Book Review | Botchan by Natsume Soseki

Tags

book review, Botchan, Huckleberry Finn, japan, japanese, Matsuyama Ehime, Natsume Sōseki, Soseki, Tokyo

Botchan by Natsume Sōseki

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

‘Botchan‘ is an amusing account based on the ups and downs of the teaching profession which is closely related to Soseki’s own short-lived stint as a teacher in Matsuyama. It is one of the most widely read novels in Japan and I can see why; anyone who has ever been a student or a teacher can completely relate to the many naughty things teachers AND students get up to. Schools were and still are utterly insane environments, and will drive even the calmest person mad.

This is very much a summer read. It is mischievous and light-hearted with tones of Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn‘ running through it, as Botchan our slightly arrogant narrator, describes his early days as a juvenile delinquent and his karmic comeuppance as a pompous maths teacher. In the beginning Botchan comes across as a naughty kid who never really applies himself to his studies (unlike his brother) and is therefore always getting into all sorts of trouble. However, after his mother’s tragic death he learns to grow up pretty fast. His father and brother look upon him as a waste of space, yet Kiyo the family servant, treats him like a prince, always telling him how he will one day be a ‘great man’.

Never really having any real aims or goals, Botchan soon realises he must do something with his life. When his father dies and his brother sells the family house and moves away to set up his own business, Botchan decides to enroll himself in the Tokyo Academy of Physics, but even this is without any real enthusiasm. A few years later he is graduated and by chance offered the job of mathematics teacher in the backwater town of Matsuyama of all places.

On arrival he realises that Matsuyama is not as refined as Tokyo and it’s people (in his eyes) are equal to that of neanderthals. His observations of the townspeople, students and other professors of the faculty are hilarious as he gives his colleagues nicknames (he never refers to them by their real names anyway). The best thing about Botchan as a character is his inability to see his own shortcomings, yet he moans when bad things happen to him. His students torture him with names like ‘Red towel’ and tease him about his love of onsen’s and noodle bars.

Very soon he discovers that being a teacher means you cannot do whatever you want out of school hours. Living in such a small town means word gets around, and anyone who has ever taught will understand how your actions out of school could so easily be used against you. I found this to be a really faithful account of first-time teaching and how certain events still resonate today even though it was written back in 1906.

Highly recommended to all those entering the teaching profession for a bit of light entertainment. It will certainly take your mind away from all the lesson-planning and essay writing one needs to do during the ITT and NQT years!

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘In The Miso Soup’ by Ryu Murakami

Tags

Bret Easton Ellis, Frank, Haruki Murakami, in the miso soup, japanese horror story, Patrick Bateman, ryu murakami, Tokyo

In The Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Murakami channels Brett Easton Ellis in this Japanese psycho-thriller with his version of Patrick Bateman. Stockholm syndrome never felt so creepy!” – Zee, The Observer

Haha, only joking. If I were a hip, well-paid reviewer for say, The Guardian or The Times (I know, I know, delusions of grandeur!) this is what I’d want the publishers to display on the back-cover. What I’d also demand is that the book should come with a warning label; the kind they put on CD’s for explicit language. Not that anyone would actually heed it. If anything, it would serve as a homing beacon for spotty emo-goth teenagers to revel in this ‘Japanese’ blood-fest.

I decided to read this after I discovered it was Haruki Murakami‘s favourite author (no relation) but quickly realised that Ryu Murakami had little influence over the former’s writing. ‘In the Miso Soup’ is more in the calibre of Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’, but without the density of long, tedious descriptions of designer-wear. In fact, I’d like to call this a Japanese view on the dangers of Western people; Americans in particular. Murakami seems to have taken the classic American horror elements and placed them in a Japanese setting. Ryu then goes on to create some non-judgmental characters like Kenji and his girlfriend, and just lets the whole thing play out on the garish, neon-lit underworld of Tokyo’s red-light district.

The story centres around Kenji, a ‘tour-guide’ for foreigners aiming to make their way through the sleazy night-life of the city. One night he happens upon American tourist Frank, who hires Kenji for this purpose. But right off, Kenji knows that something is amiss. His feelings only grow stronger as Franks strange behaviour leads Kenji to assume that he might be the serial-killer-at-large that’s been rocking Japanese headlines for the past few days. It all comes to a head when Kenji realises the only way to deal with a man like this, is to try to understand him, and even sympathise.

