Yasushi Inoue's chronicle of history

 

Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue, translated by Jean Oda May, preface by Damion Searls (New York Review Books, 2010) 

 

A view both macroscopic and microscopic emerges in Yasushi Inoue's historical novel of ancient China. Looking from afar, the protagonist Hsing-te sees someone as a “black speck” trailed by a long tail. It is a woman committing suicide.

Then it happened. Hsing-te saw the black speck, which had stood motionless for a while on the wall, suddenly leap off. It dropped beside the wall, trailing a long tail behind it. It was over in a second. There was no reaction in the gathering; no one else seemed to have noticed.

In time, he remembers her up close—her eyes, nose, mouth, and smile—yet always returns to her final act as seen from a great distance, as “that small dot tracing a fine line as it fell to the ground.”

Hsing-te seldom thought of the woman now. It was not that he made an effort to forget her, but somehow as time passed he thought of her less often. It did not mean that his love for the Uighur woman had decreased. He thought of her infrequently, but whenever he did, her image was always clear. In fact, each time it became more vivid. Hsing-te could recall the woman’s eyes, nose, and mouth. He also remembered her complex smile the last time he had seen her—joy, sorrow, and surprise all fused together. And he remembered, with vividness and clarity, that small dot tracing a fine line as it fell to the ground from the wall of Kan-chou.

Elsewhere, Inoue writes of “Turfan soldiers, like little moving dots, covered the plains as far as you could see.” Standing atop a fortress, “People walking about looked as small as peas.” From a window, “a large flock of birds at the edge of the sky migrating to the south like specks of dust.” By the novel’s end, a group of men is described as “walking toward the northern section of the Thousand Buddha Caves resembled ants compared to the scale of the mountain.”

The images of specks, dots, peas, and ants convey the infinitesimally small roles of individuals within the vast expanse of history. History in Tun-huang unfolds at two scales: the intimate world of memory, grief, and daily life, and the vast movements of armies, kingdoms, and civilizations. The shifts in perspective recall Benjamin's “old rapport between the microcosm and macrocosm.”

* * * 

Damion Searls, in his preface to Inoue's 1959 historical novel Tun-huang, grouped the novelist's fiction into four genres: historical fiction, love stories, postwar sociopolitical fiction, and autobiographical writings. Of these, I've sampled only two. Chronicle of My Mother was a candid autobiographical novel about the novelist's aging mother, and Bullfight was a reportage and commentary about the staging of the sport and its cultural significance in postwar Japan. Both books were reviewed elsewhere in this blog.

Having read Tun-huang late last year, I can now attest to the marvelous prose and generous ideas that inform Inoue's sporadically translated writings. Searls also admitted that these four genres were not mutually exclusive, with certain works overlapping across genres.

Searls quoted a fan letter from Peter Handke to Inoue (dated 1988, published 1992) to illustrate how the Japanese novelist's writings “feel lived from within, not described from without, despite the scrupulous research.”

The unique thing about your work, for me—and the books of yours I feel closest to are The Roof Tile of Tempyō and Tun-huang—is that every story presents a vision, and that unlike the visions in books by other authors, I can always follow the vision as I’m reading, always believe it; you have lived and felt these images and have the simplest and airiest language for them that I have ever seen. I don’t need to first believe your illuminations, they are simply there in the book, as facts. [italics in the quoted material]

To reinforce Handke's praise, Searls quoted from another story by Inoue rather than from Tun-huang itself, which he posited as perhaps the writer's greatest work in his greatest genre. I would instead highlight passages from the novel that demonstrate this organic beauty and lightness.

He could not tell how much time had passed. His sleep was broken by the plaintive cries of the camels and the whinnying of the horses. The surroundings were so brightly lit up that they seemed dreamlike. It was undoubtedly night, but the bodies of the camels and horses appeared to have caught fire as they stood against the red glare. The resonant, earth-shaking war cries seemed almost hushed in the startling clarity. 

Hsing-te raced up a hill. From that vantage point, he saw a fiery column shoot into the air in the wide plains not far from where he stood. Reflected in its glare was the movement of a large cavalry force. This was unmistakably a battle between the main strength of the two armies, but Hsing-te could only see a small portion of the fighting. The scene reflected in the light was only the orderly advance of the cavalry troops thrusting forward; several units emerged from the darkness one moment, and then sank into the shadows again. 

