Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima (translated by Meredith Weatherby)

This month marks the centenary of Mishima's birth so it felt like a good time to read his gay coming-of-age modern classic first published in 1949. Reading anything by this controversial author feels tricky when knowing about his extreme political views and dramatic death committing ritual suicide after engaging in a failed coup. That certainly cast a shadow over my experience of this book as the draw towards death is often openly discussed “I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with sweet expectation.” Yet, I also tried to read this autobiographical novel on its own terms as the author wrote it while he was still in his early twenties. In some ways its shockingly confessional in its male protagonist's raw desire for other men and in other ways he comes across as oddly lacking in self-awareness.

The book presents the tortured musings and philosophical reflections of a young man named Kochan. He feels increasingly alienated and isolated from the society around him to the point where his entire life becomes a performance. Throughout his youth he both desires muscular men and wishes to become them. However, as a boy frequently beset by illness who lives in a society where homosexuality isn't publicly acceptable his desire morphs into violent fantasies and repression. So he learns to present an artificial front to other people: “what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.” It's moving how the author describes the process of suppressing same-sex desire and a naturally flamboyant personality which is something many gay people feel pressured to do from an early age. Instead of embracing his nature Kochan becomes fixated on trying to desire and love women. The later part of the novel concerns his relationship with a friend's sister named Sonoko. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't result in a fulfilling romance.

Perhaps if I read this novel when I was younger I would have been more drawn to its often circular thought patterns, convoluted logic and relentless self-absorption. It's only natural that this young man should be so focused on his own preoccupations and desperate desire to understand himself. But a lot of his thought process came to feel repetitive and tiring. Since he's coming of age in Japan during WWII this naturally looms large yet it's something that's infrequently commented upon. Perhaps because he was living through it he wasn't compelled to describe it and life just carried on as normal until points of crisis. Nevertheless, his almost complete lack of interest for these larger events or the welfare of his schoolmates and family comes across as irritatingly callous. At one point it's mentions that his sister dies but this only prompts him to melodramatically reflect “I derived a superficial peace-of-mind from the discovery that even I could shed tears.” I longed to get more insight into his family and the precarious position of Sonoko after she goes on to get married. But, since the narrative doesn't extend any empathy outside the concerns of its protagonist, it was difficult for me to get past the growing frustration I felt towards this inward-gazing conflicted young man.

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

Nothing twists my heart like recalling the alienation I felt in childhood. That was a time of blistering self-awareness made all the more painful by children around me who gleefully pointed out my apparent “flaws” and punished me for them. In retrospect we like to say it's our differences which make us unique. We like to assert how the antagonism we endured has made us stronger. These are empowering notions, but what truth does this rationality hold when we still experience the visceral sting of emotional wounds from bullying? 

Mieko Kawakami's novel “Heaven” meditates on the real meaning of these trials of childhood. It contemplates who really holds the power in a dynamic where the few who are weak are preyed upon by the dominant majority. It questions what lessons are learned and what truth is revealed by these conflicts. We follow the perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy cruelly nicknamed Eyes by the boys at his school because he has a lazy eye. They relentlessly bully him for this. As their savagery escalates he befriends his classmate Kojima, a female classmate who refuses to practice standard hygiene for a special reason and gets cruelly persecuted by the other schoolgirls. 

There's a beautiful tenderness to this story as these two find friendship amidst their alienation and suffering. They pass each other notes and have awkward meetings to discuss things which are alternately banal and meaningful. This feels very true to the experience of adolescence. Equally, it's poignant how the narrator finds solace and relief in small things like putting his hands in the cool space of his desk. It's also powerfully described how his unruly emotions often physically control him. Kawakami also portrays the suffering and after-effects of bullying so sharply where the narrator finds himself driven to the point where “I started crying all night long... I couldn't stop the tears. I asked myself if I was sad, but I had lost touch with what sadness was supposed to be.” These experiences are vividly rendered and made me really reconnect with similar feelings from my own childhood. 

The story contains a deep thoughtfulness as the narrator and Kojima formulate competing perspectives when the bullying they experience intensifies and persists. They have very different feelings about the agency they possess. Where the narrator sees himself as a helpless victim, Kojima asserts “I bet we could make them stop. But we're not just playing by their rules. This is our will. We let them do this. It's almost like we chose this.” Her reasoning verges on making her a martyr: “Everything we take, all of the abuse, we do it to rise above.” Meanwhile the narrator does his best to simply endure and survive. It's a complicated reckoning which leads to some scenes which are almost surreal in tone. There's also an odd lengthy exchange with Mamose, one of the bullies who questions how we commonly perceive the state of the world: “Listen, if there's a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.” The conclusions these different adolescents come to make the reader reevaluate the meaning of these youthful conflicts and how we can get past them. Reading this emotional novel is an unsettling and rewarding experience. 

