The painful woe-is-me poor little rich boy journal of an autistic Harold Lloyd lookalike babe magnet. Spoiler alert : it doesn't end well.
Typical senThe painful woe-is-me poor little rich boy journal of an autistic Harold Lloyd lookalike babe magnet. Spoiler alert : it doesn't end well.
Typical sentence :
Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.
Typical melancholy sentiment :
I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.
So, you know, no barrel of laughs.
Note : if you love books of self-loathing like this one, check out
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky The Room by Hubert Selby Jr The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek Hunger by Knut Hamsun A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
SOUNDTRACK
Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground Machine Gun by the Peter Brotzmann Quartet When Big Joan Sets Up by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band Womblife by John Fahey Suicide is Painless by Lady and Bird Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for her Hand in the Snow) by Yoko Ono Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
Most authors want to write in a beautiful or impressive or snappy or memorable way but no, not Sayaka Murata. Stilted is the word for her first personMost authors want to write in a beautiful or impressive or snappy or memorable way but no, not Sayaka Murata. Stilted is the word for her first person account of terminal alienation. Boring, flat and cliched might be other words. Natsuki, our narrator, describes her life like this :
My husband and I cleaned our own rooms, and in the shared spaces like the living room, kitchen and bathroom we had a rule that after using them we would return them to their original clean state within twenty-four hours. That way, since we mostly ate our meals separately, we could avoid burdening the other with our own washing up and cleaning.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Wake up! You’re supposed to be writing a review!
Uh? What? Oh… er… sorry. As well as Natsuki describing everything in a monotonous tiresome way every character in this cockeyed novel talks in flat, colourless language studded with worn-out phrases and sayings that seem to come from some time before the 1950s
He was getting his hopes up
My parents and sister had let their guard down
He seems to be angling to take over
Ah, you’ve got a point there…
Come in and make yourselves comfortable
I thank you from the bottom of my heart
There was romance in the air
How to handle the situation
I’m assuming all this is intentional, and that the big trick here is that all this boringly bland prose is describing a series of the most lurid and extreme events. I’m not sure this joke is good enough to propel the reader through 247 pages although heck, I finished the whole thing in a day. It was sort of hypnotic.
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata's previous novel, was better. Both books are about how society crushes women into the compulsory roles of dutiful daughters, loving wives and doting mothers. Both books are about women who refuse to co-operate, and the guerrilla psycho-wars they have to wage against the enemy which is EVERYBODY ELSE.
In Earthlings Natsuki finds a husband eventually by going on a website and finding a guy who was urgently seeking a marriage partner but specifying :
Absolutely no sexual activity, and preferably no physical contact beyond a handshake. Someone who refrains from showing bare skin in shared spaces preferred.
Yes, it’s the man of Natsuki’s dreams! He is also fleeing from society’s expectations. Well, this could have been something. But sorry to say, the rest of this fanciful tale was hobbled for me because as well as the flat banal prose and the hackneyed phrases, Natsuki expresses her revolt against conformity through a painfully twee too-silly childhood fantasy about being an alien from another planet. That stuff got old real fast.
I wanted to like this more. It was the old disappointing-second-album syndrome.
In Britain these things are called corner shops, even if they aren’t on a corner. My local convenience store is really not convenient at all. It’s smaIn Britain these things are called corner shops, even if they aren’t on a corner. My local convenience store is really not convenient at all. It’s small and cram full of groceries and all kinds of crap in teetering towers so you can hardly edge your way inside. When you are in if there’s anyone else there it becomes an uncomfortably intimate experience if you try to get past that person to the thing you want. Then there is the owner. He fixes you with a baleful death-glare from the moment the broken bell goes click clack as you shuffle inside. He is expecting you to rob him or shoplift or perhaps just knock down one of these towering piles of crap. When you make it to the fridge and grab the only thing you ever want from this shop (milk) he switches from baleful to mournful in a second and pours on the how can my family hope to survive when all you loathsome creeps only buy milk or a packet of biscuits or a packet of chewing gum? Do you consciously want us to starve to death? Is this your desire? He sighs sorrowfully over your single purchase. Then while cashing up he will begin his monologue which is entitled Why I Hate Running this Corner Shop. (You have to work 26 hours a day and it’s frankly no longer worth it but as he’s being doing this for 28 years now he’s not fit for anything else anyway no one will buy this business, he’s tried selling it, no takers, so this is his living death prison). You will stumble out (over the bags of cat litter by the door expressly put there to trip up the unwary) into the daylight swearing never to go back. But you do, when the milk runs out. It’s convenient.
