Son of Svea: not an ordinary book about an ordinary man

You can read Lena Andersson’s Son of Svea as either a straight novel of Ragnar Johansson, a twentieth-century Swede, or you can read it as an allegory and commentary on twentieth-century Sweden. Or both.

The book is subtitled “A Tale of the People’s Home.” The translator’s single footnote helpfully glosses, “Folkhemmet, literally ‘the peoples home,’ is a Swedish term for what is otherwise designated as the Swedish welfare state.”

Ragnar was born in 1932, the year the Swedish Social Democratic Party won for the first time and changed the country forever. As the book says, Ragnar is a “man without cracks, but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.”

Lena Andersson is a columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. Considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts, she writes about politics, society, culture, religion, and other topics. Her fifth novel and English-language debut, Willful Disregard, was awarded the 2013 August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor. Her other novel translated into English is Acts of Fidelity. These two book expose “the cruelty and comedy of romantic obsession,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker.

In a sense so does Son of Svea. Rather than the cruelty of and romantic obsession with another person, however, Ragnar’s infatuation is with modernity. “The modern age, to his way of thinking, was the epoch in which the human race attained the perfection that has been lying there waiting for it.”

Ragnar’s mother, Svea, never saw or heard from her father after age seven. He left for America and the grandmother with whom Svea and her siblings lived intercepted all of his letters. Svea was able to marry a man who operated a small trucking company, but hers is a life of cooking, cleaning, laundry. When Ragnar “thought about Mother Svea’s childhood he began worshipping the state. He based this on its self-evident superiority to human beings. In the state there was no room for passion or apathy.”

As a young man, Ragnar goes to Spain on vacation, his one trip overseas. It gives him the experience of a foreign society, which reinforces his belief in Sweden’s superiority. In vocational school becomes a skilled woodworker at government expense and lands a job as a woodshop school teacher, rejecting his father’s trucking business. 

His passion for the modern continues unslaked. “The chemists had experimented their way to every conceivable kind of tasty and nourishing food. The powder would be the servant of mankind and the liberator of women. . . Now, even those who could not make potato pancakes, savory cream sauce, or crema catalana could enjoy them on an everyday basis. Its powdered form also made it possible to produce perfect nutritional value.”

He is able to marry and he and his wife have two children, Eric and Elsa. The Johanssons join the government waitlist to move into the newly-built suburbs being erected all over the country changing the character of city life, and they eventually move into their new townhouse, which looks exactly like everyone else’s.

They throw themselves into youth sports—or Ragnar throws the children into them, bicycle racing for Eric; cross-country ski racing for Elsa. They eat family dinners and visit their grandparents. Life is good, certainly for Ragnar when one of the children wins another trophy.

Ragnar, who from birth has been a devoted Democratic Socialist, believes a person must contribute to the society in which he lives, but also that it is prudent to earn the ordinary comfortable life the government offers rather than attempt innovation or greatness or even social advancement. He rejects an offer to become director of studies at the school where he teaches.

He believes after all there is only so much room at the top, and most who try to get there will fail by design. Ragnar sees his mother Svea as a relic of the past, rejecting modern conveniences and constantly cooking, cleaning, and canning. His daughter Elsa represents hope for the future even as she gives up competitive cross-country skiing, a sport she never loved. Ragnar realizes that the world is changing from the paradise of his youth, and it’s getting harder to keep up.

Son of Svea is the story of an ordinary family (assuming such a thing exists) adapting to a constantly evolving world. As Andersson writes, “The country had sped like a javelin through the sixties, and by the seventies it was near the top of every list of national comparisons. It had the most day care places, the lowest income disparity, the greatest film director, the foremost children’s writer, the best slalom skier, tennis player and pop group, the most impressive gender equality, the highest taxes—all of them sources of real pride.” What could go wrong?

Lena Andersson does not argue (in Sarah Death’s expressive translation) that anything has gone wrong exactly. Rather she probes into and occasionally shatters notions of social class, family roles, and what it means to be ordinary in a world that is changing under our feet. Son of Svea is not an ordinary book.

What's happened to the dead mother's newborn baby?

One traditional suggestion writers hear is, “Write what you know.” And that’s where Margaret Mizushima started.