The protagonist had just awakened from sleep and the flashes of fiery images provided an incomplete picture of the battle. Yet there is enough poetry to allow readers to imagine the violence behind the bloodshed. While crimson was the dominant hue, the play of light and shadows created a dynamic chiaroscuro of war—a cinematic encapsulation of conflict. 

At twilight Hsing-te’s group was inspected. The yellow sun was setting in the west, and everything—the clearing where Hsing-te’s force stood, the city wall, the oasis stretching out east, and the plains in the west—was suffused by the crimson afterglow. To Hsing-te, who had only heard of Li Yüan-hao and now saw him for the first time, the youthful commander seemed magnificent. He appeared to be twenty-four or twenty-five. He was just a shade over five feet tall and slight in build, but he had a stately, imposing bearing. At the same time, bathed by the rays of the setting sun, he appeared to be crimson-colored. 

...

Again Hsing-te was pushed out from the battlefield into a patch of quiet light. The sun shone; there was a hill; the dust billowed upward; and there were clouds in the azure sky. Lines of troops preceded and followed him. But the formation had been reduced, there was only a handful of scattered survivors. Hsing-te could only see a few familiar faces nearby. He tried to find Wang-li, but he could not see him anywhere. As he rode on, Hsing-te looked out toward the plains. There were two battlefields. And in the vast plain, lines of men and horses emerging from the combat crossed and recrossed like silk threads being pulled from a cocoon. The battlefield and lines of horsemen seemed to have a life of their own and did not remain still for a moment.  

The image of warriors and horses crossing and recrossing like cocoon silk threads was astonishing. The novelist did not so much describe the battle but let the silhouettes, colors, and shades of the battlefield speak the unsaid.

Tun-huang reconstructed the chain of events and the human motivations behind concealing a significant trove of cultural and religious artifacts in a cave network in China, discovered in the early twentieth century. Inoue was unable to visit the site of his novel's setting (Kansu Province). His research on the period (the decade following the year 1026) did not yield a historical account. He had to write with the power of imagination, which informed his view of history as a chronicle of human folly and fallibility.

The stunning imagery belied the endless cycle of violence and the natural history of destruction. Humans are dwarfed by history and by the fateful weave of public and private incidents shaping history's nonlinear course.

Much of that effect owes to translator Jean Oda Moy, who took at least 14 years to complete her translation and deserves credit for her clear and dynamic rendering of Inoue’s imagery. Her moving work in Chronicle of My Mother, a novel so far removed in theme from Tun-huang, shows her facility in rendering Inoue’s registers and heart of being (kokoro). 

How does Inoue transcend mere transcription of history? What Walter Benjamin wrote of Johann Peter Hebel might be true of Inoue's work.

When Hebel depicts the passing of fifty years of mourning this way, it almost becomes a lament, but a lament for the way of the world similar to those sometimes found in the opening pages of medieval chronicles. For we do not encounter the attitude of a historian in these lines, but that of a chronicler. The historian limits himself to “world history,” the chronicler recounts the way of the world. 

Inoue's was a lived history. He was not a historical novelist in the sense of putting into words momentous events of history that have already come to pass. He is a chronicler of lived history in the way Walter Benjamin envisioned it, in the sense of incorporating the daily practices and struggles of ordinary life. Benjamin continued:

The [historian] is concerned with the web of events woven from incalculable threads of cause and effect—and all that he has studied or learned is but a tiny nodal point in this net; the [chronicler] is concerned with the minor events, narrowly circumscribed, of his town or region—but for him this is not a fragment or a mere element of the universal, it is rather something other and more. Because in writing his chronicle, the true chronicler also writes a parable of the way of the world. What the town’s local history and the way of the world reflect is the old rapport between the microcosm and macrocosm. 

The everyday practices and rituals bathed in a dazzling chiaroscuro made for a dynamic rendering of human conflict. While Tun-huang concerned itself with the broader 11th century geopolitics in Central and West China and scenes of wars and looting at a time when two warring factions—the Uighurs and the Hsi-hsia—tried to wrest power from each other and rule the land, one cannot help but read, between these reconstructed scenes, the colors of current events. Wars have been ever-present across epochs. While the battle is witnessed up close, the true chronicle ultimately zooms out from that summit to behold the wider drama of human reckoning and futility.

