Tag Archives: Japanese literature

Hear the Wind Sing

Hear the Wind Sing is Haruki Murakami’s first book. The short novel was published in 1979.

The story takes place in August 1970 when the nameless narrator is in his early twenties. He is spending his time mostly drinking beer with his friend, the Rat (we never learn his real name) and the barkeeper J (we also never learn his real name). There is also a girl – you guessed it already: her name is never revealed – who has only nine fingers, with a mother she doesn’t like (we never learn why), and a twin sister to whom she is equally not close (not surprisingly also the reason for this remains a mystery). She works in a record store, and this leads to some references to mostly popular music of that time. The music plays a big role, there are also conversations with a radio DJ with a hiccup, and a letter of a hospitalized girl to the DJ from which is quoted extensively. Apart from that, there is a random meeting with a woman in a bar who drinks several gimlets, makes several phone calls, and goes to the bathroom several times. For some reason, the narrator and the Rat talk about books although the latter is not a reader. Containing no sex scenes and having no one in it who is dying are considered as the main characteristics of a good novel (for which reason they consider this as important is, you know it by now, not explained). The girl has an abortion, and disappears later completely. The narrator mentions the three girls with whom he had sex previously and who all committed suicide. Oh, and there are also some sentences about the pulp fiction writer Derek Hartfield and his bizarre suicide in 1938.

When this blog post seems like a mess to you, it is not my fault. Most of the things happening in this book seem to me completely pointless and not connected to each other. I didn’t understand why things were happening or what was the function of a single of the described events. The characters are shallow, the dialogues bad Hemingway. Maybe it was the intention of the author to show these young people as representatives of a counter-culture, a generation that had no intention to become part of the mainstream Japanese post-WWII society with its salarymen and consumerism. But if that was the idea, it would have been a good thing to describe a little bit more realistic characters with some depth that would have been able to attract some interest and empathy from the side of the reader, and not the flat placeholders without names in this to me pointless narrative.

This is a book for you if you are a big fan of Haruki Murakami. For all the others I can’t recommend it. Fortunately, it is a short book, I read it in one sitting. There is a sequel, Pinball, 1973, which I have also on my shelves. Not really sure if I want to read it.

It is a strange thing. So many people are raving about Haruki Murakami and his writing, he is every year on top of the list of the most probable candidates for the next Nobel Prize for Literature. But to me he seems not to be a remarkable author of literary fiction, although I tried by now already quite a considerable number of his books. The only work by him that greatly impressed me so far was his non-fiction Underground, which I have reviewed here.  

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing, translated by Ted Goossen, Vintage 2016

Other Reviews: 
Tony’s Reading List 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-7. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tokyo Decadence

The protagonists in Ryu Murakami’s collection of 15 short stories Tokyo Decadence are not your average salarymen and housewives you would probably expect from a contemporary Japanese author.

The stories, competently translated by Ralph McCarthy as it seems (I don’t speak Japanese and can judge only from the language of the translation), are taken from five story collections originally published between 1986 and 2003.

They are depicting mainly the lives of Tokyoites that live outside the “average” world of offices of big corporations. The men are film directors, novelists, university drop-outs, painters, musicians, petty drug dealers, waiters, or truck drivers, the women frequently single mothers, hostesses and call girls and they are in all their weirdness not so different from “us” average people: they are looking for love and friendship, for a way out of their unhappiness and misery, and for something that is missing in their lives – or in Japanese society in general; hence their fascination with baseball (in the first four stories, taken from Run, Takahashi!), cinema (in the three stories from Ryu’s Cinematheque), or Cuba and its music (in the four stories taken from Swans). And when they can’t find any of these things they are in a more or less conscious way longing for, there is still enough left to fill in the gaps and the emptiness: sex (lots of it!), drugs, and the joyless joys of consumerism (as in one of the strongest stories of the book, Topaz).

Tokyo Decadence could be a depressing read with all these drifters, hoodlums, prostitutes, drug addicts and women on the verge of a nervous breakdown or beyond; the fact that Ryu Murakami was hailed by some media as an author in the mould of Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk seemed to suggest that I was to expect a book I would most probably not really enjoy very much. But it turned out that this book was a pleasant surprise.

Ryu Murakami knows the milieu about which he is writing obviously very well; he is a TV host and a film director and also a producer of Cuban music; therefore his descriptions of the world of media or about Cuban music that are central to several stories feel absolutely authentic. As a film director and script writer he knows also how to write gripping dialogues. They are frequently very interesting because they reveal the real character of most protagonists. In several of the stories we get to know a character as narrator of the story before in the next story, told by another narrator, the main protagonist of the previous story is depicted in a very different way. Although each story is a stand-alone story, the frequent links between the individual stories of each collection give sometimes a feeling as if we are reading a novel or novella written from the standpoint of different narrators. And when I said in a recent review of a Colum McCann novel that that author obviously cannot create interesting female characters, the opposite is true of Ryu Murakami. Several of the narrators and main characters in the stories are women, and Murakami shows great empathy in describing them in all their humanity.

