I had the following dream. There was a mini-bus, a bit like the Mystery Machine, out of Scooby Doo. It was going on a tour, and passengers were invited. I accepted this invitation. Not for the first time in my life, I turned up to find that what I had chosen was not, in fact, the popular choice. I was the only passenger. Still, there was some sense of luxury and privilege in such a position, not to mention, well, uniqueness.
The driver was a very tall, big-boned, soft-bellied homeless man with tangled red locks and a vast red beard, which was eternally damp with drool and alcohol around the region of his lips. He was energetic, however, and loyal and purposeful. This tour had given him purpose. It was his tour, he was in charge, and I was his responsibility.
His loyalty, however, in some way overflowed, and I found myself, quite soon, having to fend off sexual advances. Luckily he got the message. He was much bigger than me, after all, and could have decided not to take 'no' for an answer. On the other hand, I got the sense that he had not given up his designs upon me.
We stopped at a canteen. Troubled in mind, I paced about, making a conscious effort to avoid the driver. What should I do? Should I simply abandon the tour altogether? That would be extremely impolite. No, best to stick with it, and simply fend off whatever advances were made in a demure fashion, like a maiden defending her modesty.
Unfortunately, however, he noticed that I was avoiding him. Our eyes met, and I saw a terrible indignation in his. Soon he had told all his friends in the canteen. They paraded between the aisles there, holding up placards denouncing me as a two-faced traitor.
The work of Mark Samuels reminds me in some way of the work of Nagai Kafu, though I've never really defined this similarity beyond thinking that both are shibui, and that often there are characters, events and descriptions that are at once, somehow, pleasingly understated and pleasingly overstated.
The work of Arthur Machen also reminds me of that of Nagai Kafu, and this is interesting, because Arthur Machen is a significant influence in the work of Mark Samuels. Neither Machen nor Samuels, to my knowlege, have been influenced by Kafu.
So, how does Machen remind me of Kafu, and is this also what Kafu shares with Samuels?
Again, I haven't defined the similarity very closely. I was thinking about it recently, as I went for a walk in the rain, and it seemed to me that both Kafu and Machen are able to write about not very much and make it majestically substantial by a kind of marshalling of the powers of lyricism. Interestingly, I don't think this is the factor that Samuels and Machen have in common, since Samuels' prose is generally a little more terse in style.
Kafu's Tales of France (Furansu Monogatari) is a work that I've been dipping in and out of for years, and recently, inspired by an unexpected Kafu-related gift, I picked it up again, remembering how much richer the experience of reading Kafu has been than almost anything else I've read. I started reading the story 'The Snake-Charmer' ('Hebi Tsukai'). It's a long short story divided into four chapters. In the first of these the narrator simply describes what one sees if one follows the route of his habitual walk in the environs of Lyon. In the second, he describes an evening he went on just such a walk, got drunk at some little hamlet, and was told that some travelling players had arrived. In the third chapter, he actually approaches the festivities to take a look. He doesn't go past the gate, but watches the performances that are put on outside to attract customers. At one point, a woman suddenly leaps up on the wooden outside stage, removes her cloak, takes five or six snakes from a box, and allows them to wrap themselves around her. She stands like that for a while, then puts the snakes back, nudges a fellow traveller with her foot, gets a cigarette from him, and sits down for a smoke. In the fourth and final chapter, the narrator complains of summer's passing, and how, with autumn, his work in a bank in Lyon has become unbearable. One day, instead of going into the office, on the spur of the moment, he goes off on a walk. He comes across some caravans that might belong to the travelling company he saw. He thinks how much better it would be to lead the Gypsy life, and walks quietly between the caravans. Outside one of them, he happens to see a tired and poverty stricken-looking woman doing needlework. Two small and filthy children are playing nearby. One of them falls and cries, and she picks it up, kisses it, combs its hair and so on. He recognises the woman as the snake charmer. He peeks, unobserved, into the open door of their caravan. There seems to be no one inside. He surmises there is no father. He has a sad feeling. He corrects himself - a somehow "dingy and damp feeling", and decides to go home without looking further.
Talking with someone about this, I tried to explain how Kafu could hold my attention even by just describing the route of a walk for an entire chapter. The story, I said, was actually in the description itself. There was a message conveyed, like an actual event, in his description of the snake-charmer: "Her expressionless and thoroughly icy eyes seemed to contain no reflection even of the gathering crowd of the customers, and, as the smoke issued from her lips and drifted away in threads, those eyes gazed purposelessly out, far, far, into the evening sky."
This line, which ends the third chapter, somehow seems to carry in it the whole weight of the story. It is not an event, or a twist in the tale, or any such thing - only a look observed in someone's eyes.
Also recently (today), I have started reading Far Off Things by Arthur Machen. There is a great deal, even within a few pages, on which I could comment, for its significance to me as a reader. I identify quite closely, for instance, with what Machen says about his childhood growing up in the countryside of Gwent. At one point he mentions the view from Llanddewi Rectory:
Through a cleft one might see now and again a bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the cliffs of Somerset beyond.
In my childhood, I was on the other side of that sea (though not in Somerset), gazing in the opposite direction.
I don't have time to linger over all such touches that have so far resonated with me (which include a reference to my favourite passage of De Quincey). Instead, I would like to quote that passage that convinces me I was right in linking Kafu and Machen in my mind. It is a passage in which Machen describes his scheme for a magnum opus he has long intended to write "some day":
This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility -- or comparative futility -- of the plot, however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the "great" book which is not yet written.
