Unmapped Territories: New Women's Fiction from Japan, ed. Yukiko Tanaka (365 Books, Day 43)

[rushthatspeaks]

The word new in the title of this anthology refers to 1991, and the seven short stories in it came out in the eighties. I had heard of two of the writers-- Yūko Tsushima, whom I was aware of as the daughter of Osamu Dezai, and Eimi Yamada, whom I've run across anthologized somewhere or other; I had not heard of the other five, Kazuko Saegusa, Minako Ohba, Mizuko Masuda, Hikari Agata and Taeko Tomioka.

Yukiko Tanaka is the translator as well as editor. Possibly because of this, the stories are not similar in content, but they are quite similar in style. I don't think this drastically harms most of them content-wise, but Tanaka acknowledges in her preface that she is not attempting to convey things such as Yamada's habitual usage of non-grammatical English sentences interspersed with Japanese prose. The style of the book is a style I've seen before repeatedly in translated Japanese fiction, most recently with Banana Yoshimoto: short sentences, short paragraphs, smooth flow, and a lot of attempts to get around the fact that the ways Japanese thinks about time and the ways English thinks about time are really very different, leading to a sort of assuredly breathless non-linearity which may or may not be in the original. This is not a book I could forget that I was reading in translation, but I am not sure it should have been.

Tanaka's theme for the book is unmapped territories, and she also talks in the preface about the eighties as a decade of new experiences for women, the opening up of new roles and new desires and new attempts to communicate those. Given that commonality, the stories here are quite different from one another.

I liked best Minako Ohba's 'Candle Fish', which is set in Sitka, Alaska, and which uses myth very strikingly as both metaphor and deeper truth in a complex relationship between a Japanese woman living in Alaska as an expatriate and her divorced single-mother neighbor. It's luminous and precise and refuses to give any answers at all, let alone easy ones. It's also a genre-mesh, one of the several stories here which could be magical realism or actual realism or out-and-out fantasy-- I am ninety-nine percent certain that Kazuko Saegusa's 'The Rain at Rokudō Crossroad' is a ghost story, but I can't tell which of the two people in it is the ghost, or in fact much else except that it is not doing what one would expect and therefore I respect it even though I am confused. And Yūko Tsushima's 'The Marsh' is also reaching for myth as metaphor and explanation for the lives of the women in it, but it's much clearer that the myth is probably not literal truth and that bearing a child out of wedlock does not actually make anyone into the vengeful spirit of a river (well, not on the level of physical reality, at any rate). It's a pretty good metaphor.

B., whose book this is, thinks that Taeko Tomioka's 'Straw Dogs' has an oden shop in it that eats people, and I think that he is probably over-generalizing from the tendency that these stories have to explicate a situation and then lay it out again in one final conclusive all-encompassing image that does not contain a standard literary resolution, and consequently he is taking the image too literally. I could be totally wrong. Maybe the oden shop eats people. At any rate, this story is one of the two (along with Eimi Yamada's) which are sexual role-reversals and depict their female protagonists behaving in patterns that have been considered traditionally male. Tomioka's protagonist is a devotee of the one-night-stand and the story is principally focused on looking at the inside of her head and how her actions clash with the way women are culturally expected to behave, which is why I doubt it's magical realism, but again, I could be totally wrong.

Eimi Yamada's 'When A Man Loves A Woman', the other role-reversal, has one element which is incredibly awesome and one which is very troubling. The awesome bit, which I could have read an entire novel of cheerfully, is that its painter protagonist meets a young man who behaves exactly, exactly as female muses are supposed to behave to male artists generally, including the falling-in-love-for-no-particular-reason, moving in to take care of the house, having wild passionate sex once and then insisting that she conserve her energies for The Masterpiece, betraying no sexual jealousy towards her previous established relationship, selflessly vanishing into the sunset, etc. etc. and it was a merciless look at just how totally ludicrous this myth is and how unrealistic people are to expect it. The problem-- well. Tanaka says in her preface that this story has less objectification and prejudice about black people than one usually expects out of Japanese writers, and coming to the preface after having read the story (I usually read prefaces last if I care about what may happen in the plot) this caused me to wince uncontrollably. Not non-objectifying. If one is trying desperately to read it kindly, one may try to read the racial politics as part of the overall myth that the story is lashing out about. Unfortunately, I think that is probably pushing the latitude of the reading beyond all credibility and it made me sad.

The final two stories are both looks at ordinary life; Hikari Agata's 'A Family Party' is a perfectly competent and careful look at a family destabilizing and restabilizing as their neighborhood disintegrates around the building of a new high-rise hotel, and the fact that I don't care very much about this sort of thing doesn't mean that it wasn't very good; I could tell it was very good. If this is the sort of fiction you like you would like this very much.

And Mizuko Masuda's 'Sinking Ground' is the one that I think is simply a failure of translation, a mismatch between style and content, because I got the impression that it was constructing its heroine's life very carefully and subtly, the way that her perfectly ordinary life was lived entirely in districts of Tokyo that had been destroyed immediately after she moved out of them, that there was meant to be some kind of interaction between the way she was with men (letting them bully her, not letting them bully her) and the way she moved through the landscape and memory around her. But the language wasn't handling it, I could sense in the distance something going on and a kind of hypnotic boredom to it but when it reached the end the final image didn't take and it stopped instead of ending, fell flat and sank without a ripple. I don't think the anticlimax was the point, I don't think it was intentional. This one was so half-parsable that it made me wish I could read Japanese without spending half an hour on the kanji every sentence.

All in all this was an interesting collection, interesting in its failures as well as its successes. I could vaguely wish Tanaka had outsourced some of the translating just to get that difference in voice going, or varied her own a bit more, but this has given me several writers to try to track down-- there does appear to be a poetry collection by Minako Ohba in translation (though I have no idea whether I'll be able to find it), and I'd like to try different work by Mizuko Masuda, and both Eimi Yamada and Yūko Tsushima look very available. So. Worthwhile. And a snapshot of a certain moment in time, as it was intended to be.

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

This sounds really interesting, thanks.