#20BooksofSummer and #WITMonth: Oyamada Hiroko

I swapped out some books but still stuck to my categories for #20BooksofSummer and am now ambitious enough to plan to complete the challenge instead of being satisfied with just ten books, as I initially stated. This is because some of the books I wanted to read were not by women writers and I wanted to also fulfill the #WITMonth mission. This is an author whose surreal novel The Hole I read (but did not review) a while back, which obviously reminded me of Abe Kobo’s Woman in the Dunes. So I was curious to read more by her and found two short novels (more like novellas), one on my shelves, and one which I ordered second-hand.

17. Oyamada Hiroko: Weasels in the Attic, transl. David Boyd, Granta, 2022

This is actually a set of three inter-connected stories, featuring two male friends who’ve known each other since college. The narrator is married but they are struggling to conceive. His friend Saiki is not married at the start of the book. In the first story, one of Saiki’s friends, an avid fish-breeding specialist, dies and the narrator recalls a visit that they paid him a few months back, to see ‘a new addition to the family’. Saiki thinks he is referring to a new species of fish and brings a big bottle of booze, but it turns out to be his wife and newborn baby, which makes for awkward moments all around.

In the second story, Saiki has married and bought an old house in the countryside, but is struggling with an infestation of weasels. The visit starts off rather awkwardly but then help comes from an unexpected quarter: the narrator’s wife.

In the final story, Saiki and his wife Yoko have had a baby and the narrator and his wife come to visit them and find themselves detained by a snowstorm. The fish make a reappearance, and the narrator has a nightmare, which may be a good or bad omen.

I usually like the ambiguity in Japanese stories, but I felt there was perhaps a little too much left unsaid in these ones. While there were clear allusions to male friendships, masculinity and marital relationships, as well as parenthood, the stories simply did not feel substantial enough. I could have done with a bit more context, a few more details or a hint of a resolution. However, I liked the slightly uncanny vibes, and the feeling of perplexity that the men seemed to experience, while pretending that they know what’s going on.

18. Oyamada Hiroko: The Factory, transl. David Boyd, Granta, 2019

The second book by Oyamada worked far better for me, perhaps an indication that I’m much more attracted by books that are more openly about wider social issues rather than just family or friendship dynamics.

The factory is a sprawling organisation that seems to have taken over the whole town. Almost everyone in that town seems to be working there in some capacity – as are the three employees whose POV we experience in this short novel.

Ushiyama is a young woman who has been struggling to keep a job for longer than a year, although she is a university graduate. She is assigned as a contract worker to the Document Shredding department – and this is all she has to do: shred documents all day long. Her brother used to be a systems engineer but was made redundant, and his girlfriend, who works in a temp agency, managed to get him a job as a proofreader at the factory – but the documents he proofreads seem to lack any sense of urgency or completion. The two siblings have no idea initially that they are working in the same place, albeit one as a contract worker, the other as a temp. Finally, the third (full-time, permanent) employee Furufue is a biologist hired to examine all the different kinds of moss that exist on the vast premises of the factory. He is given accommodation and a lab to work in somewhere on the factory premises.

We take turns hopping from one narrator to the next, but they encounter many of the same characters and each other, and start questioning what the purpose of their work is and where the boundaries of the factory actually are.

Honestly, half the stuff they have me read doesn’t even make sense when I’m fully awake… Corporate profiles, operating manuals, booklets for children, recipes, text on everything from science to history… Who wrote this stuff? For what audience? To what end? Why does it need to be proofread at all? If these are all factory documents, what the hell is the factory? What’s it making? I though I knew before, but once I started working here I realized that I had no idea.

Written in 2013, after nearly two decades of a flatlining economy in Japan, this is a book that perfectly describes the anguish and lack of meaning experienced by those dubbed the Lost Generation, who left school between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, were unable to get permanent jobs, and ended up flitting from one low-wage, dead-end part-time job to another, often unable to move out and living with their parents, unable to afford getting married, increasingly disenchanted with their employers.

I should be grateful, right? Sure, it’s a job that anybody could do — even an old man or a guy with a bad leg. In that sense, maybe it’s not the best place for a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. Still, most people my age are holed up in their rooms with nothing to do. I want to work and I’m lucky enough to be able to. Of course I’m grateful for that. How could I not be? Except, well, I don’t want to work. I really don’t. Life had nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life. I used to think they were connected, but now I can see there’s just no way…

I can’t help feeling that this sense of alienation and cynicism about work has come to Gen Z in the Western world as well, after a decade or more of economic stagnation. I remember 15 years or so ago saying that I couldn’t find many books about office life, although that was where we spent most of our time. Nowadays, there seem to be far more of them getting published. This is not an office romance, however, nor a realistic novel – there are odd occurrences and surrealist touches wherever you look – reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett, as stated on the book flap, but it reminded me far more of The Room by Jonas Karlsson.

