Japanese literature

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.16

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Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto (1958 transl. Jesse Kirkwood 2022) 149 pages

Tokyo Express is very much a howdunit and whydunit, as the whodunnit is seemingly fairly obvious from the start. This was my first time reading crime master Seichō Matsumoto and I was hugely impressed.

A young couple are found dead on Kashii beach near a shrine, having drunk cyanide. The local Fukuoka police are quick to decide a double suicide. There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but one of the team, Torigai Jūtarō, a long-standing and rather dishevelled detective, isn’t so sure.

“His overcoat was as battered as the clothes beneath it, his face unshaven, and his tie twisted and worn.”

Reminiscent of Lieutenant Columbo (whom he predates), Torigai is sharp-minded and unegotistical too. He starts trying to unravel how the couple came to be on the beach at that time. The young woman called Toki is dressed in a kimono and was a waitress at a restaurant in Akasaka; the man in Western clothes was Kenichi Sayama, an employee at Ministry X, currently under investigation for corruption. They were witnessed getting on the titular train by two of Toki’s colleagues, and it seems pretty clear that their bearing witness was engineered by a businessman called Tatsuo Yasuda.

Quicky Torigai establishes that a lot rests on that train journey and the timings of what happened when. He’s also baffled by a receipt from the buffet car found on Sayama’s body which recorded a food order for just one person.

“A scene formed in Torigai’s mind: the dark silhouette of a man, silently and briskly leading a woman to the beach, and the woman saying: What a lonely place.”

When Kiichi Mihara turns up from Tokyo, an outwardly very different detective takes over. The case is attracting attention due to the corruption in the Ministry, and Mihara works for the Second Division which investigates white collar crime.

“There was something in his cordial tone that reminded Torigai of an insurance salesman.”

The two investigators agree that the deaths are suspicious, and they also realise Yasuda is likely involved. However, trying to crack his alibi about where he was and when proves extremely difficult.

“Yasuda was always consulting the railway timetable. Did that perhaps mean he knew it secrets? In any case, his familiarity with the train times had to signify something. What if Yasuda’s entire alibi was built on it?”

This is one of the most procedural of police procedurals I’ve ever read. Everything hinges on the tight timing of trains, ferries and planes (a premise that would not remotely work in the UK as it depends on all the transport running to time, which as Magnus Mills pointed in out in my earlier read this month, will never occur). Torigai fades into the background, as Mihara tries to pick it all apart but keeps hitting brick walls.

“That crack in the wall had been nothing but a mirage. Mihara felt crushed. He held his head in his hands and, for a moment, could only stare at the piece of paper in front of him.”

I knew a bit about Tokyo Express before reading it, including that all the timings are based on the actual timetables of the time in the novel, and I wondered if it would be impossible to follow/bogged down in the logistics. But Seichō Matsumoto does a great job of carrying the reader along and there’s even a few surprises in store. The relationship between the two detectives is warm and endearing. I don’t know if they appeared in his subsequent novels, but even if not, I’d be keen to read more by this author.

“Mihara liked to ride the trams of Tokyo. Often, he would board without a specific destination in mind. Odd as it might seem, whenever he was at a loss for ideas, he would simply sit on the tram and allow his thoughts to roam. The tram’s steady trundle, its gentle swaying, induced in him an almost euphoric state of contemplation.”

“The cat is, above all things, a dramatist.” (Margaret Benson)

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This is my contribution to Reading the Meow hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri, a fantastic week-long celebration of literature inspired by our feline friends!

A Cat, A Man and Two Women by Junichiro Tanizaki (1936, transl. Paul McCarthy 2015) is published by the ever-wonderful Daunt Books and I really liked the simple cover:

There seems to have been a flurry in recent years of slightly whimsical stories about cats and I thought ACAMATW would be one of these, I’m not sure why. The prospect was fine with me, I don’t mind whimsy if I’m in the right mood and I adore cats. But in fact this wasn’t whimsical at all. It was a psychological study – albeit a gentle one – of three people and the catalyst (no pun intended but I’m happy its there 😀 ) of their shared pet.

