Japanese sci-fi that's more fiction than science

 I bought Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki because I am endlessly fascinated by Japanese fiction and because I watched a video chat about the book and the author.

Suzuki was born in 1949 (the same year as Haruki Murakami) in Shizuoka. She killed herself  at age 36 in 1986. After graduating from high school she worked briefly as a keypunch operator. In 1969 she was a runner-up for the literary magazine Shosetsu Gendai and move to Tokyo where she worked as a bar hostess, nude model, and actor in “pink films”—sort of low-budge soft-core porn. She wrote plays and from 1971 devoted herself to writing. In 1975 she published her first science-fiction short story.

She married Kaoru Abe in 1973 and they had a daughter in 1976. A year later she divorced Abe although they continued to live together. He died in 1978 from an accidental overdose of Bromisoval, a sedative/hypnotic drug. According to Wikipedia, “For a time she managed to support her daughter by publishing stories in sci-fi magazines, but eventually her health deteriorated and she began receiving public assistance. In 1986, she committed suicide by hanging herself at home.”

Given Suzuki’s tumultuous marriage and avant-garde instincts (writes the reviewer who has no idea what he is talking about), it is no surprise that the seven stories in Terminal Boredom tend to be bleak. They are selected from earlier collections and translated by six translators: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Akio Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan.

In the first, “Women and Women,” men, responsible for war and the world’s other evils—have begun to die off, the survivors exiled to the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupation zone. The narrator is fine with this until a boy—someone who has escaped the zone—passes by her house. They become unlikely and secret friends until one day:

“Suddenly he hugged me, then flipped me over and pinned me down like we were wrestling. At first, I thought he was just messing around. But he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Hiro wasn’t messing around at all. I spent the rest of that day learning the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life. Learning it with my body.” What she’s learned, however, is an adolescent fantasy.

The stories all have sci-fi aspects, but they tend to be subordinate to the conversations between characters. Two friends seem to be in an ordinary coffee shop when “she took a slow look around the room and pushed the button at the edge of the table. A see-through capsule popped up to cover us. No one could hear us now.” In “Night Picnic” the family picnics on the moon. In “That Old Seaside Club” CHAIR in small caps “sits in the middle of my apartment and talks to me—and only ever to say mean things!”

I am afraid that my patience with talking chairs and human/alien individuals and faster-than-light travel is limited. Nevertheless, I think Terminal Boredom is worth reading if only to be exposed to the attitudes and ideas of a prolific and interesting writer. I also do not regret the two hours I’ve spent (because I’ve watched it twice) with the translators talking about translation in general and Suzuki in particular. You can find it here.

How do you love someone hell-bent on harming himself?

 I picked this up because Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, said in an interview, “One of my friends, Scott Cheshire, wrote a beautiful book about faith called High as the Horses’ Bridles. Scott is not a believer himself, though he was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and used to give sermons as a child, and the novel approaches questions of faith with the same degree of respect and serious consideration that any great believing writer would. It’s a challenging and provocative read.” It is that. 

A bio of Cheshire on the Gotham Writers site says that “in the back of every New World Bible (the official Witness translation), there are appendices that include maps and ‘scholarly references’ supporting a literalist reading of the Bible. Ironically, it was the inclusion of these references, designed to keep believers in place, that led Scott ‘astray.’ Scott realized how terribly flawed the so-called scholarly references were in that they merely propped up the Jehovah’s Witness agenda. He researched secular criticism along with histories of American Christianity, Mormonism, and Seventh Day Adventists.”

In college Cheshire found that even sacred texts steal. “Good writers steal or are at least influenced,” he says. “The writers of Genesis stole or borrowed from other religious texts.” He attended church less and less and even skipping the much-revered “Last Supper” celebration. Ultimately, he began exploring fiction, began writing fiction, published short stories, and earned an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

High as the Horses’ Bridles is the story of a believer who stops believing, his father, mother, and ex-wife. The title refers to how deeply the blood will rise when God brings about the Apocalypse. In the first chapter, 12-year-old Josiah Laudermilk is a boy preacher speaking to an audience of 4,000 in what had been a Queens, NY, movie palace, now the sect’s church. Josiah, his spirit fired by the crowd, announces to the believers that in fact the world will end in twenty years, on December 31, 1999. 