All in all, an interesting author of the quietly disturbing everyday that makes us question our lives. A relief from the more psychotically disturbing and sexually depraved Japanese literature that has been awarded literary prizes lately, but also a world removed from the cosy cat cafes and bookshops.

#20BooksofSummer: German crime fiction

One of the strands for my ten or fifteen or twenty books of summer were books about Berlin – but I went a little rogue, as I explained last time, and picked up some books at random from the library. Berlin is mentioned tangentially in them, but the main action takes place further north in Germany, on the Baltic Sea coast. One of them was quite good, the other a bit clichéed. I’m not going to review them in great depth, since neither of them are likely to be translated into English, otherwise the second of them would also qualify for #WomeninTranslation Month.

15. Eric Berg: Das Nebelhaus (House of Fog), Blanvalet, 2013

This book was the debut crime novel of Eric Walz (written under a not hugely different pseudonym), better known for his historical novels. It was well received and became a Spiegel bestseller (equivalent to a NY Times bestseller I suppose) and he has written more since, all set on the Baltic coast near Stralsund. This particular one is set on a small island called Hiddensee, which I thought at first was fictional, but it turns out to be real, and a bit of a magnet for artists and writers (Gerhart Hauptmann had a villa there, now a museum). There’s a documentary out now in the cinema about this island and I’m now obsessed with visiting it.

It’s about four friends who used to be student activists and protesters in Berlin in their youth but have drifted apart since. Fifteen years later, they reconnect via Facebook, and Philipp, who has now become a renowned architect, invites them to his villa on Hiddensee. Timo is a rather unsuccessful author, Leonie is an anxiety-ridden nursery teacher, while Yasmin is still leading a vagrant hippy lifestyle. They can’t help feeling that Philipp has sold out his youthful ideals, and there are tensions within the group, even with his wife and young daughter present.

The story is told in two time frames, so we know from the start that this trip to the island ended in a bloodbath, that three people got killed (although we are only told the identity of one of the victims early on) and that the supposed perpetrator has been lying in a coma ever since. The journalist Doro Kagel has been commissioned to write an in-depth article about what was dubbed the Hiddensee Massacre, and ends up going to the island herself to investigate. The story moves between the present-day with Doro and the awkward exchanges and growing tensions among the group of friends two years before.

So far, so typical of the endless stream of crime novels about friends harbouring some kind of secret and going off to a remote location where they will be snowed or rained or blocked in somehow, and their phones will have no reception and they start murdering each other. This sub-genre has even developed its own label: ‘destination thrillers’. What I thought this book did better than many of the others in this category was that the character developments felt far more realistic – these were people who had shared certain ideals and had now become middle-aged and profoundly changed, continually disappointing each other. However, the market is currently so saturated with this type of book written by English-language authors, that there is no appetite to take on the translation of a book that offers more of the same, even if slightly better. And German books simply don’t sell as well as Scandinavian ones, although the landscape and the weather might be very similar (at least on the Baltic Sea).

16. Eva Almstädt: Ostseefalle (East Sea Trap), Luebbe Verlag, 2021

A little further west of Stralsund (and we are now in the former West Germany rather than in East Germany), we have the lovely town of Lübeck, which is where police inspector Pia Korittki works. This is the 16th book in a long-running series (I believe it has reached book 21 by now, and the author also has a standalone and four books in a second series, so she is incredibly prolific).

Perhaps because I haven’t read any of the others, and because it must be difficult to maintain excitement and diversity after so many cases, I felt this one was overblown. Quite a bit about Pia’s personal life (a bit like in the Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series), but what I found particularly annoying was the tired old trope of a missing girl and then another woman being kidnapped and held captive in the cellar. I didn’t even get a huge sense of local atmosphere, and when I go to Lübeck, it will be for the Buddenbrooks rather than because of this novel.

Fascinating how authors can take on the same old stories as others and go such different paths. Some can inject originality and deeper characterisation, while others just do a slapdash painting by numbers of lazy writing. Almstädt is also a Spiegel bestselling author, so the accolade clearly doesn’t mean all that much. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge her on the basis of a later book without having read anything else, but it just goes to prove that those publishers (and readers) who insist on having a new book by their favourite author every six months or every year are perhaps causing a drop in quality.