Yes! Yes! Yes! But this is exactly what Kafu does, though perhaps to convey something less mystic than that which Machen is speaking of, and not, either, in a magnum opus, but, instead, repeatedly in short tales, novellas and so on. Kafu tells his tales through descriptions of the seasons, of seedy rented rooms, of decaying backstreets, of the faces of those who have lived in shadows.
I could talk a little here of flaneurism, psychogeography and so on, but I only really wanted to write a quick post to note this observation, this connection, that pleases me so much. Of course, I too, aspire to tell stories through this kind of description.
That's a question I hope to ask, though there is little hope of an answer, in this blog post.
It seems to me that those growing up in the 'developed world' now will never have any notion of what life was like before the Internet, of how it felt simply to be an analogue being walking around in the literal - and not the virtual - world, in three dimensions, with no electronic extensions to one's nerve endings, and not to have any sense that one needed to check one's e-mail/Facebook messages/ever-diminishing spiral of cyber-navel. This disturbs me.
One thing I've sometimes thought about in this connection is how much more momentous it was to make personal discoveries of the music, art or literature kind in pre-Internet days.
I remember, with distinctness, the stages that led to my discovery of Celtic Frost. First there was the review in Kerrang!, accompanied by a photograph of Tom G. Warrior looking decidedly esoteric. The review was for the album To Mega Therion, and the reviewer had given it something ridiculously precise, like 3 and 3/4 stars out of 5. Going on stars alone, there was no reason at all why I should take a risk on this band without having heard any of their music - and at that time, when I was twelve or thirteen, there was no hope I would ever hear the music if I did not actually buy it myself - but there was something about the description of the album that intrigued me. I remember phrases such as "a choir of marching zombies", which piqued my interest. There was also the leader to the review: "Are you ready for art metal?" I do not doubt that there were many thirteen-year-old headbangers who read that leader and said, "No. I'm not ready. Leave me alone." I, however, was ready.
Things were so difficult to get hold of in those days, that To Mega Therion did not even comprise my first Celtic Frost purchase. I did, however, manage to find an advert for a specialist shop that was stocking the picture-disc version of the exquisitely titled EP Tragic Serenades. I sent off for it, and, some days later, in a 12-inch square, rather thin cardboard package, there arrived the first of many discs that I was to buy from that particular specialist shop.
The first time I put Tragic Serenades on the turntable, I was very disappointed. It was just heavy metal, after all. I had been expecting the 'art' part of the equation to be much, much higher. I can't really hope to convey how deep my disappointment was, since that first review of To Mega Therion had worked up my imagination in such a way that the dream of Celtic Frost had become to me an infinitely mysterious, infinitely precious kind of aether, promising in whispers to take me to strange, ancient worlds wholly other than the world that till now had been mine.
Having invested so much in it, I could not give up on the disc, however, and, as if potholing into its grim, chthonic depths, began to discover all kinds of delights that even I had not imagined. It was a key artistic discovery for me. Celtic Frost introduced me to Flaubert and Baudelaire, as well as being a significant discovery in themselves. Such were the rewards of my Celtic Frost adventure, that it encouraged me to forage even further afield for more discoveries in music and in literature.
I don't think I am alone, by any means, in my search for more and more exquisitely obscure, or obscurely exquisite, music. Such a quest is well-known in the indie music scene. But what of books?
Indie books - books from independent publishers - certainly exist, but do indie readers? I'm one of them, and I have met others, but, truth be told, indie readers are a very rare breed indeed, even proportionately to the global number of readers, which must be less than that of music-listeners. Let's put it this way, even people who like mainstream music know full well what indie music is. People who read - I won't say 'like', because I think they're just largely ignorant of what's available - mainstream literature, for the most part haven't even got a cunting clue that indie literature exists. How often have I had this experience? Someone introduces me to someone and mentions that I write books. The person to whom I am introduced, rather pleasantly, says something like, "Oh, what's your book called? I'll look it up next time I'm in Waterstones." "It won't be in Waterstones," I am forced to say, "unless the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones still has that one copy of Morbid Tales they stocked. My books have all come out through independent publishers."
At this juncture I'm usually given a quizzical, uncomprehending look. I almost expect them - seem to remember instances, even - to say, "Do 4AD do books, as well?"
It seems to me that, in contrast to music-lovers, so-called book-lovers seldom go off the beaten track and into the hinterlands in search of the rare and the exquisite.
Why?
I used the word 'discerning' in the title of this blog post. Discernment consists, I think, of two things - the desire to explore and to broaden one's horizons, and then, from the perspective of those broadened horizons, the ability to eliminate all that is inferior, unoriginal, second-rate and basically a waste of time. Life, as we all know, is very short. There are far too many books to read. At the age of 37 I am finding myself depressed to realise exactly how limited are the places on my to-read list - because of considerations of time - for what remains of my life, especially as I feel I have hardly scratched the surface of literature, really.
I am not a fast reader. I am also a reader who finds it painful not to finish a book once started. This latter fact has led to difficulties in my reading in recent years. It seems to me that I have, in some ways, shifted from the mode of broadening my horizons to the mode of eliminating what is a waste of time. (I say, in some ways - I used to be able to read and enjoy just about anything, whereas now I am finding that if something is just not good enough, I think, "The years are flying by, and I could be reading something a thousand times better than this.") In 2006, I picked up, in a second-hand shop in Arkansas, a dog-eared copy of Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac. I'd been meaning to read Balzac for some time. However, this book took me months, and because I was determined to finish it, it meant that in those months I read practically nothing else. Balzac is not a bad writer, but the book, ultimately, was dull and pointless, and, in terms of reading, it ruined those months of my life. I've had a number of similar experiences since then.
