After the Banquet, by Yukio Mishima

Mishima is a genius. His insight into his characters is flawless, and his exposition of the problems of Japanese society is not only incisive but interesting to the outsider—an impressive achievement. Moreover, unlike some other Japanese authors concerned with the modernizing of their nation, Mishima complains subtly, showing the predicament of society through the predicaments of his characters, and without ever, as far as I remember, using the word “modern.” Some other authors, I find, make the connection between their character and society too obvious, saying things like “he felt the pain of the modern age.” It's much better writing to just show us the character's pain and let us infer its cause. For example, in describing Noguchi's habits with regards to material possessions, particularly his rigid old-man sentimentality, Mishima writes that, “Noguchi’s tenacious attachment to old possessions could not be laid simply to stinginess or poverty. By way of protest against the superficial elegance created by the relentless pursuit of novelty under an American-style consumer economy, Noguchi stubbornly maintained the English-style elegance of clinging to old customs. The Confucian spirit of frugality went well with these aristocratic tastes.” Here we are given insight simultaneously into a character and a society—notice that none of those styles are essentially Japanese. Mishima quietly exposes the pretension of his society—unable to settle merely for their own culture, his characters imitate Western cultures (or, more traditionally, Chinese cultures) on their path to modernization.

This novel is about Kazu, a successful businesswoman, owner of a restaurant, who has raised herself by her boostraps (if such a quintessentially American phrase is permissible when reviewing the Japanese) from poverty to her present position. Without any other interests in her life, especially romantic ones, she is content. However, then she meets Noguchi, an older man, a former cabinet minister, and falls in love with him; they marry, and the story of their marriage, along with Noguchi's political campaign for the Radical Party, comprises the rest of the novel.

Without Mishima's beautiful writing, it would be hard for me to understand what could possibly encourage two such disparate characters to marry. Noguchi is cold and dispassionate, and extremely proud and moralistic; Kazu is warmer, more open, capable, and highly passionate. She is the crowning creation of this book, a warm-blooded, full-fleshed beautiful older woman, whose thoughts we are granted access to, and whose life we are happy to share. Noguchi, I think, just desired a wife, and Kazu appeared obedient and willing to listen; Kazu's own motivations for love, however, are far more interesting: after such a difficult youth, she is looking for security and comfort in her old age. She admits as much to herself: marrying Noguchi gives her to the opportunity to be buried in his family cemetery, which is ultimately to be accepted in proper society. While visiting their graves, she thinks of this future: “and to think that she would dissolve into one stream with them, never to separate! What a source of comfort that was, and what a priceless trick on society!”

However, this security she craves is not to be found; Noguchi's unyielding system of morals does not allow for Kazu's eager passion and excitement. As Noguchi tries to run for office, Kazu throws her own money into the cause, and appears in public to support him. She is politically brilliant, perfect for crying at public occasions, and is the only reason his campaign is remotely successful, but unfortunately she is also its downfall; slandered on the basis of past actions, her credibility is destroyed. Noguchi is unbending and unforgiving and, in his system of morals, all human actions were based on the same principles, and that politics, love, and morality, must, like the constellations, be governed by fixed laws. Thus, any one act of betrayal was exactly equal to the other acts of betrayal, and all were nothing less than betrayals of the fundamental principles as a whole.” Hence, their marriage fails, and Mishima has the opportunity to display what such an inflexible thinking system does to people. (Noguchi is, in fact, one of the few truly unsympathetic characters I've ever read of Mishima's; perhaps he would be more understandable to the Japanese, but perhaps not—perhaps he really is just a “self-satisfied old man” making facile attempts to align the world with his own twisted and outdated desires.)

Kazu, on the other hand, is, as I've said, eminently sympathetic. When she returns to her restaurant, after her marriage is over, she returns to a world that is almost the same as before: all her employees return, her same guests begin to visit the place, and she even rebuilds her garden; yet something has changed, irrevocably. Mishima writes of her garden, saying that “each tree, each stone, in its proper place, had corresponded perfectly with Kazu’s carefully arranged catalogue of the known human emotions, but this correspondence was now lost.” I think this was a brilliant ending, perfectly encapsulating not only everything about the book, but something beautiful about humans, the way that our action and the actions of others inevitably affect us, the way our choices bring consequences, and the way, most of all, that even the most intense longing for future security can overcome the desire for present contentment: the way that, in the end, life triumphs over death. It doesn't take a genius to see it, sure, but it takes a genius to write it—and Mishima has done it again.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Kidnapped” is a classic of the old adventure story genre, widely acknowledged as one of the best. While I enjoyed it well enough, reading it only reminded me that I don’t particularly enjoy this genre: having read so many hundreds of spin-offs has, unfortunately, made the originals rather distasteful to me. I mean, I know what’s going to happen, even without ever having looked it up: David will be kidnapped. He will escape. He will have adventures, but nothing seriously bad will happen. He will come into his own, in this case estate and rightful inheritance. I mean, it’s all well and good, but I’m just the tiniest bit bored by the cliches.

(Which, of course, weren’t cliches when Stevenson wrote them, but that’s what he suffers for having lived so long ago. Poor Robert L.!)

There were more problems for me than just its outdatedness, though—the main character was, I thought, rather sententious and unpleasantly moral; his claims that “it is one thing to stand the danger of your life, and quite another to run the peril of both life and character” were not only extremely old-fashioned (forgivable) but rather irritating and, I thought, unrealistic for an eighteen-year-old boy actually in danger of losing his life (unforgivable). I sympathized, though, with some of his adventures in a foreign land; for example, meeting Scotsmen who claimed not to speak English until they were paid, at which point they revealed a very good command of English. Looks like some things never change.