She lives on a small ranch in Colorado, has been married to her veterinarian husband almost forty years. When she decided to write a series, which became the Timber Creek K-9 mysteries, “I knew that one of the characters needed to be a vet. In real life, however, vets may solve medical mysteries, but rarely (or perhaps I should say almost never) are they involved in murder mysteries.  I decided that a veterinarian and a K-9 handler could make an interesting crime fighting duo—trio if you count the dog, and dogs should always be counted.” 

Deputy Mattie Cobb, her German shepherd partner Robo, and veterinarian Cole Walker have now been involved in seven police procedurals in the Colorado high country, the latest being Striking Range.

It opens with two exciting chapters. Mattie and San Diego cold case detective Jim Hauck visit a Colorado prison to interview the man who tried to kill Mattie in an earlier book and who may have killed her father thirty years earlier. When Mattie and Jim Hauck reach the Colorado state prison where they will finally get to interview him, he’s found freshly dead in his cell. There’s one clue: a map leading to Timber Creek and rugged Redstone Ridge. Mattie and Hauck photograph the map with their cell phones.

(Quibbles: What kind of prison needs an interview room with an adjoining viewing room and recording equipment? Would staff be locked inside the room during a prison lockdown? From the outside, yes, with instructions to stay put; but locked inside, no. Finally, no one—not a CO, lawyer, detective, visitor—brings a cell phone into prison. But perhaps they do things differently in Colorado and these pettifogging notes do not diminish the book's enjoyment.)  

While Mattie is visiting prison, Cole is delivering a litter of pups Robo has just sired. The description of the canine c-section is as exciting as anything in the book. 

Left to explore the map’s clue without him, Mattie, Robo, Hauck, and a local rancher journey into the burned forest surrounding Redstone Ridge. But before they can finish their search, however, they’re called to help investigate the death of a young woman found in a campground filled with elk hunters. Identification of the deceased points to her having recently given birth, but the infant is nowhere to be found.

As a deadly storm descends upon the mountains, covering everything with a layer of ice and snow, Mattie and her team search for the missing newborn. The storm batters the area, taking its toll on the team and forcing the sheriff to call in reinforcements. When new evidence surfaces that this is not the only baby to vanish under suspicious circumstances, they decide that finding the woman’s killer will lead them to her baby, making them even more desperate to solve the case.

Then Cole goes missing, stranded alone in the high country with a person that Mattie now suspects is the mastermind behind several murders, including her father’s. She and Robo take to the trail to find Cole–but the killer has a cold-blooded plan that threatens them all.

Among the book’s many pleasures: 

—Robo. He’s a character. He may not be much of a conversationalist, but he communicates clearly.

—The landscape. Mizushima’s descriptions of the high country and small-town life make me want to go there.

—The dogs and their handlers. Robo eventually is not alone, but is joined by K-9 dogs trained to search for drugs, or cadavers, or explosives.

—The relationship between Mattie and Cole and the other characters. Mattie respects and is respected by her boss, the Sheriff, and she works well with a detective who, unlike Mattie, is not native to Timber Creek.

—Finally, Mizushima creatively avoids the cliché of the villain threatening to kill the female cop in the last few pages of the book. 

You do not have to have read the earlier Timber Creek K-9 mysteries to enjoy Striking Range, however it will improve your pleasure if you do read Burning Ridge first. (I reviewed it here.) In fact, the series is entertaining enough, you might start with Killing Trail to see how Mizushima has been able to build and sustain this world and the people in it. 

Charles Johnson explores the way of the writer

Charles Johnson won the National Book Award for The Middle Passage, which is his best-known work of fiction. He’s published four other novels, two story collection, eight books of non-fiction, two books of philosophy, two books of drawings, and two books of children’s fiction. He has a PhD in philosophy, worked as a newspaper reporter after college, and taught creative writing at the University of Washington for more than thirty years. In other words, he’s been around the block—more than one blocks—a couple times.

The Way of the Writer is subtitled Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling. It is a combination memoir and guidebook. The forty-two chapters, some quite short, are organized into six sections: Who Is the Writer? The Process of Writing; What Helps the Writer? The Writer as Teacher; The Writing Life and the Duties of the Writer; Philosophy and the Writer.

