The Old Capital (Kawabata Yasunari)

The grove of cherries inside the main gate to the left of Ninnaji was overflowing with blossoms.

Whenever I see the lovely straight cedars at Kitayama, my spirit feels refreshed.

A small tree stood at the water's edge on the far side; the reflection of its crimson leaves shivered in the flow of the river.

If a novel can be built on haikus, then The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by J Martin Holman, is one. The sentences have the profound simplicity of the form. The narrative is broken by short paragraphs. The paragraphs usually contain a single sentence or two or three. The descriptions are charged with the beauty of the natural world, its concentrated essence. The sentences unfold in painterly scenes, flowering into the greenery of the forest and red orchard.

The novel's backdrop and setting are delicately described. The viewing of weeping cherry blossoms, the parade of cultural festivals, the weaving of the most exquisite obi - everything is evoked precisely. In sinuous sequence, the details appear with the transcendence of calligraphy.

Chieko, a young woman, was in search of her identity. She was a foundling, left behind by her true parents when still a baby. She grew up comfortably being cared for by a couple who ran a business selling fabric cloths. Her adoptive parents treated her like their own, but her broken connection from her biological parents seemed to weigh on her more and more. It was as if there was something lacking in her, a part of her nature that was also reflected in her seeming disconnect from and yearning for the natural world.

The novelist's theme seems to be the attempt to reconcile human beings to the natural world. There was a broken pathway that the characters are trying to bridge. They were restless, not content with the way things have so far progressed in their lives. If only this hidden something, an ecological connection, is found, then perhaps they will learn their rightful place, their niche, in their surroundings. And this knowledge will free them from their apprehensions.

As substitute for the beauty of the natural world, the fine arts of painting and weaving became significant expressions of it. Here is Chieko's father Takichiro on a painter that he used as inspiration to create a pattern for weaving:

   "He [Paul Klee] is a painter who was in the forefront of the abstract movement. His paintings are gentle, exceptional. You might say they have the quality of the dream, a quality that would speak even to the heart of an old Japanese like me. I studied them over and over until I came up with this pattern. It's unlike any traditional Japanese design. "

Flowers, wood trees, festivals, and fabric were the motifs in the books. They were the sources of inspiration to create works of art. The flowers and the trees were used to come up with the design for weaving an obi. The numerous Japanese festivals described in the book usually involved elements of nature appreciation.

The mountains were neither high nor deep. The trunk of each individual tree was visible even on the tops of the mountains. The cedars were used in the construction of tearooms so the appearance of the groves themselves had the elegant air of the tea ceremony.

The cedar grove evoking the elegance of a tea ceremony was the perfect statement of culture relying on nature. The utility of trees evoking, at the same time, the function of form and the form of function.

The old capital is Kyoto, after the designation of Tokyo as the new. The foundation of its art, crafts, and trades was the natural surroundings. Its old patterns had the vitality found in nature. Nowadays, though, the old men perceived that the increasing materialism and capitalism are affecting the quality of the artworks.

   "My eye just isn't accustomed to them [flowers]. I wouldn't like an obi or kimono cloth in a tulip pattern, but if a great artist were to create such a painting, even tulips could become a work with an eternal life," Takichiro said, looking aside. "Some of the ancient designs were like that. Some of them are older than this capital city itself. No one can create anything like that anymore. They can do no more than copy them.... Aren't there even trees here, still living, that are older than the capital?"

Like Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata seemed to eulogize the fading past. The ushering in of modernity signaled the encroachment of Western views, the increasing reliance on mechanization and mass production. They seemed not to bode well for the fate of pure art.

The old capital seemed to represent a last stand for the "old", while the new was stealthily modifying the traditions and values built on ancient nature and art. Open lands were converted into industrial zones. Houses were giving in to construction of inns. While in the mountains, in a tree plantation ("surrounded by the straight cedar trunks of uniform size") the place of man in nature was put into question, perhaps the central question raised by the novel.