Sad to say, then, the most interesting parts of this book, to me at least, were related to grammar. (Well, aside from the insight into Scottish history, which was interesting enough, but probably would have been more informative if the work were solid non-fiction.) I don't know if it's Stevenson's writing, or his attempt to imitate Scottish grammar, but there were some really strange sentences, like “for all I was so young, I was wiser than say my thought”(where's the “to”?) and the fun one, in a word game sense, “I had never been so be-Davided since I came on board.” With that interest, though, I probably would have been better off reading a book about Scottish grammar. But there's no bitterness here: Kidnapped was entertaining enough, good for a slow day at work, and certainly good to show off the origins of the genre. It's just, sad to say, been long since surpassed in terms of adventure quality.

The Europeans, by Henry James

I’ve never been a big fan of Henry James. I liked “The Turn of the Screw,” of course, but that’s so far removed from his other works that it hardly counts, and I found “Daily Miller” and “The Bostonians” completely insufferable—the prose turgid, the characters dull, and the narrative voice sententious. I’ve always felt a little guilty about this distaste of mine for one of the masters of modern literature, so I’m highly pleased to say, then, that I liked “The Europeans.” Perhaps this indicates a whole new beginning for me and James; perhaps it just means I have shallow tastes and only like his frivolous fare. (The introduction of my copy called this work “subtle” but also “light-hearted.” I guess that’s me to a tee.)

“The Europeans” is about, well, a pair of Europeans, Felix and Eugenia, come to Boston to seek their fortune, as well as the company of their American cousins. James then takes the opportunity to contrast their European natures with the staid, Puritanical disposition of their American relations, with, of course, no flattery towards the Americans: they’re Puritans, all of them, charmed but somewhat befuddled by the francophone sophistication of the newcomers.

And, of course, Felix and Eugenia are by far and away the most interesting characters in the book. The American are all reduced to types—the Boston matron, the Boston patriarch, the Boston virgin—but Felix and Eugenia live and breathe, trying for adventure and home at once, for happiness and comfort and amusement. Felix, in particular, is one of the more amusing literary characters I’ve encountered for a while; his deliberate lighthearted flippantness makes him a delight on every page, almost something out of Oscar Wilde, only with a genuinely good heart, a real naif, in his way, as he tosses off one-liners like, “To begin with, I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often entertain me; but I am afraid I have never seriously made a plan” and “she reminds me of an old-fashioned silver sugar tongs; you know I am very fond of sugar.” Eugenia, while far more serious, is equally interesting: her plight as the morganitic wife of a minor European prince, and her quest for a new husband, drives much of the action of the book, and in her brilliant charm, as well as her intense and sincere desires for happiness, her own and her brothers, she is a highly sympathetic character, the real nexus of the novel.

It all proceeds with the writerly insight James is famous for, made, due to his characters, less preachy than usual, and it all ends happily, or as happily as you can expect it. Though short, “The Europeans” exposes several critical facets of human nature and, what’s more, the relationship of that nature to its own culture, whether European or American. It certainly deserves its “minor classic” status, and encourages me to give James another chance. Thank you, Felix and Eugenia.

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve read “The Great Gatsby” three times now and, frankly, I just don’t get it. (I admit that too often on this blog—it’s a good thing it’s only cyberspace that hears me. And if a tree falls in cyberspace, does anyone hear it?) It’s not that I don’t understand the book itself—one of those three times was high school English class so yes, thank you, I’ve analyzed all the themes until I and the themes were utterly sick of each other—it’s just that I don’t get why it’s considered such a great book, and Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Nothing in that book really captured my imaginations or emotions, and so it was really, if anything, an exercise in analysis.

I thought, for years after reading it, that I just didn’t like Fitzgerald; then, however, I stumbled across “The Beautiful and The Damned,” and realized that Fitzgerald is amazing: he has a touch of genius, a lyrical poetry utterly suited to the Jazz Age he so ably represented, and when he really puts his pen to it, his prose shines and sparkles like, well, a diamond. Maybe even one as big as the Ritz. (“The Beautiful and the Damned,” by the way, is far from being Fitzgerald’s best book—I noticed his amazing writing in that one because so much of it was utterly ordinary. It’s one of the best examples I can think of of an early work which practically cries out with the potential it does not live up to.)

I’m still on the lookout, though, for what Fitzgerald’s best book really is: where, in the end, did he ever really use his potential? I don’t think it’s this collection of short stories, beautiful though they were, just because they’re so, well, short—I think he has the skills to create and continue a character, to let his readers live with him and laugh with him and love him until the end, rather than terminating their stories after twenty or even thirty or forty pages.

Not that these stories were inappropriately terminated; in fact, I felt Fitzgerald struck the right balance of plot and character, brevity and length. The stories all came to their natural end, and I never once found myself bored before the end, or hungering for more. (My two greatest problems with short stories: the ultra-short ones are uninteresting, not providing enough room for real character development, and the longer ones develop characters and situations that are too interesting, and I feel angry when they are ripped away from me after a mere ten pages.) Some of the stories here were, for the most part, unmemorable—the last one about the football player, for instance, titled “The Bowl,” failed to really capture my interest—but most were exquisitely constructed and even better written. I loved the title story, “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz,” for its exposure of the unthinking cruelties of the wealthy and the harmful influence of affluence, as well as its amusing veneer of fantasy. The story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was also a remarkably perceptive insight in male/female relations, and, what’s more female/female relations, as well as being in itself a rather charming and entertaining story. “The Ice Palace” was, I thought, a rather stirring account of South/North relations; since my only friend here is a Southerner, I appreciated the insights.

