Death by Water by Kenzaburu Oe
translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm
432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00

Reviewed by Will Eells

Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in the first person by Kogito Choko, a septuagenarian writer with published works including The Silent Cry and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. If those titles sound familiar to you, it’s because those actually are real-life titles by Oe, The Day He Himself in particular being a part of the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.

As a matter of fact, Death by Water is in many ways a direct response to The Day He Himself, and few pages go by without it being mentioned. The reason? Death by Water is essentially the story of Choko (our Oe stand-in) trying to re-write the same dramatic event of his childhood as fictionalized in The Day He Himself, i.e. the sudden drowning of his father. However, while The Day He Himself is a deliberately grotesque and stylized dramatization of the event, Death by Water is a sort of metafiction, a writer writing about the act of writing.

The plot, such as it is, finds Oe’s stand-in Choko aware of the coming end of his writing career. Besides a monthly opinion piece for the newspaper, he hardly writes anymore. Ten years after his mother’s death, he suddenly gets the chance to retrieve his late father’s old, red leather trunk, containing his notes, diary entries, and evidence of his failed coup attempt after World War II and his escape from perceived authorities leading to his death by drowning. Choko feels he can finally write a definitive version of this turn of events, as in his old age he finds his previous effort, the aforementioned The Day He Himself, to be “an embarrassingly immature piece of work.” At the same time, he becomes involved with an avant-garde theater company The Caveman Group, who in the past has dramatized Kogito’s work for the stage, and is hoping to create a new work in tandem with the “drowning novel” Kogito now wants to write. The thing is, about a third of the way through the novel, Kogito discovers his mother has already destroyed most of the trunk’s contents, and Kogito finds himself unable to continue his work.

And yet, Death by Water continues to amble on for another three hundred or so pages, the ponderous middle section a more generous reviewer might call “reflective,” as Oe reconnects with his past, and reflects on the act of writing itself. The novel is absurdly self-aware, as Kogito/Oe reflects on his own quirks and failures as a writer. He even poses the question directly in a conversation with a friend, who complains:

“At some point, doesn’t it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels? . . . Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?”

“Everything you say is true,” I said. “I admit that freely . . . but I always seem to come back to the sobering realization that if I hadn’t used the quasi-autobiographical approach I wouldn’t have been able to write anything at all. In other words, I’ve had to maintain this narrow focus out of sheer necessity.”

And while it’s true that there seems to always be a pretty strong basis of fact in even Oe’s early work, anyone who has read said work would know that Oe is capable of some fantastic, bizarre, and unreal stories. The contrast between Kogito/Oe’s early and late works becomes a major question of Death by Water, one that even Oe doesn’t seem to know how to answer. So what is better: youthful expressionism and raw creativity or the maturity, wisdom, and hindsight of experience?

It’s hard to say what Oe the writer or Kogito the character thinks on the matter. Are the late works, as Adorno says, catastrophes? Or, in the more hopeful interpretation of Edward Said, are the late works: “thrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?”

Oe seems to be hopeful of the latter, but I wouldn’t say that Death by Water is a successful example. The novel is overly long, disjointed, and aimless, particularly once the narrative thread suddenly revs up in the last hundred pages, and a more compelling story emerges when Unaiko, Kogito’s main liaison and friend in The Caveman Group, attempts to dramatize her own painful past via an abandoned script of Kogito’s to a conservative audience unwilling to deal with the issues it presents.

Oh, Unaiko, the true star of this show! One of the few characters in the novel who feels like a character and not simply a soapbox for Kogito to argue with, Unaiko has a story that needs telling, and a version of Death by Water two hundred pages shorter and more evenly split between Kogito and Unaiko’s creative relationship to their respective past histories seems like it would’ve made these questions of life influencing art and art influencing life much more entertaining and thought-provoking. Perhaps a younger writer would’ve dramatized her story directly. But even that raises the question: who gets to tell it; who is allowed to tell Unaiko’s story? Is Oe being respectful by not appropriating a woman’s more powerful and engaging story, one that could very well be more or less “true” for his own dramatic ends? Or is Oe, with his limitations as a writer, simply incapable of writing the story any other way?

Death by Water raises these interesting questions about mortality, political correctness, art cannibalizing life, and frankly, art cannibalizing itself, but comes up with few satisfactory answers. It is appropriately ambitious for a late work, but by being overly long, digressive, and didactic, Death by Water is more the bad catastrophic than the good. This doesn’t make Oe suddenly a bad writer—but a novel addressing your flaws as a novelist does not absolve you of said sins. Maybe just write a different novel.

Here’s the beginning of Will’s review:

Like any good potboiler worth its salt, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Gun wastes no time setting up its premise: “Last night, I found a gun. Or you could say I stole it, I’m not really sure. I’ve never seen something so beautiful, or that feels so right in my hand. I didn’t have much interest in guns before, but the moment I saw it, all I could think about was making it mine.”

