Sgt. Tanuki's Lonely Hearts Club Blog

Ponyo (2008)

2012-01-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

We saw this in the theater in Japan first-run, summer of 2008, and I had a blog post all composed in my head then, but never wrote it down, because we moved a few days later.

It was going to point out that it's a deeply flawed movie, with the Captain Nemo elements not jibing well at all with the Little Mermaid elements. But it was going to concentrate on the fact that, despite those flaws, the movie taps into some really deep sense of awe about the sea. The whole tsunami sequence, starting with the raging storm with little Ponyo running along on the crest of the waves and going up through the morning-after wonder of boating around on the glasslike surface of a submerged world, I found very moving and beautiful. Miyazaki gets at something really primal there, some kind of atavistic worship of the sea and its power and its grace. It lends Ponyo herself a kind of divine wildness that a post-adolescent mermaid might have lacked, and it powers the film way past the weaknesses in the story and, in particular, the ending.

That was more or less what I would have said. Watching the film again now, though... That's not what I felt. It was hard to watch the tsunami. For obvious reasons. I wasn't even directly affected - all my relatives, and all their friends, were well out of harm's way. But even so, tsunami are real to me now in a way that they weren't in 2008. And I found myself thinking that Miyazaki probably wouldn't make this film now. It's going to be quite a while before we feel quite that way about the sea again.

But then that makes me think that, while Japan hadn't experienced a devastating tsunami in many years before Sendai - so that Miyazaki might have felt the phenomenon remote enough to romanticize - the world had. The Indonesian tsunami of 2004 was still fresh in people's minds when Miyazaki started this film. Maybe he wasn't romanticizing tsunami from a position of remoteness, but trying to create for Japanese kids a kind of fairy-tale language with which to talk about tsunami, in preparation for a day when they'd have to.

Regardless, this film was difficult for me to enjoy this time. The shots of Sosuke and his mom in the car, this close to being washed away, were too similar to things we saw in news from Sendai.

Yeah. On an intellectual level, I think I understand how fairy-tales and folk-tales once fit into people's lives, speaking their unspeakable fears for them. But I've never before felt it.

Yoshimoto Banana: There Is No Lid on the Sea (2003-2004)

2012-01-15T13:29:00.002-08:00

This was serialized in the Yomiuri Shinbun in weekly installments from November 2003 to May 2004 as Umi no futa 海のふた, and the translation was serialized simultaneously in their English-language version, The Daily Yomiuri. That’s a neat idea; I don’t know if it’s ever been done before. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of the newspaper novel, which I always read about in the context of Sōseki and other early writers, but we don’t have such a thing in my country, and so all I could do was imagine what it would be like to read one. If you decide to hunt down microfilms of the Daily Yomiuri for 2003 and 2004, you can have that experience. And since, surprisingly, Emmerich’s translation has never come out in book form, and (even more surprisingly) doesn’t seem to be floating around the web, that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to read this in English.

It’s worth doing, if you can. Not only is this in the top tier of her translated works, but it’s kind of fun to see the story unfolding in these regular, dated installments (with breaks that don’t always correspond to where she breaks the story in the Japanese book edition), surrounded by ads (some of which have an interesting accidental resonance with the story), and with all the illustrations intact. Each installment came with a woodcut by NakaBokunen 名嘉睦稔 (unfortunately, microfilm reduces these to murky black and white – to see them in color you have to track down the Japanese original) – beautiful things, even if Bokunen seems to have swallowed Munakata Shikō’s style whole.

It’s about a girl named Mari who, fresh out of college in Tokyo, moves back to her small hometown in Izu and opens a snow-cone shop. The town is dying, just like the coral in the sea, and Mari wants to do her tiny part to revitalize it. Of course Banana is drawing a parallel here between economic decay and environmental, and it hits home, if you’ve ever been to one of these disintegrating beach towns. On that level, too, the story works as an updating of Tsugumi, revisiting the beach-resort milieu twenty years on.

The other character is Hajime, a girl Mari’s age who comes to stay with Mari’s family for the summer (their mothers are friends). Hajime’s grandmother, to whom she was very close, just died, and Hajime is here to both deal with her grief and escape the family debates about how to carve up her grandmother’s considerable estate. Hajime also has terrible burns over half her face. Here, too, there’s a parallel with Tsugumi: here the disfigurement is physical rather than emotional.

There’s very little plot, even for Banana. Somewhat self-consciously, the novel takes the form of the quintessential Japanese summer coming-of-age story. Lots of swimming, eating snow cones, walking on the beach, staring at sunsets, and thinking nostalgic thoughts. No romance, though: very late in the story a couple of boys are introduced, but they can’t hope to compete with the tight relationship Mari has with Hajime. In fact in one passage the two of them agree that Mari is the man and Hajime is the woman in their relationship – emotionally, although not physically, they’re presented as a couple, and there’s a lot more dwelling on essentialized gender roles than usual here.

Partly that’s because Banana is intent here on creating an elemental world, in evoking Izu as a sort of Age of the Gods primeval paradise, on the edge of extinction, and in painting Hajime and Mari as unconscious shamanesses channeling this paradise. It’s not as explicitly magical as Taguchi Randy’s work by any means, or even as Banana’s own Hardboiled and Hard Luck, but there’s definitely an overtone of worship here (enhanced by Bokunen’s luminous prints – Munakata’s folk-religion style is quite appropriate here). In the end Hajime even goes into business making seashell fetishes – she’s starting her own religion, even if she doesn’t realize it.

The problem for me with this story is the nostalgia. As in her other work from this period, Banana has settled on employing narrators/p.o.v. characters who are the age she was when she first started writing and found an audience of people her age. Her experiment in letting her characters age with her and her initial audience seems to have ended, and she now (okay, this is ten years old: but still) seems to be writing for girls, as a girl. But Mari’s nostalgia is patently that of a 40-year-old, not a 22-year-old. She describes events of her childhood with far too much distance – and far too many details describing actual changes in the world – for these things to have happened a mere seven or eight years ago. On the other hand they make perfect sense as the observations of an author remembering things from twenty-five or thirty years ago.

Of course nostalgia has always been a central theme of Banana’s, but as better analysts than me have pointed out, when she was young it was nostalgia for things she hadn’t experienced, or things that she was experiencing in the moment; either way it wasn’t true nostalgia, if you will, but rather the anticipation of nostalgia. Feeling the present moment so intensely that you can imagine a moment twenty years from now when you’ll look back on this moment with nostalgia: a kind of vision of the future as radiated from the present moment.

Now she’s old enough to experience real nostalgia – that is, to look back on her life and realize that things really have changed, that modern society is working its ravages on the world in ways that she can bear witness to, rather than just imagine. And those feelings inform this book in a powerful way – it contains some of her most evocative writing. But the book is weakened by insisting that we imagine these views as proceeding from these characters. Banana’s got hold of some good stuff here, but she can’t let go her schtick long enough to figure out exactly what to do with it.

The Who: "Sea And Sand" and "Drowned"

2012-01-09T23:39:00.001-08:00

So here's my problem with Quadrophenia. It's exhausting to listen to, and not in a good way.

What do I mean by that? I mean that Pete's early rock-opera writing had the virtues of the best pop music, in addition to all its other sterling qualities. Townshend was always the British Invasion rocker with the deepest appreciation for the conceptual value of a good pop record - the deepest sense that the brevity, the directness, that the formula demanded and encouraged could be the royal road to great art. And Tommy, for all its length and complexity, all its high-art pretensions, preserved that brevity and directness. Each separate track is short and punchy. None overstay their welcome: they all say what they have to say clearly and concisely and then leave. The result is a program that inexorably leads the listener on from one track to the next, from the beginning of the story right up to the brilliant end. The last notes of one track always leave you hungry for more, making you yearn for the first notes of the next. It's one way in which Tommy is great art.

Another way of saying this is that Tommy is music of challenging and rewarding complexity, but that this complexity resides in the relationship of the parts to each other and in the overall concept of the work, not in the individual tracks, most of which are fairly straightforward pop songs.

With the Lifehouse project, however, Pete changed the way he wrote. He started bringing that complexity into each separate song, so that things like "Baba O'Riley" or "Song Is Over" move through several parts. They're not typical pop songs. They're mini-rock-operas, if you will - rather like "Rael," actually. "Bargain" is my favorite example - it's such a ballsy rocker that you forget how many different moods it encompasses, but it's really a rather complicated song. A far cry from "Pinball Wizard."

Of course, the Lifehouse project was never completely realized, but was boiled down to Who's Next instead. And I've always thought that was a good thing. Who's Next was an attempt to construct, out of the shards of the larger project, a more or less normal rock album, and it succeeds in spades: the more convoluted material is balanced out by straightforward things like "Going Mobile" and "My Wife," allowing everything to shine. Start putting the discarded tracks in there - many of which are pretty convoluted - and it begins to feel crowded. I know: like most Who fans, I've put together two or three versions of my ideal Lifehouse, and none of them are as effective as Who's Next.

What they sound like, in fact, is Quadrophenia. A lot of really complex songs all jostling for attention. The Side Three sequence of "Sea And Sand" and "Drowned" is a perfect example. Each on its own is a magnificent number, full of creative permutations and orchestrations. But each is a full-course meal, or an opera in its own right, including everything from overture to finale. Finish one and you don't want another, not right away. But Quadrophenia is full of them. Which is why I can't listen to that record beginning to end. It's full of brilliant music, but as a program it's too much.

House of Pleasures (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close)

2012-01-08T23:18:00.000-08:00

We were in the mood for a movie and this was playing at the Bijou, so we saw it: House of Pleasures is the title it was playing under here (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close is the original title).

Mrs. Sgt. T and I, discussing it on the way home, decided that it was about 60% a movie with serious artistic aims, and 40% the kind of softcore Europorn that an adolescent boy in the '80s would have stayed up late to try to catch on Cinemax.

The 40% I won't bore you with - we're old enough and mature enough to take that for what it's worth, which isn't quite nothing. The 60% is worth mentioning: beautiful sets and art direction, fine acting and writing, and some quite effective formal experimentation. Reviews all mention the use of late 20th century pop in the soundtrack, but it's much less intrusive here than in, say, a Baz Luhrmann film. They also all mention the splitscreen photography - sometimes the screen is divided into quadrants - but what they don't mention is that this doesn't feel gimmicky at all, but rather quite effective in an almost documentary way, telescoping a lot of information about how this kind of business is run into a short time.

The Tanuki and his Mrs. can't be quite objective about this film, however, because both of us are specialists in traditional Japanese culture, with a particular interest in Edo pleasure district culture. And it was astonishing how familiar the world of l'Apollonide felt to the world of the Yoshiwara. Same kinds of financial arrangements between the girls and their owners, same kind of decorative and architectural strategies employed to make the interior of the brothel feel like a fantasy world, some of the same narrative tropes used to explore the world. Not all: the kind of jealousy that drives Sakuran, for instance, isn't really part of this film.

Anyway, I know nothing at all about turn-of-the-century French brothel culture, so I have no idea if Bonello's film is true to it, or if he's adopting geisha stereotypes (he cleverly works in geisha imagery in one scene, but it's authentic enough to the great days of japonisme that I'm not sure if it means he's drawing a parallel, or just that his characters are). But it worked. And the fact that we've spent years working through our issues with this kind of milieu probably explains how easy it was for us to connect with the 60%, whereas many viewers might see only the 40%.

The Who: A Quick One (While He's Away)

2012-01-03T23:27:00.001-08:00

So, another observation that was made the other day in that conversation about the Who is that their real heirs, the sector of rock where you can most see their influence, was prog, and since prog was very quickly discredited, there aren't as many musicians out there sticking up for the Who as you might expect. This one I stand by.

That is, I don't think the Who's formal ambitions, their artistic aspirations, are necessarily the most satisfying thing about them, but I do think that they constitute the Who's most important legacy to 20th century music. If you take rock seriously as music (rather than as a vehicle for street poetry or as a manifestation of social phenomena), it's because the Who did it first.

And some of their operatic stuff I do find incredibly satisfying. Quadrophenia has some fatal flaws (maybe I'll write about them another time), but Tommy is everything it's cracked up to be (maybe I'll write about it another time, too).

But my favorites are their first two rock operas, neither of which is long enough to merit the name in retrospect, but each of which was billed as such at the time. The first was "A Quick One (While He's Away)," and it's the more important of the two. In fact I think it's one of the Who's most impressive songs of any persuasion, and quite the best integrated of their ambitious works. At nine minutes it's not a second too long, taking the listener on a musical and lyrical journey in which each stage proceeds naturally but inventively from the last. It's not just a medley of short bits (which is, be honest, what Tommy feels like much of the time), but a truly through-composed piece. And it rocks. And it has great jokes ("cello cello cello cello"). And, in true Who fashion, it's either as cheap and trashy ("we have a remedy," heh heh) or as spiritually deep as you want it to be (the ending must be one of the most grace-filled moments in popular song: "you are forgiven").

The other is "Rael," which, at less than six minutes, really is too short to merit consideration in this category. But it does move, if very quickly, through a number of movements, and it does tell a story in musical form. And it does have that bittersweet ending, with the listener knowing the hero has been bitterly betrayed, with his contracted saviors deserting him, and wondering if it matters, if he needs saving, or not.

What's most fun about it, of course, is that it contains a passage that they'd later recycle and expand as "Underture" on Tommy. It's probably more effective here, but that might just be because, if you come to "Rael" having familiarized yourself with the later work, you can't help but feel a thrill as that noble bassline wells up, as that guitar shakes its regal mane.

Having noted that, of course we have to mention the other musical bit of Tommy that shows up in those last few months before they made that album, which is in the song "Glow Girl." The song itself doesn't have anything much to do with Tommy, but then the plane goes down and suddenly, "it's a girl, Mrs. Walker, it's a girl." It gives me goosebumps every time.

The Who: "Daily Records" and other late masterpieces

2012-01-02T21:44:00.001-08:00

So I was talking to some friends yesterday and said something about the Who that I don't really believe. I said, apropos of a discussion we'd been having about artists who remain active past their prime, that the Who were one band who really should have hung it up after their classic lineup was no longer viable. I.e., after Keith Moon bit it.

And I do believe that, I guess, but only with one big honking caveat. Which is that I think their initial post-Moon run (as distinct from their many and endless later reunions, none of which I have any use for) had enough good and, more importantly, interesting music to make an argument that staying together was the right thing to do.

I'm talking specifically here about the two post-Moon studio albums: Face Dances and It's Hard. Which, when taken together with Pete Townshend's two contemporary solo records, Empty Glass and All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, make a conceptual and musical whole that I find just as satisfying as any other period in the 'Oo's history.

See, what happened was that Pete was hitting middle age right at the moment when Moon died. The rise of punk and the death of Moon and the inevitable indignities that your body and mind visit upon you when you approach 40 all combined to give him, on the evidence of the lyrics at least, one hell of a righteous midlife crisis. And he could still write, to paraphrase a lyric from "You Better You Bet," write a razor line - and, as the song says, Daltrey could still sing it, and Entwistle could still play it. In other words, he still had most of one of the supplest rock bands in the world at his disposal. So why not stay together, at least long enough to explore the crashing waves of self-doubt that would inevitably attend upon the decision to stay together?

In short I see the decision to stay together, but hedge his bets by releasing his two best (and most Who-ish) solo albums at the same time, as a decision (perhaps not realized at the time) to end the Who with some of the most intensely ironic gestures of their career. Yes, the man who'd written "I hope I die before I get old" was now writing about getting old, and he appreciated the irony, thank you very much. Again, I don't have much use for either Pete's or the erstwhile Who's later stuff, but not because they hung on too long: I just think somehow that Pete lost it in the mid '80s. But he still had it up through '82.

And so he gives us beautiful, bittersweet bombs like "Daily Records." The musical setting alone should have shut up any detractors: it was the Who at their cod-classical best, bomping and chirping in Gilbert and Sullivan drag. Tight and silly and uplifting and muscly all at once: classic Who, this is. And the lyric: a guy who still feels like he knows the score trying to cope with the fact that the younger generation, his own kids, think he's old-fashioned. It's an immutable law of the world that once you pass 35, teenagers are going to think you're an old fogey, and this is true even if you're Pete fucking Townshend: and you may know that they're just snotty teens and don't know their heads from their asses, but you also know (and they know) that it doesn't matter, because they're young, and so they win. The end. And so the best you can do is denounce them cleverly, elegantly, but in the end weakly, in song: "When you are eleven, the whole world's out to lunch." Brilliant line.

And he gives us a more somber, introspective take on the same theme (of course part of the brilliant complexity of this last period of Who history is how Pete amps up the already well-established tension between his own lead vocals and Daltrey's, introspection versus extroversion, and stretches it out over whole albums set in dialogue against each other) in "Slit Skirts." If the speaker in "Daily Records" or "You Better You Bet" was content to assert that he still had the goods, the speaker here is facing up to the dark truth that he doesn't: "Slit skirts - Jeannie never wears those slit skirts / And I don't ever wear no ripped shirts / Can't pretend that growing older never hurts / Knee pants - Jeannie never wears no knee pants / We have to be so drunk to try a new dance / So afraid of every new romance."

Even the art is great. Look at the cover of It's Hard. Now remember that this is the band that built their careers on an album about pinball. Now catch the look on Pete's face.

Happy New Year.

The Who: Live At Leeds

2011-12-27T18:57:00.004-08:00

Everything good you've heard about Live At Leeds is true; everything bad you've heard is a lie. It's essential.

Essential, but oddly enough, I think pretty much any version would do. I haven't sprung for the recent 4-disc Leeds'n'Hull binge, and I probably won't. I never got the old 2-disc "complete" Leeds, either. I find that the 1995 expanded 1-disc set is brilliant, but even then, the tracks I always go back to were (mostly) on the original vinyl.

And they're mostly the covers. "Young Man Blues," which - if hard flexed cord-tight muscle had a sound, it would be it. It's a perfect example of how the Who could punch you in the face harder than any metal or punk group could. It's not about volume so much as it is about rhythm and attitude. (Love the sonic ambiance on this record, too: you can just feel the cavernous space of the hall, the draft coming in through the doors, the heat of the spotlights.)

And "Shakin' All Over," which proves that, well, maybe it is about volume as much as it is about rhythm and attitude, but only if volume is made not by turning the amps up to 10, but by pounding your instruments as hard as you can. Like, Entwistle mashes his bass strings so hard that his notes have the percussive power of a piano. His fingers are hammers.

And throughout - to continue the muscle idea - the instrumentalists play with the suppleness and unity of a single limb, bones muscle and sinew all working together. Not mechanically, but biologically - the Who's sound, live, was incredibly human.

Asabuki Mariko: KikoTowa

2011-12-26T18:24:00.001-08:00

This is the book that shared the 144th A-Prize with Nishimura Kenta's Kueki ressha: KikoTowa きことわ by Asabuki Mariko 朝吹真理子. Why do I do this funny thing with the capitals in the romaji? Because the book comes complete with its predetermined foreign-language title, in small print on the cover: Kiko et Towa. That is, the two main characters' names, Kiko and Towako, have been combined into one cutesy noun: they are, collectively, KikoTowa.

That's never made explicit in the book, actually, but thematically that's certainly part of it: Towako especially keeps having dreams or half-dreams in which she sees her hair and Kiko's merging into one, connecting them. Symbolically the frontier between them is constantly threatening to dissolve, allowing their identities to merge.

So, the book is about two women who were friends as children, twenty-five years before. Towako grew up and still lives in Hayama, a beach-town south of Tokyo known as a retreat for the wealthy; Kiko's family owns a summer house there and used to visit every year. Towako and Kiko were constant companions every summer, and then Kiko's mother died and they stopped visiting Hayama. Now, 25 years on, Kiko comes back down to oversee the dismantling of the house - they're selling it. Kiko and Towako are reunited and share their memories of childhood.

Is all that really happens in this book. It's uneventful, to say the least. Which is not in itself a damning circumstance: there's a lot of potential there for poetic reveries on aging, on summer beach-resorts, on girlhood and womanhood. And Asabuki tries - her language leaves me cold, but I can imagine how many others might find it evocative.

But somehow the whole thing falls flat for me. Just now, writing what I did about the motif of identity-merging, and the setting, and Hayama (nice place: I've been there), I felt a glimmer of interest. Like, I might want to read that book. But in fact I have read it, and it's... Well, it made me feel like I did when I was reading the last two Ishiguro books I read: like maybe this whole literature thing just isn't for me. Like maybe I don't even like books.

I think part of the problem might be that the thing just needed an editor. It goes on far too long. At 141 pages in hardback, it's on the long end for an A-Prize story, but more importantly I think that all the length makes problems out of what would have been non-issues, or even strengths, in a shorter work. Nothing happens: fine, this is J-lit, we expect that. But it's easier to deal with nothing happening for 20 or 40 pages than for 140. Dreamlike time-confusion, carefully constructed wispy poetical atmosphere, interplay between reminiscence and right-now: all of this is easier to sustain in a short story than a novel. And if the author is determined to draw this out over a longer work, than it needs (I think) some sort of deeper structure to hold it up - some kind of subtext (I didn't detect much in this book), or a variation in tone, some sort of darkness or tension or something.

Then again, I never got past the first 114 pages of Proust, either.

Suetsugu Yuki: Chihayafuru (2007-present)

2011-12-14T19:22:00.000-08:00

Another one that I'm the last in the neighborhood to read. Mrs. Sgt. T got hooked on this, and before I could get around to reading it, our copies of it started making the rounds of our friends. I finally got my greasy littles on it a couple of weeks ago.

The title is Chihayafuru ちはやふる, which pretty much defines the concept of untranslatable title. It's a "pillow-word," one of those lexemes that Japanese poetry has been dragging along as a patrimony since time, literally, immemorial - long enough that scholars have been unable to agree on exactly what they originally meant. Poets tend to use them more for impact and decoration than sense, although since pillow words tend to be associated (in the manner of the poetic epithets in other traditions) with particular words or classes of objects, they do have certain vague connotations. "Chihayafuru" (also pronounced "chihayaburu") tends to get used with "god." In some contexts I tend to translate it as "almighty," for obvious reasons, but that wouldn't work so well here, for a couple of reasons. First, because its use here is meant to conjure up dim memories (the farther out of high school you are, the dimmer, chances are) of a very, very famous poem in which this is the first line; and, second, because the main character's name is Chihaya. Untranslatable.

It's a comic about karuta: a card-matching game involving the poems of the famous 13th century anthology A Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu). "Famous" is an understatement: Japanese kids are expected to memorize this in high school. The game depends on having it memorized. You kneel down front of a bunch of cards on which are written the second halves of the poems and somebody reads out the first lines. You try to be the first person to grab the right second-half card. And so on. Most people play it a few times during Japanese classes in school, and maybe at New Year's. But, as most people probably don't know until they encounter this manga, there's a competitive karuta scene. That's where this story is set.

It's a little hard to classify. The art (flowers and lens flares everywhere) and the (after a brief prologue) high-school setting, complete with Young Love stories, mark it as a shōjo manga. The venue where it appears, however, is Be Love, a mag ostensibly aimed at adult women. And the way it depicts the competitive karuta play lifts extensively and knowingly from sports comics - not by any means exclusively a male genre, to be sure, but enough so that at one point one of the characters makes the meta remark that "some people say this is a boys' comic".

That's a lot of the fun of it. The main character, Chihaya, is a figure of amusement precisely because here she is, model-pretty (it's a major plot point), with a hobby that most people would probably consider fairly feminine (classical poetry being rather flowery), but she approaches it with all the killer instinct and athleticism of yer typical jock.

And that's pretty much all there is to say about the comic. It's enjoyable - I've stuck with it through 14 volumes (well, I'm waiting to get my hands on the 14th) so far. Not particularly deep, but clever and well crafted. Attractive secondary characters, introduced at almost a fast enough clip to keep the old ones from getting stale. Well-drawn, dynamic game-play sequences, dragged out to impossible lengths (a single tournament can comprise a whole volume of the manga, and spill over into the next). A background story arc (a love triangle between childhood karuta buddies) that provides occasional tears amidst the laughter (well, "tears" - I don't think the love triangle is working more than gesturally).

Fun.

The amazing Charlatans

2011-12-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

If you loiter in the perceptive doorways of San Francisco psychedelic rock for any length of time you'll run across mention of the Charlatans - like a half-torn away scrap of a concert poster on an alley wall, they hover there, so faint and faded that it takes real effort to make them out, but so eye-catching that you can't quite look away.

Well I'm here to tell you, my friends, that the Charlatans are eminently worth checking out. Yes it's true that if you go by what's available on silver disc or empty-three they're still more ghost than flesh and blood, more rumor than documented fackshual hiss-tow-ree, but what a ghost! and what a rumor!

I won't run down their story here. It can be read up on elsewhere on the web, as written down by those more knowledgeable than I. I'm just going to talk about the music.

There are only two Charlatans discs that you can get. Only two that exist. The first is called The Amazing Charlatans: it's an archival release from 1996 that picks up, evidently complete, the various demo and single sessions that the Charlatans did between their founding and their one-and-only album. These sessions consist of: an August 1965 demo session for Autumn Records; aborted sessions for an album for Kama Sutra Records in early 1966 (only a lone single was ever released); a demo session at Golden State Recorders in July 1967; and an early 1968 demo session at Pacific High Recorders.

This disc documents the classic line-up of the Charlatans: George Hunter, Mike Wilhelm, Mike Ferguson, Dan Hicks, and Richard Olsen. Actually that's what the disc claims, but in fact the 1968 demo already sees Ferguson replaced on piano by Patrick Gogerty and Hicks replaced in the drum seat (he moved to guitar) by Terry Wilson, so in fact the disc documents (a) the classic lineup and (b) an underdocumented transitional lineup on the way to (c) the lineup that made the Charlatans' one-and-only album.

That album constitutes the other disc, the other piece of music you can get your hands on, under the Charlatans name. They finally made their debut album, their vinyl bow, in 1969 with an eponymous album that documents lineup (c), which was Wilhelm, Olsen, Wilson, and Darrell DeVore. Not the classic lineup, in fact only 50% the classic lineup, and this fact among others has led to the record's dismissal as a Pale Shadow of the Charlatans That Were, a ghost, a rumor, et cetera.