Corner shops in Japan are not like this, not at all. They have aisles and are well lit and have friendly staff and special promotions which the friendly staff have been told to announce regularly throughout the day in loud but jovial tones : “10% off white chocolate all day today! Thank you for your custom!” with manic big smiles. Actually I’m not sure what’s worse, my miserable corner shop or the enforced Brave New World utopian stores of Japan.
In this teeny novel which I read in one day and still had time to do other things we have an Eleanor Oliphantish mid-30s woman called Keiko who finds she needs the rigid cultlike structure of her stupid dead end job in order to provide an exoskeleton of normality as she was born without the ability to figure out how to be a human being. Eventually though her family decides she has to grow up, get a proper job and get married. That part of normal is not, unfortunately, addressed in the Store Manual and so the fun begins. It’s a sad kind of fun.
But I do like novels I can read so quick that I finish them before I've listed them as "Currently Reading". Tolstoy could have taken a leaf from Sayaka Murata. ...more
Japan sure brings out the bonkers in everybody, doesn’t it.
(Bonkers : a demotic English term meaning crazy but with the element of horror removed andJapan sure brings out the bonkers in everybody, doesn’t it.
(Bonkers : a demotic English term meaning crazy but with the element of horror removed and an extra squirt of I will never understand this in a million years – get me out of this room!)
I tried, you may know this already, to get on board with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. That was a little too eyerollingly cute-weird for me. I had a go with the other Murakami guy (Ryu, not Haruki) and he was really strange.
Then there was Natsuo Kirino. The novel was called Grotesque and it really was.
And I must mention a little movie called Love Exposure by Sion Sono. Synopsis : A bizarre love triangle forms between a young Catholic upskirt photographer, a misandric girl and a manipulative cultist. Truly madly deeply bonkers….!! One of my all time favourites. You gotta see Love Exposure! But not with your parents!!
So now this tiny novel-memoir which is Japan from a Western point of view. 22 year old Belgian girl gets job with huge Tokyo corporation – and a year of humiliation begins. It’s a little hymn of hatred towards Japan and frankly borderline racist as Amelie Nothomb makes generalization upon generalization about all Japanese people and they’re all profoundly derogatory. Japanese people should sue this book right now. It’s so insulting.
Now I think Amelie is gonna say well can’t you tell I really deep down LOVE Japan and its people. But the experience of reading this is like watching someone wrestling rather too strenuously with their pet dog – who’s a naughty ittle doggy then? Are You a naughty ittle doggy? Are YOU the NAUGHTIEST NASTIEST MOST ANNOYING ITTLE DOGGY? Yes, you are!! YES YOU ARE. You get the strong impression there’s some genuine aggression in there.
I’ll just dish up a quote for you, in case you may think I may be misrepresenting Amelie. Here she is contemplating Japanese company men :
Everyone knows that Japan has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. What surprised me was that suicides were not more common.
What awaited these poor number-crunchers outside The Company? The obligatory beer with colleagues undergoing the same kind of gradual lobotomy, hours spent stuffed into an overcrowded subway, a dozing wife, exhausted children, sleep that sucked them down into it like the vortex of a flushing toilet, the occasional day off they never took full advantage of. Nothing that deserved to be called a life.
Oh and howsabout this:
A Japanese person genuinely apologizing happens about once every century.
Ouch!
So anyway, it’s a bitter, too-near-the-knuckle-to-be-really-funny memoir (why do they bother to call these things novels?) and I’m most curious to find out What Amelie Did Next.
THE THREE LEVELS, OR, READING NOVELS IN TRANSLATION
Manny Rayner, peerless reviewmeister of Goodreads, insists that you should learn the language and tTHE THREE LEVELS, OR, READING NOVELS IN TRANSLATION
Manny Rayner, peerless reviewmeister of Goodreads, insists that you should learn the language and then read the novels; all translation is ba-a-a-ad! I can’t disagree and if I had a machine which could stop time, I would certainly follow this advice. However, as I do not have such a device, I read the occasional translated novel and I come up with a variation of the problem here.
[Note - see discussion in messages below all about this interesting topic.]
The language in Grotesque is very often ridiculously stilted, hackneyed, and sounds like a trashy potboiler from 1870. Here are a few favourite examples:
“Well, it looks like you’re quite the victor!” I said, letting a hint of cynicism seep into my voice.
