ORIENT EXCESS
With its ritual suicides, witches gobbling up young men and cows with human faces, this mischievous collection of Japanese short stories is bizarre, exotic and memorably gory
The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories Edited by Jay Rubin Penguin £25 ★★★★★
Back in 1975, when Stanley Kubrick’s film of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon was released, Penguin Books produced a tie-in edition. It had an introduction by the then-popular comic novelist JP Donleavy, shortly before he went out of fashion.
Given that most introductions are as solemn and scholarly as can be, the first line of Donleavy’s introduction still strikes me as very funny indeed. It goes: ‘Makepeace. This middle name is all I have ever known of William Thackeray.’
I was reminded of this by The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories, which comes with an introduction by the wildly fashionable Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
Not since 1975 have I read quite such a downbeat introduction. He kicks off by saying that he is allergic to the form of autobiographical fiction that has been most popular in Japan since the turn of the century. He then admits that, as a young man, he read hardly any Japanese authors. ‘I know hardly anything about Japanese fiction,’ he writes, adding that ‘...I confess that, with only a few exceptions, I have not kept close tabs on young authors.’
Employing the unusual forum of an Introduction to establish the full extent of his ignorance of what is to follow, Murakami says that ‘to tell you the truth, I’m reading most of the stories included here for the first time in my life. I had previously read only six of the 35, including my own!’ As two of the stories are by Murakami, that leaves only four, and he later admits that he didn’t even remember having written one of them, which he now describes as ‘a simple sketch I dashed off... and promptly forgot about’.
Murakami concludes, in the writerly equivalent of a yawn, ‘this is certainly an unconventional selection of works by an unusual assortment of writers.’
Yet, despite what he says, this collection of Japanese short stories gets off to a cracking start. The first – and longest story in the whole 500-page book – is by one of the few Japanese authors I had read before, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki or ‘Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’, as he muddlingly appears here, as the editor has insisted on following the Japanese name-order, printing the surname first. This means that Murakami himself appears as Haruki Murakami on the cover, but Murakami Haruki in the rest of the book.
I suppose one could argue that this topsy-turviness is appropriate, as the first section of the book is devoted to the theme of ‘Japan and the West’. Tanizaki’s The Story Of Tomoda And Matsunaga is a Jekyll and Hyde tale of a man so torn between the constrained life of Japan and the wild life of the West – ‘a world of insatiable desires and unending intoxication’ – that he turns into two entirely different people, depending on where he is.
In Japan, he is thin and puritanical, eats with chopsticks and is faithful to his wife. In Europe and America, he transforms into a man nearly double his usual weight, gets drunk and spends his time picking up girls in clubs. It’s a brilliantly executed story, perfectly positioned at the head of this anthology to introduce the Western reader to an exotic world of kimonos, sake and tempura. .
The second section of this collection is called ‘Loyal Warriors’, and ventures into a darker, more peculiar side of the Japanese psyche. ‘My ritual suicide today will no doubt come as a great shock,’ it begins. Set in the 17th century, it is the story of a former warrior, now a Buddhist monk, who is about to impale himself.
The next story, Mishima’s Patriotism, is also about ritual suicide, and is among the most brilliant in the collection. It is set in 1936. Rather than attacking his own officers in order to quell a rebellion, a member of the Imperial Guard decides to commit suicide in the ceremonial manner, by cutting himself open with his officer’s sword and then, with his dying breaths, pulling out his own intestines. ‘Tonight I shall cut my stomach,’ he tells his wife, who replies, ‘I ask permission to accompany you.’ ‘Good. We’ll go together.’ As Mishima’s story goes on, the ritual suicide grows steadily more entwined with the sexual act. ‘Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses? The two seemed to overlap, as if the object of this bodily desire was death itself.’
As it was, I found the bizarre, gory tales in The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories infinitely more absorbing than those involving the humdrum arena of everyday life, an area much more acutely handled by Western writers. My favourite of all was Hell Screen by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, in which a court painter, commissioned to depict hell, and seeking inspiration, begs His Lordship to provide him with a real-life scene of a woman dying in agony. His Lordship duly chains the painter’s daughter into a carriage, and then sets fire to it.
Other memorable stories involve a cow with a human face, a talking grasshopper and a witch who gobbles up young men.
The earliest story in the entire book was written in 1898. Even though Japanese literature stretches further back in time than our own – they were even writing science fiction as long ago as the 10th century – the editor offers no explanation for this strange cut-off point. I am no expert, but a little part of me suspects that the mischievous Murakami may have a point, and despite several shining exceptions, this is, indeed, ‘an unconventional selection of works by an unusual assortment of writers’.