SAYAKA MURATA'S 'CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN'

The idea of someone working in a convenience and finding this is the place where they feel most comfortable is a revelation. Going to Japan for the first time recently a young friend listed the following items as what they would  like to bring home with them to Australia; convenience stores, vending machines and onsen.

The convenience store in Murata's novel is not just a haven for foreigner's looking for snacks, however, it is also a haven for those Japanese who don't fit in. For their former school mates and families it is incomprehensible that this kind of shift work for high school and college students can become a fulfilling job for an adult.

The work itself is menial and low-skilled. Shift workers need only memorise where the products go on the shelves, how to manage the register during rush hour and how to speak to customers. To do these things with any more than basic zeal or diligence is absurd. There are no plaudits to be won by excelling in the job. In fact to excel this kind of jobmis to be marked out as one of the strange ones. And in Japanese society this must be avoided atcall costs.

This bleak commentary on so-called 'normal' society in Japan is not bitter. It is life affirming and the protagonist Keiko has an answer for most of the problems her friends and family present her with. In fact, it is Keiko who proves resourceful when others struggle. Shiraha observes that, "we are all animals..." and that "this is a dysfunctional society. And since it's defective, I'm treated unfairly."

Keiko notices 'water dripping through his fingers' and takes him to a nearby family restaurant. She gets him a jasmine tea but only drinks hot water herself because she 'didn't really feel any need to drink flavored liquid.' Later he is angry at her because he wanted coffee.

Keiko is as distanced from any need for self pity as she is from the basic comforts that the people around her need. Keiko exists in splendid isolation but makes herself essential at work and is happy to play the part of the 'convenience store worker'. When she proposes to Shiraha to solve both their problems. She is sick of being asked when she was going to get bbn married. Shiraha is resentful but moves in with her. Keiko is bbn glad when he has a shower because he stinks.

OSONAE

A big lipsticked face appears
In front of your eyes,
Your ears twitch
But you remain resigned.
The face buries itself in your fur,
It wants a kiss -
Unblinking you stare into space.
The face withdraws,
In its place, a green vegetable
Is put in your cage.

The crowds gather
At the big Buddha
Down by the sea,
They leave their votive offerings;
Sake and rice wine
Oranges and green tea.
The Big Buddha
Stares unmoved,
The crowd swells
As more people arrive.

YOSHIMOTO BANANA AND ME

'NEW WAYS OF BEING' : WHY YOSHIMOTO BANANA MATTERS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

When I first read Yoshimoto Banana"s 'Kitchen' it was a book that immedately drew attention to itself because it covered theses such as sexual diversity, alienation and coming of age. I read the book in English and after studying Japanese at university and living and working in Japan for a couple of years I read the book in Japanese. I started a Masters degree and decided to make a comparison of the original text and the English translation. The point of the comparison was to look at how a story changes when it is translated from one language to another. How we speak is central to how we communicate.

By this stage in my life I was working full time as a high school teacher and had married. My wife was from Osaka in Japan. The school I was teaching at had many students from an Arabic background. There was a lot of tension in the Australian community and media at the time due to the first Gulf War. Teaching was a challenge and as the school struggled with the racial mix of the student population I continued with my Japaese studies at Swinburne University.

At that time schools and the wider Australian society were very conservative. Issues to do with bullying, sexism and sexual diversity were not well understood and generally hidden. To be called a 'fag' was a common insult and the word 'gay' was used as a general term of disparagement. It was a bleak environment in terms of sexual diversity. And yet the great irony is that the Arabic Australian community was under seige. By the time the second Gulf War came along and especially after the terrorist attacks on the WTO towers in New York Islam was the most feared religion in Australia. Muslim girls had their scarves pulled off in public and were spat upon. Banana Yoshimoto's novel seemed like it had come from another world and yet things were slowly changing.

Capital punishment had been banned and homosexuality decriminalised and anti-discrimination laws were passed in the 1970s but schools were still very traditional institutions in which boys were boys, girls were girls and 'fags' despised. Teachers saw their role as being defined by the subjects they taught and there was only limited attention paid to the well being of students.