The “I” here is a young man named Nishikawa. He’s probably in his 20s, because he’s a university student, but beyond that, there’s not much to glean from his personal life, because he’s not one for introspection. Much more fascinating is his new object of obsession, and like a man sleepwalking through life, Nishikawa finally seems to have a purpose: to use that gun.

For a debut novel, there is a lot to like here. Despite some clunky and repetitive prose, Nakamura knows how to ratchet up the tension, as we slowly progress from Nishikawa simply owning the gun, to taking care of the gun, to bringing the gun around with him, until finally, feeling like he needs to shoot that gun, at something or someone. Even as readers we know this is a foregone conclusion, but Nakamura, particularly as we barrel into the climax, knows how to employ multiple bait and switches to keep us guessing as to Nishikawa’s ultimate fate.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The “I” here is a young man named Nishikawa. He’s probably in his 20s, because he’s a university student, but beyond that, there’s not much to glean from his personal life, because he’s not one for introspection. Much more fascinating is his new object of obsession, and like a man sleepwalking through life, Nishikawa finally seems to have a purpose: to use that gun.

For a debut novel, there is a lot to like here. Despite some clunky and repetitive prose, Nakamura knows how to ratchet up the tension, as we slowly progress from Nishikawa simply owning the gun, to taking care of the gun, to bringing the gun around with him, until finally, feeling like he needs to shoot that gun, at something or someone. Even as readers we know this is a foregone conclusion, but Nakamura, particularly as we barrel into the climax, knows how to employ multiple bait and switches to keep us guessing as to Nishikawa’s ultimate fate.

What’s most satisfying about The Gun, though, is how fully realized Nishikawa is as a character for whom self-analysis is not only difficult, but pointless. Where The Gun really succeeds is as a portrait of a young sociopath, vaguely aware of traditional morality but ultimately succumbing to his own desires against all else. His obsession with the gun is chilling simply because of how easily he can justify his own compulsions, and treat them as practically mundane:

I rarely yearned for anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t much matter to me if everyone else had the same things as I did. The thing was that I had found it. The same way that, for instance, some people found pleasure drawing pictures or making music, or they relied on work or women, drugs or religion, I felt like I had discovered what I was passionate about. And for me, that thing was nothing more than the gun. There was nothing wrong with me. That’s what I realized. And I started to relax.

So what makes a sociopath? Nakamura gives us no easy answers, but simply a number of clues that might lead in one direction or another; perhaps it’s a combination of all of them, or none at all.

Written initially in 2002, The Gun, despite being written in Japan, is a thoroughly post 9-11 novel, and one that still hold weight in today’s America, a country divided between the threat of ISIS and terrorism and the homespun problems of domestic gun laws. In one section, Nishikawa goes to the library to find news stories about the missing gun, and glazes over a litany of issues that still resonate eerily today:

The vast majority of the articles were completely irrelevant to me. Whether the Americans had dropped a bomb somewhere in Afghanistan, or whether their strategy would succeed-these kinds of things had nothing to do with me right now. What Japan’s reaction would be, or whether Japan would become entangled with it-such questions did not interest me at the moment either. A kid had died after being bullied, and his parents had sued the school and the bully. There was a fire somewhere, and it was difficult to say whether it had been arson or an accident. There was a festival. Funds were embezzled, and the culprit had fled. There was a scientific discovery. Two trucks had collided. Someone had been run over. An intellectual whose name I didn’t recognize gave his opinions about the United States, offering advice to the Japanese government. Politicians quarreled, talking earnestly about something or other. Two entertainers died. It seemed like the information I was looking for was not to be found in any of these newspapers.

The descriptions above are vague, yes, but in its blandness the reader sees how very little progress the world has seen in the last fifteen years.

One thing that’s not made explicit, but tacitly alluded to (why would it, in a book written initially for Japanese readers) is that the whole reason finding this particular gun is extraordinary is because guns are illegal in Japan, and not “just a part of everyday life, nothing particularly unusual about them” like they are in the United States. So is Westernization to blame, influences from a violent, external cultural force?

Not quite, or probably not entirely (Japan certainly has its share of crime, murder, and suicide). Is it instead, perhaps, a lack of culture? Nishikawa is constantly referencing the boredom and monotony of his existence, and is essentially a person with no particular passions or desire for the future, until, at least, he finds the gun. But Nishikawa is far from the only character affected by ennui. All of Nishikawa’s friends and acquaintances are of dubious moral standards or at the very least, not particularly driven. There’s Toast Girl, a nameless, casual sex partner who doesn’t mind sleeping with Nishikawa as long as her boyfriend doesn’t find out; Keisuke, his sex-driven, womanizing “friend”; his neighbor, who it becomes clear is beating her son; and finally, Yuko, a classmate for whom Nishikawa may have some deeper feelings for, but who is equally apathetic about her future and why she even bothers with university in the first place. Is perhaps The Gun a criticism of meaningful opportunity and engagement for Japan’s Millennial generation?

