Tag-Archive for ◊ Kyoto ◊

Author:
• Friday, April 30th, 2021

Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most famous and acclaimed contemporary writers, was born in Kyoto in 1949 but grew up in the Osaka – Kobe area, an only child whose father was a Buddhist priest’s son and his mother, an Osaka’s merchant daughter. Both his parents taught Japanese literature.

Murakami spent his young years reading an array of European and American literary works, which later influenced his writing. He majored in theatre arts at Tokyo’s Waseda University in 1975.

He loved classical and jazz music to the extent that, while still at university, he worked at a record shop before opening his own coffee/jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, with his university girlfriend, Yoko, who later became his wife. He ran the bar from 1974 to 1981 and sold it when he started earning a living from writing.

Haruki Murakami translates books from English to Japanese. He is also a novelist, writing non-fiction, short stories and essays. Several of his novels have been made into films. Norwegian Wood, Murakami’s fifth novel, was published in Japanese in 1987 and English twice: by Birnbaum in 1989 and Rubin in 2000. Moreover, it was released as a film at the end of 2010.

While his fame was increasing, Murakami left Japan, discontented by Japanese social mentality in the late 1980s. He first moved to Europe, where he lived for a few years before going on to the USA in 1991. He taught at Princeton University from 1991 to 1993, followed by Tufts University from 1993 to 1995.

Because of the Kobe earthquake and the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground by a Japanese religious sect, Murakami felt the need to return to his native country in 1995. He now lives in Oiso, in the Kanagawa prefecture, and has an office in Tokyo.

Murakami’s books have been translated into several languages and are bestsellers worldwide. He has received many awards for his work in addition to The World Fantasy Award, The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, The Franz Kafka Prize, Hans Christian Andersen Literary Award, Yomiuri Prize and The Jerusalem Prize.

The story of Norwegian Wood is narrated in the first person by the thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe. Watanabe’s plane had just landed at Hamburg airport, Germany, when “Soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood”, Naoko, Toru’s first love, liked this song, which is often mentioned in the story. The melody triggered old buried memories of eighteen years earlier when Toru was a nineteen-year-old student in Tokyo and loved Naoko.

Toru, now an adult, is reminiscing on his college years in the sixties and his relationship with his high school friend, Kizuki, and his attractive and emotionally unstable girlfriend, Naoko. However, the seventeen-year-old Kizuki unexpectedly commits suicide and Naoko, who feels helpless, lost and depressed after her premature boyfriend’s death, turns to Toru for help.

Naoko likes Toru, who, in return, loves her. Nevertheless, due to the enduring impact of Kizuki’s suicide, things do not go the right way between them. Naoko shows signs of schizophrenia, abandons her studies and is admitted to a sanatorium. Her stay there becomes long and her leaving unforeseeable.

While Naoko is in the sanatorium, Toru meets his extroverted, lively classmate, Midori Kobayashi. She is the complete opposite character from the introverted, dispirited Naoko. Furthermore, Toru falls in love with Midori but suppresses it because of his commitment to Naoko. Naoko ends up taking her own life to end her sufferings, like her boyfriend, Kizuki and her older sister, who both committed suicide at seventeen. Toru is devastated after hearing the news.

Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was inspired by the eponymous Beatles song released in 1965:
“I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me?
She showed me her room.
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay.
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
And when I awoke, I was alone
This bird had flown…”
(The Beatles, 1965)

Another song, also released in 1965 by the Who, could have influenced Murakami, who was a teenager at the time:
“People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old”.
(The Who, 1965)

These songs convey the pain of living, the feeling of loss, angst, and painful existential feeling, struggle for recognition and yearning for independence from established adults’ rules and regulations perceived by adolescents coming of age.

The author also writes about the Japanese students’ street demonstrations in revolt against long-established traditions in Japan in the late sixties. The demonstrations were likely inspired by the enormous French student protests of May 1968, which reverberated among students worldwide.

The subject of the novel is a worthy issue on its own. Combining it with the need to experiment with sexual desires when coming of age is not uncommon to broaden the subject perspective. However, adding multiple recurrent sexual scenes lessens the main subject’s importance and weakens it.

Norwegian Wood is an absorbing, dark story. Fortunately, the end brings a glimpse of hope, a ray of sunshine as an incitement for a promising new start leaving the past behind. The characters are touching in their sufferings. Their “mal de vivre” convey an overwhelmingly depressing atmosphere of isolation leading to oppressive loneliness. They are undoubtedly intended by the author, whose books are often fatalistic, melancholy or even surreal and nightmarish, as illustrated in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, which we discussed in our Book Club in 2011.

In one of his interviews, Murakami says that he likes to write weird stories despite being a very realistic person. Maybe it is a sort of escapism from reality, being a “loner” as he typifies himself. Referring to his young readers, he says he hopes that his books “can offer them a sense of freedom – freedom from the real world.”