And yes, friends, it is true that the Charlatans as documented on the archival disc are a much more iron-clad and diesel-fueled motive force than the quartet that tried to bring that force to bear in 1969. Which is to say that the Amazing disc is, taken in toto, almost enough to make you believe that the ghost is flesh and blood, that the rumor is proved - and in places on this disc, the music's corporeality is beyond dispute.

The Charlatans' finest moment comes from the 1967 demo sessions: a six and a half minute long take on the traditional "Alabama Bound." If you do nothing else today, listen to this track. Loud. It is a perfect six and a half minutes of music. Take it apart and you'll find that each component is a microcosm of perfection unto itself. Dan Hicks's drum part, as powerfully driving and elegantly controlled as the snap of the reins on a team of horses pulling a stagecoach across the desert. Mike Ferguson's piano part, conjuring images of cool dark saloon melancholy while billows of dust pass by in the sunstruck street. Richard Olsen's bass, commanding, thundering, and yet unobtrusive, standing glowering in the alley framing everything with its gaze but never filling the emptiness. The same can be said for the vocal harmonies: they're ghostly, they're - roughhewn doesn't begin to do them justice - they're the voices of a parcel of ranch-hands, half-drunk, looking for trouble, but lacking a leader, and this very leaderlessness, this centerlessness, is, again, the key to the track: the track is full of music, but also of a vast, echoing emptiness, as wide open as the West itself. And clattering around in this emptiness you have Mike Wilhelm's guitar, alternating between Byrdsy jangle and real C&W leather-and-brass twang, and the coup de grace, George Hunter's psychedelic autoharp. It's like the little Appalachian accent that reminds you what the cowboy did before he came West.

Put it all together and you have a macrocosm of perfection for us all: a record more visual than cinema, more aromatic than smellovision, and incidentally a perfect little essay on what it was about the Charlatans that inspired the San Francisco groups, and what it was about the San Francisco groups that tantalized the rest of the hip world. Viz., a vision that encompassed frontiers both geographical and pyschological, musical and lyrical, contemporaneous and archaic, stylistic and substantive and transsubstantiational, a sound that at its least evoked and at its best realized that vision, and oh yeah, you can dance to it too. If you're not bopping along to that ending vamp, if you're not feeling the pound of the hoofbeats and the rattle of the stage, the rush of the audience and the swing of delight (to cop a phrase), well, you probably haven't read this far.

They never equaled this record. The Kama Sutra sessions contain a short early take of "Alabama Bound" that hints at where they'd later take it, and the 1969 album contains a nearly note-for-note remake of the 1967 version that nevertheless manages to sink the ship.

But there are quite a few tracks scattered between the two discs that are almost as good as that, and that, my friends, is not nothing. To start at the end, the 1969 album has a lengthy take on "Wabash Cannonball" that's quite worthwhile, a shotgun wedding of Chuck Berry and Maybelle Carter. That guitar is played by Mike Wilhelm, and the guitar isn't even as impressive as his voice, which is as raw and brawny and drawling and sleepy-eyed a piece of rawhide as punk ever chewed on before Tony Kinman came along.

Wilhelm also sang what should have been, but wasn't, the band's debut single in 1966, Buffy St. Marie's "Codine." You're beginning to get the picture now, I think: this band could slug it out with the best of 'em. It's just a crime that they never quite made it into the ring.

A couple more arguments. I wish I could link you to one of guest vocalist Lynne Hughes's two outings with the band, "Devil Got My Man" and "Sidetrack." They were recorded during the Kama Sutra sessions and feature the band playing very convincing blues behind a female belter even more stone-faced than Signe and almost as powerfully sexual as Janis. What ever happened to her?

And of course we have to mention Dan Hicks's stuff. He'd go on to greater fame as, well, Dan Hicks, but he was a pretty good Charlatan, too. Check out "I Got Mine." Heh.

Alan Moore and David Lloyd: V for Vendetta

2011-12-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

Picked this up at Powell's, figuring it was time I started giving myself more than a nodding acquaintance with some of the English language graphic novel landmarks. I expected great things from this.

And I have to say, I was a bit disappointed.

Art: I like the mostly outline-less heavy black art. It has something of a German expressionist woodcut feel to it. I hate the pastel colorings, though. It's an interesting idea, but has nothing at all to add to this particular story. (I know that it was originally published in b&w and it was the American reprint that added the colors, but it was Lloyd himself who did them: I don't blame Vertigo.)

Story: A classic, to be sure, with that familiar literate pithy excoriating Moore writing. But to be honest, as a script it got a little talky in the last third, not to mention preachy. The ideas were pretty clear already, and V eventually goes from being a charismatic enigma to an annoying blowhard. (I grant that part of this may be Moore's intention. But I doubt all of it is.)

Overall: This suffers from a known issue with ambitious graphic novels where the script and art are by different parties: both are trying to raise the stakes independently, and they do that by each honing their individual craft, and in the process destroying a lot of the comics-ness of the thing. (I think McCloud talks about this, although not w/r/t this title.) That is, Moore's writing is brilliant but way too much for the medium - too many words, too much literary posturing. I have fewer issues with Lloyd's art (color aside), but I feel like he's trying to cram so many panels into each page to keep up with Moore's monologues that the stories can't really get going in a comics way. Thus, script and art are independently quite fine, but for me at least don't really fuse together in the way that the best comics do.

But then again I'm probably spoiled by manga. I mean, I guess I was expecting this to be, according to the hype, one of the most sophisticated, complex, and adult comics of all time. But there are a half-dozen things running in Morning alone right now that beat it on those counts.

Nishimura Kenta: Kueki ressha (2010)

2011-12-02T22:42:00.000-08:00

Nishimura Kenta 西村賢太 shared the 144th Akutagawa Prize (for the 2nd half of 2010), with his Kueki ressha 苦役列車 (Train of hard labor).

It serves me right.

All along in my reviews of these things I've been throwing around the term "I-novel" loosely, far too loosely for my own good. What I was trying to say with it was that A-Prize novels tend to fall into a first-person, confessional mode that is one of the hallowed literary conventions of modern Japan. This mode is sometimes associated with something called the "I-novel" or shishōsetsu 私小説 (or watakushishōsetsu). But, strictly speaking, the shishōsetsu was a much more limited and strictly definable phenomenon of the naturalists of the early 20th century - and the odd thing is that many of them didn't write in the first person. They went through the pretense of putting their navel-gazing in the third person, leaving it to the readers (and the journalists) to piece together the I-ness of the thing through matching thinly-disguised details in the text with the documented life of the author. I mean, they weren't fooling anybody, but this is what they did, and it shouldn't be conflated with the larger phenomenon of first-person confessional slice-of-life novels in modern J-lit, which owes a lot to but isn't completely identical with the shishōsetsu properly speaking. I conflated it. My bad.

This kind of clarification (okay, confession) becomes necessary at this point because Nishimura Kenta is self-consciously trying to bring the shishōsetsu idiom, narrowly defined, into the 21st century. In fact he's so open about his devotion to this idiom that he was instrumental in getting one of its more obscure practitioners, Fujisawa Seizō 藤沢清造, back into print.

His story is confessional - oh boy is it confessional - but it's written in the third person. More than that it's written in a prose style that's instantly recognizable as belonging to the naturalists of the early 20th century.

The story is about a teenager named Kanta (not Kenta) in the mid-1980s who has dropped out of school after junior high to live hand-to-mouth as a day laborer. He's estranged from his mother, and his father is in prison for sex crimes. Becoming known as the family of a rapist ruined Kanta and his mother, and is largely responsible for Kanta's miserable existence, or at least that's how Kanta sees it.

If you know anything about the tradition that this story is an homage to, you'll expect the story to detail a miserable personality and its obsessions with sex, violence, and unreasonable grudges that doom the protagonist to failing at life, and that by rubbing the reader's face in the sheer squalidness of life the writer is hoping to arrive at some sort of ultimate truth, if only by forcing us to confront certain existential tragedies.

That's exactly what Nishimura does here. Over a hundred and forty pages we follow, in minute detail, Kanta's days working as a seafood unpacker, missing his rent, sleeping with prostitutes whenever he gets enough cash, skipping work whenever he gets enough money to eat for two days in a row, seemingly never showering, and creeping out more normal people who try to befriend him. And he can't figure out why he's all alone. Must be his father's fault... (Needless to say, the details of Kanta's life match up quite well with Kenta's. Notoriously, in his post-A-Prize interview, when asked what he was doing when he got the call saying he'd won, he said, "I was just about to hit a sex club." Coming from Murakami Ryū this might have been edgy or cute, but Nishimura made it sound just kind of matter-of-fact, like the old sexual harasser in the office who can't figure out why pubes on a Coke can don't make the ladies swoon...)

At first I thought this was going to be a parody. His emulation of the old prose style is pitch-perfect, and there is a mildly interesting disconnect in reading it applied to '80s things - imagine Sōseki describing vending machines and you'll get an inkling. But by the end it was clear that Nishimura wasn't up to anything new at all. In short, he's just trying to bum you out, just like his idols.

The o-make story here, Ochiburete sode ni namida no furikakaru 落ちぶれて袖に涙ふりかかる (Broken down, with tears falling on his sleeve), is if anything even more unpleasant. It joins Kanta two decades later, in something close to the present day, when he's scraping by as a writer of shishōsetsu. We spend the first half of the story getting detailed, vivid, and yet somehow dull descriptions of how he has to piss into a plastic oolong-tea bottle because he's thrown his back out and can't get out of bed. Halfway through we realize he's waiting for the announcement of a literary prize that he's up for. We then get a prodigious outpouring of bile on how he knows that it's unbecoming of him to want the prize so desperately, but he wants it anyway. (Okay, so that's kind of interesting to someone who's interested in the idea of literary prizes.)

So, obviously I didn't enjoy these stories. So what? I'm not sure so what. I don't have to enjoy them to see literary value in them. So do I? See literary value in them? Usually I'm game for that question, but I feel like to try to answer it with regard to Nishimura would just send me off into the night looking for an oolong-tea bottle to piss in and muttering about the impossibility of defining literary value. If you're really, really in need of having your face rubbed in the misery of existence, then Nishimura's probably doing something valuable. But otherwise this book is a just a wallow in a particularly grotesque kind of self-pity, unrelieved by any humor, couched in a prose that's trying really really hard to be as ugly as it is.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

2011-11-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

The best thing about Fitzgerald's first short-story collection is its title. Seeing it, and knowing of Fitzgerald's reputation as poet laureate of the Jazz Age, and maybe being familiar with his later knowing, sympathetic portraits of wild women and enchanted men, you're probably going to expect a completely unbridled, unsobered-up collection of hot jazz fantasias. Specifically the title seems to suggest that the collection will present a contrast between the body-centered concrete liberation represented the flapper and the mind-bound abstract repression represented by the philosopher, and that this contrast will redound (scandalously) to the Flapper's benefit by suggesting that she is the true Philosopher (in the sense of having the most persuasive access to Truth and Understanding). The title does all this (for me, anyway), and what's even more exciting is that it does it all with such perfect music in the language - the three words of the title. I mean, think of the orthography and how it relates to the sounds. In the word "flapper" an "f" sound like an "f" and a "p" sounds like a "p": straightforward, honest, no nonsense, intuitive. In "philosopher" a "p" is denatured, abstracted by an "h" until it stands in for a displaced "f": letters are one or two steps removed from their reflexive, direct sounds. They're processed through the brain, rather than proceeding naturally from the lips. The words work, in this instance, like the readings they're meant to evoke. "Philosopher" is fake nonsense: "flapper" is real.

I wanted to read that book. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's book only has a couple of stories worthy of that title. "The Offshore Pirate" and "Head and Shoulders." The latter really does translate the ancient mind/body split into contemporary (Jazz Age) terms, with its pairing of a Broadway ingenue and a Yale prodigy who in the end switch places. The former presents a really indelible sketch of a flapper, Ardita, "slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity," who is seduced by, or maybe seduces, a modern-day pirate. Despite the condescending O. Henry twists at the end, these stories display the kind of louche brassiness that one might expect from the title of the book.

But the rest of the stories are not that. At their best they're deft character studies (like "The Ice Palace" or "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"), and at their worst they're alarmingly conventional ("Benediction," "The Cut-Glass Bowl"). Either way, they're much more mundane than I've come to expect from Fitzgerald. Middle-brow magazine fodder, which is I guess what they were.

David Fincher's The Social Network (2010)

2011-11-27T00:04:00.000-08:00

Just got around to seeing this, right on time. Don't have much to say except that, despite all the acclaim it got, I guess I was still doubtful that much could be made of the story, and that I was wrong. It's a serious movie - if only because it lays bare, in an artful way, the obvious metaphors inherent in the whole thing. I mean, what we all realized, in that three or four year period in which we all joined Facebook, was that the site was not at all redefining the way we interacted, but rather was codifying and making explicit what was already happening in our lives. The movie brings that out nicely.

It reminded me of one of my college roommates, a history major who used to tutor freshmen. I'd lie on my bed half-reading and half-listening to him, and one day he told a freshman, what you have to realize is, everybody who ever lived is basically driven by a desire to get laid, and that includes famous historical figures. It all comes down to sex, and sometimes food. Later I realized it was hardly an original argument, but it was the first time I'd heard it, and it made a big impact on me. This movie gets that.

My other reaction to the film was one of total wonder. I was at Harvard during the years when this all happened, but I was totally oblivious to it. I was a grad student, and at least in my department that seems to have meant being almost totally estranged from the undergraduates. I'd teach them, but I never really understood their world. I have no idea, therefore, if this movie gets that right. Hell, I didn't even join Facebook until it was opened to everyone, and then only because I heard about it from family members, not fellow Harwardians.

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (2004)

2011-11-25T23:29:00.000-08:00

This is the first Wong Kar-wai joint I've been disappointed by. Knowing that this was a loose sequel to In The Mood For Love, which I loved, I was expecting great things. And there are some great things here, but the whole thing isn't a great thing.

Visually it's impeccable - but that kind of goes without saying for Wong and Doyle by now, doesn't it? They're expanding on their '60s-style-and-texture fetishes of the previous film (there's a shot with a green-tinged Faye Wong in the foreground and a green naugahyde chair in the background shadows that just knocked me out), and adding to them a deliriously mod futurism. The sci-fi elements in this film, while a disaster for the story, allow them to cut loose with some near-Barbarella level visual play. Someday I'd like to see them cut loose with a full-on sci-fi flick - I'd expect something along the lines of Fifth Element, style style style.

Unfortunately, the gynoid and Train to the Future bits strike me as silly in unintended ways - Kimura Takuya looks particularly lost in these scenes, and at one point Faye Wong actually starts moving in stop-motion, like every ten-year-old does when imitating a robot...

As for the rest of the film, well, it just didn't do it for me. Maybe it was unfair to compare it to In The Mood For Love, because in comparison to the clear emotional through-line in that film, in this one the emotional arcs seemed muddled to me. Maybe it's because Tony Leung's character's motivation was left unclear right up until the end. As Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki summed it up, it's a movie about a guy who can't get over a past love - but we don't learn that he even had a past love until ten minutes before the movie ends. Of course if we believe that this is really a continuation of In The Mood, then we already know that - but there are enough shifts to leave us in doubt about that at first, I think.

Maybe I'm just getting impatient with the director's prioritizing of visuals and mood over story; I know that's his bag, and I expect it. But in what I consider his best films, the intimations of story that do sneak in support the visuals, and the whole thing comes together. Not so here.

Groovy Talkin' Verve (or, Talkin' Verve: Groovy!) (1998)

2011-11-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

This set tries to answer a serious question in a fundamentally unserious way. At the same time, only different: it documents some artists trying to answer a serious question in ways that range from serious to un-. Viz.

The rise of rock over the course of the '60s seemed to threaten to, and in fact by the end of the decade did, displace the mainstream of American pop. From the '20s through the '50s, if I have this right, that mainstream had been a course defined, broadly, by jazz. Pop singers like Sinatra had roots in jazz, and sang in a style that drew its rhythmic pulse and melodic impulse from jazz. Popular music in America in this period swung, to a greater or lesser degree. Jazz therefore had a natural "in" with pop, because it shared this basis in swing; jazz was therefore able to enrich its repertoire with pop music, because the pop music of the period was so influenced by jazz. The mutually-reinforcing cult of the "standard," right? Pop music lent legitimacy by its adoption into the jazz world, which also legitimized jazz by situating it in close proximity to "standard" pop songcraft. Tin Pan Alley and 52nd Street shake hands and both agree that each other was the shiznit.

In the '60s (started in the '50s, but didn't hit until later), mainstream pop stopped swinging and started rocking. We're not just talking the British Invasion, either: Motown's beat wasn't a jazz beat. Stax's beat wasn't a jazz beat. And jazz suddenly found itself in danger of becoming superannuated. Its standards were sounding old-fashioned.

There were lots of ways of phrasing the questions raised by this. Could jazz appropriate contemporary pop songs like it had "standards"? Could Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards tunes, or Holland/Dozier/Holland or Hayes/Porter songs, be jazzed up the way Rodgers/Hart or Cole Porter songs could? Could attempts at doing that result in serious music, or only kitsch? Was jazz as a musical idea separable from the swing beat? Could jazz continue to evolve? Was rock intrinsically nothing but greasy kid stuff played by "non-playing motherfuckers" (in Miles Davis's inimitable characterization), or was there something there?

Verve, as we've seen, was already all about what the Village Voice would later (probably more retrospectively than it knew) call "pazz & jop". So it was natural that the label would at least be willing to experiment with the New Rock, at jazzifying it, or at rockifying jazz - natural that the label would be in the forefront of that effort, which would have been perceived as an imperative by artists for every label. So the question this set should be asking is, how did Verve do it? And how well did Verve do it?

The problem is, I don't think the compilers were interested in answering any of those questions seriously, or in examining how the artists they're dealing with tried to answer them. Because most of what's here is just here for a laugh, and the things that actually work, musically, that inspire grooving rather than goofing, work in ways that go unexplained by this compilation.

The compilation draws from a surprisingly small number of records released between 1965 and 1971 on the Verve, Mercury, MGM, and MPS labels. Over a third of it is made of Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery selections, which makes sense, given how close those gentlemen stayed to pop in their Verve years, but these selections don't provide any revelations (except possibly for pointing out how bad a singer Smith was - he vocalizes on "Dock Of The Bay," and you wish he hadn't). Add in a trio of Quincy Jones numbers and a pair of Willie Bobos, and over half of this disc is both literally and conceptually redundant with other items in this series. Okay, fair enough, they probably didn't expect anybody to be so dumb as to get all the volumes...but some of the other cuts on here are good enough to make you wish the compilers had looked a little harder, thought a little bit more seriously about what they were doing.

The most ear-opening numbers are three tracks from the atrociously-titled Blood, Chet And Tears, a 1970 record that was Chet Baker's only outing for Verve. We get "Vehicle," "Evil Ways," and "Spinning Wheel." These work for much the same reason that Astrud Gilberto's take on Chicago's "Beginnings" works: they draw from the most jazziest strain of contemporary rock, and they take it seriously. Chet's playing well, the arrangements are forceful (very close to the originals, though), and you don't get the feeling that anybody involved is looking down their nose at the songs.

Which they wouldn't have necessarily had to do... I'm no expert on any of this stuff, and I haven't yet started to seriously explore fusion (the elephant in this particular room), but it seems to me that a lot of the problem with the way jazz artists dealt with the rock threat stemmed from a general unwillingness. Like, there were enough kids in rock bands in 1970 who listened to jazz, and who really wanted to expand their own music, that you could have imagined a serious rapprochement. But instead most artists and producers seem to have taken an attitude of, "Shit, do we have to play this rock shit? Okay, let's get it over with. What're the kids listening to? Beatles? Rolling Stones? 'Tequila'?" And then they just dash off whatever Stones title is selling best at that particular moment. Instead of taking the time to realize that artists like Santana, Chicago, the Allman Brothers, King Crimson, and yes the Grateful Dead were thinking seriously about how to bring elements of a jazz sensibility into a rock context, and meeting them halfway. (To this day, Santana's early '70s records get treated as "rock," and not jazz. Why is that?)

Then again, sometimes the least serious intentions can still result in great music. Oscar Peterson, in a quartet also featuring Ray Brown and Milt Jackson, provides a rendition of the Stones' "Satisfaction" that clearly doesn't take the tune at all seriously, but it's a complete gas. Everybody solos at breakneck speed and within about thirty seconds you forget what tune you're listening to and just dig the improv. Which is what tended to happen to standards anyway. So.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night (1934)

2011-11-16T00:13:00.000-08:00

Where do you go after Gatsby? I went where Fitzgerald went, and frankly part of me wishes I hadn't; Tender is the Night is such a different book, so much sadder. More than anything it made me want to rush back and read his earlier, lighter things. Flappers and Philosophers is next.

Other than that, I can't figure out how I feel about it. Conventionally, probably. I mean, I expect most everybody feels that the opening chapters, when we see the Gausse's crowd through Rosemary's eyes, gradually leading up to her/our encounters with Dick and Nicole Diver, are the most memorable. And it's no coincidence that those are the most Gatsby-like chapters, full of rich and beautiful people doing things that only rich and beautiful people can.

Once we start to see life from Dick and Nicole's perspective, they lose a lot of their appeal. Which is, of course, part of Fitzgerald's brilliance in this book: he's destroying their glamor for us, by showing us the insecurities and instabilities that lie behind it.

But that's not quite right, because if he had effectively destroyed their glamor for me, wouldn't I remember the opening scenes a little less fondly? And yet a passage like this one floors me still (p. 21 of the Scribner paperback):

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, supper-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. The Divers' day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value...

I mean, no matter how much skepticism Fitzgerald turns toward this kind of luxurious living, it's still what he's best at describing. Maybe he's good at it because he's skeptical of it, but as Greil Marcus once wrote about somebody else in a different context, I think Fitzgerald's attitude toward it is a loud yes and a quiet no, rather than the other way around...

In that passage I love, by the way, how he translates all of the Divers' pleasure-taking into foodie terms. They consume their days with the discernment and deliberation of a gourmet.

There's another metaphor he uses for it, at least twice, that of curating. On p. 258, describing the Divers moving back to the Riviera and the obscene number of possessions they take with them, he notes that "Nicole was capable of being curator of it all." And then he proceeds to list them all.

You see this term popping up these days, too. I don't know if Fitzgerald invented this usage, but it's a brilliant one in his book, because it perfectly captures the self-absorption of the hedonist who in his/her mind gives his/her material indulgences the dignity of scholarly or aesthetic pursuits. That is, there are certain objects, and certain collections of objects, and certain settings for those collections, that require and deserve the kind of discernment and care that justify the term "curator" - but your luggage ain't it. Your iTunes playlist ain't it. Your spice rack ain't it.

My blog ain't it.

Dillard & Clark: "Bowed My Head And Cried Holy" (1969)

2011-11-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

About ten or twelve years ago I developed a real obsession with Byrds spin-off bands. It started back in high school, really, with CSN(Y), when like most fans I realized that the quartet's paucity of releases could, and indeed really demanded to, be augmented by solo and spinoff records. When I realized that CSN(Y) was half Buffalo Springfield anyway, my eyebrows shot up, and when I realized that they also had Byrds DNA, well, my little mind was blown. It wasn't until much later, though, that I seriously began collecting.

When I did, I started with the Byrds, and like anybody with ears, I fell in love with them for their own sake. But, like most collectors of this scene do, I soon realized that some of the most interesting work to fall off the whole Byrds/CSNY/Buffalo Springfield family tree came from some of the more obscure acts. Which brings us to Dillard & Clark. That's original Byrd Gene Clark, teaming up with Doug Dillard (whose namesake bluegrass act is another minor but rewarding limb on the tree) for two albums of country-rock-pop-soul-Cosmic American Music in 1968 and 1969.

Okay, I've just invoked the spirit of Gram Parsons, and any D&C fan will inevitably claim that they were doing what he did, but with less fanfare and notoriety. It's not quite true. Yes, they were wedding country and rock, broadly speaking, just like he was, and they were doing it in 1968 just like he was. But the important distinction to be made is that they were wedding different kinds of country and rock. The country that Gram was arguing for was honky-tonk, whose wry drunken outlook matched perfectly with the stoned hippie pop-rock that the McGuinn-led Byrds were doing - so perfectly that it looks obvious in retrospect.

The country that Doug Dillard is bringing is bluegrass: something a little more back-country, and a little less easy to mingle, than honky-tonk. And Gene Clark was never much of a rocker - he was a sensitive balladeer. He took to rock, but through folk: his talent, probably more than anybody's at the time, was perfectly matched to "folk-rock," however you define it.

What I'm saying is that the things D&C were doing, the ingredients they were playing with, were probably a tougher sell in 1968 than what Gram was doing, and even now what they came up with doesn't sound obvious in any way. And I say that as a big Gram fan - I don't mean to disparage the Burritos one bit. But what D&C did was something special, too.

Their first record, 1968's The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard & Clark, is usually pointed to as the most successful. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the one where Gene Clark's influence is most audible. It's mostly a collection of soft, moody, haunting folk-rock tunes with some unexpected but totally appropriate bluegrass touches. It really makes for something new, but something as natural and beautiful as the sun burning through the mist in the woods on an autumn morning.

Famously, Gram Parsons kind of lost interest in the Burritos for their second record, leaving second banana Chris Hillman to pick up the slack. Oddly, the same thing happened to D&C: the second record (1969's Through The Morning, Through The Night) is much more of a straight bluegrass affair, which suggests that Dillard was the main mover. But for my money it's just as good. And if Gene's style was getting submerged in Dillard's, he's just as big a presence in the songwriting.

In fact the most traditional-sounding original on the record, the gospel-bluegrass "I Bowed My Head And Cried Holy," is a Gene Clark original. You'd never know it. It's a Jesus-praisin' fast-pickin' raveup that sounds like it roared right out of the Ozarks, and Clark sings it without a lick of his usual self-consciousness.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be on youtube in any other version than this cover by an Italian bluegrass band. But it's well worth seeking out the record.

Ukiyoe at the Portland Art Museum

2011-11-11T22:12:00.000-08:00

Huge exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints going on now at the Portland Art Museum. It's called "The Artist's Touch, the Craftsman's Hand." They have a magnificent collection - not quite MFA-level, perhaps, but pretty damn good - and they've got a very large selection on display right now. More than enough to intoxicate you, if you're at all prone to near-drunken ecstasy when looking at these things. I am.

