Kurt the Wednesday Child

I've already reviewed several books by 大井三重子 (OOI Mieko), the writer of  the collection of children's stories, 水曜日のクルト (suiyoubi no Kuruto, Kurt of Wednesday, 1961); but they were books under a different name and in a different character, as the postwar detective story writer NIKI Etsuko. She had been trying to establish herself as a children's writer when she won the Edogawa Rampo prize for her first detective novel 猫は知っていた (The Cat Knew, 1957), a genre with which she had more success. The stories gathered in this collection are fairy tale type fantasies of various kinds.

The title story, 'Kurt the Wednesday Child', is not one of the strongest, in my opinion. A children's illustrator after meeting a young boy on a Wednesday mysteriously loses items and as mysteriously regains them, while losing other ones. Like all the stories in the collection it is engagingly narrated and inventive; but the invention here is very diffuse, a bundle of different ideas that don't really connect. The style felt a little like a dilute version of MIYAZAWA Kenji's style in the stories in 注文の多い料理店 (chuumon no ooi ryouriten, The Restaurant of Many Orders, 1924).

The second story, 'The Memoir Art Gallery', is a well worked out story that perhaps does not add up to much more than its central, not very surprising, metaphor. The main character, a young boy, finds an art gallery that anyone can visit, but each visitor can only enter one room. The paintings in that gallery all depict people and incidents important to the visitor, whether welcome or not.

The third, 'The Life of a Puddle', is another piece that somewhat predictably follows a familiar genre, in this case the slightly moralising narration of the life of an inanimate object.

'The Story of the Mysterious Water Ladle' is a long and quite lively story of a good hearted cobbler, who is given a magical ladle by a homeless wanderer he invites in. The cobbler wants to give shoes to the poor children in his neighbourhood, but the pair he has just made for one boy is the first he has been able to afford to make in months. The stranger has him plant the shoes, then water them with the ladle. The next day a tree with shoes instead of fruit is growing in the garden. The cobbler plants hat trees and coat trees to make presents for his neighbours, but attracts the attention of the country's king, who confiscates the ladle and finds a horrible new use for it. The ideas in the story are again very familiar, but they combine well to make an interesting story with unexpected plot developments. In this story, Ooi makes the narrator a character, a grandfather visiting his grandchildren.

Unlike the cheerful stories that make up most of the collection, 'The Blood Coloured Cloud' is an unhappy story about war. From the harbour wall a girl sends a piece of paper out towards the horizon where she can see a pink cloud. On the paper she had written 'To the person beneath the pink cloud, please be my friend, Lily.' One day a little sea plane arrives with a boy who had found the letter, a cadet in the neighbouring country's airforce; but on the same day trucks roll through the town with loudspeakers announcing the start of hostilities with that country. Soon Lily's two brothers are called up to fight. This is clearly a more personal story (the author lost one brother in the second world war).

'The Conserve Jars of Things that Are or Could Be' returns to more whimsical magic. An old witch rewards a shopkeeper by making a set of jamjars which contain anything he or his family might need. When they have fulfilled all their needs they start giving away the remaining jars to customers. A girl from the neighbouring town makes friends with a rich invalid boy when his family accidentally leave him unattended and she shows him a nearby wood where they can gather acorns. Much later, learning that the boy is expected to die, she sets off to walk to the shop, hoping to give him one of the magic jars; but there is now only one left, which no other customer had wanted to take.

Two Idas

ふたりのイーダ (futari no īda, Two Idas, 1969) is a children's book by MATSUTANI Miyoko ( 松谷みよ子).

While their mother goes on an assignment to Kyushu, she leaves Naoki and almost three year old Yuuko with their grandparents in the little castle town of Hanaura. Hanaura is in western Japan, on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea, a location that will become relevant later in the novel. The family sometimes call Yuuko Ida, a nickname that Naoki gave her from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

On the first night in this grandparents' house, Naoki sneaks out to explore.

Naoki did not know how long he had been standing next to the castle moat. His attention was suddenly wakened as he heard the clatter, clatter sound of someone passing by near his feet. At the same time he heard a low murmur, "Gone, gone, can't find her ....., gone."

