Booky Ooky!

Confessions of a Mask / Yukio Mishima
New Directions, 1958 (paperback)
254 p. — translated by Meredith Weatherby

Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask turned out to be a lot more than I imagined and a little less than I had hoped. I initially approached this book through the lens of Japanese fiction. Knowing this was a book about Japan during WWII and having read the author’s The Sound of Waves, I had a certain set of expectations.

What surprised me is that I also found myself evaluating the book as a piece of gay fiction, which I hadn’t originally intended. I knew the book was about a homosexual man, and based on the title, I assumed he was keeping this hidden, but for some reason, prior to starting the novel, to categorize it in the corpus of gay writing seemed inaccurate and insulting. Inaccurate because it’s older and by a heterosexual(?) man. Insulting because — and this should come as no surprise — I hate gay fiction.

Within the first 20 pages, I had completely changed my mind. During the first 100 pages of the novel, I felt like Mishima was living in my brain, pulling forth memories I didn’t know I had of my own coming-of-age and sexual awakening. In other gay works, there is a lot of emphasis on sex, relationships, alienation, and violence, but it’s often superficial and always contrary to my personal experience. The first third of this novel, however, is about the protagonist as a child, and Mishima captures so accurately many of the confusing and also nonplussing thoughts that a to-be-gay child might have, and certainly that I had. A lot of what went on in the character’s head felt perfectly normal to him, though they were thoughts that would later set him apart from his peers. The fascination with masculinity, the mistaking of sexual attraction for aesthetic appeal, the natural disconnect between fantasies in the mind and what they mean in life. It was so similar to what I experienced, it was scary. These aren’t things that I’ve talked about with anybody, so as sappy as it sounds, reading this book made me feel like I wasn’t alone.

If you read this, though, bear in mind that the guy’s obsession with death and stuff was NOT part of my experience. It’s icky.

After the first third or half of the book, though, the protagonist’s experience varies drastically from mine, so I was able to bring my mind back to a more subjective place from which to evaluate the novel. It’s here that his story becomes intimately tied with his life in Japan during and after the war, and what the rest of the book focuses on other than his thoughts are his relationships with women and how lying about sexuality to the world inevitably led to tension and a great deal of self-deception. It remains a good book with that quiet, introspective style I’ve come to associate with Japanese literature, but it does get a little dry at times and somewhat repetitive. Every now and then I wanted to say “Ok! We get it! You’re conflicted! It sucks to live a lie. Now can we please move on?!” But ultimately, the book is still insightful and engaging.

One thing the book encouraged me to do was take another look at some gay fiction. I replaced a category in that mammoth 888 Challenge to include 8 books that I feel will span a spectrum of themes (and quality, I’m sure.) I replaced the category called “Professionally Relevant” because I figured you guys wouldn’t want to read about that boring stuff anyway.

The Woman in the Dunes / Kobo Abé
Vintage International, 1991 (paperback) [orig. 1964]
239 p. — translated by E. Dale Saunders

I have this goal–more of a hope really–that 2008 will be a better reading year than 2007. “Better,” in this case, is not a measurement of quantity of books, reading focus, or really anything having to do with me. It’s more an issue of the quality of books I read. There was a lot of disappointment in 2008, so much so that when everybody was saying how hard it was to narrow down a Top 10 of 2007, I couldn’t find 10 books that deserved to be on such a list. The Murakami, the Card, the… well I don’t remember now. The point is, we (royal) have to do better.

So far, so good. The Woman in the Dunes, which I finished almost a week ago, is a fantastic novel.

Niki Jumpei is an amateur entomologist. A bug collector. Yeah, it’s an odd sort of hobby, but it probably keeps him from murdering young girls or setting cats on fire, so just go with it. He’s also fascinated by sand, on which he has done much research, in part with hopes of finding a heretofore undiscovered species of sand-dwelling insect. Again my sociopathy-sense is tingling, but I have to admit it was these obsessions of the character that provided Abe the opportunity to, within the first 20 pages, convince me this would be a favorite book of mine with his lyrical, heady, and insightful style. On sand:

Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth. […] While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

The part omitted with the ellipses make this excerpt come together even better, but it was kinda long.

