J Lit I Like

Following up on the post below about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I've been pretty indifferent to Japanese literature for many years now. I just inhaled the stuff when I was an undergrad just beginning my foray into Japanese studies. I still vividly remember reading Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on a ferry in the Japan Sea in February 1984. The ferry ride was tough, thirty-one hours on a rough sea, but the novel was so absorbing, I barely noticed (or, I should say, I barely remember the ferry ride itself). I plowed through much of the modern classics—Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Mori Ogai, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Shiga Naoya and many others. But once I got to grad school, I wasn't finding that much that interested me anymore, although Izumi Kyoka was an exception.

But I have read two things in recent years that I found very powerful: Medoruma Shun's short story "Droplets" (translated by Mike Molasky in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa) and Kirino Natsue's Out. Both of these books were viscerally effective.

Medoruma's story is a magical realist piece about memory anxiety and the memory economy in Okinawa. Apart from how great it is to use in a class on war memories, I think it is just a great piece of storytelling.

Kirino's novel is ultra-creepy on so many dimensions. Set in a lunch-box factory, she captures the alienation of modern suburban Japan to perfection. Once the murders start, however, the thing takes on a tremendous paranoid tension.

These are both great reads.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicles

I recently finished reading Murakami Haruki's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

I read my first (and, until now, only) Murakami novel, Pinball, 1973, in graduate school and didn't care for it much. It seemed to me to be another one of those contemporary Japanese novels in which nothing much happens to a person who can't manage to give a damn or form an opinion about anything. While I'm sure I have given all of those novels (Yoshimoto Banana's works, for example) short shrift, I've also not been able to overcome my boredom. Perhaps I'm shallow, but when it comes to pleasure reading I'd actually like a story.

I first started hearing about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle from students when I'd talk about Manchuria in class. Students would come up to me afterwards, excited, saying, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!" I'd feign knowledge (not hard after the first few times) and say, "Yes, yes. Just like the novel" and then change the subject.

While I had no intention of moving beyond the feigned interest at first, I soon began to feel like I should get over my Murakami aversion and read the damned book. In part it was because I felt some slight tingle of responsibility to the students to be able to converse a bit about Japanese literature (seeing as we have no one in our Lit department who does J Lit). In part it was because the WWII memories project I was doing with Alice made me want to read across broad swathes of contemporary Japanese writing that touched on the war. Finally, I found the references to the novel coming with greater regularity once I started interviewing a Japanese man in a neighboring town who had spent eight years in Manchuria, from 1945 to 1953. Every time I mentioned his story to someone, they would come back with, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!"

So I finally got over it and picked up a copy at the Literary Guillotine, my favorite bookstore in town. The owner, David, winced when I brought it to the counter. He said that he had tried to get through it, but just couldn't (this coming from a man who has recommended things like Don Delillo's Underworld, a novel I haven't been able to get through yet). I winced back at those words, remembering my own earlier experience with Murakami. But, I bought it, nonetheless, brought it home, started it, bogged down after 20 pages and put it on the shelf to "ripen" for several months. I finally picked it up again this past December and pushed myself through the whole thing.

I should say, at this point, that I thought it was a much better book than Pinball, 1973. The Manchurian passages were also by far the most gripping. There were, at the same time, some of the characteristic features of a Murakami novel that are far less interesting to me. (I joked with my friend Sakae that my heart sank when I opened the novel to find the main character cooking spaghetti in the very first paragraph. "What is this obsession that all his characters have with spaghetti?" I asked.) But, in the end, it is a novel that seems to be sticking with me.

For the record, the story of my Japanese man's time in Manchuria is nothing at all like the stories of Manchuria that Murakami tells. Murakami's Manchurian stories are terribly brutal. And in the context of Japanese memories of WWII, necessary. My man's stories are, to the point we've uncovered, rather different.

What I'll be chewing on for awhile is how The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a story about post-Imperial Japan, how the failure to deal head-on with the colonial legacy creates deep psychic scars. I'm want to resist the historian's tendency to read fiction allegorically, but at this point I do read the novel as a story of several people suffering the long-term effects of a past trauma (traumas not always directly related to Manchuria, but linked by the authorial voice to a kind of primal scene in Manchuria) and the transformation of the main protagonist into (and out of) a psychic detective/therapist.