My greatest joy in life is trying to improve my scores.
If the Q gang were to see this they’d have a field day.
It’s the last straw. I’m cutting my ties with that man once and for all!
“I don’t reply to strangers who address me so impertinently.” When Kijima realised I was rebuffing him, a contemptuous smile crossed his lips.
I’d heard that a girl from Sichuan could go to any city in the world and be assured of a warm welcome.
Yu Wei fought to bite back a sardonic laugh. “Yu Wei, my sister doesn’t come cheap.”
I gasped. How reprehensible! How could Yurio have been left in the hands of such a monster?
I was starving for mother’s affection. So I’m really happy to be living with you, aunt.
You can see the moustache-twirling and hear the gasps of horror from the audience. I kept expecting that one of the characters would be tied to a railroad track. Now – is this because
A – the first person narrators here think and write stiltedly, a deliberate style given to them by an author who wishes to reveal the paucity of their interior lives
Or
B – the translator has taken perfectly modern Japanese prose and perhaps due to demonic possession has turned it into hackneyed, stilted English
Or
C – Natsuo Kirino can’t write worth a damn?
I think readers of this translation can’t tell, so we have to roll with it and make of it what the hell we can.
IT’S TELEVISION
Me and daughter Georgia are big fans of The Walking Dead and she has pointed out to me how all the characters are always dressed so stylishly, and I have pointed out how all the actors are so good-looking, and she has said well, both of these things are because it’s television. TV drama may try to create more realistic drama these days (assuming that is that the dead can come back to life) but they’ll never hire bad-looking actors and then dress them badly. Likewise when you get characters’ diaries and journals, as you do in this novel, they always lapse into the kind of dialogue-and-detail-heavy prose which no-one except novelists would ever be able to sit down and write. The characters, whether they’re 16 year old schoolgirls or grizzled professors, become novelists.
That’s because it’s television.
WHAT IS THIS LONG BOOK ABOUT THEN?
It’s NOT a thriller, the murderer of the two prostitutes is casually revealed quite quickly, there’s zero suspense. It’s more like an elaborate enraged meditation on rigid class-bound Japanese society seen first through the prism of an elite high-school (Japanese Mean Girls but without the humour) and then through the grisly, sordid lives of two of them who become hookers. It’s also about Looksism – we’re told how beautiful the younger sister is and how not-the-least-attractive the older one is every third paragraph, it becomes most wearing, and Looksism is an ism which is of course true for the whole human race. (Which actors get called “character actors”? The ugly ones. ) So it's a kind of feminist howl of anger, too.
All the main characters hate each other, and one of them killed two of them, they’re all miserably intertwined. There is no fun to be had here – except to hoot at the various hilariously jaw-dropping zingers which these people say to each other - and here are a few favourites!!
I have to think about myself and all the people I’m involved with now : my family, Professor Kijima, all the people I killed.
I have to say, and I know this may seem harsh, that you’ve really changed. You look like you’ve got a few screws loose.
Once she turned 18 she became such a stunning beauty she even outdid Farrah Fawcett.
For a nymphomaniac like myself, I suppose there could be no job more suitable than prostitution.
She looked like some kind of swamp creature. So even a creature as ugly as this can fall in love?
I probably shouldn’t say this, but you’ve been warped for as long as I can remember.
Oh and also, one character who narrates great wedges of this novel is obsessed with physiognomy, so every gosh-darn time she meets someone we get variants of this:
His head was small, compact and nicely-shaped. His face had delicate lines, and his nose was high and thin, reminding me of the blade of a finely honed knife. His lips were fleshy, the kind girls would surely find sexy and swoon over.
MY CAT HATTER
This was a weird novel. After every chapter, which is a lengthy quote from someone’s diary or journal, another character will say “oh you can’t believe a word he says” or “I read those letters – what a load of rubbish”.
I asked my cat Hatter what he thought and he just said “Cut the chat and open the door, I got people to see” and he rushed off into the night. I nearly ran him over the other day, by the way. He streaked across the road just in front of my car. Stupid idiot. Now, flattening your own cat, that would be Grotesque.