Another element that I must mention here and that adds to the flavour of this story collection is the humor in most of the stories. The way how the unemployed macho truck driver in It All Started Just About a Year and a Half Ago finds his true – and more than surprising – vocation as a male transvestite hostess in a gay bar; and how his daughter finds out the truth about it: it is a hilariously funny story. Or when in The Last Picture Show the young narrator who was just evicted from his home starts to collect hydrangea leaves at night with a yakuza from the neighbourhood (dried and rolled they smell like weed); the whole “drug” selling is more like a prank of two kids. At the same time Murakami is revealing the soft side of the young yakuza who starts to shed tears when he is watching the movie The Last Picture Show in a cinema with his new acquaintance. This moment seems also to be the beginning of a friendship between these two young men.

There is hope in many of the stories for the protagonists that their life will change one day. One of them really makes it to Cuba. And in the final story At the Airport when we are left guessing as readers until the last paragraph if Saito, the regular costumer of the sex worker who is telling us her story, and who fell in love with her will really turn up to bring her to a place where she can pursue the training for the profession she really wanted to learn since a long time, the narrator is watching an old couple waiting nearby: he is having a cigarette in the smoking area, while she is folding the paper wrappers of some chocolate she is eating. When the old man is coming back, his wife leaves him her seat. Getting old together is maybe the best that life has in stock for some of us, and while watching the old couple, the narrator seems to realize that this is also something she could aim at with Saito – who is turning up just in time at the last moment. A hopeful end of this story and the story collection I truly enjoyed.

Ryu Murakami – not related to Haruki Murakami – is author of forty novels, a dozen short story books, several collections of essays and picture books, and also director of five feature films. Tokyo Decadence is an excellent opportunity to discover one of the best and most prolific Japanese contemporary authors. Highly recommended!

Ryu Murakami: Tokyo Decadence, translated by Ralph McCarthy, Kurodahan Press, Fukuoka 2016

Thanks to Kurodahan Press for the Advance Review Copy.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Reading/Reviewing Plans

The end of the year is approaching with fast steps. This year I haven’t been so active as a blogger as last year until recently – German Lit Month brought me back to the usual pace – and I have done more blog posts on poetry and translations than the year before; also I did more posts in German and one in Bulgarian too. Book blogging is a dynamic process and the focus of such places will always be subject to small unplanned changes, but I will keep also in the next year my habit to publish reviews of books that were interesting to me.

As you already know when you follow this blog on a regular basis, my taste in books is rather eclectic. I am definitely not a person who is permanently scanning bestseller lists or is jumping in on discussions about books that were – usually for marketing reasons – the “talk of the town”. Therefore I avoided so far reviewing books by Houellebecq or Knausgård; it is difficult to not be influenced by the public discussion that focuses frequently on aspects that have very little to do with the literary quality of the books by such authors but a lot with their public persona and their sometimes very controversial opinions about certain topics. Not that the books by these authors are necessarily bad, but I prefer to read without too much background noise. So I will come also to these authors, but most probably not in the near future.

My blog tries to be diverse, but without quota. But of course my choice is subjective and I am aware of the fact that probably most readers will find many authors/books on this list that are completely unknown to them. If you look for just another blog that is reviewing again and again the same exclusively Anglo-saxon authors, then this might not be the best place for you. If you are eager to discover something new, then you are most welcome. 

There are no ads on this blog and this will also not change in the future. There is zero financial interest from my side to keep this blog alive, I do it just for fun. Please don’t send unsolicitated review copies if you are an author or a publisher. In rare cases I might accept a review copy when contacted first but only when I have already an interest in the book. All blog posts contain of course my own – sometimes idiosyncratic – opinion for what it is worth. In general I tend to write reviews on the positive side. When a book disappoints me, I tend to not write a review unless there is a strong reason to do otherwise.

These are the books presently on my “To-be-read” pile; which means they are the one’s that i will most probably read and review within the coming months. But as always with such lists, they are permanently subject to changes, additions, removals. Therefore I (and also the readers of this blog) will take this list as an orientation and not as a strict task on which I have to work one by one. 

