Japanese Novels, Ho! (Take 二)
Jul. 8th, 2006 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
And next up we have Kagirinaku Toumei ni Chikai Buru, by Murakami Ryu.
I've read Murakami before, most recently the book (whose title escapes me at present) about the long-lost girlfriend and French food. I picked up Kagirinaku as part of a mass purchase using $50 worth of bookstore gift certificates. I was attracted by the fact that it had apparently won several awards, and that it looked like an easy read.
Purchase complete, I slapped my classy blue faux-leather book cover on it and was ready to go. I should probably use this opportunity to mention that I originally purchased my classy blue faux-leather book cover in order to read porn in public without Japanese people knowing what I was looking at; this fact will become ironically significant later.
Fast forward five days to Thursday, when I brought the book to my elementary school in the event that we had some downtime. Lo and behold, we had some downtime. My JTE knows I'm a big reader of Japanese novels, and she happened to ask me what I was reading at the moment. "Oh, this book," I told her, not having actually started it.
She seemed a bit shocked. "I thought it was a diary because of the cover you have on it," she said.
"Nope," I chirped. It's the book I'mgoing to read reading. I hear it's pretty famous. It's won a lot of awards."
"Um, yes," she said.
Again, this conversation took place before I'd actually started reading it.
Here's what happens in the first 80 or so pages: several people shoot heroin. Then they have sex and shoot more heroin. After that they shoot heroin again and then they shoot some more heroin and enjoy popping some sort of pill they've shoplifted from a pharmacy. Then they have more sex, shoot some more heroin and go to a party where the female characters are repeatedly and brutally raped and sodomized by the men in attendance before everyone does more drugs and has more non-consensual sex.
Let me reiterate that this is just the first eighty pages. And there I was in my elementary school staff room, cavalierly flinging it around and announcing to the world at large that this was what I was reading. Oops.
Funny story number two: The first several pages find the main characters lounging around in various states of drunken or drugged-out ennui. Talk turns to music and new records, as talk tends to do wherever drunken/drugged-out people are concerned. Records are popped onto the turntable and played.
Then someone mentions having just purchased a new Doors record. Jesus, I think to myself, Why would anyone bother having that on vinyl? before it occurs to me to check the publication date. 1976. (In my defense, the majority of my Japanese friends are DJs, which means we really do listen to actual records quite frequently. But still, felt a bit silly after that one...)
KTCB is certainly well-written as far as drug novels go, and the writing definitely captures what it's like to be off your head in a loud, out-of-control party with no clear idea as to what's going on.
But I dislike drug novels (in any language) precisely because I'm not a drug user, and having seen many high school and college friends (especially women) being seriously fucked over (especially by guys) while on drugs, I find nothing romantic about the genre. Still, the book is well-written (and likely stylistically groundbreaking in the world of Japanese literature), and I can see why it would have made a lot of waves, considering when it was published and the subject matter it deals with.
Interestingly enough, although the writing style and themes are very different from Ekuni or Yoshimoto, KTCB still shares the same characteristic of plunking its readers down in the middle of the life of the main character and ending without any major climax and denouement (or focus to the plot, really). It works just as well in this context as it does the former.
That will be all.
I've read Murakami before, most recently the book (whose title escapes me at present) about the long-lost girlfriend and French food. I picked up Kagirinaku as part of a mass purchase using $50 worth of bookstore gift certificates. I was attracted by the fact that it had apparently won several awards, and that it looked like an easy read.
Purchase complete, I slapped my classy blue faux-leather book cover on it and was ready to go. I should probably use this opportunity to mention that I originally purchased my classy blue faux-leather book cover in order to read porn in public without Japanese people knowing what I was looking at; this fact will become ironically significant later.
Fast forward five days to Thursday, when I brought the book to my elementary school in the event that we had some downtime. Lo and behold, we had some downtime. My JTE knows I'm a big reader of Japanese novels, and she happened to ask me what I was reading at the moment. "Oh, this book," I told her, not having actually started it.
She seemed a bit shocked. "I thought it was a diary because of the cover you have on it," she said.
"Nope," I chirped. It's the book I'm
"Um, yes," she said.
Again, this conversation took place before I'd actually started reading it.
Here's what happens in the first 80 or so pages: several people shoot heroin. Then they have sex and shoot more heroin. After that they shoot heroin again and then they shoot some more heroin and enjoy popping some sort of pill they've shoplifted from a pharmacy. Then they have more sex, shoot some more heroin and go to a party where the female characters are repeatedly and brutally raped and sodomized by the men in attendance before everyone does more drugs and has more non-consensual sex.
Let me reiterate that this is just the first eighty pages. And there I was in my elementary school staff room, cavalierly flinging it around and announcing to the world at large that this was what I was reading. Oops.
Funny story number two: The first several pages find the main characters lounging around in various states of drunken or drugged-out ennui. Talk turns to music and new records, as talk tends to do wherever drunken/drugged-out people are concerned. Records are popped onto the turntable and played.
Then someone mentions having just purchased a new Doors record. Jesus, I think to myself, Why would anyone bother having that on vinyl? before it occurs to me to check the publication date. 1976. (In my defense, the majority of my Japanese friends are DJs, which means we really do listen to actual records quite frequently. But still, felt a bit silly after that one...)
KTCB is certainly well-written as far as drug novels go, and the writing definitely captures what it's like to be off your head in a loud, out-of-control party with no clear idea as to what's going on.
But I dislike drug novels (in any language) precisely because I'm not a drug user, and having seen many high school and college friends (especially women) being seriously fucked over (especially by guys) while on drugs, I find nothing romantic about the genre. Still, the book is well-written (and likely stylistically groundbreaking in the world of Japanese literature), and I can see why it would have made a lot of waves, considering when it was published and the subject matter it deals with.
Interestingly enough, although the writing style and themes are very different from Ekuni or Yoshimoto, KTCB still shares the same characteristic of plunking its readers down in the middle of the life of the main character and ending without any major climax and denouement (or focus to the plot, really). It works just as well in this context as it does the former.
That will be all.