And, as I’ve said, Fitzgerald’s writing sparkles like the diamond itself. He throws away lines—lines that you know must have taken agonizing hours, days, weeks at the typewriter—as if they just occurred to him, as if they’re nothing, in the same way his main characters trifle with their wealth and privilege. For example, in describing the south and its men, he wrote that “mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.” Or when he says that “everybody’s youth is a dream. A form of chemical madness.” How beautiful! And the best part is that, unlike in “The Beautiful and the Damned,” these sentences don’t stand out as pearls of potential awash in the sty of untrained writership; instead, they blend in and pass as normal. It is only when the reader takes a step back, a moment away from the stories, that he can see Fitzgerald’s talent come to life. I’ll be pleased, now, to know that I do like Fitzgerald, it’s only “The Great Gatsby” which fails for me. It’s a pity these stories are treated like trifles, while “The Great Gatsby” is inflicted on high schoolers; reverse the situation, and I’d guess you’d find a lot more adults willing to read Fitzgerald for fun.

Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

I’ve been reading a lot of Japanese literature recently. For some reason, Tuttle Publishing editions of modern Japanese classics are unusually cheap in the bookstores of Semarang, and for only $3 a book, how can I resist reading? Hence, I’m going to be, by the end of this year, far more well-read in Japanese literature than your average American.

This doesn’t mean, however that I have really begun to understand Japanese literature. I’m not sure, frankly, that I ever will. These books clearly originate from a different literary asthetic than the one I’m used to, and, without the proper cultural background and literary education, I’m afraid that the value of nearly all these books is lost on me.

(Shusako Endo, as I mentioned earlier, is a notable exception. I think it’s because he’s Catholic: with that background, he has training in an essentially Western institution, and an essentially Western mode of thought. Moreover, his years of study in France provided him with insights into Western philosophy as well as his own native Japanese philosophy; hence, while his novels are clearly foreign, clearly East Asian, they also resonate soundly with the Western psyche. It’s a beautiful combination.)

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968; this means, at least to me, that somebody in the West can appreciate his art. I’m glad for him. I’m afraid, however, that person is not me. While I can see the beauty of this book—and here the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker, should also be praised—it touched nothing inside me. By the end, the characters and their plight left me as cold as the snow country that provides the book’s setting.

Shimamura, the book’s protagonist, is a wealthy dilettante, an “idler who had inherited his money.” He vacations, regularly, at a hot springs resort in the mountains, or “snow country,” where, indeed, the snow can pile up to ten feet in height. While there, he meets two women, Komako, a beautiful geisha, and Yoko, her pretty maid; he falls in love with Komako—or so we are made to believe, from their habitual association; it is clear that Komako is in love with him, but Shimamura’s own feelings are never quite stated—but also suffers a strange obsession with Yoko: her pretty face, her quiet composure, and, most of all, her beautiful voice, which, “in all its high resonance...seemed to come echoing back across the snowy night.”

This last night nicely exemplifies the style of the novel. Kawabata is a master at detail, in particular the details of nature. He invents beautiful images of this strange, snowy country, and seamlessly integrates these images into the lives of his protagonists. A mountain, for him, is not just a mountain; it is an opportunity to reflect a face, betray a feeling, or paint a tiny portrait of humanity. His images are minutely detailed, lending believabiltity to the situation; for example, he writes of Shimamura’s seeing Yoko’s face reflected in the train window by moonlight, “as it sent its small ray through the pupil of the girl’s eye, as the eye and the light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains.” This is the essence of Kawabata’s craft, in this novel: weirdly beautiful bits of nature, along with the humans whose shadows impose themselves upon the stately, quiet mountains. When he writes that “the girl’s face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains,” he means it: everything, for him, is in the flow of the evening mountains.

Kawabata’s writing rarely missteps, in these images—though one has to wonder whether describing a woman’s lips as “like a beautiful little circle of leeches” is his fault or the translator’s—but, nonetheless, it fails to satisfy me. Maybe it’s just my brash Western insistence on details and motivations and actual story, but the novel didn’t work for me. I mean, I get it, in the sense that I can analyze the craft and see how it is supposed to work; I just don’t get it, in the sense that it rattles my bones and breaks my heart and lodges inside my brain.

The problem, I think, is the haiku. In his introduction, the translator mentions how Kawabata is greatly admired for extension of the haiku ideal, the essence of beauty distilled, briefly, and presented as a symbol of emotion, into the novel form. And, indeed, I can see how this novel functions as a sort of 175-page haiku. Kawabata uses more description of the woman’s exterior than of her interior; her face is delineated in minute, affecting detail, but her personality and motivations are hardly laid so clear and bare. (The fact that the reader doesn’t learn her name until nearly halfway through the novel is indicative of this emphasis on outward appearance rather than inner depth.) Inner turmoil and deep desires are invariably represented on the outside; we know far more about Komako’s inner state from her red cheeks and white, powdered skin than we do from any of Kawabata’s narrative passages. Almost the only explicit emotion in the book is given to the mountains, which can seem “somehow transparent, somehow lonely,” thus reflecting, along with Yoko’s face, Shimamura’s thoughts; when these thoughts are strongly hinted at, it is always through the details of nature and Shimamura’s current outward physical state: “the woman’s hair, the glass of the window, the sleeve of his kimono—everything he touched was cold in a way Shimamura had never known before.” While this depiction of emotion is, at times, quite beautiful, with the stillness and perfectly captured beauty of a haiku, it fails to satisfy me. At one point, Kawabata seems to summarize the relationship between the two main characters with an explicit presentation of emotion; he writes that “a feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman’s being.” I can understand the feeling—I spent the book with a similar feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence—hoping, in vain, that a solid and understandable plot would materialize, with the nagging doubt it would not; fully admiring the beauty of the prose and the scenery it captures so succinctly, yet feeling impotent to really empathize with the characters; and, finally, misunderstanding everything, in the way that a Westerner not raised on haiku seems eternally doomed to.

