Nothing to Envy

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), by journalist Barbara Demick, chronicles the lives of ordinary people living in the destitute totalitarian environment of Chŏngjin, North Korea's third-largest city. Although she interviewed over 100 defectors, she focused on six for the book, giving us a deeper understanding of a representative few and their heart-rending hardships over a number of years. This is the 1990s, when Kim Il-sung is the nation's Supreme Leader, countless North Koreans are starving to death, and Kim Jong-il starts filling his father's merciless shoes. Since the country has remained impervious to change, and many analysts today suspect it's currently facing yet another severe food shortage, Demick's book doesn't at all feel dated.

Every year I visit a port town in the prefecture of Niigata, where I've often gazed out at the Sea of Japan and found it hard to believe that a country of such brutal deprivation lies just across the water. Demick's book is effective for how it gives us a clearer picture of that suffering and its causes and short- and long-term impacts. You won't look at North Korea and its people with the same perspective after this one. It's the kind of book that compels us not just to know but also to act.

Red Roofs and Other Stories

Four disparate short stories by one of Japan's greatest writers make up this collection. Written between 1917 and 1926, they're told with a blend of realism and fabulism. And in all four Tanizaki explores from different angles the pursuits and pitfalls of pleasure. The first story, “The Strange Case of Tomoda and Matsunaga,” is similar in a way to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and well crafted. Next is “A Night in Qinhuai,” which seems like a personal essay and takes us on a late-night search for a suitable brothel. Again a craving for the exotic pushes the narrative forward, and it's rather disturbing in its descriptions of dismal endless backstreets and a man's hunger to satiate his desire. Then in “The Magician” things get weird. I like this one for how bizarre and intense it gets, unlike anything I'd read before by the author. The final story, “Red Roofs,” brings the reader back to realism, and it's unique in that it revolves around a woman, whereas most of Tanizaki's works are centered on male characters. The story felt somewhat aimless at the beginning, but it comes together by the end. Felt, too, a bit like Haruki Murakami, or Tanazaki's novel Quicksand. Overall, the collection is great writing with a variety of narrative styles and compelling characters.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

I've at last ventured into the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (Japanese: 仁義なき戦い; also known in English as The Yakuza Papers). Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973), the first in the eleven-film series, is a chaotic, ultra-violent tale of the yakuza syndicates that formed in Hiroshima Prefecture during the years immediately after WWII. The story uncoils with a documentary-like style, sporadic omniscient narrator, and captions to show dates and names. And also with near constant action, from brawls to limb-lob-offs by katana to countless bloody assassinations—each terminated by a freeze frame and distressing (or distressed) horn-blaring, maybe trumpets.

In the film's first minute or two, when American G.I.s are trying to rape a girl out in the open in a crowded marketplace, it appears as if the cameras were being jostled about violently, which puts us, the audience, smack-dab in the pandemonium. I thought I'd seen the scene before, but no. Surely, though, there's a bit of Battles, this part especially, in Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, not to mention the battle for the Five Points at the beginning of Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002).

Battles is an ensemble piece but Bunta Sugawara most arouses the spotlight. He's got this tough as big rusty nails look with steely William-Munny-on-whiskey eyes and adamantium jaw—like if you punched him in the head you'd break your wrist. Apparently this film, maybe some of the sequels as well, is based on the memoirs of true yakuza member Kōzō Minō. And I read the actors and director Kinji Fukasaku got help from gangsters during shooting. On the flip side, it isn't hard to believe that real-life yakuza probably took a page or two from this series. At the very least, I'm sure they enjoyed it.