Tag: Japan

Review 2655: #NovNov25! A Pale View of the Hills

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A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, is restrained and delicate and at first seems relatively straightforward. But towards the end, ambiguity sets in, forcing the reader to think back through the events of the novel. I read it for Novellas in November.

Etsuko is a Japanese woman, a widow living in England whose eldest daughter, Keiko, has recently committed suicide. Her younger daughter, Niki, is visiting from London, and a child they see on a walk together reminds Etsuko of her life in Nagasaki just after World War II. Particularly, she is reminded of her friendship with a woman named Sachiko.

Nagasaki is recovering from the bombing. Etsuko is married to Jiro only a short time, and she is pregnant. The other women in her apartment building talk about Sachiko and say she is unfriendly. She lives with her daughter Mariko in the only house left in the area, a rundown cottage.

Etsuko meets Sachiko when she expresses worry about Sachiko’s young daughter, who seems to be left alone quite often. Sachiko talks as if her daughter is the most important thing in her life, but she doesn’t worry when she is out late, and Mariko is a very strange girl. Also, we eventually learn that Sachiko has an American lover, Frank, who keeps promising to take them to America but then abandons them and drinks up all their savings.

For her part, Etsuko behaves like a dutiful housewife and entertains Jiro’s visiting father, whom she likes very much. But in the present time we understand that she left Jiro to move to England with Niki’s father.

The plot of the novel centers on Sachiko’s choice—whether to return to live with her rich uncle and cousin, who welcome her, to live the life of a traditional widow, or to go off with Frank. The girl Mariko detests Frank, by the way, and she is also concerned about the fate of some kittens.

There is a moment late in the book that made me doubt that I fully understood what was going on, and this ambiguity is not resolved. As a narrator, Etsuko is not altogether reliable, but whether this moment is a slip of self-identification or of something more sinister, readers have to decide for themselves. Certainly, by then the story has taken on a darker tinge.

Some readers may not care for this ambiguity and others, I understand, have come up with some far-fetched theories, but along with its elegiac pure prose, it is this moment that turns the novel into one you will remember and think about.

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Review 2552: Malice

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I have only read a few Japanese mysteries, and those, written in the 1990s, were more focused on the puzzle than motive and psychology. A couple featured eccentric buildings that no rational person would design, explicitly there to make the puzzle harder.

Malice, although written around the same time, 1996, is much more concerned with personality and motivation. It is also unusual because the murderer is arrested on about page 80.

Osamu Nonaguchi, a children’s book author, goes to visit his friend, Kunihiko Hidaka, a best-selling writer, shortly before Hidaka leaves the country to live in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later that day, Nonaguchi returns to the house when invited, only to find it shut up and the lights out. He is alarmed and calls Hidaka’s wife, Rei, who has moved to a hotel while Hidaka finishes some pages for his editor. When Rei arrives, they find Hidaka dead, possibly from hitting his head in a fall. But Hidaka, it turns out, was murdered.

When Nonaguchi is interviewed, he can only offer the information that Hidaka had an altercation with a neighbor about a cat, and that when Rei let the cat out of the house, the neighbor was talking to Masaya Fujio, who was suing Hidaka over one of his books.

Nonaguchi has known Hidaka since middle school. By coincidence, the detective, Kyiochiro Kaga, also knew Nonaguchi in school.

Although Kaga quickly identifies the killer, he is concerned with motive. Even though the killer eventually offers up a motive, Kaga is not satisfied.

This novel is written entirely in statements and interviews. Although Wilkie Collins used this method effectively many years before in The Moonstone, it makes this novel inert. Also, a problem I found in other Japanese mysteries, when the solution is finally revealed, Kaga goes over every little detail to explain it, sometimes more than once. I felt the novel was a good 50+ pages too long, and it dragged at times.

Although I liked this novel’s approach better than that of the other Japanese mysteries I’ve read, it didn’t have any action and moved too slowly.