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Jim al-Khalili: The House of Wisdom

Ryunosunke Akutagawa: Kappa

Rabih Alameddine: The Hakawati

Sinan Antoon: The Corpse Washer

Toufic Youssef Aouad: Le Pain

Abhijit Banerjee / Esther Duflo: Poor Economics

Hoda Barakat: Le Royaume de cette terre

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel

Max Blecher: Scarred Hearts

Nicolas Born: The Deception

Thomas Brasch: Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne

Joseph Brodsky: On Grief and Reason

Alina Bronsky: Just Call Me Superhero

Alina Bronsky: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Dino Buzzati: The Tartar Steppe

Leila S. Chudori: Pulang

Beqe Cufaj: projekt@party 

Mahmoud Darwish: Memory of Forgetfulness

Oei Hong Djien: Art & Collecting Art

Dimitre Dinev: Engelszungen (Angel’s Tongues)

Anton Donchev: Time of Parting

Jabbour Douaihy: June Rain

Michael R. Dove: The Banana Tree at the Gate

Jennifer DuBois: A Partial History of Lost Causes

Isabelle Eberhardt: Works

Tristan Egolf: Lord of the Barnyard

Deyan Enev: Circus Bulgaria

Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Mani

Milena Michiko Flašar: I called him Necktie

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace

Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra

Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land

Georg K. Glaser: Geheimnis und Gewalt (Secret and Violence)

Georgi Gospodinov: Natural Novel

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow

Elizabeth Gowing: Edith and I

David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules

Garth Greenwell: What Belongs to You

Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Ludwig Harig: Die Hortensien der Frau von Roselius

Johann Peter Hebel: Calendar Stories

Christoph Hein: Settlement

Wolfgang Hilbig: The Sleep of the Righteous

Albert Hofmann / Ernst Jünger: LSD

Hans Henny Jahnn: Fluss ohne Ufer (River without Banks) (Part II)

Franz Jung: Der Weg nach unten

Ismail Kadare: Broken April

Ismail Kadare: The Palace of Dreams

Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Editors): The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia: 1965-1968

Rosen Karamfilov: Kolene (Knees)

Orhan Kemal: The Prisoners

Irmgard Keun: Nach Mitternacht

Georg Klein: Libidissi

Friedrich August Klingemann: Bonaventura’s Nightwatches

Fatos Kongoli: The Loser

Theodor Kramer: Poems

Friedo Lampe: Septembergewitter (Thunderstorm in September)

Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star

Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy

Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt

Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers

Sandor Marai: Embers

Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express

Multatuli: Max Havelaar

Alice Munro: Open Secrets

Marie NDiaye: Three Strong Women

Irene Nemirovsky: Suite française 

Ben Okri: The Famished Road

Laksmi Pamuntjak: The Question of Red

Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra

Georges Perec: Life. A User’s Manual

Leo Perutz: By Night Under the Stone Bridge

Boris Pilnyak: Mahogany

Alek Popov: Black Box

Milen Ruskov: Thrown Into Nature

Boris Savinkov: Memoirs of a Terrorist

Eric Schneider: Zurück nach Java

Daniel Paul Schreber: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Carl Seelig: Wandering with Robert Walser

Victor Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Anthony Shadid: House of Stones

Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Tales

Raja Shehadeh: A Rift in Time

Alexander Shpatov: #LiveFromSofia

Werner Sonne: Staatsräson?

Andrzej Stasiuk: On the Way to Babadag

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar: The Time Regulation Institute

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: A Mute’s Soliloquy

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: The Buru Quartet (4 vol.)

Lionel Trilling: The Middle of the Journey

Iliya Trojanov: The Collector of Worlds

Bernward Vesper: Die Reise (The Journey)

Robert Walser: Jakob von Gunten

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence

Marguerite Yourcenar: Coup de Grace

Galina Zlatareva: The Medallion

Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grisha

Stay tuned – and feel free to comment any of my blog posts. Your contributions are very much appreciated. You are also invited to subscribe to this blog if you like.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

“I’m not a sarin victim, I’m a survivor”

“The date is Monday 20 March, 1995. It is a beautiful clear spring morning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundled up in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, a national holiday. Sandwiched right in the middle of what should have been a long weekend, you’re probably thinking “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.” No such luck. You got up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags with a strange liquid…”

1995 was a particularly bad year for Japan: the economic bubble had just burst and the country suffered two major catastrophes – the Kobe earthquake and the sarin attack by the Aum Shinrikyo sect on the Tokyo subway system. Although the poison gas attack killed “only” 13 people, it affected thousands of commuters directly – many suffer from the health effects of sarin exposure until today -, and millions indirectly. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not just a medical expression, it is a condition that affects almost all aspects of life.

And that the perpetrators of the crime, a crime with no apparent reason, came from the center of the Japanese society was particularly shocking. The five men that released the sarin had high academic credentials, one of them was a famous surgeon.

