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| In the late 1930s, Junichiro Tanizaki started The Makioka Sisters, a novel of contemporary manners. The serialization started in 1943 but the military authorities who ruled Japan frowned on its continuation in light of dead serious events like the loss at Guadalcanal and horrendous fighting in the Solomons, the Gilberts, and Tarawa. The censors thought the novel of ordinary pre-war middle-class life was not in keeping with the severity of war time. After the war, it became a best seller because it struck many Japanese readers as an evocation of more gentle times irretrievably past, smashed by the war.
The action revolves around four very different sisters. Tsuruko, the eldest sister, has married an upright banker who was adopted into the family and thus made head of the main house. Very much a daughter of Osaka, she finds upon moving to Tokyo that people notice her Kansai dialect but she finds keeping up the appearances of an old family isn't necessary where nobody knows your name, far from the native region,.
The next sister is Sachiko. She married (and brought into the family) Keinosuke, another banker but much more modern in outlook and manner. They write each poems like Heian era sweethearts. She's anxious that her younger sister marry and be happy. Most of novel's incidents are seen through her eyes.
Next is Yukiko. She is fastidious about manner and keeping up appearances. Easily flummoxed, she gets tongue-tied at miai meetings with prospective husbands. As reticent Yukiko ages, her chances for a good match diminish.
The youngest sister is Taeko. She is more modern, in other words, more daring, impetuous and even wayward. She calls to mind another Tanizakian wild child in the novel Naomi, though Taeko has more respect for herself than Naomi could dream of. Taeko is impatient because she must wait until Yukiko is married before she, Taeko, can marry Kei-kun, a long-time lover. Strange that though Yukiko displays the culturally cherished ideals of womanhood (stick thin, delicate, silently modest, submissive), it is Taeko that attracts the suitors with her liveliness, creative talent, and drive (she has her own doll making business and teaches it too).
At about 500 sometimes slow-moving pages, this book is much longer than the usual Japanese novel, but just as structurally loose. For a guy, Tanizaki knows quite a lot about feminine artifacts such as kimono, obi, and cosmetics. We get more information than we need about how a go-between should arrange a miai or how Taeko prepared for a doll exhibition. But, as I indicated above, by page 100 I was persuaded the characters lived and breathed and got sick and felt frustration and contentment.
The novel moves in life-like rhythm – new people meet and disappoint each other, tact is exercised, defeats are endured, ordeals survived and people move on. Stuff happens, that’s all, it's life and Japanese life and customs are not any more or less intricate than yours or mine. I don't think we do justice to this novel if we look at it a merely an artifact or momento of what Japanese customs were like at a certain time in a certain place. Tanizaki puts real people in a setting and tells us what happens at his own pace. He makes art out of daily life, like Flaubert did in Madame Bovary.
The other appeal was its regionalism – it takes place in Osaka, which anybody who has lived in the Kansai region (me, 1979-80) will have tender feelings about, as Tanizaki obviously did. I added to my list of Eras I'd Live In, Osaka in the Thirties, to go with 10th-century Constantinople and Tang era Canton. The four sisters are genuine Osaka ladies - like certain kinds of Southern women here in the US, they have no sense of time because a lady doesn't hurry and a gentleman doesn't express impatience.
Tanizaki hints of the ongoing car of war. Teinosuke is wary of talking about the Sian Incident (December 1936) with a German neighbor. Headlines tell about Japanese bombing of Chinese cities. Characters worry about showing self-restraint in somber times. For instance, Teinosuke is surprised Kei-boy isn't cuffed about in the streets because he dresses like a dandy . Even with these tiny hints, one feels that a way of life is going to be irrevocably changed, as big wars always change life. A subtle pain, nostalgic but realistic and accepting, is felt throughout the novel.
Okay, full disclosure time. I read this novel during a uniquely difficult period, the details of which don't belong in book review blog. Anyway, I don’t often require novels to take me away from it all. It also strikes me as disrespectable to use a serious novel as mere escapism, as a kind of pain-killer. Tanizaki’s emphasis on the minutiae of everyday life was reassuringly normal and realistic to me going through a rough patch. I was happy to find a refuge in this novel, cheered to be reminded that people manage tough times and get out on the other end and live the rest of their lives. Stuff happens and it’s no use to whimper, “I want my life back.”
