Tag: Japan

Book Review: When True Love Came to China, by Lynn Pan

Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read about anything. It argues that China was a stranger to love – or at least to “true love” – until the New Culture and May Fourth movements of the 1910s, when love was imported to China from its Western place of origin.

To make her case, Pan reviews Chinese and Western literary sources and shows that China, where “feeling” and “lust of the mind” were indeed well known, nonetheless fostered only a pragmatic experience of male-female coupling, due to the prevalence of arranged marriage and also to the Confucian preoccupation on moral perfection, which left little room for supposedly frivolous pursuits such as being in love. It fell to the Western mind, with its predisposition toward religious ardor, to develop the tradition of ecstatic devotion to one person. Even if the reader is uninterested in China, Pan’s chapter on the idea of love in the West is worth the price of the ticket.

That Pan limits her search for love to the Chinese and Western literary corpora tempted me to call foul, for love, as I thought, must surely evince itself outside of books. Psychologists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists might be even more insistent that Pan’s approach is myopic and that  a better-directed hunt for love should also lead through their respective fields. Upon reflection, however, it makes sense that broader cultural phenomena such as love would sooner or later find expression in books, with the more significant phenomena garnering the most articulation. When True Love Came to China is in fact a monumental testament to the importance of books. Pan’s treatment of China’s pioneering lovers of the early twentieth century makes the primacy of book-borne sensibility undeniable.

When Pan quotes from Yu Dafu’s (1896-1945) letter to Wang Yingxia (1908-2000) – “Oh Yingxia! You are truly my Beatrice.” (p. 204) – she clinches both arguments, proving that love is a Western import to China and that books are important. Earlier chapters of When True Love Came to China highlight the role played by Ellen Key (1849-1926) and her book Love and Marriage, as well as the better-known effect in China of Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) play A Doll’s House, in which the protagonist Nora walks out on her family. Nora is shown to be the role model proposed by the ardent Xu Zhimo (1897-1931) to the married Lu Xiaoman (1903-1965) in Xu’s exhortation for her to leave her husband and run off with him (p. 217).

For love to flourish, freedom and the idea of personality (see p. 163 and thereabouts) must also be secured, and Pan traces China’s quest for these latter prizes as well. The liberation of women, obviously, becomes an important part of the story, and students of this subject will find much in the way of further reading in Pan’s bibliography.

There is simply too much here – love, freedom, religion, marriage, feminism, history, China, Japan, Europe – for the present reviewer to summarize. When True Love Came to China is enthralling from so many angles. It is essential reading for life.

Book Review: Sanshirō, by Natsume Sōseki

Sanshirō’s namesake protagonist journeys to Tokyo from his provincial hometown in 1908, to pursue his education in Western subjects. What he finds on arrival is no brave new world of expanding horizons but a stagnant morass of demoralization. On a basic level, the Western ideas he encounters are not liberating but imposing, adding nothing to the native culture but confusion:

‘The sky was so clear before,’ said Mineko. ‘Now the color is all muddied.’

Sanshirō took his eyes from the stream and looked up. This was not the first time he had seen a sky like this, but it was the first time he had heard the sky described as ‘muddied.’ And she was right, he saw. There was no other way to describe this color. Before he could say anything in reply, however, Mineko spoke again.

‘It’s so heavy! It looks like marble,’ she said, using the English word. She was looking up high, eyes narrowed. Then she moved her narrowed eyes slowly, until they were turned upon Sanshirō. ‘It does look like marble, don’t you think?’

Sanshirō had no choice but to agree. ‘Yes, it looks like marble.’ (p. 97)

Mineko was doing so well with “muddied.” Why did she switch to marble? Why did Sanshirō have no choice but to go along with it?