The novelist Haruki Murakami just came back from abroad after a long absence when the sarin attack happened. Not only didn’t he, like more or less the whole world, understand how it was possible that something like this vicious attack could happen. He was also shocked by the “secondary” victimization many survivors had to face frequently by Japanese society, a lack of empathy and understanding from the side of many employers and colleagues, the icy atmosphere and the snide remarks many survivors had to hear when they were not able to perform their usual working routine as a result of the after-effects of the sarin poisoning.

Murakami finally decided to try to give the victims a voice and to interview them in the style of the famous interview books by Studs Terkel. It was difficult to convince many victims to speak out, to recall their memories and feelings. But as a reader I feel glad for Murakami’s persistence and the obvious great respect he has for the people he interviewed.

The book Underground contains 34 interviews mostly with subway commuters, but also with station attendants, a subway driver, two doctors and several relatives of victims. A short characterization of the person by Murakami and some remarks regarding the circumstances in which the interview was taken give each interview a similar structure. The survivors tell their story: their background, the commuting routine to work, what happened on that fateful morning and what were the affects of the poisoning. Also how they go on with their lives now – the interviews were taken a year after the event – and what their feelings are toward those who committed these crimes. Murakami lets them tell their stories with very little interfering.

Not surprisingly it must have been extremely painful for the survivors to retell their personal stories, but in most interviews there is also a moment of relief present to talk it over with someone that really listens and not for voyeuristic reasons like most Japanese media – in that respect most survivors had made very bad experiences with journalists and some TV stations.

A common element in the interviews is that the interviewed person tries to downplay his or her own sufferings. For most interviewees it is also important that Japanese society doesn’t forget about the victims and does some soul-searching why it all happened. On a more practical side, a better response by the public authorities to such an emergency is also an element that is important to some of the interview partners.

The gas attack is clearly one of those events that divide a life in a “Before” and an “After”. Life after the attack is not the same anymore for any of the survivors. They all suffer from more or less serious after-effects, most common failing eyesight, deterioration or loss of memory, physical weakness, permanent strong headaches, sleeping disorders, and others. Some of the survivors are permanently handicapped by the attack.

I asked myself several times how would I have reacted confronted with a catastrophe like this. There have been all kind of experiences by the survivors; strangers helping them to get out of the station or to a hospital; station attendants sacrificing their lives by removing the leaking sarin parcels; but also the extreme opposite:

“As I said, there were people foaming at the mouth where we were, in front of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual. I’d be tending to someone and look up to see passers-by glance my way with a “what-on-earth’s-happened-here?” expression, but not one came over. It was as if we were a world apart. Nobody stopped. They all thought: “Nothing to do with me.”

In the second part of Underground, which was originally published later but is now part of the book, Murakami interviewed eight Aum members, some of them have dropped out in the meantime, but all of them still hold on to the “values” of the cult. Aum was – or better is, since it is still existing – a sect that was based on Buddhist thought, mixed together with the writings of Nostradamus, certain elements of Christianity, and a kind of elitist touch. According to a former Aum member, you had to be either a graduate from Tokyo University or a beautiful woman in order to advance in the hierarchy of the cult, the latter was referring to the “appetite” of Asahara, the founder and guru of the cult.

Sometimes, as a reader we can catch a glimpse of the great arrogance that seems to be a constitutive element of many of these cults: here are the enlightened, and there is the rest of the humans, and what happens to the latter is not really a concern for the elite, but frequently a source for remarks of a rather contemptuous nature.

Strange, but it seems that such cults offer a “product” that is attractive for a certain category of people. And Aum has still its worshippers, many of them in Russia and Eastern Europe; the same goes for similar cults like Osho, another psycho sect with a charismatic leader, a mind-control ideology with fascist elements, and a practical experience with a bio terror attack. Falun Gong shares also many features with Aum.

Not that I really understand why this Aum sect decided to poison so many innocent people after I read Murakami’s book. But the last interviews give us an insight in the paranoid world of cults: it starts with Yoga and ends with the extermination of people as if they are insects. And to learn that many of the former Aum members still don’t disconnect themselves completely from the ideas of this group made me shiver.

This is a very human, even noble book. Haruki Murakami – I am usually not a big fan of his books – gave the victims a voice and a face. I like his respectful approach in these interviews; he restored the dignity of the people who went through this terrible experience.

“I’m not a sarin victim, I’m a survivor,”

says one of Murakami’s interview partners. This is, despite the depressing topic of the book, a consoling statement. Fortunately all interview partners of the first part move on with their lives, as difficult as it may be for each single one of them.

