‾ BO ‾ ABE KO HOME
O ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
JOLENE LAI
THE SCOFIELD
RICHARD F. CALICHMAN, INTRODUCTION TO BEASTS HEAD FOR HOME
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Dialogue
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“Abe elaborates what might be called a notion of homelines that serves to call into question the fixity or givenness of all borders, and above all those borders that delineate the space of the home. Here the concept of home that appears in the very title of the novel would refer not only to the ‘hometown’ or ‘native place’ typically designated by the word kokyō. On the contrary, an attentive reading of the novel reveals that Abe seeks to generalize this concept by reconceiving the notion of border. The traditional understanding of home requires the functioning of borders, but Abe implies that this use of the border paradoxically dissimulates or disavows its force. Whereas the boundary that allows a home to appear in its identity is seen to mark its difference from the nonhome, or that which exists outside this privileged domestic space, Abe suggests instead that borders can at any moment potentially be drawn within that internal space itself, thereby disrupting its putative unity.”
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THE SCOFIELD
EIYA IWATA
“If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.” ‾ BO ‾ ABE, THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES KO
“Ah, finally with this I can rest. The setting sun stains the cocoon red. This alone is my home that no one can interfere with. But, even though I now have a home, now there is no me to return to it.”
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‾ BO ‾ ABE, AS QUOTED IN FAKE FISH: THE THEATER OF KO ‾ ‾ KO BO ABE BY NANCY K. SHIELDS
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The Entrance to Kōbō Abe’s Home (Now Demolished)
“In short, my place of birth, the place where I was brought up, and my official family registration are each different, making it rather complicated for me to compose a brief resume of my vital statistics. I think that one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is that I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the ‘hometown phobia’ that runs in the depths of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me.”
‾ ‾ KO BO ABE HOME
‾ BO ‾ ABE, “THE RED COCOON” KO
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Scofield Thayer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2
Sculpture by Gaston Lachaise
Dialogue
22
Photography by Unknown
2
Painting by Jolene Lai
The Entrance to Kōbō Abe’s Home (Now Demolished)
Kōbō Abe Prepares Gyōza
A Selection from Beasts Head for Home
23
Fiction Excerpt by Kōbō Abe
3
Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan
28
Painting by Paul Cézanne
Photography by Eiya Iwata
Table of Contents
4
A Selected Bibliography of Kōbō Abe
10
A Selection from Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō Non-fiction Excerpt by Richard F. Calichman
Ushijima, Nakataya Beasts Head for Home: The Center of His Compass
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Letter from the Editor by Tyler Malone
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36
Woodblock Print by Hokusai Katsushika
Abe in Poe’s Ballroom
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Essay by Scott Beauchamp
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Vincent Van Gogh
Decors-7
40
Painting by Minoru Nomata
Kōbō Abe Ports of Entry Recommended Reading by Various Authors
15 Four Haikus of Home
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The Yellow House
40
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Poetry by Bashō Matsuo
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
No Cherry Blossoms: Kōbō Abe on Identity, Home, and Alienation
TABLE OF CONTENTS
41
Essay by Yuji Matson
Upon the Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock
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49
The Basement
66
Two Haikus of Home
66
Poetry by Sodō Yamaguchi
52
Interview by Chandra Steele
A Home
62
Painting by Jolene Lai
Essay by Todd Shimoda
At Home in All Worlds: A Conversation with Banana Yoshimoto
The House on the Hill: A Selection from Inheritance from Mother Fiction by Minae Mizumura
Painting by Shuichi Nakano
Kōbō Abe: Never at Home
56
Interview by Tyler Malone
Poetry by Alexander Pope
At the End of Spring
Coloring in the Lines: A Conversation with Juliet Winters Carpenter
The Abandoned Case: After Kōbō Abe’s Ruined Map
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Fiction by Lincoln Michel
54
Poetry by Sarah C. Woolsey
Building Homes, Building Worlds, Building Selves
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55
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
The Judgment
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Fiction by Franz Kafka
Some News of Home Poetry by Wei Wang
55
Premonition of Storm Painting by Shuichi Nakano
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83
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Thatched Cottages at Cordeville
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Essay by Timothy Iles
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Soft Paté: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women
TABLE OF CONTENTS
84
Four Haikus of Home
117
Poetry by Issa Kobayashi
Review by Ryan Chang
A Hole Is Not a Burrow: The Ephiphanic Horror of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and Its Line of Literary Descent
87
Beasts of History, Beasts of Identity: A Conversation with Richard F. Calichman
118
Interview by P. T. Smith
Essay by Sean Hooks
Cacophony
121
Painting by Jolene Lai
Sublime-12
97
Painting by Minoru Nomata
Talk of Home
98
A House Is Not a Home: Language, Ideology, and the House in Horror
122
Essay by Tyler Malone
Essay by Tobias Carroll
In the Bedroom The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu
100
Essay by Peter Grilli
126
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
A Brief History of Beds
127
Essay by Scott Cheshire
104 Mirage
132
Poetry by Teow Lim Goh
The Fall of the House of Usher
105
Fiction by Edgar Allan Poe
The House with the Cracked Walls Painting by Paul Cézanne
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Asakusa Rice Fields and Festival of Torinomachi 117
Woodblock Print by Hiroshige Utagawa
132
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Poetry by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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My Home
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Oort Cloud
TABLE OF CONTENTS
133
Essay by Scott Esposito
A Tale of Two Suburbs: Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere
150
Review by Maddie Crum
A Selection from The Tale of Genji
140
Fiction Excerpt by Shikibu Murasaki
House in Auvers
152
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Le Penseur
140
Painting by Shuichi Nakano
Great Thinkers on Home
Night in the Old Home
152
Poetry by Thomas Hardy
141
Quotations from Various Authors
A Selection from Letters to Memory
153
Memoir Excerpt by Karen Tei Yamashita
142
Painting by Minoru Nomata
143
A Selection from The Maids
155
Fiction Excerpt by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Interview by Tobias Carroll
A Selection from ME: A Novel
154
Painting by Minoru Nomata
146
Fiction Excerpt by Tomoyuki Hoshino
From a Performance of Kōbō Abe’s Play Slave Hunting
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Deep Structures and Subverting Narratives: A Conversation with Eugene Lim
Land-Escape-4
Photography by Unknown
Nobleman’s Cart Woodblock Print by Hokusai Katsushika
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149
Evening Snow at Kangara
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Woodblock Print by Hiroshige Utagawa ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
Eastbound-2
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Three Haikus of Home
TABLE OF CONTENTS
160
Poetry by Buson Yosa
Dwelling at Home in the Dunes: Kōbō Abe and Martin Heidegger
188
Essay by Kevin Siefert
Where I Want to Be: Finding Home Between Byrne and Bachelard
161
Essay by Nathan Goldman
In the Place Where Sea Breeze Blows
A Selection from In the House of July and August
195
Fiction Excerpt by Maria Gabriela Llansol
165
Painting by Shuichi Nakano
Heirloom
196
Painting by Jolene Lai
Home (Initial Findings)
166
Poetry by Franny Choi
A Selection from Ice
197
Fiction Excerpt by Anna Kavan
Seeing Solid: Snake in a Box
167
Essay by Conor Higgins
The Problem of Home
171
Essay by Andrea Scrima
A Writer Walks Into a Bar: A Conversation with Alex Gilvarry
204
Interview by Scott Cheshire
A Selection from I Am a Cat
207
Fiction Excerpt by Sōseki Natsume Recommended Reading by Various Authors
Two Haikus of Home
210
Poetry by Shiki Masaoka
My Bisymmetrical Self Poetry by Machi Tawara
185 Kōbō Abe Looks Away Photography by Unknown
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Abeesque
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Selection from “Phantasmagoria”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
211
Poetry Excerpt by Lewis Carroll
The Problem of the Dog
222
Poetry by Kikaku Takarai
212
Essay by Joshua Rothes
You Can’t Go Home Again: Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Map Drawn by a Spy
Two Haikus of Home
On Our Nightstand
223
Recommended Reading by Various Authors
214
The Frisch Questionnaire
228
Responses by Katie Kitamura
Review by Melissa Beck
217
Painting by Shuichi Nakano
Where We Live
218
Poetry by Michael Dickman
Migration
219
Painting by Jolene Lai
The Liminal Subject: Fragments of a Dissertation on Kōbō Abe
Land-Escape-15
229
Painting by Minoru Nomata
Boxed Wine Sangria
230
Cocktail Recipe by Manny Bawkes
The Stairs at Kōbō Abe’s Home (Now Demolished)
231
Photography by Eiya Iwata
220
Panel of Dead Authors
232
Comic by Charlie Meyard
Essay by Maxim Brown and Sarah Heikkinen
Death of the Author The White House at Night
222
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Till Find the Forest
Comic by R. E. Parrish
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Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
233
Photography by Eiya Iwata
234
Non-fiction Excerpt by Edith Wharton
An Exchange from The Woman in the Dunes
Novels
234
Coda by Kōbō Abe
Undone
235
Painting by Jolene Lai
The Final Stage Directions from Friends
235
Coda by Kōbō Abe
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Collections (Stories / Plays / Essays)
Masthead
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Dramatis Personae
237
Portraits by Manny Bawkes
Beasts Head for Home (1957, trans. 2017) Inter Ice Age 4 (1959, trans. 1970) The Woman in the Dunes (1962, trans. 1964) The Face of Another (1964, trans. 1966) The Ruined Map (1967, trans. 1969) The Box Man (1973, trans. 1974) Secret Rendezvous (1977, trans. 1980) The Ark Sakura (1984, trans. 1988) The Kangaroo Notebook (1991, trans. 1996)
Four Stories by Kōbō Abe (trans. 1973) The Man Who Turned Into a Stick: Three Related Plays (trans. 1975) Beyond the Curve and Other Stories (trans. 1991) Three Plays by Kōbō Abe (trans. 1993) The Frontier Within: Essays (trans. 2016)
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A Selection from The Decoration of Houses
A Selected Bibliography of Kōbō Abe
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
The Bottom of the Stairs at Kōbō Abe’s Home (Now Demolished)
THE SCOFIELD
The Center of His Compass
“Everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home,” wrote Kōbō Abe in the novel that is generally considered his masterpiece, The Woman in the Dunes. Our home is the epicenter of our existence—the nucleus around which all else orbits. It is the private place where we stockpile many of the fragments that help to form the assemblages of our lives. In our homes, we keep our memories, our menageries, our secrets, our selves. A home is a second skin, another body—one we’ve chosen, one we’ve built. Homes delineate space, construct identity, set up borders—whether in the form of white picket fences and geometrical manicured hedges or surveilled state lines and barbed wire border walls. The home offers safety and stability, but because it lulls us with this dream of impenetrable security and uncompromising fixity, the home also entices danger and invites corruption. Interestingly, Abe set the center of his artistic compass less at his own home and more at the concept of home itself. Though there are admittedly many subjects that Abe wrestles with in his work—identity, consciousness, reality, illusion, alienation, modernity, the absurd, borders, community, masks, metamorphosis, the crowd, solitude, etc.—home, and all that the word entails, is the concept that weaves all these others together. Yet if home is central to Abe’s work, it achieves this fundamental position somewhat covertly. Unlike many of his contemporaries and forebears—masters of twentieth-
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century Japanese literature like Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Kenzaburō Ōe, Fumiko Enchi, Shūsaku Endō, Osamu Dazai, and Sōseki Natsume, who clearly set the center of their compasses at Japan—Abe was, by his own admission, not altogether interested in his homeland. “I have the habit of doubting the significance of belonging to a nation,” Abe argued, “be it Japan or any other nation, or belonging to any society. And so, in a certain sense, I’ve lived without especially mystifying nationality.” Because of this, Abe disliked being called a “Japanese author.” Timothy Iles, an Abe scholar who contributed to this issue, noted: Abe is part of the system of Japanese literature, but he exists within this system as a ghost in the machine, as a proponent of radical social, structural change—as a writer who himself rejected any associations with “Japanese literature” in favor of the broader context of world literature. Abe famously had his eye on a more international audience than many of his contemporaries. He saw himself as a world writer, not a Japanese one. Thus, like the writings of Franz Kafka, Abe’s work feels universal, allegorical, unbound to any place and its people. His stories could take place in any nation, any state, any town, any landscape— in fact, they are taking place in every nation, every state, every town, every landscape. In “Journey through a Wormhole in the Earth,” Abe laid out his philosophy: I feel nothing but repugnance for the pseudo-culture which tries to legitimize the
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Beasts Head for Home:
TYLER MALONE
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TYLER MALONE
THE SCOFIELD
He detests all walls, but especially those that constitute national and state borders. He concedes that we may never tear these walls down, but he emphasizes his interest not in borders, but in bridges—in finding avenues to explore our common humanity outside of our community particulars. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Abe’s literary touchstones were not his fellow countrymen. When he discussed the authors he admired, the names mentioned were almost entirely foreign. In addition to Franz Kafka, he claimed to be influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, and André Breton. These were writers who seemed to Abe untethered from their local affiliations. We don’t read Kafka for a description of the Czech landscape or a cataloging of daily life in Prague; we read him for his navigation of man’s interiors. He mined the minds of us all, rather than some particular set of people with similar national traits or ethnic characteristics, and he discerned what it means to exist in and to struggle against the absurdity of the modern world. Similarly, Abe avoided depicting typical Japanese traditions or utilizing obvious Japanese tropes that would bind the stories inextricably to a particular “Japaneseness.” Journalist David Remnick wrote of Abe’s work, “There are no samurai warriors, as in Mishima, no tea ceremonies, as in Kawabata.” In fact, Abe admitted to Remnick: “I get a little tired of hearing
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about tea ceremonies. I think tea ceremonies are for tourist brochures and the propaganda put out by Japan Air Lines.” Abe followed this statement with a belly laugh (what Remnick called “a New York sort of laugh”). Because he engaged with his home so much less explicitly than most of his contemporaries, it perhaps seems strange to claim home as Abe’s pet theme. But like many of his interests, just because the concept of home was glanced at in the periphery, doesn’t make it any less essential. It is always there—in his novels, his stories, his plays, his essays, everywhere. While the subject is crucial to an understanding of his work, one might argue that rather than an obsession with it, Abe actually had quite the opposite relationship to the idea of home. He had what he called “hometown phobia”: In short, my place of birth, the place where I was brought up, and my official family registration are each different, making it rather complicated for me to compose a brief resume of my vital statistics. I think that one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is that I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the “hometown phobia” that runs in the depths of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me. This “hometown phobia” is part of a larger distaste for stability. He avoids pinning things down too clearly, which is what makes his writing so strange. Nothing is set, secure, stable. In most novels, proper nouns are everywhere. Names of people and places ground us in the particulars of a world, allow us easy entrance into the fictive dream, help
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walls surrounding nations by insisting on a particularism of customs and habits which is in fact no more than a mere ramification of culture. All the same, countries try to give legitimacy to such pseudo-culture. Naturally, the people, who have been manipulated by the state, come to think of true culture as heresy.
TYLER MALONE
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TYLER MALONE
THE SCOFIELD
TYLER MALONE
us believe in what we know to be “make believe.” Not all authors attempt this sort of fixity though. Some writers run from specificity, preferring instead the abstraction of myth, the universality of allegory. Abe was one such writer. His novels, as Abe scholar and translator Richard F. Calichman put it, “typically provide a bare minimum of proper nouns as indicators of people and place.” Calichman explained that Abe sought “to present situations whose meaning, in its generality, goes beyond the limits of any particular context.” “In my fiction, proper nouns are insignificant,” Abe claimed. “They don’t need to be there.” What does need to be there—and always is, in Abe’s work—is that move toward a more universal and allegorical set of experiences. Abe’s fiction generally deals with everyman protagonists in unfixed, ever-shifting landscapes—individuals struggling with the impossibility of seizing some understanding of their identity, community, and environment. Things we imagine are static, but are actually always in flux. Abe is a writer of what J. G. Ballard called “inner space,” which is “the meeting ground between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality.” This hinterland between inner and outer worlds is a constantly shifting frontier. The way borders are drawn and redrawn is very important in Abe’s work and rightly determines his discomfort with fixed ideas of identity, community, nation, and home. Though Abe’s novels generally avoid the specificity of place and rarely explicitly deal with the particulars of home, there is an exception to these rules in one of his early novels: Beasts Head for Home, which was published for the first time in English in May of this year by Columbia University Press. (The fact that Abe’s most overtly home-obsessed work was published for the first
time in English earlier this year only solidifed our resolve to pair Abe with this theme. Columbia University Press has graciously given us permission to reprint an excerpt in these pages.) Calichman, the translator of Beasts Head for Home, whom our creative director P. T. Smith interviewed for this issue, explained in his introduction to the novel:
We like to imagine home as a stable object—an immovable house securely fastened to terra firma—but the home is a concept constantly in flux. The home is—to borrow a phrase from my favorite of Abe’s novels, The Box Man—“a movable house of cardboard.” The home in Abe is liminal, and it shares this liminality with a subject’s identity—both are constantly shifting, fluid, dependent on borders which are always in the process of being drawn and redrawn. Writer Maxim Brown, another of our contributors, explained of Abe’s ideal of liminality: Abe’s liminal subject is a step towards a new mode of consciousness. In this mode, one can exist in a fluid space where there are no preexisting
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No home is possible without this act of bordering, and yet the maintenance, or continued recognition, of the home as such demands that this border be constantly redrawn in order to confirm the distinction between friend and enemy, inside and outside, security and danger. For Abe, the disclosure of the border as in truth an act, continually repeated, of drawing borders effectively threatens the security and self-identity of the home, since this latter is incessantly redetermined at each and every moment homelines are marked.
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TYLER MALONE
THE SCOFIELD
TYLER MALONE
VINCENT VAN GOGH
structures that might project identity onto the individual. He does not condemn those who prefer to remain firmly fixed within a social field. But that is a limited and, to him, unsatisfying mode of existence, which blocks off the potential contained within the chaotic flux.
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The Yellow House
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
A question remains (one Abe himself asked in The Woman in the Dunes): “Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence?” Throughout his work, Abe argued “no,” yet perpetual flux remains as unattainable as immovable fixity. Abe may have eschewed most proper nouns, but he still needed some to tell a story. Even without proper nouns, common nouns—all words, in fact—always do a bit of fixing, even if they also produce slippage. It is natural to grasp at things, to try to hold onto them, if only for a brief moment. Beasts always head for home. We must build houses to live in. As hard as it is to picture him there, even Abe lived in a house. (We offer as evidence of this fact Eiya Iwata’s photographs of the outside of Abe’s home throughout this issue.) It is true that the world is a world of flux, and we’d perhaps do better to admit we mirror that constant state of change instead of stubbornly building up structures to affix ourselves. But the world is also a world of particulars, so it makes sense that we’d try to shore up these fragments against our ruins, to build some structure we recognize—a home, an identity, a something—because movement and change, being a natural part of life, may be easy to attain, but they are truly impossible to continually maintain without perpetual exhaustion. Even those with “hometown phobia” find ourselves building houses, heading home. Why else would we carry a compass?
THE SCOFIELD
If you’re interested in Kōbō Abe, but have no clue where to begin, here are some recommendations for you from some writers and scholars intimately connected with Abe and his oeuvre. Will Chancellor on The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe To me, Kōbō Abe is the foremost novelist of vanishment—a wife whisked away by an unsolicited ambulance (Secret Rendezvous); a husband who disappears with the single trace of a matchbook (The Ruined Map); a young man who seeks to inhabit, maybe become, a cardboard box (The Box Man)—and nowhere else in his fiction do we get as close to the full implications of vanishment as we do in The Woman in the Dunes. A teacher and amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, ventures to the dunes in search of a new species of beetle. While photographing a house partially embedded in a sand wall, the teacher meets a fearfully inquisitive old man. The teacher denies that he is a government inspector and affirms that he is a lowly schoolteacher, which the old man and his companions translate as “someone who won’t be missed.” After a brief ruse that he is being lodged in one of the quaint village houses he is so fond of, the old man and his companions lower the teacher into a deep sandy pit. PAGE 15
Practically, Jumpei has disappeared from human ken after a few dozen pages. But this is why I love The Woman in the Dunes and consider it a masterpiece of non-being: physical disappearance is nearly insignificant next to the howl of psychological vanishing. To borrow a metaphor from Abe’s non-fictional The Frontiers Within, at first we think relating to the world is trying to force open a jammed window; then we realize that the walls are a reflection of the interior world; then we realize that the walls of our house, our interiority, are not so stable after all—they suddenly collapse and we are left free-floating in infinite darkness. Imagine The Woman in the Dunes as a booklong extension of the first sentence of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Whereas Kafka sees with a realist’s eye the implications of a single fantastical change, Abe drops an entomologist in a sandpit and observes how each wall falls down until the man becomes a beetle incapable of sustained, liberating flight. Of course we each live with the horror of vanishing forever one finger-snap away. To cope, we push this wellfounded fear back into the walls. Abe does the opposite here. He looks at the hourglass and, unhappy to think of it as something apart from his life, puts his protagonist at the base of that glass bulb, looking up at the onslaught of time. As the grains fall into his eyes, he surrenders the notion of ever mastering time. And in this final moment, he ceases to be. Before pressing this book into your hands, I need to mention one way The Woman in the Dunes reconnected my brain. Throughout the novel, the narrator insists that sand is, in most important respects, a liquid. Sand pours on the teacher, threatens to drown him, ripples, and splashes. “Its flow is its life.” This liquidity of the desert is something
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Kōbō Abe Ports of Entry
VARIOUS AUTHORS
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
VARIOUS AUTHORS
THE SCOFIELD
Mark de Silva on The Box Man by Kōbō Abe You re-read some books to appreciate the niceties; others, simply the gross facts. The Box Man is of this second sort, a disjunctive novel in which “the causal relationship among things [is] naturally interrupted,” two of the three central characters are possibly figments of the other’s imagination, and the authorship of the text is itself a matter of ongoing dispute within the narrative. You could, perhaps, rigorously sift appearance from reality in this book, though two and a half readings in, I am not optimistic about the prospect. You would, in any case, also probably be missing the point. The discomfiting jumble of the authentic and the fake, the seen and the unseen, is just what Abe conjures so profoundly here. The book centers on the lives of men whose craving to see without being seen—anonymously, with impunity—has grown so overpowering, they’ve taken to walking the streets with boxes over their heads, seeing out of observation windows cut into the cardboard. The protagonist himself is an amateur photographer whose hobby, innocently begun, has led him to suspend his life within the box: “I am a box man,” he declares early on, “which is the same as not existing.” Box living offers quite a lot of in recompense for the half-death it inflicts, particularly in the impersonal modern world that is Abe’s great subject (The Face of Another is an eerily parallel study of selfhood and—or in—anonymity). Really, it’s the perfect adaption to the atomized conditions of urban life. It’s why regular men secretly dream of being box men. PAGE 16
“A box man’s eyes,” for instance, “cannot be deceived, he sees through the lies and secret intentions concealed by the scenery.” He’s immune to what Abe suggests is a universal tendency of humankind: “visual rape.” Free from the anxiety of being visually grasped by others, the box man lives more authentically, and sees more clearly, than others do. There is a price, of course: the twin paralysis “of the heart’s sense of direction” and of “the sense of time.” But then, don’t metropolitans already pay this price as a matter of course? The book’s central tableau, a psychosexual dreamdelusion (or not), occurs at a hospital and involves the box man, who’s needing treatment for a wound from an air rifle; a nurse, who’s also an object of sexual desire; and his doctor, who not only appears to be the one who shot the box man, but who has paid him 50,000 yen to shed the box and fornicate with the nurse, all while the doctor himself dons a box and watches. The box man himself offers a telling out-of-body interpretation of this mystifying scene: “At the same time as I was looking at her, another I was looking at me looking at her.” To leave the box for the nurse, the doctor (the other I) points out while goading him to do it, would make a return to the safety of the box impossible. For the box is effectively a chrysalis, and when a box man “takes it off, it is to emerge into another world, just as an insect metamorphoses.” In another description, the box is a tunnel, and romantic (or perhaps just sexual) communion is the light at its end. Abe’s box man, however, never emerges from the tunnel into the light, resigning himself instead to enclosing the world within the box’s darkness. The woman he needs, he knows, is somewhere in these shadows, and can only be found without the terrible power of sight.
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that feels like the future. Abe’s transubstantiation of the desert is linguistic shamanism of the highest order.
VARIOUS AUTHORS
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Is there anything to salvage from what the Boston Globe reviewed as “Kōbō Abe’s Artistic Shipwreck”? Kōbō Abe’s novel, The Ark Sakura, wasn’t exactly met with a thunderous applause in the Anglophone world—let alone his native Japan. The novel told the tale of a band of outcasts who sought refuge in an underground quarry from the pending threat of a (virtual) nuclear war. The protagonist’s hope of creating an utopian community in quarry erodes as nefarious forces invade his converted bomb shelter. Such a strange scenario was par for the course for most of Abe’s novels. Yet, the novel received less than satisfactory reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. All in all, the reception to The Ark Sakura in the West was overwhelmingly negative upon the first publication of its English translation. So what went wrong? To begin, having the protagonist get his foot trapped in a toilet throughout a sizable chunk of the novel doesn’t exactly make for a compelling read. As John Lewell wrote, “it is as if the author himself has suffered a seizure of the imagination.” In contrast, responses to The Ark Sakura, were slightly more favorable, but even admirers of Abe such as Watanabe Hiroshi and Okune Takeo voiced their personal disappointment in the finished product. According to the scholar and literary critic, Katsumi Takayuki, the radicalism of Abe’s avantgardism declined during the 1970s and became dated by a new wave of hyper-consumerist avant-pop genre during the 1980s. Readers in both Japan and the West related more closely to newer, younger novelists such as Paul Auster, Kenzaburō Ōe, Haruki Murakami, and Ryu Murakami. Whatever The Ark Sakura’s flaws may have been, it is simply wrong to assert that its themes were irrelevant. PAGE 17
Like most of Abe’s novels, The Ark Sakura was fixated with the nature of lies, half-truths, and falsehoods in post-war Japan. The novel posited that the virtual threat of thermonuclear war has rendered Japan in a state of “hyperreality.” Near the end, it’s revealed that the word, sakura, in the book’s title wasn’t just a blossom, but was interchangeable for the Japanese slang for shill. The meaning behind this symbol grows even more loaded if the reader recalls that the sakura was also a militarized wartime symbol for Imperial Japan. From Abe’s viewpoint, the Cold War has fabricated an atmosphere of decoherence, unreality, and lies. In the contemporary age of social media, a panicked fear of the unknown has gripped the world and consumers are uncertain of what is fact or fiction in the era of fake news. If I didn’t know any better, Abe’s novel could just as easily have been about today. Dolan Morgan on Secret Rendezvous by Kōbō Abe The straightforward pitch for Secret Rendezvous goes like this: an ambulance arrives at a couple’s home, and neither husband nor wife questions authority when the medical personnel take the perfectly healthy woman away to an unnamed hospital. After the confused man finally sets out to find her, he discovers that, while the healthy woman was indeed checked into the hospital, the attendants have since lost track of her, and her current whereabouts are unknown. A dive into the complex architecture and bureaucracy of the imposing hospital thus ensues. But this summary glosses over the cleverness, humor, absurdity, terror, moral uncertainty, and inventiveness of the book. More so than most other works granted the descriptor, Secret Rendezvous deftly earns the term “Kafkaesque.” In a plot that echoes both The Trial and
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Brett Fujioka on The Ark Sakura by Kōbō Abe
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The Castle, a banal professional serves as our protagonist, and we follow his futile pursuit of answers in a power system that rebuffs and confounds him at every turn (through both its physical complexity and its intertwined and illogical rules and protocols), until that system doesn’t so much reject him as it entirely absorbs him. That is, he quickly becomes employed by the hospital’s security team, enmeshed in the massive organization’s hierarchies, and— while he originally sets out to find his missing wife—is tasked instead (by a hospital official who may or may not be a horse in training) with investigating himself and his own choices. In this way, Secret Rendezvous is a prime “port of entry” for Abe’s work, because (unlike the more technically perfect and punishingly cynical The Woman in the Dunes) it functions as a sort of skeleton key to each of his other novels, stories, and plays. All of the refrains and tones of his larger body of work are contained succinctly in this single volume: paranoia, perversion, body horror, impossible architecture, voyeurism, the intersection of sex and science, technology, labor relations, non-linear structures, the disappearance and erosion of self-identity in systems beyond our control, and the nefarious and inscrutable intentions lurking beneath everyday elements of society. And while the form and premise of the book reverberates with elements of Kafka, where Abe takes the story and themes by the end is entirely his own. The culminating scenes of the novel are breathtakingly strange and impossible to anticipate from the book’s starting point. In Secret Rendezvous, Abe demonstrates his masterful ability to play with the form, content, and limits of the novel in a reading experience that proves at once hilarious, beguiling, terrifying, and familiar. I believe that Abe is
one of the most impressive and original writers of the past, and Secret Rendezvous (along with The Woman in the Dunes and the story collection Beyond the Curve) helps cement that case. To quote Dr. Octagon: “There’s a horse in the hospital,” and it’s fantastic. Morgan Jerkins on The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe I was a junior in college when I first discovered Kōbō Abe’s work. Deemed Japan’s answer to Dostoevsky, Abe is a master in exposing the fragility in what a person may or may not think comprises his or her identity, how psychology is directly correlated to one’s environment, and what modernization can do to a formerly closed-off nation. If any of the aforementioned components piqued your interest, then The Face of Another is for you. The Face of Another is about a scientist who loses his face due to an accident and navigates his world with the help of a mask. Abe, alongside Yukio Mishima and Dazai Osamu, was one of the most prominent postwar Japanese authors who critically engaged with the effects of World War II and especially the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book is not one to miss.
Kōbō Abe’s 1950’s novel Inter Ice Age 4 is often considered the first Japanese science fiction novel, and what is fascinating about it is how it seems to incorporate and anticipate almost every science fiction sub-genre. The novel begins as a kind of political satire around an artificial intelligence race between Japan and Russia, but soon protagonist Professor Katsumi is tasked to use his predictive computer to solve a more personal issue: one
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Lincoln Michel on Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe
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P. T. Smith on The Ruined Map by Kōbō Abe A good portion of Abe’s writing deploys traits of science fiction, but there’s also a number that undeniably live completely in that world. I’ll let a critic who only wants their complex, high-brow literature to “elevate” genre point to The Face of Another as borrowing a single science fiction concept in order to write about identity, etc., but anyone who picks up Inter Ice Age 4 and doesn’t see pure science fiction I’ll call a fool. In the same manner, but under another banner, is his straight noir, The Ruined Map. It was inevitable that Abe would write a detective story. Much of the tension in his work comes from obsessing over uncertainties in the world, a narrator, stuck in his own head, locking into details, trying to make them fit together into an answer, all the while under threat, from a known or unknown source. Women, sexuality, are often sources of danger, revolting and irresistible. With The Ruined Map, he gives the tropes freedom and writes a private eye who is less jaded, more ennui filled and faded. He’s given a half-year-old case, finding a man who disappeared in the middle of the street without a trace. PAGE 19
He’s identity-less, ready to take on whatever conception of a P.I. his client desires, and this is the case that makes that a haunting experience instead of professional poise. Like many noir antiheroes before him, he’ll be left a broken and battered man, except here it’s all psychological and existential. The femme fatale is the woman who hired him to find her missing husband. His inability to remember her face is both his seduction and his torment. And that husband who disappeared? He literally vanished in the middle of the street. With this utter absence, and with a matchbook from a pocket as the only potential clue, he attempts to proceed with a rational investigation. The Ruined Map is filled with plot elements from noir: shady, complicated business deals that don’t quiet make sense; men who know more than our P.I., who may be helping, or operating on their own agenda; the rising tension arising out of threats of violence from uncertain angles; stakeouts with nothing to do but question the certainty of experience; seductive women who confuse the men around them. Much of this is familiar from other Abe works too, but it’s here they are perfectly at home in the shadowy angles of noir. If Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was a pleasure for you, then The Ruined Map will be too. If that book bored you, The Ruined Map should still be a pleasure. Auster used the genre to write about writing, Abe lives in it awhile to write about what he’s always writing about: the struggle to be comfortable in a world that turns against you any time you think you’ve witnessed it.
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human. His subject is then suddenly murdered. Mixing what would become cyberpunk elements with a touch of body horror, the dead body is hooked into the computer which reads his mind to try and solve the case. Soon, though, Katsmui gets wrapped up in a complicated plot involving genetic manipulation and a looming environmental apocalypse, making it a novel that fits in well with the current crop of eco-SF and post-apocalyptic fiction. As with anything Abe, the book is weird and revolves around existential questions about what it means to be human.
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Patrik Sampler on Kangaroo Notebook by Kōbō Abe Kangaroo Notebook (1993) is the first Kōbō Abe novel I read, and it is still my favorite—that is, alongside
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Secret Rendezvous, to which it bears a remarkable likeness. Among other things, each concerns medical infrastructure and the protagonist’s Sisyphean journey that nevertheless concludes with entrapment in a confined space. If you haven’t read either novel, this is not a spoiler: especially from The Box Man (1973) onward, Abe’s work belongs to a school that proclaims narrative tension— along with character development and believability— among the least interesting things a novel can achieve. Imagery is paramount to Kangaroo Notebook. If you have ever wondered at the sheer density of bold and surprising images in George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine, a prose fiction equivalent can be found in Kangaroo Notebook: the protagonist is nourished by radish sprouts growing from his own legs; a squid attempts to mate with an intravenous bag; intersections are designed for “population control”; and on and on. Many of these images seem to work figuratively—like guns that appear to shoot, in the Chekhovian sense—but all the more powerfully because their analogues are hard to discern. From the 1970s onward, Abe’s work eschews the didactic symbolism of his early short stories, or the largely accessible allegory of his 1960s works. Kangaroo Notebook is among Abe’s strangest. Hardly a platitude can be found to describe it. If Kangaroo Notebook can be pinned down, it is as a surreal novel—by which I do not mean the puerile nihilism of latter-day bizarro fiction. Rather, Kangaroo Notebook is an exemplar of high surrealism. It concerns, first of all, the subconscious: the protagonist is sent on an automatic gurney (over which he seems to have some vague telekinetic control) down a tunnel to an underground world, where—among other features—there are watercourses and hints of regression. There is also
something of the surrealist program to confront miserable complacency; some residue of Secret Rendezvous’ view of society as a hospital, with all its scathingly pejorative implications. But the corollary of miserablism is a notion of the marvelous. Kangaroo Notebook is a strange novel, and in places strange and beautiful. It is somewhat gentler than Abe’s other late-career works, and may even have a touch of longing—perhaps because it is about death, and by extension the end of life. Its exegesis, because it is brought to us on weird—disparately lyrical and menacing—images, becomes part of a far richer experience than if it were told merely as a series of events. Therefore it is no spoiler to reveal the novel’s ultimate destination—but only what the protagonist sees there
A young Japanese man, orphaned by the events of World War II, leaves his occupied hometown in Manchuria to return to Japan, the homeland he has never seen. He travels with another man of clouded origins, and over the course of their harrowing journey the men come to resemble one another, their two consciousnesses slowly merged by Kōbō Abe’s delicate hand. Beasts Head for Home, like many refugee stories, is about what happens to a man’s identity when his nation is lost or confused in the midst of changing hands. This particular novel is an exemplar: the gripping, Beckettian march of its characters through the deadly Manchurian winter; its sly narrative voice, sometimes whispering doubt, sometimes screaming of blood; and its final shocking scene of antihumanism all contribute to a story of superb
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Andrew Hungate on Beasts Head for Home by Kōbō Abe
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movement and strength. Beasts Head for Home is also unique, however, in its refusal to stifle the eruption of philosophic and psychoanalytic questions that follow narratives of displaced personhood, asking not only what separates one nationality from another but also: what separates one mind from another? the human from the animal? a memory from an official report? Beasts Head for Home features a young man desperate to enter normalized human society, even while the definition of such a thing is continuously ravaged by the world he inhabits. In this way, the novel resembles much of Abe’s later work, but it is also distinguished by a significant lack of surrealism. Beasts Head for Home is explicitly grounded in the events surrounding Japan’s withdrawal of troops from Manchuria after World War II, and such events, though not without their own shades of surrealism, inevitably eclipse metaphorical or allegorical interpretation, a point underscored in the novel by the repeated intrusion of omniscient calendric statements, such as, “April 7: The Foreign Affairs Office reports that a total number of 4,039,447 Japanese remain unrepatriated,” and, “December 14: Soviet currency is reduced to 1/10 its value.” Abe himself grew up in Mukden (now Shenyang), Manchuria and throughout WWII shuffled back and forth between Manchuria and Japan. In Beasts Head for Home, we may detect a refusal to allegorize a narrative so close to the author’s own. The new English edition from Columbia University Press, published sixty years after the Japanese edition, is the first available to English readers, and Richard F. Calichman’s translation is beautiful. Early in the novel, after sprinting through freezing winds and ice, the two characters warm themselves by a fire: “Repeatedly turning around in circles, they finally removed their shoes and
warmed their feet. Every inch of their bodies became itchy, and then the itchiness turned to pain, until finally their entire bodies unwound, melted, and became engorged with blood.”
Beyond the Curve is a powerful collection of short fiction that will please Kōbō Abe fans and short story enthusiasts alike. For those unfamiliar with Abe’s works, Beyond the Curve is an excellent introduction to the author’s writing style and predominant literary themes that are surreal, absurdist, and existential in nature. Having read nearly all of Abe’s translated fiction, I can see why he has been called the “Japanese Kafka” and would suggest that lovers of Kafka, Camus, and even contemporary authors such as Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami will enjoy Abe’s novels and short stories. Abe’s characters continually find themselves in outrageous and often nightmarish situations brought on either by external systems and bureaucracies beyond their control or by the trappings of their own minds. He shatters the familiar notion of home being a place of safety, stability and a foundation for our identities. The opening story, “An Irrelevant Death,” is about a man who finds a dead body in his home and instead of alerting authorities, he convinces himself he’s a victim of an elaborate set-up. “Intruders” is a horrific story of home invasion, where the protagonist becomes a slave to a strange family that takes over his apartment. Even the body is not a safe home for an individual, as explored in “Record of Transformation,” a tale about soldiers killed in war and struggling with attachment to their ruined corpses.
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Annie Hartsock on Beyond the Curve by Kōbō Abe
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But many of these stories explore transformation into something non-human and complete loss of identity: man transforms into his business card in “The Crime of S. Karma,” man transforms into a plant in “Dendrocacalia,” woman transforms into a jacket in “The Life of a Poet,” man transforms into a ghost in “Record of Transformation,” and man heading home forgets who he is and where he lives in “Beyond the Curve.” I’ll conclude with an excerpt from the title story, which conveys this pervading sense of disorientation while illustrating Abe’s prosaic style:
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Kōbō Abe Prepares Gyōza
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For all I knew, even this scene before me, seemingly so familiar, might also be transformed on the spot to something alien. Those houses along the way might turn out to be the contrivance of my imagination, and my “memories” of the labyrinthine network of roads below could easily have been suggested somehow by the prominent bathhouse chimney…. In fact, my sense of familiarity with this place might not be based on true memory but on a deceptive sense of déjà vu. In like manner, my assumption that I was on my way home might, logically, be a mere extension of the feeling. In which case, taking the thought to its logical conclusion, I myself was no longer me but some mysterious other.
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For a long time the two remained silent as they continued walking south on the western side of the tracks. Frozen lips made it difficult to speak, while frozen ears made it irritating to listen. Their entire bodies were focused on their legs—and rather miserable at that—so as to avoid straying from the embankment and stumbling. There were stones and hollows, the weather was freezing, and it was after all pitch-dark. The only thing in their favor was the tailwind. They crossed two small rivers and one large one. While crossing the river, Mr. Anonymous turned around and spoke. “This might be the Taoer River.” On their right the wind began howling especially loudly. It seemed as if the very mouth of the wind were right there. After walking for a while, there appeared a large black mass. This was the edge of an overflowing forest. The man stopped, suddenly changed direction, and began walking toward the woods. “Let’s have our meal there.” Kyūzō hesitated. “Won’t there be wolves?” “We’ll build a fire. Besides, dead bodies are scattered about over there.” “But they’re frozen and so it won’t stink.” “Idiot! I mean that the wolves will go there to take care of business.” The ice gave off a terrible sound as it cracked underfoot. It seemed less like ice than ceramic. The overlapping layers
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of ice, snow, ice, snow clung tightly to the roots of the withered grass. The grass gradually lengthened until it felt like one were crossing a rough, solid swamp. When it sprang back, it felt painful, like needles. At times there were thickets that grew higher than face level. The situation was even worse inside the forest. Stiff ice covered the fallen larch leaves, but when one became stuck in areas where the ice was brittle, one would sink all the way down to one’s groin, making it nearly impossible to extricate oneself without help. At worst, there was even a risk of breaking or spraining a limb. Moreover, one could only grope one’s way forward at such moments. The man experienced this situation twice and Kyūzō three times, sapping them of the energy to continue moving. Besides, there were signs of living creatures about. Nevertheless, they penetrated quite deeply into the forest. From the perspective of the forest as a whole, of course, they were still only at its entrance, but they had come far enough so that the lighting of a small fire would not be visible from the outside. There was an archlike cave between two large, intertwined trees, beneath which the ground appeared to be dry. When they struck a match to investigate, a round bird the size of a human child suddenly appeared before them, flying off with a loud squawk like the sound of horse hooves. Yet the place was quite suitable. They smashed the ice and collected withered grass and twigs, which immediately began burning when ignited. The blaze was perhaps slightly too strong. However, there is no resisting the lure of fire. Although the sparks singed their clothes and eyelashes, they opened their coats and embraced the flame. When the front of their bodies became hot, their backs became cold. Upon warming their backs, they once again heated their front. Repeatedly turning around in
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A Selection from Beasts Head for Home
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circles, they finally removed their shoes and warmed their feet. Every inch of their bodies became itchy, and then the itchiness turned to pain, until finally their entire bodies unwound, melted, and became engorged with blood. Groaning, they scratched themselves all over. Screaming, the man slumped over clutching his left hand. There was a hole in his wrist, as if he had gouged it out with his fingers. The inside of his glove was filled with blood, which stuck to his hand and flowed all the way down to his elbow. He covered the wound with ashes, binding it tightly with a scrap of cloth from a hand towel. The man put snow into his small cooking pot and placed it on the fire. “Are we sleeping here?” Kyūzō asked. For some reason he appeared to be in good spirits. “Don’t be ridiculous! We’ll only eat our meal here. We sleep during the day.” With this blunt reply, the man removed something from a bit of wrapping in his bag and began chewing. It was beans. Kyūzō unrolled his blanket (taking care to conceal his other belongings, such as the Dania spoon), took out some food, and placed it in the hat that he held on his knees. Tonight he would have dry bread and cheese as well as splurge on a slice of bacon. But the man merely continued chewing beans. Convinced that he would begin his meal after first boiling water, Kyūzō chewed on his sunflower seeds and waited. The man stared into the fire. Yet was he really looking at it? Once this doubt emerged, the man’s gaze took on a very suspicious air. It almost felt that he was looking at me. It was clear what his unmoving artificial eye was gazing at, but that made it hard to know where his seeing eye was looking. They water began boiling. They each took turns
drinking. The water smelled of earth, but it was sweet and delicious. Yet the man continued chewing on his beans, showing no sign of preparing a meal. Kyūzō grew slightly concerned. “Aren’t you eating?” “I’m eating now, aren’t I?” The man looked up, his lips curled in a smile. So his gaze had been directed at me! He had been peering inside Kyūzō’s hat. “But you’ve come prepared, haven’t you? You’ve got quite a feast there. I had no idea that all this would happen.” Unthinkingly, Kyūzō replied at once. “Please have some.” “I really shouldn’t, but…” The man immediately sidled up next to Kyūzō, skipping over the preliminaries. Kyūzō quickly prepared some additional food for the man. “You’re very kind,” the man remarked while reaching out to grasp Kyūzō’s hat, carefully dividing the food between them. “Is this all right? Will the food last?” “I should have enough for seven days.” “For both of us?” Kyūzō felt his blood run cold. “No. If it’s for both of us…” he trailed off timidly. In his heart, however, he realized that there was nothing to be done, half resigning himself to the situation. He didn’t feel capable of walking through this dark wasteland alone. Indeed, he couldn’t even warm himself by the fire alone, as he was doing now. The meal ended simply, as if they had gulped the food down. “Now, let’s boil some more water and use that to fill our bellies.” They gathered more twigs and threw them on the fire. Grease oozed up between the wood as the flame spread and the smoke rose. Lifting his injured left hand high
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above his knees, the man appeared relieved. “I like to think about things, lots of things,” he murmured. Enjoying the sense of fullness that comes after digestion, the two waited for the water to boil. Once again Kyūzō observed the man’s clothes and facial features. He supposed that he wanted to put himself at ease. Other than a vague childlike quality in the middle of the man’s face, however, there was really nothing that reassured him. The light of the flame below threw into sharp relief an inch-long scar that ran along the line of his cheekbone underneath his artificial eye. Because of the man’s peculiar gaze, Kyūzō had not noticed this. It was a mark that told of the severity of the man’s past. Also, the base of his coat sleeves was pulled up toward the neck, barely covering his broad shoulders. And the worn-down area just below the line at the coat’s base was proof that he had bought it second-hand or received it from someone else. Dog fur could also be glimpsed below the collar—even Kyūzō’s collar was lined with rabbit fur—and the amateur craftsmanship could clearly be seen in the shoddy tanning of the hide. It could not really be doubted that the clothes were acquired hastily, and that the man had previously worn something quite different. But Kyūzō did not wish to think about this any further. “I wonder where we are now.” “We’re probably about twelve miles outside of Taonan.” “Will we go into town there?” “No, we won’t be able to. We’re still at the border between friend and enemy. When all is said and done, I think, the most dangerous thing is a border. They’re more dangerous than being in the midst of enemies. At least in my experience, they certainly are.” “Then how about the next town?”
“The next town is Shuanggang. That’s also on the border. The towns after that, Kaitong, Bianzhao, Tanyu, Taipingchuan, as well as the towns thereafter, are all on the border. In times such as these, the border definitely expands.” “Then where should we go?” “We’ll make our way through areas without towns or villages.” “All the way to Siping?” “No, I think it’s best if we go to Shenyang.” “Shenyang?” “We should be there in two weeks.” However, the Eighth Route Army officer had warned him against going to Shenyang. Various doubts arose. Yet he lacked the courage to confirm these. He felt anxious in feeling anxiety. Disappointment was terrifying. A phantom path was better than no path at all. In any case, it was important to get closer to Japan, even by one step. Hearing a song, the man pointed beyond the fire. A beast that looked like a filthy dog slowly passed by with slanted, faltering steps, its neck hanging so low that it nearly touched the ground. “Is that a wolf?” “Yes.” “I guess I should’ve picked up a pistol too.” The man offered no reply. The water boiled. Putting down his cooking pot, the man waited for the water to cool to a drinking temperature. “Are you happy to be returning to the Japanese mainland,” he asked idly, as if half speaking to himself. “Yes, very happy.” “I imagine so. I like to think about things, and I’ve found myself wondering where I come from. It’s strange. Perhaps because of that, I guess I’ve got something like
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a conviction. Japanese people also tend to think about things. The Japanese are all right. But they lost. I think that in the next three years the Americans and the Soviets will go to war. I’m quite certain. The intelligence is solid… How old is your father? “He died a long time ago.” “I see. Seriously, what nationality do you think I am?” “You’re Chinese, right?” “Do I not look Korean? How about Taiwanese?” “I can’t really tell the difference.” “All right…So who will take care of you when you return? Is your mother in the Japanese mainland?” “No, she died too. I’m still not sure where I’ll go.” Repositioning himself, the man took a long, burning branch from the fire, tilting his head as he watched the smoke rise from the smoldering wood. The sound of the wind enveloped the outside of the forest like a wall. “If I wanted to, do you think I could look Japanese? What do you think?” “Of course you could.” “Right? My mother is Japanese and her father was Korean, but I’m not sure about prior to that. In any case—ha-ha—this question of where I come from is quite something. I think about various things, such as not blowing my nose with my fingers when I become Japanese or that I must use tweezers to trim my whiskers when I become Korean. Either way, though, it’s not so important. One good thing about Japanese people is that they read. I like to read too. Still, I have a Fukuoka accent. Is it hard on the ears?” “I wouldn’t know about that.” “Well then, shall I tell you my new name? I’m going to trust you. My next new name is perhaps Kō Sekitō— kō meaning “high,” seki for “stone,” and tō as in “tall
building.” Kō Sekitō. It’s rather distinctive, isn’t it? This name is somewhat well known in the south.” “So it’s Mr. Kō, then?” “Yes. My acquaintances all call me Kō xiansheng—Mr. Kō.” “Shall we put on more wood?” “No, it’s time for us to get going.” Reaching into the bottom of his bag, the man who had newly become Kō carefully removed a crumpled cigarette. Tearing it in half, he placed one part in his bag and stuffed the remainder in a small brass pipe that he took from the earflap fold of his cap. “This is a real Ruby Queen cigarette. I’m down to my last two.” He inhaled slowly, getting all of it. Cradling his face in his arms, he remained motionless for some time. “The soldiers haven’t seen this, right?” “Haven’t seen what?” “This fire.” “It’s fine even if they have. They’re afraid, too. Isn’t there some proverb about shadows?” It suddenly grew bright. The two looked up at the sky at the same time. Through the intertwined branches, the moon, shining painfully white, appeared slightly distorted. Above, clouds like old spider webs scudded across the sky. Their surroundings began to fill out, and the trees appeared like willed animals. Kyūzō was very glad not to be here alone. “The moon’s beautiful, isn’t it?” “Did you call the moon beautiful? Not for me. Only women are beautiful. But even women become unpleasant if they’re too beautiful.” They gathered some snow and put it on the fire. Black steam spouted up, within which sparks like red glass
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appeared to be swimming. A greasy stink enveloped the air. It suddenly became cold, as if one were being skinned. Kyūzō recalled the moment when he opened the door when escaping from Alexandrov’s room. Hope was written on the front of that door, but perhaps despair had been written on the back. This was perhaps the nature of doors. A door always appears as hope when standing before it, but then turns to despair when one turns around. Kyūzō thus resolved to look only at the front of doors without turning around. He wanted to tell Kō about Alexandrov’s room. Yet he didn’t know how to speak of it. 9:45. Leaving the forest, they returned to the edge of the tracks and began walking, driven on by the north wind. Rocks lay scattered all about. While resting, their feet had become painfully swollen. Yet the moon was out, which made things somewhat easier. With the forest gradually receding, they soon arrived at a waterless river. The riverbank was dense with willow shrubs, in which they stumbled over the bones of a large animal. If the previous river was the Taoer, Kō remarked, then this might be the Najin. The area beyond the river was completely treeless, with only gentle swellings of the ground that continued on indefinitely. It was like an ocean that had been hardened and rendered motionless by lead. Yet Kyūzō knew about the ocean through photographs and films. After four kilometers there stood a small wooden sign with a sharpened point, beyond which the tracks began to turn wildly to the left. The sign was simply inscribed with the numbers “9.4.” Perhaps this meant that Taonan Station could be reached in 9.4 kilometers. The two argued there for a while. Kyūzō wanted to at least follow the tracks. But Kō was unyielding in his insistence that they take a straight course that led away from the tracks. They decided
to use the North Star as a marker. At first, it was quite difficult to find. There were far too many stars in the sky. In walking by the railway, one could somehow still sense the presence of people, even if this were only the tens or hundreds of coolies who worked here building it years or decades ago. In wandering further into the wasteland, however, one’s very breath changed weight, making one dizzy with an unbearable loneliness. Shortening the space between them, the two hurried along as if fleeing despite the fact that they had just started off. Yet the landscape was so vast! There were only pebbles and slightly larger stones, narrow, irregular ditches gouged out by heavy rains or floods, handfuls of withered grass dotted all about, and an endless repetition of low hills that continued on into the horizon. 11:00. When they reached the top of a relatively larger hill, there appeared near the peak of the next hill two adjacent towers in the shape of overturned buckets. They seemed to be brick kilns. A sorghum field lay between the hills. Kyūzō felt a sense of relief. However, it would be quite troublesome to walk along the perimeter of the ridge. Also, the peace of mind that came about too quickly was all the less welcome in that it seemed to hint at some future anxiety. A narrow path created by the tracks of a wagon cut across the center of the field from east to west. If one listened, the cries of people could be heard on all paths. Leaving that behind required tremendous courage. If Kō had shown even the slightest hesitation here, Kyūzō would surely have stopped in his tracks and refused to go further. Perhaps sensing his feelings, Kō said nothing until they reached the brick kilns. The kilns, decayed and crumbling, looked like many years had passed since they had been last used. They were like ruins from ancient times. They gave off an eerie
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—— Excerpted from Beasts Head for Home by Kōbō Abe. Translated by Richard F. Calichman. Translation Copyright (c) 2017 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher.
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feeling, as if something would leap out from inside them. Kō stopped and abruptly announced, “Let’s rest.” Had he known that this would be the last place to rest for some time? They dug up some stumps of sorghum, but after digging up three of the these the heels of their shoes seemed about to fall off. For the remainder, they made do with a bit of withered grass. The fire was quite poor. Not only could they not warm themselves, they were barely able to melt the snow that they placed in the cooking pot. They gathered the sparse snow and drank it without boiling it. It stank horribly of mud, making them both nauseous. They drank vodka to remove the bad taste. Rough breathing could be heard just behind them. Four stray dogs appeared, becoming entangled with one another as they circled the brick kiln towers. Although pretending to play innocently, they seemed to be trying to decide whether the two humans might make a suitable meal. Or perhaps their unpleasant frolicking meant that they had already decided to eat them. Waving their hands about, Kō and Kyūzō tried to chase the dogs off, but the animals showed no reaction. They were no doubt used to people. Kō suddenly pulled out his pistol and fired. The most ferocious-looking dog—the one with the ripped tail—fell forward with a yelp, turning his body in circles with his muzzle flat on the ground. As if nothing had happened, the other three dogs leisurely ran off, abandoning the victim.
PAUL CÉZANNE
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Relationality as flow and relationality as inscriptional articulation represent different forms of presence. In its liquidation of difference, flow takes the form of an identity in which all interruptions or discontinuities seem to dissolve and melt away. Here identity appears in the totality that is the relation itself. In contrast to this, articulation offers merely a limited form of relationality since movement is restricted to the between-spaces of those poles or points that themselves remain motionless. Nevertheless, the field of relationality that is thus opened up cannot be characterized strictly as difference because the points (i.e., borders, limitations) exist as identical to themselves. In this instance, it is the parts of the relation rather than the relational totality thtat possesses identity. Hence the two conceptions of relationality that appear at first to be oppositional can now more accurately be described as strangely complicit with one another. The flow and inscriptional mark reveal themselves in their difference, and yet both are identical insofar as they remain grounded on a notion of presence. It is what emerges from this difference between difference and identity that can be said to constitute
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writing in its generality. Such general writing appears in a form that is less than a pure flow, for it experiences constant interruption and discontinuity, and yet greater than an inscriptional mark, since its lack of self-presence demands that it stand ecstatically outside of itself, where it gives itself to be breached by alterity. If the written articulation of nature denaturalizes it, introduces its flow to internal disruption, then writing in its exposure to that flow finds itself at all times drifting outside of itself, carried away toward other writings by the overall force of relationality. Here writing must be generalized in order to take into account its essential generativity. That is to say, there can be no closure of writing, no identity of self-presence of the articulated mark, because each event that is its encounter with other marks necessarily generates something new. At every instant in which writing appears, it finds itself caught up in a network of relations that differs from any of its previous appearances. This difference transforms writing, remarking it as other to itself. Such notion of generative writing by right precedes the opposition between flow (nature, identity) and articulation (inscription, difference). These oppositional terms come into being as abstractions of general writing, which allows for the emergence of such abstraction while nevertheless withdrawing or retreating from that operation, remarking itself in its own self-difference. Niki Junpei attempts to reduce difference to oppositionality, and yet he also gives voice to a conception of writing that in its originarity and generativity exceeds all such oppositions. This is what he tries to explain to his friend the Möbius man. “I have considerable doubt about a system of education that maintains that life possesses any ground of support,” Niki tells him:
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A Selection from Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Kōbō Abe
RICHARD F. CALICHMAN
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The Möbius man appears puzzled by these words, prompting Niki to explain further: The reason I brought up the example of sand was because in the final analysis I rather think the world is like sand. The essence of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. It is not that sand flows, but rather that flow itself is sand…. You yourself become sand. You see things through the eyes of sand.1 This passage is crucial to understanding Abe’s project in Suna no onna, for what it reveals is something very close to the notion of “ontological existence” that he tried to think nearly two decades earlier in his essay “Shi to shijin (ishiki to mushiki).” For Niki, understanding deludes itself in its insistence that “nothing is something” (nai mono wo desu ne, aru yō ni). In these lines, that which is “something” in the sense of an actually existing substance is linked to the properties of solidity and fixity. Such substantial being is directly contrasted to a “nothing” that gives itself in the form of a liquid and constantly moving flow. It may thus appear that Niki, remaining within a traditional framework of opposition, advocates a romanticist departure from fixed being in order to enter into what is regarded as the fullness or heightened reality of the fluidity that is pure negativity.
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Even within such opposition, however, a more general notion of being nevertheless emerges and makes itself felt. Sand, Niki observes, occupies a strange middle ground between solidity and liquidity: “while being a solid [kotai de arinagara], it also contains definite hydrodynamic properties.” As we argued with regard to Abe’s expression yodomi no nai shizensa, such phrases exhibit a logic that in no way exists in isolation. For example, although Niki attempts to think sand beyond the subject-object distinction in reference to humans who “become sand” and “see things through the eyes of sand,” this sand flow still requires articulation in order to appear. Two different conceptions of being can be delineated here: one that is posed against nothing, which it moreover attempts to conceal in its fixity and solidity as well as through the notion of objectivity; the other, something more general that continually remarks itself otherwise, divided between being and nothing, solidity and liquidity, and fixity and flow. Here the aru, i.e., being in the sense of a substantial something, reveals itself to be more fundamentally a de arinagara, something that while being X is also Y. What is at stake in this latter conception of being is a betweenness in which entities are incessantly drawn out of themselves in their relation with other entities. The identity or as-suchness of something dissolves from the very beginning, since relationality takes place from the first moment of its appearance. Being in its determination as substance does not dismiss such relationality, but it grounds relation to the other on self-presence, because of which identity is preserved and even enhanced rather than threatened by that alterity. When Abe writes that sand, “while being a solid” is nevertheless partially liquid, he is gesturing toward a sense of being that is neither pure selfcontainment nor pure flow. The notion of flow of course
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In other words, an illusory education that makes one think that nothing is something. Therefore I’m very interested in sand in this instance, because, while being a solid, it also contains definite hydrodynamic properties.
