Haruki Murakami has a lot to answer for

This is another slim, provocative novel by the author of The Factory. I think Haruki Murakami has a lot to answer for. This is another Japanese work that starts as a realistic picture of contemporary Japanese life and then—suddenly without warning—slips into an alternate universe.

Asa Matsumura’s husband is being transferred to an office in the country. His parents live not far from the new office and, providentially, own the house next door, which is about to be vacated. The childless young couple can live there rent-free. What could go wrong?

Asa has to quit her job. The new house, much bigger than their city apartment, is much too distant from her company for a daily commute. Besides, she’s not a permanent employee. Her winter bonus is only ¥30,000 while permanent employees receive between ¥600,000 and ¥700,000 (($5,171 - $6,033).

Neither her husband nor her in-laws pay much attention to her. Her husband barely looks up from his cell phone screen. Her mother-in-law works and her father-in-law works and plays golf. Asa begins her new life, one without a car or anyone to talk to. A bus passes once an hour. Her husband’s grandfather waters the garden next door rain or shine; he does not respond to Asa’s greetings.

There is a river not far from the property and one summer day Asa spots a big, black animal, not a weasel or a raccoon. “It had wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were as thin as sticks. The animal was covered in black fur and had a long tail and rounded ears.”

She follows the animal, which almost seems to be guiding her. “I saw the animal’s tail slip through the grass, and I leapt after it, but there was nothing there to catch me.” She has fallen into a four- or five-foot deep hole, and the animal has vanished soundlessly. It is the beginning of her adventures.

A mysterious woman helps her out of the hole. A scruffy man tells her he is her husband’s older brother, someone her husband has never mentioned. This “brother-in-law” talks about the animal and its propensity to dig holes.  But he does not know what kind of animal it is. 

He points out the animal is trapped in an old well that is covered by a grate. “You can’t get it off unless you put a finger in there and lift, but this guy’s a smart one. He can push it open with his fangs . . . If you’re wonder why I bother putting the cover on when he’s only going to get out again, I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer for you.”

In addition to Haruki Murakami, Lewis Carroll also has a lot to answer for. Asa does not fall completely underground like Alice, but her adventures are also remarkable and mysterious. And at one point a character tells Asa he’s white rabbit Alice followed underground. But who is this person who claims to be her husband’s brother? Doe he even exist?  What is the animal? Possibly Asa’s own unconscious? Do the holes represent emptiness’s in Asa’s heart? Does anything mean anything? And should we care?

The Hole is interesting because it does provoke such questions. On one level the novel is a realistic description of a trash-filled rural landscape and polluted marshland and river. On another level, we have mysterious creatures and inexplicable happenings. Are they symbolic or simply Asa’s delusions?

As the book’s narrator, Asa asks some hard questions: “Can you really hide your brother’s existence from you spouse? Is it even possible? And more importantly—why would anyone do it? Were they worried about the world finding out that the family had a shut-in? Or was there more to it than that?” 

Good questions Asa, and you’re living with someone who can answer. But no: “How could I ever as my husband about any of this? So—you have an older brother? How could I say anything to his mother? So—you have another son?” So, she doesn’t.

Other readers may find The Hole more rewarding than I did. Laura Van Den Berg (author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and other works) says that “Hiroko Oyamada is brilliant on work, families, and the sacrifices women are so often asked to make. The Hole is a haunting and transformative work of fiction: as Asa begins to see the world in new ways so do we.”

I have two complaints about the publishing company. A convention to make scenes with dialogue easy to read is to make each separate speaker’s words a new paragraph. The Hole does not do that, so the reader has great blocks of type filled with quotation marks. That the Japanese original is the same does not in my mind justify the English typography.

Also, why isn’t the translator’s name on the cover? David Boyd, who’s done a skillful job of turning Oyamada’s fantasy in the English, gets a line on the back cover; he’s assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Good job, David. Shame on New Directions.

How poetry can change a life

We never learn exactly why Edwardo lost his driver’s license and was sentenced to a year of community service (there was an accident) but thanks to his sister’s confessor who knew the mayor personally he was assigned to reading books to the elderly and the infirm in their homes rather than scrubbing toilets in some hospital or prison.

Eduardo, unmarried, in his early thirties, lives with his dying father in Cuernavaca, the “City of Eternal Spring,” fifty miles south of Mexico City. His has mother died seven years earlier, and Celeste, a faithful caregiver, an important character in the novel, is the only person who can communicate with Papá.

Edwardo’s family has owned and operates a small furniture store with one employee, so Edwardo is free to drink coffee in the middle of the work day. The story pay protection money to an ex-employee, Güero, picks up the cash while a more senior member of the gang stays watches guard outside. The criminality sounds so pervasive and established in the society that going to the police would mean only that your business would be burned out.

Edwardo is required to read for an hour a week to a rich cast of characters: a retired Colonel who loves the readings, even though he’s only awake for a few pages; a deaf family who reads Edwardo’s lips not realizing their children can hear; a pair of brothers who pull bizarre pranks; and a stunning, wheelchair-bound opera singer with an aggressively flirty housekeeper.

The book jacket tells us that the author, Fabio Morábito is a writer, translator, and professor. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Italy, and relocated to Mexico when he was fifteen. He has published four books of poetry, four short-story collections, a book of essays, and two novels. He has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes including Mexico’s highest literary award, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, for Home Reading Service. He lives in Mexico City.