Although the voice was low and hoarse, it could be heard from down by his feet. Shocked Naoki looked around below him. It was a chair. It was a small - yes, about the size that would just fit Yuuko if she sat down in it - backed, round wooden chair. The chair was walking, clatter, clatter, along the white path at the edge of the the moat, dragging its legs with each step.

The next day Naoki discovers an abandoned house in the woods, and in it the chair from the night before. When Yuuko visits the house, she seems strangely at home there; and the chair thinks that it recognises her as the Ida it knew. But whoever that Ida was must have vanished long ago. Angry at the chair's claims on his sister, Naoki tries to find out what had happened to the people living in the house; but he also starts to wonder whether his Yuuko might be the reincarnation of the Ida that the chair knew.

A visit to Hiroshima suggests what may have happened to the family. A young woman from the town takes Naoki with her to a memorial ceremony for the victims; and Naoki learns about the events that he had only vaguely heard of before.

In this way the fantasy element of the book winds into a story of the atom bomb. The two fit together a little oddly. The chair's sentience is not really motivated; but its character can be seen as a way of approaching the feeling of being unable be come to terms a loss of this kind.

[UPDATE: I forgot to check the Japan Foundation's Translation Database before writing this review. It turns out there is an English translation, Paula Bush, Two Little Girls Called Iida, Kodanasha International, 1985.]

The Burmese Harp

ビルマの竪琴 (birma no tategoto, The Burmese Harp, 1940) is a 1946 children's book by TAKEYAMA Michio (竹山道雄, 1903-1984), which ICHIKAWA Kon (市川 崑) made into a film with the same title in 1956. There is an English translation, Harp of Burma by Howard Hibbett, first published by Tuttle in 1966. The story follows a group of Japanese soldiers in Burma in the last days of the second world war and in the time between their surrender to the British and their return to Japan a year later.

Apart from an introductory chapter, the story is told by an anonymous member of the group, narrating as a representative, not so much telling us his own personal feelings and observations as what the whole group saw and felt. In fact very few of the soldiers are characterised individually and only one is named, the central character Mizushima (水島). Apart from Mizushima, the most important character is the calm and serious captain, who had been a music teacher in civilian life and now keeps the soldiers in spirits with choral singing.

Mizushima is a private (first class) who has discovered a passion for music in this setting, constructing a Burmese harp. 

You know, I think if you collected together the instruments that soldiers have, it would make an interesting museum. Wherever soldiers go, if they have any free time, someone is sure to make an instrument. Some of them are specialists; and it's astonishing what good instruments they can create, making do with the materials available. In the wind section, you go from flutes made by cutting reeds and bamboo and boring holes in them all the way to proper trumpets made by putting together pieces of broken machinery. In the percussion section, I've seen everything from the skin of a dog or cat stretched over a wooden frame to drums made by stretching some kind of skin over an oil drum. They said it was tiger skin, but, well, I don't know about that. Anyway it made an incredible, reverberating noise, and was the pride of that troop.

Mizushima is the troop's scout and goes ahead of them in Burmese clothing to check that they are not going to run into British soldiers. In one village, the Japanese find themselves surrounded by Gurkas and British and Indian soldiers, waiting in ambush in the jungle outside. Pretending to still be celebrating the feast they had been enjoying, the Japanese keep singing their traditional songs, as they push the cart with their ammunition out of the village. A moment before they turn from singing to attack the enemy, the captain stops them. The British soldiers are singing the same songs. (In the nineteenth century, there was a westernising movement in music education, that brought many British songs to Japan with new texts, as well as Japanese compositions in a western style.) The threat of fighting passes, and they find that the war is over and Japan has surrendered.

Nearby a different group has not surrendered so easily. The captain is asked to help and sends Mizushima to try and convince the hold outs to accept defeat. Transported across the country to a prisoner of war camp in Mudan, they wait for him to return; but when months pass without sign of him, it becomes clear that something has gone wrong, particularly when they find that the survivors of the group he was meant to convince had in the end surrendered and are being treated for their injuries in a nearby hospital.  Unable to find out more, they have to assume that Mizushima is dead; but then the captain, driven by his guilt at sending him on the mission, begins to suspect that maybe a buddhist monk they have seen could be the surviving Mizushima. The soldiers fluctuate between belief and rejection, as various clues make the identity seem more or less likely. Meanwhile the captain starts teaching a parrot, the brother of the one that the monk always carries on his shoulder.