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occupies a central position in Suna no onna. To write, “It is not that sand flows, but rather that flow itself is sand” is to suggest that flow cannot ultimately be reduced to a mere property or quality (seishitsu) of something that itself resists that flow, existing in its fixity outside of it; on the contrary, “the world is like sand” in that all things are in the first instance governed by the principle of change and movement. The transition from “something” to “nothing,” then, far from signifying a vast, undifferentiated stream, instead points to a conception of being in which things never remain purely stable as themselves. “The essence of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state [seishi shiteiru jōtai],” Niki declares, but the fact is that nothing is able to give itself strictly as stationary or motionless. At every moment, things appear in the world in their own self-difference and exteriorization. It is because of this that all conceptual “grasping” must be regarded as derivative. Things are unable to present themselves as they identically are because of their participation in this general flow. In reflecting on this impossibility of self-identity, the narrator of Suna no onna is led to consider the classical notion of form: “This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand. Sand, which didn’t even have a form of its own—other than the mean 1/8-mm diameter. Yet not a single thing could stand against this formless, destructive power. The very fact that it no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?”2 These words must be read alongside two other passages that appear slightly later in the text. The first appears as an extension of this discussion of sand in its “formless, destructive power”: “Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its flow;
sand was the antithesis of all form.”3 In the second passage, the reader is introduced to a striking conception of life that goes beyond fixity and form in its acceptance of flow: “If a ship floated on water, then it would also float on sand. If they could get free from the fixed idea of the home, they wouldn’t have to waste energy fighting the sands. A ship that floated freely on the sands…homes that flowed, towns and cities without form.”4 The word for “form” that Abe uses here is katachi or keitai. While this concept carries very different meanings throughout the history of thought, it appears in this context to signify the unique shape or structure of something, that which functions to establish its own proper identity in its difference from other things. In his discussion with his friend, Niki Junpei emphasizes that sand should be conceived in its most general nature. “The world is like sand,” he insists, and on this basis we should understand that the tension between form and flow (sand) is not restricted to the world of empirical objects but also includes the contents of consciousness as well. This is an important point, for the text of Suna no onna contains repeated attacks against any dualist conception of the world that would posit an epistemological subject existing over and against material things. The “formless, destructive power” (mukei no hakairyoku) of flow operates equally on all borders, spiritual and material. It is precisely for this reason, as Niki tells his friend, that it is impossible to claim that “life possesses any ground of support [yoridokoro]” (“I have considerable doubt about a system of education that maintains that life possesses any ground of support”). For example, even if an individual were to reject the outside world for its painful contingency, the fact that it might always possibly betray one’s own hopes and desires, the turn to interiority proves to be ultimately no
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more secure. The privileging of self and consciousness over worldly alterity presupposes a formal distinction between these two realms, but such form is repeatedly threatened by the breaching effects of flow. Form and flow exist in constant tension with one another. The formal self-identity of something finds itself disrupted by flow, continually displaced outside of itself, but this flow in turn cannot be said to exist anywhere else except in those articulations or punctuations that are its markings. The flow of sand, Abe writes, represents “the antithesis [or “negation”] of all form” (issai no katachi wo hitei suru). However, this negative operation of antithesis does not take place in any pure or absolute sense; form, that is, suffers partial fragmentation rather than complete liquidation. Form does not disappear but is instead displaced, forced to remark itself differently. Abe provides several examples of this in the passages above: “homes that flowed, towns and cities without form.” In their flow and loss of form, these entities are not reduced to nothing; they remain as homes, towns, and cities, perhaps, but they do so in a profoundly unsettling way, inscribed with the traces of alterity that render them at all times other to themselves. The house of the sand woman is also cited as an example of such fragmentation: “This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand.” Such half-death (hanbun shi ni kaketeiru) represents a state that is suspended between life and death, neither fully one nor the other. Just as all finite beings begin to die from the moment of their birth, so too does this house continue to survive by bearing the marks of the conflict between its own form and the deformation wrought by the flowing sands that surround and invade it. This conflict between form and flow can be understood as a movement of drawing, in various senses
of the term. Form is drawn or pulled outside of itself by flow, necessitating that it be redrawn in order to maintain itself in its identity; and yet flow in this movement of exscription also finds itself drawn, both marked and cut by the fragmentation that occurs as a result of this relation.5 Exposed to flow from the moment it appears, form reveals its essential impurity. The result of this exposure, as Abe emphasizes, is and irrevocable transgression of borders, and inability to safeguard interiority from external contamination. Niki is forced to confront this experience soon after arriving at the house of the sand woman: “It was as if the sand that clung to his skin had seeped into his veins and, from the inside, was undermining his resistance.”6 Such metaphorical breaching of borders between inside and outside is complemented by the actual or physical penetration of sand within people:
If, as Niki remarks, “the world is like sand,” then ultimately no pure distinction can be made between the interiority of human consciousness and the material objects existing outside of it. Indeed, the very title of Abe’s novel hints at this porosity between human being and world. Even before the woman “in the dunes,” as the English translation reads, she is already of them in the sense that they form an inextricable part of her. But if
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He took the plastic cover off the kettle and jammed the spout into his mouth. He tried rinsing with the first mouthful, but it was impossible to clear his mouth with so little water. Only lumps of sand came out. Then, not caring, he let the sand run down his throat along with the water. It was as if he were drinking pebbles.7
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the woman is most originally of the sand, inscribed over and over again by its flow, so too is Niki Junpei: “While drawing a mental image [kokoro ni egakinagara] of the flowing sand, he was from time to time seized by the illusion that he himself had begun to flow.”8 It is this conflict between form and flow that Abe refers to in Suna no onna as the “law of the sand (suna no hōsoku).”9 This law is written. What it decrees, in its generality, is that all inscribed articulations of the world remain exposed to an alterity that exceeds them, allowing them to appear strictly on the condition that they withdraw or retreat from that appearance in the same movement. The law of sand returns us directly to Niki’s comment to the Möbius man that any “ground of support” to which humans can appeal must falsely presuppose that “nothing is something.” In such instance, entities are seen to present themselves as they are in their self-identity. The distinction between self and other corresponds to the pure opposition between identity and difference, in which the cognition of difference between entities is grounded in its possibility on their respective presence to themselves. For Niki, such conception represents the triumph of form over flow. What this view elides or disavows is precisely the impurity of inscription, the contamination that takes place at each moment of contact between form and flow. In the rightful absence of such ground, the differential force that is “nothing” resists absorption within the full plenitude named by the word “something.” Nothing does not exist merely outside something but rather disturbs its apparent stability and self-presence from within. Just as Niki discovers that the border separating him from the sand has already been breached, so too does nothing haunt the being of things in their unity and integrity. Hence it is not simply that Niki rejects something in favor of nothing
in and of itself. Given its essential allergy to identity, there can be no nothing in and of itself. Rather, nothing produces its effects strictly by drawing something outside of itself, deforming its form by requiring it to inscribe itself otherwise, each time anew. The link between sand and writing appears in various ways throughout the novel. While walking through the dunes in search of insects, Niki “advanced, cutting across the sand patterns created by the wind, which were inscribed evenly and systematically, as if made by a machine.”10 In these lines, human beings can be seen to participate in this general writing of the world, but this activity is in no way limited to the human. Even before Niki’s appearance, a relation has taken place between sand and the wind, with the latter marking the former in the form of “sand patterns” (fūmon). Here the sand functions as the surface upon which the wind writes, “inscribing” (or “carving,” “engraving”: kizamu) its lines and ridges. These marks are then remarked by Niki’s act of traversal, “cutting across” (yokogitte) them, generating successively new instances of contact between the sand and himself by means of the footprints he creates. The sand still remains the primary surface of inscription, but the stylus or instrument of writing has now changed from the wind to the human. As we have argued, writing must be understood in its broadest sense as that which marks the moment in which disparate entities enter into relation with one another. The sand is no longer precisely itself because of its engraving by the wind or its intersection by human footprints, and yet neither the wind nor Niki himself can be said to emerge from this relationship unscathed either. Niki not only marks the sand with his footprints, however, he is also capable of writing it with his hand: “On the surface of the umbrella so much sand had collected
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that he could have written characters in it with his finger.”11 The particular phrase Abe employs here is revealing, for the word “characters” (ji) can also be read as a homophone for “time.” Why is this significant? The production of marks in the instance of writing is also inescapably a marking of time. Even before the mark created can be determined in its specificity as a character, wind pattern, or footprint, it is first and foremost a temporal inscription. At the very moment one writes characters (ji), one is also of necessity writing time (ji, toki), regardless of whether one intends this or not. There can be no memory of the past, no historical consciousness, without such temporal inscriptions. In for example Niki’s traversing of the sands, the wind patterns he sees and the footprints he creates both exist as remainders of events that take place in time. At a certain moment, the wind touched and reshaped the sands, leaving behind a memorial of the singular instance of that relationality in the form of wind patterns. Likewise, the act of Niki’s “cutting across” those marks leaves behind a trace of itself in the form of his series of footprints. These traces or remainders point to the past; they help us remember how the world appeared in the relentless tension between form and flow. Just as these traces give themselves in their appearance, however, they also recede, allowing themselves to be remarked in their internal divisibility. Trapped in the sandpit, Niki at one point wonders if time has stopped—“he feared that not only his watch but even time itself would be immobilized by the grains of sand,” as Abe writes12—but the impossibility of any cessation of time can be found in the multiple inscriptions that are carved into the vast surface of sand, marks that present themselves to him strictly at the instant he repeats them. Let us now conclude this chapter by considering two additional passages in which Abe touches upon the
connection between sand and writing. At stake in both is a certain contamination in the relation between appearing and concealing. In the first passage, the narrator follows Niki in focusing upon what he imagines at the time to be his sole means of escape from the sandpit: “There was not even a vestigial sign that the rope ladder had been let down. Of course, with a wind like this, it wouldn’t have taken five minutes for any trace to disappear.”13 In the second, Niki has already managed to escape from the sandpit but is forced to remain hidden until sundown so as to escape detection: “An ideal place to hide. The texture of sand was as smooth as the underside of a shell, and there was not a vestigial sign of anyone’s having been there. But what was he to do about his own footprints? He retraced his steps and found that beyond about thirty yards they were already completely effaced. Even where he was standing they were caving in, transforming before his very eyes. The wind was good for something.”14 In these lines, several different words are used to describe inscriptions that are left behind: “vestigial sign” (keiseki), “trace” (konseki), and “footprints” (ashiato). The time of the events as recorded by these marks is irreducibly multiple. Niki might possibly determine if the rope ladder had recently been lowered judging by the imprints on the sand that act would have created and left behind. Likewise, the presence of others in the vicinity of the hiding place he has found might be ascertained by the residual marks of their footprints. These inscriptions remain: what this means, precisely, is that their temporality is divided from within in pointing to a moment in the past in which the world was singularly transformed or remarked differently while also indicating those moments that have succeeded that, continuing on from it by extending the life of that initial act. In this regard, the truism that the past can
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only be determined on the basis of the present can be said to yield two consequences. First, the past never gives itself directly as such, in its original identity, but strictly through the detour of other times and other places. By continuing to appear after the moment at which the event first took place, the past incessantly dissimulates itself while simultaneously preserving itself in its secrecy. To say that these two movements of appearing and concealing are inseparable from one another is to in effect think difference and identity in their essential impurity. Second, if the nature of the event consists ultimately in its internal divisibility, the fact that it gives itself strictly as other to itself, then that which is called “the present” can provide no real basis at all. At the delayed moment that Niki attempts to determine the past presence of both the rope ladder and other human beings, the incommensurability of those determinations vis-à-vis the events themselves necessarily condemns them to failure. Because these determinations cannot fully repeat the past that has since withdrawn, they must in turn repeat that repetition. What this involves is the present slipping continually outside and ahead of itself into the future. In this way, the project of memory reveals itself to be productive of something like lines or articulated flows, understood in the specific sense that Abe tries to think in terms of the synthesis between form and flow. That is to say, events may take place in which rope ladders are lowered or other people walk past. In order for these events to present themselves in their identity, however, they must depart from themselves, creating a trail of marks that exceed their past happening and travel on into the present and future. It is impossible to state with any degree of certainty whether Niki Junpei understands this movement or instead disavows it. For this thinker who undertakes the
important task of grasping “nothing” in its relation to “something” also appears to hold out the possibility of capturing an event in its immediacy or pure punctuality. “He might or might not regret it later, but everything depended on this instant [subete kono shunkan]. Don’t delay! An instant is something that is missed if not seized immediately [ima sugu]. One cannot chase after it by jumping on the next instant!”15 Niki appears very close here to a kind of empiricism that grounds itself on the immediacy of the experienced instant. The problem, however, is that the instant never gives itself in its unity or integrity. By insisting on this strict distinction between the “this instant” and “next instant,” Niki seems to contradict his earlier insight regarding the dissolution of form on the part of flow. If flow succeeds in exposing form, then each instant must be described as already fragmented, rendered other to itself. Given that the instant can never be fully present to itself, the “delay” against which Niki warns himself is rigorously irreducible. Time cannot flow, stand ecstatically outside of itself, without this delay. In all cases, the singular instant is “missed,” but in being missed it paradoxically sets in motion a chain of future opportunities to respond to its force.
1 Abe, Suna no onna, 169–70: trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, 98–99 (translation slightly modified). 2 Ibid., 132–33; 31 (translation slightly modified). 3 Ibid., 138; 41 (translation slightly modified).
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4 Ibid., 138; 42 (translation slightly modified). 5 The term “excription” comes from Jean-Luc Nancy: “To inscribe presence is not to (re)present it or to signify it, but to let
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come to one and over one what merely presents itself at the limit where inscription itself withdraws (or ex-scribes itself, writing itself outside itself).” Lean Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110. 6 Abe, Suna no onna, 134: trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, 34 (translation slightly modified). 7 Ibid., 182–83; 121. 8 Ibid., 123; 15 (translation slightly modified). 9 Ibid., 125; 17. 10 Ibid., 124; 17 (translation slightly modified). 11 Ibid., 130; 28 (translation slightly modified). 12 Ibid., 166; 93 (translation slightly modified). With varying degrees of rigor, scholars have not infrequently sought to examine the notion of time in Suna no onna. See, for example, Tanigawa Atsushi, “Kōbō Abe, Suna no onna no jikan,” in Kōbō Abe ‘Suna no onna’ sakuhin ronshū, 181–90. The measure of this rigor, I believe, can be found in the degree to which time is seen to threaten the notion of identity. 13 Abe, Suna no onna, 163: trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, 87 (translation slightly modified). 14 Ibid., 214; 178 (translation slightly modified).
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Ushijima, Nakataya
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15 Ibid., 224–25; 197 (translation slightly modified).
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There’s perspective and then there’s perspective. The perspective of a character locked inside of a narrative is one thing, but the perspective positioning of the narrative itself is another. The former is obvious even if complex, instrumental even if an ornament, and it flits over the surface of a written work like pixelated stars on black water. The perspective of the narrative (I hesitate to use the phrase “meta-perspective” in case the point I’m making gets obscured by jargon) is something more elusive and foundational. By “perspective” I don’t mean the identity of the author. And I don’t mean simply sociological iron cages or empty deserts of shifting discourse. I mean the categories of freedom available to an artist to record the realities of his time in the highest spiritual register and with the greatest degree of simple honesty. Kōbō Abe defended science fiction, but what he himself wrote is probably more accurately termed “fictional science.” Or Poe-esque Lab Work. A fiction of the effects of science. In his 1962 essay “The Boom in Science Fiction,” Abe writes: Maybe what we call the everyday is just thought without hypotheses. Or rather hypotheses exist, but they cling so stubbornly to phenomenal reality that they have already lost their function. When a fresh hypothesis is brought in, the everyday is suddenly destabilized and begins to take on strange new forms. It becomes activated, objectified, and our consciousness is roughly shaken.
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Unable to take sides on whether science fiction should be “hard” or “realist” (which is of course just another method for creating a narrative, not stenography of some Ultimate Reality) or consign itself to unadulterated fantasy, Abe demanded a synthesis of both. He wanted the fantasy of hypotheses to be played out in the petri dish of our communal store of rationality. A new life-form approaches me while I’m writing in my office in Mid-Coast Maine, America. The life-form is from another place. Another planet? Another dimension? Neither. We don’t have a word for it yet. Maybe even the term “place” is misleading. What do I do? How do I react? How will my dog react? How would I interpret the features and qualities of the unknown creature? Surely something comically banal would take place. I would call the police or my wife. I would interrogate the intruder from a perspective embedded in contemporary psychology and Lockean property rights. And in this confrontation a sort of ironic double vision would occur. My working model of reality would be seen floating in a void. And it would be something like an Abe story. In another Abe essay, “Science Fiction, the Unnameable,” Abe mentions a Thomas Mann passage somewhere (Abe is unsure where): to the effect that long ago, before a lion was called a lion, it was a supernatural being to be feared like a demon; but once it had been given the name “lion,” it became just another wild animal that could be overcome by humans. There is no question that unknown objects are much more disturbing than those we know; they also have a far greater potential energy. An unknown monster X in the forest is far more frightening than the
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Abe in Poe’s Ballroom
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Abe invokes the enigma by liberating phenomena from our cages of theory and hypothesis. Abe’s process is most easily observed in his short stories, particularly the collection Beyond the Curve. The same processes happen in his novels, of course, but distended over miles of literary space. It’s more easily observable in his short stories because the process unfolds in a smaller, more tightly controlled space. Take the story “An Irrelevant Death.” The first paragraph sets up the juxtaposition between the banality of our failed day-to-day theoretical structures and the mystery of event: “He had company. The guest was lying face down with his legs stretched out neatly toward the door. Dead.” A man called “A -” finds a corpse in his apartment and reacts with a logic whose wheels spin furiously in the void. The words “company” and “guest” are pathetically inappropriate, almost misleading. “A -” goes on to shift mentally through a kaleidoscopic series of reactions. He worries about the smell. He wonders how the criminal— he’s sure it was a criminal—got into his apartment. He fusses over how to get rid of it without anyone noticing. He wonders if perhaps the body has been passed along by the other tenants of the apartment complex in a kind of paranoid game of hot potato. And despite the thorough scrubbing of a blood stain, he isn’t quite able to get rid of the corpse. In Abe’s work, the dead tend to stick around.
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The incongruity between the naked horror of the event itself and the facile mental machinations of the protagonist are enough friction to create heat and light. And it’s through this friction that mystery is returned to a “corpse”—a “body” severed from the enigmatic sublime by a smug and settled sense of the rational. Abe reveals objectivity to be incomplete, at best. He gives us the thrill of discovery. What is this void that Abe works within? Who did he inherit this laboratory from? In “The Boom in Science Fiction” again, Abe mentions Poe’s story “Hans Pfaal,” and a description of a hot air balloon ride which is worth quoting at length: What mainly astonished me, in the appearance of things below, was the seeming concavity of the surface of the globe. I had, thoughtlessly enough, expected to see its real convexity become evident as I ascended; but a very little reflection sufficed to explain the discrepancy. A line, dropped from my position perpendicularly to the earth, would have formed the perpendicular of a right-angled triangle, of which the base would have extended from the right-angle to the horizon, and the hypotenuse from the horizon to my position. But my height was little or nothing in comparison with my prospect. In other words, the base and hypotenuse of the supposed triangle would, in my case, have been so long, when compared to the perpendicular, that the two former might have been regarded as nearly parallel. In this manner the horizon of the aeronaut appears always to be upon a level with the car. But as the point immediately beneath him seems, and is, at a great
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familiar lions on view at just about every zoo in the country. This is the common ground of the mystery, science fiction, and ghost-story genres. Although each is written in a different way, all are firmly rooted in the same quest for things unknown, the same world of enigma.
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distance below him, it seems of course, also at a great distance below the horizon. Hence the impression of concavity. What Poe says seems obviously rational, but Abe tells us that that isn’t the point. He writes:
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simply intuiting the theories and forms of objective science stand as evidence of that. And so perhaps the most exhilarating vision from Poe’s balloon are intimations of the symbolic unity of human conscious with the larger mystery itself.
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New rules or revealing the limitations of old ones? Abe does both. From Poe’s balloon we can see why so much great literature and imaginative writing has anticipated—and transmitted with mystery intact—what later became ossified into objective scientific fact. I don’t just mean Bellamy predicting shopping malls or E.M. Forster predicting Skype in “The Machine Stops.” Not just technology and artifacts, but entire paradigm shifts. I mean Coleridge anticipating Einstein by denying the simplicity of Cartesian separation of mind and matter and Newtonian materialism. How Poe described the Big Bang in 1848. How the Internet echoes the shape and structure of the Talmud. Abe tells us that art and science share the same experience of discovery. Artists and spiritual thinkers
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But rather than question whether Poe’s findings are verified by the facts, shouldn’t we rather ask whether he manages to elicit in his readers the feeling of surprise that accompanies discovery? In literature, proximity to discovered facts is far less important than adherence to the internal laws of discovery itself. In other words, it’s a question of forming a hypothesis and then seeing to what extent you can erect a new system of rules, utterly different from the existing rules of our everyday lives.
THE SCOFIELD
‾ MATSUO BASHO
MINORU NOMATA
Four Haikus of Home I. I sit in this spot— Creating of this coolness, My own dwelling place. II. Here within my house, There is a square of bright light— Moon through the window. III. All in this household Have gray hair, walk with a cane— To ancestral graves.
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In my home I weep At my umbilical cord— The end of the year.
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IV.
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—— Translated by Bob Jameson.
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Kōbō Abe on Identity, Home, and Alienation
As a postwar writer, Kōbō Abe was in a unique position to comment on Japan. Having grown up in Manchuria (then a colony of Japan), Abe had developed an outsider’s perspective on his country of citizenship. The Japan he was taught as a child was a distant unknown, one to which he had trouble relating. The bleak landscape of Manchuria did not correspond to the image of Japan that was portrayed in his textbooks. This disparity is conveyed in his work, which notably lacks any references to traditional “Japaneseness,” as Timothy Iles observes: There are neither cherry blossoms in his writing nor cherry orchards in his theatre, no ‘Japan the beautiful’ to bolster the protagonist’s self and integrate him—and Abe’s protagonists are always resolutely male—into its protecting bosom….1 In other words, for Abe, Japan did not provide a strong sense of belonging. Underneath the “cherry blossoms” was the reality of a nation that carved out cultural boundaries in the sand. It was this reality that Abe observed in Manchuria where the Imperial Government’s policy of racial equality and harmony, which he strongly believed in, was constantly undermined by the actions and behavior of the Japanese colonizers. As Tsuyoshi Namigata put it, “In the puppet state carrying the banner of ‘The Harmony of
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Five Races’ (gozoku kyōwa), the boundaries between races were strictly formed.”2 Based on Abe’s own recollections of the end of the war, the fall of Manchuria was also the collapse of class and racial discrimination: “I cannot deny that the government-less condition, despite the anxiety and fear, also planted within me a certain dream.”3 Perhaps, within this state of anarchy, Abe caught a glimpse of a borderless world where identities are freely explored rather than imposed. Namigata writes, Abe’s philosophy of everydayness, that is to say, his worldview of the everyday in ‘The Nation of Manchuria’ had been formed through spiritual oppression.4 This worldview would remain with him. His experiences in Manchuria, as Tadahiro Suda notes, had an enduring influence on his imagination: Within the semi-desert-like climate, in a city filled with a cosmopolitan sensibility, Kōbō would spend his childhood. The things he assimilated here would be projected strongly onto his later writing.5 Edward Said discusses the artificial nature of identity, specifically identity that is derived from membership in a collectivity: The construction of identity…involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from “us.” Each age and society re-creates its “Others.” Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of “other” is a
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No Cherry Blossoms:
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In other words, the danger of such identity formation is the distinctions that are inevitably made between “us” and “them.” The following quote from Abe seems to echo Said’s statement: Collectivities have the function of creating bonds between us, but, at the same time, they serve to create enemies, to exclude something or other, and through the act of strengthening this exclusion, they consolidate their internal organizations. So, when by some means, a weak collectivity tries to consolidate itself rapidly, it ends up strengthening not its consolidation, but its system of exclusion.7 One could argue that Japan was thrust into such a situation following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and once again following its defeat in the Second World War. In both instances, Japan’s efforts to join (or rejoin) the international community required its re-conception in terms of a modern nation. Yet, on both counts, this reconception did not come about through an internalized process but was imposed unilaterally by the state. As a result, during the upheaval of the immediate postwar period, there was what David Desser describes as a “propensity for self-examination, for raising, and trying to answer, the question of ‘Japaneseness.’”8 Of course, as Said duly points out, “We all need some foundation on which to stand; the question is how extreme and unchangeable is our formulation of what this foundation is.”9 PAGE 42
In addition to Manchuria, Abe spent part of his youth in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago. Therefore, he experienced his formative years in what essentially amounted to both extremities of Japan’s frontier. These life experiences all contributed to Abe’s problematic understanding of the concept of “home”: I was born in Tokyo and raised in Manchuria. Yet, the legal address on my family registry is in Hokkaido—I have several years experience living there as well. In other words, my place of birth, the place where I grew up, and my place of family origin are all different, making it extremely difficult to provide a brief account of my life. You could say that, essentially, I am a man without a hometown. The sort of aversion I have for hometowns, flowing at the bottom of my emotions, could be due to this background. I am hurt by all things that are given value for being fixed.10 With Japan’s defeat at the end of the war, Abe’s de facto homeland of Manchuria was lost and he was forced to return to his official homeland, to its political and commercial centre of Tokyo. In a way, his experience could be viewed as the model of a more general trend in modern Japan—the relocation of the younger generation from rural hometowns to the city. Though this sense of displacement likely contributed to Abe’s marginalization, remaining on the periphery of the mainstream provided him with the flexibility to maintain a critical perspective on Japan. Often, the target of Abe’s criticism was the traditional value system that persisted in Japan and had been appropriated by the military government to stir the nation toward its wartime efforts. Perhaps Abe saw these same
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much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.6
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Another way to view the issue of homeland is in this broader context of sense or meaning (including the meanings and values imposed by communities like family, society, or the state) and the need for the destruction of an old meaning before the possibility of a new one can arise. Abe regarded nationality or nationalism as but one species of this communal “sense” or “order” that art must struggle to overcome.12 What Abe often explored in his work was the implication of transplanting such ethics, this “communal ‘sense’ or ‘order,’” into the contemporary context with its new social relationships. He likened life in the modern age to “rootless grass” (nenashi-gusa) and, through his work, sought to discover an alternative mode of existence, a new “sense” or “meaning” suited to this rootless condition. For Abe, the loss of the “hometown” (kokyō) had deeper implications and, therefore, affected something more fundamental to one’s mode of existence, to one’s identity. Tetsushi Marukawa writes, [Abe] had perceived the loss of the “hometown” as a matter of possibly losing what it is to be
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“human” as well. For that reason, then, the “hometown” paradoxically continues to function also as an image of liberation underlying the “human being.”13 As Marukawa argues, “It is Abe’s ‘hometown’ confusion that functions as a concept shaking the orthodoxy of the postwar Japanese state.”14 In reference to Abe’s debut novel, The Road Sign at the End of the Street (Owarishi Michi no Shirube ni, 1948), Tsuyoshi Namigata discusses how the concept of “hometown” is treated as a “human image” (ningen-zō), as “units of belonging such as family, community, and the state” that you define for yourself or, as the case may be, are defined for you according to some standard.15 Namigata notes that Abe did not feel a strong sense of belonging within his homeland of Japan and, from this feeling of being out of place, he “created a ‘hometown’ as a ‘human image’ not directly connected to any space.”16 To borrow Abe’s own words, what he calls for is the necessity of “creating one’s fate, one’s hometown.”17 Under the guidance of Kiyoteru Hanada and Tarō Okamoto, two influential figures during the early stage of his career, Abe turned to surrealism for further inspiration, considering it a mode of representation made necessary by a new understanding of reality. Abe’s concept of surrealism is perhaps best summed up in the following excerpt from an essay written in 1949: The characteristic of surrealism is in taking up the cognition of reality itself as a theme, … consequently it is a revolutionary theory that rejects reality while simultaneously attempting to reconstruct it. That is to say, it is not simply the cognition of reality but the interpretation of
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values manifested in the “new” postwar Japan, which was being stirred toward economic (rather than military) ascendancy. According to Mikiso Hane, the remarkable growth Japan was able to achieve can be attributed to “the values and attitudes that have traditionally prevailed [in Japan], such as obedience, submissiveness, conformity, non-assertiveness, avoidance of conflicts, self-denial, and acceptance of a hierarchical order.”11 As Christopher Bolton points out,
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Abe’s own application of this mode was not limited to the “deformation” of the object as a function of the subjective, but was more concerned with the “metamorphosis” of the subject itself, as Namigata observes: “In his novels, … the protagonist’s individual identity crisis becomes an occasion for transformation.”19 With the rise of urbanized society in Japan during the 1960s, “disappearance” and “running away” became social problems, and Abe was among the first to make them subjects of artistic inquiry. According to Noboru Okaniwa, with the dismantlement of the “postwar” and the expansion of the new “everyday,” alienation became less tangible: “Certainly, the loss of spiritual and physical starvation contributed to making alienation difficult to grasp as a structure.”20 Namigata suggests that, for Abe, the memory of his Manchurian past (and its “everydayness” established through spiritual oppression) was “repainted” with the reality of urbanized society.21 In his fiction, Abe portrays the city as an artificial and arbitrary collectivity, an artificially and arbitrarily integrated social order indifferent to the individual, who is left to his or her own resources, and which offers minimal opportunities for significant human contact. The writer discusses the phenomenon of “disappearance” in the following manner: The escape from a nation should be recognized as a right, and the nation does not have the power to stop it. By making “escape” tangible, I believe the limit of a nation’s function should be made clear.22
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Through a series of “missing person” narratives, Abe would treat the issue of “disappearance” symbolically as the “escape from a nation,” that is escape from the concept of a nation. That man is a product of his social environment, Abe was certainly aware. As Hisaaki Yamanouchi writes, The search for identity presupposes a community in which the ego is to be realized as a social self. For Abe, however, a community is an illusory idea which he rejects outright.23 Abe recognized the tendency to view alienation as a problem that can be resolved simply by emphasizing solidarity in human relations, an assumption he was not afraid to question. He argues, “It is an emotional, regressive phenomenon that attempts to deny rootless grass; today we are in an age where rootless grasses live with power and must carry the burden of culture on their shoulders.”24 In a similar fashion, Martin Heidegger (another of Abe’s many influences) viewed nihilism as an inescapable aspect of modern life: No one with any insight will still deny today that nihilism is in the most varied and most hidden forms of “the normal state” of man. …The best evidence of this are the exclusively reactive attempts against nihilism which, instead of entering into a discussion of its essence, strive for the restoration of what has been. They seek salvation in flight, namely in flight from a glimpse of the worthiness of questioning the metaphysical position of man.25 Abe was likewise skeptical of this insistence on “the restoration of what has been,” stating,
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reality, nor is it simply a mode of representation for the sake of a new impressionistic form, but a mode of representation inevitably required because of a new cognition of reality.18
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In other words, it is not enough to simply “restore the connections” without making more fundamental changes to the nature of those connections, to the very structure of social relationships. By addressing the “rootlessness” in contemporary society and “questioning the metaphysical position of man,” his three major novels of the 1960s— Suna no Onna (1962; trans. The Woman in the Dunes, 1964), Tanin no Kao (1964; trans. The Face of Another, 1966), Moetsukita Chizu (1967; trans. The Ruined Map, 1969)27—form a thematic trilogy. In addressing such issues in his fiction, Abe often abandoned conventional plot structures. Even within the trio of novels considered in this study, Abe adopts different approaches in his treatment of the themes of alienation and identity: spatial allegory in The Woman in the Dunes, an intensely private, internal account in The Face of Another, and what could almost be described as a picaresque approach in The Ruined Map. According to William Currie, Abe’s narrative techniques, similar to the Modernist Franz Kafka and the post-modern Samuel Beckett, introduced something new to twentieth-century Japanese literature: dream narratives and the use of a dominant metaphor as organizing principle for a novel.28 Abe’s protagonists are either nameless or, as Fumiko Yamamoto points out, “have names which are
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strangely deprived of individuality.”29 These bland and depersonalizing names come to stand for the protagonist’s existential anonymity, their “dehumanized existence.”30 If one were to compare Abe’s early works of fiction with his later ones, it is possible to detect a progression in his treatment of the protagonist, as Yamamoto observes: “Abe’s heroes have evolved from the negative images of more passive transformed figures into decisive, transforming individuals.”31 In that sense, the aforementioned trilogy seems to represent a turning point, the dawning of the individual’s awareness of his or her transformative potential, of the possibility of selfidentity. Here, one can trace the influence on Abe’s writing of existentialism, a philosophy of personal choice and responsibility that attracted him because, as he stated himself, “I was persuaded that ‘existence precedes essence.’”32 However, at the conclusion of all three, Abe offers no clear answers and no explanations, instead leaving the ending uncertain and open-ended as if to invite, indeed require, the reader’s active participation and engagement with the material. His preference for the ambiguous denouement could also be interpreted as a desire to preserve the various contradictions of reality rather than imposing what would necessarily be an illusory resolution. All three novels raise the question of the “other” (tasha) with respect to modern, urban human relations. Following the publication of The Ruined Map, Abe stated that, having exhausted his inquiry into the “other,” his interests were now shifting toward representing “the you who must live inside others, the self that has become another.”33 In many of his works, Abe explores identity at a cultural crossroads. What interested him was “boundary situations” and, like Jerzy Kosinski (yet unlike Japanese writers of his and previous generations), he tended to “diminish
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Since modern society is so complex, human beings are alienated and, to recover from this, they say we must restore the connections between human beings. Yet I feel it is precisely this way of thinking that is in fact very negative.26
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the importance of nationality when exploring human behaviour.”34 Indeed, a characteristic of his prose is the absence of localization, of references to a definable place. One could say that Abe was not fixed to any particular space (and identity), going beyond Japan to transcend nationality. This characteristic helped provide his work with the universality for which he is known. His work not only crosses national borders but the borders of genre as well. Mitsuyoshi Numano writes of “boundary authors” responsible for “the literature of exile,” a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon exemplified by such writers as Paul Bowles, Isaac Singer, Elias Canetti, and Joseph Brodsky: “Appearing to freely cross all boundaries while, in fact, continuing to be concerned about the sense of incompatibility with another culture as an outsider, only to ultimately, by remaining on the border itself, make one’s own thing.”35 The applicability of Numano’s statement to a discussion of Abe is foregrounded by Tsuyoshi Namigata, who portrays him as “a figure remaining on the ‘border’ of cultural identity while continuing to renew the avantgarde.”36 While incorporating the “city” as a new element into cultural identity, Abe reworked the concept of avantgarde, treating its “popularization” as a natural consequence. Namigata argues that Abe did not consider avant-garde art as necessarily “a means for directly reforming society, but as a catalyst to provoke a re- awareness of reality.”37 Abe expressed his views on the topic in a number of articles and, based on these, it can be deduced that he was favorable to the vogue for the avant-garde at that time. Provided that a critical spirit is maintained, Namigata suggests that its “absorption into mass culture” would not have been an issue for Abe.38 It was within this context that the writer expanded the range of his artistic activity to include cinema, an art form with mass appeal, an art form emblematic of
industrialized twentieth-century culture. Yet why adapt his novels into films? What specifically did cinema offer for addressing the themes explored in his fiction? One could begin to answer such questions by first considering Abe’s creative purpose. Through his writing, Abe aimed for a “unification” of the concrete and the abstract, as Tadahiro Suda explains: “Kōbō’s literature is avant-garde and universal in that the state of man in relation to reality is not sought out within ideas or the lyrical, but in attempts to newly discover it by way of a direct negotiation with things.”39 Possibly as a further attempt at this “unification,” at this “direct negotiation with things,” Abe had ventured forth into the visual and performing arts during the 1950s, writing for the stage and for television. He was also an accomplished photographer. According to Suda, photography was more than just a hobby for Abe, who infused his photographs with “an artistic quality that can be connected to his literature.”40 For the writer, and the avant-garde in general, such crosspollinations of genres represented “an effort to bridge the gap between the written and the visual.”41 Cinema was another avenue through which to branch out into the visual, and Abe did so with the help of his close friend Hiroshi Teshigahara, a comrade-in-arms in the post-war avant-garde movements and a talented visual artist turned filmmaker. ——————————— 1 Timothy Iles, Abe Kōbō: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama and Theatre (Fuecchio, Italy: European Press Academic Publishing, 2000), 12. 2 Tsuyoshi Namigata, Ekkyō no Avangyarudo (Tokyo: NTT, 2005), 247. All translations into English of citations from
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Japanese texts are mine unless otherwise noted.
22 Quoted in ibid., 255.
3 Quoted in ibid., 247.
23 Hisaaki Yamanouchi, The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 173.
6 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 332. 7 Quoted in Iles, 39. 8 David Desser, Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 76. 9 Said, 333. 10 Quoted in Andrew Horvat, Four Stories by Kōbō Abe (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1973), 123. Translation mine. 11 Mikiso Hane, Eastern Phoenix: Japan since 1945 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 111. 12 Christopher Bolton, “Abe Kōbō 1924–1993,” Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 3.
24 Abe Kōbō Zenshū, vol. 21 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), 332. 25 Quoted in Iles, 43. 26 Abe Kōbō Zenshû, vol. 21, 318. 27 The English translations for all three were done by E. Dale Saunders and published in New York by Knopf. 28 William Currie, “Kōbō Abe: Writer for a Global Society,” Kōbō Abe Exhibition (Tokyo: Setagaya Literary Museum, 2003), 71. 29 Fumiko Yamamoto, “Metamorphosis in Abe Kōbō’s Works,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 15.2 (November 1980), 171. 30 Ibid., 190. 31 Ibid., 191.
13 Tetsushi Marukawa, “Shokuminchi no Bōrei,” Teikoku no Bōrei: Nihonbungaku no Seishinchizu (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004), 102.
32 Quoted in Nancy S. Hardin, “An Interview with Abe Kōbō,” Contemporary Literature 15.4 (1974), 454.
14 Ibid., 121.
34 Mary Lazar, “Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance,” College Literature 31.2 (2004), 100.
15 Namigata, 218. 16 Ibid., 219. 17 Quoted in ibid., 220. Emphasis added. 18 Quoted in ibid., 227. 19 Ibid., 232. 20 Noboru Okaniwa, Hanada Kiyoteru to Abe Kōbō: Avangarudo bungaku no saisei no tame ni (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1980), 91. 21 Namigata, 255.
33 Abe Kōbō Zenshû, vol. 21, 332.
35 Quoted in Namigata, 257. 36 Ibid., 257. 37 Ibid., 254.
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5 Tadahiro Suda, “Abe Kōbō,” Da Vinci 30 (Oct. 1996), 178.
38 Ibid., 254. 39 Suda, 178. 40 Ibid., 180. 41 Bolton, 10.
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4 Ibid., 226.
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ALEXANDER POPE
SHUICHI NAK ANO
Upon the Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock
At the End of Spring
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See, sir, here’s the grand approach, This way is for His Grace’s coach; There lies the bridge, and here’s the clock, Observe the lion and the cock, The spacious court, the colonnade, And mark how wide the hall is made! The chimneys are so well design’d, They never smoke in any wind. This gallery’s contriv’d for walking, The windows to retire and talk in; The council chamber for debate, And all the rest are rooms of state. Thanks, sir, cry’d I, ’tis very fine, But where d’ye sleep, or where d’ye dine? I find by all you have been telling, That ’tis a house, but not a dwelling.
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Never at Home
The Japanese story, at least a version of it, goes like this: A budding writer stands in front of the house of his favorite author. Just stands there, for hours every day. He is utterly ignored, even when the author walks out of the house and passes right in front of him. Then, after a month of this drama, the author leaves the house one morning. He gives the budding writer a little nod. Satisfied, the writer goes home, never to return. As in a Zen koan, we aren’t sure what the writer wanted from the author, nor what the nod meant. I presume it was a spark of acceptance from the author that, while not having read a word of the young writer’s work, signified that the writer at least had the fortitude to become an author. I’m sure there are many other layers to the simple fable, but the point here is I was once the writer and Kōbō Abe was the author. When I was a new writer, a short story of mine was accepted for publication—one never forgets the first time. I had arrived, I thought, and immediately began writing a novel. I ended up writing three novels over a few years, none of which went anywhere in the publishing world. I wondered if I was ever going to go anywhere in the publishing world. As do most aspiring writers, I read many books on writing fiction. One of those books was The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. In this book I first heard of Kōbō Abe’s The Ruined Map. Gardner claimed that no matter how innovative or oddly constructed (putting The Ruined Map
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in that category, although without further explanation), a great novel will leave the writer with the feeling of “that was a novel.” The Ruined Map, oddly constructed or not, grabbed my writer’s mind and soul. I read other Kōbō Abe novels, finding them all to fit Gardner’s innovative classification. The novels are surrealist and absurdist fiction, unlike most of what I read; yet to me there was the feeling of a novel in each. I knew I needed to go to Japan, but not for the ancient temples, the neon-lit urban brightness, the beauty of the gardens and the tea ceremony. The Japan I wanted to find was that of dingy coffee shops with surly waitresses, tiny hole-in-the-wall joints serving cheap sake and shochu, and food stalls under elevated railroad tracks. I wanted to meet homeless men who lived in boxes. I wanted to run into urban street thugs and the occasional yakuza, the stuff in Abe’s books. I had to stand in front of Kōbō Abe’s home. At least his home country. During my year there, I did find the Japan of Abe’s fiction—it wasn’t too hard—and the impact of Abe-esque Japan was strong, perhaps because I was rootless and culturally undefined. (Even though I’m Japanese-American, I knew little of the depth of Japanese culture). Abe’s books resonated even more while I was in Japan, which makes sense, given his early life that created his rootlessness. His father was a physician in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and that is where Abe spent much of his youth. He briefly attended high school in Tokyo, returned to Manchuria, then started medical school in Tokyo during World War II. He watched his father die of typhus before returning to medical school after the war. By his own admission in Fake Fish: The Theater of Kōbō Abe by Nancy Shields, he was reading and writing fiction more than
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Kōbō Abe:
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I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the ‘hometown phobia’ that runs in the depth of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me. This self-reflection explains the unsettled, bizarrely inorganic nature of the personal environments where his characters exist. For example, the main character, “A,” in his book The Box Man, becomes obsessed with a homeless man living in a cardboard box near his home. A (Abe?) tries to have the police evict the box man, but they are indifferent to his complaint. When the box man leaves his box, A investigates inside the box and finds a richer life than he thought a box man would, or should, have. Then A finds a box freshly discarded from the delivery of a refrigerator. It’s the ideal size and he moves in. It can’t be very long since I began living in a box…. The dark, wet sky and the black sea fused at eye level. The water was much darker than the sky. A deep black like an elevator falling. A bottomless black that you could still see even if you shut your eyes. I could hear the sea. I could see the inside of my own cranium…. My complete lack of sleep sends my blood pounding. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep at least two or three hours before leaving the box.
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“Mole,” or “Pig” depending on who is addressing him, has created an underground sanctuary in The Ark Sakura. The abandoned quarry, full of canned foods, bottled water, fuel, and other necessities, not to mention a super-powered siphon toilet, will allow Mole to ride out the aftermath of a nuclear war. But he doesn’t want to be alone in the survival, so he recruits a few others to the ark. Unfortunately, he hasn’t properly vetted his new companions. The construction inside was worthy of the camouflage outside. Just beyond the door was a small room with a low ceiling, just over six and a half feet high. Tunnels had been dug out in three levels—top, middle, and bottom—each leading to another small room, all interconnected by irregular narrow stone steps. It was rather as if several playground monsters, the kind whose labyrinthine innards children love to climb around in, had been lined up and joined together. The unnamed private detective in The Ruined Map seemingly also has no home. The story starts out traditionally enough in the vein of the hard-boiled detective story: a PI meets with a young, beer-swilling woman at her home. Her husband has been missing for six months, vanishing on his way to a train station to deliver some documents. All her efforts to find him, and those of her brother, have been futile. The only clue she presents is a book of matches from a local coffee shop. The detective follows the lead into trouble, often in some other dimension of perception. Suddenly the scenery changed, and a straight, white line of road stretched to a sky daubed with white. It was some thirty feet wide. Between
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studying anatomy and physiology. The school allowed him to graduate, with a promise from him not to practice medicine. In the book, Abe states:
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Exploring these works of fiction (which I read but largely puzzled over, not fully digested, as with my time in Japan) I was able to find my fiction writer’s voice. It was my own voice, but I freely admit aspects of Abe’s stories and characters had crept into my psyche and onto the page: an elderly homeless woman living in a converted submarine factory, deeply embedded suspense leading to irrational violence, quirky eroticism, and especially the odd places people sometimes call home, like a fortune teller’s haunted and trap-door-filled residence. With my voice in place, I was able to get published. I’ve read The Ruined Map four or five times, I’ve lost count, but still don’t fully know what happened. Each time I have a different take on it. The book got under my skin. So much so, I had to write a novel that would follow the detective, some twenty years after the original case. Sort of an unofficial sequel, you might say. Why Ghosts Appear came mainly out of my desire to understand the detective and what might, or might not, have happened. Haunted by the case of the missing husband, and by the man’s wife whom he had unwisely fallen for, the still
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unnamed detective gets a new case: a fortune teller hires him to find her missing son, who last visited her at the previous year’s obon—the festival honoring a family’s ancestors. The detective soon finds out the son supposedly died two years earlier. As he searches for the son, or his ghost, the past case comes back into his life. Readers of Kōbō Abe will find a lot of his presence in the novel. The seemingly random wanderings of the characters, the underlying, often unseen, tension of their motives, and the questioning of reality. Plus, there are more direct references: a tiny neighborhood bar, a secret underground cavern, a hospital where patients might be the doctors, and of course, a box man. As with most fiction writers, I believe most anyway, when our characters become alive, fully formed, the book writes itself. This happened with Why Ghosts Appear. A narrative inertia took over the creative process. Nearly all I had to do was open the manuscript and put my fingers on the keyboard. I don’t know if I had literally stood in front of Kōbō Abe’s house it would have done any good. I don’t know if I would have ever found him at home. But without him, I don’t know if I would have developed into the novelist I’ve become. So maybe it was him, somewhere in Japan, giving me a little nod. Now he is standing here, balancing the weight of unfulfilled dreams with what he has lost. What will he do? I search and fumble for him…but in vain. This blackness I am seeking is after all merely my own self…my own map, revealed by my brain…. But I was the one standing here now. There was no mistake, I was the one. I thought I was following the husband’s map, but I was following my own.
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it and the footpaths on either side lay a belt of withered lawn, contained by a knee-high fence. The perspective was strangely exaggerated, perhaps because the grass had withered unevenly, and I was struck with an optical illusion. It was as if I were looking at some patterned infinity: The four-storied buildings, identical in height, each floor with six doors, were lined up in rows of six to the right and left…. Perhaps it was for the lighting, but as the building were laid out on staggered lines, on both sides one’s view met only white walls supporting a milk-white dome of sky.
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A Conversation with Banana Yoshimoto
To read Banana Yoshimoto’s work is to stop and spend time with feelings that would otherwise be fleeting. You might never fully register the liminal glow of late-night shops around the midnight green of an urban park as you go about your life, but when you read her depiction, you’ll suddenly recall when just such a moment had crossed your consciousness. Time will dilate and the line between your own experience and the one on the page will be so close that you’ll feel the slow, thick summer wind of the scene brush against your skin. Yoshimoto has a talent for making everything she writes seem immediate. The first-person narratives in her novels and short stories are so direct that you have the sensation that you’re experiencing them side-by-side with her characters. This vicarious witnessing is what makes the shocking events of violence and magical realism that thread through otherwise mundane lives so believable. If you doubt a momentary opening between dimensions over a river or a conversation with a distraught ghost in a hotel room then you distrust your own eyes and ears. There is a familiarity that is all-encompassing and how she executes it is a bewitching trick. Yoshimoto delights in describing homes, yet for all their variety they will each remind you of your own. When cultural signifiers appear, they are for the most part universal ones. When you read Yoshimoto, you are at home—both wherever you are and everywhere.
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CS: There is a visceral sense of home in your works, in the small personal sense of the pleasures one can take from their living environment. For example, that sofa in Kitchen “so big, so soft, so deep” that someone could stretch out vertically across it, and the comforting smells Sakumi can sense even over the phone in Amrita. How can a sense of “home” enliven a character or text? BY: For my works, instead of finely detailing a scene for the reader, I prefer the reader to sketch out something using all five senses. It could be because when I was small, I was blind in my left eye. For me, the house was experienced the same way as wearing clothes; they were things to be touched, an extension of my body. Because of that, I think these sensory details to the home are important to convey the protagonist’s character to the reader. CS: Magical realist elements sneak up on your characters, rendering familiar environments into other dimensions for them. Do you feel that space and time really are relative and that our reality is perception and not truth? BY: I think that living in modern society has reduced our ability to fully use our senses. The sudden disruptions in the reality of my novels allow readers to take a look at their own reality as well. These are the kind of spontaneous realizations I like to show. I think the relationship between time and space relies heavily on the context of the era’s sentiment we occupy. It truly gives us the space to make such connections. CS: The violence in your work, whether it is the brutal death battle of Eriko in Kitchen or the stabbing, rape, and suicide that overshadows the lives of the couple in the short story “Lizard,” is related by your characters as completely mundane. It seems
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At Home in All Worlds:
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like they accept them as karma or fate. Do you think that attitude is essential to moving on from upsetting episodes in life? BY: I find the horrible incidents in my novels are more similar to evil folktales or fables than the cruelties of reality. Put another way, I would want the characters to review their behavior in comparison to the folk tales and fables. Although the protagonists may seem unaffected by such events, this is because they happened in the past. I don’t want to portray actual or realistic cruelty, but something similar to way M. Night Shyamalan portrays the cruelty in his film The Village. CS: In N.P., Kano loses her voice and her perception of language changes; she starts to see actions as color and says she becomes aware of the extreme limitations of language. Yet the characters in N.P. are essentially possessed by the language of a novel. How do you feel about the power of language and the limitations of language? Do you agree or disagree with Kano? BY: This work was written like a painter draws, with a specific mood. Because of that, the language is used as a decoration or set piece. The translators and writers of the world like to put heavy or light meaning on certain words which in turn can put that same pressure on all the others. For me, language is an important tool to be used, but nothing more than that. I think that communication uses more important elements than just language. CS: In the story “Blood and Water,” Chikako says “the big difference between the village and the outside world was not so much the kind of people, but the unique mood.” I think it’s the same with the works of writers. How would you describe the “unique mood” of the work of Banana Yoshimoto?
BY: Similar to the feeling of rising from a hot spring bath, I want the reader to feel “something’s a little different and happy” after reading the work. The specific mood that I construct allows the reader to contemplate and soak in the narrative, making life a little easier. I think that’s my magic. CS: Our issue is spotlighting Kōbō Abe, so I’m curious what is the “unique mood,” in your opinion, of the work of Kōbō Abe? BY: I believe we are quite similar in the way we live and our works. Also, many of the period-specific elements can be found in both of our books as well. I have not read all of his works so I am not completely familiar; however, I think we both enjoy the fascination between the real and the surreal. CS: In the letter that ends the 1994 American edition of Lizard, you say that hearing from readers around the world lead you to understand “that many of us living at the end of the twentieth century share similar thoughts and feelings, despite the great distances separating us.” The world seems so much more turbulent lately, do you still see as many unifying things at a global level? BY: As age, environment, and borders disappear, the things I like (both products and hobbies) tend to come from making real time connections with different people. Although the turbulence may be big, I think it is important to see that from this good viewpoint.
—— Banana Yoshimoto’s answers were translated from the Japanese by Patrick Varda and Sen Varda.
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What is a home? A guarded space, Wherein a few, unfairly blest, Shall sit together, face to face, And bask and purr and be at rest? Where cushioned walls rise up between Its inmates and the common air, The common pain, and pad and screen From blows of fate or winds of care? Where Art may blossom strong and free, And Pleasure furl her silken wing, And every laden moment be A precious and peculiar thing? And Past and Future, softly veiled In hiding mists, shall float and lie Forgotten half, and unassailed By either hope or memory? While the luxurious Present weaves Her perfumed spells untried, untrue, Broiders her garments, heaps her sheaves, All for the pleasure of a few? Can it be this, the longed-for thing Which wanderers on the restless foam, Unsheltered beggars, birds on wing, Aspire to, dream of, christen “Home”?
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No. Art may bloom, and peace and bliss; Grief may refrain and Death forget; But if there be no more than this, The soul of home is wanting yet. Dim image from far glory caught, Fair type of fairer things to be, The true home rises in our thought, A beacon set for men to see. Its lamps burn freely in the night, Its fire-glows unchidden shed Their cheering and abounding light On homeless folk uncomforted. Each sweet and secret thing within Gives out a fragrance on the air,— A thankful breath, sent forth to win A little smile from others’ care. The few, they bask in closer heat; The many catch the further ray. Life higher seems, the world more sweet, And hope and Heaven less far away. So the old miracle anew Is wrought on earth and provéd good, And crumbs apportioned for a few, God-Blessed, suffice a multitude.
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A Home
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Some News of Home You’ve come from my old village— Do you have some news of home? Does my window still let in the light? Was the old plum tree in bloom? —— Translated by Frank Bonneville.
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A Conversation with Juliet Winters Carpenter
A translator is tasked with converting a text from one language to another. It sounds simple on the face of it, but as anyone with even a passing knowledge of a second language knows: this process is never a one-toone exchange. All languages have their own rules, their own quirks, their own internal logic (not to mention their own internal illogic, as well). So, though translators are interpreters, they are also, in a way, novelists or poets in their own right. In other words, translators are creators, too. “Translation,” according to Juliet Winters Carpenter, “is like coloring in the lines.” It is both a creative and interpretive act. “You do have considerable creative freedom,” she admits, “but the basic picture is there for you.” Carpenter is one of the world’s premier JapaneseEnglish translators. Her first work of translation—Kōbō Abe’s Secret Rendezvous—won her the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1980. Thirty-five years later, she won the prize again for her translation of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel—the only translator to win the prize twice since its inception. TM: What was it that drew you to translation in the first place? JWC: I was drawn to translation in high school when for a term paper I read all the translations of Japanese
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literature in our school library (a handful to be sure) and realized that my impression of a writer’s abilities varied depending not just on the work in question but on the translator in question. It was a truly eye-opening discovery. At age 17 I decided that if I could ever learn enough Japanese to be a literary translator, it would be an exciting, challenging, and fulfilling career, and a needed one too— there were, after all only a handful of translations available in our library. I figured there was probably room for a new translator. So I decided to go for it and see what happened, though I really didn’t have much expectation that I would ever succeed. TM: Could you tell me the story of how you ended up starting your career by translating Kōbō Abe’s Secret Rendezvous? JWC: I was simply extremely lucky! Just at a time when I was able to devote the time to a major project, I got word from my advisors at the University of Michigan that Abe was for some reason (to this day I don’t know why) looking for a new translator, and they encouraged me to submit a sample to the publisher (Knopf) for review. Well, this was an amazing opportunity. I lost no time in buying the book (Mikkai) and translating the first chapter. Happily, the editor chose my translation, and that was that. I was also lucky because the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission was just getting started with its prize for Literary Translation, and the following year they awarded it to me for Secret Rendezvous, my first-ever book-length translation! I have often marveled at how very lucky I was to begin my career at such dizzying heights. TM: How would you describe Kōbō Abe’s aesthetic and thematic sensibilities? JWC: Nearly ten years ago now a friend of mine, Christopher Bolton, wrote a book called Sublime Voices:
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Coloring in the Lines:
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The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō (Harvard East Asian Monographs 319, 2009). Chris does a great job of analyzing the intermingling of the scientific and the poetic in Abe’s writing. Abe did after all have a medical degree and his scientist side is always on display, but he is a brilliant poet as well, a master of language in different modes. Abe deals early on with questions of identity as in the stories about transformation (into a potted plant or business card or, in the cocoon story, emptiness itself); in Secret Rendezvous and other of his later works, people (generally nameless to begin with) vanish, becoming “lost” in the innards of a supposedly benign but pretty scary place like a vast hospital or underground quarry/ nuclear bunker. Locations in his stories are out of joint— the descriptions don’t quite fit together (but then I will never forget an actual ground-floor sign in Osaka Station pointing UP to reach the subway!) or even turn out to be located inside a character rather than outside him. His short story “The Bet” is another great example of this spatial schizophrenia, for lack of a better term. Abe is constantly exploring the nature of society and the nature of the self with an inimitable touch. There is something grotesquely shocking and surreal in each of the books of his that I have translated, but darkly humorous and psychologically familiar as well. He was fascinated by technology and I have often thought that it was a shame he didn’t live to see the Internet with its huge morass of information that swallows us up. It would not have surprised him. The tape recordings in Secret Rendezvous prefigure the Net, as do the newspapers with voluminous scraps of unrelated information side by side—this aspect of information technology, the muddle of it all, was familiar territory to him, and he warned presciently where we were
headed. The obsession in Secret Rendezvous with sexual fulfillment in a world lacking deep emotional connections also seems like a dark prophesy. Sometimes I like to imagine what Abe would have made of President Trump. He almost seems Abe-esque to me: a dark vision of an awful “what if” that has alas come true. TM: For each of our issues, we select a theme to pair with each author we spotlight. For Abe, we could have easily done “Identity,” “Alienation,” “Community,” “Illusion,” or “The Absurd.” Instead we decided to go for the perhaps less obvious, but no less prevalent theme of “Home.” Abe famously claimed, “Essentially, I am a man without a hometown.” How do you see Abe’s relationship with home, hometown, and home-nation reflected in his work? JWC: Just as people have no names, there are often no place names—it’s difficult to tell where we are not just in terms of figuring out how a room or a building is laid out, but what town or country we are in. And yet there is a desperate search for home. In Secret Rendezvous, a man’s wife is taken from their bed in the middle of the night, carried off on a stretcher and then in an ambulance despite not being ill. He spends the entire rest of the novel trying to get her back and recreate that lost home with everything where it should be—especially her. It’s interesting to compare Abe with Minae Mizumura, who has such an overwhelming sense of place and such a strong tie to Japan as her home. Her characters talk about Japan constantly and choose to live there despite their global sophistication. They are acutely aware of being Japanese; they are not lost, although one book details her struggle to find her place as a writer in Japan after spending her formative years in New York…
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Anyway I think Abe’s work shows a complicated relationship with the idea of “home.” It’s good to remember that the people in The Woman of the Dunes are attached to their “hometown” to what certainly seems an unreasonable degree—like a woman stuck in an abusive relationship, they can’t bear to leave even though to us it seems like leaving would be the logical, the sane, choice; instead they resort to kidnapping and other horrors to protect their barely habitable, constantly threatened homes. (Another contrast comes to mind: Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and her unceasing, desperate attempt to go home to Tara in the midst of all that desolation; when she arrives, home is almost unrecognizable, her mother dead and her father demented; still, she is “home.”) And of course we should remember that the protagonist in “Red Cocoon” is searching for his home as he walks along, and that a cocoon is itself a kind of temporary home, even if…. TM: You’ve mentioned that you were a big fan of the translations of Edward Seidensticker. What specific translations did you encounter early on that inspired you? And what did you find in his translation work that felt different or special? JWC: To go back to my seventeen-year-old self, I did read one or more translations of Seidensticker’s at that time, and what interests me is that I do not remember a specific title or even the content. What my brain fastened on was that name “Seidensticker”; when I was looking at colleges, I looked for the one where he taught (U of M) and applied there on the early decision program. And never looked back. I was drawn to his translations because more than any other I felt they had a kind of exquisite beauty, a clean, word-perfect quality that took my breath away. By then
I was in my second year of Japanese and keenly aware of how vastly different a language it is from English. It awed me that anyone could produce such flawless translations. This was years before Kawabata’s Nobel prize, by the way—1964 or 1965. I know I didn’t read Snow Country till my sophomore year at U of M. Anyway from the start he loomed large in my mind as a role model—a shining pole star. TM: Is the act of translation more interpretive or creative? Is it more of a science or an art? How would you describe what you do as a translator? JWC: It’s kind of like learning to read Japanese at all. I struggled so much with learning to read the language, and one day Robert Brower, I think it was, gave us this encouragement: “At same point you become able to look at an unfamiliar kanji and make an intelligent guess as to its pronunciation and/or meaning. Then everything gets easier.” Thank goodness, he was right. You also develop a sense for the language after a while, and sentences and ideas sort themselves out even though you may not know exactly how you know what they mean.(Having opportunities to hear and use the language in a variety of contexts helps!) Anyway, translation is basically a kind of deep reading. Then with sufficient knowledge of English (built up from reading and appreciating all kinds of writing), you set to work finding how best to get the underlying meaning of the Japanese across. This means the best translations do not match the original word-for-word; the ideal translation is one that seems so completely English it’s hard to imagine it started life in another language. I think I would side with “interpretive” if it makes any difference. Translating is like coloring in the lines, I sometimes think: you do have considerable creative
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freedom, but the basic picture is there for you; you don’t change its nature. You bring out the colors in it that your mind’s eye sees, colors inspired by the original and intrinsic to its spirit. TM: What were the particular challenges in translating the two Kōbō Abe novels you translated, Secret Rendezvous and The Ark Sakura? Did they offer similar hurdles or were their challenges individual? JWC: Secret Rendezvous had a shocking and important lesson about a basic difference between Japanese and English. The narrator-protagonist keeps a set of notebooks and is supposed to write them in the third person, but keeps lapsing into the first person despite himself. In Japanese this happens without our noticing, until suddenly he exclaims “Oh rats! Here I am writing in the first person again, how did this happen!” This is possible in Japanese because personal pronouns aren’t strictly necessary at all, and very often their absence signals the first person. (Thus “I love you” would not be “Watashi wa anata o aishite imasu” but simply “aishitemasu”—or, even more simply, “suki.” ) Anyway, I was totally unable either to ignore the effect in Japanese or to duplicate it in English. It is simply impossible to write in an in-between, either/or style; there are so many personal pronouns that any shift leaps out at you. I realized some translation problems are really intractable. This was actually liberating—it wasn’t my fault! Both novels are weird, nightmarish yet amusing with plenty of acerbic social commentary. For The Ark Sakura I had to invent a word—”eupcaccia,” the name of the insect that devours its own excrement and so lives forever. I had fun playing with the word and the spellings. There was a lot of scatological humor as at one point the character gets trapped in a giant toilet—his foot gets caught and he
can’t escape. Oh dear. This book would be interesting to compare with one I finished recently, The Great Passage by Miura Shion. Both are concerned with ships as a means of salvation. In Abe’s book, the “ark” is an underground shelter from impending nuclear holocaust; in Miura’s world, the dictionary that the characters spend years creating is “a ship bearing the souls of people traveling from ancient times toward the future, across the ocean rich with words.” Needless to say Miura’s ship offers much more hope than Abe’s…. As usual his characters are isolated and unable to work together for the common good… TM: Did translating the stories Beyond the Curve offer a different set of challenges than the novels? Is there a different approach to translating a story as opposed to a novel? Or is it just a matter of scale? JWC: If there is a difference between writing a short story and writing a novel, then there is a difference between translating the two genres. Basically whatever genre you are translating, you have to be familiar with its conventions and then decide what you are going to do with them. A major challenge in translating Beyond the Curve was choosing which stories to put into it; there is no corresponding book of Abe short stories in Japanese. I read most of his short fiction. I still remember a few works I would have liked to put in that for one reason or another didn’t make the final cut. Also, with short stories, each one is its own world, so you have to think of voice and tone all over again for each story. TM: Though you started with Abe, you’ve become as known for bringing the work of great Japanese women writers to an American audience, including translations of Fumiko Enchi’s Masks, Machi Tawara’s Salad Anniversary, and Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel. What drew you to those three writers
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specifically? And how important is it to you to see more Japanese women in translation? JWC: After Abe, it was a thrill to be given the chance to translate Enchi, a woman who forms a contrast with him in about every way possible. I felt my yin and yang had been properly balanced! Together they were two of Japan’s greatest writers of the day, so it was a tremendous honor. Knopf liked Secret Rendezvous and asked me to consider translating Onnamen as a follow-up. Apparently they had had the book in their sights for some time and were looking for a translator. I was more than happy to oblige. It’s bothered me down the years that I never got back to Enchi, but I am happy to report that Lucy North and I are currently in talks with a publisher about doing a book of translations of her short fiction—stay tuned! Initially I was drawn to Salad Anniversary because so many people that I knew were fond of it. All sorts of people—people that I wouldn’t have particularly associated with a love of poetry. I was extremely curious to know how modern tanka could have such a powerful appeal. When I read them, the first ones in the chapter “August Morning” were about things like young love, the beach, and eventual disillusionment. “Hotel California” came up, and later on so did jazz and teaching and poems about baseball and so many other things. I was hooked, just like her other millions of readers. I myself grew up across from Lake Michigan and knew a thing or two about beaches, not to mention young love, disillusionment, and the rest of it. It seemed like a natural fit, and when Kodansha International agreed to let me translate them in three or four lines rather than a strict five-line 5-7-5-7-7 format, I was in. As I may have mentioned, I have been extremely lucky in my career, and getting to translate Mizumura is just the
latest example. Her book was picked up by the J-lit Center for translation, and someone else snapped it up—then decided to back out after getting bogged down after a few years. I was then working on Shiba’s epic Clouds above the Hill; a difficult annotated translation and commentary on Tannisho, a medieval classic of Buddhist literature; a book about Arashiyama Kitcho, one of Kyoto’s premier restaurants; and other projects—plus I was chair of the English Department! No sane person would have taken on an 800-page book on top of all that. Fortunately I am not entirely sane when it comes to translation—I knew it was a rare opportunity, and I was told (mistakenly as it turned out) that I would “only” have to do the last 400 pages, that the first half was serviceable. Well, I ended up doing the whole thing in close collaboration with the author, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Such a collaborative translation (her English is not native, but excellent) was an amazing new experience—a chance to view a brilliant book through its author’s eyes in a unique and intimate way. It was wonderful to be able to bring A True Novel to the English-speaking world. Then to be recognized with the same award I had received 35 years before with my debut translation was the icing on the cake. I am delighted to work on women writers and as I said looking forward to returning to Enchi; last year I translated the debut novel of Mako Idemitsu, daughter of the famous magnate. I have taught at a women’s college in Kyoto for thirty-one years now, and I have to say it would be a great pleasure if one of my students someday became a writer and I could translate her work into English! That said, I have absolutely nothing against men…I am currently working on Shiba Ryotaro’s eight-volume Ryoma ga yuku (splitting the volumes with Paul McCarthy and Margaret Mitsutani) and loving every minute of it.