For my next books of summer and also Women in Translation, I return to Japan and the enigmatic, slightly surreal work of Oyamada Hiroko. I’ve also been reading some poetry, dipping in and out of the Chinese classic Journey to the West and I want to read a book about the history of China… let’s see if I have the time to read, let alone review any of that. Getting ambitious now to complete Annabel’s 20 Books of Summer challenge, although initially I said I’d only attempt ten.

#FridayFun: Unique Pieces of Furniture

I find those so-called designer homes to be oppressive and overly designed or less bland and boring. But a few well-chosen and much-loved designer items can make for a beautiful backdrop.

I may have mentioned this Modernica Brasilia reading chaiselongue a few times – it’s simply perfect and comes in different choice of covers.
An elegant sideboard in solid walnut wood, from Pickawood.
A simple bedside table in Japanese style from FurnitureTsar.com
Art Nouveau display case designed by Alastair Duncan from 1stdibs.com
Another antique, a Meiji era Japanese merchant’s chest or sideboard, from 1stdibs.com
And now for something very modern, Melting Light display cabinet by Turri, from archiproducts.com

#20BooksofSummer: Going Rogue

I think I might get to finish 15 of the planned Books of Summer, which is more than the ten I thought I’d achieve. But I’ve just been to the local library and took out four books and am in the mood for going rogue. Also, I came across a French book I had on my shelves and since it’s one of my favourite contemporary authors, I couldn’t resist… However, I am still reading Monkey: Journey to the West off my list, so I will consider the book below my 14th of the Books of Summer.

14. Maylis de Kerangal: Jour de ressac (Backwash), Verticales, 2024

Her latest novel has been translated into German, but not into English, as far as I’m aware. However, I’d bought it in French when it first came out and finally got around to reading it. I absolutely loved Mend the Living, which I read in both English translations (you can guess which one I preferred by the sagacious use of the title) and the original French, and I also liked the film. I was less enthralled with Painting Time, although I liked the final part with the cave paintings. I fell once more for her with Eastbound. I still have to read Corniche Kennedy (on my bookshelf) and Birth of a Bridge, as well as her short story collection Canoes. This one is a bit less fixated on a particular profession and more on a place, namely Le Havre.

It starts off almost as a crime novel, but her looping style, with long sentences full of commas and side meanders, is certainly not typical of a crime novel. The nameless narrator, a film dubbing specialist, is contacted by the police in Le Havre. The body of an unknown man was found on the beach, with a film ticket in his pocket with her phone number scribbled on it. The narrator – wife, mother, consummate professional – spent her childhood and school years in Le Havre, although she moved away from it as soon as she could and hasn’t been back in many years.

The author herself is from Le Havre, but mercifully this is not autofiction. It is the portrait of a city that was almost entirely destroyed during the war – you could see the sea from the railway station, because all the houses that stood in the way had been completely flattened, as she says at one point. A city that is a big port and one of the key entry points for the drug trade in Europe. A city that is full of grey concrete and sordid poverty, but full of memories – the old cinema, her difficult relationship with her parents, her best friend, her first love.

Much to her relief, when she sees the photos of the deceased, it’s no one familiar. The police think it might be a death related to drug gangs, and she cannot resist doing a little investigating on her own. But this is not a crime novel, as I said before, and nothing much happens other than her wandering around the city, reliving moments from her youth, bumping into a few people, questioning her own life and the danger of her job being phased out by AI. We never find out who the dead man is, nor why he had her phone number – and ultimately, it turns out that the narrator doesn’t really want to know for sure either.

It’s one of those melancholy, windswept reads of lonely introspection and ‘what ifs’ that I find beguiling, and de Kerangal’s style is so hypnotic and elegant that it makes me want to write almost immediately (not to imitate her, but simply she gives you the desire to write too). However, I have to admit that she does try to fit too many tangential things into the story. The city and memory bit would have been enough to satisfy me (and very Patrick Modiano in a way), although I can see why the family, the daughter with her fencing, the details about her job provide a present-day contrast. Maybe the author was planning to write a novel about voice dubbing and audiobook narration, and couldn’t bear to leave the research aside?

So I liked this one for the atmosphere and would rate it above Painting Time, but below Eastbound and Mend the Living. I still love reading her though, and will continue to do so. If you want to read another book set in Le Havre (we suspect, although the town is never explicitly named), beautifully written with pitch-black humour, and deserving to be far better known, Little Rebel by Jerome Leroy fits the bill.

#20BooksofSummer and #WITMonth: Two from the Far East Again

I quickly summarised Books 10 and 11 (Romania and Berlin respectively) on my #20BooksofSummer list in my monthly summary for July, and now I went back to East Asia for two women writers to fulfill the Women in Translation Month criteria as well. Both of these books had been on my shelves for a number of years, but I finally got around to reading them just now.

