"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

This remarkable book dispenses with the norms of writing in order to express the experiences of a community.

It starts with a boat-full of Japanese women heading to the USA to marry the husbands as selected by the matchmakers. It describes their disillusioned dreams as they follow the full immigrant experience, working as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, working their way up to self-employment. And babies, lots of babies. And tragedy, a lot of that too. And then, as most of them reach prosperity, the aftermath of Pearl Harbour sees the whole community interned as enemy aliens and transported to labour camps.

I knew something about the Japanese-American experience having read, years ago, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. But 'The Buddha ...' is told in a completely different way. There are no individual character arcs. History happens but there is little in the way of a conventional plot. Instead the experiences of the women are listed in sentence after sentence, creating a powerful chanting effect. Here are two examples: 

• “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto, and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in the Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima ...” (Come, Japanese!)
• “Home was a bit of straw in John Lyman's barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse in Stockton's Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bit of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree in Fred Stadelman’s apple orchard ...” (Whites)

The whole book is like this. It is mesmerisingly effective.

Nouveau roman? Certainly it reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But whereas that book feels like an impressionist painting, whose message lies in the creation of an ambience, this is a collage of fragments with the punch of pop art.

Selected quotes:

• “In our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.” (Come, Japanese!)
• “They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl.” (Whites) As ‘Whites’ might suggest, three of these four names refer directly to skin colour: lilies and pearls are white and Margaret is a name derived from the Latin word for pearl.
• “We threw out their cheese by mistake. ‘I thought it was rotten,’ we tried to explain. ‘That's how it's supposed to smell,’ we were told.” (Whites)

It was a New York Times bestseller but don't let that put you off (some truly dreadful books have achieved the same accolade)

It was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and won the 2012 Pen Faulkner Award. 

January 2025; 129 pages

First published in the US by Knopf in 2011

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks" (and two other stories) by Natsuko Imamura

 Strange stories from Japan which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion.

The first story concerns a girl who, growing up, discovers that no-one will ever take any food she offers them. Ever. This so upsets her that when she becomes a pair of chopsticks, the joy of delivering food straight into the mouth of her owner is transcendent. (In a nod to panpsychism, the flat is full of other girls and boys who have become blankets, doorknobs, rucksacks, reading lamps etc.)

The second story is about a girl who, no matter how hard she tries, cannot get hit. Water bombs thrown at her miss, frisbees are intercepted by dogs ... She starts self-harming and it is all downhill from then on.

In the third story the protagonist spends her youth lying in her bedroom until one night when, despite having lost the use of her legs, she goes into town. There's a sort of weird 'what if humans were domesticated pets' vibe going on here?

Fiction is all about the art of imagining things that aren't actually true. Although I personally prefer my fiction to stay within the realms of likelihood, fantastic stories have a long and honourable provenance, underlying myth and fairy tales and, in literature, classics from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Often, the point of travelling to the edges of imagination is to critique reality, as with Swift's Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine by H G Wells. Each of the stories in this collection could be analysed in that way (the first is about the need of people to feel useful, the second about the fact that suffering is a psychologically necessary part of the human condition?).

I was intrigued by the fact that these stories are told in a dead-pan style as if weirdness is a normal part of the everyday. I've just read Ronan Hession's Ghost Mountain and that has the same style: a stripped-down delivery without embellishment that leaves no room for doubt despite the unlikelihood of the events it recounts. This style, as encountered from the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.") seems to be able to blur the line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Where the protagonist themselves are transformed, the narration is always in the third person. The only first person narrative in which the narrator-protagonist are themselves transformed that I can recall offhand is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. So it is possible but are there any other examples?

I imagine that there are a number of stories nowadays written from the perspective of a ghost (eg Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost), a zombie, a werewolf, or a vampire but this is a genre I don't really know. I believe Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is narrated by the horse. Other examples? Perhaps I need to dedicate a page on my blog to these sort of stories.

November 2024; 178 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Silence" by Shusako Endo

 A Portuguese priest travels to Japan as a missionary during the Shogunate. But, after an initial period in which missionaries were welcome, now Christianity is forbidden and Christians tortured and killed. Will the priest be captured and if he is what will happen to him? Apostasy or martyrdom? And, crucially, why is God silent?