Murakami

Haruki Murakami: Underground, transl. by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, Vintage Books, London 2003

see also Robert J. Lifton: Destroying the World to Save It. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

The Sea and Poison

On 5 May, 1945, during the last months of WWII – the war in Europe was just coming to an end – an American B-29 airplane went down over Fukuoka, Japan. The highest ranking surviving soldier was brought to Tokyo for further interrogation. The other eight survivors were brought to the Department of Anatomy of the University of Fukuoka. There they were subjected to medical “experiments” that were carried out without anesthetics by Unit 731 under its commander General Shiro Ishii and with the support of several doctors and nurses from Fukuoka Hospital.

The so-called “experiments” for which Unit 731 was notorious were so gruesome that they can be only compared with those of Dr. Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. A biography of Ishii mentions an example of the “scientific” experiments of Unit 731:

“To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.” (Byrd, Gregory Dean: General Ishii Shiro)

In the case of the American soldiers, the vivisections meant that inner organs were consecutively extracted in order to see how long the soldiers would survive. It was murder with a so-called “scientific” alibi and under the cruelest conditions you can possibly imagine (no use of anesthetics, as already mentioned!). All prisoners died after unimaginable suffering.

Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo was one of the first authors to shed a light on Japan’s moral guilt for the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers, but also by respectable medical doctors, nurses and scientists. His novel The Sea and Poison is based on the Fukuoka crime.

The narrator of the novel that is set in Japan in the 1950s, is a man with a lung disease (just like Endo himself who suffered from tuberculosis and who had a part of his lung removed). He is treated successfully by a Dr. Suguro, an unfriendly and uncommunicative man with a swollen face that looks somehow creepy. But he is obviously a good professional in his field. The narrator investigates out of curiosity about Dr. Suguro and meets someone who knows the past of this strange person.

Dr. Suguro was during the war part of the team of doctors and nurses that carried out the vivisections in Fukuoka. During that time Suguro was a young practitioner at a hospital. One of the first surgeries after he starts his duties in Fukuoka Hospital and in which he participates, is the lung operation of an old woman, a welfare patient. The operation is not necessary from a medical point of view and it will end with the death of the woman, but since she is “only” a welfare patient and will probably die anyway from her disease, the responsible doctor is not hesitating to use her (without her knowledge or even consent) for this human experiment in the name of a very doubtful “scientific progress”,

Suguro finally gives in to participate in this surgery which is supposed to bring at least some more scientific results and might help to find a better treatment for similar cases in the future. Suguro is shocked and devastated by what he sees and he shows compassion to the woman before the surgery. Sometimes he is giving her extra food when nobody watches. But he, the young practitioner doesn’t stand up to the driving force behind this completely useless and lethal surgery: Dr. Toda, the main surgeon, wants to make a career for himself and for this he needs to have under all circumstances a big number of surgeries performed. That in many cases these surgeries will end necessarily with the death of the patient, is not a matter of concern to Dr. Toda. Welfare patients seem to be not fully human to him, interesting only as human “material” and as long as it is in the name of “science” (i.e. his personal ambition), anything is in the right order for him.

Toda is in many ways the complete opposite of Suguro. He is talkative, over-ambitious, and he enjoys exercising power, a fact that results also in a constant bickering directed at Suguro, who has moral scruples and choose this profession obviously out of the real wish to help people, not to make a career at all costs. But Suguro is weak and he collapses morally. Japan, like Germany, was not a society where subordinates were used to doubt or even to stand up to their superiors or any higher authority when receiving orders that were ethically doubtful or inhumane.

A minor figure but nevertheless an important character in the book is the nurse Ueda with a rather unhappy personal history. She is more passive and chose this profession neither out of enthusiasm nor out of the wish to make a career. But her unhappy private life and frustrated pre-disposition together with her experience in Manchuria have taught her to follow orders and how to deal with “inferior” people and races. She is participating in the operation without enthusiasm but also without sign or even thought of rebellion against this unnecessary and lethal surgery.

When the surviving American soldiers are brought to the hospital, it is again Toda who takes the initiative. The post of the deacon of the faculty is vacant and the spectacular vivisections will be the perfect opportunity for him to bring himself in position for this important job. None of the doctors and nurses who participate in the vivisections because Toda puts some pressure on them rejects this request and so these “scientifically” disguised crimes take place under the hands of doctors whose profession it should be to protect and save lives.

I don’t think that Endo wanted to write a kind of documentary novel that was meant to expose the terrible crimes of a part of the Japanese doctors and medical staff during WWII, and I also don’t think that Endo should be blamed for not writing in very much detail about the sufferings of the American soldiers, or for changing some details in his novels compared to the reality, such as the use of anesthetics (which were not used during the real vivisections of the soldiers). It’s a novel after all and any author is entitled to change or adapt certain details when it suits him – otherwise he should write a report, not a novel.

