Hayashi Fumiko’s nuclear winter

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Japan’s genocidal war crimes do not go away. They constantly feature in our media and I for one will never forget them, as my uncle died in Japanese captivity in 1945. A recent article in The Spectator was headed ‘Not prosecuting Hirohito was a mistake’. We all know what ended the war with Japan, and the controversy still surrounding that end. We know the facts about Japan’s war…but I have to say I never knew how it affected ‘ordinary Japanese’, particularly the working class, until I recently read this book.

Selected, translated and published by the American Japanologist J.D. Wisgo, most of these nine stories are set in wartime/immediately post-War Japan, particularly Tokyo. Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never mentioned, the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo that virtually destroyed it forms the background to the stories: one of such devastation of life and property as to approximate, I think, to a picture of nuclear winter. They are tales of extreme poverty, starvation, death and personal tragedy; bleakness unforgettably evoked.

At their core is usually a woman-man relationship which is explored fully, with impressive knowledge and confidence. I put the relationship that way round, as the Japanese women portrayed here are stronger, less crushed, more active and emotionally complex than the men, who are often deeply traumatised by the war and its destruction of their families. Stereotypic western ideas about Japanese women go out of the window. A seventeen-year-old daughter saves her doting widowed father from a post-War marriage whilst deftly leaving the family home to live with her older lover (‘The Master of the Wanderer’s Tavern’). A young woman runs away from the country to the ruins of Tokyo, works as a dancer, becomes pregnant, but is determined to have the child and is supported by an older woman and a homosexual (‘Downfall’). A male medical student is torn between a chubby housemaid infatuated with him and an impossibly beautiful woman he meets one night in the communal bathroom where he has gone ‘as usual to wash his two pairs of underwear’ (the hilarious ‘Tale of the Seishūkan Guest House’). Most moving of all, perhaps, a penniless married couple whose clothes shop has failed and who decide they must separate for economic reasons and because the woman believes they are incompatible, at the very last minute rediscover gentleness and love (‘Days and Nights’). Truly, in Fumiko’s stories life begins the other side of despair.

However, from the point of view of educating oneself about Japan the most valuable thing about them, I think, is their ‘strangeness’, i.e. their sheer cultural difference; what some readers might consider weirdness. There are constant references to the dimensions of rooms in metres. Suicide is an accepted choice. The idea of ghosts has a strong hold on people. Chronology keeps being broken, so that the total effect of the story is more compositional than linear. Similes are startling: ‘a suited salesman stood smoking absent-mindedly with a head of hair glistening like the eyes of a dragonfly’ (p. 95), a woman brushes a man’s hand ‘roughly off like an eagle cleaning its feathers’ (p. 104). ‘A girl with black earlobes served him tea’ (p. 100), and a man suddenly grabs his wife’s fingers and starts to ‘bite her fingernails, one at a time — pointer finger, middle finger, and pinky’ (p. 117). ‘Black earlobes?’ one exclaims; ‘bite her fingernails?’ Why? The translator has perhaps prudently decided not to explain these things to us in notes, for once started where could he end? Fumiko takes them all for granted, of course, and that is what one needs as a foreigner if one is going to engage with a raw, unfiltered Japan.

‘Strangest’, most ‘unrecognisable’ of all in these stories is the world of feelings and the sudden explosions of violence. The heroine of ‘Employment’ doesn’t herself understand why she is so angry, but screams as she throws pebbles at the sea, then ‘fell down abruptly onto the sandy ground, rolling around and kicking up bits of dry sand like a dog, thrashing about’ (p. 57), whilst the amiable hero of ‘The Tale of the Seishūkan Guest House’ rages ‘violently like a tiger’, repeatedly throws a surgical knife into a wall, and cuts his books ‘to shreds’ (p. 36) — and the passionate biting of a woman’s fingernails has already been mentioned. I certainly didn’t understand why many of the characters of these stories behave the way they do; but that is exactly what you would expect of a totally different culture and your task is to grapple with it if you are going one day to understand it. For instance, it was a complete revelation to realise that several of the Japanese women in these stories are emotionally upset, silently weep, or are stressed out, because of what they perceive (or foresee) as the emotional consequences for their men of the men’s own actions; in other words the women are not suffering from the direct impact of actions on themselves, but from the violent effects of empathy and pity for the other. I don’t know that this is a very common English phenomenon.

In case you are wondering what the word ‘pinky’ means in my quotation above, it is the American for little finger. These are translations by J.D. Wisgo into his native American, and I think this is a very good thing for two reasons. First, it enhances for the U.K. reader the sense of strangeness that is vital to the experience of reading another culture’s literature. Second, as a consequence of that terrible war American is Japan’s other language. I for one am immensely grateful to Wisgo for initiating me through Fumiko’s stories into the post-war world of Japan. I have never recommended a book to a reading group before, but I do recommend this one as the experience is bound to provoke widely differing responses, discussion and even argument. I have read the book three times, feel I have understood more about Japanese values and culture each time, and will surely read it again.

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.