Totoro

Totoro Sushi, Ann Arbor.

At Totoro, a sushi place named for the Miazaki movie “My Neighbor Totoro” we had a pleasant dinner.

Miso soup with tiny cubes of tofu. Miso, made from fermented soy beans, has been eaten in Japan for
many centuries. It was originally invented in China over 2000 years ago.

My Bento Dinner. A selection of Japanese dishes with varied history.

The chicken katsu -- breaded and fried chicken breast-- is a version of a Western dish. The Japanese eat a variety of noodles, mainly introduced from China centuries ago, but the wheat noodles are Western: they became popular after the war when American wheat was imported to alleviate food shortages.

Len’s Bento Dinner. A sushi roll and sashimi, vegetable tempura, and noodles.

Sushi and sashimi -- fish and rice -- are a traditional Japanese dish. I've noticed many references to people eating sushi in Japanese fiction; in particular, sushi is often mentioned in Osamu Dazai's book No Longer Human, which I read recently. The popularity throughout the world of Japanese-origin sushi is fascinating. In The Sushi Economy, by Sasha Issenberg, I read that sushi is a totally global food phenomenon, constantly changing as it moves from market to market, yet viewed as somehow more authentically Japanese than other global cuisines. 

"The narrative of a perfected past debased by the homogenizing pressures of integration is a convenient fiction embraced by reactionaries of all stripes. Yet sushi's history shows a foodstuff always in flux, remaking itself over centuries due to shifting pressures of economics and culture." [p. xxi]

The Original Totoro

The film My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miazaki is one of our favorites!
The hostess at the restaurant, which is named for the film, said that everyone tells her that they love Totoro.

Film poster for My Neighbor Totoro. Miazaki's films are fabulous.
His creation, the mythical beast Totoro, is now a children's and adult's classic.

A wall hanging that we bought at the Studio Ghibli
store in Tokyo some years ago.

Blog post and food photos © 2023 mae sander

Books and Films

Another Japanese Classic

I read another book by Osamu Dazai titled Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu. Totally fascinating! I must admit that the cover design was partly responsible for my decision of which of this author's books to read next. Isn't it neat? It shows a famous fairy-tale character riding on the back of a sea turtle. Here is the original print.

Urashima Taro Returning Home from the Palace of the Dragon King, 1886.
Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (source: Art Institute of Chicago)

In this collection of stories, Dazai retells several fairy tales that would have been familiar to any Japanese child or anyone who grew up in Japan before or during World War II. While I am completely unfamiliar with these classics, his presentation is complete, so I felt as if I understood him. (Maybe I did, and maybe I didn't.) 

Each of the tales is retold with a great deal of elaboration, explaining the moral of the story, in a way, but actually turning these fairy tale types into psychological and social histories of individualized human beings. As the author interprets each tale, he describes his own thoughts and experiences, living through World War II bombings, as he writes. At the beginning of the last fairy tale in the collection, he explains:

"I’ve been writing these fairy tales little by little in what spare time I’ve had, what with being mobilized for civilian duty and dealing with the post-bombing remains of my house and what have you, and despite a persistent fever, hoping only that they might prove a mild diversion suitable for any moments of leisure afforded those fighting courageously to help Nippon through her national crisis."  (p. 97). 

The foreword of this translation points out that Dazai wrote in a style of "autobiographical or self-referential semi-fiction, known as shishōsetsu, which exerted a powerful hold on many Japanese authors and readers for much of the twentieth century." As I learned a few days ago, his daughter also wrote in this style, as do many more recent Western writers. Very intriguing. 

A Popular French Novel

After participating in the blog event Paris in July, I have mainly switched my focus from France to Japan for the month of August. However, as a Paris in July followup,  Emma, of the blog Words and Peace, who organized Paris in July, sent me her copy of An Astronomer in Love by the very popular French writer Antoine Laurain. I very much enjoyed reading it. 