[image]
This could be Hatter, the resemblance is eerie ...more
I had been wondering where my cat was when the phone rang. It was my brother who was now living as a woman in some part of Tokyo which recently had liI had been wondering where my cat was when the phone rang. It was my brother who was now living as a woman in some part of Tokyo which recently had like a nuclear attack, as far as I remember, but don't quote me. I told him there was no point in ringing me any more as we were now living in the same room together. I don’t think he’d noticed. We were both coin locker babies you know. That’s where your mother is so out of it that when you’re just a new born itty bitty baby coo coo coo your mother shoves you in a coin locker at the bus station and legs it. Most of us coin locker babies asphyxiate horribly in a few hours but a few of us get rescued and that was me and my brother so we were like cool and weird. My brother left home first and me and my adoptive mother went to Tokyo to track him down but when we went to see The Sound of Music at the pictures my adoptive mother got so excited seeing Julie Andrews skipping and yodeling about goats that she had a brain aneurysm right on the spot and died but I couldn’t get my money back so I decided to learn about poisons so I could kill the entire human race because I hate them. So then I found my brother in the nuclear slag pile and noticed straight away that he was wearing make up and a dress and had fake breasts and high heels on so while he was out queening around with the weirdos I picked up the novel I was reading. It was a long one by a not especially modish Japanese writer called Ryu Murakami. It wasn’t the Murakami that writes all the really cool stuff like The Wind Up Chronicle (by the way, I read a review of that one on Goodreads and it cracked me up, it was by this English guy called Paul Bryant, you have to read it.) So anyway I guess these Murakami novelists must get mistaken for each other all the time until the point where at swish dinner parties they just take credit for everything – IQ84 – yeah that’s mine, Coin Locker Babies, mine too, they’re all mine, shut up I am the God damn greatest. Anyway the blurb says the Wind Up Murakami is like The Beatles of Japanese literary fiction and the Coin Locker guy is like The Rolling Stones but nah, I thought the first one was more the Grateful Dead of Japanese fiction, you know, so stoned you fall off the stage and can’t remember how many fingers should be on each hand, er is it five, five? and this Coin Locker guy was Kiss, you know that stupid band with cartoon faces with that guy with the disgusting long tongue, because all his characters are like thinner than paper and race around so fast like they’re trying to prove how lively they are but all the yelling and the manic just gets them frayed at the edges like I was getting so I deliberately left my copy on a bus when I went out to buy the poison to kill the whole human race. The only positive thing was that I never thought for a moment about paying my electricity bill....more
I did a quick audit of my Japanese cultural input and came up with the following :
MOVIES
Tokyo Story – beautiful acknowledged masterpiece Nobody Knows –I did a quick audit of my Japanese cultural input and came up with the following :
MOVIES
Tokyo Story – beautiful acknowledged masterpiece Nobody Knows – great indy Kikujiro – worth watching Love Exposure – quite insane, probably brilliant, unmissable, but you should be warned that it’s quite insane Visitor Q – er, probably avoid this one! Really gross. Seven Samurai – may be the greatest film ever, if there is such a thing
WESTERN PERSPECTIVES
Babel – brilliant film, but the Tokyo part is strange & uncomfortable Lost in Translation – what planet was everyone else on? This was a snoozefest. If you haven’t seen it, count yourself fortunate
NOVELS
In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami – yeah, I liked this A Personal matter – Oe – yeah, I HATED this The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the other Marukami guy – I LOVED this because it was so easy to parody and gave me my top scoring review (While I was reading it was a different story)
MUSIC
Absolutely NOTHING
And now to add to this very small Japanese input, Kitchen, a tender sprig of a novel. It was kind of goofy, kind of nice, kind of weirdly translated. Kind of sad. Had a transgendered person and a transvestite. Had a lot of food. If I write any more of this review it’ll be longer than the novel. But basically, I need more Japanese stuff. Recommendations welcome. ...more
Another Murakami? I thought you didn't like the Wind Up Bird thing.
This is a different guy. It must be like Smith or Patel over there.
Two stars? Not tAnother Murakami? I thought you didn't like the Wind Up Bird thing.
This is a different guy. It must be like Smith or Patel over there.
Two stars? Not that good then?
Well... nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnot really, but....
....yes?
It could have been. He lumbered himself with this boring serial killer oooh oooh Frank Booth-in-Blue Velvet nutcase when he should
- in your humble opinion!
- yes, yes, all this stuff in my HUMBLE opinion, I'm not the arbiter of recentish Japanese novels, I've read exactly three -
- all right, no need to get ratty -
- I'm just saying that this particular Murakami was hovering all the time over some really interesting questions about Japanese society such as the idea of high school girls and "compensated dating" -
What?
