Hello Japan! November Mini – Challenge…

Tags

After Dark, akira, anime, gackt, ghibli museum, ghost in the shell, hanami, hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world, Haruki Murakami, in the miso soup, japan, okinawa, ryu murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, Tokyo, tokyo tower, wind up bird chronicles

NOVEMBER MINI-CHALLENGE: Five Questions

Hello Japan! is a monthly mini-challenge focusing on Japanese literature and culture. hosted by ‘In Spring It Is The Dawn’. Each month there will be a new task which relates to some aspect of life in Japan. Anyone is welcome to join in any time. You can post about the task on your blog. Or if you don’t have a blog, you can leave a comment on the Hello Japan! post for the month. Everyone who completes the task will then be included in the drawing for that month’s prize.   

This month’s challenge is a good one. We get to answer five questions relating to Japan and Japanese culture. Here goes!

1. My favourite Japanese tradition is manga because:

I just love art, and manga is probably the first contact I ever had with Japanese culture. A person can learn so much about a country and it’s people by studying its various art forms and manga is so uniquely Japanese that no other culture can copy it. Cult classics like ‘Akira’ made me a firm fan of cyberpunk literature and made me more aware of the dangers of technology, social isolation, corruption and power. This, and a wonderfully complex storyline between Tetsuo and Kaneda led me to look for similar stories like ‘Ghost in the Shell’.   

2. The best Japanese movie I’ve seen this year is:

 

‘Zatoichi’ starring Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano. It’s an excellent version of the blind swordsman who comes into a small Japanese town to kick gangster butt. It also stars the awesome Tadanobu Asano. It’s set during the feudal Edo period. It has ronins, geishas and lots of great sword-fighting, so its well worth a look at if you get the chance.

3. What Japanese author(s) or book(s) have you enjoyed that you would highly recommend to others?

Nothing comes close to Haruki Murakami. 2010 has been a good year for reading his books as I’ve got to know him better as a writer. I would recommend ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’, ‘After Dark’ and ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ as an introduction to his work. I am currently reading ‘Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ and ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles’. So far, they are both turning out to be excellent!  

4. What is something Japanese that you’d like to try but haven’t yet had the chance?

I’d love to try Miso Soup ever since I read the novel ‘In The Miso Soup’ by Ryu Murakami. I would also love to try on the traditional Japanese costume and go through the tea ceremony.  I’m a teaholic, and Japan is THE place to do some serious tea-tasting! Just thinking about it is putting a smile on my face!

5. You’re planning to visit Japan next year. Money is not a concern. What is on the top of your list of things you most want to do?

 

 

This is a VERY long list. First off I’d probably stay a few months (considering how long the journey is) so I’d start off with ‘Hanami’ or the cherry blossom viewing in March. It would be a perfect time to go as I’d also celebrate my birthday there. We’d pack our bento lunches and go sit in the park with all the other watchers. Then I’d visit Tokyo’s various districts: Ginza (shopping), Akihabara (electronics), Harajuku etc and some of the old temples that are located in the capital. Something tells me praying there would do me some good. There is also the Ghibli Museum I’d like to see. It’s very hard to get tickets, but because I’m such a fan of Ghibli films it’s an absolute must. I’d also go and visit the Tokyo Tower. I heard that young couples go there and sit under it. If you stay long enough and the lights go out, then its a sign that you’ll stay together forever.

Finally, towards June (I said I was staying a few months), I’d go over to the Okinawa islands as I’ve heard it’s a sub-tropical paradise. A bit of swimming, some fishing; perfect. Nothing like rounding up my Japan pilgrimage by visiting the birth place of my Japanese rock hero Gackto-san!

That’s my questions answered. What about you?

Book Review | ‘After Dark’ by Haruki Murakami

Tags

7/11, After Dark, book review, full moon, Haruki Murakami, japanese horror story, Koji Suzuki, love hotels, nocturnal, Norwegian Wood, Paul Auster, Tokyo, Travels in the Scriptorium

First of all, I think everybody should read ‘Norwegian Wood’. It’s not particularly vital that they understand it, but it would do them good to take a little trip down the back-alleys of frustrated love and deathly longing that Murakami is so good at writing about. Another reason they should read it, is because when they come to ‘After Dark’, they will appreciate the maturity of Murakami as an author and his mastery in the art of saying so much, with so little.

 

This is a novel I struggle to place. Murakami seems to straddle several genres, using different elements from each, enmeshing them in his own way to form a narrative that flows delicately from one character to the next. As the title suggests, the novel explores the strange nocturnal activities in the city of Tokyo. We are introduced to Mari, yet through her a string of other characters begin to form odd, disjointed relationships with one another.

Sometimes by past events, other times by chance and occasionally through indirect technological encounters, Murakami’s characters lead us through very personal, tragic and often unintelligible moments of their lives. This attempt at emulating Koji Suzuki is not uncommon; as Paul Auster demonstrated a similar, yet more subtle version of this in his novel ‘Travels in the  Scriptorium’. For example, Murakami’s way of making two seemingly unrelated characters interact with one another could be through a mobile phone (one character loses her phone, the other by chance discovers it in a supermarket and answers a call). Or one scene might end with a character watching a program, and the next begins with another character watching the same show.

As I read, I got a sense that this was a detective story that didn’t want to be solved. In fact, I think things are better that way with a story like this, where characters begin in a state of limbo and leave without much change in their status. It was refreshing to watch them get pulled into the ebb and flow of a fate they have no control over. They often found themselves in ridiculous situations like love hotels and 7/11’s, criss-crossing each other’s lives like busy city traffic, oblivious to the fact that they are part of a much bigger, chaotic storyline. These are characters that feel their lack of control, yet they can sense a frustration similar to theirs being suffered somewhere on the periphery of their ‘vision’. While the full moon turns their actions and intentions into lunar paranoia; the characters themselves enjoy being on the edges of sanity. By no means are these characters incapable of happiness, it is fully in their means to be so. Yet it is the choices they make that put them in the position they are in.

Murakami has offered up an intense, yet deliciously frustrating plot due to its lack of a good ending. There are many questions left unanswered in the reader’s mind, and I think this was intentional on the author’s behalf. The narrative also changes form, veering from a ghost-story to a crime novel, and then hitting the well-known notes of a classic Japanese horror story. It is in fact neither of these, but the expert use of them in subtle, suggestive ways that enable a reader to create their own answers to the questions.

This short novel will stay with you for a long time, often making you wonder just how he did it.

I give this 4/5 stars.

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