Fukushima villages re-claimed by nature, Gothic horror works, Gloria Steinem, Spending time alone, Moby Dick card game: Cultural digest October 17

Nature re-claims chunks of the abandoned towns near Fukushima

• Amazing photos show nature taking over the site near where the Fukushima reactor melted down in 2011. The supermarkets, highways, schools and parking lots sit silent and empty as the Earth claims them back.
• A list of gothic horror works that should be of interest to all who like to have the bejeezus scared out of them. A lot of great works here which include Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (one of my all-time favourite novels) and more contemporary works like White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. One thing I noticed: most of these works are by women.
• A personal reflection on the benefits, joys and comforts of regularly spending time on your own. There's also evidence that it is good for the brain.  
• A writer imagines Charlotte's Web as though Albert Camus were a character in it.
• Long piece on Gloria Steinem. Steinem will be here in Montreal on December 1st at 7pm in Mile End.
• I want this: a card game based on Moby Dick. 

Vermeer, A Little Life, Hokusai in Boston and Coming Out Stories: Cultural Digest for August 5

Vermeer and love

• Really interesting interview at The Millions with the writer of one of this year's most buzzed about books, A Little Life. The work has been raved about, the writer seemingly coming from nowhere and creating a literary stir that has been praised almost universally. No, I haven't read it yet but the more I read about it, the more intrigued I am.
• Moving piece in The Paris Review yesterday about Vermeer's evocative & haunting scenes and what they can teach us about love, inspiring Michael White's book Travels in Vermeer.
• I'm really dying to see this exhibition on 18th century Japanese artist, Hokusai, now showing in Boston. Road Trip!
• Happy to see that the Montreal Gazette is doing this video series on Coming Out Stories by well-known Montrealers. 
• Chinese Guzheng player, Bei Bei, mesmerizes with her "strange instrument of beauty." 

Hokusai in Boston

Blue Met's A Year in Reading: from Ferrante to Adelstein, Luiselli to Benedetti

Since everyone else seems to be doing it, I thought I'd weigh in on my personal favorites for 2014:

Best 2014 comfort reader: Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance: I've long been a fan of Eileen Chang, but this novel, which dates from the middle part of Eileen Chang's career, was a new one for me. It appeared in serial form in the 1950s but is set in 1930s Shanghai and tells the story of a doomed love affair in the tumultuous period leading up to the Chinese Civil War. It's a tale of a young woman trying hard to live life according to her own terms in a society where women are diminished and dismissed. It's not a perfect novel but it's engaging a fascinating tale of power, love and fate.

Best  2014 binge-read: Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan novels: in 2014 I read the first three books in a few months and was absolutely riveted by them. They tell the story of a friendship (sometimes enemy-ship) of two girls growing up in 1950s Naples (the first book starts then, the third book ends in the late 70s) while one girl manages to pull herself out of the neighborhood through study and hard work, the other relies on pluck and street smarts. It's the story of an Italy that's long gone, but also romantic & violent.

Best 2014 discovery: the work of Valeria Luiselli. One of Mexico's most promising up and coming Faces in the Crowd is still with me months after I read it. It is a fascinating novel that looks at time, art, writing and fate/choice. This is a writer who I will be watching for years to come because everything she's written so far is interesting.

Best 2014 shocker: A True Novel by Minae Mizumura: this novel is a retelling of Wuthering Heights set in post-war Japan. But that really diminishes the book in a certain way because it's only a tiny fraction of what's interesting about this book: it's fascinating formally and one keeps asking oneself throughout the book: is this the novel or the story on which the novel is based? Is this real? Then one wonders what real actually means: is anything real? But I'm making the book sound pedantic or possibly boring. It's anything but. It's an excellent novel that I highly recommend.

Best 2014 Guilty Pleasure (and best 2014 book by a man?!): The Rest of Jungle & Other Stories by Mario Benedetti: I loved this book. It's a collection of stories by a Uruguayan writer whose work is hard to pin down: it's about middle class love affairs, about jungle adventures in the bush, it's about office workers stuck in bureaucratic hell, it's about animals who are bitchy and judgmental.

Best 2014 non-fiction journalism: Tokyo Vice: an American Reporter on the Police Beat by Jake Adelstein: Adelstein is one of the only foreign reporters ever hired by a Japanese newspaper and he tells the tale of his work for one of Tokyo's biggest daily newspapers, including his involvement in writing stories about Yakuza and other sordid Japanese adventures.

