MURAKAMI HARUKI: 'THE STRANGE LIBRARY" AND THE RETURN OF THE SHEEP MAN

Murakami’s latest book in English is interesting for a number of reasons: its brevity, its pictures and the return of an old, favourite character the Sheep Man. Its shortness means that the plot is quite simple. Whilst the idea that reading makes the brain creamy to the taste might put some children off reading, it is a dark fantasy in which parallel worlds are jumbled up and what belongs in this world one minute doesn’t belong the next. As his pet starling dies in order to secure his release from the strange library so too his mother passes away soon after he notices “shadows gathering around her.”   

The pictures are also very much part of the story. As the narrator reads the diary of an Ottoman tax collector and becomes the tax collector he experiences the sights and sounds of Istanbul. The book transports him to another time and another world despite having no knowledge of the language. The pictures come from the books in the library and they illustrate events in the narrative as they unfold.

Finally there is the character of the Sheep Man. It is impossible not to read this story and to have flashbacks from Pinball 1973 and the Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dnce etc. The whipping he receives at the hands of the old man in the strange library perpetuate the his ongoing struggles. The sacrifices he continues to make his equanimity all the more endearing. This is a story for the fans who fell in love with this character and never want to let go…

ANDO HANAKO x KYARY PAMYU PAMYU

Oshin the perennial favourite on Japanese television seems more and more incongruous in this era of the empowered female. Think Kyary Pamyu Pmayu the queen of the Harajuku girls and female gender identity in Japan does not look like there will be a return to the self-sacrifice embodied in the Oshin narrative. Whilst Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is the latest in a long line of examples of the New Japanese Woman, the NHK production about Ando Hanako, the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables, shows that there is a still a fascination for the traditional Japanese female stereotype. The NHK story has Hanako growing up in a poor farming family with no education until her father comes home and sends her to primary school. From there she is sent to a girls school in Tokyo where she is forbidden to speak Japanese. Typical of the era, the rules were strict but for those who adapted the rewards were great. Of course Anne of Green Gables had a powerful impact on young women all around the world. Simone de Beauvoir has written at length about the importance of this book to her during adolescence. This is the spirit with which the New Woman in Japan in the early twentieth century was imbued. The character of the New Woman developed (or degenerated, depending in your point of view) into the shojo of which the Harajuku girls are the latest manifestation. Interestingly, the spirit of Oshin is, however, not dead. Apart from the ongoing television series directed at those nostalgic for the traditional hard luck story of being born female in Japan, there is a group of mothers, survivors of the earthquake and tsunami in the Fukuoka region, who have made the news with their nuigurumi made from socks, named Onoko. These soft toy monkeys are sold to raise money for the victims of natural disasters. Supporters of the campaign include the actor Tsugawa Masahiko who starred in many of the late Itami Juzo's films. People who buy them hold parties and take toys on holidays and photograph them in famous locations. In this way traditional values and virtues of sacrifice and hard work endure in the age of digital technology and are propagated on social media displacing to some extent the idol culture and the slavish devotion to individualism that it promotes.

'THREE SISTERS': JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL 2014

'Three Sisters' was screening at ACMI as part of the 2014 Japanese Film festival.  It was a reasonably full house and after a short introduction it was into the film. The big screen was luxurious and lush compared to the flat screens that people's houses were filled with these days. The film walks a fine line between drama and comedy and somehow the women who ran the confectionary business Toraya in Kagoshima managed to keep their failed relationships with men in perspective. Except for the youngest sister Sakae, who was struggling to let go of the married men with whom she was having an affair. Namie, who has walked out on her husband in Tokyo, returns to the family home in Kagoshima but hardly has time to settle down before her husband arrives to ask her for a second chance. There is little encouragement for him at first but as time goes by the family warm to him and Namie slowly reconsiders her position. Or does she? She has prospects with a young publisher who has shown an interest in he as she tries to get her career going as an illustrator.

 

After the screening both producer Nishida Seishiro and director Sasabe Kiyoshi took some questions from the M.C. and the audience. They were asked questions such as whether the film reflected contemporary Japanese society? They were also asked if there were any problems with their portrayal of divorce in Japan?

"No" one of them replied through the interpreter. "In fact, the further south you go in Japan, the higher the divorce rate gets."

The audience laughed.

Then there was the scene at the airport when Namie wife meets her husband in the nick of time before he catches his plane. Whilst there is no indication that she will stay with him there is a lingering moment where the camera is focussed on her eyes. This is a scene filled with a pregnant but unspecified meaning teasing the audience to guess as to whether she will pursue a relationship with the young publisher or whether she will she return to Tokyo to be with her husband? Whilst the film left this open, current trends in Japanese society would suggest this is the last good-bye.

