One account of student life in a Kyoto university

Given my interest in Japan and things Japanese with a special interest in the literature, I wanted to like Tomihiko Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy translated by Emily Balistrieri. I really wanted to engage with . . . learn from . . . enjoy the novel.

Balistrieri is a Morimi fan. She discovered him one day when she realized she didn't have a book to read on a train. "I went into the bookstore inside the JR gate at Shinjuku Station for a quick fix. Swayed by the cute cover and the fact that it won a science fiction prize, I picked up Morimi's Penguin Highway (now available in English translation by Andrew Cunningham). After finishing it, I went straight to another bookstore and bought every single title by Morimi they had."

A generally favorable comment about The Tatami Galaxy by Gianni Washington concludes, "The decision to leave the narrator without a name was wise as he is clearly a proxy (a term you will come across repeatedly in this book) for all of us. He discovers that it is never too late to live a better life, even if that life doesn’t look exactly the way you think it should. A combination of making the best of what is and keeping your eyes wide open for the next opportunity, however small, is Morimi’s simple, yet potent recipe for positive change. No matter your stage of life, it’s fool-proof."

The book may make that case but I'll never know. I couldn't finish.

The text has four parts. Each part appears to cover the same events and involve the same characters with relatively small changes. The protagonist narrator is a junior in an unnamed Kyoto university. (Morimi attended Kyoto University.) He lives in a run-down dormitory and appears to have only one friend, Ozu.

"Because [Ozu] hated vegetables and ate only instant foods, his face was such a creepy color it looked like he'd been living on the far side of the moon. . . Ozu kicked those who were down and buttered up anyone stronger than him. He was selfish and arrogant, lazy and contrary . . . There was not a single praiseworthy bone in his body." With a friend like that, who needs enemies?

The narrator, who seems to have no parents, siblings, or relatives whines repeatedly that his university experience is not what he anticipated. I was willing to stick with him through the first section, became impatient in the second section which repeats word for word paragraphs from the first section, and gave up in the third when it appeared the author was going to cover essentially the same material with small variations.

This is not Rashomon in which different narrators give different versions of the same event. The narrator in The Tatami Galaxy does not seem to change much in each section. But again, don't hold me to this because I read only the first two and the beginning of the third. I am sure other, more patient readers, will do better. 

Don't speak of the abuse. Keep the usual silence

An acquaintance of mine, Jenny Milchman, has published a new mystery, The Usual Silence. Drawing on her own background Jenny has created an engaging new protagonist, a psychologist who treats troubled children.

Jenny writes that when she was nine years old and walking with her younger brother in her suburban town "I felt something from behind. A hand where it should not have been on my body." She didn't know what was happening but "something felt very, very wrong. Whoever was behind me continued to trail along at our heels. Not letting himself be seen. And not letting go."

The children ducked into a pet store where there was a clerk and pretended to browse until the man—it was a man—left. Back home Jenny told her parents who called the police. "I remember driving around in a cop car, although we never saw the man. I didn’t recall what he looked like well enough to give a reliable report. I now realize how lucky I am in many ways."

Jenny's new creation, Arles Shepherd, treats troubled children while struggling to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she's lost over time. Jenny writes "Arles is a character who’s good at amplifying the voices of her clients, but struggles with speaking up for herself. It’s a daily battle for her, but one she intends to win. So she fights. Every day. And when the biggest danger of all appears, at the end of the story, she is ready.

"Arles had to fight bigger battles than I did, if such rankings should even be a thing. I admire her greatly for what she survived, just as I admire every survivor out there. And I think we all can play a role in encouraging each other to speak up."

Arles has set up a new kind of treatment center in the Adirondack mountains and The Usual Silence involves two mysteries. One is a ten-year-old local boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother believes. The other is a twelve-year-old girl a couple hundred miles south who gets off the school bus one afternoon—and vanishes. No clues, no witnesses and the police are baffled. 

One of the many satisfactions of the book, and there are a great many, is how Jenny finally connects the events downstate with the center in the Adirondacks. She writes that her own memory as a menaced nine-year-old "lives on, decades later, as poison. It’s a there-but-for-the-grace-go-I memory for me. I think of those who have faced encounters that didn’t end so well. That’s maybe why I wrote my book. I wrote myself into it and what could’ve been if it hadn’t turned out as it did." Readers of The Usual Silence will be pleased it does.