I confess that I remembered this passage incorrectly. I thought that Mineko had described the sky consistently as marbled and that Sanshirō concluded that marbled was the only adjective that suited it. The difference, however is only one of nuance, with the true text showing how an English word comes to replace a Japanese one and my misremembered version accepting the imposition of English as an accomplished fact, conforming to my experience of Japan in recent years. On drives along the hilly coastline of southern Hokkaido, our car frequently passes through tunnels, uniformly designated as ton’neru, which has always seemed to me like bad English and not Japanese. I wonder how the Japanese named tunnels before the arrival of Commodore Perry and what was wrong with the old name.  Why not call it a zuidō, using two kanji? (But then again, kanji are Chinese characters and zuidō is a Chinese pronunciation. Perhaps the Japanese really can’t avoid borrowing a foreign term, the only choice being the era in which the term was imported.)

At any rate, as though responding to the general marblization of things, a student at Sanshirō’s school addresses a gathering, “We do not study Western literature in order to surrender ourselves to it but to emancipate minds that have already surrendered to it.” (p. 116) Very soon after hearing this bold proclamation, Sanshirō attends a crowded track meet, which, auguring poorly for the emancipation project just announced, takes place under both the Japanese and the British flags.  

Sanshirō was disappointed to find that the ladies’ seats were separate from the rest and unapproachable for ordinary human beings; also, there were a lot of important-looking men here in frock coats, which made him appear less impressive than he might have wished. Ogawa Sanshirō, youth of the new age, had shrunk a little in stature. (p. 118)

Of course, it doesn’t matter if skies are muddied or marbled, or whose flag flies over the track meet, if sex segregation and aristocracy are still so prevalent. As Haruki Murakami observes in his introduction to the 2009 Penguin edition I read, “Western ‘modernity’…had not yet taken root in Meiji Japan, nor, perhaps, is it all that firmly rooted in our own day.” (p. xxxv)

As for the plot, it involves Sanshirō’s somewhat passive pursuit of the witty and cosmopolitan Mineko and leads, rather predictably, to the contradiction between free and arranged marriage, which is fundamental to the Westernization question. The persistence of arranged marriage, as evinced in the storylines of myriad Asian movies and TV dramas popular today, confirms the truth of Murakami’s observation.

Therefore, as I finish Sanshirō, and as I finish also the 2020 Japanese movie Aristocrats, which features an arranged marriage, I resolve that my next reading, perhaps my next several readings, will focus on the crucial conflict between arranged marriage and freedom in marriage. No sooner have I closed the cover of Natsume’s novel than I have rushed to the library to borrow Lynn Pan’s nonfiction When True Love Came to China, which has some bearing on Japan as well.

Book Review: A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

As is known, Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is a retelling of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights that takes the form of a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, triangulating on the character of Taro Azuma, the racially impure pauper who makes the best of the various table scraps the world throws to him and becomes a millionaire. As such, it illustrates the triumph of the middle class over residual aristocracy, a theme that is developed on other levels as well, outside the main storyline. Secondarily, it draws attention to the process of novelization itself by, among other things, impugning the reliability of the chief narrator.

I loved losing myself in A True Novel’s 854 pages and seldom put it down. The pace does drag in one or two of the middle chapters, which provide the background of the aforesaid chief narrator, but it picks up again.

The cover blurb promises “an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class,” although its treatment of westernization is muted (it is more explicit in Mizumara’s Inheritance from Mother) and its depiction of the middle class, while not exactly triumphalist, is certainly not an indictment. In this respect, A True Novel is representative of postwar Japanese literature in its mostly happy adjustment with bourgeois, middle class life. The sense of angst and malaise, the criticism and satire that would accompany any American novel set in the middle class, is entirely absent. While A True Novel makes ample mention of squalor, failed marriages, and office drudgery, these occurrences never warrant a rejection of the bourgeois ethos in toto; no alternatives are considered. When its characters enter a hotel, restaurant, bookstore, or supermarket, they are comfortable in such places and participate unselfconsciously in the consumption that occurs therein. They refrain from mocking the decor or caricaturing the clientele, activities de rigueur in America. In short, these bourgeois settings are not enemy territory, through which its unassimilated characters trespass.