 

Producer Nishida suggested the film explores what is meant by family, and what is meant by marriage? The film also pays homage to his hometown in Kagoshima. The film is set at a time when small family businesses were closing down and being replaced by large shopping malls. Asked how it hard it is to get funding for film projects, he explained that he was able to get funding from local government, businesses and individuals after he explained that he wanted to film the local matsuri (festival) and introduce it to the world. 

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND JEAN PAUL SARTRE'S BIG TRIP TO JAPAN

Two old lefties who could never agree with anybody... Neither with the communists and definitely with those on the right. de Beauvoir was filled with loathing and hatred for her own country during the Algerian conflict. In the end thewy had to side with somebody and so it was the communists that they found the most common ground despite Stalinism and suppression of the facts about the camps. Trips to Cuba in the early 1960s helped give them faith in the goals of political solidarity. In 1966, however, they visited Japan for a three month period and were feted from one end of the country to the other (as they had been in Cuba). All Sartre's and de Beauvoir's books had been translated into Japanese and The Second Sex had been a best-seller.  On a boat to Beppu, de Beauvoir observed that Sartre was travelling with a camera for the first time in his life and "plied it with the ardour of a Japanese." Elsewhere she noted that Sartre had told reporters at a press conference that he held a very high opinion of the works of Tanizaki. Tanizaki's relationship with his wife had been as unconventional as that of Sartre and de Beauvoir. For a while, with her late, first husband's consent, she  had been Tanizaki's mistress. When Sartre met Tanizaki's widow, he questioned her about her late husband's sexual life. She told him that, "Tanizaki had wanted them both to try out some of the some of the practices described in his account of the blind female musician; at first she had refused, but then, because she admired him so, she agreed."

In her account de Beauvoir speaks about many aspects of Japanese life including the economy, religion, society and the arts. She writes about  Japanese temples and shrines, the Eta, sumo wrestling and both Noh and Bunraku theatre. In terms of her meetings with Japanese woman, de Beauvoir observed that women at one port did the work of unloading cargo from the boats. Questioning them she learned that as well as working seven days a week they also did all of the house work and were paid less than men. This was a widespread phenomenon in Japan; women received on average sixteen thousand yen a month compared to men who received thirty-five thousand yen. At that time, women represented thirty-five per cent of the Japanese work force. In the little town of Komamuto, de Beauvoir observed some men accompanied by geisha and noted that compared to other geisha that they had seen, these were "less stiff" and "sang cheerful songs, laughed a great deal, and put up with having their bottoms slapped." The author of The Second Sex did not seem to feel the need to make any adverse comment about this frivolous behaviour.

NAKAGAWA TAKASHI: KAIDOSUJI NO CHAKKUCHI SHINAI BLUES

Nakagawa Takashi is an old school rock n roller with Neil Young sideburns and some zeal for Neil Young style political activism. He started as a post-punk musician in a band called Newest Model and graduated to a more blended sound in a new band called Soul Flower Union, combining elements of rock and roll, Irish folk music and traditional Japanese music. After the Kansai earthquake in 1995, he set up a side band called Mononoke Summit which played the pre-war ching dong style of music on old style musical instruments allegedly to raise money for earthquake victim and to steal pre-war Japanese culture back from the militarists and to give it to the Japanese people. On his latest release Kaidosuji no chakkuchi shinai buru-su (At the Roadside: No Touchdown Blues), Nakagawa revisits material from throughout his career and gives it the old acoustic guitar treatment. The photos in the booklet show a sunset, a small country road (with a rusty side rail) and an old farmer's house. These are the roots that Nakagawa clings to in the fast paced world of mass media and commercialised newsfeeds. Roots that inevitably take Japanese people back to the homeland of the heart, the furusato. Nakagawa is a reminder of the atavistic role the balladeer once played, a little too opinionated to be a chronicler he is more the conscience for a generation that want quality of life rather than endless growth and consumption. In a nod to popular Japanese culture and perhaps to distance himself from fanaticism, he plays a version of the theme song to the film series Otoko wa tsurai yo (It's Tough being a Man).

In the credits it says:

 

"To everybody who has been supporting Nakagawa Takashi and Soul Flower's activities, Thanks! Cheers! This album is dedicated to resistance all over the world with no touchdown blues and to children everywhere."  

 

Every year in early December, Soul Flower Union do live shows in Osaka. These are a must-see for fans of live music that is aggressive, soulful and politically engaged. Japanese popular music has given us TAMA and it has given us Nakagawa Takashi. 