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Tale of Genji, Soseki, and other early modern writers. Practically speaking, the vast majority of people are more likely to get an idea, however imperfect, of the scope of her achievement through reading her in English. Again, I am more than happy to oblige. The next book of hers (due out in a couple of years) will be an even greater challenge linguistically; while all three books of hers I have done so far mixed in a certain amount of English with the Japanese, An I-Novel from Left to Right, another semiautobiographical novel, goes much further. Getting the English-language reader to appreciate the cleverness of what she has done with two languages, despite being limited to one in my translation, will be a challenge. But challenges are fun…
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TM: Already this year, you’ve published two translations of books by Minae Mizumura. You translated the novel Inheritance from Mother on your own, and you translated her critical work The Fall of Language in the Age of English with Mari Yoshihara. I’m curious about your personal thoughts regarding the central thesis of that latter Mizumura text. What do you hope for in regards to language in the “Age of English”? And where does that place you as someone who translates literature (and especially in the case of Mizumura: a uniquely Japanese literature) into English? JWC: As someone who has benefited enormously from knowing another language, and who has studied French, Chinese (modern and classical), New Testament Greek, and German (but only enough to help me sing the works of Bach and Brahms), I wish more native speakers of English would branch out. It really helps to develop empathy for others when you have tried on their language and perhaps more importantly found out what it feels like to be fairly helpless in a new language and to soldier on anyway and make communication happen, or decode a paragraph properly. It’s a humbling and exhilarating experience. Obviously, as a translator from Japanese to English, the “age of English” works well for me! Yes, it would be nice if everyone could read her works in the original Japanese and see for themselves what she has done, but as she would be the first to point out, that would require not a passing acquaintance with the written language but familiarity with many layers of Japanese from the past and a sense of how she weaves not only echoes of Western works like Madame Bovary, L’Etranger and Wuthering Heights into her works, but echoes of The
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A Selection from Inheritance from Mother “Yokohama” had been engraved deeply in her mother Noriko’s mind since childhood. The “Yokohama” house at the top of the hill was always drenched in bright sunshine. Her family lived in a little rental house below that was always in the shadows. Even as a child, she must have dimly sensed that the steep terrain represented the difference in social status between the two families. Looking up from below the steep rise, “Yokohama” was in plain sight, but to get there you had to take a winding detour. Very like Noriko’s own life. After years of moving from place to place across Japan, her father was transferred to Tokyo before she started elementary school. The family settled in a house near his older sister, who had married into “Yokohama.” As a little girl with bobbed hair looking up at the house on the hill, Noriko hadn’t known anything— not even that her mother wasn’t allowed to cross the “Yokohama” threshold. Or that her parents weren’t properly married. Or that because her parents weren’t properly married, she herself was illegitimate—a disreputable love child. All she knew was that the sunny house on the hill held everything shiny and bright, everything that was lacking in her house and that formed the object of her yearning and envy. All the rooms in the house where her family lived had straw tatami mats. “Yokohama” had a Western-style parlor redolent of fine polished wood, with a shiny grand
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piano played by the cousin seven years her elder—the future Uncle Yokohama. She had never heard the sound of piano playing or seen such a parlor before. The walls were lined with elegantly bound books—Western books too, naturally—and there were unfamiliar Western-style pieces of furniture too, a “sofa” and “armchairs.” Next to the parlor was the dining room, with a table as high off the floor as her small head was. There was the aroma of roasted coffee beans in the air, and tropical fruit brought back by her cousin’s father, the future Grandpa Yokohama, who was captain of an oceangoing merchant ship. It was because of him that the family lived near Yokohama, Japan’s gateway to the West, but little Noriko knew nothing of this. On his days off he smoked a pipe in his study. The yard was planted with grass instead of moss, and the garden, marked off by a circle of bricks, bloomed with roses, dahlias, tulips, and other Western flowers. A Scottish terrier, a breed then rare in Japan, had the run of the place. To top it all off, living next door was a French woman married to a Japanese. On Sundays Noriko went to church with her cousins and discovered the pleasure of singing, something she did well. As she warbled in church with all the strength her small body could muster, Noriko had surely believed that she would always be able to come and go at “Yokohama” as she pleased. But the adult world is prone to sudden, violent shifts without regard for the feelings of small girls. Eventually her father found work in Osaka through family connections, and Noriko had to move there with her parents, both of whom were originally from the western part of Japan.
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The House on the Hill:
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What a different world it was! The sound of the multiplication table being recited in the unfamiliar rhythm of Osaka dialect was dumbfounding, the sniffling and shouting in church—a church in name only, to her— astonishing. She felt as if she’d been sent to civilization’s remotest outpost. As she grew up and it became increasingly clear that people looked down on her and pitied her, memories of “Yokohama” grew all the more resplendent in her mind. As she pored over the illustrations of stylishly dressed Japanese girls and Western girls in the pages of Girls’ Friend, and later as she began going to see foreign movies, the world depicted there overlapped in her mind with those memories. But “Yokohama” was far away. One time she persuaded her father to have a new dress made for her, a rare treat, and to let her go back by herself during summer vacation—but the two weeks flew by, serving only to deepen her longing and envy. She returned chastened to Osaka. When her cousin, now a rising concert pianist, came by on tour, he was surrounded by fellow musicians. She could only look on from the sidelines. Feeling out of place, she was dazzled by their aura—the aura of what she later recognized as “high culture.” The desperate longing that most Japanese used to have for the West became inseparably entangled in Noriko’s mind with her veneration of “Yokohama.” At the same time, that veneration served as the sort of guidepost people have when they seek to better themselves even a little through art or learning. The more impoverished her status, the more intense her hunger for the world of the house on the hill. After graduating from a girls’ higher school—as private high schools for girls used to be called—Noriko
made the greatest decision of her lifetime, prompted by a proposal of marriage from the son of a local barber. By then her father had already set up house with another woman, and she and her mother were living alone in a row house in the back streets of Osaka. Downstairs consisted of a concrete entryway with a tiny anteroom, a kitchen, and a three-mat room; above was a six-mat room with a clothes-drying platform at one end. It was closer to downtown than the place they had lived in previously, and so older, dirtier, and more run-down. Their neighbors were a colorful mix: a young woman who recited ballad-dramas of the puppet theater for a living; an old woman who taught girls the art of kimono making; the mistress of a geisha house; a concubine; and assorted cooks, carpenters, and dancers. Even if she refused the marriage proposal, Noriko understood that unless she could escape her present circumstances, she would have no choice but to go on living a small life in this back alley far removed from her dreams. Fear verging on desperation prompted her to come up with a scheme: she would get her maternal relatives to look after her mother while she invited herself to stay with her paternal relatives—at “Yokohama”—ostensibly to polish her household skills and her manners. With the determination of a seventeen-year-old, she pushed to have her way, and the adults in her life yielded to her determination. Noriko’s mother felt a lingering regret over the failed proposal from the barber’s son: “He said he’d take me in along with you.” The need to marry someone who would take in her mother as well as herself was a burden Noriko had to bear, as an illegitimate child. “Him? Nothing doing.” “You’re always hankering for the moon.”
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“I don’t care. Nothing doing.” “Just what kind of fellow would suit your fancy, I’d like to know?” Someone like her cousin, was the obvious answer. No point in saying so to someone as woefully uneducated, as innocent of high culture, as her mother. And so off Noriko had gone to “Yokohama,” with such determination that almost overnight she switched to the refined speech of uptown Tokyo. From her aunt she learned housekeeping—cleaning, laundry, cooking—but with formidable spirit made it clear that she hadn’t the slightest intention of settling for the status of domestic helper. To differentiate herself from the maids, she affected a longsleeved kimono even when helping around the house. Her aunt and uncle had only two children, the concert pianist and another son, younger than she was. Her aunt may have felt a little uneasy about Noriko’s presence, but the strong family resemblance helped, and soon she began treating her almost like a daughter. Her uncle, with male nonchalance, welcomed their unexpected guest wholeheartedly. In no time, Noriko spread her young wings almost as if she’d been born into “Yokohama” from the first.
snow-white shirt, surrounded by bouquets of roses. The bouquets, suggestive of their donors, made it seem as if he were surrounded by a dozen lovely young ladies, his students and admirers. Noriko he had of course consistently ignored. In time he became engaged to marry. His fiancée had everything Noriko lacked. She was not only the daughter of a renowned university professor with a raft of prominent relatives but also a gifted soprano seen as having a brilliant future. She in fact went on to great success: when the Fujiwara Opera, Japan’s first professional opera company, gave its first overseas performance in New York City, she sang the lead in Madama Butterfly. Noriko too could sing, but her parents had never given her proper lessons, and she lived on the consolation of having sung a solo at her graduation from girls’ higher school. The contrast with her cousin’s fiancée was stark. Thinking over her mother’s life, Mitsuki surmised that the marriage of the much-admired cousin must have brought her mother a degree of sadness, but probably no very deep wound. He had never paid her much attention and had always seemed to exist on a higher plane; she was probably content just to be allowed to polish and repolish his grand piano in his absence. When he married his Madama Butterfly in a splendid wedding and reception at the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, young Noriko, though no doubt envious, had evidently been more entranced by the figure she herself cut in an exquisitely embroidered kimono, worn at the peak of her youthful beauty. The story went that afterward, when she heard that one of the guests had inquired if she were perhaps a princess of some sort, she had jumped for joy. In any case, once she joined the “Yokohama” household she acquired kimono made especially for her,
Her mother Noriko’s two years in “Yokohama” must have been sweet, thought Mitsuki, and at the same time bitter. She found several old photographs of Uncle Yokohama carefully mounted in an album. He had a noble air; the photographs might have been stills of a movie star. Noriko’s cousin graduated from the Tokyo School of Music (later Tokyo School of Fine Arts) and then enjoyed a brief career as a concert pianist. Photos taken after performances showed him dressed in a black tuxedo and
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new ones for every change of season. She took classes in tea ceremony and flower arranging. She joined a church choir and so met the woman her daughters would know as “Auntie,” becoming such friends with her that people mistook them for sisters. She even received a generous allowance to use with her friends. She never knew its source, but it was easy to imagine that her aunt must have contributed some, and probably her father also. The Noriko who lived in a back alley of Osaka on frayed tatami mats had seemingly vanished from the earth like smoke. But reality was not that obliging. Seeing how entranced Noriko was with her own transformation, her aunt must have had mixed feelings. Taking in a girl of marriageable age was tantamount to agreeing to find her a husband—but Noriko’s illegitimate birth was a barrier. Finding someone willing to take on her mother, persona non grata at “Yokohama,” made the task all the harder. Yet Noriko seemed born to the role of charming young lady. She attracted attention. One thing led to another, and soon she had the effrontery to fall in love with a tenor who was a frequent guest at “Yokohama.” “Si, mi chiamano Mimi.” Yes, they call me Mimi. When Mitsuki was little, her mother’s soprano voice used to soar through the house thanks to the arias taught her by that tenor, whose family pedigree was every bit as illustrious as that of “Madama Butterfly.” Though she carried her head high in that world, Noriko understood that she and her tenor could not meet openly. For a while they used her tea ceremony and flower arranging lessons as pretexts to take long walks together. He promised to win over his parents and marry her—but he was studying voice with their support and was moreover about to leave for Germany to continue his studies there,
again with their support. No sooner did he inform them of Noriko’s existence than he was sent packing on the first ship out of Yokohama. Accused of lax supervision, “Yokohama” could only apologize. Pity gave way to disapproval: instead of “poor Noriko,” people said, “Noriko, that little upstart.”
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—— Excerpted from Inheritance from Mother by Minae Mizumura, published by Other Press on 2 May 2017. Copyright © Minae Mizumura. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.
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JOLENE LAI
Two Haikus of Home I. My hut in the spring— There is nothing in it, yet There is everything.
II. Taking me along, My shadow returns back home— A view of the moon.
—— Translated by Bob Jameson.
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The Basement
THE SCOFIELD
After Kōbō Abe’s Ruined Map
I was half-drunk and the phone seemed to be ringing at me from some impossible distance, as if through a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a dame. “Is this Abe Castle?” The woman seemed to be reading the name off a slip of paper. “Abe Castle, P.I.?” “It is,” I said, “the p stands for profit. My time costs money.” “We’ve got—” she corrected herself, “I’ve got savings. Money isn’t a problem. I’m looking for someone discreet to track down my husband. He’s simply disappeared.” She gave me an address in the suburbs, not far from where I was holed up. It sounded like easy money. I figured the husband was shacked up with the secretary, or blowing the kid’s college fund up his nose. He’d come home with his head down and pockets empty, eventually. I said I’d be there in the morning, 8 a.m. sharp, then hung up the phone. I slept roughly, wrapped tightly in the motel sheets, like a caterpillar that mistakenly made its cocoon on the wing of a plane. When I rang the doorbell the next morning, a woman answered in a blue robe. She stared at me with the kind of face you felt like you remembered even if you hadn’t seen it before. “Abe Castle.” I passed her my card. “The detective. You called me.” “Yes, of course. That’s why you’re here. I’m Meredith.” She waved me inside. Her fingers were as thin and pale as the cigarette held stiffly between them.
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As I stepped through the door, I thought I saw a man hiding in the hedges across the street. People got nosy like that out in the suburbs, that’s why I’d moved away. I liked to be the one doing the snooping. Meredith poured me a glass of tea and herself a glass of gin. It wasn’t a large place, but it wasn’t cozy and a large mirror behind Meredith’s inviting leather wingchair gave the illusion the room was doubled. She went over the details, such as they were, but the story was as featureless as a used bar of soap. It slipped right through my grasp. Her husband had a normal salary at a normal job, something to do with numbers. No known enemies. He liked to play golf with his buddies on the weekend. Last week he went to work, or so she thought, leaving behind a half-finished cup of over-milked coffee and the remains of some scrambled eggs. He never came back. The closest thing to a clue was a matchbook she’d found in the driveway. It was for a bar back in town I’d been to a couple times. I was feeling like a dried up houseplant anyway, so I drove over for some watering and maybe a little info. “Sure. I knows him, same ways I knows you,” the bartender said as he poured me a second whiskey. “Which is to say, he drinks my whiskey and tips me shit.” I placed a bill on the counter and let that green face ask my questions. The bartender went in the back and came out with the menu for a burger joint across town. “I think the guy you’re looking for left it here. I was going to throw it away, but then I got hungry.” There was a number scrawled in pencil on the back. I smiled. A number was something. A number could get you another number and another number and then pretty soon you were somehow getting somewhere.
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The Abandoned Case:
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When I called, a woman with a beautiful, low voice, like the purr of well-fed jungle cat, answered. “Is that you honey?” “I’m afraid it’s Abe Castle,” I said. It was the dame who’d hired me. Meredith laughed. “I guess we’ve looped back around to the beginning.” I told her she should come out to the burger joint, help scope it out. We got shakes and cheeseburgers and I tried to make her forget about her missing husband. We talked about other things, and laughed between bites of fries. When I dropped her off, I couldn’t help but think about how warm and inviting her home was. The kind that private investigators are too private to ever share. As I was getting into my car, I remembered the man I’d seen behind the neighbor’s hedges. I got a flashlight out of my rented car and slashed the beam around like a machete cutting through wilderness. I could see a set of footprints. Large guy, probably at least as tall as me. Then I saw a card in the dirt. Abe Castle, Private Investigator. It was my card alright, except it was scrawled in pencil on an index card. I found the pencil stuck between the eyes of a garden gnome. So it was a scam, but what was the angle? There wasn’t any life insurance for the husband, and I didn’t have a cent to my name. I slipped the index card into my pocket and decided to keep it to myself, for the time being. Mull it over, maybe with a glass of mulled wine. The company that made the pencils was across town, but they didn’t have anything to tell me. The case proceeded this way for a long time. Each clue kept leading to another that seemed to be taking me further and further away from the truth. A man at the bookstore had a card for strip joint where they had a cancelled check with an
address that was an abandoned building with graffiti that said to call a number for a “good time” that turned out to connect to an ice cream shop that told me the husband liked to order chocolate shakes before walking across the street to an old movie theater and so on and so forth. I felt like a snake slithering after his own tail, thinking I was chasing something when really I was making circles in the dirt. I started going back to the same places as the husband, trying to think like him, sitting in his chair while talking to his wife before going out for a chocolate shake and taking in an old film to unwind. Meredith kept trying to pay me, but it felt wrong to take money for discovering nothing except air. Months were rolled together into seasons, then piled on top of each other like a snowman and called a year. It was winter and I’d spent so much time at Meredith’s house that it had begun to feel like ours. I knew the comfortable way to position myself on the couch and how long the toilet handle had to be held down to properly flush. Mostly I knew Meredith. Knew her slightly lopsided smile and the way she laughed right before she told a joke. No useful information about the husband had surfaced, but then neither of us even brought him up anymore. I had no other cases and started to wonder what I was doing with my life. All the time I’d been searching for clues to other people’s affairs, I hadn’t been investigating my own. Finally, while we were sipping Manhattans by the fireplace, I asked her to marry me. “I was about to hire an investigator to figure out why you hadn’t asked,” she said with her sparkling laugh. We kissed and fell into the warm comfort of each other’s arms. I closed down my private investigations business and got a job in the city working at a bank, this time looking at numbers that at least led to a healthy salary.
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someone walking up to the house. I hid behind a set of hedges and watched in confusion. The man was about my height and wearing a similar trench coat and hat. He checked his watch, and then rang the doorbell. When Meredith answered the door in her blue robe, he held out his card.
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The years floated away like smoke rings blown in the wind. Pretty soon I had an extra layer of fat around my belly and a retirement account accruing interest. My backswing was getting pretty good too. I was almost impossibly happy. Then suddenly I wasn’t. I woke up in the middle of the night to a honking car. It drove away and when I threw on a jacket to go see what the fuss was about, my hand touched a slip of paper in the pocket. The pencil had mostly faded away, but I could still make it out: Abe Castle, Private Investigator. Standing there on a freshly trimmed suburban lawn in a pair of house slippers, I suddenly felt like a total stranger. Like I’d been wearing someone else’s life as if it was a Halloween costume for years, and it was starting to stink inside the mask. Meredith was still sleeping as I snuck past the bedroom window to my car. I drove blindly through the dark, searching for some kind of clue on the looping, lonely roads. I bought a motel room and a bottle of bourbon, drank away the week. When I sobered up, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I’d found love with Meredith, and that was something people searched their whole lives for. I was letting it go because of some slip of paper? I’d gotten it all mixed up again. I drove as fast as I could back across the state to Meredith, to our home. I practiced the words of regret that I’d say along the way. All I could hope for is that she’d hear them. It was early morning when I drove into town and the sun was smiling over the horizon like a child playing peekaboo. There was a car in our driveway and I had to park across the street. As I hopped out of my car, I saw
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Many themes run through the works of Kōbō Abe, and do so with remarkable consistency: the outcast individual seeking a place of stability and integration; the same individual, seeking a transport to freedom and personal determination; worlds which offer alluring visions of inclusivity but which mask loneliness, alienation, and hostility behind thin veils of civilization which do little to cover their true insistence on conformity. These themes are not contradictory, for they constellate around Abe’s central, primary concern: the ways in which individuals can freely and willfully come together, or part company, to build the lives and societies that they themselves determine are the most suitable for them and their contemporary circumstance. A common metaphor in Abe’s work which summarizes this central concern is the image of the home. From red threads that spin and entrap a lost individual in a coccoon to a shack at the bottom of an encroaching sand pit to a hospital bed that propels an apparently healthy man through a hallucinatory landscape beyond the river separating the living from the dead, Abe’s protagonists search for, encounter, inhabit, or attempt to flee from a diverse range of homes that encapsulate, isolate, infuriate, but sadly never celebrate the aspirations of the individuals whom they should shelter and protect. Abe’s focus on the idea and problem of “home” is partly PAGE 70
biographical, stemming from his experiences as a child in Manchukuo, Japan’s colony in Manchuria during the 1930s, and his eventual return to Japan as war drove away civilian, colonial families. More importantly, though, are the moral, ideological challenges of belonging in an urban world, wherein individuals encounter swirling maelstroms of other people, and dwell, especially in cities like Tokyo, in small, enclosed spaces. Home becomes both a dream and a nightmare—a place of reclusion, seclusion, on the one hand, but also of oppression and constant reminders of presence on the other. Abe’s apartment dwellers encounter inquisitive neighbors and meddlesome concierges, voices of “common sense” that drown out the solitary sounds of individual choice or preference. In his most well-known play, Tomodachi (Friends, 1967), these neighbours become intruders who displace a bachelor living alone in what was for him comfortable anonymity—comfortable until he needs the help of his concierge to verify his identity and legitimate, because self-sought, isolation. This play piles metaphors atop allegories: it works as a critique of colonial settlement, of religious, ideological, or social conformity, of neighbourly interference and “busybodiness,” of totalitarianism, of abdication of personal responsibility— but also of sincere community-minded solidarity. At root, what Abe critiques is imposition. But it is precisely imposition which so often marks the imperatives of modernism. The political movements of the twentieth century which brought to Abe in particular, but Asia and the world in general, displacement, strife, conflict, and war are movements of imposition, and these have not even now receded, though their proponents may be different. The political movements of the twentyfirst century have inherited the tactics and agendas of imposition, as well, and Abe’s resistance to imposition is
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Building Homes, Building Worlds, Building Selves
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as relevant—and inspirational—today as when he wrote his most insightful novels. The question of Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes, 1964) is how can an individual balance individual will with community responsibility against a social organization that demands acquiescence to an imposed, and so too-easily artificial, love of home— an ersatz patriotism that is nonetheless dangerous for its obviousness. But it is patriotism—equally false and alien to the same basic equation which holds together the individual and the communal—which even today drives wedges between China and Japan over untenable territorial claims, between Europe and Britain in competing visions of sovereignty, between Republican and Democrat in an increasingly-insane U.S. political climate.
protagonist muses about the unsuitability of building a traditional house on water; much better, he thinks, to build a boat—of course! But it is tradition and ideological intransigence which insist on house/home having only one shape, one form, one connotation. Extrapolate from this word “home” and we can apply Abe’s critique to any aspect of life that remains in the grip of stubborn tradition— marriage, family, employment, gender: each of these has its connotations, its expectations, its propriety, which are more often at odds with contemporary circumstance as not. So why not discuss, debate, redefine, renew? For Abe, there is no viable reason not to explore the recreation of fundamental human ideas. His starting example is the word home, and by starting here, he is able to present some truly disturbing examples of recalcitrance, of stubbornness, of oppression, intrusion, and destruction of legitimately individual members of frighteningly conformist social organizations who try, simply by choosing to remain isolated, to recreate the starting point for truly inclusive communities. This new configuration of social organization and individual participation may exist only in the mind of the artist who can conceive it, but it is from art that ideas emerge to transform resistant reality. Abe remained engaged in art for all of his adult life, and this art and its engagement had a keen and particular goal: innovative liberation of the place and processes of human interactions. In short, the goal is a new home for humanity, one both truly inclusive but also truly rejuvenative and respectful of individual desire. Without this new home the contemporary urban world is a place of fear, violence, and loss, a place of shadowy underground organizations and vanishing roads and neighborhoods. Abe presented just this dystopian scenario in Moetsukita
And so home is the problem; home where individuals escape from and yet congregate with each other. The basic question is one of decision—who has the right to decide with whom one can congregate, from whom one can escape, and when, and why? For Abe, throughout his continuous search for the perfect meaning of the perfect home, it is the individual him- or herself who is the sole arbiter of choice. Only the individual can be the legitimate source of determination for how best to live life and how best to build a home. As a resolute humanist, Abe gives to the individual both primary and ultimate responsibility to choose, and to groups of individuals, who remain still and always atomic in their independence, primary and ultimate responsibility to decide, through dialogue and mutual agreement, the parameters of their communities. Home is a word, a notion, of variable reference; of diverse connotations. Circumstances change, and the notions from previous generations may no longer pertain. Abe addresses this directly in Suna no onna, when his
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was able to push himself forward toward the inevitable feelings of emptiness. Always I think I have a sense of amazement about myself. Afterwards, I wonder how I was able to create what I did. I judge other novelists by only one standard: the author’s control over his material and his ability to give it life beyond himself. In other words if a certain work surpassed its author, I regard it as very good. I can say the same thing about my own work. During the time I am writing a novel I remember everything that I write. I remember even on what part of the paper I wrote that paragraph or phrase. But at the moment I finish writing, I forget everything and then I get depressed. On the other hand, if I then read that work again five years later, I am often happily surprised by what I’ve written. That doesn’t mean all my works are superior. Let’s put it this way, in case my work is good, just in case, I don’t think the author is that good. What I mean to say is that a work should be at least better than himself.1 The works which Abe has left behind stand up very well under repeated readings years after the times in which he created them. The issues with which they deal are still parts of the contemporary milieu, and the critiques of a society compartmentalized by its own efficiencies which Abe offered are still valid. Abe deftly describes the gasping, desperate attempts of the endangered individual to reaffirm his own viability in the face of an alienating, hostile social order determined to absorb him. Even in this “postmodern” world wherein the very existence of the self
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chizu (The Ruined Map, 1967) and Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous, 1977), wherein protagonists wander lost and desperate in search of missing persons—husbands or wives who have gone off, leaving behind intangible hints of themselves in incongruous crevices of cities devoid of compassion. By writing nightmare cities of amnesia and dread, Abe reconfigures through (minimal) exaggeration the urban reality of modern times—how much more intense are these cityscapes of terror now, in these days of religiously, ideologically motivated attacks on innocence? By writing through nightmare cities, Abe points to their flaws and their potentials, for both good and ill, to highlight the necessity of their transformation into places of sanctity, imagination, dialogue, and cooperation. But the city is nothing more, Abe understands, than homes clustered with other homes, people—individuals— clustered with others, in almost unimaginable density. By reconfiguring the terms by which homes and people accrue the freedom necessary to live in such situations, a modern definition of “home” and “city” can grow from circumstances real and present, unencumbered by traditional expectations born from ages of comparative emptiness, of times less dense and oppressive. Each novel gives Abe a new opportunity to imagine anew the limitations of the current city, the current home, and so an opportunity to consider avenues towards improvement. Each project becomes a crucible in which ideas converge, merge, and emerge as suggestions, warnings, or pleas. The goal, though, remains the same: new mechanisms for the conception and formation of recreated homes. Abe has said that concluding each project left him drained, depressed, and in despair. Each next project was begun with the knowledge of what lay ahead, and yet he
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has become the intellectual conundrum of the moment, Abe’s work still offers an alternative to the celebrations of fragmentation which so characterize much contemporary work in fiction, film, and theatre. In place of the absorption of the individual into society, Abe worked for integration—free, equal, flexible integration of individuals able to meet, interact with, and leave one another at will. The novels that he wrote propose the need for this type of social arrangement; the plays he wrote explore it dynamically within their intercharacter relations; the actor’s training methods he developed encouraged it within his performers. Through communication, the formation of community, Abe sought to rebuild into more viable shapes the structures of an earlier time which the modern world has left behind—from the staves of the buried boat in Teshigahara’s adaptation of Suna no onna (1964), Abe’s project was to construct: something, anything, provided it was suitable to the needs of its creator. In the concrete plains of the city, something, anything, must be found to reunite people in ways suitable to their circumstances. Abandonment of the past for Abe always leads to a regrasping of the future. A focus on the actualities of existence is never an appeal to a mystifying dogmatism. Existence must always precede essence: it is only through being that the nature of that being can be understood. For Abe these ideas are not mere platitudes. They were the substance of his daily life, the fundamental material of his work. The experiences of his childhood taught him both the loneliness of exclusion and the deceptive, secretive hostility of inclusion. Membership in the Japanese Communist Party taught him the thrill of political action, but also the disillusionment of betrayal and the contradiction of following a reprehensible party line. Forty
years of working outside of the mainstream of Japanese culture left Abe reclusive, to the point that he preferred listening to music in his own room through headphones, over attending concerts—listening “inside the cocoon” of his own making. It was inside this cocoon that Abe found himself most comfortable; it was the freedom to create their own cocoons that Abe offered his readers. Yet once individuals have made their own private enclosures they need not remain trapped within them. The world has forgotten this simple fact, and thus it is possible to say that
Abe would undoubtedly have agreed that the trick is all the while to remember something similar to what the American film director Sidney Lumet had Henry Fonda, as the President of the United States, say in determination to the Soviet Premier in his powerful 1964 film, Fail Safe: “What we put between us, we can remove.” This film was a plea for sanity during the Cold War, an appeal to reason to overcome the demonization of opposing points of view—an attempt at establishing dialogue between strangers who fear one another for their mutual ignorance of the other’s mode of existence. This film aimed for an understanding of humans as human, as equal although different. Abe, too, aimed for an understanding and an acceptance of difference, a celebration of alterity for the freedom of individuality it guarantees. Abe aimed for dialogue between strangers no longer hostile but secure in their own stability and confident in their own self-
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compared with the feudalistic society of the middle ages, we now have an open society. But in another sense we have made for ourselves a cage, or a kind of prison.”2
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worth. Whatever cage society has created for itself, for its outsiders, it has the power to remove: thus the cage which the actors form of their own bodies in the final few minutes of the Abe Studio’s final production, Kozō wa shinda, becomes a fitting, metaphorical representation of the type of social repression of the individual against which Abe argued in his work. The human arms linked together to lock in the character of the Frightened Woman in that production could as easily become a means of support for her, or a means of construction devoted to the establishment of new human bonds. What is required is an act of will, an acceptance of the possibility of change. The form of “inoculation” Abe imagined his writings to be served to immunise his readers against the disease of blind faith. To what extent, though, this campaign of inoculation has proven successful is a necessarily open question—Abe’s work is read the world over, it has been translated into dozens of languages, it addresses issues relevant to urban dwellers in whichever city they may find themselves, and yet cities still exist as places of alienation, social breakdown, violence, and loneliness. “Loneliness,” Abe once said,
condition within some form or other of rural structures.”4 Better to abandon this outdated model all together, Abe suggests, and deal with the reality rather than the analogy. And yet Abe has said, with no equivocation, that he “has not yet found the solution” to this problem; moreover,
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I don’t think in actuality I have that much…. It may be wrong, but the creativity seems to come out of a sense of scarcity…. It is a negative pressure, a sort of emptiness…. It is not, you see, entirely a matter of myself, but it is more a matter of what others want. I feel that everyone has a hole, a kind of emptiness. And if I can, I want to fill up that hole.6 In this it seems Abe was completely sincere: the best way for him to guarantee his own individuality and freedom was to guarantee those things for everyone else as well.
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Now, with this urban mode of life quickly supplanting all others, Abe’s claim that we have yet to find a suitable form of interaction able to take the urban setting fully into account assumes pressing, and prescient, dimensions. “All the stresses and sufferings of urban dwellers are born,” Abe claims, from “trying to seek an analogy for the modern
Despite the depression into which he would fall at the conclusion of each project, this sense of duty for a reconstruction of human relations provided Abe with the incredible energy necessary to carry on to each new venture. When asked about the sources of this energy, Abe replied that
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is universal…. But you know, as a matter of fact, it is a new theme for the Japanese. The reason is that the concept of loneliness appeared in the urban mode of life.3
I’m completely at a loss about it. But in fact, I’m making every effort to discover, through literature, just who the unknown Other [michi na tasha] really is. I don’t know whether or not I’ll find this out. It may be something that cannot be found. But at least I have the feeling that making the effort to seek out some path toward this unknown Other is my mission.5
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Does this make him altruistic or selfish? Ultimately perhaps there is little difference. I am reminded of the boddhisattva-like nurses at the close of his late novel, Kangarū nōto. The impression they made on the narrator was to amaze him, to make him aware of the complete lack of total, unconditional love in his own life, of the gulf between himself and everyone else. That narrator was unable to overcome this gulf, and died in terror. Abe worked to overcome it. I have no way of knowing how he died; I would like to believe that he himself was an optimist. Perhaps nothing else will explain his determination. At the beginning of each project, Abe faced an inevitable question:
as they will the structures of their daily lives—their interactions, their institutions, their selves, their homes. These powers, Abe insists, can neither be abbrogated nor abdicated, for either will lead to the dystopic worlds he has depicted within his work. Individuals always have choices before them, and from the cumulative weight of these choices, freedom may or may not be born. The works which Kōbō Abe has left behind thus become some of the most consistent reminders of this need for choice, relevant clarion calls for a perpetual vigilance against dogmatism and collective tyranny over the individual, and the need, with each choice, to redefine the contours of life, and the parameters of home.
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——————————— 1 Abe, “Interview with Abe Kōbō,” Contemporary Literature, 15.4, (1974), 452 2 Ibid., 450 3 Ibid., 452 4 Abe, “Henbōsuru shakai no ningenkankei,” Toshi e no kairō (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1980), 198
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Abe, without a doubt, was a strong person indeed. His work continues to be relevant, and we continue to read him, precisely because of this strength which demonstrates a thrilling willingness to face the absurd choice of writing or suicide, and respond positively that so long as there is a need, there is a duty. Duty here is a personal responsibility to reconstruct the forms of existence which create that very duty—it becomes tautologically self-perpetuating, but through this process it perpetuates the individual “self” who is responsible as well. Society is born of individuals; the reverse may not be true. The forms which society will take lie within the powers of its constituents to refashion
—— A revised version of “Conclusion: Community and Despair,” from Iles, Timothy, Abe Kôbô: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama, and Theatre,” Fucechio: EPAP, 2000
5 Ibid., 200 6 Abe, “Interview with Abe Kōbō,” 452 7 Ibid., 454
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To write or commit suicide. Which one will it be?… Many people ask why a writer commits suicide. But I think the people who ask don’t know the vanity and the nothingness of writing. I think it is very usual and natural for a writer to commit suicide, because in order to keep on writing he must be a very strong person.7
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For Miss Felice B. It was a Sunday morning at the most beautiful time in spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his private room on the first floor of one of the low, poorly constructed houses extending in a long row along the river, almost indistinguishable from each other except for their height and colour. He had just finished a letter to a friend from his youth who was now abroad, had sealed it in a playful and desultory manner, and then was looking, elbows propped on the writing table, out of the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the other shore with their delicate greenery. He was thinking about how this friend, dissatisfied with his progress at home, had actually run off to Russia some years before. Now he ran a business in St. Petersburg, which had gotten off to a very good start but which for a long time now had appeared to be faltering, as his friend complained on his increasingly rare visits. So he was wearing himself out working to no purpose in a foreign land. The exotic full beard only poorly concealed the face Georg had known so well since his childhood years, and the yellowish colour of his skin seemed to indicate a developing sickness. As he explained it, he had no real connection to the colony of his countrymen in the place and also hardly any social interaction with local families and so was resigning himself to being a permanent bachelor. What should one write to such a man, who had
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obviously gone off course, a man one could feel sorry for but could not help. Should one perhaps advise him to come back home again, shift his life back here, take up again all the old friendly relationships—there was certainly nothing to prevent that—and in addition rely on the help of friends? But at the same time that amounted to saying to him—and the more gently one said it, the more wounding it would also be—that his previous attempts had been unsuccessful, that he should finally give them up, that he must come back and allow everyone to look at him as an eternal returned prodigal, that only his friends understood anything, and that he would be an over-age child, who should simply obey his successful friends who had stayed home. And then was it even certain that all the misery one would have to put him through had a point? Perhaps it would not even succeed in bringing him back home at all—in fact, he said himself that he no longer understood conditions in his homeland—so then he would remain in his foreign country in spite of everything, embittered by the advice and even a little more estranged from his friends. But if he really followed the advice and became depressed here—not intentionally, of course, but because of his circumstances—could not cope with life, with his friends or without them, felt ashamed, and had, in fact, no homeland and no friends any more, was it not much better for him to remain abroad, just as he was? Given these facts, could one think that he would really advance himself here? For these reasons, if one still wanted to maintain some sort of relationship by correspondence, one could not provide any real news, the way one would without any inhibitions to the most casual acquaintance. It was already more than three years since his friend had been home, and he explained this with the very inadequate
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success, and if he were to do it now belatedly, it would have looked really odd. So Georg limited himself to writing to his friend only about insignificant details, the kind which pile up at random in one’s memory when one is thinking things over on a peaceful Sunday. The only thing he wanted was to leave undisturbed the picture which his friend must have created of his home town during the long interval and which he would have learned to live with. And so it happened that Georg had announced three times to his friend in fairly widely spaced letters the engagement of an unimportant man to an equally unimportant young woman, until, quite contrary to Georg’s intentions, the friend really began to get interested in this curious event. But Georg preferred to write to him about such things rather than to confess that he himself had become engaged a month ago to a Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young woman from a prosperous family. He often spoke to his fiancée about this friend and about the unusual relationship he had with him in their correspondence. “Then there’s no chance he’ll be coming to our wedding,” she said, “and yet I have the right to meet all your friends.” “I don’t want to upset him,” Georg replied. “Don’t misunderstand me. He would probably come, at least I think so, but he would feel compelled and hurt and would perhaps envy me—he’d certainly feel unhappy and incapable of ever coping with his unhappiness and would travel back alone. Alone—do you know what that means?” “Yes, but can’t he find out about our wedding in some other way?” “That’s true, but I can’t prevent that. However, given his lifestyle it’s unlikely.” “If you have friends like that, Georg, you shouldn’t have gotten engaged at all.” “Well, we’re both to blame for that, but now I wouldn’t want things to be any different.” And then
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excuse of the uncertainty of the political conditions in Russia, which would not allow even the briefest absence of a small businessman, while it permitted hundreds of thousands of Russians to travel around peacefully in the world. But in the course of these three years much had changed for Georg. Since his mother’s death, which had taken place about two years earlier, Georg had lived with his old father in a household they shared. His friend had naturally learned about it and had expressed his sympathy in a letter with such a dry tone that the reason could only have been that the sadness of such an event is completely inconceivable in a foreign country. But since that time Georg had tackled both his business dealings and everything else with greater determination. Perhaps while his mother was still alive, his father’s unwillingness to accept any point of view in the business except his had prevented Georg from developing a real project of his own; perhaps his father, since his mother’s death, had grown slacker, although he still worked all the time in the business; perhaps fortunate circumstances had played a much more important role—something which was, in fact, highly likely—but in any case in these two years the business had developed very unexpectedly. They had had to double the staff, the cash turnover had increased fivefold, and there was no doubt that further progress lay ahead. His friend, however, had no idea of these changes. Earlier, perhaps for the last time in that letter of condolence, he had wanted to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and had expanded upon the prospects which existed in St. Petersburg for Georg’s particular line of business. The figures were minute compared to the scale which Georg’s business had now acquired. But Georg had had no desire to write to his friend about his commercial
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when she, breathing rapidly under his kisses, kept insisting “Still, it truly does upset me,” he really thought it would be harmless to write everything to his friend. “That’s what I am, and that’s just how he’ll have to accept me,” he said to himself. “I can’t carve out of myself another man who might perhaps be more suitable for a friendship with him than I am.” And, in fact, he did inform his friend about the engagement which had taken place in the long letter which he had written that Sunday morning, in the following words “The best piece of news I have saved until the end. I have become engaged to a Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young woman from a well-to-do family, who first settled here long after your departure and thus whom you could hardly know. There will still be an opportunity to tell you more detailed information about my fiancée. Today it’s enough for you to know that I am truly fortunate and that, as far as our mutual relationship is concerned, the only thing that has changed is that in me you will now have, instead of a completely ordinary friend, a happy friend. Moreover, in my fiancée, who sends you her warm greetings and will soon write to you herself, you acquire a sincere female friend, something which is not entirely without significance for a bachelor. I know that there are many things hindering you from coming back to visit us, but wouldn’t my wedding be exactly the right opportunity to throw aside all obstacles for once? But whatever the case, do only what seems good to you, without concerning yourself about anything.” Georg sat for a long time at his writing table with his letter in his hand, his face turned towards the window. He barely acknowledged with an absent-minded smile someone he knew who greeted him from the lane as he walked past.
Finally he put the letter in his pocket and went out of his room, angling across a small passageway into his father’s room, which he had not been in for months. There was really no need to do that, since he was always dealing with his father at work and they took their noon meal at the same time in a restaurant. In the evenings, of course, they each did as they wished, but for the most part, unless Georg was with friends, as was most frequently the case, or was now visiting his fiancée, they still sat for a little while, each with his own newspaper, in the living room they shared. Georg was surprised how dark his father’s room was, even on this sunny morning. So that was the kind of shadow cast by the high wall which rose on the other side of the narrow courtyard. His father was sitting by the window in a corner decorated with various reminders of his late lamented mother and was reading a newspaper, which he held in front of his eyes to one side, attempting in this way to compensate for some weakness in his eyes. On the table stood the remains of his breakfast, not much of which appeared to have been eaten. “Ah, Georg,” said his father, coming up at once to meet him. His heavy night shirt opened up as he moved and the ends of it flapped around him. “My father is still a giant,” said Georg to himself. Then he spoke up: “It’s unbearably dark in here.” “Yes, it certainly is dark,” his father answered. “And you’ve shut the window as well?” “I prefer it that way.” “Well, it is quite warm outside,” said Georg, as if continuing what he’d said earlier, and sat down. His father cleared off the breakfast dishes and put them on a chest. “I really only wanted to tell you,” continued Georg,
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who was following the movements of the old man quite absent mindedly, “that I’ve now sent a report of my engagement to St. Petersburg.” He pulled the letter a little way out of his pocket and let it drop back again. “To St. Petersburg?” his father asked. “To my friend,” said Georg, trying to look his father in the eye. “In business he’s completely different,” he thought. “How sturdily he sits here with his arms folded across his chest.” “Ah yes, to your friend,” said his father, with emphasis. “Well, father, you know at first I wanted to keep quiet to him about my engagement. Out of consideration, for no other reason. You yourself know he’s a difficult person. I said to myself he could well learn about my engagement from some other quarter, even if his solitary way of life makes that hardly likely—I can’t prevent that—but he should never learn about it from me personally.” “And now you have been thinking about it differently?” the father asked. He set the large newspaper on the window sill and on top the newspaper his glasses, which he covered with his hand. “Yes, now I’ve been reconsidering it. If he’s a good friend of mine, I said to myself, then a happy engagement for me is also something fortunate for him. And so I no longer hesitated to announce it to him. But before I send the letter, I wanted to tell you about it.” “Georg,” said his father, pulling his toothless mouth wide open, “listen to me! You’ve come to me about this matter, to discuss it with me. No doubt that’s a credit to you. But it’s nothing, worse than nothing if you don’t now tell me the complete truth. I don’t want to stir up things which are not appropriate here. Since the death of our dear mother certain nasty things have been going on. Perhaps the time to talk about them has come and
perhaps sooner than we think. In the business, a good deal escapes me. Perhaps it’s not hidden from me—at the moment I’m not claiming it’s done behind my back—I am no longer strong enough, my memory is deteriorating, I can’t keep an eye on so many things any more. First of all, that’s nature taking its course, and secondly the death of our dear mother was a much bigger blow to me than to you. But since we’re on the subject of this letter, I beg you, Georg, don’t deceive me. It’s a trivial thing, not worth mentioning. So don’t deceive me. Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?” Georg stood up in embarrassment. “Let’s forget about my friend. A thousand friends wouldn’t replace my father for me. Do you know what I think? You’re not taking enough care of yourself. But old age demands its due. You are indispensable to me in the business—you’re very well aware of that—but if the business is going to threaten your health, I’ll close it tomorrow for good. That won’t happen. We must set up another life style for you. But something completely different. You sit here in the dark, and in the living room you’d have good light. You nibble at your breakfast instead of maintaining your strength properly. You sit by the closed window, and the air would do you so much good. No, my father! I’ll bring in the doctor, and we’ll follow his instructions. We’ll change the room. You’ll move into the front room. I’ll come in here. For you there won’t be any change. Everything will be moved over with you. But there’s time for all that. Now I’ll set you in bed for a little while. You need complete rest. Come, I’ll help you get undressed. You’ll see. I can do it. Or do you want to go into the front room right away. Then you can lie down in my bed for now. That would make a lot of sense.” Georg stood close beside his father, who had let his head with its tousled white hair sink onto his chest.
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“Georg,” said his father faintly, without moving. Georg knelt down immediately alongside his father. He saw the enormous pupils in his father’s tired face staring right at him from the corners of his eyes. “You don’t have a friend in St. Petersburg. You have always been a jokester and even with me you’ve not controlled yourself. So how could you have a friend there! I simply can’t believe that.” “Think about it for a moment, father,” said Georg. He raised his father from the arm chair and took off his nightgown as he just stood there very weakly. “It will soon be almost three years since my friend visited us. I still remember that you did not particularly like him. At least twice I kept him away from you, although he was sitting right in my room. It’s true I could understand your aversion to him quite well. My friend does have his peculiarities. But then you later had a really good conversation with him yourself. At the time I was so proud of the fact that you listened to him, nodded your head, and asked questions. If you think about it, you must remember. That’s when he told us incredible stories about the Russian Revolution. For example, on a business trip in Kiev during a riot he saw a priest on a balcony who cut a wide bloody cross into the palm of his hand, raised his hand, and appealed to the mob. You’ve even repeated this story yourself now and then.” Meanwhile, Georg had succeeded in setting his father down again and carefully taking off the cotton trousers which he wore over his linen underwear, as well as his socks. Looking at the undergarments, which were not particularly clean, he reproached himself for having neglected his father. It certainly should have been his responsibility to look after his father’s laundry. He had not yet talked explicitly with his fiancée about how they
wished to make arrangements for his father’s future, for they had tacitly assumed that his father would remain living alone in the old apartment. But now he quickly came to the firm decision to take his father with him into his future household. When one looked more closely, it almost seemed that the care which he was ready to provide for his father there could come too late. He carried his father to bed in his arms. He experienced a dreadful feeling when he noticed, as he took a couple of paces to the bed, that his father was playing with the watch chain on his chest. He could not put him in the bed right away, so firm was his father’s grip on this watch chain. But as soon as he was in bed, all seemed well. He covered himself up and then even pulled the bedspread unusually high up over his shoulders. He looked up at Georg in a not unfriendly manner. “You do still remember him, don’t you?” said Georg, nodding his head in encouragement. “Am I well covered up now?” asked the father, as if he could not check whether his feet were sufficiently tucked in. “So you feel good in bed now,” said Georg and arranged the bedding better around him. “Am I well covered up?” the father asked once more and seemed particularly keen to hear the answer. “Just rest for now. You’re well covered up.” “No!” cried his father, cutting short Georg’s answer to the question. He threw back the covers with such force that in an instant they had completely flown off, and he stood upright on the bed. He steadied himself with only one hand lightly touching the ceiling. “You wanted to cover me up—I know that, my little offspring—but I am not yet under the covers. And even if this is the last strength I
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have, it’s enough for you, too much for you. Yes, I do know your friend. He’d be a son after my own heart. That’s why you’ve been betraying him for years. Why else? Do you think I’ve not wept for him? That’s the reason you lock yourself in your office—no one should disturb you, the boss is busy—that’s the only way you can write your twofaced little letters to Russia. But fortunately no one has to teach a father to see through his son. Just now when you thought you’d brought him down, so far down that your buttocks could sit on him and he wouldn’t move, at that point my son the gentleman has decided to get married!” Georg looked up at the frightening spectre of his father. The friend in St. Petersburg, whom the father suddenly knew so well, seized his imagination as never before. He saw him lost in the broad expanse of Russia. He saw him at the door of an empty, plundered business. Among the wreckage of his shelves, the shattered goods, the collapsed gas brackets, he was still standing, but only just. Why did he have to go so far away! “But look at me,” cried his father, and Georg ran, almost distracted, to the bed to take everything in, but he faltered half way. “Because she hoisted up her skirts,” the father began in an affected tone, “because she hoisted up her skirts like this, the repulsive goose,” and in order to imitate the action, he raised his shirt so high one could see the scar from his war years on his thigh, “because she hoisted her dress up like this and this, you chatted her up, and that’s how you could satisfy yourself with her without being disturbed—you’ve disgraced our mother’s memory, betrayed your friend, and stuck your father in bed, so he can’t move. But he can move, can’t he?” And he stood completely unsupported and kicked his legs. He was radiant with insight.
Georg stood in a corner, as far away as possible from his father. A long time before he had firmly decided to observe everything closely, so he would not be surprised somehow by any devious attack, from behind or from above. Now he recalled again this long-forgotten decision and forgot it, like someone pulling a short thread through the eye of a needle. “But now your friend hasn’t been betrayed at all,” cried the father—his forefinger, waving back and forth, emphasized the point. “I’ve been his on-the-spot representative here.” “You comedian!” Georg could not resist calling out. He recognized immediately how damaging that was and bit down on his tongue, only too late—his eyes froze— until he doubled up with pain. “Yes, naturally I’ve been playing a comedy! Comedy! A fine word! What other consolation remained for an old widowed father? Tell me—and while you’re answering still be my living son—what else was left to me in my back room, persecuted by a disloyal staff, old right down into to my bones? And my son goes merrily through the world, finishing off business deals which I had set up, falling over himself with delight, and walking away from your father with the tight-lipped face of an honourable gentleman! Do you think I didn’t love you, me, the one from whom you came?” “Now he’ll bend forward,” thought Georg. “What if he falls and breaks apart!” These words hissed through his head. His father leaned forward but did not fall over. When Georg did not come closer, as he had expected, he straightened himself up again. “Stay where you are. I don’t need you! You think you still have the strength to come here and are holding
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yourself back only because that’s what you want. But what if you’re wrong! I am still much stronger than you. Perhaps all on my own I would have had to back off, but your mother gave me so much of her strength that I’ve established a splendid relationship with your friend and I have your customers here in my pocket!” “He even has pockets in his shirt!” said Georg to himself and thought with this comment he could make his father look ridiculous to the whole world. He thought this for only a moment, because he constantly forgot everything. “Just link arms with your fiancée and cross my path! I’ll sweep her right from your side—you have no idea how!” Georg made a grimace, as if he didn’t believe that. The father merely nodded towards Georg’s corner, emphasizing the truth of what he’d said. “How you amused me today when you came and asked whether you should write to your friend about the engagement. For he knows everything, you stupid boy, he knows everything! I’ve been writing to him, because you forgot to take my writing things away from me. That’s why he hasn’t come for years. He knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself. He crumples up your letters unread in his left hand, while in his right hand he holds my letters up to read.” In his enthusiasm he swung his arm over his head. “He knows everything a thousand times better,” he shouted. “Ten thousand times!” said Georg, in order to make his father appear foolish, but in his mouth the phrase had already acquired the deathliest of tones. “For years now I’ve been watching out for you to come with this question! Do you think I’m concerned
about anything else? Do you think I read the newspapers? There!” and he threw a newspaper page which had somehow been carried into the bed right at Georg—an old newspaper, the name of which was completely unknown to Georg. “How long you’ve waited before reaching maturity! Your mother had to die. She could not experience the joyous day. Your friend is deteriorating in his Russia— three years ago he was already yellow enough to be thrown away, and, as for me, well, you see how things are with me. You’ve got eyes for that!” “So you’ve been lying in wait for me,” cried Georg. In a pitying tone, his father said as an afterthought, “Presumably you wanted to say that earlier. But now it’s totally irrelevant.” And in a louder voice : “So now you know what there was in the world outside of yourself. Up to this point you’ve known only about yourself! Essentially you’ve been an innocent child, but even more essentially you’ve been a devilish human being! And therefore understand this: I sentence you now to death by drowning! ” Georg felt himself hounded from the room. The crash with which his father fell onto the bed behind him he still carried in his ears as he left. On the staircase, where he raced down the steps as if it were an inclined plane, he surprised his cleaning woman, who was intending to tidy the apartment after the night before. “Jesus!” she cried and hid her face in her apron. But he was already past her. He leapt out the front door, driven across the roadway to the water. He was already clutching the railings the way a starving man grasps his food. He swung himself over, like the outstanding gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride. He was still holding on, his grip weakening, when between the railings he caught sight of a motor
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coach which would easily drown out the noise of his fall. He called out quietly, “Dear parents, I have always loved you nonetheless” and let himself drop. At that moment an almost unending stream of traffic was going over the bridge.
—— Translated by Ian Johnston.
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Premonition of Storm
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Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women The cover of the U.S. edition of Haruki Marukami’s latest book, Men Without Women, is an instruction in Modernism Lite. The silhouette of a male figure, slightly hunched, perhaps averring the gaze, stands stark against the yellow background of the jacket. Where the heart should be is the space for a puzzle piece, which is floating a few inches away. The image is repeated on the frontispiece, and once again as a diptych on the title pages. We are not meant to ignore the cover as mere decoration. The cover would have us believe that the stories within are puzzling, therefore inscrutable, perennially mysterious. Men without Women? Or Men without Women? Where should the stress fall? The revelations the (male) characters experience are less than challenging, let alone novel or provocative. Woman is, ostensibly, the puzzle piece missing from Man’s heart. It’s a ridiculous proposition: He’s just a Man. But, yeah, you say: what does it mean? Shift the emphasis on the phrase: Men Without Women. I’m not sure why Murakami—or his editor(s)— save the title story for last. An obvious, shallow answer: Gravitas. The emphasis thus shifts to the preposition between the genders; I think this is where we’re supposed to be. The narrator in that story understands Men Without Women as a space between “knowledge and ignorance”; he often loses himself in extended metaphors whose referents are ambiguous and murky at best (perhaps this is the point), exemplifying that nonspace by punctuating
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them with some very bad similes: “Her essence always vanished like a mirage.” (Further down the page, he tells us that he is older and thus “knows the difference between a metaphor and a simile.”) Wait—isn’t essence already a metaphor? If it vanishes like a mirage—an image wishfully posed—is it a metaphor for the vanishing essence of metaphor? Do women exist? For him, being a man without a woman is to live in a defamiliarized second nature wherein all the mundane everyday activities—peeling onions, snapping the ends of green beans—become stains in the experience of Being. That is, Woman’s absence is an idea against which Man reveals to himself the arbitrary nature of his identity. I think? The narrator, too, seems confused: I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe I’m trying to write about essence, rather than the truth. But writing about an essence that isn’t true is like trying to rendezvous with someone on the dark side of the moon. Perhaps placing “Men Without Women” at the front of the six-story volume may strait the reader into too didactic of a chair, to see the stories as more of the same. The problem is that it’s happened as is. The six stories in this volume cover well-known territory in the genre of Dudes Who Are Lovelorn: self-pity, -discovery, -loathing. On the occasion of deaths, cuckolding, absence (& adolescence), the men in these stories all learn a lesson. Sometimes it’s a lesson about them, and sometimes it’s a lesson about capital-H Humanity. Most often, the men here often discover that the Other (read: Woman, or the idea of her) and/or himself are utterly, terrifyingly, indefatigably—surprise— unknowable.
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Soft Paté:
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These “fatal blind spots” enable the protagonists to finally feel—like Kafuku in opener “Drive My Car”—or, to recognize that they had never been feeling, like Kino in his eponymous story. Or they feel too much, like the multiple-dater, A+ cosmetic surgeon Dr. Tokai, who literally dies from lovesickness. There’s even an homage to Kafka in “Samsa in Love,” which finds a Samsa unable to comprehend the precarious fiction of middle-class life (OK, there’s also an army invading Prague). The revelations of the men here may be characterized as the cousin of memoire involuntaire. Once their cards are drawn, they realize their lives have been only the apotheoses of the should’ve-would’ve-could’ve. For the largely ordinary but by no means trivial situations (there’s a lot of betrayal and shame and guilt to share) are rendered with equal occasions of signature Murakami precision and dumbfounding, lazy simile. In the opening story, Kafuku, a well-known stage actor who is unable to drive his own car due to a “fatal blind spot” from glaucoma, employs a young girl, Misaki, as his chauffeur. She’s a dutiful and competent driver, and both are quiet until—in a nice use of irony—they’re stuck in a traffic jam. There, Murakami uses Misaki to wrench Kafuku out of his shell. What he discovers about himself is that his wife, after twenty-odd years of marriage, transformed into an idea; the glaucomic blind spot transforms into a metaphor. Kafuku and his wife’s ex-lover, Takatsuki, console each other over this knowledge: “‘I doubt this blind spot you speak of is yours alone,’ Kafuku says, ‘If that’s what you wish to call it, then we men are all living with the same sort of blind spot.’” The point isn’t to fix the blind spot; since it is fatal, Kafuku concedes to it in sober acceptance. Murakami quickly exhausts the conceit’s mileage.
Dr. Tokai in “The Independent Organ” literally dies from love-sickness, and the story’s insistence on metaphorical appendages—he’s a cosmetic surgeon with multiple girlfriends who creates beautiful artifices of love—to clock the conceit’s centripetal force reads heavy-handed. True, we’re told that the story is “partially” based on fact, but the story grows like “soft paté nicely filling in the gaps between one fact and another.” It’s less of an interrogation of the blurred line between fact and fiction than an amplifying rhetorical gambit. We might be so taken with the startling strangeness that our own blind spot hides the fact that soft paté has almost nothing to do with the story, that it really is abstraction for abstraction’s sake. At the other end of the metaphorical spectrum, “Samsa in Love” relies too much on the referential irony to differentiate the defamiliarization of the nuclear-domestic space from mere trope. “Kino” is occasionally captivating because of its nods to the mystery and crime genres, but the stand-out achievement of this book is “Scheherazade,” which finds Murakami at his modernist and successful. Not because it focuses on the call-in sex/domestic worker known only as Scheherazade (a “support liaison”), nor because of any technical achievements. Many of the moves here are textbook: self-conscious commenting on its own construction as a plot-forwarding device; embedded story within a frame narrative. It’s this reader’s favorite because it’s the only one to transpose the book’s thesis into its relative minor key, producing something different from the rest. Woman still produces Man’s experience of himself, but the narrative self-consciously short-circuits its syllogistic mechanisms. In her non-literary life, Scheherazade is a middleaged housewife supplementing her family’s income by bringing the shut-in Habara groceries, movies, books,
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and regular sex. In their uncanny form of pillow talk, “Scheherazade”—after putting away his groceries and fucking him—regales the shut-in Habara with a story of her past. She tells him how she used to ditch school and break into the home of her high school crush. Crushes are virtual realities of a future consummation of desire; to maintain the crush, consummation can never happen. A substitute may take its place, something fetishistic, almost pornographic—for the pencil of his Scheherazade steals, she leaves behind a lock of her hair. For the soiled t-shirt, whose adolescent musty musk makes her feel “as though she were in his embrace,” and entices her lower body into a “languid sensation,” she doesn’t tell us. She asks Habara if they can have sex again. Instead of the male protagonist relying on the other to produce experience, the polarity is reversed and upended; instead of the notquite-transactional sex before, their intercourse is intimate. “Habara guessed that she was reliving her days of breaking and entering. That memory must be very vivid.” The blankness of Habara’s character enables him to become a technology for Scheherazade’s past erotic life, her crush. More importantly, that Scheherazade breaks off her story before the climax, if you will, extrudes the fact that the reader’s desire to know, in this instance, is a particularly pornographic (and possibly male) form of knowledge. Later, Scheherazade tells Habara that the boy’s mother changed the locks, but it isn’t the end of the story. (Un) fortunately for Habara—and us—we don’t get to finish it off, as Murakami’s story ends with Habara descending into sleep, wondering if he’ll ever see Scheherazade again.
The curious thing about puzzles is that they present only the appearance of the enigmatic and inscrutable (i.e., Difficulty, e.g., Genius); except that anyone can put together a puzzle without ever once needing to know how the reproduced picture was originally constructed. In other words, I wouldn’t need, at all, to know how Rembrandt commands the light and shadow of his portraits in order to construct the puzzle’s reproduction of it, I need only to know how the puzzle pieces fit together. The argument is already completed; the completion of the puzzle teleological—one knows the ending in advance. The forms of knowledge Murakami’s male characters inhabit and transform are nothing new, nothing novel, but their slight distortions of the mundane every day—in America, the feature on which his reputation rests—are what makes these stories work. However, we should not be charmed and thus seduced by the appearance of genius via nonsequitur metaphor that this book is revelatory. If the “facts” of the everyday have gaps large enough to allow the “soft paté” of fiction to fill in, then when is paté ever hard? Don’t mistake this for a metaphor on Murakami’s; I mean only to point out that the redundancy of a phrase like “soft paté” jibes with these stories’ sometimes lazy modernism by posing as such. Men Without Women makes nor reveals nothing new, but offers us occasional glimpses of the dark, imagined depth out of which the other is fashioned. ‾ BO ‾ ABE KO HOME
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The Epiphanic Horror of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and Its Line of Literary Descent
In an essay titled “No Escape,”1 David Mitchell writes: “In [Kōbō] Abe’s novels, plot and character are usually subservient to idea and symbol. This makes The Woman in the Dunes something of an anomaly. Its plot is devious, addictive yet straightforward.” The devious plot is a central mode in Mitchell’s own work, particularly Number9Dream (2001), his most “Japanese” novel, where the tone is despondent and the plotting is not only devious but exculpatory, a word I use intentionally as I begin to dig into Abe’s masterwork concerning a man trapped inside a declivity full of Sisyphean sand at the bottom of a cliff. Both The Woman in the Dunes (1960 Japan, 1962 U.S.) and the opuses of David Mitchell feature revelations—and that is meant in the end-times sense—where the epiphany turns out to be unremitting horror. Layer upon layer of it, worlds unravelling, slowly, painfully, with the whimper as opposed to the bang, and more horrifying because of it. Abe writes that “the beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the insignificance of its ruins and its great power of destruction.” This is a theme that educes both erosion and incapacitation. As Mitchell says later in his essay, “Things fail to go as planned, and the woman reveals a more chilling face.” In Mitchell’s own works, this reveal is positioned in Abbot Enomoto in The Thousand Autumns of PAGE 87
Jacob de Zoet (2010), perverting religion in order to enslave, rape, and redistribute the children of the lower-class women of late eighteenth-century Japan. It is the torment Jason Taylor endures from adolescent bullies in Black Swan Green (2006). In Number9Dream this chill is in abundance; the recurrent imagery of the panopticon, the runtish protagonist Eiji’s brutalization by Yakuza wars and other looming social forces that are downright naturalist, where even the investigative journalists who could lend one a helping hand are pre-emptively blacklisted. A linking theme is obedience, compliance. In The Woman in the Dunes, The Man ends the book’s first section trying to scale the incline and clamber out of his hole. At the end of Number9Dream, Eiji states: “I watch the pedestrians crossing en masse when the green man says so. I join them.” The harder you try to climb out, the more sand comes pouring in, so you give in and go with the current.2 The individual is, in both novels, quite literally subsumed, swept away, usurped and absorbed and incorporated. The protagonist of The Woman in the Dunes, Abe’s most widely read novel, is a carceral victim, severed from his native habitat, and surveilled from above. He is a thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher and amateur entomologist referred to as The Man and named (Niki Jumpei) on only a handful of instances, including in a missing person’s report at the end of the text. The firstperson narrator is pensive, analytical, introspective. “Introverted, stubborn, but not especially inept socially,” one who has difficulty communicating, who “speaks thickly with a stammer.” This makes him the perfect victim. David Mitchell’s victims are also the doomed, the powerless, the liminal and the underclass. Niki Jumpei’s vocation is the study of insects, and what is a bug if not a nuisance, a vermin, an intruder,
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A Hole Is Not a Burrow:
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[B]ut it does suggest that the man is trapped in a class war—or caste war— unacknowledged by society at large, yet taken for granted by the burakumin. This flash of relativism challenges the man’s conviction that he is the innocent victim and the villagers the guilty perpetrators. The notion that those who defy the status quo or hold unpopular opinions require vetting and reeducation from an elite is reflected in the tyrants who imprison the hubristic narrator in Abe’s novel. In Mitchell, such themes are seen in the persecution of dissenters, quelled by Maoist militias in Ghostwritten (1999), or by myriad forms of instantiated malfeasance in Cloud Atlas (2004), including jealous composers, power-mad old people’s home staffers, corrupt corporate energy conglomerates, avaricious doctors, vicious slavers, and a futuristic fabricantcannibalizing corpocracy. The narrator of The Woman in the Dunes, his path to oppression stems from within, his desire to be known, to achieve something, to climb6 to the top of his field. To do this he took risks. As did David Mitchell, who triumphed over a speech impediment in his youth, moved to Japan as a young man, and became one of the most revered storytellers of his time, a literary/mainstream hybrid finding solace in the act of creation. In Number9Dream he borrows his title from John Lennon, offered up as a hero, the self-made Liverpool boy who became part of the best band of all-time, the greatest of the Fab Four at that, the most venerated, the system-skewering searcher, the rebel.7 It is this occasional longshot lottery ticket loophole, the genius, the chosen one, who provides a way to elide the epiphanic horror that awaits us all. Authors and musicians, all artists really, afford us the idea of immortality through
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something to be trod underfoot. I could do a full-on S & M reading of the text but we needn’t get so speculative, post-Freudian, and lurid. Suffice it to say he is alone and exposed (i.e.: feminized3), a city man in the desert (with nowhere to hide in the terrain of the uncivilized, subject to natural law). He’s hunting beetles and hunting fame. He hasn’t told anyone where he’s going. He misses the last bus home. Superficially, it’s B-movie territory, though it was faithfully adapted into a classic film, a highbrow arthouse delight lensed by the auteur Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964, just two years after the book’s publication. Within Japanese literature, Abe’s most prominent inheritors would include Yukio Mishima and Sawako Ariyoshi,4 and among authors publishing today, Yoko Ogawa, alongside a Canadian-American author with Japanese heritage, Ruth Ozeki.5 Even stronger reverberations can be found in Shusaku Endo’s enduring historical fiction, Silence (1966, experiencing a revival thanks to the 2016 Martin Scorsese film adaptation), and in the works of Kenzaburō Ōe, who thanked Abe along with Shōhei Ōoka and Masuji Ibuse in the aftermath of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. Ōe’s novels often revolve around the severity of randomness, as does Abe’s. What would’ve happened if The Man hadn’t missed his bus? Round-trip vs. one-way ticket. The path not taken. The order we continually try to impose on this life. The surprise we express when life refuses to have order imposed on it. Mitchell’s introduction notes that, especially to the Japanese reader, it would be clear that our protagonist’s victimizers are the burakumin, the lowest caste, and thus the novel reads as a commentary. “The novel is not an apologia for the burakumin,” says Mitchell.