I found the narrative to be of a sweet and sour mix that is so intrinsic to Japanese story-telling. There were moments of sheer horror, that were later tempered by humour and even pensive reflection. Frank is portrayed as a lardy, pasty, pale psychotic who, despite all his madness has some sort of coherent method to his murders. Like Bateman, there is a side of him that is completely inaccessible, his kill-zone area that operates outside of his will. Personally, I found him more realistic and relatable than Kenji, but was equally relieved that I couldn’t/ didn’t have access to that part of him. In essence, we realise that Frank’s solitude is probably one of the major factors of his being this way:

“… The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there”

As slimy and repulsive as Frank is (almost reptilian with his dead-pan expression) there is also a very human part to him that Murakami did well to bring out in the end. The chemistry between him and Kenji displays ‘stockholm syndrome’ at its best. In general, the Japanese do not treat horror the same way as the West. Which means they come up with more original material to scare by. The scare factor here wasn’t so much the bloodbath, the disseminated school-girl prostitutes or Frank himself, but the fact that Kenji relates to Frank far more deeply than he, or we, could ever imagine. It brings home the fact that serial-killers aren’t a world away from us. They were, perhaps, once ‘normal’. But sometimes something happens somewhere, the normal becomes singed, burned or corrupted. That plastic layer that is clamped over our sensitivity might become unhinged, and the poison of life gets under it; sullying the way we see the world around us.

Frank comes across as one such tragedy. He knows what he is, and confides in Kenji, tries to tell him what and why he does things. The effort alone is humbling really. What ultimately happens is that the two men learn that they are more similar than they think they are:

“Nobody, I don’t care what country they’re from, has a perfect personality. Everyone has a good side and a side that’s not so good …. What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what’s not good is that they can’t imagine any world outside of the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect…”

It is passages like this that really helped gel together what Murakami was thinking about. The divide between East and West, their methods and ways of doing things become a metaphor. Kenji and Frank meet, East and West collide. Like the left and right sides of a brain, the conscious and unconscious, they probe and attack each other until they come to an understanding. The inaccessibility of Japanese culture has been the subject of many novels and movies. ‘Lost in Translation’ is a firm favourite of mine in this respect. Tokyo city could be a major culture shock and a source of alienation if you don’t know what it’s all about. It’s a bewildering place, but not as bewildering as perhaps, the inner world of Frank the killer. Murakami manages to unite two opposing cultures who are both fascinated and terrified of the other, through some impressive role reversals.

In some respects, Kenji was more American than Frank and Frank more Japanese than Kenji. Both characters see their cultural ‘self’ in the other; and to them, it doesn’t make sense. If that’s not pure genius, then I don’t know what is.

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami

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book review, hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world, Haruki Murakami, japanese, Tokyo

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“You’re wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this.”

“I believe you,” she whispers after a moment. “Please find my mind.”

Even though I read this two months ago, I am still processing the many memorable, often beautiful and sometimes terrifying images that Murakami has left imprinted on my mind. As a Murakami fan, I have read enough of his work to establish an impression of his writing style; but ‘Hard Boiled’ has blown that to pieces.

This novel is one that challenges notions of the psyche, memory and self. It plays around with theories of Quantum Physics as the story is batted back and forth from one separate, insulated world to another. Can a person exist in more than one place at a time? If so, what happens when one entity becomes aware of the others existence? What would you do if you were caught in such a dilemma? What happens when that much-needed membrane of ignorance is broken?

Murakami, with his fistful of crazy characters and seemingly random symbols and metaphors grapples with these and other off-the-wall questions by constructing a hybrid narrative that is part cyber-thriller and part folkloric mythos. As the chapters alternate from one reality (or unreality) to another, the reader begins to see surreal correlations between the two worlds.

Right and left, left and right. Like two sides of a brain that run side by side, but can never be reconciled or come in contact with each other; so the two nameless protagonists of this story begin by skirting along the veil between the conscious and unconscious worlds. On one side lies the Hard Boiled Wonderland; the metropolitan hubbub that is Tokyo city. On the other is the End of the World; a haunted village where shadows wither and die and strange golden beasts graze the plains. Two men exist in these places; two men who begin to question the laws of the places they live. On the periphery of their senses, they both feel the presence of the other and so begins a battle of awakening.

The delicate symmetry between the realities is juggled with expertise by Murakami, who in this novel is beginning to show that he is very capable of managing a large and eclectic cast of characters. What I found enjoyable was the ‘merging’ of the two worlds and especially the originality of the more fantastical aspects of the story. It was nice to see some Japanese mythological creatures appearing in unexpected places (the INKlings or kappa make many appearances).

This is one of those books that one can’t really talk that much about. Saying anything more about the plot or characters would give away a lot of spoilers. But one thing is for sure, this is definitely worth reading, if only for the cliffhanger ending.

View all my reviews

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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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