An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers.
Atmospheric, meditative story of memory and loss in a gentrifying Tokyo neighborhood.
There’s not much room for gardens in the older districts of Tokyo, where concrete has long covered up fields and streams. In one spot, sold by a farmer long ago for development, block after block of apartment buildings sprouted in the postwar era, each named after a sign in the Japanese zodiac. Taro, divorced for three years and still not used to it, still grieving the death of his father on top of that, is almost alone in the urban wasteland that Shibasaki constructs; the only neighbors he’s aware of are an old woman he calls Mrs. Snake, after the apartment building in which she lives, and Nishi, a comic book artist. All are being pushed out of their homes, which are slated to be razed once the last inhabitants are gone. But what of the secret treasure at the heart of the nondescript district, one of “the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”? Painted sky blue, with a pyramidal roof, it fascinates Nishi, who wonders who might have lived there. In time, Taro and Mrs. Snake come to see the sky-blue house as an anchor, even as their personal histories begin to unfold: Mrs. Snake, for instance, is now old, but when she was young, “she had been to see the Beatles playing the Budokan.” Ancient history, that, as is the unexploded bomb that disrupts the life of a nearby Tokyo neighborhood, prompting Taro to reflect that “the bomb was probably the same age as his father, and Mrs Snake too.” Just as the things of the surface belong on the surface, Shibasaki seems to be saying, so, too, are subterranean things—and memories, and secrets, and private artifacts—sometimes better left hidden, as her ending, steeped in foreboding silence, suggests.
An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78227-270-0
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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