov. 2014. here)

So I guess I got it right.

 

Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library, Harville Secker, London, 2008. First pub. in Japanese, 2005. Translated by Ted Goossen.

 

All the Lives We Never Lived, Anuradha Roy

All the Lives We Never Lived (2018) is an Indian novel narrated by an old man recalling his boyhood in the 1930s, when his mother, frustrated by the restrictions of traditional Indian marriage, ran off to Bali. The old man is called Myshkin, the name given him by his grandfather, after the epileptic prince in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

His mother ran off with the Russian-born German artist, Walter Spies – ran off with an ‘Englishman’ according to the townsfolk to whom all white men were ‘English’, or with her ‘German lover’ in many reviews, including the New York Times, though Roy is quite clear that Spies was gay.

Walter Spies (1895-1942) is a real person in this work of fiction, who lived and worked in Bali in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), was arrested in 1938 during a crackdown on homosexuals, and again when war broke out in Europe with the Dutch and the Germans on opposite sides, and who died in 1942 when the ship transporting detainees (ironically) to India was sunk by the Japanese. The community of Europeans to which Myshkin’s mother, Gayatri accompanies Spies was also ‘real’, and included Margaret Mead, “the musician Colin McPhee and his wife, anthropologist Jane Belo, the Swiss artist Theo Meier and the Austrian novelist Vicki Baum.” (wiki)

As an artistic sixteen year old, Gayatri had been taken to Bali by her father and had there met Spies on a raft in a lake and he had taken them up ..

Over the next few weeks, he took Gayatri, her father and their friends to dance performances, concerts, to beaches, to painting schools … Different here, yet familiar. How strange that most of the people around her thought the whole of the Ramayana had taken place in Java and had no connection with India at all!

The story is told from three perspectives, Myshkin as an old man, a retired landscape gardener; Myshkin growing up; and Gayatri, ostensibly from stories she told Myshkin, and later and less satisfactorily, from a cache of letters whose existence Myshkin had been unaware of of. Although told by Myshkin, this is Gayatri’s story – of her rebellion against the carefully constrained freedoms allowed by her ‘tolerant’ husband.

On their return to India Gayatri’s father dies and her mother marries her off as quickly as possible.

What happened next was represented by my father as romance, and he loved retelling it, each time with new flourishes. My mother listened poker-faced, doodling with her fingers on her sari.

He was 33, a teacher, an Anglo-Indian from the north. She was 17, a well-off Bengali Hindu from Delhi, but flighty, artistic, fatherless. They married, moved in with his father in his combined junk shop/doctor’s surgery in a country town in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Spies, and I could not find this in his bio’s, visits India with a friend Beryl de Zoete, in 1937, seeks out Gayatri, and stays on, boarding nearby, befriending the whole family, taking Gayatri on excursions. One day Gayatri begs Myshkin to be home from school on time, but he is held up, and by the time he gets home the three are gone. Sailed to Bali. Myshkin and his mother write, letters arrive intermittently, but war intervenes and contact is lost.

The father is distraught, shamed, becomes even more involved in the anti-British Independence movement, spending some years in jail. Eventually he finds a single mother to marry and bully and over very many years Myshkin and his step-sister become friends. In the latter part of the novel, from her letters to a friend in India, we learn that Gayatri has become a respected artist in Bali, but has fallen into poverty with the war and Spies’ arrests – she was living separately from, but near him.

I have done some research. A little. And as far as I can see, this is a fiction based around a real community of Europeans on Bali. Reviewers in prestigious magazines can’t take the risk of making mistakes, but I can (or do) and have chosen not to read them too closely, so it is still possible that Gayatri is based on a famous Indian of whom I am unaware.

Now. Anuradha Roy. “One of India’s greatest living novelists” it says on the cover. I bought this thinking it was by Arundhati Roy, surprised that she should have a new novel to release so soon after The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and it was some time before I discovered my mistake. Having read this, I prefer Arundhati whose writing is much grittier. Anuradha Roy, on the basis of All the Lives We Never Lived is solidly middle-class, less political.

Anuradha Roy (1967- ) has written four novels including this one, and they have all won or been shortlisted for various prizes. I’m not sure that’s enough to make her “one of the greatest living” etc., but neither is it to be sneezed at. All the Lives We Never Lived is a good maybe not excellent book, but worth reading, and despite the sometimes less than convincing old man narrator, an interesting, feminist account of Indian life, the difficulties of traditional marriage, and the end of the British Raj.

 

Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived, MacLehose Press, London, 2018