What's really nice about this show - I mean, beyond the amazing numbers of rare (even unique) and magnificent prints - is how it's arranged. Rather than a chronological approach, they've laid it out thematically - a few rooms of kabuki-related prints, a few rooms of beauty prints. And so rich is the collection that this gives them the chance to feature some really unusual stuff. There's a whole room of prints depicting the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, for example.

In short, it's extremely educational, as well as being just damn beautiful. We've only been once, and for not nearly long enough; we're going to swing an overnight trip sometime soon. It's a show worth immersing yourself in.

Akazome Akiko: Otome no mikkoku (2010)

2011-11-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

This appeared in the June 2010 issue of Shinchō 新潮, and was published in book form a month later. It won the 143rd Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2010. It's by Akazome Akiko 赤染晶子.

The title is Otome no mikkoku 乙女の密告, a title which poses a couple of translation problems. Otome is easy enough: you could go with "virgin," but that would be overdoing it a little: "maiden" works pretty near perfectly. Mikkoku, too, is straightforward enough: as a verb, it means "to inform on" someone. How do you get both of these elements into the title, though? The Maiden's Information doesn't work at all - sounds like "girl data" or something. The Maiden Informant is about as close as I can come, even though it sort of telegraphs the ending.

First things first: it's told in the third person, and while the author herself, like the protagonist, studied German in a foreign-languages university, it doesn't feel particularly shishōsetsu-ish. It's more adventurous, IOW, than the typical A-Prize winner, I felt.

It's about, then, girls, "maidens," at a gaidai 外大, a Japanese college that specializes in the teaching of foreign languages. This one is an all-girls' school, and the girls in question are studying German. And this year their prof, a German named Bachmann, has them reading The Diary of Anne Frank. In German, although it was originally written in Dutch. The novel comes with a Works Cited list in which Akazome cites both the German and Dutch editions, and makes it clear that all translations from the diary that appear in the text of her novel are by herself, from the German. And excerpts from the diary play a pivotal role in the story. The maidens are preparing for a speech contest in which they're supposed to recite passages from the diary, from memory. The main character, Mikako, has to confront a particular passage that she keeps forgetting, and explore what it is about the passage that throws her.

Akazome's technique in this novel is interesting. I don't speak German, but I'm pretty sure that the particular prose style she's employing is meant to read as if it's translated from the German. Certainly it reads like translationese, with much more prominent uses of subjects and objects than normal Japanese prose displays; it feels like a student translation, where the student is trying to prove to the teacher that she understands the original by accounting for every element of it. Student translation is, I think, the key: the result isn't anything like the famously convoluted translationese of Ōe, but rather an almost obnoxiously clear, terse, repetitive prose. Very effective.

Syntax, as well as grammar, plays a large part in this, and primary among the syntactical choices is that of using the word "otome" for "girls." That is, every place in the novel where a normal prose stylist would write "shōjo 少女" or simply "onna no ko 女の子," Akasome uses the older-sounding, stiffer-sounding otome, with its undeniable overtones of virginhood. I suspect that she's intending this to be a student translation of fräulein. That is, she's giving us the flavor of a class in which the teacher addresses the students, and has them addressing each other, as fräulein, but rather than giving us the German word in katakana, she's giving the textbook translation of it. And, due to the translationese grammar that she's employing, the word gets repeated again and again and again.

The effect is to thematize the state of being "otome," and indeed from very early on Akazome's narration starts speaking in general terms about the habits of mind and behavior of "maidens." Susceptibility to rumor, fastidiousness about reputation if not behavior, cliquishness: these are all qualities that characterize the otome, we're told. This aspect of the book is fascinating to me, because Akazome is talking about the much-explored, much-discussed shōjo of contemporary Japan, and yet she's not quite, because she insists on calling them otome. She's defamiliarizing the concept so that we can look at it anew, and she's also pointing out how much our thinking about human nature gets embedded in particular expressions, resulting in a tendency to essentialize.

In fact, by writing in translationese, and exploring the girls' relationship to the German text they're immersing themselves in (more on that below), the story is really about how language shapes us and controls us. It sets boundaries for what we can say and how we can say it, and therefore what we can think and how we can think it. And these boundaries - these languages - are narrower than we may think, because they're less a matter of national languages and more a matter of much smaller communities: college classes, cliques. And the boundaries are exportable.

The other way that Akazome gets at this theme, besides through her own language (which, she's forcing us to realize, isn't really her own), is through Anne's diary. First of all we're made aware of the barriers that lie between the characters and it: Mikako grew up reading it in Japanese, and now she's reading it in German, but she's constantly aware that it was written in Dutch, and she uses the Dutch title, Het Achterhuis, to remind us of that. In spite of all that distance, Mikako has always felt an intense identification with Anne - more of an infatuation, actually, so that studying the diary as a college student is an intense emotional experience for her.

The passage that gets her is one in which Anne expresses a desire to become Dutch - to leave her Jewish identity behind and become, as Mikako conceives of it, the Other. And yet at the same time she (Anne) fully owns her Jewish identity. It's clear that Mikako is deeply affected by anxieties about identity - not so much national as insider/outsider identity. The damaging effect (on a maiden) of rumor and innuendo, of ostracization, is a major theme of the story, and Mikako seems to be thinking through these issues in terms of Anne's ethnic and national identity. Is conforming to the group a way of denying yourself? Is standing up for your individuality the same as "informing" on yourself - reporting yourself as Other and therefore submitting yourself to inevitable ostracization or worse?

I confess, first off, that I haven't read Anne Frank. I mean to, but haven't. That said, this aspect of the novel struck me as a bit murky. It may be that Akazome is trying to suggest that Mikako herself doesn't have the vocabulary (as limited as her language is in this particular semiglot community) to really think through these issues. In any case I admire how the story raises them but I'm not sure it handles them as well as it could have.

And then there's the issue that comes up whenever a work of fiction decides to deal with the Holocaust. Is it dilettantish and insensitive to connect Anne's sufferings with those of college girls in affluent, free Japan? Or is it a tribute to the universality of Anne's experiences? Does the book do justice to the gravity of the history? Does its (possible) failure to do so say something else about otome, or this particular community of them? Do we, alternatively, admire the otome for so far transcending their own culture as to relate so intensely to Anne, on such a universal human level? Or is the point that they're not relating to the real Anne at all, but only to a version of Anne that they've claimed, or created, for themselves as the model of all otome?

One of the best A-Prize books in a long time.

Fairport Convention: The Deserter (1969)

2011-11-01T00:59:00.001-07:00

Once or twice a year - always in the autumn, usually around Samhain - I go back to my old Fairport Convention albums. I have the three they did with Sandy Denny in 1969, which I find so heart-thumpingly transporting that I've never been able to bring myself to explore the band or the singer any farther. Nothing else could possibly compare.

Of the three, I agree that Liege & Lief is the best of them. (However you wouldn't want to live without "A Sailor's Life" from Unhalfbricking or "She Moves Through The Fair" from What We Did On Our Holidays. You need them all.)

What I can never decide is which song on L&L is best. It's one of those records: each song on it has its day, from the pagan invocation of "Come All Ye," which convinces you that, with a little help from Sandy, you could indeed "raise the spirits of the earth / and move the rolling sky," to the appropriately murderous guitar-fiddle wild ride that ends "Matty Groves," to the incantatory canter at which they take "Tam Lin."

But lately it always seems to be "The Deserter" that gets me deepest. It's the lament of a poor man caught up in the hellish samsara of the draft, a plaint that says man should not have to kill his fellow man and any regime that makes it so perverts humanity, an an observation that it's the way of the universe that mercy and cruelty so often alternate, one leading to the other. The arrangement and musicians' work provide a perfect setting for this argument, delivering us a world of cyclical recurrence that nevertheless keeps building the tension with each iteration. Tension and release, tension and release, just like the narrator's alternating bondage and escape; tension is a mad sawing at the fiddle, release a gentle striding into rhythm. But of course it's Sandy Denny's vocal that really drives the arrow home: her cold sensuality, an icicle dripping grief and pain yet catching in its prism the very sun that destroys it. Her voice is just otherworldly.

Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels (1995)

2011-10-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Even if you don't know that Fallen Angels (1995) grew out of what was meant to be a third story in the previous year's Chungking Express, you may find yourself making connections between the two films. Common settings (the Chungking Mansions), similar structures (two parallel love stories only tangentially related, only this time they're intercut rather than back-to-back), recurring motifs (canned pineapple, blonde hair) take you there. And thematically this feels very tied to its predecessor, with its emphasis on relationships doomed before they start by - what, ennui? Modernity's anomie?

I think the film may be less satisfying on its own, though, then it might have been as a third part of Chungking Express. I gather that the hitman's storyline here is what was planned for Chungking, which suggests that the other storyline, about the mute played by Kaneshiro Takeshi, was new for this film. I don't think the two mesh very well.

Visually, of course, they do because Doyle and Wong are mainly interested, here, in exploring neon-smeared nightscapes rather than telling stories. But tonally the Kaneshiro storyline is just too light, too goofy; in theory it probably sounded like it would be a great counterpoint to the hyperviolence of the hitman storyline, but in practice it just gives you whiplash.

The dual storylines do, however, set off one of the great scenes in Wong's oeuvre, when the woman from the hitman storyline and Kaneshiro's mute finally come together, uniting the two halves of the movie. They get on his motorcycle and ride off through the same tunnel we've seen Kaneshiro zoom down two or three times already, but this time he emerges from the tunnel, while we hear the woman's voice in voiceover talk about feeling closer to this man than she's felt to anybody for a while, and then the camera's gaze turns up at skyscrapers leaning against a gray dawn sky. It's the first daylight we've seen in the film, the first semi-open sky, and the sense of release and relief are a powerful payoff.

(As usual, the film is most satisfying from a purely visual standpoint. The big-city-at-night shots are the equal in atmosphere and beauty of anything ever accomplished. The combination of omnipresent blackness and lights of sickly intensity and unnatural hue stays with you.)

Nakamura Hikaru: St. Oniisan (2007-present)

2011-10-20T15:31:00.001-07:00

A student of mine turned me on to this manga. I turned my wife onto it, and she turned some friends onto it. So we have a regular little St. Oniisan fan club here on the banks of the Willamette. But I never got around to reading the whole series until a couple of weeks ago when I was sick and it was the only thing I felt like reading.

The author is Nakamura Hikaru 中村光. The title in Japanese is Saint Oniisan 聖☆おにいさん, but it comes with its own author-specified English title, which shows up on the cover: Saint Young Men. I actually hate it when manga do this: the pre-supplied English titles are almost always geared toward the Japanese audience, meaning they work for people with only a vague grasp of English (sometimes they work quite well from that perspective), but they're lousy when read by a native English speaker. "Saint Young Men" is a lousy title. Anything would be better. How about "Holy Bros"?

But that's the only thing about this series that misses. Everything else is pure comedy gold.

The gimmick is that, shortly after the millennium, Buddha and Jesus decide they need a vacation, so they come to earth - Tokyo, to be exact - and take an apartment together. If that sounds like a variation on a classic joke set-up - "so Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar, and Buddha says..." - that's because it is. It's a killer premise, legendary from the start - be honest, you smiled the second you read my explanation of it. Already you're imagining the possibilities.

And it gets better, because he's imagined Jesus and Buddha not just as fish out of water, divine personages in modern Japan, but freeters - dudes in their early twenties, aimless and underemployed. There's a wicked subtext about the superfluousness of religion in contemporary Japan, and the sheer numbers of young people falling through the cracks in the system, and oh yeah, the witty observation that Jesus, as traditionally depicted, kinda looks like a modern hipster - skinny, long-haired, with a wispy beard. Buddha, too - looks surprisingly convincing in a puffy North Face coat.

What's amazing about this series is that it lives up to the premise. Nakamura's six volumes in, and so far he's managed to keep coming up with new jokes. A lot of them are of necessity variations on familiar themes, but still he's managed to introduce a new twist every time you think the well's about to go dry. It helps that he's willing to introduce new characters - we get Jesus's homey Uriel and Buddha's boy Brahman, for example, each one of whom brings in train a whole new set of associations to exploit.

I guess what I'm admiring is the craftsmanship. Nakamura had an inspired idea, but what's making it work is his mastery of all the comic techniques you could think of. This series is like a textbook of comedy, everything from complicated visual puns to low comedy, character-driven humor and off-the-wall gags.

What it's missing is a hard edge, but I don't think that's a bad thing. There's plenty of blasphemy in here, but it's all so good-natured and light-hearted that it's hard to imagine anybody getting too het up about it. Maybe Rick Santorum, but nobody sane. In fact, somewhat surprisingly given that it's about young men in their early twenties (well, not really), there's been no mention at all of sex. Nakamura's keeping it family-friendly. Which ends up giving the whole series this really benign glow. I'm not saying it's exactly faith-promoting, but it's not trying to grind any axes either. It's just fun. Endlessly fun.

EDITED 11/26/11: I refer to Nakamura Hikaru as a "he." In fact Nakamura Hikaru is a "she." Imagine my embarrassment. Feel free to doubt anything I write about anything from here on out.

All the President's Men (1976)

2011-10-16T12:18:00.001-07:00

Can't remember why I put All the President's Men (1976) in the Netflix queue, but at the same time I can't figure out why it took me so long to get around to seeing it. I have a mild fascination with this period of American history, and films about it, on top of which one of my favorite cinematic tropes is the jaded, corroded Washington informant as embodied by Donald Sutherland in JFK and William B. Davis in The X-Files, and of course the granddaddy of them all is Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat.

IOW, it's an important film politically, but also a satisfying film artistically.

But I think my favorite scene, at the moment, isn't one of Holbrook's, but Dustin Hoffman's conversation with Robert Walden, playing Donald Segretti, a low-level operative in Nixon's dirty tricks team. From the Mouth-of-Sauron smile he flashes when he opens the door to the way he sits cross-legged in his lawn chair, Walden gives us a guy who's still half a college kid at heart, a naughty frat boy only partly grown up, just wise enough to know that what he's done is no prank, is serious shit, but just foolish enough to try to convince himself that it was all just fun and games, and just young enough that he probably half believes it. Panic and cockiness, regret and disbelief and perverted pride in his own badness, all painfully evident.

Who knows if this accurately represents the real-life Segretti, but as a character in a narrative, as a work of art, it rings true: I've known people like this. Young Republicans so sure of their own smartness and their savvy about the System, and so confident that they're serving the side that secretly controls everything, that they feel they can get away with anything, but still young enough to worry that maybe they can't, or that they might actually care that you think they're serpents. They're usually right about the first, and they usually get over the second. But not always.

Ikeido Jun: Shitamachi Rocket (2010)

2011-10-13T15:46:00.001-07:00

Ikeido Jun 池井戸潤's the author; Shitamachi Rocket 下町ロケット (literalishly "Downtown Rocket", although Seidensticker is probably right that "Low City" is better) is the title. It was published in book form in late 2010 (after having been serialized in Shūkan Post 週刊ポスト, a general-interest newsweekly) and won the Naoki Prize in summer 2011. There was no A-Prize awarded this summer, so I picked this up instead. Thought I'd have a go at a Naoki Prizewinner for a change. I've read a few over the years, but accidentally: despite my interest in the A-Prize, and in popular fiction of some varieties, I've never taken on the Naoki challenge.

This one is a keizai shōsetsu 経済小説, what's usually called in English a "business novel": a good description, if an inexact translation. I freely admit (this is me, freely admitting it) that I don't know much about this genre. Think a novel set in the business world, then imagine what genre conventions might arise? I.e., not a mystery or a thriller or a love story that just happens to involve people with jobs, or a backdrop of high finance, but a novel in which the ups and downs of business deals are meant to provide the main narrative interest? At least, that's what's happening in this one.

It was interesting to notice my reactions to it, because I went into it having intentionally read nothing about it. All I knew was the title, and some vague recommendations I'd seen in an ad on a train: I wasn't expecting it to be a "business novel." I had no expectations at all, other than (this being ostensibly popular fiction) readability and an interesting plot. And some kind of excellence somewhere, this being a Naoki winner and all.

So I'm going along, reading through it, and it's following all the ins and outs, ups and downs, of a small-to-midsize manufacturing company in an unfashionable district of Tokyo, and it's going into such details about their deals - a patent-infringement lawsuit, a countersuit, a negotiation over licensing, a subcontracting proposal, all dealing with valves and other engine parts - and there's not much else going on, and I was about halfway through before I remembered, oh yeah, there's a genre for this. That's when I stopped expecting anything more to happen. And sure enough, nothing more happened: we just kept following Tsukuda Manufacturing's efforts to convince the behemoth rocket-engine maker Empire Heavy Industries to let them supply them with a particular valve, when Empire would rather just license the technology. That's the story: little company convincing big company that it can do the job. In the end, the rocket launches with Tsukuda's valves aboard, and everybody's happy.

Knowing nothing about the genre it supposedly so excellently represents, I can't say anything about how it does or doesn't deal with its conventions. What it felt like to me from the very beginning was a Japanese TV drama series - keeping in mind that, like HBO series or most British series, Japanese dramas begin with an end in mind. Also keeping in mind that I love a good TV drama, in this case I don't mean it as a compliment. It felt formulaic - odd how you can feel that even if you've never encountered the formula - and shallow.

Formula: the Little Company that Could. Again and again we have scenes and encounters designed to remind us that Tsukuda is an old-fashioned, familiy-oriented, craftsmanship-rich company that's trying to do business in a world increasingly filled with financial and legal predators, and still dominated by snooty Big Firms who disrespect the Little Guy. And of course the Little Guy comes out on top. There's even a scene where reps from the Big Firm are inspecting the Little Guy's manufacturing setup, and we learn that Tsukuda Inc. sometimes makes their precision high-tech rocket valves by hand, by feel, rather than with machines calibrated to the micrometer. (Maybe that's how it really works, but to me the scene was as risible as the one in the third Matrix movie where we see our future tribal people making high-tech machine bombs with mortar and pestle. The Old Ways...)

Shallowness: The main character is Tsukuda himself, son of the guy who founded the company, an ex-academic rocket scientist who took over the family business when his dad died. Also Tsukuda had been associated with a failed rocket launch and hounded out of academia. So of course he's having to adjust to the business world, and also redeem himself by being associated with a successful rocket launch. Fine. He has a family - a mother who was once pretty involved in the business herself, an ex-wife who stayed in academics and divorced him because he didn't (wtf?), and a teenage daughter in a rebellious phase.

Here's what I mean about shallow. Tsukuda's back story exists entirely so that we can see him discover that there's meaning and satisfaction to be found in running a company well - people always suspect, half accurately, that he secretly misses the hallowed halls of etc., but in reality he's finding that helping his company succeed, his employees take pride in their work, etc., is a good life for him. Has intrinsic dignity. And I don't disagree, but jeez, how hackneyed is that? Especially in a business novel - it's like having your detective in a mystery novel learn by the end that, "gee, I really like solving mysteries."

And the women in his life exist entirely to forward his story. His mother exists solely to reassure Tsukuda that he's not neglecting his teenage daughter by spending so much time at work. His ex-wife exists solely to get us to feel sorry for the lonely, misunderstood middle-aged salaryman. And his daughter exists solely so that at the end she can give him a bouquet and say, "well done, Dad." Sniffle.

I want to say it's a novel resolutely devoid of subtext, but that's not quite right. It's just that the subtext is so incredibly (a) obvious and (b) old-fashioned. In 2011 we're still celebrating the Little Company that Could? Still celebrating the sad-sack salaryman as the repository of all that's good and holy in modern Japan? Especially in light of the trenchant critiques of the work world that have appeared in recent A-Prize winners (by women, significantly), this seems either incredibly reactionary or almost poignantly naïve, like the antidote to companies wrecking the economy is just celebrating the idea of a company that doesn't...

On the other hand, it really was readable. Ikeido's prose is chock-full o' clichés, but at least they make the writing go down easy. And the plot really did move right along, hitting the right emotional notes at every turn. That bouquet...

I'm not surprised to learn that it actually was made into a TV show.

Asano Inio: Oyasumi Punpun (2007- )

2011-10-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

The other Asano Inio title I've read is Oyasumi Punpun おやすみプンプン, which started in 2007 and is still going on, up to 11 volumes at the moment. I read the first three volumes back when that's all there was, and never went any farther. Reading Nijigahara makes me want to go back to Punpun to see if it got better.

Here's what I wrote in my pre-blogging days:
Punpun is a fifth-grader in anabusive home. His father gets sent toprison for beating his mother almost to death, then they get divorced; his mother’s not too nice either; her slacker brother Yuichi moves in and sortof takes care of Punpun. Meanwhile hehas a crush on a girl at school, Aiko, who’s also in a scary family—hermother’s a cultist, and drags her around proselyting. Aiko wants to run away, and makes Punpunpromise to come with her, but he has to stand her up when his mother attemptssuicide. Then we skip to two yearslater, Punpun’s a seventh-grader, Aiko hasn’t talked to him for two years, buthe still has a crush on her. She,however, is going out with the captain of the badminton team, who Punpun iskind of friends with. Meanwhile, westart to follow Yuichi more, as he meets a cute ex-nurse who likes him; he starts to tell her about a traumatic eventin his past, when a sixteen-year-old hottie from an abusive household made apass at him… And that’s where Vol. 3ends.It’s a well-told story so far,with just the right number of minor characters, and a lot ofdysfunctional-family stuff that’s handled with an appropriate dull ache. By the end of the third volume, though, it’sstarting to lose focus—the whole Yuichi bit feels like we’re moving sidewaysrather than forward. Maybe Asano doesn’tknow where he’s going with this after all.

What makes it special, though, isthe art. Everything is in asuper-realistic style except for Punpun, his parents, and his uncle, who aredrawn in thick, childish lines, and who in fact don’t look human at all: they’re drawn like lumpy birds, or stickfigures with sheets on and pointy noses. Like something a kindergartner would draw. Nobody else interacts with them anydifferently because of this, so clearly what we’re dealing with here is anexpressionistic way of depicting Punpun’s (everybody else has normal names, bythe way) sense of alienation. A strikingvisual metaphor, and it creates any number of interesting and suggestivesituations.There’s a whole overlay of Godstuff, too, as Punpun, in his adolescent gawkiness and horniness, thinks he cansee God—who looks like a grinning hipster. We’re not sure yet quite what this means—make of it what we will, Iguess—but it’s part of a consistent metaphysical questioning by thecharacters. It’s a serious manga, aboutserious themes. That’s why itdisappointed me when in the third volume it began to feel like the author wasjust spinning it out, creating saleable variations on the basic situation,rather than leading us through a story he’d planned out. Abuse and depression are not really the stuff of episodic manga—I want to know he has an idea to resolve things, not necessarily with a happy ending, but with something other than “This week on the Suicidal Depression Show!”

Asano Inio: Nijigahara horogurafu (2006)

2011-10-11T21:56:00.001-07:00

The author is Asano Inio 浅野いにお. The title is Nijigahara horografu 虹ヶ原ホログラフ (translatable as Nijigahara holograph, Nijigahara being the name of the town where it's set). It was serialized in the "subculture magazine" (trendspotter central) QuickJapan between 2003 and 2005 before being published in one volume in 2006.

The title is never explained. It's that kind of book. If I had to guess I'd say it that (a) the word "holograph" is being used as it sometimes seems to be in Japanese, as a mistake for "hologram", and that (b) Asano's trying to suggest a parallel between the way holograms create the illusion of three dimensions in two, i.e. seem to rotate as your perspective shifts, and his narrative technique here, which involves gradually and piecemeal revealing the identities and relationships between characters, on two timelines ten years apart, so that your understanding and sympathy changes with each chapter. It's that kind of book. (I'd also entertain the idea that he's using the word "holograph" according to its proper meaning: I don't suspect that this manga is autobiographical [I sure hope not], but it may be told, arguably, in the first person, something that isn't always and immediately apparent. It's that kind of book.)

I've read one other title by Asano (I'll blog it soon), and was impressed by his art and his serious themes, but not by his storytelling. Here it all comes together. This is a masterpiece. As a narrative it's as fragmented, multiperspectival, and time-ruptured a story as any postmodernist could wish for, and yet despite its refusal to resolve itself into any final form, it's curiously satisfying anyway. It's not about teasing you. It's about fragmentation as a way to emotional truth, about the possibility that the only possible response to existential horror is myth and wonder.

The plot, as you might guess, can't easily be summarized, partly because you can't be exactly sure what it is. But it concerns a group of people in the small town of Nijigahara (Rainbow Meadow). One timeline follows them when they're all in the same 5th-grade class, and another timeline follows them all 11 years later. We meet some of their parents, teachers, and some of their families. But the narration is cagey about names - only gradually do we become aware that all the characters we're following in one timeline match up with those in the other timeline, and how.

But by the time the book ends, not only have we made all the connections (we think), but we've also learned how grotesquely they're all linked by horrible things: suicide, murder, child abuse, rape, stalking, bullying, assault with deadly weapons. We see a scar, then learn how it was administered, then realize we've been sympathizing with the administerer.

Thematically, then, I guess you could loosely say it's working the rich seam of anxiety about Kids These Days, with their bullying and their tempers and their shut-in tendencies. But it goes so deep, and is so determined to invest all this melodrama with metaphysical significance, that it hardly reminds you of the typical social-issue story. As this very perceptive (and much more coherent than mine) pair of blog posts on Manga Bookshelf Transmissions suggests, it's really trying to make its own myth about familial love and redemption, about where it all went wrong and how it might have turned out if it hadn't.

Yeah, I won't say any more than that.

(Hey. I wasn't the first to blog in English about this.)

Cal Tjader: Talkin' Verve (1996)

2011-10-01T00:44:00.001-07:00

Taken from albums Tjader recorded for Verve between 1961 and 1967, produced by Creed Taylor.