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)

When “Convenience Store Woman”, Sayaka Murata's first novel to be translated into English was published a couple of years ago it became a cult hit with many enthusiastic fans (including me!) She was already a well-established writer in Japan having published ten books and won multiple prominent literary awards. Now more of her books are being translated into English including “Earthlings” which explores a lot of this author’s familiar themes such as alienation and societal pressures but the story dramatizes them from a surprising new angle and contains more shocking twists. The novel centres around Natsuki, an adolescent girl who develops a strong bond with her cousin Yuu as the pair believe they are aliens who've come from a planet called Popinpobopia. Many years later Natsuki forms an unconventional marriage with a socially awkward man named Tomoya. They refer to society as The Factory wherein they are expected to function as mechanical parts by creating babies and serving specific functions: “Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told.” To escape this fate, the pair travel to Natsuki’s remote family home Akishina where they create a new connection with Yuu and try to establish a way of being outside of social expectations.

Murata’s writing is so compelling in the way she gives voice to outsiders - people who don’t quite fit into mainstream society and feel they must grudgingly obey unwritten social rules in order to survive. It makes it very easy to relate to the author’s central characters who take a weary view of people who do excel at being model citizens. For instance Natsuki observes of her friend Shizuka that “She had always been exemplary in learning to be a woman, truly a straight-A student. It looked excruciatingly tiring.” There’s an implicit humour in this wry view of others, but there’s a distinction between being socially-awkward and a sociopath. Murata’s characters tread that line and this makes her plots so compelling because it feels like at any moment the story might stray into violence, tragedy and madness.

This novel also exposes the hypocrisy of living in a patriarchal society where the authority of a good-looking man is valued over the testimony of an adolescent girl. During Natsuki’s childhood, her handsome teacher Mr Igasaki takes a predatory interest in her. However, nobody believes Natsuki’s account especially not the other women in her life – not even female friends she confides to in her early adulthood. It compounds her feelings of being an outsider and makes her even more mistrustful of following the expectations which are placed upon her.

Many will be shocked by the extremes this novel goes to. The ending of “Earthlings” is really wild and it’s likely to divide the opinions of different readers. Like with the novel “A Little Life”, I think many readers who initially feel sympathetic to the characters and story might become repelled by how far the author goes. In some ways, I found it frustrating as it does feel like Murata sacrifices a consistency with her characters for the sake of shock value. The attitude of Natsuki’s cousin Yuu changes very quickly and her husband Tomoya’s fear of physical contact is abruptly abandoned. But I don’t think this is simply a case of the author prioritizing a rhapsodic plot over the integrity of her characters.

There are a number of different interpretations you could make about the ending. It could be viewed in the realms of pure fantasy where the characters are what they believe they are. It could be seen as a form of joint hysteria. Or you could interpret it as a very intense example of how people will sometimes do terrible things to alienate themselves from society in order to violently free themselves from its rules. When his family try to take charge of him Tomoya desperately seeks a way to do something so shocking he’ll be permanently outcast. Similarly, at the end the trio go so outside the realms of convention they are absconding from any hope of being integrated into normal society again. It could be viewed as a radical form of liberation.

In some ways “Convenience Store Woman” felt like a more restrained and accomplished novel with hints of potential horror – whereas “Earthlings” tips into full-blown terror as its protagonists become lost in fantasy and violence. But it’s fascinating how this novel gives an interesting perspective on feelings of alienation. It’s common to imagine oneself as having been born in the wrong time or place when feeling crushed by expectations which go against one’s instincts. Here the characters really believe themselves to be aliens, but because we’re so entrenched in their perspective it’s so-called conventional people who come to seem like aliens with their banal rituals and rigid expectations. Murata inventively traces the way different outsiders cope by submitting to, rebelling against or escaping from the dominant ideologies of a society they are forced to live in. It makes for a vivid, thrilling and thought-provoking reading experience.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)

On its surface “The Memory Police” feels like a typical dystopian novel about an oppressive military force. The narrator lives on an island where certain objects such as roses and music boxes totally disappear. Not only do these things vanish overnight but so do people’s memories of them. Anyone possessing or even recalling these things after they’ve been outlawed disappear themselves through the enforcement of an impersonal group known as the memory police. This leads people (such as the narrator’s mother who is taken away) to conceal objects which were supposed to disappear and people who remember outlawed things go into hiding. Events such as the systematic burning and destruction of outlawed objects have obvious parallels with historic fascist regimes. While it portrays this nightmarish world in a moving way, Yoko Ogawa’s novel isn’t as concerned with the mechanics of totalitarianism as it is with the philosophical mysteries of the human heart as well as the meaning and function of memory.

