Category: Reading Asia
A Japanese kind of weekend
It wasn’t really intentional but we had a rather Japan-filled weekend. It started with dinner at our new favourite Japanese restaurant just a ten-minute drive away. Yuki Sushi. A little more pricey than our regular Japanese restaurant but perhaps more authentic? Their grilled Saba was just absolute perfection. The right amount of seasoning, and that wonderful smokey flavor. Absolutely divine. We’ve been to this place twice so far and both times I’ve ordered this dish and both times I’ve been blown away. It was so good I forgot to take a photo. Instead you’ll have to be content with the top two pictures. The left hand corner is the husband’s chirashi. The right photo has the other two-thirds of my ‘combination dinner’: sushi and sashimi. It also came with rice, salad and miso soup.
The next day, we headed to San Jose to have ramen at Santouka, located in the Mitsuwa supermarket food court. And then some grocery shopping at the supermarket – fresh sashimi-grade unsliced pieces of fish (salmon, kanpachi and hamachi) and some fish roe and green tea. Homemade California rolls and some Popeyes fries chicken that a friend brought over rounded up the kind of Japanese dinner. Ok so maybe the fried chicken was not so Japanese!
To top it all off, I finished reading Natsuo Kirino’s Out. It was perhaps the first Japanese novel I’ve read that wasn’t dreamy. Instead it was ugly and nightmarish (but in an everyday way, if that makes sense) and kind of depressing. It’s not just because of the murder (it is crime fiction after all) but because of the lives of Kirino’s characters. At its heart are four women, colleagues in a bento factory. It’s a hard life – night shift, hours of standing in line scooping rice and curry, and rumours of a pervert lurking around the carpark and grabbing women. Life isn’t pleasant at home either. Masako might as well live on her own, as her husband and son both ignore her. Kuniko is heavily in debt and her boyfriend is on the verge of leaving her. Yoshie is a single mother and the caretaker of a bedridden mother-in-law. Yayoi has two young children and a husband who gambles and is besotted with an escort named Anna who works at a club owned by former gangster Satake. It’s not really a spoiler since it’s all over the synopsis but well, I’ll be a bit vague in case you’d like to find out for yourself: someone gets murdered and the body needs to be disposed off. Things get complicated and essentially, lives get turned upside down.
In an interview with Japan Review, Kirino explained that “being a woman in this society is mainly an anonymous existence. I don’t think the fact that the environment is such that women are nameless and overlooked is a good thing. For example, a young man once told me that until he read Out, he “never realized that regular middle aged women actually had a life.” What makes these women special is not that they committed a crime, but the circumstances around these normal women that cornered them into that situation. It’s often merely convenient to depict them as seeking an escape from their life through an act of crime.”
Kirino brings these women, these everyday down-on-their-luck women, and brings their story to light. This is the book’s strong suit – the everyday life of these women in the suburbs of Tokyo. Because sometimes it can head towards too much melodrama, too much gore. But overall, a good, gritty read.
The Lake
Chihiro, a painter of murals, tells the story of The Lake. Her late mother was the owner and ‘mama-san’ of a club and her father is of some prominence in their small rural town. The book opens with her mother’s hospitalisation and death, which leaves Chihiro feeling lost and distanced and eventually she moves to Tokyo, where she meets Nakajima, who lives in the building diagonally across. She finds herself attracted to him.
There’s a tenacity in him that’s beyond all that. The intensity of a person unafraid of death, at the end of his rope.
Maybe that’s how I knew we would get along.
Yes there is an actual lake in this book.
“The water was so still you almost felt like it would absorb any sounds that reached it. The surface might have been a mirror. Then a wind blew up and sent small waves drifting across it. The only sound was the chirping of birds that whirled around us, high and low.”
Nakajima and Chihiro travel several hours to get to it, to a little shack by the lake that Nakajima and his mother used to live in, and which is now the home of Mino and Chii, siblings who make their living as clairvoyants. That is, Mino voices what the bedridden Chii ‘sees’. Mino also makes the most delicious tea, from spring water.
“The tea, made from leaves with a subtly smoky aroma, was so good I could feel my senses sharpening. It had a sweetness to it, and at the end of each sip I’d catch a whiff of fruit.”