The book is based on an email exchange between Johnson and the poet E. Ethelbert Miller who, at the end of 2010, “asked if he could interview me for an entire year.” They discussed Johnson’s interests: literature, meditation, Buddhism, teaching, martial arts, the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., contemporary and canonical writers, films, poetry, Sanskrit, my personal habits, American history, technology, sex, race, the state of black America, the love of dogs, science, philosophy the Culture Wars, comic art, fatherhood, and the literary world. The entire exchange is available in a 672-page The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson (Dzanc Books, 2015). The Way of the Writer is a 232 distillation of that.

While it is interesting to read how Johnson came to be a writer and to teach writing, aspiring writers will find the book filled with tips and suggestions for further reading. I have made a list of Johnson’s recommendations: Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination; E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel; Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction; Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing; plus, novels and essays that illustrate his points.

He has stimulating thoughts on the craft. On words: “ . . . a writer with an expansive vocabulary is much like a visual artist with many colors at his command.” 

On sentences: “I’ve always seen the sentence and paragraph of units of energy to be released. So yes, I use long sentences for rhythm and music.” 

On first sentences: they are “as crucial as final or concluding sentences.”

On voice: “In developing a voice what the writer does is transform or personalize the expressive instrument—language—adapting and individuating it to fit his experience, his vision of the world.” 

On scene and dialogue: Ideally, it “should reveal character through the words the speaker uses and the specific cadence of his or her use of language.”

On plot: It is “the storyteller’s equivalent to the philosopher’s argument; its importance lies in it being an interpretation (one based on causation) of why the world works the way it does.”

I made a note of Johnson’s instruction to his writing students: “Determine what their protagonist most feared in the world . . . his or her deepest social fear. The one situation they most dreaded experiencing. The one event they would prefer to die than have to face. Then I told them they should maneuver their protagonist into exactly that situation to see what happens—if, in fact, he or she is destroyed by it, or is change by it and in what ways.” What a great way to think about a story.

Finally, he quotes Agnus Wilson’s “Four Rules” for writers:

1. There are no rules.

2. The first rule is wrong, so pay attention. 

3. You can’t write for an audience; the writer’s first job is to survive.

4. You can make no mistakes, but anything you write can be made better.

I would say those are worth the price of the book, and now I’ve given them to you free. There is, however, much, much more worthwhile in The Way of the Writer.

 

Can an ex-offender go straight in a corrupt world?

 I’ve just read two mysteries back-to-back, one a cozy set in France and Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, which is more thriller than mystery and set in Virginia. The experience gave me an opportunity to think why I enjoyed Cosby far more than the other.

True, I am comparing kumquats to cherries here. The cozy’s protagonist is a middle-aged English woman who buys a house in France and immediately finds a body in the swimming pool. This leads to an enormously complex puzzle involving feuding families, WWII betrayal, a dead card shark (whose decayed remains the protagonist finds on the house’s property), and a psychopathic villain who has been an innocuous minor character.

Cosby’s protagonist Beauregard (Bug) Montage is a middle-aged black man who spent five of his teen age years in juvenile detention for vehicular manslaughter and several years out of it as a getaway driver. He’s a master mechanic and a peerless driver (as police who tried to catch him could testify). Better even perhaps than his father who had to vanish after a job went sideways.

He’s gone straight. He misses the high of escaping from a job (it’s better than alcohol, better than drugs, better than sex), but he and his cousin are partners in a struggling auto repair shop. He’s married and the father of two sons. 

Unluckily, he’s behind on the shop’s rent which he will lose if he doesn’t raise the cash; his bitter, angry mother will be evicted from the nursing home to live with Beauregard, his wife, and the boys in their doublewide if cannot pay for her support; and his daughter by a teenage girlfriend needs college money. What does a former criminal do in such a situation?

In chapter one, Beauregard and Kevin participate in an illegal street race. Beau wins, but it’s a scam, he loses the $1,000 he brought to bet to fake county deputies, and he’s able to recover—with some violence—only $750. 