The lack of any snark directed toward the middle class may be explained by the simple fact that most Japanese are pleased to identify themselves as members of it. (For that matter, Japan’s racial and cultural homogeneity also ensures that the ethnic, religious, political, and cultural strife that dominates American novels has no parallel in Japanese ones.) In fact, A True Novel may be read as a middle-class epic, with Taro Azuma as its hero.

But does Taro find love? And if he does, is it of the aristocratic or the bourgeois kind?

The answer, of course, would be a spoiler.  

Book Review: Inheritance from Mother, by Minae Mizumura

Inheritance from Mother is a two-part novel: Part I is almost entirely a flashback, describing protagonist Mitsuki’s mother’s prolonged decline and intercutting scenes of their relationship; Part II takes place at a resort hotel, where Mitsuki has gone to figure out what to do about her unhappy marriage (and it also contains many flashbacks). Part II was more pleasant for me to read, since I like hotel settings and internal dialogue in which characters figure out what to do.

The latter part contains one of the best portraits of relationship disappointment I’ve ever read:

As she sang, she felt enveloped in the peculiar bliss of singing – the sense that, at least for that fleeting moment, the world is in harmony.

She was halfway through the first verse when Tetsuo quietly left her side and walked slowly off to the pier.

‘The ship’s whistle sobbing, a flutter of cherry petals.’ She sang on alone, watching his figure grow smaller.

Why?

That was the first ‘why’ of her married life.

She herself was fond of hearing others sing at the chansonnier. Her past boyfriends had enjoyed hearing her sing. And Tetsuo was her husband – shouldn’t he listen gladly? This precise thoughts had not come to her at the time, but she had felt a voiceless cry tear through her, like an echo from the bottom of a deep well. (275-276)

Like Haruki Murakami, Mizumura includes copious references to Western music and literature, yet she also, without becoming nativist or reactionary, expresses resentment at the general degradation and sense of trauma that has accompanied Westernization.

Of course, culture flows both ways, and for every Mizumura character reading Madame Bovary, there is a Westerner like me reading Mizumura. On the subject of world literature, it seems to me that Japanese writers best capture the essence of modern bourgeois life: culturally amalgamated, materialist, and reflective, if not spiritual. Perhaps I am reading different literatures in search of different facets of the human experience in time. If Japanese novels are the best representations of the present, it is in European (especially Hungarian) literature that I find the most homesick remembrances of the past. American literature is where I turn for liberating visions of the future – which seem, ironically, to have been most vivid in the past.

(Maybe this last observation explains why I set my great American novel in seventeenth-century China.) At any rate, I will enjoy reading all of Mizumura’s books.

No! Speed Racer, No!

A quarter cup of non-decaffeinated coffee has unlocked repressed memories of watching Speed Racer as a five-year old, which I always found extremely scary and confusing. The contrast between Speed’s cute family life and the appalling evil and danger to which he subjected himself was just so bizarre and impossible to assimilate that it has troubled me ever since.  Watching it on after-school TV, which suggested normalcy, was a real mind-fucker, too.

Now I am hysterical.

I rant: “If you’re a professional car racer, you can’t just kill the other drivers!”

I invent ironic dialogue: “So long, Pops, Trixie, Spritle. I’ve signed up for a race through an active volcano. If I win, I’ll bring home a big trophy, and we’ll go someplace nice for dinner. If I lose, I’ll be burned to a crisp in molten lava, along with twenty other people.”

And, of course, I take to YouTube, finding the show’s opening credit. I watch it over and over, really freaking out. Check out the boyish grin at 0:28 and nonchalant murder at 0:40.