An Astronomer in Love contains two wonderful and vivid stories, told alternately in brief, beautifully written short chapters. One physical object unites the stories: a beautifully crafted telescope. And one astronomical phenomenon motivates the central characters in the two stories: the Transit of Venus, which is the passage of the planet Venus in front of the sun from the perspective of an observer on earth. The brilliant feature of this novel, in my opinion, is that the two stories are not in the least parallel -- there's no forced connection other than the telescope, the planet Venus, the sun, and in a sense, love. That's all. 

One of the alternating stories is about the efforts of a French astronomer named Guillaume to make accurate observations of the successive transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769; he travels around the world on the very slow ships of his day, and spends almost 12 years on his long and fascinating voyage. In the 18th century, accurate observation of the transit would have contributed to a more exact estimate of the size of the solar system, so the French astronomer was sent with a clear mission. 

Laurain based this story on the actual diaries of the historic person, Guillaume le Gentil, who was the appointed astronomer to King Louis XV of France. A wonderfully told story, it vividly describes many exotic locations in that long-ago era. For example, Laurain describes how Guillaume experiences many remarkable things; among others, he has the opportunity to taste "thousands of fish caught, from Isle de France to the China Sea, fish he had prepared, boiled, eaten, and shellfish too, species that no one in France had cracked open, even in their dreams." (p. 149)

The other story is about a modern Frenchman named Xavier, who somehow comes into possession of Guillaume's original telescope, and then witnesses the transit in 2012. Xavier is a rather ordinary man who lives alone, and often for a meal just eats some cheese, toast, and a tomato -- but in a small parallel, he once is offered a luxury meal, in which a butler offers him "skewers of grilled lobster" as well as the finest of wines.A little parallel tease, maybe?

In the course of the story, Xavier meets the love of his life, a woman named Alice, and they manage to watch the 2012 transit together. And at the end, Guillaume also finds the love of his life, who had been waiting for him for 12 years. Laurain describes the transit as both the 18th and 21st century characters see it. Here's what they saw:

The Transit of Venus, 2012.
(NPR: this source also explains the science involved in the observations.)

The next Transit of Venus will take place in 2117 -- it is a strange and rare event with a rather bizarre 243 year repeating schedule: two transits occur 8 years apart, then there is a more-than-100 year pause, another two close together, and an even longer pause. I remember hearing about the transits that took place in 2004 and 2012. Historic discussions then were focused on another historic figure that made an extraordinary voyage to witness the 18th century transit; that is, the famous Captain James Cook. On his ship the Endeavor, he went to Tahiti for the 1769 event. Unlike the unfortunate French astronomer Guillaume, who missed both of the 18th century transits, Captain Cook did manage to observe the celestial event in 1769.

More Agatha Christie

This is one of Agatha Christie’s paranoid spy stories, which I watched in the 1981 Netflix version that is now available on streaming.. Her spy stories have many of the same features as her murder mysteries, but also a kind of existential fear that Britain is full of sinister plots and evil people. I probably read this years ago but forgot it, or maybe the script writers rejiggered it in some way. But fun to watch, and also full of great period clothing and antique cars.

Reviews © 2023 mae sander.

Shared with bloggers on my favorite weekend blog parties.

 

Yuko Tsushima "Of Dogs and Walls"

“I write fiction, but I experience the fiction I write,” the Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima wrote, in 1989. “In that sense, they are not fiction anymore, but reality.” Tsushima, who died in 2016, was the daughter of the novelist Osamu Dazai, who committed suicide when Tsushima was barely a year old. In her novels, the protagonist is often shadowed by a death in the family—an event that, because of its suddenness, can never be mentioned. — From “The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima” by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty.

 

Yuko Tsushima’s two stories,  “Of Dogs and Walls,” and “The Watery Realm” are both puzzling and very readable. Both stories (which appear in a single short volume) include a mother, a daughter, and a brother, and a totally missing father, but the identities and relationships of these individuals are very different in the two stories. In both stories, a house or apartment and its garden or surroundings play a big role in the minds of the characters, which I find very relatable.