The narrator is a novelist and over the course of the book we also get snippets of a story she’s writing about a typist and her instructor. As the novel progresses the parallels between the narrator’s world and the typist’s world become surreally aligned as they seem to reflect her internal reality. While I found the sections of the narrator’s novel-in-progress somewhat intrusive at first they take on an increasing power as her reality grows increasingly bleak and restricted. The interplay between these stories is given a further complexity in how the narrator’s editor (only referred to as R) goes into hiding and tries to coax the narrator into remembering what’s been lost in the disappearances. It’s so interesting how this shows the complex process of memorialisation and prompts the reader to question things like: what’s vital to remember and what’s better to forget? How much do we imaginatively insert false memories into the truth of what occurred in the past? To what degree is our memorialization of certain things or people about our own ego rather than honouring what’s been lost?

From reading Ogawa’s previous novel “The Housekeeper and the Professor” it’s clear these complex issues about memory are ones which doggedly preoccupy the author. I admire how she explores them in surprisingly subtle ways and from different angles in her brilliantly unique novels. She also has an interesting way of approaching the parallel issue of romance – both romance between people and our romantic relationship with our own pasts. In “The Memory Police” there’s a lot of discussion about the heart and how “A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.” When things disappear it’s described as leaving holes in the hearts of people who can’t remember them and, because their absence forms these “new cavities”, it drives people to destroy any remaining physical trace of the thing. It’s like destroying sentimental letters, photographs or mementos when a relationship ends or a person dies – as if that can cancel out our feelings of bereavement.

The narrator’s mother is a sculptor: “My mother had loved to sculpt tapirs, even though she had never seen one in real life.”

In contrast to the resistant attitude of the editor R, the narrator also has a long-time friend and supporter in a figure only referred to as the “old man”. Although he assists the narrator in hiding the editor and rescuing disappeared goods, he has a more apathetic attitude about the worrying frequency with which things vanish. He states: “The disappearances are beyond our control. They have nothing to do with us. We’re all going to die anyway, someday, so what’s the differences? We simply have to leave things to fate.” Paired with the disappearances of memories is an inertia and lack of resistance from most of the general population who simply comply. This echoes many examples from history where people are unwilling to defend their values, way of life and the lives of others when threatened by a perceived authority. I’m sympathetic to this dilemma and it’s a complex subject. I admire the way this excellent novel wrestles with these issues that we all face both as individuals and citizens of our communities.

Farewell, My Orange by Iwaki Kei (translated by Meredith McKinney)

There’s perhaps no greater challenge to one’s sense of self than travelling to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. This experience is so instantly disorientating and isolating that you’re forced back into a state of infantilism struggling to communicate what you mean with those around you. It also provokes self-reflection making you consider assumptions about the meaning of culture and language. Whenever I’ve spent time in a foreign country I’ve felt simultaneously energised with curiosity and very vulnerable as I pondered these issues. This experience is powerfully conveyed in Iwaki Kei’s novella “Farewell, My Orange”. The story primarily focuses on the experience of two women who move to Australia: Salimah from Nigeria and Sayuri from Japan. They meet in an English language class. Gradually they form a bond amidst their different feelings of estrangement and establish a more robust sense of independence. It’s a poignant tale of friendship that considers the ways in which meaning is filtered through language.

Having left Nigeria with her family under strained circumstances, Salimah’s husband abruptly leaves her. Suddenly she’s the sole provider for her two sons so finds work in the meat department of a grocery store. Along with this enormous responsibility, she takes steps to learn English. Accounts of her experience are interspersed with letters that Sayuri writes to a teacher back in her native Japan. She moved to Australia because of her husband’s work and although she was an advanced student in her native country, she’s forced to enrol in a basic English class to learn the language. When tragedy strikes she must reckon with the direction she wants her life to take. Fascinatingly, the beginning of Salimah and Sayuri’s friendship starts before they can even communicate with each other. Their connection is formed not so much through speaking to each other but an awareness of each other – through gestures and presence. I think this is so interesting because it highlights how our sense of other people is mostly formed from observation rather than what people directly say to us.  