Twenty-five years later, the world has not ended. Josiah returns from California to the Queens family home. He is divorced. He owns a shaky computer retail business. After growing to four stores, Otter Computing has shriveled to one with one employee, Josiah best friend Amad Singh, who keep the business afloat. His mother has died after suffering for several years with with the onset, remission, and return of cancer. And his father, Gill, has retreated into his faith, allowing the house and his health to deteriorate.

While Josiah has given up on the church although not (apparently) on his belief in God, his father has become obsessed with living by the rules of the Bible that mean the most to him. For example, that one should lie down beside the still waters means that Gill has moved a cot in the bathroom so he can sleep beside the filled bathtub. Everything that happens, happens for a reason. In a scene between Gill, Josiah, his mother and church elders, Gill says:

“I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life . . . And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

High as the Horses’ Bridles puts us in the consciousness of white, middle-class American man who in his mid-thirties is trying to make sense of the world and his own history. Josiah does not debate his father or the tenets of his church. The novel does not question the inerrancy of the Bible’s stories, nor does it suggest that there may be questions about or inconsistencies in the stories.

The book does convey the difficulty of loving someone who seems hell-bent on harming himself in a mad quest for . . . what? Transcendence? Ultimate truth? Death? At times I found Josiah irritatingly indecisive. I wanted to tell him: Clean the damned house of the cat crap! Don’t let your father continue to live in such filth! Do something even if it’s wrong! 

Eventually, with the unexpected help of his ex-wife, he does. His friend, Amad back at the store in California, never gives up on him (or the store). And in an extraordinary coda, Cheshire ends the novel with a story of religious transfiguration in Woodford, Kentucky, in 1801. It alone is worth the price of admission. 

What life can be like while serving a life sentence

This Life is a fascinating novel for several reasons, starting with its publishing history. In the book’s Foreword, Zachary Lazar writes that he first met Quntos KunQuest in 2013 at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison.

Lazar, a professor of English at Tulane University, had come to the prison as a journalist to cover the production of a play the inmates were performing. Quntos was part of the sound crew and wrote some of the play’s music. “He was a rapper, he said, but Angola disapproved of hip-hop, unlike country, gospel, and rock, so he had to find ways to work that didn’t draw much notice.”

Lazar mentioned to Quntos that he was trying to write a novel “about a man serving life at Angola.” Quntos, 20 years into his life sentence, said he’d written a novel like that himself. He said “he would send it to me and I could ‘steal’ from it anything I wanted.” Lazar wasn’t interested in stealing but was interested in read the manuscript—which was 348 pages hand printed in ballpoint pen with cursive for italics. It took at least one false start before the novel found a publisher in Agate.

This Life is a highbred: memoir, poetry, fiction, all written in an English that may take some getting used to. Here on page 1 is Lil Chris considering the correctional officers who are taking him to Angola: “If anything unusual happened, they wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot. That triptriggered sump’n he wa’n’t tryna think about, but he knew: this was his slow descent to the bottom of the barrel.”

The other major character is Rise who’s been inside for a while. Looking at the new arrivals, “within 30 minutes he’ll have assessed every one of them’s makeup. He’ll know who’s dangerous and who’s soft, who’s got sense and who can’t think, who’s playin’ games and who wants to be left alone. And, most importantly, which of these fools he’s willing to allow inside his zone.”

Lil Chris and Rise are both natural born rappers and This Life is studded with, and enriched by, rap poetry. At the climax of the story, they compete in a rap contest.

This could have been a simple memoir of what it’s like to be serving an extended sentence in Angola, which has provoked a number of books, notably Wilbert Rideau’s In the Place of Justice and Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. Covering 18,000 square acres, Angola is larger than Manhattan. It currently houses about 6,000 prisoners. 

In a facility so large with working farms, manufacturing facilities, education center, an inmate-run radio station, TV station, and magazine, one individual prisoner’s daily life inside can be very different from another. Violence exists, but prison tends to be more peaceful than movies and television would have you believe. We watch Lil Chris being institutionalized before he is fit to live relatively peacefully in a dormitory with a job in the library rather than in a two-man cell or in the SHU—the segregated housing unit, what modern prisons call solitary.

In the course of This Life, we watch Lil Chris change from an angry young man into a rap artist who (we can hope) has a future within and perhaps beyond prison. He is guided in this change by Rise who has his own demons and history to live with, but who also has learned exactly how the system works. As one of the old ’victs tells Lil Chris:

“The prison system is a racket. When we go out and commit criminal acts and get caught, we fall into a well-planned net. A trap. From that point forward, it’s we, the offenders, who are usually victimized. They already know that a large percentage of us don’t know the law—let alone our rights. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us can’t afford competent legal assistance. We’re given a court-appointed lawyer who not only doesn’t have adequate resources, but also can’t properly defend us even if they did have the resources. They’re being called to defend too many clients at one time.”

