The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories
Edited by Jay Rubin Penguin Classics £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 J P 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 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 is introduced 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 very few 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.’
Despite several shining exceptions, The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories does indeed appear to be ‘an unconventional selection of works by an unusual assortment of writers’
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!’ I love the shamelessness of that exclamation mark. 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’.
I wonder what the people at Penguin thought when this singularly tepid introduction came through their postbox. Had it been by anyone else, I’d guess they would have sent it back for a rewrite, but since it was by the most trumpeted Japanese novelist in the world, I imagine they simply had to grit their teeth and print it. ‘In any case,’ 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 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 within the rest of the book. Similarly, the writer famously known as ‘Yukio Mishima’ in the West is here called ‘Mishima Yukio’, and so on.
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’, and emphasises the stark differences in our two cultures. 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. Of course, some of these items have become more familiar to us in the past few decades, but others remain mysterious. In a number of the stories, for instance, there are references to ‘two-mat rooms’ and ‘six-mat rooms’. Presumably, they indicate the size of each room, but I would have liked more explanation: there are a few notes at the back, but they are brief and patchy.
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.’
It’s all a far cry from Jane Austen, though, in a funny way, their dedication to the formal rituals of this deathly act has strange echoes of the elegant to-ing and fro-ing in the courtship of Miss Bennet and Mr Darcy.
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.’
The husband and wife make love for one last time, and experience a strange rapture. ‘As their tongues explored each other’s mouth, reaching into the smooth, moist interior, they felt as if the still-unknown agonies of death had tempered their senses to the keenness of red-hot steel.’
The tale is given a further edge by the knowledge that Mishima himself committed ritual suicide, as recently as 1970. Murakami touches on this in his introduction, saying that he did it ‘in a patriotic act of grieving for the fate of his nation’, but I had to look to another volume of short stories on my bookshelves to find that Mishima ritually disembowelled himself following an attempt to achieve a revolutionary coup d’état, after which he was ‘decapitated by his faithful followers’.
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 Ryunosuke Akutagawa, 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, a witch who gobbles up young men, and an old lady who is slowly turning into sugar. First, this old lady is covered in ants, who feed off her, and before long even her daughter can’t resist a lick. ‘After checking to be sure that her mother was asleep, Yukiko softly extended her tongue, over which spread the sensation of the foot’s melting. Was it the sugar that made her tongue feel hot, or the perversion?’
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’