We can assume that Endo’s readers in Japan were (just like the author himself) aware of the details of this case, which were reported in length by all Japanese newspapers during the trial of 1948 against some doctors and medical staff. We can only guess why he introduced the use of anesthetics contrary to the real story. It might be simply for the pragmatic reason not to shock the readers more than necessary, it might be a concession to the publisher, it might be even considered as an act of compassion toward the victims of this crime. And that he doesn’t describe the graphic details of the vivisections has also to be seen in the framework of the artistic tradition of Japan.

It is a constitutional moment of many Japanese novels and movies to make extensive use of the ellipsis as a narrative device (think of Kurosawa’s or Ozu’s movies). It’s more important to see that there are doctors and nurses that have a profession that is aiming to heal people – and they come together to commit a number of sadistic murders. As for the sufferings of the victims, it is left to the readers’ imagination. No need to describe something that would have more similarity with a splatter movie than with the situation in any normal hospital in the world.

It has to be mentioned that Endo was a catholic author. He lived several years in France and was familiar with the work of authors like Bernanos or Mauriac. Additionally he was suffering from tuberculosis and had to undergo surgery to remove one of his lobes. So we can suggest that he had a lot of his own experiences with doctors and hospitals flow into this novel, as well as his views on the freedom of will and personal ethical responsibility for one’s actions.

In my opinion, the three main characters in the book are based on typical representatives for different approaches of people working in hospitals or in the medical profession in general. There are the ones that choose this profession out of the genuine wish to help other people and to render a valuable service to mankind (like Suguro). For others (like Ueda) it is just a profession like any other. And for a number of people (like Dr. Toda) it is an instrument to display power, a vehicle for their personal ambition, a place where they can use any means that suits the only aim that matters: to rise in the hierarchy, to gain more recognition, prestige, money, and power for themselves.

The main question for Endo seems to be: where are the ethical limits for the work of a doctor or medical professional? The surgery that the welfare patient has to suffer is completely useless, will not help her, cure her disease or make her life more comfortable. In the contrary it will kill her. But since she is a welfare patient, she seems to be the suitable ‘material’ to gain at least some (very doubtful) additional knowledge that might help to cure similar diseases in the future more efficiently. (At least this is the alibi that the doctors make up for themselves.) It is clear that already this case shows a complete lack of humanity from the side of the doctors and is against all ethical principles of medicine. And it is also obvious that doctors or nurses that are already so morally compromised to perform such surgeries will not protest against any order to undertake vivisections on prisoners that have absolutely no medical justification and are simply a cruel form of murder.

For me this is clearly a book about the importance to act according to ethical principles under all conditions. Just as the way to Auschwitz started when people were not protesting against the boycott of the shop of their Jewish neighbor, the way to the ‘medical’ experiments of a Dr. Dr. Mengele started when people were not protesting against the declaration of certain people as being ‘lebensunwert’ (not worth living).

Considering today’s discussions about reproduction medicine or euthanasia in many countries, or the participation of medics in the torturing of prisoners in Guantanamo or elsewhere, the question of individual ethical responsibility of doctors is as acute as ever. Therefore Endo’s disturbing but important novel, as depressing as the story is, has lost nothing of its urgency and strength.

Postscriptum:

The real doctors and nurses that participated in the Fukuoka vivisections were sentenced to death or very long prison sentences in 1948.

General MacArthur, the military commander of Japan commuted all death sentences and reduced the prison sentences considerably.

In 1958 all Fukuoka killers were free again. Most of them held later high positions in medicine, science, and the pharmaceutical industry in Japan.

Emperor Hirohito, who created Unit 731 and who was fully aware of the biological warfare and human experiments and who encouraged the deeds of this Unit, never saw a court.

General Ishii – still today considered a hero by many Japanese – received immunity for his crimes in return for delivering the results of his “scientific research” to the Americans(!).

Results of the biological human experiments of Unit 731 were used in the US and the Soviet Union for their respective military Biological Warfare programmes.

The Japanese Supreme Court confirmed in 2007 that victims of Unit 731 or their family members are not entitled to any financial compensation.

the-sea-and-poison

Shusaku Endo: The Sea and Poison, transl. Michael Gallagher, Tuttle Publishing, Rutland Tokyo 1991

On the Fukuoka case:

Marc Landas: The Fallen. A True Story of American POWs and Japanese Wartime Atrocities, Hoboken, John Wiley 2004

On Unit 731:

Peter Williams, David Wallace: Unit 731 – Japans Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London 1988

Sheldon H.Harris: Factories of Death. Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-up. Routledge, New York 2002

Toshiyuki Tanaka, Yukiko Tanaka: Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Westview Press Inc. 1998

On similar cases in Nazi Germany:

Alexander Mitscherlich / Fred Mielke (eds.): Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit (‘Medicine without Humanity’), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009

Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer (‘Auschwitz, NS Medicine and its Victims’), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2012

Robert J. Lifton: The Nazi Doctors, Macmillan, London 2000

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


The Simple Art of Poetry

I admit it: I have a preference for poems written in a simple, almost sparse language. And that say many things with comparatively few words.

