Nothing Ever Dies

Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of those books, bursting with ideas and brilliantly illuminating from stunning angles. Nguyen tells us that "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." He calls for an ethical, simultaneous awareness of our humanity and inhumanity, for equal access to the "industries of memory," both within countries and among them, and also for the ability to "imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared."

What I liked most about it was Nguyen's take on and dissection of the complex, multilayered relationship between war and art, especially his thoughts on films, mainly by Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Americans. He borrows and builds on ideas from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Toni Morrison, Le Ly Hayslip, various filmmakers and many more. It's an excellent read that's rich with imagery and occasionally poetic, from a profound mind and masterful writer.

This art also shows us, in the words of Toni Morrison, that “nothing ever dies,” an insight both terrifying and hopeful.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen

As an Aside

Viet Thanh Nguyen's appreciation for Le Ly Hayslip's work comes through in this book. As a scholar and intellectual, Nguyen surprised me for how high he regarded her memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989; Oliver Stone's 1993 film, Heaven & Earth, is based on her life), the ideas and hopes of, and ultimate forgiveness from, a once simple peasant girl caught between—and raped and tortured by—Viet Cong and American soldiers.

I had the pleasure of meeting Le Ly Hayslip in the summer of 2003 while working for a Japanese NGO on an around-the-world cruise. She wanted a dance partner, preferably an American (I was told), and so she sent one of the staff over to fetch me (I was in my 20s, and Canadian but close enough). I can't remember our dance together. I'd seen the Oliver Stone movie and read her memoir. I'm sure my palms were sweaty. We had drinks a few nights later and, of all things, talked about prostitution and sex slaves in SE Asia (and surely other things that I no longer can recall). She helped the ship's captain preside over a Vietnamese-style wedding of two Japanese passengers on the upper deck, after a stop in Da Nang, where she had picked up all the requisites and accoutrements for the ceremony. A courageous, high-spirited and clever individual with sharp eyes and a beatific smile.

Deep River

Shusaku Endo's 1993 novel Deep River (深い河, or Fukai Kawa) follows a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of Buddhist sites in India. Each is searching for some form of spiritual understanding or healing. Isobe lost his wife years before and ruminates on reincarnation. Mitsuko, my favorite character in the novel for her type and how well Endo developed her, is a cynical nurse who believes she's incapable of love, and who mocks the priest Otsu for his devotion to Christianity and its "Onion," the name she feels more comfortable calling its god. Kiguchi seems forever stuck in painful memories of the war and Japanese withdrawal from Burma. While Numada, a writer who seeks salvation from nature, is certain that a myna died in his place so that he could live.

The novel pits a number of themes and philosophies against each other, such as East and West, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, and egotism and compassion. We're also given a wide array of perspectives, carefully laid out to us as the characters recount their pasts and question who they are. The tour takes place during the final days of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Endo's rich descriptions of the atmosphere during that time, the Ganges, the religious sites, relics, and gods, as well as various strata of Indian society will leave lasting impressions. He's been called by some the Japanese Graham Greene, and I could see why as I read this book; it's more evident in Deep River than in other Endo novels. Overall, it's an exceptionally well-crafted story that'll make you think about humanity, love, death, devotion, and spiritual paths.

Japanese Fairy Tales

A dragon king, tongue-clipped sparrow, sake-drinking tortoise, vengeful rabbit, pitiful hare, flying paper crane, and luminous beings from the moon... A dreadful goblin hag, Rin Jin the Sea King, the Dragon Queen, the Peach Boy, the ogre of Rashomon, and so on and so forth. Oodles of imagination in this book of twenty-two fairy tales translated into English by Yei Theodora Ozaki. They aren't haunting or creepy-bizarre like Lafcadio Hearn's translations and retellings of old Japanese stories; they're rather fantastic fables and parables replete with rewards of treasures for good deeds done and awful punishments doled out to the mean-spirited and unfilial. They seem more for kids than adults, and yet the language is formal and old-fashioned and the tales lack the thrills young people these days are accustomed to in reading modern fiction. The book was released in 1908 (same collection came out in 1903 under the title The Japanese Fairy Book).

About some Ozakis: Yei Theodora Ozaki's father was one of the first Japanese to receive a Western education. He and Ozaki's mother divorced a few years after they married, and their three children remained in the mother's care. Ozaki moved to Japan as a teenager and lived with her father for a few years. Apparently she would occasionally receive letters intended for an Ozaki unrelated to her. This was the Japanese politician Yukio Ozaki, known as the "father of the Japanese Constitution." Interestingly, the two later married, presumably as a result of mistakenly getting each other's mail and having to sort out the matter via their own correspondence. Yukio Ozaki was locked up at times for his anti-war views and struggled for universal suffrage. He was also mayor of Tokyo when the city gave 3020 cherry tree saplings to Washington, D.C.

Yei Theodora Ozaki