Death in Midsummer and Other Stories

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories is a 1953 collection of stories by Yukio Mishima that was translated into English in the 1960s. I've read a few Mishima novels and I still can't decide whether or not I like his work. I suppose some of it I do, and other stuff I haven't gotten much out of. I feel the same about this collection, in which the nine stories and one play are so dissimilar they seem to have all been written by different people. Most of them, including Mishima's modern Nō play "Dōjōji", won't leave a lasting impression, but three stick out for me:

"Death in Midsummer"—A mother, her three children and her sister are staying at a hotel near the beach. While the mother is resting in her room, the sister watches the children swim in the sea. When one of the kids disappears, she runs to help but dies of a sudden heart attack at the shoreline. Two children drown, one survives. The mother must send word to her husband of the deaths, and he comes at once, sorting out train tickets along the way and unsure as to whether he's understood his wife's telegram accurately. The rest of the story describes mostly the mother's grief over the following year and the family's subsequent return to the same hotel and beach, with a new child. It's gripping not so much because of it's themes of death and grief but because of the ice-cold way Mishima tells it. Mishima performed seppuku in 1970 (died a few minutes' walk from where I worked for years in Akebonobashi; born a few blocks from where I work now in Yotsuya), and I see him as a self-tortured individual with too many dark thoughts. In this and other stories in the collection, that side of Mishima darkens their telling, and he consistently comes across as a cold-hearted reporter of life's misfortunes and misery, and duty as well, leaving the reader with little to no feeling of hope. But his writing works very, very well. He is exceptionally descriptive, and he certainly knows what buttons to push to get reactions out of his readers.

"Three Million Yen"—Much shorter than the others, this one follows a young, naive couple through an amusement park as they kill time before they have to meet with some woman who will take them somewhere to do something. By the end, we kind of realize the woman is selling the couple, who have lofty Disney-sized dreams of babies and money and a big house, to wealthy middle-aged women for a sex show. Mishima is evasive in revealing details of the seediness these young lovers have fallen prey to and rather focuses on the innocence and hopes of the couple, thereby building empathy in the reader and leaving it up to us to decide if they are victims of some evil or somehow willing partners to it. I got the feeling too that Mishima was trying to shine a light at the decay of traditional values, especially that among the wealthy.

"Patriotism"—Apparently Mishima failed to disembowel himself cleanly during his suicide, and so his cohort had a tough time chopping his master's head off because his hands were shaking so much. Mishima died agonizingly, nothing like the idealized way Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama commits the act in this short story. Shinji and his wife, Reiko, make preparations for their suicide in their home in Yotsuya after the Ni Ni Roku Incident, an attempted coup d'état in the Empire of Japan in 1936. It's cold outside, so Reiko will leave the front door open, knowing that their neighbors will think something's up in the morning and find their dead bodies sooner. Mishima clearly wants us to see some honor in suicide through his story, an unsettling enough view without all the blood and gore the man and woman's blades ultimately give us at the end. The imagery from this one will be hard to forget, not least because of Mishima's detached storytelling style and the fact that he would kill himself years later.

Would I recommend this collection of short stories? No. Or at least not to anyone who hasn't read Mishima before. Once you've read his other works and know what you're getting into, then Death in Midsummer and Other Stories is all right.

Tampopo

Tampopo (1985), directed by Juzo Itami, is entertaining, funny and occasionally bizarre. Truck drivers Gorō (a cool Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Gun (a young Ken Watanabe) happen upon a run-down ramen shop where they stop for noodles and meet Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), who hasn't mastered the art of making ramen yet. She's nowhere close, actually, and so tough-guy Gorō in a cowboy hat will chivalrously show her the ropes, and will meanwhile fall in love with her, in a reticent sort of way, both well aware he's the wandering type and probably won't be sticking around in the end. All the plot digressions make things more interesting. In the first scene the fourth wall is broken by a gangster and his girl watching a movie (us) as we watch a movie (them). He tells us he can't stand it when people make noise in a theater and warns us not to shed any tears for him should we see him meet his own death (so we know he will). These two pop up now and again, in some outlandish sex-slash-food scenes, as do other eccentrics and deviants. Sometimes called the "noodle western," Tampopo has everything from street fights to heart-melting melodrama to recipe theft. It's offbeat and exemplifies a number of flavors or facets of Japanese humor.