One of my most recent purchases has been The Yellow Wallpaper and selected writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Because the title story is a favourite of mine, I bought this book to discover more about a writer I had neglected in that I only knew the one story. However, after reading seven of the stories within, out of about twenty, my will to read further has shrivelled. There is another piece, two or three pages long, that I found to be worth reading. It was called 'An Extinct Angel', and was not so much a story as a parable - an extended metaphor about the historical oppression of women. For the rest, I suppose I've read worse, and they have their moments, but I find them to be facile and insubstantial. They remind me, in fact, of the little I have read - and despised - by that master of the trite, O. Henry.
I don't really know what to do about this cunting Yellow Wallpaper book. I really do hate not finishing books, but I might have to develop that ability. Life is short. I'm even finding the Ambrose Bierce collection I bought (The Spook House), after a promising start, to be duller and duller with each story.
Sick to the teeth of starting dull books, and having them destroy my reading for months on end, I've taken the step of drawing up a list of books/authors I want to read. I've only started it recently, and it is open to revision. Because I still wish to expand my horizons - very much so, in fact - this consists largely, but not entirely, of authors I have not read before. I need to be careful, though, and make sure, as best I can, that I'm not selecting dull, waste-of-time authors and books. There's always the chance that I will, however, in which case I really shall have to cultivate the habit of abandoning books I've started.
Anyway, here's the list as I have it so far:
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn Inferno, by August Strindberg The Cathedral, by J-K Huysmans Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton Fanny Hill, by John Cleland The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg Flann O’Brien The Assistant, by Robert Walser The Word of God, by Thomas Disch Doris Lessing Truman Capote Flannery O’Connor Raymond Queneau Cordwainer Smith Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl Walter De La Mare Our Town, by Thornton Wilder Germinal, by Emile Zola. Boethius Reflections in a Golden Eye, by Carson McCullers The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño
I mentioned, on the telephone to a friend of mine, who recently gave me my current reading matter,The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin, and who has been trying out some Philip K. Dick, partially at my recommendation (he loved The Man in the High Castle, but was not so sure about Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said), the trouble I have been having with dull books, and how it has led me to the measure of drawing up a reading list.
"Don't you think that readers are less discerning than music lovers?" I asked.
He knew what I was talking about immediately. I'm afraid I can't remember his response verbatim, so the following will have to be taken as a paraphrase:
"Yeah. It's like, just turn on cunting Radio One and leave it at full blast from morning till the cunt of the night. That's the equivalent. I get people recommending me books, like, 'Hey, there's this great book that won the Booker Prize--', and I have to say, 'Stop right there, you cunt. I already know I'm going to hate it. Why are you recommending me cunt like that? You cunted cunting cunt.'"
I have pondered this strange phenomenon, but haven't come, as yet, to any deep or detailed conclusions. I'd be interested in any readers' opinions on the matter. I wonder, however, if there is not a whole tribe of people who think, when they pick up a prize-winning piece of pap straight off the biggest display table in Waterstones and take it home: "Hey, I'm reading a book. Books are indie! I'm indie!" It almost seems as if it doesn't matter what the hell they read. Except that it does. They think they are being discerning, perhaps, in reading respected, serious literature, and would probably turn their noses up at anything genre-related. However, people who read Booker Prize-winning books and so on are, I would hazard a guess, far, far less discerning than those who read, say, exclusively science fiction novels. At least the latter have taken the time to find out what they really like, to some extent, rather than just let some flatulent git on a panel of judges dictate their tastes to them, day after dull, middle-class, humanistic cunting day, until they die.
I thought I had more to say, but perhaps I'll stop there.
Oh yeah, I read the first page of Vernon God Little that everyone was raving about at the time - it was shit. I didn't read the rest.
I feel somewhat out of the groove of blogging at the moment, and I have an appointment this afternoon, so I expect that this post will not do its subject justice in any shape or form. However, I could not let today pass by without posting a couple of links. Fifty years ago to this day, Nagai Kafu, one of my favourite writers, died, at the age of 79. The Japan Times Online of Sunday the 26th features a rare article on the man, covering two Internet pages below:
Mention of Kafu in the Western press is, indeed, very rare, and for that reason alone I am very grateful to the author of this article.
However, I wish - wish - that he had not relied so heavily upon Edward Seidensticker's opinion of Kafu:
Even his biographer and principal English translator, Edward Seidensticker (whose translations from "Kafu the Scribbler" are used here except where otherwise specified), had serious reservations about Kafu. Dubbing him (in his 2002 memoir "Tokyo Central") "the writer of whom I was probably fondest," he hastens to add that "affection and admiration are not the same thing."
Kafu is cursed with being introduced to an English-speaking audience by a translator who has employed a laughably Anglosphere-centric set of critical criteria in assessing Japanese literature. In almost every case, those aspects of Kafu's work that Seidensticker decries in Kafu the Scribbler are the elements I most admire.
There's not much left of Kafu today. Among the major Japanese writers of the early 20th century, he scarcely ranks as a survivor. Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki are the towering names of the period. Kafu, relatively speaking, is a footnote.