Günter Eich’s Inventur (Inventory) was one of the first examples of this kind of poetry I came across when I was very young.

Inventur


Dies ist meine Mütze,
dies ist mein Mantel,
hier mein Rasierzeug
im Beutel aus Leinen. 

Konservenbüchse:
Mein Teller, mein Becher,
ich hab in das Weißblech
den Namen geritzt. 

Geritzt hier mit diesem
kostbaren Nagel,
den vor begehrlichen
Augen ich berge. 

Im Brotbeutel sind
ein Paar wollene Socken
und einiges, was ich
niemand verrate, 

so dient es als Kissen
nachts meinem Kopf.
Die Pappe hier liegt
zwischen mir und der Erde.

Die Bleistiftmine
lieb ich am meisten:
Tags schreibt sie mir Verse,
die nachts ich erdacht. 

Dies ist mein Notizbuch,
dies meine Zeltbahn,
dies ist mein Handtuch,
dies ist mein Zwirn. 

 

Inventory
 
This is my cap,  
this is my overcoat,  
here is my shave kit  
in its linen pouch.  

Some field rations:  
my dish, my tumbler,  
here in the tin-plate  
I’ve scratched my name.   

Scratched it here with this  
precious nail  
I keep concealed  
from coveting eyes.   

In the bread bag I have  
a pair of wool socks  
and a few things that I  
discuss with no one,  

and these form a pillow  
for my head at night.  
Some cardboard lies  
between me and the ground.   

The pencil’s the thing  
I love the most:  
By day it writes verses  
I make up at night.   

This is my notebook,  
this my rain gear,  
this is my towel,  
this is my twine. 

(Translated by Joshua Mehigan)

Later I discovered many other interesting and beautiful examples of this genre. There are of course too many to quote them all, so I will just present a very few examples here:

Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise. 

(Theodore Huebner Roethke a distant relative)

Another one:

Was ich habe, will ich nicht verlieren, aber
wo ich bin, will ich nicht bleiben, aber
die ich liebe, will ich nicht verlassen, aber
die ich kenne, will ich nicht mehr sehen, aber
wo ich lebe, da will ich nicht sterben, aber
wo ich sterbe, da will ich nicht hin:
Bleiben will ich, wo ich nie gewesen bin.

 
What I have, I don’t want to lose, but
where I am, I don’t want to stay, but
the one I love, I don’t want to leave, but
the ones I know, I don’t want to see again, but
where I live, I don’t want to die, but
where I’ll die, I don’t want to go:
I want to stay where I have never been. 

(Thomas Brasch, translated by Thomas Hübner) 

The following poem is already a kind of modern classic:

Was es ist
 
 Es ist Unsinn
sagt die Vernunft
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
Es ist Unglück
sagt die Berechnung
Es ist nichts als Schmerz
sagt die Angst
Es ist aussichtslos
sagt die Einsicht
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
Es ist lächerlich
sagt der Stolz
Es ist leichtsinnig
sagt die Vorsicht
Es ist unmöglich
sagt die Erfahrung
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
 
What it is
 
It is nonsense
says reason
It is what it is
says love
 
It is misfortune
says calculation
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It is hopeless
says insight
It is what it is
says love
 
It is laughable
says pride
It is frivolous
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love 

(Erich Fried, translated by Gwilym Williams) 

 And here is a quite famous example:

This is Just to Say
 
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
 
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
 
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold  

(William Carlos Williams) 

The shortest possible form of a poem is of course the haiku. Therefore here some examples from the great master of the haiku genre, Matsuo Basho:

Waking in the night;
The lamp is low,
The oil freezing.
 –
 It has rained enough
To turn the stubble on the field
Black.

 Winter rain
Falls on the cow-shed
A cock crows.

 The leeks
Newly washed white,-
How cold it is!

 The sea darkens;
The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.

Ill on a journey;
My dreams wander
Over a withered moor. 

(translated by Robert Hass)

These are examples by well-known or even famous authors. But frequently lesser-known (but equally gifted) poets produce works that deserve to be noted, read, distributed and recommended. And I don’t want to conclude this short choice of poems without giving the floor to a poet that is probably unknown to most of you. I discovered this author only recently, after a close friend presented me a copy of his newest collection of poetry. I am talking about the Bulgarian poet Vladislav Hristov (born 1976), and his book Fi (Фи). (Thank you, Eli! And thank you, Vladislav Hristov, for the dedication in my copy!).

