"Real World" by Natsuo Kirino

 

In the summer of 1992, I studied International business in Tokyo, Japan. Every school day, I would commute into the city on the train along with mostly businessmen, office girls and high school students who were attending cram school. After a while, the students on the train figured out that I was an approachable friendly sort of guy, and a few of the braver ones tried chatting with me to practice their English. I didn’t realize it at first, but as I talked with one or two of the students, their classmates were listening very carefully to what we were saying. Once I made a joke that the person with whom I was talking didn’t catch, but one of the eavesdroppers did. When she laughed, we all turned to look at her, and being embarrassed for having brought attention to herself and her curious classmates, she melted into the crowd of students behind her.

During that long ago summer, it occurred to me that young Japanese women suffer a harder row to hoe than most American high school women or, in fact, other Japanese. They had to meet the social expectations that the rest of their generation has to suffer, but they also had to suffer an arrogant sort of Japanese male chauvinism. This ranged from TV cameramen who would run their cameras up and down the legs and made sharp close ups on the cleavage of pretty girls to the discreetly paper-cover manga that men and boys would read on the trains. These comic books often had terrible scenes of pornographic sex and sexual violence.

At the same time, these young women-like all young people everywhere sought for ways to express their unique individualism. This was expressed many ways from decorating personal items with “Hello Kitty” to dressing as Brazilian samba dancers in a summer Bon Festival parade. When a person is young and under enormous social pressure to conform and meet the expectations around him or her, it is normal to band together with friends to enjoy and express an unique and  separate identity.

This is the premise of “Real World,” the 2008 translation by Phillip Gabriel of “Riaru Warudo” the 2006 novel by Natsuo Kirino. This is the story of four high school girls who live in metro Tokyo and have been best friends forever. They don’t belong to any other clique or group and they all are attending the same summer cram school as they prepare for college entrance exams. Beyond that, each one feels that she is unique. Each has her own terrible secret which she believes the others don’t know and wouldn’t understand. The others know or least suspect, of course, but it’s not mentioned because they’re friends.

One of the girl’s neighbor is an unremarkable boy who attends a more prestigious high school, The girls have nicknamed Worm. One day, he is accused of violently beating his mother to death, but before the crime is discovered, he steals the girl’s bicycle and cell phone while apparently leaving the crime scene. As a result, the four girls become involved in different ways with the young murder suspect as he goes on the run. Each girl in her own way has her life changed when they completely confront the reckless violence of the real world.  

I enjoyed reading “Real World,” and I look forward to reading more by Natsuo Kirino who has been described as a feminist noir writer. In some ways, this novel is like “Catcher in the Rye” meets “In Miso Soup.” After all, J.D. Salinger was an adult who wrote about being a runaway kid and Japanese author Ryu Murakami wrote about an American mass murderer loose in Tokyo. Kirino was in her mid-fifties when she wrote “Real World.” So perhaps this is just a cautionary tale that confirms the worst stereotypes of Japanese high school life. I would have felt different about “Real World” if it had been written by a woman who was in her twenties. Still it resonates as true when one of the girls tells her BFF that “With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.” In the end, don’t we all in the real world.

22/11/63 by Stephen King

Author Stephen King and I are members of the same generation-we are both sons of what has been called “the greatest generation. And just as every member of the greatest generation can recall where they were on December 7, 1941 when they heard the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, every member of my generation can recall where they were when they heard the news that the greatest member of the greatest generation President John F. Kennedy has been assassinated.

For me, I was in class that day at George Mason Junior/Senior High School in Falls Church, Virginia. The public address system came on abruptly throughout the building, and we were told that classes were going to be cancelled that day. Then we were instructed to go to our last period classrooms and to wait to be dismissed [i.e., wait for the school busses to arrive] there. When I got to my last period classroom, there was a turned on TV, and my classmates and I watched as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite tried to explain to the world what was going on in Dallas. JFK had been shot. It was the teary watershed event of my generation.

I remember the quiet bus ride home keeping my emotions from welling up; I remember yelling for mom with tears in my eyes and voice when I got home; I remember the incredulous look on her face when I told her the horrible news.

My grandmother and great aunt were coming up to visit that weekend, and they with my parents and brother went over to nearby Washington DC for the funeral. I couldn’t go. I was too torn up-too sadden-by the death of the president.

Instead, I stayed home and watched everything on the television. I saw the photograph of LBJ being sworn into office on Air Force One with Jackie standing by in her blood-stained dress; I saw the rider-less horse, and I saw little John saluting as his father’s funeral cortege rolled past; I saw Lee Harvey Oswald being shot down himself by Jack Ruby. I saw it all. My whole generation did, and our hearts ached.