The chapter accomplishes several things seamlessly: We learn that Beauregard needs money. He can tell by the sound a car has a bad valve. He’s lightening on wheels. He’s able to recognize a rent-a-cop even with a gun in his face. He knows he’s been scammed. He knows where scammer would go to celebrate. He has no compunction about jamming wrench into the cheater’s mouth like a gag. He retrieves his $750 and doesn’t kill the guy. But now he’s $250 further behind.

Again, what does an ex-offender do in such a situation? One last job.

Beauregard teams up with a small-time white criminal who’s learned of a treasure of uncut, illegal and untraceable diamonds in a suburban jewelry store’s safe. Ronnie’s girlfriend knows how to turn off the alarm and the combination to the safe. Quick and out with Bug waiting in the car as the getaway driver. What can go wrong?

It should not spoil the book to tell you that things do go wrong, but thanks to Beauregard’s planning and exceptional driving skill, they escape unscathed. Ronnie’s fence buys the diamonds. Ronnie gives Beauregard his $80,000 share. He uses the money to satisfy the bank and save his business, to pay the nursing home, and to give his daughter enough cash for a year of college. And they lived happily ever after.

Spoiler alert: They don’t.

Last year, Cosby told a Los Angeles Review of Books interviewer, “I grew up in Mathews County, Virginia, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. While the setting of Blacktop Wasteland, Red Hill County, is not Mathews, it shares many of the same features. Red Hill is like a lot of towns in the rural South. Most of the jobs have left town on the first thing smoking. There is an unenforced social segregation. There is a black part of town and a white part. A wealthy part of town and a poor part. But the geographic details are important to the narrative too. Miles and miles of cornfields that separate you from your neighbors. Single-lane gravel roads that connect you to the main part of town like arteries where the light dies quick once the sun goes down. Red Hill is a dying town bleeding people.” This sense of place permeates the book. 

More significantly and what sets the book apart from the cozy are the characters. Cosby said, “I wanted Beauregard to be as fully formed a character as he could be.” He is. “I wanted to show that we are all multifaceted and full of different faces that we show to different people in different situations. Too often I think black characters are forced into supporting roles as either ‘magical’ characters long on wisdom but short on depth, or strong silent types that exist only as plot devices.”

Unlike the cozy in which I felt the author was moving pieces around the board to set up and work out the puzzle, Blacktop Wasteland’s story grows out of the place, the situation, and the characters’ response to their circumstances. The book is filled with violence, which, in my opinion, skirts with overkill, but the violence does grow out of what we know about these people and who they are.

Cosby has won honorable mentions in Best Mystery Stories and an Anthony Award for short fiction. Blacktop Wasteland is an impressive debut novel. I look forward to his next.

A book for anyone serious about writing fiction

If you are unable to be admitted to the Syracuse University writing program (it accepts six students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred), the next best thing is George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Actually of course it’s Saunders who gives the master class, which is based on his twenty years of creative writing teaching. To illustrate what he wants to convey he uses three Chekhov stories (“In the Cart,” “The Darling,” “Gooseberries”), two Tolstoy stories (“Master and Man,” “Alyosha the Pot”) and one each by Turgenev (“The Singers”) and Gogol (“The Nose”).

Saunders advises reader at the beginning that none of the models he offers as a way to think about a story is “correct” or sufficient. “If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it.” He is not trying to teach you how to write like George Saunders (or Chekhov). He is trying to teach you how to write a compelling story, one readers want to read.

Each of the stories he examines is, in its own way, worth studying for what the author does and how he does it. Saunders gives each a very close reading. Indeed he analyses “In the Cart” virtually sentence by sentence, one of his points being that the short story writer does not have room for words or sentences that do not contribute directly to the whole. So how does Chekhov do it?

The million-dollar questions Saunders wants to answer is: What makes reader keep reading? He believes happens through a series of expectation/resolution moments. “We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. ‘A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.’ Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly.”

Janice Hardy on her Fiction University blog has an interesting article that points out the difference between idea, premise, plot, and story. “Ideas are those moments of inspiration that first excite or interest us. The premise is a general description of the story you plan to tell, and what the story is about. The plot encompasses the core conflict. [The] story is . . . the internal struggle the character goes thorough to resolve a personal issue.” 

Saunders says that a story “frames a moment of change, saying implicitly: ‘This is the day on which things changed forever. A variant of that says, ‘This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.”