Here is one such house in the title story:

“The old house was old indeed: built by her grandparents before the war, it had survived the air raids that devastated much of Tokyo. Feeling sentimental on hearing that it was due to come down, the daughter had got out her camera, a hand-me-down from a cousin, and taken a number of photos. It was only when she saw them developed after the move that she noticed the whole house was listing. It had such a lean it looked ready to give way at the slightest push; she wondered how she’d been unaware of it till now. There really was nothing for it but to knock the old place down, she conceded, which seemed to put her regrets to rest. For a long time, though, she constantly returned to the old house in her dreams.” (p. 34)

 That was the outside, here is the inside:

“The children weren’t told how their mother had located the new property. But she must have been delighted to say goodbye to the slug-infested kitchen, with its cave crickets and its mice scrabbling in the ceiling, and to the cold dark privy, at long last.” (p. 38)

The condition of houses also plays a role in the other story:

“With a small child and a baby in the house, I had to fetch water many times a day, no matter how sparingly I used it. If everybody had been in the same situation, I could have resigned myself to it, but ours was among the few houses in those days still relying on a well; and, as if to rub in the drudgery, it was a communal well at that. If only we’d had a yard with a private well, then as long as it didn’t rain I could have done the laundry there in peace and quiet, and we could have washed our hands and feet at the well side. I expect I wouldn’t have minded that, as I was accustomed to it in my childhood. It wasn’t so much the cramped conditions that I resented, though. Those I was prepared for. This was Tokyo, after all; I was no longer in the provinces.” (p. 12)

And a better house that the narrator moves to:

“The old house I had decided to make our home was at the end of a lane, next to a graveyard. It was ideal for keeping to ourselves and not being bothered. It had running water, naturally, and indeed a bath, which not even my brother’s house had. I put in flower beds. The flowers were such a treat, each an eyeful of colour.” (p. 18) 

There’s much more to each of these short stories, which mainly focus on psychological sketches of the mothers and daughters, but I just wanted to focus on the interesting portrayal of houses in them. I know very little about either Osamu Dazai or his daughter Yuko Tsushima, but I am beginning to learn more about their literary accomplishments and reputation. 

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

The Setting Sun

About the corrupt and idle noble family, whose life in 1947 is portrayed in his book The Devil’s Flute Murders, mystery writer Yokomizo wrote:

"This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used." (The Devil’s Flute Murders, p. 17).

I quoted this in my review of  Yokomiso’s book earlier this week, and then decided to read Osamu Dazai’s very famous book The Setting Sun, which in a way defined the postwar era as Yokomizu said. Luckily, I already owned this book, along with many other classic Japanese novels. 

Wonderful Japanese classics that I might read again, based on Haruki Murakami’s list.

In reading both Yokomizo’s detective novel and Dazai’s work of literary fiction, I learned that Japan before World War II had a class of titled aristocrats as well as an Emperor, and these aristocrats had much inherited wealth and did not perform productive labor. Noble families lived on large estates with a number of houses, sometimes designed in both Japanese and Western style. Like European aristocrats, the Japanese nobility relied on numerous servants, who cooked for them, served their meals, took care of their beautiful silk kimonos and other clothing, aired and folded their bedding in the morning, and filled their large bathtubs in the evening. The new Japanese constitution outlawed titles and hereditary peerage. The constitution took effect in May of 1947: the characters in both novels are highly aware of this official loss of status that they have experienced, or are experiencing during the events of the two books.

Also in 1947, conditions in bombed-out, burned-out cities were disastrous for rich and poor Japanese people. All necessities, including food, were very scarce for everyone, with black marketeers creating even more problems. Neither of these authors describe the plight of poor people, though one knows they existed, and in fact many lacked not only food but also shelter. Despite being somewhat better off than the poorest citizens (to whom they were suddenly equal before the law), the aristocrats in the novels felt very deprived: their former unearned standard of living simply could not be maintained. In both stories, the noble families include one relative with a bit of his fortune remaining — and the entire family wants to depend on this person. However, that doesn’t last long. 