"These [man-made trees] are about forty years old. They'll be cut and made into columns or the like. Left alone, they would probably grow for a thousand years ... wide and tall. I think about that occasionally. I like virgin forests the best, but in this village it's as though we're growing flowers for cutting."
[...]
"Were there no such thing as man, there would be nothing like Kyoto either. It would all be natural woods and fields of grasses. This land would belong to the deer and wild boar, wouldn't it? Why did man come into this world? It's frightening ... mankind."

What is the place of men and women in that natural canvas? The supremacy of nature is fleeting when it is us who eventually manipulate it at our own bidding. Takichiro turned to Western painters like Klee who were inspired by orientalism in order to come up with a flower pattern for his daughter's obi. He sought harmony and yet Hideo, a young master weaver, saw through the artifice of the design and dismissed it as lacking in "harmony". Hideo recognized that, ultimately, an artistic design for an obi can mimic the color of the flowers, yet it can never capture the true beauty of nature.

One after the other, the Kyoto festivals were described in the novel in detail, a seemingly endless profusion of ceremonies. The Gion festival, the bamboo cutting ceremony at Kurama Temple, the Daimonji fire-lighting festival, the Festival of the Ages. In these moments the novel seemed to transform into a cultural guide to festivals.

By interspersing these cultural events with nature viewings, the novelist seemed to contrast the activities of man in unbuilt nature and in his built environment. Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first of his Duino Elegies, seemed to have voiced the same perpetual listlessness of the novel's characters, as they move in the world interpreted for them:

... Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

The cedars and willows are always at home in the natural world. In contrast, the fine art of painting, the wearing of colorful obis, and the festivals - all are mere "interpretations" of nature, all subject to human appreciation. They exist as a culmination of inspiration, having been shaped after the likeness of trees and flowers.

Kawabata said in his Nobel Prize speech that his goal is to seek man's harmony in nature. In The Old Capital, the novelist manipulated nature and conducted a "natural experiment" to observe a person discovering her natural (biological) identity. The novelist set up questing identities, selves, and cultures in their natural surroundings and from there sought to define their feelings for it.

Chieko preferred camphor trees over mountain cedar trees presumably because the former are natural forest trees while the latter are man-made plantations. It cannot be denied that the gulf between landscape and man widens whenever land use decisions led to alteration and modification of nature.

To repair a broken connection is a difficult thing. Because the forest trees possess some great power, a "weird power", that holds sway over the characters, they have the capacity to strike them to the core, to restore them to their selves, who were born naked in the face of the elements. From a delicate sequence of sentences and passages as slender as cherry branches, Kawabata produced a beautiful work of ecological realism. One that questioned the rootedness of man in the natural environment and in this, our interpreted world.

Addendum to the reading plan (June 2011)

In addition to the books mentioned in the previous post, I'll be flipping through the flip side of modern theater.

6. The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry, translated from the French by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor

Aba, it's Ubu!

The inimitable bloggers Nicole of bibliographing and Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations are hosting the The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity.

My edition (thanks to J for picking me up a copy - the very last copy - at Fully Booked Rockwell) contains the three core Ubu texts: Ubu Rex, Ubu Cuckolded, and Ubu Enchained.

I'm already un-bored.



Ubu cross-posted.

Reading plan: June 2011

Here's my reading plan this month:

Design by Teammanila

1. El Filibusterismo (Subversion) by José Rizal, translated from the Spanish by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin

The Filipino national hero is celebrating his 150th birth anniversary on June 19. In observance of it, the Malacañang Palace declared June 20 a non-working holiday. What better way to celebrate this than by reading one of his two masterpieces? The other one is Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) to which El Filibusterismo is the sequel.

Originally written in Spanish, the two novels are popularly known as the Noli and Fili. As I've written previously: "The novels of Rizal, the Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo, are the formative documents in the securing of Philippine independence from the Spanish government before the turn of the twentieth century. The tinder that set on fire the hearts and spirits of Filipino freedom fighters, they inspired the revolutionaries to fight for their own independence."

Incidentally, Penguin is coming up with a new translation by Harold Augenbraum (via The Literary Saloon). But I don't have this copy. The one I have is by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin so that's the one I'm going to read and blog about. It was also her version (a superb version, I think) of the Noli which I read in 2009. I've previously read both books in English translation by Leon Ma. Guerrero. The books were required reading in school. I'm excited about this read because I personally prefer the Fili over the Noli, although both are great really. 


