Women in Translation Month – An August of Japanese Authors
There is something so uncanny about Japanese translated literature that lures me in. The familiar in the unfamiliar. Maybe it’s my inner Asian or perhaps because descriptions of food are my actual bread and butter with my own cooking usually resembling Miso soup, tofu or noods.
Unable to analyse, I instead settled down to read three oldie but goodies this month which are written by and explore Japanese females.
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
Kawakami splits her novel into two parts and, when I first read this, I was aggravated by how disjointed the two seemed. Upon re-reading, I found that there were links between the different generations and general sentiments about being a woman – particularly the mother, virgin and whore trinity that discharges throughout other story lines.
Set up to give birth, even before I was born. I wish I could rip out all those parts of me, the parts already rushing to give birth.
In the first book Natsuko is hosting her sister, Makiko, and her niece, Midoriko, in her small apartment. An intense culture of silence surrounds these women with Midoriko literally giving up speech. There is a huge issue currently unveiling itself concerning Covid-19 and the treatment of East and South East Asian folk with ideas like the Model Minority arising. With so much intentional erasure and misreading of feminine figures already arising, it seems that Midoriko uses silence as a survival strategy for womanhood and particularly towards her mother who seems obsessed with becoming the ‘ultimate’ female figure using breast augmentation to improve her figure. The lack of voices and visibility of ESEA women is already apparent in literature but Kawakami literally presents them to the reader in Breasts and Eggs.
Why is it that people think this is okay? Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense.
In an odd contrast the second book is set later on in time with Natsuko being almost compulsive about achieving motherhood but without having sexual intercourse as she does not enjoy it. It contradicts the ideas that the family seemed to have in the previous book about having children and, in particular, the difficulties of being a single mother.
She meets with sperm donors who revolt her and children of sperm donors who attempt to put her off going through with this. She is labelled irresponsible and selfish to the point where it almost seems that this is no longer her choice but the choice of the child she wants to bring into the world. A person cannot unhave a child – there is only one way for them to leave this world.
Natsuko is simultaneously the mother and the virgin but also she is neither. As is Makiko both and neither the mother and the whore. Makiko is a little more tricky as it seems she takes on the role of the mother towards her own whilst also rejecting any form of motherhood in herself. Kawakami successfully dismisses the stereotypes of female roles with three very real feeling women subjected to and rejecting expectations.
Personally, I would have liked to learn more about the fate of poor Midoriko who feels she had the unfortunate task of being born into this tough world and being forced to survive. However, it may be that, as she was young enough, her salvation was possible to survive and thrive. A salvation that was made possible in the first book through eggs, eggs that revealed a truth or rather a lack of one. As she smashes them onto her head and utters her first words of the book (very child-related metaphors here) her mother gives her the crushing truth she has been waiting for. There is no ultimate truth.
Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
When it comes to descriptions of food, the aptly named Kitchen is able to conjure literal feasts in the mind but they overfill the stomach and attempt to block the hole left by loneliness and depression. Food is endowed a different kind of meaning, with the kitchen as a place to eat, sleep and live and meals as a comfort and feat of survival.
The night felt so deathly silent that I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens. The glass of water soaked into my withered heart.
It seems that most of all this is a book about unhappiness and how devastatingly lonely it can feel to be unhappy. The main character, Mikage, and her love interest of sorts, Yuichi, find themselves surrounded by death which leaves a cloud of abandonment and solitary around them. Eriko, the mother of Yuichi, takes Mikage in when she has no one else but unfortunately dies as well.
I realised that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn’t up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman and here I am.
Eriko maintains this idea that the world is not a truly joyful place and her son inherits these feelings but they do what they can. The casual approach to her being transgender feels so natural too as if there could never be a possibility of her being anything else other than a woman. This is the natural course of life and these characters are simply swept up in them – the reprise seeming to be a delicious meal interspersed here and there.