So runs the article. If this is so, I can't help thinking this is at least partly because of the shadow that Seidensticker's judgement has cast over Kafu's work in the West (he's much better thought of in Japan, surprise, surprise!, but the author of this article doesn't seem to think that's worth mentioning, after all, that's only the opinion of people who speak and read Japanese as a first language). If anyone should be the "footnote" here, it should be Seidensticker. Seidensticker the Footnote has too large an opinion of himself, and gives himself billing over the writer for whom he should simply be a faithful translator. He states that some stories are not worth translating in whole, thereby not even allowing readers to judge for themselves. This, as far as I am concerned, is literary vandalism. It makes me fume. I will refrain from the kind of language I often allow myself on this blog, but I don't think I shall ever forgive Seidensticker for this attitude, grateful as I otherwise am for the fact that he introduced Kafu to the West in the first place.
I just wanted to let it be known that there are other views on the matter apart from Seidensticker's. I would have liked, for instance, the author of the above article to reference the much more clued-up (in my view) assessment that Stephen Snyder makes of Kafu's work.
Seidensticker entirely fails to look at the unreliable narrator in Kafu's work, his modernism, the depth of his irony, his treatment of text as artefact. In short, his views are pitifully conventional, shallow and outdated.
I think it was five years ago that I started my translation of Kafu's Okamezasa. I haven't been able to give it high priority, unfortunately, and I think I am only about halfway through the first draft. Thinking of how time flies, I really want to get back to it again. If ever I finish it, and it is published, I hope that it will help to bring Kafu out from under the shadow of his first English translator.
Nagai Kafu saved my life. There are few other authors, if any, about whom I can say that.
I'm going to see the doctor in a minute, so might have to cut this off suddenly.
When I visited Devon this summer, I came back to Wales with a number of books, some of which had long been in my possession, some from the mouldering spare room of the house where I grew up, and some from the local bookshop. I will list those books here:
The Lonely Doll, Dare Wright The Little One, Dare Wright Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe Confucianism and Taoism, Professor R. K. Douglas On a Chinese Screen, W. Somerst Maugham Allan and the Ice Gods, H. Rider Haggard The Complete Works of D. T. Suzuki The Western Lands, William S. Burroughs Persuasion, Jane Austen Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton Selected Stories, Anton Chekhov Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany Tea Life, Tea Mind, Sen Soshitsu
Some, but not all, of these, I have read before. At least one of them I have started but never finished.
Also, as a result of a conversation that took place while I was in Devon, I now have in my possession a copy of an art book - a collection of art prints - called Visions, with an introduction by Walter Hopps, which I remember from my childhood, and which left a strong impression on my young imagination, directly influencing, I believe, at least one of my stories ('The Fairy Killer').
I list these here because it's pleasant simply to make lists of books, and also, perhaps, as a small indication of the kind of competition that other books are up against in my reading, by which I mean, books that have been given me by people kindly trying to enrich my life. I'm a slow reader, and the list of books I am currently reading, of books I am theoretically about to read, and books I would some day like to read, are quite long, very long and unfeasibly long, respectively.
I am currently reading, amongst other things, the following:
Journey to the West, author unknown The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman The Penguin Anthology of Japanese Literature The Bhagavad Gita Melmoth the Wanderer (mentioned above, re-reading)
There are really so many that I'm reading that I've even forgotten many of them. Some I started years back, and never finished, so that I might have to start again at the beginning, such as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Sasameyuki, which I have already read in translation.
Books I have recently finished include Ice by Anna Kavan, Beroul's The Romance of Tristan and Tea Life, Tea Mind by Sen Soshitsu.
Books I would like to read... I would actually like to try and make a list. Some of these books will be ones that I actually possess, but still haven't got round to. Some will be books I have simply been dreaming of for a long time. I'll make a brief and haphazard essay at a list below, which I may or may not add to as the mood takes me:
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African Inferno, August Strindberg Our Town, Thornton Wilder Transformation, Mary Shelley Dogura Magura, Yumeno Kyuusaku 虚無への供物 (Kyomu e no Kumotsu), 中井英夫 (Nakai Hideo) The Secret Glory, Arthur Machen Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote (or 'Cuppatea', as I call him) Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy
Hmmm, looks like I've got to get ready to see the doctor. Maybe more later. If you have any recommendations, or if you've lent or given me a book and wish to jog my memory, or recommended me a book before and wish to jog my memory, please feel free to use the 'comment' function.
I suppose there must be such a thing as an organised writer, but for me the particular curse of a literary life is perhaps best typified by the kind of despair that comes with an ever-growing collection of papers and reading matter, the limited space that results from lack of funds, and the disorder of the former within the latter exacerbated by a mind absent in dreaming and energy reserves brought low by the lack of reward for all one's best efforts.
Today, it seems, has been a day in which the despair of that disorder had to be confronted, at least to some extent, and so the hoover came out of the cupboard. Everything that had been on the floor was piled onto the bed, and the window was opened to let in the outside air, which hopefully would blow away the stale smell of dust.
I have never been very good at packing my luggage for travel, and it seems that being tidy in one's digs is a similar skill. How do you pack everything efficiently? I need to sort through all the papers lying about, but how to store them? It occurred to me that I could make use of the two computer bags behind the desk. Perhaps in one of them I could put my manuscripts, and those that have been sent to me. Oh, and letters, too, since I'm not sure where else to put them for the moment. And in the other, maybe I could put materials relating to 'work'. I wonder what that pile of papers under the bags is? As luck would have it, the pile of papers consists mainly of manuscripts. Why didn't it occur to me before to put them actually in one of the bags?