The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh

At one point in The Glass Palace, far into the action of the novel, a minor character, an Indian soldier in the British army, asks himself, a propos of his participation in World War II, his constant risk on behalf of the Empire that, from his view, enslaves his country, “In the everyday world when would you ever stand up and say, “I’m going to risk my life for this”? As a human being it’s something you can only do if you know why you’re doing it.” He means it as a condemnation of his role in the army—why would he risk his life for an idea that, in the end, means nothing to him?—but it serves as a handy key to the novel. In everyday life no one stands up for anything, no one risks their life for anything, and the meaning of things is unimportant, trivial. Yet, in lives like the ones portrayed in this novel, there is no everyday life; or, rather, everyday life is a patina protecting history, thinly laid over heroism and cowardice and the rise and fall of great kingdoms. This book is about families, yes, and characters, yes, but it’s also about history, about Asia, about life. It’s a saga in the greatest sense of the word—concerned with the small details while at the same time portraying the vast scope of the twentieth century as it sweeps across South and Southeast Asia.

It’s an impressive accomplishment, this blend. It is, on the whole, the story of Rajkumar, an Indian orpha in Burma, bereft of ties to family or places, working his way up in the world and out of his initial state, in which he is “unaware that in certain places there exist invisible bonds linking people to one another through personifications of their commonality.” It is, in essence, the story of the community Rajkumar acquires—his wife, a servant of the King and Queen of Burma who accompanies them in exile; his sons; his granddaughter; his friends. Moreover, it is their story set against the wane of Burma and the rise of Britain, and, later, the wane of Britain and the rise of Burma, this time a very different nation in politics and soul. The transfers of power, in this book, serve as backdrops to a family saga which weaves its way in and out of individual lives—friends, children, grandchildren—and the way each person deals with a new reality, a new world. Ghosh writes of the smooth transfer from King of Burma to British regime, “this is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation,” and his novel bears out these sentences: the shifts of political power serve as mirrors to reveal the characters’s methods for survival and self-preservation, the ways that they ensure their family saga can live on, as each new dynasty dies.

Ghosh’s writing is fine and balanced, just enough to keep the reader cruising through his story, which is the really compelling aspect of the novel. He has a delicate insight into character, and a solid grasp of the history of these events—no wonder, after reading in his postlude the research he undertook to write this. My only complaint is that the novel is somewhat long; in attempting to take the entire century in his grasp, Ghosh has overreached, and the last hundred pages are rather weak, almost a hasty afterthought to the real meat of the novel. Likewise, the writing seemed finer, more skilled, more detailed, near the beginning, with the tale of young Rajkumar and his ascent into business. All flaws aside, though, I love family sagas like this, and those that teach history in addition to humanity are the very best of the breed. This one is sure to please.

Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask is the growing-up and coming-of-age story of a young man who struggles with a burgeoning awareness of his own homosexuality and sadistic desires, as he grows up in the Japan of World War II. The main character is, if anything, an anti-hero: weak, sickly (autointoxication, no less, quite a serious sickness), cowardly, and deceitful. Yet the reader is given such a powerful insight into his psyche that one can’t help but sympathize—with an understanding that perfect, all is forgiven.

I’ve said before, on this blog and elsewhere, that one of my complaints about Japanese literature is its vagueness, its refusal to make distinctions (as one translator put it), and the deliberate refusal, on behalf of most of the authors, to explain themselves or their characters. Mishima is clearly an exception to this trend: he has a masterful ability to probe the innermost depths of his characters and come out triumphant, with a sparkling portrait of mankind in general, and one man in particular. He was recommended to me by a friend who said he was the “Japanese Dostoevsky,” and I have to agree: in reading his novels, much like Dostoevsky’s, I feel an increased understanding and fellowship with mankind, no matter how dark the actual topic matter presented here.

And the topic is dark—after all, growing up gay and sadist is no easy feat, not to mention in pre-WWII Japan. The story arc takes us from early childhood memories, in particular, the fantasy fairy tale books which first expose our narrator to the thrill he finds in young male bodies, wounded and bloodied, to the reminiscences of a young man pretending to be, or maybe genuinely being, if one can accept, as the narrator can’t, “love with absolutely no basis in sexual desire,” in love with a young woman. Mishima is an artist with the details—each of the picture books, each of our narrator’s young crushes, each of his daydream masturbatory images are lovingly described, perfectly depicted for our eyes. (Note: this book is not for the faint of heart.) He has a way of painting a scene, whether imaginary or real, that makes it, for the reader, more than just real—it is a work of art, on par with any of the Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian that so titillate the narrator as a young boy.