 

Quoted passages of Walter Benjamin were from The Storyteller Essays (New York Review Books, 2019), edited and with an introduction by Samuel Titan, and translated by Tess Lewis. 

 

“Vila-Matas” and I

 

In “Cascais,” the second section of Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas—co-translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott—we learn that the protagonist, unnamed, is one to whom things happen. 

After I finished the “Paris” section, which the reader has possibly just read, I went three years without writing anything at all, totally adrift. What’s more, no sooner had I stopped writing than things started happening to me—a very strange development. It’s not that things didn’t happen to me before, but the things that started happening once I’d abandoned my desk all had something in common: they met every requirement for being turned into stories, and indeed they demanded it, almost crying out to be told. [italics in translation]

When things begin to happen to a writer, one can expect a novel. Lived experience becomes raw material, shaping character and plot. Walking through the streets of Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires enables him to take stock of his surroundings, to admire the archways of façades and the grilles of entrances, and, above all, to reflect on his predicaments. Thus, our blocked writer found himself following the advice of another novelist.

you’ll soon realize that the most important thing is not dying for ideas, styles, or theories but rather taking a step back and maintaining a distance between ourselves and the things that happen to us.

The narrator of Montevideo was a different novelist in each section because of the temporal dimension. What he recounted in the “Cascais” section while looking back at the “Paris” section was already separated by time. The writer of the first section was a figure of the past, an older self. The narrator of the second section was situated in the present. The “novelist” of the first was not the “I” of the second. However, they might share some preferences and their relationship was hardly a hostile one. After all, the amazing things happening to the writer of the present would likely find their way into another “I,” the novelist of the future, however much the present novelist sought to put distance between his present self and his past self.  

While responding to an interview at a literary event, the present novelist could not shake off the impression that he was faking it, that he was exaggerating his present self.

As I spoke, I deliberately gave a misleading impression of myself, going overboard in my efforts to make everyone think I was the sort of writer to whom extraordinary things happened but who then approached them in writing with a certain distance, a kind of cold impartiality, as if they had nothing to do with him. And I explained how this was a kind of unconscious defense mechanism that all these writers carry with them wherever they go. Such a writer might, I said, be railing furiously at his girlfriend, while she rages back, at which point he abruptly stops and asks: “Do you mind if I write about this?” With the following reaction from her: “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? Are you even genuinely angry?” To which he might respond that yes, he’s livid, but there’s still a part of him that’s taken up with the question of how it all ought to feel, really feel, and even at that very moment he’s wondering how to describe the scene, including his reflections about how it ought to feel, which for him is a matter of great importance.

The “I” of the present was wary of his past writer self because the latter had the propensity to magnify and falsify (fictionalize) events. Thus, the “I” also distrusts his present unreliable novelist self, because he inherited this tendency from his embroidering past self. But writers must live, let themselves go on living, and embrace their literary contrivance if only to feed their fictional machine, which serves to justify their creative practice against the encroaching slop of artificial intelligence. They surrealistically imagine what's behind closed doors, invent and open doors within doors to penetrate the unknown and discover the unknowable.

If a writer is any good, he knows his contribution is now out of his hands. It is read by readers who happen upon the novel. Little by little, he can no longer detect himself in his published books. The novel ceases to be his own, belonging instead to language, tradition, and perhaps later to oblivion.

At the end of Montevideo, after a certain protracted war of attrition (between reader and writer), “Vila-Matas,” the unnamed stand-in for Vila-Matas, might or might not have realized that the novel was finished. His friend, a “French writer,” had the last say:

“Lately you’ve become a writer to whom things really happen. Let’s hope you understand your destiny ... Your destiny—the key to the new door—is in your hands.”

Vila-Matas almost knew perfectly well who had written the last page.