The translator, Curtis Bauer, is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University. The translation here is smooth and engaging and I was particularly taken by Bauer’s translation of a poem by Isabel Fraire, a Mexican poet who died in 2015, a poem that plays a key role in Edwardo’s growth.

Although he reads great (or not so great) literature to the elderly and the disabled, Edwardo does not listen to a word he reads. But when he comes across a Fraire poem that his father, now dying of cancer, had once copied out, it affects him as no literature has affected him before: “Your skin, like sheets of sand, and sheets of water swirling/your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance . . .” (The book includes the Spanish original as an appendix.) In sharing the poem, Edwardo is astonished at what the words are capable of bringing out in others.

Complications ensue. Edwardo, a man who’s spent most of his thirty-four-plus years on earth simply allowing things to happen to him, has to cope with a dying father, a dying retail furniture business, and the demands of the people to whom he must read for an hour a week or find himself scrubbing toilets. And, of course, there’s the “protection” he’s paying and the gangsters behind it.

Home Reading Service is a fascinating picture of contemporary middle-class (?) Mexican life. Without knowing better, I accept Morábito’s picture of how things work. That a man can be sentenced to a year of community service and that the service be to read for an hour a week to a variety of shut-ins. Moreover, that the act of reading and being read to can change your life. An interesting and satisfying book. 

Stories set in pre-Tokugawa Japan

I picked up this 1983 collection of Japanese short stories because Charles Johnson recommended it in his book The Way of the Writer, making a special point of discussing John Gardner’s introduction, “Meditational Fiction.”

Gardner points out that most Western fiction offers a causally related series of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Or it did until recently as more books are being published as “fiction” are more like life with coincidences, accidents, and the inexplicable.

What makes Kikuo Itaya interesting, Gardner wrote, is his use of “storytelling as a façade: the deeper impulse of the fiction is what I shall call meditational.” As readers are lured into Itaya’s stories by the graceful surface—"the apparently coherent but sometimes puzzling line of action”—we gradually realize that nearly everything is symbolic.

The symbolism, however, is not Western symbolism where a rabbit in a medieval painting symbolizes fecundity and a book symbolized learning. “In Eastern symbolism the distinction between vehicle and tenor—the thing said and the thing meant, or the temporal instance and the eternal principle—is illusory. To see only the temporal instance (this character in this story or life-situation) is to be unenlightened.”

The symbolism in a Itaya story may look like traditional Western symbolism, Gardner wrote, “but it is no more the same thing than wings are to, respectively, a butterfly and a bird. The two are products of distinct evolutionary lines.”

Kikuo Itaya was born in November 1898. His father became a nationally famous ceramist and Kikuo began following his father’s craft. In his early twenties he decided to enter Waseda University to study Japanese literature and gave up ceramics. When he graduated from Waseda after almost dying of pulmonary tuberculosis he began teaching at a prestigious Tokyo boys school. He published only one story, “Tengu Child,” during his fifty-four years of teaching. He did however continue to write and polish the stories that make up the book, however.

The tengu images I’ve seen have red faces and giant noses. In Japanese folklore, they are supernatural creatures that inhabit mountains and forests and are found in both Buddhist and Shinto traditions. They are goblins with a human body and wings, carry a feather fan, and able to fly and perform miracles. 

In the title story, boy named Tengu Doji—"Bird-creature child”—lives in a village with his carpenter father who maintains a small shop that sold canes and straw sandals to the travelers who passed through the village on the way to Kyoto. One day, the child’s father finds an unusual stone beside the house. It has fine shape, a beautiful crack, and beautiful blue moss. When an itinerant monk passes through, the villagers ask him about the stone. 

It is no ordinary stone, he announces. “This is a sacred treasure called a Tengu stone, which the great noble Tengu living high up in Mt. Kurayama lets fall occasionally.” The monk uses the magical powers of the stone to cure a woman’s headaches and a man’s aching hip. He tells villagers to build a shrine as a sanctuary for the stone and he will perform further religious rites on his return trip.

The carpenter builds the shrine beside his house having risen to the rank of a priest at one bound. His son however grows more and despondent and finally admits that one day while he was in the great persimmon tree beside the house he saw passing armed monks pass. The halberd of one “struck the eves of our house with great force, and one of the stones on the roof fell off to the ground”—the Tengu stone.

Everything turns out well. The boy is forgiven, the carpenter is reconciled to being a carpenter, and the villagers laugh at the monk on his return. “The incident of the Tengu stone shook the lives of the commoners’ district for only a short time and then was gone. Nothing in particular was gained, though perhaps it could be said that after this incident the hears of the people seemed more united, somewhat warmer. The child’s mind, however, was swinging and swaying in a complex thought. The grown-up world seemed to him empty, ridiculous, and shameful. He was weary of having to live in such a twisted world.” The story concludes with the Tengu child at the top of the persimmon tree.

The fifteen stories in Tengu Child all take place in the Heian era (794 to 1185) or during the Warring States period (1467 to 1615). Many read like folktales and have elements of the supernatural. For example, a fox becomes a human woman to become the wife of “a soldier in the Right Division of the Imperial Guards,” the men responsible for protecting the Emperor and his family in Kyoto. It does not end well.

Although I did not enjoy all the stories equally—a few seemed hardly more than anecdotes or shaggy-dog stories—the Gardner introduction and several of the stories are both fascinating and informative.