Two hilarious scenes that had me nearly in tears: the spaghetti-eating lesson for a group of ladies who can't stop themselves from slurping up their noodles, and later the part when half a dozen clueless honchos all order the exact same items off a French menu before the young guy accompanying them, an assistant or lackey of some type, orders a much finer, more dignified selection of dishes with confidence and a knowledge of French cuisine but oblivious to how searingly he's embarrassed his senpai. An entertaining movie and good fun.

Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs

Lafcadio Hearn lived a wandering life. Born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the U.S. and became a successful newspaper writer, living in and writing about Cincinnati and New Orleans. Defying a law against interracial marriage, he married an African American woman in his early 20s (1874). He then divorced and made his way to Japan, where he had a family and is well known to this day as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published an article about Hearn on its website on July 2, 2019, which gives a much broader account of his life, interests and achievements.

Hearn's 1902 book, Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs, is a miscellany of old tales, poetry and short essays. It was released a couple years before he died at age 54, and in it he touches on various philosophies connected to Buddhism, Shinto and the East in general, and at times it seems with some prescience of his own death.

The first nine tales, Hearn tells us in the preface, are his own translations from "old Japanese books." And the first of these, "The Legend of Yurei-Daki," is a four-page story about a woman who—on a dare—goes off at night with her baby wrapped up and on her back to a haunted waterfall, Yurei-Daki ("The Cascade of Ghosts"). She makes it there, and although she hears a spirit calling out her name, she makes it back unharmed, to where her friends have been anxiously awaiting her return. Everything seems fine. Except the clothes on her back are sopping wet. As her friends take a closer look in the dull lantern light, they discover it is not water that has soaked her. The story ends: And out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands—nothing more. The child's head had been torn off!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!

The second tale, "In a Cup of Tea," is also the fourth story in Masaki Kobayashi's film Kwaidan (1965). Next, in Kottō, a few more ghostly tales, mostly about human interaction with the spirit world and not tales of horror like the one with the missing baby head.

The book then takes sharp turns. "A Woman's Diary" is, as you might expect, a series of excerpts from a woman's diary. Very personal and sad. She writes about losing her baby daughter and son soon after they were born. She considers herself a wretched failure to her husband and to their arranged marriage, and we're left to wonder if her diary entries suddenly come to an end because she herself came to an end by her own hands. Her descriptions of areas in Tokyo are interesting and include Shinjuku, Yotsuya and Okubo. Reading these, you get a feeling that Tokyo of the late 1800s isn't so far off.

Hearn next tells us about crabs and insects, writing about the latter:

Even the little that we have been able to learn about insects fills us with the wonder that is akin to fear. The lips that are hands, and the horns that are eyes, and the tongues that are drills; the multiple devilish mouths that move in four ways at once; the living scissors and saws and boring-pumps and brace-bits; the exquisite elfish weapons which no human skill can copy, even in the finest watch-spring steel—what superstition of old ever dreamed of sights like these? ―"Gaki" (III)

He also gives us translations of haiku on the theme of fireflies. And searches for links between the microcosmic (insects, tiny spirits, a dewdrop) and the macrocosmic . . .

But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes. ―"Fireflies" (VII)

Something I didn't know until recently is that Hearn's grave was a few blocks north of where I lived in Bunkyō-ku in the 1990s, where I first read some of Hearn's books. I used to take walks around the area but somehow missed Zōshigaya Cemetery, where he rests in the area of Minami-Ikebukuro.

Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs can be downloaded here legally and free thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲)