I wish I’d notated the moment when I realized how comfortable, almost swaddled, I felt as I read these Haruki Murakami tales. It is like meeting up wiI wish I’d notated the moment when I realized how comfortable, almost swaddled, I felt as I read these Haruki Murakami tales. It is like meeting up with an old friend in a train station that I haven’t seen for a long time, and as we talk, I realize how much I miss the cadence of his voice and the specific way he shares with me the story of his life. I have a long reading history with Murakami so I’m not sure why I am so surprised. It isn’t a shocking surprise, but a pleasant surprise, like discovering that you love somebody whom you’ve been friends with for decades. These stories are about men without women, or we could say men without a person they love most dear in their lives. These men are not marooned on a deserted island or incarcerated for crimes or cold and dispassionate people. They have through design or mishap found themselves bereft of close female companionship.
These stories are ethereal. I feel like I am slowly drifting downward from above into the middle of events already begun. I am to only listen and learn what I can so I can piece together the dangling fragments of details in order to ride the slipstream of plot. These aren’t tidy stories in the sense that there is a beginning and an end. There is no ribbon wrapping the tendrils up into a nice big bow. The stories continue beyond what Murakami chooses to share with us. They are succulent, dainty appetizers that remind readers of the abundant feast that awaits us when we open one of his novels.
Drive My Car ”The most excruciating thing, though, had been maintaining a normal life knowing his partner’s secret--the effort it required to keep her in the dark. Smiling calmly when his heart was torn and his insides were bleeding. Behaving as if everything was fine while the two of them took care of the daily chores, chatted, made love at night. This was not something that a normal person could pull off. But Kafuku was a professional actor.”
Kafuku needs a new driver for his car, and he hires this enigmatic, quiet young woman with a slightly shady, mysterious past. It is always good for us to meet new people who we can tell our stories to. They are fortunate because we’ve told the story many times and have cut superficial parts, tidied up the main plot, and can present them with the most entertaining version of events. As the two of them develop a trust between them in those daily drives, a friendship begins to flourish. He talks to her about the woman he shared with others long before he lost her for good.
Yesterday ”The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories--I did. A handful of happy experiences. But if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer.”
I’ve certainly had those moments when I wanted to step outside myself and be someone brand new, someone of my own particular creation, based on avoiding all the past failures of my old self. This story is about a young man who meets a friend who is completely oblivious to how things are supposed to be done. He does everything...weird. It is invigorating to know someone like this, but also extremely annoying because he is doing exactly what you wished you had the guts to do. His friend even encourages him to go out with his gorgeous girlfriend because he feels he just isn’t right for her. This story is an ode to The Beatles song Yesterday. I know it is impossible for younger generations to understand how influential The Beatles were on the minds and souls of those who first listened to their music. I was three years old when they broke up, so I was the second generation of listeners, but I still remember the first time Revolution came on the radio.
An Independent Organ ”I’ve been out with lots of women who are much prettier than her, better built, with better taste, and more intelligent. But those comparisons are meaningless. Because to me she is someone special. A ‘complete’ presence.”
Our narrator for this story has always admired Doctor Tokai for his carefree lifestyle. He has never been interested in getting married, but instead prefers to borrow married women from other men. He isn’t attracted to beauty as much as he is those women possessing a quick wit and a brimming intelligence. He has an aptitude for extracting himself from these situations the moment the woman starts to feel too attached to him. He is a clever fox indeed, but as we know from our childhood fairy tales, sometimes the fox is so clever he traps himself. When the Doctor falls in love and is rejected, we start to understand why he was living such a life to avoid such debilitating feelings.
Scheherazade ”While the sex was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed--if only in a small way--to have found a kind of pleasure in it.”
He is housebound, but a woman brings him food and supplies and stays to have sex with him. He thinks of her as Scheherazade, as she reminds him of that famed storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights as she shares with him stories from her life. She tells him of this boy she admired...lusted after, in school. She would break into this boy’s house and take something from his room. She would leave something of her own in exchange. He has no idea how she feels about him. It is one of those one-sided love affairs that can be so wonderful because the dialogue and the lingering looks are written into the script perfectly. This is one of my favorite stories from the collection. It has the right balance of spice and longing.
Kino ”It was obvious what they were up to. His wife was on top, crouched over the man, and when Kino opened the door he came face-to-face with her and her lovely breasts bouncing up and down. He was thirty-nine then, his wife thirty-five. They had no children. Kino lowered his head, shut the bedroom door, left the apartment, lugging his shoulder bag stuffed with a week’s worth of laundry, and never came back. The next day, he quit his job.”
I have to say I could only hope that I would have the presence of mind to handle such a horrific revelation as well as Kino did. He cuts through the unspooling fabric of his married life and moves on. He opens a bar in some property his aunt owns and starts to enjoy doing the things he didn’t have time for before, like reading books and listening to music. He is somewhat mystified that he doesn’t feel more anguish over his wife’s infidelity, but the bouquet of memories he’d made with her died the moment he opened the door. Things are going great, and then the cat he inherited with the place disappears, snakes begin to appear everywhere, a ‘yakuza’ takes to reading a book at the bar everyday, and a woman with cigarette burns begins to haunt him. This is an interesting supernatural story that goes in unexpected directions.
Samsa in Love ”Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tanel of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him?”
Gregor Samsa! I about fell out of my chair. Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, quite possibly one of the most famous characters to ever emerge from a short story, is back. Only this time the metamorphosis is reversed. I’ve been thinking about rereading Metamorphosis for some time now, and I can only assume that the universe thought I needed yet another reminder. Murakami does not reveal what insect Samsa has metamorphosed from, but needless to say, this is one insect that is very confused to find itself trapped in such a useless body. The world outside has descended into chaos, and the news of the disruptive world is brought to him in the form of a hunchback woman who has come to fix a lock on the upstairs room. The very same room that Samsa found himself in this morning. The repartee between the woman and the childlike Samsa is permeated with quirky honesty. I was not ready for this story to end, and it is certainly one of my favorite stories of the collection.
Men Without Women ”It’s quite easy to become Men Without Women. You love a woman deeply, and then she goes off somewhere. That’s all it takes. Most of the time (as I’m sure you’re well aware) it’s craft sailors who take them away. They sweet-talk them into going with them, then carry them off to Marseilles or the Ivory Coast. And there’s hardly anything we can do about it. Or else the women have nothing to do with sailors, and take their own lives. And there’s very little we can do about that, too.”
It all begins with a phone call in the middle of the night from an emotionless voice informing him that his ex-girlfriend has committed suicide. I’m sure most of us have had a death call, and for some reason it usually comes between one and four in the morning, as if the dying person did her best to make it to a new dawn, but the oppressive black night just went on too long. The man is discombobulated by the news, and as he struggles to understand all the whys, he begins to move their relationship back to when they were both fourteen, as if he is trying to remember his time with her in more innocent days. He talks about his fourteen-year-old self being gone forever, and I often think about, when we lose someone who was close to us or who used to be close to us, who we were with them dies with them. We mourn them, but we also mourn the missing part of ourselves.
Murakami, throughout these stories, dangles some thoughts in front of you, and it is up to you to make of them what you will.
”With a hundred and fifty yen I could have had a bowl of noodles, milk, a curried bun, a melon roll, and a jelly doughnut. But I always made do with o”With a hundred and fifty yen I could have had a bowl of noodles, milk, a curried bun, a melon roll, and a jelly doughnut. But I always made do with one bun--no milk--and saved the rest of my money to spend on books by Sartre, Genet, Celine, Camus, Bataille, Anatole France, and Kenzaburo Oe.
In a pig’s ass.
What I really needed the cash for was to go to coffee shops and discos where I could hit up on loose chicks from Junwa Girls High, a school with a FOX RATIO of over twenty percent.”
I laughed out loud when I read the passage above. Ryu Murakami set me up nicely. The saliva was increasing in my mouth just thinking about spending the rest of the novel with a character that loved the writers on that list. We soon learn our narrator knows what he should know about, like even being able to list prestigious authors like these, but doesn’t really know their books. He gives this inspiring speech about the films of Godard, but we learn that he has never seen a Godard film. His gift is the ability to stretch his thin knowledge into something that sounds like he is an expert. His name is Kensuke Yazaki, and people call him Kensuke, Ken-san, Ken-chan, Ken-yan, Ken-bo, and Ken-Ken. It is a constant battle for him to get people to just call him Ken.
He might be slightly ahead of the curve on the one name designation, like Picasso, or Sting, or Plato.
He is really just trying to get laid. It’s 1969, the summer of love, and love of any form has totally eluded him. He comes up with a scheme for a summer festival, to make money, but also to convince the most beautiful girl in the school, Hiroko Nagato, to be a part of it. He has a Scooby gang. Adama is the smartest member of the group who quickly determines that Ken is not only selfish but willing to do anything to get what he wants. ”Yeah, but listen, Adama, maybe it’s because there’s people like me that the human race has progressed this far.”
Ken sparks a minor rebellion at the school that quickly gets out of hand. He really is just doing it for attention rather than for some higher ideal, but he soon finds himself the poster child of a troubled youth. The more trouble Ken finds himself in, the more Hiroko seems interested in him. Thus, he is learning an important rule of seduction and being seduced...girls kinda dig bad boys.
This novel is somewhat autobiographical, and it certainly has that feel of nonfiction/fiction fusion. The unreliable narrator is great. The humor is unexpected and hip. Music plays a huge part with this group of kids like it does with any generation. You can be poor or rich, but everyone has access to a radio, making music something that anyone can make a connection with. They share albums. They sit around together listening to music, defining their lives by the lyrics.