Anyway, Niki takes a couple days off work to visit some dunes and look for bugs. He needs to stay the night in the village there, so–and bear with me here–I guess they lowered him into a sort of pit in the dunes where a woman lived alone in her house. The physical layout of this house and the surrounding dunes was never clear in my mind, though this was the setting for 90% of the novel. This was actually a minor drawback, as I had to take it on faith that things happened the way they did. Though I suppose it’s fiction, so taking it on faith is the only way…

The point is, this was all a trick. The sand enters this house constantly, and it is the woman’s full-time job to shovel the sand into buckets that will be lifted out and discarded. She must do this because if the sand builds up in her house–her pit–too much, it will upset some sort of balance and the entire village below will be destroyed by sand. Again, I have no idea why this was or what this village looked like. The physics of the thing are totally beyond my grasp, so just go with it. Anyway, now Niki’s trapped in there with her to help her out because the townspeople took the rope ladder away. Ha ha.

I’ve rambled already. Basically, the book’s about a guy trapped in a sand pit with a woman. The entire book. A sand pit. Excited yet? It’s a hard sell, I’ll admit, but Abe manages to transform this strange plot into a deeply moving, intensely psychological, and non-stop page-turning study on this man and both his relationship with the woman and how he deals with his entrapment. It touches on identity, acceptance, adaptation, sexual politics, and most of all Niki’s struggle with himself.

And by “sexual politics,” yes, I mean sex in a sand pit. As if he wasn’t chafed already.

The point is, this book is exceptional. Had I read it a week sooner, I may have been able to eke out a Top 10 list with this at the top. As it is, Mr. Abe will have to wait until December for this illustrious honor.

Wow, guys. Wow. Hi! It’s me. How’ve you been? Glad to hear it.

Kafka on the Shore / Haruki Murakami
Vintage International, 2005 - 1-4000-7927-6 (paperback)

Where does one start with Kafka on the Shore? I suppose a plot synopsis is in order, not that it’s possible to get a concept of this book through a plot outline. I hate doing these, so I won’t. Sarah Chung’s brief LA Weekly review is a serviceable primer to the novel.

This is a book that I’m terrified to write about. I was reading it for a book group meeting, and I ended up chickening out and not showing up because I didn’t know how to interpret it, and I was scared everybody would think I was stupid. They’re reading Philip Roth for the next one, so we’ll see how that goes.

I take minor solace in the fact that between about 8 reviews I read online (just now), I found 8 different contradicting interpretations but also got the impression that they were all copying ideas from each other because they were just as lost as I was. Plot synopses across the board contained direct cut and pastes from other synopses. And seriously, this is a 500-page book. There’s no reason multiple people should be quoting the same unspectacular lines.

So, although I was unable to glean (read: steal) any specific insight from those other reviews, I have managed to built up a bit of confidence due to the collective bewilderment of Kafka’s readers.

Some people claim this novel to be overtly American. Others say it is quintessential Japanese. Some label Kafka as a typical Murakami character, and others call him a total deviance. Various interpretations float around like an amorphous cloud, and it occurs to me that that’s how I felt the entire time reading it, and that’s why I love it so much. I could go on and on pulling images and metaphors from the book and telling you why I liked which characters and what certain scenes meant to me, but that would take pages and would likely not inform your personal reading of the novel.

The truth is, Kafka on the Shore is a novel that is impossible to pin down if you think on it too hard. I believe the key to understanding it is to just let it exist in your head. Some of our most sacred emotions are those that would be destroyed by expressing them with words, and this novel calls those out. Reading it took me a long time because each chapter elicited a different state of mind that I could sit in and let my subconscious explore. Incidentally, reading in bed at night was generally not an option as I found myself having some of the strangest, most psychologically frightening dreams of my life under the influence of Murakami’s work.

I want to very seriously endorse this novel, but only if you’re able to seriously suspend your disbelief and if you don’t feel the need to nitpick and understand every last metaphor you come across. This book is like a psychotic drug. Murakami is the William S. Burroughs for the silently introspective…. and the sober.

Further reading:

• “Subconscious Tunnels” - John Updike’s New Yorker Review
• Haruki Murakami Resources - with links to many reviews