Mishima is no less genius with psychology. The narrator is truly twisted, his thoughts, kept to himself, constantly tangled and confused—am I or aren’t I? he asks himself, page after page—and Mishima captures the unsettled confusion of youth with admirable clarity. Of his character’s mental state as a child, he says that childhood is “a stage on which time and space become entangled. For example, there was the news I heard from adults concerning events in various countries—the eruption of a volcano, say, or the insurrection of an army—and the things that were happening before my eyes—my grandmother’s spells or the petty family quarrels—and the fanciful events of the fairy-tale world in which I had just then become immersed: these three things always appeared to me to be of equal value and like kind.” Indeed, this sort of jumbled, what’s-real presentation is typical of the book, and works brilliantly for this sort of piece. The real and the unreal, the true and the untrue, are all jumbled together like old junk at a yard sale, and, as we watch the narrator himself try to sort through them, try to remember for us what he felt and thought and hoped at each moment, we can see what a mind is truly like.

This sort of mixed-up, topsy-turvy thinking shows itself more clearly in the narrator’s late adolescence, as he tries to imitate the behavior of other boys his age, tries to pretend that he, too, is interested in women and not in the nubile bodies of the boys around him. This is the origin of the title: the narrator is forced to take on a mask, a sort of “everything’s normal here” facade to hide his true aberrations, his true self as what the novel calls “an invert.” Mishima shows us the syllogisms of the self, the paths of thinking that keep the narrator hidden behind his safe mask, wondering what he really is: step by step, he transforms himself from a freak, apart from the others, to someone whose only job is to fit in: “therefore the intoxicating thought of “I am ahead of others” was amended to the diffidence of “No, I too am a human being like the rest.” Because of the miscalculation, this in turn was amplified into “And also I am a human being like them in every respect.” The part of me that was not yet sober made such an amplification possible and supported it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that ‘Everyone is like me.’” Anyone who has lived has experienced this kind of thinking, and Mishima’s genius is using the very processes that everyone uses to show the essential humanity of his character.

Likewise, the narrator is aware of the complications of living his life as a sort of “mask” like this: as time goes on, this mask becomes a deeper and deeper part of his nature, until he is hopelessly confused and unable to achieve any happiness at all, unsure whether to renounce his true desires, those strange tendencies that differentiate him from other young men his age, the very objects of his desires, or to indulge them and, in so doing, renounce his claim to any sort of “normal” life, public or private. As the narrator tells himself, “my ‘act’ has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It’s no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense at normality. To say it another way, I’m becoming the sort of person who can’t believe in anything except the counterfeit.” By the end, he fundamentally is a mask, still torn between his asexual passion for Sonoko, a tender young woman, and his all-too-sexual passions for the rough, crude young men who are nearly her complete opposite. The novel ends in this state, leaving our character in this hopeless in-between situation, unsure of his place in the world and his future destiny. Mishima surely meant this as a message for his country, to which he was always fiercely loyal; Japan, too, was unsettled at this period, torn between its feudal traditions and the modern world which had so nearly destroyed it entirely. Should, or even could, Japan betray its own unique desires simply “fit in,” or should it follow its own fate and hence be irreparably separate from those other modern nations of the world, its leaders and role models? In showing us the psychology of one desperate, lonely human being, Mishima has not only created a portrait of the intricacies of psychology, but depicted an entire nation struggling at the brink of a new and unfamiliar era. This dual portrait is truly a work of art.

Monumen, oleh Nh. Dini

Monemun, oleh Nh. Dini, adalah kumpulan cerpen yang cukup memuaskan tetapi tidak sempurna. Nh. Dini sangat terkenal di Indonesia sebagai seorang penulis feminis dan seorang penulis yang pula ingin mendukung suasana sastra di Indonesia; dia telah membangunkan pondok-pondok membaca untuk anak, dan dia beri uang and dukungan lain kepada organisasi yang mau mengembangkan sastra Indonesia. Dia sungguh-sungguh terkenal.

Kemasyurannya dan kepopularannya sungguh-sungguh berasal dari bakatnya. Dia sangat pintar menulis dan mengarang: wataknya menarik, desripskinya penuh detail, dan pilihan katanya tepat. (Bagi saya, pilihan katanya terlalu sulit! Tetapi ketika saya pakai kamus, saya paham artinya dan saya mengagumi kecenderungannya untuk menemukan kata yang sangat cocok untuk keadaan apapun.) Ceritanya cukup menyenangkan untuk membaca.

Saya hanya ingin mengeluh tentang satu sifat cerpen ini: saya sering kecewa setalah selesaikan setiap cerpen. Saya tidak tahu kenapa, tetapi akhiran cerita-cerita ini mengecewakan. Biasanya tidak ada resolusi yang tertentu, dan saya masih tidak tahu apa yang akan terjadi dengan watak atau tempat di ceritanya. Barangkali kekecewaan itu kekeliruan pikiran saya, karena saya, sebagai orang Barat, terbiasa dengan akhiran yang tertentu, meskipun akhiran yang mengejutkan atau tidak disangka. Tetapi cerpen-cerpen ini berakhir dengan suatu keluhan, bukan dengan suatu “bang,” seperti apa yang dituliskan seorang penulis Inggris, T.S. Eliot. Selain sifat itu, cerpen-cerpen di dalam kumpulan ini baik, dan saya ingin membaca lagi dar Nh. Dini.

Three Men On the Bummell, by Jerome K. Jerome

I read my first Jerome K. Jerome book, “Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)” sometime early in high school—ninth or tenth grade, I believe—and even at that stage I regretted that I had not stumbled upon him earlier. I would have adored his writings during my P.G. Wodehouse phase in middle school, because they seem fundamentally similar to me: they’ve got that same dry, wry British sense of the ridiculous, and the same gently mocking tone which is neither particularly forgiving nor fierce.