I kept expecting the novelist, Ryu Murakami, to show up with a splash of gore or with some graphic description of an unusual sex act, but he shows untypical restraint. I talked to some of my friends who have read this book, many years ago, and they described it as haunting. Maybe it is the coming of age aspect of the book. Maybe it is the way it reminds us of who we were at that time in our lives and the friends who used to have so much influence on our lives then who are no longer in our lives. I like lines like this: ”In the end, what really mattered to her was, as she herself put it, ‘living life like the sound of Brian Jones’s harpsichord.’”
”I will have a job convincing the police that I am innocent, but one thing is indisputable. If Lily had never met me, she would be alive now.”
It would”I will have a job convincing the police that I am innocent, but one thing is indisputable. If Lily had never met me, she would be alive now.”
It would seem that death follows Lucy Fly around. For a young woman, she has had too many people she knows meet an untimely demise. She is aptly named, because when people talk to her about rooting down in a place, she will correct them and say people don’t have roots...they have legs. She grew up in the Yorkshire area of England, and as soon as she possibly can, she flees to Japan because it is someplace completely different from her pudding and ginger beer upbringing. She loves her simple life. She has a job as a translator that gives her intriguing word puzzles to unravel. She has a few friends, really the right number, and she has a boyfriend who is strange and wonderful.
Everything is going fine until she meets Lily Bridges. A taste of home, a Yorkshire girl who talks incessantly about the very place that Lucy wants to forget. She is asked by a friend to help her find a place and settle in. Lucy isn’t the right person for this type of favor. She is self-sufficient and doesn’t really like the lack of that in others. Still, she decides to help.
Teiji is a photographer, a photographer who never sells his pictures. He has file folders brimming with wonderful, evocative photographs, but they are his and not for anyone else. He likes the odd intensity of Lucy’s eyes. They meet because he finds her on the street in the lens of his camera.
Lucy hasn’t introduced Teiji to any of her friends. She is the golem, and he is...precious. She doesn’t want to share him because he is...hers and hers alone. He works in a noodle shop, and sometimes she likes to watch him without him knowing she is there. She is obsessively protective of him because to lose him is something she doesn’t even want to contemplate.
There is a murder, and Lucy is the perfect suspect.
The novel centers around the police and also the reader trying to sort out what is true, what is partially true, and what is absolute delusion. The truth is sometimes a chimera.
The writing moves between first person and third person, which has been confusing to some readers, but I didn’t experience that problem. It makes perfect sense to me as I start to discover that Lucy is experiencing some disassociation from her life. She is an unreliable narrator, and some things she tells us are easier for her to share with some distancing of the narrative. As the plot unfolds, we have to weigh everything that has been revealed to us and determine if we believe what happened really happened.
I also watched the movie version of this novel from 2019 starring Alicia Vikander. They made some revisions to the plot, including transforming Lucy from being English to Swedish. This might be because Vikander is originally from Sweden, and her particular accented Japanese would make more sense. There is one death that was changed for the movie, and I’m so glad they made that modification. It added a more compelling aspect to the subplot that was better than the book. The biggest alteration in the movie was to the ending. I MUCH preferred the ending in the book, and many movie watchers found the ending of the movie to be one of the weaknesses. My recommendation for those who are interested in this story is that they should read the book first and then watch the movie. They will still enjoy watching the book come to life on the big screen, but they will certainly be shorting themselves by not reading the book first.
The dust jacket blurb compares this book to The Wasp Factory and The Sculptress. I haven’t read the Minette Walters book, but I have read the Iain Banks book, and even though it is considered a classic by some and a piece of filth by others, it is, in my mind, not the best comparison. I think The Earthquake Bird has a broader appeal to a larger audience.
I ended up really liking Lucy. Her eccentricities are ones that I have sympathy with. Her obsessions, her desire for privacy, her inadequacies at interacting with people, her fears of public exposure, her desire for intimacy are all things that I think most introverted readers will identify with.
”My lascivious blood leaves me no choice but to lust for men. No matter how common I become, how ugly, how old, as long as there is life in my body I ”My lascivious blood leaves me no choice but to lust for men. No matter how common I become, how ugly, how old, as long as there is life in my body I will go on wanting men. That’s just my fate. Even if men are no longer amazed when they see me, even if they no longer desire me, even if they belittle me, I have to sleep with them. No, I want to sleep with them. It’s the retribution for a divinity that no one can sustain forever. I suppose you could say my ‘power’ was little more than sin.”
Yuriko was born grotesquely, monstrously beautiful. It is unsettling to be around someone so excruciatingly gorgeous. Someone so ethereal that they suck all the oxygen out of a room and every head turns to watch them as if a unicorn has just pranced through the door. We believe that being born beautiful is a ticket to a lifetime of happiness, but being universally alluring and beguiling brings difficulties that are sometimes worse than being born painfully plain.
For instance, even as a pre-teen, grown men become prancing puppies around her.
Yuriko’s mother and father are mystified by her. They are proud of her, but also unsure of exactly how someone so lovely was spawned by their copulation. Yuriko is so beautiful that people struggle to believe that she is her mother’s daughter. To make matters worse, her sister loathes her. She speaks of her in terms usually used to describe diabolical creatures. For most of the book, the sister provides an unreliable narrative about not only Yuriko but the other people around her. We are never given her name, but as we get to know her, we start to understand that her personality has been warped by jealousy, deep seated anger, and bitterness. She is a destructive force in Yuriko’s life, but we also see that her gift for dreadful manipulations is a skill she shines on all who surround her.