I'd forgotten some of these things. There's an autobiography, called Nenashigusa, that I started writing in Japanese. It seems unlikely I'll ever finish it. Oh, and here are some translations I made of some poems from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. One or two of them don't seem so bad:
#24
I came away in haste, without the usual offerings. May the gods accept instead The brocade of Mount Tamuke's maple leaves, And bless this journey!
#37
A wind-beaten autumn field. White beads of dew are scattered Like pearls whisked from a broken string.
#70
Weary of my loneliness I step outside to see Everywhere, only the same autumn evening.
#87
Around the needles of cedar, Still wet with the passing shower's dew, The autumn evening rises with the mist.
I'll have to put these where I can remember them, on top of the other manuscripts in this bag.
I also discovered the xerographic copy I made of Higuchi Ichiyo's tale 'Umoregi', which I have not yet read. 'Umoregi', literally translated, means something like 'buried log' (my Japanese-English dictionary gives the definition as 'bog-wood', and my Japanese-Japanese dictionary gives some incomprehensible definition), referring, I believe, to a dead tree in a forest, rotting beneath undergrowth, fungus and so on. Apart from the literal meaning, however, this phrase is a metaphor indicating 'obscurity', as in, lack of worldly success, as in... Well, you know the story.
As I said, I haven't read this particular tale of Ichiyo's yet, and I believe that no translation of it exists in English, but I've read a synopsis of the plot, which involves a master craftsman of ceramics who fails, with depressing consistency, to make a name for himself. Then there are some shenanigans involving the marriage of his sister, I believe, and, in the end, disgusted with the world, ambition, and absolutely everything, he takes a hammer and smashes his masterpiece into smithereens. If I try to translate the opening of the story, it goes something like this:
When he began painting, from the tip of his single brush there would spring five hundred ancients and sixteen deities; towers were builded in the air, and grand designs were worked around on all sides. On three inch tea burners, or five inch vases, would appear personages of Yamato, and Cathay; the elegance of the age of Genroku lived again, and the age of the gods was summoned back. The armour of warriors he devised, the patterns of the costumes of courtiers in the palace he selected, or, painting around a vessel, his brush waxing ornate, he would decorate with birds and flowers, and scenes of nature's beauty...
There are, I'm fairly sure, some mistakes in that (in other words, I had to guess some of it), but I thought I'd just see how far I could get before I had to give up. Higuchi Ichiyo wrote in the classical style, without full-stops. The text as reproduced in a modern book has some punctuation, but it's mainly commas. In this story, there only seem to be full-stops at the end of each chapter.
I think I'll leave these sheets out somewhere, since I want to read this story, despite the difficulties involved. (It will also help me to keep up my Japanese.) But I suppose it will add to the general clutter that I am trying to reduce. And yet, if I put it away, will I forget it again? Will it become, as its title suggests, a buried log?
The irony of Britain topping the polls in a survey on literary travel destinations is that the British themselves are such thumping philistines when it comes to literature. Or just about anything, come to think of it. Oh, also, in my opinion, English literature is amongst the most desiccated and boring in the entire world.
Last night I spoke to an old friend on the telephone. He asked if I watched S4C, the Welsh TV channel. I replied that I did not have a television. Flabbergasted, he then asked, "But what do you do with your flippin' time?!" I hope and expect that there was at least some alloy of satire in this remark, but these days, who can tell? I replied, "Well, nothing really, just write lots of stories that no one will ever read because they're too busy watching television."
The British, well, specifically the English, like to be 'amused', and can't stand metaphysics, which is why English literature is so shallow. 'Amusement', a la Jane Austen, is considered the height of cultural endeavor. What this boils down to is a kind of conceitedness, and belief that one is cleverer than everyone else on Earth, and will certainly not get tricked into taking anything but one's own cleverness seriously. Of course the evidence for that cleverness consists of nothing but the fact that one refuses to take anyone else's concerns seriously (on this score I'm recently less and less impressed with brittle British comedy). The conceitedness of English cynicism is therefore as airtight and self-perpetuating as American patriotism.
But the English are, in fact, so downright crap that we even have to get a bloody foreigner in to manifest English cleverness for us; Oscar Wilde, the epitome of the English wit, was, of course, Irish. The English themselves would have found actual manifestation of this vaguely held cleverness to be beneath their dignity. (In other words, they didn't have the ability.)
These days, even the very hollow cleverness that once existed has been dumbed down, so that the conceitedness and cynicism are as dull as some blokey journalist's warm beer.
Can you tell how much I hate this country?
To be fair, in terms of literature, we do have a certain amount of variety on our side. The desiccated nature of our culture sometimes gives rise to a kind of stilted eccentricity that does not seem to have a counterpart elsewhere in the world: A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll... Er, maybe that's it, actually. And perhaps the best English literature is children's literature, since the tyrannical and very tiresome light of reason reigns elsewhere with such completeness, it seems as if it is only in or through childhood that the English imagination can be expressed. I'd favour E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle over, say, Thomas Hardy, any day.