Hristov is undoubtedly one of the best haiku poets of our times: 

изгонената котка
само тя
видя звездопада
 
cat shooed away
only she saw
the meteor shower 

(Translated by Maya Lyubenova)

Also in his new collection the tone is laconic, sparse, but always evocative:

дясната ръка
държи книгата
лявата
ръката на любимия
всяка нова страница
е раздяла
 
the right hand
holds the book
the left
the hand of the beloved
each new page
is shared

снимането на ангел
е много лесно:
просто кажи обичам те
преди да натиснеш копчето
 
photographing an angel
is very simple:
just say I love you
before you press the button

сънувах тарковски
седнал на пода
в детската ви стая
андрюша какво правиш тук
той мълчи
вцепених се от ужас:
ами ако ме попита
същото
 
I dreamt Tarkovsky
sat on the floor
in your children’s room
andryusha what are you doing here
he was silent
frozen in horror:
what if you asked me
the same 

(Translations by Thomas Hübner)

Vladislav Hristov is an extraordinarily versatile and talented poet/photographer/artist. He writes also interesting short prose, and it would be nice to see more of his works translated and published in other languages.

Ergo Books, his Bulgarian publisher, is to be congratulated for the efforts they are undertaking to promote contemporary Bulgarian poetry. Beside from Vladislav Hristov, they publish also the poetry of Jana Punkina, Miroslav Hristov, Jordanka Beleva, Dimana Ivanova, Palmi Ranchev, Maria Vasileva, Margarit Zhekov, Kamen Kostov, and Ivaylo Ivanov, amongst others.

Fi

 Vladislav Hristov: Fi, Ergo Books, Sofia 2013 (in Bulgarian language)

 

Günter Eich: Abgelegene Gehöfte. Schauer, Frankfurt am Main, 1948 (transl.: Poetry, Apr2009, Vol. 194, Issue 1, p37)

Theodore Roethke: Open House. Knopf, New York, 1941

Thomas Brasch: Die nennen das Schrei. Gesammelte Gedichte. Suhrkamp, Berlin, 2013

Erich Fried: Es ist was es ist. Wagenbach, Berlin 1983 (transl.: http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.com/2009/06/coming-soon-erich-fried.html)

William Carlos Williams: The Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909-1939. New Directions, New York, 1991

Matsuo Basho: Poems, e-book 2004 (http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/matsuo_basho_2004_9.pdf)

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Best Chess Novels

There are more than two hundred belletristic works in my library in which the game of chess plays a more or less important role. Here I have chosen the – in my humble opinion – thirty best novels with chess as one of or the main topic (randomly sequenced):

 

The DefenseEine gefaehrliche BegegnungTactics of Conquest

  1. Vladimir Nabokov: The Defense
  2. Fernando Arrabal: The Tower Struck by Lightning
  3. Rudolf Jakob Humm: Spiel mit Valdivia
  4. Stefan Zweig: The Royal Game
  5. Ichokas Meras: Stalemate
  6. John Brunner: The Squares of the City
  7. Barry N. Malzberg: Tactics of Conquest
  8. Walter Tevis: The Queen’s Gambit
  9. Robert Löhr: The Chess Automaton
  10. Bertina Henrichs: La joueuse d’echecs
  11. Elias Canetti: Auto-da-fe
  12. Paolo Maurensig: The Luneburg Variation
  13. Thomas Glavinic: Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw
  14. Fabio Stassi: La rivincita di Capablanca
  15. Ronan Bennett: Zugzwang
  16. Wilhelm Heinse: Anastasia or The Chess Game
  17. Gustav Meyrink: The Golem
  18. Samuel Beckett: Murphy
  19. Guillermo Martinez: Regarding Roderer
  20. Andy Soltis: Los Voraces 2019
  21. Ernst Jünger: A Dangerous Encounter
  22. Friedrich Dürrenmatt: The Chess Player
  23. Yoko Ogawa: Swimming with Elephants
  24. Ilya Ilf/Evgeny Petrov: The Twelve Chairs
  25. David Szalay: The Innocent
  26. Jesse Kraai: Lisa
  27. Jennifer DuBois: A Partial History of Lost Causes
  28. Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
  29. Ignacio Padilla: Shadow without a Name
  30. Arne Danielsen: The Highest Rank

Just for the record, there is at least one excellent novel available in English translation that is featuring the game of Go: Kawabata Yasunari, The Master of Go (trans. by Edward Seidensticker), Vintage.

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.