2. Austerlitz by W G Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell

This is for a group read in the Sebald group in Shelfari. Our discussion starts in July. This will be the fourth selection of the group. Austerlitz won for its author and translator the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002.


3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

This is the June selection by the Wolves. I sort of liked Díaz's short stories in Drown. Oscar Wao should be interesting, footnotes and irreverence and all.

4. The Japanese Literature Challenge 5, hosted by Dolce Bellezza, just took off today and I'm so hyped up I listed down the books I plan to read in the next 8 months. My short list comes to more than a dozen titles. Wishful thinking, I hope not. Last year I was able to finish 15 Japanese books, and this year I count 6 books already. As to which one to read first for this year's challenge, I'm thinking of finally starting something by Yasunari Kawabata or Shusaku Endo.


5. Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

The Your Face Tomorrow Group Read is being hosted by Richard at Caravana de recuerdos. The discussion of the first volume, Fever and Spear, will officially start at the end of the month. I will be joining in August for the finale - Poison, Shadow and Farewell. I heard there's a twist at the end of the book. A twist no one could have seen coming.

Underground (Murakami Haruki)

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
by Murakami Haruki, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama.

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, released sarin poison gas inside the trains of the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Nine months after the incident, the novelist Haruki Murakami began to interview the victims in order to understand what actually happened.

Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. But it was a real nightmare happening to real people in the real world, unfolding as if in real time. He did what Gabriel García Márquez did in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interviews into a compelling narrative.

The narrative has two self-contained parts, divided into short sections focusing on one person and his part in the gas attack. The first part, titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of members and ex-members of the Aum cult. The first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism; the second part was a glimpse into the minds of individuals who renounced the world and joined the religious cult.

In the first part, the victims and their relatives narrated the story one by one. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current occupation, the daily itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway on the day they were exposed to sarin gas. For most of the victims, the attack had taken a permanent toll on their health. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. Many are still burdened by the aftereffects of sarin months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted well into Murakami's adopted journalistic framework to convey a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. But here it was told naturally, without sensationalism, and yet several moments in the book would give one the scare. While some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth was no less unbelievable or surreal, just like any surreal event in life.

The acknowledged influences in the composition of Underground were Studs Terkel and Bob Greene, but the form and structure itself was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witnesses were asked in a kind of deposition to recount what happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

(Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces to the two parts, in the brief introductory sections preceding each interviewee's account, and in his summary essays at the end of the two parts. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake, this work of nonfiction tackled upfront the cruelty inflicted on an unsuspecting public.)


LEFT IMAGE: NORMAL LEFT EYE OF A RABBIT; RIGHT IMAGE: CONTRACTION OF THE PUPIL, 5 MINUTES AFTER THE INSTILLATION OF 5 µg/kg OF SARIN (Vijayaraghavan et al. 2007)


Just how deadly was sarin gas? Classified as a weapon of mass destruction and banned by the United Nations in 1993, a tiny drop of it could kill a person on the spot. Depending on the amount of exposure, sarin can lead to contraction of the eye pupils, convulsions, coma, difficulty in breathing, disturbed sleep and nightmares, extreme sensitivity to light, foaming at the mouth, high fevers, loss of consciousness, loss of memory, nausea and vomiting, paralysis, post-traumatic stress disorder, respiratory ailments, seizures, uncontrollable trembling, vision problems (temporary or permanent), and death.

(One victim suggested that increasing materialism was partly to blame as catalyst to this attack. Capitalism as a precondition to insensitivity, the loss of moral compass, leading to complacency, selfishness, and cruelty. This critique was not really too pronounced in the book although one can frame this latent argument from the way the narrative repeatedly presented the attack as an interruption of the subway passengers' travel to their work. Something of a Marxist idea about this interruption of the mode of production was similar to the way countless crimes against women in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 can be seen as an indictment of the maquiladora economy in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.)