Sayuri’s accounts written in letter form are more naturally self-reflective as she ponders the various ways living somewhere that she doesn’t speak the language is disorientating and sharpens her senses. She observes how “While one lives in a foreign country, language's main function is as a means of self-protection and a weapon in one's fight with the world. You can't fight without a weapon.” It’s curious how language is something that feels second-nature to us most of the time but when we don’t have the right words we’re left defenceless and unable to express our needs. This applies to both basic physical needs and emotions whose subtlety can become completely lost when we can only gesture or speak in broad terms. Therefore, the connection between Salimah, Sayuri and other individuals in their class is formed more from an intuitive understanding of each other’s needs as women and mothers in a country that is foreign to all of them.

Although so many things about the environment and culture are different for Salimah, the one consistency she clings to is the colour of the setting sun which was the same in Nigeria. It’s really poignant how Kei describes Salimah’s story as the meaning of home slowly shifts for her and this change allows a more expansive potential to grow in ways she never considered before. It’s also shown how expression through language is both communal and highly individual: “the cultivation of the written word, the language that sustains thought, is an individual matter, a thing that endlessly changes as it's propagated inside each person's head.” We instinctively revise what we want to say and write in our minds before putting it out into the world. This is done as we reach for the right words which will better express our feelings and ideas. These women’s stories capture this sense in an absolutely fascinating way and I was greatly moved by their journeys.

The Sailor Who fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima (translated by John Nathan)

Something about reading my first novel by Mishima now at the age of 36 makes me think I would have appreciated him more if I read him in my early 20s. His writing is without a doubt very sophisticated and eloquent, but there is something about the philosophical digressions he goes on which feel much like an ardent university student making fanciful speeches where he’s trying to sound impressive. There are a lot of interesting points and it’s very well crafted, but I don’t think this is a book that flows as gracefully as a novel that is merely showing you what life is made of. I hasten to add that there is a meaningful story here amidst the sometimes fervent tangents. It’s basically a novel about three characters. Noboru is a precocious 13 year-old who discovers a hidden spy-hole into his mother’s bedroom. His mother Fusako is a widow with a successful business with some high profile clients who takes on a sailor lover. This sailor is Ryuji, a solitary man with a strict code of values who breaks from his life at sea after embarking on this affair with Fusako. The novel switches focus between these characters and tells a tale about sexual discovery, aging and becoming disillusioned with idealized notions about life.

Noboru’s complex adolescent state is described beautifully. He’s locked in his bedroom each night by his mother. His discovery of a hole between his bedroom and his mother’s gives him a way to extract revenge on Fusako by invading her privacy. It also yields contemplative thoughts on identity as Fuasako looks at herself in a mirror when she thinks she’s alone. Noboru has a burgeoning understanding of a new kind of world as he witnesses his mother’s love affair with the sailor whom he looked up to when he first met him. Apart from notions about a kind of Oedipus complex that this suggests, it forces Noboru to contemplate his epistemological position on life. Noboru longs to sail on ships himself but he “found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.” When presented with a solitary/exploratory life or a domesticated/fixed life, he surmises that the preferable option is the liminal space between the two. Isn’t this typical - for young men particularly? Both Ryuji and Noboru want to have it both ways: the security of having a home and the freedom to pursue limitless other possibilities. 

Ryuji finds himself at a challenging cross-road in his life. He’s prided himself at working hard on his own, separate from the other sailors on his ship and building up substantial savings by not spending his money on frivolous things. However, he does spend money to lose his virginity with a prostitute in one scene where he hilariously images the thick mast of a ship while having sex with her. This suggests latent homosexual impulses which I can’t help reading into the story considering Mishima’s own homosexuality. But this isn’t something the author pursues because he remarks somewhat dismissively that “His sexual desires too, the more so because they were physical, he apprehended as pure abstraction; lusts which time had relegated to memory remained only as glistening essences, like salt crystallized at the surface of a compound.” I’m guessing the question of whether sexual desire is driven more towards men or women is too specific to fit into the grander statements about life that Mishima wants to make in this novel. Because Ryuji reflects that “I’ve never done much, but I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man” he sees himself separate from the human race or as a kind of embodiment of pure existence. The real challenge comes when he finds he wants to change course and that now “The things he had rejected were now rejecting him.”