I would just like to pause (paws?) here to let you know that my typing is being severely hampered by my calico cat sitting on my lap, demanding attention – and my tuxedo cat (her brother) has just arrived and there’s a bit of a turf war ensuing…

The titular cat of this novella is Lily, adored companion of Shozo. The story opens with his ex-wife Shinako appealing to his new wife Fukuko to let her have Lily. Her letter emphasises Shozo’s adoration of Lily and Shinako deliberately sets a cat among the pigeons (ha! I’m only a little bit sorry for this 😀 ) of the new marriage,

Even Shozo, feckless in the extreme, notices the change.  

“Could Fukuko be jealous of Lily? He considered this possibility for a moment but then dismissed it as making no sense. After all, Fukuko herself was basically fond of cats. When Shozo was living with his former wife, Shinako, he had sometimes mentioned her occasional jealousy of the cat to Fukuko who had always made rather scornful fun of this silliness.”

Shozo requests his wife cook meals she doesn’t enjoy, so he can share them with Lily. I’m not surprised Fukuko is annoyed:

“Fukuko had been prepared to sacrifice her own taste for her husband’s sake, while in fact it was for the cat that she cooked; she had become a companion to the cat.”

(Update: turf war won by the tuxedo. Calico has stalked off in disgust. Tuxedo determined to rest on my dominant hand and impede my typing.)

The tensions in the marriage centre around Lily, but really have nothing to do with her. She merely highlights Shozo’s lack of drive and inability to engage fully in relationships, except with his cat.

“When he heard people with no knowledge of a cat’s character saying that cats were not as loving as dogs, that they were cold and selfish, he always thought to himself how impossible it was to understand the charm and lovableness of a cat if one had not, like him spent many years living alone with one.”

Shozo isn’t unsympathetic. His mother is manipulative and choosing Lily seems to be one of the rare independent choices Shozo has made. He has had a longer relationship with Lily than either of his wives and his bond with the cat is meaningful to him.

“It was Lily, with whom he’d lived so long, who was more intimately bound up with many memories of his; who formed, in fact, an important part of Shozo’s past.”

Tanizaki does a great job of portraying Lily as a very believable feline, without attributing human motivations or emotions to her. He leaves this to his three human protagonists, who fail to see she is not a strategist in these adult negotiations.

Shinako gets her wish, and the cat she was indifferent to arrives at her sister’s home, where Shinako now has a room. Gradually, she finds herself discovering new emotional territory, thanks to Lily:

“When she thought of the link that bound them together, her anger faded; and she felt, rather, that both of them were to be pitied.”

“Other people had told her so often that she was hard hearted, she had come to believe it herself. But when she considered how much trouble she had put herself to recently for Lily’s sake, she was surprised, wondering where these warm and gentle feelings had been hiding all this time.”

But will Shozo want his cat back? Will Shozo and Fukuko’s marriage survive without Lily to blame for the irritations and lack of understanding?

Tanizaki has a great understanding of cats and of people which makes this novella really shine. The humour is gentle and the psychological observations astute. The ending is left very open which didn’t wholly work for me but this is a minor quibble in regard to this engaging and insightful novella.

ACAMATW was adapted into the film A Cat, Shozo and Two Women in 1956. The summary on Wikipedia makes me think the filmmakers opted for a less open-ended conclusion to the story. From this clip the cat actor looks a lot more tolerant than my two would be 😀

“Everybody is a teenage idol.” (Barry Gibb)

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Idol, Burning by Rin Usami (2020 transl. Asa Yoneda 2022) took me into a world I knew nothing about – that of having an oshi. It is a complex culture and there are lots of interesting articles online about it. For the sake of brevity in this post I’ll describe it as where fandom is taken to another level, with devotional idolatry of your oshi, with apologies for huge oversimplification.

At the start of the novel, sixteen-year-old Akari is waking up to her social media DMs going into overdrive: her oshi, Masaki Ueno, part of boy band Maza Maza, has punched a fan. We follow her through the subsequent days as she struggles with the fallout of his behaviour.

Akari struggles even when things were going well with her oshi. She not academic, she doesn’t like her part-time job but she needs it to pay for all the merchandise associated with her oshi. (Without hammering it home, Usami makes it really clear the financial demands of having an oshi, and how this is exploited by merchandisers.) Her father is away overseas and she’s aware she frustrates her mother and studious sister.