12. Kim Bo-Young: I’m Waiting for You, transl. Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu, Harper Voyager, 2021

These four science-fiction tinged stories (for want of a better description, although to me they seemed more philosophical than anything else) were written and published at different times and separately in South Korea, but the first and last are linked, as are the second and third, so the English language publisher decided to gather them all in one volume, which works very well. I was not quite sure why they chose that particular order for the stories, though, separating the natural pairing of the first and last. Perhaps so that the whole volume would end on a hopeful note?

‘I’m Waiting for You’ and ‘On My Way to You’ are unabashedly romantic science-fiction love stories. This is indicated in the epigraph to the volume:

The way I see it, loving one person means loving the universe. When you do something for the sake of one person, you do something for the whole universe. A gift for one is a gift to all.

The first story was commissioned by a friend of the author who wanted to propose to his girlfriend, while the second was written five years later, by which point the couple had married and had a child. Both of the stories are told in epistolary form (once from the male perspective, once from the female perspective), and start offgiddily hopeful and enthusiastic: two lovers separated by travel to the outer reaches of the universe who are making an effort to get to their wedding in time.

But their spaceships get delayed, their messages to each other scrambled, and when they do finally reach planet Earth many years in the future, it has changed beyond all recognition. Yet through it all, their love for each other, their belief in each other endures.

You know, there’s that saying: People don’t really die as long as we remember them. If we remember someone, they live life along with us… If that’s true, then you’re living with me know… You’re alive as long as I am. That’s why I want to keep living. To make you live. To keep you, who I love most in all the world, alive. Because the evidence and traces of you having existed in the world are all in me, because I’m what’s left of you.

The two stories in the middle require a bit more knowledge of Buddhism and Korean folklore. They are set in the bardo, that in-between land where souls ‘rest’ before being reincarnated. Genderless Prophets (or god-like creatures) inhabit this realm and divide up into further entities or reabsorb them as required, treating Earth as a sort of laboratory where they can experiment with different forms and acquire learning. However, one of the Prophets is going rogue and starting to question the unity of all things, the collective, and militates for a more individualistic approach instead. This is perceived as dangerous corruption of the core principles, so Naban, one of the oldest and most powerful of the Prophets, takes on the task of rooting out this blasphemy… but as they do so, they begin to doubt themselves.

I can’t claim that I fully understood these two stories, but they appear to be a powerful meditation on collectivism vs. individualism, a topic that is even more prickly in Korean society.

13. Yoko Ogawa: The Diving Pool, transl. Stephen Snyder, Vintage, 2009

I absolutely loved Ogawa’s The Memory Police but this collection of three short stories (at about fifty pages each, I hesitate to call them true novellas) is quite a different beast. Nevertheless, they share something of the same style – the sinister undertone, occasionally raising its unruly head to shock us from the waters of limpid descriptions.

‘The Diving Pool’ is the story of a young girl infatuated with her slightly older foster brother; she goes every day to watch him practise his diving after school. However, this is not just a sweet story of first love or awakening of sexual feelings: Aya feels neglected as the only biological child of her parents, who run a foster home for orphans. She is equally fascinated by the buttery smell and rolls of flesh of the youngest orphan in the household, and she delights in using her power over a vulnerable young being in increasingly cruel ways.

The narrator of ‘Pregnancy Diary’ likewise displays a far darker side as her sister’s pregnancy progresses. There is an obsession with her sister’s body and the baby growing inside her, and an aversion to food but also greediness for it.

The final story ‘Dormitory’ also has a female narrator, a less cruel one, but somehow passive and confused. When her nephew comes to Tokyo and decides to take a room in her old college dormitory, she finds it hugely changed: declayed, isolated, almost completely silent, marked by ghostly presences rather than noisy students. The only thing that has remained the same as in her memory is the crippled caretaker who lives there too. This last, somewhat surreal story felt more like the Ogawa I’d known and loved in The Memory Police, dealing with themes of loss, the unreliability of memory, and the profound loneliness of humans.

The callous behaviour of the narrators in the first two stories reminded me a little of another Japanese author, Kono Taeko, where things start off apparently conventional and banal, then suddenly swerve into the unexpected and even shocking. There is less of the sudden swerve in Ogawa, more like a layering of tension, towards what feels like an inevitable though terrible outcome. And yet nobody gets punished… Dark indeed!