We also follow the life of Kazue, a frequently stiff-armed friend of the narrator and a girl who worships Yuriko by doing everything she can to be as much like her as it is possible for someone who is not born with the gift of ethereal beauty. She is destined for failure, and the narrator has no small part ensuring that her insecurities are properly cultivated to assure her eventual destruction. Yuriko, with all her promise, becomes a plaything of men. Her fall down the ladder is not quick, but a rung at a time, until she finally lands on a street corner selling her body for a handful of coins. Kazue also becomes a prostitute. She is a graduate of university and uses that as an enticement for men who fantasize about having sex with a woman of her social standing. She sees prostitution as merely an opportunity of capitalism. ”By day a businesswoman; by night a whore. I was capable of using both my brains and my body to make money. Ha!” She wins!?
We are also introduced to a Chinese man named Zhang, who becomes a free floating electron bouncing between the atoms of Kazue and Yuriko. He was also born very handsome and carries his own bitterness at being abandoned by his sister, who becomes a prostitute. His love/hate for his sister leaves rattling rocks in his head that make him a ticking time bomb of derangement.
Our narrator goes on about her pathetic, unhappy life completely unaware of her influence on the outcomes of others. As Kazue says to Zhang at one point, “please be good to me,” which could have just as easily been Yuriko saying that. Everyone needs someone to be good to them, and unfortunately, most people never find someone who will provide that emotional safe harbor for them.
”Sperm, spit: a woman receives what men excrete.”
Natsuo Kirino puts us on a train with rattling boxcars and loosely bolted seats and pries up a few rails in front of the chugging engine to make sure we eventually crash. We know happiness for these characters has flown away, never to return again, and yet I have to keep reading. It isn’t about knowing the outcome. I have people frequently ask me...tell me how it ends, but the ending is not the sum of the book. Sometimes the ending is the least important part. As readers, we have to choose to get on that rust bucket of a train, even if the windows are broken and the pale conductor looks like he crawled out of a sarcophagus. The journey is discovering the nuances and the intrigue hidden in the shadows. Who are these people, really? And why must they continue down a path with no way to return? Why are people consumed by envy? Why do we continue to let destructive forces into our lives?
”Nice person, bad person--that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but”Nice person, bad person--that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you’d be better off staying away from someone like her. I can’t read her exactly, but I can tell you she’s either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.”
Aoyama never remarried after losing his wife to illness. He decided to raise his son by himself, but now seven years later, his son Shige is encouraging his Dad to remarry. Aoyama isn’t opposed to the idea, and when his friend, a movie producer, suggests having a casting call to find the perfect woman for him, he goes along with the unorthodox idea.
An essay, accompanying an application written by one of the hopeful actresses, especially catches his eye. ”It so happens that I studied ballet for many years but had to stop when, at eighteen, I injured my hip. I don’t suppose I really had what it takes to become a ‘prima’ in any case. But the injury occurred just as I was making preparations to enroll at a ballet school in London, and it felt like the end of the world. It took me years to recover from this disappointment. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it was a process not unlike learning to accept death.”So before they even start the tedious process of interviewing all the potential applicants, Aoyama has already decided that Yamasaki Asami is the one for him.
She is young and beautiful, but has been tempered by pain and loss which lends an air of melancholy and maturity to her that makes her more attractive to an older man seeking a true companion rather than an adornment. As he begins to take her out for “dates,” he sees those creative attributes that he loved about his wife inherently displayed in Yamasaki Asami.
There are niggling concerns. Her stories about herself are vague and do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. She is evasive, a ghost of her past, whenever Aoyama asks personal questions. Not that he needs to know much more about her. He has already made her the heroine of his future life.
So this is definitely a slow burn, which seems like a funny thing to say about a book that barely edges 200 pages. I have read several of Ryu Murakami’s books, and so I kept thinking to myself, when is his odd, sometimes demented, mind going to show itself? I felt the same way when I was watching The Hateful Eight... okay, when is Quentin Tarantino’s lust to shock going to take over the movie? Needless to say, just as Tarantino shows up in the final part of The Hateful Eight, Murakami also shows up in the final pages of Audition.
The true horror of the situation is that Aoyama has been miscast in his role as the villian. He may not be perfect, but he is far from the insidious man that Yamasaki Asami must believe him to be. If she sees him clearly for who he is and weighs his intentions as they truly are, she would have to see herself in a different light. At one critical moment, she says: ”I’m not that sort of person.” The reader is put in the position of madness overshadowing sympathy.
