Allan Massie reviews Patient X by David Peace plus Jane Bradley on The Walrus Mutterer by Mandy Haggith
David Peace has created a fragmentary new world in the shadow of Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The author’s preface begins: “These are the stories of Patient X in one of our iron castles. He will tell his tales to anyone with the ears and the time to listen.” When he comes to the end of his stories, however, his face will change, the “melancholy smile” will fade away, and he will address insults and accusations to his listener. I suppose this is a warning directed at the reader.
The book has a sub-title: “The Casebook of Ryunosuke Akutagawa.” The sub-title is inaccurate. What follows is not a case-book, though at times you may think you are being offered materials for such a thing. What we have is a dozen stories or sketches, based on, or deriving from the stories, essays and letters of Akutagawa, one of the most distinguished Japanese authors of the first quarter of the 20th century. He was fascinated by western culture and the Christian religion, and deeply versed in European (which includes American) literature, and it’s easy to understand why he appeals so deeply to David Peace, who has lived in Japan for a number of years – the last part of his Tokyo crime trilogy will be published in the summer of 2019.
Akutagawa himself appears attractive, and a writer with a delightfully light touch. He was successful and is now regarded as one of Japan’s great writers. Nevertheless his life was haunted by the knowledge that his mother died mad after years in a mental asylum; he himself overdosed on Veronal – a barbiturate sedative – at the age of 35, evidently suicide rather than accident.
The question for anyone ignorant of Akutagawa’s work is how much of Patient X is his, and how much Peace’s. It’s natural to wonder about this, nevertheless futile, and indeed rather stupid. Literature has always fed on literature as well as life, and the acknowledgement of influence or the practice of imitation are at the same time acts of creative criticism and a new departure. If these stories and essays tell us something about Akutagawa, a writer of whom it’s likely most of us know very little, if indeed anything, it is also reasonable to treat his appearance in this work purely as fiction.
Certainly one would read the collection of stories – most of which have plots that never arrive at what
This book does have the reader questioning the reality or fictionality of people
might be thought to have been their intended destination – with just as much delight and admiration for the lightness of touch with which Peace treats often grim and painful material, if Akutagawa had been an invention of his.
Indeed, a book like this does have the reader questioning the reality or fictionality of other people, and not only because one of the recurrent themes is that very Scottish one of duality – the double or doppelganger – which we associate, rightly, with Hogg and Stevenson, though here it is in reading one of Poe’s stories that Peace’s fictional characters see themselves across the room, approaching them, disappearing perhaps from mirrors. But it is in delivering a lecture on Poe’s story “The Premature Burial” to a class of naval cadets that Ryunosuke sees “an army of doubles, a Doppelganger Korps, the student and their doubles, all staring at him”.
There are remarkable stories here, none more so than “The Exorcists” which, like so much of the book, is in part an examination of the transmission of faiths and cultures to societies that are, on the face of it, and on account of their inheritance, antipathetic. But there is so much in common, not least the imagery of gardens, stories about our expulsion from the garden of innocence and our wanderings in search of a way back.
This, it would seem, by Peace’s interpretation, to have been one of the questions that occupied and perplexed Akutagawa, just as, one may assume, it perplexes and disturbs Peace himself, as in a different, yet directly comparable setting, it perplexed and disturbed two great Orkney poets, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown. The elegance and wit of Peace’s book acts as a sort of pleasing veil, behind which we are brought to look on life and death, First and Last Things. ■