Read that Wikipedia article. What Bert Gambini says about CTI is something: "It's that temporal stamp that I interpret as an asset, not a liability." That's something I think I've been trying to get at, without achieving quite that conciseness. But that's it. I don't often cringe when I see something that's outré in its epitomization of a past era. I may laugh, but usually it's a sympathetic laugh, and if you can make me laugh you've mostly won me over already. In other words, maybe I believe that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

So anyway, I don't know CTI records yet, and though I lived through that era I was too young to be aware of its jazz, but I think I know what it sounds like, and it makes sense as a natural progression from what Taylor was producing at Verve in the '60s. Basically he was doing stuff that hit what he considered to be the sweet spot between jazz and pop. That is, music with the virtues of pop - accessibility, tunefulness, emotional directness - and the instrumental richness of jazz.

If today that sounds like a formula for elevator music, that's because two or more decades of smooth jazz have ruined the concept. (It may surprise you, if you've read all my Talkin' Verve reviews, to learn that I take a back seat to no one, except maybe Pat Metheny, in my hatred of Kenny G.) But I don't think the idea of a jazzy pop, or a pop-inflected jazz, is intrinsically a bad one. It certainly could never replace challenging, avant-garde jazz, but they could coexist.

Anyway, that's kind of what Verve was about from the beginning, and certainly during the '60s under Creed Taylor. And Cal Tjader, as exemplified on this disc, is a perfect example of just how pleasant a thing that could be.

So there's Latin underpinnings on basically everything here - bossas, afro-cubano, mambos. It's not hot'n'greasy like Willie Bobo's stuff, though; it's cool. Like a caipirinha. I guess that's inevitable, being as how Cal's instrument is the vibes, but it's not just the sound: Willie's all about the groove, and the instrumental lines tend to be almost tight enough to qualify for the Commitments' definition of soul vs. jazz. Cal's records are full of improvising: they're all about the solo, the instrumental interplay. This loosens them up, and if it lowers the temperature, it also deepens the groove. There's some seriously soulful stuff on here.

What, as they say, 's not to love?

Dizzy Gillespie: Talkin' Verve (1997)

2011-09-29T21:56:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of Miles lately, specifically early '50s Miles; I've been trying to start filling in the (huge) gaps in my Miles collection, and I started by looking at the sort of fallow period between the Birth of the Cool sides and the Coltrane quintet. Anyway, then I pulled this out and listened to it.

Man, it's refreshing to come to Dizzy after Miles. I love Miles - I always come back to him - but I can't listen to him too much, and hearing Dizzy this morning made me realize why. Miles is all psychodrama. At its most basic his technical - well, sometimes they're physical limitations, sometimes they're a by-product of his style, but anyway, there's always the question of, will he hit the note? What note was he trying to hit? But it's not just that, of course: there's an emotional pinchedness, a mental tension, to his playing. That's the essence of his style, of course, and at his best he mined it for a complexity, an abstraction, that brought his music to the highest pitch of art. But it can be tiring, too, and sometimes frankly a little constricting.

Dizzy's always good for your soul. There's a generosity in his playing, an ebullience, that somehow seems all the more striking because of his incredible technical virtuosity. Like, he can do all that, effortlessly, and he will do all that for the pleasure of his listeners. I understand why that stance might have seemed unsatisfying to some listeners at one time; I think it's easy to hear some of Louis Armstrong's hokum side in Dizzy's Caribbean scatting, and certainly some of Louis's basic stance toward audiences in Dizzy's openness to entertainment. I understand why that might have dismayed listeners looking for a more brazenly ambitious artist. And for them there's always Miles - and for me too. But damn if I don't enjoy Dizzy.

This is a good disc, too. It draws on records he made for Verve, Limelight, and Philips between 1957 and 1966 - and he was pretty prolific in that timespan - and it concentrates on the funky and exotic sides of his work. We get his original studio version of "Swing Low Sweet Cadillac," for example (and here he is later doing it with Muppets), and the even more jungley "Jambo." But there's also the deeply bluesy "Theme From Cool World," which out Horace Silvers Horace Silver. And we get some of his excellent, out of time big band work: a long meaty track from Gillespiana, and another movement from Lalo Schifrin's The New Continent. It's really groovy Dizzy, in other words, while never being anything less than total jazz.

Roland Kirk: Talkin' Verve (1996)

2011-09-24T02:43:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I'm not sure if I like something or just "like" it. That's not an original thought, either.

This whole series is a case in point, and no-sword-san's recent comment reminded me of that.

The music here - recorded for Verve and Mercury between 1961 and 1967 - can't be argued with. Can't be mistaken. Among the artists that this series features, Roland Kirk (he added the "Rahsaan" in 1970, so it would be anachronistic to use it here) is one of the more unassailable, and he's in his prime here. He plays with the wild passion of Coltrane but with a bluesiness that Coltrane usually sacrificed for churchiness, and to that he added an almost garage-band kind of sensibility. Play whatever instrument you can get your hands on, play it rough and ready, and sing like something out of Jack Kerouac's fondest dream (insert link to nonexistent youtube of "Berkshire Blues" here). Verve has a Kirk installment in most of their series, and they all draw from the same albums; what distinguishes this one is a gonzo take on "Peter Gunn" with Quincy Jones's orchestra, and a duet with Sonny Boy Williamson called "Untitled Blues." It's that kind of series: it walks on the pop side of the street.

Musically, I like this. I say that with no scare quotes. That is, I'd characterize that take on "Peter Gunn" as pop, calculated, certainly too slick to have much heart, but played with swing, and with a wicked flute solo. What's not to like? It's hardly the most affecting, the most musically challenging or rewarding, song on the disc, but it's a nice complement to them. I'm glad I have it (and part of the reason I still buy CDs is to discover things that I wouldn't have thought to look for on my own).

What about the package, though? I've averred that I'm kinda fond of the graphics conception of this series, but that's too simple a statement. Because the series (and how silly is it to devote this much time - any time at all, really - to analyzing it?) went on for about five years, and encompassed at least two distinct (but related) phases in late-'90s graphic design.

As I've noted, musically the series is actually split between an early spate of repackagings meant to cash in on the acid jazz trend and a late grouping trying to hook onto the lounge-music craze. The graphics reflect this: the early releases echo the kind of rave-culture-influenced techno-psychedelic graphics that could be seen on acid jazz releases of the time (such as this Courtney Pine album from 1995 that I loved a lot when it was new) (otoh that was from Verve too, but from their French division - does that mean different graphics people or not?). Youthfully overenthusiastic, but fundamentally sincere. Jejune, even.

[Edited to add: I misremembered the label of that Pine album. It's on Verve Antilles, which is evidently what happened when Verve bought out Island's Antilles jazz subsidiary. I have a few other discs that I bought at the same time on Verve Gitanes - which I've always assumed, from the name, was Verve's French subsidiary, but come to think of it I'm not sure. And my google-fu doesn't seem to be up to the task of finding out. Anyway, that's what I was getting this confused with.]

The late releases, meanwhile, reflect where that aesthetic was five years later, when the earnest aspirational (occasional) musicianship of acid jazz had given way (in some quarters) to the lounge thing, with its muy-ironical fetishizing of ideas such as the Space-Age Bachelor Pad and Las Vegas. This was largely about the quotation marks, and the graphics reflect this: Verve doesn't quite go so far as to employ tiki-bar imagery on the Buddy Greco disc, but almost. And they do much worse with the Walter Wanderley disc. Predictably, I'm less than thrilled with the graphics there - but less for their intrinsic visual qualities (whatever those may be) than because of what they seem to be trying to say.

What about those intrinsic visual qualities? One of the painful things about growing old is the realization that the cliché "you can't fight fashion" is actually one of the eternal verities. That is, you can't prevent a look you like one year from looking hopelessly dated the next: that's something beyond your control. And as you get older it dawns on you that this is a species of ephemerality, transience, 無常. But, there are fashions that are so egregiously overstated that it's possible to know, even in the moment, that they're going to look risible in ten years.

The late '90s were one such moment. It helped that I spent most of the '90s in Tokyo, observing the denizens of Harajuku and Roppongi with a rapt fascination (I say that because I gather that what I'm talking about was more of a European and Japanese phenomenon, that concurrent US fashions were more about the gangsta rap, which is not at all what I'm talking about), but it was clear that the way early '70s glam and pimp fashions were being revived, shot full of steroids and amphetamines, and set loose under strobes was making for an aesthetic so outré that it was simply impossible to believe it would be looked back on fondly by kids of a later time. I mean, I can remember what we said in high school when we saw photos of our teachers in the actual '70s: why wouldn't our kids laugh when they saw photos of us in our virtual '70s?

But God help me I loved late '90s fashions (while never being cool enough to actually dress in any). They entertained me, and at best they connected with past awesomenesses in creative, liberating, and moving ways. Pizzicato 5 and United Future Organization were my gurus for a while there. (Guru himself wasn't bad either.)

That probably explains a lot of my inappropriate enthusiasm for the graphics on these Verve releases. They are shameless attempts to appropriate contemporary youth culture for the purpose of moving old product. (The series title is a worse offender than it might even initially appear: it's not only trying to appropriate hip street lingo, it's trying to piggyback on this very respectable and influential indie label.) But some of them work as graphic ideas anyway.

...When it comes to aesthetics and philosophy, I'm not sure I've encountered a jazz reissue/anthology program I really like. The Blue Note catalog seems to have gone from lame reissues to mostly absence from the marketplace. The Prestige catalog (I've been getting into early-'50s Miles lately) as handled by Original Jazz Classics seems mostly aimed at people old enough to remember the original issue of this material on vinyl. Columbia's jazz catalog (including Miles) seems to be handled with some of the feather-boa tease mentality that guides their handling of their rock artists. Verve at least goes all out...

Les McCann: Talkin' Verve (1998)

2011-09-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Tanuki lived in St. Louis for a couple of years around the turn of the century. He lived a few blocks from the barely-remarked-upon (at the time) ruins of Gaslight Square. I don't get out much, don't go to many shows, but I was aware of St. Louis's respectable, honorable traditions in jazz, blues, r&b; I used to walk to Gaslight Square and imagine. I went to the Scott Joplin house and wondered why it seemed so deserted, when it should be a mecca of American music.

It was the only time in my adult life when I've listened to radio on a regular basis. I can't stand commercial radio, and I can't stand too much talk, so NPR is out. But St. Louis had two excellent music-oriented public stations. One was the inestimable KDHX, with blues, bluegrass, Sunday morning gospel, obscure psychedelia, Eastern European ethnic musics, and all sorts of other tasty stuff.

The other was WSIE, beamed in from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. This was jazz, all the time, and while sometimes it leaned to the easy-listening, I found myself listening to it in the car a lot. And I fell in love with one of their DJs: LaVerne Holliday, whose name suggests a cross between LaVerne Baker and Billie Holliday, of course, and whose voice and on-air persona were just as silky, sexy, and soulful as the name promised. Holy moly.

She used to play this one Les McCann tune all the time. An up-tempo thing with a stomping, bounding beat, honking horns, stomping piano - I used to crank it up every time I heard it. But I only ever heard it while I was driving, and so I never got the chance to write down the title. For ten years now I've been trying to figure out what it was and what album it's on - I've listened to samples of every likely Les McCann tune on iTunes, on youtube, and never found it. Shit.

It's not on this album. But that's alright, because it's good Les McCann anyway. It draws from records he made for Limelight between 1964 and 1967. It does have "Compared To What?" on it, although evidently this isn't the most famous version. The one on here is an up-tempo, poppy-but-gritty studio version from 1966.

Speaking of crosses-between, McCann is what you'd get if you added McCoy Tyner to Ramsey Lewis and divided by two. He can play r&b pop-jazz piano as funky as you please, but then he'll throw in hints of abstraction, of too-lush-to-be-believed moodiness, of advanced jazz. Plus, he sings beautifully. The formula may not be an improvement on Tyner, but it sure is on Lewis, and so there you go: listen to some Les McCann.

George Benson: Talkin' Verve (1997)

2011-09-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Like the Buddy Greco, this disc represents an exceedingly small, and commercially relatively minor, slice of the artist's oeuvre; in this case the two albums George Benson recorded under his own name for Verve in 1968, plus one track from his guest shot on a Jimmy Smith album that year. This isn't quite Benson's earliest stuff, but it's several years before he became the pop superstar some of us remember from the '70s.

Also, and this doesn't show up in the liner notes, but this music represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of Verve Records; Benson seems to have been brought to Verve to replace Wes Montgomery, who had followed Creed Taylor to A&M; after Montgomery's death, Taylor would sign Benson to his new label, CTI. What's on this disc, then, represents Verve's attempts to extend the Wes Montgomery pop-jazz vision into the late '60s without Wes, and Benson's establishment as the kind of pop-oriented jazzer that the CTI empire would be built on, in Wes's wake.

All of which might lead one to expect this disc to be nothing but imitations of Montgomery. It's not. There are unmistakeable similarities in sound - both in Benson's stringwork and the arrangements. But fundamentally Benson is a bluesier player, more comfortable with contemporary soul and r&b, even rock. As the cover photo suggests, some of the more down-home moments here ("Some Of My Best Friends Are Blues," the meeting with Smith; Benson's vocal showcase "That Lucky Old Sun"; "Giblet Gravy") are greasier and more viscerally satisfying than Wes's work usually was.

On the other hand: some of this stuff is straight-up Easy Listening. The kind of music that brings back memories of riding with your grandma in her avocado-green Pontiac boat, frosty inside from the a/c while the August sun bleaches the streets outside, you twelve and restless on nylon seats that make you shiver if you scratch them with a fingernail, astonished that the radio, this magic machine that you only just discovered, can play queasy squishy music like this as well as AC/DC and Led Zep - like, it's weird to think that the same air that carries that can conceal this as well, music as comfortable as a pair of Haggar stretch-slacks, and just as surrenderful...

That is, Verve gave Benson arrangements that built on Wes's lime-cool vibe, but in a less tasteful way. With even more strings, with Nashville harmonica, with the Sweet Inspirations cooing their way through "Natural Woman." I'm 41 now, not twelve, but I still don't know if I'm ready for this.

Buddy Greco: Talkin' Verve (2001)

2011-09-17T02:09:00.001-07:00

I'm gonna just own the fact that until I decided I had to pick up this whole series, I had never heard of Buddy Greco. Turns out he's a crooner-lounge singer type; as the liner notes make clear, he sings like Frank Sinatra but tries to play piano and band-lead like Nat King Cole.

This disc is hardly representative of his career; even I can tell that. It draws from precisely four albums he made in the late '50s, three for Kapp Records and one for Coral. Presumably somewhere along the way those two catalogs entered the Mercury/Verve/Universal morass, and that's why this disc. So I have no idea if it's his best or not. That's my caveat.

If Sinatra is the Chairman of the Board, then Buddy Greco works for the same company, but somewhere way down the food chain: he's in Sales, probably travels, mostly lives out of midpriced hotels in midsize Midwestern cities, where he hangs out at the lounge bar hitting on middle-aged married women. Or: If Sinatra is Tony Soprano, Greco is Chris.

Sinatra has swagger, which may or may not be empty depending on whether you like that kind of thing. But he also has enough restraint to make you feel like he loves the music, even if he mostly coasts through it. Greco doesn't sound like he has any respect for these songs at all. He mugs and vamps his way through "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)" like it's nothing, like maybe it's so old and hackneyed that all you can do with it is joke around. His singing on this record is all about him, never about the song, or what it's about.

Which is almost a shame, because he's got an agile, expressive voice, and plays a great piano. Has a nifty band, and some rather okay arrangements - clever flutes and whatnot.

Sincerity, man. It's such a drag.

Taniguchi Jirō and Kusumi Masayuki: Sanpomono (2003-2005)

2011-09-13T21:32:00.001-07:00

Art by Taniguchi Jirō 谷口ジロー, script by Kusumi Masayuki 久住昌之. It was serialized in Tsūshin seikatsu 通信生活 from 2003 to 2005, collected in book form in 2006, and issued in bunkobon 文庫本 format in 2009 by Fusō shuppan 扶桑出版, which is what I read.

This is a really interesting manga. Perhaps the most junbungaku manga I've yet encountered. It's about a typical salaryman who takes walks. That's it, essentially. He's out on an errand, or visiting a friend, misses his bus, and decides to walk home instead, or whereever he's going; each episode details what he sees while he's walking, and involves some very minor daily-life epiphany. The end result is the sort of apotheosis of the mundane that is one of the major themes of modern Japanese literature. Finding meaning, beauty, delight, solace, in a small thing encountered by accident and seen in just the right light.

The art supports this marvelously; it's probably no exaggeration to say that the whole point of this series was to give Taniguchi a chance to experiment visually, or maybe even to show off. The art combines photorealistic backgrounds with pretty manga-esque humans; just as the scenery of the strolls is the thematic point, the backgrounds are the artistic point.

Photorealistic doesn't quite cover it, because he's giving you more detail than you'd pick up from a photograph. His unbelievably fine lines and exact geometry give you a sort of heightened realism, an almost surreal level of detail and volume: the buildings and trees fairly leap out at you. To this amazing line Taniguchi adds amazing facility with screentones, creating effects of light and shadow, texture and touch, that pretty much define the state of the manga art. If you want to know what it feels like to walk through a Tokyo neighborhood, just read this manga.

The art is so wonderful, and the theme so deep, that it makes the two flaws I find in the project all the more glaring. One is that Taniguchi's handling of human facial expressions, at least in this manga, isn't as subtle as his rendering of the scenery. I came to this right after Billy Bat, and for all the adventure comix cartooniness of that manga, the way figures are rendered in it is incredibly expressive and well-observed. You've seen people make that exact face, stand in just that way. Taniguchi's people, on the other hand, are a little stiff, their expressions a little blunt, and for me that meant the art just barely failed to support the theme.

The other flaw is more interesting. I mentioned that each episode culminates in a kind of daily-life epiphany, usually through an encounter with some object. In classic modern J-lit this object would be a cherry tree in bloom, or a locket that belonged to a former lover - those are clichés, but you can see what I mean. Here, almost all the objects are items for sale. A particular kind of light bulb, lunch at a particular curry shop in Kichijōji. And the kind of epiphanies the main character experiences - the lessons he takes from them - have to do with nostalgia for a better time, but that better time is basically the Tokyo of thirty to fifty years ago. More mid-Shōwa nostalgia, in other words.

And this was, for me, pretty disappointing. I like a good curry lunch, a good unchanged '50s neighborhood, as much as the next guy, I really do, but this manga was so aesthetically promising that it was a let-down to realize that the meaning-in-life it was finding was basically just a cool thing to buy, or a Tokyo with simply a slightly lower degree of commercial exploitation. Like, that's the best you can imagine? Really?

That's where I'm glad I read the paperback (which otherwise is a bad deal, because the art really deserves to be seen as large as it can be), because it has lots of prose in the back by Kusumi detailing the making of this series, and where each episode is set (they're all real neighborhoods). And he comes right out and admits that it was the publisher's insistence that each episode involve a product. This was serialized in a magazine that's half general-interest mag and half mail-order catalog. Of course they want the comix to celebrate consumption.

So I can't make up my mind whether this is art compromised by commercial concerns, or a case of art sneaking in under the radar of commercial concerns.

Hatakenaka Megumi: Shabake (2001)

2011-09-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

If you've been paying attention to Japanese pop culture over the last dozen or so years you know there's been a real vogue for yōkai 妖怪, traditional Japanese monsters. Part of this has been the elevation of my boy Mizuki Shigeru to the status of manga saint. Part of this has simply been the '90s and beyond "Edo boom," wherein there has been wave after wave of popular interest in one aspect or another of Edo-period culture, everything from hand-towel designs to comic storytelling.

In any case, part of the boom has been a renewed presence of yōkai and/or traditional-flava horror in Japanese popular fiction. Seemingly the biggest figure in this is Kyōgoku Natsuhiko 京極夏彦, who has written a series of doorstop-sized mystery-horror novels set in the twentieth century but with yōkai motifs. The first of them has been translated recently; I read it in the original years ago, but it was in my pre-blogging days, and I don't seem to have written any notes on it for myself. (Meaning, I might as well have not read it at all, for all I remember of it. My memory is a sieve. A broken sieve.)

Hatakenaka Megumi 畠中恵 is part of this trend as well. She writes a series known as Shabake しゃばけ, after the title of the first book in the series, published in 2001. Shabake (the kanji would be 娑婆気) is an archaic term; she provides a definition as an epigraph; basically, it refers to a state of mental captivity to worldly desires such as for honor, advancement, profit. How exactly the concept relates to the story is for the reader to figure out.

Unlike Kyōgoku, Hatakenaka's approach to this genre is to set her stories in the Edo period. Her main character is Ichitarō of the Nagasakiya, the scion of a wealthy merchant house - they run a shipping business, and an apothecary shop on the side. Ichitarō, 17, is in charge of the apothecary, but really he's not in charge of anything in his life. He's frail - constantly getting sick - and since as the heir he's the future of the family business, his family pampers him in every respect. In addition, they set two strapping young shopboys in charge of him, to take care of his every need and make sure he doesn't overexert himself.

These shopboys happen to be yōkai: one's a Doggod and one's a Whitemarsh. They can and usually do shape-shift to disguise themselves as humans, but when they're angry the camouflage slips...

Ichitarō can see, and hear, and communicate with, yōkai. He knows his companions' true identity. Exactly how much the rest of the family knows is part of the mystery - Ichitarō's abilities seem to be unique, although he takes them for granted, and why he has them isn't explained until the end.

This novel can be thought of as combining a number of different genres. First is the yōkai story; it's not quite horror - it's not scary - but it involves some of the trappings of horror. Second is the jidaigeki: it makes use of a lot of the tropes of pop lit and TV shows set in the Edo period. The way it depicts townsmen and samurai, the kinds of stock characters and situations, are part of the jidaigeki repertoire. Third is the mystery: halfway through, Ichitarō is forced to turn (armchair) detective, in order to save his life. Someone starts killing apothecaries, searching for the right medicine; Ichitarō has to figure out what the medicine is and why the killer wants it, before he becomes the next victim (dot dot dot)

All of this is fine and dandy, and the story is reasonably well constructed and entertaining. But what mainly holds the book together is its cuteness. Japanese Wikipedia says the series is mostly popular with young women, and I can see why (if I can engage that stereotype at face value): Ichitarō is cute. His yōkai minders are cute. The other characters - Ichitarō's parents and his best friend Eikichi are cute.

I don't mean visually cute. That's part of it, of course; the book includes some adorable illustrations by Shibata Yū 柴田ゆう. But mainly it's that the ways Hatakenaka imagines these characters - the situations she puts them in and their reactions to them - tend to make you smile indulgently and affectionately at the character, or roll your eyes in mock exasperation. Or just laugh.

Ichitarō himself: he's both a stereotype and a reversal of a stereotype. As a lazy scion of a wealthy Edo merchant, he's a centuries-old stock character; the trick here is that his parents lovingly force him into laziness. They don't want him to lift a finger. His parents dote on him to a ridiculous degree, and since Ichitarō himself doesn't act like a spoiled brat, the whole situation becomes adorably comic. Ichitarō chafes against his inactivity - but mildly, with a sort of wan grace that would make him a tragic figure if this were a more serious book. But it's not, so he's just kind of a pale, wry figure at the center of his own story.

His best friend Eikichi: he's also the scion of a merchant family, but his house is as poor as Ichitarō's is rich. Eikichi's family are confectioners, and Eikichi's problem is that for all his best efforts he sucks as a candy-maker. He burns the an. His dango come out different sizes. He's kind of a sad sack, but he's also a loyal friend. So: cute.

And then there are the yōkai. Mizuki uses yōkai as a sort of exposé of Japan's collective unconscious, I think: there are creepy-crawlies in there, and denying that will get us nowhere. Kyōgoku, from what I can tell from one novel, uses them as motifs, metaphors, to explain contemporary human behavior. Hatakenaka's yōkai are more down-to-earth; in their haplessness, they have a lot in common with Mizuki's, but without the palpable aura of creepiness that his have even at their most comixy. Hatakenaka's really are cute. Even when they're capable of murder.

Kokurikozaka kara (manga version)

2011-09-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

This summer's Ghibli release, Kokurikozaka kara コクリコ坂から, was based on a manga by the same name. It was drawn by Takahashi Chizuru 高橋千鶴 with a story by Sayama Tetsurō 佐山哲郎, and it was serialized in the girls' comix mag Nakayoshi なかよし in 1980. It's currently available complete in one volume, in stacks next to all the movie paraphernalia in the bookstores.

Taken on its own terms, it's an utterly typical shōjo manga. Average. I guess I mean that as both a pejorative and a mere descriptor. That is, I don't find the manga really remarkable in any way; but there's a certain value in reading unremarkable works, too, because they help you appreciate the excellent ones.

The art: it's undistinguished. Very few compositions struck me as being memorable or arresting. At the same time it's obviously using the visual vocabulary of girls' comix circa 1980 in typical way: the flowers, the floating-in-space emotional moments, the dizzy-angle closeups of eyes, mouths, etc. It's kind of a primer on the genre.

The story: same. Puppy love presented with an accent on beautiful boys just out of reach, and the endless internal sufferings of a girl in love. Just enough complications to keep the plot going, and a resolution just in time to bring tears to your eyes. (Theoretically.)

Read in terms of the movie, however, it's fascinating, precisely because Ghibli was able to make such a deeply resonant movie out of such average source material. They kept the basic outlines of the story (Mer and Kazama's relationship, the boarding house, the school), but changed the setting from "contemporary" (in 1980 the manga was set in 1980) to "past," and thus the tone from up-to-the-minute (in the manga the boys all have Shaun Cassidy long hair) to nostalgic. Furthermore they drew out the emotional, almost mythic power of the dad-lost-at-sea motif.

Here's an example of what they did. High-school-student protest is a theme in both. In the manga, it's a gag: Kazama manufactures a student uprising against school uniforms, as a way of selling more papers (he's on the school newspaper). It's mildly funny, but mostly a shockingly cynical parody of the student protests that had swept the country just ten years before. Takahashi and Sayama's youngest readers may or may not have had any memory of them, but older readers would have, and it's some kind of sign of the new decade that student unrest in 1980 could only be thought of in terms of this kind of ridiculous parody.

In the movie they keep the theme, but transform it into a crusade to save the Latin Quarter dorm. Notably, this too neutralizes the student-protest theme - what in the late '60s would have potent political significance is recast in the film as pure-hearted young people trying to save their community. But at least it's taken seriously by the filmmakers - commitment to something other than puppy-love and hairbrushes is held up as a real thing.