There is a 1999 movie version of the same name, directed by Takeshi Miike, and those who are familiar with his work will understand why the movie is more disturbing to me than the book. The acting by Eihi Shiina, playing Yamasaki Asami, is terrific, especially in the final scenes. Her mannerisms and her gorgeous voice turning sinister are especially unsettling. The changes Miike makes to the storyline actually add layers of anxiety to an already disturbing plot. This is another one of those times where I really enjoyed reading the book and then watching the movie.
”My name’s Kazumi Ishioka. I’m a huge fan of mysteries; in fact, they’re almost an addiction. If a week goes by without reading a mystery, I suffer wi”My name’s Kazumi Ishioka. I’m a huge fan of mysteries; in fact, they’re almost an addiction. If a week goes by without reading a mystery, I suffer withdrawal symptoms. Then I wander around like I’m sleepwalking and wake up in a bookshop, looking for a mystery novel. I’ve read just about every mystery story ever written….
But of all the mysteries I’ve read, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was, without a doubt, the most intriguing.”
Kazumi is not only obsessed with mystery novels, but he is also obsessed with his brilliant friend Kiyoshi Mitarai, who is not overly ambitious but does get motivated when there is a puzzle to be worked out. When Kazumi challenges him to solve the 40 year old mystery of the Tokyo Zodiac Murders, he is intrigued enough to devote his little gray cells to the task of solving it.
Kiyoshi Mitarai’s name means clean toilet, which is humbling for even the most arrogant of men. I think I’d flip a few letters around or change my name completely, but then it would probably be fine if his friend Kazumi didn’t point it out to everyone they meet. Kazumi is his Watson, and as this investigation into the Tokyo Zodiac Murders continues, he, like Watson at many points in the Holmes stories, begins to believe that he can find his own clues and make his own break in the case. Which is simply adorable. What he forgets is, even when Kiyoshi doesn’t seem to be doing anything, he is still pondering the case. ”I had often complained about Kiyoshi’s oddity, but I never doubted his talent, his intelligence, his knowledge and his powers of intuition. Those were the good things about him. But they lingered just on the other side of catastrophe.”
This is a locked-room mystery, which harkens back to the golden age of British detective novels. The writer in these types of books has to release information to the reader in such a way to inspire conjecture, but not enough information to let the reader solve the case too quickly. Certainly, Soji Shimada accomplishes this. He even pops into the novel at one point to say that the reader has all of the information required to solve the case, which is a bit of a nana nana boo boo moment for this reader. I am quite content to be spoon fed the solution at this point because my head is spinning, but for some of you brilliant deductionists out there, I’m sure you would have the murders solved and the killer in mental handcuffs already.
An artist, Heikichi Umezawa, is murdered in his studio with no discernible way for the murderer to have left the room. There are a few clues that only seem to make the crime more baffling. He is a painter of the astrology and working on a series of paintings of the zodiac upon his death. What is fascinating is the discovery of his journal detailing his plans to create the perfect woman from the chopped up pieces of his female family members. He has notes saying which woman has the best thighs, the best breasts, the best torso, and so on. He wants to create the most beautiful of Frankenstein’s monsters. This is certainly disturbing, but what is more disturbing is that, after his death, seven of the women are killed and dismembered.
What? Wait? But he’s dead. What madness is this!
The case isn’t any easier because it is forty years old. Witnesses have died or moved away. The investigation is beyond cold. It is Arctic. Little did the original investigators know, but all the “pieces” were there for them to solve the case forty years ago. Fortunately, Japan’s version of Sherlock Holmes, who is not addicted to cocaine or as showy with his deductions, is on the case. Speaking of Holmes, there is this funny bit in the book where Kiyoshi is critical of Holmes, and Kazumi takes exception. We do find ourselves defending our fictional friends from time to time, don’t we?
If you like books to tease your brain, then warm up some sake and stir up some miso soup. You will need to be properly fortified to ponder away as Shimada unspools the clues.
”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belie”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belief that the U.S. has nothing to learn from Canada and Western European democracies: not even from their solutions to issues that arise for every country, such as health care, education, immigration, prisons, and security in old age--issues about which most Americans are dissatisfied with our American solutions but still refuse to learn from Canadian or Western European solutions.”
It has been a source of frustration for me that Americans have developed so many prejudices against Europe and even their North American partnerships. We do so believe in our exceptionalism that we refuse to recognize that someone else somewhere else knows how to do something better than we do. When I read about the Roman Empire, one of their strengths, that always impressed me and helped them become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, until the United States, was their ability to recognize and assimilate good ideas from other cultures. They assimilated the very best from every culture they encountered.
As Jared Diamond points out, look at how many of the United States’ winners of Nobel Prizes were immigrants or first generation descendents from immigrants. The US may have provided the catalyst for those exceptional people to reach their full potential, but the synergy of bringing people together from different cultures,with different eyes, with different experiences, leads to amazing breakthroughs in science, economics, literature, art, etc. So is American exceptionalism really based on American ingenuity, or is it based upon the synergy of all those fatherlands/motherlands contributing to the melting pot of what makes us Americans?
What are immigrants good for? Well, it seems to me like they are essential in keeping America exceptional.
