Visions of The Gate

I have been intrigued to note that a new translation of Soseki's The Gate is being released by The New York Review of Books in December this year. The Gate is one of those supreme masterpieces of twentieth century literature, a work of such profound subtletly that while being casually dismissed by many an empty vessel ('A Huge Disappointment!' writes one such on Amazon America), it nevertheless remains not only the ultimate connoiseur's choice, but also its author's own personal favourite. The translators of this new edition are denoted as 'William F. Sibley and Edward Fowler'. 'Who they?', I wondered, imagining that they must be a couple of preppy Harvard graduates holding each other's hands on their first book together. Perhaps they were the irritatingly talented faces of the nouvelle vague who I might be hearing a lot more from in years to come.

As it turns out however, the back-story is considerably more interesting. When I googled 'William F. Sibley', I discovered that far from being a young graduate he was in fact an eminent academic at the University of Chicago. And far from hearing more from him, I was startled to realise he was already dead, having passed away in 2009 at the age of 67. Very distantly, a few bells start to ring. I dimly remembered being told a few years back in some emails exchanged with Marvin Marcus (author of a recent book on Soseki) that a 'Bill Sibley' at the University of Chicago was working on a translation of Soseki's first 'trilogy' of novels. Whether he actually got anywhere with Sanshiro and And Then, I don't know, but presumably publishing these first two would be a bit tricky as a rejigged version of Jay Rubin's translation of Sanshiro has been released in the last few years by Penguin (see my blog 'The March of the Penguin') while the previous translator of And Then, Norma Field, was also a colleague of Sibley's at the University of Chicago.

Reading about Sibley and Fowler in the Memorial Symposium address at Chicago delivered by Sibley's erstwhile pupil Fowler (now a senior academic himself in California) made me warm to them both. Sibley sounded like something of a free spirit, a man who while being perfectionist in his pursuit of Japanese letters, never lost sight of the bigger picture, wanting in the early days to blow off academia altogether and just go travelling. He made room in his life for Italian cuisine, Mahler and rock music, and always referred to his big thesis on the Japanese author Shiga Naoya (later published as The Shiga Hero) as 'the fucking ronbun' (ronbun meaning 'essay'). He sounded like the type of guy that could entertain you royally if you went out for a few beers with him in downtown Chicago or Tokyo.

That an intelligent, colourful maverick like this should be drawn towards a work of extreme understatement like The Gate might seem superficially strange, but is in fact entirely apposite. My regret though is that it seems this edition will ultimately lack any introduction from Sibley. When a man like this has been obsessed with a book and a writer for decades, what a pity that they have never actually managed to put into words what it is about the book that so absorbs their interest. Reading Edward Fowler's address, I saw that Sibley had also previously translated a chapter by the Japanese critic Maeda Ai on The Gate and Fowler himself recycles a lot of ideas by the critic Kumakura Chiyuki to explain why the novel is profound. Yet to my mind none of this really gets to the heart of the matter. Analysing Tokyo's Meiji period topography or discussing the way in which Chinese characters segue from one word to another in The Gate are all mildly interesting, but it is not the reason why the novel gripped Sibley and refused to let go. The real reason is because in the 'nothing narrative' of The Gate, Soseki smashes an axe through the surface calm of human consciousness to create a novel of profound unease. There is an entire universe of ideas on the fundamental nature of existence that instantly connects to people around the world, whether in Chicago, Manchester or Manchuria.

Alas, now I suppose we will never know how the book spoke to Sibley. Instead it seems the publishers are drafting in a third person, Pico Iyer, to pen an introduction. Iyer is apparently a prolific travel writer (though I confess is unknown to me) and I suppose if he helps bring a wider audience to The Gate, then all well and good, though I must admit jaded cynicism when it come to publishers' usually lame attempts to parachute in 'celebrity endorsements' for such books.

Briefly immersing myself in the world of Japanese Literature academics in America elicited a couple of contradictory emotions. On the one hand, I thought how great it would be if every day you could hang out with people of similiar interests, where everybody in the field knows each other like members of the local village. There's a lot of back-slapping and bonhomie and references to Ed Seidenstecker and Donald Keene. In contrast, over here in my backwater of England, things paradoxically seem like the Wild West, where books get written on the hoof, in stony solitude, where you scramble to pursue your interests in a sea of utter indifference.