Akari’s mind troubles her with a lack of focus outside her oshi, and her body troubles her too:

“Just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathe to get rid of the grime that built upon your skin and clicked your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.”

What helps is her oshi:

“When my eyes met his, they reminded me how to really see. I felt an enormous swell of pure energy, neither positive nor negative, come rising up from my very foundation, and suddenly remembered what it felt like to be alive.”

Akari lives a substantial amount of her life online. Following her oshi’s accounts; blogging about her oshi; chatting with others who share her obsession and understand.

“Narumi sounded the same in person as she did online. I looked at her face, the round eyes and concerned brows overflowing with tragedy, and thought, There’s an emoji like that.

[…] Her facial expressions changed like she was switching out profile pictures.”

What was really clever in this novella (115 pages) and its translation is how Usami changed Akari’s tone and language depending on the medium she was using. The reader could see clearly how the person she created online through her blog and social media interactions wasn’t entirely authentic. It wasn’t entirely inauthentic either, and some of her closest relationships are with those she speaks to online – who of course, may not be entirely authentic either.

“When I pictured a world without Masaki, I thought about saying goodbye to the people here, too. It was our oshi that brought us together, and without him, we’d all go our separate ways. Some people moved over into different genres like Narumi had, but I knew I could never find another oshi. Masaki would always be my one and only. He alone moved me, spoke to me, accepted me.”

It’s a lonely world and there are hints Akari has been diagnosed with depression.

Through her devotion to Masaki we see all that Akari can do: she can be focussed, she can be insightful and she can be sensitive. It’s just that nothing other than her oshi prompts these behaviours.

We never learn the truth of Masaki’s actions and I was pleased about this. It is not his story, and while demonstrating the fallout of a celebrity flaming, Usami keeps the focus tightly on Akari. There is a Q&A with the author at the back of the novel and I wasn’t surprised to read that she has an oshi herself, because her portrayal of Akari is never patronising or pitying.

What Idol, Burning explores is how we all have to find a way to live, and that when this is focussed on something external and unpredictable – like a person and their constructed celebrity persona – then you can be in an incredibly vulnerable position. The novella ends on a tentatively positive note and I hoped Akari would learn to be the protagonist of her own life, rather than giving that power over so completely to someone else.

To end, I should definitely choose some J-pop, but I know absolutely nothing about it. So it’s back to 80s cheese, which I do know about 😀 Idol by name, Idol by nature…

“Some things I cannot see until I write about them.” (Yuko Tsushima)

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I wasn’t planning on joining in Japanese Literature challenge 17 hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza other than enjoying other bloggers wonderful posts. However this enthusiastic post by Marina Sofia on Tsushima Yūko’s Territory of Light meant I immediately started rooting through the TBR to find Child of Fortune (1978, transl. Geraldine Harcourt 1983), which I knew I had buried somewhere…

This is the first of her novels I’ve read and on the strength of this I definitely want to read more. Novella length, it tells the story of Kōko, a 36-year-old single mother to eleven-year-old Kayako. Told in the third person from Kōko’s perspective, it is a compelling examination of one woman’s inner world and her barely articulated resistance to the expectations placed on her.

Early in the novel, Kōko suspects she is pregnant. She is ambivalent about Osada, the father, as she is about most things. But gradually she realises that she wants to keep the child:

“Maybe she was reaching an age when it was senseless to want a fatherless child; but, precisely because of her age, she didn’t want to make a choice that she would regret till the day she died. Lately she was more convinced than ever that there was no point in worrying about what people thought. She would soon be thirty-seven. The only person watching Kōko at thirty-seven was Kōko. When this obvious fact finally came home to her it was still a surprise – what a very lonely fact it was!”

Geraldine Harcourt’s informative introduction explains that pregnancy at that age in Japan around this time could still be viewed as shameful even within marriage, so Kōko’s decision is doubly transgressive.

Kōko is an intriguing character, as she lives an unconventional life which places her in opposition to so many, by barely doing anything. Her lack of decision-making is an act of quiet but determined resistance.