One of the problems with my stories (one among many) is that they tend to be anecdotes. Time passes. Things happen. They often have interesting ideas and observations. But the main character does not change. Or, the character had an opportunity to change but didn’t. 

Chekhov said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” Saunders says, “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”

Saunders mines each of the seven Russian stories for what they can teach about description, pattern, repetition, facts in fiction, and the possibility of saying true things in a world in which “things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.” I.e., in Gogol’s “The Nose.”

How does a detailed description of a country inn, the furniture, a character’s face, or clothing add to the story? What does “a bloated face, a pair of sly, genial little eyes, and a fleshy forehead with deep furrows running right across it” really tell you about the character? We modern readers are sensitive to and impatient with data dumps. 

Saunders describes how he discovered he was a writer and how he works. He seems to be a pantser rather than an outliner, never sure where the story is going after he’s written the first sentence. He also believes in revision.

At the same time, he insists that every writer should find his/her own way. Hemingway may be a great short story writer but he’s already done what he can do. Writing in the style of Hemingway is still fake, no matter how skillfully done.

Rather he argues, “We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition . . . In my experience that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a splendid book for several reasons. As a writer, I have revisited older stories and think I now see why and where they fail. As a reading writer, I try to see the mechanism at work under the stories and novels I read; I believe I am now more sensitive to what is actually going on (or not). As a reader, I am delighted to be introduced to seven masterpieces by an experienced and knowledgeable guide.

Finally, I am inspired by Saunders writing. Anyone who is serious about writing fiction should own and read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and return to it regularly for insights and inspiration.

 

How do you make sense of your life?

Reader Alert! The following includes spoilers. Do not read on if you are the sort of person who is upset by learning how a book ends before you’re read it. 

Ordinarily, I avoid giving away an ending, but (a) careful readers of Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer will know how the novel must end halfway through, and (b) the pleasure the book offers has little to do with how the book ends.

Ruffato was born in Cataguases, a small industrial city in southeastern Brazil. The novel is set there and, if the text is to be believed (and why not?), the town has fallen on evil days. The textile factories on which the economy was based have closed. The polluted and stinking river Pomba floods during the rainy season. Street crime is common.

The grandson of immigrants who fled northern Italy, Ruffato worked throughout his youth as a bar clerk, textile worker, street book vendor, and turner to supplement the income of his parents, a popcorn vendor and a laundress. He earned a journalism degree from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, and later settled in São Paulo. 

He is the author of eight novels as well as short story collections, poetry, and essays. In addition to numerous Brazilian literary prizes, his works have received the Premio Casa de las Américas (Cuba) and the Hermann Hesse Literaturpreis (Germany), and have been published in thirteen countries. Since 2003 Ruffato has worked exclusively as a writer.

Late Summer begins with Oseias Moretto Nunes, an older (elderly?) Cataguases native returning to his home town from Sao Paolo on Tuesday, March 3, which could make it 2015. His wife has left him taking their son. He is sick, and he is tired. He still has two sisters living in the city; a third sister, Légia, is dead. And he has a successful and wealthy brother. His parents are dead. He did not return to the city for their funerals.

Oseias spends five days in the city, two nights his sister Rosana’s houses. Rosana is a school principal, visits New York City once a year, is fighting a furious if losing battle with the signs of aging, and is married to a doctor Ricardo. After the second night, Rosana leaves a note in her “teacherly scrawl”: 

“Oseias, I’m afraid this situation can’t go on. Ricardo has been patient, too patient. I don’t want to get into a fight with him at this point in my life. He’d appreciate it, we’d appreciate it, if you could find some other place to stay. Rosana.” He moves to a cheap hotel.

A former school chum is now mayor and Oseias attempts to see him, finally ambushing him one morning. The mayor is not interested in talking about old times and brushes him off. Oseias does  connect accidentally with a former art teacher who is now sick and penniless and who would like to talk about old times. Oseias is repulsed and escapes.

He visits his younger sister Isinha (Isabela), who is married to an affable drunk and has an ingrate and shiftless adult son who has at least two illegitimate children. Isinha, although poor and estranged from her Cataguases siblings, seems to have accepted her portion. She washes and irons his dirty laundry Oseias brings her. But in a house overflowing with children, Isinha has no place—or much time—for her brother.