And as to Shakespeare, I remain unconvinced. He still seems to me like a bloke who could write some good one-liners, but I've never found the stories at all engaging. What did he actually convey, apart from the fact that he was the Bard, and therefore pretty damned clever? People (and critics) will sometimes give someone like H.P. Lovecraft as an example of a bad writer, because of certain things that, stylistically, you are apparently not supposed to do, and because he didn't flatter society with amusing comedies of manners, but at least Lovecraft conveys something in particular, whereas, to me, Shakespeare conveys nothing at all. And Shakespeare is the jewel in the passage to India of English literature, apparently. No wonder all the rest of it is so crap.
Some time back, I announced that I would like to introduce to my readers, through this blog, a number of short stories, with my own commentary, simply in order to share and encourage interest in the form. I have not forgotten this intention. In fact, I am about to fulfil it by delivering the first in the series of my recommendations. It's taken me this long in part because I have been thinking carefully about my selection. I didn't want to choose something too likely to be familiar to my readers, but I didn't want to choose something (to begin with at least) with which I was not all that familiar myself. In other words, I wanted to choose something that is a favourite, or close to being a favourite of mine, available online in a form that is not an insult to the reader's intelligence, but which I haven't already mentioned on this blog one thousand and two times. And I have finally chosen the first story. It is 'Rashomon', by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke's work may already be familiar to some readers without them even knowing it (a fate that befalls many writers). If you are a fan of Japanese cinema, then the chances are you will have seen the film Rashomon, from director Kurosawa, the plot for which is constructed from two of Akutagawa's short stories, 'Rashomon', and 'In a Grove'. In fact, the short story 'Rashomon' only provides the framing device for the action of the film, most of that action being a reproduction of the plot of 'In a Grove'. Therefore, if you have seen the film Rashomon and now read the short story, you will not know from the film what is going to happen. It should perhaps also be noted that the final ending of the film suggests a far more hopeful future than is ever suggested in either of the original stories.
Chris Power of The Guardian, writing on Akutagawa, tells us, "Using limpid prose to blend traditional and modernist storytelling, Ryunosuke Akutagawa is an under-acknowledged master". Under-acknowledged? This is questionable. I suppose he is under-acknowledged in at least two ways. Firstly, he is under-acknowledged simply because he is a writer and all writers (with only one or two exceptions) are under-acknowledged. Secondly, he is underacknowledged in the English-speaking world, because nothing outside of the deathly tedious 'comedy of manners' in Britain, and the 'great American novel' in the US, is generally deemed even to exist. In Japan, Akutagawa's name is attached to the foremost literary prize - the Akutagawa Prize. Of course, that one fact alone doesn't mean that he is sufficiently acknowledged, even in Japan. People say 'Dickensian', thinking (inevitably wrongly) they know what it means, even if they have never read Dickens. This could easily be the case with Akutagawa in Japan, too. However, I wonder if that was what Chris Power meant. Or did he simply mean that Akutagawa is Japanese, and therefore you will never have even heard of him, let alone read him? Sadly, I suspect that he did.
I'm not really criticising Chris Power here. He seems to know his Akutagawa better than I do (I'm not going to get into a competition about this). I just find the underlying assumption very sad, even if it is (because it is?) a correct assumption with regard to the attitudes of English-speaking readers.
I also noticed something else in what Chris Power has written:
As a final note, Jay Rubin's translations in the recent Penguin edition of Akutagawa's stories represent a significant improvement on several past efforts. The choice of Haruki Murakami to write the introduction is a puzzle, however, given that he only musters faint praise for his subject. But that's an irony Akutagawa, who once ended a story by claiming that if her boyfriend didn't brutally deflower his heroine then the critics most surely would, might well have enjoyed.
If they do represent such an improvement that's because past efforts have been abysmal. One of the many curses of Japanese literature is that lack of interest in the West means no money in translating, which means that the dismal trickle of translations that do appear are usually executed by anaemic academics, with no idea of literary style, in their coffee breaks, between marking exam papers. I wonder if Chris Power has been able to compare Jay Rubin's translations with the originals here. I often remark blurbs that say what a good job the translator of such-and-such a story has done, from reviewers who obviously don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Also, he's right to say that Murakami only "musters faint praise". Why was Murakami, who doesn't even care about Japanese literature, drafted in to write this introduction? Because he's probably the only Japanese writer who people in the West can name, I imagine. He provides an introduction that reads like an essay he was forced to write for high school, with a few metaphorical I's dotted and T's crossed. And all the while, beneath the surface of the introduction, is the subtext, "Forget about Akutagawa. That's old Japan. Pre-war stuff. Worhship me! Me! Me! ME! ME! MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI FOR THE CUP!"
Chris Power suggests Akutagawa would enjoy this irony, but having one's grave shat on is not really so much an irony as something that's very boring and expected for a writer. My personal guess is that Akutagawa wouldn't 'appreciate' it at all; and there's no reason he should do.
Anyway, I shall proceed to my thoughts on the story in question. I can't remember when I first read 'Rashomon', but it would have been in one of those bad translations at university. I found it understated, but it stirred something in me. In any case, I remembered it, when I forget so much of what I read. I've since read it again at least twice in other English translations as well as once in the Japanese orginal. Reading it in the orginal I found the whole thing suddenly came alive to me, and I understood. What did I understand? The usual line in describing Akutagawa's work is, to borrow Chris Power's words again, that he achieves his effects by "applying modernist techniques to [...] adaptations of traditional stories". 'Rashomon' is set in Mediaeval Japan, the distant past, at a time when the country was collapsing into barbarism at the end of the effete gentility of the Heian Period. The opening passages mention a series of disasters that have ruined the capital - "earthquakes, whirlwinds, fire and famine". This is, in fact, the period written of by Kamo no Chomei, author of Hojoki, or, A Record of My Hut, and Akutagawa seems to borrow some images straight from this work, including the Buddhist effigies used for firewood. They are images that conjure up the idea of a 'dark age'. Reading the story in the original, however, it suddenly struck me with a ghoulish tingle, as if I could see the piled corpses before me - this was not only the distant past, this was also the future. It is that tingle, I think, at once understated, and also vast and chilling in its scope - the tingle of an observer in a gold-plated, air-conditioned atrocity exhibition - that is the hallmark of much of Akutagawa's work.