Novel-gazing

 

Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Yale University Press, 2025)

 

I have it all planned out—my reading list for the year. I have carefully slotted the book titles into each of the 12 months of 2026. The Excel worksheet was auto-saved. Then I picked up the book Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas at the end of December 2025, and it wreaked havoc on my reading list. The narrator of the novel spouted interesting titles and authors left and right: books, for example, by Elizabeth Hardwick, Antonio Tabucchi, Augusto Monterroso, and some “French writers.” I wanted to add them to my already groaning book list. This year I will need extreme time-management skills if I want to make headway with my list. As if compiling a reading list of actual books were not enough, one also has to contend with nonexistent books by nonexistent authors, which not only complicate or muddy the list but also automatically make it a fictional one.

The narrator was a novelist who happened to be suffering from a profound writer's block. Who would have thought that the condition of writer's block could be a fertile ground for writing an entire novel, or two novels, or even three, or even more.   

The unnamed young Spanish narrator also happens to be a drug dealer (“hash, marijuana, and cocaine”) in Paris. Of course, this narrator never really recounted a single incident about his shady profession, never discussed his tawdry transactions or his wayward clients. Although he “embarked on a life of crime,” his stories were not filled with unliterary escapades. He adopted the tone of “controlled meaninglessness, bordering on pretense” and name-dropped every modernist novelist from his arsenal he could conveniently insert into his narrative. The writers (and their works) were so carefully chosen and cautiously dropped like bombs that they formed a curated list of precursor novelists.

So what we have are his notes on reading and his reportage on not-writing, a creative and novelistic form of solipsism mediated by books—what else—and so a clever solipsist in a way. We read his ramblings in Paris and other cities, all bemoaning the lost ability to express in writing his human condition. He created this patchwork of a reading life, very much aware of his own literary posturing, and very much self-referential in invoking his various precursor “French”  novelists.

His humor could be so dry that one was unsure it was not meant to be serious at all. I wanted to think he was sincere yet unfunny.

I also remembered the exorbitant Thomas Wolfe, who, in his eagerness to take in all the world’s stories, drowned in the storm of those materials that seemed to evade his grasp. This eagerness of Wolfe’s to rule over time could be seen in his torrential first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, which included some words that I’ve always deemed worthy of constant reflection and that could be said to form the crux of my own poetics: 

“We seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane.… Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” 

He was taking things out of context, pushing his way into his own literary sandbox. He was sharing his “readings” of literary novel-gazing, which was practically a reading of his own life. Ultimately he produced his “unwritten” novel, yet another (extended) meditation about a writer of No, but a writer not wearing his Noh mask and instead volubly sharing a pastiche of literary quotations. The novelist was flexing his practical skills in literary criticism. Spot on was his reading of Roberto Bolaño:

laughing away in his cave in Blanes and flaunting his magnificent refusal to conform to the work of those contemporaries whose writing he didn’t like, which was most of them, although his opinions were liable to change. Understandable, really, given that he liked to be arbitrary and make lists and not take literature too seriously, which, in my opinion, has always been the best way of taking it in any way seriously.   

We could relax while reading Montevideo because our character was not serious at all. He was the slightly older version of the neophyte writer in Never Any End to Paris. He was full of contradictions and absurdities. That was probably why he was a winsome character even if somewhat of a dolt. He had a predilection for “French writers” (Lispector, Gracq, Ida Vitale, Felisberto Hernández, Felipe Polleri, Harry Mathews, Madeleine Moore, and the Comte de Lautréamont) whose Frenchness was not defined by their nationality.

I can hardly contain my excitement as I prepare to say this: the writers I like the most are the very model of the coldest, most rapierlike intelligence, the ones who push to the limit what someone once called the “frightful discipline of the spirit.” And that’s it; I could finish there. But I think it’s worth adding that perhaps the quality I most admire in “French writers” is their absolute autonomy. Because the truly extraordinary thing about literature is that it’s a space of such immense freedom that it allows for all kinds of contradictions. For instance, within a single paragraph you can both believe and not believe in Madeleine Moore.

We may believe and not believe in that last sentence. The reader in us could catch a whiff of that immense space of freedom embedded in certain novels of this ilk.  

Montevideo's echoes, affinities, and tangential connections to Vila-Matas's previous books were so pronounced they were no longer echoes and affinities but direct connections in the fictional metaverse. Our drug dealer was the author of a novel called Virtuosos of Suspense, which he “wrote without a care in the world and that has haunted me ever since in a most worrying way, as if it were the only book I’d ever written.”