In The Setting Sun, Dazai’s narrator is a 29 year old woman, Kazuko, who has formerly lived a completely idle and undemanding life with her mother and her recently deceased father. Her brother is missing in action somewhere in Pacific theater after the war, and when he appears, he’s quite a mess. 

Kazuko suddenly finds that she and her mother must move from their rather luxurious home in Tokyo to a small house far from the city they knew. At the insistence of her uncle, who more or less takes responsibility for them, she and her mother, and later her brother, must figure out how to live with no servants, and how to cope with postwar food shortages and other challenges. Her mother is good-natured, very passive, and doesn’t even try to understand what has happened, but assumes that she will continue to be cared for, fed, nursed, and be handed whatever she needs despite her sudden loss of status, money, and servants. She loves her son and her daughter, but fails to understand what they are going through.

Kazuko tries to insulate her mother by doing heavy farm labor to keep them supplied with vegetables, and by selling their valuables one by one: clothing and jewelry, etc. While her uncle tries to help them, he too is rapidly losing his sources of income (the details are vague: we don’t really ever know where their wealth came from previously). Her brother, after being repatriated from the former war zone, spends most of his time drunk; he becomes addicted to opium, takes any money they have, and often goes to Tokyo where he has disreputable friends with artistic careers but little moral character.

Choices are limited, and Kazuko descends into self-destructive behavior, attempting to become the mistress of a dissolute artist who maintains a Bohemian and corrupt lifestyle. Quite a bit of the short novel consists of the long letters she writes to this man, attempting to explain her position in society (or her lack of a position). It’s a very dark book, with an even darker ending. Her efforts to find herself are very fascinating, and I haven’t really captured the spirit of the book in these few paragraphs. It’s a portrait of a person deprived of the environment she had been accustomed to expect. At the same time it is a portrait of a society that has changed drastically and for the complacent aristocracy, has changed catastrophically.

My impression, based on both The Setting Sun and The Devil’s Flute Murders, is that Japan was lucky to be rid of the idle and unproductive nobles, who were effectively living as self-indulgent parasites. This impression is based solely on the two books, and I think this was the intention of both authors. It’s amazing to imagine this long-ago and very alien era compared to dynamic and democratic life in Japan today — if I am not misinformed! I wonder if the few nations on earth that still maintain such an idle class would be lucky if some catastrophe had rid them of these parasites. Finally, I wonder about our own billionaires and how their excessive lifestyle will be able to continue!

Review © 2023 mae sander.

“The Devil’s Flute Murders”

 

The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is a very creepy murder mystery, full of sinister, desperate, and unscrupulous characters. Detective Kosuke Kindaichi is called to work with a family of former nobles just after the end of World War II, in 1947. The country is in terrible shape because of the wartime bombings and fires that have destroyed many houses and entire neighborhoods. The formerly wealthy and idle members of the family have all moved into buildings on one estate, where destruction has been only partial. Kindaichi finds them full of resentment. unpleasant rivalries, old feuds, and emotional dysfunction. Clearly, he hates working with them to solve a mysterious suicide, a locked-room murder, and then other murders in the family. 

Discussing the family's corrupt and idle habits, Yokomizo wrote:

"This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used." (The Devil’s Flute Murders, p. 17).