The book has obvious parallels with Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, also a story about a priest in a land where priests are forbidden, where to be a priest is a capital crime; and with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a story about the interrogation of an old Communist, both of which I read fifty years ago, at school. 

The prose is interesting. In some ways it is a minimalist style, recounting only the facts. There is no great melodramatic over-analysis of emotion (I read it immediately after Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the contrast could not have been greater). It is like the difference between a Chinese painting and a Baroque battle scene. Endo achieves his effects using a minimum of perfectly selected images: "Holding the string attached to the kite, they ran up the slope, but there was no wind and the kite fell idly to the ground." (Ch 10) On the other hand, he repeats and repeats and repeats some images and ideas as if he is hammering them into you. I found this combination of deceptive simplicity and ostinato powerful.

The form is also interesting. After a prologue, the first four chapters are told in the form of letters from the priest; from chapter five the story becomes a straightforward first person narrative. There are two epilogues: one in the form of notes made by a Dutch merchant, the other extracts from a Japanese prison log.

Some great moments:

• "Man is a strange being. He always has a feeling somewhere in his heart that whatever the danger he will pull through." (Ch 3)
• "Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." (Ch 3)
• "Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ." (Ch 4)
• "Sin ... is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind." (Ch 5)
• "In evil there remained that strength and beauty of evil; but this Kichijiro was not even worthy to be called evil. He was thin and dirty like the tattered rags he wore." (Ch 6)
• "True love was to accept humanity when wasted like rags and tatters." (Ch 6)
• "What he could not understand was the stillness of the courtyard, the voice of the cicadas, the whirling wings of the flies. A man had died. Yet the outside world went on as if nothing had happened." (Ch 6)
• "You look upon missionary work as the forcing of love upon someone? Yes, that's what it is - from our standpoint." (Ch 7)
• "Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani! It is three o'clock on that Friday; and from the cross this voice rings out to a sky covered with darkness. The priest had always thought that these words were that man's prayer, not that they issued from terror at the silence of God." (Ch 7)
• "Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither." (Ch 7)
• "Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew." (Ch 8)

A brilliant book.

April 2021; 267 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

Other Japanese books reviewed in this blog include:

• By Kobo Abe: 
• The Woman in the Dunes
• By Haruki Murakami: 
• Norwegian Wood
• What I talk About When I Talk About Running (essays)
• After the Quake (short stories)
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• By Yuko Tsushima:
• Child of Fortune
• Territory of Light

"South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki Murakami

 Hajime, an only child, looks back at his life and loves. As a boy his best friend was Shimamoto buit they drifted apart; as a teenager his first love was was Izumi but he betrayed her. Now in his thirties, running two successful jazz bars, married with two daughters, Shimamoto reappears and his steady, successful life is thrown off course.

There are some scenes in this book, with their dream-like, lyrical writing, that are beautiful and true and among the best things I have read recently.

A small selection of my favourite moments:

• "After a certain length of time has passed, things harden. Like cement in a bucket. And we can't go back any more." (C 1)
• "Here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just be living, damage another human being beyond repair." (C 2) 
• "She closed her eyes and let me undress her. It wasn't easy. I'm all thumbs, to begin with, and girls' clothes are a pain. Halfway through, Izumi opened her eyes and took over." (C 3)
• "When necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plauisible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal." (C 4)
• "The four a.m. streets looked shabby and filthy. The shadow of decay and disintegration lurked everywhere, and I was part of it. Like a shadow burned into a wall." (C 7)
• "For the first time in a long while, I looked into my own eyes in the mirror. Those eyes told me nothing about who I was. I laid both hands on the sink and sighed deeply." (C 9)
• "As I sat on a bar stool, looking around my establishment, everything looked monotonous, lustreless. No longer a carefully crafted, colourful, castle in  the air, what lay before me was a typical noisy bar - artificial, superficial and shabby. A stage set, props built for the sole purpose of getting drunks to part with their cash." (C 15)
• "Her face had nothing you could call an expression. No, that's not an entirely accurate way of putting it. I should put it this way: like a room from which every last stick of furniture had been taken, anything you could possibly call an expression had been removed, leaving nothing behind." (C 15)
• "Dying is not that hard. Like the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me." (C 15)
• "No one will weave dreams for me - it is my turn to weave dreams for others." (C 15)