I also find it fitting that the first work I present in this series of short stories, should be written by someone who wrote no 'full-length' works. I hope that, even in translation, it demonstrates that the worth of a writer does not come from the bulk of his or her output. As a matter of fact, it would have been difficult for Akutagawa to produce an oeuvre of great volume. Suffering in his final years from poor health, and fearing the onset of hereditary madness, which he believed might be his destiny, in 1927, at the age of 35, he took an overdose and ended his life. He had written just prior to his death that he felt "a vague uneasiness" about the future.
So, readers, just in case you missed it the first time, let me provide a link to an English translation of 'Rashomon'. I won't comment on the translation, except to reiterate that I did find there to be a considerable difference between the translations I had read, in their impact, and the original Japanese. I hope that you will enjoy the translation sufficiently for it to be worth your while. It is, after all, only a short story. And finally, I will give that link again; readers, let me present, the future.
Recently Justin Isis sent me a link to this story, about a seventeen-year-old boy from Alabama who recently received a lot of attention for writing a letter to The New York Times declaring that their literary gods were on the way out (DeLillo has "already had his turn anyway"). I suppose I'm glad that anyone would send in a letter to The New York Times challenging the literary status quo, and I'm also glad that there are seventeen-year-olds (at least one) in the world who care enough about literature to do so. The boy, Alec Niedenthal, wittingly or otherwise, has also, in doing so, scored a great publicity point for his own cause as a writer. It looks like he might not have too much trouble finding a publisher for his work after this, and I certainly hope that's the case, because when, as a writer, you see how barren life is without the big break, you begin to want big breaks to happen to any writer out there, if possible, even if you don't like their work (as long as they're sincere about what they do).
However, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed when I read the actual letter, and can't really work out why it caused so much fuss, unless it's simply because nobody expected any seventeen-year-old even to be reading books, let alone writing a letter to The New York Times about them. The New York Observer called the letter "incendiary". It's hardly that. All it says, basically, is that Dwight Garner's desire for a "bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror" will be met by someone from the younger generation rather than from the current heroes of The New York Times. Is that incendiary? Incendiary would have been to say that the whole self-congratulating New York literary scene is comprised of people who wouldn't even know what a prose style is if it kidnapped them and kept them in a cellar for seven years, subjecting them to a nightmarish ordeal of sexual abuse and physical and mental torture. Or, anyway, that would be approaching incendiary. Niedenthal's letter is actually more in the cute and lovable vein than the incendiary. This disappointment was compounded by other things. I was interested to see who Niedenthal's literary influences might be:
Right now I’m more into modern and postmodern stuff, not anything really contemporary. Like I’m reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell right now. I like William Vollmann, too ... William Gaddis, Pynchon, John Barth, that stuff, mostly.
It all sounds fairly tame and conservative to me. Which is fine, but Niedenthal is looking less and less like the great hope of some wild literary revolution. If he had namechecked Kanehara Hitomi, Thomas Ligotti, Can Xue or even a snarling old fogey like Michel Houellebecq, I would have been more impressed.
Then there's Niedenthal's prose style, which is basically seventeen-year-old thesaurus prose. He is trying to write beyond his ability, which in some ways is good, because at least he's trying to stretch himself. Take the following example:
You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses.
Someone should tell (hopefully has told) him that "conscientious" here is a malapropism. Good old "conscious" is the word he's looking for, though it has two fewer syllables.
There's another example here:
The literary call to arms sounded long ago (only many neglected to listen), and, Mr. Editor, well, we’ve been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don’t mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you’ll be more than impressed.
Can't have been whiling away that fucking long if he's only seventeen. When you get to my age... (oh God!!!)... you'll know what "whiling away" is. But the malapropism in this case is "persisting". Can you "persist" on raw fish and Red Bull? Maybe. But I have a feeling that the desired word in this case was 'subsist'.
My intention here isn't to be mean and try to embarrass the guy. I mean, I'm still guilty of using malapropisms after more years wrestling with my native tongue than Niedenthal has spent breathing the air of a doomed planet. And it is always embarrassing to discover that one has been using a malapropism when one was trying to be all "bloviated" and "lofty" (I try my damnedest to be bloviated, it has to be said). No, I am not trying to discredit Niedenthal as a writer. When I was seventeen... it's hard to remember what I was writing then, actually, but it probably wasn't as good as what Niedenthal is writing now. If anything, I'm trying to defend the guy in a way. The chances that he's fully developed his writing style already are very slim indeed, and, in that sense, he really shouldn't be judged as a writer based on his current output. Also, if I were to give him some advice - use a dictionary as well as a thesaurus.
