Osamu Dazai had tried to take his own life on a number of occasions, two of these attempts assuming the form of shinjuu, the traditional Japanese suicide pact entered into by a pair of lovers. But when he disappeared with his mistress on a rainy night in mid-June of 1948, the signs that he was thoroughly prepared to die were unmistakable. Dazai and his companion, Tomie Yamazaki, left behind a series of farewell notes to friends and kin, the author conscientiously composing his last will and testament for his wife, Michiko. Photographs of Dazai and Tomie stood next to one another in Tomie’s lodging in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, along with the traditional water offering to the deceased. Also, nearby was a small pile of ashes, all that remained of the incense that the lovers had lit before departing. After the police began an intensive search for the couple’s whereabouts, they eventually found a suspicious-looking place along the Tamagawa Canal, midway between Dazai’s own home and Tomie’s residence. A strip of wet grass lay flattened from the top to the bottom of the bank, as if something heavy had slid down into the water. The ground nearby was strewn with several objects - a small bottle or two, a glass plate, a pair of scissors, and a compact. A little ways downstream, two pairs of wooden clogs were found against the lock of a dam. Despite these ominous signs, an intensive search along the canal failed to turn up anything more. It was almost a week later - on June 19, the author’s thirty-ninth birthday - that a passer-by happened to notice two waterlogged corpses in the canal tied together with a red cord. This discovery occurred less than a mile from where the couple had evidently entered the water.
- James O’Brien, Crackling Mountain and Other StoriesIntroduction
The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.
I was assailed by a sensation of desolation more intense than anything I had previously known, as if I had been abandoned at dusk in an autumnal wasteland where no answering sound would ever come.
In the summer he wrote Hosaka again, reporting that lately he had been “bad-tempered and easily becoming furious”: Anger flares up and my body feels as though it has entered alcohol. Sitting at a desk and remembering someone saying something, I suddenly feel like smashing the desk with my whole body. Anger looks red. When it’s too strong the light of anger becomes so luxuriant it rather feels like water. In the end it looks deathly pale. To be sure, anger doesn’t make you feel bad… This paroxysm that almost turns me into a madman I mechanically call up by its true name and join my hands. An asura in the world of humans becoming a buddha. And filled with joy I turn the pages again.
“I don’t have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with these feelings is painful beyond description. Isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.”
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Spider’s Thread” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“The first attempts at giving “speeches” in Japan were made in 1874. these attempts were initiated by Fukuzawa Yukichi and his pupils, studying western speech and debate methods. The next year (1875), a “speech society” was established, and this speaking hall was built in the following year (1876). Built in Western style, the building with wooden structure has a tile roof and namiko-kabe walls. It is said that drawings of various halls were brought in from the United States for reference in designing the building, and cost more than 1,000 yen to build. It was designated an important cultural property in June 1967. Mita Enzetsu-kan is currently used as the venue for biannual meetings of the Mita Oratorical Society (spring and autumn), Fukuzawa Yukichi - Francis Wayland Memorial Lecture, and other events” (source).
Look familiar:
Fukuzawa’s speech and debate hall, named Mita Enzetsu-kan, was the reference for the Agency’s secret base in Bungou Stray Dogs.
MK: I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfill a sexual function. On the one hand, your work is boundlessly imaginative when it comes to plots, to wells, and to men, but the same can’t be said for their relationships with women. It’s not possible for these women to exist on their own. And while female protagonists, or even supporting characters, may enjoy a moderate degree of self-expression, thanks to their relative independence, there’s a persistent tendency for women to be sacrificed for the sake of the male leads. So the question is, why is it that women are so often called upon to play this role in Murakami novels?
HM: Now I see, okay.
MK: Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that?
HM: This may not be the most satisfying explanation, but I don’t think any of my characters are that complex. The focus is on the interface, or how these people, both men and women, engage with the world they’re living in. If anything, I take great care not to dwell too much on the meaning of existence, its importance or its implications. Like I said earlier, I’m not interested in individualistic characters. And that applies to men and women both.
MK: Most women in the real world have had experiences where being a woman made life unlivable. Like victims of sexual assault, who are accused of asking for it. It comes down to the fact that making a woman feel guilty for having a woman’s body is equivalent to negating her existence. There are probably some women out there who have never thought this way, but there’s an argument to be made that they’ve been pressured by society into stifling their feelings. Which is why it can be so exhausting to see this pattern show up in fiction, a reminder of how women are sacrificed for the sake of men’s self-realization or sexual desire.
HM: I think that any pattern is probably coincidental. At a minimum, I never set things up like that on purpose. I guess it’s possible for a story to work out that way, on a purely unconscious level. Not to sound dismissive, but my writing doesn’t follow any kind of clear-cut scheme. Take Norwegian Wood, where Naoko and Midori are respectively grappling with their subconscious and conscious existences. The first-person male narrator is captivated by them both. And it threatens to split his world in two. Then there’s After Dark. The story is propelled almost exclusively by the will of the female characters. So I can’t agree that women are always stuck playing the supporting role of sexual oracles or anything along those lines. Even once I’ve forgotten the storylines, these women stay with me. Like Reiko or Hatsumi in Norwegian Wood. Even now, thinking about them makes me emotional. These women aren’t just novelistic instruments for me. Each individual work calls for its own circumstances. I’m not making excuses. I’m speaking from feeling and experience.