It wasn't always enjoyable for me, but it was worth reading in the end and, as I said, will likely stick with me for awhile.

Nostalgia for Five Year-Olds

A couple of weeks ago, Sammy found an old Anpanman tank top in a plastic box that had been stashed in a closet. It was a shirt he wore when he was two. Thrilled to find that he could still, kinda, get into the shirt, he has since worn it under his shirts and pajamas every single day and night. And it isn't the Anpanman picture that thrills him. It is the thought that he used to wear it.

At least we know he has gained in height, if not girth.

Wild Life

Mountain Lion Habitat
Originally uploaded by Takecrew

I often think about the differences between being raised on the east coast, as I was, and being raised on the west coast, as my sons are. One difference I've mulled about lately is the relationship to wild animals. Growing up in the northeast, specifically suburban Boston, in the 1960s and 70s meant that the wild animals I encountered were squirrels, raccoons, skunks, garter snakes, chipmunks and a variety of small birds. At a stretch, I could go to New Hampshire or Maine and see deer, beaver, black bear and, if lucky (and I was never this lucky), moose. The small animals that shared my environment were so non-threatening as to barely register in my consciousness. Rabies from raccoons was about the worst I could imagine.

I had been in Santa Cruz only about a month or so when I was stunned one night to hear a pack of coyotes on the hunt. A few weeks after first hearing that pack, I heard a horrible series of screams that sounded like they were coming from a nearby quarry. It sounded like someone was beating a child in an outdoor echo chamber. I would have called the police, but it sounded far enough away and too indistinctly locatable to be able to give any directions. Besides, someone else closer to the scene must have heard it. It was only a couple of days later when I learned that the screams were coming from a mountain lion that had come down to our local woods (the Pogonip). Worse yet, the lion wasn't being attacked. That was just its normal cry (really hideous)! As time went on, I encountered other exotic animals: hawks, bobcats, sea lions, elephant seals and otters. Sure, the usual small animals were about, but these new animals were big, dangerous and (holy cow!) right next door!

So I've been thinking about these animals in my new environment a lot lately, especially on the "nature walks" with my boys. A couple of weeks ago we took a walk into some serious back country in a park called The Forest of Nisene Marks. We passed one of the above signs warning us that we were entering mountain lion territory and gave it little thought. But as we hiked up into a narrow arroyo late into the afternoon, I began to think about how risky I was being with my sons. I might not have much to fear from a mountain lion attack, but I was walking along with a couple of bite-sized morsels. I spent much of that walk looking over my shoulders, scanning the ridges above us for any sign of a big cat, cursing myself for being unprepared. Two days later I read that a big cat had attacked a 5 year-old boy walking with his parents in Washington State. The cat was dragging the boy away by the head but the mother managed to drive the cat off by beating its head with her metallic water bottle. The parents then carried the badly bleeding boy (head wounds!) for one whole hour back to the car certain that the lion was stalking its wounded prey. Ack! (Good thing the lion hadn't gone for the neck, must have been a young, inexperienced one.)

Since reading that article, I've started carrying my old pilgrimage walking staff with us on our hikes, figuring that plastic water bottles might not be as effective as metal ones. I'm also planning on buying one of those fog horns in a bottle that I used to hear blown at Red Sox games. Whack 'em and blast 'em if need be, I tell myself.

But I managed to keep these east coaster's fears to myself until our last hike, yesterday, in Wilder Ranch. This time, the boys spotted the mountain lion warning sign and spent the first 10 minutes of the walk trying to figure out the risk. I assured them that Wilder Ranch was a good place for us (that's why I chose it), but I was also concerned about them getting scared of nature.

As a born and bred east coaster, it will take me a long time to get blasé about the wildlife in Santa Cruz, the way I was about the animals I grew up with in Boston. What will it mean for my sons' attitudes about animals that they are growing up in a place where wildlife is really wild?

Trailheads

Trailhead
Originally uploaded by Takecrew

The boys and I spent much of the summer exploring the many parks and trails of the Santa Cruz mountains.I called these hikes "nature walks" to appeal to Peter's affection for science and to conceal the possibility that these walks could turn into "slogs" or "forced marches." It seems to have been a successful strategy, for while we ended some of the walks with the two of them taking turns riding on my shoulders, they never seemed to associate these nature walks with exhaustion, which was my biggest fear.