Her sister Shoko is much more conventional and doesn’t approve; Kōko’s daughter Kayako much prefers to spend time with her more affluent, conformist aunt. Kōko tries to explain to Shoko:

“No, that’s not it – don’t think I’ve liked using choosing a different world from other people. I know I’ve been stubborn – but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though I often haven’t known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don’t know if they were right or wrong. I don’t think anyone can say that.”

But really she hasn’t made that many choices. She married because of pregnancy; husband Hatanaka organised the divorce years later, unsurprisingly as Kōko didn’t love him, still holding a candle for her lover Doi. She doesn’t enjoy her job teaching piano, but she also takes no steps to do anything else. She doesn’t take great care of herself and she doesn’t have many friends or interests.

Two driving forces in her life are her love for her brother, who died many years earlier, and sexual desire. The latter has led to her current predicament, the former suggests one reason that may be contributing to her lack of attachments.

“A little over a year ago, Kōko had understood something for the first time: the in the end she had let everything slip away from her, that in reality she hadn’t a single resource. It was an alarming discovery.”

Her lack of attachment includes reality – we are taken into Kōko’s dreams and daydreams, woven in seamlessly but disconcertingly.  As we move back and forth in time, learning about Kōko’s childhood, marriage, griefs and pains, Tsushima builds a picture of a woman who may not be completely likable but who is recognisably human and flawed, and muddling through the best way she knows how.

I was really rooting for Kōko to find a more articulate agency, and the penultimate scene was unbearably tense in this regard. Child of Fortune is never didactic yet absolutely achieves a compelling portrait of a woman fighting for her life, against immense societal pressure.   

“Kōko was shaken by the realisation that even now, more than twenty years later, she still lacked any compelling reason to go on living. And by the fact that the will to live was still there.”

To end, Kōko has fond memories of a visit to Karuizawa, which does look lovely:

PS When I was looking for a title quote for this post, I found this great conversation between Tsushima and Annie Ernaux.

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

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Life has caused me to fall behind on blog writing, so unusually I’m writing this a few weeks after having read the book. Thankfully I found this one really stayed with me and I can get it in just in time for the last week of Women in Translation Month 😊

Having really enjoyed Mieko Kawakami’s Miss Ice Sandwich (2013) during my novella reading in May, I was delighted to find a copy of All the Lovers in the Night  (2011, transl. Sam Bett and David Boyd 2022) in my local charity bookshop. It’s very different to my previous read of hers, and while I didn’t enjoy it as immediately as Ms Ice Sandwich,  it did grow on me.

Fuyuko Irie is in her thirties and lives alone. She used to work in an office but her alienation from her colleagues means she prefers working at home. Her colleague/friend Hijiri is supportive of her talents and sends her regular work as a freelance proofreader, this work suiting her precise and solitary nature.

But this means that Fuyuko is even more isolated and achingly lonely. Kawakami is so good at capturing that modern urban alienation for people living surrounded by others but unable to connect, the feelings compounded when in the midst of a crowd.

“As I passed below the haloes of green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people – people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.”

It looks like things could change for Fuyuko when she meets Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher. Light is important to Fuyuko – every Christmas Eve (her birthday) she walks the streets at night looking at the illuminations. As Mitsutsuka explains the workings of light to her, they begin a tentative friendship, with brief points of connection offering glimmers of hope:

“‘Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?’

‘Of course they are, Mitsutsuka said with a smile. ‘We’re talking about the same light.’”

In a flashback chapter we learn more about Fuyuko’s background, and why she finds herself in the situation she does. There is an event in the past that Fuyuko describes without naming it in the way that I think most readers would, suggesting she doesn’t fully recognize her trauma or why she is making subsequent self-destructive decisions.

Kawakami subtly demonstrates how Fuyuko could change things for herself, but also how wider society makes this extremely difficult for her. She and Hijiri are women who have made very different choices and present themselves very differently to the world, but both struggle under the expectations placed on women and the fact that these are not an easy fit for either of them. A brief meeting with old school friend Noriko suggests traditional choices are not always happy ones either.

“I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realised how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colours packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be. And that would never change, no matter where I went in the world.”

All the Lovers in the Night is a slow burn novel, despite being only just longer than novella length. As I mentioned at the start, it was a story that grew on me and I found Fuyuko’s voice more compelling the more I read. A few weeks on and she’s really stayed with me.