Book Review: The Stolen Bicycle, by Wu Ming-yi

Here is a passage from toward the end of the book:

I rode around [Taipei] but felt I didn’t know her anymore. She keeps on getting renewed, over and over again, as if in a rush to shed some sort of shell, the grotesque, mournful, scandalous past. With each renewal, so many things that shine with an incredible radiance in many people’s memories disappear. I felt a bit sorry and lonely. ‘Yes, this is gone, and that too!’ I could say that on practically every street. (p. 334)

Here is another passage, from more toward the end of the book:

I rode circles around the city, ring upon ring. As the slowest vehicle on the road, I was able to appreciate scenes the others left behind. (p. 359)

These two passages suggest the purpose of The Stolen Bicycle: to recapture, before it’s too late, the “grotesque, mournful, scandalous past,” which has already been erased from view but which yet lingers in memory. Using the protagonist’s father’s lost and found bicycle as a device, Wu Ming-yi embarks on an odyssey through a hundred years of Taiwanese history. His footsteps take us through the provinces of culture, including material culture, language, psychology, and family. The subtle implication of his narrative is that Taiwan is no mere subset of China but a unique mélange of aboriginal, Fujianese, Japanese, postwar Chinese, and Western influences.

Despite the overarching melancholic nostalgia, the tone of The Stolen Bicycle is actually rather positive.  Absent is the entitled, cosmic angst of Western literature, and the element of conflict is likewise missing. Instead, Wu’s narrator copes with bleak reality by cultivating private enthusiasms such as antique collecting and bicycle restoration. Often this sort of occupation leads to camaraderie (say, with fellow junk collectors), creating a sense of fellow travelers if not intimate friendship. Obviously, the attention given to junk collecting in the story points to the larger task of the writer, as he forages through Taiwan’s past; but the feeling  of wandering souls coming together stands in contrast to the strife for its own sake that one often finds in Western novels. (I wonder if some generalizations along these lines might be food for thought.) The passage describing a somewhat paranormal scuba dive in the basement of an old building makes it especially difficult not to think of Haruki Murakami. Perhaps Wu’s Taiwan, like Murakami’s Japan, is an outwardly peaceful but historically troubled land, compelling its literary types to become detectives of the past, as a sort of therapy.

I have made a study of Taiwanese literature in recent months and can report that The Stolen Bicycle may be the most accessible recent work to have been translated into English and therefore the most pleasant to read. Many other recent Taiwanese books have been written using experimental methods, like stream of consciousness. The Stolen Bicycle, by contrast, follows a straightforward first person narration, and it is, again, a lot like a detective story. I previewed this book in electronic form, which I don’t generally enjoy, but I found it nearly impossible to stop reading, even on a computer screen. It is jarring, about two-thirds of the way through, when the narrative device switches briefly from bicycles to elephants; but that is a minor complaint. The Stolen Bicycle is a fascinating book about a very special place.

The Last Eatery in Japan

This is the last photo I took in Japan. I turned around and snapped a picture of the FaSoLa Cafe, just before going through Gate ?? at Narita Airport, down the jetway, and onto my plane.

There is something fascinating about the FaSoLa. You experience Japan as an apparently endless succession of restaurants, cafes, bistros, snack bars, patisseries, and ice cream stands — but actually it isn’t endless, and the little cafe at Narita (the FaSoLa, in this case), just yards from your gate, is the Last Station. Here you can park your carry-on bag and sit down at a clean table for one last aloe-laden grape drink and yakisoba, while the last few minutes of Japanese television you are apt to see for a while provides the backdrop. Then, you wipe your mouth, take your tray to the collection counter, make sure the table is tidy for the next guest — and leave a spiritual imprint of yourself there, while picking up a little memory in return. You walk just a few steps, through the gate, down the jetway, and through the main hatch.

The next time you walk through it, as you deplane, the FaSoLa won’t be there anymore. It will have transformed into a bank of Burger Kings, Jamba Juices, and Quiznos.’ You’ll be in America, as if you never left — except for the little bit of yourself that you gave to the FaSoLa and the little bit of it that you brought with you.