My other top strategy was to take these walks in places with running water. I stumbled on this principle on our first walk in the lower portion of Big Basin, in the area known as Waddell Creek. It was the first of our nature walks, back in the spring, and I had decided to drag the kids out for a walk because of my concern that neither was getting much exercise or had much stamina. My fears were stoked at the very beginning of the walk when the boys wilted at the trailhead. Somehow I managed to drag them through the park entrance and then winced when they chose the narrow uphill path, rather than the broad, flat path to the creek at our first fork in the road. Indeed, there was much groaning as the path continued to climb. But then we had our first lucky break when a group of three young women caught up with us. The leader of the group had worked in outdoor education and she kindly pointed out a number of interesting plants that caught Peter's attention. We learned about "miner's lettuce," the "refrigerator tree" and, most importantly, poison oak. Without it necessarily turning into a specimen hunt, the boys seemed to begin to perceive the landscape around them differently. The started naming each new stretch of the path and rushing ahead to discover new terrains. Eventually our path intersected with Waddell Creek. The boys played in the stream for about an hour whereupon they pronounced it "the best day ever!"

Since that day, we've managed a nature walk about once every three weeks. We've walked in the Fall Creek Unit of Henry Cowell Redwoods, the Forest of Nisene Marks (this is the trailhead featured in the photo above), Butano State Park, Elkhorn Slough, and the Pogonip (a set of trails skirting the edge of the UCSC campus). We've usually gone just the three of us, but we've gone with the boys' favorite friend Qun-Qun a couple times and even once with Noriko (she'll join us more once she's done writing her book). I've wanted to blog these trips, but haven't done so yet. Perhaps this can be a start.

Speaking of Evil...

Enjoy more of these at I Can Has Cheeseburger?

L.O.S.E.

Our friend, Kirsten, wondered today on Facebook how it is that Scooby Doo continues to be popular across the generations. It is something I have pondered myself. I loved it for a short time as a kid, but ultimately left it behind for the "sophistication" of Looney Tunes (especially any cartoon written by Michael Maltese). Not only were Looney Tunes vastly superior as animation, but they were chock full of sly and referential humor. I was so certain of the superiority of the fluid L.T. animation that it took me a long time to appreciate Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The boys, of course, love Scooby, in all its irritating versions, including "A Pup Named Scooby Doo" (one of the things that most annoyed me about American cartoons in my teen years was the proliferation of all those "baby" versions of my childhood cartoons like "Baby Looney Tunes"; but that's a rant for another day). One day while out visiting Grandma in her camper in Felton, we spotted a real life Mystery Machine. The boys screamed to pull over so we could go into the store (the Felton New Leaf grocery store) and find Scooby and the Gang. We spent months afterwards coming up with excuses ("modeling creativity" as Kirsten says) for why we couldn't go back out to Felton to track Scooby down or invite him to come over to play. Our explanations often involved resorting to a DVD of a Scooby show or movie to show them how often the gang traveled all over the world to solve mysteries.

I'm not sure why the boys love Scooby. I imagine it has something to do with the thrill of the contest with monsters. Sammy has occasionally professed fear of Scooby episodes and Peter has assured him that Scooby and the Gang "always win." Scooby, in short, is an utterly safe flirtation with danger. Predictable and totally earnest. And that is what both made Scooby tedious and then enjoyable in irony. Saying, "I'd have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!" and "It's Mr. Jenkins!" in other situations made Scooby fun beyond the time when I was its natural constituency.

All of this is mere prelude to report that my boys are getting into a new cartoon that is introducing them to ironic humor: "The League of Super Evil". It is the story of four evil villain friends whose plans for nefariousness usually extend only so far as finding ways to delay the pizza delivery boy so that they can get their pizza for free. The League (L.O.S.E.) usually fail, but their motto—"Be afraid, be slightly afraid"—is a new household favorite.

The question of the moment: will the introduction to cartoon irony in League of Super Evil begin the boys' inevitable, yet only temporary, separation from Scooby?