But then there's the other side of the coin. I also can't help thinking that this whole world of well-heeled academia is a trap, that locks minds within the narrow parameters of often perversely defined disciplines. By constantly focussing on the word 'Japan', for example, academics become mouthpieces and lackeys for Japanese critics (themselves often highly parochial in their vision) instead of opening their minds to larger, more universal possibilities. In the end someone outside the field has to be dropped in to explain everything to a wider readership in the West.

In the ultimate irony, with a depressing lack of vision or orginality, the University of Chicago has inauguarated an annual 'Sibley Translation Prize' despite there already being a similar prize run by New York's Columbia University (Chicago's prize is for works up to 15,000 words; New York's for books). Wouldn't it have been a lot more fruitful and innovative if the University of Chicago offered the prize instead for an original critical essay, to reward someone for thinking for him or herself, for being able to do what Sibley himself tragically never could - to explain what it is about a literary work that speaks not just to a closetted discipline but to the larger world?

I rather suspect too that on some level or other Sibley was probably of the same opinion - wishing to drop out of his university position, fuck off his academic 'ronbun', hit the road, go travelling and mull the deep, deep reasons why a novel like The Gate kept swirling and swirling round his mind. You can read the full text of Fowler's address here.

The Arab Spring and Literary Freedom

Following hot on the heels of the last podcast on Tarjei Vesaas, running in the second track of my Cultural Olympics is an essay on the Arab Spring and Literary Freedom. You can hear the podcast on the controversy surrounding the life of Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz here:

The Old Man and the Knife

Introducing My Own Cultural Olympics...

England's second city (London) is apparently due to have a few running races later on in the summer and in conjunction with this over-touted event we are being bored to death with a variety of cultural events. Amongst these is apparently the production of Shakespeare's plays in 35 languages (yawn). If you hadn't by now passed out with tedium at the British going on and on about Dickens in his anniversary year, they are intent on finishing you off with yet more things you already knew, but this time in languages you can't understand. We might be struggling to hold onto the Malvinas, Scotland might be on the verge of departing, but yes, British culture and institutions still rule supreme, don't you know.

Forgive me, but I don't really see how Shakespeare in 35 languages tells me much, in the Olympic way, about the rest of the world. However I'm not going to hang around waiting for the dullards at the BBC to actually come up with anything innovative and enlightened. So instead as a little bit of fun and adventure I am going to run my own little Cultural Olympics on the track of this blog over the following weeks.

Come with me and we'll sprint off on a literary race around the world... Our competitors will be superstars from Norway, Egypt, Argentina, China, Nigeria and other places as I put up as podcasts some introductions to the greatest literature of countries around the world.

A few years ago when discussing this idea with an editor at Penguin, he told me it was a near-impossible task to do something truly world-wide in vision, something that could only work if it was Olympian in scope. I'm sure he's right, but as we have an Olympic Games coming up, now is as good a time as any for a bit of a literary inspiration from Mountain Olympus.

Today, in Track One, is a literary master from Norway. You can hear me talk about him in my first podcast here.

A Norwegian Palace of Ice

There will be seven more tracks and seven more international literary superstars in the coming days and weeks. Feel free to tell me which one you think breasts the finishing tape first! On your marks, get set...

Save Aidan

Towards the end of last year came the disturbing news that Aidan O'Connor, a long-term resident of Kansai, all-round good egg and erstwhile culinary correspondent for Kansai Time Out, was battling with leukemia. Worse, it transpired that his only hope for survival lay with a bone marrow transplant from overseas, an expensive procedure not covered by the terms of his medical insurance in Japan.

The situation was grim and particularly distressing given that Aidan has a young family and had just moved to the countryside and was setting up his own small restaurant. His closest friends in Japan have rallied round and put together a campaign called Save Aidan designed to raise enough money to give some support to Aidan and his family and to help finance the transplants which are his only hope for survival. They also hope to draw attention to the wider problem of there being no bone marrow bank available for non-Japanese in Japan.

You can read more about the moving story of Aidan's battle with cancer and the Save Aidan project here.

Pre-animate in Chinese

The patter of little feet and the putting to bed of a new book has kept me away from blogging for a while but, ah, so much to catch up on...