I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 3.
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| The Candlemass Road by George Macdonald Fraser is historical novella is set on the Scots-English border in the 16th century. Lady Margaret Dacre grew up in Queen Elizabeth's secure court in London. Upon returning to her late father’s lands in the anarchic North, she is outraged that bandits are crossing the border onto her lands to extort from her people and upon failing to do so, plunder and murder.
The sheriffs of the crown are no help – indeed what can they do against mad and bad men who can cross borders with impunity?
She finds that she has to use an outlaw named Hobbie Noble to protect one of her families. A fight he has with marauders in one of the best action scenes I’ve ever read. The characters of the priest-narrator, the Lady and the Outlaw live and breathe. Fraser makes us believe in the smart tact of Priest, the calculating coldness of the Lady, and the surefooted will to survive in the Outlaw.
Well worth reading for those into short sinewy historical fiction. Plus, it has exuberant period dialogue which you'll like if, like me, you dig Bard of Avon lingo: "A sorry pack they were, the men-folk stout enough but dirty and ill-clad, the women as slatternly as I ever saw, and if there were three pairs of shoon among them it was enough." Begs to be read aloud.
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| During WWI, Hervey Allen’s unit of the National Guard (from Pennsylvania) fought in France. Many military and cultural historians consider Allen’s Toward the Flame: A War Diary to be the best combat memoir of WWI by an American. This is not a mud and blood memoir of the trenches since by the time Hervey and the men he served with got to fight, it was a war of movement. Allen was keen observer and gives descriptions of men dealing with shelling, anxiety, boredom, and ordinary but wonderful activities such as eating. Hervey gets across that in battle the individual infantryman’s survival depended on a combination of training, comrades, lay of the land, and luck. Allen gives a powerful account of the battle for Fismes and Fismette during the Aisne-Marne offensive of 1918. Some historians of the war call that battle the worst five days of fighting faced by the American forces in WWI. Allen is best-known as the author of the historical novel Anthony Adverse in the 1930s. It sold like hotcakes for its stirring story and spicy parts.
One time I heard PBS' Rick Steves interview an Englishman who takes tour groups around the beaches of Normandy. The English guide says American tourists don't usually know what side the US fought on in WWI
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| Moe Berg: The Spy Behind Homeplate (Vivian Grey) is a biography was written for the YA audience.
To say the least, Moe Berg's father frowned on his son's passion to play baseball, assuming it was a Jewish son's duty to study hard and become a professional and be his own boss. Blessed with a photographic memory, Moe learned many foreign languages and obtained a law degree. Being a brainy guy, he had his eccentricities so Casey Stengal, who knew many odd people, said Berg was the strangest man to ever play pro baseball. Moe played 15 years in the majors, but with WWII raging, he became a spy for Wild Bill Donovan's OSS, the mother of the CIA.
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| Mon (The Gate) is the last novel in Natsume Soseki’s First Trilogy. The first two installments, Sanshiro and Sore Kara (And Then), covered alienated intellectuals that could not find a place in the rough and tumble of modernizing Japan at the beginning of the 20th century.
Mon (The Gate) departs from the parentally-supported characters and focuses on two adults that make up an unlucky couple. They lead a drab, uneventful life, barely able to make ends meet on his salary as a government clerk. He works five and half days a week and his too exhausted to deal with basic family problems, much less live the examined life. They only positive aspect the couple has is their love for each other but for his part even the stance of “us against the world” is not enough to keep his unlived life from stirring and making trouble with guilt, anxiety and depression. He takes a spiritual retreat to a Zen temple, thus the title of the novel, the gate that lead to the monastery.
Granted, a portrait of middle-aged people in a lower-middle-class marriage sounds like unpromising stuff for a whole novel. Such is Soseki’s art that he takes this mundane material and makes us readers turn the page in aroused expectation that something surprising is going to happen. Skillful modernist that he is, Soseki uses time shifts to reveal gradually, with great control, how the couple find themselves in such a narrow world.
The translator was Francis Mathy. Though a glossary and biography list are included, they are not needed by somebody who knows already what geta and o-zoni are. Unlike the other Soseki novels in the Perigee editions from the late 1980s, this one has no forward or afterward by the translator.
I read this for the Japan Literature Challenge 3.
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