MURAKAMI RYU'S TOXITOWN AND THE REAL LIFE STORY OF OKUNOSHIMA

It is a long time since I have read this book but the image of Toxitown has stayed with me. In terms of environmental catastrophe, this book examines the legacy of a murderous military past with a hidden dump of chemicals off the coast of the southern islands of Japan and the resentment of two young boys, Kiku and Hashi, abandoned in coin lockers in the early 1970s. Life is cheap, especially in Toxitown where the dregs of human society eke out a brutal existence in the shadow of the skyscrapers in West Shinjuku. The repeated image of corpses reduced to a red blob, drive the plot forward as the boys come face to face with their past.

Raised as orphans on a small island to the south, Kiku and Hashi know little about their past except for the fact that they were abandoned. When Hashi runs away to Tokyo, Kiku and his foster mother come looking for him. In one of the first of the red doll images, Kazuyo dies after being knocked to the ground in the streets. After wrapping her corpse up in a sheet like a mummy Kiku describes her in the morning:

"Kazuyo's body had apparently bled from the mouth during the night, dyeing the top half of the mummy a deep rust colour and laminating the sheet to the skin so that Kiku could see every detail of the  face and chest" (p 85, Translated by Stephen Snyder)

As a result Kiku feels claustrophobic until he wonders if 'he too was a hard red doll draped in a sheet?' The sounds from a demolition site fill the air until he imagines the city calling to him to destroy it and he is given a sense of freedom. He imagines the city 'as a sea of ashes, bloodied children wandering among the few surviving birds and insects and wild dogs...' Filled with a murderous rage, this is just the start of his plan to unleash an apocalypse on Tokyo, a plan that can now be realised through Kiku's discovery of the truth about DATURA, a chemical stockpiled by the Americans in a cave on his faster-mother's island. Significantly, he is briefly united with his mother, and kills her in what is described as an accident by the courts. What is most significant is the description of her death. He pulls the trigger and:

"A second later, her face had been ripped away and her arms spread open as she collapsed into the same crouch as before, covered now with what might have been a bright red sweater. her head was just a smooth globe with no trace of eyes, nose, lips, ears, or hair. The globe tilted at Kiku, and a muddy red pool drank in the snowflakes from the sky, giving back a fine, faint steam" (p 211, Translated by Stephen Snyder).

Human life is reduced yet again to a sticky red doll image set off by a family dispute. This combination of the breakdown of the family, the willingness of mothers to abandon their young, a world where obscene amounts of money lead to an inflated sense of self worth whilst the legacy of the past is stockpiled in piles of abandoned chemical weapons is a recipe for disaster and Toxitown is the end result.

Whilst Murakami indulges himself to some extent in a one-sided polemic against the U.S., the reality is that today the Japanese on the southern islands are facing a deadly legacy from the war that was created by their own military. The island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Hiroshima. was used by the Japanese military to create and store the chemical weapons it used on nearly two thousand occasions in China. According to activist Yamauchi Masayuki, 6,000 tonnes of mustard gas were manufactured here as well as lewisite gas, mustard gas and tear gas. After the war, much of it was buried by American and Australian troops. Two ship loads, however, were sunk in barrels at sea. A worker at the time, one of 6,700 Japanese employed at the plant, recalls that the lives of workers was secondary to the production targets set by the military. They had no protection gear and just wore cotton masks. Breathing in arsenic trioxide led to cancer rates in the workers 3 to 4 times the average. Apart from demanding compensation, Fujimoto has been to China three times to personally apologise for war crimes that he feels he helped to commit against the Chinese people. As for the barrels of poison gas, they sit quietly at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be disposed of properly. This is the real Toxitown that the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge.

YASUNARI KAWABATA VERSUS NATSUME SOSEKI ON THE GAME OF GO

I was very lucky to find a nice first edition copy of the English translation of The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari in the Bookends bookshop in Carlisle earlier this year. What a fabulous book shop. Three floors of meandering rooms that you can easily get lost in. I did whilst killing time waiting for the bus to Furness to start my hike along Hadrian's Wall. But that's another story... 