One noteworthy event in the Flanagan household last year was the publication in Chinese of Pre-animate, that masterwork guide to animation by Karen McCann, the mistress of the house. Rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of royalties rolling in from a potential market of 1.5 billion readers, I was even more dazzled by the means by which this book came about.

Karen has a friend from her days as a lecturer in computer animation in Hong Kong called Louisa Wei, herself a professor and film producer. (Louisa was already the recipient of my eternal gratitude for once sending me from Shanghai a heavy metal bust of my literary hero, Lu Xun, which now proudly adorns the mantlepiece in my home in England.) But this time round, without any prompting, Louisa took it into her head to get a Chinese version of Pre-animate published and wrote to a publisher in Hong Kong. They politely declined offering some reason about not being sure about how well it would sell or how suitable it would be for a Chinese audience. It's the type of brush-off you get all the time from publishers and if anyone else but Louisa Wei had received this letter, they would have just taken it with a shrug and moved on.

But Louisa Wei is an extraordinary woman. She then wrote back to the publishers, doggedly dismissed their arguments and urged them to reconsider. Amazingly, the publishers then wrote back and said, 'OK, we'll do it!' The next thing you know Louisa, who was heavily pregnant, translated the whole book in her spare time and saw it through to publication just about the same time as her waters were breaking.

When the Chinese edition dropped onto our doormat in England, I marvelled that anyone could be so lucky to have such a one-woman whirlwind acting on their behalf.

Meanwhile, for anyone interested in reading Pre-animate in English, you can find it here.

The Restaurant of Love Regained

You can hear me discussing The Restaurant of Love Regained and other literary matters on today's Open Book on BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012f8np.html

The Restaurant of Love Regained is a debut novel by 37-year-old Ito Ogawa that was published three years ago in Japan and is just being released this month in English in a translation by David Karashima. The book has sold over 800,000 copies in Japan so it will be interesting to see how it fares over here.

It's the story of a 25-year-old girl who comes back to her city flat one day and discovers that her Indian boyfriend has disappeared, taking with him all the couple's possessions. Her dream of their having their own restaurant one day is in tatters and, distraught and penniless, she heads back to her home village in the countryside that she ran away from ten years earlier. There, traumatized and unable to speak, she makes an uneasy peace with her estranged mother and decides to set up her own makeshift restaurant, preparing wholesome home-made food to order for just one person or group at a time.

It's an account of someone who has lost everything starting over again and getting back to basics - rediscovering the wonder of nature and the home town she had left behind. Through the craft of cookery and the intimacy of serving food, the heroine begins building and re-building a host of new and old relationships. Her restaurant provides emotional therapy not just for herself, but to everyone in the village - from a stray rabbit to a lonely spinster - and ultimately is the means of reconciliation between mother and daughter.

The central idea is how love and affection can be transmitted through food and how joyous it is to make people happy through serving people dishes oozing in natural flavours. It's a rejection of some of the evils of modern life - the breakdown of families, the fast food culture, the obsession with profit and en masse uniformity - and a return to the provincial, the family, local flavours and simple pleasures.

The author Ito Ogawa (pictured right) is a lady of many talents.
As well as writing adult fiction, she has written books for children and is also a member of a musical group Fairlife for whom she writes lyrics.

The book is not something I would have usually read: I devoured it while simultaneously scrutinizing Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy and its lightness of touch and easy readability could not have been in greater contrast to the dense prose and heavy philosophizing of Mishima. I did however find a lot of interest in it and both watched the film of the book and listened to the Fairlife musical album associated with it.

There's no doubt that the novel has struck a chord with Japanese female readers in particular, who can readily empathize with a central character for whom life had not gone as she would have wished. On one level, the book connects to recent bestselling fiction in the West such as Joanne Harris' Chocolat and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love in the common theme of rediscovering oneself and finding love through food. However the book is also very much a part of the strong tradition of popular Japanese female writing by authors such as Banana Yoshimoto and Amy Yamada.

The book is indeed a symbol of the power of Japan's female readership. A few years ago, the bestselling book in Japan was called The Dignity of the State and was a very nationalistic male polemic, warning against the dangers of Westernization and calling for a return to samurai values. But the following year this was trumped by a book called The Dignity of a Woman, which sold 3 million copies, and appealed to the huge female reader market. The appeal of that book was to offer advice on how a Japanese woman should conduct herself in the modern age and suggested a fairly traditional agenda of conducting oneself with decorum.

