日本語を勉強は楽しいです*

Why study a foreign language?

An impossible question, although I just asked Google AI which told me that such study "improved cognitive skills like memory and multitasking, enhanced career opportunities in a global economy, and deeper cultural understanding and appreciation. It can also lead to increased confidence, better decision-making, and a more enriching travel experience." Who knew?

I took Latin in high school. In my memory the teacher is elderly, the class tedious, the time entirely wasted. When would I ever have occasion to say "Puellas amo ego" or "Britannia insulla est"? Never.

Japanese is something else. I was gobsmacked when I got off a troopship for ten hours in Yokohama harbor in 1955. I was illiterate and speechless. Japanese was both humbling and challenging.

I studied Japanese when I was in the Army in Japan. I studied Japanese in college. Because I did not finish the collage's language requirement, I resumed Japanese study in my mid-50s. I took two weeks in an immersion Japanese course in Japan in my mid-60s. For 1,150 days straight I've been reviewing Japanese on the Duolingo website (a site I heartily recommend for beginners and for review).

All this has meant I have not needed to speak English on visits to Japan. It meant I could lead two tours in Japan. I speak enough that I am able, as a friend said, "exchange ideas in Japanese." I am certainly not—and will never be—fluent. Nor am I able to read a Japanese text without help, which is why I continue to plug away at Duolingo lessons and short story translating.

I do it because, as the headline on this post says, studying Japanese is fun*. So that's why I study a foreign language.

Don't make time for "Time of the Flies"

If you intend to read Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro and translated by Frances Riddle stop reading this blog. There will be spoilers.

Here's is how the publisher describeds the novel, which was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels (and one reason why I bought the paperback. "Fifteen years after killing her husband’s lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they’ve started a business – FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies – dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, an affluent TV producer, one of her clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs – she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband’s lover." 

It's an interesting setup and the prose is smoothly translated (and there's a lot of it). I was interested that a woman found guilty of homicide in Argentine can serve just fifteen years. 

Bonar wants Inêz to buy a poison that only she as a licensed pest control company can buy. Complicating the situation is Manca's cancerous breast. With Bonar's money Inés can pay for a life-saving operation. Inéz and Manca discuss the situation at length and Inéz decides to buy the poison (but couldn't the cops trace such a purchase?), charging Bonar $10,000 for the service which she agrees to pay. But Bonar is apparently single so who is she planning to kill? Herself? 

Not with her bags packed, her bridges burned, and a ticket for Singapore in hand.

Another complication: Bonar had a son who was transitioning to female, something Bonar could not accept, and who killed himself. Another complication: Inéz has an estranged daughter Laura who is married and who works as Bonar's housecleaner. 

Just as Inéz and Manca are finally coming down to the story's thrilling conclusion, Piñeiro interrupts the forward movement once again for a little essay, one of several, this one on transphobic people. "Feminism has to be committed to gender freedom, to radical equality, and to alliances with other minoritarian positions, sexual dissidents. Transphobic feminism is no feminism, that cannot happen." Okay, but is this the best place for the discussion? I almost threw the book against the wall.

Maybe the way to enjoy Time of the Flies is by skipping these little didactic essays. I couldn't and didn't and regret the time I spent reading it.

About the garden in "Kanazawa in the Rain"

Story Sanctum's illustration for my story Kanazawa in the Rain

Last summer an online publication, Story Sanctum (storysancturm.com), published my short story Kanazawa in the Rain.

Kanazawa is a small city on the west coast of Japan. It was not important enough to be bombed during WWII, so a lot of pre-war and older charm remains. During the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868) it was the Maeda family's capital, and the Maeda family was one of the richest in the country.

Rated (by the Japanese) as one of Japan’s three most beautiful gardens, Kenrokuen is next to the reconstructed Kanazawa Castle. The name means “having six factors”: spaciousness, tranquility, artifice, antiquity, water sources and magnificent views. The garden has an area just over 28 ares and is located in central Kanazawa. The Maeda family, who ruled the Kaga Fief (the present Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures) in feudal times, established and maintained the garden.