“Three Men on the Bummel” is very much in the same vein as “Three Men in a Boat”: the author and his two friends, Harris and George, decide to go on a trip together, sans wives or children; where last time it was a boat down the Thames, this time it is a bicycle tour through Germany. The result, in terms of the writing, is the same: Jerome meanders through and around his topics, which are, roughly, Germany, bicycles, and the English gentleman, without ever precisely either stating his topics or making any concrete statements about them. He promises, near the beginning of the book, not to give any actual information, because it always seems to go wrong (and, indeed, he produces several humorous examples to this point), and he delivers on this promise.

Were these books any longer, it might be irritating that there is no semblance of a plot. In fact, I’ve talked to several friends, since reading this, who have been annoyed at that very thing; they couldn’t get into the book because what on earth was he talking about? And would anything ever happen? Sure, there are a few incidents portrayed in the book—George trying to buy a cushion and using the word “kiss” instead, Harris wrestling with a man with a hose—but there is certainly no structured story arc to this book. For me, though, things happening is clearly not the point: the point is to listen to Jerome muse about the possibility of things happening, and the slapstick potential were those things actually to take place.

Jerome definitely has a gift for words and their placement; he has learned the art of putting the right words in the right order. He’s quite remarkably funny—I laughed out loud several times, even in public places, awkward spots for laughing. He has some great offhand comments, for instance about trying to discourage his friend George from buying a present for his aunt because “his aunt will be meeting other aunts, and talking to them; the whole class will become disorganized and unruly.” Or later, when talking about German laws, he comments how a young Englishman looking for trouble could find hundreds of ways to break the law, because “the German law-maker does not content himself with the misdeeds of the average man—the crime one feels one wants to do, but must not: he worries himself imagining all the things a wandering maniac might do.” He also keenly skewers the British educational system, especially with respect to foreign languages, stating that “an English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able to tell the time, or make a few guarded observations concerning the weather. No doubt he could repeat a goodly number of irregular verbs by heart; only, as a matter of fact, few foreigners care to listen to their own irregular verbs, recited by young Englishmen.” I shudder to think what kind of poisonous, yet oh-so-funny words he would have to say about our modern American system, after which the average student cannot even recite irregular verbs.

On top of that, Jerome has a rather keen eye for observation. I was impressed, for instance, at his thoughts on Germany. At one point he rambles for a few pages about the German love of order (“It is a tidy land is Germany”) and command—essentially, how the German idea of duty is “blind obedience to everything in buttons.” This points struck me as interesting in light of World War II—here, fifteen years before World War I, thirty years before anyone had even thought of Hitler, Jerome takes great glee in pointing out the Teutonic need to be controlled by the state: “The German can rule others, and be ruled by others, but he cannot rule himself.”

In short, I like these books. I don’t care if there’s no plot; I don’t care if, fifteen minutes after reading them, I can’t really remember what, if anything happened, or what, if anything the book was about. They are fun to read, and Jerome’s keen eye for ridiculousness and humor is quite enough to satisfy me.

Some Prefer Nettles, by Junichiro Tanizaki

It was a breath of fresh air to read this Japanese novel: I've been reading a lot of them lately, and the last few have been total disappointments, at least in the way of understanding. This one, however, worked for me, though I'm not sure I can pintpoint why. It's the story of Kaname, a "modern" Japanese man trapped in a loveless marriage; though he has no hard feelings against his wife, he's also not particularly interested in her. Through the novel, he and his wife struggle towards the divorce that both of them want, mostly, but are too afraid to really pursue. Kaname also struggles with his status in contemporary Japan: the other characters each represent n approach to dealing with modernization, and Kaname seems trapped between them. His wife, with her lover, clearly represents a liberal, modern perspective, while her father, obsessed with Osaka puppetry, music, and other traditional arts, represents old Japan, and the spirit of ages past, while his mistress, who he forces to wear old-fashioned, "musty" clothes, seems like young, modern Japan trapped in the old ways without choosing them. As the novel progresses, so too Kaname edges towards this old-time view, the comfort of old ways and traditions, an option for dealing with the stress of modernity, and the emptiness it can bring.

Tanizaki's writing style worked very well for this novel, I thought. The translator, in his introduction, discusses how Japanese, at least in writing, is a very vague language, which refuses to make distinctions. (Though how it's vague, I don't know; he didn't say, perhaps exercising a bit of that famous vagueness himself.) In any case, Tanizaki's imagery is concrete enough to keep me interested, and while he doesn't probe the psyche of his characters the way a Western author might, he did enough exploration to keep me aware of what was going on. (In contrast to, say, Snow Country, where I felt confused for much of the book.) The ending was appropriately vague, yet, again, not confusing--difficult to pull off. And, as always, the translation was excellent; reading it hardly felt like a translation at all. I can't say I adored it, but I can say, without a doubt, that I enjoyed it, and that I'm going to look for more of Tanizaki's works next time I'm at the English-language bookstore.

Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara

I wrote a brilliant review of this one—okay, maybe not brilliant, but at least passable—a few days ago, but then, as is typical here, the electricity in the internet café died, and the computer I was working on didn’t even have a USB port, and I was left with no way to save it but to leave it on the computer and hope that it wouldn’t be erased in the week between when I saved it and when I next got to use that computer.

Too bad. I lose. The document is, alas, gone.

