Tsushima's light and darkness

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt (Penguin Classics, 2018)



Yūko Tsushima's early novels and stories, at least those that were translated so far, were of a piece. They were variations of a single theme: they constantly featured single mothers and their struggles to raise their daughters alone in modern Japanese society that was still marked by traditional mores. Her latest in translation, Territory of Light, appeared originally in 1978-79, between the publication of Child of Fortune (1978) and Woman Running in the Mountains (1980). It might not be far-fetched to say that each of the first person narrators in these I-novels (Shishōsetsu) could be substituted for each other. They registered the same cold voice, the same stubbornness, and the same calculated rebelliousness.

While the backgrounds of the female characters were the same, the individuated details and poetic images were what made them distinctly whole and apart. The silent voice and quiet devastation lingered in each for a long time. The single mother was thankfully not a saint or martyr, but just a plain human being, what shallow readers would usually detest for being "unlikeable" or "unrelatable". Because they were fallible and often turned down by their own failings, their journeys were all the more interesting. They usually began as a newly separated single mother, challenged by ordinary circumstances, judged by society and their designated moral police or arbiters, and eventually, gradually, gaining and recognizing their self-worth.

Even if I was an incorrigible fool, I wanted to believe that there was still something fundamental in me worthy of my own respect.

With combined humility of character and stinging outbursts of emotion, the wife decided to file for divorce from Fujino, her husband, after he practically abandoned her and their daughter. This decision was rebuffed by her and Fujino's friends and acquaintances. "Nothing good will come of a divorce", one would say to convince her to backtrack from her decision. "Believe me, nothing goes right for a woman of her own", another one would tell her pointedly. And her husband would chastise her, "how are you going to manage with the little one on your own?" "Shadowy figures", who seemingly were conspiring collectively against her, would plague her consciousness. This novel was as much a poetic journey toward an unknown epiphany as a psychological journey (or "transformation", though that word is overused) of the woman from a helpless single mother to an independent individual able to repulse at every turn the forces that compel her not to turn away from her husband and "ruin" the family.

*

Among her virtues as a novelist, Tsushima's extraordinary display of compassion and empathy was the most haunting. Contemplating the reasons behind a woman's suicide by jumping in front of a train, the narrator of Territory of Light was "gripped by a sense that [she] shouldn't distance [herself] from the person who'd gone under the train as if it were nothing to do with [her]." Her extraordinary sympathy extended from the singular victim to the collective.

What burden of suffering or grief had brought them [the suicides] to this point? How long had they spent on this platform, and what were they looking at? They'd stood here alone, unnoticed. Now there was a whole crowd staring at the cast-off physical body, mangled and bloodied. What pain had driven them to it? I wanted to know, I badly wanted to know.

In several instances, the female protagonist was creating scenarios in her mind where she tried to communicate with characters or imagine a conversation. She would, for example, recall a story in her childhood wherein several children talked about the miraculous survival of a boy who fell from the school's rooftop, who had fortuitously landed on a water trough just about his own size. She would consider the veracity of this story in hindsight, and assume that the story might be a fictionalized account because it was convenient for children to think so.

The children might well have made up that version of events. Maybe one of them saw the accident victim's body, noticed the nearby cistern, thought 'If only he'd landed in there', and in a moment of anger at the child who hadn't fallen where he should, decided to forget he was dead. Reality couldn't be as brutal as that. Perhaps the child who saw returned to his playmates, not giving the body with its shattered skull a backward glance, and reported: 'They say someone fell off the roof, but he fell right into the water and he's fine,' adding, with a laugh, 'Some people do the weirdest things!' Yes, I remember the rumour as always being accompanied by laughter. The children had realized that it was possible to survive a fall from a roof, despite the grownups' best efforts to scare them, and the shared sense of superiority this gave them made them erupt in laughter.

This made-up story would itself be tested by the end of the chapter. In any case, this building of an alternate reality within the reality of the fictional fabric, making up a different version of past events, a kind of fiction within fiction, was a technique that Tsushima was using since Child of Fortune, her first novel, and was exploited in full in her novel Laughing Wolf. In the latter, the children's points of view were the departure point to set off convenient fictions, assumptions, and simulations to stave off the brutality of reality. As the narrator confessed at one point, "it cheered me up to expand the bounds of what I could think of as not impossible."

In a scene of the mother and daughter visiting a tree park on a Sunday, she imagined a playful conversation with another pair of mother and daughter she encountered in the park. The imagined version of an event to suit one's convenience was also akin to the imagined transaction or trade in "The Silent Traders", one of Tsushima's signature stories in The Shooting Gallery. In an almost similar manner and voice, the mother created a fictional version of a "silent trade" in her mind as a substitute to the boredom, insecurity, and fear she felt as a single mother, this time looking for a child who just ran away from her.

Tsushima's approach to the novel was also unique in terms of her handling of imagery. The twelve chapters, which originally came out in monthly installments in a Japanese periodical, were often built around a single image mentioned in the title. Hence, "The Water's Edge" was centered around the flooding of the apartment roof. The narrative unfolded with the restraint and grace of the elements – light, water, wind, sand dunes, trees, birds, fire. And with light as the dominant, illuminating image, the poetry was evident in the sentences. Geraldine Harcourt, the perennial translator of Tsushima's novels and stories, must have been on point and extra cautious in her selection of words here if she can reproduce sentences like, "The early summer leaves were still young; they stirred coolly at the tips of the branches, giving off tiny gleams that flitted like insects", or "The more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal's eyes. There was something there glaring back at me. Although it scared me, I wanted to approach it."

