Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve (1860). One of my current reading projects is to catch up on Turgenev, whose work was enormously influential on Meiji Japan. This novel, for example, is cited repeatedly in Tayama Katai’s “Futon” (1907), a landmark in modern Japanese fiction. I can see the attraction On the Eve held for Japanese writers: the bold and beautiful heroine Elena, the lamentations over the weakness of Russian men (the hero is a foreigner, a dashing Bulgarian nationalist eager to die for his country), and the wry social commentary that dots the narrative. The story ends rather mysteriously, though there is a suggestion of hope in the air, as the work’s title suggests. I read the classic Constance Garnett translation, first published in the 1890s: it’s probably the same version that Tayama Katai knew.

Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World (1916). Tagore’s another writer I’m catching up with, in part because I’m interested in reading him alongside his contemporary, Natsume Soseki. This one contains many Soseki-like themes: multiple narrating voices, a love triangle in which two men compete for the same woman, disputes over family property accompanied by fears of treachery and theft, with all of this personal drama played out against a social field of dramatic change and discontinuity. Tagore’s understanding of the double-edged erotics of nationalist passion is prescient: here, the desire for fraternity can shift registers in an instant to become bloodthirsty rage. The translation (by the author’s nephew, with close attention from Tagore himself) feels creaky in places, but that might say more about my limitations as a reader of Bengali fiction than it does about Tagore’s talents as a novelist. If you’re interested in this book, by the way, you should catch “Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore,” a fine exhibit of Tagore’s visual art from the 1920s and 30s, on now at the Art Institute of Chicago through April 15, 2012.

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (2010). My father died in late 2010; this was the last book he read. Frustrated for years by a brain injury that impaired his memory and mobility, Dad had a hard time following complicated narratives, but this epic novel of the Vietnam War cut straight through the cognitive fog to reawaken the passionate reader in my father. He devoured this repeatedly in the last months of his life and it was all he wanted to talk about. Dad had a lifelong connection to the military stretching from the late 1950s, when he enlisted as a teenager in the Minnesota National Guard and then the U.S. Army, to his retirement from the Veterans Administration in the late 1990s, where he counseled ex-soldiers suffering from PTSD. In other words, he’d lived his life alongside the sort of people depicted in the novel, even though Dad never served in Vietnam. I’m about halfway through the book now. In some ways a conventional war narrative (we accompany a heterogeneous group of soldiers through a series of increasingly dangerous missions, each member of the band representing a different socioeconomic, ethnic, and regional type), it is a gripping narrative, its impact aided by the knowledge that it is based on the author’s own experiences in the war.

A few things I’ve been reading as of late:

Jim Harrison, True North (Grove Press, 2004). I’m a belated convert to Harrison’s fiction: I’ve known about him since a girlfriend in high school recommended him, but only started reading his work in the last few years. I inadvertently read Returning to Earth, the 2007 sequel to this, first and found myself mesmerized. So it was with high expectations that I picked this up–but I ended up mildly disappointed. It’s quite good, yes, but not at the level of Harrison’s best. Why? I guess I felt emotionally distant from the characters and from the whole notion of taking historical responsibility for one’s familial past. It’s a fine novel, but Harrison has produced more compelling work elsewhere.

Kirino Natsuo　桐野夏生, OUT (Kodansha, 2002; two volumes). My first foray into the land of Kirino, though I did see the fine film adaptation of this novel a few years back. The suspenseful plot (will our heroines be arrested for their heinous crimes of murder and corpse dismemberment?) works well, but most of all I like the gritty details of contemporary life that Kirino captures better than her more “Literary” peers: what it feels like day after day to endure a shitty night-shift job and a dead-end family life. Despite the, uhm, moral shortcomings of all the major characters, this reader ended up kinda liking them as people.

Steven Ridgely, Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). An excellent study of one of the most fascinating figures from Japan’s 1960s, covering his work in poetry, sports writing, guerrilla theater performance and experimental film. Ridgely presents a sophisticated and highly readable study of the multiple ways in which Terayama creatively redrew the boundary between fiction and reality.

How ’bout you? Read any good books lately?

Last week the University of Tokyo’s Center for Philosophy hosted a symposium on “Globalizing Natsume Sōseki’s Theory of Literature,” commemorating the publication of the English translation of Bungakuron (1907), Sōseki’s remarkable attempt to construct a fully scientific theory of “literature” complete with mathematical formulas and graphs, one that was supposed to be valid at all times and in all places.