So, instead of trying to rewrite it and get everything just the way it was, with my fresh-off-the-book insights, I’ll just summarize, and use, instead, my several-weeks-since-reading-it insights. My thoughts on the book, as far as I can remember, were thus:

1. It’s a minor classic. This seems to be a given.
2. He’s brilliant with dialogue, particularly the type between husband and wife. The domestic scenes he writes were, I thought, fairly accurate (though, not being married myself, maybe I can’t judge), touching, and altogether remarkably well-done. This is what all those other reviewers are talking about when they bandy about words like “social realism”--
3. This “novel of self-destruction” frankly didn’t make much sense to me. I got that Julian was feeling self-destruction, but I didn’t feel that O’Hara really gave the reader enough info to figure out why. As it was, it just seemed that Julian was acting out randomly, in an almost adolescent way, and that made the entire plot a little tiresome.
4. This may be a minor classic, but that, in my mind, is only because it was one of the first doing this sort of down-to-earth, socially-accurate, twentieth-century angst and self-destructive behavior novel. Since O’Hara published this (in the early 1930s, if I have my dates right), Updike has come and written about the same social classes, even in the same state! (Pennsylvania) Sylvia Plath, along with, at this point, countless others, has done self-destruction. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, a contemporary, has done nearly the same social milieu, nearly the same sort of privileged unhappiness—and, unfortunately for the status of O’Hara’s works, Fitzgerald did it better.

So. It’s a quick read, and enjoyable enough, but there’s nothing world-changing here, at least not for me.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Neil Gaiman, in his review, called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell the best work of English fantasy written in the past seventy years. While, not being a particularly devoted reader of fantasy, English or otherwise, I don’t have enough information to really judge whether his comment is true or not, it is, without a doubt, the most compelling epic fantasy I’ve ever read. It’s nearly 800 pages long and yet I read it in only two days; while this speaks very strongly to the amount of spare time I have in any given day, it also speaks very highly of the novel itself—its readability, its plot, and the amount of enjoyment it affords. (Hint: lots.)

JS&MN is a book about magic; more specifically, a book about the return of magic to England, set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s a reimagining of history, using real historical figures (like Lord Wellington, whose characterization here, while of possibly dubious accuracy, is highly entertaining) along with fictional characters, like the eponymous Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the two magicians credited with the return of practical magic (as opposed to theoretical magic) to England, which was once, according to this novel’s vision of history, a land positively overrun with fairies, and, of course, magicians trying to make use of those fairies. The plot of the novel is, actually, fairly simple, following the ups and downs of the magical careers of the title characters. Although at first Strange becomes Mr. Norrell’s pupil, finally their different views on the purpose and proper application of magic (Mr. Norrell has a rather dry, academic approach, which limits the use of magic to those who have undergone the proper course of study, although Mr. Norrell’s innate reticence and, perhaps, selfishness causes him to store away all the useful magical tomes in his own private library. Mr. Norrell—and, throughout the book, he retains that very proper “Mr.” in his name—also decries the history of fairies and, most especially, the Raven King, the pregenitor of all English magic, as he tries to keep magic a regulated and, frankly, rather unexciting discipline. Strange, the younger and more vigorous of the two, wants to open magic up for all, believes in fairies and the Raven King, and, at great personal danger to himself and his loved ones—or perhaps just “one,” as I’m thinking primarily of his wife—begins to reinvestigate the realms of Faerie.

The real genius of this book, though, is not so much the plot or the characters, but the narrative voice. Since this is a reimagining of history, Susanna Clarke strives to make this, above all, a piece of historical fiction. The book’s tone is very nineteenth-century popular history: the narrator has a very dry, rather erudite humor—jokes about “’Tis Pity She’s a Corpse,” for instance, upon the death and later magical resurrection of Lady Walter, one of the main characters—which occasionally even satirizes its characters. (Lord Wellington, in particular, was one of my favorite victims of this narrative presentation. He’s just so...well, so British. Upon hearing a number of corpses, magically reanimated, speaking in the dialect of Hell, he comments that “’They have learnt it very quickly...They have only been dead three days.’” The narrator then adds that, “He approved of people doing things promptly and in a businesslike fashion.” So British, that.)

More impressive than the sense of humor, though, is the use of footnotes. Clarke, here, presents herself as a master scholar, in addition to creator, of her magical world. She includes, every few pages, footnotes explaining references to works of magic, and magical history, written in the Middle Ages, the grand flowering of magic in England. She writes footnotes explaining the political situation at the time, including whether Strange should be knighted for his service to his country during the Napoleonic wars in Spain. She footnotes obscure magicians whose dates of birth and death are debated. She footnotes the legends of Merlin. She footnotes the history of the Raven King, down to the scholarly debate that persisted for hundreds of years after his death. She footnotes certain aspects of the lives of her main characters, explaining how a later commentator or historian would know about such a private matter. (Strange wrote a number of works about himself and his life, in addition to his magical histories.) Her fictional world is quite unbelievably rich, both in actual happening and in backstory; and Clarke never fails to showcase this fact. Lest that sound irritating, though, rest assured that the footnotes share the same light, proper historical tone as the rest of the narrative, and, even, at times, indulge more in small, dry jokes than the actual text. In short, the footnotes are almost as much a pleasure to read as the story itself; it is a source of constant surprise and wonder to discover the story behind the story behind the story behind the story...you get the picture.