Despite the sadness and alienation running through All the Lovers in the Night, I thought it ended with a suggestion of hope. That incrementally things can change, and improve. That imperfect people can make poor decisions but might still be moving towards a brighter time while doing so.

To end, any excuse for the wonderful Patti Smith:

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.25

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Ms Ice Sandwich – Mieko Kawakami (2013 trans. Louise Heal Kawai 2017) 92 pages

A nine-year old boy tells the story of a short period of time where he has a crush on the young woman who works at the sandwich shop in the local shopping centre. He never speaks to her but lines up to stare at her and buy a sandwich.

“‘Ms Ice Sandwich’ is a name I made-up, of course. I thought of it minute I first saw her. Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our freezer since last summer. There’s one more awesome thing about her – if you watch when she looks down, there’s a sharp dark line above her eyes, as if when she closed her eyes, someone started to draw on two extra eyes with a felt-tip pen but stopped halfway. It’s the coolest thing.”

The story could so easily be creepy or at least unnerving but it really isn’t. He’s young, quite lonely, and navigating that period of older childhood as friends change and he tries to work out who he is. His mother is distracted, his elderly grandmother is extremely frail, and his father has died.

Child narrators are so difficult to get right, but I really thought Kawakami pulled it off. The boy uses the striking imagery that children sometimes access “Bicycles are lined up like mechanical goats.” without it feeling too knowing for someone of his age. I thought this was done especially well when he is trying to describe his feelings for Ms Ice Sandwich:

“Like when you’re holding a cat and you touch it soft belly. Or sticking your finger in a jar of jam and stirring, then slowly sinking in all the rest of your fingers. Or licking the sweet condensed milk at the bottom of your bowl of strawberries. Or when a blanket brushes the top of your feet. Or when butter turns transparent when it melts over your pancakes. As I stand gazing at Ms Ice Sandwich, all of these things are happening to me, one on top of the other, right there.”

The boy doesn’t try to build a relationship with Ms Ice Sandwich and I think it would have lessened the story if he did. Instead we see his gently burgeoning friendship with classmate Tutti, who is also bereaved for a parent, and some very touching scenes between him and his grandma, so delicately realised.

“The little bit of golden sun that shines through the shoji screens on the window lights up the white areas of Grandma’s quilt, making a faint shadow of leaves, and each time the wind blows outside, the shadow pattern of leaves shakes a little bit. I go over to Grandma and I hold my breath for a moment. The room goes very quiet.”

Ms Ice Sandwich captures a particular time in a young boy’s life with sensitivity and compassion. By capturing ordinary moments between people so precisely it demonstrates something universal that carries far beyond childhood.

Novella a Day in May 2020 #30

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Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata (1935-7 trans. Edward G Seidensticker 1956) 121 pages

My brother doesn’t often lend me books, in fact I can’t remember the last time he did. So when he lent me Snow Country with the warning ‘I want it back’, I thought it must be exceptionally good. Turns out my brother and the Nobel Prize committee are in agreement on this, as Snow Country was cited when Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

It begins with Shimamura, an overprivileged wastrel who doesn’t have to work, leaving Tokyo to travel to a hot spring town in the north of Japan. He is captivated by Komako, a young geisha who works there.

“The more he tried to call up a clear picture of her, the more his memory failed him, the farther she faded away, leaving him nothing to catch hold. In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand, and in particular one forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch, seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar.”

Shimamura has a wife and children back in Tokyo so the relationship with Komako is a commercial one, but still one in which both seem emotionally invested. I say seem, because nothing is ever spelled out in Snow Country. This is not the novella to read if you want fully rounded characterisation or plot development. What Kawabata creates is series of impressions, moments and images that layer on top of each other.

“The woman’s hair, the glass of the window, the sleeve of the kimono – everything he touched was cold in a way Shimamura had never known before.”

That’s not to say that Snow Country is an unsatisfying read. Kawabata is a beautiful, precise writer and he crafts an atmosphere expertly. The natural surroundings are stunningly described, and the people are believable and idiosyncratic, even though we know very little about them.

“there was something sad about the full flesh under that white powder. It suggested woollen cloth, and again it suggested the pelt of some animal.”