In her talk, Noami Mariko (University of Tokyo) spoke on the role of emotion (small f) in Sōseki’s theory, in particular the indirect experience of emotion by the reader of fiction, tracing through the ways Sōseki put this theory into practice in his 1912 novel, Until the Spring Equinox and Beyond. Joseph Murphy (University of Florida) also explored the relation of Sōseki’s (F+f) formula to his fiction, especially the early story “Tower of London,” and talked about the missing, perhaps subconscious, possibility of (non-F, non-f) as an implicit possible permutation of the formula.

In the afternoon sessions, Atsuko Ueda (Princeton University) situated Bungakuron in the context of late nineteenth century literary histories, as well as the tradition of rhetoric studies that Soseki relied on–and the implications his transcending the categories of national language and national literature holds for contemporary area studies scholarship. Saitō Mareshi (University of Tokyo) raised the question of what kagaku means in the context of Bungakuron: science or discipline? He also traced Sōseki’s use of keywords from the Chinese literati tradition of rhetoric, looking in particular at what was at stake in Sōseki’s switch from that vocabulary to the mathematical language of (F+f). I followed with a talk exploring Bungakuron as a theory of world literature, reading Sōseki against his contemporary Rabindranath Tagore, as well as Pascale Casanova’s more recent attempt to theorize a “world republic of literature.” The final speaker, Komori Yōichi (University of Tokyo), explored the specific scientific contexts on the work, noting its connections to early twentieth century atomic theory, as well as the productive gesture Sōseki made in creating a horizon in which embodied sense perception and intellectual understanding were synthesized into a single entity within the bracketed space of (F+f).

We had lively discussions throughout the day, and the symposium was very well attended. My thanks to the organizers, my co-presenters, and to all who participated.

In the meanwhile, the Modern Language Association has announced that the volume has won the 2011 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature. From the award citation:

Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, by Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), provides English language readers with major critical works by Japan’s foremost novelist of the twentieth century. Sōseki aspired to a grand and systematic explanation of literature, focusing on literature’s effects on readers. Based on the cognitive psychology of his day, his account explores how the content of the literary work generates emotional responses. Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy have done a superb job of supplying the contextual information necessary for today’s non-Japanese reader to appreciate the subtlety and significance of Sōseki’s work.

On top of that, the Japan Times newspaper has just named it one of the “Best Books of 2011.” It’s gratifying to see this project, begun with my colleagues six or seven years ago, reach fruition in this way. Our goal from the start was to get people reading and talking about this remarkable book, and it feels like we’ve accomplished that.

Like you, I’m currently reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. (You are, aren’t you?). I have to reserve judgment on the novel as a whole until I finish reading it–and I’m a sssslllloooowwww reader these days–but in general you can color me impressed. As he did in The Corrections, Franzen presents a painfully life-like portrait of what Elvis Costello a couple of decades ago called “emotional fascism.” That is, he draws a finely detailed topographical map of the decline of American democracy, all as lived out in the privates lives of our psyches and families.

His choice of my hometown, the Twin Cities, for the opening scenes seems prescient, too. What’s happened to Minnesota over the past three decades presents in distilled form the effects of Reaganism, consumerism, and religious fundamentalism. Back in the 1970s the state was celebrated as the “Minnesota Miracle,” a bastion of progressive values and a can-do spirit, but now our bridges fall down, our schools disintegrate, and our families work two and three jobs so that we can cut taxes on the wealthy, buy incredibly cheap underwear made in Guatemala, and prevent gay people from marrying.

The following paragraph, from a therapeutic autobiography written by the heroine Patty as she looks back over the wreckage of her life, captures the novel’s central theme:

That’s about as succinct a depiction of emotional fascism as you’ll find anywhere.

So I like Franzen’s choice of setting. But I’m also gnawed at by the sense that he gets the external details wrong: the texture of daily life in St. Paul just doesn’t jibe with my own memories. It’s a bit like that typical scene in parallel-universe science fiction when the hero starts noticing little slips in the world around him and starts to wake from the illusion and realize that he has left home far behind.

