A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase (羊をめぐる冒険, in Japanese) is a 1982 novel by Haruki Murakami. It's sort of a mystery with magical realism mixed in (the first book I've ever bought with 3D glasses taped inside the front cover). It's told by a lackadaisical, beer-drinking, unambitious narrator, whose name we're not given, I suppose done to make him out to be an everyman of sorts, labelled as definitively mediocre by another character in the story. This guy is coerced into searching for a particular sheep, with a star on its side and of a breed no one can identify—an alien sheep, it would seem, or at the very least extremely foreign. The narrator falls for a girl with majestic ears, and the two take off to Hokkaido in search of his friend "the Rat" and this mysterious sheep. They come across eccentrics in a surreal adventure that wraps up with way more questions than we began with, typical of what I've recently read by Murakami. I sometimes wonder if Murakami has some grand design behind his stories or if he just spews out his imagination for us to wade through. Either way, his stories feel like they're working very well. And there are themes you can get hold of firmly in this book, such as war and its influence on types in Japan, urban vs. rural, ambition vs. apathy. It's funny at times too, especially the first half, whereas the last few chapters become quite surreal as the pace of the narrative considerably slows. All in all, I liked this one for its laid-back storytelling and absurd elements. The narrator is like a Japanese Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski; and both the reader and narrator are left guessing about the significance of the tale as it unfolds.

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.

The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) is considered to be among the greats of modern Japanese literature. The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga (first published in Japanese in 1926, later in Italian, then in English in 2018 in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories) is a Tanizaki novella which explores the dichotomy between aspects of Eastern culture (specifically Japanese) and Western culture (specifically European) through the use and eyes of a doppelgänger, a Jekyll and Hyde sort who vacillates in his desires and attitudes toward provincial, traditional Asia and a dissolute, gluttonous Europe.

The narrator, F.K., is a celebrated novelist residing in Tokyo. He receives a letter from Shige Matsunaga, from a rural village in south-central Honshu. Shige's husband, Gisuke, has left her, after having told her he'd be taking a long trip, and he is gone for several years without a word to her. After he returns, he slips back into his role of loving husband and content father. Naturally suspicious of her husband, Shige rifles through his personal effects and finds a postcard addressed to a Ginzo Tomoda. Her husband, years later, again leaves, for years more, and she suspects he's living a double life, as Gisuke and as Ginzo. During Gisuke's second "trip" is when she sends the letter to F.K., hoping the novelist can find out if Ginzo (or "Tom" as he's also known) is in fact her husband. This seems unlikely to F.K., who is Ginzo's drinking companion and sees the man for who he appears to be, a devil-may-care libertine with grand appetites for women and food and drink, not one who'd ever be able to settle down in the sleepy countryside.

A stretch of the book reads like a detective story, along with compelling dialogue, scenes with foreign women in Yokohama's bordellos, and all with exceptional pacing on par with what you'd find in Kafka, building up the mystery and suspense, and at last the reveal, which in this case is delectable (presumably more so for anyone who's thought at length about the oft-illusory boundaries between Japan and the West). Through the narrator, we eventually learn if Gisuke and Ginzo are one or two, and the rich accounts and colorful perspectives that fill the final pages are delivered with intensity, painting an unreliable perspective of the West as wild and the East as prosaic and restrained. The ambivalence of Tanizaki, who apparently was fascinated with Western culture and surely would've chewed on what being Eastern and Western meant, comes through these pages, which are sharply written and gratifying to read.