For me and I believe for others, it was a hurt that took a long time to heal. And afterwards any mention of the assassination stirred up sadness for me. Even songs like “Abraham, Martin and John” and “American Pie” brought back sad memories of that tragic day. Now I know the song is about the plane crash that took the life of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, nevertheless I was reminded of JFKs funeral and Jackie dressed in black every time I heard the lines:

 …Bad news on the doorstep - I couldn't take one more step
I can't remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside the day the music died

And I think that a lot of people thought what would have happened if the music hadn’t died that day in Dallas and if JFK had lived through his trip to the Lone Star State. It would have been a different world, a better world. For instance, a lot of people like to believe that JFK was too smart and pragmatic to have allowed America to be drawn into the Vietnam War. This is the premise of Stephen King’s book “11/22/63.” A young school teacher is shown a way to travel back to the late 1950s. After he’s told that by saving Kennedy he would save everyone who had died during the war in Southeast Asia, he accepts the commission to go back and prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting JFK.

As he waits he learns the great, good, bad and evil about those happy days. Diner food compared to modern fast foods was delicious. Cars looked so cool. Everything was cheaper. Everybody smoked cigarettes. The air in every factory town was more polluted. Segregation segregated. Most importantly the teacher realized that everybody was oblivious to what was terribly obvious to him.

In this strange new world of a half century ago, the teacher falls in love with a colleague while at the same time he stalks Oswald and waits for his moment of destiny with the assassin. What will he do after Dallas? Will he live in past or should he try to take her back to this time of the Internet, hip-hop and Starbuck on every corner. The past is obdurate and difficult to change. Likewise one has to consider “the butterfly effect” which hypothesizes that even the slightest thing a person does now [whenever that might be] may/might/will have a great effect on what happens in the future.

I usually read King’s novels when I’m on vacation or want to take a break from the books that I usually read. They are like brain candy-something light and easily digested. Still, some of his books like “The Green Mile” are wonderfully poignant; “22/11/63” was one of these.

 I have to confess I enjoyed King’s travelogue through time. After all, that was my boyhood, and like all Americans, I tend to be more nostalgic and ahistorical than I should be. Still, I can remember being back then in that classroom waiting for the buses to pick us up. My classmates and I learned more about the horror and idiocy of violence and hatred than we ever did watching westerns on the television. We had been ignorant to the world good and bad around us. We shouldn’t be now.

As the fiftieth anniversary of JFKs assassination nears it’s worthwhile to think back to that terrible day. It stills makes me sad. And I know all of the forthcoming books, TV specials and cute, commercial, commemorative crap that will be available soon are going to sadden me more. After all, that was my boyhood. Still, Stephen King’s “22/11/63” is a useful reminder that we cannot change what has happened without changing what’s happening now and what may/might/will happen next.

"Infinity in the Palm of her Hand" by Gioconda Belli

“Infinity in the Palm of her Hand [2009]” is a translation by Margaret Sayers Biden of “El infinito en la palma de la mano” by Gioconda Belli. This interesting book is a feminist look at the story of Adam and Eve from the sentience of the first man to shortly after the first homicide recorded in the Bible. The author says that she was inspired to recount the tale after coming across some books that she found in her father-in-law’s library. Perhaps she had perused ancient writings based on the Mishnah, or perhaps it was Mark Twain’s “The Diary of Adam and Eve.” We don’t know. Nevertheless, her browsing inspired the author to ponder those first familiar chapters of Genesis.

The Other [aka Elokim] makes Adam to tend his garden; the creator then makes Eve from Adam. He communicates with his creations not through discourse and conversation but mainly by intuition and dreams. While the first man and women do not possess the knowledge of Good and Evil, they understand that fruit of two trees in the garden are forbidden to them.

Eve is also advised by a feathered serpent who claims that she has been with Elokim since the time before there was a garden. Curiously, the creature speaks to the woman in enigmatic caveats, and so Eve is forced to make her own decisions. The serpent also tries to explain Elokim’s ways and motives, but she also urges the human to “Accept your solitude, Eve. Don’t think of me, or of Elokim. Look around you. Use your gifts.”

Adam accepts Eve’s choices, and pragmatically he tries to adjust to the real world when Paradise is taken away. Although he is a problem solver, there still are thoughts of returning to the garden lingering in his heart.

Gioconda Belli, a poet, creates lovely descriptions of the changing worlds that surround her characters. Additionally, she does a great job when recounting the challenges that threaten violence that were faced by mankind’s first family in the real world. She, however, doesn’t follow Genesis chapter and verse as she tells her tale. As a result, the book ends in an unusual way.

In the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Belli cautions her readers that her story is not Creationist or Darwinist, it is fiction, and as fiction this is a fun and worthwhile novel. It is important to read and meditate on stories in the Bible. It’s also important to read other people’s meditations-both scholarly and lay-on the Scripture. With that in mind, I encourage you to read “Infinity in the Palm of her Hand” as you make up your own mind how it was in the beginning.

Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa

“Necropolis, “ a translation by Howard Curtis of Necrópolis by the Columbian writer Santiago Gamboa , is a strange book indeed, especially when you consider that it is the first of Gamboa’s work to be published in English. What launched its publication was its winning the La Otra Orilla Literary Award in 2009. At that point Gamboa was [and still is] considered an important writer in the new McOndo school of Latin American writing. Although some of his works are available in translation in seventeen other languages, this is his first novel that has been translated into English.

Basically, it is the story of a writer [the narrator] who attends an academic conference on biography at the King Davis Hotel in Jerusalem. The city is caught in a battle between the dividing political and religious forces of the time. So in the middle of the death, dying and destruction that occurs in a war zone an academic meeting on the study of life is convened.