The Restaurant of Love Regained also falls into this category of post-feminist Japanese writing. It is feminist to the extent that the heroine has the independence to fend for herself and set up her own restaurant; but it is also traditional in its appeal to time-honoured Japanese values - and a woman's place is still in the kitchen! The heroine actively rejects the apparently sexually liberated lifestyle of her mother and feels kinship instead with her grandmother - indeed she goes through life with her talisman of a rice bran miso pot passed down from her grandmother.


The appeal of the book is instant and universal - we all dream of having time to cook - but I also read this novel as an interesting metaphor for modern Japan itself. On the surface everything seems cosmopolitan and international: the heroine has been living with an Indian guy and worked in a Turkish restaurant and picked up recipes for Iranian pomegranate curry. But then she takes all this experience back, along with her grandma's traditional miso pot, to a profoundly Japanese setting - her little restaurant in the countryside and starts making international cuisine there. So it is very typical of the Japanese way of managing to absorb influences from around the world and yet, by keeping its core values, transforms them into something distinctively Japanese. The world is enfolded into Japan and is then seen through the microscopic. In the dishes concocted in a provincial Japanese restaurant, we can taste Indian aromas, dreams of Turkish mosques and fantasize about Iranian plains.

The one additional thing I might say is in relation to the heroine's rather 'hands-on' (and occasionally excruciating) manner of sourcing and preparing meat, which manages to be distinctively Japanese in its ability to be delicate, aesthetic and brutal all at the same time. There is something quintessentially Shinto-Buddhist in the perception even of meat preparation as a sacred rite, representing the transfer of nourishing life force.

There is also an accomplished children's fable enfolded into this novel - the story of the owl who hoots twelve times at exactly midnight every night and is the unchanging, comforting guardian of the heroine is a clever metaphor for the hidden wisdom of a parent looking out for a child (albeit in an occasionally irritating way) - and is really a children's story threaded into the text of this simple, but often quite profound book.

The Displaced Nation

I was alerted yesterday to a great blog on Soseki's ex-pat experience in London on the website The Displaced Nation which you can read here:

http://thedisplacednation.com/2011/05/04/classic-expat-writing-letter-from-london-soseki/

It's really gratifying when you come across thoughtful blogs like this and are reminded just how many inquisitive readers there are out there.

It can sometimes be a somewhat dis-spiriting experience to realize that six years after The Tower of London: Tales of Victorian London was published, it is still lucky if it breaks into the top million (!) of 'best-selling' books on American Amazon and that not a single review has been posted on that site. (Actually, there is one review, but it relates to the abysmal, botched translation of the 'Tower of London' story from twenty years ago). Jay Rubin, the translator of Soseki and Murakami, remarked to me a few years back that a book on Soseki on London was a very odd way to relaunch Soseki as it would only appeal to a narrow British audience and I often fear he has been proved right. No matter that the story of Soseki in London is of incredible importance to the whole surge of masterpieces that would pour forth from Soseki's pen after returning to Japan. Whisper it quietly, but it is Soseki's nervous breakdown in London that is the defining moment of twentieth century literature and the Sosekian literary revolution starts there. Sadly however, it seems that American readers in particular just don't 'get it'.

But then, just when you think that you might as well be talking to yourself, up pops a blog or two, seemingly out of nowhere, that shows you that there are fantastically insightful people out there. Given the narrow interests of the review pages in the Western press, you can only really conclude that the future of diverse, original comment lies in the blogosphere. In this context, I must extend a belated thanks to those people who have posted some great blogs on some of the recent Soseki books.

http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2010/11/classics-circuit-tower-of-london-by.html

http://naehauf-wayhoose.blogspot.com/2010/07/sosekis-books.html

http://miikegreen.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/on-the-tower-of-london-and-other-stories-by-natsume-soseki/

Thanks very much to you all. My only further request can be that some brave soul actually posts a decent review on American Amazon!

By the way, also worthy of note is this very cute film on Youtube touching on Soseki and 'The Tower of London' by promising talent Ai Nishiyama:

http://www.youtube.com/user/anishiyama#p/a/u/0/dp7x8c8Inqo

And one final thing: I am now on Twitter (@DamianFlanagan), so please come on board and follow me there.