Two starkly beautiful narratives, spare and strange.
First English translation of a pair of novellas by a masterful Japanese author.
Mizukami (1919–2004) writes in a spare style, so the novellas’ emotions are just-beneath-the-surface-subtle. They do not share characters, but they’re thematically related. Both focus on outsiders whose alienation is symbolized by their strange, nearly grotesque physical appearance. In The Temple of the Wild Geese, a Zen priest named Jikai enters a relationship with Satoko after her lover dies. Jikai, a man of prodigious sexuality, is also the mentor of Jinen, an apprentice priest at the temple and covert admirer of Satoko. Jinen is malformed, with a thin body and huge head, and Satoko finds herself in equal measure attracted and repelled by him. One night they become lovers, and Jinen’s seething resentment about the way the older priest treats Satoko leads to a murderous explosion. Bamboo Dolls of Echizen is the tender tale of Kisuke, an expert craftsman who discovers that his recently deceased father had a secret life involving Tamae, a prostitute. Diminutive Kisuke, only four feet tall, gradually feels love for Tamae and persuades her to marry him, but with one striking proviso: that they not engage in sex. He sees her much more as a mother figure than as a lover. As Kisuke develops his skill in carving bamboo dolls, his fame spreads far beyond the small village of Echizen, eventually drawing the attention of the head clerk of a doll shop in Kyoto, Chubei, who was involved with Tamae when she was a prostitute. Just as Tamae begins to accommodate herself to her semi-wifely, semi-motherly role with Kisuke, the unthinkable, but perhaps inevitable, happens. She has a night of passion with Chubei, finds herself pregnant and, feeling guilty, tries to keep this knowledge from her husband. The story then takes a dramatic (verging on melodramatic) turn with the tragic resolution of Tamae’s pregnancy.
Two starkly beautiful narratives, spare and strange.Pub Date: March 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56478-490-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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