Finally, and somewhat less successfully, is a rather humdrum Nature vs. Nurture question. It turns out Nishikawa was more or less orphaned when his real father abandoned him (being raised instead by foster parents), and whom Nishikawa visits on his deathbed in the course of the novel. The connection is more or less made explicit when Nishikawa suddenly remembers how at the orphanage, he had trained himself with a coping mechanism of: “if I didn’t think about things, then I wouldn’t be unhappy.”

Nakamura seems content to let all these factors influence the reader’s perception, and it ultimately works because, instead of an easy answer, what the reader gets is a surprisingly complex character study of a very unreliable narrator. In his writing career, Nakamura would also go on to receive great acclaim for another character study disguised as run-of-the-mill thriller with The Thief, the first of his novels to come out in English from Soho Press. The Gun is an admittedly rough genesis of what would become Nakamura’s ultimate strength, and why he’s more Patricia Highsmith than James Patterson: a literary bias toward character over plot machinations. And despite his penchant for the darkness in his character’s souls, in the end, Nakamura betrays his slightly more optimistic outlook for humanity: the fascination and impulse for destruction is human, but the act is not. The problem is that the line dividing the two is awfully thin.

But anyone attempting to play Murakami Bingo with his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is going to lose. There are no parallel worlds, talking animals, or mysterious women. There’s only one passing reference each to wells and cats, both only as metaphors, and there’s really only one piece of music that’s talked about at any length. And it’s not even jazz.

This is Murakami at his most straightforward and subdued, the likes of which we’ve really only seen—in novels, at least—in Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun. It is a relatively straightforward tale of friendship, depression, and memory. As such, it sheds a beacon on both Murakami’s core strengths and weaknesses as a writer, some thirty odd years into his career.

In this latest novel, the eponymous Tsukuru, a middle-aged train station engineer, reflects on his high school days, when he belonged to a group of friends so close that its importance to his life has become essentially mythic. Each of their names even contain a color—Aka (red), the temperamental brainiac; Ao (blue), the cool people-person; Kuro (black), the sarcastic comedian; and Shiro (white), the quiet beauty—except for Tsukuru, who they joked was “colorless.” This moniker takes on a whole new meaning for Tsukuru when the group unceremoniously and without explanation excise him from their circle after he leaves their hometown for Tokyo and college. Tsukuru’s sudden exile sends him into a wretched depression, from which he clearly did not come out entirely intact. Sixteen years later, in the present day, a casual girlfriend prompts Tsukuru to try and figure out just what exactly happened, in the hopes that he might be able to finally heal, and perhaps commit more fully to his present relationship with her.

Peel away the usual pseudo-magical realist trappings, and this is the template for the über-Murakami story: an average, lonely man embarks on a quest. But time changes both the man and the world around him. An adventure like this, thirty years ago, involved research and a cross-country trek into parts unknown, á la A Wild Sheep Chase. In Colorless, his girlfriend suggests he checks Facebook.

This epitomizes what makes Colorless both compelling and frustrating in equal measure: it is, essentially, drama-free. The conflict, such as it is, takes place entirely in the past, waiting quietly to be unearthed. Tsukuru systematically contacts each friend, one by one, and slowly comes to learn the truth. And while there is a conspiracy of a sort, and twists and turns along the way, the universe does not fracture in two in response; there is no McGuffin to set it all right. The only thing Tsukuru can do is to push forward and engage with his old friends, and finally be able to come to terms with the contents of his present existence. It is perhaps the best novel I have read where nothing actually happens.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. The novels that Murakami is best known for—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84—are bombastic in their everything and the kitchen sink approach to writing. They’re weird, messy, digressive, splashy, about seemingly everything and nothing at the same time. They succeed and suffer in their attempts at a fractured 21st century “total novel,” the kind that Doestoevsky and Victor Hugo used to write. Stripped down to just an emotional core, Colorless is outwardly less ambitious, but a lot more personal. Without the distraction of the typical Murakami weird, however, it is a lot easier to spot Murakami’s weaknesses.

For one, Tsukuru is boring. Like every Murakami protagonist, Tsukuru is the consummate everyman. He is average in just about every way, as we’ve been told over and over in one story or another. In other novels, it is pretty easy to get past this—the narrator is a cipher, our surrogate, the straight man in a cast of weirdos, holding our hand as we bemusedly come to terms with a strange new reality. Colorless has no such distractions, and there are no other characters that stick around long enough for us to get interested in, like the vivacious Midori in the similarly somber Norwegian Wood. Tsukuru trots from one friend to the next, knowing that despite the amicable, nostalgic peace that comes with reconnecting with an old friend, things will never be the same, and it’s time to be moving on.