In the first part, Murakami questioned 35 individuals and elicited from them a sense of what it felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. It was obvious that he had copious amounts of sympathy for the victims. In interview after interview, he introduced a new face, a new victim, someone with not just a unique injury but a new perspective on what transpired on that day. The victims were telling and re-telling the terrorist act for the reader, over and over.

   ... I walked up the stairs to the ticket barrier and went above ground. Suddenly I met with the most amazing sight. People were dropping like flies all over the place.
   I'd taken the third car from the back and had absolutely no idea what was happening at the front of the platform. I was just heading up above ground, swearing under my breath like everyone else, when right before my eyes I saw three people fall down and foam at the mouth, their arms and legs twitching. "What the hell's going on here?" I thought.
   Closest to me was this man whose limbs were quivering, he was trembling all over and foaming at the mouth, having some kind of seizure. I just looked at him and my jaw dropped. I knew it was serious and rushed over to ask him what had happened. I could see he needed immediate care. That's when someone who was still walking by said, "Him foaming like that is dangerous, you'd better stuff some newspaper in his mouth." So we both helped him. After that all these exhausted people kept coming up from the ticket barrier below, then dropping to the ground. I couldn't work out what had happened. Some of the people sitting down suddenly just keeled over flat out.

What would be the point of replaying for the reader the above scene in different ways, repeatedly drilling the same thing in his mind? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent, something that can be grasped?

One was struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who personally talked and listened to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

In the act of reading, the packets of sarin were being punctured dozens of times, the deadly liquid spreading on the floor, releasing the potent smell and downing passenger after passenger. But in the end it did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. The stories were reliving the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet collectively they were pointing to something more troubling, more arresting. We were not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We were reading about many disasters, many parallel nightmares, many hells that materialized simultaneously.

"Overwhelming violence" is Murakami's description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent March earthquake and the resulting tsunami and the nuclear accidents. Hate and violence and natural calamities are being staged in an uncertain world. It is a world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world turning upside down, literally darkening in front of you.

The blow was very hard but that doesn't mean one ought to give up. What the survivors can do is describe what memory can still describe. And what the writer can do is seek out the witnesses, listen to their stories, and set on paper testimonials of suffering. Murakami accomplished what he set out to do: describe a person's life, family, hopes and fears, contradictions, and dilemmas. In addition, "Underground" was a catalogue of crimes.

What impelled the novelist to write about the gas attack was his desire to know how this kind of event could happen in Tokyo, one of the safest cities in the world. A terrorist act by a religious group, undertaken in the name of salvation, flew in the face of everything we hold sacred. Logic and common sense broke down. In the transcribed interviews in Underground, belated words after the brutal fact, Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a dangerous world. He wrote a memorial for human fortitude, a manifesto against irrationality.





(Posted in early form in Project Dogeared; Chemical structure of sarin nerve gas from Wikipedia; Images of rabbit's eye from J Med CBR Def.)

Journey Into the Past (Stefan Zweig)

Journey Into the Past is a well written novella about love tested by years of physical separation. It reminds me of Henry James in the depiction of inner passions and conflicts, but with a more fast paced and electric prose. Not to say that James is less intense, but his is a kind of cold intensity that withers a flower in a single glance. Stefan Zweig's intensity is a fever-pitch evocation of desire and disappointment.

Ludwig, a man of humble beginnings, fell in love with his employer's wife, and she with him. They recognized their strong feelings for each other on the eve of Ludwig's departure abroad. He was sent overseas, in Mexico, to oversee a mining venture, a rare chance for him to improve his lot in life. The job will cost him two years away from Germany. Before his departure the lovers came to an understanding that they will renew their relationship when he returns to Germany. After two years, when he was just about ready to come home, the first world war broke out and transport to Europe was cut off.

