The Book of Tokyo (A City in Short Fiction)

Emmerich, Michael, et al., editors.

(2015)

Comma Press

This collection is part of the City in Short Fiction series published by Comma Press, UK. 

Four of the ten pieces included in this collection are best reserved for mature audiences.

“Model T Frankenstein”

By Furokawa Hideo (m.)

Translated by Samuel Malissa

Furokawa is the author of the novella Slow Boat. The short story “Model T Frankenstein” is of the experimental or avant-garde genre; the opening pages seem influenced by Burrough’s cut-up method; the prose is illuminating at times, especially when Furokawa discusses the acts of witnessing or reading, which seem to be interchangeable in the story, or when he discusses the borders or limits of Tokyo. Furokawa can also frustrate the reader who attempts to fully grasp all of the material he places before us. The action takes place in the extreme south on the Izu peninsula. The narrator is on an island “50 miles from Tokyo,” but throughout he seems to establish that physical geography is at the mercy of the influence of the psychic energy and presence of Tokyo, which reaches its long fingers far beyond the city limits. The island is alien, the island goats are alien, yet they are all within the world of Tokyo. Certainly, the narrator is of Tokyo, though he may also be losing his own borders, just as the goat loses his. 

“Because, as has been established, you are completely ignorant, and intermittently stupefied. Tertiary Tokyo has a tertiary Tokyo night, and a dawn, and a morning. It is the morning of tertiary Tokyo. You greet the morning, but you are nothing more than a spirit. The goat is the subject, the one experiencing all of this. You are watching, but watching is all you can do.” (14)

“Picnic”

By Ekuni Kaori

Translated by Lydia Moed

The narrator is a young husband who is increasingly alarmed by the conduct of his wife. She certainly seemed to be a good woman. Three years his junior, she was polite, amenable, reserved, and compliant. She was not especially beautiful; in fact, she was quite ordinary. The progress of their courtship was unremarkable and their wedding, though small, was quite lovely. He enjoyed his in-laws: they seemed particularly eager to have him, while he could not expect too much from his own parents who clearly did not care for him. The source of his discomfort is his wife’s predilection for dining out of doors. She insists on picnicking at the park near her house at least once a week, through spring and summer even as the cold of winter threatens. The meals are not unpleasant; his wife is a good cook. But nevertheless, her desire to eat outside makes him uncomfortable. He also notices that she frequently calls him by the wrong name. When he broaches the topic with her, she pours oil on the water by choosing to call him by the old-fashioned “dear.” What could be the meaning of this? When he puts her on the spot, she gives an answer so surprising that he fears he may have married a witch–but perhaps it is just as likely that she has married a demon.

“No doubt the thing she has found most surprising about married life is the fact that my existence is unpleasant and incomprehensible to her. I am a contaminant – I don’t belong indoors. I think she drags me outside like this to let the sun fall on me and the wind blow through me, to air me out like a futon.” (26)

“A House for Two”

By Kakuta Mitsuyo (f.)

Translated by Hart Larrabee

Like many contemporary Japanese authors, Kakuta focuses on the trend in Japan for women to avoid childbearing or even marriage. Her heroine is Ku-chan, the eldest of two daughters. She continues to live with her mother in the home she grew up in. Her parents divorced after her father abandoned them. Shortly after, Mon-chan, her younger sister by three years, also moved out. Mon-chan pursued a career before marrying, buying a home, and raising two children. She continues to drop in on Ku-chan, each time urging her sister to leave their controlling mother and seek fulfillment as a wife before it is too late for her. For her part. Ku-chan has absolutely no interest in marriage. She regard’s her sister’s effort to match her up as amusing, and while she concedes that their mother is manipulative, Ku-chan believes that despite her so-called “freedom,” she is as much a slave to their mother’s influence because every decision she makes in her life is the opposite of what she believes her mother would do.  The relationship between Ku-chan and her mother is disturbing; her mother goes through her possessions, reads her diary, and rakes her gentlemen callers over the coals. Despite the perpetual interference, or perhaps because of her tireless attention, Ku-chan seems to embrace her role as her mother’s living idol.

“When I asked, ‘Of what?’ she said, ‘It just looks like that woman is taking over your life.’ I was a bit put off by the way she referred to Mother but she carried on, looking perfectly serious. ‘At this rate you’ll never get out,’ she said. ‘You’re always with her. Your whole world is just the two of you.’” (37)

“Mummy”

By Yoshimoto Banana (f.)