Stroking the parrot, he said, "There, there, we've all been ignoring you, haven't we? From now on we'll look after you properly. In return, you can learn some Japanese."

The parrot shook itself with happiness. It clacked its hard bill and stuck out a cold rubber like tongue and pecked the captain's hand.

What the captain had started doing was really strange. He would divide up the food he received three times a day, then he would say, "Oy, Mizushima," and when the parrot repeated it, he would let it feed from the palm of his hand. Then he would say, "Come with us" and when the parrot repeated that he would give it a share of meat from his side dish. Finally he would say, "Home to Japan."  

They send the parrot to the monk; but although he receives it, he seems unwilling to admit that he is Mizushima, appearing only as a silent watching figure outside the camp. Only when they have finally embarked on the boat home do they learn from a letter what had kept him in Burma.

The narration, despite the serious subject matter, mostly runs along calmly and cheerfully. Some bits are even like a children's adventure story. In particular an episode in a cannibal village, wisely dropped from the film, reads as if it came out of a nineteenth century adventure. The book and film are sometimes described as anti war; and they're certainly not pro war. It might be better to see them as depicting people coming to terms with being the losers in a mistaken war and working out what they should be doing with their lives now.

The film is very close to the book. There are hardly any scenes or dialogue which are not taken from it. The main difference, except for some abbreviation, is that Mizushima's narrative is inserted into the story earlier. As Takeyama comments, the central part of the book is structured like a detective story, except that the mystery is only important for the soldiers' feelings. Since the narrative is so even paced, readers are probably willing enough to read first the troops' account, then Mizushima's; but a film viewer has different expectations.

Children with No Mother, A Mother with No Child

TSUBOI Sakae (壺井栄, 1899-1967) was a writer from Shoudoshima, one of the larger islands in the Seto inland sea. She was the daughter of a cooper, one of a large family, which later fell on hard times when the barrel making business failed. Her most famous work is 二十四の瞳 (にじゅうしの ひとみ, Twenty Four Eyes, 1952), which follows the relationship of a primary school teacher in a village on the island to twelve of her pupils through the years leading up to the second world war and beyond. The book was made into a very famous film in 1954, and is an influential depiction of the effects of the military regime and the war on ordinary people.

母のない子と子のない母と  (Children with No Mother, A Mother with No Child) was first serialised in 1948 as 海辺の村の子供たち (The Children of a Seaside Village), then revised and published in book form in 1951. Both theme and structure are very close to 二十四の瞳. The story follows a woman who has moved back to her home village on Shoudoshima from Osaka after the death of her husband and son during the war. A little later, her cousin's family, a mother and two sons, move back to the neighbouring village, after their home in Saitama is bombed on the last day of the war. (The cousin himself has not yet returned from the war, and the family is uncertain whether he is alive or not.) Soon after their arrival, the mother becomes ill and her youngest son Shirou is sent to stay with his aunt. Then she dies and the eldest, Ichirou, joins his brother in the little earth built home of his aunt. Ichirou and other primary school children in the village share the focus of the story, which progresses in a series of small episodes or with gaps of days, weeks or sometimes months in between. This is similar to the way 二十四の瞳 is narrated, but there the gaps are sometimes several years.

The villagers are almost all fishermen or small farmers (or some combination). Many houses have names that recall their status as shops; but during the war, they have abandoned the business. Like Ichirou several children in the village have fathers who are missing or dead; and the memory of these people and the difficulty of accepting that they will not be coming back recur in several scenes, particularly in a chapter where Ichirou helps his best friend (also called Shirou, but with different kanji) harvesting. The villagers and their life is sympathetically depicted. The children show occasional realistic selfishness, jealousy and pettiness, but all are shown as good hearted.