#6Degrees August 2026

Aiming to be punctual this month with the #SixDegreesofSeparation meme, as hosted by Kate, where we all start with the same book and then diverge wildly and widely through various literary associations. This month the starting point is Land by Maggie O’Farrell, which I probably will read, because I enjoyed some of her other books, especially Hamnet.

I heard Maggie O’Farrell speak about Hamnet and her obsession with Shakespeare at an online event during Covid, and this reminded me of another writer I saw online talk about her literary obsession: Katherine Rundell and her love for John Donne. Her book Super-Infinite is full of the joy, sensuality and spirituality of Donne’s poetry (a personal favourite of mine also).

For some reason, Donne reminds me of Montaigne – perhaps because they lived in roughly similar times and they retired from public life later on? So my next link is to the wonderful Essais by Montaigne, which seem to cover everything one might want to think about, from the trivial to the profound.

A similar, though much earlier attempt to cover all sorts of things is Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. We might argue, however, that the Japanese author is not interested in doing much soul-searching, she’s more inclined to jot down the everyday and trivial, and this feeds into the ‘male author = profound, female author = shallow’ spectre that has haunted the literary world for a very long time.

A far less famous pillow book forms my next link, Scottish writer Alison Fell‘s tongue-in-cheek recreation of 11th century courtly Japan, The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro. The lady in question has problems achieving climax with her official lover, so she hires a young stable boy to spice up her sex life by whispering erotic tales from behind the screen at the head of her bed.

The book has been criticised for not being very accurate historically, which can be said of a lot of books that are nevertheless fun to read, such as Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, a book that we all re-enacted as children in Romania… well before the film Gladiator was released.

Another book that we all avidly read and role-played as kids in Romania was Legendele Olimpului (The Legends of Olympus) by Alexandru Mitru, a retelling of the classic Greek myths and legends, published in the early 1970s, which was my earliest introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. And no, I haven’t watched the film yet, but intend to, even though Nolan is more often miss than hit for me.

So this month’s series of links have taken me from Elizabethan/Jacobean England, to 16th century France, to Heian Japan, Anicent Rome and Ancient Greece. Not quite sure why it all took such a historical turn, but there you are… Where will your 6 degrees take you?

#FridayFun: Artists, Writers and Studies

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something for #FridayFun and, although I feel I should be highlighting holiday posts or beaches or something dreamy like that, I’m stuck here at home, so instead I’ll post some airy studios.

Artists’ studios make for the best writing studios, to my mind, as this remarkably tidy one from Art-Now-And-Then.blogspot.com demonstrates.
Not quite sure who Tom Junod is, but this is his cosy, slightly messy study (the chair looks uncomfortable though, is it supposed to be good for posture?) From ESPN.com
Suzy Murphy’s studio, from House and Garden.
This studio was featured in the NY Times under the headline ‘What happens to artist’s studios after they die?’
Not a studio as such, more of a kitchen/living/library combo, but quite beguiling. From Ross Dahlke on Pinterest.
I really hope this is not AI (have seen it from different angles, so it makes me hopeful it exists in reality). A huge study with a view, from Pinterest.

July 2026 Summary

Not quite the end of the month, but I’m jumping the gun, because I don’t think I’ll get to read any more books in the next couple of days. I was lucky to get to read as many as I did this month, partly because I didn’t feel too well and stayed in bed one or two days, partly because I was reading on planes and trains. I was planning to write longer reviews for some of these, but lack the time to do it properly.

I continued my reading about China, finally getting to grips with a (mercifully abridged) version of one of the classics of Chinese literature, and also a book about contemporary Chinese society, economics and politics. I stayed in the Far East with a rather unusual offering from old favourite Mishima, and inter-connected sci-fi short stories from South Korea. I’d love to say that I’m going to review I’m Waiting for You but I’m not sure I will (for reasons of time, not because I didn’t like it), so for the time being I won’t count it towards my #20booksofsummer. Maybe it will reappear for my #WomeninTranslation month.

I also wanted to participate in #ParisinJuly and read in just one day the short but memorable story No et moi by Delphine de Vigan, but alas never got to review it. It’s billed as a YA novel in the English-speaking world, because the main protagonists are in their teens, and there certainly was some of that youthful enthusiasm and naivety, but also social critique. And it certainly shows that the issue of homelessness doesn’t always have simple solutions.

I have to admit I haven’t read Arundhati Roy’s novels, but I rather liked this memoir of her complex, difficult relationship with a mother whose first loyalty was to the school she founded and to the social issues she fought for, rather than to her own children. Yes, the author does gloss over some things, but who doesn’t want to present themselves in the best possible light?