Kusaka Riki: Kumarajiva (2009-present)

2011-09-09T07:32:00.001-07:00

The title of this shows up as "Kumara jiva" (from the original Sanskrit), クマーラジーヴァ (a Japanese phonetic rendering of same), and 羅什 (the Chinese equivalent of same); often two or three of these elements appear together, and in seemingly miscellaneous order. Anyway, the point is clear: this is a manga bio of Kumārajīva, the Indian monk who went to China and translated the Lotus Sutra into Chinese, thus making it available ever after to the entire East Asian tradition. It's by Kusaka Riki くさか里樹 (there's a nice pun in her name), and it's been serialized in the weekly newsmagazine Ushio 潮 since 2009, although there was a long lag between the start of serialization and the appearance of the comic in book form. The first volume came out in July of this year, and it's all that's out so far, and it's all I've read.

It's probably worth mentioning that Ushio is put out by the publishing arm of the Soka Gakkai. I don't think that necessarily means that this comic is going to be mere hagiography; not only is Ushio a seemingly fairly mainstream publication, but they're the same publisher that did Tezuka's Buddha, although it ran in a different magazine. The pedigree doesn't seem to have prevented that work from being taken seriously. So I'll take this seriously.

Tezuka's life of the Buddha is the obvious precedent for this, and the thing I couldn't help but compare it to even before I noticed that they were from the same publisher. After only one volume it's not going to be possible to say much, but we can start with the art. This is a lot less distinguished, artistically: I doubt anybody would disagree. But visually, I like it a lot more.

Here's what I mean by that. Tezuka famously never managed to leave behind his Disney-influenced art style. His characters always had that roundness; they always looked like they were rubber bendy-toys. And his backgrounds, his things, weren't much different - they could boast a high degree of detail, and he could do atmosphere, but they always looked cartoony. I've written about how for me that ruins some of his more ambitious work. That's more or less my take on his Buddha. In it he takes his cartoony style about as far as it can possibly go - I can recognize that he's really pushing himself there, and he does achieve some marvelous effects. But in the end it's still rubbery, and it's off-putting to me. I just can't get around this. I don't love Buddha.

I find myself much more at home in Kusaka's art. But the thing is, objectively I would probably rate it lower than Tezuka's. She's drawing in a quite typical contemporary seinen-manga style: utterly typical. I'd be hard pressed to cite anything at all about the art in this volume that sets it apart from any other average manga aimed at your average late teen or adult. It's reasonably well executed, but artistically unambitious. Undistinguished. As opposed to the great ambition, care, and skill evident in Tezuka's work.

So why do I prefer Kusaka's? Idiom. It's simply that the seinen style, even when executed in an uninspiring way, feels more appropriate to this story, this kind of story. It's somehow more effective at conveying adult emotions, adult thoughts, than the cartoony style of Tezuka, no matter how well executed. At least, that's my impression. This story, even though the characters are shallow, begins to move me, reflexively, in ways that Tezuka's didn't.

Maybe the best way to get at what I'm trying to say is this. I tend to think of the art in manga as being equivalent, in some ways, to the words that it's replacing: and artistic style can be likened to prose style. In that metaphor, Tezuka's art in Buddha is the visual equivalent of: a story in short words! aimed at a boy with a fifth-grade reading level! with lots of exclamation points! There's a lot you can do with that! kind of writing! sure! but it still has! lots! of! exclamation points!

Whereas Kusaka's art is the visual equivalent of adult prose, aimed at adults. Certainly not the most eloquent prose, but at least it only has a few! exclamation points.

I feel like such a heretic now.

Urasawa Naoki/Nagasaki Takashi: Billy Bat (2008-present)

2011-09-08T19:05:00.001-07:00

Here's an entertaining take on the opening of the first volume of this manga. Complete with affectionate hardboiled-pastiche prose.

So: Billy Bat ビリーバット, by Urasawa Naoki 浦沢直樹 and Nagasaki Takashi 長崎尚志. It's been serialized in Morning モーニング since 2008, and the book version is up to Volume 7. It's the first thing I've read by Urasawa, but it won't be the last. For at least the first couple of volumes, I was convinced this might be the greatest comic ever written. It loses a little intensity when it decides to spend a full volume on a ninja story, but it's still pretty cool.

For the first couple of volumes it's following a Japanese-American comic-book author named Kevin Yamagata who, in immediate postwar LA, has a hit series called Billy Bat. Billy Bat, the comic-with-a-comic, is a furry story with a bat as a hardboiled detective. It's black-bat noir. Kevin's proud of his creation, but a visiting cop makes an offhand remark that he saw a similar comic as an Occupation soldier in Japan. This gives Kevin the Anxiety of Influence, since he himself is an Occupation Vet; he rushes back to Japan to find out whether he has unconsciously plagiarized someone or something. Once in Japan he gets caught up in a conspiracy to subvert the democratization of Japan by assassinating an industrial leader. And, oh yeah, Billy the Bat starts talking to him...

It's a wacky story, when you put the elements of it down like that. And it just gets wackier: it jumps back centuries to follow the fortunes of ninja clans in Iga, ahead decades to encompass the moon landing and the JFK assassination, way back to Jerusalem in Jesus' day; and I think they're going to work their way up to 9/11, too. In addition to Kevin we get a host of other characters, from cops to other comics artists to cowboys to Lee Harvey Oswald. We also get excerpts from episodes of Billy Bat, both Kevin's version and that of his successor (his assistant, who usurped the series) And then, of course, there's the bat: it pops out of the page from time to drop cryptic clues about good'n'evil and the destiny of man...

So the series is, among other things: an occult alternate history of the world in which comix artists (cave painters, picture-scroll makers) are the oracles of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction, the avatar(s) of which are bats; a commentary on the uneasy relationship between American comics and Japanese manga in the postwar period; an elegy to the betrayed postwar promise of both America and Japan; a meditation on Disney; and a hell of an adventure story, presented in art and writing that manages to have all the dynamism it needs to keep you turning the pages swiftly and an almost gratuitous subtlety that makes you want to linger over every composition, every facial expression.

This guy's a genius, and I can't wait to see where the story goes from here.

Norwegian Wood (film) (2010)

2011-09-05T21:36:00.000-07:00

I expected this to suck.

The Tanuki loves Murakami Haruki 村上春樹. That won't really be apparent from this blog, because this blog only covers the last three years of the Tanuki's engagement with cultural production, and it just so happens that the Tanuki hasn't been reading a lot of Haruki in the last three years. That's because the Tanuki damn near OD'd on Haruki in the previous sixteen years since first encountering him. Murakami's works hold a deep and abiding importance for the Tanuki, for more reasons than can be discussed in this post (so I won't try). And the novel on which this film is based, 1987's Norway no mori ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood), happens to be my favorite Murakami novel. The one that turned me on to him. The one that pretty much decided my career path. And so I expected this to suck (=to fail to satisfy the Tanuki's very personal requirements for a treatment of Murakami's work).

And: I know Tran Anh Hung's pedigree - I saw and loved The Scent of Green Papaya - but that still didn't give me much hope that he'd get this right (=please me, selfish git that I am). Not necessarily through any fault of his own. Murakami somewhat famously has refused permission to film his novels, but a few years ago he made his first exception, for Ichikawa Jun 市川準's Tony Takitani トニー滝谷; the result merely confirmed for me that Murakami's first impulse, to keep his novels on the page and in his readers' minds, was the right one. I don't know that Murakami's novels are any more difficult to adapt to the screen than most; I just know that in his case, I don't want to sit through any more failures. I expected this to suck.

Mostly it doesn't. Mostly, in fact, it's a great movie. It might even be all the way a great movie, but you'd have to get that opinion from someone with a little more distance on the source than me. But even for me: it gets the novel about three-quarters right.

That, of course, is not all it does. The visuals are, as one would expect from Tran, amazing, and they're amazing in a way that largely captures the wide-eyed romanticism of the novel. The contrast between the natural settings and the cityscapes, the period detail in costume and interiors, the thoughtful, unblinking camera work all contribute to a film that's gorgeous to look at, simply intoxicating. The score, by the Radiohead guy, is equally impressive, with bold dissonance that reaches verges on noise, but in a very romantic-tragic way. (I have my quibbles, inevitably, with the songs interpolated into the soundtrack: Can, with their Japanese lead singer, has a certain metafictional appropriateness, but there were any number of Japanese psychedelic/early prog bands that could have been used, too: couldn't they have found room for somebody like the Mops? The Flower Traveling Band/The Flowers? The Tempters?)

And it gets two of the main characters right. Matsuyama Ken'ichi as Watanabe-kun is pitch perfect: his delivery of "mochiron" is just how it should be, a wary rapprochement with the world that just happens to be cool to the point of near-arrogance. And Kikuchi Rinko realizes Naoko with all the ethereal, waifish beauty the role requires: the character needs to be barely there, and yet emotionally dominant, and that's how she is here. The parts of the movie that focus on this relationship are fine.

In the novel, however, Naoko's character is perfectly balanced by Midori, who is Life to Naoko's Thanatos, earth to Naoko's otherworldliness, Body to Naoko's Spirit; and Mizuhara Kiko doesn't quite bring it. Maybe she's just too physically insubstantial, or maybe she just can't shake the passive flirtatiousness that is required of so many Japanese starlets, but her Midori fails to provide a counterbalance to Naoko, which means the movie ultimately fails to spell out the crossroads that Watanabe finds himself at.

The film also fails with the all-important secondary character of Reiko. Her dazzling monologue about her piano student is eliminated, meaning we really have no idea of her past, why she's hospitalized, or even what kind of person she is; and although her sex scene with Watanabe at the end is preserved, in the film she comes across as a weak older woman begging for the young phallus. Which is not what she is in the book at all. I'm not really sure why they kept this scene in the film, actually.

All of which means, I suppose, that I think this film really does fail, ultimately; it just fails in a very seductive way, I guess.

The Argentine Hag (film version), 2007

2011-09-02T23:33:00.000-07:00

Am I being obsessive, or just thorough? Either way: boring, right?

So there's a film version of this, released in 2007 and also called Aruzenchin babā (The Argentine Hag). It was directed by Nagao Naoki 長尾直樹, and it's the only film of his I've seen.

The best thing about this film is the decision to cast Yakusho Kōji 役所広司 as the dad. It works on a meta level, since the character already seems to echo Yakusho's character in Shall We Dance. And more importantly, casting Yakusho almost saves the movie. He's so damn handsome, so damn charismatic, and such a good actor: his part here is drastically underwritten, and the characters he's interacting with are so tongue-tied, but the body language and speech mannerisms he gives his character make any scene he's in at least watchable. With almost no help from the script or director he creates a character who's somehow both a working-class Japanese dad and a hippie, both impetuous and stolid.

Otherwise the film is too disappointing, and on too many fronts, to even bother exploring. Among its crimes are: failing to capture any of the spirit of Nara Yoshitomo in the visuals; reducing the typically thoughtful, smart Banana narrator to a standard-issue J-film pouty-cute teenager (but without the difficult resonances of Nara Yoshitomo's pouty-cutesiness); and rejecting, at the end, the novel's message of acceptance of the town cat-lady and all she represents about living. (In the film, the Hag tells the dad that he has to go back to his daughter. Rather than letting the daughter come to them.)

Ghibli: Kokurikozaka kara (From Up On Poppy Hill) (2011)

2011-08-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

I can imagine Arrietty finding an audience overseas, but I wonder about this one: Kokurikozaka kara コクリコ坂から (which seems like it's going to be released as From Up On Poppy Hill). It's about kids - well, high school kids - and no doubt young anime fans will find a lot to enjoy in it. But the tone is pretty grown-up. It's very much an adult's nostalgic view of adolescence - and really an older adult's, with the longing for the Showa 30s that has gripped Japanese boomers for years now. Maybe younger viewers in Japan can sort of approximate that point of view - but will it register with overseas audiences?

Maybe not; maybe it doesn't matter. The story is moving, and the animation is some of the most beautiful Ghibli has ever produced. What's not to love?

It's about a girl named Umi, nicknamed Mer (a bilingual pun) who lives in a big house on a hill overlooking Yokohama Harbor in 1963. Her father died at sea during the Korean War, and her mother is in America studying medicine; Mer lives with her grandmother, her younger sister, and three single women boarders. Every morning Mer runs a nautical signal flag up the flagpole in front of the boarding house, hoping in vain that her father will see it and return.

So, with the longing for the dead father and the absent mother, the story is awash in sentimentality, right? Yes, it is. If that's not your cup of tea, then this isn't your movie. But if you appreciate a good flushing of the tear ducts occasionally, a deft pull on the heartstrings once in a while, this anime delivers.

At school she develops a crush on a guy named Kazama who lives in an old Meiji-era foreign-style mansion that's been turned into a high-school dorm. It's called the Quartier Latin, and it's a fabulous creation, combining the kind of colonial-style Western-yearning grand architecture that can still be seen today on the Bluff in Yokohama with decades of accreted boy student embellishments, everything from theatricals posters to dismembered bicycles to ledgers that probably contain missing parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This dorm provides one of the major subplots, as the owner, an absentee landlord living in Tokyo, has decided to sell it, and the kids decide to band together to save it.

The lightness of the Quartier Latin parts of the film nicely balances the sadness of Mer's story, and of course the two threads intertwine in effective, affecting ways. You'll laugh, you'll cry.

And if you're like me (and just pray you're not) you'll be enthralled at how carefully the filmmakers work in period details. The story starts out in what feels like fairy-tale territory, the kind of fantasized-Europe-in-Japan that the Borrower house in Arrietty embodies. But gradually the story eases us into the realization that this is a very particular time and place being depicted - Yokohama on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics - and that the West-East fusions, the nostalgia-vs.-renovation themes, are all carefully accounted for by the specificity of the setting. Right about the time you realize exactly where and when this has to be taking place, the story brings you to Sakuragi-chō Station, sits you down in a Tokyo publisher's office surrounded by Olympics posters and magazine covers (all quite recognizable), lets you walk by the Hikawa-maru at night. An idealized glow permeates everything, but it only enhances the sense of locatedness that this movie provides.

I like Ghibli's kid movies. I really do. But I get most excited when I see the company pushing the limits of what animation has traditionally been considered capable of doing. Omoide poroporo おもひでぽろぽろ (Only Yesterday) might be their greatest achievement in this regard: while kids appear in the story, it's all about an adult woman thinking through events in her childhood in order to make sense of her present-day situation. That all this is accomplished, with perfect subtlety, through animation is a remarkable achievement, and what's more remarkable is that some parts of the story are told much more naturally than they could have been with live action. It's an argument in favor of animation as an art form unlimited by age, subject, or theme.

Kokurikozaka kara is almost like that. The story is all about adolescents, and nostalgic perspective aside there's no adult consciousness in the story reminiscing. But still, thematically it's working on a more mature level than anything Ghibli's done in years and years. It's a major work.

Ghibli: Karigurashi no Arrietty (Arietty the Borrower) (2010)

2011-08-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

Catching up on a few Japanese films we'd missed. I hadn't heard anything about this - it came out just after our Japan trip last summer, and somehow none of our family or friends in Japan had been talking about it.

Which is odd, because we normally keep up on Ghibli. Sometime I mean to write a series of posts about all their films - I've seen them all, and loved most of them. Our opinions were kind of mixed about Ponyo, I guess, and worse than mixed about the couple before that, which may be why our breaths weren't particularly bated for this one.

The Japanese title is Karigurashi no Arrietty 借りぐらしのアリエッティ, which literally translated to "Arrietty the Borrower," although it looks like it's going to be released overseas as simply Arrietty. Anyway, we were a good ten minutes into before I realized: dude, this is The Borrowers. Which I haven't read since I was, like, ten, and haven't thought about in just about as long.

So anything I say about it as it relates to the original (and to English-language film adaptations - I remember seeing one as a kid, evidently this one) is based on ancient memories, right? But here goes nothing. I remember the original as being pretty jokey about the Borrowers - like, aren't these quaint little folk? This film doesn't do that. It doesn't look down on them.

So when the dad goes out borrowing he's not some odd little cod-Victorian pilferer - he's a stern paterfamilias braving ever-present dangers to go hunting for his family (the concept works even better in Japanese than in English, since the verbs for "to hunt" and "to borrow" are homophones). He's kind of heroic, and so you can easily see why Arrietty looks up to him so much. The father-daughter relationship is really at the heart of this film (and, come to think of it, at the heart of a lot of Ghibli films).

The human boy, meanwhile, comes off as a kind of Keatsian figure - we don't know if he actually writes poems, but his illness is handled with a kind of wan picturesqueness that makes his crush on Arrietty quite believable. It meshes perfectly with the lush romanticism of the setting, which makes a rainswept backyard feel like Eden and a cobwebby crawlspace feel like a Roman ruin.

The depiction of nature in this film is one of its chief delights. It makes for some nice gags, as we hear them referring to the lawn as a forest, but mostly what we get are views of the fairylike Borrowers in close communion with flowers, leaves of grass, raindrops: I hadn't looked at grass with this much wonder since I was, well, since I was almost young enough to read The Borrowers. Pay particular attention to the way the film treats water: the jewellike texture of raindrops or dewdrops when seen close up, and the way the animators decide not to scale down the effects of surface tension, so that when Arrietty's mom pours a cup of tea it comes out as one big droplet. Very striking.

Arrietty herself, of course, is another in a long line of strong Ghibli heroines; I'm not sure, on one viewing, if I could say what if anything differentiates her from Nausicaa or San or Fio. Which doesn't meant she's an ineffective center for the film: she's just as winsome as the others.

It's on the kiddy side of Ghibli's output, to be sure, but it's one of their better ones. And it's probably the best of their attempts so far at adapting a foreign story (if you don't count Spirited Away as an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland).

Saimon Fumi: Tokyo Love Story (1988-1990)

2011-08-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Love Story 東京ラブストーリー is the name of the manga. It's a bold title, promising that the love story it tells will somehow encapsulate the city of Tokyo, at least at that particular moment. I don't know enough about Saimon Fumi 柴門ふみ's career to know if she had any right to be that ambitious in 1988. Any right, that is, other than the fact that her manga succeeds perfectly. If I had to pick one manga to be Exhibit A for the argument that manga can be Literature with that capital L, it might be this one. If I had to pick one work of literature to represent Japan in the bubble years, it might be this one.

Generically, it's a romantic comedy. It follows the conventions of this genre right down to the meet-cutes and the best-friends and the unexpected reversals, etc. It's also a seishun monogatari, in this case the very end of youth, that moment in your early 20s when you're done with college, you're working, you're out on your own with disposable income and a driver's license that says you can drink legally and there's nobody to tell you not to sleep with person X and you're wondering if all this means you should start settling down but you're having too much fun in the big city... (Mrs. Sgt. T notes that this manga is St. Elmo's Fire, and by God she's right. But it's a little more than that.)

It centers around four main characters. Nagao Kanji and his friend Mikami, who grew up together in Ehime and have now wound up in Tokyo, Nagao as a salaryman and Mikami as a med student; their friend Sekiguchi Satomi, a fellow classmate from Ehime who's now working at a kindergarten in Tokyo; and Akana Rika, an OL in Nagao's office. Nagao is a painfully sincere, good-hearted guy who's a country boy at heart, lost in the big city, and he's been in love with Sekiguchi for years but she only thinks of him as a friend. Mikami is a playboy, a dissolute son of wealthy parents, but he has, of course, a heart of gold, and he's been in love with Sekiguchi for years, too. Rika is an overseas returnee - she spent her childhood in Africa - and this is held up as emblematic of her approach to life: she has a freedom, an impatience with rules and customs, and a self-directedness that her countrymen (the manga sez) lack. She sets her sights on Nagao.

From here we get the expected love triangles in their various permutations. As a love story, what makes it work is the fact that it never feels like Saimon is extending it needlessly. It's not a very long manga as these things go, and given its popularity at the time it must have been a temptation to spin it out endlessly, but she didn't. Each development feels like it was planned from the start, adding new depth and complexity to each character and their relationships. And so it succeeds as a romantic comedy. You really root for each of these people - if you're open to this genre at all - and you laugh and cry along with them as they fall in and out of love.

But what makes it work as literature (and what is literature? whatever you want it to be; in this case what I want it to be is something that makes me think, something that says something, something that somehow transcends itself) is how elegantly each of the characters represents this particular moment. She's writing during the later bubble years, just before things went to hell, and so her characters are effortlessly affluent and enjoy the best of everything. (There's more than a little Gatsby in here, too.) And it's not just unprecedented material freedom that this manga captures: it's the utter freedom from tradition.

Sex is a fact in this manga; it's not particularly explicit, but it portrays characters thinking about sex with an openness, a matter-of-factness, that feels quite fresh. Of course it's not precisely new, and it's not universal either: part of the subtlety of the book is how it brings out a tension between the sexual fastness of Tokyo and the perceived conservatism of the countryside. And of course Tokyo in literature has been sexually fast for decades - it's something each new generation discovers to its delight and shock, at least since Tanizaki's day. (But then, every generation thinks it was the one to discover sex.)

Rika is held up as the exemplar of all of this fast Tokyo-osity. At one point Nagao even says she's Tokyo itself. Which means that of course she's yet another take on the age-old theme of the moga. But it's the specificity of the character that is so powerful: the details of her position in the company, the work she's expected to do, how she does it; her ease with fashion, international travel, communication in English; the way she represents for the men in the company a kind of consumption-based sexually-inflected freedom that both fascinates and threatens them. All of this makes her a compelling new character, and simultaneously a perfect expression of the place of Tokyo in the cultural imagination in the late '80s. There was, and is, a dynamic in Japanese culture that sees Tokyo as somehow un-Japanese (despite the metro area being home to something like a quarter of the population), something to be shunned, even as it's plainly something that attracts vast numbers of people. Rika is all that.

Which is why it's so wonderful that this manga doesn't punish her. This manga doesn't look at Tokyo with horror. Rika isn't an aberration to be contained. Saimon's vision of contemporary Japan is big enough to have room for Rika just as she is - just as Saimon accepts (depicts with loving surehandedness) Nagao's awkwardness as a common reaction to the newness of someone like Rika.

I could go on. This manga is rich in theme, character psychology, dramatic detail. And it's something to behold visually, as well: Saimon's art is just light enough to deliver the comedy, while being just detailed enough to sustain the seriousness. And on top of it all she has a great eye for fashion. This is exactly how people dressed in Tokyo offices in 1989. That reaching for a '20s kind of elegance - the scarves, the corduroy, the culottes and baggy suits. It not only captures the era, but it resonates nicely with the characters' desire to be grown up.

Tezuka Osamu: Dororo (1967-1968)

2011-08-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

The line on Dororo どろろ, which Tezuka Osamu 手塚治虫 serialized from 1967 to 1969 in Shūkan Shōnen Sunday 週刊少年サンデー and then Bōken-ō 冒険王, is that it was an attempt to compete with people like Shirato Sanpei 白土三平 (by writing a dark, bloody samurai piece) and Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる (by peopling it with traditional and traditional-seeming monsters), and that it was a failure.

The story revolves around two main characters. One is Hyakkimaru, a youthful swordsman who was born with basically every horrible physical handicap one can imagine: no arms, no legs, no eyes, no ears, no nose, etc. This is because his father, a lord of samurai, had made a deal with a collection of 48 demons that he'd sacrifice his newborn son in exchange for the power to conquer Japan. Each demon, he said, could take a part of his son. And so they did. The boy survived, but his father cast him adrift in a basket on a river. The boy was found and raised by a kindly physician who made artificial limbs for him, with special effects: he could take his arms off to reveal sword, he had chemical weapons hidden in his fake leg, etc (yes, shades of Mighty Atom). To boot, the boy learned that he could compensate psychically for his lost senses - talk, see, smell, hear, etc. mentally. When he sets out on his own, the boy, known as Hyakkimaru ("Hundred Demons"), learns that he has a special talent for fighting and killing monsters, and that each time he does, he regains one of his stolen body parts. So he's on sort of a quest to rebuild himself by conquering all the monsters.

Early on he gains a sidekick, a little boy named Dororo whose parents were Robin Hood-type populist robbers betrayed by a greedy sidekick. Dororo is an orphan, and a little runt, but he prides himself on his burgling abilities, calling himself the best thief in Japan, and sets his sights on Hyakkimaru's sword (not the one in his hand, the normal one he carries at his side). Thus they team up to travel the land and fight monsters...

It's not a bad setup, and Tezuka is a natural storyteller, so the tale never lags. It's always interesting. But. It has several fatal flaws. One of them is Dororo himself. Unlike Hyakkimaru, he doesn't really have a story arc. He has a back story, and it provides some hooks for further episodes, but it's never clear what Tezuka wants to do with him as a character. And, more importantly, he's just annoying. He's a standard-issue spunky boy hero, which is fine in some contexts, but here he's as cloying as the little boy in the second Indiana Jones movie. He's out of place here - his presence shows that Tezuka either wasn't fully committed to telling an adult story like his competitors, or just didn't know how.

The main problem with Dororo is that Tezuka just comes up short. Again, he's a good enough storyteller that he can keep the reader interested, but he doesn't have the deep feel for samurai-type stories that Shirato did, nor for yōkai that Mizuki does. The story feels derivative, and more than that it feels jokey toward its material in an inappropriate way. Part of this comes down to the art: Tezuka famously never quite outgrew the Disneyish character-design on which he had built his career. Much later than this series he finally managed to temper it enough to enable it to tell serious stories, but at this point he's still all-out cute. There's a disconnect here, considering that he's amped up the violence to compete with Shirato. Seeing cute li'l Dororo cavorting amidst all that blood'n'guts is frankly a little disturbing.

But it's not all a question of style. Like I say, it's also a question of feel. Mizuki took the idea of yōkai and used it as a way to explore mood and atmosphere: even with all the gags in his Kitarō series, there's an amazing variety of creepiness afoot. And of course it goes beyond that: he uses yōkai to satirize the present, preserve the past, suggest a whole alternate take on Japanese cultural history... In Dororo, Tezuka seems to see yōkai as nothing but scary obstacles for his heroes to overcome. His monsters don't have the extra dimensions that Mizuki's have.