Like James, class distinction between characters hangs like an oppressive weight. Early in the book the narrator Ludwig contemplates his new opulent surroundings, the house of his employer where he was asked to live:

All he had brought with him, even he himself in his own clothes, shrank to miserable proportions in this spacious, well-lit room. His one coat, ridiculously occupying the big, wide wardrobe, looked like a hanged man; his few washing things and his shabby shaving kit lay on the roomy, marble-tiled wash-stand like something he had coughed up or a tool carelessly left there by a workman; and instinctively he threw a shawl over the hard, ugly wooden trunk, envying it for its ability to lie in hiding here, while he himself stood inside these four walls like a burglar caught in the act. In vain he tried to counter his ashamed, angry sense of being nothing by reminding himself that he had been specifically asked for, pressingly invited to come. But the comfortable solidity of the items around him kept demolishing his arguments. He felt small again, insignificant, of no account in the face of this ostentatious, magnificent world of money, servants, flunkeys and other hangers-on, human furniture that had been bought and could be lent out. It was as if his own nature had been stolen from him. [12-13]

Being a member of the lower class ("His one coat ... looked like a hanged man"), in Ludwig's own mind, is like being a criminal ("like a burglar, caught in the act") and at the same like a victim ("his own nature had been stolen from him"). The book is characterized by this kind of inner speech, where the protagonist blurts out his emotional and mental angsts.

Ludwig's stream of feelings is in constant flux, undergoing metamorphosis. His self-awareness is fueled by suddenness, by uninhibited epiphanies.

   ... She shone down from another sphere, beyond desire, pure and inviolable, and even in his most passionate dreams he did not venture so far as to undress her. In boyish confusion, he loved the fragrance of her presence, appreciating all her movements as if they were music, glad of her confidence in him and always fearing to show her any of the overwhelming emotion that stirred within him, an emotion still without a name but long since fully formed and glowing in its place of concealment.

   But love truly becomes only love when, no longer an embryo developing painfully in the darkness of the body, it ventures to confess itself with lips and breath. However hard it tries to remain a chrysalis, a time comes when the intricate tissue of the cocoon tears, and out it falls, dropping from the heights to the farthest depths, falling with redoubled force into the startled heart. [19-20]

This is part of a longer passage sketching Ludwig's acknowledgment, at first, of a chaste love. The chrysalis in his mind is getting more desperate to get out and express its wings. He is conscious of his desiring yet its unfolding yields surprise.

And yet love is not only the kind of feeling that arouses Ludwig. It is but part and parcel of his strong sensitivities, his always startled recognitions. This passage comes right after his employer (the Councillor) offered him a new lucrative job, the job that will improve his station in life.

Then he had left the Councillor's study, still heated by the swirl of figures, reeling at the idea of the possibilities that had been conjured up, and once outside the door he stood staring wildly around him for a moment, wondering if the entire conversation could have been a phantasmagoria conjured up by wishful thinking. The space of a wingbeat had raised him from the depths into the sparkling sphere of fulfillment; his blood was still in such turmoil after so stormy an ascent that he had to be in control again, sensing his inner being more powerfully and as if separated from himself. [24]

This is reminiscent of a passage in The Wings of the Dove: "One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the joy of life, and everything did then fit. She couldn’t stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces."

Ludwig couldn't stop for the joy, he could go on and on, floating, but suddenly his eyes "fell as if by chance on a picture hanging over a large chest, and lingered there. It was her portrait." It was the portrait of his beloved, and realizing the implication of accepting his new job abroad, he once again underwent an extended epileptic-like seizure, a state of possession ("a blow struck through his whole body from the top of his skull to the bottom of his heart, a lightning bolt tearing across the night sky and illuminating everything"). The lightning singed his wings.

This is a pretty intense book, and what makes it intense is the fluid flow of the prose. The book is to be read aloud so as to savor the sentences, the lyricism, and the sentiments. Anthea Bell's translation captured the live-wire intensity of Zweig's poetry and the Jamesian lucidity of perception.

The second half of the book is where the "journey into the past" takes place, though every bittersweet journey here is already some kind of journey into the past. The present is always filtered by what happened in the past. Very aptly, the novella is in the past tense. The intimations of a new war in real time is in the past continuous. And even Ludwig's present thoughts are referred to in relation to the past: "The past always comes between us, the time that has gone by."


Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig, translated and with an afterword by Anthea Bell, introduction by André Aciman, New York Review Books, 2010. Copy from BookMooch.