The big change came in the new millenium. The school I had spent fifteen years in finally closed. It had been shrinking each year during that time and a relocation and three name changes and two separate mergers had done little to change public perceptions about the school. It was still known as 'Beirut High School' and Anglo families sent their children to different schools. It had effectively become a ghetto. Eventually right wing commentators in the media sniffed that something was up and Andrew Bolt used the school to make one of his attacks on Muslims on the Herald Sun newspaper. It was a relief when the school community voted to close the school.

At my new school which was three kilometers away things were very different. The students achieved good results and the community valued the school. The whole school felt calm and there was no need for a police presence to help build better comminity relations. After the Cronulla race riots in Sydney there was also a perveption more needed to be done to build a cohesive society. When students started celebrating sexual diversity on 'Rainbow Day' I had my doubts but change was the order of the day. Change that Yodhimoto had written about in her novels fifteen years earlier.

'Rainbow Day' is a celebration of sexual diversity. When students supported by shool services started celebrating this day I was sceptical. The world Banana Yoshimoto explored in her novels seemed very distant to the world I was living in. The characters in novels like 'Kitchen' seemed isolated and their concerns far removed from the mainstream. Little by little, over a ten year period, I realised that Rainbow Day was far from being of limited interest to only a few. The Safe Schools coalition and Same Sex Marriage plebiscite showed that there were huge social changes taking place in Australia. In surveys young people saw equal marriage rights as their number one political priority. Some heterosexual couples even argued against marriage unless everybody enjoyed the same rights.

With the advent of 'Rainbow Day" and the Safe School coalition there are also more fundamental changes to the way schools work as institutions. The idea that boys are boys and girls are girls was being questioned. Yoshimoto Banana identified and explired these issues three decades ago. And while I first read the books and responded to them on an rmotional level, my focus in my Ph D thesis was on the ecocritical aspects of her writing in her later work. Looking at 'new ways of being' from a post-human perspective. A better topic would have been to explore the ways in which these novels were exploring new ways of being in terms of exual diversity and how social change allowed society to be more flexible and recognise the rights of individuals even in conservative rule based settings like schools. In Australia, the issues Yoshimoto Banana explores in relation to sexual diversity, domestic violence and abuse and the need to focus on well being and healing are now core issues rather than add ons that schools struggle to address.

When I started teaching in 1989, teachers focussed mainly on the content of their subject areas. Today teachers are expected to consider the whole child. The well being of the child is seen as being central to their academic progress. This means more than just expecting a student to ignore bullies or sexual harassment. There are now expectations that teachers create a learning environment that supports all students. To do this teachers are now asked to start using non- genderbinary pronouns in classrooms. They are also expected to recognise that not all students come from traditional families. Teachers are also expected to recognise signs of bullyong and take steps to prevent this from happening. They are expected to educate students about the importance of schools being safe for all students and caution them about the use of homophobic language. Uniforms are no longer labelled as 'boys' and 'girls' uniforms but as 'summer' and 'winter' uniforms. Finally there are toilets labelled 'boys', 'girls' and 'unisex' for those students who identify with neither gender or are transitioning.

And so the world I live and work in in Australia has slowly started to recognise the 'new ways of being' that Yoshimoto Banana started to explore iin her writing in the late 1980s. When I first read her work there was some reluctance to take it seriously as literature. It was criticised for being 'lightweigth' and superficial.. After discussions with my Ph D suprrvisor Darren Tofts at Swinnurne University I argued that her writing should be seen as an example of a relatively new genre that had emerged in the postmodern landscspe referred to as 'paraliterature'. It engaged with ideas like literature but in a language close to that of everyday use. My focus was on the reconnection with nature in her later writing due to the negative affects of living in modern urban environments. Now, based on my experiences teaching in high schools for the last thirty years, I think it is the 'new ways of being' that she explored so early in her career that are the most relevants aspects of her writing given the social changes that have occurred in recent years. In Australia these are social changes that I could not imagine wgen I first started reading Yoshimoto Banana. This is why I believe she is the biggest selling Japanese novelistr in the Heisei period. Her achievement is far more substantial than her critics first imagined.