The same can be said for his treatment of the medieval setting. Given Tezuka's vaunted humanism one might have expected him to find a lot to love in the ninjō heavy conventions of the jidaigeki. I'm not sure I can put my finger on why it doesn't work, but his samurai are one-dimensional, and so are his peasants. His treatment of the feudal social system feels preachy, not rich with ambiguity like Kurosawa's (another of his obvious models here - the tip-off is an early scene in an abandoned temple gate strongly reminiscent of the one in Rashomon).

Tezuka has, of course, a towering reputation in manga, and so it's worth reading any of his work you can get your hands on. I've read all or parts of six or seven of his series - not a big proportion by any means - and I have to say, I find him kind of hit or miss. When he's in his comfort zone of kiddie adventure comix, he's untouchably brilliant. When he strays out of it - not so much. Above I mentioned the Indy Jones movies, and in fact I've come think of Tezuka as being a lot like Spielberg: a genius in a field that was at the time not well respected, who pushed himself to work in well-respected fields to mixed results.

Yoshimoto Banana: Argentine Hag (2002)

2011-08-23T19:00:00.001-07:00

There’s one other novel by Banana that’s been published in English, although this is so scarce as to almost not count. Her 2002 novel Aruzenchin babā アルゼンチンババア was translated by Sawa Fumiya 澤文也 as Argentine Hag. I don’t know anything about Sawa except that he studied at SOAS; that probably explains the Britishisms that pepper this translation; that’s fine.

This was the third of Yoshimoto’s highly-visible collaborations with Nara Yoshitomo. I suspect it’s the most elaborate (Hard-boiled was just a normal hardback with some illustrations) but I haven’t seen the original/deluxe edition of the second yet, Hinagiku no jinsei ひな菊の人生. I understand it’s pretty serious.

This one, if you get the deluxe hardback, is a pretty serious production. Nara contributes illustrations and/or photographs for nearly every single page, and the whole thing is presented in a very sturdy case. Impressive. And part of this package is that the story is presented bilingually with a facing-page English translation by Sawa.

With all these fireworks, one might reasonably expect the story itself to be the least of the attractions, but in fact the Banana rises to the occasion. The story starts out as Typical Yoshimoto Plot #1-C, “girl narrator loses mother, bonds with father, forms atypical family unit.” That is, the narrator’s mother dies, and her father takes up with the local cat lady, an old lady in town who used to teach tango (this is only a few years after Shall We Dance, remember) and who, partly as a result of this, is nicknamed the Argentine Hag, living in the Argentine Building. (Like Happy Together, this really doesn’t have all that much to do with Argentina itself.) Narrator is freaked out at first, but comes to discover that said Hag is actually a really interesting, engaging, and spiritually uplifting person. Epiphany.

But it’s handled extremely well this time. Yoshimoto combines these familiar elements with some of her late-‘90s interest in spirituality, and unlike in Amrita the results here are quite fascinating. The father, an ex-stonemason who had specialized in tombstones, moves in with the Hag and becomes fascinated by mandalas, eventually constructing a huge one on the roof of the Argentine Building. With the Hag represented as the center of the universe. This motif resonates beautifully with Nara’s art, which doesn’t use any mandala motifs per se, but which includes not only his usual pouty girls but also semi-abstract photos of plants, starry skies, luminously mundane suburbscapes, etc., enough to make you feel like you’re getting, in bits and pieces, a mandala of sorts…

So the story is worthy of the presentation, and the presentation enhances the story. The design of the book is very careful in this regard to make sure that images match up with the text; colored type and colored paper are also employed to give you the feeling that each page is its own world, its own new experience.

Which raises the question, however, of: why the English? I don’t believe this was designed for export. It was probably available in a few museum shops or boutiques in Portland or Williamsburg, but even then I suspect the thing was meant to be experienced as an objet, rather than as a story. I say this because the care that was put into making sure the text and the images match up was only given to the Japanese text, not the facing English translation, which typically lags two or three pages behind the Japanese. If all you’re reading is the English, the careful balance is utterly destroyed, and you may find yourself wondering how indeed the images are meant to relate to the text.

More importantly for my purposes, the translation is mediocre at best. It’s fairly accurate, in that it’s clear that the translator understood the original Japanese – since the translator is a native speaker, that’s to be expected. What he lacks is much sense of colloquial English – even though a few Britishisms are thrown in to suggests naturalness, the prose still feels stiff and textbookish. And, furthermore, doesn’t pay much attention to paragraph breaks in the original. It reads, in other words, like a translation that was prepared as part of a package aimed Japanese readers, not English readers. It’s a translation to be looked at, not read.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

2011-08-22T04:40:00.001-07:00

Aviator Books, in the International Wing of the San Francisco Airport, is the best bookstore I've ever encountered in an airport. I can't sleep on airplanes, and I've stopped listening to any music I care about because the noise of the engines gets in the way, so I get a lot of reading done. I read the Ishiguro book I just blogged about on a flight to Tokyo last week, and during my layover in SFO I could tell I was going to finish it before hitting Setagaya-ku, so I went hunting for a bookstore. Aviator had more attractive things for the literary-minded than I had hoped for, and I settled on The Great Gatsby. Had about twenty pages left in it when I got to my in-laws' house, so: that worked out well.

And now I'm sitting in our hotel in Kyoto trying to think of something intelligent to say about it. I've got nothing. It's one of those books that everybody loves, and so do I, and I'm sure I love it for the same reasons everybody else does. The way it mingles wisdom about material wealth and worldly glamor with an honest human love of same; the way it lays bare American obsessions with origins, with self-reinvention, with status and place; the way it does all this in some of the most glorious English ever written.

I guess it's something, though, if I can say I love it now. I don't think I've read it since high school (required reading, sophomore year), and I didn't have much patience with it then. A) I didn't appreciate language for its own sake then (despite pretensions to poetry), and B) I was in my full-on anti-materialist hippie phase, and didn't have any patience for the narrator's patience with Gatsby and Daisy.

Like, these are shallow people, and Nick Carraway knows that, but he's attracted by their glamor anyway. By their what Gatsby says (in just one of the novel's immortal lines) he hears in Daisy's voice: money. I didn't get this when I was young. I figured you either bought that stuff or you didn't; it was black or white. You know, that's youth. Now, as a wizened (not necessarily wise) old dude, I'm all about the conflicted feelings, the self-contradictory attitudes, the loving what you don't necessarily approve of. It strikes me as being about as close as you can get to a summary of the human condition.

Fitzgerald nails it.

Kazuo Ishiguro: When We Were Orphans (2000)

2011-08-20T04:09:00.000-07:00

And this isn't how you do it.

I'm on record as having hated The Unconsoled, Ishiguro's previous book, but still I had high hopes for this one. I seemed to remember it having gotten good reviews, and it came highly recommended by at least one person whose opinion I quite respect. And: I knew that with this book Ishiguro, for the first but not last time, had decided to flirt with genre fiction. In this case, the detective story.

The fact that The Unconsoled had been such a dismal misstep didn't concern me: I was entirely prepared to see it as the kind of experiment that, while not successful in itself, paved the way for future successes. Well.

At first that's precisely what When We Were Orphans felt like to me: the kind of achievement that pre-Unconsoled Ishiguro wouldn't have been able to pull off. From the start it's clear that we're, yet again, dealing with an unreliable narrator - a narrator whose self-deceptions it's our challenge to unravel. But because of the monstrously unmoored quality of the previous novel it's not clear quite what our basis for judging the narrator of this novel is: what is the nature of reality, of normality, in When We Were Orphans? We need to know this to know how far his narrator, Christopher Banks, deviates from it. In other words, the previous book casts a shadow of uncertainty over this one, and it's to this work's benefit, at least at first: there's the sense that the book could go off in unexpected directions at any moment. And since the plot here is quite straightforward and coherent, that sense of uncertainty is a good thing. It provides a frisson of subtextual suspense that the first three books didn't have.

But. When We Were Orphans falls apart in the second half, precisely when it should be at its best.

Banks is a self-styled Sherlock Holmes-type detective between the wars. He was born and partly raised in Shanghai, but sent home to England as a boy when both his parents were kidnapped. The kidnapping was never solved, and now as an adult, in 1937, he decides it's time to go back to Shanghai and solve their disappearance. This, of course, brings him back to Shanghai just as the Japanese are invading China, giving Banks and the reader a front-row seat for this historical tragedy. Banks's connection to it is personal, not just because he was born in Shanghai, but because his best friend as a child was a Japanese boy who lived next door to him.

There's a lot of potential here for social-historical critique, contrasting the International Settlement of which Banks is a product with the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens, exploring the distance between the behavior of the Japanese army in the '30s and Banks's knowledge of his friend in the '10s, etc. And Ishiguro does pursue some of this. But it's largely undercut by what he's trying to do with his narrator's self-deception.

Simply put, Banks is so obsessed with his parents' disappearance that he's completely unable to see past it to what's going on in Shanghai when he returns. The second half is dominated by a long set piece in which Banks ventures outside the International Settlement in search of a kidnappers' safe-house where he thinks his parents are being held. The invasion is in full swing, with much of the city lying in ruins and the dead and dying filling the streets, and all of this is described to us, but Banks doesn't seem to register it (despite the fact that he's doing the describing). All he can think about is locating the safe-house; the battle and its casualties are mere annoyances to him, obstacles. At one point he stumbles across a Chinese army outpost and demands of an English-speaking officer that he provide men to help him in his wild-goose chase, despite the fact that every last soldier is needed to defend the city.

It's pretty clear that what Ishiguro is doing here is satirizing the solipsism of empire, the cluelessness of Europeans in Asia who thought the world revolved around them. And that's certainly a thing worthy of satire. But this didn't work for me as satire - Banks's self-delusion is just too hard to believe. Even the most oblivious expat would have noticed the bombs going off next to him. It's clumsy.

And it's undercut by the way Ishiguro has other characters interact with Banks. Banks demanding that the Chinese officer provide men is satire - we immediately see Banks as the white imperialist ordering other races to serve him instead of themselves. But why does Ishiguro have the officer comply? If this is part of the satire it's even less effective. And, curiously, the scenes in which the officer complies don't feel like satire - the officer seems to have heard of Banks's parents' kidnapping, and seems more than willing to lead him around the city for hours. It's one thing to posit, as part of the satire, subject peoples trying to please their colonial masters, but this is a bit heavy-handed...

And why do all the foreigners in Shanghai greet Banks with the assumption that he's going to somehow defuse the tension between China and Japan? Several times people refer to the great work that he's there to carry out, and oh yes, he's also going to solve his parents' case - and why does everybody know about that, too? Especially when it's revealed at the end what really happened to them, it hardly seems the kind of thing that would still be on the foreign community's mind twenty years later, while bombs are going off all around them.

The only way to explain much of the book is to conclude that Banks is not just in a state of denial about certain things, like the narrators of Ishiguro's first three books, but outright delusional - in this sense the resonances with The Unconsoled become dismaying as the book goes on, because the way things just don't add up means either that the narrator is nuts (which the book doesn't seem to support) or the world is...

So, to sum up. As a satire of British imperialism this is weak, and as a depiction in fiction of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai it's distracted. On both counts that's a shame, because there's a deeply coruscating novel to be written about the foreign community in Shanghai at this time - it's a rich subject.

Meanwhile, as an examination of a self-deluding character it falls short of the achievements of Ishiguro's first three books, because it's impossible in the end to figure out exactly how Banks is deluding himself. (For about a hundred and fifty pages in the middle of the book I had an entire alternate scenario worked out in which we learned in the end that Banks was actually ethnically Chinese or Japanese and had been adopted by white parents and raised in the English way - that would have explained a lot of the odd expectations people seemed to have of him, as well as a number of other details - and I think I would have liked that book better!)

Perhaps worst of all, as a detective novel it's a complete failure. Now, I get that Ishiguro wasn't trying to write a straight detective novel: rather, it's an Ishiguro novel with a main character who happens to be a detective. Nevertheless I think Ishiguro is playing with the conventions of the detective novel - he gives us a mystery, puts a detective there to solve it, and in the end he does provide a solution to the mystery. But the solution is simply ridiculous, and the detective does so little detecting that it's impossible to believe that he's the celebrated sleuth that everybody else in the novel seems to admit he is.

Yeah. I'm afraid I just don't get this one. I still have two by Ishiguro to go - I hope he gets better.

Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

2011-08-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

First things first: in the Coen Brothers film of this that's playing in my mind, Adrian Brody plays Landsman and Sarah Silverman plays Bina. I won't take no for an answer.

Another summer, another cold-weather noir. Just a coincidence; as is the fact that the last few books I've read in English have all been crime/mystery/noir/thriller type things. Michael Chabon, whose career I've been aware of for a while, although this is the first thing of his I've gotten around to reading. The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007). I probably would have read it even if I'd never heard of Chabon: the cover is one of the coolest pieces of graphic design I've seen in years.

It's a masterpiece on more levels than I can do justice to in a blog post. As an alternate history it's tantalizing, giving a glimpse of a present that could have been but isn't (but at the same time is too, if you know what I mean); and the achievement here is all the more impressive because it's a noir. The Sitka, Alaska that Chabon imagines as a Jewish metropolis on the West Coast is required, by the rules of the genre if nothing else, to be a dark and dangerous place, full of festering evil and squalor. And it is: but somehow Chabon also manages to make you wish the place really existed.

(Is it just that one really, really wishes for a place, in contemporary America, where you can wear fedoras and listen to jazz-rock klezmer and have it be a mainstream pursuit? Is it [somewhat less facetiously] that one suspects that a densely packed city of four million in the Pac Northwest would have an interesting effect on the cities we've already got? What would Seattle, Portland, Vancouver be like with a megalopolitan Sitka up north? The urbanist in me is intrigued.)

As alternate history it's also, of course, really a secret history of this timeline, our own, and as such it's - well, tantalizing is the word I'll use here, too, because of the way Chabon keeps his critique of contemporary America in view, even in reach, but just out of grasp. With much of the Jewish immigration of the war and postwar years diverted, seemingly, to Sitka, Chabon's alternate America of 2007 is a much more Gentile place, which seems to have contributed to an even stronger tendency toward Christianist politics than we were already seeing in 2007. So his take on what the rest of the US is like, outside of Sitka, is pretty clear, and yet hardly fleshed out at all - all we get are glimpses, off-hand remarks. We're left wanting much more, but this frustration forces us to concentrate that much harder on the details we do have, which in turn drives home Chabon's critique. This is how you do it.

As a noir...well, I posted that bit about Walter Mosley's writing style partly in preparation for this post. Mosley's style is awesome, but not particularly original: he's employing what I think we'd all agree is the standard thriller style. The hallmark of which is functionality: first of all, tell us what happens. Keep it simple and vivid, so the reader is never knocked out of the story, is pulled along powerfully to the end. It doesn't have to be Hemingway-sparse, but embellishments should be kept to a minimum: terse and wry. Mosley does this style extremely well, but he didn't invent it; in fact, perhaps the central pleasure of the Rawlins books is in how he appropriates this style and adapts it to a black narrator so that it takes on whole new meanings.

Chabon doesn't write like that. His sentences are embellished, adorned, wrought. There's something to knock you out of the story every few lines, some clever turn of phrase or elegantly complicated formulation of thought. You have to read his paragraphs twice sometimes to get the gist. This shouldn't work - it should feel like what it is, a literary writer flirting with a genre that most would consider beneath him, and ignoring (perhaps through ignorance) one of its central conventions.

But in fact he makes it work. The plot and the subtext are quite absorbing enough to compensate for the prose's unwillingness to let you race through it, and the prose itself is beautiful. It comes bearing its own gifts.

A randomly-selected sentence from p. 3:

According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy.

We've already, in the first couple of pages, had to get used to Chabon's decision to narrate the book in the present tense, not a bad choice aesthetically by any means but still a deviation from the norm that takes some getting used to. And we're still trying to process the perfectly evocative but determinedly unexplained details that bring Sitka to such vivid life, such as the fact that Landsman's drink of choice is plum brandy - what is this, and what does it mean? So the sentence is already carrying a lot of weight - and then he goes and tosses in this image of the man's moods as a set of tubes and crystals - evoking a home-made radio, perhaps? An unfamiliar image in 2007, to say the least.

So, yeah, I had to read this one twice. But what did I get when I did? The moods-as-primitive-radio comparison is a nice one, and the image of bashing those delicately-assembled parts to bits with a hammer - an improvised one, no less - is a great one for reckless drinking (implying impatience with one's inability to get the radio to work, to pick up the signal one wants, to play soothing music? his moods are uncooperative, and so he breaks them?). And the image-quality of the sentence - tubes and crystals (which we can't help but imagine shattering), not just "liquor" but "hundred-proof plum" (nice alliteration) "brandy" (nice rhythm) - is great. This is intense writing. Good stuff.

What this book is, is a classic example of a, like I say, literary writer flirting with a lowly genre (or two or three), and flouting its conventions (some of them), and coming up with something that works anyway, pleases anyway, both as genre fiction and serious literature. This is how you do it.

Walter Mosley: Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002)

2011-08-16T03:51:00.000-07:00

Here's why I love Walter Mosley:

BobbiAnne had big, upstanding breasts and broad shoulders, crystal blue eyes and a stomach that protruded just slightly. All of this worked to make her more attractive as the moments went by. She was the kind of girl who would turn beautiful on you overnight.

This is from p. 119 (Warner paperback) of Bad Boy Brawly Brown, the seventh Easy Rawlins book, and Mosley's return to the series in 2002 after a five year break. It's a good book, maybe not the best in the series but a worthy entry. And I love it for that.

But mostly what I love is his writing. This is the real hardboiled deal. That's a perfect paragraph. Look how it progresses. The first sentence is concrete description - carefully chosen details that make it so you can see BobbiAnne in your mind's eye. And what details - they establish BobbiAnne as something other than your run-of-the-mill beauty (of which there are none in Mosley - they're all unique, like this). The second sentence wastes no time in moving from the concrete and factual into the mind of the observer, the narrator Easy, as he responds to these details. We're in the middle of the stream of his consciousness - time's passing, and his perceptions are changing - but there's utter clarity about all of it. And the third sentence completes the move from the particular to the universal, as Mosley delivers to us one of those classic noir statements about existence: that some girls will turn beautiful on you overnight. And all that that implies, not just about sex, but about the whole shebang.

I see two main thematic developments in this installment of the series. One is external: it's 1964, and part of Easy's milieu is the emerging Black Power movement. Not quite called that yet, but still it's something more assertive than MLK, and more streetwise than the beatnik Garveyites that he's encountered before. You can sense Mosley laying the groundwork here for an assessment, through Easy's eyes, of the black experience of Mosley's own (b. 1952) formative years.

The other is internal. Mouse is dead, or so everybody thinks throughout this book. It happened at the end of the 5th book, and that's why we took the detour into the past of Gone Fishin'. Hints are dropping right and left that maybe he's not really dead - nobody's seen the body - but what's most important is that Easy thinks he's dead, and that it's his (Easy's) fault.

Which means that throughout this book he's dealing with that guilt. But what's more interesting is that he starts to hear Mouse's voice in his head. Up to now he's had Mouse at his side as the Stagger Lee figure: Easy knows he's only survived this long because of Mouse, and Mouse's implicit (often explicit, actually) threat of violence. But Mouse's presence has also allowed Easy to distance himself from the violence of his life. Now, with Mouse gone, not only does Easy have to consider how to survive without that threat, he finds himself urging himself, in Mouse's voice, to do the violence that Mouse would have done. Kill him, Mouse urges in encounters with cops or thugs. This is new for Easy, and worrisome. He's internalized Mouse - internalized the threat of violence and destruction. The stakes for Easy all along have been: can he survive without losing his soul? Having Mouse in his head raises those stakes considerably.

James Church: Hidden Moon (2007)

2011-08-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

Second in the Inspector O series, after A Corpse in the Koryo. I won't bother to try and summarize the plot, because I don't think I understand it. Something about a bank robbery and a coup attempt and a Scottish intelligence agent who isn't. More than most thrillers, a certain amount of haziness in the details of the plot is to be expected here, or maybe lauded: the subtext of this series is how in a totalitarian state you can't trust anything. Everybody lies to everybody about everything. Communication is a matter of parsing lies. If you don't understand, in the end, just exactly what's gone down, well: welcome to the club.

To describe the situation as Kafkaesque is maybe too obvious - Kafka, after all, is one of the great progenitors of the spy novel. But I think Church is hoping we'll be put in mind, not just of the great tradition of espionage thrillers that preserve and expand upon Kafka's wicked insights into the absurdist character of the modern state, but of Kafka himself. I think that's what's going on with the name of his main character, Inspector O. "O" is a perfectly serviceable, even common surname in Korean. Therefore, the Inspector's appellation in these books isn't an initial or a code name: it's just his name. But the reader, I'd argue, can't help but be reminded of Kafka's ubiquitous K - can't help but think of O as an initial or a code name. And if we do we may be reminded of things like The Trial or The Castle, and we may reach the conclusion that life in a totalitarian state like this so oppresses the individual, so alienates him (or her) from his (or her) own desires, that one's own identity becomes a code-name, an alias. Everybody lies about everything.

I loved the first book. Is it a worthy sequel? Pretty much. The tone is a bit lighter - O's narration is less mordant and more in the vein of black humor, and he and his new superior even engage in some banter. On the one hand I found this a little less richly involving than the pervasive melancholy and sobriety of the first book. But this kind of gallows humor certainly isn't inappropriate or even unexpected in depictions of this kind of society. It fits.

Other than the humor, not much has changed about O. His tics and his opinions are the same. The most memorable of the former is his habit of carrying around scrap bits of wood in his pockets and keeping them in his desk drawers; in idle moments or times of stress he'll sand them or just finger them. It's an effective device in establishing him as somebody who in a different time and place would have been a cabinetmaker, say. He's the Reluctant Warrior; there's also a resonance with the East Asian Confucian ideal of the scholar-gentleman with his public life and his private creative, wholesome pursuits.

His opinions - well, the thing I like most about this character is how neatly he resists being co-opted into a narrative of "poor North Koreans yearning to be free." I mean, basically the whole point of the series is to help us understand how somebody like O can chafe against the restrictions and privations that his country gives him as a patrimony but at the same time be quietly, fiercely patriotic when it comes to serving that country. A recurring theme is his encounters with Western intelligence agents who assume that O is just champing at the bit to defect, when in fact that's the last thing he has in mind. He loves his country. The wood ties in with this, too, I think - he's conscious of the kinds of trees that grow in North Korea, their uses and personalities, and there's something symbolic about his penchant for remaining in physical contact with them, even when surrounded by concrete and asphalt. Like, his love for his country doesn't have much to do with the state superstructure that currently stands on it - it goes deeper, into the trees and rocks.

Rebecca Reider: Dreaming the Biosphere (2009)

2011-08-14T10:44:00.002-07:00

We were in Tucson a couple of months ago, visiting the 'rents. Every time we go, we visit a few more of the places listed in our guidebook. This time we hit Bisbee, Tombstone, and some of the historic spots in downtown Tucson.

We also drove out to Biosphere 2. I had a vague memory of this from news reports in the early '90s, as many do: it's a totally sealed manmade ecosystem, a kind of earthbound spaceship out in the desert. A bunch of scientists locked themselves inside for a couple of years to see if they could survive on nothing but what they could grow inside the facility. If you remember this much, you probably remember something of the media narrative, as well: what had started out with such high hopes and idealism ended in failure and ignominy.

First, the place. In purely architectural terms, it's fascinating. We have a colleague, an architectural historian, who specializes in utopias, and this is one. It looks like a spaceship out in the desert - between the geodesic domes and the greenhouses, the airlock through which you enter and the sky-reaching towers, it makes you think of Star Trek more than anything. Not a ludicrous comparison, either: remember that certain iterations of the Star Trek myth involve things like hydroponics bays, spaceship gardens - manmade ecosystems. Biosphere 2 was meant to experiment with the idea that humankind might be able to engineer its way away from dependence on the planet, by recreating it under controlled conditions. Utopian.

And, it's beautiful. From a scientific standpoint this is irrelevant, but from a Utopian one it's not: from the outside, from the inside, the facility appeals to the dreamer, the aspirer, in the viewer. It makes you want to believe.

In the gift shop they had a number of books, and this looked like the best, so I bought it. Rebecca Reider's 2009 Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities. It's an amazing book, doing so much more than it promises.

One thing the book is: a media critique, specifically a coruscating look at how the US mass media (mis)reports on science. Her critique here echoes, intentionally or not, a lot of what has been pointed out about the way the media treats politics: shoehorning everything into a narrative, a simplistic storyline with heroes and villains, winners and losers. In the case of Biosphere 2, what that means is that science reporters wrote positively of the project as long as it fit easily into the mold of exploration, pioneers, heroic experimenters - but when it became easier to fit the project into a different mold, one of cheats and miscreants, the media tore down the Biospherians as quickly and eagerly as they had built them up. All of this without much effort at presenting to the public the complexity of what was really being done at the facility.

Consider: if you, like me, have only the vaguest notion of this project, but still have the general impression that it was a failure, what does that mean? That the Biospherians ended up not being able to survive their two years completely without outside help? But if this is science, if it's an experiment, how is that a failure? It produced results. It generated data. That's no failure - but popular science reporting isn't interested in that. It wants triumphs. It wants the money shot of happy plump bionauts waving and beaming as they bound out of the airlock - not emaciated, older-but-wiser people stepping hesitantly out into a world their bodies have learned to cope largely without...

The media wants telegenic alphas, not weirdos. And the Biospherians were weirdos. (More on that below.)

Another thing this book is: a critique of the way science is conducted, and most importantly funded, in contemporary academic America. Biosphere 2 was constructed with private money by a private group, but when the plug was pulled it went on the market to anybody who might be interested in doing something with it. It's a weird facility, but utterly sui generis; surely somebody can do something with it. Reider, writing in 2009, extends her story past the end of the original Biosphere project through the years when the place was leased and managed by Columbia University, and this is as fascinating a story as anything else in the book. It seems the Biosphere was always either too controlled or not controlled enough for the kind of experiments Columbia's science faculty wanted to do. It either simulated the real biosphere too closely - with too much complexity, too many natural systems interacting too unpredictably - or not closely enough, with too few variables. That's bad luck, but what Reider also manages to suggest is that Columbia wasn't willing to look at what Biosphere 2 could do. It wasn't designed as a laboratory, but as a living thing - but the kind of science that might be able to effectively utilize such a thing, she argues, doesn't fit into the small-ball, results-oriented, grant-proposal-friendly science that the current American system rewards. Not being a scientist myself I have no idea if she's right, but it sounds right - it squares with what I see in my very different corner of academia. (In this connection, I'd love to see her carry the story foreward someday. After Columbia gave up, the University of Arizona, in Tucson, leased the place, and the day we visited happened, just happened, to be the day that it was announced that Biosphere 2 had been given outright to UA. Are they doing any better? They're well placed to, not just because they're local and Columbia wasn't, but because UA people have been involved with the project for a very long time...)