Murakami has always had a straightforward yet quietly elegant way with words, but the language in Colorless is so undemanding it frequently comes across as repetitive. (Translator Philip Gabriel has always been more than up to the task in previous translations; it seems unfair to throw him under the bus now.) When tasked with illustrating a character’s feelings, Murakami generally has no qualms with telling instead of showing—a big no-no any Intro-level creative writing class will teach you—but in Colorless it feels like this has become a bigger problem than ever before. While reading I even came up with a drinking game: a shot for every time you read some variation of Tsukuru wanting or needing something “more than anything.” Spoiler alert: you’re going to blackout.

So, to tally up so far: a boring narrator, facile language, clichéd characters, and a conflict-free narrative. Sounds pretty dismal.

And yet, there’s something about Colorless that works despite all these obvious flaws, something that makes all these seemingly egregious sins click into place. It is still just so damn readable. And while this subtle propulsion certainly doesn’t make the work transcendent, it makes it a far cry from the mess that I make it sound to be. Murakami is a workman, a writer in some tangibly fundamental way—in short, a professional. He can’t help but get a few things right.

One of the ways in which Colorless is much cleverer than at first glance is the way Murakami so deftly and subtly illustrates the fallibility of memory. Tsukuru is reflecting on events that happened sixteen years ago, the aftermath of which has colored his perspective of himself and the world around him. He frequently remarks that nothing is interesting or remarkable about him because that’s fundamentally how he sees himself. He has carried the feeling of being “colorless” for years; he is someone who seems himself, essentially, as someone who is very easily abandoned. His friends are described practically with only one characteristic each, as if stock characters right out of the Breakfast Club. But memory orders our lives by both exaggerating and obliterating the truth. Each friend had their role to play, as we all do during those formative years, and the distance of time amplifies those impressions even more. It’s telling that with every friend Tsukuru reconnects with, Tsukuru can’t help but notice how they seem both exactly the same and inexplicably different.

So while the language itself is perhaps shallow, its simplicity belies a complex and satisfying narrative thread of a man who is taking his first steps toward self-actualization. A man who learns he has self-worth, and value, and that his friends, his history, his fundamental self, are not what he assumed they were. They are simple but powerful truths about what it means to grow older and wiser, and to be able to look back at the past without letting it define you. Anyone who has suffered, and survived, episodes of depression or trauma will easily relate.

Murakami moves deftly back and forth between past and present in the beginning of the novel, so while it takes nearly a hundred pages for the “plot” to begin, in the meantime we get to enjoy another common but more welcome Murakami-ism: the story within the story. Here, it comes courtesy of a friend named Haida (another colorful name, this time gray), whom Tsukuru meets in his traumatic college years. The tale concerns Haida’s father, who, after suddenly dropping out of college, meets a pianist at a secluded hotel who claims to be able to predict his own imminent death. Haida similarly drops out of college soon after, another colorful friend who suddenly abandons the colorless Tsukuru.

The reader will have to decide whether the sum of the novel is equal to more or less than its parts. At times it feels both simultaneous too long, with a hundred-odd pages just to feel like something is happening, and too short, with that niggling sense that characters aren’t as fleshed out as they could be. On this issue I might perhaps place blame on the presentation of the book itself. Chip Kidd has designed the book beautifully, as he always does, but the font and margins are absolutely gigantic, making what should be a relatively concise 200-odd page character study feel like a sloppy mess at 400. Perhaps Knopf wanted to hedge their bets and make readers feel like they are getting “their money’s worth” or, “a real page-turner”; I hope the paperback will adjust the layout so I won’t feel like I’m reading a large-print young adult book.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will not go down as Murakami’s masterpiece, but it certainly won’t go down as his worst either. I absolutely cannot imagine it will change the minds of Murakami detractors, and even amongst his fans it will be a pleasurable read that might leave some feeling hollow by the end. But, as perhaps befitting of the old saw, still waters run deep. Strip all the metaphysical nonsense away, and Colorless is Murakami to the very core, fault lines and all.

Here’s a bit from his review:

One of the most pleasant surprises of the literary world in the past few years, at least in my opinion, is the success that Japanese author Yoko Ogawa has seen in the United States. Her breakout, modest hit The Housekeeper and the Professor received national attention and, more anecdotally, was a top-selling book for years (yes, years!) at my neighborhood indie bookstore the Brookline Booksmith. I don’t know if the Boston area just happens to be a particularly hot spot for Ogawa fandom, but thanks to bookseller and local book club love, The Housekeeper and the Professor has done extremely well in my neck of the woods. On top of that, her follow-up novel, Hotel Iris, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010. [. . .]

