Gaijin Book Club
Sep. 4th, 2003 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004Seems like I've read a bunch of books about Japan lately, or rather a couple of books about Japan and a couple more about Westerners with various Japanese obsessions. Zeitgeist, my favorite Bruce Sterling novel, is not about Japan, but it does have a good line in it about the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. A character in the novel says that if you are Japanese, reading Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is "a scarifying, transformative cultural experience," but if you're not, "it reads like fifty kilos of boiled radishes."
Well, I'm sure not Japanese, but I do like Murakami—in fact, we read him at our wedding—so I think boiled radishes are a little harsh, but the three hundred pages of Wind-Up Bird where the narrator is stuck in a well are admittedly slow going. I used to recommend Hard Boiled Wonderland as the Murakami gateway-drug, but from now on I'm going to have to push David Mitchell's Number 9 Dream. Mitchell is a Gen-X Brit who lives in Japan and Number 9 Dream is pretty self-consciously Murakami-esque. It's also probably the best novel I've read this year.
The back of the book says Number 9 Dream is "a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective-family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one." Which turns out to be about right, except that if you count Hard Boiled Wonderland, it's really a genre of two. Number 9 Dream is nominally about a Japanese boy from the sticks who comes to Tokyo to find the father he has never met. It's great. It's funny, it's smart, it's sad, it's sprawling, it's confusing, it's hypercool. Tokyo is a living, breathing presence in the novel, and it feels absolutely authentic (of course, what do I know?), yet at the same time it's dripping with all the exotic gimcracks that we Western Japanophiles realize probably aren't really a big part of real life in Tokyo but deep down want to be: Bladerunner-esque cityscapes, pink love-hotels, Yakuza organ harvesters, Matrix-y action, hedonist club kids on Akira motorcycles, World War II human torpedoes, island thunder gods, and nuggets of zen wisdom.
It does, I admit, have the same kind of irritating fade-to-white ending as Lucky Wander Boy, a far lesser novel on some similar territory that I mentioned a few months ago, and also as Tokyo Suckerpunch, an even flimsier Japan-for-gaijin mystery I read but probably didn't mention. (Tokyo Suckerpunch did have a great opening line, and that goes a long way with me: "I'm hardwired for geisha.") But Number 9 Dream is so good I forgive it this one thing. Highly recommended. (There's a grumpy review here and a long excerpt here, but they don't do justice to the book.)
Still with me? Heading over to the non-fiction shelf, I also got a lot out of crunchy bits out of The Great Wave, by Christopher Benfey, which Lisa was reading but I kept stealing. William Gibson wrote a column for The Guardian a few years ago about Japan being "the global imagination's default setting for the future." It included this terrific paragraph on Meiji-era Japan:
The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to the West. These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvelous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances. Set it all up and yanked the lever to full on. Went mad. Hallucinated. Babbled wildly. Ran in circles. Were destroyed. Were reborn.
The Great Wave is about that period, and specifically about the curious symbiosis between the Gilded Age Americans who "discovered" Japan in this era—many of them Boston Brahmins like Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Harvard History Department's very own Henry Adams—and the Meiji-era Japanese who simultaneously "discovered" America. Of course the things about Japan that the Americans fell in love with were exactly the things that the Japanese were trying to get away from, and vice-versa. But the two groups worked together quite ingeniously. It's interesting how a very small group was basically responsible for engineering the American image of Japan and the Japanese image of America.
Lisa wanted more Japan in the book and less Boston, and I guess I have to agree, but there are still some good stories in there. One involves Theodore Roosevelt, that Boy's Own Adventure! president, who was of course captivated by the martial arts of the Mysterious East. While president, he took weekly jujitsu lessons in the White House, and Benfey tells of Teddy bounding into a cabinet meeting one day to announce with glee that his jujitsu instructor was "so powerfully developed that it is impossible for any ordinary man to strangle him!" "This was peculiar news for a cabinet meeting," Benfey continues, "and Secretary of State John Hay copied it down in his diary." Hee. Go Teddy.