I found the family and their ugly history to be just as distasteful as Detective Kindaichi did. Their arrogance and inability to cope with the recent loss of privilege, which happened to all the Japanese nobility in 1947, isn’t amusing at all. What I did find very interesting was the detailed description of life in immediately postwar Japan as experienced by the detective and his police colleagues. For example, at a family meal which Kindiaichi shares: "Tokyo still struggled with food shortages in 1947, so lunch was a very modest affair, but it managed to satisfy." (p. 122). The few details about food show it to be pretty sparse, such as a lunch of "salad and finger sausages." (p. 295)

Kindiaichi had to make several trips to search out witnesses in other parts of Japan, which in the postwar chaos was also difficult: 

"Travelling was a still a hardship in the autumn of 1947. Even getting a train ticket was no mean feat. Luckily, Kindaichi’s connections with the police simplified that issue, but since the trains tended to be packed with black marketeers and their buyers, they were not places where public displays of police presence were welcome, and his connections did not go as far as securing him a proper seat. So now, Kindaichi found himself squeezed into this sardine-can of a train car looking like a crumpled handkerchief and gasping for breath."  (p. 141). 

As Kindaichi's search for needed answers to more and more questions about the past of the family, he uncovers more and more unsavory details that have created their murderous present-day situation. It's a suspenseful book, and interesting also because he finds them so revolting, and because the final explanation is, of course, quite surprising.

Seishi Yokomizo (1902–81) was a famous and much-loved Japanese mystery writer. I have read three other books of his: The Honjin Murders, The Inugami Curse, and Death on Gokumon Island. His best-known creation is Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, who appears in many of the author's novels. Yokomizo’s mysteries have been dramatized in a variety of TV shows in Japan, and even in video games. The novels are currently being republished in English: this is a recent edition.

Review © 2023 mae sander

Murakami's Best Japanese Literary Writers

In his introduction to Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, novelist Haruki Murakami discusses Akutagawa's place in modern Japanese literature. Murakami says:

The stories in this volume are my
current reading project.

"If a poll were taken to choose the ten most important 'Japanese national writers' since the advent of the modern period in 1868, Akutugawa would undoubtedly be one of them. He might even squeeze into the top five." (p. xix)

Murakami lists the top nine writers and then says "Soseki would unquestionably come out at the top. I can't think of a good candidate for tenth place." (p. xxxvi) Perhaps Murakami hopes that place eventually will be his! I'd be in favor of including him, based on my own amateur opinion.

Here's the list in the order that Murakami gives it (arbitrarily adding his name to the list). Names appear Japanese style, family name first:

1. Atugawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927)
2. Natsume Soseki (1867-1916)
3. Mori Ogai (1862-1922)
4. Shimazaki Toson (1872-1916)
5. Shiga Naoya (1883-1971)
6. Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965)
7. Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972)
8. Dazai Osamu (1909-1948)
9. Mishima Yukio (1925-1970)
10. Murakami Haruki (1949- )

The nine writers on Murakami's original list lived and wrote in the fairly distant past. Seven of the writers were born before 1900. In fact, Murakami says that to be on the list, a writer's most representative works "must have the depth and power to survive at least a quarter century after the writer's death." That technically would leave Murakami out, but I decided to add him anyway.

I wonder which writers Murakami would add if he didn't have that quarter-century-after-death requirement. I definitely wonder if any women would make the late-twentieth century or twenty-first century lists! While pre-modern Japanese writers of note include "Lady Murasaki" the semi-anonymous eleventh-century author of the great Tale of Genji and other women as well, there just isn't a single woman writer on Murakami's list.

Some of my books by authors on the list:

Top row: old edition of Kappa by Akutagawa, Botchan by Soseki, The Wild Geese by Mori, The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki.

Bottom Row: Snow Country and The Izu Dancer by Kawabata, The Setting Sun by Dazai, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea

by Mishima, and South of the Border, West of the Sun by Murakami.

I'm happy to say that over the years, I've read stories and novels by eight of the ten writers, and I've enjoyed these works. Murakami says about the two authors that I haven't read: "With regard to Shimazaki and Shiga, I can only say I have no particular interest in them, I have hardly read a thing of theirs aside from what I found in the school textbooks, and what I have read has left little trace in my memory." (p. xxxvii)