Therefore, I’m happy to report (knowing full well that I’ve been trying your patience until now, just wanting to know if the damn thing is any good) that Revenge is not only an unbelievably magnificent piece of fiction, but that it is in fact better than The Housekeeper and the Professor, and undoubtedly the best thing American readers have seen yet. Revenge is “Best Thing I’ve Read in a Year” material, and I say this coming off reading the new George Saunders that everyone is currently wetting their pants over.

But let me actually tell you about the book (yes, I know we’re five paragraphs into this thing already). Revenge is not simply a collection of short stories—it’s more of a novel-in-stories kind of deal, an assemblage of interconnected stories that play off each other in various, haunting and beautiful ways. It starts quietly enough: a woman goes into a local bakery to buy a cake. It’s a normal, beautiful kind of day; the only thing wrong is that there’s no one in said bakery, including behind the counter. Eventually, another woman joins her, and they strike up a conversation: how good the bakery is, how strange it is that there’s no one around. The first woman reveals that she’s come for a strawberry shortcake:

“I’m buying them for my son. Today is his birthday.”
“Really? Well, I hope it’s a happy one. How old is he?”
“Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.”

And just like that—quietly, suddenly, matter-of-factly—we enter Ogawa’s dark, beautiful world.

Read it all here

I was lucky enough to review (glowingly, I might add) The Housekeeper and the Professor for this very website almost four years ago. The timing was just right; I had just finished reading it before starting as an intern for Open Letter, and the review was my first major contribution to the job. It was wonderful to publicly sing the book’s praises, and seeing the book’s subsequent success has made Ogawa’s minor triumph in the English-speaking world almost like my own.

A few months down the road, I jumped at the chance to review Hotel Iris, but found the novel to be a disappointment. After the sunny beauty of The Housekeeper and the Professor, the disturbingly sexual and gloomy Hotel Iris was a hard pill to swallow, made all the worse by thin characters whose backgrounds and motivations never seemed to coalesce into something that made any sense. Hotel Iris left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I began to wonder in which Ogawa’s path would lead next, and whether it was a path I wanted to follow. I desperately needed a tiebreaker.

So, I’ve been waiting with cautious optimism for the release of Revenge, Ogawa’s latest work to be translated into English. Two things made me anxious in the months leading to my actually reading it: first, Revenge was billed as “Eleven Dark Tales,” lining it up with the Ogawa I felt I wasn’t in tune with; and second, that instead of a novel, the tiebreaker was a collection of short stories. I love short stories and certainly have nothing against them, but for the purposes of breaking said tie that exists, admittedly, only in my mind, I was afraid that Revenge simply would be the oranges to Ogawa’s previous releases of apples. Instead of choosing a path at the fork in the road, it was going to veer off in another direction entirely, make me more lost than ever.

Therefore, I’m happy to report (knowing full well that I’ve been trying your patience until now, just wanting to know if the damn thing is any good) that Revenge is not only an unbelievably magnificent piece of fiction, but that it is in fact better than The Housekeeper and the Professor, and undoubtedly the best thing American readers have seen yet. Revenge is “Best Thing I’ve Read in a Year” material, and I say this coming off reading the new George Saunders that everyone is currently wetting their pants over.

But let me actually tell you about the book (yes, I know we’re five paragraphs into this thing already). Revenge is not simply a collection of short stories—it’s more of a novel-in-stories kind of deal, an assemblage of interconnected stories that play off each other in various, haunting and beautiful ways. It starts quietly enough: a woman goes into a local bakery to buy a cake. It’s a normal, beautiful kind of day; the only thing wrong is that there’s no one in said bakery, including behind the counter. Eventually, another woman joins her, and they strike up a conversation: how good the bakery is, how strange it is that there’s no one around. The first woman reveals that she’s come for a strawberry shortcake:

“I’m buying them for my son. Today is his birthday.”

“Really? Well, I hope it’s a happy one. How old is he?”

“Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.”

And just like that—quietly, suddenly, matter-of-factly—we enter Ogawa’s dark, beautiful world.

The stories that follow are all dark, but the title Revenge belies the kinds of stories actually on display. Revenge isn’t the macabre, bloody collection you might think it will be. While it does contain a few murders, betrayals, and maybe even a ghost, the stories are often eerie and creepy in a much more evocative way, hinting at the evils more than ever showing them. In “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” a woman is questioned by the police in connection to a murder that had taken place on the floor above her, and later finds herself at said museum, where an old man gives her a tour of authentic torture devices, lovingly describing their actual use. One of the more bizarre artifacts is a simple funnel:

“It’s just a funnel,” I said.

“Yes, but a special one. The victim is immobilized on his back, and the funnel is used to drip cold water on his face, one drop at a time.”

“And that’s torture.”

“It most certainly is—one of the most brutal, in fact.” He picked up the funnel and held it carefully in both hands. It was made of a dull silver metal almost the same color as his hair. “For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.”