The one Romanian book I read was sort of a crime mystery, but more of a portrait of a typical Bucharest neighbourhood and block of flats. I could imagine the sights, smells, noises and rough texture of the walls. It sort of fits into my #20BooksofSummer as a Romanian entry, but, sadly, it’s not a book that would ever awaken the interest of a foreign publisher (especially with some controversy about the recently deceased author Petru Berteanu), yet very well written, I thought.

So that’s my tenth book of summer fitting into my predetermined criteria, and my eleventh one is the Berlin-set quiet novel by Christoph Hein. Written in East Germany in the early 1980s, it was then republished under a different name (hence the two titles – The Stranger Friend and Dragonblood) in West Germany. It’s one of those understated examinations of the everyday life of a female doctor in her 40s, divorced and not keen to get into any close relationships anymore. She keeps herself aloof from everyone, including her parents, her sister, her colleagues at the hospital, and even the neighbour she begins a relationship with. Then, when her neighbour dies, she makes an effort to convince us she is content with her life, her routines, and that she does not feel lonely, that there is nothing missing from her life. It’s tangentially a political book as well, describing the lack of ambition and hope of a generation raised in the GDR who could not foresee an end to it. A book with simple sentences and descriptions, yet hidden depths.

Finally, a book that I picked up at random from my shelves to read on the plane while I went to my older son’s graduation in Cambridge. I picked it because it was small and light (my Kindle has broken – the fourth one in 12 years – and I’m not sure I want to buy another one), and because it had been recommended to me by many of my blogger friends. Bruce Chatwin’s novel is about Utz, a Czech porcelain collector, whom the narrator meets a year or so before the Prague Spring. The interweaving of the personal and the political/historical, the examination of the passion for collecting, the discussions about art and possessions all make for a very niche but very charming novel that reminded me of Bohumil Hrabal (and not just because of its Prague setting).

This month was a month of excellent books indeed, not a single disappointing or forgettable one among them. And I’m more than halfway through my #20BooksofSummer, although I doubt I’ll quite reach the twenty mark in August.

However, I do have an ambitious set of recommendations for myself for #WITMonth, which all align with my #20booksofsummer reading goals this year. Let’s see what happens, shall we?

Contribution to Classical Discourse

I haven’t watched the most recent interpretation of The Odyssey (my favourite is still possibly Ulysses 31, the Franco-Japanese animated series set in space), but it has led to SO much online debate, that I wanted to share my own thoughts about Classical Greece. This is a poem I wrote more than twelve years ago and which was published in a now defunct online literary journal. It was inspired by a vitriolic reaction to an article in an English newspaper. How the discourse has changed now that women no longer seem to want to have children!

Errant Fathers, Stupid Women

‘Don’t come complaining to me about how harsh your life is as a single mother. It’s self-inflicted: you wanted children, so deal with it. I do not blame errant fathers at all. Especially my errant father. He never wanted children. It’s stupid women who want children.’ (Irate reader’s comment on article about pursuing ‘errant fathers’ via the justice system  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/4338301/Child-maintenance-laws-to-strip-errant-fathers-of-driving-licence-and-passport.html.)

Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon by Pierre Narcisse Guerin, Louvre, Paris

We did everything right, we appeased gods and men.

There was no escaping the justice they dispensed

as freely as poison.

They threw their curses at us,

forced us to endure beyond any mortal’s span.

So why, tragedians, did you turn our children against us,

get them to prefer your account over ours?

He will tell you: ‘Don’t expect us to be grateful, Medea.

Nobody asked for your sacrifice.’

And you have to admit Jason would have coped fine without your scattering of body parts.

That’s when he should have realized you’re too sharp,

too clever, thinking only of yourself

under the guise of undying love.

No wonder he found somebody new

more easy-going

without grandiloquent gestures.

He needed rest after his journey

and all you offered was barbaric revenge…

Or so he says.

Agamemnon returned from Troy a hero,

while his dear Clytemnestra struggled for so many years

alone yet not free,

mourning the daughter he’d sacrificed for his mission.

It’s all about ego in the end, you see.

His spoils of war in the shape of a nubile wench,

his embarrassed smile barely veiling

the testosterone pride of middle-aged conquest.

‘You’d grown a little stale.

I’d forgotten how to let fun into my life.’

So he said. So people believed.

Was she really the only one to see the clay-sodden feet

on this former giant of a man?

When history remembers us wrongly if at all,

in every discarded, bitter woman

there’s a Jocasta lying in wait:

jewellery poised to maim errant fathers,

secretly rooting for the son to take over,

unable to bear the loss of self.