Translated by Takami Nieda

Yoshimoto’s female narrator is reminiscing about the woman she was in her early twenties, a person awash in a sea of sexual fantasies and willing to experiment with any extreme expression of desire and submission. She details an affair she began while at university with an older man, Tajima, who spends half his year abroad on archaeological digs and the rest of his time writing in his cavernous apartment, decorated with a sparse collection of Egyptian funerary artifacts. The narrator is candid–she did not find his spindly body attractive in any way. Yet she throws herself into the relationship like a fury, imagining herself kidnapped and held against her will, though her paramour makes no effort to keep her from moving on. Those were different days then. She was young, she had learned that a serial killer was stalking the campus, and when this strange man appeared one night on a dark path, she gave herself to him.

“It was a moment when the sensibilities of a younger time became abnormally heightened and turned fantasy into reality. Things are usually comprised of many different angles. But if you remove everything else and take a look at only one world, anything becomes possible. The two of us came together by chance, he responded to my strange inner world with the same energy, triggering something like a chemical reaction, and we both dove into a different realm from reality.” (55)

“The Owl’s Estate”

By Horie Toshiyuki (m.)

Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies

Horie is a specialist in French literature; his narrator is a bachelor who works part-time jobs and supplements his income by buying and selling used books. Eventually, he decides to specialize in the work of French authors and introduces us to his scheme for ordering texts directly from French publishers in order to bypass the costly Japanese taxes and markups that can double the cost of foreign books. An isolate and a committed penny pincher, he further reduces his costs by picking up shipments and carrying his purchases by hand along the train route rather than paying for a ticket. It is on such a journey that he is accosted by a French woman who recognizes the logo on his box and asks him in French to accompany her as she searches for a new sushi shop to pick up food for a friend. The narrator agrees but seems to be extremely uncomfortable talking to a woman and not altogether certain that he is not about to be conned or ambushed. Despite his fears, he eventually finds himself at what appears to be a rooming house for adventurous young foreign women who are being farmed out to work as bargirls in Tokyo’s entertainment district and “professional translators” in fly-by-night schools. The narrator seems to regret the tawdriness of this new and unforeseen foreign presence, but he is also acutely aware that he is well on his way to losing his own sense of what it means to be Japanese. He also seems stunned by the decidedly foreign sensuality and brashness of the outsiders and more than a little challenged to step up his own performance of masculinity.

“I had not been inside a proper Japanese room like this for a long time. My apartment at the time was Western, the kind with an actual bed, and even beforehand I had always put down carpet to cover up the threadbare tatami of my other dirt-cheap apartments. I realized I was close to forgetting the way exposed tatami felt underfoot.” (64)

“Dad, I Love You”

By Nao-Cola Yamazaki (f.)

Translated by Morgan Giles

The author has taken “Diet Coke” for her pen name as it is her favorite drink; her fascination with the ordinary is a detail that seems profoundly relevant, as the narrator is a forty-four-year-old man who seems to have been living life as something of an unthinking and unemotional automaton until his wife walked out on him three months ago. True, his current mood could be a product of the despair and loneliness he is currently experiencing. Yet he seems altogether surprised, baffled, and delighted by the ordinary kindnesses he encounters as if he had never noticed them before. He also seems willing to experiment with new activities, even something as banal as going out to lunch with a colleague and trying pad thai at a new restaurant. He learns a new word and relishes saying it aloud. He even finds himself at an upscale cafe sipping a can of coffee and eavesdropping on an elderly pair who met while attending a friend’s funeral. Although they haven’t seen each other in years, they too seem to have rediscovered the simple joys of making a human connection. What were their lives like before the losses that triggered their reawakening desire to connect with the world around them? 

“It is a mystery to me that sympathy is an emotion common to all people. When you’re down, those around you will always urge you on. A near-stranger you would never tell your worries to suddenly showers you with kindness. Like sunlight pouring down on you.” (79)

“Mambo”

By Kanehara Hitomi (f.)

Translated by Dan Bradley

Like the woman in Yashimoto Banana’s “Mummy,” Kanhehara’s twenty-something narrator in “Mambo” seems awash in a sea of sumptuous desire. Through the course of day she seduces or is seduced by any number of men (fifty is suggested as a fair estimate) and in a glance or two she might mate with a security guard or a middle-aged businessman in the back of his Mercedes. “Mambo” seems to be another study in the dangerously flatlining birthrate and a nation that is simply too exhausted by its economy and work culture to make love or even breed. Despite the narrator’s fervid imagination, her sex life with her video-game-obsessed boyfriend, Utsui, is tanking fast. and when she appeals to him for advice on how to manage her libido, he simply recommends that she see the psychiatrist she has been avoiding. She makes it as far as a cab stand before she decides that it might be better to distract herself by pursuing an elderly man who is meeting his ex-wife at the Tokyo aquarium in order to see the Mambo fish. Although she begins by imagining having sex with him, it is not long before the old man and the young woman are engaged in a frank discussion of the peaks and valleys of human sexuality, relationships, and marriage.