MK: I see what you mean. As a writer myself, I’m thoroughly familiar with what you mean by feeling. At the same time, I can see how readers might come away with the kind of reading experience we’ve been discussing.There’s something really important to me about what you’ve been saying, this idea that in your opinion, women can go beyond sexualization, or exist wholly apart from it, and take the story in an entirely different direction.
HM: Right. I do feel that women have rather different functions from men. Maybe it’s cliché, but this is how men and women survive—helping each other, making up for what the other lacks. Sometimes that means swapping gender roles or functions. I think it depends on the person, and on their circumstances, whether they see this as natural or artificial, as just or unjust. Whether they see gender differences as involving stark opposition, or being in harmonious balance. Perhaps it’s less about making up for what we lack, so much as cancelling each other out. In my case, I can only tackle these complicated questions through fiction. Without demanding it be positive or negative, the best that I can do is approach these stories, as they are, inside of me. I’m not a thinker, or a critic, or a social activist. I’m just a novelist. If someone tells me that my work is flawed when viewed through a particular ism, or could have used a bit more thought, all that I can do is offer a sincere apology and say, “I’m sorry.” I’ll be the first guy to apologize.
“If you look for women in fiction, you’ll find them everywhere—novels, movies, and of course in anime, perhaps Japan’s main cultural export—but they are almost always assigned supporting roles, sexualized and self-sacrificing. It doesn’t matter how young or old the woman is, it would seem she has no choice but to walk one of two paths: the mother or the whore.”
“Then, about ten years ago, men and women alike started asking one question with particular urgency: “How do you feel about Murakami’s representation of women?” The question had such gravity that it was impossible to ignore. Answers ran the gamut. Some wished that he would handle women with the same creativity that he summoned when writing about men (or wells). Some said “The women make themselves unreasonably available,” while others said “I don’t see anything wrong with this.” Meanwhile, some said they actually thought Murakami’s depictions of women were realistic—even convincing.
Then they would turn to me and ask: “What do you think?”
I understand what’s at stake. Among the true pleasures of reading a tale spun by Murakami is the way he makes the world we know a foreign place. Oftentimes, sex functions as a skeleton key, allowing his protagonists access to other worlds. As these protagonists are overwhelmingly heterosexual and male, women must take on the role of sexual accomplice. I recognize that this pattern is present in no small number of his works, and I can understand that there is something to be learned from paying attention to this pattern. But what can we actually understand from this sort of pattern? The author’s personal ethics, obsessions, or attitude toward the world? Does it speak to something in his work obscured beneath the surface? All of the above? When we uncover these patterns, how does that substantively transform the thing we’ve read?”
“We just need to recognize that there is no single standard by which all works ought to be evaluated. The possibilities are infinite. Feminist criticism is one such possibility—one among many—but one that offers insights not otherwise available.”
Author Talk with Misa of Japanese Ammo & Mike Montesa
Author Talk with Misa of Japanese Ammo & Mike Montesa
Perfect event for manga fans and lovers!
Manga extraordinaire and regular contributor to this blog, Joe Pascullo, will be hosting an author talk that fans of his recommendations would love to attend. Join him Thursday, May 26 at 1 PM EDT where he will be in discussion with with Misa of Japanese Ammo & Mike Montesa, the translator & editor respectively of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End!
Syzygy? Androgyny? I’m no man and I’m no woman. Who needs gender anyway? I just want to get out of this place, to be on my own.
I’ve got no desire to see the collapse of humankind or the end of the world. I just want everyone to enjoy their lives. That’s why I came here — to a different time stream, a different planet, a different universe.
A book setting SFF community abuzz in April 2021 was Terminal Boredom, an English translation of seven, decades old, very dark speculative fiction short stories by Suzuki Izumi. Imaginings that are nostalgic, melancholy and sometimes queer offer readers peeks an extreme matriarchal society, overpopulation and cryosleep, scattershot appropriation of pop culture and humanity’s influence through at the edge of the universe, limitations of the virtual world, transformation and times effects, a pair of lovers caught in fears of an interplanetary war, and in the title story ennui of youth and dangerous numbness in a media saturated world. Told with psychological emphasis writing that can carry forward to today, some of the overreaching themes touch on gender or are about (dis)connection between people or the past.