Harcourt was able to reproduce not only Tsushima's poetic touches but also her characteristic motifs here and in stories elsewhere – shooting galleries, aquariums – including the abiding figure of a mentally handicapped boy who, like a guardian angel, was almost to be expected in every novel and story of Tsushima's. Another fascinating aspect of the stories was the dream sequences which the mother constantly relived as if to assuage her heightened anxiety.

While the element of water was also very pronounced, as it was in Child of Fortune and in "The Watery Realm", from the recent two-story sampler Of Dogs and Walls (2018), it is the titular imagery of light that surfaces now and again in the novel. In the tradition of Sōseki's Meian (Light and Darkness) and Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, Tsushima fully embraced the light and bathed her scenes in it.

My daughter ... scampered off towards the pond. I ran after her, out of breath. A weeping willow stood at the point where the side path joined the main one. As it caught the rays of the sinking sun full on, its brightness was dazzling to eyes grown accustomed to the shadows. My daughter was jumping up and down, trying to grab one of the willow's dangling branches. All right, I would wow her by grabbing a whole bunch. Shading my eyes with one hand, I approached my daughter in the light.

While light was everywhere in various forms, the "territory of light" was the single mother's newfound apartment that gave her freedom to live on her own after her husband abandoned her. The wide windows that brought in sunlight to the rooms enabled her to expel the actual and symbolic shadows and darkness lurking in the corners. The novel thus explored how it is to claim just such a territory, such a certain sanctuary. Just how it is to search for and live in a clean, well-lighted place. By the novel's end, we saw the mother, after bathing her life in the light for some time, expelling darkness in the process, ready to face darkness once again as she made arrangements to transfer to a new apartment room that was now placed in a dark, secluded corner.

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When Yūko Tsushima passed away on February 2016, she was at the peak of her literary prowess. Unfortunately for readers in English, we have not yet encountered the full range of her achievement and genius. Much remained untranslated in Tsushima's oeuvre. In contrast to the themes of motherhood and pregnancy in the early novels, there was what might be termed a Tsushima late style. To be more precise, this style constituted a geographic and thematic shift in subject in her later works. Already, through the prism of single mothers trying to cope with their situation amid fears and insecurities, the novelist was able to distill the rhythms and textures of a challenged, solitary life. In her recent novels, she turned from the domestic upheavals of a split nuclear family to the varied classical and historical themes in Japanese fiction. Think of wars, famines, and religion. Then combine it with Tsushima's modernist techniques in full throttle, already apparent in her early fiction and exemplified in Laughing Wolf, originally published in 2000 and her only novel translated so far in this mold.

In terms of geographic reach, Tsushima's settings of late veered toward Eastern and Southeast Asia. According to Harcourt, her final novel was partly set in Macau and Batavia during the 17th century. As evident from an interview with her in 2014, posted in Youtube (here) with subtitles by Harcourt, Tsushima was influenced by indigenous people's worldviews, particularly the Ainu's, and ecological issues in the early 1990s, something that have influenced her recent work. What is clear is that the full extent of her innovation in novel writing is yet to be revealed in translation.



I received a review copy of the book from the publisher. I have to commend them for the increasing interest they take on Tsushima's fiction. Child of Fortune, which has gone out of print, will be republished by them later in the year. My gratitude also for the translator, Geraldine Harcourt, for her correspondence in early 2016.

Favorite books 2015

My reading choices lately had been pretty much insular. For various reasons, I became interested in local (Philippine) literature in English and Tagalog. There's a very practical reason for this. The books were simply what's readily available and accessible to me in bookshops. Also, the postcolonial and postwar orientation of the books I've sampled was of great interest to me. I managed to make good headway on my two reading lists: the best Philippine novels of the last century and Filipino novels in English translation.

A subjective and flawed exercise, this singling out of books. Yet the obligatory post is quite enjoyable to write, if only to relive each specific reading experience, the beautiful flaws and obvious artifice of a well-made fiction. I selected eight novels as favorites this year. My only complaint about them is their ugly covers.

I probably have not read a finer Philippine novel in English in But for the Lovers by Wilfrido D. Nolledo. First published in 1970, it became extinct until miraculously resurrected in 1994 by Dalkey Archive Press. It is a fountainhead of creativity [not in any Ayn Rand sense, God forbid]. Surreal and savage scenes are interspersed with scenes of great hilarity and profundity. The large, multi-national cast of characters floats in a state of dreaming, half-waking, or in-between. The wartime set-pieces unravel in magical fashion. It's a powerful work of postcolonial perversity. Hyperbole does not give it justice.

After attending a party in a garden among socialites, the executive assistant of Imelda Marcos visited her estranged father. They argued about politics and the hot issues of the day. The father is a fervent critic of Marcos, the daughter does not care. In the end, both will be implicated in the New Society.

Linda Ty-Casper is perhaps the best living novelist from the Philippines, the one most deserving of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. (F. Sionil José -- the supposedly best bet of this country -- simply does not cut it for me.) She had a rather cruel vision of failed history in A Small Party in a Garden (1988). In this short novel, the intersection of domestic personal conflicts with fractured official histories is narrated with uncompromising irony. In one unpleasant episode in the novel, historical forces, military and male, simply shatter and belittle any human effort for decency. A political novel that slaps the face of anyone who kept silent (i.e., almost everyone) during the Marcos regime.