“‘Don’t you think it’s odd saying something is either psychological or physical? Because I don’t think they can be divided or separated that easily. It’s like, Utsui, your shoes and shoelaces being classed as separate things.” (100)

“Vortex”

By Hashimoto Osamu (m.)

Translated by Asa Yoneda

The protagonist of “Vortex” is Masako, a middle-aged woman who seems to have been so consumed by the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood that she only pauses to reflect on her life when her twenty-five-year-old daughter announces that she would like to move out on her own. Masako and her husband are shocked by the request; it certainly would not have been thinkable when they were young and starting out. Yet much is new in the world. And Masako does not seem to have been much aware of how Tokyo and Japan have changed in her lifetime. She notes that Japanese television is constantly running programs on the remarkable growth of the nation during the Showa period, yet she has no recollection of the transformation. She recalls that her mother too spoke of this rapid growth after the destruction of Tokyo, and though Masako asked her mother about her life during the war, she speaks only in generalities. In time, Masako’s daughter drifts out of their lives, marries, and seems to altogether disappear. Perhaps confused by her own predicament, she searches her memory for images of her own mother, now deceased, and even makes inquiries about her brothers. What was mother like? The painful answer is that her children have only the vaguest memory of the woman; Masako herself can only recall her mother working a mechanical knitting machine in a darkened room.  Are Masako’s disappearing identity and fading personal memory a function of not having approached her life in a more planful manner, or is her sense that she is disappearing a function of the rapid growth of the modern age? 

“Masako was a woman without distinguishing features. Since getting married, she’d been a stay-at-home wife, and until then she’d been an ‘Office Lady’. She wasn’t one of these ‘OL’s who dreamed of marriage, nor an ‘OL’ who lived for her career, nor one who aspired to balance work and married life.” (114)

“The Hut on the Roof”

By Kawakami Hiromi (f.)

Translated by Lucy Fraser

Kawakami is the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Ten Loves of Nishino. “The Hut on the Roof” is a bit of a mystery mashed up with a pair (or more) of romances. The forty-two-year-old divorcee, Ms. Karaki,  is an established English teacher at a well-known cram school. She stops often enough at the Uoharu fish shop to have attracted the attention of its owner/operator, Heizo-san. She is also observed by the owners of the chicken shop and the green grocers. The entire community is curious about her marital status; Heizou-san, for example, formerly called her “okusan” or married woman whenever he talked with her, despite her objections. In truth, she does have a lover, a man four years her junior whose wife has recently left him. Ms. Karaki seems to find her lover’s newness to being a divorcee and single quaint; she certainly enjoys acting as the mentor to this babe in the woods. Yet she is unsure of how long she will have the will to sustain the relationship. As she struggles to figure out her own love life, she becomes further intrigued by the relationship between the widower Heizo-san and his mysterious accountant who lives in a hut on the roof of the building.

“I saw something like the true face of Heizō-san and Gen-san, just once. Uoharu was closed for the day and they were in the larger supermarket. This was the first time I had seen them together. Gen-san was pushing the trolley, and Heizō-san was swiftly throwing things into it. Plastic bags and a scrubbing brush. Milk and bamboo skewers. A few vegetables and, as I sneaked a look, two long sausages of spicy cod roe. The shoe-makers go ill-shod, I thought, amused.” (146)

“An Elevator on Sunday”

By Yoshida Shuichi (m.)

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

The narrator, a man in his early thirties, lives in a tiny apartment. Initially, he was the pride of the building, starting early each morning and coming home late every evening. He had no family, ate all his meals on the fly, and seemed as if he were destined for success. However, because he was something of a non-starter when it came to studying, all of his jobs relied on his physical labor. When fired from his last job for negligence, he drifts along on his meager savings, certain that something will come up. Despite his dwindling finances, he continues to play the bachelor and finds himself with a lovely young girl he believes is in nursing school. Like him, Keiko seems to have no family. She is almost always studying; their inability to meet frequently is appealing to the narrator as he never wishes to become too involved with a woman, but it also leads to jealousy. When he charges Keiko with infidelity, she confesses that she just completed her final exams and that she is actually now an M.D. The relationship continues, in part because the hero is still unemployed and too lazy and non-commital to end it. And yet, almost inexplicably, Keiko fights to keep the relationship alive. Now successful, she buys them tickets for the romantic holiday they always desired. As repulsive as the narrator is, the tale is nevertheless marvelous for its climactic shift when we finally have a glimpse of the world Keiko inhabits and perhaps clings to this otherwise useless man: she is a Zainichi, an ethnic Korean living in Japan.

The longer he was unemployed, the more he lost the sense of what day it was, and the boundaries between yesterday, today, and tomorrow grew ever more blurred. However mixed up time became, today could only be followed by tomorrow, but then suddenly something got messed up and it wasn’t tomorrow but rather yesterday again; so time passed in the utter absence of any motivation. (151)