It’s interesting the path Fusako’s journey takes, but she doesn’t feel as well developed as the boy and man. I was struck by a hilarious observation by Yoriko, one of  Fusako’s famous female clients, where she considers “A prerequisite of any marriage… was an investigation by a private detective agency.” Rather than this spying presenting a complication in the relationship it’s affirmed as a great idea and carried out in a way that leaves everyone satisfied. This is a curious plot point which feels like it could have yielded a different kind of dramatic story, but it doesn’t go down that route. Overall, it seemed to me that the course of the story leaves Fusako behind. Although she’s a successful independent business woman she doesn't develop as a character. She simply comes to represent an anchor for Ryuji’s unmoored existence.

One of the most fascinating things about this novel is the adolescent gang that Noboru hangs out with. They are like something out of a Donna Tartt novel waxing philosophically about the sacred way life should be lived and methods for dangerously putting the world right when irregularities occur. They take the story down a dramatic path. Their actions inspire notions about the cyclical savage nature of life and how earnest passions can be ultimately squandered. I’m sure many of the subtler symbolic meanings of this novel were lost on me. I did enjoy the story and many of the thought-provoking statements the author makes. In the future I intend to read more of Mishima's work - especially with the beautiful red & white covers that Vintage came out with for all his novels. I was entertained and engaged by this novel, but not totally swept away by Mishima’s sea-faring notions about existence.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)

During the long flight from London to Tokyo, I was grateful to have a novel that was fairly simply written but emotionally engaging. ‘The Housekeeper and the Professor’ has an easily digestible style of writing and structure. However, it has a meaning which subtly builds over the course of the story. Narrated from the point of view of a single mother and professional cleaner, the Housekeeper tells her story of working for a man she only refers to as the Professor. She and her son (who the Professor dubs Root because his head is shaped like the square root symbol) develop a close bond with the Professor. He is an ingenious mathematician but suffers from an illness where he loses all recent memory every eighty minutes. This developed after he received a head injury in a car accident at the age of forty seven. As such he wears a suit every day which is covered in notes to remind him about his condition and who the Housekeeper and her son are. He gives this mother and son an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics. In turn, the Housekeeper develops a deeper engagement/relationship with other people and the world around her.

I really appreciate fiction which sensitively depicts working class life. The Housekeeper has worked diligently her whole life because she needs to make ends meet. She’s a single mother who gets no assistance from the boy’s father or her mother who rejected her. The fact that she doesn’t use her own name and lets herself only be referred to as the Housekeeper is a clue to what little importance she attributes to herself. Nevertheless, she takes pride in what she does and through engaging with mathematics finds a value in how she fits into the equation of the world. Where most people of humble origin might find connection with a higher existence through religion, she uses the guidance of the Professor to see how mathematics connects her with something greater: “I felt no fear, certain in the knowledge that the Professor would guide me toward eternal, unchangeable truths.”

The order and structure to the world which mathematics gives is a lifeline for the Professor whose immediate world is so insubstantial because he can’t remember and hold onto it. The personal truth of his daily existence must be maddeningly tragic as he can form no connection with what he’s experienced day to day since he was forty seven. Rather than taking faith in anything transitory he places it in what he refers to as the eternal as he says to the Housekeeper here: “Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression – in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.” There is a power found in numerical equations which is fixed in a way our own fleeting existence is not. The Professor’s condition highlights how everyone’s experience of reality is subjective, but there is an underlying structure which is comfortingly constant.

Baseball card for a player that has a deep significance for the Professor

What really struck me was the meaningful way Ogawa presents how we relate to memories. The Professor is kept by his Sister-in-law who wants virtually nothing to do with him. She lives in another part of the property and hires an endless stream of housekeepers to see to the professor’s daily needs. The Housekeeper finds it difficult to emotionally deal with the fact that the close bond she feels for the Professor can’t be reciprocated because she must be reintroduced to him every eighty minutes. But conversely the Sister-in-law is suspended in the Professor’s immediate memory. She states: “You see, my brother-in-law can never remember you, but he can never forget me.” Both women are complexly trapped in their relationship with the Professor because of their place or lack of place in his memories.

This is a very sophisticated and beautifully executed story which made me care about mathematical equations more than I ever thought I could. I didn’t find it completely satisfying as there were some strands of the narrative and mysteries about the Professor’s behaviour which weren’t resolved. But perhaps it is better that my questions about his back story and relationship with the Sister-in-law go unanswered so I can imaginatively fill it in. It’s a novel of subtle power and a touching tribute to kinds of beauty which aren't immediately apparent.