The Reed Cutter & Captain Shigemoto's Mother

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (July 24, 1886–July 30, 1965) was a master at burrowing right down into the heart of human relationships while describing them with precision and clarity. English translations by Anthony H. Chambers of his short story "The Reed Cutter" (蘆刈, or "Ashikari" in Japanese) and Captain Shigemoto's Mother (少将滋幹の母, or Shōshō Shigemoto no haha), published in 1932 and 1949, respectively, appear in this book which came out in 1993. The narrators for both quote from a number of old poems and other stories. Among the main themes is the transience of life, including our endeavors made out of love and for family, and the consequences of our actions over generations.

I enjoyed reading both, perhaps "The Reed Cutter" more. In Captain Shigemoto's Mother, the narrator digressed too often, which was intentional but made the narration hard to follow at times. What's best about the stories is the imagery, particularly the descriptions of nature and autumn in the first half of "The Reed Cutter" and those of death and rot towards the end of Captain Shigemoto's Mother. Remarkable writing from one of Japan's most revered literary figures.

When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans (2000), Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, has been called the author's weakest work, and I heard that he's admitted this himself to some degree, perhaps in an interview. That said, he's such an incredibly capable storyteller that his "worst novel" would be more appropriately labeled as his "least best."

I do agree, though, that this isn't as good as his others. It felt too long in places and could've benefited from some editing to slim these parts down. At times I really enjoyed it, as much for Ishiguro's brilliant descriptions as for the story itself. He's extraordinarily astute when it comes to describing particular scenes and human nature, choosing the precise language, as Dickens would, to capture the very essence or nuance of something or someone.

I got the feeling Ishiguro didn't know exactly where he was going about two-thirds of the way through. The book follows detective Christopher Banks as he tries to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance, which occurred during his childhood in 1930s Shanghai. From London he eventually returns to Shanghai, areas of which the Japanese at this point are regularly bombing. There he tries to track down those who may know what happened to his folks. He suspects they got caught up in the opium trade and were kidnapped by a warlord and have for years been locked up in a house. And this part, towards the end, didn't make much sense to me. Banks being so sure that his parents would still be in that house after so many years was implausible. And why did Ishiguro devote so many pages to Banks' seemingly endless search for that house? It felt as though the narrator or author had become distracted from telling the actual story. But to end on a positive note, I think the first half of the book is excellent, and the last fifty pages or so are good too, and whatever makes the other parts disappointing does not make the book anything less than a pretty good read.

Quicksand

Quicksand by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is a novel about deceit, jealousy, and betrayal. Written between 1928 and 1930 as a serial for a magazine, the story is narrated by a young Osaka woman named Sonoko, who becomes infatuated and then in love with another woman, the childish but cunning Mitsuko. Sonoko is married, while Mitsuko is secretly spending time with an impotent playboy, who proves himself to be even more deceitful, at least according to Sonoko. Sonoko relays their entire story, of these two women and two men, to some author (we assume to be Tanizaki). She talks and talks, at times like a garrulous teenager, describing the minutiae of a love triangle plus one. The remarkable thing here is that Tanizaki has seamlessly woven together an immense tangled web, convincingly showing us each connection, twist and turn, of which there are countless many.

After reading a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who died in 1927, a year before Quicksand started to appear, it was interesting to compare the authors and see how much more modern Tanizaki was in terms of style and subject matter. Again, however, the theme of suicide as an act of purest love or a fatal form of commitment comes up in this novel, as it did in Akutagawa's work and with lots of other Japanese writers and filmmakers at the time and onward to Mishima, Nagisa Oshima, and to a lesser extent Murakami as well.

There's a 1964 film called Manji that's based on Quicksand. The serial was also called Manji, but as Howard Hibbett, who translated the story, points out in the foreword, the title, if directly translated, wouldn't work in English since it means Buddhist swastika—its four prongs in Quicksand each representing one of the four lovers.