Shiro tried to calm things down, "Still, just perhaps, he might return. He'll come back, that's what I think."

"How would you know? As if!" Ichirou said, casting the words aside. His spoke with distaste, as if Shirou had been humouring him.

At that point, Tatsuo had the strongest reaction. In an angry voice, he said, "Aye, it's clear. How would he know? As if. But, you're still better off than me. They sent my father's body back to us. Compared to that, since there's no official word on your father, he might return, mightn't he?"

Ichirou lifted his face. Tatsuo went on all the more, in an aggressive tone, adding examples, "Take Shirou chan's father. He was on a ship and is missing now. Shigeru's older brother died in the war. Lots did. Around me there are six people gone. But everyone thinks maybe they'll come back, and waits for them."

Ichirou listened in silence, then, his head bowed down, "I didn't know. I'm sorry," he apologised in a small but clear voice. "Still, you have a mother, don't you?"

Both for its picture of the aftermath of war and for its scenes of life in Shoudoshima at that time, the book is well worth reading. My edition recommends the book for the upper years of primary school (10-12 years, I suppose) and above. But for a Japanese learner, it's probably better not taken lightly. I found it often much harder to understand than most children's books (though a lot easier than 二十四の瞳). There are two problems. There is a lot of speech, so there is a lot of dialect, which also crops up outside direct speech, when the narration reflects the attitudes of the characters. The narrative technique involves little jumps from one episode to the next, and these are often introduced with something that even Japanese readers of the time would not immediately have understood, little riddles arising from the circumstances or local customs, which then become clear in the course of the narrative. But a non-native reader is thrown out a lot more by something like this.

奇想、天を動かす

What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered, "Wilkie, have a mission!"

 (Swinburne on Wilkie Collins)

There are various ways you can divide up crime fiction. Greater or lesser realism is certainly one important spectrum; but in practice, the decision of where a book belongs can be complicated. Discussion of Japanese crime fiction often brings up a 'social school', which is supposedly more realistic and more concerned with depicting the nature of the modern world, as opposed to purely puzzle stories. In fact the two classics most often named in this context, Points and Lines (点と線
1958) and Inspector Imanishi Investigates (砂の器 1962) by MATSUMOTO Seichou (松本 清張, 1909-1992), are both distinctly unrealistic, particularly the latter. Nor do they avoid puzzle elements. But (on the basis of these two books) the style does avoid many of the conventions of traditional puzzle stories. There are alibis and tricks of misdirection by the criminal ; but fantastic crimes like locked room murders, fantastic disguises, unusual buildings or other such settings, the appearance of the supernatural etc. do not occur.  Some recent Japanese writers particularly cultivate such elements. When SHIMADA Souji (島田荘司, born 1948) gets mentioned, it is often as the forerunner of this style. But the stories that I've read featuring the policeman YOSHIKI Takeshi (吉敷竹史) seem to have more in common with the realist school. From western stories the most comparable figure is perhaps Freeman Wills Crofts: an investigation which goes through a period of orientation, then focuses on one suspect, with a problem like an alibi that still needs solving left to the end; a professional policeman as hero, characterised by stubborn persistance.

The 1989 Yoshiki novel 奇想、天を動かす has a rather unusual place in this. One part is pure 'social school', as Yoshiki patiently traces the early lives of a murderer and his victim. The other is a deliberately fantastic impossible crime story. I'll say in advance that this makes a truly, truly terrible mix. But I like both types of story; so it's a readable book despite its faults.

The book starts in the 1950's with a night train journey through a wintery Hokkaido landscape. Down the corridor between the seats, in which almost all the few passengers are asleep, a man in clown's makeup, with a strange and unsettling smile, dances silently past. One wakeful passenger hears a shot and goes to the door through which the dancing clown had passed. He meets another passenger coming from the other compartment; and the two deduce that the shot must have come from the locked toilet. They summon the conductor who unlocks the door. There is the clown, surrounded by burning candles, with part of his head blown off. The conductor relocks the door; but some travellers complain that the burning candles are a danger. He reopens it to extinguish them, and finds that the clown has disappeared.