It’s also a deeply melancholy read. The two main characters will never be together and both seem trapped. Shimamura by his inability to find a meaningful way to spend his time, Komako by debt and circumstance. The sadness of it all crept up on me due to the writing style I’ve described, and it seemed all the more poignant for doing so, rather than explicitly announcing itself.

My memory is terrible, so as a reader I find what tends to stay with me is not plot or character, but more the atmosphere of a novel and the feelings it evoked. Snow Country is one of those that will stay with me a long time.

“All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever.”

Novella a Day in May 2020 #5

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The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino – Hiromi Kawakami (1995, trans. Allison Markin Powell 2019) 195 pages

I really enjoyed the previous novels by Hiromi Kawakami that I’ve read, Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop, so I approached The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino with high expectations. Although this was still highly readable and full of well-realised, idiosyncratic characters, I didn’t find it quite as satisfying as the others. I think this is because I misunderstood the title. I thought Nishino was the subject and the Loves were the object. But, in having the Ten Loves tell their stories in individual chapters, it turns out they are the subject, Nishino the object – an enigmatic object who remains mysterious to the end.

This is not a novella about the romance of love, though it is about the impact of romantic encounters. Kawakami is interested in how people relate to each other and the effect that we have on people’s lives that we can’t recognise or fully comprehend. She’s not interested – at least not here – on rose-tinted explorations of romantic love. The first chapter is from the point of view of a married woman who has an affair with Nishino:

“What is love, really? People have the right to fall in love, but not the right to be loved. I fell in love with Nishino, but that’s not to say he was required to fall in love with me. I knew this, but what was so painful was that my feelings for Nishino had no effect on his feelings for me. Despite this pain, I longed for him more and more.”

We then go back in time to when Nishino was at school, and learn something of his painful past:

“A strange air drifted around Nishino. An air that none of the other kids in class had. I had the impression that, if I were to try and push that air around, there would be no end to it. The more I tried to push it, the deeper I would get caught up in it. And no matter how hard I pushed, I would never reach Nishino on the other side.”

Nishino is someone who is never without a partner, and sometimes these women overlap. The women’s perspectives on each other add to the narrative; one of his loves is stunningly beautiful, but we only learn this from his subsequent girlfriend, as the woman herself would never describe herself that way.

Despite his womanising, it is Nishino who comes across as vulnerable, much more so than the women, even when he causes them pain.

“I wanted to flee from Nishino as quickly as possible. This desire welled up from the bottom of my heart. I still couldn’t put my finger on what the sense of discomfort was – all I knew for sure was that it was present. And no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t make it go away – that cold and awful uneasiness.

I wanted to flee. This simple thought flooded my mind. The same way that I had wished I could love him.”

Through ten very different women, we catch glimpses of Nishino but we never see him fully. This captures the central question of the novella: how much do we ever know another person? It’s not a bitter question though, or a desolate one. Rather it is one of compassion. I came away from Ten Loves… with a sense not of the importance of romantic love, but of kindness. Because at the point you touch another person’s life, you have no idea of what has gone before and what they carry with them.

Novella a Day in May 2020 #1

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Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata (2016, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori 2018) 163 pages

It’s always with some trepidation that I embark on Novella a Day in May, as I’m never sure I’ll make it to the end. This year the feeling is even more marked, as with all that is happening in the world I’m finding it hard to read as well as write blog posts. But I do really enjoy NADIM, so I’m making a start and I’ll try not to berate myself if I don’t finish this year. Onwards! 

I shouldn’t really worry about not feeling ready or particularly organised, as the world has a way of laughing at such endeavours. I read Convenience Store Woman a while ago and thought I’d get it written up well in advance of NADIM 2020. Then somehow the document got overwritten  – and by somehow I mean I stupidly overwrote it – and I couldn’t recover it. So I’m writing this months after I initially read the novella. It speaks to its strength that even with my terrible memory I could recall how good it is and how much I enjoyed it.

Keiko is in her mid-thirties and has been working in a convenience store half her life. For all of her life, she has never fitted in:

“My parents were at a loss what to do about me, but they were affectionate to me as ever. I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.”

Within the highly ordered, routine environment of the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart convenience store, Keiko finds her approach works well.

“For the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part of the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.”