#20BooksofSummer: China, Old and New, and Japan

I’ve nearly completed a ten books of summer challenge and it’s not even the end of July yet, so I’m quite chuffed. Might be a bit challenging to stretch to 20 before the end of August, so I might be content with just ten or else stretch it to fifteen. Especially if I start reading all the poetry books that were going to be part of my challenge.

The reads below were all from my East Asian shelves, although I also read one set in India (Arundhati Roy’s memoir), which wasn’t part of the original plan, but I might count it anyway.

7. Cao Xuequin (also written as Tsao Hsueh-Chin): Dream of the Red Chamber, translated and adapted by Chi-Chen Wang, Anchor Books, 1958

This classic of Chinese literature is one of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese literature, dating from the 18th century, but revolutionary at the time because it was written in vernacular Chinese rather than in the more formal Classical Chinese. In this respect, it bears some similarity with Genji Monogatari. Another similarity with the Japanese novel: it has a very large cast of characters and they are often referred to by their titles or their family monikers (aunties and uncles abound), which can be very confusing, especially when they marry or change positions.

However, unlike the Japanese novel, which focuses largely on the life and loves of one main character, this book is about the rise and fall of a family, and therefore has more in common with the Buddenbrooks, perhaps. It is the story of several generations of the Chia family and the families related to them. We have the widowed Matriarch who rules everyone with an iron rod. We have her favourite grandson Chia Pao-yu, who was born with the mythical stone of precious jade (introduced in the first chapter) in his mouth and who is therefore more or less the hero of the story. Much to his strict father’s dismay, he is not all that keen on studying for his civil service exams and would much rather spend time with his cousins and their servants (especially the female ones). He falls in love with his cousin Black Jade, who moves into their home upon the death of her mother, but is ultimately forced to marry another cousin Precious Virtue, who seems to be the ideal woman, but whom he does not love. His older sister brings honour to the family by becoming an Imperial Concubine, which puts the family to a great deal of extra expense, building a special garden and pavilion in her honour. She is not very happy with her royal status and can only visit her home briefly (and dies young).

Chia Lien is another son of the Matriarch who is an inveterate womaniser – which was apparently all fine and dandy in that period, when there were concubines and their children living altogether in the same household, except that he keeps lying and tricking his wife Phoenix, who is the linchpin of the household, until she makes some unwise financial investments which lead to the downfall of the family.

There are lots of intrigues, rivalries, ambitions and deaths as the book covers many years and many branches of the family. There is also a lot of cruelty – both servants and relatives getting beaten or abused or even killed by various members of the family. This violence seems so commonplace in the Chinese literature I’ve read so far this year (see also my reaction to Red Sorghum), that I wonder what it is about the historical and social conditions in China that have made this kind of experience mainstream in their literature. I’m sure medieval and Renaissance Europe was just as violent, but there seems to be a queasiness about describing it so boldly – perhaps because of the influence of the church?

There is a soap opera quality to all the goings on in the book, and it is certainly an enjoyable read once you manage to remember the characters’ names. Their social circumstances may be very different to our own, but some of their thoughts, dialogues and characteristics feel very familiar. It is a fascinating description of daily life in a large, wealthy Chinese family in the 18th century, but it is also a meditation on the transience of love and material fortune, and contains many supernatural and fortune-telling or folklore elements. What struck me most of all is the detailed description of the lives and thoughts, the unhappiness and joys of women, at a time when they were barely given any consideration in society.

Nota bene: I read the abridged and adapted version of the work (I’m not sure that I could have coped with the full-length one, although it was interesting to be immersed in that world for a while). The translation is from the 1950s, so feels a little old-fashioned, but that is perhaps very well-suited for an 18th century piece of work, and the language reminded me at times of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, written around the same time (and likewise portraying family and social pressures, as well as illicit love).

8. Frank N. Pieke: Knowing China. A Twenty-First Century Guide. Cambridge University Press, 2016

Although this is a relatively recent book by a professor of modern China Studies at the University of Leiden who seems to really know his stuff, the pace of change in China is so rapid and its influence around the world has grown so much recently that it is already starting to feel a little outdated. However, the basic concepts remain sound: the author tries to break down monolithic views of China and respond to some of the most pernicious myths. No, the Communist Party is unlikely to crumble and fall, but nor is it quite the all-seeing, all-commanding Big Brother some make it out to be. China’s economy will grow but cannot do so forever as they face many of the same demographic challenges as the rest of the world. There are certain freedoms for ethnic minorities and even for individuals, but there are no universal human rights as we understand them in the West, nor is there any chance of Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang being recognised as independent states.