Kawabata says of the master "He had the good fortune to be born in the early flush of Meiji. Probably never again will it be possible for anyone - for say, Wu C'hing-yuan of our own day - knowing of the vale of tears in which the Master spent his student years, to encompass in his individual person a whole panorama of history... He was the symbol of Go itself, he and his record shining through Meiji, Taisho and Showa, and his achievement in having brought the game to its modern flowering The match to end the career of the old master should have had in it the affectionate attention of his juniors, the finesse and subtlety of the warrior's way, the mysterious elegance of an art, everything to make it a masterpiece in itself, but the master could not stand outside the rules of equality" (Translation by Edward G. Seidensticker).

Kawabata says of the Master's game "The Master had out the game together as a work of art. It was as if the work, likened to a painting, were smeared black at the moment of highest tension. That play of white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony as of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. That Black 121 having been a source of wonder and surprise and doubt and suspicion for us all, its effect in cutting the flow and harmony of the game cannot be denied" (Translation by Edward G. Seidensticker).

Soseki's description of the game in I am a Cat "Since I know little of the world outside my master's house, it was only recently that I clapped eyes on a go board. It's a weird contraption, something no sensible cat would ever think up. It's a smallish square divided into myriad smaller squares on which the players position black and white stones in so higgledy-piggledy a human fashion that one's eyes go askew to watch them. Thereafter, the devotees of this strange cult work themselves up into a muck-sweat, excitedly shouting that this or that rediculous little object is in danger, has escaped, has been captured, killed, rescued, or whatever. And all this over a bare square foot of board where the mildest tap with my right, front paw would wreak irrevocable havoc. As Singleman might quote from his compendium of Zen sermons, one gathers grasses and with their thatch creates a hermitage only to find the same old field when the thatch is blown away" (Translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson).

'NATSUME SOSEKI'S: I AM A CAT'

I am a Cat by the twentieth century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki is a great read. It is a sprawling and scathing satire of a school teacher written by his cat. There are descriptions of his friends, neighbours and family all designed to show him in the most grotesque possible light. He, of course, can't see any of this. Some of my favourite episodes include;

 

1. The narrator reflecting on his own role in the observation of the ongoing disgrace of his master: "I sometimes think I really must be blood-kin to that monster cat one sees in ancient picture books. They say that every toad carries in its fore-head a gem that in the darkness utters light, but packed within my tail I carry not only the power of God, Buddha, Confucius, Love, and even Death, but also an infallible panacea  for all ills that could bewitch the entire human race" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1, Chapter 3). 
 
2. The narrator's description of his master the school teacher: "The others in the house think that he is terribly hard-working. But actually he works lees hard than any of them think. Sometimes I tiptoe to his study for a peep and find him taking a snooze. Occassionaly his mouth is drooling onto some book he has begun to read. He has a weak stomach and his skin is a pale yellowish color, inelastic and lacking in vitality. Nevertheless he is a great gormandiser. After eating a great deal, he takes some taka-diatase for his stomach, and after that, he opens a book. When he has read a few pages, he becomes sleepy. He drools onto the book. This is the routinue religiously observed each evening" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1 Chapter 1.) 
 
3. A descritpion of the master's blanket: "It makes a squalid hut, whose only distinctions are the tufts of shepherd's purse sprouting from its roof, no less gaily warm  than, for all its solid comfort, the Goldfield's mansion. I am, however, obliged to confess that that blanket jars with the day's spring feeling. No doubt its manufacturer meant that it should be white. No doubt, too, it was sold as white by some haberdasher specializing in good imported from abroad. No less certainly, my master must have asked for a white blanket at the time he bought it. But all that happened twelve or thirteen years ago, and since that far-off Age of White, the blanket has declined into a Dark Age where its present color is a somber gray. No doubt the passage of time will eventually turn it black, but I'd be surprised if the thing survived that long. It is already so badly worn that one can easily count the individual threads of its warp and woof. Its wooliness is gone and it would be an exaggeration, even a presumption, to describe this scrawny half-eroded object as a blanket" (translated by Aiko Ito and Grameme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 1).
 
4. On the nature of the narrator's difference to his master: "All created things are entitled to demand of their Creator some rest for recreation. We are born with an obligation to keep going while we can, and if, like maggots wriggling in the fabric of this world, we are to keep on thrashing about down here, we do need rest to do it. If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest. Even my master, that timid but complaining crank in the grinding mechanism of our national education, sometimes though it costs him money, takes a weekday off. I am no human cog. I am a cat, a being sensitive to the most subtle shades of thought and feeling. Naturally I tire more quickly than my master" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 2).