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It is possible that in this novel the writer wished to eschew moral absolutes and certainties in order
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to suggest that no dogma, interpretation and no authorial intention is immune to the transforming effects of the future, as it inches towards us like a sea of dunes. The Woman in the Dunes is thus also a novel of the Anthropocene, early to the front when looking at the impact of humans on our ecosystems and geologies, at how our technologies, horologies, and environmental activities can shift those ‘sands of time.’ Alt-lit author Blake Butler puts it less subtly in “The Disorienting Novels of Kōbō Abe,” a February 16, 2013 Vice article. About The Woman in the Dunes he writes: “Abe’s most well-known novel, and for good reason. It gets very close to a feeling that I suspect many of us have had—that life is often fucked, and we are all trapped in an endless cycle of shit.” A “fucked” shit-cycle that we can’t escape from? Hmm. Some would go Franz Kafka13 or David Lynch14 but I think more of No Exit (Huis Clos in French, or “Behind Closed Doors”), Sartre’s15 vision of hell. The captivity in The Woman in the Dunes (Suna non Onna in Japanese, or “Sandwoman”) isn’t as hierarchical as JeanPaul’s but it’s equally surreal and claustrophobic, more Foucaultian and insidious. The Man initially sneers at the ‘simple’ villagers who can’t extract their town from its fate, before it becomes his own fate as well. He compares The Woman to his solipsistic subject of choice, beetles, as early in his stay he bemoans the pointlessness of sweeping up the sand around the domicile. “It’ll take until morning to do that,” he says. “As though challenged, she turned abruptly and hurried off. She apparently intended to return to the base of the cliff and continue her work. Quite like the behavior of the beetle, he thought.” A short time later, he egotistically “wanted to believe that his own lack
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one’s works, and even then you have to be very lucky, as scads of brilliant and talented people never become known to the world because they draw that queen of spades before they get any recognition, or the credit and success they attain is mediated and/or entirely posthumous.8 Some are the opposite of lucky. They are born or stricken deaf, or blind, or autistic.9 They wander into the wrong town and get taken prisoner. One of David Mitchell’s greatest concerns is: What happens to the picked on, the marginalized? It can happen in a variety of ways. You can get exploited like Coriolanus (one of the many allusions in Number9Dream) or imprisoned like the poor bastard in Kōbō Abe’s sandpit. Haruki Murakami10 also features subterranean internment, most explicitly in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1997). And many of Mitchell’s characters are crushed by fate or lack of power, stomped out like bugs. A very few escape or become prodigies. On the subject of prodigies, please consider one of David Mitchell’s American Generation X analogs, one who, like John Lennon, was both top-of-the-heap hero and short for this world, that polymath literary luminary with the same first name as Mitchell’s, David Foster Wallace, himself a blender of philosophy and speculative fiction, who said, in one of his very first interviews: “Writing fiction takes me out of time. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.”11 Abe’s The Man, presumed dead in his former life but existing in the void in a town of sand; well, you see what I’m getting at—he is quite piquantly “out of time.”12 Mitchell concludes his essay on The Woman in the Dunes with:
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of movement had stopped all movement in the world.” By the end of the novel there occurs quite the transition, perhaps even an admission (the most truly damning revelations are admissions of self-knowledge oft-deferred and finally confronted) that all we know, all we can know, is the self. This perdition can also be seen in Chapter 25, during an internal dialogue about an overheard story. The tale concerns the oldest boy of a middle-class farm family “that had recently added land to its holdings, bought machinery, and was doing quite well, when the eldest son suddenly left home.” The family is surprised, there’s no concrete reason he left, “he just couldn’t stand it any longer.” A farmer’s work can give purpose, but what happens when it does not? “Compared with a farmer’s work, shoveling away the sand is like trying to pile up rocks in the River of Hades, where the devils cart them off as fast as you throw them in.” And what happens in hell? “Not a thing. It’s an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.” True hellishness is boredom, repetition, tedium, a ceaseless reiteration of stories within stories, being trapped in a pit and trying in vain, every day, to shovel oneself out. The Woman in the Dunes has many times been called absurdist. One of the core tenets of absurdism is that logic can’t help you. In Chapter 14, The Man assumes that his neighbors and colleagues would never believe him a runaway or a suicide, because they know him well, and to think him the type of man who would run away or kill himself is illogical, but he has also left his ex- a letter, telling her “that he had gone off alone for a time and had purposely told no one of his destination.” A reputation is a thing constructed, and hence just as easily deconstructed, with one of the persistent motifs being that there is no reality, that everything is a construct, an illusion, a sand
castle that gets built and washed away time and again. Abe’s book has also been labelled a parable and a fable. There is a dystopic quality reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), though it is much more squarely a horror tale, the creepy town/ village its subgenre.16 It’s abstract too. Referring to the main characters as The Man and The Woman, when done with the aplomb and verisimilitude that Abe employs (the text even contains sketches/drawings of several key incidents), has the counter-intuitive effect of humanizing and specifying via universalism. The impetus for dwelling on David Mitchell is because he is essentially a humanist. He seems to know better, to have intuited that ours is a failed species, but he holds out hope. He’s an optimist, maybe even an idealist, and certainly a soul-sibling to Andy Dufresne.17 In order to maintain his perspective about the potential of humanity, he has had to retreat to a mostly hermetic existence, not to mention an increasingly entwined, enmeshed, ennested, and recondite fictional universe of his own making, occasionally emerging to promote his next best seller or grant a favor to the Wachowski siblings (directors of the Cloud Atlas movie, based on Mitchell’s best novel) by making a cameo in an episode of Sense8.18 If David Mitchell has a foil in contemporary literature, it’s Tom McCarthy, a fellow Brit, who in essay collection Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish (2017) rails against hoi polloi middlebrow realism, celebrates the avantgarde, “challenging” works of art, highlighting Joyce and Bataille. He knights the former a non-empiricist materialist and the latter a stalwart dissident campaigning against the Platonic internments of form. To McCarthy, the imposition of needless and idealistic forms are artless conformances, bourgeois trappings. As I would Abe, I’d
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It’s hard to think, outside of zombie movies, of a work more omnivoric—and omni-emetic. Rats eat corpses; savages eat missionaries; Bloom eats cheese; cheese eats itself; dogs eat themselves too; spew themselves out; eat themselves again; the city and the day eat and spew Bloom. Regurgitating my opening, then, Abe and Mitchell are both explorers of victimhood and victimization, relating modes and manifestations. Mitchell is right that Abe’s other novels are more symbolist, mechanistic, and allegorical. They are also more blatantly philosophical and monologic, but it is the Abe of The Woman in the Dunes who sits at the apex of profoundly unsettling horror. David Mitchell uses Nietzsche’s “will to power” and “eternal recurrence” as the ideological tentpoles for his own masterpiece, Cloud Atlas, though Mitchell’s best moments are when he allows himself to be a bit mean, to chronicle the true rapacity of our species. The most arresting character in Cloud Atlas, for my proverbial pound and sixpence, is assassin Bill Smoke. That’s one iteration of Nietzschean nihilism—predation, the stalker.22 Abe’s man in hole (née: vagina) is another, his life spent fighting off the impinging sands only to end up a sheeple in his apartment collecting goods, surrounding himself with pretty but meaningless things.23 This is how Abe concludes The Woman in the Dunes; his protagonist sated, charmed, indoctrinated, institutionalized, thirsty for a small draught of notoriety, still hoping to acquire fame (for his innovation, a “water trap” that he’s developed at the bottom of the dunes), not wanting to escape, the slave who adores being a slave. The Man is simultaneously dead and alive, free and captive, hidden and out in the open. This horror-themed
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call Joyce a “coalescer,” one who throws materialism into a blender and out come the most delectable Irish smoothies. Bataille is a chef, one who favors reductions, who scrambles and fuses and subverts, his prime ingredient the formless/l’Informe, which, says McCarthy, “carries the dual sense of lowering in class, or demoting, and of releasing from all classificatory or taxonomic constraints.” For McCarthy, this radical opposition to academic19 cataloguing is “one of the central thrusts of literature as it moves into and through the twentieth century—perhaps the central one.” For Abe, sand equals death because it is formless, uncontainable. The Man observes: “Not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?” Later he comments that “sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires,” from the Roman Empire to a village written about by Omar Khayyam. “Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of form.” By the end of the book, it is revealed that the villagers are isolationist terrorists who sell the sand, covertly and illegally, for use in concrete,20 and this may be destabilizing the entire outside world. As it is with the Anthropocene; they don’t much care. Upon realizing that he is the victim of a conspiracy, The Man acquiesces. He does not mount an insurrection, he does not resist, he concedes, like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, and muses about getting a plant or tree with which to spruce up his hole. After becoming consumed by sand, he becomes a consumer, forming another link to Tom McCarthy’s thoughts about Joyce21. McCarthy argues that the central theme of Ulysses (1922) is eating, consumption:
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simultaneity magnetizes David Mitchell’s quotation about the “woman who reveals a more chilling face,” a popular move in the genre, and if you were born in my generation,24 horror meant Stephen King.25 If David Mitchell is fundamentally humanist and doesn’t want anyone to get hurt (even when dabbling in horror himself, in 2015’s Slade House), then Stephen King (in his books anyway; in life, he seems like a square enough dude26) is an anti-humanist. King is fundamentally a literary terrorist. He aspires to fill one with terror.27 Be clear, Stephen King’s horror is at its most unremitting when it aims to injure. King is assaultive, and that means he aspires to shock and harm and traumatize his reader, to brand you.28 At the conclusion of The Woman in the Dunes, damage, interregnum, and aporia are unavoidable. It is a substantial work of art for those most classical reasons, it holds up to multiple readings and it raises more questions than answers. A single human being’s existence reduced to a small cramped space, a recession in the ground, a man sandwrecked, a deserter deserted in the desert and receiving, from nature and his fellow man alike, his just or unjust desserts. Comeuppance is another timeless horror trope, and a cardinal element in classic tragedy as well. Almost all of Shakespeare’s work this way. Think of Lear stuck on the heath and the fool’s disappearance, Macbeth’s hauntings, Hamlet’s proto-surreal dualities, Othello and Desdemona pinioned by Iago. At the bottom of the hellpit, Abe’s man in The Woman in the Dunes is stuck in an unending interval, an interim time. As per Julius Caesar (1599): “all the interim is / Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.”29 For a socio-economic slant, consider a scene just short of midway through Abe’s text where The Man engages in outright struggle, opposition, and violence. He attacks and
binds The Woman, telling her “Don’t cry out. I won’t hurt you. Just keep quiet.” She immediately goes passive, turns submissive and obedient (foreshadowing how The Man will do the same at novel’s end). “She showed no resistance or antagonism. Perhaps she was in a kind of hypnotized state.” As she lies on the sand-covered ground, almost suffocating, twisting her lips and nose to avoid breathing in the sand, he insists on paying her. The Man tells The Woman:
That rape-ish last line, in conjunction with The Man’s devotion to money and commerce and currency, and to notions of remuneration and adherence to societal structures, concludes quite the Marxist critique. When he musters up escape plans, The Man’s desire is to flee to a place where “buses would be running, and people would be in their right minds.” Giving anti-capitalists further succor is the fact that to ameliorate and subdue his insurgency, The Man is thrown down a package containing sake and cigarettes, and later, in an antiindividualist spin, it’s revealed that he is not the first itinerant to be ensnared. He was preceded by a postcard dealer and a “Back-to-the-Land student”/book peddler. The Woman tells him that the former died and the latter is very likely still around, against his will, at a neighbor’s three houses down.
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Well, you’ll have to put up with this for a while…. There’s no reason for you to complain after the nonsense I’ve had to put up with. Besides, I’ll pay honest board…. You can’t mind that, can you? Really, my stay here should be free; but I can’t stand not canceling such a debt. I’m going to make you take it.
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Abe can be visceral and harsh but he consistently dabbles in the transcendental, conflating self and society, natural law and civil law, so let’s conclude with Henry David Thoreau, whose 1862 essay “Walking” opens: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Wanderlust is one of our few permanent universals. The value of travel is true freedom, the holy instigations of the peripatetic. But sometimes you go out wassailing and you don’t come back. Be it in life or in literature, or in the Venn-diagramlike weft of the two. From the Lindbergh baby (Charles Jr.) to Adam Walsh (abducted son of John Walsh, victim advocate and creator of America’s Most Wanted); from Helen of Troy (or her eidolon) to Smeagol (Gollum) to Christopher McCandless (Alex Supertramp).30 Thoreau writes, “It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce.” The epiphanic horror of The Woman in Dunes reveals that life is both tragedy and farce, existential in the most eerie, unpredictable, and punitive ways. The prodigious horror that The Man offers us at the end of the Abe’s novel is that people don’t want to be free. We don’t want to walk and wander. We would rather be safe (well, have perpetual access to the soporific illusion of safety anyways) than free. We elect a walled-in consumerist existence. Whether we admit it or not, we want to be anodyne, contented, caged; docile and tame.31 That’s the real shitstorm. It’s nightmarish and it’s ancient. Awareness isn’t a solution or a path of flight, but it’s an armament, a vigilance, a glimpse of patience and self-betterment in a world that imprisons by snatching and siphoning, sapping your autonomy and sanding down your
attention span, your capacity for reflection. Abe’s book may be bleak, but it is not a defeatist text. It is majestic because it magnifies. It is expansive. To read it is to abjure complacency. In raising such disconcerting questions, The Woman in the Dunes becomes the dagger with which Abe perforates the stagnant shroud of prevailing norms. Great literature doesn’t so much empower readers as enable them. A story about a man who is hobbled and tamped down becomes a mirror, and if we at least recognize our predicament, we are that much more able to dance away from the edge of the chasm, the pitfall of ignorance, the stifling sands known as lack of self-awareness. ———————————
2 And if you don’t, what do you get? Disorientation and deluge. The undertow pulls you in and roughs you up. Part I of The Woman in the Dunes ends thusly (one of the better “act breaks” in all of literature; the book has three “parts”): “Suddenly the flow of sand grew violent. There was a muffled sound and then a pressure against his chest. He tried to look up and see what was happening, but he no longer had any sense of direction. He was only dimly aware of a faint milky light playing over him as he laid doubled up in the black splotch of his vomit.” Part II then opens with The Woman singing about the devil. Badass, Mr. Abe, badass. 3 Lest you accuse me of an unfeminist leap, be assured that I am sticking to the text and to the narrator’s standpoint, and perhaps Abe’s, as when The Man, in Chapter 7, the early days of his detention, inhabiting the same space with The Woman,
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1 From the October 7, 2006 issue of The Guardian. A later version of this essay would appear as the introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Woman in the Dunes published on March 1, 2007.
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wakes up disoriented, his face encrusted with sand, and remembers that she is in the hole with him. When he hears “the breathing of the sleeping woman on the other side of the sunken hearth,” he looks over, swallows his breath, and states, “She was stark naked,” with this short sentence set aside by Abe as its own paragraph, and with the facing page entirely composed of a drawing of the naked woman, one hand at her abdomen, one at her crotch, her face covered in sand but her body exposed: “The parts that one usually covered were completely bare, while the face, which anybody would show, was concealed under a towel. No doubt the towel was to protect her nose, mouth, and eyes from the sand, but the contrast seemed to make the naked body stand out even more.”
like an aspiring author or songwriter; he is attempting to muster up a creative force; he is the dreamer of the dream. A dream, naturally, is the ultimate version of escape, ascendency, flight. Please consider that the epigraph of The Woman in the Dunes is the haiku-like aphorism “Without The Threat / Of Punishment / There Is No Joy / In Flight”.
6 Very ‘social climber,’ almost Victorian in his desire for ascension, The Man receives his punishment in the form of a descent, and also the eternal inability to climb out of the sandpit, which is, of course, shaped like one half of the hourglass of time. 7 Like Abe’s existentialist comrade in Europe, the eminent Albert Camus (author of both The Rebel (1951) and Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1944)). And also like (for a Euro-American crossbreed) Travis Henderson, Harry Dean Stanton’s lead character in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984). The Man is stuck, imprisoned, detained, and he wants to get unstuck. He is
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10 Murakami is a major influence on David Mitchell, particularly on early works like Number9Dream and Ghostwritten, and Murakami alludes to Kōbō Abe as an influence on his own fiction, calling Abe a senior countryman who “combined old Japanese folk tales and bizarre sci-fi.” For more, see Nicholas Blincoe’s “The Cult of Murakami” in the January 16, 2005 issue of The Telegraph. 11 This interview with Bill Katovsky was published in an April 1987 issue of the no longer extant lit mag Arrival. Reprints are available online, prominently at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. 12 As David Mitchell withdraws from social engagement, embracing rurality (he lives with his family in Ireland, in a town with less than 5,000 people) and avoiding the cosmopolitan world he so regally documents, it’s hard to think he doesn’t agree with Wallace. 13 The Man is both literally and figuratively impotent in ways that are quite Kafka-esque. 14 The Man repeatedly refers to the circumstances of his
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5 Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) has a great entendre’d title and a promising premise but in the end it’s a bit ‘David Mitchell–lite,’ more book group fiction than capital “L” literature. But like Ozeki, Abe himself is more of a blend than first glance reveals. Abe was born in Tokyo on March 7, 1924, but as a child during the ‘30s he lived in Japanese-occupied China. “Kōbō” is the Chinese transliteration of his birth name, Kimifusa.
9 David Mitchell’s son is autistic and Mitchell translated (and helped achieve popularity and accolades for) the book The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism (2007), written by Naoki Higashida, a thirteen-year-old boy. Mitchell has called the experience of raising a child with autism “parenting on steroids,” so it’s not hard to understand why he might be drawn to a book like Abe’s, about a man destined to be buried in a torrent of sand over and over again.
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4 Particularly in Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife (1966), as Abe’s données often reflect his own status as trained physician who studied at Tokyo University and was the son of a doctor.
8 See: Bach, Dickinson, Kafka, Poe, Van Gogh, ad infinitum.
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15 The most famous line in No Exit, one of the most indelible in all twentieth-century literature, is “Hell is other people.” In The Woman in the Dunes, when The Woman first takes The Man in, he wonders if there are any other people (souls?) residing within her house. “What do you mean, ‘other people’?” she responds. He inquires about her family and she informs him that she is quite alone, that her husband and little girl were killed in a sand typhoon. She then flirts with him and he finds this indecent given her recent revelation (an epiphany of horror about the loss of her family due to a natural disaster). 16 See also: Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”), Donald Barthelme (“A City of Churches”), Stephen King (various). The films of John Carpenter and M. Night Shyamalan take us there as well, most notably Carpenter’s In The Mouths of Madness (1994) and then a decade later with Shyamalan’s last above-par movie, The Village (2004). 17 Come on, you know who Andy Dufresne is! 18 My tone in this essay may seem awfully critical of David Mitchell, but I actually admire his work, teach it regularly, have given conference presentations and have published essays about it, am often in awe of his intellect and talent, and have even seen him read in person. This was at Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus in September of 2014, and he’s an engaging, spirited reader, if a bit too theatrical, an aspiring but essentially secondrate thespian. I think he’s kind of showing off in the way that only someone who was a kid with a stammer—an affliction shared by Abe’s The Man—and wants to prove to the world that he’s conquered it can. And I did really loathe the vast majority of his fantasy novel The Bone Clocks (2014), which he read from that night and which I refused to wait in the long-ass line to get signed. I’m not big on getting my books autographed, or having my picture taken with “celebrity authors.” But as for David Mitchell, literally all his earlier books are damn near perfect,
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roiling groundswells of creative storytelling stirred up and birthed into the world with abiding intelligence and remarkable linguistic brio. Just don’t waste your time on The Bone Clocks, it sucks. 19 Wallace Fowlie once wrote of Sartre: “Sartre often insists that literature should not bring comfort to readers, but on the contrary it should raise disturbing questions and initiate anxiety in the hearts of readers…. Disparagingly he speaks of academic culture, of a fruitless kind of study carried on in libraries, those isolated places he does not hesitate to compare to tombs.” 20 If you’re looking for a work that literalizes and stylizes the existentialist experience of being at the bottom of a pit of sand, or of prose, check out Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete (1982), a meditative work (about the erosion of its protagonist, not an entomologist but a musicologist, by sarcoidosis, a man who seeks escape, metaphorically through classical music, literally by moving from Vienna to the island of Majorca, where he discovers an epiphanic horror) written as one long 153-page paragraph. 21 “Why Ulysses Matters,” originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2013, and later published under the title “Ulysses and Its Wake” in the June 19, 2014 issue of the London Review of Books. 22 To give a nod to Stalker (1979), the film by Andrei Tarkovsky which is in many ways an existentialist inheritor (the town in The Woman in the Dunes might as well be called The Zone: The Man is pronounced dead back in “the world” after seven years missing and suicide is theorized, but of course he is still alive, sucked down into that beehive-shaped village in the dunes, where the locals initially think he may be a “government inspector”) but in others is the complete opposite of Abe’s book—it is a film not of epiphanic horror but of epiphanic joy. 23 An oblique progeny in this intellectual genealogy is the nameless narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s minimalist cult classic turned canonical Fight Club (1996), the one played by Ed
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confinement as a “Mobius circle,” a term often applied to Lynch’s work.
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24 The last vestiges of Generation X. I was born in 1976. 25 He’s got a lot of women revealing a more chilling face, starting early in his bibliography with the titular character of his debut novel Carrie (1974) and the iconic woman in the bathtub in Room 217 in The Shining (1977). 26 Now, anyways. During his booze and coke days King probably did some pretty fucked-up shit. David Mitchell seems like he’s never thrown a punch, whereas Stephen King seems like he’s used his size and strength against innocent people, including loved ones, and if it wasn’t for the act of writing, his demons might have taken him a long way down that road of masculine violence. In an interview with Eric Norden for Playboy in 1983 (collected in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King (1988), edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller), King recalls compiling a scrapbook about famed ‘50s mass murderer Charles Starkweather (who also fascinated Terrence Malick and Bruce Springsteen and became the inspiration for Badlands (1973) and Nebraska (1982) respectively) when King was just a boy, and hiding it from his mother. Says King: “Starkweather killed nine or ten people in cold blood, and I used to clip and paste every news item I could find on him, and then I’d sit trying to unravel the inner horror behind that ordinary face. I knew I was looking at big-time sociopathic evil, not the neat little Agatha Christie–style villain but something wilder and darker and unchained. I wavered between attraction and repulsion, maybe because I realized the face in the photograph could be my own.” 27 From King’s Danse Macabre (1981): “I recognize terror as the finest emotion…and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But
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if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.” 28 Peter Straub, in an appearance with King at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore (also collected in Bare Bones), is asked about the horror writer’s “job” and responds: “You are supposed to burrow under the reader’s skin. And unsettle them. Stephen sometimes uses the word ‘hurt,’ which is a wonderful word, in a way, because it sounds so violent! That you want to hurt these readers.” I would argue that King wants to hurt, Mitchell wants to heal, and Abe wants to harrow, to scrutinize, to place his readers under a dark philosopher’s microscope. 29 The “hideous dream,” a seminal component in both King and Mitchell, is a suitable depiction of warfare, or what it’s like to lose a child, or the perversion that is mass incarceration. The sheer voluminous reach of The Woman in the Dunes is its hallmark. The uselessness of logic when trying to escape one’s predicament calls to mind Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). The nature of the predicament, the stranded man story, brings up everything from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Tom Hanks in Robert Zemeckis’s Cast-Away (2000). The singlesetting imprisonment matrix themes (Chapter 15 begins with: “In spite of his intention, his movements were sluggish, for his strength had been sapped by the sand.”) that define The Man’s predicament are reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both the 1962 Ken Kesey novel and the 1975 Milos Forman film, and also call to mind the French trio of Genet, de Sade, and Rabelais, the works of Bernard Malamud and Arthur Koestler, or Marek Bienczyk’s Tworki (1999) if I am allowed to go a little off the conventional radar and offer up a less canonical choice. The depredation on display reminds one of the milieu of Nathanael West as well as A Clockwork Orange, the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel, though Kubrick’s recurrent fascination with civilization vs. dehumanization is present in both his adaptation and in Abe as well.
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Norton if you prefer David Fincher’s 1999 filmic adaptation, or “Sebastian,” as Palahniuk names him in his 2015–6 comic books, unified under the title Fight Club 2: The Tranquility Gambit (art by Cameron Stewart) and released by Dark Horse in 2016. A tranquility gambit is what victimizes the The Man in The Woman in the Dunes as well.
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30 Even across great swaths of time, from crime of the century to movie of the week, from epic poetry to genre-inventing fantasy trilogy to modern-day literary non-fiction, identity is dualized, individuals real and not real are both chaos and order, motion and stasis, kinetic and potential, ignited and dormant, simultaneously alive and dead, moving and stuck, conscious actor and inertial object, free will and uh not so much.
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31 Bringing to mind a last trifecta of Abe’s potential descendants: The obese future-humans in 2008 Andrew Stanton–directed Pixar-animated feature WALL-E; Gary Shteyngart’s pathetic and narcissistic uber-consumers and commodity-addicts in Super Sad True Love Story (2010), which predicted the apparatus of imprisonment known as the smartphone; and the cyclical nature of the tech-obsessed worlds and language-garbled characters of George Saunders’s oeuvre.
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There’s a town called Shrewsbury in England, but I’ve never visited it. There are numerous towns named after it in the United States. In my home state of New Jersey alone, you’ll find Shrewsbury and Shrewsbury Township, and what Wikipedia tells me is another Shrewsbury. Over forty years ago, there was also New Shrewsbury, but its name was changed to the more distinctive Tinton Falls in 1975. In 1977, my parents moved to Tinton Falls from Mohegan Lake in Westchester County. At the time, I was just shy of my first birthday. When I talk about my hometown to people who aren’t from my corner of New Jersey, it’s generally in terms of proximity. Tinton Falls is to the south of Red Bank and to the north of Asbury Park, both of which are places where travelers from out of state may have had a reason to go. The rough area in which I grew up has been depicted in movies like Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Chasing Amy, novels like Sam Lipsyte’s The Subject Steve and Home Land, and in dozens of Bruce Springsteen songs. But even now, I’m writing about it in terms of what it’s not, or what it resembles; I’m throwing in RIYLs and approximations and hoping that weird evocation of negative space does the trick. If I’d made this town up as the setting for a novel, that salient detail about it having changed its name would be the kind of thing that loomed over the narrative, a symbol or metaphor that would weave between clumsy and clever, depending on how I stuck the landing. And, really, scoring points on a post-war suburb for its lack of a defined identity feels increasingly trite.
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Better to go deeper; better to arrive at some sort of greater understanding of the place. Still, I can’t help but to digress, and bring up another point that echoes in my own history in the hopes of landing some sort of connection. So here it goes: the hospital in which I was born late in 1976 was located in North Tarrytown, New York. North Tarrytown no longer exists as such, though; instead, it followed the lead of New Shrewsbury and decided to reach out and be bold and seek its own distinctive identity—in this case, going for the historical and literary deep cut and renaming itself Sleepy Hollow in 1996. (To digress within my digression: my college roommate in 1996 would go on to work as a producer and writer on the television series of the same name.) What it comes down to is the long-running theme of places that have touched me in some way being decidedly eager to rename themselves, dub themselves something new—or hearken back to something old. And this is nothing new. This is nothing new on a global scale and it’s certainly nothing new in a nation whose history abounds with scenes of displacement, of hamlets christened something fresh, of repeated attempts to transform a “what was” to a “what is.” All that I can point directly to with respect to my hometown’s history of this is that it’s my hometown. It fascinates me because it’s something to be fascinated by. ——— I was in the area around which I grew up recently for an assignment. And that came with its own dose of surrealism, driving down familiar roads that now held dedicated bicycle lanes, taking note of which shops still persisted (the one selling model trains, the candy shop that
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Talk of Home
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looks identical to the way it did thirty years ago), those which were gone, and those which had been bulldozed for luxury retail or parking lots. My hometown’s biggest claim to fame now seems to be a complex of luxury outlets, which I’ve never visited. That push-pull is nothing new: the record store on Route 35 where I bought dozens of punk records in the mid-90s, and had one of the clerks give me constant shit for being straight-edge, was flattened sometime during my college years. But if we’re going to talk about home, the Vintage Vinyl that used to be on Route 35 in Ocean, New Jersey would have to qualify as one. Like any good shop carrying a particular type of media, it was the sort of place where one could get lost. It was the sort of place that lent itself to solo excursions and trips with friends. But what I suppose was my clearest education that emerged from there was the growing confidence that it was fine being into art that was weird. Sometimes that came in the form of punk records. Sometimes it was stumbling onto assorted albums I never actually picked up—I have a clearly defined memory of being in there with my oldest friend and almost picking up the Girls Against Boys’ “Sexy Sam” CD single but deciding against it for some reason. What emerged was a sense of going—pardon the inadvertent but period-accurate Bad Religion pun— against the grain, aesthetically speaking. It was the sense that strange music, strange films, and strange books could all find an audience. A few years ago I wrote about shuttered bookstores around my hometown; I still think of the used bookstore a few blocks from the main drag in Red Bank, where I dug up some old Sandman trade paperbacks and a host of offbeat science fiction novels. Maybe it’s in keeping with a fluctuating notion of home that I tie these ideas of home to places that no longer exist.
My family’s no longer based in the house where I grew up. My parents moved a couple of towns west in 2011, so my time in my hometown is intermittent. Sometimes I pass it on drives north on the Parkway: the soccer fields at my old high school are situated parallel to the roadway in question. There are a couple of bars and restaurants that I venture to when I’m back, either with family or to catch up with old friends. On my last trip I discovered a new level to a restaurant I’d been going to since high school. It was nice to learn that I could still be surprised by the place— in this case, by a high-ceilinged bar adjacent to the main restaurant space. It was the first time I’d ever thought, yes, if I lived around here, I would probably spend a lot of time in this place. And maybe that’s it, too: the feeling that this is a part of the world tied to an older version of me. I can’t quite get my head around it when I drive these old roads and circle old haunts; there’s still too much of the past there. Which is an understandable side effect of a space that I dwelt in full-time for over half my life, I suppose. And that’s the other part: the realization that, right about now, I’m coming up on that milestone, that moment of truth wherein I realize that, yes, I spent about half my life in my hometown, but the figure that’s less than fifty percent is dwindling, and will keep dwindling. Is it something to keep an eye on? Is it something to mourn? The image of home that comes to mind for me doesn’t entirely line up with a place that properly existed, and maybe that’s the point. Better that than stagnation; better that than nostalgia, a theme park, or an image eternally fading.
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The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kōbō Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker, designer, flower artist, potter, calligrapher; Takemitsu as composer, poet, musical theorist, philosopher; and Abe as novelist, playwright, director, theater innovator. Individually, they transformed every area of artistic endeavor they turned to, and they are among the small handful of Japanese writers and artists who have had a significant, lasting impact on international culture. In the mid-1960s, these three artists came together in a series of extraordinary film collaborations that shocked their more conventional countrymen and instantly won enthusiastic response abroad. Through work intended principally for Japanese audiences, the three struck a chord that harmonized unexpectedly, but perfectly, with the sensibilities and existentialist instincts of the international avant-garde. Their four films—Pitfall (1962),Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and Man Without a Map (1968)—set Japan center stage in the intellectual discourse of a world seeking answers to questions about identity, human existence, and the alienation of modern man in urban society. The first three PAGE 100
of those landmark films are collected in this box set. Although Teshigahara, as director, was responsible for organizing and unifying these collaborations, it is otherwise difficult to distinguish absolutely the separate contributions of each of the three artists. To say that Abe wrote the screenplays, Takemitsu composed the musical scores, and Teshigahara provided the imagery is too simplistic. Each of the three challenged, provoked, and enhanced the work of the others. They’d all known and admired each other since the late 1950s. Teshigahara had asked Takemitsu to produce concerts of contemporary music at Sogetsu, his family’s avant-garde art center, in Tokyo, and in 1959, Takemitsu had produced a superb musical score for Teshigahara’s debut film, José Torres, about a Puerto Rican boxer in New York City. Even before Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes first appeared, in 1962, as a best-selling novel, both Teshigahara and Takemitsu had recognized its potential as a film and begun planning the unique aesthetic that might sustain the transfer from printed page to screen. Abe had worked earlier with Takemitsu on radio dramas and seen how the composer’s soundscapes brought unexpected emotional depth to his words. When they all finally came together on Pitfall, Teshigahara’s innate tendencies toward overexpression were quickly reined in by the austerity of Abe’s vision and the sere understatement of Takemitsu’s sounds. Each artist involved himself deeply in the work of the others, and none of them hesitated to criticize or reshape the work of the others in order to strengthen it or give it deeper meaning. “He gave me much more than just music,” Teshigahara reminisced about Takemitsu, shortly after the death, in 1996, of the composer who provided the music for every one of his feature films. “He gave me ideas and energy and a kind of trust that never failed. He was always more
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The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu
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than a composer. He involved himself so thoroughly in every aspect of a film—script, casting, location shooting, editing, and total sound design—that a willing director can rely totally on his instincts.” Much the same was said by and about each member of this triangular collaboration. Both Abe and Takemitsu had strong visual instincts, as revealed in their private sketches and designs, and they were not hesitant to advise Teshigahara on the look of the films. (Abe later went on to devise unique theatrical works that abandoned language and verbal communication, relying entirely on movement, visual stage patterns, and soundscapes.) Abe, born in 1924, was the oldest of the trio and in a sense initiated the collaborations by first penning the texts on which the films were based. Pitfall, the earliest of the films, emerged from sketches for stories that were still percolating in the writer’s mind. Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another were both based on best-selling novels of the same names, which were transformed into films almost immediately after the books were published. Teshigahara was three years younger than Abe, and Takemitsu, born in 1930, was the youngest of the three. Teshigahara was perhaps the most “Japanese” in heritage and upbringing. He was the son of Sofu Teshigahara, a painter, sculptor, calligrapher, and the creator of the highly innovative Sogetsu flower school. Born into a family of considerable wealth and influence, which traced its antecedents back to the aristocracy of medieval Japan, Hiroshi Teshigahara was a highly educated intellectual whose artistic instincts might be called hereditary, albeit honed by the devastating turmoil of World War II. Abe and Takemitsu came from very different backgrounds than Teshigahara, and the two of them shared the experience of being reared outside Japan, in the
vast wilderness of Manchuria, during the 1930s period of Japanese colonization. Like other Japanese writers and artists born or raised in China or Manchuria during that era, Takemitsu and Abe exhibited a kind of freedom and self-confidence that was not shared by Japanese who grew up in the much tighter, socially constrained circumstances of the Japanese Islands. In Manchuria, one could gaze out over vast terrain, with almost nothing blocking a view of the distant horizon—something that was virtually impossible in the densely populated and mountainous geography of Japan. The magnitude of that Manchurian landscape seemed to set them free. As young adults, both Abe and Takemitsu had been sent back to Japan to be educated, but the frontier life had spoiled them for conventional schooling. Both were bored in school and followed paths of self-education far different from what their parents had envisioned. Abe was pressured by his physician father to enter medical school at Tokyo University, but he failed his examinations and boldly told his professors that he had no intention of ever practicing medicine. Though he chose to pursue literature as a career instead, his medical studies did seem to have an influence on his writing, which is informed by a kind of scientific precision and an analytical quality in which ideas are operated on with the sharpness of a surgeon’s scalpel. Takemitsu, who was supposed to follow in the footsteps of his businessman father, was ill during the war years and the immediate postwar period and could not attend school. Tubercular and lying for years in sickbeds, he read voraciously and listened constantly to radio broadcasts of all types of music. He was intensely inspired by American jazz, broadcast by the U.S. occupation forces in postwar Japan; self-taught in musical composition, he always claimed that his only real teacher was Duke Ellington.
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Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a harsh terrain, still devastated by nuclear holocaust and by the fire bombings that had reduced most Japanese cities to ashes. The world in which Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu came of age as expressive artists was not one for which they had been prepared by their forebears or by any social legacy. The values of prewar Japan had been utterly discredited by their nation’s defeat, the society emasculated by foreign occupiers for the first time in Japanese history. The so-called democracy that was being layered onto the Japanese body politic by temporary American rulers seemed ill fitted to a culture that had never valued individualism or freedom of expression. They wandered forth into a strange new world that had no identity of its own and was distorted by poverty and foreign occupation. Everywhere were symptoms of an existential dilemma on a vast national scale. In retrospect, it seems hardly surprising that the compelling themes of Japanese artists of the day were those of alienation, the search for identity, and the struggle for survival in a wasted landscape—or that their styles and languages of expression should have been so austere, desiccated, and severe. The three films in this collection pose essential questions but provide few answers. Who am I? Why does one live? What is the nature of this thing called society that surrounds me? Where am I going? What is the value of my work? My relationships? My existence? These are the issues that the protagonists of these films grapple with, and they struggle alone, without a benevolent deity or a comprehending society available to provide solutions. How is the viewer of these films to respond to such characters, in such situations? Are they real, we ask ourselves, or are they mere devices in a larger allegorical universe? Are they flesh and blood or ghosts from another time and
place? In the opening sequence of The Face of Another, the protagonist is introduced through an X-ray image of his face, speaking in a recognizable language but utterly detached from reality and asking questions that cannot be answered. His identity is further called into question when we realize that his bandaged visage is not his own face but that of another person, grafted onto his head. Who then is he? Is he the man whose face was burned from his body, or is he the personality of the new face, or is he some grotesque amalgam of the two? In Pitfall, the “hero” is continually in flight from some unknown pursuers—or is he fleeing a crime, or the memory of his own misdeeds? We’re never sure. In Woman in the Dunes, an archetypal man and woman labor together at the bottom of a sand dune, continually digging sand, supposedly in order to protect some unseen village nearby. What is the society for which they sacrifice themselves? And why do they obey its dictates? When they attempt to resist their “fate,” they quickly realize that escape is impossible. Are these people Japanese or somehow universal? Is the environment of their lives any recognizable place? Or is it the tortured mental landscape of Sartre or Kafka or Camus? And where, ultimately, does the viewer stand in relationship to these spectral figures? Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu were in total accord in their vision for Woman in the Dunes. While making the film, Teshigahara frequently commented that the film had three main characters, not two: the man, the woman, and the sand. Decades after completing the film, he repeated: “The sand has its own identity…. And without Toru’s help, we never would have been able to realize this fully.” Takemitsu’s music for Woman in the Dunes relies almost totally on a string ensemble, first recorded and subsequently rearranged and distorted electronically for
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perfectly with the film’s picture of severe hardship and deprivation in Japan’s impoverished coal-mining society. Similarly, in The Face of Another, Takemitsu’s incisive electronic music accords well with the icy visuals (the light in many shots is captured through glass or refracted in mirrors and cold reflective surfaces) of Teshigahara’s aesthetic scheme for this film about lost or artificial identity. Viewing these three Japanese film masterpieces together, it is clear that they spring from an ideal collaboration of three extraordinary creative artists working collectively almost as if they were a single body and mind. Has the existential dilemma so pervasive in world literature of the twentieth century ever found more compelling expression than in these films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kōbō Abe, and Toru Takemitsu?’
—— This essay was originally written for and published by the Criterion Collection in their Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara box set.
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desired sound effects. The sounds, alternately shrill, harsh, and menacing, form a perfect soundscape for the austere allegory of Abe’s narrative. But this “composed” music is only part of Takemitsu’s unique contribution to the film. The weird environment is the dominating quality of the film, and, recognizing this, Takemitsu gives life to the sand through sound. It is there at all times, even when a scene seems completely silent. The soft, barely audible sizzle or hiss or patter of sand—dripping, shifting, and constantly in motion—inhabits every moment of the film, as it does every moment of the protagonists’ terrifying existence. And it is through the subconscious quality of sound that the woman’s persistent reply to the man’s fearful questions—“It is the sand”—develops its total, allenveloping meaning. Similarly, in the scene where the man is forced to rape the woman for the sadistic pleasure of the onlooking villagers, Takemitsu uses the hypnotic drumming of the villagers’ Onigoroshi-daiko (demon-killing drums) to create a sound sequence that is as terrifying as it is dehumanizing. The drums, visually appropriate to the festive environment of the scene, take on a character far more important than their narrative identity. Deafening in its aural force and overpowering in its ritualistic, barbaric monotony, it is the sound of the drums that reduces everyone—the characters and onlookers in the film, as well as the spectators in the theater audience—to a common bestiality. The music for Pitfall, although produced out of the straitened circumstances of an extremely tight budget, is no less innovative or harmonious. For some passages, Takemitsu’s score calls for only a single musician, playing a “prepared piano,” which produces sounds like none ever heard before in film music. The result corresponds
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ELL A WHEELER WILCOX
My Home This is the place that I love the best, A little brown house, like a ground-bird’s nest, Hid among grasses, and vines and trees, Summer retreat of the birds and bees.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
Far from the city’s dust and heat, I get but sounds and odours sweet. Who can wonder I love to stay, Week after week, here hidden away, In this sly nook that I love the best— The little brown house, like a ground-bird’s nest?
The tenderest light that ever was seen Sifts through the vine-made window screen— Sift and quivers, and flits and falls On home-made carpets and gray-hung walls. All through June, the west wind free The breath of the clover brings to me. All through the languid July day I catch the scent of the new-mown hay.
Better than treasures brought from Rome Are the living pictures I see at home— My aged father, with frosted hair, And mother’s face, like a painting rare.
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In the cunningest chamber under the sun I sink to sleep when the day is done; And am waked at morn, in my snow-white bed, By a singing-bird on the roof o’erhead.
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The morning glories and scarlet vine Over the doorway twist and twine; And every day, when the house is still, The humming-bird comes to the window-sill.
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The Fall of the House of Usher Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu’on le touche il resonne.
—De Beranger
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught
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of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay inunruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him—and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—it the apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed
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me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression.
There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is theparadoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity-an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which,
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extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me— while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master. The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was
profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eve, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded,
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and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity. In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement. It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and
there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.” I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated— an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution-of a tenderly beloved sister—his sole companion for long years—his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with
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a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread—and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother—but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partiallycataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted
me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;—from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least—in the circumstances then surrounding me—there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli. One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may
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I. In the greenest of our valleys, By good angels tenanted, Once fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion— It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair. II. Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow; (This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A winged odour went away.
Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically To a lute’s well-tuned law, Round about a throne, where sitting (Porphyrogene!) In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen.
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be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled “The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:
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And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. V. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. VI. And travellers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more.
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I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacitywith which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence— the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none. Our books—the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid— were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character ofphantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the
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Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and AEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the stair case, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution. At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The
body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with
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toll, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified-that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch— while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and
rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment. I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual,cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me— but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. “And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence— “you have not then seen it?—but, stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm. The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly
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beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion. “You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement;—the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen;—and so we will pass away this terrible night together.” The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated
the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild over-strained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design. I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus: “And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling there-with sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest. At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of
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the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story: “But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten—
presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded: “And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.” No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than— as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver, became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win. And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.” Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient
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whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. “Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!” here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—”MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!” As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the
lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “HOUSE OF USHER.”
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PAUL CÉZANNE
ISSA KOBAYASHI
Four Haikus of Home I. Croaking behind my hut, In the beginning and still— Primordial frogs. II. Village of my youth— Every memory of home Blossoming a thorn. III. Returned home at last! I abandoned long ago— The moon is clouded.
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—— Translated by Bob Jameson. ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
The House with the Cracked Walls
To say the word “home”— That word “home,” all by itself, Is pleasantly cool.
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A Conversation with Richard F. Calichman In some ways, Kōbō Abe is an origin story for me. He was one of the first authors I consciously read as translation, and after reading his translated oeuvre in one binge, I never looked back. Years later, with Beasts Head for Home, that collection expands. It’s a pleasure of translation that a dead author, and a translator like Richard F. Calichman, can gift readers with another work—not an unfinished posthumous piece, but a complete novel that has been waiting for someone to bring it across languages. Elements of Beasts Head for Home are familiar to anyone who knows Abe’s work—such as a protagonist who follows someone almost certainly deceiving him, while being lost both in space and in himself—but here it is more realistic, grounded, and historical. Not only that, but there are autobiographical connections. It can be an opening to the world of Abe, or a late entry, a glimpse into how that world came to be. PTS: There are a few other Kōbō Abe works left untranslated, so what drew you to this Beasts Head for Home? Is there something about it that appealed to you all, or does it come from a general love of Abe and this being one of the available options? RFC: A little of both, actually. I had admired Abe for PAGE 118
quite some time for his unusual ability to write fiction in a way that was clearly philosophically informed. That led me to translate his critical essays several years ago. Even then, however, I felt that I was perhaps focusing excessively on certain conceptual elements in his work and paying insufficient attention to his more fictional or literary qualities. That led me to the idea of translating one of the few novels that had not yet been rendered into English. At the same time, Beasts is a rather rare text. Generally speaking, modern Japanese literature tends to be set in Japan and involve primarily Japanese characters. Beasts is obviously different in that sense, but what struck me was that Abe was not simply interested in focusing on what takes place outside of Japan; rather, his intent was to disturb that very division between national interiority and exteriority. In this sense, Abe’s novel can be said to very much emerge from his own conceptual commitments. PTS: How would you pitch this book to someone? Is it something for the Abe completist, or would you hand it over to anyone expressing interest in him? RFC: It’s really an unusual work when viewed from the perspective of Abe’s entire corpus. Abe wanted to escape from the trap of national-cultural particularism in the sense of, for example, finding geisha and cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji in literary works from Japan. Because of that resistance to particularism, he generally avoided giving proper names to individuals and places that would identify them as recognizably Japanese. In order to express such literary themes as alienation and anxiety, for example, he thought it best to stage the texts in such a way that the actions depicted could take place anywhere and by anyone. Yet Beasts Head for Home is a work that is impossible to conceive outside of its specific historical setting. No doubt this might disappoint certain readers of Abe who
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Beasts of History, Beasts of Identity:
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are more used to, let’s say, a certain existential abstraction in his novels. These historical details are important, but it seems to me that Abe’s probing into the complexities of identity are just as central to this novel as they are to his more famous works. PTS: Is retranslating something that appeals to you? Abe has had a few translators—E. Dale Saunders, Donald Keene, Juliet Winters Carpenter—and they are talented, knowledgeable translators, so it’s not like Abe is someone in desperate need of retranslation, but the prose of Beasts Head for Home is different than much of his work. The sentences seem to have more room to breath, an easiness, even as the narrator faces death. Do you see this? Did it come from the text or from your approach? Did having others be the first to create his English voice create a style you felt you had to work within? RFC: The translators you mention are all first-rate, and it’s an honor for me to be mentioned in the same breath. Despite our different approaches to translation, I would say that all these translators found themselves in some sense touched by Abe’s work, and wanted to respond to that feeling by opening his work to a larger audience. There are different strategies one can adopt when translating, and part of these differences depend on the genre of what one is translating. My past translation work focused primarily on intellectual history. In those translations, it seemed important to me to represent concepts and lines of thought as precisely as possible, even if this meant occasionally disrupting or disturbing what is considered to be proper English. Many of Abe’s previous works were published by commercial presses for a more general readership. As a result, certain aspects of Abe’s language were at
moments somewhat ironed out in order to accommodate the English-language reader. Such external exigencies cannot simply be dismissed, I realize. At the same time, I was lucky enough to have greater freedom to allow the linguistic strangeness of Abe’s text to, as it were, sink its claws into the English. As a result, the translation reads at times a bit strangely, but it seemed important to me to preserve that strangeness as a sign of fidelity to the unsettling effects of Abe’s own language. PTS: If you were to retranslate Abe, what work would you choose? RFC: Interesting question. Perhaps The Woman of the Dunes. It’s already beautifully translated. My desire to retranslate the novel has less to do with any dissatisfaction I might feel with the translation than with my great admiration for the novel itself. This might be one of those rare occasions where critical and popular reception converge, correctly I believe. Teshigahara’s cinematic adaptation is brilliant, but the novel is probably Abe’s most sophisticated, accomplished work. PTS: The narrative of Beasts Head for Home shifts in its distance from Kyūzo often, and that must have influenced your translation. There are times when it’s omniscient and distant, other times his thoughts are set aside in parenthetical with quotes, and from time to time, it’s a third person intimate voice, but as the novel progress, slips into first person are more frequent. How does this come across in the original Japanese? How much did you consciously track and work on developing this slow shift in voice? RFC: You’re absolutely correct to see the novel in those terms, and this was without doubt the most difficult part of the translation. Given this fluidity of voice, which shifts unpredictably from omniscient narration to Kyūzo
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to yet another narrative perspective that cannot simply be equated to either of these, it was clear that Abe was commenting on the complexity of identity. At times Abe signals this shift more or less clearly, but there are other occasions where the shift takes place imperceptibly. In translating these passages, I tried to remain as faithful to the original Japanese as possible. As I mentioned earlier, this at times produces a sense of awkwardness or strangeness in the English, but it seemed important to stay as close to Abe as possible in these passages. PTS: Do you see Beasts Head for Home as an origin story for Abe? I don’t mean this autobiographically, Abe as a man, but as a writer. I was struck by how familiar everything was, even though this novel is incredibly different. Beasts is significantly more realistic than most of his work, so what in later work is abstract, strange, unsettling, is here realistic and literal, and its unsettling nature comes from suddenness or intensity. RFC: That’s an interesting interpretation, and I think you’re certainly correct to a degree. In terms of an origin story, however, it’s important to recall that even before Beasts was published, Abe had already written novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. I agree that the effects of realism are more assertive in this novel than in his later work, where, as you say, he often includes rather densely abstract passages. PTS: Viewed from this perspective, it is an interesting step in the development of an author, which for me is a deep pleasure to read and witness, but some might find that type of reading boring. What excites you most in this novel? What makes this novel stand out amongst Abe’s work that most readers might miss, but you reached, spending so much extra time with it?
RFC: I’m sure there are readers of Abe who might see in this novel nothing more than an instance of juvenilia, something that might allow us to retrospectively grasp the development that eventually led to the creation of his more famous works. That seems to me to be somewhat unfair to Abe, however. The insistence on the complexity and mystery of identity is fascinating in this work. Precisely because this thematic is elaborated in the context of concrete history, the thinking of identity extends here to the categories of nationality, ethnicity, and race. From the perspective of Abe’s later, more celebrated works, this is quite an unusual intervention. Given the attention to historical detail in a work that takes place partly on the basis of actual historical events, the critique of nationality in its relation to language and race is quite remarkable. The protagonist Kyūzo is constantly seeking out other Japanese with whom to establish some form of commonality, and Abe plays with this desire in order to show the fallacy of national unity as well as the lack of any necessary correspondence between the notions of nationality, race, and language. PTS: What Japanese author do you think needs translation? What book would you most want to translate? RFC: I realize that there’s not much of a market these days for translations from Japanese philosophy, but the fact remains that many valuable texts remain untranslated. Abe interests me partly for his attempt to introduce certain philosophical elements into literature. Generally speaking, that relation between philosophy and literature strikes me as an important one. In terms of a future translation project, perhaps I’ll eventually tackle some of the works of Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School of Philosophy.
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JOLENE LAI
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Cacophony
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PTS: For Ko and Kyūzo, our beasts, home is like the mark for Zeno’s arrow. There’s something similar with translation: you’re never going to completely reach the original. What did you feel was the absolute most important thing to make it clearly from the Japanese to the English? RFC: Translation involves a relation between languages, and it seems important not to automatically privilege the target language of English merely for the comfort of the English-language reader. In the past, translations were often done in such a way as to flatten out the oddness or apparent awkwardness of the original in order to present to the reader a form of English that did not greatly vary from established, conventional forms. Given the centrality of Abe’s artistic intent to disturb the reader, to remove him from his comfort zone so that he may encounter something unsettling or uncanny, it seemed important to allow for a departure from standard beauty or mellifluousness in order to introduce another, different form of beauty, one that was perhaps rougher around the edges and so capable of lingering longer, more uncomfortably, in the minds of readers.
THE SCOFIELD
Language, Ideology, and the House in Horror
The closing shots of John Carpenter’s original Halloween may be the most horrifying in all of cinema. And, in them, no murder takes place; we see no bodies, no blood: just houses. These images of deserted suburban residences in the night, with the silhouettes and shadows of leaves dancing on their whitened outer walls, commingle with the sound of deep breathing (the foreboding respiration of the escaped Michael Myers, acknowledged in the credits as merely “The Shape”). These final shots—more terrifying even than Myers’ bleached William Shatner mask, in part because the whitened walls and blackened windows reproduce the horror of the mask in the everyday— disorient all we think we know of the suburbs and force us to confront the false sense of security we feel indoors. The house, the dwelling place, in its varied forms and styles, has long been associated with horror wherever it exists (in urban, suburban, or rural areas): there’s the eponymous old dark house in James Whale’s The Old Dark House, a setting as unsettling as the Fenns who inhabit it; the quaint columned Elm Street home in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, with its blood red door and barred windows, where Freddy Krueger torments in dreams; the archetypal haunted house in Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror, an abode in the Dutch Colonial Revival style, with haunting eye-like windows, where George Lutz claims that “houses don’t have memories;” the residences in the planned community PAGE 122
of Cuesta Verde in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, callously built over bodies, bones; the English country estate of Bly in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, where Henry James’ screw is turned; the Bramford apartments in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, ground zero for the devil’s return; the creaky castle of the titular count of Transylvania in Tod Browning’s Dracula; the psychedelic, cannibalistic Japanese manse in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House; the isolated cabin in the woods in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. The house is the body on which the horror film is largely writ. But why is this so? Why do most of the great horror films obsess over the physical structure that we, in our attempts at self-assurance and safekeeping, call a “home”? An answer may lie in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, where the philosopher stated, “Language is the House of Being. In its home human beings dwell.” What these horror films do is literalize the Heideggerian metaphor, where the house as language becomes ideology—that which we dwell in, that which we cling to, that which gives us shelter, that which we use to define ourselves, and that which, ultimately, we cannot escape. When the first cavedwellers left the caves and erected their initial edifice, they were in search of a new and better home, and what they built was a house. That house presumably had a foundation, a structure, walls, a roof, and thus, in fulfilling its core purpose, acted as a barrier, offering protection from the outside world—from the elements, from predators, and from horrors both physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural. But the home is more than the structure of the house—more than mere roof and walls—it is also the comfort this structure provides, the sense of belonging it engenders. The home is our private place, the nook where
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A House Is Not a Home:
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we hoard the detritus of our lives, the museum that houses our menageries and our memories, the body we choose to build outside of the body we’re given. “We spend all our time here,” one character says of the home she shares with her husband in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! “I want to make a paradise.” And, indeed, a proper home does often seem like a paradise, a safe haven, a hermetic universe, a Garden of Eden. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “Our house is our corner of the world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” A home is where we dwell, not just where we live. Though one might assume that building comes before and, therefore, allows the act of dwelling, in the Heideggerian sense, dwelling is actually fundamental for building, it is always-already-there. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger explained, “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving.” Dwelling is predicated upon sparing and preserving things as they are, as they are becoming. He proclaimed, “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.” What, then, do we build for dwelling? What is this house-shaped cosmos we call “home”? Is it, as the cliche assures us, the place “where the heart is”? Is it the site of our sleeping? Is it the space where we store our stuff? Is it the location in which we feel most safe? Is it a residence with rooms, and walls, and doors, and…windows? Windows, perhaps the most chilling features of a house, are the planes through which we are seized by the uncanny. They are places of intrusion. Though their primary purpose is to allow the dweller within the house
to peer out, they also, crucially, allow those outside the house to peer in. The most horrifying moment is arguably not the moment when the murderer stands over you with knife in hand about to snuff you out, but instead it’s the moment when you notice him lurking outdoors, peering through windows into your private place, knowing you’re being watched, stalked, hunted. It must be noted that “eyes are the windows to the soul” not because eyes are the place where the soul peers out to the other, but because they’re the place where the other peers into the soul. Windows allow the outside world a glimpse of the inside, those beyond the house to view the home. For, as we know, the home is as much the clutter within as it is the walls and the roof. The home is the leftover Chinese food in the refrigerator, the slept-in sheets on the California King bed, the teddybear snuggled between the matching decorative pillows, the work halffinished at the desk, the wineglasses left in the sink with purplish-brown rings, the hairpins huddled together on the nightstand. The horror genre itself is a home, of sorts, too—with its comforting cliches, its common structures, and its seeming safety. (After all, it is rare, though not impossible, for the horror onscreen to be mirrored in the theater itself.) As the heroine of Wes Craven’s Scream, Sidney Prescott, says of scary movies, “What’s the point? They’re all the same.” And she’s not entirely off-base. While horror films can look and act differently, just like houses, they do seem to serve common tropological purposes, housing similar horrors. The genre exists in a continuum of metaphorical language, where not just endings (the virginal girl lives, the horror is held at bay but still exists to haunt the franchise at a later date…) and images (house, mask,
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knife, noose…) recur, but even things as seemingly unique as names tend to circle back unexpectedly, re-fed through the projector. Dr. Samuel Loomis, the psychiatrist who watches Michael Myers grow from boy to man (or, as Loomis sees it, from boy-sized force of evil to man-sized force of evil) borrows his name from the lover of Marion Crane, the shower victim of Norman Bates in Psycho— another film where houses and bodies are more haunting than homey, traps and tombs instead of sanctuaries and citadels. Dr. Loomis says of Myers, “I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall.” In horror films, evil sees through walls as though they were windows. It stalks its prey regardless of interrupting obstructions. As is said of the “it” in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, “Wherever you are, it’s somewhere walking straight for you.” You can put distance and people between you and it, but it keeps following. This is true of all the most terrifying forces of evil in horror. These forces, these followers, they want you to stop running, want you to be lulled by the imagined safety edifice erects. They fear not the house which the victim calls a home. If anything, this supposed safe space, this comforting domicile, becomes the killer’s playground, his mousetrap. Locks can be picked; windows can be broken; all boundaries are porous. Even a closed door has a welcome mat, as if inviting the axe. Evil can’t be stopped. It gains entry, and then uses the home against us, trapping us in our own closets, stabbing us with our own cutlery, turning the walls we erected to protect us into our tombs. As Freud knew, we are not even masters in our own houses. Our misguided sense of security in the home is more enticing than the cheese to the mouse, but, as deadly
temptation, it has an even higher kill rate Of course, sometimes in horror films, there are motives given to the killers: revenge or fame, anger or jealousy, money or madness, hunger or sexual desire. But the best slashers and monsters on the silver screen remain mysterious, they come after us for reasons we can’t recognize, reasons it seems they might not recognize themselves. Myers, as the ultimate abjection, needs no other motives. He’s the blank canvas which Norman Rockwell painted over. As Carpenter explained of his creation, “Michael Myers was an absence of character.” He erupts from the Rockwell painting with no other purpose than reminding us that he’s always been lurking beneath the surface, that in fact the surface is as predicated on his existence as it is its covering up. The opening scene of the original Halloween shows six-year-old Myers committing what is presumably his first murder. The victim, his sister, has just had sex with her boyfriend—which one might abstract into a web of assumptions regarding his motivations, but this would be a mistake, for the film gives us no motive for Myers. Motivations aren’t superimposed onto the character until the sequels, which is why the original has always remained superior to the films that followed. Once we know why a force of evil is following us, the force becomes less frightening. If you explain a monster away, you risk making him palatable. The most horrifying motivations, therefore, come in the form of answers that beget more questions, cryptic explanations with even more terrifying ramifications. In Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, for example, one of Halloween’s latter day descendants, the victims ask the three killers their motive. One answers, “Because you were home.” This, of course, on the one hand, means nothing; it implies, “Because
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we could,” or “Because you were there,” and would have the same basic meaning if the killer had merely left off at the word “Because…” Yet, on the other hand, this “Because you were home” opens up a whole new horrible possibility, one that is foundational to the horror genre: the home brings the danger as much as it insulates us from it. And more than just bringing the danger by inviting the horror in, the home may in fact already house the horror, a terror that is always-already-there. Every Eden has a Tree of Knowledge, a serpent, some forbidden fruit. The home—all homes, in fact—might be, as they say of the haunted house in Robert Wise’s The Haunting, “an evil house from the beginning—a house that was born bad.” Thus, even when Poltergeist’s Tangina, after removing her glasses and posing for the camera, announces, “This house is clean,” we ought to know better—no house is clean, safe, certain. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard claimed that “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,” but it is precisely our steadfast belief in this idea—our allowing the house to become a sanctuary in our minds, our letting down our guard in the home—that makes it such a dangerous space. This misplaced faith in a structure “born bad” is not only what can turn those dreams into nightmares, but worse, it is what can wake us from our dreams into the worst form of nightmare: a living horror. Likewise, language and ideology, the warp and woof of being, are not only the structure and safety offered by the home but the walls which trap us too. The language that gives us a way to vocalize our being is also the tool that confines us in itself, that disallows any transcendent understanding of being, that confronts us with the horror
of its own lack—the real horror that underpins all art. Scream’s Sidney Prescott argues that scary movies always have “some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door.” Countless horror filmgoers have sung a similar refrain: “Why do the characters always stay in the house or run back into the house once they’ve exited? What is this magnetic attraction to a structure that they already know is compromised?” It might be that the house is the only place we can run to. It’s all we have to protect us, even when it fails at providing protection. “Without it”—without this dwelling place—Bachelard noted, “man would be a dispersed being.” And without language, too, man would be a dispersed being, with no means of cohesion. (However false our cohesive identity may be, it is a fiction that we are attracted to—not unlike the home—one we need, one we continually reify.) Yet if language is the house of being, then along with acting as the place where an inhabitant dreams during restful nights of sleep, as the magnet which attracts a victim in distress, and as the site where a murderer traps his prey in a closet, it is also the space for the suicide who wrote his final goodbyes, stands up on a chair, slips his head through a noose, and kicks out the chair from under him. That empty chair is all we leave behind, the material that outlasts our ideology and our identity, our belief and our being. “Oh yes, and this house will be here long, long after you have departed,” Arnold Allardyce admits in Dan Curtis’ Burnt Offerings. It turns out that what we thought was home—the chair, the bedsheets, the hairpins—is actually nothing more than the collected debris within the house. As Dionne Warwick sublimely sang in that classic
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Bacharach-David hit: “A chair is still a chair / Even when there’s no one sittin’ there / But a chair is not a house / And a house is not a home.”
