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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| The Meaning of Ichiro
ISBN 0446531928
by Robert Whiting
Robert Whiting is best-known for his excellent book You've Got To Have Wa, the go-to book for anybody interested in baseball played the Japanese way. This book updates the same basic information as to why Japanese professional baseball is, in the words of one player, “no good” and why Japanese players with gumption (Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui, Kazuo Matsui) want to play in the US. Stinging are Whiting’s portraits of the powers that be and the players that kowtow to them. The chapter on manager Bobby Valentine’s unhappy sojourn in the Japanese big leagues provide a cautionary tale to anybody that has been offered a supervisory or managerial position in that country. We can also draw the inference that though players go from east to west and managers go from west to east, it will be a cold day in H. when managers go from east to west.
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| Gamera the Invincible
1966 / B & W / 86 minutes
Superpower tensions lead to a dogfight over the Arctic in which a USAF fighter shoots down a Soviet aircraft. The crash causes the explosion of the small nuke, which in turn releases a monster. As a monster it is hard to take seriously – a turtle walking on its hind legs, with tusks, and it flies and eats fire. The monster makes mixed-up bids for our sympathy: in misguided methods to create construction jobs for us, it stomps the sashimi out of our infrastructure.
Footage shot in the US reminds us of how far we’ve come, media-wise. Two scientists on a talk show have a loud argument which ends up with name-calling, which brings to mind a lot of talking heads on TV today. A US senator insists on nonsense and balderdash in the face of reality – just like today. Poor Brian Donlevy makes an appearance as an USAF general, looking rather blurry and slurring lines, very far indeed from his starring roles in noir classics such as Impact and Kiss of Death.
I’ve seen Gamera movies better than this one but let’s finish this review on this movie’s merits. It is not too long and the inevitable kid as the Monster’s Little Advocate doesn’t show up much. Gamera’s roar scaringly combines an elephant’s trumpeting with a factory klaxon. Both Japanese females, Michiko Sugata and Harumi Kiritachi, have a goofy but trusting and sturdy look.
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| In the Freud Archives
ISBN 0394729226
by Janet Malcolm
In this classic of long journalism, Malcolm tells about the clashes of personality, style, and intellectual chops among Freud scholars. K.R. Eissler is the true blue Freudian. Jeffrey Masson is a former Sanskrit scholar out to tear a swath through Freud studies. Peter Swales, a self-educated scholar, wants to make a career change from a assistant to the Rolling Stones (!) to free-lance researcher and full-time debunker of Freud. It’s a story of fierce rivalry to the extent that anybody thinking of entering the cut-throat world of academe should read.
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| The Family Lie
ISBN 0151562474
by Georges Simenon
In Simenon’s ‘hard novels’ – aka non-Maigret psychological thrillers – motivated by one of life’s usual crises (illness, accident, crime or family members forgetting one’s birthday), an alienated protagonist must evaluate his barren compulsive daily life and choose another way of living. Sometimes he chooses a healthier way, sometimes neurosis keeps him in his rut. In this short novel, a doctor must come to terms with his parent’s sins, big and small, while his young son battle diphtheria. Fans of the hard novels will like this one, novices not so much. My minor gripe was that going unexplained were references to French high and low culture that nobody outside the non-French world of the 1950s could be expected to understand.
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| Behind the Curtain
ISBN 0899660789
by Earl Derr Biggers
This novel is the third Charlie Chan mystery. San Francisco is evocatively described so we readers can enjoy the vivid sense of place Biggers put across in the first two Chan outings. He handled the setting of Hawaii beautifully in the first one The House Without a Key (1925) and described the Mojave desert country in the second The Chinese Parrot (1926).
Like all the other Chan novels, this was originally published as a serial in the magazine The Saturday Evening Post, so some chapters end with cliffhangers. The plot is intricate, involving murders committed years apart and a woman who changes identities at the drop of a hat. Or in this case, the drop of a pair of Chinese slippers, which is the only clue that ties the two killings together.
Another plus is Biggers’ understated sense of comedy. His stand-in who gets off witty observations, Barry Kirk, is a rich bon-vivant who has funny exchanges with his society matron grandmother and his would-be girl friend, an assistant district attorney named Miss Morrow. Biggers is sensitive to the career obstacles faced by working women, though he will often refer to Miss Morrow as “the girl.” Biggers was born in 1885, after all.
Activists and critics nowadays disrespect poor Charlie Chan for his inscrutability, servility, dainty walk, sing-song voice, and unidiomatic English (in Behind That Curtain, he says, "The facts must be upearthed"). Writer Gish Jen even dismisses Chan’s astute intelligence, designating him as “the original Asian whiz kid.” I wonder sometimes if nowadays critics are annoyed with Chan less because of the novels but more because of the movies which had Caucasian actors playing Chan and period stereotypes of blacks, Asians, and women.
For what it’s worth, I think in both the novels and movies Charlie Chan is wise, courageous, modest, patient, devoted to his family, and loyal to his friends. Like many non-native speakers, he uses English in his own unique way that, as a speaker of broken Japanese, I can’t help but respect him for the time and effort that he put in to get fluent in a second language as an adult. The Chan novels overturn Chinese stereotypes because Chan was playing the role of the Good Guy, whereas most Chinese characters in fiction back then were villains. Generally speaking,
I like detective fiction from 1920s and 1930s. As formulaic as it is, I like the atmosphere, characterization, and narrative push. I like it that violence happens off stage. There is no moral relativism, film noir-ish nihilism or sociopathic tough-mindedness. I must not be alone in this preference – for once - since the Chan novels never stay out of print and are available on these new-fangled contraptions like Kindle.
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