What Diamond is doing in this book is encouraging all of us to expand our view of the world and see the exceptionalism and the miscalculations that have occurred around the world in moments of crisis. He has selected 7 nations for which he has developed a particular fondness, and all of them are places he has spent a significant amount of time visiting or living in. The seven finalists for the Diamond round of analysis are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
I am surprised that he did not include an African country. He does talk about the population explosion in Kenya, 4% growth, but he uses it in such a way that changes my perception of how to analyze population growth. Yes, of course, it is in the best interest of Kenya to lower their reproductive rates. There are currently 50 million Kenyans and 330 million Americans. Guess how many Kenyans it takes to equal the consumption of ONE American.
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Thank goodness, the population growth of the US is nearly flat because, really, how many more Americans can we afford? For that matter, the ratio is way skewed between any first world country and any country in Africa. I feel that lowering our footprint is a duty for all of us.
The goal of the book is to analyze these countries at moments of crisis and weigh the successfulness of the decisions that were made to attempt to avert disaster.
I am pleasantly surprised that Diamond chose Finland because I know next to nothing about the history of Finland and certainly had no clear understanding of the complicated relationship they have had with Russia. In 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. There is a strip of land between Russia and Finland that has geographical significance for both countries. Interestingly enough, Finland had alliances with Britain, France, and Sweden and fully hoped those nations would come to their aid.
They did not.
It was a true David and Goliath situation. The population of Finland was 3,700,000, compared to the Soviet Union’s 170 million. Now the allies were busy with a war with Germany, but still you have to think that they were looking at the mismatch of that situation and realizing that the war was over before it ever began.
They were wrong.
The Soviets threw everything at the Finns. They had modern tanks, planes, and artillery, which were nearly nonexistent for the Finns. They had 500,000 troops to use as just the first wave. It should have been over before it ever began.
One of the Finnish secret weapons turned out to be skis.
The Finns brought the Soviet advance to a screeching halt with courage, ingenuity, and superb leadership. I’d love to tell you more about how they accomplished it, but you really need to read the Diamond assessment. I will say, equally impressive has been the way that Finland has positioned itself between the West and the Russians to make it more advantageous for the Russians to let them continue to exist as a sovereign nation, rather than attempting once again to conquer and control them.
Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, changing the trajectory of Japanese history forever. As Diamond weighs the evolution of Japan in world events, you will see that they had moments of brilliant decision making and some very bad ones when hubris outweighed intellect.
A coup in Chile, in 1973, led to the systematic murder of thousands of leftist leaning Chileans. Augusto Pinochet, the mild mannered, religious, psychopath who orchestrated this coup, stayed in power, of some sort, clear up to 2002. He was never prosecuted for his crimes. In fact, the Chilean economy eventually prospered because of some of the decisions he made as dictator. Diamond will sort through the blood and economic boom to analyze the Pinochet decisions that worked and those that led to genocide.
Diamond discusses the particularly unique issues that happen when a country is an island nation, like Indonesia. How do you coalesce all these isolated island cultures into one sense of nationality?
There is a lot to unpack in the recent history of Germany, and Diamond breaks down the disasters, as well as the moments of resilience, that have led Germany back to the forefront of successful nations.
I’ve always heard that Australia is desperate to increase its population. Diamond breaks down the benefits and potential pitfalls of a liberal immigration policy to increase population. When you look at the successes of small nations, like Finland, who enjoy a very high standard of living from the top to the bottom of their societies, is a larger population really the key to greater productivity?
Of course, Diamond devotes the most chapters to the United States. There are still a lot of wonderful things about being an American, and Diamond is unexpectedly hopeful that the US will begin to focus on the more important problems facing Americans, such as health care, education, our outrageously large prison system, immigration, and shoring up a system to insure comfortable retirements for our elderly. Solutions are all within our grasp, and many of them already exist with other friendly nations abroad, and even some solutions might rest with those nations right on our own doorstep. I do want us to, in fact, think more like the Romans and recognize good ideas wherever they might blossom into existence and not be afraid to apply them for the greater good of our society simply because they originated elsewhere. We need to embrace the fact that our exceptionalism isn’t the definition of being an American, but that we are an immigrant nation that provides a haven for exceptionalism from all over the world.
You may not always agree with Diamond. Believe me, he is used to dissenting opinions. He even discusses the lack of manners and civil discourse, especially online, that might eventually prove as detrimental to our society as anything else we face. It is hard to reach reasonable conclusions when you presume the people who disagree with you are inherently evil. Diamond, as always, gives me much to ponder. Highly Recommended!
I would like to thank Little, Brown for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigza”Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.”
Our Narrator for this tale, unnamed, is a gifted portrait painter. He can capture the true inner nature of a subject and is astute enough to understand that people want to see what is best about them revealed. For most of us, who we are goes well beyond what we look like on the surface, and this artist is an expert at capturing those hidden layers in our surface reality.