However, as a woman approaching middle-age, Keiko comes under pressure to become a different type of normal cog. She is always single, with no interest in sex. She will not be getting married or having children any time soon, and the job that was at first tolerated by others, is now thought odd as it is not a career. Her sister has helped by thinking up a lie she can use, that she has health issues that suit a part-time job, or elderly parents that need her support, but still Keiko finds herself coming under closer scrutiny for her life choices.

A new employee at the store, Shiraha, may offer a solution. He is a misogynist with ill-thought out social theories and is completely unlikable. However, if they live together, Shiraha gets a place to stay and Keiko can pretend to fit in. What could possibly go wrong?

Keiko is a truly unique character. She is detached to an almost disturbing extent – whacking a playmate over the head with a shovel as a child, idly wondering about knifing her nephew to keep him quiet. Ultimately though, she is a convenience store woman to her core:

“A convenience store is not merely a place where customers come to buy practical necessities, it has to be somewhere they can enjoy and take pleasure in discovering things they like. I nodded in satisfaction and walked briskly around the store checking the displays. […] I could hear the store’s voice telling me what it wanted, how it wanted to be. I understood it perfectly.”

Convenience Store Woman is funny and almost surreal in places, but it is also an incisive look at what it means to be a woman struggling to find a place of acceptance within a society that oppresses who she truly is.

Novella a Day in May 2019 #10

/ madamebibilophile / 13 Comments

The Hunting Gun – Yasushi Inoue (1949, trans. Michael Emmerich 2013) Pushkin Press 106 pages

Published by the wonderful Pushkin Press, The Hunting Gun tells of the fallout from an extramarital affair via three letters, from the daughter of the woman involved, the betrayed wife, and finally the woman herself when she knows she is going to soon die.

The letters are sent to a poet who has published the titular poem about a man he once saw.

“He had simply struck me, as he came along the path with his shotgun over his shoulder and a pipe in his mouth, as having a sort of pensiveness about him that one did not ordinarily see in hunters- an atmosphere that seemed, in the crisp early-winter morning air, so extraordinarily clean that after we had passed each other I couldn’t help turning back.”

The man, Misugi Josuke, recognised himself in poem and has sent three letters he received to the poet, in order to explain why he had that atmosphere about him.

The first letter is from Shoko, the daughter of Saiko, with whom Misugi had an affair. Shoko only learns about the affair from reading her mother’s diary.

“And then I heard, very distinctly, the sound of that stack of words I had seen in her diary the night before SIN SIN SIN, piled as high as the Eiffel Tower – crashing down on top of her. The whole weight of the building she had erected from her sins in the course of the past thirteen years, all those floors, was crushing her exhausted body, carrying it off.”

Shoko’s letter is full of anger and betrayal, at both her mother and Misugi, the family friend. In contrast, Misugi’s wife, Midori, is surprisingly measured and even funny. But she acknowledges she has known for many years, and the hurt is not as fresh as that first day.

“I am sure you have had the experience of going for a swim in the ocean in early autumn and discovering that each little movement you make causes you to feel the water’s chillness more intensely, and so you stand there without moving. That was precisely how I felt then: too frightened to move. Only later did I arrive at the happy conclusion that it was only right to deceive you the way you had deceived me.”

Finally we hear from Shaiko, mother to Shoko, best friend to Midori and lover of Misugi, writing a letter to be opened after her death.

“Even after I die, my life will still be waiting here hidden in this letter until it is time for you to read it, and the second you cut the seal and lower your eyes to read its first words, my life will flare up again and burn with all its former vigour, and then for fifteen or twenty minutes, until you read the very last word, my life will flow as it did when I was alive into every limb, every little corner of your body, and fill your heart with various emotions. A posthumous letter is an astonishing thing, don’t you think?”

The Hunting Gun is a short, simply constructed novel that manages to convey emotions and characterisation of real complexity. The affair is shown to involve so many more people than just the immediate couple, and how the fallout and hurt from such a betrayal cannot be anticipated. Inoue shows the capacity human beings have for causing deep, irreparable sadness in one another, but the tone is never judgemental. A beautifully observed novella.

“Why, when we had just formed a united front, so to speak, to battle for our love, why, at a moment that should have been the most fulfilling, did I tumble into that helpless solitude?”