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Review 2481: Memorial

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Benson is a young Black gay man living in Houston with his Japanese boyfriend Mike. When Mike’s mother is due to arrive for a visit for the first time in years, Mike tells Benson that his father is dying and he’s going to Osaka to be with him, leaving his mother with Benson, who has never met her before.

While Benson navigates the situation with Mitsuko, Mike’s mother, he also considers his relationship with Mike, which has been deteriorating lately. For his part, Mike must work through his resentment that his father deserted him and his mother when he was a teen. That, and Eiju’s general prickliness.

This novel explores the difficulties both men have had with their families and their relationships with each other. Each man also tentatively begins getting to know another gay young man.

Although this novel is supposed to be funny, the humor went right over my head. I found it perceptive and sometimes touching, although I am not a fan of explicit sex scenes. I read it for my James Tait Black project.

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Review 2335: Silence

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I was interested in this novel because of its setting in 17th century Japan. However, although it is considered the author’s masterpiece, it is almost completely about religious faith, Roman Catholic faith, in fact, although the particular religion doesn’t affect my lack of interest in that subject.

Although the Japanese originally welcomed the Portuguese and allowed missionaries and conversions, by 1627 when the novel begins, the shogun has closed the country’s borders and outlawed Christianity. Word comes back that Christóvão Ferreira of the Society of Jesuits is apostate in Japan.

Three of his former students cannot believe this of their beloved leader. So, Francisco Garrpe, Juan de Santa Maria, and Sebastian Rodrigues get permission to journey to Japan in hopes of finding Ferreira.

After a long and difficult journey, Garrpe and Rodrigues arrive in Japan, Santa Maria being too ill to leave Macao. In Japan, they immediately take up a life of hiding, the situation being perilous, while they wonder if they have the inner strength to be martyred. They have come from Macao with the only Japanese man they could find there, a shifty man named Kichijiro, who says he is not a Christian. However, when they reach Japan, he takes them to a village of Christians who say he is one.

Several times Rodrigues has to witness Japanese being tortured or killed for being Christians, and he begins to wonder why God remains silent while Christians suffer. His battles with doubt become the focus of the novel.

Although the novel is historically interesting, the continual mental thrashing is not, at least not to me, nor are the religious arguments between him and Japanese authorities after he is caught. However, someone interested in religion may find them so. I also found distasteful the fascination with becoming a martyr.

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Review 2048: The Decagon House Murders

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Although a mystery should eventually make everything clear, it definitely should not belabor the obvious as if readers are numbskulls. Unfortunately, The Decagon House Murders does so several times. We’re only a few pages in when some members of a university mystery club are introduced and it’s clear that they are using the names of Golden Age mystery writers. But then the novel not only explains this but laboriously tells us who those writers are. Okay, I thought. It’s Japan. Maybe everyone wouldn’t know. But then, just a few pages later, a drawing of the floorplan of the Decagon House appears, labeled Figure 2, and then it is laboriously described—a description that adds nothing to the figure and “(See Figure 2)” is actually included. There are also several excruciating recaps of the clues, not to mention the four- or five-page explanation at the end of everything that happened.

So, here’s the setup. Some members of a university murder club are spending their spring break on an island where more than a year earlier there was a series of murders and the house was burned down, leaving only a utility building called the Decagon House (and an odd utility building it is). After the students depart for the island, some of their colleagues back on the mainland receive letters accusing them of murdering another club member, who died in a drinking party the year before. That person was the daughter of the family that was murdered on the island six months later. These two students, Kawaminami and Morisu, begin looking into the island murders by visiting the victim’s brother Nakamura Kōjirō, where they meet Shimada Kujoshi, a friend of Kōjirō.

The group on the mainland think they are pursing an intellectual mystery—a puzzle—but on the island, the murders have started with the death of Orczy, one of the two women, strangled in her sleep.