And this is that kind of book that is to be read with a pot of steaming tea (lapsang souchong perhaps?) next to you - and I suppose if you have a view of a lake, that would be helpful. Because this is story that gradually awakens.
I made the mistake of glancing at an interview with Banana Yoshimoto about The Lake which revealed more than I cared to know (at the point of my reading progress). The Goodreads description also reveals just a little too much about the story. So hopefully I’ve managed not to, and if you are interested in reading this book, just jump right in and read it, without reading too much about it! Because Yoshimoto (and her translator) has written a book that seems, at first glance, simple, direct. But there is so much more beneath.
“But sometimes we encounter people like Nakajima who compel us to remember it all. He doesn’t have to say or do anything in particular; just looking at him, you find yourself face-to-face with the enormousness of the world as a whole. Because he doesn’t try to live in just a part of it. Because he doesn’t avert his gaze.
He makes me feel like I’ve suddenly awakened, and I want to go on watching him forever. That, I think, is what it is. I’m awed by his terrible depths.”
Title: The Lake
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Translated by: Michael Emmerich
Originally published in 2005
A Tuesday round-up
Wee reader sure has a knack for detecting when I’m blogging. It’s 720am and he’s stirring, the baby monitor picking up his kicks and little noises. So I guess this will have to wait till later.
And I’m back! For a few quick mini reviews. Because these are deserving books, which deserve to be blogged about and read. And unfortunately all I can manage right now are these short bits (among other fun things, feeding an unhappy baby oral antibiotics).
Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror
I was definitely in a sort of seasonal/winter-y mood (perhaps because it hardly feels like winter here?) and read the latest Flavia de Luce novel, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, which obviously is Christmas-themed. This time, the de Luce manor is being taken over by a film crew and as usual, Flavia comes across a dead body and starts her own investigation. As always, a delight to read. Best with a mug of hot chocolate (I love Trader Joe’s Sipping Chocolate!).
‘Richard Castle’s' Heat Wave
Books from Singapore
Gone Case the graphic novel – Dave Chua and Koh Hong Teng
The Scholar and the Dragon – Stella Kon
What I’m reading
Hi! I’m still here! I’m just doing more reading than blogging right now. Will explain more another time.
Meanwhile here’s what’s I’m currently reading:
The Jade Peony
This book took a while to get going. Perhaps it was because I started off with a little wariness – I’m not all that fond of reading Chinese immigrant stories, partly because they’ve always seemed… perhaps a little too similar to each other. Perhaps because they also hit close to home, but in a different sort of way (my great grandparents moved from China to Singapore – essentially moving from one Chinese-dominated country to another). It’s hard to explain, but it’s always made me hesitant.
Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony is set in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 40s and opens with a story of Jook-Liang, the ‘useless girl’ who dreams of being Shirley Temple and befriends old Wong Suk (Monkey). This story tripped me up a little, it was kind of sweet but I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind to read it (still wary, still hesitant – the grumpy grandmother stuck in her old ways especially called for a big fat ‘aiyah‘*). I have to admit that I almost put this book away at this point. But I’m glad I stuck with it, as in the end, the book was quite worthwhile.
The second section was second brother Jung-Sum’s story. He was adopted by the family at age four and struggles with his new life and the spectres of his past. The third story is told through the eyes of Sekky, the youngest, during the Second World War and the tensions between the Japanese and Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. This third story has the most action – the other parts seem more like reminiscences, rather episodic. But despite the lack of action, the reader feels drawn into the lives of these three children, perhaps on the strength of their characters. However, the three stories seem quite separate from each other, and the three main characters seldom feature in each others’ stories, which is quite curious.
* Which can be translated into somewhat of a sigh or an ‘argh’.
Title: The Jade Peony
Author: Wayson Choy
Year: 1995
Acquired from: The Library
Wayson Choy’s works
Novels
* The Jade Peony — 1995
* All That Matters — 2004
Memoirs
* Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood — 1999
* Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying — 2009
I read this book for the Global Reading Challenge
Sputnik Sweetheart
“A deep silence ensued. Her mind was as clear as the winter night sky, the Big Dipper and North Star in place, twinkling brightly. She had so many things she had to write, so many thoughts and ideas would gush out like lava, congealing into a steady stream of inventive works the likes of which the world had never seen. People’s eyes would pop wide open at the sudden debut of this Promising Young Writer with a Rare Talent. A photo of her, smiling coolly, would appear in the arts section of the newspaper, and editors would beat a path to her door.