SUKITA MASAYOSHI: THE SHOOT MUST GO ON

The Japanese film festival is on again and this year one of the highlights is the documentary The Shoot Must Go On about the eighty year old Japanese photographer Sukita Masayoshi. Born in Nogata, a small mining town in Fukuoka prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Sukita moved to Osaka and became a photographer before moving to Tokyo. He was however to be drawn to London by his love of music and the emerging glam scene created by musicians like Marc Bolan – here of course he discovered the great inspiration of his life, David Bowie. There are the photos from 1972 of David at the Rainbow theatre and then later on, in Berlin and later on, on tour in New York. There are also the photographs of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Japan in 1977. There are lots of photos on the Hankyu train line between Osaka and Kyoto as well as photographs taken in and around the city of Kyoto that Bowie came to love. There are also photographs from the set for the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train and interviews with YMO whose album cover for Solid State Survivor was created on mahjong table at Sukita's studio. This game was big at the time so, in bright red uniforms designed by Takahashi Yukihiro, they sat down at the mahjong table but as there were only three of them Sukita brought in a human mannequin to be the fourth player.

Out of all his photographs, including the photographs of Bolan, Bowie and Iggy Pop not to mention a procession of various Japanese rock stars, it is a photo Sukita took of his mother sitting outside the family home in Nogata before going to participate in the local summer festival of which he is most proud. She is wearing a sedge hat and yukata, the profile is from the side and you can’t see her face. But this is the one photograph that he says brings together the best elements of his photography in a single image.

At age eighty Sukita is thinking of retiring. He might go back to Kyushu and live. In a 2016 shoot at the Royal Albert Hall he took photos of Iggy Pop's final tour for Post Pop Depression. Iggy stayed after the show for photos with the fans and he was praised in the media for turning the Albert Hall into an intimate club for the night. Sukita observed that in the early days photographing Bowie it was amazing how close the fans could get to him. There were shots of him performing in his underwear with the fans literally at his feet. By the eighties there were cameras with cranes going backwards and forwards in front of the stage and a huge distance had opened up between the performers and their audience. For Sukita who liked to photograph the interaction between the artist and their audience this was a cause for regret.

'MANBIKI KAZOKU' AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2018

The Japanese film 'Shoplifting' by director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a Melbourne Film Festival, quickly sold out this year. The queue to see the film stretched from the front of the Kino cinema to the steps and then up to the level on Collins Street above. The film had already won a number of important awards and was a 'must see' for fans of Japanese cinema. The poverty that the film explored was perhaps a novelty for many young cinema goers who see Japan as a first world economy. Those who have seen the films of the post-war period know that, for an older generation of film goers in Japan, it would bring back memories from not a not so distant past when the country was devastated by war.

In 'Shoplifting a young boy is shown teaching his young 'sister', a new addition to the household rescued from an abusive household, how to steal food from the local shop. Towards the end of the film the shopkeeper, who is forced to close, gives the boy some snacks and tells him not to teach her to steal. He has known all along how the young boy and his 'father' come to his shop in order to steal food but he has turned a blind eye. When the family is discovered by the authorities, they are living in an apartment that belonged to an old woman who died. To avoid discovery they bury her in the house. The body is subsequently discovered as is the body of the husband of the young woman who plays the role of the 'mother'. There is a media storm and the 'mother' takes responsibility and goes to prison. The film looks at how these people living below the poverty line in a big city like Tokyo survive. It looks at how they have to break the law in order to survive. The way these individuals form a 'family' unit in order to survive is reminiscent of the anime 'Tokyo Godfathers' by Satoshi Kon. This is another grim look at the Japanese under-class who largely remain invisible in everyday Japanese discourse despite their obvious visibility. This film puts them front and centre in a  film designed to prick the social conscience of a nation in which failure isn't an option and hasn't been since the twelfth century.