This life is soon to be a part of his past. We meet the Narrator at the point that his wife Yuzu has just informed him that she wants a divorce. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to explain herself. She just wants him to accept what she wants. After six years of marriage, I think anyone who wants to dissolve the union probably owes the other person an explanation. “It’s not you; it’s me” kind of thing at the very least. Our Narrator is puzzled but accepts the situation, packs up his artist’s materials, and goes on a walkabout, or to be more precise a driveabout.
This is a theme in many Haruki Murakami books, the grand quest. The people he meets and the situations he encounters in this brief journey do have a lasting impact on his life, on his art, and the future plot of this novel.
He ends up in a mountain retreat, staying in the house of the respected artist Tomohiko Amada. He is alone up there but finds that he is perfectly suited to a life without people. He can focus on his art and feels inspired to be working in the studio of such a celebrated artist. He is done with portrait work and wants to finally explore art without restrictions. He has created a perfect storm of creativity, and he feels reinvigorated about painting. The question is, how long can the world be held at bay?
The house is like many houses of old people, filled with things from a certain era. Records instead of CDs, for example. Murakami mentions the pure pleasure there is in turning a record over, to listening to songs in order because records used to be carefully arranged to lead a listener in a direction to achieve greater understanding, as the songs built beautifully upon one another. Now, people buy the single they hear on the radio and never listen to the rest of the album. It is a real bastardization of the craft of music. It is consuming without finding the soul behind the music.
Murakami also takes the opportunity to talk about books as well.
”All the books on Mr. Amada’s bookshelf were old, among them a few unusual novels that would be hard to get hold of these days. Works that in the past had been pretty popular but had been forgotten, read by no one. I enjoyed reading this kind of out-of-date novel. Doing so let me share--with this old man I’d never met--the feeling of being left behind by time.”
Readers who have followed my reviews for a long time (I do appreciate your loyalty and your input into what I read) will know, without me saying this, the almost pathological curiosity I have about reading what we can term “lost books.” Books that may have even had a large audience at one time but now are not read at all, or even more enticing, those books that never did find an audience but are actually minor masterpieces. When I dive into these books, I feel like I’m an archaeologist discovering buried treasure that deserves to see the light of day again. How about those fat WW2 books from the 1950s? Many of them have merit and should continue to find new audiences. How about a book like Mortal Leap by MacDonald Harris? This book has been out of print for decades, but it is a seriously entertaining and deep novel that has been...lost.
So for me having an opportunity to explore a personal library that is suspended in time, filled with books from the 1930s, 1950s, or even 1980s, would be as conducive to raising my pulse rate as having Salma Hayek nibble on my neck.
The other part of this quote that really resonates with me is “being left behind by time.” Several of the characters in this novel, even the young girl Mariye Akikawa, who becomes so intricate to the plot, struggle with accepting the importance of gadgets, like cell phones. The pressure for each and every person on the planet to own and pay those alarming, high fees for service is frankly too overwhelming. To not own a cell phone these days is almost like not being a human being at all.
I will admit I’ve always been fascinating by new breakthroughs in technology. I owned a computer when they were really too expensive to own personally. I watched with fascination as the internet came into being, chunk...chunk...chunk a few loaded pixels at a time. I’ve always loved science, even when I haven’t fully understood it. However, now technology seems to be intent on not freeing me, but confining me. It owns me rather than being a tool for my own edification. I hear more and more people say to me, why do they have to know anything if they can just google it? There are so many things wrong with that statement that I could write a whole dissertation on what the true meaning of that statement means to the future, but I’m going to keep to one part of it. How will people know what to google if they don’t have enough reference points already in their mind to start with?
I’m starting to believe that I am a man on the verge of being left behind, and it doesn’t scare me one bit. I may move in with the artist in his time stamped house, and while he paints, I’ll read and write. We will have tea at three with crumpets.
The plot becomes more and more convoluted as the world does start to encroach upon the artist. When I say world, I may not mean this world. A ringing bell in the middle of the night from underground sets off a series of events that revolve around a painting called Killing Commendatore by Amada that is carefully wrapped up and stored in the attic. The subject of the painting is a scene from the opera Don Giovanni. The last time I was in Prague, they were showing Don Giovanni in the theater it debuted in for the first time since the original showing. Needless to say, I scored tickets, and the experience was as magical as I could hope for.
When you read and travel, it is amazing the cool associations a person can develop that adds enjoyment to future reading and traveling experiences.
His wealthy neighbor, Wataru Menshiki, offers him an outrageous amount of money to paint his portrait. He seems intent on becoming good friends, as well. Unfortunately, through trial and error, I have discovered that people expressing that much interest in me usually means they want something from me. I’d like to think that I’m infinitely fascinating, and that is enough reason for people to want to spend time with me, but I’ve been disabused of that idea. The artist is of the same mind as me and looks with suspicion upon this offer of friendship. What is Menshiki’s true motivation?