My characters, an older, solitary American man and a middle-aged Japanese waitress, visit Kenrokuen and the villa on the grounds that the lord built for his mother. Late in the story the man compares the villa to the waitress's apartment. They're different.

Story Sanctum asked AI to create an illustration for the story, which it did. Here however is a picture of the real garden, from the Visit Kanazawa website (https://visitkanazawa.jp/en/attractions/detail_10106.html). 

Kenrokuen in the spring.

 

I've changed a character's unsatisfactory name.

A low-income housing project building in Harlem like the one Matt and Karen move into.

Although I believed my novel Matt and Dee Move into Harlem was finished and polished, proofread and edited, I grew dissatisfied with Dee's name. The longer I thought about it, the more I thought that it did not give the impression I wanted of a young white wife from a small Ohio city. 

It did not help Dee's case that after a year of sending out queries to literary agents, not one had responded positively. I concluded she needed a new, more appropriate name and, because I was making the change, to reconsider the title and review the entire manuscript.

The character is now Karen. Through the magic of the internet, changing every Dee to Karen took less than a minute. And the book's title is now Matt and Karen Move to (not into) Harlem.

I've recently read two novels that impressed me by the writing or translation: Free Love by Tessa Hadley and We Do Not Part by Han Kong, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Rereading my manuscript with those fresh examples in mind helped me see innumerable places where I could cut extra words or add a telling adjective.

I'm about a quarter into revising the book and it seems to be going well. Wish me luck,

Good intentions can take you only so far

For the last ten years most of my blog posts have been book reviews. I have every good intention of reviewing every book I read.

But I don't. 

I make time for my own writing, to maintain my Duolingo Japanese streak, and to translate Japanese fiction which I began doing as a way to improve my ability to read. 

Because there is often quite a gap between reviews (my last review was almost a month ago; the one before it appeared August 13) I have decided to make the time and post more often. These may not be reviews, but they will, I hope, be related to my reading, writing, and Japanese study.

For example, I told a writer friend that a literary magazine had just accepted one of my short stories and added that it was an online publication. I was pleased it was accepted, disappointed that it would not appear in a physical magazine,  She also had had a story accepted by an online magazine but was not distressed. She pointed out that because her story is online she can link to it and potentially attract more readers than the physical magazine has readers as people pass the link on to friends.

Obviously a handful of literary magazines have respectably large circulations, but (so far) those have not accepted my stories. I've decided I'm happy to be online and will post the link as soon as the story is available. And I will aggressively seek to have my stories published anywhere.

Enjoy, and comments are always welcome.

Young people trying to make sense of life

I read Sally Rooney's third novel,  Beautiful World, Where Are You to learn, if possible, why she is so popular.

The publisher's precise sums up the book's plot, such as it is, nicely: "Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in."

All right on, but then the blurb asks two questions to induce sales: "Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?"

I don't know about the characters standing in the last lighted room, but the text does read as the four, all around 30 years old, are trying to make sense of the world and their lives. Alice, who has had phenomenal success with her first novel, now has more money than she knows what to do with and, apparently, is recovering from a mental/emotional crisis by renting a house in rural Ireland.

She meets Felix who works in a warehouse and spends most evenings with drinks and darts with the lads at a pub in town. Except for the sex, which Rooney describes in titillating detail (Philip Roth has a lot to answer for), he and Alice do not seem to have much in common. Neither do Eileen and Simon, perhaps because they are so uncertain who they are they do not even know how they hope—or want—to live. 

The book's title is the literal translation of a phrase from a 1788 Friedrich Schiller poem. By implication, it is a question Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are asking. It implies, of course, that there is a beautiful world to find. My guess is that Rooney is so popular because many, many readers can identify with the characters and are asking the same question. 

Disappointingly, the characters do not find the (or a) beautiful world, perhaps because there is none.

Who makes a better mom? The mother or the nanny?

The novel's first sentence tells the story: "I'm kidnapping a child."