When I first picked this book up, after hearing that it was a story about magic in England, I mentally dismissed it, or at least prepared to summarize it, as “Harry Potter for Adults.” Now, after having read it, while I can see some similarities—um, England, magic—I have to admit, this book is so much more than that. Harry Potter never had such a sense of humor; Harry Potter never wrote quite so well—Clarke’s novel, while nearly 800 pages long, never felt overlengthy or in need of a good editor; and, most of all, while the magical world Harry Potter inhabits is admirably fleshed out, it’s got nothing on Clarke’s magical universe, which has been imagined, and, more impressively, researched, down to the tiniest detail, and she’s got the footnotes to prove it. It’s a rare novel that can keep the reader actively engaged for that many pages; it’s a rare novel that can tell a story, no matter how interesting, so compellingly, and it’s a rare novel, of course, that can use footnotes so brilliantly. If you’ve got the spare time—and for this novel, everyone must—I highly recommend it.

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens

Dickens has a theme here, and, being Dickens, he’s not afraid to hit you over the head with it. I’ll quote it as Dickens says it, from the mouth of a circus performer with a rather unfortunate lisp: “People must be amused, Thquire, thomehow.”

Or I’ll quote it as Dickens gives it to the same circus performer: “People mutht be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, not yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it.”

Or I’ll quote it as Dickens himself says it: “not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and regulated actions.”

Or I’ll quote it as Dickens says it at another point: “the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need or ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.”

Get it? Got it? Good.

Maybe I should elaborate a little bit: Dickens, writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, protests the emphasis on Fact, on Reason, on Science, on the part of some of society’s most distinguished citizens; through this novel, which, in his typical style, alternates neatly betweeen serious and entertaining, he skewers those members of society who insist on banishing any spectre of fancy from their lives and the lives of those under their control. The novel opens with a classroom scene, and it’s a fair representation of the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, two of Coketown’s upper middle class noteworthies. Children are there to be drilled; education means Fact, and only Fact, and those children who can happily recite numbers and dates and sciences are those children who, in their view, are sure to be successful.

Yet, of course, the actual action of the novel belies this. Mr. Gradgrind’s own children, raised under the heavy hand of Fact, are unhappy, underdeveloped creatures—they suffer in loveless marriages, don’t know how to reach out to their fellow beings, and, in the case of one of them, Thomas, who Dickens rather uncharitably refers to as “the whelp,” throw over the moral code altogether and engage in bank robbery to pay back gambling debts. On the other hand, the girl, Sissy Jupe, who Mr. Grangrind adopts later in life, and whom Fancy still haunts, is the novel’s one successful character: she is completely hopeless at Fact, as she proves in school, where, as Dickens writes, “she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first principle of this science?” the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me.’” However, her persistence in believing in things like love, kindness, and happiness keep her away from the troubles that inevitably strike the others, and she, at the end, is the only one who can claim to a happy marriage, to happy children, and to a happy life.

Basically, as this novel has it, fact cannot explain everything; science fails in certain areas, and reason, while useful, is not the end-all be-all of human existence. Dickens writes, at one point, describing the reading habits of the townspeople, that “it was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women!...Mr. Gradgrind was for ever working, in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product.” In sum—get it?—you can’t understand mankind with only math. Or economics. Or chemistry, biology, physics, what-have-you. Mankind is something more than the reasonable sum of its parts.

It’s an admirable moral, of course, and certainly one that needed to be pushed during Dickens’s own time; one gets the sense that Dickens is skewering some quite specific people here, and doing so rather effectively. I, at least, am grateful that Dickens never turned his satiric pen on me; he is remarkably witty and when he decides to ridicule a character, that character stays ridiculed. I always forget this in between reads, and it always comes as a surprise because he’s such a “classic,” but Dickens is funny. His works were meant as popular entertainment, not as Biblical tomes, and they still, a hundred fifty years later, serve as such, for those brave enough to seek them out (or maybe for those who read them outside of a high school classroom). He’s a great writer, with a real mastery of the sarcastic aside; he presents characters in their full light, but isn’t afraid to use the narrator’s voice to point out something ridiculous. In this novel, for instance, Mr. Bounderby’s constant repetition of the hard-knock (and, apparently, completely invented) story of his youth meets with the narrator’s strong satiric disapproval; as Mr. Bounderby tells Thomas Gradgrind “how empty of learning my young maw was, at his time of life,” Dickens slyly adds, “which, by-the-by, he probably did know, for had heard of it often enough.” His treatment of Mrs. Gradgrind, a faded, rather stupid sort of mother, is, I thought, the funniest in the novel: she tells her children to “Go and be something-ological directly,” and upon hearing that Mr. Bounderby, in his youth, was so dirty that she wouldn’t have touched him with a pair of tongs, she “faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing her imbecilty could think of doing.” Now that’s funny.

This is not Dickens’s best work; far from it, in fact. The moral is presented perhaps too heavy-handedly; the characters are not so fleshed out as in the other works; the secondary characters are not quite so brilliant as, say, Uriah Heep or Fagin (although the admirable, down-on-her-luck, Roman-nosed matron Mrs. Sparsit could certainly give a few other secondary characters a run for their money); the narrator’s persistent optimism, even in the face of his characters’s tragedy, is a little jarring, a little trite; even the main characters are not so charming or sympathetic as young Pip, or David Copperfield. Yet it’s highly refreshing, after slogging through Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans, to encounter a classic that is meant to be thoroughly enjoyable, in addition to thoroughly educational. Dickens does well to listen to his own moral: people must be amused and he, here as elsewhere, is always ready to oblige.