What this book mostly is, to my surprise and delight: a counterculture chronicle. And this made everything else make sense. Biosphere 2 was conceived, funded, built, and inhabited by people who had been living together on a New Mexico commune called Synergia Ranch since 1969. In her telling it sounds almost like a cult, centered around the charismatic John Allen - but if Reider had used that narrative her book would have been as useless as the pop science that gave you the "Biosphere failed" narrative. She's quite sympathetic to the Synergians/Biospherians - which is not the same as saying she's "on their side." She's open to their point of view, interested in their aspirations and achievements.

So. The Biosphere was, like the Oregon Country Fair and the latter-day Grateful Dead, one of the ways in which the '60s counterculture managed to plant itself in the distinctly inhospitable soil of the '80s and '90s. It was a hippie thing.

What's the Synergian deal? It's very un-hippie - that is, not at all like what the mass media would have you think hippies were. They were Gurdjieffian rather than Learian, dedicated to a mysticism of self-improvement rather than worship or the pursuit of religious ecstasy. They taught themselves how to be architects, builders, shipwrights, scientists. Action was their thing - get out and do, then get out and do more.

Very Horatio Alger in some ways. But they were doing this in a context of communal living outside of Santa Fe - and in many ways they kept up the communal arrangement all the way up through the Biosphere years. Cooking and eating together, and performing regular group theatricals. Theater as ritual, though, as Jungian group self-analysis or therapy. Putting on masks to reveal the true face. They were, like other communes of their time and place, rejecting straight society by withdrawing from it.

So, to put it crudely, they were science hippies rather than art hippies, I guess you could say. But it was a different kind of science. It has to be admitted that if they were presenting Biosphere 2 to the media as a wholly straight-science, experimental-data-gathering sort of thing, they were being a bit disingenuous themselves, because the philosophical roots of the project were in the '70s counterculture's sense of crisis. The belief that humankind was rapidly making this biosphere, the real one, the first one, uninhabitable - polluting and destroying its systems, so that human life would one day become physically unsustainable here - not to mention cultivating political and social systems that have already made human life nearly unpalatable here...

(Well, they're not wrong.)

...and that therefore, forward-looking people needed to think about a way to get out. The "2" in Biosphere 2 means just that: the facility was designed to be humanity's second habitat, a prototype for what we'll need to build to escape the charred embers of Biosphere 1.

You can see this impulse, this vision of the future so strangely utopian and dystopian at the same time, in much of the science fiction and counterculture pop culture of the day. What is Star Trek but an acknowledgment that the situation on Earth is going to get worse before it gets better (Star Trek is a utopia that takes place after a dystopia), and that for it to get truly better we're going to need to reach beyond our own planet? Some of the better examples are more obscure - Jefferson Airplane songwriter Paul Kantner's recurring vision (in "Wooden Ships" and Blows Against The Empire) of hippies escaping straight society to literally found a new world somewhere, Neil Young's image of spaceships "flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun."

And once the media discovered that, it was all over, really. Hippies? With a bank account, and machines? God forbid.

But: as Reider notes, it may have been weird science, but that doesn't mean it wasn't science at all. She makes a case for Biosphere 2 as swashbuckling exploratory science. Build the thing and try the thing and learn what you can from that, rather than measuring every inch of ground. It's not a kind of science, again, that plays real well in grant committee deliberations, but then again, maybe Magellan's wouldn't have, either...

If there was a failure in the Biosphere project, it wasn't a scientific one, per se, at least not a biological one. The biosphere inside the facility did develop in unexpected ways, the systems did go a bit haywire, but again, all of that generates data. What went wrong in less useful ways was the social system. Reider does an excellent job of explaining how the crew locked inside the facility very quickly split into opposing factions. Real Survivor stuff. And she marshals all kinds of sociological studies to suggest that this was inevitable. Small groups will always split into factions. That, coupled with the fact that Allen was an autocrat, and the Synergians insisted on maintaining their separateness within any group of collaborators, meant that the social utopia that they had assumed would follow upon the physical one decayed even more rapidly than the physical one.

And that's what I found most interesting, even moving, about this book. I'm fascinated by the idea of idealistic groups withdrawing from mainstream society and setting up on their own. Of course in some ways it's the age-old American pattern, right? If you think England, or Boston, or St. Louis, is screwed up, don't fix it, leave. And in some ways it's the Mormon heritage to which I'm heir: the people who set up Salt Lake weren't hippies, but they were radical idealists living in a commune.

I'm fascinated, but not very hopeful, because as near as I can tell what happens when you set up on your own is that, at best, you end up more or less replicating what you left behind, just with you on top. As Euro-American society spreads across the continent it ends up not really improving on what it left behind, right? Just replicating it - if anything, with more McDonald's. Or, at worst, the community apart shades off into autocracy, cultlike organization, craziness.

But it doesnn't have to be that way. Sometimes, in a limited situation, it can work, for a while, or at least I like to think it can. It did in the parking lots of some Grateful Dead shows. It does at the OCF. And by Reider's account, it did at Synergia Ranch. Not that I'd want to live in any of those places - but the beauties you can glimpse in those times and places are things I wouldn't want to live without having available to think about.

(But I may change my mind tomorrow.)

Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

2011-08-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

Somehow missed this until now: Sukiyaki Western Django スキヤキ・ウエスターン　ジャンゴ, cult fave Miike Takashi 三池崇史's 2007 film. Actually I have to admit this is my first Miike film - I'd always been turned off by rumors of the extreme gore in his films. And this has it, but it's still a brilliant movie. I want to see more.

I'm glad I went into this knowing basically nothing, because I was utterly unprepared for the Heike monogatari references. When guest star Quentin Tarantino opened his mouth and, in his best rawhide drawl, recited the opening lines of the classic medieval war tale, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

So, to be clear, this film is a classic Edo-style naimaze, thoroughly intertwining two separate and distinct story-worlds. Miike is combining an homage to Kurosawa's Yojinbō (complete to the calligraphy style of the opening credits) with a retelling of the Tale of the Heike. Actually it's a little more delightfully weird than that, because he approaches Yojimbo through its unauthorized spaghetti-Western remake, A Fistful of Dollars. Django is, then, a Japanese appropriation of the Italian appropriation of the Hollywood Western. (Why sukiyaki? Because, I think, the the more natural Japanese analog to spaghetti, ramen, had already been taken by Itami Jūzō's Western pastiche Tanpopo.)

As such it's a delight: if you love these disparate cinematic and literary traditions, you'll be endlessly entertained by picking up on the references.

As a J-lit person I was of course most interested in the Heike references. The blog post I linked to above (by A Man With Tea) runs some of them down. Not only do we have the obvious, the great red army of the Heike led by Kiyomori and the great white army of the Genji led by Yoshitsune, but Miike brings several lesser characters from this cycle into his movie: Yoshitsune's lover the dancer Shizuka, his brawny retainer Benkei, and the great Genji archer Nasu no Yoichi; Kiyomori's sons Shigemori and Munemori.

There's a bit more to be said, though, I think (and I'm sure somebody somewhere has already said it). I'm pretty sure that the character of Ruriko, i.e. Bloody Benten, the female gunfighter played with such indelible charisma by Momoi Kaori, is based on the legendary Princess Jōruri (Ruriko = Jōruri), with whom Yoshitsune had an encounter early in his career (like Shizuka, she isn't part of the Heike monogatari proper, but comes up in other tales in the Heike cycle: Miike did his research).

Why is Miike overlaying Princess Jōruri with the goddess Benten, though? I haven't figured this one out yet. It seems that there's some hints of a historical connection, either because Jōruri sought to woo Yoshitsune with music and Benten is the goddess of that art, or because there's a shrine to Benten within the precincts of an old shrine in Tōhoku which is said, in legend, to have been where Jōruri died, having chased Yoshitsune up to the wild Northeast. And of course the wild Northeast is where Miike filmed this...

Another aspect of the way Miike plays with the legends here deserves mentioning. This is that he's bringing together figures from all stages of the Yoshitsune cycle. If you know the literature you'll know that Kiyomori and Yoshitsune never share the stage, so to speak: Kiyomori dies before Yoshitsune arrives on the scene. Shigemori dies, too. And, as I've mentioned, Shizuka and Jōruri don't figure in the battle narrative at all: Shizuka is only introduced after Yoshitsune has defeated the Heike and become a hunted man himself, while Jōruri is a figure from his youth, before he has ever proved himself in battle. Miike is kaleidoscoping all this together. Why?

Partly because it's fun. Okay, maybe mostly because it's fun. But I think there's more. The key is that he has Kiyomori saying (screaming), "This time I win!" The characters in this movie are conscious that they're reenacting battles that have already taken place. It's as if all the characters in the war tales have been brought back to life in a new setting to play it all out again. Which, of course, is true, in that Miike has brought them back to figure in his sukiyaki Western. But interestingly there's a provision for this in the legend, as well, in the concept of the asura, the Warring Demon that constitutes one of the Six Realms of Buddhist existence. These are creatures, just lower than humans, who spend their eternities locked in endless bloody combat, and to the medieval mind of course they provided an irresistible metaphor for, and object lesson on, the fates of warriors. Professional killers: doomed in their next incarnations, possibly, to never know peace. Certainly this is the theme of more than one Nō play, as for example Yashima, which summons up the ghost of Yoshitsune himself to present the specter (pun intended) of a warrior condemned to endlessly reenact his battles.

What Miike is doing, then, is nothing less than taking us to the Asura Realm, to see the Heike and Genji locked in eternal mutual slaughter.

Awesome.

Yamazaki Mari: Thermae Romae (2009-present)

2011-08-11T16:17:00.001-07:00

Some friends are wild about this manga, so we borrowed it and gave it a try. As usual, my wife zipped through the two volumes we borrowed in about five minutes (yukking it up the whole time), while it took me the better part of a Sunday afternoon...

The author is Yamazaki Mari ヤマザキマリ, and the title is テルマエ・ロマエ, or Thermae Romae. It's from Beam, which is a pretty dependable publisher; usually they do things that are aimed at grown-ups, and are relatively sophisticated, or at least interesting.

This is, sort of. The set-up is a lot like that in JIN, only in reverse. In ancient Rome (Hadrian's reign), we meet an architect named Lucius Modestus, who specializes in designing bathhouses. While in a public bath one day he slips through a mysterious drainhole and surfaces in a modern Japanese public bath. Astonished by everything he sees, he comes up with a great idea for the bath he's designing back in ancient Rome, and then just as mysteriously fades out of consciousness and wakes up in the bath back home.

It's a comedy, of course. It's the gags that have made it a huge hit in Japan (there's a movie planned, live action), and I have to admit they're pretty good. The art is mostly forgettable (Yamazaki employs a light, sketch-like line, which lends everything an airy, marble-like look), but good enough that a lot of the gags depend on making readers recognize similarities between the way she draws characters and the kind of Roman sculpture you've seen in school books and on public TV. Not just famous people like Hadrian, but even Lucius himself is drawn like a sculpture come to life, with comically rigid postures and facial expressions.

Some of the gags amount to no more than that, visually punning on famous statuary. Elsewhere her humor exploits the predictable situational humor of an ancient Roman showing up (naked, of course) in a modern Japanese setting. Culture shock, technology shock, etc.

And it is enjoyable, as far as that goes. I mean, I laughed at several episodes.

There's a disappointing undercurrent, though (is that a pun? can't tell). Like JIN, there's a wish-fulfillment thing going on here. Minakata Jin went back in time to introduce modern medical technology to late early-modern Japan and thus changed world history to make it appear that modern medicine depended on Japanese innovation and ingenuity. Here an ancient Roman jumps forward in time and marvels at the superior technology and ingenuity of modern Japanese bath culture, then goes back to introduce it into Ancient Rome. The manga doesn't take it seriously enough to develop this into a full-fledged alternate history of the Roman bath. But still Yamazaki is pandering to her Japanese readership's cultural nationalism, flattering them on how superior their bath culture is to Rome's.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it. If you're reduced to boasting that you're technologically and socially superior to a 2nd century CE culture, you're not really boasting at all.

Of course, the implication is that modern Japan's bath culture is also superior to that of the modern West. That's the real ax Yamazaki's grinding here. And, let me hasten to add, I don't necessarily disagree: I enjoy an onsen as much as anyone. But Japanese cleanliness vs. supposed Western dirtiness is an old Nihonjinron theme, and Yamazaki is catering to it (not so much in the manga as in her prose afterwords to each episode). And that's a little dispiriting.

Murakami Motoka's Jin (2000-2010)

2011-08-08T22:39:00.001-07:00

My mother-in-law got me hooked on this one: Jin, by Murakami Motoka 村上もとか. (The official Japanese title is JIN ー仁ー, for what it's worth.) It's a manga that ran in Super Jump from 2000 to 2010; it's set in the late Edo period and has samurai in it, and my mother-in-law knows I'm a sucker for that stuff. She sent me the first few volumes about a year and a half ago and I was hooked. Eventually she sent them all.

The story follows a surgeon in present-day Tokyo who falls and hits his head and wakes up in Edo on the eve of the Meiji Restoration. His name is Minakata Jin (thus the title). He spends six years in the past, making his way as a commoner physician in Edo, revolutionizing the practice of medicine with his 21st-century knowledge, and getting tangled up in the politics of the day.

Its flaws are many. Above all it's a Jump comic, which means that it's basically for boys. Adolescents. This shows in the way all the characters are stock, and all his friends turn out to be major historical figures that, oh hey, didn't we study that guy in history class last year? Cool! Like, it's so inevitable that he befriend Sakamoto Ryōma (every Japanese boy's favorite historical martyr) and Saigō Takamori (every Japanese middle-aged dude's favorite historical martyr) that it's almost painful when he actually does...

Then there's the transparent flag-waving fantasy aspect of it. I mean, it's a time-travel story that actually allows its protagonist to affect history, which means it qualifies as an alternate history of late 19th-century medicine as well. And in this alternate history it ends up being a Japanese physician who pioneers penicillin, modern anesthetic, brain surgery, and other revolutionary techniques. Which is clever and fun to read, but also ever-so-slightly pathetic - there's such an element of 12-year-old patriotic wish-fulfillment in seeing all these foreign advances being made by one of your own countrymen instead...

The thing is, it's a tremendously entertaining manga. Not groundbreaking, not particularly deep, but a lot of fun. The stock characters in particular I ended up enjoying, because they were deployed with such sincerity and gusto - there really was a hooker with a heart of gold, there really was a spunky pickpocket with a dangerous boyfriend, there really was a rival doctor who hated Jin's methods until Jin saved his life, there really was a stern samurai matriarch who had to be tricked into accepting his unorthodox treatment... It's all terribly old-fashioned and earnest, and quite refreshing because of it.

The art deserves special mention. In the early volumes especially Murakami has a particular quality to his lines that I really loved. There's a clarity and solidity to them, an exactness, that I find quite graceful. He's definitely working close to the realistic edge of the comics idiom, but for him that means careful shading and almost architectural exactness of line, not impressionistic sketchiness. The backgrounds are lushly detailed, the perspectives and angles all effectively chosen, and the characters are rendered with the perfect measure of cartooniness - just enough to give them more life than the backgrounds, without breaking the mood establshed by the realistic backgrounds.

The later volumes kind of drag, as the politics of the Restoration take center stage (lots of people sitting in rooms delivering expository dialogue), and the art becomes a little more generic. And the wind-up to the whole story is just kind of silly. Read the first five or six volumes and then let the story hang, telling yourself that someday you'll get around to reading the rest. It's better that way.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-08-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about Terrence Malick. Only what I read. We saw Tree of Life basically because lots of people we knew had asked us if we'd seen it yet. We came out of it quite glad we saw it.

Me partly because it plugged into something I'd already been thinking about as a result of seeing Happy Together a couple of nights before: film as something other than dramaturgy.

Tree of Life has a story, certainly, and scenes and actors and performances; but that aspect of the film is so intentionally attenuated that I came away thinking that the story (and I'm sure if you know Malick this is obvious) isn't really the point.

But that's not quite the same as saying, as I would about much of Wong Kar-Wai's work, that the patterns of imagery, or the pattern-imagery, is the main point and the story is only incidental. Rather, I came away from Tree of Life feeling that the story was of paramount importance, just not as a story. Not as drama, the way we commonly think about it. Rather, it seemed to me that this film is story as ritual - drama as ceremony, the way it began in most cultures - this film is like a mass.

Viz. The story is one of brothers growing up in Waco, Texas, in the mid 20th century: we get to know them and both of their parents. But despite some memorable specificity in several of the scenes I'd argue that we don't really get to know any of these people as individuals, but only as archetypes - the Lawgiving Father, the Lifegiving Mother, etc. And the life events they go through are presented as universal stages as well - the Oedipal stages that the firstborn son goes through, for example.

We're being shown, not specific lives, but essentialized Life. And that's why it makes perfect sense thematically (even if it's a bit jarring) for this film to digress and go back to the beginning of life, tracing evolution through, yes, the dinosaurs up to the present day. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, right? And ontogeny begets ontology, in this case: we're being shown the life of Life, as well as the life of Man, in its most essentialized outlines, to enlighten us. We're being told the Story of Life, in order to help us find some transcendent meaning in it. Just like the liturgy of the mass tells a particular story of the universe and our place in it.

I don't think I've ever seen a film do that before. At least, no film meant to be seen in theaters, rather than church rec halls or other dedicated spaces...

Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997)

2011-08-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

I'm a story person. Reading, thinking about, writing about, talking about stories is, no joke, my stock in trade. And so it's probably inevitable that my default approach to films is as stories. I guess I see filmmaking as, essentially, dramaturgy. As far back as history records, humans have acted out stories to one another; film is simply what has replaced live theater for most of us in the modern era. I know that doesn't do film justice - that it doesn't account for what's unique and specific to cinema as an art form - that film doesn't have to tell stories - but in practice, almost all films do tell stories, and so my approach serves me well almost all the time.

But every once in a while I encounter a film that doesn't tell a story, or tells it in such a way as to make it clear that dramaturgy is the furthest thing from its mind, and I'm reminded that there are other ways to look at film.

Like Happy Together. I mean, it does have a story, but two things about this film convinced me that the story wasn't quite the point. One of these things is a legitimate reason for me to think this, the other not quite so much.

The legitimate reason is what Wong's (and Doyle's) camera is interested in, which is not always, maybe not even usually, the story. It's interested in textures, patterns, views. Like the tiles in the guys' apartment - they're having a knock-down drag-out, but the viewer's eye is caught less by the action than by the oddly lush concatenation of colors and patterns and textures in the tileage on the bathroom wall. Or like the scene of Tony Leung riding around on a boat in the harbor feeling depressed: we start out feeling his pain, but the camera lingers so long on odd angles that before long we're just captivated by the black water, the blank sky, the looming shapes of boats and face. It's abstract.

The film is abstract. And, in case it's not clear, I'll say that I found it quite beautiful. Maybe the most amazing thing I've seen by Wong so far. It's just an unexpected beauty: he goes to all the trouble to film in Buenos Aires but we get virtually no cityscapes, no local color of the kind one might expect. This could have been filmed anywhere - but maybe not. Those tiles.

The second thing is not contained within the movie proper, but in the documentary on the DVD. It must be watched. If you've seen In the Mood for Love you know Wong Kar-Wai's method: he shoots far more material than he could ever use, almost all of it improvised, and settles on the story in the editing room. Here the documentary gives us nearly an hour of unused footage, and it's basically an entirely different film. New characters, new storylines for familiar characters - familiar characters being redefined. It's almost as good as the film we have.

Which was really fucking disconcerting, to tell you the truth. Because, the foregoing notwithstanding, I liked the story I thought Wong was telling: it was a moving depiction of a relationship, made all the more powerful by the fact that it was a relationship between two gay men. Like, that mattered and it didn't matter: the specificity of it, but also the universality of it. Despite the disjointedness of the narrative, you really felt like you came to know these guys.

Then you watch the doc and realize that the story you just saw was, basically, accidental. Like, depending on how you cut it, maybe these guys aren't even gay, maybe they're in Argentina for completely different reasons, maybe they're not even the main characters...

On one level it's genius: it demonstrates the illusory nature of storytelling in film. We always think we're seeing an organic story being acted out before our eyes but in fact we're only ever seeing a collage, disparate pieces that were assembled to make us think we're seeing a story. (Ever have one of those moments when you see an over-the-shoulder shot of someone talking and you remind yourself, oh yeah, that shoulder probably belongs to a stand-in? Or when you realize you're watching a stun double?)

This is Cinema 101, I know, but it's particularly easy for me to forget it. Happy Together reminded me of it.

Yoshimoto Banana: Amrita (1994)

2011-08-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

             Published in 1994 as Amurita アムリタ, translated 1997 by Russell F. Wasden as Amrita.  But that ain’t the half of it.  The genesis of the novel was a short story called “Melancholia メランコリア,” published in Kaien in 1990.  This is reprinted as the first part of Amrita, and in the original Japanese edition it’s just put there, under the title “Melancholia,” and it’s the first thing in the book, and then you turn the page and Amrita proper starts.  In other words, it’s not presented as part of the novel per se, but as a clearly related piece that, of course, no reader is going to skip.  In the English translation the title “Melancholia” is eliminated and the story is incorporated into the novel proper as the “Prologue.”  Which isn’t quite right.  When you start reading Chapter 1 (and that’s another thing: in Japanese the chapters are all given titles, but these are dropped from the translation for some reason) you find her introducing characters and situations that you already know about from the “Prologue,” and you wonder if the author has lost her mind (or the narrator, and of course that's not inappropriate in the latter case).  No, she hasn’t:  it’s merely that she’s decided not to tinker with the short story that contained the germ of the novel.  If you understand the publishing history and the relationship between short story and novel, you’re not confused, but because this information is missing from the translation, you are.  (What is it with publishers of translations in English anyway that they’re allergic to this kind of metatextual info being included?  Are they so paranoid that they think potential readers are going to be scared off if they see fine print saying “This novel was originally serialized in the magazine Kaien in 1992 and 1993”?  Any reader who would be scared off by that isn’t going to be reading the fine print anyway.  Dudes.) 

Anyway.  The “Prologue” was written as a standalone short story, and then a couple of years later (in 1992 and 1993!) she decided to serialize a long, long novel based on – continuing – that short story.  If you know your ‘90s J-lit you may be thinking of Murakami Haruki and his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first volume of which was serialized in 1992 and 1993 (the second and third volumes were written for book publication, and of course all three volumes are in one set of covers in translation), but which incorporated and continued from a short story written several years before called “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (translated in The Elephant Vanishes).  So, hey, was Banana following Haruki’s lead?  But dig:  she started serializing Amrita in January 1992, while Murakami didn’t start Wind-Up Bird until October... 

Amrita is a very long book, the longest she’s ever written, as far as I can tell.  The English translation comes to 460 pages.  Its heft marks it as her attempt at a magnum opus.  In English J-lit still seems to have a reputation for brevity, for haiku-like conciseness (how often have you read that in a jacket blurb?), but in fact Japan has historically produced some of the most massive works of literature in the world, and even today, for every slim, handsome volume of lapidary prose that makes it into English there’s a doorstop of labyrinthine storytelling that no translator wants to touch.  More to the point, even for serious writers, length is important.  Most literary writers start out with novellas – Akutagawa-Prize standard length, is how I like to think of it – but it seems that most novelists with any ambition for literary immortality produce something massive sooner or later.  Take Haruki:  his first two works, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973, were short, but then he unleashed A Wild Sheep Chase. Take Ryū:  his first two works, Almost Transparent Blue and Umi no mukō de sensō ga hajimaru 海の向こうで戦争が始まる(untranslated, but it deserves it: War Breaks Out Overseas), were short, but ten he dropped Coin Locker Babies. 

In other words Yoshimoto Banana, in 1992, probably felt like if she was going to make a career out of this novel-writing thing, if she was going to be taken seriously as a writer and not just a social phenomenon, then it was time she produced something substantial. Thus:  Amrita.  Her bid for immortality, for serious Serious Writer status. 

It’s a mess.  God, it’s a mess.  The first time I read it, right after it was translated, it convinced me to give up on Banana for a good ten years, I was so disappointed.  This time around my reaction wasn’t nearly so extreme – in fact I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected to – but I still have to say it’s a mess.  What’s changed in the interim is me, clearly:  I now have a fascination, which I didn’t have before, with big glorious messes of novels.  An ambitious failure is often more interesting to me than a perfectly-realized book of modest proportions. 

The story is told by a 28 year old woman named Sakumi who, let’s get this all down:  has a celebrity younger sister who kills herself;  lives with her twice-married, once-widowed, once-divorced mother, her grade-school-aged half-brother, her mother’s best friend Junko, and a college-aged cousin named Mikiko;  falls down some stairs and has to have brain surgery;  loses then gradually (then suddenly) regains her memory;  discovers her half-brother sees dead people and can predict UFOs;  gets into a relationship with her dead sister’s ex-boyfriend, a novelist named Ryūichirō;  visits Saipan where she, along with her boyfriend and a strange Japanese couple she meets there (an albino man and his ex-prostitute wife), feel the presence of all the Japanese soldiers who died there in the war;  meets and almost falls in love with a woman whose powers echo her brother’s;  meets and is traumatized by, but ultimately becomes picnic-friends with, the ex-boyfriend of said clairvoyant woman, a hypnotist... 

As I said, it’s a mess.  It’s pretty clear that she’s making the story up as she goes along, and for long stretches she doesn’t seem to have any idea where she wants to take it.  Then when she does get an idea and runs with it, it ends up having precious little to do with anything that came before.  Like the Saipan episode:  halfway through the novel it just appears, out of the blue, takes up a good hundred pages, builds to a nice climax, and then ends, leaving the author trying to figure out what to do next... 