We won’t comment on the bad taste demonstrated by the selection of this venue for their meeting so soon after the death of the family. The novel had some surprises, or rather, it successfully led me up some blind alleys, pages and pages before the characters got there. It is interesting, though, that I noticed a Goodreads review claiming this is a “fair play” mystery—that it provides clues for the reader to get the solution. Actually, it hides a key relationship that would give away the motive until after the identity of the murderer is revealed.

The author’s bio claims this novel is a landmark book that revived the puzzle mystery in Japan when it was published in 1987. To me, it feels like a throwback to some of the more primitive efforts of the early 20th century. Anyway, I’m not sure the puzzle mystery needs to be revived.

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Review 1546: Murder in the Crooked House

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I made several attempts to read Murder in the Crooked House, but it irritated me so much that I stopped even before the famed detective came on the scene. It was published in 1982, but it reminded me more of the super-complicated mysteries of 40 or 50 years earlier that concentrate mostly on the puzzle.

First, Shimada introduces the maze-like house built by the eccentric millionaire Kozaburo Hamamota, a house so absurdly unlikely that it is laughable. Then, he introduces us to a plethora of characters, barely bothering to differentiate them. By 100 pages in, I could only tell apart a handful of them.

Without further ado, including any explanation of the relationships between the characters, he has a strange phantom appear at an upper-floor window followed by the murder of the chauffeur. Two bumbling detectives arrive.

Even the way the characters are introduced, with one character giving an elaborate introduction of everyone else, seems totally contrived. I give up.

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Review 1501: Pachinko

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In 1932, 16-year-old Sunja is fascinated by Hansee, a debonair Korean who lives in Japan but visits her small village in Korea to buy fish. Sunja has an affair with him, but when she learns she is pregnant, he tells her he has a wife and children in Japan but wants her to be his Korean wife. While realizing she will disgrace her family, she does not agree.

Isak, a frail Christian minister, comes to stay at Sunja’s mother’s boarding house on his way to Japan, but he soon falls ill with tuberculosis. Sunja and her mother Yangjin nurse him back to health. When he understands Sunja’s predicament, he offers to marry her to give her child a father. So, the couple leave for Japan, where the novel follows the fates of them and their descendents for the next fifty plus years.

At the time of the beginning of the novel, Japan ruled Korea, and the Japanese treated the Koreans as second-class citizens in their own country. In Japan, the Koreans are considered dirty and lazy and are forced to live in ghettos. They are discriminated against, and most are not allowed to become citizens even if born there.

This novel is an interesting story about the difficulties Koreans had living in Japan. It is the type of novel that is more interested in what happens to this family, though, than in creating well-rounded characters. I liked it but did not love it.

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Day 1228: The Great Railway Bazaar

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Cover for The Great Railway BazaarBest of Five!
Although it was not his first published book, The Great Railway Bazaar was Paul Theroux’s first to be profitable. Written in 1975, it describes the journey he took from England through Europe and southern Asia to Japan and then back through Russia almost all the time on railroads. On the journey, he travels on some fabled railways, such as the Orient Express when it still went to Istanbul and the Trans-Siberian Express.

This isn’t a traditional travel book. For the most part, Theroux isn’t interested in describing tourist destinations. There is some description, but Theroux is mostly interested in the people he meets on the train and the glimpses of life beyond.

The book is interesting but especially for me in describing countries as they no longer are but were during my lifetime. He describes a Middle East not torn by war, as it has been since the 1980’s, an Iran ruled by the Shah, a Vietnam abandoned by Americans but still at war. He dismisses Afghanistan as a country to be avoided in future but not because of war.

His descriptions of conditions he finds are graphic, and his conversations on the train are sometimes funny. He is a keen observer of human behavior.

This book just zipped by for me, I was so interested. I was surprised to find that at that time, the Orient Express was one of the least luxurious trains he takes. It is more luxurious now, but sadly it no longer goes to Istanbul.