She is kidnapping a child, and the rest of the book is a working out of the consequences as told by Maju, Cora's nanny, and in alternate chapters by Mrs. Fernanda, Cora's mother.

The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso and convincingly translated from by Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato (and shame on Europa Editions for not including Lovato's credit on the cover) is set in contemporary Sao Paolo and on the road to Paraguay.

Maju is kidnapping Cora, who seems around four years old, because she believes she will be a better mother—more loving, more attentive—than Mrs. Fernanda, who we first see in the second chapter having sex with her female lover. Fernanda is successful, powerful, affluent, stressed television executive whose husband is emotionally detached, just along for the ride.

The Tokyo Suite is the ironic name the Fernandas have given Maju's very modest room, perhaps because it is the most remote in the apartment. A revealing chapter is Mrs. Fernanda's inspection of the room.

The Tokyo Suite is an interesting and engaging story. I was not distracted—or lost—by the shift back and forth in first-person point of view. Madalosso gives us enough detail about contemporary Brazilian life that we understand why Maju and Mrs. Fernanda do (or don't do) what they do. Cora is believable as a very young child who loves her nanny and misses her mommy. Maju truly believes she is giving Cora a better life by taking her to Paraguay. Mrs. Fernanda has difficulty accepting that she has to deal with a kidnapped daughter in addition to her business and personal difficulties.

I had no idea where The Tokyo Suite was going and am delighted I found it.

Is it worth losing the reality you have always known

Louise, a French woman in her twenties, has had difficulty hearing all her life. When the novel opens she is being examined in a clinic because her hearing has become worse and, depending on a speaker's register, she cannot hear at all. The specialist recommends a cochlear implant. Hearing "normally" would, of course, entirely change Louise's relationship to the world and her perceptions of reality. Is it worth it?

That's the central conflict of Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adéle Rosenfeld, translated from French by Jeffrey  Zuckerman. She is writing from the inside. As she writes in a note, "I was far younger than Louise F. when I got a cochlear implant in 1995 . . . As I faced down the list of heard and misheard words that, in English, begins 'woman, lemon, boulder' [a list that appears on the second page of the novel], it was deeply moving to enlist Beverly Fears, the audiologist who originally programmed my implant, and who had me do the same test countless times since, in recreating all the phonemes and meanings of the list in English.

Which indicates the task the translator faced. The novel is not a straightforward account of Louise's situation. Louise is telling her own story and recounting the words misheard for which Zuckerman had to find English equivalents because I suspect Louise's French puns and malapropisms cannot be translated directly.

The novel is exceptional because we are with Louise throughout, seeing and hearing her life, her Paris, her friendships, her jobs—all affected by, influenced by what she hears. As the prospect of surgery looms, she is accompanied by a damaged soldier from World War 1, an irritable dog, and a whimsical botanist.

As the jacket says, Jellyfish Have No Ears shines a light on the black hole of losing a sense and the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.

Characters in a strange and fantastical world

Gwendolyn Paradice describes herself as "hearing impaired, queer, and a member of the Cherokee Nation." She has an MA in nonfiction from the University of North Texas, an MFA from Bennington College, and a PhD from the University of Missouri. She teaches creative writing at Murray State University. More Enduring for Having Been Broken (2021), a collection of short stories, is her first book.

They are . . . original. I cannot do better than lift the book's description from the back cover; "A carnivorous ferris wheel, exploding chickens, a theme park that’s home to a god, and a centuries-old Spanish ship found in the Texas hill country. . . stories of children abandoned, forgotten, and ignored, their trauma and the desperate need to survive it. Whether it’s living in a rusted stingray above a tourist shop in coastal Florida, feeding faces to monstrous catfish in the bayou, maintaining a derelict and fog-shrouded hotel in South America, or escaping through the labyrinthine caves of Crete, the boys and girls in this collection weather their aloneness in a world touched by the strange and fantastical."