The fact that there are so many characters and relationships is, I think, something else that marks this as her attempt at a magnum opus.  It’s as if she’s trying to recapitulate elements of all her work so far.  There’s a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, but cute minor character who echoes Tsugumi;  there’s the haunted writer figure, echoing N/P;  there are passages reflecting on the place of kitchens in women’s lives that clearly reach back to Kitchen;  there’s the dead sibling and the sibling’s lover motif, right out of Asleep;  I could go on.  It’s a trick that Endō Shūsaku, for example, employed in his grand-summation novel, Deep River:  reintroducing all your favorite characters and their problems in one masterful narrative.

So the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink idea isn’t itself evidence of incompetence – it’s an honorable literary technique – but in this case Banana doesn’t seem to know what to do with all these people once she introduces them.  The cousin Mikiko, for example:  she’s always there, but in the end she doesn’t do much of anything.  I imagine Banana had intended for her to have her own arc, but never got around to thinking it up... 

Part of what we’re seeing here is, I think, one of the potential pitfalls of serialized fiction.  In a commentary contained in Honjitsu no, Yoshimoto Banana 本日の、吉本ばなな – banana yoshimoto at work, 2001 (a “mook,” i.e. magazine-book, i.e. magazine-format coffee-table book), she mentions how tough it was for her to think up each installment, and how much pressure she put on herself to end each installment with a bang.  Amrita’s problems make a lot of sense if you imagine a harried writer, with lots of other projects demanding her time, realizing early on that she’s committed to telling a big story, but has no big story to tell.  She has some idea of where she wants to end up, but she doesn’t have the whole thing plotted, much less written, ahead of time, and so she has to improvise month after month. 

Some writers can do this brilliantly, and keep the whole thing building naturally toward a climax that feels organically related to where the whole thing started.  Others can make the serial format work for them, exploiting the imperative toward self-contained episodes to create a pleasant sense of disjointedness in the work – that’s how I think of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  He may be improvising, but since that’s the unique flava of a Murakami work anyway, it doesn’t matter.  In some ways I like him best when he’s just spinning his wheels. 

Banana isn’t quite in that league, it appears, or at least she wasn’t back in 1992 and 1993, and she doesn’t seem to have attempted anything like this since.  What she came up with feels episodic in a bad way:  epiphanies are repeated, the narrator seems to discover the meaning of life and her place in the world a good half-dozen times, and never seems to realize she already knew it.  The tension peaks in the middle, at the end of the Saipan sequence, but about fifty pages from the end she decides to introduce two more new characters and make them the catalyst for the plot’s resolution.  Structurally, narratively, it’s a mess. 

But, strangely, that didn’t bother me this time.  It’s all an interesting mess:  there’s lots of business, more than in the usual Banana novel.  You know, one damn thing after another.  Sometimes it’s puzzling, but sometimes it clicks, and this time around I had fun watching Banana wrestling with this unwieldy plot she was spinning.  She gives it the old college try, she really does, and that made the book a lot more interesting to me than some of her more polished works.  Ambition I find attractive, and this book has it. 

It has thematic ambition, too, but in a way that I found to be a weakness of the book, not a strength.  She may well have been, in the Saipan sequence, trying to come to terms with Japan’s WWII experience, but if so the result is just maddening:  she has endless reserves of pity for the Japanese who died there, but no awareness whatsoever that there might have been other people on Saipan at one point who might not have wished the Japanese to be there... 

Luckily (!) she seems mostly uninterested in political and historical questions;  mainly she’s after the Meaning of the Universe.  At this point it’s going to be helpful to explain the title:  amrita is Sanskrit.  As one of the characters in the novel explains it (p. 445), it was “a divine nectar, something the gods indulged in by guzzling the stuff down.  They say that when you let the liquid gush through you, you’ve actually achieved life...”  This is the narrator’s boyfriend the novelist speaking, because he’s decided to call his new novel – which is based on the life of the narrator herself – Amrita.  (No, it’s not suggested that this novel-within-the-novel is in fact the novel we hold in our hands.  She’s not that cute.) 

In other words, this nectar of the gods, this elixir of life, this liquid euphoria and divine communion wine, is the subject of the book.  And on this level I really do think Amrita works as Banana’s magnum opus, the fullest statement of her biggest theme. 

Part of what marks her as a shōjo writer – John Treat enunciated this in a famous article – is the intensity of the emotions she depicts.  They’re intense, and yet that intensity seems to come from something other than hard-earned experience.  They feel like the romantic imaginings of poetic youth – it’s an intensity that can only come from the imagination.  And so at her worst Banana’s works can feel awfully glib about their emotional content – I think that’s what so turned me off of her in my late 20s, when I came to feel that my experience wasn’t bearing out the descriptions on life that her youthful imagination had led her to make, if that makes any sense.  That is, I’ve always thought that Banana works best for readers in their teens or early twenties, readers who still share her combination of shallow experience and deep feeling. 

Some of her translated work bears the marks of a maturing sensibility:  Lizard doesn’t gush.  Hardboiled doesn’t gush.  The Lake doesn’t gush.  In these works she’s still trying to speak from a place of unfiltered, unprocessed emotion, of cherished innocence, but there’s a calmness and a hint of restraint there that separate the works from her early shōjo writing. 

Amrita does a different thing.  Here she’s not yet ready to surrender the idea of girlish emotional intensity (and I’m sorry if I sound sexist putting it in these terms:  I’m actually using terms that are already part of the discourse on Banana;  I’d be open to seeing them interrogated, but I do find persuasive the argument that this is how she sees her work).  Even though her narrator is 28.  And why does she make her 28?  She could have made her younger.  But she makes her 28 – no longer a girl – and then she turns around and makes her lose her memory.  Actually this happens between the prologue story and the novel proper – so for almost the entire novel, until she recovers her proper memories in a rush at the end, she has an excellent excuse for reacting to the world like a schoolgirl.  She was born yesterday, so to speak.  She’s seeing the world with fresh eyes, feeling it with a newness and intensity more common to 18 than 28 (lemmetellya).  The age thing isn’t commented on explicitly in the story, but I think there’s some strategy at work here. 

But it goes farther.  The epiphanies that are so much a part of Banana’s prose style and narrative technique are everywhere here (the serialization thing), and she claims much more on their behalf.  From the very beginning there was a strain of mysticism in Banana’s writing, but in her earlier works it’s easy to write off as merely a kind of magical-realist decoration, a function of her romance-fantasy underpinnings.  In Amrita, as the title suggests, it takes on metaphysical dimensions.  It’s a novel about spiritual awakening, about religious experience.  Not organized or codified religion, God no;  rather, it’s about religious ecstasy, about euphoric apprehension of God, or God-in-nature, or the Universe.  That’s the kind of epiphany Sakumi gets. 

I’m not sure if Banana realized that was where she was going with this (although if she chose the title ahead of time, she must have at least had an inkling).  To what I think is her credit, she never breaks character, so to speak, never comes out and preaches a religious philosophy.  But it’s there.  The book is taking this irresponsibly exuberant emotion that has been a hallmark of her fiction all along and elevating it past an aesthetic into an ethic. 

Now you may, like me, decide that this religious ecstasy it itself a mark of youth – and indeed it’s not something that’s there in the two later works that have been translated (now I really want to explore her untranslated stuff).  But at the very least this shows ambition – there’s that word again.  She’s really trying something with this book. 

Which is why I recommend it.  It’s flawed, boy is it flawed, and in places it can be downright annoying.  But there’s something there.

Yoshimoto Banana's The Lake (2005)

2011-08-02T16:32:00.003-07:00

Published in 2005 as Mizuumi みずうみ, translated 2011 by Michael Emmerich.

Yoshimoto Banana is a penname.  Her real name is no big secret:  it’s Yoshimoto Mahoko.  But in fact her penname is no longer Yoshimoto Banana.  It’s Yoshimoto Banana.  That is, it’s no longer 吉本ばなな, but よしもとばなな.  Let’s break it down.  Banana is of course a loanword (and I’ve got a whole riff that I give my students on what’s behind it:  not just her professed love for the banana flower, and her obvious affinity with the fruit’s pop qualities – bright-yellow-cheerfulness, an innocent phallaciousness, but also, I suspect, a canny reference to Andy Warhol’s famous image for the Velvet Underground &Nico album, an image that basically defined pop art for her generation and mine), and as such it’s usually written in katakana, like so:  バナナ.  She wrote it in hiragana, giving it a softer, friendlier vibe;  her choice of this as a penname already put her in the same league as TV entertainers and manga author/artists, the kind of people who routinely took (and take) this kind of pseudonym.  What happened about ten years ago was that she changed the writing of her surname from kanji to hiragana.  The official explanation (you can find it on her website, under Q&A) is superstition:  that the total number of strokes was unlucky.  However, it can’t be a coincidence that this all-hiragana style is something used by, as far as I can tell, basically kids, mostly girls, and the manga writers who try to appeal to them.  In short, it can be seen as another attempt to remain relevant.

If you wanna be cynical about it.

This is the most recent book of hers translated into English, as of this writing.  Whatever else I may think of her writing I’m glad so much has been translated – English, strangely, lags behind German, French, and Italian when it comes to translating J-lit, so it’s kind of rare to have so much translated by one author.  A rare opportunity for the non-Japanese-reader to take the measure, or begin to, of a Japanese author’s career.

So, almost twenty years into her career, six years on from Hardboiled, eleven from Amrita, what’s changed?  At first blush, almost nothing.  Her concerns are still love and loss, her narrative strategy is still one of near-constant epiphany, her prose is still straightforward and conversational to the point, almost, of pain.  Her narrator is still enmeshed in a difficult family situation marked by death and instability, and a romantic relationship that is anything but normal.

She’s in her comfort zone here, in other words, and it’s a little disappointing to find that, I have to admit.  There are some differences, however.  

The narrator is a mural artist, living on her own.  We explore, mostly through flashbacks and reminiscences, her relationship with her dead mother and her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but who acknowledges his daughter and tries to do right by her.  At the same time we follow the narrator as she falls in love with the guy whose apartment is just opposite hers in the neighboring building. Their windows look directly into each other and so they get to know each other that way – looking before they speak.  Kind of Rear Window-ish, but not done creepily.  As she gets to know the guy, she gradually realizes that his dysfunctional upbringing has given him a lot of baggage.  He was, we learn in the big revelation at the end (which is by way of a trela reliops), kidnapped as a child by a bizarro religious cult that brainwashed him and, it’s implied, sexually abused him.

Introducing the religious cult makes it sound like she’s ready, eleven years after Amrita, to engage with social issues again.  The jacket-flap copy on the English hardback certainly wants us to think so:  it invokes Aum.  But, just as with Amrita, if you go in expecting social commentary or historical analysis, you’ll be disappointed.  The cult is here mainly, I think, to give a plausible origin-story for the kind of savant that Banana seems to be fascinated by, periodically.  Not only do we have the narrator’s boyfriend, whose haunted past shows up in the present as a striking gentleness of character, but we have two of his childhood friends from the cult, fellow survivors, who we meet twice and who are presented as prophet- or god-type people, removed from the dust of mortality and the hurly-burly of the world.  

In short, her main interest here seems to be the idea of a childlike purity that not only survives the most hellish upbringing, but that paradoxically seems to survive precisely because that hellish upbringing arrested the children’s development.  So, okay.  We’re still within the precincts of the territory she marked early on – this purity has its echoes as far back as “Moonlight Shadow.” Still, this might be its fullest expression in her fiction.

And there is something new (-ish) about the way she’s presenting it.  The narrator is the narrator, a fairly typical Banana speaker, a shōjo grown up.  But for a change it’s not her epiphany, her enunciation of self, that’s the object of the story.  Rather, the climax of the story is her boyfriend’s story-within-a-story, and once it’s told, the book more or less ends. The focus is on his troubles, his development, his heart.  I think it’s less significant that the book is focusing on a boy than it is that it’s focusing on someone other than the narrator.  She’s talking about other people.  At least, so it seems.

Yoshimoto Banana's Hardboiled & Hard Luck (1999)

2011-08-02T14:47:00.007-07:00

Published in 1999 as Hādoboirudo/Hādo rakku ハードボイルド／ハードラック (note that the two elements are linked with a backslash, not an ampersand), translated 2005 by Michael Emmerich.

Two short stories (“Hardboiled” and “Hard Luck”), written especially for this volume.  It was published by a publisher named ロッキング・オン, which comes out to Rocking On in English (but they mercifully [?] romanize it Rockin’on).  Yes, it’s a music mag;  in this case, the book-publishing arm of it.  This is one of several publishers Banana seems to maintain relationships with, and given her penchant for name-checking her favorite bands (in the after-material to Lizard she mentions Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain), it’s not an inappropriate one.

I could go farther.  Banana’s initial burst of popularity was partly a factor of the way she confounded the categories of pop and pure lit – writing at times like a gushy romance novelist, but often refusing to write stories that resolved themselves like that.  Part of what confounded the categories was the venues she wrote for – Marie Claire marked her as pop, but Kaien marked her as pure.  By that token, Rockin’on seems to represent a decisive step in the pop direction – pop in two senses here.  Which is interesting because these two stories are, I’d say, on the pure-lit side of Banana’s output.

Another thing:  the English translation sports a cover illustration by Nara Yoshitomo 奈良美智.  This isn’t just a rare bit of appropriate trendiness on the part of the American publisher:  it reflects the fact that this book was a collaboration with Nara: it featured four color illustrations plus one for the dust jacket.  (The cover of the American edition is one of the interior illustrations from the Japanese edition.)  This was the first, I believe, of Banana’s collaborations with Nara, and not the last.  I haven’t yet teased out all the nuances of this pairing – in some ways I think Nara’s pouty, sociopathic girls are perfect for Banana’s work, and in some ways I think they couldn’t be more wrong.

“Hardboiled” is the first and longer story, and I like it quite a bit.  The narrator is walking along a road in the mountains;  she encounters a foreboding roadside shrine; she spends the night at a haunted hotel;  she thinks about the woman she just broke up with.

Two things to me seem worth remarking on in this story. First is the fact that it takes the motif of romantic/sexual love between women, a theme that Banana had been flirting with (pun intended) for some time, and makes it explicit.  As far back as Asleep female homoeroticism had a place in Banana’s world, but it was never really the theme like it is here.  (It may be in something yet untranslated:  I haven’t started to delve into her deeper oeuvre yet.)  I’m not sure what to think yet of the place of lesbian love in her fiction;  in some ways it’s the utterly normalcy with which she depicts it that is most striking.

Second is the tone.  The supernatural motifs – ghosts, eerie shrines, etc. – are by no means new in her work.  But all these motifs seem to be deployed with much more care here than previously, and they work together with setting and the measure way with which the narrator’s reminiscences are doled out to create a genuinely haunting tone.  The deserted mountain-road setting reminds me of the barking dog sequence in Kurosawa’s Dreams, and this is just about as vividly done.  There is, I guess I’d say, a control on display here that puts this up with her best work.

“Hard Luck” isn’t quite as memorable.  The narrator is falling for the brother of the fiancee of her brain-dead sister.  The general pattern – love feeling its way around the obstacle of a dead sister – echoes the relationship between Sakumi and Ryūichirō in Amrita.  This is a neater rendition of that pattern – more satisfying, but less ambitious.  More perfect, but less interesting.

By this point Banana was 35.  No longer a shōjo, and old enough that it had to be sinking in.  This would have been a big challenge for someone so identified with an aesthetic of youthfulness. Maybe allying with a rock magazine and a pop-art phenom were forms of overcompensation, ways to reassert her relevance to a new generation of youth at the end of the century.  But in other ways she seems to be trying to grow up.  The narrator of “Hardboiled” especially strikes me as an adult, and the sober tone of the story strikes me as aimed at adults. 

Yoshimoto Banana's Asleep (1989)

2011-07-27T18:48:00.005-07:00

Translated by Michael Emmerich in 2000 as Asleep.

Three stories linked by the motif of sleep.  The stories were first published in late 1988 and early 1989 in Kaien, where she had published the Kitchen stories, then the book came out in mid-’89.  So, it was part of her first rush of popularity, those miracle years of 1988-1992 or so.  The fact that in English it came out after Lizard is just one of those vagaries of the lit-in-translation game.  

Incidentally, the only Japanese edition I have at hand (and there have been, evidently, a few) has the stories in a different order.  Emmerich’s translation gives us “Night and Night’s Travelers” (in J. Yoru to yoru no tabibito 夜と夜の旅人) first, followed by “Love Songs” (Aru taiken ある体験, “An experience”), and then “Asleep” (Shirakawa yofune 白河夜船 – see below for explanation).  In the paperback I have (Kadokawa), the order is “Asleep,” “Night and Night’s Travelers,” and “Love Songs.”  I don’t know if this was Emmerich’s decision, his editor’s, or what;  maybe the hardback had a different order.  Worth checking out…  In any case, I think I like Emmerich’s order well enough.

The title of the book in Japanese is Shirakawa yofune – same as the third story in the English;  the translation makes it “Asleep” both times.  That’s what you might call a barely sufficient choice.  It’s an idiom that does mean, basically, “fast asleep,” with an emphasis on “dead to the world” – oblivious.  But it’s where this idiom comes from that makes it so interesting.  

A literal translation would be something like “white river night boat.”  Which doesn’t make any sense.  The key is that the “white river” in question is actually a district of Kyoto – Shirakawa.  It does have a waterway involved, and that waterway is called White River, Shirakawa, but from at least as far back as the beginning of the Edo period the river seems to have been so much less prominent in the public imagination than the district was that the following joke was possible.

A guy is boasting about a recent trip to Kyoto.  Only, he didn’t actually go.  Somebody asks him what he thought of Shirakawa, and the ignorant bragger-dude, afraid he’ll be caught out, makes up a clever lie on the spot.  “I was on the night boat, so I slept right through it.”  Rimshot.  See, the joke is that Shirakawa isn’t a river that you float down on a boat, night or day, but a part of town that you walk to, or take a sedan-chair.  If you know that, you know the guy is lying and has never been to Kyoto.  The joke is about braggarts, wannabe sophisticates, the prideful brought low.  If the modern idiom is usually used to mean, as the dictionaries say, just “fast asleep,” then there’s at the very least a nuance, there to be gleaned if you want to, of obliviousness not just to the waking world but to the world one imagines, wrongly, to be beyond one’s eyelids – obliviousness to one’s own obliviousness, really.  

(Incidentally, I imagine there’s a locus classicus for this joke but I don’t know what it is.  Dictionaries that I’ve consulted show the idiom in circulation by the early-mid 17th century, but don’t give a source for the joke behind the idiom.  Right about now I’m expecting – hoping, even – that No-sword-san will chime in with the info.)

Anyway, it’s no wonder Grove and/or Emmerich decided not to open that can of antiquarian worms to whoop English readers’ asses.  And so “Asleep” is okay.  But given the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the slumbers in this book, I think the original title is very apt – all its nuances are applicable – and so I hate to see it vanish like a dream in the morning (if you will).

So, the stories:  more than N/P, this book is the true successor to Kitchen, I think.  Three more stories of love and loss, with hints of magical realism and moments of everyday epiphany.  

“Night and Night’s Travelers” is about a woman whose older brother died after having ended a relationship with an American girl, a one-time foreign exchange student, who he’d followed back to Boston;  the real emotional journey is that of Mari, the narrator’s cousin, who had been in love with the narrator’s brother (after the American girl).  Bereft, she’s now taken to sleepwalking in the snow.

“Love Songs” is about a woman who’s drinking herself to sleep every night.  She’s in a good relationship now, but she just got out of a bad relationship with a guy who was stringing along two women, the narrator and her rival Haru.  The narrator and Haru were at each other’s throats at the time, but strangely never really blamed the guy;  now the narrator’s sleep is haunted, and through a medium she realizes it’s Haru.  They meet and make peace – they admit that there was actually a homoerotic tension between them that they had never acknowledged.

The title story is about a woman who is the mistress of a married man whose wife is in a coma.  He’s kind of stuck because he doesn’t want to leave his wife – he wants to be the kind of noble guy who will stick with her – but at the same time he’s in love with the narrator.  His solution is to keep the narrator removed from the world – she quits her job and lives on money he gives her, all alone in her own apartment.  It’s a peachy arrangement, she thinks at first, but gradually she starts sleeping more and more until finally she can hardly wake up.  Only the intervention of the wife’s ghost saves her from totally slipping away.

Dig:  the issues are those of complicated relationships, and how young women respond to them.  Sleep takes on different meanings at different points in each story – an escape, a mystical conduit to the world of the dead, but also a reaction to depression, a symbol of emotional numbness.  In the third story it’s working as an evocation of the narrator’s total envelopment in the will of her lover – she’s allowed her identity, her being, to become a mere extension of his, and it’s destroying her.

Thus, there’s something here.  The writing is standard Banana – not terribly distinguished, but very accessible – and as stories they’re almost on the same level as those in Kitchen.  Well evoked.  Well epiphanized.  Not bad at all.

Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys at the Oregon Zoo, July 24

2011-07-26T23:34:00.002-07:00

We saw Los Lobos in concert on Sunday (July 24), at the Oregon Zoo amphitheater in Portland. Los Lonely Boys opened. I didn't know any Los Lonely Boys beyond their hits, but even from them I could tell it was a natural pairing. Not only is there the Latino rock thing (they kinda look like Los Lobos Jr.), but more importantly there's a lot of musical compatibility there, too. And in that respect we weren't disappointed: it was a great bill. If anything, we were disappointed in the headliners.

It was our first show at the Zoo, and it proved to be a surprisingly good place to see a show. The amphitheater is right by the elephant house, right next to the lion compound and a tropical bird dome. All that sounds like it should feel pretty hokey, but they've arranged it so that you can't actually see or hear any of the animals from the lawn, so it's pretty easy to forget you're in a zoo. (They flew some zoo birds over the audience before the show, though, which was cool: a red-tailed hawk, an ibis, a bald eagle. Made me wonder if the boys were going to play "Down On The Riverbed" in response)(they didn't.) Basically you feel like you're just on a fir-lined hilltop on the edge of Portland, with the sun setting beautifully just to the right of the stage, on a hot summer day in July. Can't go wrong, really.

Los Lonely Boys opened, and while they did play "Heaven," otherwise they seemed to be pushing their new album pretty hard. Which meant it was mostly songs we'd never heard, but that didn't matter. Within minutes we were fans. "Heaven," it turns out, while a great song, isn't all that representative of their stuff; mostly they were playing classic Texas blues trio stuff, ZZ Top by way of Stevie Ray, with any Latin flavor coming in mostly through the way their vocals sound like a younger Los Lobos, and the way they'd occasionally quote a Santana lick. That's a pretty sweet spot to hit - and the rest of the audience, most of them at least as old as me (meaning they had at least a good ten years on any of the Garza boys) seemed to think so too.

Really tight stuff, and in some ways it gave me a new appreciation for the power trio idea. I've been listening to Cream, Jimi, Rush, the Who all my life, so the concept is, shall we say, familiar to me, but all of those acts did extensive overdubbing in the studio - and live recordings aren't the same as being there. Watching Henry, Jojo, and Ringo go at it, I felt like a light went on: this is why trios work. In this kind of setting, at this volume, two guitars can sound like overkill anyway, and if your one guitarist has the goods, that's all you need.

Henry has the goods. He can blueswank with the best of them, and he looks the part, with his rock-star long hair. All three of them were just a lot of fun to watch on stage: energy, great licks, great look. Best song: a new one, actually, "16 Monkeys," funky stoner lyrics that could have been written in 1969, and ending in a long jam that passed through "Third Stone From The Sun" and ended with a quote from "Gypsy Queen."

Los Lobos. David Hidalgo sat in on drums for one song in the Lonely Boys' set, then on guitar for another couple - Cesar Rosas came out too and they all jammed on "Rip It Up." Classic rockabilly bruiser. Boded well for the main set.

But, hey, it was not to be. It was apparent from the first song that there were problems: David's mike didn't seem to be working, and his guitar was buried in the mix. They fixed the guitar problem after about three songs, but the voice thing turned out not to be a mix thing, but the simple fact that his voice was shot. That beautiful, soulful instrument was just gone - he couldn't sing for shit. It was painful to hear. After the first song Cesar (who seemed to be having some vocal problems too) joked that they'd been partying too much. Maybe that was the problem.

But I kind of doubt it. Bassist Conrad Lozano wasn't there, and when David introduced his replacement (David's son Vincent), he explained that Conrad had had a health scare the night before. He didn't say what, but said it had scared the hell out of them, and that he'd flown home, and Vincent had come up to fill in. We guessed that the health scare was somehow connected to the voice thing - like maybe they'd been up all night worried. Anyway, that's what we'd prefer to think. ...No word on the band's website about Conrad, but they don't seem to have canceled any dates, so I guess he's okay.

But between the bassist being gone and the vocalists being subpar at best, there wasn't much they could really do. They soldiered through a few songs, but about halfway through they seem to have decided to just, as the saying goes, shut up and play their guitars. A tortuous rendition of "Dream In Blue" turned beautiful as David took (finally) a gorgeous extended solo, and Steve Berlin followed it with a flute solo that took the jam someplace else entirely.

Then the Lonely Boys came out for what was no doubt a scheduled guest spot, and provided the highlight of the night. Henry, David, and Cesar trading licks on a long, blues-drenched "Little Wing." Hendrix's music - this is true - sounds better, less interred in the '60s, and just plain more alive with each passing year, and they did a good thing in bringing this out that night, under the stars.

But, Deadhead that I am, my favorite moment was during the inevitable "La Bamba" encore, which they extended by jamming their way into "Good Lovin'" in the middle and then back into "La Bamba." Which was - had to be - a wink in the direction of the fact that, in autumn '87, when Los Lobos were burning up the charts with "La Bamba," the Dead interpolated it into the middle of their classic take on "Good Lovin'" in several East Coast shows. The Dead and the Wolves had a well-known mutual admiration society going by that time, and of course the two songs are a natural fit. I don't know when Los Lobos started returning the favor, but anyway: I appreciated the wit of it. As well as the music, which was authoritative.

But I do want to see Los Lobos sometime when they're on their game.