At the meeting are the usual intellectual types that normally are found at such literary events, but there also are some unusual attendees as well, including an ex-con religious leader and an Italian porn star. This is reminiscent of the “Decameron” or “Canterbury Tales” where a group of people are isolated together each with his own tale to tell.

Actually, such literary references abound throughout the novel. Gamboa is a philologist like Jorge Luis Borges, and like Borges, Gamboa has seeded his text with false and real literary references from Uriah Heep to Simonides for his readers to find. He also sometimes not too subtly lifts plot lines from classics like Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

After the first day of the conference, one of the attendees dies under mysterious circumstances, and the narrator sets out determine the real reasons for his demise. As he searches for answers regarding the suicide or murder of his co-participant, the conference continues while the war outside rages on and grows closer and closer to the King David and the meeting.

Necropolis has been compared favorably with Roberto Bolaño’s “Savage Detectives.” [One of Gamboa’s first literary references is a tip of the hat to the great Chilean/Mexican writer.] And the book is clearly in the new McOndo style. Most of the characters are very cosmopolitan Latin Americans moving around on a global stage. Still Bolaño’s work was grittier and more realistic, and the ending of “Detectives” was more satisfying-at least for me.  “Necropolis’ ends on a dark and stormy night which may be Columbian’s last joke with the reader. Still, “Necropolis” is a very good book. The narrative quickly captures and maintains the reader’s interest, and the story flows despite the biographical interruptions of the participants at the conference. Indeed these narrative detours are in themselves interesting. I look forward to reading more by Santiago Gamboa.

SIn: The Early History of an Idea

"Sin: The Early History of an Idea"[2012] by Paula Fredriksen is an interesting but challenging read about how the concept of sin changed over the first four hundred years of Christian history. Fredriksen looks at Scripture and other the extant writings concerning seven people: Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus in the first century,  Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin the Martyr of the second century, Origen of Alexandria in the third century and Augustine of Hippo in the fourth.

Jesus and Paul were two first century leaders that believed that the apocalypse was at hand. Jesus, as he is recorded in the gospels, was concerned with the fate of the Jewish people. Paul, on the other hand, concerned himself in his writings with the fate of gentiles and the rest of creation. So their ideas on sin differed.

After the rise of Constantine and his conversion to Christianity in 312 CE, the church in Rome sought to  “orthodoxize” the extant writings of earlier Christian writers. In Marcion, they practically succeeded; very few of his works remain. As a result, this type of analysis is particularly difficult when it comes to the second century writers. Nevertheless there remain plenty of writings by orthodox writers condemning his “heresies,” and it is from those writings that the author has made some interesting conclusions about him, Valentinus and Justin. Each represents a different view based on the facts that Jerusalem had been destroyed and Jesus had not yet returned.

Finally she looks at the prolific writings of Origen and Augustine. Both are worthy of examination. Augustine was the last great mind of the early Christian era. The Vandals who had earlier sacked Rome were practically at his door in Hippo as he lay on his deathbed. Nevertheless, his writings survived him and “became a font of subsequent Latin Christian doctrine.”  As such, they continue to affect modern definitions of sin and virtue, condemnation and salvation, and the nature of a severe, all-powerful God, etc. Origen also remains important. Starting from the same sources as Augustine, his writings and conclusions represent “a road not taken by the church.”

People who enjoy reading about theology, philosophy, language, ideas and early church history will enjoy this book.

Red April

 

RED APRIL

Edith Grossman's translation of Santiago Roncagliolo’s award-winning novel "Abril rojo" is a great read. The book is a Kafkaesque murder mystery about one man's journey into the horror that has lingered in Peru after the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], a rural Maoist revolutionary group.

The story takes place in a rural township in the foothills of the Andes during March and April 2000. Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a civil servant who was raised in Lima. A year before, however, this minor functionary had asked for and had received a transfer back to the town of his birth in rural Peru. His main professional concern is to quietly and inoffensively succeed within the local federal bureaucracy. His other ambitions are to be a good son to his mother and to win the heart of a local waitress that he just met.

As Holy Week 2000 approaches, he is forced to investigate a particularly gruesome murder. As a result he is drawn into the world around him. This is a world which still harbors some of the social and political horrors that have been a part of Peru’s history before, during and after the rise of the Shining Path in the 1980s.

Chacaltana changes as the novel progresses from a milk-toast civil servant to someone like the inhabitants of the world around him; people who yearn “for a kind of power, a kind of domination, the feeling that something was weaker than he was, that in the midst of this world seemed to swallow him [Chacaltana] whole, he too could have strength, potency, victims.” The novel has an ending that is unexpected but satisfactory.

Like I said, this book is a great read, and I heartily recommend it. Edith Grossman’s translation is, as always, excellent, Roncagliolo was born and raised in Peru. He discusses growing up during this sad time in “Deng’s Dogs.” The essay can be found in the aptly named “Horror” issue of “Granta” 117. By the way, Roncagliolo left Peru to live in Barcelona, Spain in 2000. "April rojo" was first published in 2006. Grossman's translation was first published 2009.