Oh, I’d been waiting so long for someone to release me from that excruciating phrase [“I would prefer not to”], that ghastly cliché that’s haunted me ever since I published Virtuosos of Suspense, in which, some twenty years ago, I investigated cases of writers affected by that syndrome “of the No” I called “Rimbaud syndrome”! Over time that book became a nightmare, one I’ve learned to live with in recent years, a nightmare buried under my skin like the apple Gregor Samsa’s father threw at him, which lodged itself in Gregor’s flesh and eventually rotted.

It was as if the success of Bartleby & Co. Virtuosos of Suspense had overshadowed the literary enterprise of our novelist, so he had to exorcise it with more literary ramblings. He was so consumed by the success of his creation that he had to concoct a different medicine with the same generic name. Because Enrique Vila-Matas was short on ideas and brimming with comp lit insights, he borrowed the wide-eyed sincerity and pretentious tendencies of the protagonist of Never Any End to Paris, the germ of literature sickness in Bartleby & Co., and the schematic architecture of Montano's Malady to come up with this drug.

Proper novels are bygones, replaced by stories of literary possibilities. Not that we've nearly exhausted all possible permutations and sequences of plot points in a story; perhaps now the only possible ground for novelistic exploration lies in critiquing those stories.

Hence, we accompanied our novelist drug dealer's adventures in multiple cities of literary imagination. Serial name-dropper, he was also a serial quote-dropper. In Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), Jonathan Kramnick considers the practice of literary criticism as the perfection of creative writing skills and its unique methods: “Quotation is the art of moving across two orders of writing, one's own and someone else's.” Hence, Kramnick viewed the practice of quotation as close reading, a sui generis skill for a literary critic.

For in-sentence quotation, the know-how is that of weaving another person’s words with your own so you gently alter both, so that some sort of third space emerges in the process of interpretation. For block or between-sentence quotation, the know-how is that of adjusting your own idiom so that it reveals something about another’s, either by way of contrast or connection.

Our novelist then, who in Paris led a life of crime, exhibited (in the words of Kramnick) “deft treatment of language—the craftwork of spinning sentences from sentences already in the world.” His skill “is ... a discipline-specific way that the literary humanities tell important truths about the world.”

Back to Montevideo. Saddled with “the burden of speaking out against novels with plots” and consigned to perpetually evaluate his own life against the aphorisms and ideas of “French writers,” our narrator managed to splice together quotes and passages from books and writers deserving our modernist attention. His bookish ideas and writerly predilections were his means of dissecting his own “style,” after Nabokov in the quote our narrator shared “The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.” What a style it was—seemingly unstructured incidents and ideas that were nevertheless shaped by a sensitivity of a passionate and obsessive literatus.

Our narrator was almost ready to admit his fictivity or fictiveness, yet he persisted in asserting his own reality, his own freedom and will. The clash of fact and fiction was most evident in the “Montevideo” section of the book—the third one after the “Paris” and “Cascais” sections—where our drug dealer was in search of the actual hotel room that was the basis of Julio Cortázar 's story about a sealed door.

In this portrait of a novelist as a drug pusher—but really he was a drug addict as well, or more accurately a book addict, which also made him a book pusher. I meant to compare book addicts with book pushers, though not to equate drug addicts with drug pushers. Montevideo appeared in Spanish in 2022. If Vila-Matas's character visited Manila between the years 2016 and 2022, the period corresponding to Rodrigo Duterte's presidency, and he wrote about it, the novel would have turned into a horror story for he might end up as one of the thousands of individuals summarily executed by the Duterte police state. End of digression. – The novelist was a recommender of unsolicited novels—an accusation he leveled against his tour guide in Montevideo. He unapologetically deals in books like he deals in drugs and cherishes the freedom granted novelists to inveigle their characters into one absurd situation after another. We would not know the merits of his arguments if we were not familiar with the potentially addictive writers and books he recommends. Yet the novel still should come with a trigger warning, particularly for serious readers who never take books seriously.

I'm in the “Bogotá” section (p. 132) of the book.  

 

Related posts:

Vila-Matas's lecture novel 

Bartleby has company

The healing powers of mediocre fiction

Carte blance