—— An earlier version of this essay was published at Literary Hub under the title “Every House Is a Haunted House.”
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In the Bedroom
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II.
Last year, at forty-three, I got very sick. My mother sent me a color copy of an old photo. She even named it: “The Book Lover,” a photo of me in my crib, I was no more than two or three years old, with a pile of books in my lap. I remembered that crib disassembled, the cracked pad, cotton stuffing, brittle skin, the headboard, and backboard, thin wooden bars, all leaned flat against a mattress in the dim attic room. Queens, New York. I discovered the crib as a young boy and could not make sense of the fact that it had once been my small bed. As a child, I did not see its obvious resemblance to a prison, even though my fingers once gripped those bars. Later, at fourteen, I had a bedroom beside that attic and occasionally saw the forgotten crib leaning there in the darkness. Daily, it fell away from me further in memory, but I did finally see the resemblance. The crib looked like a jail, and my surly teenage self liked the comparison. Now, I see how silly the jail cell metaphor is, that crib bars are not meant to imprison a child, to keep a child from accessing the world, but rather simply meant to keep a child from falling from bed while sleeping, and to stop the world from touching the child, to stop sickness, suffering, and death from slipping in like ghosts between those bone-like spindles.
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III. My father, a Jehovah’s Witness minister, said he would build me an artist’s bed. I was fourteen and wanted to be a cartoonist, and my hero was Don Martin of MAD Magazine. The bed consisted of a wooden platform, low to the floor, with built-in drawers for materials, pens, pencils, paper, a mattress, and a stage for my upright drawing desk. How good of him, I realize now. My own studio. I lay on that bed devising comic book ideas, thesaurus-inspired
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I.
My brother and I shared a bedroom for over a decade, and we slept on bunk bed-halves not stacked. I can still see the thick wooden dowels atop my bedposts and the wide empty holes atop my brother’s. The bed was sturdy, wooden, painted black, and waiting to be paired with the other. It never was. I dreamed there of Spider Man, and had nightmares after re-watching Psycho. I built forts from tented sheets and chairs balanced on the mattress, and swung Star Wars action figures on strings during interplanetary wars, while my brother mocked and watched. I had, have two brothers. The first: we shared that room, hated one other, and cruelly fought like children do. I kicked him in the eye one Saturday and sent him bleeding to the hospital. We are now best friends. I adore him. The second: the one who used to hide beneath my bed, the one who patiently waited for me to go to sleep, and then terrified me with sudden pulls of bed sheets, a crawling left hand under the covers, an ecstatic flash of his face in the dark—I adored him. We no longer speak much.
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A Brief History of Beds
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My father kindly suggested he and I build a headboard for my new bed, one that also served as a bookshelf. We did this together, and stained the wood dark cherry. I was sixteen, and my parents and I had just made a difficult move from Queens, New York to Lawrenceville, Georgia. It was a grim transition. Letters from Vanessa M. weekly wounded my heart (“We will always be friends.”). My dream of being a cartoonist had faded, and books were now my main interest. And girls. I even had my own library: all of Kurt Vonnegut, much of Ray Bradbury, and all of Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels. I read countless books in that bed, and often pretended to be reading the Jehovah’s Witness literature, Watchtowers, Awakes, the Bible. I wrestled with angels. One day, a few years later, I left home, taking my books and leaving the empty headboard behind.
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I had, again, a low mattress, this time directly on the floor, surrounded by stacks of books, and records, CDs, Neil Young, the Minutemen, a boom box, a record player, and a waist-high pile of clothes in the corner. I had begun to dimly develop my theory that a low bed kept one grounded. Forgive the pun—I meant it. This was my first apartment. Roswell Road. I lived with three other guys. It wasn’t pretty. There was a general stink of mold and urine. I had my own room, and paid extra for it. I had stopped going to church, to the great dismay of my parents. More, I had left the Jehovah’s Witness faith entirely. I stayed in that room. I listened to records. I read, and slept, and worked as a meat cutter. I sat low on the floor and pondered the single question of God. VI. I don’t recall much about this bed except it had a metal frame, thick box spring, and a luxurious mattress. I slept some four feet from the floor. Not my kind of bed. This was in my first house, which I bought for my girlfriend. Snellville, Georgia. The house was cheap. I was making good money in sales at a computer hardware and software distributor. She lived in the house, but I did not. Until we got married, and I was no longer a virgin. We had outdoor furniture inside the home. A metal backyard sofa, chairs, and a chaise in the living room. The rooms never felt quite lived in. Some of them were empty. We were really just kids playing house. I played guitar in that bed. I was not very good. I listened to music on headphones in that bed. Townes Van Zandt. The Go-Betweens. We would soon move to California and take the bed along.
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names of super heroines and heroes (ION, who had a Laser Sword), but mostly thinking of girls. I fell in love daily and counted, there, in bed, the many ways I especially loved Vanessa M. She was my moon and I responded like a wave to the possibility of her telephone calls. I also remember what strange pleasure I took every morning in rolling from the bed’s low mattress to the floor. Roll. Half-fall. Sit. I am closer to the ground. This means something. I was an angry kid and that bed gave me a kind of bodily relief. It made me appreciate the possible power of a gesture.
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VIII. I unrolled the thin mattress pad at night and slept badly with my left shoulder painfully pressed against the hardwood floor, in Queens, New York, back home, after leaving my wife. I was young, angry, confused. I stayed with an old friend and we kept that mattress pad in the hall closet. This was the start of a long and self-imposed penance. IX. The bed was already there when we moved in which means I slept for years on someone else’s bed. It was a ghostly room. I bought an expensive pillow and taped a photo of Kim Gordon on the wall above my sleeping head. The old friend and I had rented an apartment, and I got a job waiting tables at an Applebee’s. (I will never again
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X. I had a room in the basement of a large two-story home (we had moved closer to the Applebee’s), a small nightstand by the bed, a lamp, a covered metal bowl in which I saved my tips. And of course I had a mattress on the floor. I was relatively happy, though I quietly mourned the death of my marriage. I read all of Kerouac. My favorite was Big Sur. I wanted to be a writer, and I sat on my mattress and wrote bad short stories, and I read, and read, and read, and thought of myself as something of a monk. The space was spartan. Except for the gleaming drum kit. I had taken up drums. I was a terrible drummer. XI. I slept on my brother’s sofa, back in Atlanta. It was old, lumpy, dusty, ripped, and had long been the soft, mute witness to all sorts of debaucheries. It is remarkable where we lay our heads when we are tired. I met my current wife on that sofa. I was wearing “mules,” backless leather sandals, and one dangled from my foot as I crossed the leg. She was next to me on the sofa—there was a party going
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In Seal Beach, California, we bought a “milkwashed” set of wooden bedroom furniture, including a tremendous bed with thick, bulbous bedposts. It was expensive, and the Southern California sun shone through the gauzy window veils and the bed looked as if it were in a Home and Garden magazine photo spread. It was a perfect bedroom and I never felt comfortable there. The bedroom was hers, as often happens, and I had my own room, with a record player, and stereo, a low leather sofa with a wooden frame. We increasingly spent time in separate rooms. I sometimes lay on that sofa, asking myself why we had married, while staring up at the ceiling, alone. We would eventually divorce.
eat at an Applebee’s.) We lived alongside the Long Island Expressway and I had my own bedroom. I spoke with my estranged wife on the phone several times in that bed. I wept in that bed. I did a lot of drugs in that bed to forget I was awake and once did more drugs than I could handle and lost consciousness and dreamed that I was dead. I believe I might have actually been briefly dead. I saw the great white light and I entered it, I became the white light, and then awoke in a sweaty, terrified calm. I eventually left that bed behind. I hated that bed.
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VII.
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We had a great wide and simple bed and I heavily slept there after working double-waiting shifts at the South City Kitchen. We had rented a small house in Cabbagetown, East Atlanta and books lined the floor along the wall, and were stacked on homemade shelves, long planks of wood fitted into concrete blocks. I occasionally talked on the phone with my ex. I was wildly committed to my new girlfriend—we’d moved in together three weeks after our first unstoppable date—but I had still not divorced. Divorce is complicated, and I was still trying to come down from years of hazardous living, and bouncing, really, from day to day, living irresponsibly, incidentally, accidentally, come what may. When my girlfriend found out the ex and I were still talking and the divorce had not been finalized, we fought. I spent part of that night “sleeping” on the slatted porch swing that hung from chains. I wore no clothes. XIII. The bed came with the cluttered apartment, non-descript. We’d moved together to Forest Hills, New York City, and rented an apartment from a former bar patron in Atlanta, who owned property in Queens. We took a leap. The landlord also owned a medical sales and rental company. We shared the apartment with a gargantuan nurse with wide shoulders. Medical equipment lay scattered throughout the rooms. So did his hair. He was hairy. Like PAGE 130
XIV. The small bedroom fit only the bed, same mattress from Atlanta (it had stood against the wall in our former apartment), new bedframe, its sides pressing against the walls, and a hospital room-style television affixed to the corner upper wall on a steel swiveling arm. I had to climb across the bed to leave the room. We’d moved across the hall into our own apartment, same landlord. It was all small. There was nothing particularly romantic about that place, save for the fact that Joey Ramone had once lived in the apartment above us. XV. The bed was an IKEA platform model. Built-in drawers. Hard wooden sleeping surface for the mattress. Low to the ground. To this day, it remains my favorite bed. We’d moved to Astoria, Queens. 1,200 square feet. Our first apartment with space. And we fought madly as I pieced the bed together with tools discovered in junk drawers, kitchen cabinets, and the glove compartment of our Honda Del Sol. (Phillips screwdriver.) We lived there for seven peaceful years—we got married—before the eventual invasion, before they came crawling down the pipe from the upstairs neighbors drawn to our proximate body heat. My wife’s ankles swelled, she had a bad reaction. Bedbugs. We tossed most of our clothes, all of our furniture, slept
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fur from a dog. One night, in bed, I worked on a short story about a childhood friend who had been murdered and while I was writing the local TV news, silent, displayed the face of the very same friend. It was like some digital religious vision. I stared up at the screen, drawn, frozen.
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on, loud music, beer cans in koozies, strangers climbing support poles on the patio. She said, “You think you’re sexy, don’t you?” She ignored me for many months afterward.
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The bed frame was steel, on wheels, bedbug-proof, and the small boxy bedroom barely contained it. Manhattan. Another small apartment. On the Upper East Side. Only 350 square feet, but, somehow, two terraces. Nine-footwindows, floor to ceiling. The light was glorious, buttery, and bathed our tiny gray sofa in yellow. At night, by now, the bed slept five, me, my wife, two cats, and a pug. One early morning I stood on the bed trying to hold my iPhone steady convinced I was recording a UFO. My bleary eyes eventually recognized the object as a police helicopter. We lived there for eight years before my first book tour took us to California. We fell for the West Coast fast and hard. XVII. Our stuff in storage. Someone else’s furniture. Again, someone else’s bed. This was Southern California, an Airbnb. We rented a converted garage for six months. I often lay on that bed trying to incubate lucid dreams. This was strange behavior for me. I watched YouTube how-to videos. We held a book club in the rented yard. No one read the book. A possum walked along the top of our fence and Olive the pug barked. The possum froze, played dead, and stared at us with a face of fear and snarling horror for forty-five minutes straight. I timed it on the kitchen stove clock. I had one lucid dream in which I saw a samurai ghost guarding our bedroom. PAGE 131
The bed is the very same IKEA low platform model I loved so much in Queens. Assembling it the second time was a cinch. No fight. The weather was too good. We’d moved to West Hollywood. 1,000 square feet of open space. Golden light. The Dream of the West. A washing machine and dryer, our first. We also didn’t argue because I got sick. Very sick. I was hospitalized for ten days. My first bout with mental illness. My dreams invaded my waking days and those dreams were apocalyptic nightmares. Our two-year love affair with California was ruined. We left the great bed leaning against a chain-link fence across the street and fled home for New York. IXX. We live on the Upper West Side, our smallest apartment yet. 300 square feet. A sublet, we are lease-less. The room was rented empty, save for one thing—a lone metal futon. We have stacked our books around us, and we sleep. We sleep on a rented bed, low to the ground, and, over wine, every evening, in bed, we talk of possible futures in which we move to Bourbon, Kentucky and learn “the whiskey business,” or to Ashville, North Carolina to run a bar and bookstore, or to upstate New York to become beekeepers. And of course, every dream has a bed—though the bed goes unspoken, always unspoken. And in those dreams we are healthy, there are no medicines, my hands do not shake, and in those dreams we are settled, us three, the cats are gone now, it’s just, Olive, Kate, and me, and this city, this home, this bed will be our last.
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XVI.
XVIII.
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on a tent erected on top of the mattress, and then moved to a different borough within one week of sighting the first bloodsucker. We left the bed behind.
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TEOW LIM GOH
HIROSHIGE UTAGAWA
Mirage The tide keeps rising past the barrier of logs and sand. The house is in danger from the sea. A green light glares, the fog horns blast. Far away, boats appear as fairy
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Asakusa Rice Fields and Festival of Torinomachi
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vessels of glass.
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I. Three Movies In the 1960s, the Japanese author Kōbō Abe, director Hiroshi Teshigahara, and composer Toru Takemitsu made three movies about people undergoing drastic identity transformations. These are the films: 1) Pitfall. Based on Abe’s television play titled Purgatory, involving an impoverished miner who is murdered, and who then becomes a ghost that watches the humans he has left behind claim his body and life. 2) Woman in the Dunes. Based on the Abe novel of similar title, involving a man who is coerced into excavating a pit constantly filling with sand, from where he learns to love his fellow prisoner and the prospects of his life. 3) The Face of Another. Based on the Abe novel of the same title, involving a chemist whose his face is mutilated in an industrial accident, and who must claim a new identity by taking on another man’s face. Three movies, three shifts of identity: alive to dead, free to imprisoned, disfigured to restored. We can add a fourth shift: from book to film; text to image. Originally conceived by Abe as pure language, these words emerge from a savage struggle into figures. A little like a full body transplant, the old brain straining to assert its self from within new skin and limbs. They are about the mind’s need to find meaning in any situation the body is thrown into. No matter the setting, PAGE 133
we must construct the identity that allows us to inhabit it. If we fail to do this, we are lost. Another thing about these films: they live in the border regions between realism and allegory. Their protagonists possess life histories, and they do live in a world like ours. Yet they depend on types: there is always a Powerful Character imbued with the ego of a god, and he has the means to impose a new identity; there is a Subject whom circumstances have put inextricably within the Powerful Character’s grip, and from whose futile resistance comes the plot tension; and there is a Third, always a woman, who observes the Subject’s identity shift and whose submission to the Powerful Character’s authority represents an important alternative. Three lives interlocking. An obvious sense here of a nuclear family, the father, son, and mother; but the true dexterity of these films is in mapping these types onto as many triads as we might manage. Executive, Legislative, Judicial; First World, Second World, Third World; the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit; Id, Ego, Superego; Christianity, Judaism, Islam; Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis; Past, Present, Future; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… One last triad: Abe, Teshigahara, Takemitsu: word, image, sound. Three visionary, interdisciplinary talents; towering intellectuals of the postwar era. Three equally robust minds imposed upon one another: a uniquely potent situation. For three is not two, three never resolves into stability, into order. Three is a mischievous number. These men push one another into greater and greater discoveries. Alliances shift, the binary is forever being upset by that troublesome third. That dynamism is artistic strength.
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The Oort Cloud
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The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical sphere of trillions of chunks of rock and ice that stretches perhaps as much as halfway to the nearest star. It is likely the largest structure in our solar system, though it is invisible to us, its individual pieces too small for our instruments to detect. It represents the absolute limit of our sun’s gravitational field, and therefore the very end of the system of heavenly bodies that houses us and our home planet. It is theorized that the sun’s gravity sits so weakly upon the Oort Cloud that the gravitational influence of passing stars, and even that of the Milky Way galaxy itself, can dislodge pieces of the Cloud, sending them crashing in toward the Earth, where they might be consumed by the sun, or detonate in our planet’s atmosphere, or simply fly by as a dramatic and unprecedented light in the night sky. Comets reaching us from the Oort Cloud can have orbits lasting thousands of years, and they have likely had significant influence on the evolution of life on this planet. Although he was Japanese, Abe grew up an outsider, raised in the large chunk of northern China that Japan had annexed for its empire, known then as Manchuria. In 1978 Abe told Nancy Shields, “I am essentially a man without a hometown. This may be what lies behind the ‘hometown PAGE 134
When he died in 1993, the New York Times called Abe, “the skeptical poet of an uprooted society.” Born in 1924, he came of age as his nation’s glorious empire was destroyed, its emperor humiliated, its age-old culture invaded by an alien way of life. Amid this convulsing social organism, how could Abe have turned his experience into anything but existentialist parables about dislocation and the trauma of identity? III. Stimulation “A common earthworm won’t attain full growth if it’s not stimulated, they say.” We are first thrown into this world uncertain, and over decades we build a sense of narrative, granting our life a feeling of purpose. This is the basis of a stable, coherent, satisfying life. But then dawns the day when identity is profoundly contested. You are stripped of the job you have invested decades into. Your life partner is revealed to have lied to you for years. Your body is mutilated and no longer yours. Your community’s values transform into ideals you detest. These are the moments when you must doubt the story you have put your life toward. What then? How does one overcome this grievous loss? How to reclaim your life’s narrative? How to rebuild the certainty that only comes from decades of slow acquisition? There are frequently cases when we must construct our life narrative within a situation imposed upon us by duress. At these points one experiences a tension: always
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Much like the vast clouds of experience that coalesce into identity, there is no clear way of gathering the many points of intersection among the three movies made by Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu. There are only the innumerable pinpoints through which a viewer may enter, the multitudinous observations that speak to that great circumscribing subject whose existence is no sooner intuited than it has shifted into a new form.
phobia’ that runs in the depth of my feelings. All things that are valued for their stability offend me.”
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II. The Oort Cloud
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Anonymity is another word for estrangement. To be fully anonymous is to be fully alienated. Anonymity is to withdraw identity into perfect privacy, which is to deprive identity of oxygen. An identity’s survival depends on touch, it comes to resemble that which it is most touched by. When it is touched by nothing it comes to resemble nothing at all. At the most basic level, if one is not spoken to, it is possible to lose the faculty of language, which is the basis of all self-knowledge. If anonymity is the name for the person whose identity is perfectly masked, then what is the word for the person whose identity is perfectly known? IV. Freedom Pitfall opens with the Miner dashing for his life through dark night. He is deserting his mine, which owns him like a servant. This is the only possible way to escape its grip. He strives to be free, and he succeeds, but freedom’s burdens are soon met: in order to eat he will connive, he will suffer backbreaking work and humiliation, he will walk into a trap that equals his death. In Pitfall, freedom = alienation; the Miner’s identity = his means of his escape. He must always be wary of freedom’s next pitfall. What is it to be free? Freedom means the possibility of a PAGE 135
hidden or unsuspected danger. It implies hazard, requires risk, puts you into peril. At the least it forces you to experience difficulty, the possibility of being caught or snagged or stumbling. That’s one vision of freedom, call it individualistic. There is another; say, communal. It involves the art of submitting gracefully, of adapting to a role. If the individualistic dominates Pitfall’s narrative, the communal claims the two films that follow it. There is always a tension between the individualistic and the communal visions of freedom; the freedom to discover one’s form vs. the freedom to inhabit a role. Abe’s protagonists must decide which freedom they can best tolerate. So must we. Junpei is an amateur entomologist hunting bugs in the desert. There is some easy irony to the insects he captures en route to being lured into an inescapable pit of sand. The genius of Woman in the Dunes is that it doesn’t merely set its existential drama in the desert; it makes the landscape a major character. The futility and forcedness of hauling sand, the impersonalness and implacability of the shifting pebbles. The tantalizing prospect of escape always seems so near at hand (how can something so paltry as sand grains spell Junpei’s doom?). And the estrangement of this chthonic place that enforces its enfeebling rules with a crushing power. I assume the place where Junpei is captured is the Tottori Sand Dunes, the only sizable desert in all of Japan, which Abe visited before writing his novel. In a perfect detail that no novelist would dare invent, this landscape has
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striving toward the meaning required by our nature, but also repulsed by the world that we are forced to find meaning from within. This is the crux of the existentialist worldview: the need to find meaning in a world that fundamentally alienates us. It is precisely this tension that gives these three movies their coiled energy.
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V. Disfigurement The dominion that bodies cast over identity is unmistakable in the shots of a prosthetic finger that open The Face of Another. Dr. Hira declares, “sadly, this is not only a finger, it’s an inferiority complex in the shape of a finger.” Hira understands that our fragile bodies are indispensible and irreplaceable—break them and you break the mind that depends on them: “Inferiority complexes dig holes in the psyche, and I fill them in.” His patient is Okuyama’s destroyed face. We first glimpse Okuyama via an x-ray of his skull, and this gabbing jawbone is as close as we’ll ever come to seeing his true face, which is always swaddled with enormous bandages, or covered in Hira’s perfect mask. Okuyama would rather be a death’s head, or a covered head, or another’s head, than his own flesh. When medical science gives Okuyama a new face, it is an indication that modern medicine has given us all a new face. Our understanding of ourselves is predicated on its regime for interacting with our bodies and conceiving our minds. It construes what we see when we look toward those letters that spell human. When we look into the mirror, we see what medicine tells us to see. When next it PAGE 136
makes a massive leap—perhaps it will be perfect genetic alterations, or the capacity to build motherless humans, or an entirely new concept of consciousness—our whole vision of ourselves will shift accordingly. Nuclear weapons: the ultimate authoritative father to terrify the modern psyche into obeisance. A subplot in The Face of Another treads deeply into their use upon Japan, a national disfigurement analogous to Okuyama’s deformities. Having seen its flesh mutilated, its empire and emperor taken, Japan felt the world’s eyes transfixed on its abasements. It needed a new face to survive. The stresses that came with this masking produced the social turmoil that gave rise to Abe’s collaborations with Teshigahara and Takemitsu, which chronicled the very stresses that enabled them. Were it not for the war’s traumas, Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu would not have been possible. Absent the turmoil unleashed onto their society by a shocking modernization, what would have become of their genius? How could their creativity have taken the forms of alienation and existentialism to which it seems so uniquely suited? Perhaps certain veins of artistic genius cannot be worked in the wrong time and place. What if Virginia Woolf had come of age and written in the Victorian era and not between the World Wars—would she still have reached so deep into human consciousness to invent a form of prose capable of rendering it visible on the page? It is a fundamental function of art to ponder the conditions that made the world that requires the art. A mask can be in the shape of a bandage or in the shape of a face. The first will chasten the wearer, because it declares
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shrunk for decades and is in danger of death. Invasive crabgrass afflicts it, and concrete barriers meant to protect against tsunami now prevent the ocean from depositing dearly needed sand. Extensive desertification efforts are under way. The Japanese hope to save their only desert. Nonetheless, Tottori’s reputation of untamed wildness, of being a place where one might become unfindable, appears irredeemable. Perhaps it is a warning for those who, like Abe, would stand outside of society.
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one’s anonymity; the second will empower because it hides anonymity beneath the best possible guise, authenticity. And this is also why the bandage can never come to feel natural, even though with time your old face might grow into the shape of the mask. Once the prosthetic has filled in the psyche, it ceases to be noticed as such—it is simply you. This completion is only possible with the most subtle, enduring of our prosthetics; for instance: language, image, ego, narrative.
The occasion of your death will add a crucial detail to your life narrative, but it will have no meaning for you, only those you leave behind. Once you die you are no longer human, no longer of this Earth, and so you must care no more for your life’s story. But after he is murdered, the Miner is resurrected into an afterlife where he walks the Earth, and as he watches what the humans make of his death, he cares very much about the story they tell of him. This is the profound tragedy of the Miner’s predicament. He is forced to endure the fact that those who are still alive seek to make sense of his death, with no regard to his own interpretation. It seems that this would wholly undermine the peace that one supposes would make heaven idyllic: how could one inhabit the afterlife in equanimity while watching all the mischief survivors made of your life’s narrative? Which of us would not be like the Miner, endlessly bedeviled by the thought that they were getting it all wrong?
“Why was I killed? What was it for? Where was the meaning in my life?” Suicide is the only form of death that is under our control; any other will necessarily impose upon our life narrative an endpoint that is outside our will.
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All life long, we must wonder how and when we will die. For only a few moments will we know that death is imminent, and thus experience the resolution of this question. What insight comes in those moments between the realization that your time has come and the sweeping of death’s blade? What change does it bring to this thing we call identity? VII. Futility The fear of not knowing who one is; the fear that identity is not one’s choice; the fear of depending on one’s body; the fear of a world without fixed identity; the fear that there is no real identity; the fear of a life lacking meaning; the fear of a bad death; the fear of losing one’s identity
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A dapper man dressed entirely in white murders Pitfall’s Miner, but the movie’s plot dynamics make it impossible to say why he kills. It is a wholly senseless killing, entirely unnecessary by the plot’s own logic. Who is the dapper man in white? For whom does he operate? And where does the Miner’s death fit into his plan? These answers remain unknowable because Pitfall does not give us the necessary information to piece them together. We must add our own information—say, for instance, that the dapper man was an operative of certain interests, or that he represents fate, or that he is an aspect of God. But we have no firm evidence for any of these conclusions, so the narrative ends in discord, like a jarring note of Takemitsu’s that leaves us wanting resolution.
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VI. Death
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To use your chopsticks to pick off one ant after another as they flood over a tray of crisp donuts. To use a gallon bucket to excavate a cavernous sand pit that is always being filled by the desert winds. To use words to rebuild an ego that is thrown into humiliation at every gaze. “Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?’’ There are many pits to be stuck in. There is the Earth’s gravity, from which only a handful have ever climbed free. There is the need to be nourished and to be loved. There is the entangling sense of self. There is language. There is culture. There is the body. Community. Relationships. Logic. Reason. Health. Etc. The horror of Woman in the Dunes is realizing that these pits are so integral to the human condition that it takes the most powerful possible art to make us realize that they are pits. What difference does it make whether all the sand that entraps you is slowly replaced by new sand if you are still stuck in the same pit? Or is it a new pit now—who cares? What difference does it make if all the cells of your body change but you’re still the same you? New body, old
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person. If all the neurons in your brain fill with thoughts and memories but they still comprise the same self? People are a flow of sand. The sand is the only movement. It’s constantly in motion, and it’s impossible to tell the new from the old. VIII. The Invention of the Psyche Through our individuality we generate life histories. These histories let others make judgments about us, and they let us construe the meaning of our lives. Any tampering with them is an existential threat both to ourselves and the communities we inhabit. Our understanding of humanity necessitates an enduring identity; if it could be changed at whim, we would could escape all rules, all morality. As much as the social order attempts to impose itself upon these identities, we must claim agency over our enduring self; otherwise we very rightly feel that our life is not ours but someone else’s. Part of the pleasure of these movies is in seeing what happens when identity is tampered with. Instinctively we know that this is perverse. Off limits. Identity should not be imposed from without; it should be the authentic result of a life lived freely. Our nature warns us from the methods required to actively construct a human psyche. Their results seem dubious. In Dr. Hira’s immaculately white office, Okuyama’s disfigured face is posed before two images: da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and Langer’s lines. The former is an idealization of the human body based in natural proportions, the latter is a map of human skin that is indispensible to cosmetic surgery. Combined with the
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in love; the fear of losing one’s identity in chaos; the fear of losing one’s identity in death; the fear that one will never determine one’s identity; the fear that one is superfluous; the fear that one is unnecessary; the fear that one is pointless; the fear that one wants what one is not; the fear of anonymity; the fear of the mirror; the fear of being unmasked; the fear of loneliness; the fear of being misconstrued; the fear of failing to express; the fear of expressing the wrong thing; the fear of never finding the right words; the fear that the unknown is all there is.
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When I wrote that last sentence, I realized that those words came from deep within me, for my own struggle was just that of Okuyama. He must feel that there is a place where he belongs, which is the foundation of his self. Like Okuyama, I too donned a second face to prove that I had at last found a place in the world; and also like him I watched this second face graft onto my first, until all that was left was this amalgam, which is in fact the truest face possible. What we do not want is a face of perfect aesthetic proportions; we want a face that we feel is ours, and that does not alienate us from our place in the world. By film’s end, Okuyama is on his way. And where is Junpei headed? By film’s end he seems to have found his proper place, and it appears to be one of servitude. Given the opportunity to escape his sand pit, he chooses to stay. His only remaining sliver of alienation from this world that has imprisoned him is the rationalization that he will just stay a little while longer so
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that he can complete an experiment he has been running with the water in the desert air. And here it is all too easy to feel implicated in this decision, so I do not besmirch Junpei making peace with what he now knows. But the ending of Pitfall, by far the most chilling of the three. Up until his death, the Miner had with him a boy, and once the older man’s end is met this young child wanders, detached from any other human being. At film’s end we see him setting out on a lonely road into a desolate landscape immense enough to swallow him without a thought. All he knows of the social organism is its brutality and danger, so perhaps he prefers the trials of abandonment to those of men. Ill-equipped to make sense of what even adults do not understand, he runs headlong toward the comfort of oblivion. From oblivion to acceptance to endeavor, these movies seem to be moving from abjection to hope. From 1962 to 1964 to 1966, this is perhaps a lens into the movement of the Japanese psyche as it built its miraculous postwar society. Three great Japanese artists were able to put everything they had experienced during a uniquely tumultuous period in their nation’s history into three films that explained something essential about what their country was becoming and how it was finding its new identity in a new world. In what trilogy of movies of today might one discern the movement of America’s traumatized psyche?
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miraculous medical technology present in The Face of Another, they are a means of perfecting the human form: Vitruvian man is the perfect human that we could engineer with Langer’s knowledge. Yet the new face that Okuyama dons is not perfect: it has a prominent mole on the right side, which Hira allows because it will make the disguise more believable. Hira rightly intuits that a perfect face would make Okuyama as much of an outcast as a disfigured one. Perfection will not heal the psyche; Okuyama needs a face that will accord him a place in the world. Which is to say, Okuyama’s problem is not one of aesthetics, it is one of alienation. His solution, no less than that wanted by the Miner and by Junpei, is not a perfected identity, it is one that belongs.
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SHIKIBU MUR ASAKI
SHUICHI NAK ANO
A Selection from The Tale of Genji
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—— Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.
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I did not really mean to leave her, but my days were occupied in wanderings here and there, and I sent her no message. Then, late one evening toward the end of the year—it was an evening of rehearsals for the Kamo festival—a sleet was falling as we all started for home. Home. It came to me that I really had nowhere to go but her house. It would be no pleasure to sleep alone at the palace, and if I visited a woman of sensibility I would be kept freezing while she admired the snow. I would go look in upon her, and see what sort of mood she might be in. And so, brushing away the sleet, I made my way to her house. I felt just a little shy, but told myself that the sleet melting from my coat should melt her resentment. There was a dim light turned toward the wall, and a comfortable old robe of thick silk lay spread out to warm. The curtains were raised, everything suggested that she was waiting for me. I felt that I had done rather well.
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“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” William Faulkner mused. “Everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.” Determined Kōbō Abe.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder felt: “Home is the nicest word there is.” “He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.” So sayeth Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “Home is where you hang your head.” Croaked Groucho Marx. “Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.” Argued Walker Percy.
T. S. Eliot thought: “Home is where one starts from.”
Joseph Brodsky admitted: “No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there—well or poorly.”
Gaston Bachelard imagined: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
Maya Angelou claimed: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
“Home was the telescope of childhood.” According to Zbigniew Herbert.
John le Carré knew: “Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.”
“The home should be the treasure chest of living.” Le Corbusier decided.
Robert Frost put it: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Kahlil Gibran prophesied: “Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.”
Aleksander Hemon thought: “Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.” The words of Charles Dickens.
“A house is not a home when there’s no one there to hold you tight.” Wrote Hal David. “A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” Added Benjamin Franklin.
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Great Thinkers on Home
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Wallace Stegner noted: “Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” Thomas Wolfe warned: “You can’t go home again.” “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Posited James Baldwin. “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” Insisted Bashō Matsuo. “Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Determined James Joyce. “One never reaches home…. But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” Proclaimed Hermann Hesse.
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Eastbound-2
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Warsan Shire wrote: “At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
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A Conversation with Eugene Lim
Each of Eugene Lim’s three novels to date eludes easy summation. Fog & Car channeled the feel and mood of pulp fiction to tell a story of alienation, while The Strangers told a sprawling, surreal tale featuring twins, totalitarian states, underground filmmakers, and life on board a cruise ship. His latest novel, Dear Cyborgs, is about the lives of a group of pulp adventurers—but it’s also about lost friendships, the limits of activism, and the uncomfortable ways in which art and politics can converge. Lim’s interests in the literary expand beyond his work as a writer: he’s a librarian by day, and also runs Ellipsis Press, which has published books by the likes of Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Evelyn Hampton. I talked with Lim about his books, the historical figures evoked in his latest novel, and a whole lot more. TC: Much of Dear Cyborgs deals with the ambiguity of history, whether it’s the discussion of Richard Aoki late in the book or juxtaposition of Henry Clay Frick’s acts during his lifetime and his subsequent cultural legacy. What draws you to the historical figures that you chose to invoke in this novel? EL: Frick is in some ways the exception because I think when I included a historical person in this book it was usually an artist or a protester or a protest
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movement—e.g. Richard Aoki, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Kim Jin-suk, Tehching Hsieh, the protestors of Occupy. And these are people I admired or had looked up to and looked to for inspiration. But by my pedestalizing regard, I’d also come to see within them their complications, paradox and controversy. And I think those aspects parallel the book’s discussion in general of the possibility or impossibility of protest. Frick, one could argue is representative of a different strain of reality impinging on the novel. There are a series of places and objects named in the book: the minaret at the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, the Stari Most, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Jaffna Public Library—and I think it sticks out a little but we could add to this list the Frick Museum…. All of these are supreme achievements of human culture that have been destroyed by war and greed. (In the Frick example you could call it a case of Original Sin or a corrupt foundation so that the destruction is, rather than a moment of disaster, a result of internal rot.) So these historical objects I think were chosen to make a point about the fragility of art and culture (fragile but also perhaps our primary justification for existing) in the face of avarice and ethnic conflict and state violence. TC: All of your novels to date have made use of narratives where reality itself seems layered, its properties malleable. What draws you to the stylized and surreal as a writer? EL: I’ve a theory that there are three interrelated primary elements to a fictional narrative: some sense of personhood (traditionally achieved through the psychological avatar of a “character”), a series of impressions or events in time (traditionally described as a “plot”), and the “voice” or style or form of the language. (I’m a great believer in Robert Creeley’s adage that form
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Deep Structures and Subverting Narratives:
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is nothing more than an extension of content.) Of the latter, choosing a style for your work is largely a decision, whether it’s a conscious one or not, in conversation and conflict with ideology, with received wisdom about what constitutes style and with the tacit assumptions one makes about what constitutes a “story.” Writers I think often unthinkingly default to some mode of style and sometimes aren’t as thoughtful about why they are making these choices…. In a way it’s like clothing fashion in that most want to dress “hip” and, in fact, some even strive to be “fashion forward”—not just au courant but let’s say avantgarde—and yet what we end up with, in the main, is a great deal of uniformity and mediocrity. As a literary snob, I mind this much less when it comes to sartorial matters than when we’re talking about the novel. TC: Your first novel, Fog & Car, struck me as having certain aspects of pulp crime fiction in its DNA. And Dear Cyborgs abounds with pulp fiction, whether it’s in the crimefighting occupations of some of its characters or the superhero comics that others read. What inspired you to bring experimental prose together with a genre that seems, on the surface, to be incredibly far removed from it? EL: In Dear Cyborgs, often it was about using genre tropes. And while I like some of these (superheroes and science fiction, for instance, I’ve been a big fan of), this is done less as homage than to subvert these pre-known narrative forms, their momentum and propulsion, in order to freight upon them other ideas and narratives. However, having said that, I think there indeed are some deep structures that are very hard to abandon when talking about the architecture of the novel and, furthermore, ones I personally am very drawn to. One of those deep structures is that of the quest, and this is also
why I think the genre of the mystery in all of its iridescent taxonomy—the procedural, the hard boiled detective, the soft boiled one, the cozy, the missing persons case— reoccurs in fiction writers as diverse as Murakami, Borges, Ishiguro, Bolaño, Juan José Saer, and Jean Echenoz. That was a quickly spun list, but I bet it’s fairly easy to rattle off names of so-called experimental novelists who use the costume of Mystery because the idea of inhabiting a mind in search of something lost or missing is a very elemental use of the fiction narrative. TC: Given that reading and nestled storytelling play such a large role in Dear Cyborgs, I’m curious— does that show the influence of your work as a librarian? EL: My wife, a book lover, nonetheless gets annoyed at the stacks of books I tend to make in various nooks of our apartment, probably mostly because it’s further evidence that I’m a slob. But in my defense I think of these as hard clouds or totems of ideas, reminding me by their physical place. Certainly the idea and romance of the library get mention in my books, particularly in The Strangers. The feeling one gets when visiting stacks within the sanctuary of a good library, I think, is profound. And it’s a much different feeling from when using a so-called digital repository or even from when browsing a bookstore, especially one of only new books. Universal coverage and acquisition is one thing. Curation and mindful collection is another. Human error, human art. One thing about being a librarian, even a solo librarian of a high school’s small library (maybe even more so, for you get to be the generalist) is that the world, it feels to me at times, flows through you. The new releases, the pop, the trends of biography and science, the subscriptions to The Nation and The National Review, Sports Illustrated
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Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice—and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans. Academics invented an ingenious way to test for such a bias. It is called the implicit association test. The tests have consistently shown that it takes most people milliseconds longer to associate black faces with positive words, such as “good”, than with negative words, such as “awful.” For white faces, the pattern is reversed. The extra time it takes is evidence of someone’s implicit prejudice—a prejudice the person may not even be aware of. There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. I’m of an age that I can just remember everyday social decorum before the ascendance of political correctness in the 90s. Some criticized that rise as camouflaging racism or making it go underground. I’d always been thankful for it because I’d thought it at least blunted people’s public prejudice, a cosmetic change I thought I was grateful for. Now I’m not sure what I think.
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and New in Chess—it’s such a torrential flow you’ve no hope to really grasp and hold much of anything. And yet there are privileged informing sightings: glints of zeitgeist and rare harmonies and strange resonances. Which, all to say, yes, I think there’s an influence. TC: Part of The Strangers is set in a totalitarian state, and many of the characters in Dear Cyborgs confront and discuss questions of political protest and state control. Have you found that the current state of American politics is causing your work to become even more engaged with these questions, or do you think your next project will move in a very different direction? EL: With Dear Cyborgs, I was genuinely surprised to find myself taking the risk of writing a political novel (risky foremost of creating a useless and self-righteous piece of hypocrisy)…. For the next novel, I do have some ideas, but I don’t know if they’ll pan out. One of them has to do with trying to explore the Hart-Celler Act (some of my initial ideas are in a piece called “Returning to the Problem” up now at The Brooklyn Rail). This was the major immigration law change in 1965 that allowed for the first time a wave of immigrants from places other than Western Europe, a wave that included my parents…. But all right now is just stumbling in the dark at this point. Most importantly I’m just hoping another book happens at all. But in terms of the current state of American politics, I do find it all such an intensity of jaw-clenching rictus and despair that it’s hard to think of anything but. Have you heard about Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies, which purportedly data-mines our aggregate google (and porn) searches to write a collective portrait? In particular his discovery of an America riddled with racism seems both obvious and revelatory. Here’s an excerpt:
TOBIAS CARROLL
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THE SCOFIELD
My spirits remained low when I returned to my apartment. As I put the key in the lock and opened the door, I decided to hit the sack without bothering to shower first. But then I noticed that the light was on in the dining room and was immediately enveloped in tepid air and the smell of cooking. I could hear the sound of the television, and from the other side of the sliding door in front of me came a voice: “Dai-chan? You’re home so late!” A moment later its source stood before me: an elderly woman I had never seen before. “I’m sorry!” I said, panicking, as I started to back away. “I’m in the wrong place!” “What are you saying? This is your place, isn’t it? You must be upset at my sudden visit, but you’re the one who’s at fault here, you know. You’ve changed your cell phone number, haven’t you? You should have told me. You promised me you’d call the next day, but then you didn’t, and when I tried to call, I couldn’t get through. And you responded to none of my messages. I thought something must have happened. I was afraid you might have gotten yourself caught up with some loan shark. I almost called the police. But then Kasumi said I should just look for you here. So I dropped everything and came. Now don’t just stand there, come on in!” I did as I was told and took off my shoes. The silly question I was about to pose—Who the hell are you?—died on my lips. I could tell from her voice and manner of
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speaking exactly who she was: Daiki’s mother. But why was she here? Unless she was involved with the police, she had no way of knowing my address. Was it a sting operation? I’d heard of would-be victims of remittance fraud playing along in order to help the police arrest the culprits. But I had given her my own account number, so there was no need for any such charade. So what was the scam? What sort of scheme was I caught up in? “Your face tells me you’ve been drinking. Do you need anything to eat? I’ve prepared something simple…” “No thanks,” I answered cautiously, taking my place onstage. “How are you feeling? Have you been overdoing it?” “I’m all right.” “Did you solve that problem involving your friend?” “Yeah. You came to the rescue all right—and I’m grateful.” She persisted even as I kept giving her brusque answers. “Dai-chan, are you sure you’re not hiding anything from me?” She’s closing in on me! I thought, bracing myself. For a moment I contemplated confessing everything and returning all of the money. It occurred to me that if I opened up in that way I might get off the hook. But I hesitated, unable to reply to her question. After an awkward lull in our exchange, I gave up any hope of conning her this way. “Well, to be honest, I haven’t touched that money yet. So let me give it all back to you.” “What? Do you mean the story about your friend in trouble was a lie? If so, what was the money for? I really don’t understand. Do you think you can get any old tale past your mother? Don’t be ridiculous! Parents can always
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A Selection from ME: A Novel
TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
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TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
see through their children’s shenanigans, and I smelled a rat from the beginning. So tell me what’s going on!” She was shouting now, stubbornly keeping this charade going. It was irritating and also rather creepy. Here I was more or less leveling with her, so why did she have to drag this out? But was it really a charade? And if not…what it would it mean if Daiki’s mother really thought I was him? It was a horrifying idea. Suddenly I didn’t care about getting arrested; I just wanted out. Get me back to reality! I silently pleaded. “Okay, okay, I did something stupid. It was just an impulse. I didn’t mean any harm. It just happened…” Clinging to that idea, I told her the whole story. I thought that I could somehow reset everything that had happened since I picked up Daiki’s cell phone. I didn’t know that it was already too late. Mother heard my confession, only to fly into another rage: “Of all the nerve! So you say you’re not my son? Fine. If you want to treat your old mother like a stranger, go right ahead! You’ve been neglecting me all this time anyway. In exchange, I won’t hold back either—I’d been telling myself not to intrude. I was waiting for you to tell me. But I’ve had enough, so I’ll ask you anyway: are you going to marry Mamiko-chan or not?” I was speechless, having no idea how to reply. “I see…. When faced with an inconvenient question, you fall into convenient silence. Very well then, go your merry way. It’s your life. Never mind your mother.” “It’s…it’s not like that.” I barely managed to spit out the words, unnerved at not knowing what Mother would do next. “Then what is it? Just tell me something.” “I’ve broken up with Mamiko.”
I’d caught her off-guard. “Oh,” she sighed, looking momentarily dazed. I felt somewhat relieved. And then my mind began to work. “Actually, the money I borrowed has something to do with that. I made a terrible mess, hurting her and all, and so I wanted to put a little space between us.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “I’m sorry, really sorry. Look, what I told you before is true: I was driving my friend’s car with Mamiko and we had an accident. Mamiko was badly hurt.” “Oh no! How badly hurt?” “Multiple hip fractures. She’s a lot better now, with no aftereffects. We’d both been drinking, so the insurance barely covered anything. I managed to get some money together, borrowing it from friends. I told Mamiko how sorry I was and tried to take care of her, so that even though there aren’t any bad vibes, it’s somehow not quite right. We feel awkward together, you know, uncomfortable. There’s now a distance between us. We decided not to meet for a while, and then about a month later Mamiko suggested that we call it quits, at least for the time being.” I was riding high. With my own parents, it occurred to me, I would never have been able to pull this off, but in my role as Daiki I found I had a measure of self-confidence. “When was that?” “Nearly six months ago.” “I see. And all of this has obviously knocked you for a loop.” “Yes, I’ve had a lot to deal with.” “But about Mamiko-chan…you could have told me. The least I could have done was lend you some money for her hospital treatment. It’s as if we were strangers.” “No, quite the contrary. I couldn’t speak precisely because I knew you really liked Mamiko and that it would
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be quite disappointing. I had my hands full just coping with my own state of depression. And Mamiko didn’t want to tell you much about what had happened.” “Hmmm, so is that what it was?” she said before sighing deeply. “But it’s still too bad.” “I know, I know. But dwelling on it only makes me feel worse. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.” “Still, time will work things out, won’t it? My feeling is that you just have to wait for the dust to settle, and then everything will be back to normal.” “That’s all very well, but I can’t work myself into a very hopeful frame of mind.” “You’re quite the pessimist, aren’t you? You’ve got to try to have a more positive outlook, otherwise you’ll never get back on track. And without Mamiko you may wind up a bachelor for life.” “That has nothing to do with anything. I’m hurt…. Is this the kind of talk I get from my mother?” “Ah, I’m sorry. I take it back. You’re right—it’s a separate matter. But really…give her some time and she’ll come to her senses.” I stood there more than a little amazed. What was there for Mamiko to come to her senses about? Mother didn’t seem to be taking in anything that I was telling her. Perhaps she was no better at understanding Daiki, thus leading him to think that he was better off staying away from her. But I didn’t care. The important thing was for me to leave her satisfied. So I said to her: “I’ll give it some time and then talk to Mamiko.” “Yes, please do that,” she said cheerily. I too was happy with that. “But now it’s late!” she exclaimed, looking at her watch. I checked the time as well on my cell phone. It was already midnight. “Well now, what’s your new number?”
I had no desire to give it to her and thought about reciting a false one. But then I blurted it out anyway, and she wrote it down in her notebook. “You’re staying over, aren’t you? It’s too late for you to get back tonight.” I did not want her to stay, but there was no alternative. I knew from her telephone prefix, 048, that it must be a Saitama number, as my family home in KitaUrawa was in the same area. “Yes, but where can I sleep?” “Use my bed. I can get by in the kitchen.” On the tatami mats lay a futon that I never bothered to fold up and put away. I covered it with fresh sheets and gave her my new bathrobe. “Good night,” I said as I slid the door shut. Fatigue overwhelmed me; I felt that every bolt and screw holding me together was coming loose. I pushed the kitchen table into a corner and used my down jacket as a makeshift mat, on top of which I spread a towel and then a wool blanket, a cushion serving as my pillow. Having changed into an old bathrobe, I turned off the lights and lay down. I could hear faint sounds from the other room, and then the light went out. Once more we wished each other a good night. And then there was silence. I was unable to sleep. Dead tired, I wanted to shut down my mind and doze off. But the oppressive presence across the way made that impossible. It was as though a phantom had been swallowed up in the darkness once the door was shut. In a low voice I turned in her direction and called out: “Mother?” There was no answer. I tried once more, this time a bit louder: “Mother? Are you asleep?” Again there was no response. I got up quietly and cracked open the door slightly. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could
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TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
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THE SCOFIELD
TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
HOKUSAI K ATSUSHIK A
dimly make out the white shape of the bedding, but it appeared flat, as though no human form were underneath. I inched the door open further and stepped inside. The tatami creaked. I stooped down, brought my face close to the futon, and saw that the quilt was moving ever so slightly up and down. Protruding from under the sheets was a clump of tousled hair. A chill swept through me as I returned to the kitchen.
—— Copyright 2017 by Tomoyuki Hoshino, reprinted with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).
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Nobleman’s Cart
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Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere
Millennial-led families are flocking to cities, preferring the conveniences, the sustainability, and the goings-on of busier hubs—or so the story goes. But the most recent population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau paint a different picture: while cities are still expanding, the gap between city growth and suburban growth is closing, post-recession. It would seem that the suburbs—their orderliness, their affordability, their school-centric structures— continue to appeal. And yet, contemporary literature set in the suburbs tends not to take life there seriously. Whether snarking about the mundanity of McMansion living, viewing suburbia through the lens of teens plotting their escapes, or using the setting as an opportunity to explore the surreal, stories set on the outskirts of cities tend not to engage sincerely with the lives of their inhabitants. Which is what makes Celeste Ng’s new novel Little Fires Everywhere a rare accomplishment. This is Ng’s second book, following the success of her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, about a family cobbling itself back together after one of its members commits suicide. Her sophomore effort is just as vulnerable, and just as successful at veering away from sentimentality, a risk that comes with Ng’s earnest approach to her subjects. Little Fires is set in Shaker Heights, a planned community in Ohio that was founded in 1912, on principles of orderliness. We learn that in Shaker Heights, there are ordinances for lawn grass height, and fines for those who disobey. In Ng’s vision of the community,
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residents’ philosophies are similarly tidy: hard work pays off, and everyone’s given an equal opportunity to succeed. Living in pleasant accordance with this illusion are the Richardsons, a well-off white family of six who are characterized by their penchant for The North Face. There’s Mr. Richardson, a kind of absent attorney who met his wife, Mrs. Richardson, when they were in college. She works as a journalist for the Sun Press—Shaker Heights’ local paper—turning out “tangible, black-and-white proof of her industriousness.” She’s proud to have maintained her figure, even after having four kids: Trip, a vague and kind jock; Lexie, an entitled blonde whose performance of ditz belies her true smarts; Moody, a straight-A student with Kerouacian dreams; and Izzy, the black sheep, whose Dr. Martens are worn in protest of the status quo. At the story’s outset the Richardson teens are gliding toward college, and their parents are working to support this effort. Due to their rigorously maintained schedule, they live as though they’ve been granted the same promise made by the founders of Shaker Heights: “…protection forever against depreciation and unwelcome change.” That is, until Mia and Pearl Warren arrive. The Richardsons meet the mother-and-daughter pair when they move into a duplex they’ve been subletting, and soon, the cracks in their meticulously maintained world view are uncovered. A dedicated photographer who works odd jobs to support herself, Mia makes a point to not own much. She and her daughter Pearl are nomadic and thrifty, traversing the country in their rattling Volkswagen, sprinkling the dredges of takeout into weeks’ worth of meals. While Mrs. Richardson’s job is in service of her nebulous interest in family values, Mia’s job supports her art. The families don’t immediately butt heads. Due to a burgeoning crush on Moody’s part, Pearl is swept into the
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A Tale of Two Suburbs:
MADDIE CRUM
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MADDIE CRUM
MADDIE CRUM
Richardsons’ daily routine, and she acts as an awestruck voyeur. “At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if in a bubble bath,” the narrator observes through Pearl. She marvels at the ease with which Lexie and Trip move and laugh and pinch and slurp—unselfconsciously, even in their PJs and morning breath. While Pearl is left agog, Mia begins to worry. Does her daughter not notice how stifled Izzy feels by her parents’ quiet insistence on structure? Or Lexie’s reductive views on race—her apparent belief that, because her own boyfriend is black, Shaker Heights is “post-racial”? It’s a tale of two suburbs: the family with everything before them, the family with nothing before them. Ng’s portrayal of both is Dickensian: characters’ names and habits teeter on caricature, but are saved by how fully the author inhabits them. Trip is a bumbling jock, but a bumbling jock with specific desires. Pearl is thought to be a rare treasure, but a rare treasure who’s both proud and ashamed of her vintage rock tees. While suburban life is so often limned as sad and monolithic, Ng throws the particularities of a place like Shaker Heights—and the tensions caused by subtle class differences—into relief. The peaceable coexistence of the Warrens and the Richardsons continues, if tenuously. Izzy begins assisting Mia with her photography projects, which involve constructing collages or dioramas that she later snaps shots of. Pearl starts borrowing Lexie’s preppy clothes, and in doing so catches the attention of Trip, who she starts sleeping with in secret. More secrets abound: Lexie scribbles Pearl’s name on the login sheet at Planned Parenthood, where she gets an abortion; Pearl wonders about her mother’s past after spotting a photo of her in a local museum, taken by a renowned photographer.
These bubbling conflicts erupt all at once, catalyzed by a lawsuit that divides Mia and Mrs. Richardson. Bebe Chow—a woman who works with Mia—confides in her that, due to financial and emotional strain brought on by single parenthood, she left her infant daughter on the doorsteps of a fire station. The child was unofficially adopted by friends of the Richardsons—the McCulloughs, who’d tried and failed to conceive for years. Mia and the Richardsons become entrenched in either side of the case, and, to get the upper hand, Mrs. Richardson puts her journalistic skills to use, surfacing whatever she can about Mia’s mysterious personal history. The case exposes not only the newly formed alliances between members of both families, but also the shortcomings of the Richardsons’ tidy and convenient views on race and class. While Mrs. Richardson and Lexie believe Bebe was negligent and the McCulloughs could provide both comfort and conscious exposure to the child’s heritage, Mia and Izzy insist that visits to Chinese restaurants in no way constitute a proper introduction to the baby’s own history. Meanwhile, the child—named Mirabelle by the McCulloughs—has been playing with white dolls, already party to racial inequities. All of this is related through a scintillating point of view, as the story’s narrator shifts to embody the psyches of each of the Richardsons, and each of the Warrens, in turn. The effect is zippy, and chaotic; it grants credence to the dramas of these warring suburban residents, rather than writing them off as petty. The calamities of their lives— their little fires, and small acts of protest against stifling expectations—aren’t so little. The resulting story is a rare combination of high art and book club fodder, carefully wrought and yet brimming with bursts of expression.
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MADDIE CRUM
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THE SCOFIELD
VINCENT VAN GOGH
THOMAS HARDY
Night in the Old Home When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast, And Life’s bare pathway looms like a desert track to me, And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest, My perished people who housed them here come back to me. They come and seat them around in their mouldy places, Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness, A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces, And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.
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House in Auvers
“—O let be the Wherefore! We fevered our years not thus: Take of Life what it grants, without question!” they answer me seemingly. “Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us, And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!”
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“Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here, A pale late plant of your once strong stock?” I say to them; “A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere, An on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?”
THE SCOFIELD
Dear Vyasa: One day, I received a telephone call from you. In those years, I was working at the television station; how did you find me in those dark ages before cyber? Perhaps you wrote to me through my publisher, and appropriately we corresponded. You were editing a book about Asians in the Americas. Would I contribute something about Japanese in Brazil? I was amazed and gratified. You were among a half-dozen American scholars interested in the subject, but unlike the specificity of most academic scholarship, you were expansive in your reach, casting your net across the entire hemisphere, across any genre of cultural production that could be represented in a book, and encompassing the diaspora from the broadest possible geography that might define Asia, from Lebanon to Japan. In one book, you reclaimed the halving of the world— north and south, old and new, occident and orient, first and third—by twisting the globe in a crisscross of human migrations. Your vision was expansive in your desire for inclusion—amateur and professional, academic and layperson, matured and youthful—all would be given voice. I realize that is why we met; you sought me out on a hunch, that some obscure writer hidden in the engineering department of a television station might have something to say. It must have been years later that we actually met
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face to face for Chinese lunch. You invited another guest, a Chinese American scholar. None of us had ever met. You arranged what you call a contrapuntal meeting to create a beginning of some possibility. Three American women from multiple diasporas— Chinese, South Asian, Japanese—met over tea and tofu and created a new space of knowing. This day stays in your memory because, as you confessed later, you went home with an MSG attack. You might have been tricked by the sensation of dying, but if it’s any consolation, memorable for me was learning to value the surprise of the contrapuntal. It took me many years from that first meeting to get to know your traveling body and its traveling memories. You were born in Bombay, raised in Karachi, educated in Beirut, Durham, and Berkeley, and adopted by a second family in Oaxaca. And by complicated routes that I have no doubt confused, your great-great-grandmother was Chinese from Shanghai, your great-grandfather born in China, and your mother in Yokohama. You speak Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, English, Spanish, and read Sanskrit and Greek. One day you explained how, in the seventh century BCE, the Persian Sassanid Empire was replaced by the Arab, and thus the Zoroastrian by the Islamic, which heralded the exodus and diaspora of your people. Pondering this starting place, I asked if your folks ever thought of returning to claim Iran as a homeland. Your response was angry and adamant: Absolutely not! I was taken aback by the fierceness in your voice. It was only later that I understood, not that I had asked a stupid question, but that the idea of a national home is antithetical to everything you believe. You would teach me that there are dreams and memories that make human creation possible, but to dream the memory of home might be the most dangerous. It is, you have
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A Selection from Letters to Memory
K AREN TEI YAMASHITA
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K AREN TEI YAMASHITA
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K AREN TEI YAMASHITA
MINORU NOMATA
insisted, not always where you were born that makes you who you are.
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Land-Escape-4
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—— This excerpt is reprinted by permission from Letters to Memory (Coffee House Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Karen Tei Yamashita.
THE SCOFIELD
Trains coming from Tokyo on the National Rail line entered a tunnel right after leaving Yugawara Station. It was rather a long tunnel, and the trains emerged at the Izusan hot springs, just past an inn called “Torikyō,” or “Peach and Plum Border,” then quickly entered a second and a third tunnel, coming out beyond Aizomebashi. The first tunnel ends just a short distance from Shōheki Cottage, midway between the Narusawa and OkuNarusawa bus stops, where the bus turns slightly from the national road toward the coast. Gin would sometimes climb up to a place right above the mouth of the tunnel, squat above it, and spend hours looking down at the passing trains and crying. At such times, you could be certain that she had quarreled with Mitsuo—perhaps because someone had seen him in town giving a ride to a woman from somewhere or other, or because Gin had gotten a harassing phone call from the woman bus conductor, or he had stood her up—but always something trifling that nevertheless upset her terribly. Crying out “I can’t stand it!” or “I wish I could die!” she would drop whatever she was doing and run out of the kitchen. When Koma or Suzu ran after her in concern, they would find that she had dashed down the stone stairs and disappeared in the direction of the train tracks. “Ginsan! Gin-san! Where are you going?” they would shout, but Gin wouldn’t even look back. If they followed her, they would find Gin squatting over that tunnel, deep in
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thought. “What are you doing in a place like this? You’ll get us all in trouble, you know.” Finally, even her friends got so used to Gin shouting about dying that it no longer surprised them much. When she started it up again, they would shout “Gin-san! Ginsan!” and run after her as before, but now they would give up the chase midway and return to the house. Sure enough, Gin would turn up two or three hours later but, seeing the faces of her friends, she would be plunged into depression again. At such times, she would call the taxi company incessantly and insist on seeing Mitsuo’s face that day, no matter what. She would call persistently, as late as two or three in the morning, wrapping the bell of the telephone with a piece of paper or a cloth to muffle its ringing, just as Hatsu and the others had done in the past. Her friends, exhausted by the drama, had long since retreated to the maids’ room and gone to bed, but Gin wouldn’t leave off. Giving in at last, Mitsuo would wake up, rub the sleep from his eyes, and resign himself to walking over, nearly a mile through the dark. Gin, lying in wait on the stone steps, would seize him there, and a violent lovers’ quarrel would ensue. Not only did Mitsuo have a rough way of speaking, but he also had a bit of a lisp and couldn’t speak very smoothly or fluently, so when they got into it, he tended to fight with his hands rather than words. Soon it devolved into a brawl, the two of them punching and kicking and scratching. Of course, Gin wasn’t the only one prey to jealousy. Before she became involved with Mitsuo, she had been close with someone who worked for Shōwa Taxi in Atami. She hadn’t dated him long at all and had cut it off completely, but Mitsuo knew about it, and when Gin’s jealous rants became too harsh, he would respond by throwing that in her face, and the brawl would escalate.