But it never happened that way. Sumire wrote some words that had a beginning. And some that had an end. But never one that had both a beginning and an end.”
A while ago, I’d had too much of Haruki Murakami and had to take my leave of him (it was a pretty long one – I didn’t read any in 2010, and only his non-fiction, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in 2009. So the last Murakami I read was in 2008.) But when I returned to Murakami, it felt good. It was comforting, falling into his world of quiet, of music and literature, of Japan, of friendships and love again. An interesting relationship between a man and a woman, and another woman with that woman, a tale of early morning phone calls, of changes, of affection, repressed and unrequited love and longing. And as I read about this relationship of Sumire and the unnamed narrator (we never get to know our narrator’s name although this story is as much his), and of Sumire and an older woman Miu, who eventually becomes her boss, I am waiting, expecting that bit, that twist in the story. And then it comes and it is bizarre, a little creepy in its own way, a little like thinking you heard something in the middle of the night, then you wake up the next morning wondering if you had actually heard it or if it were just a dream.
“Sumire and I were a lot alike. Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing. Every spare moment we’d settle down in some quiet corner, endlessly turning page after page, Japanese novels, foreign novels, new works, classics, avant-garde to best-seller – as long as there was something intellectually stimulating in a book, we’d read it.”
It takes a while to emerge from this book and back to the gloom and wet of my own settings. I am a little jealous of their journey to that little Greek island. It brings a little warmth into my living room where I am seated on my couch with the fleece throw over my socked feet.
I am glad to have picked up Murakami again. I just reckon one requires quite a breather in between his books, although two years is probably too long a break. However, I have to be honest and say that I am constantly confused by which of his novels I’ve read!
I read Sputnik Sweetheart as part of the Global Reading Challenge (Asia).
Murakami’s novels (with English publication dates, but in order of Japanese publication dates)
Hear the Wind Sing (1987)
Pinball, 1973 (1985)
A Wild Sheep Chase (1989)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)
Norwegian Wood (2000) - Watch the trailer of the film adaptation of Norwegian Wood here.
Dance Dance Dance (1994)
South of the Border, West of the Sun (2000)
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (1997)
Sputnik Sweetheart (2001)
Kafka on the Shore (2005)
After Dark (2007)
1Q84 (2011)
Reading Challenges 2011
Ah…. they do tempt me. But I am also concerned about the arrival of the wee reader in March – will I have time to read then? Or will I just want to sleep and nap and doze during my precious free time?
But here’s what I think I might be able to manage, especially if I work on it during the first three months of next year!
The Medium Challenge
Read two novels from each of these continents in the course of 2011:
Africa
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America (please include Central America where it is most convenient for you)
The Seventh Continent (here you can either choose Antarctica or your own ´seventh´ setting, eg the sea, the space, a supernatural/paranormal world, history, the future – you name it).
Try to find novels from fourteen different countries or states.
The Expert Challenge involves reading three books for each, but I figure I’ll start with the Medium Challenge and see how it goes from there. This challenge fits in with my constant goal to read more internationally, so I should be able to complete this one. I’ll do up a separate post on my reading pool, and will add the link here.
Update: Here’s the link!
Victorian Literature Challenge 2011
What you need to know:
This challenge will run from 01 Jan 2011 – 31 Dec 2011.
Participants can sign up at any time throughout the year.
Read your Victorian literature.
Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901. If your book wasn’t published during those particular years, but is by an author considered ‘Victorian’ then go for it. We’re here for reading, not historical facts! Also, this can include works by authors from other countries, so long as they are from this period.
Choose from one of the four levels:
Sense and Sensibility: 1-4 books.
Great Expectations: 5-9 books.
Hard Times: 10-14 books.
Desperate Remedies: 15+ books.
My pool:
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Adam Bede – George Eliot
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Reading Asia and the Middle East
I also have my own personal reading project, which is to read more books set in Asia and the Middle East. I’ve been working on a list of books that I can find in my library system and I have to admit it’s quite ambitious as there are slightly more than 200 books on it right now! I might post it one of these days, in case anyone’s interested.
What reading challenges are you thinking of joining next year?