The Folio Society edition I have is full of beautiful photos of people traveling on trains. Unfortunately, none of them were taken by Theroux on his journey.

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Day 1184: The Garden of Evening Mists

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Cover for The Garden of Evening MistsBest of Five!
Yun Ling Teoh, a Malayan federal judge of Chinese descent, has decided to retire early. She has been diagnosed with a neurological ailment that will cause more and more frequent episodes of aphasia and will eventually destroy her language abilities. She decides to return to Yugiri, a Japanese garden in Malaya that she inherited from its creator, Aritomo.

On the advice of her friend Frederik, the owner of a nearby tea plantation, Yun Ling decides to record her memories. She begins in 1951, when she went to Aritomo to ask him to design a garden in memory of her sister, Yun Hong, who died in a Japanese labor camp during World War II. Yun Ling also was in the camp, and her hatred of the Japanese makes it difficult for her to ask for Aritomo’s help. But her sister loved Japanese gardens.

Aritomo refuses her request but makes her a different offer. If she will take on the job of apprentice, he will teach her enough to design her own garden. She decides to accept the offer, having quit her job as prosecutor.

It is a difficult time in Malaya. No sooner did the war end than the government began fighting Communist guerillas, who were attempted to take over the country. And Akitomo has his secrets. He came to Malaya before the war, having resigned as the Japanese emperor’s gardener, but Yun Ling occasionally hears that he played a role for Japan during the war. He had some kind of influence, because he saved his neighbors from the Japanese labor camps. Yun Ling, we find, has her own secrets.

The Garden of Evening Mists is the best kind of historical fiction, immersing me in its time and place while informing me of events I was formerly unaware of. I found it deeply interesting and affecting. The descriptions are delicate and evocative, and the characters feel real yet mysterious. This novel was part of both my Walter Scott Prize and Man Booker Prize projects, as well as the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize. It is a powerful novel.

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Day 1095: Number9Dream

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Cover for Number9DreamI usually enjoy, on one level or another, everything David Mitchell writes, and I consider a couple of his novels to be really excellent. I wasn’t as fond of Number9Dream, however.

Eiji Miyake has traveled from his home on a southern island of Japan to Tokyo to find his father. He and his twin sister were the product of an illicit relationship that their father abruptly broke off, and Eiji and Anju have never known his identity. They were raised by their grandmother with only infrequent visits from their mother.

When Eiji was eleven, his sister drowned. We are supposed to believe that he ran away on that day and lived in the mountains by himself.

The book begins with a series of unlikely daydreams that Eiji has about meeting his father as he sits in a cafe looking at the building where a lawyer representing his father has an office. When he finally meets the lawyer, she refuses to give him any information about his father or even to give his father a message.

Eiji begins a series of attempts to find his father, involving some unlikely and almost surrealistic adventures. He journeys to the city’s underworld, visits brothels, gets involved with the Yakuza, and has other adventures, all while working a series of low-wage jobs.

This novel is Mitchell’s second, and it seems more juvenile than the others. I don’t think I’m giving away too much, considering the quotes on the jacket cover, when I say that it’s difficult to tell at times whether the protagonist is dreaming or not or whether the entire novel is a dream. There are varying opinions about whether using dreams in novels is effective, or whether they simply stall the plot. I am usually bored by them.

Like some of Mitchell’s other novels, this one also involves several voices. One chapter interjects a series of children’s tales in between sections of the main story, and I found these frankly tedious and unlikely to amuse children. In another section, Eiji receives a diary of his uncle’s life during World War II. This manuscript is interesting inasmuch as it tells about a Japanese program to send manned torpedoes against the American fleet, a suicidal mission that proved more costly to the Japanese than it did to their enemies. This section had some appeal but didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the novel.

So, this novel was not to my taste. I felt it was disjointed and occasionally uninteresting. Although it uses techniques that Mitchell employs in other books, it doesn’t use them as skillfully. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize, though, so I guess I’m in the minority.

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