João Lúcio, Oseias’s younger brother, having been given a leg up by an uncle, has been able to turn a local sawmill into a regional furniture manufacturer and himself into a rich man with a big house, a pool, a wife and a mistress. Caught unawares by his older brother’s arrival, he invites Oseias to spend the night in the guest room although he cannot stay with him. He has an unspecified appointment elsewhere. 

In the final pages, Oseias showers in João Lúcio’s house, dresses in his clean, freshly ironed clothes, destroys his driver’s license and ID, crushes the pills he’s been collecting for his condition (cancer?) to make a cocktail. On Sunday, March 8, he hides himself in the deep woods behind the estate and kills himself.

Late Summer is so vivid, so alive that it did not occur to me until much later to wonder how Oseias was able to tell his story in the first person—the only way it could be told and have the effect it has—if he were dead.

I can imagine some readers will be put off by the 277 pages of solid type, no paragraphs. The book’s design reflects Oseias’s thoughts and perceptions, leavened with dialogue, as they pour from him.

I can also imagine readers being put off by all the unfamiliar names of relatives, children, friends, associates, acquaintances. Julia Sanches’s translation from Portuguese is fluent and smooth however, so anything the reader bumps on is the author’s not hers. (For example, I had to look up “Cebion” to learn it’s a branded form of vitamin C.)

But you don’t read Late Summer to ask how a dead narrator can tell his story or for the plot. You read it—or I read it once I became acclimated to the lack of paragraphing—for a powerful evocation of a man trying to make sense of his life. To explain to himself how he came to be where he is. To attempt one last time to only connect with his sisters, his brother, his nieces and nephews, his childhood companions. 

You read Late Summer for a compelling portrait of contemporary Brazilian life. Ruffato’s evocation of Cataguases is not one that will please the local tourist office. (And I cannot imagine what the Covid-19 pandemic is doing to the town.) 

You read Late Summer because it extends your knowledge of what it is to be human. 

How do you live with history?

Ordinarily I do not care for a book that has to include a family tree to guide the reader through the family connections. 

I am making an exception of Asako Serizawa’s collection of thirteen linked stories, Inheritors. The stories involve five generations of a Japanese family. They cover the period 1913-2035 although do not appear in strict chronological order. The family tree is useful to see how characters are related and the year in which a story takes place.

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her pre-college life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. She completed her BA in English and French at Tufts University, her MA in English and American literature at Brown University, and her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College.

She told the Rona Jaffee Foundation in connection with the book, “Over the years, the task of balancing my practical responsibilities with my writing needs trimmed my life to its essentials, but my project, over ten years in the making—an interconnected short story collection spanning 150 years and tracing five generations of a family fractured across Asia and the U.S. by war—was slow going, its completion, as well as my sense of its viability, blinking in and out of focus. Then, several years ago, I received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I made tangible progress, after which pressing on felt critical.”

Serizawa’s winning a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award made possible not only a whole year of full-time writing but also the freedom to return to Japan for final research. The result is Inheritors, an exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. 

A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his work at Unit 731, where the Imperial Japanese Army experimented on human subjects.

The doctor’s sister-in-law, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the realities of life in Occupied Japan. 

Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. 

Decades in the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war. 

We live through the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which more people died than in the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima (and thankfully, given Serizawa’s fierce writing, we do not have to live through that). We ride with a pilot as he guides his kaiten, a manned suicide torpedo, toward an American destroyer. 

Because Serizawa is writing from both an American and Japanese perspective, the stories are exceptionally rich with insight and the details are fascinating and apt. The storis are told from both a first-person and a third-person point of view. They can come in the form of a Q&A interview and as a transcript, as in: 

“I was born in the first year of Taisho—

“That’s right, 1912. Of course, as a Japanese, I wonder if nuances aren’t lost when accounting in the Western way. For example, unlike Meiji people, like our parents, we Taisho people were very open to the Western world. Have you heard of ‘moga,’ or ‘modan gaaru’? As a girl, I thought we were quite modern, quite the sophisticates <laugh>. . . .”