Magical. Poetic. Profound. September 2020; 187 pages

Also by Murakami and reviewed on this blog:

• Norwegian Wood: a novel
• What I talk about when I talk about running: non-fiction
• After the Quake: short stories

Other Japanese written novels reviewed in this blog include:

• The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
• Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima
• Child of Fortune by Yuko Tsushima

This review was written
by the author of Motherdarling

"Territory of Light" by Yuko Tsushima

The narrator moves into a flat on the top storey of an office block with her two year-old daughter after separating from her husband, the child's father. This book consists of episodes during the next year in which the narrator experiences dreams, memories, problems raising her daughter, and problems with relationships and work. The episodes are presented more or less sequentially, and they are more or less standalone; in one case a subsequent episode refers to a previous one in a way that means one doesn't necessarily have to have read (or remembered) the earlier one.

As with Tsushima's Child of Fortune, the narrator doesn't seem a particularly good mother (one of the differences being that in CoF the protagonist is in the third person rather than the first as of ToL which makes the neglect seem worse in ToL). In one episode she loses her child at the park and after an initial panic more or less gives up looking for her. In another episode she leaves her child asleep in the flat while she goes out and gets drunk. Later she palms the little girl off on a neighbour for free childcare. Perhaps this is normal in Japan.

The prose is very flat. Mostly things happen and there is dialogue; there seems to be little exploration of feelings. In  The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu compares "Chinese brush paintings ... full of blank spaces" with " classical oil paintings ... filled with thick, rich, solid colours." Perhaps the same is true of Japanese literature. Certainly I have that feeling from the Tsushima novels that I have red, as well as The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. This is not to deny that ToL some wonderful moments of description, such as: "When I lifted my face to the sky, the berries in their grapelike clusters gleamed an opulent red against its blueness." (Red Lights) Fundamentally, Tsushima's technique seems to be to aim for precision and clarity of expression, simplifying as far as can be done, and to allow emotions to be inferred from the actions and speech of each character.

Her prose is certainly elegantly exquisite and this book seems like a carefully crafted miniature. It drops hints rather than overacting.

Some great moments:

• "Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down." (Sunday in the Trees)
• "Growing up is overrated, if you ask me. If I'd known adult life would be this boring, I'd have had more fun while I could." (The sound of a Voice)
• "The way nightmares vanish and anxieties evaporate when you open your eyes is one of life's pleasures." (Red Lights)
• "Stars! The colder it is, the more clearly they appear." (The Body)

March 2020; 122 pages

"Child of Fortune" by Yuko Tsushima

Koko, a single parent, has a job she doesn't really enjoy and an eleven-year-old daughter with whom she has a fractured relationship and who is presently living with Shoko, Koko's sister, who seems to want to adopt her. Then Koko discovers she is pregnant. The story is told from the point of view of Koko in an interwoven mixture of dialogue, experiences, memories and dreams which gives it an unearthly quality (reinforced in the final pages when Koko pretends to be an extraterrestrial).

The style of the prose is mostly straightforward and matter of fact which makes the dialogue sometimes seem over-formal. Perhaps this is a Japanese 'style'. It reminded me of what Cixin Liu is talking about in The Three Body Problem: "Chinese brush paintings are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colours." I wondered whether this feeling of 'style' was linked to this. But in chapter two Tsushima describes the night thus: "It was still raining, a viscous, opaque rain. The steamy windows reduced the street scene to blurred shadows. The street lamps ... were circled by spreading blots of violet light." This felt very much like the "thick, solid colours" of westernised oil painting. Nevertheless, with this book and The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, another Japanese writer, there is a feeling of minimalism in the prose.

It is a short novel and the narrative seems unstructured; it is sometimes difficult to tell where memory ends and present day returns; Koko believes the father of her foetus is Osada on page 5 but since this is the only mention of him until well over half way through the book I wondered whether I had misunderstood and whether another of Koko's lovers, Doi, was the father.

Spoilers: There is structure. Koko's preganancy is revealed almost immediately but she doesn't tell her sister until just over the half-way mark and she doesn't discover that the pregnancy is imaginary until just over the 75% mark.