Well, I'm sure not Japanese, but I do like Murakami—in fact, we read him at our wedding—so I think boiled radishes are a little harsh, but the three hundred pages of Wind-Up Bird where the narrator is stuck in a well are admittedly slow going. I used to recommend Hard Boiled Wonderland as the Murakami gateway-drug, but from now on I'm going to have to push David Mitchell's Number 9 Dream. Mitchell is a Gen-X Brit who lives in Japan and Number 9 Dream is pretty self-consciously Murakami-esque. It's also probably the best novel I've read this year.
The back of the book says Number 9 Dream is "a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective-family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one." Which turns out to be about right, except that if you count Hard Boiled Wonderland, it's really a genre of two. Number 9 Dream is nominally about a Japanese boy from the sticks who comes to Tokyo to find the father he has never met. It's great. It's funny, it's smart, it's sad, it's sprawling, it's confusing, it's hypercool. Tokyo is a living, breathing presence in the novel, and it feels absolutely authentic (of course, what do I know?), yet at the same time it's dripping with all the exotic gimcracks that we Western Japanophiles realize probably aren't really a big part of real life in Tokyo but deep down want to be: Bladerunner-esque cityscapes, pink love-hotels, Yakuza organ harvesters, Matrix-y action, hedonist club kids on Akira motorcycles, World War II human torpedoes, island thunder gods, and nuggets of zen wisdom.
It does, I admit, have the same kind of irritating fade-to-white ending as Lucky Wander Boy, a far lesser novel on some similar territory that I mentioned a few months ago, and also as Tokyo Suckerpunch, an even flimsier Japan-for-gaijin mystery I read but probably didn't mention. (Tokyo Suckerpunch did have a great opening line, and that goes a long way with me: "I'm hardwired for geisha.") But Number 9 Dream is so good I forgive it this one thing. Highly recommended. (There's a grumpy review here and a long excerpt here, but they don't do justice to the book.)
Still with me? Heading over to the non-fiction shelf, I also got a lot out of crunchy bits out of The Great Wave, by Christopher Benfey, which Lisa was reading but I kept stealing. William Gibson wrote a column for The Guardian a few years ago about Japan being "the global imagination's default setting for the future." It included this terrific paragraph on Meiji-era Japan:
The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to the West. These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvelous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances. Set it all up and yanked the lever to full on. Went mad. Hallucinated. Babbled wildly. Ran in circles. Were destroyed. Were reborn.
The Great Wave is about that period, and specifically about the curious symbiosis between the Gilded Age Americans who "discovered" Japan in this era—many of them Boston Brahmins like Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Harvard History Department's very own Henry Adams—and the Meiji-era Japanese who simultaneously "discovered" America. Of course the things about Japan that the Americans fell in love with were exactly the things that the Japanese were trying to get away from, and vice-versa. But the two groups worked together quite ingeniously. It's interesting how a very small group was basically responsible for engineering the American image of Japan and the Japanese image of America.
Lisa wanted more Japan in the book and less Boston, and I guess I have to agree, but there are still some good stories in there. One involves Theodore Roosevelt, that Boy's Own Adventure! president, who was of course captivated by the martial arts of the Mysterious East. While president, he took weekly jujitsu lessons in the White House, and Benfey tells of Teddy bounding into a cabinet meeting one day to announce with glee that his jujitsu instructor was "so powerfully developed that it is impossible for any ordinary man to strangle him!" "This was peculiar news for a cabinet meeting," Benfey continues, "and Secretary of State John Hay copied it down in his diary." Hee. Go Teddy.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 06:04 am (UTC)I airbrushed them all onto nine foot by nine foot squares of canvas, then scanned them in (22.8 GB each!) and shrank them down into little one-inch jpegs. The originals are now filling up my kitchen, living room, dining room, and front stairs, except for Cooter, which I'm using as a bedspread.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 07:43 am (UTC)You should've put Cooter on the hood of your Iroc and come down to Reverah. We'd get some Kelly's and cruise the wall for chix. Wicked pissa.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 07:34 am (UTC)And the Boston Brahmins as proto-otaku (try saying that five times fast) is a pretty endearing meme. You could steampunk it up, take The Difference Engine forward 30 years or so, and have the best clacker-tech come from Japan, along with sequential art and kinemascopes that are distinctively Japanese.
My mind is spinning.