Suzuki too an actress and model I want to say the picture used on the cover is one of her nude, dated to the early 70s and found (possibly among other places) in a photo book “Izumi, this bad girl” with photography by Araki Nobuyoshi (who is a whole other matter). Described as an incandescent creative by some, it’s a notable development for examples of her work to be translated to English so many years after her untimely death in 1986 due to suicide. Though, readers in this book won’t find an introduction or afterword to provide such details about her life or, context to her writings. An odd choice when Suzuki has been all but unknown in Anglophone circles, and even in Japan often filtered through lenses of other figures around her. Six different translators were also tasked to bring this collection of stories, chosen from a larger Japanese volume to English. If one finds appeal, know Verso also has plans for another.
Terminal Boredom by Suzuki Izumi is available in English translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O'Horan, in print and digital (including audio) from Verso Fiction
To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.
All 55 illustrations of the Genjimonogatari series in one collage!
One of the main ideas behind this series is that you can combine the illustrations in different ways to showcase various relationships, thematic groupings, and key narrative connections. Many of the illustrations were designed with these potential groupings in mind, so you’ll notice things like similar or mirrored/complementary compositions and colour palettes. These groupings make great print displays or inspirations! For me personally, it’s also a fun way to learn, reinforce and even discover new things about this rich literary masterpiece!
Sumori (“Nest of Protection”) is the granddaughter of Prince Hotaru,Genji’s younger half-brother, but you won’t find her in a single line of the novel we know today as the Tale of Genji.
Youwill find her in the apocryphal chapter “Sumori”.
For hundreds of years there have been writings floating around claiming to be secret or “lost” chapters of the Tale of Genji. Many fakes, of course, but it’s not an impossible idea. A thousand years is a long time, and the tale was written and shared as it was being created. Distribution was a super manual process of copying, and there were certainly errors, edits and tweaks by the author (or authors, depending on what theories you subscribe to) and by the copyists. The Tale of Genji we have today is remarkably coherent in no small part thanks to the diligence of centuries of fans.
There are three chapters generally considered to have higher-than-average likelihood of being legit parts of the Tale of Genji written by Murasaki Shikibu. Of these, Sumoriappears to be the best documented. It exists only in fragments today, but these fragments contain people and pieces of poetry that are actually mentioned in some very, very old critiques and analyses of the Tale of Genji - including genealogies that map out the relationships of the characters. Such references have aided in its partial reconstruction. The gist of the pieced-together plot is that Niou is pursuing Sumori, who can’t stand him and his philandering ways. She falls in love with Kaoru instead because he’s so noble and sincere. When Niou tries to go after her again, she’s like “get away from me you creep” and runs away to the mountains, where Kaoru visits her.
There are several theories about what Sumorireally is. One is that it’s a Kamakura-period fanfic written by a Kaoru fan unhappy with how the Uji chapters ended. If this theory is true, it’s a classic move in the long-running history of fandom, and it wouldn’t have been the only historical fanfic attempting to right perceived wrongs against a beloved character. (Go Team Kaoru!)
Another interesting hypothesis is that Sumoriis actually an early draft of what would later be polished into the Uji chapters. It has quite a few similarities and parallels, particularly Niou and Kaoru in a love triangle with a woman who then becomes a nun.Ifthis theory is true, it’s intriguing that the original concept is a lot more sympathetic and favourable to Kaoru - giving him a “good” ending - than the version we know today, 1,000 years later.
Fascinating, right? As a creator and participant/appreciator of fandoms, Sumori sums up so many things I love about stories in general and Tale of Genji studies in particular!
And aaaahhhhhhh I did it!! Nearly five years later, the Genjimonogatari series is now complete! For fun, I’ve included some wip photos showing the progress of this particular piece, including my trying to figure out the palette from looking at my fountain pen ink swatches, on my Pillowfort!
You can see all 55 illustrations one for each chapter of the tale (including the blank chapter Kumogakure), on my website. The commentary for each illustration is here on Tumblrandon Pillowfort!
Now… I hope to do something with all these illustrations… when I have time…
“Better if I’d never been born.” I don’t remember now when I started thinking that way. Not, “I’m sorry for being born,” but “better if I’d never been born.” As I did not choose to be born of my own free will, there is no reason to feel apologetic. I have lived my life instead with anger and despair at being thrust into the world, without knowing how best to express them.
This is a little different from “I want to die.” Having been born, I have no desire to bring about my own death, and even if I did die, this would not achieve a perfect nothingness, as it would not alter the fact that I existed. It is aggravating too just to imagine all the speculation on, interpretations of, and inquiries into my death that would follow in realms beyond my control.
In the end, the most desirable state is never to have existed, undergoing everything in life—its joy, rage, sorrow, and pleasure, and the pain of parting from loved ones …more.
“Someone who has a cosmos within himself escapes a locality no matter where he may be in the world, no matter at which periphery he may be… Miyazawa Kenji, the poet of Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, was one of the rare possessors of such a cosmos.”
“Still, the world is a strange place when you think about it: a guy who rubs you the wrong way treats you kindly while a friend, somebody you get along with fine, turns out to be a scoundrel; it all seems like some kind of farce.”
“Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.” ― Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job