• Some of my favourite moments:
• "You have to compete with your own kind. If a bird imitated a fish, it would only drown." (C 2)
• "It was she who'd trampled her relationship with Doi underfoot - under the dirty feet of respectability." (C 2)
• "Lately she was more convinced than ever that there was no point in worrying what people thought. She would soon be thirty-seven. The only person watching Koko at thirty-seven was Koko." (C 2)
• "Over a dizzying span of years the universe repeats its rhythm of birth, collapse, and regeneration. ... The world is just a great illusion flowing emptily by; we mustn't be deceived.  Where, then, should we seek the truth that passes into eternity? Hidden in the present, in a single instant, is the power to shatter the illusion. In this single present instant the eyes of eternity open, eyes that can penetrate the secrets of the movements of the cosmos." (C 2)
• "Her hands had melted into the baby's flesh as if squeezing an overripe banana." (C 5)
• "Why did she go on living still? There was no justification, none. ... whichever way she looked at herself, there wasn't a single redeeming feature to be found. They were wasting the food and clothes they gave her, and the place at school. The more she thought about it, the less reason she saw to carry on. Yet she made no attempt to die, and this very fact added to her humiliation. Dying was too frightening, after all, to be seriously contemplated." (C 7)

An interesting exploration of life in Japan. February 2020; 153 pages

Another elegant novel by Tsushima (with a very similar theme) is Territory of Light.

"The Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe

This is a Kafkaesque novel. In prose suited to an impartial report this book tells of a teacher whose hobby is entomology. Seeking beetles he comes to a weird sand-bound village near the sea. He spends the night in a house at the bottom of the sand-pit ... and awakes to find he is trapped, condemned to labour digging sand out of the hole he is in. Of course he tries to escape ...

It seems to be a metaphor for life, in which we try to deny the necessities but time sweeps our dreams away and buries them.

This is not a page-turner although, like Kafka, it is very easy to read. It is wonderful because of its profound, though troubling, insight into the human condition, such as:

• “Punishment inflicted ... would mean that a crime had been paid for.” (C 7)
• "Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost." (C 18)
• "Time cannot be spurred on like a horse. But it is not quite so slow as a pushcart." (C 19)
• “Obligation is a man's passport among his fellow men” (C 19)
• “Life is a bound diary, and one first page is plenty for one book.” (C 19)
• “More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.” (C 21)
• “One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.” (C 24)
• “Even flies won't come if you don't advertise.” (C 24)
• “It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.” (C 25)
• “What was the use of individuality when one was on the point of death?” (C 26)
• “Three days a beggar, always a beggar they say.” (C 28)
• “The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.” (C 28)
• “Patience itself was not necessarily defeat. Rather, defeat really began when patience was thought to be defeat.” (C 28)

As well insight he has some grotesquely original descriptions. I don't think I'll ever forget the boiled gristle or the taste of ear wax:

• “The man answered her with eyes in which time had ceased to run.” (C 20)
• “A strong smell like boiled gristle surrounded her.” (C 20)
• “He had dozed off for a moment, rolling over in the sweat and secretions which smelled like rancid fish oil.” (C 21)
• “His vocal cords were shredded like strands of dried squid” (C 21)
• “Maybe even a human being could sing such a song ... If tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears ... if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra ... if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids.” (C 22)
• “There was nothing that tasted so good as one's own ear wax ... it was better than real cheese.” (C 24)
• “Suddenly a sorrow the colour of dawn welled up in him.” (C 27) 

And there are other great quotes:

• “The village, resembling a cross-section of a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes lay sprawled over the village. Either way, it was a disturbing and unsettling landscape.” (C2)
• “Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.” (C 6)
• “It was like to trying to float a house in the sea by brushing the water aside. You floated a ship on water in accordance with the properties of water.” (C 6) 
• “Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself.” (C 11)
• “It only happened in novels or movies that summer was filled with dazzling sun. What existed in reality were humble, small town Sundays ... ... little scenes everyone has seen in the corner of some trolley ... people's pathetic jealousy and impatience with others’ happiness.” (C 14)
• “Why did places where animals live have such an unpleasant smell? Wouldn't it be fine if there were animals that smelled like flowers!” (C 24)

In the end, there is a sense of defeat: “They might as well lick each other's wounds. but they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.” (C 27)

Very thought-provoking. November 2018; 240 pages