Today, Assistant Managing Editor Rachael Pennington, who joined us in October this year, tells us about her year of reading Japanese literature—and how it gave her a heightened appreciation for the smaller details of life.
When asked to review my year in reading, my initial reaction was to think back to my most significant moments—travelling to Japan, getting a new job, seeing my best friend getting married—and to recount what I was reading at the time. But on second thought, remembering Ishiguro’s Nobel lecture, which celebrated “the small and private”, I decided to look past 2017’s more momentous occasions in search of the quiet moments of revelation. Asking myself, when nothing seemingly important was happening around me, what books was I reading in what Ishiguro described as “quiet—or not so quiet—rooms”? In the times I was caught up in the monotony of everyday life and lost to my daily routine, which books had tided me over and heightened my appreciation for the minutiae of life?
I read Nastume Sōseki’s The Gate (translated by William F. Sibley) on several Sunday mornings throughout September. Here, cradling a hot cup of coffee and basking in the first rays of the day peeking through the window of my downtown Barcelona flat, I came to understand why Sōseki declared it his favorite amongst his works. The novel captures the intimacy of life through a minimal plot, tracing the magnificently undramatic existence of a middle-aged couple, old before their time. With this relationship as the anchor, people come and go, seasons flourish and wither, yet the patience with which Sōsuke trims his toenails and the grace with which Oyone carries the loss of their children never once falter.
In The Gate, it’s what is not said or done that counts; the onus is on the reader to infer from what Sōseki’s characters hold back and what they choose to reveal—a narrative coyness reminiscent of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. A simple scene in which the protagonists roll out their futons and go to sleep brings out their reaction to losing their children; a seemingly innocuous question “Kyoto is lovely, isn’t it?” confirms the intense connection shared between two people.
Observing Sōsuke’s and Oyone’s calm stoicity and their passive resignation was the ideal remedy for restoring tranquility and warmth after a long, cold week.
This year brought one of those summers to Barcelona in which the heat never seemed to cease. Under the blast of the air conditioning in quaint coffee shops, I sought out the sea in Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of the Waves (translated by Meredith Weatherby).
The story of Hatsue and Shinji stands out from all of Mishima’s other works in its simplicity and ingenuousness. Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the island’s most affluent family and, Shinji, the strong-willed son of a humble fishing family, meet and fall in love on the island of Utajima. Isolated from the fast-paced world of mainland Japan, the young couple’s illicit relationship struggles to bloom under the weight of the conservative beliefs held by this traditional community.
Through his poignant prose, Mishima evokes the delicate vitality of nature in all its detail as the force that guides the slow pace of island life. Given the pair’s conformist natures and, at times, lack of conviction, it is the island itself that ultimately brings Hastue and Shinji together—its sea breeze coyly stealing away private conversations as well as its lighthouse, dense forest, and hidden mountain pathways offering refuge to a couple in the throes of their first love.
As no trip to Japan would be complete without a Haruki Murakami novel, I reserved several sleepless nights—kept awake by the bright Tokyo lights flashing outside my hotel room—for his strange worlds. Murakami differentiates himself from other Japanese writers by self-identifying as an outcast. And that’s exactly how you feel when reading him in the dead of the night whilst the rest of the world is asleep.
Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by Philip Gabriel) enters the worlds of dreams in which the boundaries between the real and the surreal are distorted and the limits of action and inaction are challenged. K, the narrator, is your standard high-school teacher caught up in the monotony and solitude of his routine in Tokyo, and helplessly in love with his best friend, Sumire. When she goes missing on a Greek island, an inexplicable force induces K to disrupt his routine and look for her. Both geographically and mentally miles away from Japan, K begins to experience a detachment from his life back home, wondering if anyone would notice his absence were he never to return. Frequent readers of Murakami will recognize these casual descriptions of life in Tokyo and the recurring elements of reticent commutes through the metropolis and a solitary lifestyle characterized by dinners for one and long afternoons spent doing very little. Yet it is the nostalgia for these small and private moments K has chosen to leave behind—a nostalgia caught between logical thought and irrational emotion—that has stayed with me long after I finished the book and returned to Europe.
This year has brought me Japanese titles that disarm despite very little happening in their pages, books in which complacent inaction is the protagonist, and books in which characters are unwilling heroes or even anti-heroes. The real gift of these books was not only in their characters’ humble resignation to their fates, but also in how they revealed—and revelled in—the smaller details of life often overlooked in Western culture. In this sense, Japanese literature has been like a skilled gardener to me, pointing out the areas of my life that I need to prune and the areas I need to let bloom.
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