So not only is This Life an interesting story, a persuasive picture of prison life, a chapbook of rap poetry, it also offers a thought-provoking perspective on the criminal-justice complex. It reads so well, so persuasively one wonders what, if anything, a copy-editor did with the manuscript. Would you touch an exchange like this between Lil Chris and a female CO:

—“How you doin’ Sarge?”

—“Fine. What’s up with you?” she returns.

—I’m straight.” A little too emphatic. Damn! “I mean, I’m cool. Just another day in the joint.” He recovers. “So you chllin’ wit’ us tonight”

—"Yeah,” she smiles. “I’ll be here with you, tonight.”

—Did she just give him a little under-eyed glance? Boy, that’s cold. I know she just didn’t do me that, Lil Chris thinks.

This Life deserves to be read, to be read widely, to be read aloud, to be savored, and to be thought about.

What Jane Austin would have written if she'd written a mystery

Death Comes to Pemberly is an outlier among P.D. James’s murder mysteries. It was published in 2012 after James had published 17 mysteries set in the contemporary era in which she created Adam Dalgliesh, a police commander and poet. James died in 2014 at age 94, so Pemberly is a very late blossom indeed.

It is also as far as I know unique in that recreates Jane Austin’s characters an involves them in a mystery, rather than, say, taking a detective like Sherlock Holmes and involving him in another mystery as Laurie King does in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. James said, “I wanted to combine my two enthusiasms: writing detective fiction and reading Jane Austen. I thought it would be enjoyable to revisit the characters in Pride and Prejudice and to create a really original, exciting, credible detective story at the same time.”

Death Comes to Pemberly opens in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice, with Darcy and Elizabeth happily settled in Pemberly House, the great house on the Darcy estate. They are the parents of two young boys and preparing for the annual Lady Ann’s ball. The evening before the ball, a carriage hurtles out of the stormy dark carrying Elizabeth’s flighty sister Lydia who is screaming bloody murder. Lydia’s husband, the despicable if charming, George Wickham, has followed his friend, a Captain Denny, into the woods after Denny stopped the carriage. Lydia screams that Denny has killed Wickham. When a search party finds the two men in the wood, however, Denny is dead and Wickham, cradling the body exclaims, “He was my friend, my only friend, and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him! It’s my fault.”

Because the death occurred on Darcy’s land and because Wickham, much to Darcy’s disgust, is Darcy’s brother-in-law, Darcy cannot be the investigating magistrate. That has to be Sir Selwyn Hardcastle from a neighboring estate. Complicating matters is some unfortunate history between the Darcy and Hardcastle families. Indeed, that is only one complication and among the pleasures of Permberly are the number of events and characters in which Darcy and Elizabeth are embroiled. 

Another pleasure is James’s ability to reproduce Austin’s style and syntax. Here, taken entirely at random, a sample: “The statement was met by a silence which Elizabeth felt she was expected to break. As she rose she was aware of the sixteen pairs of eyes fixed on her, of worried and troubled people waiting to be told that all in the end would be well, that they personally had nothing to fear and that Pemberly would remain as it had always been, their security and their home.” The passive voice, the long sentences, the record small moments and social relations all reflect Austin’s sensibilities. 

At the same time, James managed to avoid the melodrama and preposterous coincidences of much 19^th century fiction. In my reading, James handles masterfully the ripples caused by Captain Denny’s death, the potential harm to the estate, the family in crisis, and the story of what led up to and actually happened the night before Lady Ann’s Ball. We understand Elizabeth and Darcy, Lydia and Wickham, Elizabeth’s parents and her sister Jane. We understand them better perhaps that we did in Pride and Prejudice.

Readers who enjoy the book may also enjoy the three-part BBC television adaption of the story. It is no longer Jane Austin, and the scriptwriter had to simplify as they always do. I did not see Ann Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, but that is a quibble. It did help to see Chatsworth House as a stand in for Pemberly House’s exteriors and Castle Howard for its interiors. When the show was broadcast in December 2013, Antonia Frasier called it “a Christmas feast.” I recommend it, but for maximum pleasure, read the book first.