The Hand of the Enemy (1962), the only novel written by Kerima Polotan, is a postwar novel of social corruption that anticipated the political stagnation during the years of dictatorship under Marcos. Herself a Marcos crony, Polotan is redeemed not by the probity of her characters but by their failings. There is an almost metaphysical representation of chance fate as the enemy, whose iron hand is a specter not to be trifled with. And yet the shadow of a false prophet leading his followers to perdition haunts these pages, like the would-be dictator. And like Linda Ty-Casper, the ardent anti-Marcos, Polotan the Marcos sympathizer makes palpable a very human, and evil, design in the institution of marriage and in the political structure of government.

The Cloak of God (1975) is the best of the three novels by Rosario de Guzman Lingat finally brought into English in recent years by her indefatigable translator and champion Soledad S. Reyes. Like The Hand of the Enemy, it analyzes corruption and degradation of spirit through its duplicitous main character, Felino Paras, a theater actor who accidentally became a religious leader. It has a parable-like quality in its treatment of religion as a source of salvation for the gullible masses, easily manipulated by the perfect performance of an actor who secretly lived in sinfulness and depravity. Maestro Felino perpetrated a massive fraud by brilliantly playing a double life, by naturally acting out the role of a religious leader. It is a role the artist is born to play. Wearing the cloak of God is the character's, as well as the novel's, performative act. And in the second act of the play, she will again subvert her own performance by switching roles and switching genres.

I couldn't readily decide which of the two novels by Tsushima Yūko I read this year to include in this list. Woman Running in the Mountains (1980) almost edged out Child of Fortune (1978) in terms of which mystified me the more. But the two are sister novels, both majestically translated by Geraldine Harcourt. There's a continuity in their themes and preoccupations. Both are portraits of an unwed, expecting woman in Japan, circa 1970s. The delicate progression of scenes in these novels reveals a portrait of an immediate family and a society almost unfit for bringing up children. Through challenges in their work stations and family relations, Tsushima's protagonists discovered small personal triumphs against personal doubts and insecurities. Her almost realist narratives are deepened by tensions arising from a wayward metaphor or a stray scene, a simple recollection or a brutal dream. Tsushima is a fixture in this blog and for good reasons.

All the Conspirators (1998) is Carlos Bulosan's posthumous detective novel, published 42 years after the author's death after being discovered among his papers. It exposes the deplorable actions of persons who collaborated with the Japanese enemy during the war and who betrayed their country and fellowmen in exchange for wealth and comfort during the Japanese occupation. This entertaining novel is accessible, full of action, and a fast read. But on the serious side, it provides a damning portrait of traitorous characters who sold out their souls by informing on freedom fighters. They are always waiting in the wings, these frigging collaborators.

And then there's this infamous 1915 Kafka story of magical transformation, Ang Metamorposis, in a recent Filipino translation. This is magical transformation in a cruel, terrifying way. The pathetic and noble struggle of Gregor Samsa against unjust power structures at work and in society is a reflection of the continuing class struggles of wage workers. A Marxist interpretation of the Kafkaesque may be inevitable, especially as it dramatizes how capitalism reduces the nuclear family to financial relations.


That's it for the year round up. Been a great year for badass reading.

Woman Running in the Mountains

Woman Running in the Mountains by Tsushima Yūko, tr. Geraldine Harcourt (Pantheon Books, 1991)

She was a full six months pregnant by the time her mother noticed. Her mother at once launched into an endless stream of angry questions, demanding to know why hadn't she gotten an abortion, how had it happened, who was the man, did she want his child because she loved him, was he a married man, did he know, did she plan to bring it up herself, did she think she knew how, was she doing this to get back at her parents, did she have such a grudge against her father, did she realize what this would do to her life, and just what was the big idea?

The consistency with which Tsushima Yūko plumbed the stories of single women dealing with pregnancy and motherhood is impressive. The women in her narratives face debilitating domestic situations. As in this novel where Takiko Okada found herself constrained to bring out a child in a society where her kind is being discriminated against. Even her pregnancy does not deter her father from physically assaulting her several times.

But Tsushima's Takiko does not belong to the traditional mold of feminist heroines. Her protagonists start out as uncaring of their lot in life. The shift in their disposition is very slow in coming. The process of discovery and recognition is a slow burning of indifference and reflection. Takiko doesn't or can't particularly think far ahead of her situation. She can be profoundly apathetic. And she can be ruthlessly pragmatic. They are, at best, passive resisters of life.

When they'd told her at dawn, "It's a healthy baby boy," they must have been talking about her child. But she could also have dreamed those words. She was in no hurry to find out. Whether what she'd given birth to was alive or dead, and what it might be like if it was alive, need not concern her right now. Takiko couldn't help being profoundly relieved to find that her own body seemed to have come through safely. As long as she, at least, could live that would be enough. She couldn't let anything happen to her because of this, not when it had turned out to be such a simple thing.

Little by little, Takiko starts to acknowledge her motherhood. She enrolls her son in a baby home and actively participates in recording and reading the baby's progress in a journal.