What we talk about when we talk about Murakami

This really interesting article in Publishing Perspectives touched on something that I noted when I was in Asia last month: Murakami's incredible influence on the cultural life and relations in between Asian countries.

His books were everywhere in Taipei: in bookstore windows, in people's hands, on tables in cafes. I also noticed that whenever anyone mentioned jazz, they'd also mention whiskey. That's a Murakami connection. People I spoke to knew his works, his short stories and his novels, and could speak about them with authority and in detail.

Many Westerners, though, are surprised to hear that in much of Asia, Murakami is not considered a "literary" writer at all and many pooh-pooh him as being a popular writer.

It's significant that he's not drinking green tea.

In Japan especially, the gap between high culture and pop culture is still very much pronounced though it's slowly changing. Because of this, I think, serious writers and cultural workers tend to look askance at Murakami's work, both for its content and for the language he uses (very intentional colloquial writing is what he has long been known for in Japan: one of my big gripes, in fact, is how translators try to mimic this when they translate him into English: Kafka on the Shore was, in my view, almost unreadable due to this issue).

Yet he's a writer who has enormously broad appeal: in Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and many other countries (not to mention Quebec: his books translated into French are probably some of the most commonly seen books on the metro).

Yet as the writer notes in the piece linked above, it's ironic that though Murakami can bring Asian countries together to overcome all the complexities and tensions of past conflicts and current political wrangling, he writes very little about Asia as a whole. Certainly Japan is there but not as much as one might assume given that many of his works are set there.

This is precisely why many foreigners (meaning non-Japanese) and particularly Westerners like Murakami: he is like "Japan-light," an easy writer to access for those interested in Japan or Asia but not willing to go the extra mile to really explore its literature, history or culture in any complex or subtle way.

Plus, he's a decent storyteller and that means something, too...

First Snow on Fuji

Been reading this amazing collection of short stories by Yasunari Kawabata this week, "First Snow on Fuji." Translated by Michael Emmerich, the stories date from the mid-1950s and there are some real gems here.

The title story recounts the doomed love affair of a young couple who get pregnant before the war (WWII) and because of happenstance are not allowed to remain together. The woman is taken by her family away from Tokyo ostensibly to protect her from the air raids but really so that she would not be tempted to marry the man who impregnates her. The story starts eight years after this, the couple is reunited on a train, looking out the window at the first snowfall on Mt Fuji. They discuss their recent pasts--she has left her husband after eight years of marriage though, as custom seems to dictate, she is no longer allowed to be with her two young children--but they also reflect back on the child they had together who died shortly after birth. It is this death, both the death of the child and the death of their love, that haunts them both. Mixed in with this painful history is Japan's own painful wartime experience: the air raids, the mass loss of life, the radically altered society.

          "Let's talk until morning," Utako whispered, "But I don't want to talk about some things, okay?"

          Jiro put his arm around her and drew her closer to him.

          "Are you able to sleep well these days?"

          "Oh, I'm always so exhausted...hold me the way you used to," Utako said, lying very still.

          "Hmm - how was that?" Jiro felt slightly at a loss.

          Utako smiled. "I can't believe it -  you've forgotten, haven't you?"

          "And you used to be so quiet."

          "Of course. I didn't know anything then."

          Jiro closed his eyes, trying to call up the images of Tokyo's streets burning in an air raid. He      remembered the broken corpses. This was the method he used to keep his desires in check.

So much is communicated in this little scene from the story: pain of loss, aging, memory, desire, war, guilt.

Other stories stay with me, as well: "Silence," about a writer who loses his voice and ability to write after a stroke and the pain his daughter goes through in sacrificing her life to take care of him. In "Row of Trees," a family falls apart while oddly focused on the fact that the leaves on the trees outside their house are falling off in a bizarre, seemingly inexplicable way.

Kawabata was Japan's first Nobel Prize-winning writer (in 1968) and the introduction to the collection here (by Emmerich) traces the difficulties he faced once he became so enormously successful. Oddly, the theme of the silence of the writer surfaces strongly in this collection, one of Kawabata's last before success truly would silence him. He died, of suicide, in 1972, four years after his Nobel win and two years after his most famous protege, Yukio Mishima, committed suicide himself in a spectacular and quite public coup attempt (beautifully chronicled in Mishima, by Marguerite Yourcenar).

                                                   Yasunari Kawabata, 1940s