Japan Journal: How to Bathe in an Onsen (Hot Springs Bath)

Here are a few pearls of wisdom concerning hot springs bathing in Japan.

  1. Know Before You Go. Try to distinguish between a mere communal bathhouse (OHURO) and a true hot springs bath (ONSEN). The latter, of course, will require access to a volcanic vent of some kind; but most towns with onsen will advertise them heavily, for they are a huge part of the tourist industry.
  2. Learn the Rules of the House. Onsen can be complicated. The larger establishments will have a small locker at the entrance, in which you store your shoes. Put in your 100 yen (which is usually returned when you leave) and take your key. Then, check your shoe locker key when you buy your entrance ticket and get your main locker key, which will usually be on a wristband (cause you gonna be nekkid in a minute, with no pocket to put it in). You will also need to know what amenities (like soap and shampoo) the house has available, either for free or for purchase; if they are not provided, you will have to bring them. Most experienced bathers invest in plastic baskets for their soap, shampoo, and towels. If they live in an onsen town like Hakodate (where I am now), they keep their baskets in their cars, enabling them to bathe on a whim, without having to return home for supplies (or for bathing). At any rate, when you enter the locker room, find your locker and put everything in it but your locker key. Smaller onsen might have wicker baskets instead of lockers, in which case, you might feel more comfortable leaving your wallet in the car or at home. Some bathers carry a washcloth into the bath area proper, to employ as a fig leaf, but you can go in buck nekkid, with nothing but the locker key around your wrist, and no one will call you daffy.
  3. The Washing. As most Americans know, in Japan, you don’t wash in the tub; you wash before getting in the tub. At an onsen, you do your washing while seated on a little stool at a washing station, which includes a hand-held shower head and a larger spigot for filling a little plastic or wooden bucket, also provided. The washing stations are in a row, before a long mirror. You will have to sit your ass down on the little stool, which is about six inches off the ground. Americans, unaccustomed to squatting, may find the action difficult; and Americans also tend to be more portly than the average Japanese, in which case they will find their bellies on their laps – or their laps on their bellies. Anyway, in this rather unnatural posture, you will wash yourself. You may use the hand-held shower sprayer, or you may fill your little bucket with water and dump it over yourself. You usually can control the water temperature, but many of the “on” levers are time-sensitive and will shut the water off after a few seconds, sometimes leaving you with a face full of soapsuds. This mode of washing is not as efficient as an American shower. You will find it especially challenging, whether you are portly or not – I should say no matter how portly you are – to wash and rinse your nether parts, while sitting on the stool. You may want to get back to your feet to do it, but rising again will require some exertion and will result in your standing nekkid next to another man, with his head about waist-high. Therefore, you will probably just have to discover some way to get the water down there while seated. The hand-held nozzle will do the trick, if you are aggressive with it, but you will have to get over your self-consciousness (if you still have any, that is) and forget how it looks. Warning: Some of the larger establishments might have one or two American-style showers in the room, and you will be tempted to sneak into one of these and get your washing done much faster; but these showers are for rinsing off the onsen water when you’re all done. If you use soap in there, you may get a talking to (by a nekkid man), as I did once, supposedly because you will have created a slip hazard with your soap but really because it’s not fair for you to shampoo and wash efficiently while no one else can. You must conform to the custom of the house, even if it means lathering and rinsing your bum, one cheek at a time, while doing a gyrating lap dance with a water jet, sitting on a low plastic stool with a hole in the middle of it.