Another island nation built on a fault line that explores similar social dilemmas in film is New Zealand. In the film 'Boy by director Taika Waititi there is a similar family group experiencing poverty. While the grandmother is attending a funeral her son comes home from prison having formed a gang with a couple of mates. He proceeds to dig up a paddock where he has buried treasure. As more and more holes are dug his son dreams of joining the gang. He begins to steal marijuana from a crop next door for his father. This leads to a visit from a rival gang and a few heads are busted. When the grandmother finally comes home the children busily cover the holes in the walls of the house with their art work. The father finally visits his dead  wife in the cemetery is rescued living under a nearby bridge after he falls into the water. 

Both families in these two island nations are fringe dwellers but they all have their dreams and in their own way look out for each other. Whether state intervention or institutionalisation is the answer is doubtful. The young people and the adults who care for them form relationships that are caring despite the blatant disregard for the law. In both cases there is an absence of 'adult' figures apart from the grandmothers. The problem is that their 'children' have failed to become independent and self supporting. As a result the next generation experiences a debilitating poverty from which it is hard to imagine that they can escape.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA: MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

There was a queue at the cinema which quickly made its way back up the stair case to the street outside. Sakamoto may not be a household name in Australia but he is not unknown. After the tickets were scanned, a process ticket holders were allowed inside for the sold out screening. There was the usual as people found each other and then their seats and then the rustling of chip packets. Why cinemas advertise popcorn is beyond me - its not just the working of multiple surreptitious jaws that is offensive it is also the smell. Horrible. 

The documentary started with footage after  the tsunami in Fukushima and Sakamoto's discovery of the now famous piano the 'tsunami piano'. The tsunami was now way back in 2011 and precedes Sakamoto's discovery of a stage three throat cancer that stopped him playing and composing music while he underwent treatment. A call from Director Alesandro J. Inarritu soon had him back at work composing the soundtrack for The Revenant  as he admired his films so much.

The documentary ,looks at a career that started in the 1970s with electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. There is great footage from a live performance in America and an interview where he explains why he likes computers and synthesisers. Essentially he argues they can play the music a lot faster than the human hand and rather than sending decades learning to play that fast you can program a machine and focus on ideas instead. Very pragmatic! 

A lot of time is spent looking at footage from the Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and listening to sounds and music from his film Solaris. Sakamoto even had a copy of his collection of polaroids Instant Light. Sakamoto credits Tarkovsky with being a musician given the way he uses the sound of footsteps and water in his films. He is a composer. And post The Revenant soundtrack Sakamoto turned to Tarkovsky for inspiration especially in his use of Bach Chorales. Sakamoto finds a lot of melancholy in these which is not surprising given the wars and political instability not to mention the plague that racked Europe at the time.

Sakamoto's concerns about his own world emerged in the early 1990s when evidence of climate change first appeared. Sakamoto has subsequently appeared at demonstrations against nuclear power in Tokyo after the Fukushima earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. Recordings on the 'tsunami piano' have been used in the compositions for his latest CD.  He talks about the piano being a product of the Industrial Revolution in the way tat the case and the strings are made. When a piano is in tune it sounds natural to us he say but all of the components and the materials from which they are made have been forced into a particular shape to make those sounds. It is only natural that they will attempt to return to their natural shape. And the tsunami in Fukushima only helped speed up that return in the case of the 'tsunami piano'.

Along the way the documentary looks at the success Sakamoto achieved writing the scores for Merry Christmas Mt Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor. Unsure of his future post cancer, Sakamoto wants to leave work behind that has significance. He has traveled to Kenya to the site of the oldest human remains ever found in a search for the origins of the rhythms and sounds that have shaped music. he has also traveled to the North Pole to see the effects of climate change and taken sound recordings of pre-Industrial Revolution snow melting. The purest sounds you can imagine he says... 

In the documentary there is a scene where Sakamoto with his plays for tsunami survivors. His music has a global appeal but the history of the atom bomb in Japan, his politic activism and his concern for the environment give his work a strong local focus.  

THE REAL JAPAN: CLIVE JAMES VERSUS PETER CAREY

Over a lifetime the Australians Peter Carey and Clive James have made a name for themselves with their writing, one in London and the other in New York. Both, however, have had time along the way to contemplate Japan and the Japanese. Clive James made his television program Clive James in Japan in 1987 and in 1991 published his novel, Brmm Brmm. Peter Carey published a memoir about his trip to Japan with his son Charley in 2004, Wrong About Japan. Recently Peter Carey was in Australia to promote his new novel A Long Way from Home and I asked him if he was still wrong about Japan? 