There is something else. I'm not sure to whom I would address my closing remarks. I would say that I address them to the publishers and critics who currently call the shots in mainstream literature. For instance, the critics of The New York Times, and the publishers and authors of the kind of books they review. But I don't think any of them are really listening to anything outside of their very narrow humanistic universality. If they published Niedenthal's letter it's probably because they think that, given a few years, he'll fit right in. However, if I try to imagine some scene - beyond the very limited imaginations of those associated with that scene - in which they were actually listening to the likes of me, I would say something like this: The only reason that Niedenthal's letter got published was because he is seventeen. Great. It's good that you acknowledge there is a younger generation. But there are plenty of writers older than Niedenthal who could write much better letters, without overuse of a thesaurus, without the malapropisms, and with much more incendiary material, who, I am sure, you would never think of publishing in your pages. They have been "whiling away" for a very long time indeed, and, in the process, some of them have got pretty good at what they do. But they no longer have the novelty of youth on their side, and they are too old now to start again through the right channels with the right connections in order to get the big break and be somebody on the scene, but, you know what, my own personal view is that they have much more chance of writing a "bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror" than Niedenthal. Even better, they might care so little about nine-fucking-eleven that they write something truly unusual and interesting in a way that neither DeLillo nor perhaps Niedenthal can ever dream of.
They say - someone said - that there's no friend as loyal as a book.
Sometimes I get really wretched thinking about my position in society and the state of my relations with other human beings. Not that I'm universally reviled or anything like that, but, without wanting to go into detail, I sometimes feel like I've committed a crime for which I can never atone, just by being who I am. At such times it feels like every word I utter and every act I make only serves to dig me deeper into the pit of my shame.
Luckily there's art in this world, and, for me, especially literature.
Recently, someone sent me a little package from Japan containing a book about one of my favourite authors, Nagai Kafu. It is his picture that you see on the right hand side of this screen, in a hat and raincoat, walking along a street away from his favourite cafe in Asakusa, Tokyo. The cafe still stands. It is called Arizona Kitchen, and I have visited there twice on pilgrimage.
The title of the book sent to me is Nagai Kafu to iu Ikikata, which translates roughly as The Nagai Kafu Way of Life. The little wraparound slip tells us:
"Living freely, as you please, in a manner true to yourself! Hints we may pick up from the great author on how to live a stress-free life."
Japan seems to be big on this kind of lifestyle book, and it's kind of amusing that such an ultimate individualist and contrarian as Kafu should become a model for one of them. The author, Matsumoto Hajime, has written a great deal on Kafu, and I think this was probably an angle suggested to him by the publisher.
Anyway, here's what the inside cover says:
"Life becomes more and more enjoyable with age. The name Nagai Kafu brings to mind a man of letters responsible for such peerless works as Pleasures and A Strange Tale From East of the River, which influenced an age. However, the life behind those works, too, is unique; without relying on relatives or in-laws, having no traffic with other writers, vilified as a miser and a womaniser, he lived a full seventy-nine years on his own and in his own way. In his diary, Dyspepsia House Days, which he kept continuously for forty-two years, right up until the day before he died, we find not only the deepest thoughts of Kafu the man, but also a precious record of social and sexual customs that spans the three ages of Meiji, Taisho and Showa."
I've read a little of the book already. Unfortunately, I can't read the whole thing yet because I'm still maintaining my policy of finishing four books before I start any other, so I only dipped into it. I read, though, of how he came by his pen-name. Sent to hospital at the age of fifteen, he fell in love with a nurse there, though he never divulged his feelings to her. Her name was O-hasu, which means 'lotus'. The character 'ka' in 'Kafu' also has a meaning of 'lotus'. In fact, the two characters of 'Kafu' together mean 'lotus-wind'. As Matsumoto Hajime remarks, in this way, Kafu kept alive the memory of his first love throughout his entire life:
"It is said that there are few men who knew as many women in their lives as Kafu, and so it's rather interesting that such a Kafu should employ a pen-name that paid tribute to his first love his whole life. Unfulfilled love, which ends before it begins, is not forgotten. If one has a full chance to enjoy the love of the other, there is always the chance that one will tire of it, or be disappointed. However, if one sets a seal on it before it begins, it remains beautiful."
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing.
It's easy to see why someone might want to write a book about Kafu as a sort of how-to on avoiding stress, because, well, reading Kafu does tend to relieve my stress. Everything in life suddenly becomes of merely aesthetic consideration. Not having read Matsumoto's book, I don't know exactly what lessons he will draw from Kafu's life, but off the top of my head, if there is a lesson to learn, it seems to me it's that Kafu just didn't give much of a damn what other people thought about him. Is that why life becomes more and more enjoyable as he gets older? One of my favourite photos of him shows him towards the end of his life, with a broad grin in which many of the teeth are missing.
I leave you with a quote from Kafu's diary, as translated by Edward Seidensticker:
"It has been four years since I commenced this life of solitude, living in the maid's room and cooking for myself. At first there was a certain novelty in the arrangement. Then, toward the end of last year, the ways of the military government began to grow more arbitrary, and there came a change in the world; and somehow the drab and inconvenient life of the bachelor has come to seem so appropriate to the moods of the days that I would not now find it easy to change. Indeed, my feelings and thoughts are quite beyond description when, on an evening of a sudden autumn rain, I drag my sandals along the cliff, taking care that the frayed thong does not break, and buy onions and radishes in Tanimachi. I am quite drunk with the melancholy poetry of it all. However malicious and arbitrary may be the ways of the government, it cannot keep one's fancies from running free. There will be freedom while there is life."
WIDGETIZE