A central character in one story becomes peripheral in another, and the book’s power grows as we learn more about this family, their lives and histories. And Serizawa is not afraid to break free of the strict realism that characterizes most of the stories. The penultimate story, “The Garden, aka Theorem for the Survival of the Species,” while still realistic is set in 2035 and begins:

“’So, the world’s deconstructing,’ Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. ‘War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?’”

Reading Inheritors would be a good start.

The life and art of a Living National Treasure

This thin work of non-fiction does not reflect its depth and substance. While Back to Japan may not be the most captivating title, it does the job of identifying the key event in the subject’s life. The subtitle offers readers much more information: “The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter Kunihiko Moriguchi.”

The author, Marc Petitjean is a French writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He has directed several documentaries, including From Hiroshima to Fukushima about an atomic bomb survivor, Living Treasure (2012) , about Kunihiko Moriguchi, and Zones Grises, on his own search for information about the life of his father after his death. 

Several years ago while Petitjean was making the Hiroshima documentary, he met Kunihiko at the late, lamented Hotel Okura. Kunihiko speaks French thanks to his years in France where he went to study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs after graduating from Kyoto City University. 

He and Petitjean talked about France, art, Japan, Japanese art and culture, and he gave Petitjean a catalog of his painted kimonos. It piqued Petitjean’s interest, which resulted ultimately in the documentary, Trésor Vivant and this book.

Kunihiko was born in Kyoto in 1941 where his father Kako Moriguchi was a master yūzen artist. Yūzen (友禅染) is a  resist dyeing technique that involves applying rice paste to silk to prevent the dye from bleeding into other areas of the fabric. Originating in the 17th century, the technique became popular as both a way of subverting the Shogun’s sumptuary laws on dress fabrics and as a way to produce kimono designs that were hand-painted with dyes rather than woven. 

The Moriguchis survived the war. The U.S. never bombed Kyoto, although Kunihiko recalls houses being torn down to create firebreaks in the event we did. Around the time he turned twelve, a student of his father’s came to live with them and was soon joined by two others. “According to the old school to which his father adhered, being a student meant not merely learning a craft, but living full-time with the master, cleaning the house, carrying out all sorts of thankless chores for the family, keeping quiet and obeying orders.” 

Rather than stay at home as another apprentice to his father, Kunihiko entered the department of modern painting in the Japanese tradition at Kyoto City University of Arts where “teachers and students alike were dazzled by American Pop Art.” He, however, distanced himself from that movement.

On graduation, he applied for a student grant from the French government, won one, and in August 1963 sailed to Paris where he was exposed to Op-Art (in which repeated shapes are used to produce illusions) and became a friend and protégé of the French-Polish painter Balthus. Through that connection, he met Jean Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and other artists. 

He finished his course of study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and was courted by French companies. Friends expected him to stay on in France, but he decided to return to Japan and learn yūzen painting from his father. He realized that it would be impossible to duplicate his father’s approach, telling him, “I think your kimonos are magnificent, but if I have to draw the same patterns as you—” Waterfalls, plum trees, cranes, chrysanthemums. “—I might as well stop right now. I need to know if following in your footsteps implies working in the same style as you. I might as well tell you straightaway, I’ll never be as good at it as you are.” 

Rather than insist Kunihiko match his patterns, Kako gave him permission to follow his own path. 

Kunihiko’s patterns resemble Op-Art. He called his first yūzen kimono “Hikari” (light). The design is made up of squares that push and pull the illusion of space on its landscape, creating a sense of movement.

The geometrically inspired patterns create different visual effects thanks to the interplay between the background and the foreground or the movement created when the kimonos are worn. Back to Japan includes photos of both Kunihiko’s and Kako’s kimonos; unfortunately they are not in color. And while these are garments meant to be worn, they are also works of art now collected in museums.

The book, smoothly translated from French by Adriana Hunter, not only sketches Kunihiko’s life (and suggests the life of a traditional Japanese artist), it discusses kimono, the art of yūzen, and Japanese culture generally. 

“For me,” says Kunihiko, “tradition is like the purity of spring water. There always needs to be water falling into pure water. When it’s dirty, it overflows. And so it’s always kept pure. And I’m just one droplet in history. That’s how I see tradition.” He is also, like his father, a Living National Treasure, a trésor vivant.

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.