Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (2009) is a collection of works by Ryünosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927). I'd seen Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon a couple times but never read the story on which it's based. Turns out that the film is actually more of a retelling of Akutagawa's 1922 short story "In a Grove", which is the second of the 17 stories in this book. "Rashōmon" the story is the first in the collection and categorized under the editor's heading "A World in Decay". This section also includes Akutagawa's fantastically imaginative tales "The Nose" and "Hell Screen", the latter of which recounts the degenerating sanity of a renowned artist ("the greatest painter in the land") who is commissioned to paint his vision of Buddhist hell on a folded screen. The artist becomes obsessed with accuracy and truth in his work, and this eventually drives him over the edge.

The other sections are: "Under the Sword", "Modern Tragicomedy", and "Akutagawa's Own Story". And reading through these subsets of stories you get a good sense of this troubled author's rise to literary success and fall due to drugs and mental instability ("wracked nerves" as he describes it) before he committed suicide at the age of 35. He was considered a prodigy in his youth, publishing in popular magazines and newspapers and gaining the respect of celebrated Japanese writers, and then later tried his pen at different types of writing (tragicomedy, autobiography, perhaps a play he might've burned, etc.), and then finally published (some posthumously) what reads like diary excerpts, many of which are dark and at times cryptic.

I really enjoyed the collection for how it reflects this arc that was Akutagawa's life. He was a painstakingly honest writer, not only in terms of conveying his sensitivities but also in delivering highly textured, authentic images through language. He was quite modern in terms of style as well. I found it remarkable that the stories had been written around a hundred years ago. Also, Akutagawa was terrified of going insane. His mother went mad during his adolescence, and a fear of insanity creeps into a number of these stories. The first and final parts of the book are most absorbing. The first for its strong descriptions and elements of horror and the latter for Akutagawa's honesty (albeit in third person) in his writing at great depths about his own life and suffering, with "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears" especially standing out. The cover art is impressive too, and I like the paperback's uncut-style pages and the book's introduction by Haruki Murakami.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Giri/Haji

BBC Two's eight-part series Giri/Haji is the best TV I've seen so far in 2019, and that includes this year's The Handmaid's Tale and Killing Eve (I have yet to see The Terror: Infamy and Chernobyl). For me Giri/Haji stood out because of its fusion of genres and its mix of languages, cultures and character types. While loads of TV for Western audiences is focused on the hard-boiled cop, this series is centered on a Japanese detective with a yakuza brother who's run off to London. The gay characters (a seemingly requisite "type" in TV and film these days) are a witty cokehead and a teenage Japanese girl. The white woman falls for the Asian man. The chic black woman is the assassin. Etc., etc. Diversify. Diversify. After all, we've seen it all before, why not switch things up? Parts are in Japanese, others in English, some of it shot in Tokyo and the countryside in Japan, some shot in and around London. The fantastic (and again diverse) soundtrack features everything from jazz and classical to J-pop and techno. The plot surprises too. Someone you think will make it to the end gets a bullet through the forehead. Another is forced to demonstrate atonement by slicing off a pinky, just when you think he's off the hook and can keep all his digits. Camera angles and shots are experimental. Lighting is unique and creates various nuanced moods. The dialogue is sharp. Acting is all right. Bits are shot in black and white, and there's some animation, and even a dance sequence believe it or not. Also the series is self-conscious about its shuffling around of and cutting into conventions and stereotypes, which makes it better entertainment—funnier, more dramatic, more suspenseful. Each episode is about an hour long, and that with the fairly rich narrative makes this not so suitable for binge-watching. All in all, fresh viewing and probably a sign of what's to come in the year's ahead.

Earthquake Bird

Another guilty Netflix pleasure, Earthquake Bird is as predictable as it tries not to be. Labeled as a "psychological drama mystery thriller," directed by Wash Westmoreland, and based on the novel The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones, this November 2019 release is a great way to waste 108 minutes with the brain switched to low power mode. Alicia Vikander, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2016 for her performance in The Danish Girl, gives it her all in this Ridley Scott production. She even learned Japanese (by rote) to play the role—that of a gloomy Swedish girl living in Tokyo who's convinced herself that the people around her are at a high risk of instant death owing merely to their proximity to her—the sole reason, we suspect, that she has "escaped" to Japan.

Vikander is subtle with the character. A brief glance or a slightly flexed brow or a wee lift of the chin or a cheek tells us far more than most words could from Lucy Fly—her character. But the name Lucy? Really? Back to this in a sec. The other girl, Lily Bridges, a role nailed by Riley Keough, is a ditzy American just off the boat in Tokyo to work as a bartender (is she a hostess in the book?). We know from the beginning that she has gone missing, and is presumed murdered (the rest of the movie is mostly flashback sequences). And now back to the name Lucy, and with Lily killed, it was really hard not to think of Lucie Blackman. The novel came out the same year Blackman's remains were discovered, in 2001, the year after she was murdered. So watching Earthquake Bird I was uncomfortable with the possibility that Jones may have incorporated Blackman's killing into her pages of entertainment, or maybe it's just a gaping coincidence. Though wouldn't it have been respectful of Jones, or Scott Free, or Netflix to have at the very least changed the name Lucy/Lucie to something else?

I liked the shots of Tokyo. The location scouts, while they would have had a smorgasbord to choose from here, found some pretty cool places to shoot. And I liked the "earthquake bird" idea and wonder if this is really a thing (a distant, mysterious and very eerie bird call right after a fair-sized earthquake). I remember hearing something like it myself once after a quake, and figured it was probably a remote car alarm. I also liked that Ikebukuro, Sado Island, and other parts of Tokyo and Japan are mentioned and visited, not just Shinjuku with the Shibuya scramble crossing thrown in for effect as in lots of other Tokyo-set Western movies.

And that's about it. Those are the only parts that interested me, and also Vikander's sedate performance. The villain, if that's what he is, is grievously hollow. We're not given any motive or background for his obsession or violence or . . . who knows what? We don't know what it is because it's not touched on in the story. He's just a psycho. Full stop. Actually, at the end it seemed he might have been a danger simply because he was not a Westerner, or not a white Westerner. And by now shouldn't we all be exhausted with "the other" being the baddie just because he's "the other"? Wouldn't Earthquake Bird have delightfully surprised us if the Asian guy turned out to be an average Joe and the Swedish translator or dumb American blonde was the bloodthirsty sociopath? And what the hell did the sound of the earthquake bird have to do with anything else in the story?! Either I missed the significance and connection or I didn't care enough to pay attention.