Mon., Jan 1 (cloudy)
 7:15   Formula (200 cc).
           Bed.
10:10  Playing on his own.
11:00  Pumpkin puree (small amount).
           Formula (200 cc).
11:50  Started crying.
12:10  Bed.
 1:00   Woke up and started crying.
 1:30   Juice (120 cc).
 3:00   Formula (200 cc).
 4:30   Very bad temper.
 5:30   Bed.
 6:00   Started to howl.
 6:20   Gave him a crust to suck.
           BM.
 7:30   Formula (200 cc).
 9:00   Started to cry.
 9:30   Bath.
 9:45  Juice (120 cc)
          Bed.

The long stretches of this journal in the book are puzzling and yet somehow illuminating. The writing is accessible, with flashes of engaging haiku-like lyricism, yet the ideas are modernist and complex. This novel mystifies through suggestiveness and avoids being too subtle. Her naturalistic writing in this book is beyond subtle. It can even veer toward comedy of the dark kind.

Takiko closed her eyes and relaxed. The bed was slow to warm up. The snow outside had given the room an icy chill, the first real cold of the winter. In the living room the kerosene heater would still be burning with a bluish flame. There might well be an earthquake in the night, or one of the men [her father and drinking companions] might knock it over with his foot and start a fire. But so what if there was a fire? Since Atsushi [her brother] would no doubt rescue their mother, at worst those three men would burn to death, and she and Akira [her baby] as well if she didn't wake up; and the house would burn down. That was the worst that could happen, and it wouldn't be any great loss. If she turned the heater off the three men might freeze to death in this drafty house. Seeing as how they were such old friends, born in the same town, that might not be such a bad way to go. But if everyone were calmly to wake up tomorrow morning without having burned or frozen to death, that wouldn't be a bad thing either.

In this novel published in Japan in 1980 and in her first, Child of Fortune (1978) and in The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories, Tsushima has mapped out the subterranean consciousness of women responding to difficulties in their lives in their own singular ways, responding to the shifting societal and economic forces in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s.

The choices Takiko made, for better or worse, are hers alone. This is what ultimately defines her and how she came to achieve her sense of self.

She didn't regret it, nor did she think she ought to go down on her knees and apologize to her mother. This wasn't something that an apology would solve. It wasn't something that allowed regrets and second tries. All she could do was go on giving Akira his bottle and watching her parents, her brother, and her self, without regrets. There was nothing else she could do: this was the conclusion she inevitably reached. She had given birth to a baby that no one had wanted her to have, a birth to which she alone had consented. Regrets were not permitted.

Takiko's passivity ("All she could do ...")  belies the power she gained from acknowledging and accepting the repercussions of her decisions. Takiko herself is a complex portrait of a society coming slow to a liberal mindset. This is reflected in the three-part structure of the book, mirroring the various changes in her employment status as she constantly changes jobs to support her baby. The structure follows Takiko's gradual recovery of her self-worth, in her own eyes and in the eyes of the reader. Suffice it to say that the third act of the book involves a literal mountain and a man that opens her eyes to wider horizons. The mountain as an elevated destination. The ideal place to reconcile inner with outer conflicts. From which she would descend with a newer purpose.



With thanks to the translator Geraldine Harcourt for a copy of the book and for sharing her translation of a very insightful kaisetsu (commentary) by Tomoyuki Hoshino which appeared as an afterword in the novel's 2006 paperback edition in Japanese.

Child of Fortune

Child of Fortune by Tsushima Yūko, tr. Geraldine Harcourt (Kodansha International, 1983)

By all indications Child of Fortune, the first novel of Tsushima Yūko, was a realist novel of domestic matters. It centered on Kōko Mizuno, a divorced single mother who had had complicated relationships with two men: her former husband Hatanaka and her former lover Doi who was married to another woman. Lately Kōko had sexual relations with Hatanaka's friend Osada.

The realism of the main character's travails as a husbandless woman was complicated by her constant examination of her failed relationships. Her many detours into the past expanded her story, and the reader gradually became acquainted with her independent outlook in life. Sometimes her memories could be disturbing even as they betrayed her present anxieties:

Doi had once told her about seeing some deformed babies in glass cylinders. He was shown them by a friend who worked at a university hospital. Some twenty cylinders, about twelve inches high, were arranged on shelves. The surfaces were kept very clean. Inside floated the whitened bodies of all kinds of babies. Some were staring wide-eyed from behind the glass. All of them, Doi had said, looked very much as though they'd forgotten they were in glass jars and were still intending to be born.

This memory proved to be ironic, given the fact that Kōko, at thirty-six years of age, was apparently pregnant once again. This realization opened wide the floodgates of her memories as she carefully analyzed what her life amounted to so far. The regret she felt that Doi was not the father this time. The decisions she made that estranged her from her sister. Her increasingly difficult relationship with her daughter Kayako who was about to enter secondary school.

Despite the seemingly calm and harmless surface of the novel and its prose, there was an undercurrent of malignity in it. As with Tsushima's stories in The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories, written at around the same time as this novel, her prose was simple and unassuming and hardly intellectualized. The stream of consciousness of her protagonists was built not only on shaky memories but also on unfounded assumptions such that the question of the reliability of their narratives was already moot. The free consciousness of Tsushima's characters was what made their narratives interesting. They were intelligent characters who were prone to over-analyzing their situations. In this case, situations that involved the men in Kōko's life: her lovers, her own absentee father, and her deceased retarded brother. Even Kōko's descriptions of her sexual encounters with Osada bordered on the comical, a careless balance of lust and wit.

