The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

"The Dancing Girl of Izu", particularly its last three pages, is excellent for its delicate poignancy. After that comes a series of vignettes, like postcard-sized watercolors, that Kawabata called palm-of-the-hand stories. Blending fiction and memory (his parents and sister died when he was a child, then his grandparents during his adolescence), as well as misremembering and gaps, Kawabata evokes mono-no-aware through sparse, seemingly evasive, prose.

Kawabata could deliver a lot with just a handful of words. There's Ryunosuke Akutagawa in his style too, with a similar underlying downheartedness. Akutagawa created fuller, more defined pictures, while Kawabata's stories can read like experimental scraps requiring some supplementation—an enlightening book club discussion, maybe, or an academic lecture—to throw light on the depths. "The Dancing Girl of Izu" is the strongest in this collection, but others are sure to linger in the reader's mind.

A question for myself to ponder, or for anyone who can provide the answer: Why do paulownia trees appear so often in Japanese literature? Their literary significance eludes me. With countless tree species in Japan, I doubt the paulownia serves merely as an object of imagery; there must be more to it.

Title: Paulownia Trees at Akasaka in the Evening Rain; Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige II; Date: 1859

Tokyo Junkie

Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie covers the author’s ties to Japan’s megacity over a period of more than half a century, including his relationships and notable encounters with all sorts of people and his work on several popular books and articles about Japanese culture, sport, and politics since the 60s. Whiting doesn’t pull punches, and he gives us an honest sizing up of many Tokyo layers and key figures and events, from the construction boom leading up to the 1964 Summer Olympics to the doings of yakuza syndicates and behind-the-scenes workings of the Yomiuri Giants, to foreign ballplayers in Japan, press freedoms (or lack thereof), government screw-ups and shady deals, wrestling, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and plenty more, with his personal experiences and Tokyo itself taking turns at center stage.

When I heard Whiting was releasing a memoir, I was eager to read it (plus surprised he’d beaten me to the punch, as I’d recently finished writing the first draft of a novel I’d titled Tokyo Junkie.) When I moved here in the mid-90s, a “gaijin-house”-mate passed on to me what was then a selection of current required reading in English on various things Japanese, most of which had been written by “foreigners” who’d dug deep into topics across a spectrum of focus areas. Among these were Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan, Ian Buruma’s The Missionary and the Libertine and, of course, Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa. And they were instrumental in shaping my views and helped to make sense of a place and culture which from every direction confounded me to varying degrees. I still have (and prize) some of these books (I somehow lost the above Buruma, regrettably; if anyone has a first edition they’re willing to abandon, do let me know).

I also enjoyed Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld (1999). It’s arguably the most compelling book about the city’s seamier sides. Alongside Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice (2009) perhaps. And some choice bits in Tokyo Junkie are Whiting’s recollections of Nicola Zappetti interviews and the author’s accounts of brushes with the yakuza. Occasionally (maybe unavoidably) repetitive but consistently absorbing and informative, it’s a book you can either barrel through or sip at, with its countless, roughly two- to three-page chapter sections. I’ve shelved Tokyo Junkie next to Ian Buruma’s memoir, A Tokyo Romance (2018), and I’d recommend it to anyone familiar with Whiting’s work and/or enchanted by (or addicted to) Tokyo.

Runaway Horses

Mishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who served as a tutor for Kiyoaki Matsugae, the protagonist of Spring Snow (published serially, mid-1960s). Kiyoaki offs himself in the first book, and Honda, a childhood friend of Kiyoaki’s who plays a big part in both novels, believes Isao is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki. Both Isao and Kiyoaki are rather unpleasant characters. Kiyoaki is petulant and conniving and Isao is tragically naive.

Isao is also an idealist, nationalist, and wannabe revolutionary who vows, with a bunch of other somewhat sycophantic schoolboys, to emulate “the purity of the League of the Divine Wind, hazard ourselves for the task of purging away all evil deities and perverse spirits.” He plots a coup d’état or, as he calls it, a “Shōwa Restoration,” which seems doomed from the start. Lots of Mishima fantasizing here and perhaps for himself weighing out the merits and virtues, and folly and futility, of such an insurrection.

The narrator (omniscient third-person) tells us: “This was a plan that struck at every great capitalist family in Japan. All the zaibatsu-controlled heavy industries, iron and steel, light metals, shipbuilding—an illustrious name from each of these sectors was on the list. That morning of mass killing would, beyond any doubt, send a severe shock through the economic structure of the nation.”

OK, so there’s that, with a lot of soapy he-feels/she-feels meandering and digression (if he’d cut 200 pages out of this, it’d be more solid, cohesive.) Then there’s the idea that Japan was pure before being polluted by the outside world and outside ideas. Even Buddhism gets a bad rap by characters in this book.

I can’t remember reading a Mishima novel in which seppuku is not romanticized. But in Runaway Horses it comes up again and again and again as a sublime act of purification.

Narrator: “…when Isao felt a guard’s hand touch the moles on his side and squeeze them momentarily, he realized once again that he could never commit suicide out of humiliation. During his sleepless nights in the detention cell he had toyed with the thought of killing himself. But the concept of suicide remained for Isao what it had always been, something extraordinarily bright and luxurious.”

This recurring theme in Mishima novels can make reading his work difficult, considering how the author took his own life. What ended the creator interferes with the art that outlived him. I shouldn’t let his suicide interfere with his fiction, but it does.

I liked this one better than Spring Snow, which more often seems to lack direction and purpose. Runaway Horses isn’t an easy read either. The second half is stronger and more interesting and makes up for some of the long-winded time-wasting in the first half. And it’s a book that makes you want to ask the author a bunch of questions starting with Why…