Ogawa’s greatest achievement in Revenge is the strange ways her stories turn, defying expectation and at the same time making each story fit perfectly in the entirety of the work. She never has to resort to a cheap trick to shock the reader; instead she revels in her slow, methodical reveals, masterfully building tension and absorbing the reader into her surreal, twisted world. In one of the highlights of the book, “Sewing for the Heart,” an expert bag maker is tasked with his most difficult challenge yet: creating a bag designed to protect a human heart precariously attached to the outside of a beautiful woman’s body. But other stories work equally well, without the threat of violence, and the darkness that pervades the atmosphere is that of melancholy instead. “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” follows a woman as she goes to confront her husband’s mistress, only to witness instead the final moments of a dying pet tiger. In “Fruit Juice,” a high school boy accompanies a girl from school through an awkward lunch with her estranged father.

All of these stories connect in surprising ways. Incidental characters from one story become the stars of another; scenes and places from one story collide in the next; inanimate objects become important markers throughout the text. The effect is dizzying, awe-inspiring, electrifying. Revenge is a panorama of people, places, and things that come in and out of focus, tying the work together in unbelievable ways. The stories themselves are short, almost ethereal, and loose in detail, yet they come together into something much more than just the sum of its parts. Amazingly, the problems of Hotel Iris become a strength in Revenge, which, combined with Ogawa’s keen eye for beauty in sadness that characterized The Housekeeper and the Professor, make Revenge a stunning piece of fiction. Really, the only complaint I have is that of the title itself. The theme of revenge is certainly one that filters a handful of the stories, but certainly not the whole, and as a title just feels kind of generic. The original title, which could be translated as “Silent Corpse, Improper Funeral” is much more evocative (and evokes the scene that ties the whole book together), though it doesn’t have quite the same ring in English as the original Japanese: Kamoku na shigai, midara na tomurai.

Already I can see that Revenge is getting some wonderful attention in some influential places, and Ogawa, and particularly this work, is more than deserving. Ogawa is a writer positioned perfectly in the sweet spot of literariness and accessibility, and Stephen Snyder, who has translated all of Ogawa’s major releases in English, has done his job perfectly in nailing the haunting and bewitching tone that makes this book so compellingly readable. Ogawa has many, many novels left to be translated, and in a few years, I could see her having the kind of success that few international authors receive. And with the kind of marketing push Picador has been giving her, I think they think so, too. I sincerely hope she does. Revenge is a career-defining work, and one that readers of international fiction must pay attention to.

Mishima is a huge figure in Japanese literature, and this is a huge biography, so let’s just let Will get into it:

ukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The enormous body of work left behind almost outshines his shocking public suicide after taking hostages with the help of his personal nationalist militia at a Self-Defense Forces base. In Persona, the first biography of Mishima to appear in English in over thirty years and the first translated into English from Japan, Naoki Inose and Hiroaki Sato take an extremely lengthy and detailed account of this paradoxical figure of modern Japanese literature.

And when I say lengthy, I mean a Tolstoy-esque brick of a tome. You could do some real damage with this book. The reason for this is twofold: Mishima as a writer was extremely prolific, with thirty-four novels, almost two hundred short stories, seventy plays, and countless essays, poems, interviews, and more to his name—and this was all before his death at just 46. Not every piece of writing is addressed here (how could it?) but a shocking amount is, even if certain novels (many unfortunately still untranslated) hardly get a few paragraphs of attention. It’s both tantalizing and frustrating to get a taste of Mishima to which English speakers still don’t have full access.

More importantly, perhaps, in regards to Persona’s length, is that ultimately, it is not really just about Mishima. Persona, I would argue, is a book about Japan itself, as filtered through the life of one of its perhaps most important creations. Mishima is Japan in microcosm, a man deeply torn between European enlightenment and patriotic nationalism re: traditionalism. I hate to characterize any argument down to “He’s East-meets-West,” (it has become one of the most annoyingly clichéd characterizations of Japanese culture) but of all Japan’s writers, Mishima encapsulates that beautiful, violent schism most perfectly. If Japan truly represents the Occident and the Orient as so many would have us believe, it’s because of icons like the talented, tragic Mishima.

But Mishima really was a man divided in two. He came from both samurai and peasant stock, his grandparents a witness to Admiral Perry’s Black Ships forcing Japan to open their gates to the West. According to Persona, the great loves of Mishima’s life were women, but his sexual proclivities towards men are well documented and numerous. He was a sickly, smothered bookworm of a child who grew up to become obsessed with bodybuilding and martial arts. He was extremely well read in both Eastern and Western writers, devoted equally to Kabuki as he was to the works of George Bataille. He was a literary writer with clear commercial instincts, aspiring for both the Nobel Prize and blockbuster movie adaptations of his work.