Kōko's narrative was framed as a journey into self-discovery and yet it meticulously mapped a pregnant woman's mental and physical conditions. Her resolve not to have an abortion and to raise the baby herself eventually hardened.

Thickly muffled in weariness, she was glad she would soon slip into the same routine. From now on she would think of nothing but her womb. She would get plenty of sleep, plenty of nourishment, think of names, and prepare baby clothes. This time she wanted to give the baby all the loving she could. This time, there would be no regrets. Just as long as the baby came safely into the world, she didn't care if she, the mother, were left an empty shell. Her child would feel proud to be alive if he knew how intently his mother had awaited his arrival. She promised him that much, regardless of what kind of future she would be able to give him. He might be born terribly handicapped, but that mustn't stop him growing up proud. Let him grow up arrogant and ruthless, she thought, with Kayako and me to watch over him. Especially if he's retarded like my brother. No one is going to force him to live in servile deference to other people's wishes.

The freedom that Kōko experienced as a pregnant woman at an advanced age, in a Japanese society transitioning toward liberalism and modernity, was the freedom she wanted for her unborn child where "no one is going to force him to live in servile deference to other people's wishes." Her choices in life defined her life. Kōko herself was the titular child of fortune, not her daughter, not the one in her womb.

I know I've been stubborn—but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though often I haven't known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don't know if they were right or wrong. I don't think anyone can say that.

One thing, though, was certain: that she had never betrayed the small child she'd once been; the child who had pined for her brother in his home for the retarded; the child who had watched her mother and sister resentfully, unable to understand what made them find fault with her grades, her manners, her language. And she was not betraying that child now, thirty years later. This, she had always suspected, was the one thing that mattered. And although she was often tempted by a growing awareness of the "proper thing to do" once Kayako was born—not only in the harsh advice she was constantly offered by others, but within her own mind—in the long run her choices had always remained true to her childhood self.

Her "fortune" was in being wise. Her wisdom was gained from experience. In her careful delineation of the psychological (and physiological) aspects of Kōko's pregnancy, Tsushima founded an alternate reality where various scenarios were already erected and accepted as true. This was how imagination, how fiction, built alternate realities.

Most bewildering of all, these two things had both been real, and both at the same time. Neither was a figment, nor a fleeting image. She'd believed, in spending her time the way she did, that this reality was the only one there was ... But when had she split in two? She didn't know....

This foundation of alternate realities within a domestic, realistic narrative fabric became a signal element in Tsushima's fiction, already present in her early stories and in her latter novel Laughing Wolf. In this regard, her first novel was reminiscent of the novella The Black Swan (1954) by Thomas Mann, the story of a woman whose medical condition was supposedly triggered by her sexual expectations. The major difference was that Mann's female protagonist died tragically while Tsushima's Kōko – symbolically depicted as a drowning woman through the recurring images of water and beach in the book – had a chance to escape the quagmire and reach the surface.

She was lying on the bottom now, she decided, and there was only one direction from here: toward the surface. She must survive till she reached it, whatever happened; right now she must nurture the energy to carry her there. Her position reminded her of a shriveled fetus afloat in a glass cylinder of clear culture medium.

For the Japanese Literature Challenge 8 by Bellezza and January in Japan by Tony. With thanks to the translator, Geraldine Harcourt, for a copy of this book and another novel by Tsushima.

Laughing Wolf (Tsushima Yūko)

Laughing Wolf by Tsushima Yūko, trans. Dennis Washburn (Center for Japanese Studies – The University of Michigan, 2011)

AKELA THE WOLF AND MOWGLI, 2006 LANTERN FESTIVAL, TAIPEI
(Image from: The House of Two Bows 雙寶之屋)

It was around 1889 that the Ezo wolf of Hokkaido was believed to have gone extinct. The main cause, according to Hiraiwa Yonekichi in Ookami—Sono seitai to rekishi (The wolf: its ecology and history) (Tokyo 1981, revised ed. 1992), was the intense persecution the animal suffered at the hands of humans. By 1905, the Japanese wolf, a distinct and endemic species found only in three islands of the Japanese archipelago, went missing as well. Its extinction was largely a result of hunting, the spread of disease, and the loss of habitat and prey. Anecdotal reports gave information of the possibility that the wolves were still in existence beyond these dates, but the truth of these claims was in question.

In fact, the extinction of the wolf species in western Europe came before these two species: 1680 in Scotland and 1710 in Ireland. A worldwide trend indicated that the population of the species was in decline.

   Hiraiwa claims that wolves went extinct so early in Europe because they were always seen as a threat to people who from ancient times had raised livestock such as sheep and cattle. They feared the wolf as man's mortal enemy, and constantly persecuted the animal by every possible means—guns, poisons, traps, and snares, even hand grenades—until they had finally eradicated them.

This natural history of wolf, including the appearance of the animal in legends and classic novels, was contained in "Prelude", in the opening of Tsushima Yūko's novel Laughing Wolf (published in Japan in 2000). The prelude ended with the mention of the extinction of the Japanese wolf in 1905 coinciding with the end of the Russo-Japanese war, after which, Japan was again involved in a war with China and then in the world war which ended in 1945, after Japan's unconditional surrender: "The Japanese wolf was no longer around, but as things turned out, wild dogs who had lost their masters could be spotted running through the smoldering ruins of Japan's cities."