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A Selection from The Maids
‾ TANIZAKI JUN’ICHIRO
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
‾ TANIZAKI JUN’ICHIRO
‾ TANIZAKI JUN’ICHIRO
The Chikura villa stood on the right-hand side of the stone steps that led up to the Kōa Kannon; on the lefthand side, directly opposite, stood a much grander villa. This recently became the property of the singer Segawa Michio, and I understand he goes there sometimes to relax, but it used to belong to the president of a certain private railway, or so people said, and it stood empty just about year-round—Raikichi and the others had never even seen the shutters opened. There was a strip of lawn in front of the main part of the house, and a single large camphor tree, visible from the porch of our villa, towered over it, extending its thick branches. Well, this empty villa and its garden provided the perfect rendezvous spot for Gin and Mitsuo. When they wanted to have an unhurried talk, they would slip away there to spend some time together. They could meet in the garden of the empty villa in the evening, of course, and even in broad daylight without anyone questioning them. They could embrace there—or fight, or flirt—to their hearts’ content. Once, one of her friends picked up a scrap of a letter that Gin had written and then torn up and thrown away. Glancing at it casually, she saw that it was addressed to Gin’s grandmother back in her hometown and said, “I truly am in need, so please send me three hundred thousand yen.” All the maids wondered why Gin would need such a lot of money; well, she was worried about debts Mitsuo had incurred by living beyond his means. The thing is, he had fallen in with some unsavory types and gotten into the habit of going out to gamble with them. They were all professionals at that sort of thing, so he had no chance of winning when he gambled against them. Sometimes they would let him win, but in general, he went home the loser. His debts piled up, and the more desperate he became to win back the money, the more
he invited the opposite result until, before he knew it, he had incurred debts of over six or seven hundred thousand yen. Needless to say, Gin tearfully implored him to do something to extricate himself from this band of gamblers. The three hundred thousand yen she had asked her grandmother for was meant to be applied to these debts, to help lift him from this quagmire, but her grandmother wasn’t likely to send such an amount without knowing the reason. At one point, Mitsuo suddenly said, “What am I gonna do? Isn’t there any way to get fifty thousand yen by today?” “Fifty thousand yen? What for?” “If I don’t get the money, something terrible will happen—” “Something terrible?!” “They’re gonna ‘trim my hand.’” “Trim your hand? What do you mean?” “They’re gonna cut off my finger.” “Does it have to be the whole fifty thousand?” “I have to keep my promise. Those type are really strict about rules. Once you make a promise, you have to keep it. And if you don’t pay back your debts, you lose a finger—anyone who falls in with those guys has to be ready for that.” “But why did you fall in with such men?” “What’s the use of asking that now?!” “When do you need the money by?” “Today.” “Can’t you ask them to wait a few days?” “There’s no way they’ll wait. They made that clear from the start.” I mentioned above that Gin’s family back in Kagoshima was rather well off. Just after she joined the
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Chikura household, her salary was three thousand yen a month, but later she was getting three thousand five hundred. In addition to that, she received about one or two thousand each month from her grandmother for pocket money, and more if she asked. She should have been better off financially than any of her friends, but she was lavishing most of her money on Mitsuo. First of all, the taxi fares she paid every day amounted to quite a sum. When he was in a good mood, Mitsuo would refuse money for the fare, saying, “I don’t need it,” but after one of their lovers’ quarrels, he would take the money without a word. Beyond what she paid him directly, the money Gin gave her friends to treat themselves to rides in Mitsuo’s taxi added up to a not insignificant amount. Mitsuo liked beer, so sometimes she would come down the stone steps to meet him with a bottle. When she knew what time to expect him, she would discreetly chill the bottle of beer in the icebox in advance. She also bought him fancy neckties at a store in town that sells western goods. Between this and that, she didn’t have a cent left in her savings account these days. So she was in no way capable of raising fifty thousand yen. “Couldn’t you borrow it from someone else?” “I’ve got no way out. Can’t you do something?” “I don’t know what to tell you…” Gin thought for a moment, then had an idea. “I don’t know if she can help, but anyway, let’s talk to Suzu-san.” “Does Suzu-san have that kind of money?” “Mitsuo-san, if you borrow that money from her, do you intend to pay her back?” “I’ll pay it back. If I can’t pay it all back at one time, then I’ll split it into two payments. If you give me just two months, I can pay it all back.”
“You really will pay it all back, right? You promise? If you don’t, I’ll be in a fix.” This was Gin’s plan. At the turnoff from the national road heading up to Shōheki Cottage stood an inn called “Shōgetsurō,” or Shining Moon Mansion. The head clerk there—the maids all called him “The Receptionist”—was a young man named Hasegawa Seizō. Gin knew that Suzu was on intimate terms with this young man, and she suspected that he had some money saved. So, as a last resort, she thought she would get Suzu to ask Hasegawa for the money. “Sure, I’ll ask him. I think he’ll probably agree.” Suzu left immediately, and, a short while later, returned with five ten-thousand-yen bills. “Thank you! Thank you! This will save Mitsuo’s finger! I’ll never forget this!” “Never mind that; just tell Mitsuo to cut his ties to those gamblers. Until he does, you mustn’t get engaged to him.” Later, that same Hasegawa married Suzu; perhaps this incident brought them closer. Now then, at this point, another young woman, a formidable rival of Gin’s, is ushered onto our stage. The young woman’s name was Yuri, or “Lily.” Yuri entered service with the Chikura household around the same time as Gin, but a few months earlier, when the Shimogamo house was still the family’s principal residence. If she hasn’t appeared in this story until now, that’s because she didn’t work for the family steadily, but left and returned repeatedly without ever settling in. To be quite honest, this girl was Raikichi’s favorite; in some ways, he liked her even better than Gin or Suzu. At one time, while they were living in Kyoto, he enjoyed nothing more than to go walking around the Kawaramachi area or
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to see a movie with her, to the point that he wouldn’t ask anyone else to join him. And yet, she wasn’t a beauty like Gin or Suzu. She was a year younger than Suzu, so she must have been a year older than Gin. Small of frame and a bit shorter than those two, she had a round, flat face—a face like a plate, as they say—as she herself acknowledged. However, her skin was very fair, and she was pleasantly plump; her arms and legs weren’t unattractive; her feet were as pretty as a child’s; and about her whole body there was a voluptuousness. Come to think of it, there was one distinctive feature to Yuri’s face. Just next to her right eye, only a hair away, was a tiny little mole. It was so small that it didn’t look like a mole at all, and many people mistook it for a bit of snot. Raikichi himself made this mistake once. “Hey,” he said, “you’ve got something just there,” and tried to brush it off. Raikichi liked walking with her more than anyone else because she was so lively and cheerful, and so unreserved around her master. The other girls—even a veteran like Hatsu or someone as confident as Suzu—maintained a slight formality when they went out alone with Raikichi. They would respond without hesitation if he spoke to them, but they wouldn’t initiate conversation themselves. And if Raikichi said something funny, they wouldn’t laugh out loud; if they laughed at all, it was only delicately. If Yuri had something interesting to say, though, she would freely bring it up herself. Sometimes she would even banter with Raikichi or tease him, and she never bored him. Thinking that it might help to keep him young, Sanko once suggested to Raikichi that he find a young geisha in the Gion quarter to dote on, but when he tried this, Raikichi found he couldn’t be bothered with all the trouble he had to take with such a girl, and said that he found it much more invigorating to spend time with Yuri.
Since she became Raikichi’s constant companion, it goes without saying that Yuri was a perceptive and clever girl, quick to read people. Being such a girl, she also had an independent streak; she could be temperamental, opinionated, and arrogant; and she often clashed with Raikichi. She could be terribly kind and good-humored when so inclined, but when she grew disagreeable, she’d fall into a sulk and take on an indescribably gloomy aspect. Sanko was constantly taking offense at such behavior, and Yuri’s reputation among the other maids was abysmal. She took advantage of the fact that she was Raikichi’s favorite to intimidate the others and she pushed around the younger maids. Even Suzu, who was only a few months her junior, became the target of her bullying. To make matters worse, quite unlike Sada, she absolutely hated animals. Of course, some of the other servants disliked dogs and cats, but with Yuri, it wasn’t a simple dislike; she positively persecuted them. If a cat came near her, she would kick or push it away, crying “Beast!” More than a few times, one heard from the maids’ room someone saying, “I’m taking a break. I just can’t deal with it when Yuri’s around!” “Yuri, please leave this house.” One day, Raikichi unexpectedly handed down his judgment. “You’re really very bright. When you watch a movie, you understand the key points; your penmanship is good; you understand dressmaking and can sew just about anything quickly and skillfully; you’re actually a very valuable person to have around. The problem is, you can’t get along with anyone in the house. I would give anything to keep you here, but, unfortunately, I have no alternative but to ask you to leave. If you mend your ways, I will be happy to have you back at any time.” At that, Yuri did not protest, I’ ll reform, only let me
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UNKNOWN
stay! But rather, saying “Fine, I’ll leave,” she got her things together and left immediately. And this must have happened two or three times. Each time she returned to the household, it was never on her own initiative, but because Raikichi, unable to stand her absence, sent her a letter saying “It was wrong of me to send you away.” Even then, Yuri wouldn’t listen to his request at first, but would make him ask repeatedly before at last she deigned to return.
—— Translated by Michael P. Cronin. Used by permission of New Directions.
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From a Performance of Kōbō Abe’s Play Slave Hunting
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HIROSHIGE UTAGAWA
BUSON YOSA
Three Haikus of Home I. Around the small house Which had been struck by lightning, The melon-flowers. II.
Evening Snow at Kangara
Of the winding paths, Which ones will lead me back home? The grasses of spring. III. Autumn beginning— There is a light in the house In the evening dusk.
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—— Translated by Bob Jameson.
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Finding Home Between Byrne and Bachelard
The performance of my favorite song—Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”—in my favorite concert film, Stop Making Sense, begins in total darkness. After the first moments of the opening synthesizer sound, before the screen behind the stage and the overhead lights activate to illuminate the band, singer David Byrne turns on a lamp. The lamp, the aesthetic center of this stunning performance, will become Byrne’s dance partner during the blissed-out instrumental interlude that consumes much of the song’s final minute. But for most of the song, it simply stands beside Byrne, domestic yet otherworldly. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the source of this homely, haunting glow, Byrne sings the opening lines: “Home is where I want to be / Pick me up and turn me ‘round.” “This Must Be the Place” is both a love song and a song about home—that is, about intimate space. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher of science turned phenomenologist, inquires into the contours of what he variously names “eulogized space,” “vital space,” “really inhabited space,” and “the spaces of intimacy.” At issue is the space of our deepest dwelling and, Bachelard argues, our deepest dreaming. At issue is the space we call home. In the final move of the first chapter, Bachelard briefly considers instances of the poetic image of a lamp glowing in the window of a hut. Though there is no window and no hut in the performance in Stop Making Sense, Bachelard’s analysis sheds light (sorry) on the PAGE 161
way Byrne’s lamp illumines (again) the song’s notion of home. Bachelard reads the lamp as an opening up of the home. “The lamp,” he writes, “keeps vigil, therefore it is vigilant…. Through its light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to night.” This openness to night establishes the lamp within what Bachelard calls the dialectic of house and universe; for him, poetic dreaming occurs in the play of these opposed terms, in the tension between shelter and expanse. The house lit by a lonely lamp touches both terms. But it seems, too, to privilege one of them. Bachelard writes that “however cosmic the isolated house lighted by the star of its lamp may become, it will always symbolize solitude.” There is a loneliness to this love song, a solitariness to Byrne’s elegiac performance. These qualities are heightened in his long dance with the lamp, which—lighting Byrne’s expressive visage, his eyes open wide to the world’s wonders—plays the role of a lover, tempting us to see it as something other than what it is. But there’s a limit to this trick. In the end what we’re watching isn’t a couple, but a man alone with a lamp, longing for home. ——— What is a home? For Bachelard, asking this begins with asking about the house, which bears in it “the topography of our intimate being.” What is a house? The question so posed invites the kind of banal or utilitarian answer that doesn’t interest Bachelard at all, that a house is a structure for survival, an answer to a physical need. Better, maybe, to ask instead: What does a house do? For in Bachelard’s invigorating analyses, houses take on the characteristics of active, vital forces. For instance, “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house
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Where I Want to Be:
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allows one to dream in peace”; “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.” The house shelters, protects, allows. The house is a power. Since I was a kid I’ve been a dreamer. Although I’ve almost completely forgotten my first homes except for echoes that could well be ghosts gleaned later from home movie footage, I can remember with desperate clarity the house in which my dreams first flourished. I can close my eyes now, reach out a hand, let it guide me from room to room. It’s no surprise that when I try this, I begin in my bedroom—the space most intimately mine, closest to the dreamworld that, Bachelard suggests, lies spiritually adjacent to the houses of childhood. I find myself on the top bunk of the bed I shared with no one for years, nearly touching the ceiling, where the wall’s uppermost heights were decorated with wallpaper showing a repeated pattern of space objects: moons, ships, satellites, astronauts. The play of house and cosmos—as if from the safety of my bedroom I might float into an unending beyond. This was a space for sleeping, reading, imagining. For being freely. For a study of intimate spaces, The Poetics of Space spends little time dwelling on the intimacy of those who dwell together. It’s a strikingly solitary work. What interests Bachelard more is oneiric intimacy—the closeness to all of human beings achieved in solitary day-dreams— and the way in which this contact is made possible by the houses we call home. Thus, Bachelard’s study of the house treats it as a lived—and loved—space, but not principally as a shared one. He delves deeply into the relation between home and human being, but mostly in the singular. It’s revealing that he refers to “inhabited space” as “the non-I that protects the I.” This formulation, though it subverts a bloodless Cartesianism by framing the home not as a
passive object but as an active other, still leaves us with a world of discrete and disparate subjects, of “I” and “I” and “I,” rather than of “we.” But houses have histories of inhabitance, and dwelling is often a shared practice. Hasn’t Bachelard missed something of the meaning of home without a careful consideration of cohabitation? Bachelard finds the sense of community that interests him in the shared human imaginary. But even our access to this through encountering poetic images is, for him, somehow solipsistic. Bachelard holds that the deepest poetic truths aren’t communicable. “All we communicate to others,” he writes, “is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.” But it isn’t as if the poet, for Bachelard, can evoke in the reader an incommunicable, non-objective truth, either. Rather, the poet must send the reader back into the reader’s own imagination. Bachelard writes: All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a day-dream in which I shall find repose in the past…. If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy…. Thus, very quickly, at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is “reading a room” leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again.
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This account has an undeniable truth. But it seems to hastily discount the possibility of the sharing of experience in any sense other than one person’s evocation of their experience occasioning another person’s evocation of theirs. This is an intimacy not of one person with another, but of each person’s with their own experience, shared only in the sense of similarity adjacence. Bachelard’s valorization of solitude permeates his rhapsodic account of the image of the “hermit’s hut,” which he takes to be fundamental in the history of house images. “The image,” he writes, “leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God.” Bachelard writes that “primal images” such as these “give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being’s certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths.” The hut, he decides, is “the concentration of intimacy in the refuge, in its most simplified form.” But can we truly have intimacy or refuge or home, in all their fullness, without any reference to other human beings beyond the abstract, universalized space of the human imaginary? In “This Must Be the Place,” we can find an alternate interpretation. In the song, solitude reigns until the third verse, in which the narrating “I” encounters a “you.” Byrne sings, “Hi-yeah, I got plenty of time / Hi-yeah, you got light in your eyes / And you’re standing here beside me / I love the passing of time.” From this point on, the narrator is no longer alone. His seeing is lit by the light of another’s eyes; the “here” in which he stands is a standing beside another. When Byrne repeats the song’s opening line, the other is now on the scene: “Home is where I want to be /
But I guess I’m already there / I come home. She lifted up her wings / I guess that this must be the place.” Here, contra Bachelard, Byrne imagines home as essentially linked not to an “I,” but to a “we”—that is, to “I” with “she.” The first two lines are recognizably Bachelardian: home is beloved, already-inhabited space. The next line pivots. It’s one of my favorite moments in the song—no, in all of music I’ve ever heard. The simplicity, the colloquial casualness of first sentence, “I come home,” melts into the strangeness of the second: “She lifted up her wings.” The lover’s act of welcoming home is a gesture at once domestic and fantastical, like the lamp’s alien incandescence. What could better embody the utterly ordinary miracle of coming home to a lover? And then the line that sounds equal parts shrug and incantation: “I guess that this must be the place.” Home is not only a beloved space, but a shared one, nominated to its being—not a place, but the place—by virtue of being shared. Byrne reaffirms this understanding of home in what is, for me, the song’s climactic moment. He sings, “I’m just an animal looking for a home and / Share the same space for a minute or two.” Home is that sharing of the space. As in Bachelard, the home stands solidly in its smallness against the immense everything that swallows it; for Byrne, it blinks out brilliantly, glorying in its evanescence in the maw of eternity. ——— When speaking of home, it’s easy to lose oneself in abstraction. Byrne is arguably guilty of this. Home is shared being in space; to me this seems a clear truth that Bachelard overlooks. But what might Byrne miss that
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Gently I lift a branch. In the nest is a setting bird. But it doesn’t fly away, it only quivers a little. I tremble at having caused it to tremble. I am afraid that this setting bird will realize that I am a man, a being that has lost the confidence of birds. I remain motionless. Slowly the bird’s fear and my own fear of causing fear are allayed—or so I imagine. I breathe easily again, and I let go of the branch. I’ll come back tomorrow. Today, I am happy, because some birds have built a nest in my garden. He devotes an entire chapter to the phenomenology of corners. This poetic study of spaces is truly, rigorously, a study of spaces. Bachelard has a tic that annoys me until I stop to appreciate the radicalness of what he’s after. The tic is the repeated reformulation of this claim from the final pages
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of the introduction. “Space that has been seized upon by the imagination,” Bachelard writes, “cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimations of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.” I accept this on my first reading without objection. Wouldn’t anyone? To me it seems obvious that the space in which we dwell is fundamentally different from space flattened to a coordinate plane, that dwelling is imaginative, transformative, and at odds with the possibility of a removed, objective positivism. But perhaps this isn’t so to any reader. Perhaps I’m a sympathetic audience, prepared to accept Bachelard’s claim by my predilection for poetry and philosophy enmeshed in embodiment and experience over the calculative and objective. Bachelard finds the point worth reiterating. “A house that has been experienced,” he writes later, “is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Later still, he inflects the point to apply it not only to space, but also to the objects within it. He writes, “Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality.” I think at first that I don’t need convincing of any of this. I categorize these claims as insistences for less sympathetic readers, or Bachelard speaking to his former self, before he turned from the philosophy of science (Intuition of the Instant, Dialectic of Duration, The Formation of the Scientific Mind) to his later work (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Water and Dreams, The Poetics of Reverie). But I begin to wonder whether I do need convincing. I think I understand that space as inhabited, lived in, loved, transcends space as mapped, dissected,
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Bachelard grasps? What about that space that the narrator of “This Must Be the Place” longs to share for a minute or two? What would it mean to take that space seriously, not just as the incidental setting of the loves and lives of human beings, but as space? I think it would mean the passionate close reading and phenomenological work of The Poetics of Space. Bachelard leads the reader through varied landscapes—up into attics and down into cellars, into drawers and chests and wardrobes. He takes up homes beyond the human sphere in chapters on shells and nests. Lest I unfairly portray him as cold, here his warmth for other beings is clear, as in this passage I’ve now re-read too many times to count, which hints at his sense of the importance of being beyond solitude, even if he never thematizes such being:
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In the Place Where Sea Breeze Blows
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diagrammed. But even if I understand this, even if I can say it and re-say it, do I feel it in my flesh? I know that, as Bachelard insists over and over again, intimacy is inherently spatial. But can I walk around my own home and feel the space around me actively structuring the intimacies of my daily living, dreaming, and being? “We shall have to apply ourselves increasingly,” Bachelard writes, “to studying how, by means of the house, the warm substance of intimacy resumes its form, the same form that it had when it enclosed original warmth.” I can easily forgive Bachelard what he seems to neglect—the intricacies of being with others—when I stop to appreciate what his work invites me, through insistence and obsession and repetition in search of clarity beyond reason, clarity in the body, the imagination, the soul, to see: the wonder of being at home as a specifically spatial splendor.
SHUICHI NAK ANO
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FR ANNY CHOI
KEY 1. the apartment came with a table attached to the wall. the center point of my mother’s body. 2. i sit in bed, clean laundry lotused around me. 3. brother sister & me in the same room for hours, being, being. 4. his sleep patterns, his weight, the smell of thin cotton against his back. 5. a photograph of a yellow t-shirt sends me flying back 12 years to the suitcase dad heaved 6. into the trunk, the milk jug crawling across the pavement. 7. when logic jumped off the roof, my friends made a nest of the living room. 8. sunlight on brick rooftops saying, this is where you live now. 9. a burnt hole, a pressed eyelid’s starburst, red to green. 10. i filled the room with smoke, seeped out bottom corner of the window. 11. three mattresses side by side on the floor, a pink quilt, a soft heap of body. 12. i never learned my grandmother’s name.
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Home (Initial Findings)
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Snake in a Box
The cardboard box has a history of preservation and concealment. In the first and second centuries BCE, the Chinese of the Han Dynasty were known to strip and treat mulberry tree bark as a means of preserving food products. Asian variations of preservative paper transformed over time, yet western versions of pleated paper appeared in 1817. Silk manufacturers popularized the material in the 1840s to transport Bombix mori moth eggs from Japan, and by the 1850s, the Kellogg brothers began to massproduce the cardboard box. The lightweight, inexpensive vessel safeguarded their flaked cereal and later replaced traditional wooden crates to ship other objects like bottles, fruit, and glass-lantern chimneys. Even through the end of the nineteenth century, cardboard lined the inside of tall hats to maintain their shape during shipping. Men often left the liner inside the hat to absorb sweat before it dripped into their eyes. Though usually torn open and discarded in some capacity, empty cardboard boxes beget games and imagination. Children often find the paper shell more thrilling than whatever it used to conceal, and even through advent of virtual gaming, the box seems less like something empty, and more like something open—a mouth shouting an invitation. Early consoles like NES, N64 and Playstation were packaged in cardboard boxes and secured by Styrofoam, yet the box extends into the gaming experience itself. Whether it’s the boxy matrices that support the virtual
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images manifesting on the screen, or the glowing idiot-box that fixes our gaze, the shape of a box frames the subject’s visual and virtual experience. Video games are always played on a screen, a television, or some variation of a monitor—less like a window, and more like a yawning, bottomless toy box. We play through an X-box or a warm, pizza-box-shaped laptop. With handheld consoles, we can bring the box into a public space, but wherever we game, it seems a box unfolds between our eyes and our lives. Boxes not only help us play; they help us see. Kōbō Abe’s The Box Man is also a variation on boxes and play. The novel revolves around the nature of vision, seeing and being seen; its focus is focus, on how sight intersects with sex and writing stories. The voice comes from a failed photographer—an unnamed narrator who has decided to abandon his old life to live inside a large cardboard box. He writes his thoughts and observations on the inside of his soggy shell, appearing as lists, as images, as fragments: Instructions for Making a Box MATERIALS: 1 empty box of corrugated cardboard Vinyl sheet (semitransparent)—twenty inches square Rubber tape (water-resistant)—about eight yards Wire—about two yards Small pointed knife (a tool) (To have on hand, if necessary: Three pieces of worn canvas and one pair of work boots in addition to regular work clothes for streetwear) Wandering the streets of Tokyo, the box man’s feet stick out the bottom of his cardboard prism. When he
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Seeing Solid:
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stops to make observations, he peers through a small, rectangular window cut out for his eyes—between his gaze and the world hangs a vinyl veil. Likening looking and photography to holes, to absence, he says:
audience is more rigid, though not entirely impenetrable. It’s as though a cinematic fourth wall were wooden—it can break to reveal characters’ thoughts and desires, but Ferris Bueller, Wayne Campbell, or Frank Underwood can’t crack the screen enough to give the audience control over their bodies and actions. A film casts the audience as observer, but a game shoots the audience as voyeur and actor. If a film’s fourth wall is wooden, then the video game’s fourth wall is made of cardboard. With intentions and objectives, a gamer has to rip open the screen, to unfold it, to poke through it. Thumbs, fingers, joysticks and eyes assemble to reach into the screen, seizing control of a character’s image, actions and intentions. In a film, a character breaks the fourth wall; in a game, the viewer violates it, cuts through it—punctures that create peepholes and good ventilation. The cardboard box, just as a game, grants a lived-in feeling. The stealth genre, popularized by Hideo Kojima in the Metal Gear Solid series, further muddles the relationship between playing, seeing, and being seen. Kōbō Abe’s Box Man proves to be a major influence on the game’s aesthetic and thematic tones, as the hero, Solid Snake, is known to have a strange relationship with a cardboard box. In a director’s commentary, Kojima claimed,
I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world. One night, as he peers through the observation window, the protagonist’s shoulder gets punctured by a BB gun sniper. As the distinction between gunman and victim dissolves, the shooter, abhorred by the sight of a box man in public, can’t explain his weird fascination with him. He’s both repelled by and attracted to someone who wants to look but not be seen, and his shot seems to jar the box-man out of a state of pure subjectivity. The voice slithers back to the box man; he describes his pain, how the BB-wound reminds him of his body, his materiality, the fact that he too is an object and image for others. For a moment, his box is penetrable. Abe’s fascination prods at the connection between looking and puncturing—that eyes are a weapon, a means of violation. The protagonist laments, In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at. A thin membrane separates a film from a videogame. In a film, the veil hanging between the image and
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Since Metal Gear, Snake covering himself with a cardboard box is an homage to Kōbō Abe’s Hako Otoko (Box Man). I am fan of Kōbō Abe’s novels. And Snake hiding under a box is inspired by the main character, Box Man. Snake, Metal Gear’s main spy and protagonist, doesn’t kill his enemies indiscriminately like in Doom or Grand
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Theft Auto. Though he has access to advanced post-Cold War weapons and technology, in every game, Snake covers himself with a simple cardboard box as an infiltration technique. In most action games (especially first-person shooters), the audience completes objectives by facing and overcoming obstacles. We normally yearn for our digital image to be recognized—we want to be shot at, raced against. But in Metal Gear, the point of the game is to evade detection, to avoid the gaze of the world we freely inhabit. As Snake, we play to not be seen. Cardboard preserves and separates. It creates a boundary, an inside and an outside. Sadly, no one knows this better than American untouchables, the urban homeless who rely on an eighth-of-an-inch of cardboard to separate themselves from the cold indifference that lurks outside. Home. Snake’s box, too, is a sort of home. It preserves his image and his health, but the box also complicates the screen separating the audience from the visual, digital world. The box reconstructs a flimsy fourth wall between game and the viewer, casting us in an anxiety-laden limbo between game and film. The only difference between Metal Gear and a movie is that the enemies on screen could spot us at any moment. From the box perspective, the gamer observes a virtual world with an absence of an image (in this case, Snake’s not there). The image we adopt and identify with (the box) is something to be ignored. The audience isn’t seen, and the surrounding characters walk about in a blissful state of pre-programmed ignorance. The movie goes on as though we were never there. Like the Box Man, if we succeed at vanishing, in becoming a ghost, then we become a pure subject, an actor without a body. Much of Metal Gear, like Abe’s Box Man, should be observed rather than played. Abe’s narrative is regularly
interrupted by blotchy, dark images, reminders of the photographer/protagonist’s old life. Though more entangled with theme than plot, the images act as a violation, an interruption more than an accompaniment. The reader is forced to stop the symbolizing part of the literary experience—don’t read; just look. But in this case, the eyes mystify more than clarify. The Box Man ponders, “The reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and inexactitude of human eyes.” Similarly, Kojima’s narrative disrupts the flow of a usual gaming experience. Metal Gear’s structure punctuates gameplay with cinematic cut scenes—some of which span nearly thirty minutes. When we watch, we give up control—we become aware of the plastic controller in our hands. The plastic seems clunky when we’re learning the buttons, but once we master it, the commands become unconscious. We don’t need to constantly remind ourselves to hit X to crouch or R1 to draw our weapon. When we control Snake we don’t have to think about how to make him move; we just move him. The controller becomes part of our body, and like Snake, it disappears when things are going well. While the controller seems to meld with our flesh as we control Snake’s movements, the cuts, like Abe’s photographs, make us painfully aware of our materiality, that we occupy a box. When the cuts rupture the gameplay, when we lose control over snake’s movements, our controller reappears along side the fourth wall. Unable to reach into the screen to move our hero, the cut scenes snap our cardboard box shut. We can’t act as Snake; we can only watch him. Deprived of the controller, we’re at the mercy of the cinematic, the interplay of pixels and color and Komjima’s cinematic mastery over advanced
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something ignored, something invisible; what Abe wants us to confront is the ugliness inside the box—pain, blood, sweat, inconvenient erections, wetness, cold—nakedness. When the protagonist stands before a naked woman, he looks upon her and thinks, Since this nakedness existed only when I looked at it, my desire to see it became poignant too. Since it would vanish the minute I stopped looking, I should photograph it, or get it down on canvas. The naked body and the body are different. The naked body uses the actual physical body as its material and is a work of art kneaded by fingers which are the eyes. Although the physical body might be hers, according to the proprietorship of the naked body, I had no intention of retreating in impotent envy. Graphics, VR, and mobile gaming will all continue to advance, but are games nothing more than a vinyl screen, separating our eyes from the world? Is digital play just a variation of a cardboard box? When we enter our gaming boxes, do we yearn to take part in a world without the trauma of appearing as a body, without the ugliness of an imposed image? Are we avoiding nakedness? Our own nudity? The horror of showing our image in a public place? When we game, are we able to act and look without being seen? Cardboard has always preserved and concealed. Maybe Snake’s box reveals our deepest desire: participation without perspiration.
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graphics. Jarred out of the subjective, choice-based mode of gameplay, we become something that can look, but something that isn’t looked-at. Metal Gear experiments with different modes of objectification: Snake’s box makes the character an object; cut scenes make the viewer the object. When cinema strips us of our call to action, our subjective role in the game, our hands, our bodies become something present-at-hand, the furniture of the world, an empty cardboard box. It doesn’t matter if we play World of Warcraft alone or Goldeneye 64 shoulder-to-shoulder with cousins on split-screen—our presence before the box drives the game, and obstacles appear relative to the appearance of our digital image (taking the form of Link, Laura Croft, Snake or simply an AK-47). No matter the genre, the game is programmed to react to the controller, the gamer. But Metal Gear doesn’t just grant the viewer the gaming experience; it reveals the actual gaming experience. If we yearn to be recognized as part of a digital world, as belonging to a community of digital participants, why does a series like Metal Gear persist? Do we play as Snake, or any character, to not be seen? Is gaming—on console, phone, tablet, PC—a mode of avoiding detection? Are video games a wish-fulfillment machine, granting a return to the cardboard box? Is play itself an act of preservation and concealment? Maybe it’s about nakedness. When we turn on the box, we go inside. We look through a screen, and our digital cypher is recognized, but the bodies we inhabit— our faces, hair, buttocks, arms, fingers and eyes remain unseen. Even in an age wherein we film our reactions as we play on Twitch.tv, we surrender the image of our body to the screen. We enjoy the ability to look, but we enjoy it knowing we can’t be seen. Outwardly, the box man is
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Whenever I wonder how living in Berlin all these years has changed me, I’m reminded of a Star Trek episode involving an extraterrestrial species that settles into the body at death, mingling with the memory and character of the deceased and maintaining the human shell as its home. Apart from telltale furrows on the forehead and a grayish complexion, the alien still strongly resembles the woman whose body it now inhabits; it reaches into her past, draws on her loves, her predilections, her habits and quirks. At issue, throughout the episode, is whether the woman is still alive in some way, or if it’s a mere imprint of her lost self that the alien has absorbed. To complicate matters, she seems to be an unusual borderline case, with a self-perception still for the most part in keeping with her former human state. Needless to say, there’s a romantic interest involved who wants her back, or rather the woman she used to be. The ship’s doctor gives her an injection to suppress her external alien attributes, after which the furrows and gray complexion gradually disappear and her appearance is restored to normal (as it later turns out, however, parts of her memory aren’t at all complete, and an odd foreign word slips out now and again to everyone’s great consternation). The question is whether she’s still human. The very idea of a hybrid state seems suspect, intolerable somehow. Is this too drastic a metaphor? The fact is you lose a part of yourself when you move to another country. First you lose your language: struggling to explain things in simple terms, grappling with a new grammar and syntax, you wince at the wince on the face of the person you’re
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talking to as you stumble through your botched sentence. The next thing you lose is your identity: as a citizen, as a member of a family and an ethnic group (and when did I stop being a native New Yorker?). Eventually, however— and this is the weird part—you learn to master this new language, grow comfortable in this new culture: you crack jokes, slip into slang, it’s become second nature, and you think in it now, dream in it. After thirty-three years abroad, home is my family in New York and Berlin, my friends, my cats; it’s a culture that took me in as a young art student and expanded my world in unforeseeable ways. It’s the tug of the familiar, and it’s the privilege of reading Robert Walser in the original; of reading Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard in the original. But home is also a phantom, a longing for a place that no longer exists in the form I remember it in, a clingy relationship to the talismans of my youth: a small fat man in a turban, cast in bronze, his face contorted in a grimace—his head opens on a hinge, he is an ashtray, a souvenir my father picked up during the war. A plastic Roy Rogers stagecoach my grandparents purchased in the fifties in New Mexico, with a small chunk of the Petrified Forest in the luggage rack on top. My original copy of “Be Here Now,” lost to a kleptomaniac babysitter. My parents are gone and the house I grew up in has long since been sold: these things are easier to understand than the fact that the world I come from is sometimes unrecognizable to me. And so home becomes something complicated and reactive: when America frightens me, I retreat into the familiarity of Berlin and my life here and the fact that I have great health insurance and that my son can go to university without signing up for a lifetime of debt. But when it’s Germany that weirds me out, which it still occasionally
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The Problem of Home
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meant to be more than cosmetic; they served to arrest a slow process of transmogrification during the course of which the alien would grow to be a distinct being as more and more of the human host’s identity dissolved. The implication here is that acquiring a hybrid identity necessarily kills off the former self, turns one into an alien with alien allegiances—in other words, something dangerous: a tainting, a contamination, a contagion. ——— What is identity? In one respect, it’s a construct that forms in response to a psychic need: for protection, for validation, for a sense of belonging in a bewildering world. It’s a narrative; it tells itself stories about itself. But identity is also a reflex, a tribal chant performed collectively to ward off danger, the Other, and even the inevitable. Its rules are simple: they demand allegiance; they require belief in one’s own basic goodness and rightness. What I’ve learned about American identity is this: it not only permeates every facet of life in the U.S., but implicitly questions the validity of other cultural identities it has not, in some way, already absorbed. It can be found in the movies, in politics, journalism, school curricula, on the baseball field, in TED talks, award ceremonies, foreign TV, courts of law, NGOs, Saturday cartoons, and the way we speak about disease and death—virtually anywhere we enact the narratives we’ve created about our history; our collective aspirations; our idea of who we are and what we’d like to be. And I’ve learned that it is, in large part, a dangerous illusion. But to disagree with this narrative, to call any one premise of this allegiance and belief into question, is to betray the tribe. If this sounds atavistic, consider for a moment what a
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does, I tell myself (with some indignation) that at the end of the day I’m American, and thus, fundamentally, different. In other words, home can be an opportunistic category; it’s two places and nowhere, with both of these states of mind occurring at the same time: a minefield of emotion, contradiction, self-deception. But home is also language, which forms the basic structure of our thinking. German and English are not equivalent versions of the same thing; they offer distinctly different sets of possibilities for expression. This is not merely a problem of translation: it has to do with the very substance of thought, how grammar and syntax guide sentences in particular directions, how certain nuances are more accessible in one language than another. It has to do with how the sphere of connotations hovering around a given word is never identical to the equivalent word’s sphere of connotations in another language. This is one of the most baffling things about language. I’ve been told that I’m not the same person in German as I am in English, and I wonder if it’s true. My subjective perception is that my thinking takes place in the interstice between the two, where nascent mental impulses seek their verbal expression, and it’s this in-between space that feels most like home—a home I can only share with others in a similar position. But back to our extraterrestrial. If we assume that deeper registers of the collective psyche are imbedded, in disguised form, in popular culture, then clearly this episode of Star Trek is channeling a complex of repressed fears—some of which originate in the Cold War and the specter of Communism (think of all the zombie monsters in post-war cinema history), and some of which are directed at the alien within. In my no doubt imperfect memory of the episode, the doctor’s injections were
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primitive thing national identity is, what a primitive level it operates on. And consider for a moment the degree of vulnerability involved in being alien, in not being “one of us.” What is so threatening about a point of view or a culture different from our own? Are we really as brave as we think we are, are we as honest, as enterprising, as free as we think we are? In America, national identity is a narrative drawn from a largely commercialized shared cultural experience and an interpretation of history that merges with legend—it’s a construct based not in fact, but on belief, and as such it has far more in common with religion than with reason. And while intellectual culture is currently undergoing a period of profound disillusion, in large parts of the country, anything that calls what makes America American into question is met not with impartial analysis or self-scrutiny, but indignant and often hostile repudiation. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, German identity was predicated on the rejection of the other. And because the two Germanys defined themselves in opposition to one another, because each of them claimed a moral superiority over the other, one that was contingent on the depravity of the other—that blamed the fascist past on the other—anything that touched upon this taboo was a threat. It wasn’t a case of Siamese twins, but of a single schizophrenic patient: one of the two personalities had to be rejected to maintain sanity—and this, of course, is precisely what happened. It was an intense time to be in Berlin, and it took a foreigner, the French artist Sophie Calle, to see and address what almost every German I knew wasn’t able to: the fact that the country was slipping, post-Reunification, into a state of selective amnesia. Her work The Detachment (1996), in which she asked passersby to describe emblems
of GDR history that had been removed—including the gigantic wreath with hammer and sickle on the Palast der Republik, the former East German parliamentary building that would itself soon be demolished—poignantly captures an era of collective repression during which the past was in a process of being rewritten. The empty space left behind by the removed monument or plaque became a gap in memory that could not be filled by the largely inaccurate descriptions of passersby, no matter how emotionally charged, or how close to home. In psychology, the self-defense mechanism known as splitting involves a failure to integrate opposing aspects of the self into a unified whole; the phenomenon can also be observed in the current political climate in the U.S. Everything that’s gone wrong and continues to go wrong in our deeply divided country is seen as the fault of the other, “bad” half. Yet the illusion, of course, exists on both sides of the political divide—and there’s a danger that our ability to see ourselves objectively could further worsen. All we need is one good crisis for the patriotism reflex to kick in: it’s an immediate emotional response, yet what is needed most in times of shock is a suspension of emotion, distance to the forces that would manipulate us. What happens is this: something shakes us to the marrow, we rally around what makes us feel safe—and it’s the bulwark of national identity we cling to, even if this identity is precisely the thing that clouds our cognitive faculties most. So while a person with equivocal allegiance is better positioned to offer a truly critical perspective— Susan Sontag in the days immediately following 9/11 comes to mind here—this is the moment she is held in the greatest suspicion, because critical distance means that she is not part of the emotional bond a reaction to a state of shock brings about; that the observations she makes or
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the conclusions she draws might find fault not with some evildoing Other, but with us, with our own. Leave your native country—leave America—and you begin to see it as the rest of the world sees it: as an unpredictable, potentially hostile force dedicated exclusively to protecting its own interests; as a gargantuan military power with an aggressive presence on the world stage and a dangerously undereducated populace. We’ve toppled governments, covertly assassinated democratically elected leaders, waged illegal wars that have poisoned and destabilized entire regions around the globe. The enormous post-war bonus we’ve enjoyed—our status as the world’s darlings—has been eroding steadily away, yet we still, incredibly, imagine that everyone still loves us. Peering wide-eyed from our self-absorbed bubble, we issue Facebook “apologies” to the rest of the world for our mortifying president, not quite realizing that the world, at this point, is less interested in how Americans feel than in foreseeing, assessing, and coping with the damage the current administration is likely to wreak on world peace and stability. We are not the envy of the world and haven’t been for a long time, and while this might not match the image we have of ourselves, it’s time to correct the cognitive dissonance and look within. It seems simple enough: if you move to another country and let that country’s own national narrative act upon you long enough, it all gets put into some kind of perspective. But things are never this easy, identity is a kind of skin, and shedding it has a lot to do with privilege or lack thereof and brings its own kind of pain. The learning curve is steep. I’d been living in Berlin five years by the time the Wall came down: the Cold War, the enclave in the communist East, barbed wire and border controls and all of this under the shadow of a still very
palpable fascist past with Ronald Reagan wagging his finger in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It was a strange mixture of embarrassment and relief to be an American at that time, to bear witness without having to agonize over being German: whether it would ever again be something that did not automatically inspire the Nazi joke and smatterings of poorly pronounced Achtung Achtungs. A generation and a half later, of course, Germany’s been there done that, and I find myself experiencing the current political situation in the U.S. at a greater emotional distance than I’d ever have thought possible, frustrated and alienated and wishing that if America would let go of its exceptionalism for even a moment, it might be surprised at how much it could learn from its old Teutonic friend—if it would only listen.
A few days ago, I took my son to see the Andres Veiel film on Joseph Beuys, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year. I hadn’t actually thought about Beuys in a long time, but it seemed to make sense to turn my sixteen-yearold budding graffiti artist on to some bona-fide radicalism in art. The first time I saw Beuys’s work was in the 1979 show at the Guggenheim, and I understood nearly nothing. Gradually, of course, I came to see the ways in which Beuys—both his person and work—epitomized the psychological drama of post-war West Germany, but what I’ve rediscovered now, after seeing the Veiel film, is that he also had quite a lot to say about America—and that he and his art are as relevant today as they were forty years ago. In May of 1974, Beuys, wrapped in felt from the moment his plane touched ground on the American continent, was taken to the Rene Block Gallery in Soho in
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an ambulance. The plan was to spend several days locked up in a room with a coyote. I Like America and America Likes Me was Beuys’s poignant, searing critique of the country and its violent history; in choosing an animal indigenous to the North American continent for over a million years, an animal that is totemic in Native American mythology and that inspired the coyote deity stories dating back to over 10,000 years ago, the oldest known literature on the continent—an animal that nonetheless fell victim to the bitterest, most widespread and ruthless extermination campaign in American history—Beuys instinctively went for America’s Achilles heel: the founding trauma of the American Indian. His action took on the guise of a shamanistic ritual: America was spiritually ill, he contended, the result of a violent psychological repression; there was “a score to be settled with the coyote,” Beuys said, “and only then will this trauma be over.” When you consider that Germany has been confronting the darker sides of human nature for over seventy years; that its history and its own obsessive and enduring examination of this history have left little in the way of pride, it becomes clear what happens when a national narrative is rewritten through an experience of profound shame. Today, pride is taken in an absence of the very pride that led it to the abyss in the first place; in a distance to and general suspicion of national identity; in a commitment to work against the grandiosity and hyperbole and fanaticism that are a danger to peace and stability. It’s a lesson in humility, one we’d all be well advised to learn. As Beuys intuited, we have a lot on our conscience. And as we know from psychology, repressed guilt leads to rage. And, inevitably, to violence. But back to the problem of home. If I could pinpoint where it is that I feel most comfortable, most like myself—
where the landscape feels most familiar—it would probably be in books, in certain works of art. Home is spiritual and intellectual affinity; it resides in a kind of homelessness. And while much of art is rooted in a specific cultural context, it’s when it transcends this context that it speaks to the larger categories of what it means to be human, imperfect, unknowing, and mortal. But what happens when culture takes on the role of feeding and maintaining national self-esteem? And when this doesn’t occur from the top down, through the imposition of political censorship, but within the cultural industries themselves? The outspoken and unapologetic writer and intellectual Dubravka Ugrešić watched as her native language, Serbo-Croatian, was pried apart into a cluster of separate languages cleansed of the centuries of their intermingling. In the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, she criticized the writers that rallied together to forge new nationalist mythologies and diagnosed this as a form of regression. The Croatian press dubbed Ugrešić one of “Five Witches” and attacked her for her “unpatriotic” opposition to the new regime. When the pressure on Ugrešić became intolerable, she embarked on a series of academic fellowships and residencies abroad, and eventually settled in Amsterdam. Reflecting on the ways in which her colleagues failed to live up to the writer’s responsibility, Ugrešić wrote: “[This regression] is why I have passionately propagated the notion of transnational literature, which could be a new cultural platform, a literary territory for those writers who refuse to belong to their national literatures, or to belong to their national literatures only.” When Ugrešić proposed a transnational territory that could serve as a kind of home for a certain type of writer,
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she was not only referring to the dangers of nationalist ideology in literature, but to similar effects wrought by a publishing industry based on commercial profit. When books require a high degree of popular appeal to speak to larger readerships, and when anything that doesn’t promise desired sales is effectively censored, it’s the self-celebratory, mainstream narratives that prevail. Here, it’s not an oppressive government that silences the intellectual, but market forces relegating the more difficult and worthwhile literary production to the fringe—in anticipation of which a kind of self-imposed censorship arises, an a priori capitulation to market demands. And it’s precisely this fringe—a territory essential to the preservation of literature’s autonomy, a territory that is growing increasingly endangered—that I call home. There’s the old story of the frog sitting in a pot of water on the stove: as the temperature rises, the change is too gradual for the frog to detect the danger and escape to safety. National culture exerts a similar spellbinding effect, in which all forces serve to craft and reinforce a narrative that passes for objective reality. One of the biggest illusions in the American myth is that “evil” is something that comes from without—and not something lurking inside each of us, waiting to be activated, waiting to be unleashed. In other words, something common to all humans. In his Ideas and Opinions, Einstein wrote: “In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.” But there is also the passive form of spellbinding, one that lies in acquiescence. We know we’re in crisis, we understand that our democracy is at risk, yet what I see—with very few exceptions beyond the
occasional comparisons to the Weimar era that directly preceded the advent of fascism in Germany—are not efforts to transcend national identity to understand the dangerous ways in which the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation, but a clambering to recover our “values” and cherished attributes and to reaffirm them. If we’d only embrace our homeless aliens—our intellectual hybrids—whose business it is to compare one culture’s hallucinations with another’s, we’d have a better chance at breaking the spell.
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—— The passages on the Star Trek episode are lightly adapted from a section in the author’s own A Lesser Day.
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Mari Yoshihara on The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Juliet Winters Carpenter on At the Edge of the Wood by Masatsugu Ono I used to live in a small, old-fashioned community in a farmhouse located right behind the community center. There were lots of old folks in our neighborhood, and as old folks have a way of doing (along with the rest of us) every now and then one of them would pop off. When that happened, the community center would announce the death and give details on the wake and funeral. For some reason, they would do this early in the morning, say at six, in VERY LOUD TONES through a loudspeaker aimed straight at our house. I always thought those moments were distinctly Abeesque. Absurd, darkly funny, upsetting, even disturbing, and yet somehow moving, and getting at the heart of what it is to be human. What other writer comes to mind that suits that description? I suppose it is a matter of taste. Perhaps Masatsugu Ono, whose stories from At the Edge of the Wood I translated for Stranger Press earlier this year, comes close. Those stories describe the ordinary yet dreamlike, bizarre experiences a young father has with his preschool-age son while the wife/mother is away at her parents’ home to give birth to a second child. The first story in particular is compelling, unnerving, and touching.
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Allison Markin Powell on Masks by Fumiko Enchi Masks is probably the book I have recommended the most often—to anyone travelling to Japan, to anyone expressing interest in contemporary Japanese fiction, or really, to anyone who asks. Fumiko Enchi is a titan (titaness?) of Japanese literature—the daughter of a great Meiji-era scholar—whose work is revered and respected
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If you’ve read Kōbō Abe, and you’re looking for books by other authors who write in a similar style to Abe, here are some recommendations for you from readers of Abe and the Abeesque.
My association of Kazuo Ishiguro with Kōbō Abe comes less from their ethnic origin than their literary and imaginative DNA. Both of their writings have Kafkaesque surrealism, cinematic visuality, and enigmatic narrative. Like many of Ishiguro’s novels, The Unconsoled is about memory, distance, language, and communication—or failures thereof. And also like many of his other novels, the protagonist is a memorable, if not entirely likable or trustworthy, character that stays in the reader’s mind. But the setting, premise, and plot are unlike any other of Ishiguro’s works. Protagonist Ryder is a renowned concert pianist who arrives in an unnamed European city to perform. Yet he ends up on a bizarre journey not leading anywhere, wandering through what appears to be a dream or nightmare. Along the way, he encounters a number of strange characters who seem to have had some intimate relationship with him and now burden him with various requests big and small. Is this a strange new city he just arrived in, or has he just returned home? This and other haunting questions pile up to shake his sense of art, politics, society, and his place in it. Eerie, funny, and aggravating, the immersive tome makes the reader as irritated, confused, and lost as Ryder himself.
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crafted and eerily clever, Masks will seduce you with its blend of fantasy and realism. Michiko Wilson on The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away by Kenzaburō Ōe History, or more specifically, the memory of history, is essential in the literary universe of Kenzaburō Ōe, the 1994 Nobel Laureate. Exceptionally cross-cultural in his intellectual imagination, he thrives in having a dialogic conversation with the writers of world literature—imagined or in actual correspondence. In his 1971 novella, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (translated by John Nathan as Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness), Japan’s ugly past is presented with quixotic madness and celebrated with gargantuan hilarity in a Rabelaisian portrait of a seemingly crazed or deranged man and the son who worships him. A thought-provoking delight guiding you through confession, testimony, chronicle, allegory and memoir, the story re-imagines the role of the Shōwa (1927– 1989) Emperor, once divine and inviolate, who abruptly descended from heaven on August 15, 1945, the day of Japan’s unconditional surrender which he announced over the radio in his own voice, as a mortal man. The novella’s Japanese title contains the verb, nuguitamō, which is an honorific form and which says to the Japanese reader that the person who will be “wiping my tears away” is royalty of the first order, namely his Majesty the Emperor. One asks, how could an inaccessible emperor—totally disconnected from the masses—whom Japanese people could neither see nor hear nor speak to until after the unconditional surrender of 1945, move an ordinary person to tears? Would he be capable of showing any emotional concern for this awed individual? Of course,
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in Japan but who is sadly under-appreciated and underrepresented in translation. I had not recalled just how slim this novel is—my paperback copy runs to only 141 pages—Masks is densely packed with references to Noh drama and classical poetry, passages from The Tale of Genji, shamanism and spirit possession, and a love triangle (square? pentagon?), all set against the backdrop of a postwar Japan struggling with modern conventions of femininity and female roles. Beautifully translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, this fascinating story centers on the powerful figure of Mieko Togano, her widowed daughter-in-law Yasuko, and the two men who are in love with Yasuko and competing for her attention. The novel begins in Kyoto but is mostly set in and around Tokyo, with a stopover at the seaside resort town of Atami. I first read Masks during my university study abroad in Japan, and a classmate and I promptly planned a pilgrimage tour to each of the spots mentioned in the novel. In an uncanny tale of sensuality and desire, grief and mourning, Enchi weaves a mysterious plot around several female Noh masks of the title, with the male characters playing the roles of unwitting puppets. Never sure to what extent they are being manipulated—and by whom, Mieko or Yasuko?—the men compare notes on their encounters with the women, speculating on their possible motivations and potential outcomes. Drawing upon literary allusions to ancient female shamanism, Enchi seems to suggest that from the Heian era through feudal Japan to modern times, for a certain kind of woman, spirit possession—that is to say, taking leave of her own body to enact deeds or extract revenge— is an inevitable result of the devastating effects of suppressing her ego for the sake of (or by) a man. Expertly
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postwar democratic Japan. If you are looking for unusual storytelling, a multi-layered, non-linear parody, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away will be a rare treat. Atsuko Sakaki on “The Trade” by Yumiko Kurahashi Among Japanese literary writers who came of age in the wake of WWII emerged a sibling rivalry of a sort for the most legitimate heir to the legacy of Franz Kafka, who was warmly received in the country. Competitors or soulmates, these writers resemble each other significantly in theme and form, yet each owns his or her own brand of the Kafkaesque. Though Kōbō Abe may be the most proclaimed, owing to the extensive translation and remediation of his works, others are just as effective storytellers of the absurd, dystopian, and humorous. One writer who is often compared with the literary brother, by herself and others, is Yumiko Kurahashi (1935–2005), whose text can be bare and abstract, with the naming (or unnaming) of characters K, L, S, M, and Q only the most obvious marker. Her novels and stories neutralize essential identity, in an experimentation that Abe also persistently undertakes. Whereas Abe’s “The Crime of S. Karma” relates the loss of one’s name, Kurahashi’s Divine Maiden observes the loss of memory; his The Woman in the Dunes centers on a man’s loss of belonging in captivity, while her Blue Journey relates the disappearance of a woman’s significant other; finally, his The Face of Another narrates the loss of a face and the fabrication of a replacement, to which her “The Trade” responds with a story about men who exchange faces that occupy polar ends on the scale of ugliness/beauty. In this last piece, Kurahashi embellishes the fantastic storyline with ancient Chinese tales of the supernatural—
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that is the very point of this novella. The mythical power of his Majesty—or more broadly, the Royal Family—who has never possessed a family name (every royal is only referred to by his or her first name), still induces a strange kind of reverence from ordinary Japanese people. Ōe the raconteur is masterful in the way he portrays the stunning transformation of the emperor from Olympian god to mere moral, expelled from a heavenly abode to an earthly throne, the Chrysanthemum Throne, which besides referring to the flower on the royal family crest has always been an indirect reference to the divine emperor. The divinity who swiftly left his Mount Olympus behind on August 15, 1945, would be “circling upward in a swift ascent again…he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum, would cover Japan and all [his] people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and glittering like an aurora, his Majesty would manifest himself.” As in many other works by Ōe, this remembrance of history also combines the political with the personal: the relationship of the Emperor as the father of Japanese people, akago, (in the sense of the Tsar as the “father of the people”), and of Ōe as the father of a mentally challenged son, Hikari, in real life. The impossibility of a dialogue or a normal human relationship with the “idiot son” becomes superimposed with the no-see, no-hear, no-speak image of the wartime emperor, a major theme that culminates in his 1976 novel, The Pinchrunner Memorandum (translated by Michiko N. Wilson and Michael K. Wilson). To Ōe, past history is no abstract concept. As a totally indoctrinated ten-year-old boy at the end of the Asia-Pacific War, the image of a strict paternal figure has complicated his coming to terms with the atrocities of the imperial war and
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one of a sudden demand on the central character’s face by a stranger in a dream, deprivation of the dreamer’s face in reality, and the consequences of struggles for selfidentification in family and society, the other of the reward for and cost of one’s incidental and secretive visit to a utopia (which, in Kurahashi’s retelling, is inhabited only by those who had facial transplants to become inhumanly beautiful). Her story multiplies narrative layers by way of characters’ citations of similar stories from their own literary archives, whereas Abe’s novel unfolds in one notebook (his favorite medium) after another in sequence, filled by the narrator-protagonist’s observations of his ongoing life with and without the face of another. The formal difference speaks to the two authors’ compositional preferences and positions vis-à-vis the literary canon: Kurahashi stands for intertextuality while Abe does not rely on the heritage of the classics; she privileges dialogue between characters who share reading knowledge and intellectual community across time, while he thrives in the monologue of the hero who lives in a contemporary Japan traumatized by the recent war yet industrialized at precarious speed, distant from the masses and his significant other, and unable or unwilling to communicate. While Kurahashi’s characters are male literati who simulate literary precedents and exchange faces as if to accept their roles in a preordained plot, Abe’s narrator-protagonist seems to agonize over questions of appearance versus essence, and female versus male. Instead of Abe’s scientific elaboration of an industrial accident and historic atomic bombings that irrevocably damage human skin, Kurahashi minimizes description of the physical and references to contemporary society, replacing them with fable-like seamless transformation of one’s visage. In Abe’s Face one observes the pain of the collapse of normative quotidian life
by the loss of the “real” face that proved so essential to the male protagonist’s sense of identity and relation to his wife. With Kurahashi’s “Trade” one is compelled to believe that identity is nothing but performance, the face only a mask with which to perform another act.
Three novel(la)s by Paul Auster grouped in The New York Trilogy—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room— share the characteristics of noir. The protagonist is enlisted, in two of the three cases, by strikingly beautiful women married to indecipherable men, in a mission that is comparable to a private eye’s: to keep an eye on an abusive father so as to protect his son from further danger; to move into an apartment from which to observe every step of the man living in the opposite building; and to sort out manuscripts left by a childhood friend who had suddenly left his wife. In each story, the central mystery not only remains unsolved but also proves to be unsolvable. The purpose of involving a third party is not to rely on his neutral and objective mind, but to deprive him of precisely that faculty and disrupt the normalcy of his life, often through the intervention of a femme fatale. The mission of an investigator in standard detective fiction (to find a missing person/object/culprit) turns out to be a façade concealing some other reason, or at least to create another consequence rather than solving the mystery. Such consequence affects the thitherto unremarkable life of the ‘detective’ most— who loses tenancy and ends up on the street, or loses his girlfriend whom he had neglected in order to undertake the commission, or marries the missing man’s wife assuming he is dead. The irrevocable turn in the life of
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Atsuko Sakaki on The Locked Room by Paul Auster
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each ‘third party’ invalidates the golden rule of detective fiction, namely, his detachment from the situation under review. The absurdity of scientific procedure, the fragility of identity, and the intangibility of belonging are among the concerns shared by Auster and Kōbō Abe. Of the three texts, The Locked Room manifests affinities with Abe’s fiction most prominently. The narratorprotagonist relates an episode involving his childhood friend Fanshawe, who would occasionally hide himself in a cardboard box for an undisclosed adventure. The specifics of the material and the anti-social nature of the act are highly reminiscent of Box Man, in which the narratorprotagonist moves into a box from which he observes others in an urban space without revealing his identity. Abe’s readers could not but recall The Woman in the Dunes—about the central male character’s disappearance from family and society for seven years, leading to the legal declaration that he is a missing person—when Fanshawe’s extended absence sets off a new phase of his family’s life. Then his wife Sophie’s contact with the narrator-protagonist is reminiscent of A Ruined Map, in which a woman who requests an investigation into the disappearance of her husband does not seem keen on locating him. Similarly, Sophie appears less committed to finding her husband than to having his manuscripts published by requesting help from his best friend “I,” a professional writer, according to Fanshawe’s expressed will. Lastly, Fanshawe’s final narrative, meant for his son who was yet to be born at the time of his flight, is written in a notebook—the medium that predominates in The Face of Another. What “I” lets happen to Fanshawe’s arguably most important document may be taken as the ultimate expression of his position vis-à-vis the monologue that his friend has always been absorbed in, firmly excluding him
from the privilege of sharing it, except as the ‘agent’ of his voice—and perhaps Auster’s final analysis of Abe. Auster renounces the noir, whereas Abe may have extended its fate.
It’s true that Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another could swap titles with nary a change to the texts and their meanings, but that alone is not necessarily enough to make Confessions of a Mask truly Abe-esque. If Mishima is Abe-esque, it is in the fact that he shares certain thematic interests with Abe— both wrestling with ideas of identity, community, and alienation, both utilizing sex and violence to sometimes nightmarish effect. But the similarities of these two most prominent of post-war Japanese writers mostly end there. Mishima was much more interested in Japanese culture and aesthetics than Abe, who spent much of his life looking West. Mishima’s longtime editor, Harold Strauss, saw their relationship this way: “[Mishima] had one foot in the past and one in the future. He was able to articulate this change as no other Japanese novelist was able to do. Older writers such as Yasunari Kawabata can write only of the past and younger writers such as Kōbō Abe can write only of the present.” Confessions of a Mask does straddle these binaries—past and present, East and West—with alarming ease. It’s the story of Kochan, a homosexual struggling to fit into Japanese society, desiring nothing more than to be “normal.” Much like many of Abe’s novels, though in a completely different way, the book shows the masks we wear, the “reluctant masquerades” we participate in, the existential crises inherent in an individual trying to belong to a larger community.
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Nathan See on Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
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In Kōbō Abe’s The Ruined Map, a private detective goes in search of a missing husband in a city that seems to exist as a series of blank surfaces: a cliff side, high rise apartments, a parking lot, a café that is a front for illegal labor. The client is a woman who is alcoholic and forgetful, whether deliberately or not. The woman gives him a matchbox with a phone number written on it. Her brother, she says, has been hunting too for her husband but without success. The detective’s search leads him to discover other narratives that seem only tangential to his declared goal. The milieus that he enters are peripheral to an expanding city: a building site serviced by a camp of prostitutes who work out of the back of food trucks that sell noodles; a propane gas depot, a business that will inevitably fail when the city provides infrastructure to new buildings. In each sordid environment, the woman’s brother appears as if by chance. Informants all appear to be lying while knowing more about the disappeared victim. The investigation leads the detective into more trouble, and deeper enigma. The further the private detective investigates, the more lost he becomes. On the day I was asked to recommend a book that is Abe-esque, all I could think about was Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City. Like The Ruined Map, an investigator, this time a journalist named Junior, sets off in search of a woman informant who – over the phone or from strange radio signals – gives him all kinds of prescient information for news stories. Who is she? Junior’s first lead is an alcoholic woman who lives in a dingy hotel. She sends him to find a Korean man called Fuyita, who may be able to help him. Fuyita is hidden in the basement of the Museum of the Novel, a place where stories
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intersect. In the museum, Junior discovers an automaton that was invented by the Argentine writer, Macedonio Fernandez—a writer who was a major influence on Borges, and on Piglia, too. The automaton was built to house the ‘spirit’ of Macedonio’s wife Elena, who died at the age of twenty-six. The automaton has outlived Macedonio and her circuits are connected to different parts of the museum that house pieces of novels by writers like Roberto Arlt and Jose Hernandez. The white nodes of her circuits begin to produce stories by taking pieces of other novels, notably Poe, and transforming them into new stories. Piglia’s novel then follows the lines of new narratives through a futuristic city. All this a mirror image of life under the dictatorships in Argentina in the seventies and eighties. The Absent City with its shifting topographies and narratives – the paragraph outline above is but a sketch, even though the novel is short – also has some parallels with Abe’s Secret Rendezvous and its dystopian medical institution where an investigator searches for his wife among bizarre sex researchers. The tone of Secret Rendezvous also has something in common with another of Piglia’s antecedents and influences, Roberto Arlt, who wrote Seven Madman. And Arlt features as a fictional author in Piglia’s story Assumed Name. Abe and Piglia share an anarchistic and surreal aesthetic that meets in their responses to a world that is by turns blank and threatening, febrile and enigmatic. Readers of The Absent City will find themselves caught up in a kaleidoscopic reflection of Abe’s labyrinthine and disturbing alternate dimensions. The Absent City is a novel that mirrors the storied world in which we live.