You can read the whole review by clicking here.

And when I say lengthy, I mean a Tolstoy-esque brick of a tome. You could do some real damage with this book. The reason for this is twofold: Mishima as a writer was extremely prolific, with thirty-four novels, almost two hundred short stories, seventy plays, and countless essays, poems, interviews, and more to his name—and this was all before his death at just 46. Not every piece of writing is addressed here (how could it?) but a shocking amount is, even if certain novels (many unfortunately still untranslated) hardly get a few paragraphs of attention. It’s both tantalizing and frustrating to get a taste of Mishima to which English speakers still don’t have full access.

More importantly, perhaps, in regards to Persona’s length, is that ultimately, it is not really just about Mishima. Persona, I would argue, is a book about Japan itself, as filtered through the life of one of its perhaps most important creations. Mishima is Japan in microcosm, a man deeply torn between European enlightenment and patriotic nationalism re: traditionalism. I hate to characterize any argument down to “He’s East-meets-West,” (it has become one of the most annoyingly clichéd characterizations of Japanese culture) but of all Japan’s writers, Mishima encapsulates that beautiful, violent schism most perfectly. If Japan truly represents the Occident and the Orient as so many would have us believe, it’s because of icons like the talented, tragic Mishima.

But Mishima really was a man divided in two. He came from both samurai and peasant stock, his grandparents a witness to Admiral Perry’s Black Ships forcing Japan to open their gates to the West. According to Persona, the great loves of Mishima’s life were women, but his sexual proclivities towards men are well documented and numerous. He was a sickly, smothered bookworm of a child who grew up to become obsessed with bodybuilding and martial arts. He was extremely well read in both Eastern and Western writers, devoted equally to Kabuki as he was to the works of George Bataille. He was a literary writer with clear commercial instincts, aspiring for both the Nobel Prize and blockbuster movie adaptations of his work.

Inose and Sato (Inose wrote the original biography, and Sato both translates and expands the text) are not afraid to draw both literary and political meaning out of the life and work of Mishima, frequently providing criticism and interpretation that the reader will often have to take at their word, since much of the referenced work is not available in English. The criticism is welcome, as Inose and Sato are certainly well researched and compelling, but they often go the opposite direction as well, by taking Mishima’s fiction and mapping it to his life. The parallels between Mishima’s childhood and homosexuality dovetail nicely with the widely accepted autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, but it seems inappropriate to expect the same parallelism from his other work and assume that scenes in other novels and stories probably happened in his real life, as occasionally happens throughout Persona.

Towards the end, Persona’s focus becomes much more political than literary, and though his plays and serialized novels are mentioned frequently enough, the essays and interviews that are expounded upon the most are more political in nature, as the real driving force in Mishima’s life seems to become his nationalism (though in fact he was still writing his Sea of Fertility tetralogy until the end of his life, delivering the final chapters to his editor on the day of his suicide). The book overall is well balanced between the personal, the literary, and the political. We can thank Inose in that regard, as he is both a renowned writer and the current Governor of Tokyo. He is also, refreshingly, not afraid to criticize Mishima’s poorer fictions and his contradictory, sometimes illogical political ideologies.

But what about the gossip you say! Don’t worry, there’s plenty of it, and while the tone of Persona is certainly tasteful and dignified, there is quite the wealth of salacious tidbits. Mishima’s childhood was particularly weird; after he was born, he was basically snatched away by his grandmother, who smothered him, and only allowed his mother to see him at scheduled times purely for breast-feeding (and these sessions were timed at that). He hardly ever left his grandmother’s room, hardly ever even seeing sunlight until she passed away. Those that knew the family describe Mishima’s subsequent relationship to his mother as “incestuous”; one incident describes how Mishima’s mother complained that her foot hurt and had Mishima lick the painful area in front of friends and family.

Mishima was well connected with the writers, poets, and celebrities of the day. He despised his contemporary Mori Ogai, and was also close friends with the Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (and even pursued his adopted daughter for marriage). He correctly predicted that if Kawabata won the Nobel, he would not, and that Kenzaburo Oe would probably be the next. He briefly dated the future Empress Michiko, before she met the Crown Prince and current Emperor Akihito. Mishima apparently loved to dance, but was notoriously clumsy.

Persona has much to offer for anyone interested in Mishima the writer or political figure, even though because it covers so much ground, it feels like there could be so many more details to explore. Mishima had a fascinatingly full and busy life outside of writing—traveling abroad, starring in films, researching and training for his Shield Society militia—that even after this 800-page journey, Mishima is still very much an elusive figure. That may, in fact, be one of Persona’s strengths as a biography. It can be satisfying to write or read a story that can take a man’s life and tie it nicely into one big, thematic bow. But Mishima was a complicated genius of a man, and any narrative that only focused on one aspect of his life or personality would lose too much in the process. Persona attempts to capture the totality of a man, but instead ties a complex man to his beloved, complex country, which I think is all Mishima could have ever wanted. To the reporters he trusted and invited to witness his final, climatic day, he wrote:

“No matter how you might look at it . . . No matter how deranged an act it may seem, I would like you to understand that to us it derives from our sense of yukoku“—p���ٰ����dzپ�����.