  4. The Soaking. Now that you’re squeaky clean, you’re ready for the onsen proper. All onsen will have at least one indoor pool, and most will also have an outdoor pool. If there is more than one indoor pool, they probably contain water of different temperatures, usually medium, scalding, and boiling. There may also be a special, “herbal” pool featuring a treatment du jour such as aloe, lavender, chamomile, and so on; and some bathhouses include a pool of cold water, for polar bears. Go ahead and try as many as there are (except the polar bear water). The hotter baths you will only be able to stand for a minute or so. Note that when you move while immersed, you will get burned. This is because your body is cooling the water; so when you move your leg, for example, you are moving it out of cooler water and into the real soup. Stay in each pool until you are miserable, and then move to the next one. When you feel that your chest has turned into a pot roast, it’s time to step outside.
  5. The Air. Here is where your experience will turn delightful. The outdoor pool, if there is one, will be situated on a terrace or in an enclosed garden-like area. By all means, take an additional soak in the outdoor pool, but your objective, after your body temperature is maxed out, will be to get out of the water (take it easy as you climb out, or you might faint) and to find a nice place to sit down, where you won’t be disturbed. It may be a rock (which will leave an interesting pattern on your tooshie) or a lawn chair (the plastic will feel icky at first contact – splash some onsen water on it first) or a flat tree stump. Your body will be so hot that the season won’t matter; you can stay out in the open, even in winter. I myself enjoy winter bathing for the unique experience of hanging out nekkid in the falling snow, with the public address playing atmospheric music-box sounds, and ice forming in my hair. Even in summer, though, the air feels marvelous (it will always be cooler than what you’ve just been in), and if the sulfur of the onsen has done its work, your lungs will have opened, cleared, and expanded to such a degree that every deep inhalation will seem to fill your whole body, your whole world, your whole soul. You will lose your anchor to the earth and expect to float off the ground. If you are in a truly exquisite onsen, the outdoor pool will have been designed with a dreamlike view. A few hours ago, I was perched on a rock next to the outdoor pool at the Isaribikan, hollowed out and euphoric, gazing across at Mount Hakodate, all sparkling at night, while squid boats bearing isaribi (the bright squid-attracting lights that give the Isaribikan its name) rounded Cape Tachimachi and formed a dotted line across the water (just like in the photo, except that I’m a man and I was out of the water). My skin was tingling, as it dried in the caressing breeze.
  6. The Rinse. The light, unlocked feeling will stay with you, even after you remember yourself and sense that it’s time to go to rejoin your family or friends. You will need to rinse the sulfur water off, back at a washing station or in the shower, if there is one. As you do so, you may wish to try one last sensual experiment: Use the plastic or wooden bucket to douse yourself with cool water. It sure feels nice running through your hair and down your back. Then, dry off, get dressed, and go home feeling like a million bucks.
  7. Answers to Questions You May Be Afraid to Ask. Many Americans fantasize about uninhibited exotics and assume that coed bathing is common in Japan. It isn’t. About 99% of Japanese onsen, every one I’ve visited, are segregated by sex. If you happen to find a KONYOKU (coed onsen), it will probably be empty or filled with elderly people who, presumably, aren’t the reason you want to go. If you want to get nekkid with your significant other (of the opposite sex), you can try a family (KAZOKU) onsen, but you will find it about as romantic as an ordinary bathroom, which is pretty much what it is. I’m also not sure if groups of unrelated people would be allowed into a family onsen. There is one other thing you may try (besides going someplace really sleazy, in which case, I can provide no insight): At some of the outdoor onsen, the male and female pools are separated only by a partition; it may be possible, if no one else is around, to lean out beyond the partition and give your friend(s) on the other side a little peep show.
  8. One More Thing. Until recently, tattoos in Japan would mark a man as a gangster and a woman as a prostitute. Attitudes concerning tattoos are changing, but many onsen may still bar your entry, if you have one. Once, however, I was at a large onsen, toward closing time, and suddenly, about twenty men with full-back tattoos came in all at once. I suppose that that particular onsen had made some kind of deal with the yakuza, allowing their members to get in for a few minutes before the end of business. So there I was, standing nekkid in the shower, surrounded by twenty gangsters. In the event, I didn’t look at them, and they didn’t look at me. It was as though there were a nekkid gentlemen’s agreement.