For a work of fiction it was strange to read a long precis of a nonfiction book on wolves. It was also strange, and particularly jarring, when the following chapter changed in tone and took up an altogether different narrative thread, indicating a hybrid approach to the novel. The story turned to a father and his four-year old son living in the apocalyptic landscape and waste of postwar Japan. The two survived air bombings and were left homeless and hungry. The child's point of view could remind one of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The child recalling his early life through hazy memories: "One day fire came pouring down from the sky. The fence burned, the house burned, his mother, brother, and sister all burned. Even the cat burned. They all vanished from the earth." Later the child's father also died and the child was taken to an orphanage. But memory of one event particularly lingered in the boy's imagination. While he and his father were sleeping in a cemetery, he witnessed the suicides of three adults: two men and a woman. When already grown up, he investigated the deaths of these three and even visited the house of the wife and daughter of one of the men.

The narrative also took up the point of view of the daughter, the young girl Yuki being visited by the now grown up young man Mitsuo. The tenuous connection between them did not prevent their becoming easy friends. The young man and the girl, 17 and 12 years old, both orphaned of fathers, decided to leave Tokyo and take a train trip to the countryside.

The novel then recounted their adventures while on train journeys and stops, inadvertently witnessing the social and economic realities of postwar Japan. As with The Shooting Gallery, Tsushima's collection of translated stories, the two characters in Laughing Wolf were wont to escape their present situations, and in the process create and inhabit for themselves avatars or surrogate identities. In this novel, Mitsuo and Yuki took on the names Akela and Mowgli, respectively, characters from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. With their new aliases, they appropriated not only the identities of the children's book's characters but also the fictional reality associated with them. Hence, their every adventure was colored by plot elements of The Jungle Book, as well as the difficulties they faced in their takeover of Cold Lairs, the world of men, which they were seeking to understand via the book's law of the jungle—We be of one blood, ye and I. 

This newly created "alternate" reality allowed the novelist Tsushima and her characters to navigate the inhospitable, savage world-at-war heightened by poverty and crimes faced by the Japanese in the 1940s. In this reality, they resolved to adopt role-playing as a viable strategy for the two of them, Akela and Mowgli, to survive the world where they found themselves outsiders: "He's [Akela] the leader of the wolf pack, the solitary emperor who embodies the law of the jungle. He's the reason the human child Mowgli is allowed to live on the margins of the pack. I'm not all that distinguished, but I'm taking the name because I have responsibility for you. I'm the leader—the father, older brother, and teacher all rolled into one—and you're the apprentice. So I think Akela and Mowgli are perfect for us." And so they transformed into the wolf and the young boy, outsiders in the midst of monkeys, the "Man Pack".

Among the people they encountered in their long train journeys were homeless and destitute men traveling to work in the coal mines. After the war, when poverty and scarcity of food struck the majority of the population, some of the homeless, including children, were forced to enter into manual labor in the mines in exchange for low salaries. After this incident, where Akela and Mowgli observed the men consigned to backbreaking work, several news clippings were inserted into the text, dated December 1945 to January 1947. The news provided direct context and circumstances of child labor in the coal mines.

By the second half of the novel, the set of news clips were interspersed in the text more and more frequently. The effect was jarring. It forced collisions between what was happening in the made-up (fictional) world and the actual (real) events and the collisions of private and public lives. In the first place the real and imagined identities of the main characters already dissolved into their respective stories. In addition, the not seamless juxtaposition of the adventures of Akela and Mowgli and the accompanying news excerpts were also forcing the collisions of individual and collective histories. The hybrid text was now bringing out human-interest stories from war-torn Japan and was introducing a clash, or perhaps more appropriately a necessary confrontation, between fiction and nonfiction, to tell a larger story. These episodic news and stories concerned the aforementioned labor in the coal mines, the corrupt police raiding trains and confiscating rice and barley from the common peasants, a serial killer of young women, a major train accident, outbreaks of epidemic diseases, and other newsworthy social problems brought about by the just concluded war. With side-by-side accounts of events, the novelist was inviting a pairwise comparison of the fictive and the realistic, in a manner that was more interesting than the 1Q84-1984 dichotomy of Murakami Haruki in his 1Q84 (trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel). The latter novel was bogged down by didactic tendencies and narrative spoon-feeding doled out in serviceable prose. Tsushima, in contrast to Murakami, had the novelistic flair to use language and plot elements in a seemingly conventional manner at first and then turn it on its head without apparent self-indulgence and self-validation.

Also, by the middle of the book, Akela and Mowgli once again changed their avatars, as Remi and Capi of the French novel Sans Famille (1878) by Hector Malot (trans. Florence Crewe-Jones, Nobody's Boy, 1916; also trans. Adrian J. de Bruyn, Alone in the World, 2005). With these active shifts in characters' identities, the "Prelude" about the wolf at the start of the novel suddenly made sense. The states of extinction and of orphanhood as logical consequences of abiding wars, lawlessness, cruelty. In the words of Mitsuo/Akela/Remi: "I've thought it over carefully, and the scariest thing in the world is the Man Pack. Radiation and germs are scary, but unlike humans, those things don't think up evil ideas or try to inflict suffering on people."