MATSUMOTO SHUNSUKE: PRIVATE SPACES IN PUBLIC PLACES

Matsumoto Shunsuke, was born in Shibuya, Tokyo but spent his childhood years in Northern Honshu, and lived in Hanamaki and Morioka city before moving to Tokyo at the age of 17. At this time, Tokyo was a new city having emerged from the ravages of the 1923 earthquake. Matsumoto, with his interest in Western painting and in particular in modernism, was well placed to paint this new city. In one of his early pictures called Machi (town), Matsumoto painted a montage with a blue background against which there are details such as the girl in the red dress, a man polishing shoes, a man with a soft hat, a clock tower and a café. It is like a dream like world. Later he painted New York featuring some scenes from downtown as well as the White House. In other paintings from this period, there are dark, sombre, secluded places devoid of people which raises the question of why he painted Tokyo like this? There is a feeling of isolation and loneliness in many of his paintings. The scenes are often of isolated spots such as bridges, garbage disposal centres, public toilets  and, in one case, some sewage outlet pipes into the Kanda River. Matsumoto also liked to paint the St Nikolai Cathedral near Ochanomizu. One picture was painted from such an angle that it puzzled critics for many years. The sketch books showed, however, that he had merged two views into one.

 

 

 

Matsumoto caught the Yamanote line train to get to many parts of the city he painted on canvas drawing lots of sketches and taking lots of photographs. He painted many scenes near various stations such as Ochanomizu, Suidobashi, Tokyo and Shinjuku. Near Tokyo station he painted the Yaesu bridge and in the background a series of chimneys that capture a sense of the rhythm  of the city. He also painted a pedestrian bridge near Yokohama station. The post-war version of the same bridge shows the destruction of the surrounding area and a jeep. It has been suggested that Matsumoto's attraction to bridges is based on the idea that bridges connect areas that are otherwise separated. Made from steel and concrete, they allow people to move freely from one side to another. With the nation embarking on the road to war during the 1930s, Matsumoto painted a monolithic vision of himself as an artist that suggests that he would not be so  easily subsumed into the self-sacrifice required for the war effort. Together with his wife Teiko he started a new drawing and essay magazine called Zakkicho. He published an essay on the subject of humanism. His wife also featured in his 'Portrait of the Artist'. Matsumoto Shunsuke died in 1948 at the age of 36. The parts of Tokyo that he painted include:

• Takebashi bridge
• Rooftops near Yoyogi Station, east exit
• White buildings near the Suidobashi station
• Miyoshoji river, near where Matsumoto lived
• Tokyo station, Yaesubashi
• Hijiribashi, Ochanomizu station
• Nikolai Cathedral, Kanda
• Shinjuku station, south exit stairway and public toilet
• Yokohama station, Tsukimibashi (pedestrian bridge) and public toilet
• Showadori bridge, Shinbashi

As a modernist, Matsumoto follows in the footsteps of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch whose famous painting 'The Scream' is also set on a bridge. Where the man in Munch's painting is the centre of attention, Matsumoto has turned to the surrounding city itself. The atmosphere he creates is one of isolation and loneliness. The line work he uses in Y shi no hashi (Bridge in Yokohama) allows him to suggest structures in the background whilst the fine lines add a sense nuanced detail in the foreground. These are contrasted with the heavy lines that he uses for the pedestrian bridge which give it a surreal, playful  presence like some gym equipment. An example of his fine line work can be seen in the 1948 work semi (cicada) which looks like something that Brassai, and his ilk with their predilection for graffiti might have been drawn towards.

 

 

THE SPACE ELEVATOR

Every now and then you hear something that has to be seen to be believed. And even then it is unbelievable... When Japanese scientists say that they will build a 96,000 kilometre elevator into space using nanotechnology making space rockets redundant you think okay, maybe this will work. Or, more likely, you will think how will it stay attached to the earth's surface? What if it is hit by a piece of space junk? How will it stay straight without getting tangled up in itself. As someone posted on a chart site, it would take a week to get there. Imagine being trapped in an elevator with 29 other people for a week? I guess it depends on what you mean by an elevator. Maybe it has cubicles and a bar and a restaurant... But if it is travelling at hundreds of kilometres to get the passengers to the station inside a week I guess comfort has to be sacrificed for speed. The Japanese have built and designed many amazing things in the post-war period from pocket transistors to the Sony Walkman, the video cassette recorder to instant noodles and the electric rice cooker, the blue ray disc and the compact disc, then there is the bullet train and the ninja robot. The list goes on.... The idea that we can catch an elevator into space, this one might outdo them all.