Don’t you think that seeing such a beautiful moon influences what one cooks? But not in the sense of ‘moon-viewing udon,’ for instance.
Eating holds a kind of ritual, it brings you back to the kitchen time and again like the moon brings the tide to the shore. There is something instinctual and unknowing about the pull to provide. Some people eat to live and others live to eat. I undoubtedly fall into the second category and with this comes the joy of cooking for others, vicariously devouring their meals alongside my own. I believe eating connects in a communal sense and a bad meal puts me in a bad mood. The kitchen of my own childhood has always been full of life from cooking curries to late night kitchen discos and there is no other place that holds a dearer place in my heart than the cold, unforgiving tiles of the floor I constantly found myself on. Kitchen is able to reflect this fondness people seem to have of their own kitchens and encapsulates the hub of life and interconnectedness that it holds.
There is also a short story in this book called Moonlight Shadow which follows the death of a young man and woman whose partners have been left behind.
Here, have the rest. It’s Pu-Erh tea.
Pu-Erh tea, a rich fermented black tea, can be very valuable. The process of aging means that each one has its own complex and distinct flavour and they can also be very valuable – some more than gold. This tea creates a bond between two people and in this way almost becomes a currency for connection.
There is something quite otherworldly about this story as people are described like demons and dimensions are shifting causing visions of the dead. At first, I thought it seemed odd that Moonlight Shadow was added to the end of the hyper-realistic Kitchen but both portray the idea that utter loneliness is capable of creating, evoking a reminder that beautiful things are capable of being formed from places of darkness whether this be the actual thing taken away which created said loneliness, new bonds with new people or even a simple meal.
The residual thoughts of a person who has died meet the sadness of someone left behind, and the vision is produced.
The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
The mystery of the memory police is wrapped up in the elegiac prose of Ogawa. The simultaneous mourning and apathy of the lost objects is heart breaking. I am not usually one for mysteries and this book does not present itself conventionally as such. For example, the why is never answered. Why do things keep disappearing and who is behind it? Instead, the forgetting of items and eventually themselves are simply accepted as an inevitable part of life, fading into non-existence.
A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.
The hearts of the people are described as lacking, decaying - in short, not enough. Memories themselves are interesting as they are pliable, susceptible to time and utterly unreliable. The head and the heart have been presented not only as important but also as weak with constant comparisons to bodies of water, sometimes stagnant, sometimes clear but always with a deep, boundlessness.
You may think that the memories themselves vanish every time there’s a disappearance, but that’s not true. They’re just floating in a pool where the sunlight never reaches. All you have to do is plunge your hand in and you’re bound to find something. Something to bring back into the light.
The novel also contains a kind of mise en abyme where the narrator is a novelist writing about a typist whose voice has been lost. The narrator notes that most of her novels contain a theme of loss. Any writer can admit to the guilt of writing about their own experiences but Ogawa deliberately inverts the idea of the novel containing an image of itself with the typist character losing her voice then her body and the novelist becoming nothing but a voice.
The hand that had written the story, my eyes overflowing with tears, the cheeks that had received them – they all disappeared in their turn, and in the end all that was left was a voice.
However, she does find a kind of liberation in her formless self. There is satisfaction in the inevitable, in disappearing completely. Mise en abyme is a device for self-reflexive narratives and the novelist is able to present her thoughts to herself as well as others. Abyme literally means a coat of arms that contains an image of itself but linguistically it is also a homophone with abîme which is the French word for abyss.
I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth.
There are these gaping, unfillable holes left behind by the forgotten which leaves her heart decaying and abysmal. What is left behind when forgotten? The book answers nothing. Without memory there is no history and who you are ceases to be. Interestingly there is also an associated verb for abîme – to wear out or to wear away (or to be lost in prayer) which further evokes ideas of loss. The story almost becomes a token (for R? One of the remaining people who is able to remember everything) to reflect on the forgotten as there is no explanation for the disappearances which simply fade away until even the people of the town are forgotten into nothingness.