Murakami mentions that even though Norwegian Wood’s story takes place in the late sixties when he was a university student, it is not an autobiography. He says: “I borrowed the details of the protagonist’s university environment and daily life from those of my own student days. As a result, many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all”.

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Author:
• Sunday, May 27th, 2012

Kanegae Hideyoshi was born in Harbin, China in 1926 and his pen-name was Mitsugu Saotome. He studied at Keio University’s Literature Department but left before obtaining a degree.

In 1954, Yamamoto Shugoro, the popular Japanese novelist and short-story writer, accepted to be Saotome’s mentor.

Before writing novels about the Japanese Warring States period from the pre-modern to modern times (1868 to 1912), he was publishing period fiction and historical stories in journals.

In 1968 Mitsugu Saotome was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize for his novel Kyojin No Ori (The Cage Of The Traveller) and in 2006 he was elected chairman of the Japanese P.E.N..

Saotome is well known as a writer of Japanese historical fiction. He claimed that this interest derived from the fact that he was descended from a Samurai of the Aizu-Wakamatsu domain and therefore he had a special affection for Aizu-Wakamatsu, the land of his ancestors.

He was a prolific writer, his novels are very popular in Japan and several of them have been adapted into feature films and television series. Okei was first published in Japan in 1974 and was translated into English in 2008. Unfortunately, Okei seems to be the only novel of all his work which has been translated into English.

Mitsugu Saotome died in 2008 of stomach cancer in the city of Kamakura in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan.

The epic story of Okei is set in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the mountainous town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, during a turbulent internal bloody period of Japanese history. It’s the transitional period between the end of the feudal shogunate, from 1853 to 1867, and the restoration of the Meiji era which lasted from 1868 to 1912.

The shogun had a very strong military power in Japan which relegated the power of the emperor to solely being a religious and political leader. The word Meiji means enlightened rule, which had as its target the combination of Western progress with Eastern established values. The Meiji era saw the disappearance of the Keio period and with it the city of Edo which became the “Eastern Capital” Tokyo and replaced the ancient capital, Kyoto, located in the western part of the country.

Okei, the main character of the novel and the one that stands out against all the others, is a teenage-peasant cooper’s daughter, who despite very strict rules, with class distinctions rigorously enforced, plus the Samurai complex code of honour, falls passionately in love with the young Samurai, Sasanuma Kingo. Her ardent flame isn’t shared by Kingo, being himself in love with Yukiko, the widow of the senior councillor, Jinbo Shuri, who had taken his own life by committing Seppuku (Harakiri) in order to wash his shame, as was the tradition among Samurai when they displeased their master.

The author describes how throughout centuries people had established connections and loyalties to the local feudal lord because his defeat meant the defeat of his clan and how the long established code of manners, loyalties and obedience started to fade from Japanese society and was replaced by new values. Aizu has lived three hundred years of peace before the Westerners violated the eastern land and were hated for it.

Okei, whose character is well developed in the novel, lived a short but intense life. In fact, her forlorn life and death are tragic. She matures too soon due to circumstances which she can’t fathom most of the time. The innocent, hard working, romantic girl becomes more reasonable and acquiescent to harsh reality. She is nearly raped by Edward Schnell when she is asleep in his warehouse loft. Luckily, Henry Schnell, Edward’s elder and wiser brother, who is nearby, comes to the rescue. The two Dutch brothers, Henry and Edward are suppliers of up-to-date arms and canons to the western Japanese. They have dissimilar characters, Edward is frivolous, liking to use Japanese women for his pleasure only and thinks little of them, while Henry is more level-headed, respects them and marries one of them, the widow, Matsuno.

Throughout her life, Okei has to re-adapt. Whether it is due to the war and the starting of a new era in Japan and with it the change of mentalities and new codes, or the emigration to the new world for survival. She has to learn to readjust, like her compatriots, to the American culture in Coloma, California, the El Dorado country, where the big Gold Rush took place from 1848 to 1855, fourteen years before Okei and her rural community arrived in the area.

Until her last breath, Okei was longing to go back to her home in Aizu but realised that her feet took her where she had to be buried, at the site of the old settlement, on top of Gold Hill colony in California.

If only she hadn’t murdered an imperial army officer, in panic, fear and in self defence and especially after the Crane Castle had fallen. She was certain that her deed would be considered a crime rather than an act of war and that is why she could never go back to her beloved Aizu. She realised and accepted that she had to submit to her fate and to the fact that the so far trustworthy, Henry and his wife, who was her mistress and friend, left California for Japan without ever keeping contact with her which is a big disappointment for Okei and a betrayal of the trust she had for them.

Touching in parts, violent and bloody in others, it’s a well documented novel with abundant action. A very colourful epic with vividly intense historical details. A good insight into Japanese and American history of the time.

 

 


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