She could hear the students and the old man chatting.
   "I heard that some smallpox patients escaped again. Why in the world would they do that?"
   "Because they're worried about their families and their jobs. It's a real hardship for them to be suddenly locked away in a hospital."
   "I've also heard rumors that there's been an outbreak of the plague."
   "Good god, they do everything they can to control it with vaccinations and DDT, but I wonder how much they can do to suppress it...."
   "Armed robberies, bandits, murders, whole families committing suicide—all are the result of losing the war."
   "There was a robbery in my neighborhood. The victim was hit on the head with an iron bar."
   "The way society's going, it's possible that someone will suddenly shoot you with a pistol and kill you."
   "That's right. Kids like them have no compunctions about committing really atrocious crimes. When there's no order in society, kids are the first to go bad."
   "But it's always kids and young people who are being sacrificed. There was a family suicide that happened in Kyūshu ... six kids were killed [...]"

Writing about the immediate aftermath of WWII in Japan, Tsushima was doing something interesting and innovative to the fictional form of the novel. Her technique had unassuming intelligence behind it. Laughing Wolf was a jarring text, in a provocative and brilliant sense, because it unsettled the pace and expectations of reading. The non-fictionality of past events was almost like a comment on the surrealism of the fiction-like present or future ("On a gigantic television screen atop a tall building the leaders of North and South Korea are shaking hands.").
 
A novel must somehow clear a path, demonstrate its mastery on the page, and Laughing Wolf did that by writing about aspects of Japanese postwar history in a manner that was not entirely beholden to the methods of conventional historical fiction. The central story of the novel—the friendship between a young man and a girl and their endless train journey—was ultimately heartwarming for its generous sympathy and understanding.

The Shooting Gallery (Tsushima Yūko)

By default, three things at least define the literary career of Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947). The first is that her real name is Tsushima Satoko. The second is that she is the daughter of the novelist Dazai Osamu who killed himself when she was just one year old. The third, and the most significant, is that she's an accomplished writer herself, a multi-awarded literary figure in Japan. With Kōno Taeko, Tsushima blazes as the foremost female short story writer in Japan, a prolific and consistent teller of subtle stories concerning human relationships. Like Kōno, the majority of her works remains untranslated. At least three books of hers have made it in English so far: the short story selection The Shooting Gallery (1988) and the novels Child of Fortune (1983) and Woman Running in the Mountains (1991). All were handled by translator Geraldine Harcourt. The two novels were originally published in Japanese in 1978 and 1980 while the short stories appeared in the period 1973-1984. It is puzzling (but maybe not) that no recent book of hers has appeared in English – in French, for example, nine titles already came out – given that she is a considerable talent, her stories displaying a diversity of approaches that are hard to categorize into a single style.

The eight stories in her only collection in English are about the aftermaths of (or preludes to) a divorce from a lover or family. It reveals a writer concerned with gender disparities and with a woman's search for freedom. Tsushima's female protagonists are confronted with situations they either want to understand or, having failed to do so, they want to escape from. In their stubbornness and liberal attitudes they can be considered rebels of the time. The characters are almost exclusively single mothers, divorced or separated partners, or single women who tenaciously face their lot in life and dream of something better. What is exemplary in Tsushima is the unique chameleon-like style she deploys in story after story. The writing is clear and transparent, without any apparent tricks and obscurities, and yet the whole composition exhibits a strong sense of both familiarity to and estrangement from the narrative intent. Consider the opening of "The Silent Traders" in which a single mother begins her narrative straightforwardly, only to defamiliarize it with her unexplained fear.

   There was a cat in the wood. Not such an odd thing, really: wildcats, pumas, and lions all come from the same family and even a tabby shouldn't be out of place. But the sight was unsettling. What was the creature doing there? When I say 'wood', I'm talking about Rikugien, an Edo-period landscape garden in my neighbourhood. Perhaps 'wood' isn't quite the right word, but the old park's trees – relics of the past amid the city's modern buildings – are so overgrown that the pathways skirting its walls are dark and forbidding even by day. It does give the impression of a wood; there's no other word for it. And the cat, I should explain, didn't look wild. It was just a kitten, two or three months old, white with black patches. It didn't look at all ferocious – in fact it was a dear little thing. There was nothing to fear. And yet I was taken aback, and I tensed as the kitten bristled and glared in my direction.

With this nest of stray cats in the background, Tsushima tells of an imagined transaction (the 'silent trade') between the narrator's two practically fatherless children and a cat. The children previously met their father six months before but it was a rather awkward reunion. The mother is thinking of a beneficial exchange between her children (who will leave food for the cat) and this same cat who could act as a "father figure" to them whenever he visits to eat his fill. This mutual trade she likens to an ancient transaction that is ideal but then is always accompanied by primal fear.

There are tales of mountain men and villagers who traded a year's haul of linden bark for a gallon and a half of rice in hard cakes. No villager could deal openly with the lone mountain men; so great was their fear of each other, in fact, that they avoided coming face to face. Yet when a bargain was struck, it could not have been done more skilfully. The trading was over in a flash, before either man had time to catch sight of the other or hear his voice. I think everyone wishes privately that bargains could be made like that. Though there would always be the fear of attack, or discovery by one's own side.

Such is the mother's wild imagination that she makes a leap from this trade of old to the current situation of her children. Their lack of a "human father" impels her to enact a similar trade in her mind, a beneficial one but also attended by fear.