Exactly - these girls are not exactly on the game but they go on "dates" with older guys and get the guys buy them stuff, this little novel mentions various phenomena of the sex trade like that, and his protagonist muses on why in such an affluent country girls would do that, it's not like they're short of a bob or two, these are not skanky crack-heads.
The blurb says this is all about loneliness.
Yes, it could have been a meditation on Japanese loneliness through the prism of the Tokyo sex-trade. That would have been interesting.
Sounds like one of your crap art house movies.
Thanks.
Hey, I sat though enough of those. What was that last one? L'Humanite? and the one before that? Lourdes? I mean, OMG. Paint dries faster than those movies. Did you know they're called motion pictures for a reason? Like, there's supposed to be motion in them, as opposed to some loser staring into space for like two hours that felt like six hours? I bet an entire galactic civilisation rose and fell while I was watching that one.
Er, we're drifting away from the topic here.
But when I want to go and see something normal at Cineworld, it's oh no, look at these reviews and blah blah... what's wrong with 3D anyway? Too many Ds for you?
Er, this is still just light-hearted banter isn't it?
I had been wondering where my cat was when the phone rang. It was a woman offering to have no strings sex with me. I made some non-committal remarks tI had been wondering where my cat was when the phone rang. It was a woman offering to have no strings sex with me. I made some non-committal remarks to her and put the receiver down. I hate those cold callers. I had nothing to do that day, or any other day, so I walked down the back alley and fell into a desultory conversation with a random 16 year old girl who had a wooden leg and a parrot on her shoulder. She suggested I help her make some easy money by counting bald people. That sounded about as good as anything else to me, after all, as I have already explained, i had nothing to do. At all. And I was doing it. It was kind of a cool period in my life when i wasn't really doing anything. I didn't have a job, I had become estranged from my family and for some reason I could not quite put my finger on, i had no friends. So we counted the bald people for a while and then we stopped. We went back home, or should i say, she went back to her home, and I, of course, went back to mine, where I prepared a simple evening meal consisting of grated cucumber, a little olive oil, half a smoked mackerel and a pot of basil. I didn't put the tv on because I didn't have a tv because if i had had a tv i might have switched it on and seen something on it that was actually interesting. Then the cold calling sex woman rang again and this time she said that she couldn't quite tell me how she knew this but she knew something was going to happen to me but she did not say when it would. I decided to rehang the curtains in the front room. But not right away. Maybe later. I picked up the novel I was reading. It was a long one by a very modish Japanese writer called Haruki Murakami. It was about this English guy called Paul Bryant. He was kind of dull but all these weird unexplained things kept happening like he was a magnet for all the weirdness around. I don't know how to explain it. Neither did he. Neither did Haruki Marukami. I read for an hour and found I was on page 303, which in my paperback edition, was the exact centre point of the novel. I put it down. I had a feeling that in this novel things would continue to happen but the things would all be made of blancmange, a tasteless gooey substance which looks a little like wallpaper paste but isn't. And the people in the novel would all be not really real but also not really not real, if you know what I mean. My arm felt slightly tired holding the book. I shifted to a different reading posture on my couch but it did not help. The strength went out of my arm. I do not know why. As you may have noticed, I do not know anything at all. I struggle to recall my name on most days. The novel fell from my hand. I had the feeling I would never pick it up again. I did not know why I had that feeling, but I was pretty sure that I had it at the time I was having it. Although later, I was almost sure I had no memory of it. When I looked up a completely naked woman was sitting at the table eating a slice of thinly buttered toast. I asked her who she was and she said she was not at that point in a position to be able to divulge that information. She asked if she could borrow my car. I explained it had been taken by my wife who had left me two weeks ago. This did not seem to phase her. I noticed that her body was almost the same as that of my wife. She had two breasts, two nipples, and although the table was obscuring the lower parts of her anatomy I was sure that the rest of her was also not dissimilar. She consumed three pieces of toast and told me in a cool voice that I would never see my cat again except possibly in a place that began with the letter H or has a H in the name somewhere. She borrowed my wife's smart summer coat and a pair of her stilettos and left after about 15 minutes. It began to rain but I did not notice. I thought about paying my electricity bill.
People love this damn book but I wanted to climb inside the pages and tip our hero into a cement mixer so he could become part of the foundations of tPeople love this damn book but I wanted to climb inside the pages and tip our hero into a cement mixer so he could become part of the foundations of the new Tokyo and therefore perform the only useful act in his miserable life. I mean, fucking hell, get a grip....more
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