Here are a few things which made me (the anthropologist) even more curious to explore and observe in my future trip to China:

Heritage is anything but a weapon of the weak. Authorities have latched onto this internationally recognized concept to gain greater latitude and creativity in the construction and exploitation of aspect of local culture beyond the mere preservation of traditional minority cultures. The development of heritage often involves significant investment for the restoration of buildings, the reolcation of people and sometimes even the construction of whole sites from scratch… The production of heritage has liberated the energies of countless ambitious localities, groups and indiviudals and have paved the way to imagine the Chinese nation as made up of endlessly variable components.

Sustained development often continues to trump sustainable development… Whereas the central government has most to gain and relatively little to lose from stricter environmental standards, many localities and their governments depend on the employment and revenue generated by often highly polluting industry… the result is a political economy of environmental protection in which the costs have to be borne by those who are powerless and poor, while others who can curry favour with the local leadership continue to pollute and develop…. That is not to say that people in backward areas are unable to understand that pollution is bad for them, or that environmentalism is a luxury that only developed places can afford.

9. Mishima Yukio: Beautiful Star, transl. Stephen Dodd, Penguin, 2022.

This is an odd book, rather out of character for Mishima, one might think, although of course his concern about the state of the world and what needs to be done to save it resurfaces a few years later in his own life and politics, with tragic consequences. It is and it isn’t science fiction, just as it is and it isn’t about aliens. It was written in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, and was not translated into English for sixty years, perhaps because it was considered too ‘out there’ for Western tastes.

It starts off as the story of a middle-class family, the Osugis, who live near one of the American military bases in Japan, and who believe that they each hail from a different planet and have been sent to earth to rescue humanity from mass destruction. Father Juichiro is from Mars and leads the campaign for disarmament his beautiful daughter Akiko is from Venus, his mercurial son Kazuo is from – where else? – Mercury, while his wife Iyoko tries to provide some balance and support, while hailing from Jupiter.

The son gets involved in politics, the daughter in love affairs, and then the family confront their greatest problem: a rival group of aliens who have very different ideas of what the fate of planet Earth, the beautiful star, should be. Rather than being saved, they envisage utter annihilation. The book is both a searing satire of postwar Japanese society with its muddled politics, growing materialism and Western influence and its obsession with social conformity, but also an indictment of global politics and ambitions, all while living under the very real fear of the hydrogen bomb.

This starts out very well, and is much funnier than most of the other work I’ve read by Mishima. We are never quite sure if the family is suffering from some kind of group delusion or if they really are aliens, but they certainly are somewhat naive and fail to see how neighbours or strangers might view them or take advantage of them. For example, the local shopkeepers deeply resent the family and always sell them the worst of their produce at inflated prices. Akiko is blind to all that.

What lovely people they are… The whole family always looks happy and they bring such energy to their work… And they always greet me with such a nice smile! I’m no expert on the matter, but that’s the goodness and happiness of human life in a nutshell. We need to do our utmost to protect them from the hydrogen bomb.

Kazuo meanwhile gets caught up in politics, and Mishima is so sharp-tongued about political corruption and hypocrisy, about demagogues and the impossibility of living up to your ideals, that you cannot help but wonder how he came to have such extreme political views just a few years later.

The rival group of aliens come from the constellation of Cygnus and are much less enthusiastic about the human race. One might almost call them incels if we were to use contemporary language: Haguro their ringleader is a second-rate lecturer at a local university, and his acolytes are the chatty barber Sone and the young graduate Kurita, who yearns after women but was rejected and ever since has developed a huge hatred for them. They all see flying saucers together and realise they are aliens, although perhaps they are influenced by Haguro’s attempt impose his will and gain control over the minds of others.

Now was the moment for Haguro to come up with a concept that would illuminate their common past like an instantaneous bolt of lightning and terrify them to the core of their being. A concept that would touch everything with the same purple tinge expressed in a flash of lightening… It was only in hindsight that things had become clear, but there was some sort of bond between the three of them – so different in character, occupation and age – from the moment they set eyes on each other. They had various things in common. For example, none of them was much of a looker, they were all driven by constant hatred towards people, and they had equally harboured a long-standing vague hostility towards the whole of mankind.

Sadly, the fun of the book deteriorates at the moment when the two rival groups of aliens meet and Juichiro and Haguro have a lengthy exchange of speeches about their philosophy and the fate of the planet. This is a novel of ideas, I understand that, but it was so much better when it was a series of character studies and social satire.

Perhaps not the ideal entry point to Mishima’s work if you have never read him before, but I’m glad it got translated at last and enabled me to discover a more playful side to him (in spite of the sombre warnings).