   The children leave food on the balcony. And in return the cat provides them with a father. How's that for a bargain? Once a year, male cats procreate; in other words, they become fathers. They become [fathers] ad nauseam. But these fathers don't care how many children they have – they don't even notice that they are fathers. Yet the existence of offspring makes them so. Fathers who don't know their own children. Among humans, it seems there's an understanding that a man only becomes a father when he recognises the child as his own; but that's a very narrow view. Why do we allow the male to divide children arbitrarily into two kinds, recognised and unrecognised? Wouldn't it be enough for the child to choose a father when necessary from among suitable males? If the children decide that the tom that climbs up to their balcony is their father, it shouldn't cause him any inconvenience. A father looks in on two of his children from the balcony every night. The two human children faithfully leave out food to make it so. He comes late, when they are fast asleep, and they never see him or hear his cries. It's enough that they know in the morning that he's been. In their dreams, the children are hugged to their cat-father's breast.

In the above passage, the mother mentions the word "father" almost a dozen times, as if the very scenario she painted vividly in her mind already makes it a feasible trade, that the cat would be a substitute for her children's absent father. The other stories in the selection also cling to this idea of looking for suitable substitutes (or metaphors) or of creating ones. The finding of these substitutes-metaphors, usually some kind of animal (mythical or legendary or not), is often the objective of the characters, the very task they are trying to complete. In "The Chrysanthemum Beetle", the kikumushi beetle is the central metaphor of the story, in fact the beetle supplies a back story, making for a story within a story. It is an old ghost story that is then dissected by the characters through the lens of their personal interpretations of it. In the title story, the single mother of two young boys imagines herself as a golden dragon ("one day my back will sprout a pair of lance-shaped wings which will begin to beat, my body will visibly expand, and when the metamorphosis is complete I'll be a dragon that ascends spiralling to the heavens") to divert herself from boredom and perhaps to forget her difficult situation of raising her children. The soaring dragon is a projection of her desire for complete freedom and independence which are now undercut in part by her caring for her two boys all by herself.

It can be said that an essential itinerary of these stories, stories of self-discovery in some ways, is teasing out these overt metaphors, underlining the substitutions, the surrogate images that will fully describe the characters' petrified condition and thus release them from being mystified by their own boredom and discontent. The characters are seeking to unmask their avatars which will bring them to a more complete description of their states and thus toward a diagnosis of their afflictions. Their chosen avatars may or may not save them, the characters, who were somehow aware of their wishful thinking, but at least there is satisfaction to be had in knowing their lives at this point have meanings insofar as metaphors and details, both tangible and mystical, reflect their stories.

Aside from this tendency toward marked symbolism, another brilliant aspect of Tsushima's fiction is her remarkable structuring of stories. The stories seem to be composed of discrete "acts", as in a drama, where each succeeding act is seemingly disconnected to the previous. The recombined parts at the end of a reading do not always produce a neat puzzle-fit whole. Rather, the enjambment of disparate scenes create and reinforce surface tension as the plot jumps from one area of concern to another. Instead of relying on the limited rationality of decoding the sequence of dynamic scenes, Tsushima seems to encourage a multiple reading of her setups, that is, looking not only for substitutes and masks and symbols, but for the justification itself of the story's fragmentary expansion, teasing out the very seams in her sketched outline. At the level of the sentence or paragraph or broken chapter, this appeal for unbounded rationality can be spontaneous and immediate and unsettling. The beginning of "Clearing the Thickets", the story with the most unreliable narrator in the selection, illustrates these transitions.

   The door opened and a red colour appeared. A clear, dazzling red. The young woman stared in admiration at the dress, whose wearer she knew.
   In an art class once – years ago, in high school – a classmate had selected a tube from a box of oil paints and shown it to her grandly: 'This colour is produced by crushing a certain exceedingly rare species of insect and working it into a chemical base.' It was, she understood, a very expensive pigment, and although she wasn't sure whether to believe the story of its source, the squeeze of red on the palette certainly suggested an insect's body fluid. Although clear, it had a choking viscosity. A beautiful colour, there was no doubt about that. But she expected that once on canvas it would turn heavy and sombre beside the other tints. It's so rich I wouldn't know how to handle it, she had thought. She was even aware of an odour like an ant-lion fly's.
   The dress was the same red. A light material, perhaps, for its triangle of skirt billowed coolly. It had no buttons, ribbons, or other trimmings. It suited the slender wearer well.

The narrator's awareness of the color red proceeds first from the color itself before identifying it as the young woman's dress. From the red dress, it moves to her recollection of the same shade of red in her high school art class, the supposed 'origin' and manufacture of that specific color, before going back to the red dress in question. The shifts in focus at the outset already signal a structural treatment of the story, for a few more paragraphs into it, the speaker branches off into an entirely new direction – a lengthy flashback, memory, daydream, or dream – another territory, another tale that does not organically derive from the first. This second act is about a woman's slow and tiring progress clearing out the grass weeds in the lawn with her gossiping mother and sister. It's a complete about-face from the red-colored dress, almost making for a diptych. It is a most strange story that otherwise wears its strangeness very lightly. As in the rest of The Shooting Gallery, the story is lucid, precise in its telling but approaches a state of hallucination via its procession of startling proxies and metaphors. Unlike the oil paint, the prose is not choking heavy and viscous. Yet this anthology of Tsushima's is the same rich red: a beautiful and stunning pigment of imagination.

An autobiographical essay by Tsushima can be read here.