"Always" was his reply.

In Brmm Brmm Clive James refers to a "a facetious commentary by an Australian in lamentable physical condition." This not so thinly disguised self-portrait is a good description of the Clive James that appears in his TV special on Japan as he takes viewers into the world of the capsule hotel, sumo wrestling and the giesha. James struggles but perseveres with the language as he is lost in admiration on his way to an appearance on Beat Takeshi's game show, Takeshi's Castle. James is a good sport and does his amiable best despite being lost in a culture without a suitable guide book. 

We see reverse culture shock in James' novel Brmm Brmm as a young Japanese man comes to terms with life in London. There is the tiresome humour of the British such as the endless jokes about his name, Suzuki, which lead to his nickname and the title of the novel. Elsewhere there are jokes about personal hygeine. He describes his trip to the English massage girls who "wore nothing under their nurses' uniforms." He observes that, "Their lack of cleanliness sometimes made him gag and even the pretty ones were no pleasure to the eye when one looked closely." He is then propositioned by a male journalist who he finds "physically repellent". He imagines his seducer in the tub and says, "The thought of a would-be seducer getting unwashed into the bath, and sitting there in his own scum, made Suzuki's face freeze." Clearly in James' mind cleanliness equals Japaneseness. And when you think about it. every great Japanese fim has a good cleaning scene with endlessly scrubbing. The best of these, perhaps, is the bath cleaning scene in the Miyazaki Hayao anime, Spirited Away. 

Ultimately for James, there is a fiundamental disconnect between East and West. When Suzuki reflects on Jane, his English girlfriend and Japanese women, there are similarities but these are quickly destroyed. "He tried to imagine her in Japanese traditional dress, slowely and meticulously laying out the utensils for the tea ceremony. The thought was instantly dispelled when she tore a lettuce to pieces without looking at it. He could hear the lettuce scream for mercy." Not all is lost, however, as Jane's body passes inspection despite the disorderliness of her life. "Suzuki was pleasantly surprised to find that in resepct of her person she was, by Western standards, scrupulously clean." Phew, that was a close call!

No such qualms about cleanliness for Peter Carey. His view of Japan is framed by his son, Charley's love of anime and manga. And Charley's one stipulation when the decision is made to visit Japan, is that they not visit the 'Real Japan'. In other words. "No temples. No museums." Upon arrival there is the inevitable humour that comes with discovery and disappointment. The traditional toilets that Tanizaki lauded are nowhere to be seen. Instead there are contraptions, "designed for a science-fiction comedy." Think Woody Allen when it was okay to laugh at a Woody Allen movie. Visiting a traditional Japanese sword maker Carey senior is disappointed that they were not shown a sword. "We were gaijin, capable only of hurting the sword or ourselves." Finally, after being bored to death at the kabuki and learning all about the war, Charley gets to visit Kodansha, the holy shrine where the world of Gundam is created. Here, Yuka, a transexual otaku, explains manga and anime to Carey senior. He learns that manga is not a postwar phenomoenon. It is in fact based on traditions like the kamishibai (paper theatre). And the real purpose of Gundam, is to sell robots. Having worked all that out, there is the, after all, inevitable bath scene. Naturally, there is no way that Charley is going to get into the bath naked with Carey senior. Carey blames the puritan aesthetic of their New York lifetsyle for this. He himself doesn't get into the communal bath either due to all the Toblerones and cognacs he has consumed over the years since his previous visit. This leads to the suffereing of a "private guilt over my incomplete experience of the Real Japan." The climax of the trip, however, comes after a viewing of the anime classic Tottoro. Despite advice to the contrary, Carey senior and Charley do get to meet Miyazaki Hayo on a visit to the Ghibli museum. Here the great man did a show-and-tell for them... Carey senior writes that as Miyazaki showed Charley the notebooks in his drawers, "He was the kamishibai man dashing his wooden blocks together and working the magic of paper film." And so everything comes together in a sublime magical moment that is Japan.