Speaking of Wakefield Press, I truly believe that it is one of—if not the—most interesting presses out there today. From the deliciously funny and incredibly off-color to Perec’s to Fourier’s “Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bandruptcy,“http://wakefieldpress.com/fourier_cuckoldr.html Wakefield has carved out a niche for doing peculiar books that defy categorization in very intriguing ways. Witness:

The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, recently published by Wakefield Press and translated by Andrew Joron, chronicles the two and a half years Scheerbart spent trying to creating a “perpetual motion machine,” a device considered impossible to create due to its violation of the laws of thermodynamics. However, The Perpetual Motion Machine is not just a memoir. In fact, it’s pretty hard to describe what it is at all. Part-fiction, part-memoir, part-blueprints, and part-philosophical-treatise, The Perpetual Motion Machine is the intersection of art and science, presented in the form of a narrative.

The defining characteristic of the text is Scheerbert’s joyful exuberance and his almost unyielding optimism. He truly believes, despite all logic, reason, and evidence, that building a perpetual motion machine is possible, even after countless failures. He has no discernible background in science, and he has to hire a plumber to build his contraptions for him. At times he doubts himself and his work; he even gives up from time to time, but he always goes back to believing. The book even ends with Scheerbart bragging that he “succeeded in flawlessly solving the problem” . . . though he can’t tell the reader how he solved it for fear of “invalidating its registration at the patent offices.”

Read the full review here.

The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, recently published by Wakefield Press and translated by Andrew Joron, chronicles the two and a half years Scheerbart spent trying to creating a “perpetual motion machine,” a device considered impossible to create due to its violation of the laws of thermodynamics. However, The Perpetual Motion Machine is not just a memoir. In fact, it’s pretty hard to describe what it is at all. Part-fiction, part-memoir, part-blueprints, and part-philosophical-treatise, The Perpetual Motion Machine is the intersection of art and science, presented in the form of a narrative.

The defining characteristic of the text is Scheerbert’s joyful exuberance and his almost unyielding optimism. He truly believes, despite all logic, reason, and evidence, that building a perpetual motion machine is possible, even after countless failures. He has no discernible background in science, and he has to hire a plumber to build his contraptions for him. At times he doubts himself and his work; he even gives up from time to time, but he always goes back to believing. The book even ends with Scheerbart bragging that he “succeeded in flawlessly solving the problem” . . . though he can’t tell the reader how he solved it for fear of “invalidating its registration at the patent offices.”

However, what makes The Perpetual Motion Machine occasionally transcendent are the moments when Scheerbert contemplates the ramifications, both good and bad, of his “perpet.” That is when the text bleeds from non-fiction to eerily prescient fiction—or one might say fantasy, or science fiction:

In the year 2050 A.D. there lived in the nation of Germania a general who was more malicious than all the other generals of his time put together.

At that time the Europeans were waging a great war using bombers against the Americans. Many bombing victories were achieved, thanks to the ultramodern science of war. In spite of this, the Americans continued imperturbably to survive.

Naturally this aggravated the most malicious general of his time, who held the highest power of command in Germania.

What did this monstrous person, who went by the name of Kulhmann, do as a result?

Kuhlmann worked out a plan that was supposed to inundate all of America.

He wanted to surround all of Europe with gigantic walls and then inject the waters of the Mediterranean and the Baltic into the Atlantic Ocean with the aid of two billion perpets.

The response to this barbaric plan was a single cry of horror; a peace agreement was immediately reached with America.

Through these hypothetical musings, Scheerbart effectively illustrates what I see as the joy of science: the possibility, the hope, and the expectations that come with the potential applications of a newly developed scientific theory or model. Thus, the question becomes almost more important than the answer, which when unsolved remains unknown, and therefore infinite.

This is how I understand the drive for the individual to pursue science, and The Perpetual Motion Machine is the kind of book, a very specific category to which I would also add Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, which renders the beauty of science in a way the artist can experience it. Translator Andrew Joron deserves recognition for his superb rendering of Scheerbart’s humor, joy, ego, and despair, in a language that is extremely readable but somehow still feels like it comes from a bygone age. Though the story drags when Scheerbart explains the insignificant changes he makes to his model, as the reader knows full well the project is doomed to fail, Scheerbart’s flights of fancy—and tailspins into fear—elevate The Perpetual Motion Machine into something that will likely appeal to anyone who dreams of the coming future.