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Des Barry on The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia
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Kōbō Abe’s influence is evident in all five of Todd Shimoda’s novels. Protagonists float untethered through urban landscapes as they search for grounding, substance, something to dull (or heighten) the pain of daily life. They are jaded, beaten, full of foreboding. And yet the prose clips along at a whodunit pace, never turgid, never wallowing. Shimoda often cites Abe as his favorite novelist and The Ruined Map as his favorite novel. Much of Shimoda’s fiction seems inspired by that novel’s combination of noir and existential dread. Shimoda also mirrors Abe’s penchant for sprinkling maps, sketches, illustrations and other ephemera throughout his work. Shimoda’s novels are artistic objets where the illustrations of his partner, LJC Shimoda, riff off of and re-interpret the plot. “I enjoy page-turning plots as well as experimental structures,” Shimoda said in an interview years ago. “I try to put these two approaches together, with the main storyline in the body of the novel and bits and pieces of other storylines or information in marginalia.” When Shimoda lived in Japan, he recalled feeling like a character in an Abe novel hanging out in grungy coffee shops and bars, rubbing shoulders with shady types from the Tokyo underground. As a Japanese American in Japan, he also felt a constant sense of alienation or otherness – he was never quite at home, another recurring theme in Abe’s writing. Of Shimoda’s five novels, the Abeesque elements are most apparent in Why Ghosts Appear, an unofficial sequel to The Ruined Map. In Shimoda’s novel, the unnamed detective is hired to find the missing son of a fortuneteller. As he looks for the son, he’s haunted by the unresolved case PAGE 183
of the missing husband from years ago. He hears rumors about the alcoholic woman behind the lemon-yellow curtains, and he begins to lose his moorings once again. Both Abe and Shimoda combine a love for the abstract with a storyteller’s sense of economy and precision. And they both look in the shadows to find the truth about men’s souls. In Why Ghosts Appear, the detective is plunged into a netherworld of “pleasure” tours reminiscent of the riverbank brothel in Abe’s novel. “It seems to me that we find out who we are in the ‘low’ emotions of loneliness and loss rather than pleasure and happiness,” Shimoda told an interviewer years ago. Why Ghosts Appear is a physical work of art featuring abstract calligraphy, words snipped from magazines, entomological drawings, and blotches of ink that hint at and enhance the sense of being adrift in the world. I believe that Abe, an ardent photographer and student of the arts, would have loved to see his novels given this sort of treatment. Andrew Mason on The Dark Room by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki If Kōbō Abe is Japan’s Franz Kafka or Albert Camus (or possibly even their Philip K. Dick?), then Junnosuke Yoshiyuki is perhaps Japan’s Henry Miller or D. H. Lawrence (maybe their Georges Bataille?). Thus, his most famous novel The Dark Room admittedly has more in common with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, whose interest in human sexuality Yoshiyuki shared, than with Kōbō Abe. The Dark Room, in fact, won Yoshiyuki the coveted Tanizaki Prize (one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards) in 1970. But Yoshiyuki is even darker and more pessimistic than Tanizaki—and in that bleakness and existential crisis one can find some threads that connect
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Bruce Rutledge on Why Ghosts Appear by Todd Shimoda
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him to the Abe-esque, even if it’s not as apparent on the surface. There’s a vein of Friedrich Nietzsche undergirding both writers’ works. The Dark Room is narrated by a writer wary of emotional investment, monogamous attachment, and mundane domesticity. It can be a punishing read, but is well worth it.
Kawabata was much more insular, much more interested in an expression of “Japaneseness.” “There are no tea ceremonies in Abe,” wrote David Remnick, as a way to differentiate him from Kawabata. It’s not a description Abe would have quarreled with. “I get a little tired of hearing about tea ceremonies,” Abe once said. “I think tea ceremonies are for tourist brochures.” Abe was the “internationalist,” with one eye always looking outward, whereas Kawabata “venerated versions of the Japanese pastoral, the traditional ways of life, and mourned encrouching industrialization and westernization.” Abe’s main influences were foreign— Kafka, Poe, Camus, Carroll—and, thus, veered away from realism and naturalism into existentialism, science fiction, psychological horror, surrealism, and magical realism. If there is a Kawabata novel that feels akin to that project—uncanny, existential, hypnagogic, globalist, Abeesque—it might be Dandelion, his final work, which has recently been translated into English for the first time by Michael Emmerich for New Directions. While it has the beautiful spareness of prose that Kawabata is known for, it has a strangeness reminiscent of Abe’s work. In it, Ineko suffers from a condition of seizures of body blindness, where she periodically becomes unable to see her lover’s body. Because of this, she is left by her mother and lover at the Ikuta Mental Hospital for treatment. An exploration of madness, desire, and communication, the novel is a compelling swan song for Kawabata, both an extension of his previous work and a movement into new territory.
Dustin Illingworth on The Trial by Franz Kafka In Kōbō Abe’s 1993 New York Times obituary, Takatsugu Nakano referred to the departed giant as “Japan’s Kafka”—and little wonder. Abe’s disorienting oeuvre seemingly bore all the telltale scars of Kafka’s stygian fabulism: the claustrophobia of The Woman in the Dunes, say, or the Samsa-esque transformation of Okuyama in The Face of Another. But while Nakano’s comparison may seem apt to the point of innocuousness, Abe had in fact never read Prague’s greatest literary son. “I read Kafka after I had become a writer,” Kōbō Abe admitted in an interview. “I was really shocked when I read him for the first time. I felt a sense of relatedness, of someone very close to me.” Whether or not one believes this to be creative misprision, Kafka remains Abe’s essential literary pairing. Like Abe’s best novels, The Trial’s resilient ambiguity is capable of withstanding any interpretive schema: existential fantasy, parable, prophecy. James Penn on Dandelion by Yasunari Kawabata Of the two Japanese Nobel Laureates in Literature, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe, few would dispute that Kōbō Abe is more aligned with the latter than the former. Both Abe and Ōe thought Japanese literature should be in direct conversation with the world, whereas PAGE 184
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Deciding to return home to live I close my eyes to a furtive whisper: “Sad, sad” Time flows on… laden with misgivings and regrets, time flows on its amber way Caught between two choices I lie spread-eagled— in perfect bilateral symmetry The smell of bread I baked with Mother on a midsummer afternoon— put away the memory. The day I left home, Dad muttering not “So you’re off” but “So you’re leaving us” The day I left for Tokyo Mother looked older by all the years of separation ahead Fukui Station, where I left Mother with a light “See you, then”— as if going shopping In the sun peace seemed so mundane— what have I thrown away? PAGE 185
Buy myself a pair of slippers yellow as spring flowers now that I live here Next door, hanging out quilts to air— rattle of the window opening echoes with spring Spitting out the day’s fatigue, taking it on again, round and round it goes— evening train on the Yamanote Loop Line Beautician who’s cut my hair three times asks me as I take my seat “Is this your first time here?” Living alone— rotten lemon in my right hand hardly an event On a night when the world has forgotten me the phone next door rings on and on Haven’t watered my plants for three days now— as if taking some sort of revenge Long-distance call from Mother— discuss the prospects of her herbs and tomatoes
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My Bisymmetrical Self
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Out in the garden I pluck a morning tomato— yes, this is home
Your fragrance— suddenly turn, knowing it can’t be you: summer festival in my hometown
Slip out of my T-shirt— feeling Mother’s gaze trace over me
Admonished to stop writing of romance— what’s poetry, then? Just another way to get a man?
Making sushi with Mother, summer comes to an end— I chew a hempseed, savoring the taste
After a muddled conversation, I wonder— was I expecting too much of ties with my mother?
Hug my kid brother, lover of chocolate parfaits— I’m off once more, leaving home again
Days of wanting to doubt one another— my mother with sagging breasts, and her daughter, me
Persimmons sent from home— their warm glow brightens my single room
My kid brother, who’s never been in love, takes me to the movies— I want to look pretty
Before the day is out I really must do something— gourmet mushrooms from Mother, a bit of a nuisance
From the second floor I watch my mother’s umbrella, a glowing red— like a watercolor by Chihiro Iwasaki
Winter brings a chill even to the heart— as cold winds blow my phone bill goes up Warmly recommended by my mother— this hand cream called “You-skin A”
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VCR bought to capture my five minutes on TV
My favorite singers, the Southern All Stars— kid brother now old enough to listen to them too
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Back home on an excursion ticket good for a limited time— layover in my hometown
Groping in the mailbox of my solitary room— already my face has back its Tokyo feel
At the bus stop I meet a boy who speaks my native dialect with perfect courtesy
January—the soft curve of the daffodil bending its head sets me thinking of home
In my hometown, children’s boots running in the snow like a sprinkling of bright gumdrops Ordinary conversations, ordinary smiles— the ordinariness of home is what I like best
—— Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. This excerpt is reprinted by permission from Salad Anniversary (Pushkin Press, 2015). Copyright © by Machi Tawara.
From mother-and-daughter we turn into a pair of women— an age when I think of marrying
New Year’s Eve— back in my old home, complain to Mother my toothbrush is gone
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Examining old New Year’s cards, I sort the senders into piles— this year draws to a close
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Roasting ginkgo nuts— my thoughts turn to the gentle universe of home and family
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Kōbō Abe and Martin Heidegger
There is no question that Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is an uncanny work of literature. From the seemingly passive complacency of the woman with regards to her situation, to the “rational” reasonings of the narrator at the novel’s conclusion, there is no resolved comfort offered by Abe with regard to his characters’ absurd existences. Discomfort itself is focused on with minute 1/8 mm detail at numerous times throughout the narrative, along with all of the pains that come with living in a house without proper foundational support. But perhaps what is most substantial about the novel is the question Abe raises as to the uncanniness of the human being itself. For it is not merely the situation that the characters find themselves in which strikes us as being familiarly unfamiliar. And surely it is not merely an autobiographical feature which Abe relied upon in making his protagonist an entomologist. It is rather the groundlessness of the characters’ existences which gives rise to the feeling of uncanniness throughout the novel. From the literal lack of a strong foundation to the house for the characters to reside within, to the quicksand which ends the possibility of escape, there is no solid ground for Abe’s characters to dwell upon. The twentieth century produced an abundance of thinkers concerned not only with the state of philosophy post-Nietzsche, but the human being’s unique place in PAGE 188
history as technology began to develop and create previously unforeseen problems. And while it is trite to further point out the exact ways in which the influences of such thinkers manifests in Abe’s writings, it is indeed worth noting the ways in which the thinking of artists such as Abe expresses the “thinking of thought” mirrored by his peers. Martin Heidegger is such a thinker of the twentieth century who was also attentive to the ways in which human existence was exemplarily uncanny. In a world threatened with nuclear annihilation, thought was necessarily confronting the absurdity of human existence. But how such thinkers and artists “chose” to ground such questions, and the way in which these problems manifest is indeed a problem worth uncovering. Perhaps what is most striking about the works of Heidegger and Abe is the lack of a foundation the human being’s existence has. Indeed, in a certain sense, Abe’s novel can be understood as a work of anarchism. I. Heidegger’s Analysis of Human Existence as Uncanny Heidegger’s analysis of the “thrownness” of human existence is well known. Whether it be from the “shallow” problems of human facticity to the “deeper” problems of historicity, Heidegger is unrelenting in his understanding of human existence as being one of struggle. And while it is obviously true that we are born into a situation of which we have no say and often times struggle against, it is not at all clear why such an existence ought to be understood as uncanny. Of course, the German word that Heidegger uses for expressing the English translation of “uncanny” is unheimlich, which refers to the home (Heim). But if the human existence is one which is not-at-home, how is it that we ought to understand such a formulation?
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Dwelling at Home in the Dunes:
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Perhaps we ought to start with the traditional formulation of what it means to be human. The human being has—for millennia—been understood as zoon logon echon, or, in a Heideggerian translation, the animal who dwells which gathers with discourse.1 The logos here, or the gathering, is what we shall focus on most explicitly. For this is the feature which best exemplifies why the human’s existence is one of such exemplary uncanniness. And while it is true that we have an animal existence, dwelling with other animals, neither of these features give rise to the unhomely feeling which is the human affair. For Heidegger, no other animal has an existence as nearly as uncanny as ours.2 The uncanniness rather, comes from our essential gathering. But surely the way in which we ought to understand what is “gathered” is nothing explicitly literal. What is unique to the human is not the ability to gather things together as such. Instead, what is unique to the human is the ability to gather together in a mode of discourse. When Heidegger discusses the gathering of the human it is always in reference to language, but not merely the linguistic sense of language and speaking. Nor should logos be understood to be a mere “rational” way of comportment to our world and environment. Human beings are the beings who are able to bring together beings, “having” an ability to see the essence of what things are, and thus have an insight into the being of things. Now, without delving into the full breadth of Heidegger’s project of interrogating into the question of the meaning of being, there are a few preliminary questions that should be noted. For Heidegger wants to understand how it is that the human being is able to understand (gather) how it is that things are, and thus perhaps it will become possible to understand what
being more properly is. For if we can properly come to understand how and why it is that things appear to be the way in which they “hold sway” before us, the entire philosophic tradition and the thinking that has been produced as a result may indeed find a proper foundation for more speculative questions. Is it not necessary to find a “ground” for our thinking before we can begin to ask the more abstract or secondary questions? But where in the tradition do we find such notions as a “ground” to being? In the Western tradition, Plato is the first to give being a proper ground.3 In coming to identify the truth of existence with the eternal, permanent, and always present eidos Plato is indeed able to provide a foundation to all of our representations and thoughts. The ability of human beings to reason out the proper way in which these Forms exist and manifest themselves in various instances gives us a proper way to live our lives. For, after all, it is the Form of the Good towards which all things strive.4 And if we are to read Plato in a more properly Heideggerian fashion, it is towards such Forms that our comprehension and understanding strives towards. The idea (look) of things by which the human being is able to grasp hold of, and determine the essence of that which one has come to “see,” is indeed a type of sight. And while it is a type of sight that makes the human being unique for Heidegger, such sight has nothing to do with any empirical ability of eyesight as such. Rather, the type of sight that Heidegger is concerned with is a type of insight into the way in which things appear and come to presence before us. Perhaps now it is becoming clear the issues that will manifest for Plato, and why it is that he appeals to such a ground as the eternally unchanging and present Forms. For clearly, the ways in which things appear before humans
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are never understood in an unanimous manner. And the being of such things is likewise rarely agreed upon, especially with more complex concepts such as Justice or the Good. But with a ground that is able to be grasped through the rational faculties, Plato is indeed able to give the idea of things a way that ought to be understood. For when we can reason our way to uncovering the more truthful way in which things always are, then we can make present the things that we are striving to grasp (such as Justice). Uncovering the truth of being then becomes a task uniquely for the human being insofar as the human being is the only being capable of properly reasoning and uncovering the eidos of that which is. This Platonic understanding of the truth of being, and the properly human way of uncovering it, is not Heidegger’s affair. Heidegger is much less willing to grant the human being’s “exceptional” character on rational grounds. This is not to say that Heidegger disparages reason altogether or outright. But his understanding of why the human being is unique has much more to do with the confrontation with being than any rational faculties as such. Human beings are the only beings that are certainly aware of and acquainted with their mortalities.5 And with such knowledge comes the problem of the finitude of existence, and the “thrownness” of our having been born. Such problems will of course bleed into each other, and eventually lead to the question of being as time. But without attempting to grapple with such a large and ineffable problem, perhaps we can focus more succinctly on the problem of the human being as not-at-home within its own existence. This problem will stem from the confrontation with the ground we have sought after thus far. In coming to question into the way in which things present themselves
to us, Heidegger adopts the method of phenomenology. In interrogating the way in which things appear to us via the phenomena that are present to us, Heidegger is opening up his analysis to problems of finitude and the inability of the human being to ever properly apprehend that which appears before her as such. For the human’s ability to gather that which appears before her will depend on factors and influences that are not only outside any particular “agent’s” control, but are also irrational influences as well. As previously noted, what determines our ability to gather (logos) is dependent, at least to some degree, upon the language of which we are “equipped.” But is our ability to use and maneuver within a language dependent upon any particular will or agency? Is not our understanding of that which appears before us largely informed by an entire history of which we have no determination over, nor influence? The question at hand is not one of historiology. This question is indeed one for historicity, and the way in which being has come to be “determined” and understood by the human being. For any given thing to which we strive to understand, there are ways of looking at, and thus comprehending the thing which will always escape us “in itself.” This is not merely a problem of beauty resting upon the eye of the beholder, or the excellence of the beloved only being known by the lover. What is problematic in this instance, is the inability of the human being to ever attain “knowledge” as such. Is such a radical conclusion truly a product of Heidegger’s writings? Do we not know things in their entirety? Cannot the physicist break down the thing under investigation to the most fundamental parts, and the relations that subsist within? To these questions, Heidegger’s analysis must answer that we do not
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II. Kōbō Abe and the Desire to Knowledge It is important to note that the protagonist of Abe’s work is a learned man of science. He begins his journey out to the dunes in order to catch, gather, and name previously unknown varieties of insects. This protagonist demonstrates the ancient Greek definition of the human being in an exemplary fashion. For after all, he is an animal who is dwelling in a manner which is gathering with a discourse. But I do not wish to call attention to the seemingly ironic wish of the human being to assert her immortal place in history with a previously unknown discovery. Rather, I should like to focus on this act of naming and attempting to gather by the protagonist. For this is perhaps what is most essential about the human being, over and above the wish for an immortal place within history. If we thus far acknowledge that Heidegger is provoking an understanding of the human existence that has been historically covered over (or forgotten), then perhaps we ought to better understand how it is that the human being was conceived in a more “original” manner. As previously mentioned, the human being is the animal that dwells which gathers with discourse. This definition, while unconventional, does not offer any immediate objection. But perhaps this notion of “gathering” does not seem at all self-evident. Following Heidegger’s analysis of the way in which the human being dwells “within” the world, the gathering of the logos is not as unfitting a definition as may appear at first blush. For Heidegger, human beings are the location and site in which being is revealed. It is as though through the human being, being is wrested out of concealment and brought into the “light” of understanding. Now this is not to be considered
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understand things in their entirety. Indeed, there will always be an aspect of the thing which escapes our understanding. But if we want to widen the scope of the analysis, “things” are not alone in their inability to be properly grasped. For the human being, likewise, has no proper way of being approached and understood in its entirety. Again, this is not a question of biology, chemistry, or physics. The human being may indeed come to be understood in its entirety in a biological fashion, but this does not close the discussion of what it means to be human. The human being can approach things and existence through a manifold of ways and understanding, but none of them will ever be able to properly account for existence as such until being itself is given a proper investigation. This is the conclusion that Heidegger promotes through all of his writings and arguments. He eventually writes that the era and tradition of philosophy and knowledge that has been promoted and continued has reached its end. In order to properly prepare for the thinking that is to come, we ought to orient ourselves towards the “inceptive beginning.” This beginning is the beginning that escapes representational thought, and which cannot be approached through rational argumentation indebted to a Platonic tradition. Indeed, in approaching this beginning, we need to attend to the ways in which our tradition and historical being has subsisted in all prior instances, and avoided being properly discarded. We must attend to the ways in which all of our approaches towards beings and being, have always failed to properly grasp the “ground” from which these questions and problems come. Indeed, it is as though all of our prior analyses and philosophizing have let that which demands thinking slip through our hands.
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having completely founded knowledge. Human existence, in being necessarily historical, cannot found itself. In fact, the foundation seems to recede at all times in some way or another. And once again, this is not merely a problem of collecting enough historical “data” to uncover the more “proper” way of understanding the past events. Human existence is inherently limited in its ability to focus, understand, and reveal the past. One only need consider what events must occur in the contemporary “present” for the question of prior “errors” to become evident out of the past. And, as previously mentioned, this is not merely a question for the natural sciences to uncover. For even if we were able to give a full biological account of what the human being is, this is still only a biological account. Abe’s thinking of this problem is not only manifest in the protagonist being an entomologist. The strife of the prisoners within the dunes against the apparently meaningless work is one of the central ways in which the feeling of uncanniness is evoked throughout the novel. But it is not only the work itself which is rebelled against throughout, but the very dwelling within which the prisoners are forced to live. The habitat of the prisoners is in a constant state of perpetual collapse, in which the very house which protects the prisoners from the interminably sifting dunes is likewise always on the brink of ruin. And while the prisoners attempt to ground the house’s foundations, there is no stable ground for them to dwell and live upon. Instead, they must exist in a way that accepts the fragile stability of the sand and not attempt to demand more than such a precarious house can offer. But is all of this to say that Abe is merely writing in metaphor in order to evoke the feelings of not-being-athome? It does not seem necessary to confine the literary writings of Abe to be purely metaphorical. Instead, it
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the activities of some volition on the part of the human being itself. Rather, human beings are the beings who are able to draw being out of concealment, and hold it in sway before us. Of course one of the predominant ways in which human beings are able to gather things, and hold said things in lying presence, is in naming that which appears before them. It is the ability to “have” discourse which separates human existence from the other animals for Heidegger. And this holding sway over the beings that appear before them is what allows human beings the ability to investigate into the being of the things, and being itself. The ability of the human being to gather is fundamental to what it means to be human. Abe was clearly aware of this unique and seemingly unbecoming practice by humans. For, after all, it is the protagonist’s desire to name and gather unknown beings before him which ultimately leads to his imprisonment within the dunes. But how is it that the activity of gathering and questioning being leads to the opening up of the groundlessness of the human existence as such? Why does a Heideggerian analysis require that we can never gather in full understanding that which appears before us? The problem lies in the essence of unconcealment itself. If human beings are the beings which partake in unconcealment, and partake in the revealing of that which lies before us and shows itself, then there remains the question from whence the beings are being unconcealed from. It is this challenge of the primordial concealment which poses such a problem for human existence. Indeed, when we make an appeal to the ground from which things come, it is as though we are faced with an abyss (Abgrund). It is this abyss of existence which we have already called attention to when discussing the impossibility of
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should be possible to read this bizarre situation as what it is: human beings attempting to live a necessarily unstable existence. And when the protagonist does indeed attempt to give reason and stability to the condition he has found himself in, there is no complete answer given. Whether the absurd economic practices of the town within the dunes have justification or not is of little importance when one’s life is being determined beyond one’s control by such absurdities. Of course it is reasonable to understand the human being’s existence to be one which is inherently determined by seeming absurdities. And this is all due to the “fact” that human existence is a historical one, in which we have no permanently stable foundation to rest upon and ground our experiences and beliefs. Our understanding is of necessity determined by what is able to manifest and show itself to us, and our ability to let that which appears lie before us and be gathered through the power of language and understanding. But this power of language is nothing purely linguistic, nor necessitated by the ability to vocalize sounds. It is rather, the uniquely human way of dwelling within the world which allows us to gather that which has come before us for concernful dealings and disclosure.
focusing on the traditional notions of masculinity that the protagonist embodies, there are a few points worth emphasizing. This protagonist is not a calm and collected prisoner accepting of his situation. He has been imprisoned, and, as he understands it, unjustly. Throughout the novel he attempts to rebel against his state of imprisonment, even managing an escape. His thinking is rational, and his appeals to justice and his captors are likewise those of a reasonable and calculative agent. His frustrations at the sustained injustice he is being subjected to cause him to not only destroy parts of the house within the dunes, but hurt his fellow prisoner as well. He displays the expected behaviors of someone coming out of a tradition and world which is concerned with laws, order, and justice grounded upon permanent and unchanging principles of human reason. But as is evident throughout the novel, this is not the proper way to exist in a habitat and situation which is not hospitable to demands for stability. Indeed, his traditional expectations and demands of what ought to be only frustrate the situation and his position within it further. Against this, though, is his fellow prisoner who is able to live within the dunes in a relatively calm manner. This woman does not frustrate the situation, nor does she live in an entirely amoral state. She has notions of justice and morality, but they are not of his tradition. Abe is able to express the feminine as that which is able to endure the seemingly absurd existence of the prisoners. And perhaps this is what is most striking about the novel. Against a “masculine” tradition from which the protagonist comes out of, is the fluid dwelling of the woman in a habitat of fragile stability. She does not live a life erecting structures upon which to dwell in order to appease a desire for permanence. Indeed, it is as though an existence of
III. The Woman in the Dunes Thus far this investigation has focused on the human being’s existence in a seemingly “neutral” way, attempting to capture and relate to the “human experience.” But perhaps there is an aspect of Abe’s work which has been covered over, or slipped through the cracks of interpretation. This aspect deals with the femininity of the other prisoner within the dunes, and her ability to dwell. Abe’s protagonist is not only a learned man of science, but is indeed very much so a “man.” And without PAGE 193
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——————————— 1 Of course the most common way to understand this formulation is the “social rational animal.” For reasons which shall be argued further, we ought to reject such a simple translation. 2 Indeed, for Heidegger, other animals do not properly “exist” at all! 3 While there is an abundance of literature working to establish Aristotle as the first philosopher giving being a foundation (ousia), I shall be operating within this paper with a more traditional understanding regarding Plato’s theory of the Forms and how his thinking first gave being a ground for representational thought. 4 Republic, Book VII.
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5 I understand—and agree—that Heidegger’s insistence upon the human being’s familiarity with mortality as exceptional is no longer tenable. For the purposes of this essay, however, I shall accept Heidegger’s formulation. Perhaps the conclusions drawn here and throughout Heidegger’s work will lead to further problematizations of the “otherness” of the other animals.
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fluid maneuverability is better suited for a life without a subsisting ground. Perhaps one further reflection upon the nature of Abe’s writing and the “problem” of the feminine that is provoked by it. As briefly noted earlier, there is a question regarding the nature of metaphor within Abe’s novel. And while it does not seem necessary to confine his writings to merely metaphorical symbolism, perhaps there is a feminist argument for such a view. For if the woman in the dunes is not only rejecting the tradition and morality from which the man comes from, perhaps Abe too is rejecting a tradition. Western thought is built out of an understanding of language and writing that is indebted to a semiology of signifier relating to the signified. And it is just this understanding which has given us the concept and tool of writing metaphorically. But does not such an understanding contain a tacit complacency in the very tradition we have been critiquing throughout this paper? Are not the questions and problems of our existence as provoked through the uncanny writings of Abe and Heidegger enough to make us feel not-at-home with a “perfect” semiology? Would not writing outside of the framework of metaphor in itself be a challenge to a tradition of writing, thinking, and philosophizing we have inherited in the West? Is this tradition not one which has been largely dominated by masculine figures and ways of relating to the world? Perhaps the feminine in the dunes is not merely a woman, but something closer to 1/8mm in size.
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Our departure is approaching; we take our places in two carriages; I appreciate the strength of the horses and think, constrained, about their tireless march; we leave Brabant in winter, and at the end of the year; we will greet the New Year along the way, we will see long stretches of road, and inns; we will see different houses, we will be able to look at our faces languidly, sitting down facing one another, we will see the journey measure itself against what we say; I think to tell them a bit about the journeys of my life, I open myself up to them with my voice. Blanche, Eulalia, and Alice travel with me, and we remember the nostalgia of our homes. Thus are we women. The horses have now stopped, and we abandon the last forests of Flanders, with Brabant already behind us; like our past life; we close the windows hermetically, and Alice opens her mouth in the new language.—If we spoke according to the second language—she says. Sitting between us is a passenger who has come from Portugal to show us the way and who seems to have lived in a time much farther at the future than our own; “at the future” shouldn’t be said, if the language were always immaculate; outwardly she is not pleasing but her speaking, yes, is almost enticing:—My country is a country of poor rebels. By day, they are miserable; by night, opulent on the island of loves.—It was then that Nietzsche revealed himself
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sitting among us in our carriage. He traveled pressed between Alice and Eulalia. He still loathed women, but not us, who continued swaying on the road and who were what remains of women. He said to us:—“The truth? Oh, you don’t know the truth. Is it not an attack on all our modesty?”—He spoke among women, as if he were also a woman. But he looked at us suspiciously, our hoods starched, and exalted; he told us a donkey couldn’t be tragic and, when the carriage turned onto the right path, he disappeared through Alice’s face. She, after a pause, conveyed to us that the last murmur she had heard from him had been that, since knowledge placed boundaries on wisdom, there were many things he never wanted to know. Cecilia, who had come with the intention of taking us to Portugal, did not let silence fall:—I want her to be as invisible to you as you are to me invisible.—The carriage had stopped; they had reached an inn. Today it isn’t cold, it seems less wintry, and the rooms in this inn look toward the country where Saint John of the Cross was born; Cecilia’s country, where we’re going already knowing its language, is farther to the West and I imagine we’ll still have to cross green valleys, almost deserted plains, land, land, land. Cecilia either speaks at length, or is silent, a binary rhythm brings her to us, and takes her away from us; because I told her she had similarities to the sea its waves as I offered her a sip of water from the pitcher sitting on the windowsill which overlooked the arid soils of Saint John of the Cross, she confessed that she had also known him, through companionship in love and writing, that he had been the only man she’d ever loved, although she had always lived far away from him, except on the day he’d come to sit down, lower, at her side,
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A Selection from In the House of July and August
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and she had ultimately been unable to speak, only write the text he dictated; his face, when it was near, was always what she saw when she was far away, and he had an unexpected way of commanding her to write, or rather, making her understand his movement of voices, gestures, the tilting of his head which, out of all the parts of his body, put everything into words; I feared losing this subtle, and strong fluidity, and leaned toward him, ever nearer to his closed fists. And, at a certain point, he got up to go to the window that overlooked this same landscape, or one almost identical to it, and told me that I, either now or later, must accompany you to Portugal, and that he gave you his hand. I accepted it for you, not for me, though I had always loved him, and his hand remained on the windowsill, the hand itself, not its shadow, and he left with his bloodied wrist hidden in his sleeve and murmuring to me, when he departed, “the writing grows,” he consoled me.
—— Translated by Audrey Young. Courtesy of Deep Vellum.
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I beg your pardon for being, Alice began to say when, at the meeting in the inn which replaced that of the Chapter, she came to show us her nightmares. I offered her a tree branch to say that I would support her. Dearest Alice, tonight, in the place for your head, I had a dream: that you lived inside a small glass; that’s why you were eager. When I asked if you would, soon, die, they replied that you would live until the rim of the glass.
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I heard that the girl had left home suddenly. No one knew where she was. The husband thought she might have gone abroad. It was only a guess. He had no information. I was agitated and asked endless questions, but no concrete facts emerged. “I know no more than you. She simply vanished, I suppose she’s entitled to go if she wants to—she’s free, white and twenty-one.” He adopted a facetious tone, I could not tell if he was speaking the truth. The police did not suspect foul play. There was no reason to think harm had come to her, or that she had not gone away voluntarily. She was old enough to know her own mind. People were constantly disappearing; hundreds left home and were not seen again, many of them women unhappily married. Her marriage was known to have been breaking up. Almost certainly she was better off now, and only wanted to be left in peace. Further investigation would be resented and lead to more trouble. This was a convenient view for them, it excused them from taking action. But I did not accept it. She had been conditioned into obedience since early childhood, her independence destroyed by systematic suppression. I did not believe her capable of taking such a drastic step on her own initiative: I suspected pressure from outside. I wished I could talk to someone who knew her well, but she seemed to have had no close friends. The husband came to town on some mysterious business, and I asked him to lunch at my club. We talked for two hours, but in the end I was none the wiser. He persistently treated the whole affair lightly, said he was glad she had gone. “Her neurotic behavior nearly drove PAGE 197
me demented. I’d had all I could take. She refused to see a psychiatrist. Finally she walked out on me without a word. No explanation. No warning.” He spoke as if he was the injured party. “She went her own way without considering me, so I’m not worrying about her. She won’t come back, that’s one thing certain.” While he was away from home, I took the opportunity of driving down to the house and going through the things in her room, but found nothing in the way of a clue. There was just the usual collection of pathetic rubbish: a china bird; a broken string of fake pearls; snapshots in an old chocolate box. One of these, in which a lake reflected perfectly her face and her shining hair, I put into my wallet. Somehow or other I had to find her; the fact remained. I felt the same compulsive urge that had driven me straight to the country when I first arrived. There was no rational explanation, I could not account for it. It was a sort of craving that had to be satisfied. I abandoned all my own affairs. From now on my business was to search for her. Nothing else mattered. Certain sources of possible information were still available. Hairdressers. Clerks who kept records of transport bookings. Those fringe characters. I went to the places such people frequented, stood about playing the fruit machines until I saw a chance of speaking. Money helped. So did intuition. No clue was too slender to follow up. The approaching emergency made it all the more urgent to find her quickly. I could not get her out of my head. I had not seen all the things I remembered about her. During my first visit I was in their living-room, talking about the Indris, my favorite subject. The man listened. She went to and fro arranging flowers. On an impulse I said the pair of them resembled the lemurs, both so friendly and charming, and living together so happily here in the trees. He laughed. She
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A Selection from Ice
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looked horrified and ran out through the French window, silvery hair floating behind her, her bare legs flashing pale. The secret, shady garden, hidden away in seclusion and silence, was a pleasant cool retreat from the heat of summer. Then suddenly it was unnaturally, fearfully cold. The masses of dense foliage all around became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging toward her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. The room was cold. There was thick frost on the window panes and snow piled up on the sill outside. He wore the long uniform coat. She was shivering. When she asked, “May I have a rest?” her voice had a pathetic tremor. He frowned, looked at his watch before he put down his palette. “All right. That’ll do for now. You can dress.” He untied her. The cords had left deep red angry rings on the white flesh. Her movements were slow and clumsy from cold, she fumbled awkwardly with buttons, suspenders. This seemed to annoy him, He turned away from her sharply, his face irritable. She kept glancing nervously at him, her mouth was unsteady, her hands would not stop shaking. Another time the two were together in a cold room. As usual, he wore the long coat. It was night, freezing hard. He had a book in his hand, she was doing nothing. She looked cold and miserable, huddled up in a thick gray loden coat with a red and blue check lining. The room was silent and full of tension. It could be felt that neither of them had spoken for a long time. Outside the window, a twig snapped in the iron frost with a sound like a handclap. He dropped the book and got up to put
on a record. Instantly she began to protest. “Oh, no! Not that awful singing, for heaven’s sake!” He ignored her, went on with what he was doing. The turntable started revolving. It was a record I had given them from my tape recording of the lemurs’ song. To me, the extraordinary jungle music was lovely, mysterious, magical. To her it was a sort of torture, apparently. She covered her ears with her hands, winced at the high notes, looked more and more distraught. When the record ended and he restarted it without a moment’s pause, she cried out as if he had struck her, “No! I won’t listen to it all over again!” threw herself at the mechanism, stopped it so abruptly that the voices expired in uncanny wailing. He faced her angrily. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Have you gone off your head?” “You know I can’t stand that horrible record.” She seemed almost beside herself. “You only play it because I hate it so much….” Tears sprang unchecked from her eyes, she brushed them away carelessly with her hand. He glared at her, said: “Why should I sit in silence for hours just because you don’t choose to open your mouth?” His angry voice was full of indignant resentment. “What’s wrong with you, anyhow, these days? Why can’t you behave like a normal being?” She did not answer, dropped her face in her hands. Tears dripped between her fingers. He gazed at her with a disgusted expression. “I might as well be in solitary confinement as alone with you here. But I warn you I’m not going to put up with it much longer. I’ve had enough. I’m sick and tired of the way you’re carrying on. Pull yourself together, or else—” With a threatening scowl, he went out, banging the door behind him. A silence followed, while she stood like a lost child, tears wet on her cheeks. Next she started wandering aimlessly round the room, stopped by the window, pulled the curtain aside, then cried out in amazement.
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Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous skyconflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and color, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering icecliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor. Despairingly she looked all around. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline icelight, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. It was essential for me to find her without delay. The situation was alarming, the atmosphere tense, the emergency imminent. There was talk of a secret act of aggression by some foreign power, but no one knew
what had actually happened. The government would not disclose the facts. I was informed privately of a steep rise in radioactive pollution, pointing to the explosion of a nuclear device, but of an unknown type, the consequences of which could not be accurately predicted. It was possible that polar modifications had resulted, and would lead to a substantial climatic change due to the refraction of solar heat. If the melting Antarctic ice cap flowed over the South Pacific and Atlantic oceans, a vast ice-mass would be created, reflecting the sun’s rays and throwing them back into outer space, thus depriving the earth of warmth. In town, everything was chaotic and contradictory. News from abroad was censored, but travel was left unrestricted. Confusion was increased by a spate of new and conflicting regulations, and by the arbitrary way controls were imposed or lifted. The one thing that would have clarified the position was an overall picture of world events; but this was prohibited by the determination of the politicians to ban all foreign news. My impression was that they had lost their heads, did not know how to deal with the approaching danger, and hoped to keep the public in ignorance of its exact nature until a plan had been evolved. No doubt people would have been more concerned, and would have made greater efforts to find out what was taking place in other countries, if, at home, they had not been obliged to contend with the fuel shortage, the power cuts, the breakdown of transport, and the rapid diversion of supplies to the black market. There was no sign of a break in the abnormal cold. My room was reasonably warm, but even in hotels heating was being reduced to a minimum, and, outside, the erratic, restricted services hampered my investigations. The river had been frozen over for weeks, the total paralysis of the docks was a serious problem. All essential commodities
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were in short supply; rationing, at least of fuel and food, could not be delayed much longer, despite the reluctance of those in power to resort to unpopular measures. Everyone who could do so was leaving in search of better conditions. No more passages were available, either by sea or air; there were long waiting lists for all ships and planes. I had no proof that the girl was already abroad. On the whole it seemed unlikely she would have managed to leave the country, and an obscure train of thought suggested that she might embark on a certain vessel. The port was a long way off, to reach it involved a long complicated journey. I was delayed, got there, after traveling all night, only an hour before sailing time. The passengers were already aboard, crowding the decks with friends who were seeing them off. The first thing I had to do was to speak to the captain. He turned out to be maddeningly talkative. While I became more and more impatient, he complained at great length about the way the authorities allowed overcrowding: it was a danger to his ship, unfair to himself, to the company, the passengers, the insurance people. That was his business. As soon as I got permission to get on with my own, I made a methodical search of the ship, but without finding a trace of the person I wanted. Finally I gave up in despair and went out on deck. Too tired and disheartened to push through the crowds of people milling about there, I stood by the rail, overcome by a sudden urge to abandon the whole affair. I had never really had a valid reason for supposing the girl would be on this ship. Suddenly it seemed neither sensible, nor even sane, to continue search based solely on vague surmise; particularly as my attitude to its object was so undefined. When I considered that imperative need I felt for her, as for a missing part of myself, it appeared less like love than
an inexplicable aberration, the sign of some character flaw I ought to eradicate, instead of letting it dominate me. At this moment a big black-backed gull sailed past, almost brushing my cheek with its wing tip, as if on purpose to draw my attention and eyes after it up to the boat deck. At once I saw her there, looking away from me, where no one had been before; and everything I had just been thinking was swept out of my head by a wave of excitement, my old craving for her returned. I was convinced it was she without even seeing her face; no other girl in the world had such dazzling hair, or was so thin that her fragility could be seen through a thick gray coat. I simply had to reach her, it was all I could think of. Envying the gull’s effortless flight, I plunged straight into the solid mass of humanity separating me from her, and forced my way through. I had hardly any time, in a moment the boat would be sailing. Visitors were leaving already, forming a strong cross current I had to fight. My one idea was to get to the boat deck before it was too late. In my anxiety, I must have pushed people aside. Hostile remarks were made, a fist shaken. I tried to explain my urgency to those who obstructed me, but they would not listen. Three toughlooking young men linked arms and aggressively barred my way, their expressions threatening. I had not meant to offend, hardly knew what I was doing. I was thinking only of her. Suddenly an official voice shouted through a loudspeaker: “All visitors ashore! The gangway will be raised in exactly two minutes.” The ship’s siren sounded an ear-splitting blast. An immediate rush followed. It was quite impossible to resist the human flood surging toward the gangway. I was caught up in the stampede, dragged along with it, off the boat, and on to the quay. Standing at the water’s edge, I soon saw her high above me, considerably further off now. The ship had already
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moved away from the shore and was gathering speed every second, already divided from me by a strip of water too wide to jump. In desperation, I shouted and waved my arms, trying to attract her attention. It was hopeless. A whole sea of arms waved all around me, innumerable voices were shouting unintelligibly. I saw her turn to speak to somebody who had just joined her, at the same time pulling a hood over her head, so that her hair was hidden. Immediate doubts invaded me, and increased as I watched her. After all, perhaps she was not the right girl; she seemed too self-possessed. But I was not certain. The boat was now beginning the turn that would bring it round facing the mouth of the harbor, leaving behind it a curving track of smoother water, like the swath left by a scythe. I stood staring after it, although cold had driven the passengers off the decks and there was no more hope of recognition. I dimly remembered what I had been thinking just before I caught sight of her, but only as one might recall an incident from a dream. Once again the urgency of the search had reclaimed me; I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being. Everything else in the world seemed immaterial. All around me people were walking away, stamping their feet in the cold. I hardly noticed the mass departure. It did not occur to me to leave the edge of the water, over which I continued to gaze at the vessel’s diminishing shape. I had been an utter fool. I was furious with myself for letting it go without discovering the identity of the girl on board. Now I would never be sure whether she had, or had not, been the right one. And if she had been, how would I ever find her again? A mournful hoot traveled across the water: the ship was leaving the protection of the harbor, heading out into the open sea. Already meeting the
offshore rollers, it kept disappearing behind gray masses of water surging along the horizon. It looked absurdly small, a toy boat. I lost sight of it, my eyes could not find it again. It was lost irretrievably. I only became aware that everyone else had gone and that I was alone there, when two policemen approached, marching along side by side, and pointed to a sign, “Loitering on the waterfront strictly forbidden: War Department.” “Why are you hanging about here? Can’t you read?” Needless to say, they refused to believe that I had not seen it. Hugely tall in their helmets, they stood on each side, so close that their guns stuck into me, and demanded my papers. These were in order. There was nothing against me. Nevertheless, my conduct had been suspicious, they insisted on writing down my name and address. Again I had acted stupidly, this time by drawing attention to myself. Now that my name had been noted, it would appear in the records; I would be known to the police everywhere, my movements would be kept under observation. It would be a serious handicap in my search. As the two men hustled me through the gates, something made me look up at a row of big black-backed gulls perched on a wall, all facing into the wind and pointing out to sea, as motionless as if they had been stuffed and put up there to act as a message. On the spot I decided to leave the country before any of my visas lapsed or were canceled. No particular place seemed more or less promising than another as a base from which to start searching. But to attempt to operate from here while under suspicion would surely invite failure. I had to leave at once, before the police report circulated. It could not have been done through the normal channels. By employing other methods, I managed to board a northbound cargo boat carrying a
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few passengers, and booked to the end of the voyage. The purser was willing to vacate his cabin for a consideration. Next day, at the first port of the trip, I went on deck to watch our arrival. I remembered the complaints I had been forced to listen to about overcrowding when I saw a lot of people packed together on the deck below, waiting to disembark. Twelve was the authorized number of passengers. I wondered how many more were on board. It was extremely cold. Loose fragments of pack ice drifted past in the green water. Everything was misty and indistinct. The landing-stage was quite close, but the buildings at the end of the jetty looked insubstantial, amorphous. A girl in a heavy gray coat with a hood was standing a little apart from the other passengers, leaning on the rail. Occasionally a fold of the coat would blow back, showing a quilted check lining. It was the coat I noticed; although I knew perfectly well that such coats had become almost a uniform among women since the start of the cold, and were to be seen everywhere. The mist began to lift and break up, the sun would shine later. A rugged coastline appeared with many inlets and jagged rocks, snow-covered mountains behind. There were many small islands, some of which floated up and became clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it. The town appeared to consist of ruins collapsing on one another in shapeless disorder, a town of sandcastles, wrecked by the tide. A great wall which had protected it was broken in many places, both ends subsiding uselessly into the water. The place had once been important. Its fortifications had lain in ruins for centuries. It was still of some historical interest.
Sudden silence fell. The engines had stopped. The boat was still moving forward under its own momentum. I heard the faint swish of water against the sides, the plangent crying of sea birds, that sad northern sound. Otherwise all was silent. No sounds of traffic, of bells or voices, came from the land. The town of ruins waited in utter silence under the brooding mountains. I thought of long narrow ancient ships, vast collections of loot preserved in barrows, winged helmets, drinking horns, great heavy ornaments of gold and silver, piles of fossilized bones. It looked a place of the past, of the dead. There was a shout from the bridge. On the jetty a group of sullen-faced men rose out of the ground. They were armed and wore uniform: black padded tunics, belted tight at the waist, high boots, fur caps. The knives in their belts caught the light as they moved. They looked outlandish, even menacing. I heard somebody say they were the warden’s men, which meant nothing; I had not heard of this warden. Their presence surprised me since private armies were forbidden by law. Ropes were thrown; they caught them and made them fast. The gangway crashed down. A slight stir started among the passengers, who picked up luggage, got out passports and papers, began a slow shuffling progress toward a barrier that had been set up. Only the girl in the gray coat did not concern herself with landing, did not change her position. As the others moved forward and she was left isolated, my interest increased, I could not detach my attention from her, kept on watching. What most struck me was her complete stillness. Such a passive attitude, suggesting both resistance and resignation, did not seem entirely normal in a young girl. She could not have been more motionless if she had been tied to the rail, and I thought how easily bonds could be hidden by the voluminous coat.
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A bright strand of glittering blonde hair, almost white, escaped from the hood and blew loose in the wind; I felt a sudden excitement; but reminded myself that many northerners were extremely fair. All the same, my interest now became compelling, I was longing to see her face. She would have to look up toward me before that could happen. The passengers’ forward movement was interrupted. Men in uniform came aboard and cleared a way through them, demanding room for the warden, shouting peremptory orders. Space was made for a tall man, yellow haired, handsome in a tough, hawk-hard northern fashion, his height jutting above those near him. His arrogant manner, his total disregard for the feelings of others, made an unpleasant impression. As if he sensed my criticism, he glanced up for a second. His eyes were startling pieces of bright blue ice. I saw that he was making for the girl in the gray coat, the one person who had not seen him. Everyone else was staring. When he called out, “Why are you standing there? Have you gone to sleep?” she swung round as if terribly startled. “Hurry up! The car’s waiting.” He went close and touched her. He was smiling, but I detected a hint of a threat in his voice and behavior. She hung back, seemed unwilling to go with him. He linked arms with her, apparently friendly, but really forcing her forward against her will, pulling her along with him through the bunched, staring people. She still did not look up, I could not see her expression, but I could imagine his iron grip on her thin wrist. They left the ship before anyone else, and were immediately driven off in a big black car. I had been standing there as if petrified. Suddenly now I made a decision. It seemed worth taking a chance. Although without having seen her face…I had no other clue to follow, in any case.
I ran down to the cabin, sent for the purser, told him I had changed my plans. “I’m going ashore here.” He looked at me as though I was out of my mind. “Please yourself.” He shrugged his shoulders indifferently, but could not quite conceal an incipient grin. He had already received his money. Now he would be able to collect a second payment from somebody else for the remainder of the voyage. I hurriedly threw into my suitcase the few things I had unpacked.
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—— Adapted from Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition by Anna Kavan, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1967 by Anna Kavan.
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A Conversation with Alex Gilvarry
Alex Gilvarry makes me laugh. And I don’t just mean his novels. Although his latest novel, Eastman Was Here, is the funniest book I’ve read since his last novel, the award-winning debut From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. My wife and I have gone so far as to call him the funniest person we know. Even the way he walks into a bar. He and I met on a Friday, at Clandestino, a dark, moody spot in Chinatown, New York City, on a hot, bright day, a real scorcher. Gilvarry was framed by rectangular light as he opened the door, clutching a closed umbrella, irked and plucking at his shirt. Sweat. I was doing it, too. He is tall, very tall and—what’s the word— dashing. Yet his mannerisms and the air about him suggest a man at odds with his appearance. He seems older than his years, seemingly frustrated, as if he has just received inconvenient news. He immediately cracks a joke as he orders us a round of Aperol Spritzes. SC: Both of your novels are about men who leave home to find themselves. AG: That’s true. We’re all obsessed with home, leaving home, getting back home, the stakes are high when you write about home. Who said it? Something like, “Whatever you write, you’re always writing about home.” SC: I have no idea who said that. AG: Maybe I did. PAGE 204
SC: I like your confidence. AG: And of course Eastman isn’t just leaving home he’s losing his home in the beginning of the book. He’s losing his life, his wife, his kids. SC: What year is this again? AG: 1973. Eastman is fifty. SC: He’s achieved the American Dream. AG: Well, home is a sacred idea. When it’s shaken up, there’s almost nothing worse. I had a fight with my father when I was seventeen and he threw me out of the house. I can’t remember why. I thought my life was over. I thought it would be a life on the road from then on. I’d have to quit my job at the mall. SC: Where did you work? AG: Sam Goody. See, when a break-up happens, or a divorce, you have to reevaluate everything, including the basic question: where will you live? After the break-up, where are you going tonight? He’s trying to get his life back. SC: And to do that… AG: He goes to Vietnam. To write about it. And maybe get a Pulitzer. This will give him his life back. It’s a crazy idea. SC: It’s not even his idea. It’s someone else’s idea. AG: Exactly. And at first his response is: “That’s crazy.” But then he decides to do it. And then he takes credit for the idea. These are all natural lies, and of course his behavior is exaggerated. He will do and say whatever it takes to get his wife back. SC: But not everyone would feel that way. He’s an asshole, sexist relic, and yet he’s also a romantic. He wants her back. It makes us side with him. AG: Oh good. That was my intention. Even though he is such a hypocrite. He’s cheating on his wife with his
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A Writer Walks Into a Bar:
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mistress, the wife of his publisher, and he doesn’t even think of it as cheating. It’s a ten year relationship they’re in—Eastman and his wife—and it goes through the sixties, through the sexual revolution. They don’t have an open marriage, but they have gotten past infidelities. On her part and his. SC: This is why he’s so obsessed with “the phantom.” AG: Exactly. He begins to call the man his wife is sleeping with—a man he has never met—“the phantom.” And the phantom brings out the machismo in Eastman. He makes Eastman pound his chest. Eastman has someone to measure himself against, and so he has to turn up the volume on his past and present successes. And yes the question is: why this one? His wife has cheated before and they have always gotten past it. But not this time. Not this guy. Why this one? These are natural insecurities. But, again, they’re exaggerated. Sometimes events like this bring out the best in people. But this brings out the worst in Eastman. SC: He leaves for Vietnam, to meet a totally different kind of woman. AG: He meets Anne Channing, a journalist, after we spend a hundred pages with him. She’s brave, and he’s not used to that. SC: There’s a great moment in which Eastman watches a boy kill two soldiers and then a soldier kill that boy, which leads to Eastman hiding behind a flowerpot. Then he suddenly sees Channing chasing the action with her camera. AG: I thought it was a beautiful image of the real journalist following the story as the hero of his own story hides behind a flowerpot—which is probably what I would do. But it shows you Eastman’s there for all the wrong
reasons. He doesn’t really want to be there. And here he is doing all of this work, as so often happens in times like this, in the service of getting back his wife, and she’s probably not even thinking about him. There’s something very dramatic, and tragic, and human about that. SC: Norman Mailer, who partly inspired Eastman’s character, seems to me a writer intensely interested in the idea of home. AG: He didn’t really write about Brooklyn. I think though if you’re thinking about America as home, he was a writer who wrote big books about America. SC: But you have problems with him. AG: Oh yes. SC: Then why write a book at least partly inspired by him? AG: He was so flawed. Any of the mistakes he made would break any writer today, or his books would at least simply not get published. And so I read once somewhere that the Herald Tribune wanted to send him to Vietnam. And he wanted to go. I assumed he would have turned this into a book. He had so many kids and ex-wives that he had to turn everything into a book. But then the Herald Tribune pulled out at the last minute. The publisher didn’t like Mailer’s attitude about the war. I was fascinated by the idea of what that book might have been like. And I thought how funny it would have been because, like every other book he wrote, it would have been about himself. Ultimately, I had trouble reconciling with his jealous drunken behavior, and his violence, especially the stabbing of his wife. He came very close to killing her. He went to Bellevue for a month or two, a slap on the wrist. I never could quite get around that. I no longer liked him. And that’s when I realized his story would be a jumping off point, but I had to create my own character in Eastman.
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SC: Speaking of homes, you just bought one. AG: I did. I bought a home. I’m renovating it, and putting a lot of blood, sweat, and money into it. SC: But no tears. AG: No tears. I don’t cry anymore. I have pills for that. SC: How has owning a home changed you? AG: You think it will give you stability, but it doesn’t. It makes you cash poor. That’s what they call it, anyway. Although I guess if I were still living in an expensive Brooklyn basement shithole that would definitely negatively affect my writing. So now I live in Staten Island where there’s nothing going on at all. SC: Does that affect your writing? AG: Absolutely. I get so much done. We live on the water. And so there’s this physical and mental barrier between us and the rest of the city. Honestly, when someone invites me to do something in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, because it’s so much work to head into the city, I almost always would rather stay home and get some writing done. I almost didn’t show up for this today. SC: I’m glad you did. I’m also thinking about how a writer’s home is different from others, and I think of desks. Plus you’re married to a writer, Alexandra Kleeman. Do you have a desk? Does she? AG: I built a 12-foot desk, which now let’s us look out at the Verrazano Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. I love it. Took a couple a weeks. Making something physical, which is not something we really do as writers, I found it so satisfying. You ever work with wood? It’s amazing. But it also gave me tennis elbow. I used hand tools, and hand-turned every screw. It was for both of us, but my dog has taken over the second part of the desk. I gave it up, so she can sit up there and perch and look at the water. But
we have another desk in a loft space. I use that. We also combined our books. It’s still a New York City apartment so there’s not a lot of space, but we did take part of the living space and turn it into a library, a serene reading space. You know what’s funny, I am a person who has been trying to escape from Staten Island, all my life, a place where everyone seems to have a chip on their shoulder. I left at eighteen, and swore I’d never go back, and here I am. I own a home in Staten Island. Does anyone want to read the great Staten Island novel? Do you? SC: I do. AG: For years, I never wanted to write about the place. One day, I will have to confront it.
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I am a cat; but as yet I have no name. Where I was born is entirely unknown to me. But this still dimly lives in my memory. I was mewing in a gloomy damp place, where I got the first sight of a creature called man. This human being, as I afterwards learned, belonged to the most brutal class of his race, known by the name of “students,” who, as it is said, will not unfrequently seize, boil and devour us. But knowing at that time little of what he was like, I felt no fear in particular. Only when he lifted me lightly on his hand, I experienced a strange sensation of buoyancy passing through me. That was all. It was at this instant that I, collecting myself a little, while thus perched on his palm, cast a glance at his face. This was my first contact with a human creature. I thought then how strange he looked. And I bear this impression to this day. To begin with, his face, which ought to have been adorned with hair, was as smooth and slippery as a kettle. I have seen many a cat in my day, but never have I come across one so deformed. Not only that, the face protruded too much in the centre; and from the two cavities of this projection, smoke puffed out now and then, making it hard for me to keep from choking. That this smoke came from tobacco which man uses, did not come to my knowledge until quite recently. I sat comfortably for a few moments on this student’s palm; then I began to feel myself in full motion. Whether he was moving or I alone was being whirled, was more
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than I could tell. At any rate, I felt fearfully giddy and qualmish, and began to prepare for the worst, when “thud!” came a sound, and sparks flew from my eyes. As to what happened next my memory utterly fails me. When I came to myself the student had already gone, and not a shadow was to be seen of my brothers and sisters who had been with en masse. But the worst was the disappearance of my mamma. Besides, instead of being in the shade, I now found myself in a flood of light,—so dazzling that I could scarcely keep my eyes open. “There is something strange about this,” thought I, and began to creep slowly, when I felt a pricking pain in my paws. Out of the straw that received me at my birth, I had been cast away into a thicket of bamboo grass! I toiled through the thicket as far as a big pond, which I saw in front of me. I sat down by it, and wondered what I had better do. But nothing bright came into my mind. After a while, the thought struck me that if I mewed that student might come again to get me. This experiment, however, was of no avail. In the meantime a smart breath of air rippled the pond, and the sun began to sink. I was feeling very hungry, and fain would cry, but my voice failed me. The only thing I could do was to go somewhere in search of something to eat. Thus resolved, I wormed my way along the left side of the pond. It was indeed a trying expedition. But taking heart I steadily worked on until at last I came to a place where I fancied it smelled of man. A gap in a bamboo fence caught my eye. Thinking it would help me, I crawled through it into a yard. How strangely the wheel of Fortune turns! Had it not been for this gap, I might have starved to death on the roadside. “Even a rest under the shade of the same tree has something to do with a certain affinity in a previous life.” The proverb has much truth in it, for this gap has become
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A Selection from I Am a Cat
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the passage by which, to this day, I pay visits to Miss Miké who lives next door. Well, I said I crept into the yard. But I was quite at a loss what to do next. By this time it was growing dark; hunger was staring me in the face. Cold came, and rains began to fall, into the bargain. This drove me towards a lighter and warmer place. I think now that I had then already made my way into a dwelling house. Here I had a chance to see other human beings. The first one was a maid, whom I found to be a more violent creature than the student mentioned before. For, no sooner did she catch sight of me, than she seized me by the neck, and flung me into the yard. Before this formidable foe struggling was useless. So I shut my eye, and gave myself up to Providence. To this brutal treatment were added the pangs of starvation. So I watched another chance, and stole into the kitchen only to be hurled out again. I remember that the same thing was repeated four or five times at least, which deeply impressed me with the feeling that a maid is a very disgusting brute. The other day, by way of tit for tat, I secretly devoured a mackerel pike that was on her plate, and thus relieved my feelings to a certain extent. When I was about to be thrown out for the last time, a voice came, saying: “What’s all this row about, eh?” And the master of this house appeared. “This homeless cat tries my patience,” responded the maid. “It insists upon coming into the kitchen, do what I will.” She showed me to him, snatching me up by the neck. And he, looking at my face, while twirling the black hair above his upper lip, at last said: “Keep it, then,” and walked into a back room. The maid dashed me fretfully on to the kitchen floor. It was in this way that I came to settle in this house. It is rarely that I meet my master in the house. They say he is a teacher by profession. When he comes back
from school, he usually shuts himself up in his study for the remainder of the day. The members of his family think him a very diligent scholar; and he himself is trying to appear as such. But in reality he is not so hard at work as his folk say. I often make a stealthy approach to his “den,” peep in, and not unfrequently find him taking a nap. Sometimes I even catch him in a ludicrous state, letting water drop from his mouth on to the book he has been reading. He suffers from indigestion, and his sallow completion tells of the want of elasticity and vitality of his skin. Nevertheless, he is a gormandizer. He eats his fill, takes a drug of “Taka Diastase,” opens a book, and reads two or three lines. Then “his eyes begin to draw straws,” and spittle drops upon the book. This is his routine of every night. Though I am a cat, I often think that the lot of a teacher is a very easy one, and that it would be well for every creature that is born a man, to enter upon the profession. For, if one who thus dozes away his time, passes as teacher, it cannot be altogether impossible for a cat to be one. Yet, in the opinion of my master, nothing seems harder than to teach. In fact, he makes a business of complaining of his work whenever a friend calls. At the time when I was first received into this house, I was far from being a pet of any member of the family, save the master. Go where I would, I was kept at arm’s length. How badly I have been slighted is known by the fact that to this day they have not even named me. In this sorry plight, I had no choice but to keep as close as possible to the master who had given me permission to stay. I made it a rule to get on his lap when I saw him reading a paper in the morning, and to crawl upon his back when he was taking a siesta. This was not exactly because I liked him, but because I could not help it, there being no one else who cared for me. After many experiences, however, I have
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come to choose lying on a rice-tub in the morning, on a Kotatsu at night, and in the daytime, when the day is fine, on the veranda. But the most comfortable bed I ever have is when I creep in and sleep with the children in their bed. There are two girls in the household, the one aged five, and the other, three. They sleep in the same bed at night made in one of the rooms. I usually find room between, and manage somehow or other to force my way in. But if by ill chance one of the kids awake, I am certain to get into a scrape. They—the younger is especially churlish, will cry out no matter how late it is, “The cat is here! The cat is here!” Then my master, who is nervous through indigestion, is sure to open his eyes and come flying from the next room. In fact, the other night I received a severe blow on the back from a measuring-stick he had in his hand. Since coming to live with human beings, the more I observe them, the more I am led to conclude that they are very selfish. But of all the human creatures with whom I have come into contact, there are none so selfish as the children into whose bed I now and again creep. They often amuse themselves by holding me by the tail, covering my head with a bag, throwing me about, or thrusting me into the oven. And if I dare make the slightest resistance, the whole household runs after me to punish me. The other day when I sharpened my claws a little on a padded mat, the mistress got so angry that she has rarely let me into the living-rooms since. And they do not “care a straw for me” even if they see me shivering with the cold on the kitchen floor. Mrs. White, my opposite neighbor, whom I hold in high esteem, also gives expression to the same sentiment whenever I meet her, saying that there hardly exists any creature less capable of compassion than man. Some time
ago, she gave birth to four lovely kittens. What has become of them? Three days later they were seized by the fiendish student of her house, and cast away, all of them, into a pond behind the house. Mrs. White, with tears in her eyes, told me this sad fact; and added that unless we wage war against the human race, and succeed in destroying it to the last man, we, cats, can never make sweet peaceful homes to safeguard true domestic affection,—an opinion full of sense and truth.
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—— Translated by K. Ando.
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SHIKI MASAOK A
UNKNOWN
Two Haikus of Home I. Everyone goes home After the fireworks explode— Darkness of the night.
II. Alone in my home, Mother off viewing cherries— I’m watching the clock.
Kōbō Abe Looks Away
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—— Translated by Bob Jameson.
THE SCOFIELD
One winter night, at half-past nine, Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy, I had come home, too late to dine, And supper, with cigars and wine, Was waiting in the study. There was a strangeness in the room, And Something white and wavy Was standing near me in the gloom— I took it for the carpet-broom Left by that careless slavey. But presently the Thing began To shiver and to sneeze: On which I said “Come, come, my man! That’s a most inconsiderate plan. Less noise there, if you please!” “I’ve caught a cold,” the Thing replies, “Out there upon the landing.” I turned to look in some surprise, And there, before my very eyes, A little Ghost was standing! He trembled when he caught my eye, And got behind a chair. “How came you here,” I said, “and why?
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I never saw a thing so shy. Come out! Don’t shiver there!” He said “I’d gladly tell you how, And also tell you why; But” (here he gave a little bow) “You’re in so bad a temper now, You’d think it all a lie. “And as to being in a fright, Allow me to remark That Ghosts have just as good a right In every way, to fear the light, As Men to fear the dark.” “No plea,” said I, “can well excuse Such cowardice in you: For Ghosts can visit when they choose, Whereas we Humans can’t refuse To grant the interview.” He said “A flutter of alarm Is not unnatural, is it? I really feared you meant some harm: But, now I see that you are calm, Let me explain my visit. “Houses are classed, I beg to state, According to the number Of Ghosts that they accommodate: (The Tenant merely counts as weight, With Coals and other lumber).”