The story moves to the present day, where a homeless man, less that 1.50 m. high, wanders round Tokyo playing his harmonica at train travellers, but seeking no money. He wanders into backstreets near Asakusa and, apparently in an argument over change, stabs the owner of a small shop. Yoshiki suspects there must be more to the story and finds that the man had previously been wrongly imprisoned for murder. Another prisoner remembers the stories that the man had written, which in turn prove to be reflections of an impossible event in Hokkaido thirty years ago, when the man had been a clown in the circus there. Indeed the events of the night include not only the locked room mystery, but a corpse returned to life, an invisible giant with glowing eyes, and a force that hurls one carriage off the rails.

The final explanation has a wealth of ideas, with a train alibi added to the problem for good measure. But a lot of the explanation comes down to coincidence. The solution to the locked room is not very credible, but it will probably occur to readers. The worst problem for me is that the motivation just doesn't seem to make sense. Even if it did, the mix of social mystery and fantastic mystery feels like a well meaning lapse of judgement.

A core element of the back story is the Japanese kidnapping and use as forced labour of Korean civilians and associated crimes in the period of military rule. Yoshiki is portrayed as someone with no idea of this part of history, which might imply that Shimada expects other Japanese readers to be similarly ill informed. (On the other hand, Yoshiki's role in the novel is generally that of an ignorant but interested listener, whatever the subject.)

The Little People of the House in the Tree's Shadow

木かげの家の小人たち is a children's book from 1959 by INUI Tomiko (discussed here). As with A Long Long Penguin Story, there's no English translation. But if you speak French, Le secret du verre bleu seems to be a translation. [UPDATE: There is now an English translation, "The Secret of the Blue Glass" (2015) by Ginny Tapley Takemori, published by Pushkin Press.] The book reads as if it is aimed at older readers than ながいながいペンギンの話, and it's quite long, just under 300 pages in my edition. (Japanese books are small. So there isn't room for much text on a page; but a Japanese page probably works out to not much less than an English paperback. The syllable alphabet and lack of spaces between words saves space.)

The story is a fantasy featuring tiny people, like many children's books in English and Japanese literature. Inui in an afterword mentions being enthralled by a book on fairies by Yeats; and the little people here are in fact British fairies. MORIYAMA Tatsuo's English teacher brought the little people with her when she came to Japan as a young woman. Now, in 1914, she is returning to England and asks Tatsuo to look after them, giving him a blue glass in which they must be given milk every day. Tatsuo installs them in an unused bookroom in a tree shadowed corner of the house. And there they stay, provided with milk first by Tatsuo then by later generations of the family.

But the core of the story is the experience of life in wartime Japan, which the little people first witness as two men come into their room, pulling volumes from the shelves to pile up on the floor as they search through the books.

"The books here are mostly just the children's books."

"Madame, in your house is this the kind of book your children read?" said one of the men, pushing a black covered book in German in her face.

"Ah. Kropotkin. That's .... well yes, that is my father in law's -"

"For now we'll take it with us to the station for consideration."

The story on the one side centres on the young daughter of the family, Yuri, who is evacuated to the countryside and must try to find the milk that the fairies in her care need to live, on the other on the fairy family themselves, the parents, Balbo and Fern, who are accustomed to rely on the human family, and their children Robin and Iris, who gradually start exploring the world outside. The depiction of the wartime mood in Japan is fairly bitter: Yuri's father is imprisoned for unpatriotic sentiments; but one of her brothers thinks he deserves it for betraying the country and that Yuri is similarly unpatriotic in giving milk to the fairies. In the countryside where Yuri is sent, she soon becomes isolated, since the other children's families regard her family with disapproval, in particular the mother of her friend, who is proud of the her other sons, who have lost their lives in the war.　And sickness and the difficulty of getting milk lead to a bitter parting with the fairies in her care. The expanding horizons of Robin and Iris are more optimistic, as they make friends first with a pigeon then with a Japanese fairy. But although the book's ending is not exactly unhappy, and there is a reconciliation of sorts between Yuri and the fairies, the reader is likely to be left a little melancholy and thoughtful.