At the sentence and paragraph level, the writing is impressive. Where I had a problem with many of the stories were the "strange and fantastical" elements. The children in these stories—and the central characters all tend to be young—live in a world that is more cruel and meaningless than the world I recognize.

Why? 

Why invent an English (not Spanish) sloop-of-war from the 1700s, intact but abandoned, sitting  inexplicably in a Texas pond? Is this the best way to evoke, dramatize the 19-year-old's relationship with her grandfather? Rather than focus on the story Paradice is trying to tell, I focused on the extraordinary ship—where did it come from? What is its name (a record of it must exist somewhere)? Why aren't national news organizations and a maritime museum swarming around to check it out?

I had similar problems with the carnivorous carnival ferris wheel. It apparently lives on the bugs the character catches, but a ferris wheel is big. Would bugs be enough to sustain it? No wonder it began to eat a rider. Won't someone miss the half-eaten rider? Did the ferris wheel have parents? 

It occurs to me that when a story is set in a recognizable universe, the writer doesn't have to even think about such questions. Readers will assume a character—even an orphan—had parents. In some ways it makes the writing easier.

All this is to say that most of the stories in More Enduring for Having Been Broken provoke more questions than they answer, questions that left me unsatisfied. They told me nothing about the world or how it works. One exception to that is the story of Elias, an orphaned pre-teen boy, who finds refuge in the rusted interior of a stingray. What happens to Elias is extreme but believable and the story is accessible for it. Too many other characters function in a world I cannot accept or enjoy. Others may feel differently.

An now, other opinions of Kairos

I do not generally read reviews of a book I intend to review until I've read the book. I would rather present my reaction as uncolored as possible by someone else's opinion. That obviously does not always happen if only because I read a book because I've read a review, although by the time i read the book I've usually forgotten what the review said.

When I do look at Amazon reviews, I look for those by readers who disliked a book I liked very much. If I've given a book five stars, why have others given it one? Why are our opinions of the same text so different?

All this is a preamble to say I've now read the negative comments about Kairos. I thought several were as interesting as the novel. For example, "I grew up in East Germany and was excited about this novel. But I am so disappointed! The love story… well… Hans is a despicable sadistic prick and Katharina too naive… and the interwoven philosophical ideas seem forced. I suffered through the book hoping for a turning point but there is none. It’s an exhausting read."

And: "I agree with the Amazon review titled 'Not Mastering the Past,' of this novel set in East Germany around the opening of the Berlin wall. A romance turned abusive becomes the vehicle for a revisionist perspective on German reunification. I disliked the book on many levels, although it is skillfully written. The character Hans is a familiar, repugnant type of intellectual. His 34 years younger lover Katharina discovers after his death that he was a Stasi informer, and muses in the next-to-last sentence of the novel that she was his 'mirror image.' The parallel, apparently, is that both were psychologically captive, brainwashed into giving up their privacy. This seems a bizarre exculpation of the uniquely pervasive culture of mutual spying that existed in East Germany. The Stasi’s penetration of all levels of society had less to do with communist ideology than with the seamless transition from Nazism to a Stalinist police state. Yet the reunification with the West is framed not as access to democracy but as a victory of capitalism and soulless consumerism over the humanitarian ideals of socialism.

"The tediously obsessive love affair begins with a sexual encounter (on Hans’ marital bed) to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem, a lengthy scene which brought to my mind the German word Edelkitsch, 'noble kitsch.' (Translation note: the word “Slip” in German means panties, not “slip.”) For all its sophistication, this novel has a mushy core. The death throes of the relationship coincide with the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification. 'What will history’s verdict be about our time?' the novel asks, stating that 'the question is still open.' In another place Katharina asks why it is that only they, the East Germans, have had to examine their conscience, and not the West Germans. Undoubtedly it was difficult and demeaning for many East Germans to find themselves on the losing side of history. But the fact is that West Germans have been grappling with their Nazi past in a way that East Germans never did. I grew up in West Germany and we studied that era in school nearly every year, with no hint of exculpation."

It's enough to make me want to reread Kairos with these comments in mind.