For example, the depiction of the Ramsey Hill neighborhood of St. Paul. Granted, I didn’t live there in the 1990s, but the portrait of the neighborhood just feels off. For starters, the renovation of that neighborhood largely took place in the 1970s and 80s, not the 1990s. Moreover, the kinds of municipal corruption and street life he depicts for it sound East Coast to me (or perhaps Chicagoan); we had corruption and crime in St. Paul, but it wasn’t of the genus that he depicts. Likewise, the scene set circa 1980 at the Longhorn, the legendary bar in downtown Minneapolis that spawned the Suicide Commandos, the Replacements, and a hundred other punk bands, is all wrong. For starters, Mohawks and safety pins weren’t the fashion of Minnesota punks, nor was pogo dancing a big deal. And I never ever saw a crowd at the Longhorn pack the front of the stage for a local opening band: for better or worse, that just wouldn’t have been cool. In sum, I’m pretty sure Franzen never set foot in the place.

A couple of his major characters attend Macalester College in the late 1970s and early 1980s–as did I. I probably passed them in the dorm hallways and at Kagan Commons cafeteria. But they do and say the wrong things. One of them, for example, wants to find out where the “townie girls” hang out. I’m sure that expression was never used at Mac; the closest thing would have been “St. Kate’s girls,” referring to the Catholic women’s college a mile away, but even that meant something quite different from “townie girls” as Franzen’s fictional character uses it.

So what do you do when your knowledge of reality interferes with your enjoyment of the dream of fiction? I guess you sit down and write whiny blog posts….

In my reading recently I’ve been haunted by the devil.

For example, he shows up, albeit ambiguously, in Charles Baxter’s fine 2008 novel, The Soul Thief. The narrative, written with Baxter’s usual intelligence and style, traces the life on one “Nathaniel Mason,” as told in the first person–or, perhaps not. It might be that Nathaniel is dead and his place has been taken up by a psychopathic mimic, ala Norman Bates in the film Psycho, which is alluded to repeatedly (we even get a creepy motel scene at the end). Or perhaps Nathaniel is none other than Satan himself–another possibility deliberately raised. The first half of the book, detailing Mason’s younger days as a grad student in Buffalo, New York, is especially strong, as good as anything Baxter has written.

So I finish that novel and then in all innocence move on to Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). Here, the central figure is Dougal Douglas (or, sometimes, Douglas Dougal), and again the narrative strongly suggests that the protagonist has more than a bit of devilry to him. He even invites people to touch the two bumps on his scalp where his horns were surgically removed. It’s a terrific comic yarn about the dark powers of the humanities to disrupt the social order. Douglas is a recent “Arts” graduate hired by an industrial firm in South London that fears it is falling behind the times in its failure to carry out “human research” on its employees. Once he arrives all hell breaks loose, literally: weddings fall apart at the altar, loyal workers start skipping shifts, and young men take to battling it out in the streets.

The Christian undertones are missing, but there is more devilry afoot in another work I’m reading just now, Okazaki Kyoko’s awarding-winning manga, Helter Skelter (serialized 1996, published in book form 2003). The heroine is a beautiful fashion idol who becomes increasingly cruel and cold to those around her as the surgery, drugs, and manipulation that artificially generate her desirability take an increasing toll on her person.

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately. How ’bout you?

Ugaya Hiromichi, J-Poppu to wa nani ka: Kyodaika suru ongaku sangyo (What is J-Pop? The expanding music industry, 2005). A provocative study of the music business in Japan since the late 1980s, when marketing executives coined the word “J-Pop” to suggest the appearance of a Japanese pop music scene that could compete on an international basis. Ugaya isn’t as interested in musicians as he is in the business, technological, and marketing sides of the industry. He shows, for example, how the switchover to the CD format (along with the rise of inexpensive CD players) transformed the gender and age demographics of the music-buying audience in Japan.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1816). In which a British female writer tells us what women really want. It’s amazing how contemporary Austen’s characters remain, despite the now-archaic nature of the world they occupy. Differences of birth or class are both overcome and reinforced (just like today!), and of course the colonies hover in the background: the widowed Mrs. Smith gets her happy ending when her rights over her late husband’s estate in the West Indies are recognized. No wonder Natsume Soseki loved her writing so much. A fine novel to begin the summer with.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1998). In which a British male writer tells us what men really want. Hornby’s comic memoir of his life-long obsession with soccer seemed a good choice to accompany this year’s World Cup. As usual with Hornby, it’s inlaid with countless funny, poignant observations–e.g.:

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?