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A Selection from “Phantasmagoria”
LEWIS CARROLL
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
LEWIS CARROLL
THE SCOFIELD
∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y
Much has been made of the narrative volatility of Kōbō Abe’s 1973 novel, The Box Man, of the question of ultimate identity and identification, of voyeurism and the power of seeing and powerlessness of being seen. But what of the dog? The dog had arrived before me and was waiting, but he made no pretense of barking. I had won him over by giving it some food beforehand. A light was burning faintly in one window. A luxuriant tangle of weeds twined around my feet. Apparently the remains of an old flower bed. I stumbled over the edging stones, and the dog, misunderstanding, frolicked around me. When I stood still and took a breath, sweat poured out and ran into my eyes. There is a shift to the past perfect. He is, for a moment, the box man, outside of himself; events are complete instead of continuous. He and the dog are thus contained. He interrupts the ongoing narrative as Calvino might to tell the short tale of “The Box Man and the Dog”; this may be the only complete narrative in the whole of the book. (This is an absurd exaggeration.) But it is apparent that the transactional nature of the events requires an apposite grammar. The shift is an unremarkable grammatical turn in a book so rife with amorphity, save for the inherent conflict between the timeline of the two sentences, seemingly that PAGE 212
the dog arrived before the box man, who arrived—in order to appease the dog with food—even before that. Who preceded whom? Does beforehand refer to a hypothetical period of agitated barking, which exists elsewhere, as all choices must exist in a realized universe of their own, that was headed off in another? All of this is based, of course, on the hypothesis that a dog can choose. This is what an argument such as this must depend on, if it is to carry its own weight. Of course, you say, he had met the dog only moments before; this is from whence he came: “Suddenly I heard the violent breathing of some beast. A huge growling mongrel brushed against my knees with its shoulder, and ran off at once.” But at what point is the food produced? Is the prose so scant as to omit the transaction? There are no fewer questions. The dog arrived before the box man, was waiting for him, but made no move to bark. The dog did not bark because the box man, in his prescience, had given the dog some meat in a time before. But when? The box man, he tells us, “had taken the road any number of times, but this was the first time I had walked it wearing a box.” Was it on some previous walk that he encountered the dog and, knowing the trip would repeat itself—the dog may have barked at him so many times before—gave him some meat to once and for all end their adversarial relationship? Did they have such a relationship? Did it occur to him to offer meat to the dog when he last visited the hospital, after being shot by the man in the raincoat? Did he walk there under his own power? This is all rhetorical. I am convinced that it is not perspective but reality that forks and bends and doubles-back, which is one equally plausible explanation for how he was able to attend
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The Problem of the Dog
JOSHUA ROTHES
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
JOSHUA ROTHES
JOSHUA ROTHES
to the dog, to curry its favor with meat, before he arrived to find the dog placated and friendly. If Abe wanted to linger here longer, he, the box man, might go back once again to commit some small offense against the dog, to keep it from brushing his knees later on and interrupting his gaze. But we must move along; there’s a warning here against constant corrections in one’s actions. The private self, exhibited by the box man, must be able to move on. The publication of the book preceded the publication of our private lives. Who preceded whom? The answer to the riddle is the answer to the book; hence the trap of strange grammar. We are throughout the book occasionally caught, one foot in a contained moment that resists the instability of the work as a whole. Who preceded whom? The answer has irrevocable implications for the remainder of the text. Apologists must read and re-read by their answer to that question. It is utterly unavoidable. The dog is an obstacle foreseen. The box man is as farsighted as he is nearsighted. He/she (the dog) represents the practical concerns and habits of the box man. They are much the same as his own, but they are provoked to opposite reactions. The box man, it’s true, can’t particularly be coerced into friendship if he is to remain a box man; it is only when the box is able to be considered as contingent that indulgence is considered. The dog? She/he is heard (or not, rather; to be heard, rather) and felt, but is not an object of sight save for the glint of the hospital’s red light; even the frolicking, we have to imagine, is implied by the thrrrumping of its paws. Or else, it is set aside as a given, in a hypothetical, the contingent conditions by which the following range of possible actions is constrained.
Or else, the narrator has skipped ahead and slips tense, having gotten ahead of himself, amending some events already in the relative past, given as color, but unimportant otherwise; the narrative would have lost its steam had we stopped for the encounter, as it would have to be laboriously described even in Abe’s sparse prose, as any encounter with an animal requires a certain speculative attitude that resists terseness. The box man has, perhaps, preceded himself; in fact, we find, he is already inside. In his Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz argues that no two alike things are truly identical, indiscernible, if what is true of one is not true of the other. Generally, above the quantum level, at the scale at which interference patterns solidify probability and men and dogs inhabit the world, this has held up. A box man is a definite article, as much as an archetype, a category. “You already know very well that I’m identical to a box man.” If they are identical, are they not the same? The question is not one of resemblance or aptitude, but of being, of thisness. In matters of identification, genuineness is a false monotony. It is possible that grammar is a tic even when identity is in flux. Does the dog belong, in fact, to the doctor, who feeds him regularly? Is he not also “identical to a box man”? But this is a shallow explanation.
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JOSHUA ROTHES
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THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Map Drawn by a Spy In the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s death, the publication of Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Map Drawn by a Spy is a timely reminder of the complicated history of the author’s island homeland. While serving as a cultural attaché in the Cuban embassy in Belgium in 1965, the author’s mother dies and Cabrera Infante flies back to Cuba for her funeral services. He is only supposed to be in Cuba for a week; however, when prohibited by authorities from boarding his plane back to Belgium, he is forced to confront a native country he no longer recognizes. Map Drawn by a Spy, Cabrera Infante’s autobiographical account of this forced stay before final exile, candidly reveals the decaying of the old, prosperous Cuba and its way of life, as well as the people’s growing disillusionment with the Revolution of 1959. Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara, Cuba in 1929 and moved with his impoverished family to the capital city of Havana in 1941. In addition to being a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist, he was also a film critic who wrote under the pseudonym of G. Caín. In 1952, when he published a short story containing English-language profanities, he was arrested and fined by the Batista regime. His parents were two of the original members of the Cuban Communist party and, along with PAGE 214
his family, he supported the revolution that launched Fidel Castro into power. But he soon became disillusioned with the new socialist government that shut down Lunes de Revolución, the weekly literary magazine which he founded and edited. His position as a diplomat in the Cuban embassy was an attempt by the authorities to send him into exile. Published in 1965, his novel Three Trapped Tigers, favorably compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses, earned him international attention. It has been speculated that both his political stance against the government, as well as his literary success, caused him to fall out of favor with the Cuban authorities. In 1965 he fled from Cuba to Madrid and later settled permanently in London, where he died in 2005. Cabrera Infante never returned to his home in Havana, but he remained a stanch and outspoken critic of Fidel Castro until his death. Map Drawn by a Spy was found among the author’s papers after his death in 2005, so this version of his story was never subjected to Infante’s edits or corrections. Indeed, the accounts of his meandering daily activities within confinement often feel as if they are written spontaneously, without any literary premeditation: When he arrived home a novelty was awaiting him: instead of rice and beans on the menu there was rice and potatoes, a diet for an ulcer patient. He could only get it down slowly, which made the meal seem interminable. He cursed his bad fortune, and his grandmother said, “Ay, my son, accept your fate,“ and added, “though you really shouldn’t have come. In the end, you didn’t fix anything.” Though he had not stopped thinking about his dead mother for one second, deep inside he realized his grandmother was right. He went
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You Can’t Go Home Again:
MELISSA BECK
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
MELISSA BECK
THE SCOFIELD
Although his narrative is autobiographical, the author chooses to write in the third person, a unique choice for a book that reads like a journal or diary; however, this formal gambit leads to unfortunate frustrations. The text is frequently difficult to read because of the constant changing of subjects, and there is an unsatisfying vagueness surrounding Infante’s precarious political status. We never find out, for instance, why he is detained in Cuba and by whom. Much of his personal story, composed in simple, stark prose, describes spending time with his two young daughters, going out to dinner with old acquaintances, sitting on the balcony of his apartment, and sleeping with women he picks up at bars or at parties. Although these everyday activities provide a compelling glimpse into the ordinary life of a Cuban, his story lacks specific details about his dangerous political enemies and their motives for detaining him. Cabrera Infante’s writing is laden with a deep melancholy as he reminisces about his once prosperous nation whose people are now forced to shop with food rations and survive without basic necessities. He discovers, on a daily basis, more and more items that could be easily bought prior to the revolution but are nowhere to be found just five years after Castro’s ascension to power. Coffee, alcohol, meat, and vegetables, are all scarce in Fidel’s Cuba. Cabrera Infante incessantly complains about his inability to find a cup of coffee anywhere in Havana and about his grandmother’s attempts to turn his family’s food rations into something edible. When his daughter gets an ear infection, he is horrified to discover that aspirin, antibiotics and proper medical care are in short supply in post-revolutionary Cuba.
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Map Drawn by a Spy is part of the ever-growing genre of communist dissident literature in which authors recount an inhumane deficiency of basic supplies available to those living under totalitarian regimes that deceptively identify their systems as socialist. Sergei Lebedev, in his novel The Year of the Comet, notes a lack of everyday items in the waning days of the Soviet Union that, in the west, we take for granted, such as shoelaces, frying pans, nails, and glue. In The Physics of Sorrow Georgei Gospodinov recalls a disturbing shortage of appropriate living space and childcare in Soviet-era Bulgaria as he is left alone in a basement apartment for hours at a time when he is a young boy. Similarly, in a recent collection of stories smuggled out to the west, the anonymous North Korean author, Bandi, describes the food that his people are forced to eat from the pathetic government rations as disgusting slop not fit for human consumption. What sets Cabrera Infante’s writing apart from these other authors is his frank and enlightening commentary on the causes of privation he has discovered in this disturbing version of his homeland. He notes that the Castro regime would have the Cuban people believe that embargoes imposed by the United States and other capitalist nations are the cause of its deprivation of food items and other provisions: He did not believe the official justification for rationing, since the U.S. blockade did not cause shortages of the food the country produced; the cause was the bureaucratization of the entire country, which turned farmers into employees of the state and made them utterly indifferent to the harvest. Even in well-functioning cooperatives, the product of their labor was lost through careless
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out on the balcony with his binoculars, but in the boiling early afternoon no one was about.
MELISSA BECK
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
MELISSA BECK
THE SCOFIELD
From the moment he lands in Cuba for his mother’s funeral, Cabrera Infante has an eerie feeling that he is being watched by the regime’s interior ministry and its spies. Even though he was a supporter of the revolution and was jailed for his criticisms of the Batista government, he is no longer safe in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Artists, writers, and journalists are all carefully watched for producing works that display any hint of dissent against the regime. Cabrera Infante and his friends—many of whom are famous Cuban authors and artists, such as Lisandro Otero, Antón Arrufat Mrad and Virgilio Piñera—have meetings in public places for fear that the ministry has bugged their homes to eavesdrop on their conversations. Homosexuals, in particular, are despised by Castro, who sends out spies looking for signs of supposed sexual deviancy: men who wear long hair, tight pants or carry books. Vague speculation and elusive reports about the suppressive, cruel dictatorship of Fidel Castro have been circulated since he took power in 1960. But Cabrera Infante’s book gives us a definitive, first hand, and deeply alarming account from inside communist Cuba. About half way through the book, Cabrera Infante realizes he has made powerful enemies inside the
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government who are blocking the resumption of his diplomatic position in Belgium. Despite repeated visits to the Office of the Interior, he is never able to gather definitive information regarding his detainment in Havana. Staying in Cuba means the end of his writing career—and if he is not careful, his life. Given this precarious position with the government, it is astounding that the author is able to remain calm and devise a reasonable and viable plan to go into exile with his young daughters. What charges could there be against him? Where precisely did the accusations come from? How far would they take their suspicions, and how long before they became formal charges? For the first time since the triumph of the Revolution, he felt afraid and understood what it was to be a victim of totalitarian power. His first reaction was not to go out at all until he could decipher what was really going on. After three days, he changed his mind and told himself that only by acting with utter normality could he be shrewd enough to save himself. One of the most surprising topics to which Cabrera Infante repeatedly returns is his voracious sexual appetite and never ending conquest of women. He maintains contact with his wife who stayed back in Belgium, and he fears he will never see her again. Although Cabrera Infante can’t control his eroding city or his dangerous political situation, he can control how he approaches women. He writes about one of his many conquests: “He thought then, as at other times during his stay, that the only thing that redeemed this country of all its historical
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picking or lack of transport, and entire harvests sat rotting in rural warehouses or in central supply houses, never reaching the consumer. The excuse of the blockade might explain the absence of cars or radios; it could not explain the widespread shortage of foods the country used to produce in such abundance they were exported. He was aware that this thought, if expressed aloud, would be considered counterrevolutionary in any government office…
MELISSA BECK
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MELISSA BECK
THE SCOFIELD
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Till Find the Forest
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sins was its natural beauty and its women, another form of natural beauty.” These women, at the very least, provide a distraction and an outlet for his anxiety until he can make his final escape from the island. When Cabrera Infante finally boards a plane to Madrid on October 3rd, 1965 with his two young daughters, he is overcome with emotion. He knows that he will never again return to Cuba and that the Cuba of his memories has been destroyed by the selfishness of dictatorial power. In an essay written during his exile in January of 1992, he writes, “…the nation has been demolished, ruined and brought finally to a fate worse than death: to take corruption in life. Havana is as destroyed physically as Beirut, in a civil war made by one man. Fidel Castro lives out his last days in his Palace (read bunker) surrounded by physical and moral ruins.” Map Drawn by a Spy contains a resonant lesson about doing everything in our power to avert governments and regimes that insist on the control of goods and services to the detriment of its people. Persecution of the LGBTQ community, attempts to suppress and control the media, and lack of proper medical care could just as easily describe Fidel Castro’s Cuba as it could the political agenda being promoted in the United States by the Trump administration. There is a phrase of Jose Marti’s of which Cabrera Infante was very fond: “Of the tyrant say all, say more!”
SHUICHI NAK ANO
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
MELISSA BECK
THE SCOFIELD
MICHAEL DICK MAN
I used to live in a mother now I live in a sunflower Blinded by the silverware Blinded by the refrigerator I sit on a sidewalk in the sunflower and its yellow downpour The light of the world beads up on one perfect green leaf It scribbles its name on every living thing then erases it so what’s left is more of a whisper than a mother Here it’s spring Over and over and over again • I used to live in a cloud now I live in a crow PAGE 218
All the windows in the crow are left open and let the clouds in Back in They float past my bed and have nothing to say Hello it’s nice to meet you! From a telephone pole tongues slide out singing welcome home Welcome home they sing • I used to live in a tree now I live in a king He waves his arms in front of him and endless migrations of birds disappear into his coat I like to sit up inside his crown eating sandwiches and watching tv
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For John Guare
It’s tiny and crippled in there but I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark if I need to
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
Where We Live
MICHAEL DICK MAN
THE SCOFIELD
MICHAEL DICK MAN
JOLENE LAI
Hills shake in the distance when he shuffles his feet Floods when he snaps his fingers I bow inside his brow and the afternoon stretches out Orders more sandwiches And sells the slaves and sets the slaves free and sells the slaves
—— Reprinted courtesy of the author, from his book Green Migraine.
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Migration
THE SCOFIELD
Fragments from a Study of Kōbō Abe I propose to define the main body of Abe’s work as the search for a liminal subject that not only can navigate between the striations of territorialized ideological existence, but also one that can survive and perhaps even be happy there. “Why is it so terrifying not to have the concept of a state? The fact that there would be something frightening about having gone without forming a new idea of the state indicates that somewhere there is an assumption that the idea of the state is necessarily a priori. My idea of rootless grass is, in a word, the questioning of this way of thinking.” Identity is based fully on a set of totalizing ideological ideals placed upon the subject from without and is dependent on the continued ability of the community to enforce its meaning. Abe’s question is whether or not the individual can exist without the community. “Was this what it meant to have your head swim?” The condition of modern communities is that their subjects are forced into the comfortable, if not happy, existence of rooted plants in order to fend off the overwhelming and fractured flow of modern life. “But what difference do happiness and unhappiness make, anyway? They don’t matter in the least.”
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It is a disconnected and deterritorialized existence that does not adhere to the signifying and normalizing codes of the modern socius. It is also a source of creative potential, however. Like the Promethean fire, it allows for progress towards the creation of a new kind of civilization that does not try to tie subjectivity to the transcendental signifier of the state or homeland. “Why is not a single one of these homes mine?” Unable to resist, individuals submit themselves to a dehumanizing, structured life as the subject of a communal whole. The only other option, however, is to be swept along outside the borders of the social structure. “But, even though I now have a home, now there is no me to return to it.” Abe’s rootless grass speaks to a nomadic existence that does not need to remain rooted to a single territory or idea. “This sense of individual potentiality worked against the idea of the community…” Instead of trying to build a crystal palace over these inconsistencies as many state structures did, Abe sought a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and group that rejected the Oedipal myth of the homeland and allowed for a more open and creative existence. “Stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive…”
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The Liminal Subject:
MAXIM BROWN AND SAR AH HEIKKINEN
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
MAXIM BROWN AND SAR AH HEIKKINEN
THE SCOFIELD
“Japan kept escaping from me.” In this space, civilization and human community do not exist. “But you took the trouble of coming to such a place as this precisely because you rejected such a reason for existence.” Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. “More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes a prisoner feel locked in.” Communal belonging, even if it means existing only to maintain that community, is preferable to remaining totally isolated and wandering. “Honestly there hasn’t been a single person to get out yet.”
“What was the use of individuality when one was on the point of death?” To decenter oneself is to break off from any kind of communal stability. “It would be simple, wouldn’t it? You can do anything if you want to.” As a period of chaotic development and upheaval, modernity cannot be walled off. “But just as inevitably as the great reptiles ultimately had to give way to the mammals, they too would be taken over by city gas. They were born of the city’s growth and of that growth they would die—a paradoxical business.” Abe’s liminal subject is a step towards a new mode of consciousness. In this mode, one can exist in a fluid space where there are no preexisting structures that might project identity onto the individual. He does not condemn those who prefer to remain firmly fixed within a social field. But that is a limited and, to him, unsatisfying mode of existence, which blocks off the potential contained within the chaotic flux. “Maybe even a human being could sing such a song…”
In the end, he loses himself and disappears… “…he shuddered with an uncanny loneliness for people…” Individuals are “locked within a prison of self.”
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—— This piece was created by Sarah Heikkinen through taking quotes from Maxim Brown’s master’s thesis “The Liminal Subject in the Work of Abe Kōbō.”
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What he knew about Japan was only that which he could imagine from his textbooks—(Mount Fuji, Three Views of Japan, surrounded by the ocean, the green smiles of islands…the soft breeze, small birds calling, fish swimming…leaves falling in the forest when autumn arrives, the sparkling sun afterwards, and the coloring of red berries…a diligent land, industrious people…).
MAXIM BROWN AND SAR AH HEIKKINEN
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
MAXIM BROWN AND SAR AH HEIKKINEN
THE SCOFIELD
VINCENT VAN GOGH
KIK AKU TAK AR AI
Two Haikus of Home I. The homeless beggar Wears the heavens and the earth For summer clothing. II. A summer shower— The ducks are running, quacking, All around the house.
—— Translated by Bob Jameson.
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The White House at Night
THE SCOFIELD
If you’re looking for interesting books to read, here are some recommendations for you from writers, artists, and intellectuals that we know and trust. Matthew Specktor on 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso My attention span is shot, just like everyone else’s. It’s been a form of counter-programming lately to read things that are molasses-slow, syntactically patient: Henry James, say. Yet Sarah Manguso’s recent 300 Arguments amounts, I suppose, to a form of counter-counter-programming as such: three hundred short…blurts? Blasts? (Each time I have seen Manguso read from the book, someone is tempted to call them ‘aphorisms,’ which they are emphatically not. Manguso has settled upon ‘arguments,’ in line with that word’s more classical applications.) I am more inclined to think of them as inflictions, impingements: the crystalline strobings of a consciousness at once infinitely restless and uncommonly steady, each one arriving with a small shock of recognition. Like many of us, I’ve fallen into a slight over-reliance on Twitter these past six months, and so perhaps there is a familiarity to be found in this sort of pointillism, and yet—hardly. If Twitter is an undifferentiated stream of thought, a chyron of consciousnesses almost (but never quite) as witty as it is useless, Manguso’s book is the very opposite of this: refined, deliberate, carved out of silence as opposed to shouted into wind. To frame it in terms of ‘brevity’ is to do it an immense disservice, in fact: pocketsized, I’ve nevertheless been (re-)reading it for months. PAGE 223
Like Renata Adler, or Elizabeth Hardwick, Manguso’s keenly-differentiated consciousness casts a wide circle. This book is no more “short” than Pascal’s Pensees, or—for that matter—Montaigne’s Essays. That it is able to cut more immediately to the quick is testament to its amplitude. Gabrielle Bellot on The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote in “Modern Fiction,” one of her best-known—and best—essays; rather, the Bloomsbury author continued, “life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” The sentiment, which can be found in her young collection of essays The Common Reader, is revealing. In some way, indeed, it is a skeleton key into much of Woolf’s writing and thinking. It tells us, in part, a summary of Woolf’s teleology, her philosophical and religious views that privileged a vision of the world as uncertain and shifting (influenced, itself in part, by the agnosticism of her father, Leslie Stephens), rather than being described by a simple religious certainty. (An agnostic leaning towards atheism, Woolf presented a vision of the world as having no author, no god, in a much-quoted passage from “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being; she also often ridiculed those who stuck too closely to theological certainties, declaring, in a 1928 letter, that T. S. Eliot was “dead to us all from this day forward,” as he “has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”) However, Woolf’s
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On Our Nightstand
VARIOUS AUTHORS
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VARIOUS AUTHORS
THE SCOFIELD
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ever-defining when our worlds, if not the world at large, have changed. Alongside these are eclectic meditations on Chaucer, Elizabethan drama, Conrad’s prose, and more. More accessible than Three Guineas and as deserving of recognition as A Room of One’s Own, The Common Reader is a grand little—and not-so-little—discovery for any of Woolf’s readers. David Ulin on Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson A number of years ago, in a review of his novella Train Dreams, I suggested that Denis Johnson had written only a handful of (essentially) flawless books. I didn’t mean it as a criticism, and I don’t now, even though I still believe it to be true. Johnson was—let’s just say it—the finest American writer of his generation. That many of his books veer, or meander…well, that’s kind of the point. “Did you think we were just thinking?” a character asks in his 1997 novel Already Dead: A California Gothic. “Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?” What Johnson is saying is that the mysteries are so large we can only apprehend them in pieces, which makes everything conditional, even the stories we tell ourselves. Or, as he writes in “Beverly Home,” the final story in his 1992 collection Jesus’ Son, “I was lurking there in the dark, trembling, really, from the pit of my stomach out to my fingertips. Two inches of crack at the curtain’s edge, that’s all I could have, all I could have, it seemed, in the whole world.” Jesus’ Son is one of those flawless books, a work of fiction so transcendent it feels inevitable. Revolving around an unnamed narrator experiencing the first fragile blush of sobriety after a long run of addiction, it begins with the
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luminous metaphor also well describes the collection of essays it appears in, which I finally recently decided to read in full. If life is not rigidly symmetrical, Woolf believed, neither should modern essays be too linear. “The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world,” she wrote in “The Modern Essay.” The Common Reader’s essays are more elegant, erudite explorations than argumentative screeds, pieces for “the common reader” more than criticism proper. The title, Woolf reveals in her introduction, comes from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours,” Johnson wrote of Thomas Gray. “The common reader,” Woolf tells us, “differs from the critic and scholar,” reading for pleasure rather than to advance a rigorous literary theory; such readers may not hold a candle to critics when it comes to breadth of knowledge, but beneath their humble stature is a vast, diffuse group whose untutored ideas “contribute to so mighty a result”—that is, to Johnson’s “poetical honours.” Woolf modestly selfdescribes as one such common reader; her essays here, however, are quiet, yet far from insignificant. And that, to me, is their quiet terpsichorean joy: they read like the dance of ghosts on gas-lit streets, the wandering down a hedge maze on a lazy melancholic Sunday, worlds soft and dense as the sea. While not every essay in here is equal, all are worth reading, particularly when Woolf ponders what it means to be “modern”: what the modern novel should be, what modern essays are, why modern critique seems so ideologically divided. On or about December 1910, she famously mused, the world changed; we, too, are
VARIOUS AUTHORS
ISSUE 3.1 WINTER 2018
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She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere. Gone looking for that feeling everywhere…yes, and I have gone looking for that feeling everywhere also, the feeling of shock and awe and wonder that comes from confronting a line that gets at a truth we don’t want to acknowledge, a truth we might not be said even to know. Jesus’ Son is full of such moments, beginning with the opening paragraphs of “Car Crash,” in which Johnson telegraphs the narrative to come. “A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping…. A Cherokee filled with bourbon…A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student…. And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany Missouri…” It’s all there, every piece of the action, which means the narrator knows what’s coming and gets into the car anyway. Why? Because the truth is knowledge doesn’t always save us. Or maybe it’s that salvation isn’t the point. “I knew every raindrop by its name,” the narrator tells us. “I sensed everything before it happened…. I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.”
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It’s a car crash of a book, a collision of sensibilities that pierces us with its glorious shrieking, its recognition of the pressures of being alive. All of this, and for what? A few transcendent moments—although the trick is that this may be, that it has to be, enough. “All these weirdos,” Johnson writes, “and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.” Rita Banerjee on The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin In The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin takes an incisive and illuminating look at the movies, both American and European, and examines the black gaze on the white body, the black gaze on the black body, and what it means to be black and still maintain a dynamic sense of subjecthood in America and in Europe. In the collection of essays, Baldwin traces the origins of his own critic’s eye to the inimical tension between his parents, his father’s violent relationship towards him as a young boy, and his unexpected allies and mentors in teachers like Bill Miller, a young white woman, who, when he was a child, took him to see Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities, shedding light on the relationship between racism and classism in America. In what is perhaps one of the most provocative essays in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin focuses on a French film based on Boris Vian’s book, I Shall Spit on Your Graves; Baldwin describes it as “a French look at the black American problem.” In postwar France, when Sartre and Camus still regularly visited Café Flore, an establishment which Baldwin himself frequented, and the doctrine of
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magnificent “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which is on the short list of the most profound short stories I have read. “She was glorious, burning,” he writes in the closing pages.
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Nicole Audrey Spector on Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton You can take a girl out of Earl’s Court but you can’t— actually, no, there’s no taking anybody out of Earl’s Court, at least not the one depicted in Hangover Square. That’s the dark magic of Patrick Hamilton’s WWII-era London: Once you’re in (the door opens in broad, beery daylight and slams shut in a gin blackout) you’re stuck, doomed to petulance and penury, or more precisely, to drink after drink. Funny thing is, George Harvey Bone, our oafish, sad-eyed, protagonist actually thinks he has a chance at a decent, sober life—that any day now he’ll clean up and move on, get out of this rut and away from Netta Longdon (Hamilton often makes you wonder, which came first, the character or the name?). Netta is a pretty terrible but terribly pretty woman who doesn’t even pretend to admire dear Bone, yet gets him to do whatever she wants—he’s precisely that pathetic. He also provides her great comic relief with his “stooge moods.” You see, old Bone here has schizophrenia. It’s nothing like actual schizophrenia; it’s the pulpy Norman Bates kind: a split personality with one side good and sheepish, and the other evil and murderous. This isn’t the most original or clever ploy for a noir thriller, and re-reading the book ten years after I first read it in college (I was then inspired to pick it up after watching Cukor’s Gaslight and Hitchcock’s Rope, both based on plays by Hamilton), I learned that though it was my first, it’s not my favorite of Hamilton’s fictions (that would probably be the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which I scarfed down along with the rest of his works, after reading Hangover Square), in part because it relies on a B-movie lampoon of a mental condition to get things done. This disappointed me more than it did the
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l’existentialisme had yet to meet the word négritude, Vian’s I Shall Spit on Your Graves made its “literary” splash. French critics described the book as “pornographic,” as it centers on “a black man who looks like a white man.” In the narrative, this protagonist, passing as white, seeks revenge for the murder of his younger, darker-skinned brother, who was lynched for being in the company of white women in New Orleans. Baldwin notes that “Vian’s character is eventually uncovered, but not before he has seduced and murdered two of the richest and most attractive white women he can find.” This exploration of the fault line between tribalism, violence, and desire, especially between black and white communities, will be echoed in later texts such as Tayeb Salih’s Sudanese-Arabic novel Season of Migration to the North. But Baldwin’s analysis of Vian’s 1943 crime novel— and Michel Gast’s 1959 French film adaptation of the same name—is particularly captivating and provocative for its timeliness. He writes, “The film has no brother… there is the guilty, furtive, European notion of sex, a notion which obliterates any possibility of communion, or any hope of love. There is also the European dream of America—which, after all, is how we got America: a dream full of envy, guilt, condescension, and terror, a dream which began as an adventure in real estate. That song which Europe let out of its heart so long ago, to be sung on ships, to cross all water, is now coming back to Europe, perhaps to drive Europe mad: the return of the song will certainly render Europe obsolete, and return the North American wilderness—yet to be conquered!—to a truth which has nothing to do with Europe.” Perhaps what is so uncanny about reading Baldwin today is recognizing how much that North American wilderness, full of violence and ghosts, has conquered us all.
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first time around, but I was also reminded that there’s a lot more to George Harvey Bone than just his cartoon case of crazy. His insights about society are so painful and true you could cry, and he really does want to change his life—he just can’t—and it’s got nothing to do with being a part-time psycho killer and everything to do with being a full-time drunk. Revisiting Hangover Square reminded me just how generously Hamilton writes, with such shameless ecstasy, like big boots splashing in filthy, iridescent puddles that reflect jagged pieces of a city. I was worried about reading Hangover Square through a second time—afraid I wouldn’t be moved. It was the first book I read by an author who, like Nabokov or Flannery O’Connor, I fell so hard for, so fast, at a time when I was so naively optimistic about writing that I’d come to associate him with my own identity as a reader and thus as a writer. Fortunately, it still kills me. Especially that last line.
you have a parrot, you can be pretty certain this book is for you because anyone with a parrot doesn’t understand him,” but I, Parrot is really for anyone who appreciates knockout art, unconventional love stories, and always roots for the underdog.
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I’ll read anything Deb Olin Unferth writes, so I was pretty jazzed when I heard that she’d collaborated on a graphic novel with Elizabeth Haidle. I, Parrot is spooky and funny and weird in its shapes and its storytelling, following a seemingly-hopeless yet ceaselessly determined heroine, and also offering beautiful schema of urban spaces (and maybe their decline). The tragicomic has become a standout subsection of graphic novels over the past decade or so, and I, Parrot earns its place among Fun Home, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, and recent favorites like Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch. The book cheekily begins, “If
Jean Toomer has been described as a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Cane, a reckoning with America’s tragic history of ritualistic violence and racial oppression, is the lyric novel for which he is best known. Alongside the narrator of the novel, readers descend into the aftermath of slavery in the Jim Crow South to bear witness to the violent realities perpetrated by unreconstructed whites against black communities. Toomer’s Georgia is a hell of a place, where spectacular deaths, including lynchings, are well-attended events. Violent white supremacists prey on the bodies and minds of black Americans, yet Toomer renders the experiences in a poetic language unique in American literature. Toomer wrote Cane when he was only twenty-seven. It would be his only major contribution to American letters. In the wake of Toomer’s silence, we are left with unanswered questions about repression, disassociation, and an almost painterly blurring of the boundaries of identity. As a light-complexioned black man who appeared white to many, Toomer had a certain plasticity of appearance, spurring debate about whether he may have deliberately obfuscated his personal background when the occasion arose. Considering whether Toomer may have passed as a white man, and the repercussions such a decision may have had on his writing life, Alice Walker writes that Toomer “would want us to keep [Cane’s] beauty, but let him go.”
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Kristen Radtke on I, Parrot by Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle
A. M. Davenport on Cane by Jean Toomer
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Many know the “Proust Questionnaire,” which Marcel Proust didn’t actually create, but made famous by answering two similar questionnaires at different points in his life—and which Vanity Fair has since prominently featured in their issues. Lesser known is the “Frisch Questionnaire” which Max Frisch created in 1967 and which is included in his Sketchbook 1966–1971. Below author Katie Kitamura answers Frisch’s questions. MF: Are you really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive? KK: Yes, of course. MF: State briefly why. KK: There are people I know in theory— grandchildren, for example. MF: How many of your children do not owe their existence to deliberate intention? KK: Deliberate on whose part? MF: Whom would you rather never have met? KK: No one. MF: Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to some other person (who need not necessarily be aware of it)? If so, does this make you hate yourself—or the other person? KK: I am not at the moment—but when I am, it makes me hate myself and the other person in equal measure.
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MF: Would you like to have perfect memory? KK: Perfect memory—that sounds like an instrument of torture. MF: Give the name of a politician whose death through illness, accident, etc. would fill you with hope. Or do you consider none of them indispensible? KK: Given the current administration, this is too easy a question. MF: Which person or persons, now dead, would you like to see again? KK: My father. MF: Which not? KK: … MF: Would you rather have belonged to a different nation (or civilization)? If so, which? KK: I don’t always know which nation I belong to. This complicates the project of imagining a desirable alternative. MF: To what age do you wish to live? KK: That depends on the health that accompanies it. MF: If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority? (Yes or no) KK: Yes. MF: Why not, if you think they are right? KK: If I think the majority are right? Or does the question assume that the answer to the previous question is no? MF: Which do you find it easier to hate, a group or an individual? And do you prefer to hate individually or as part of a group? KK: I find it much easier to hate a group, but I prefer to do my own hating individually. MF: When did you stop believing you could
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The Frisch Questionnaire
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become wiser—or do you still believe it? Give your age. KK: When my father died. I was twenty-nine. MF: Are you convinced by your own self-criticism? KK: Too much. MF: What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse? KK: My reticence, for the first. My cowardice, for the second. They are related. MF: Do you find the thought that you might never have been born (if it ever occurs to you) disturbing? KK: No, I find it reassuring. MF: When you think of someone dead, would you like him to speak to you, or would you rather say something more to him? KK: I would like him to speak to me. But I do not currently have unfinished business with the dead. MF: Do you love anybody? KK: Yes. MF: How do you know? KK: Because there are many moments in the course of each day when I place these individuals before my work. MF: Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it? KK: Dumb luck. MF: What do you need in order to be happy? KK: On the macro level, many things—love, family, health, money. On a daily basis, a cup of tea followed by a cup of coffee. MF: What are you grateful for? KK: That cup of tea. MF: Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal? KK: A healthy animal in which ecosystem?
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1 1/2 boxes of Bandit NV Cabernet Sauvignon (500 ml each, 750 ml total) 4 cups Canada Dry Ginger Ale 1/2 cup Kuchan Blood Peach Indian Eau de Vie Brandy 1/4 cup lemon juice 1/4 cup orange juice 1/4 cup triple sec 1/4 cup brown sugar 1 lemon sliced into rounds 1 orange sliced into rounds 1 lime sliced into rounds 8 maraschino cherries Mix in a large bowl the boxed wine, peach brandy, lemon juice, orange juice, triple sec, and brown sugar. Drop the cherries and the slices of lemon, orange, and lime into the mixture. Refrigerate overnight. Just before serving, add in the ginger ale. ———
My Case This is the record of a boxed wine sangria man. He expected no visitors and had no place to go. From morning on, he stuck to the boxed wine sangria. It seemed foolish even to discuss the uses of a boxed wine sangria.
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Now I may seem to be repeating myself, but I am at present a boxed wine sangria man. And for a while I intend to write about me. Generally, people know too little about boxed wine sangria men. They take too casually the meaning the boxed wine sangria has for the boxed wine sangria men. A boxed wine sangria man possesses some offensive poison about him. A boxed wine sangria man has experiences that only a boxed wine sangria man can talk about, adventures that apply to him alone, that a fake boxed wine sangria man can never tell. Just making the boxed wine sangria is simple enough; at the outside it takes less than an hour. I personally feel that a boxed wine sangria, far from being a dead end, is an entrance to another world. I don’t know to where, but an entrance to somewhere, some other world. Is some transformation beginning to take place in my boxed wine sangria? Perhaps so. But usually a boxed wine sangria man’s days, after he goes out into town, pass tranquilly. When he’s used to the town, wherever he is, time begins to describe concentric circles around the boxed wine sangria man as the center. No matter how many times boxed wine sangria men keep awakening from their dreams, they apparently end up being only the boxed wine sangria men they always were. This boxed wine sangria of mine has been sold to someone. There is a buyer willing to pay fifty thousand yen. I’m waiting for her now to make the transaction. If you find it incredible, I too am suspended between belief and disbelief. I can’t understand—fifty thousand yen for this boxed
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The Stairs at Kōbō Abe’s Home (Now Demolished)
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wine sangria—and why would she want to negotiate in a place like this? There’s no reason to believe her, nor is there any to doubt her. There’s no reason to doubt, nor is there to believe. Now should I bid goodbye to the boxed wine sangria? I do not fancy disposing of the boxed wine sangria as she wishes. I still know too little to trust her. At least I had better put off disposing of the boxed wine sangria until I check her real motives once more. In the long run, my attachment to the boxed wine sangria won out. The boxed wine sangria man did not budge. Instead of leaving the boxed wine sangria, I shall enclose the world within it.
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CHARLIE MEYARD
Panel of Dead Authors
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The theme of home makes us think of a door and a door makes us think of knocking and knocking makes us think of knock knock jokes. So…what’s your favorite knock knock joke?
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Death of the Author
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A Selection from The Decoration of Houses
An Exchange from The Woman in the Dunes
The supreme excellence is simplicity. Moderation, fitness, relevance—these are the qualities that give permanence to the work of the great architects. Tout ce qui n’est pas nécessaire est nuisible. There is a sense in which works of art may be said to endure by virtue of that which is left out of them, and it is this “tact of omission” that characterizes the master-hand. Modern civilization has been called a varnished barbarism: a definition that might well be applied to the superficial graces of much modern decoration. Only a return to architectural principles can raise the decoration of houses to the level of the past. Vasari said of the Farnesina palace that it was not built, but really born—non murato ma veramente nato; and this phrase is but the expression of an ever-present sense—the sense of interrelation of parts, of unity of the whole. There is no absolute perfection, there is no communicable ideal; but much that is empiric, much that is confused and extravagant, will give way before the application of principles based on common sense and regulated by the laws of harmony and proportion.
“Yes. In our village we really follow the motto ‘Love Your Home.’” “What sort of love is that?” “It’s the love you have for where you live?” “Great!” He laughed, and she laughed with him. But she did not seem to understand the reason for her laughter herself.
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—— Translated by E. Dale Saunders.
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The Final Stage Directions from Friends They begin to march off. The curtain falls slowly. Halfway off the lighting is extinguished, and all that can be recognized is the laughter of the family.
——
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Translated by Donald Keene.
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MASTHEAD
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Masthead Editor-in-Chief: Tyler Malone
Editors-at-Large: Carman Boullosa Mark de Silva Laura Sims Mira Jacob Matthew Specktor David Ulin Editors: Scott Beauchamp A. M. Davenport Mary Duffy Sarah Heikkinen Conor Higgins Joseph Schreiber Editorial Assistants: Sergio Mendez Daniel Rathburn
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Creative Director: P. T. Smith Creative Advisor: Alyssa Bishop Social Media Strategist: Adam Reece Dramatis Personae Portraitist for Issue 3.1: Manny Bawkes
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Managing Editors: Scott Cheshire Dustin Illingworth
Creative and Technical
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Editorial
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Paul Auster is an American novelist, translator, essayist, and poet. He is the author of the experimental crime novels, The New York Trilogy, and, most recently, 4 3 2 1. In this issue, Atsuko Sakaki recommends his novel The Locked Room for our Abeesque section. Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He is perhaps best remembered for his book The Poetics of Space. He is the subject of Nathan Goldman’s essay “Where I Want to Be: Finding Home Between Byrne and Bachelard” and Tyler Malone’s essay “A House Is Not a Home: Language, Ideology, and the House in Horror.”
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James Baldwin was an American writer and social critic. Best known for his novels Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell It on a Mountain and his collections of essays The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son, he is often seen as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. In this issue, Rita Banerjee recommends his book-length essay The Devil Finds Work for our On Our Nightstand section. Rita Banerjee is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, March 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, February 2018), the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and is currently working on a novel about a Tamil-Jewish American family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime, and a collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool. In this issue, she recommended James Baldwin’s booklength essay The Devil Finds Work for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Kōbō Abe was a Japanese novelist and playwright. His surreal depictions of contemporary urban life awarded him both critical and commercial success. He is best known for his novels The Woman in the Dunes and The Box Man. This issue is based around his work.
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Manny Bawkes is a box man. He created the Dramatis Personae portraits for this issue. He also created the “Boxed Wine Sangria,” cocktail based on Abe’s The Box Man. Scott Beauchamp is an editor at The Scofield. His work has appeared in Bookforum, the Dublin Review of Books, and The New Criterion. He is the author of the forthcoming book Did You Kill Anyone?. This issue features his essay “Abe in Poe’s Balloon.”
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Melissa Beck lives in Connecticut where she teaches Latin and Ancient Greek. She blogs at The Book Binder’s Daughter. Her writing has also appeared in 3:AM Magazine, World Literature Today, Open Letters Monthly, and Numero Cinq. In this issue, she reviews Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s book Map Drawn by a Spy. Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Tin House, Electric Literature, Lambda Literary, The Normal School, and many other places. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is working on her first novel. In this issue, she recommends Virginia Woolf’s essay collection The Common Reader for our On Our Nightstand section. Maxim Brown is a writer and editor in New York City. This issue features Sarah Heikkinen’s remix of his dissertation.
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Des Barry has published three novels with Jonathan Cape: The Chivalry of Crime, A Bloody Good Friday and Cressida’s Bed. His shorter prose has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, London Noir, and quite a lot in 3:AM Magazine. His alter-ego David Enrique Spellman wrote Far South, published by Serpent’s Tail. By night he’s a Butoh performance artist. In this issue, he recommends Ricardo Piglia’s novel The Absent City for our Abeesque section.
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David Byrne is a musician and author, primarily known as the principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the Talking Heads. He is the subject of Nathan Goldman’s essay “Where I Want to Be: Finding Home Between Byrne and Bachelard.”
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this issue.
Paul Cézanne was a PostImpressionist painter whose work helped to drive the transition from the ninteenthcentury conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the twentieth century. His paintings appear throughout
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Juliet Winters Carpenter is an award-winning Japanese translator. Her translation of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel won the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award’s Grand Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kyoto, where she is a professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts. Tyler Malone interviewed her for this issue.
Tobias Carroll is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird). He is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His writing has been published by Tin House, Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, The Scofield, Bookforum, and more. This issue features his essay “Talk of Home.” He also interviewed Eugene Lim.
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Richard F. Calichman is Professor of Japan Studies at the City College of New York, CUNY. His research focuses primarily on Japanese literature and philosophy. This issue features an excerpt from his book Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Kōbō Abe. Additionally, P. T. Smith interviewed him for this issue. He also contributed one of this issue’s epigraphs.
Lewis Carroll was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. This issue features a excerpt from his poem “Phantasmagoria.”
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Ryan Chang is an author whose writing has appeared in Tin House, 3:AM Magazine, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He tweets @avantbored, and blogs @biblioklept. In this issue, he reviewed Haruki Marukami’s story collection Men Without Women. Scott Cheshire is the author of the novel High as the Horses’ Bridles. His work has been published in AGNI, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harper’s, One Story, and the Picador Book of Men. He is a Managing Editor at The Scofield and lives in New York. This issue features his essay “A Brief History of Beds.” He also interviewed Alex Gilvarry.
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Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is a Kundiman Fellow, an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan, co-host of the poetry podcast Vs., and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. This issue features her poem “Home (Initial Findings).” Maddie Crum is a writer. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub and HuffPost, where she was a books editor and culture reporter. She’s from Texas, and lives in New York. In this issue, she reviewed Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. A. M. Davenport is a writer and an educator in Brooklyn, NY. He is also an editor at The Scofield. In this issue, he recommends Jean Toomer’s novel Cane for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Will Chancellor is the author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes for our Ports of Entry section.
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“Where We Live.”
Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Green Migraine, is out from Copper Canyon Press. This issue features his poem
Fumiko Enchi was a Japanese novelist. She is best known in the U.S. for her novel Masks. In this issue, Allison Markin Powell recommends her novel Masks for our Abeesque section.
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Scott Esposito is the author of four books, most recently The Doubles from Civil Coping Mechanisms. They are a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the San Francisco Chronicle, and their work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Tin House, The White Review, The Lifted Brow, The Believer, The Washington Post, and others. They were a finalist for the 2014 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. They are a senior editor for Two Lines Press and run The Quarterly Conversation. This issue features their essay “The Oort Cloud.” Max Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. His works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and politics. He was one of the founders of the Gruppe Olten. His Frisch Questionnaire was answered by Katie Kitamura for this issue. Brett Fujioka is a writer concentrating on video game criticism, literature, pop culture, politics, and Asia. He currently lives in Japan. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel The Ark Sakura for our Ports of Entry section.
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Mark de Silva is the author of the debut novel Square Wave, which was released by Two Dollar Radio in February of 2016. He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD). After several years on the editorial staff of the New York Times’ opinion pages, he now freelances for the paper’s Sunday magazine, while also serving as a contributing editor for 3:AM Magazine and an editorat-large for The Scofield. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel The Box Man for our Ports of Entry section.
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Alex Gilvarry is the author of the novels Eastman Was Here and From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. He was selected as a “5 Under 35” nominee by the National Book Foundation and received the Hornblower Award at the 2012 New York City Book Awards. He is the Artist-inResidence at Monmouth University where he teaches fiction. Scott Cheshire interviewed him for this issue.
Peter Grilli is president of the Japan Society of Boston. A Japan specialist, writer, and documentary filmmaker, he was a close friend to Toru Takemitsu and Hiroshi Teshigahara during the last decades of their lives. This issue features his essay “The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu.”
Teow Lim Goh is the author of Islanders (Conundrum Press, 2016), a volume of poems on the history of Chinese exclusion at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Her work has been featured in Tin House, Catapult, PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker. She lives in Denver. This issue features her poem “Mirage.”
Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the illustrator of an 80page biography of Nikola Tesla entitled Mind Afire: The Visions of Tesla. In this issue, Kristen Radtke recommends her and Deb Olin Unferth’s graphic novel I, Parrot for our On Our Nightstand section.
Nathan Goldman is a writer living in Minneapolis. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, the Kenyon Review Online, The Millions, Prairie Schooner, and other publications. He is a blog editor for Full Stop. This issue features his essay “Where I Want to Be: Finding Home Between Byrne and Bachelard.”
Patrick Hamilton was a British novelist and playwright. He is best-known as a Dickensian chronicler of London publife, which, by all accounts, he knew quite well. In 2008, NYRB republished his trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In this issue, Nicole Audrey Spector recommends his novel Hangover Square for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Annie Hartsock has a Master’s degree in English Literature with an emphasis on the Victorian period and more than twenty-five years of experience in marketing and communications. Catching the Drift is her first novel. In this issue, she recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel Beyond the Curve for our Ports of Entry section. Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. He is the subject of both Kevin Siefert’s essay “Dwelling at Home in the Dunes: Kōbō Abe and Martin Heidegger” and Tyler Malone’s essay “A House Is Not a Home: Language, Ideology, and the House in Horror.”
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Sarah Heikkinen is an editor at The Scofield. She’s currently a graduate student at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, studying Magazine, Newspaper, and Online Journalism. She spends most of her time retweeting political memes and forgetting to post new content on her blog, passingforwhite.weebly. com. This issue features her remix of Maxim Brown’s dissertation. Conor Higgins is a writer and professor. He is also an editor for The Scofield. This issue features his essay “Seeing Solid: Snake in a Box.”
Sean Hooks is from New Jersey but now lives in Los Angeles. He is a writer of fiction and essays whose work has recently appeared in The Smart Set, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and from Akashic Books. This issue features his essay “A Hole is Not a Burrow: The Epiphanic Horror of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and Its Line of Literary Descent.”
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Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. His most notable works include Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Jude the Obscure. This issue features his poem “Night in the Old Home.”
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Andrew Hungate is an independent scholar and book reviewer. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel Beasts Head for Home for our Ports of Entry section. Timothy Iles holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada. The subject of his dissertation was Kōbō Abe and his literary and dramatic works. Tim has taught in the United States and Canada; currently, he is an Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Victoria, where he teaches and researches Japanese film, literature, and culture. This issue features his essay “Building Homes, Building Worlds, Building Selves.”
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Dustin Illingworth is a managing editor at The Scofield. His work has appeared in the The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In this issue, he recommends Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial for our Abeesque section. Guillermo Cabrera Infante was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, screenwriter, and critic. His 1967 novel Tres Tristes Tigres has been compared to Ulysses for its playful, intricate use of language. He also published acclaimed film criticism under the pseudonym G. Cain. A review of his book Map Drawn by a Spy appears in this issue. Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, including the international bestsellers The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. In this issue, Mari Yoshihara recommends his novel The Unconsoled for our Abeesque section.
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Tomoyuki Hoshino is a writer. His debut novella The Last Gasp, won the Bungei Prize. His novel The Mermaid Sings Wake Up won the Mishima Yukio Prize, and Fantasista was awarded the Noma Literary New Face Prize. His other novels include Lonely Hearts Killer and The Tale of Rainbow and Chloe. ME is his latest novel. An excerpt from his novel Me: A Novel appears in this issue.
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Morgan Jerkins is an author whose debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial. In this issue, she recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel The Face of Another for our Ports of Entry section.
Denis Johnson was a novelist and shortstory writer. He is best known for the story collection Jesus’ Son, which chronicles the life of one “Fuckhead,” who ought to be remembered alongside (if not atop) Ishmael and Holden as one of American literature’s most memorable voices. Johnson died this May. In this issue, David Ulin recommends his novel Jesus’ Son for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Franz Kafka was a German-language novelist and short-story writer, who is widely regarded as being one of the most significant figures of twentiethcentury literature. His work is lauded for its fusion of realism and the fantastic, exploring themes of existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. This issue features his story “The Judgment.” In addition, Dustin Illingworth recommends his novel The Trial for our Abeesque section. Hokusai Katsushika was a Japanese artist of the Edo era. His woodblock painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa is known across the globe. His paintings are featured throughout the issue.
Anna Kavan is the nom de plume for Helen Emily Woods. She is a novelist, short story writer, and painter, best known for her sci-fi masterpiece Ice. An excerpt from her novel Ice appears in this issue.
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Eiya Iwata is the publisher of Mogura Tsuhshin, a monthly magazine founded in September 2012 for Kōbō Abe’s readers around the globe. His photographs are featured throughout this issue.
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Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. Her latest novel, A Separation, was published this year by Riverhead. She answered the Frisch Questionnaire for this issue. Issa Kobayashi or Issa (”Cup of Tea”) was a Japanese poet. He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson, and Shiki. This issue features a selection of his haikus. Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer, screenwriter, director, and producer. He is the subject of Conor Higgins’ essay “Seeing Solid: Snake in a Box.”
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Yumiko Kurahashi was a Japanese writer known for her postmodern and anti-realist style. She was awarded the Won Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature for her “Journey to Amanon.” In this issue, Atsuko Sakaki recommends her short story “The Trade” for our Abeesque section. Gaston Lachaise was a twentiethcentury American sculptor of French birth whose female nudes helped to redefine the form. His bust of Scofield Thayer appears on the title page of this issue.
Jolene Lai is a fine artist born and raised in Singapore and currently residing in Los Angeles. She works primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas and has a tendency to document interesting urban spaces which she manipulates to form whimsical “playgrounds” for the characters she creates. Her paintings are featured through the issue.
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Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. In this issue, James Penn recommends his novel Dandelion for our Abeesque section.
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Maria Gabriela Llansol was a Portuguese writer. During her prolific career she was awarded the APE best novel prize in 1990 and 2007. An excerpt from her novel In the House of July and August appears in this issue. Tyler Malone is a writer and professor of English. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Scofield and a Contributing Editor for Literary Hub. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere. He wrote the Letter from the Editor for this issue. He also interviewed Juliet Winters Carpenter. In addition, this issue features his essay “A House Is Not a Home: Language, Ideology, and the House in Horror.”
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Sarah Manguso earned her BA at Harvard University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her latest book, 300 Arguments, a collection of essays, came out this year from Graywolf. In this issue, Matthew Specktor recommends her collection 300 Arguments for our On Our Nightstand section.
Shiki Masaoka was a Japanese poet, author, and literary critic during the Meiji period. This issue features a selection of his haikus.
Andrew Mason is a Brooklynbased writer and reader. In this issue, he recommends Junnosuke Yoshiyuki’s novel The Dark Room for our Abeesque section.
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Eugene Lim is the author of Dear Cyborg, Fog & Car, and The Strangers. His writing has appeared in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, Little Star, Dazed, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press and works as a librarian in a high school. He lives in Queens, New York. Tobias Carroll interviewed him for this issue.
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Yuji Matson studied Modern Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, earning a Master of Arts degree in 2008. His thesis was on the cinematic collaborations between the writer Kōbō Abe and filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara. He now works as a lawyer in Vancouver, serving Japanese clients. This issue features his essay “No Cherry Blossoms: Kōbō Abe on Identity, Home, and Alienation.”
Lincoln Michel is the author of the short story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015) and writes essays and criticism for various magazines, papers, and websites. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com. This issue features his story “The Abandoned Case: After Kōbō Abe’s Ruined Map.”
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Charlie Meyard is a guy who likes to draw the funnies. His comic strip The Panel of Dead Authors appears in each issue of The Scofield.
David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of Slade House, The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2007. He is the subject of Sean Hooks’ essay “A Hole is Not a Burrow: The Epiphanic Horror of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and its Line of Literary Descent.”
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Bashō Matsuo was a Japanese poet of the Edo period. He is known as a master of the haiku form. This issue features a selection of his haikus.
Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. In this issue, Nathan See recommends his novel Confessions of a Mask for our Abeesque section.
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Dolan Morgan is the author of two story collections, That’s When the Knives Come Down (Aforementioned Productions, 2014) and Insignificana (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). His work has appeared in The Believer at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, on Selected Shorts, and in the trash. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s Secret Rendezvous for our Ports of Entry section. Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist and short-story writer. He is best known for his novels IQ84 and Kafka on the Shore. Ryan Chang reviewed his story collection Men Without Women for this issue.
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Shikibu Murasaki was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji. An excerpt from her novel The Tale of Genji is featured in this issue.
Shuichi Nakano is a Japanese painter. Her paintings are featured throughout this issue.
Soseki Natsume was a Japanese novelist, scholar, poet, and professor. From 1984 to 2004, his portrait appeared on the 1000 yen note. Haruki Murakami called him “the representative modern Japanese novelist.” An excerpt from his novel I Am a Cat is featured in this issue.
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Minae Mizumura is a novelist based in Tokyo. She also writes essays and literary criticism. Her work, appearing in books, major journals and newspapers, has won both critical acclaim and a wide readership. An excerpt from her novel Inheritance from Mother is featured in this issue.
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Minoru Nomata is a Japanese artist, who creates imaginary buildings and architecture on canvas. His paintings are featured throughout this issue.
Kenzaburō Ōe is a Japanese writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” In this issue, Michiko Wilson recommends his novel The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away for our On Our Nightstand section. PAGE 250
Masatsugu Ono is a writer, translator, and professor. His debut novel, Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), won the Asahi Award for New Writers. He is one of the rising figures of Japan’s literary scene. In this issue, Juliet Winters Carpenter recommends his story collection At the Edge of the Wood for our Abeesque section. R. E. Parrish is an online cartoonist. She lives in Bulgaria, where she works as a Fulbright ETA. Her comic strip Death of the Author appears in this issue.
James Penn is a writer from Los Angeles, California. In this issue, he recommends Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Dandelion for our Abeesque section.
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Celeste Ng is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, has won multiple awards and was a New York Times bestseller, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and on the Best Book of the Year lists of over a dozen outlets. In this issue, Maddie Crum reviewed her novel Little Fires Everywhere.
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Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly those with a focus on the macabre and mysterious. He is credited as being the inventor of the detective novel, while also having an enormous influence on the evergrowing science fiction genre of the nineteenth century. This issue features his story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He is also the subject of Scott Beauchamp’s essay “Abe in Poe’s Balloon.” Alexander Pope was one of the major poets of the eighteenth century. This issue features his poem “Upon the Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock.”
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Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. Her translation of Hiromi Kawakami’s The Briefcase (UK title, Strange Weather in Tokyo) was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Fuminori Nakamura, and Kanako Nishi. She lives in New York City, and maintains the database Japanese Literature in English. In this issue, she recommends Fumiko Enchi’s novel Masks for our Abeesque section. Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic non-fiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the managing editor of Srabande Books and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Non-fiction Writing Program. She lives and works in Brooklyn. In this issue, she recommends Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle’s graphic novel I, Parrot for our On Our Nightstand section. Joshua Rothes is the author of An Unspecific Dog and The Ethnographer or: Nixon in Caracas ‘58. He is a founding member of Burr. He lives in Seattle, Washington. This issue features his essay “The Problem of the Dog.”
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Ricardo Piglia was an Argentine critic, essayist, novelist, and short-story writer. He also taught literature at numerous institutions in the United States, including Harvard and Princeton. In this issue, Des Barry recommends his novel The Absent City for our Abeesque section.
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Atsuko Sakaki reads, writes on, and teaches Japanese and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. Her publications on Kōbō Abe include “Anonymously Yours: Abe Kōbō’s Engagement with Photography,” Chapter 2 of The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature (Brill, 2015), “Abe Kōbō 1924–1993” (as Editorial Advisor) in Vol. 297 of Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism (Gale, 2015), “Is the Pen Mightier than the Mouse? Phenomenology of Japanese Word Processing,” in PAJLS 7 (2007), and “Scratch the Surface, Film the Face: Obsession with the Depth and Seduction of the Surface in Abe Kōbō’s Face of Another” (Japan Forum, 2005). In this issue, she recommends Yumiko Kurahashi’s short story “The Trade” and Paul Auster’s novel The Locked Room for our Abeesque section.
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Patrik Sampler devoted much of a postgraduate degree to the late-career novels of Kōbō Abe. He is author of The Ocean Container, published in 2017 by Ninebark Press, and can be found online at www. patriksampler.com. In this issue, he recommends Kōbō Abe’s novel Kangaroo Notebook for our Ports of Entry section. Andrea Scrima is the author of A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York); a German translation titled Wie viele Tage will be published by Literaturverlag Droschl (Graz, Austria) in 2018. She’s currently completing a second novel, the opening pages of which won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. The passages on the Star Trek episode in the essay published here are lightly adapted from a section in A Lesser Day. Scrima lives and works in Berlin. This issue features her essay “The Problem of Home.” Nathan See is a writer living in San Diego, California. In this issue, he recommends Yukio Mishima’s novel Confessions of a Mask for our Abeesque section.
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Bruce Rutledge is the founder and publisher of Chin Music Press, an independent publisher in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. The press specializes in literature in translation and books about Northeast Asia. In this issue, he recommends Todd Shimoda’s novel Why Ghosts Appear for our Abeesque section.
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Kevin Siefert is a lecturer of philosophy at San Diego State University. His philosophic interests pertain to TwentiethCentury Continental, Ancient Western, and Post-Modernism. Outside of philosophy he enjoys international cinema (especially the French New Wave) and punk music. This issue features his essay “Dwelling at Home in the Dunes: Kōbō Abe and Martin Heidegger.” P. T. Smith is Creative Director for The Scofield, an Assistant Editor for Asymptote, a judge for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, and occasionally writes criticism. He interviewed Richard F. Calichman for this issue. He also recommends Kōbō Abe’s The Ruined Map for our Ports of Entry section.
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Matthew Specktor is a writer. Some of his work includes the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and other publications. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and an editor-at-large for The Scofield. In this issue, he recommends Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments for our On Our Nightstand section. Nicole Audrey Spector is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Vogue, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Over at @bookishdresses on Instagram, she pairs books with her dresses, enabling her hoarder tendencies. In this issue, she recommends Patrick Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square for our On Our Nighstand section. Chandra Steele has been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Newtown Literary, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has been a finalist in L Magazine’s Literary Upstart series, had a novel make it to the semifinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and won the MTV Write Stuff competition. Find her on Twitter at @ChanSteele. She interviewed Banana Yoshimoto for this issue.
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Todd Shimoda is a writer whose novels have been called “philosophical mysteries;” the most recent is Why Ghosts Appear. This issue features his essay “Kōbō Abe: Never at Home.” Additionally, Bruce Rutledge recommends his novel Why Ghosts Appear for our Abeesque section.
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Toru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer who achieved worldwide renown for works that combined the tradition of Western classical music and the sounds of traditional Eastern instruments, especially the biwa (a short-necked lute) and the shakuhachi (a bamboo flute), in addition to serial music and musique concrète. He is the subject of Scott Esposito’s essay “The Oort Cloud” and Peter Grilli’s essay “The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu.” Jun’ichirō Tanizaki was a Japanese writer. He was awarded Japan’s Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949, and in 1965 he became the first Japanese writer to be elected as an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He is best known in the U.S. for his book In Praise of Shadows. An excerpt from his novel The Maids is featured in this issue.
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Machi Tawara is a contemporary Japanese writer, translator and poet. This issue features her poem “My Bisymmetrical Self.”
Hiroshi Teshigahara was a Japanese avant-garde filmmaker. He is best known for his films Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another. He is the subject of Scott Esposito’s essay “The Oort Cloud” and Peter Grilli’s essay “The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu.” Scofield Thayer was the publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926. He is the namesake of The Scofield. A bust of him by Gaston Lachaise appears in this issue. Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. He is best known for his novel Cane. In this issue, A.M. Davenport recommends his novel Cane for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Kikaku Takarai was a Japanese haiku poet. He was also a student of the haiku master, Bashō. This issue features a selection of his haikus.
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Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics’ Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Boston Review. In this issue, Kristen Radtke recommends her and Elizabeth Haidle’s graphic novel, I, Parrot, for our On Our Nightstand section. Hiroshige Utagawa was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. His paintings appear throughout this issue.
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Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. Known for his bold colors and dramatic, impulsive, and expressive brushwork, he is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. His paintings appear throughout this issue.
Wei Wang was a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman. This issue features his poem “Some News of Home.”
Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. This issue features an excerpt from her book The Decoration of Houses.
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David Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. He is the former books editor of the Los Angeles Times. In this issue, he recommends Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son for our On Our Nighstand section.
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Michiko N. Wilson is the author of the first full-blown work on the 1994 Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, The Marginal World of Kenzaburō Ōe: A Study in Themes and Techniques, as well as a work on Japanese women writers’ re-visionary voices, Modern Japanese Women Writers as Artists as Cultural Critics (University Hawai‘i Press, 2013). She has also translated Ōe’s The Pinch Runner Memorandum and Minako Ōba’s Of Birds Crying. Ms. Wilson, emeritus professor of the University of Virginia, is also the editor of New Japanese Horizons (a Japanese literature-intranslation series), Cornell East Asia Series. In this issue, she recommends Kenzaburō Ōe’s novel The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away for our On Our Nightstand section.
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Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost Modernists of the twentieth century. She is often considered one of the greatest writers in the English language. In this issue, Gabrielle Bellot recommends her book The Common Reader for our On Our Nightstand section. Sarah C. Woolsey was an American children’s author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge. This issue features her poem “A Home.”
Sodō Yamaguchi was a master haiku poet. This issue features a selection of his haikus.
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American poet. Her works include Poems of Passion (1883), A Woman of the World (1904), Poems of Peace (1906), Poems of Experience (1910), and Poems (1919). This issue features her poem “My Home.”
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Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. This issue features an excerpt from her book Letters to Memory. Buson Yosa was a Japanese painter and poet. This issue features a selection of his haikus.
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Banana Yoshimoto is the author of numerous best-selling books, most notably Kitchen. She was born in Tokyo, the daughter of Yoshimoto Takaaki, an influential Japanese philosopher. Chandra Steele interviewed her for this issue. Junnosuke Yoshiyuki was a Japanese novelist and short-story writer. In this issue, Andrew Mason recommends her novel The Dark Room for our Abeesque section.
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Mari Yoshihara is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She writes and publishes in English and Japanese and is currently completing a book on Leonard Bernstein. In this issue, she recommends Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled for our Abeesque section.