There are many philosophical concerns, psychological growth, supernatural occurrences, including astral projection sex, and some wonderful descriptions of the artistic process all within the confines of this novel. Most readers should find parts, or maybe even all of these elements, as aspects that they can identify with. This book reminds me somewhat of Murakami’s masterpiece Kafka on the Shore, but it lacks that something something that would have had me genuflecting to the deftness and creativity of his genius. Normally, I rate books against other books in their genre, but with Murakami, like say Charles Dickens, I can only rate him against his own body of work. A contemplative book that tries to slow the world down and remind us that fast is not always better and new is not always an improvement.
”Worrying oneself over the dead—was it in most cases a mistake, not unlike berating them? The dead did not press moral considerations upon the living.”Worrying oneself over the dead—was it in most cases a mistake, not unlike berating them? The dead did not press moral considerations upon the living.”
Kikuji is floating like a red maple leaf on a still pond. His father and mother are dead, and the most logical thing is for him to marry now. The family house is large and musty from disuse. He needs to fill it with children and the care of a woman who will make the house into a cheery home again. Or at least that is what is being suggested to him.
The first to start to take control of his life is Chikako, one of his father’s castoff mistresses. She has a birthmark, which as a boy he inadvertently saw. The size and shape and placement of this birthmark haunt him as if it were a living creature beneath her skin. ”Had his father occasionally squeezed the birthmark between his fingers? Had he even bitten at it? Such were Kikuji’s fantasies.” Chikako has found the perfect woman for him. ”One of the girls was beautiful. She carried a bundle wrapped in a kerchief, the thousand-crane pattern in white on a pink crape background.”
All Kikuji has to do is indicate that he is interested, and all the details will quickly be worked out. The thousand crane girl will be his. He doesn’t even need to say anything; he just needs to nod, but he is wrestling with who he is in relation to who his father was. Is this his decision or is it his father’s decision through his surrogate, the bitter and overbearing Chikako?
When Kikuji meets another mistress of his father, Mrs. Ota, the tentative track leading to his future takes another unexpected detour. Her daughter Fumiko is a carbon copy of her mother. She has grown up with the world taking more from her mother than what she can afford to give. She wants to break the pattern, but isn’t sure the world will let her. “Mother and I both presume a great deal on people, but we expect them to understand us. Is that impossible? Are we seeing our reflections in our own hearts?” There is a poignancy here that resonates with anyone who feels that her life has been misunderstood by those who know her. That their best qualities are perceived as weaknesses, and their weaknesses are perceived as lost strengths.
The plot revolves around the tea ceremonies, who shows up to the events, and the implements that are used to conduct the ceremonies. ”It had passed from Ota to his wife, from the wife to Kikuji’s father, from Kikuji’s father to Chikako; and the two men, Ota and Kikuji’s father, were dead, and here were the two women. There was something almost weird about the bowl’s career.” I often feel this way about antiques that have been passed down through my family to me. The history of all those other owners, blood of my blood, comes to me in the stories surrounding those artifacts. I can still see the glass fronted bookcase, that now sits in my home office, where it originally stood for decades in my grandmother’s house. I can still remember the books and bobbles that she had kept preserved on its shelves. When I buy items from antique stores that have lost their histories, I hope that a new line of stories will begin with me. So I understand the idea that this tea bowl could be haunted by the essences of previous owners.
With the women he is surrounded by, can he ever separate himself from his father? ”“You think of my father, don’t you, and my father and I become one person?” His mind is scattered to the point that making any decisions beyond what to eat, where to sleep, and when to go to work are beyond him. His father and the vestiges of women he left behind have put Kikuji in a position where he is encountering the ghost of his father wherever he goes. ”To forgive or to be forgiven was for Kikuji a matter of being rocked in that wave, the dreaminess of the woman’s body.”
Does he need to forgive himself or forgive his father? Who is responsible for his life now? Who will save him?
This is a quiet tale with grand passions smothered before they can ignite. There are seemingly bloodless battles being waged in the minds of all concerned. A reader who reads this book impatiently, skimming along waiting for the stop signs and big curve ahead warnings to guide them to the point of the book, will have missed seeing the man floating on the still pond who wants them to ponder things along with him. My suggestion is to read some of the book and then stop and make some hot tea. Read some more and let your mind sift through the words for the quiet meanings that will be lost if you drive by too fast.
”The thing was that I had found it. The same way that, for instance, some people found pleasure drawing pictures or making music, or they relied on wo”The thing was that I had found it. The same way that, for instance, some people found pleasure drawing pictures or making music, or they relied on work or women, drugs or religion, I felt like I had discovered what I was passionate about. And for me, that thing was nothing more than the gun. There was nothing wrong with me. That’s what I realized. And I started to relax--I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair.”
Nishikawa stumbles upon a dead man in the street. When corpses are in coffins slathered with makeup to make them look as if they are sleeping peacefully, they hold a certain amount of fascination for some people, but finding a sprawled dead body in the street...well, you’ve stepped right in the middle of death. Moments ago someone was alive and now they are departed. This is raw death before the ensuing packaging for disposal can begin. As interesting as a corpse with a bullet hole through its head would be, Nishikawa is more mesmerized by the shiny metal object in the man’s hand.
He picks it up, taking it with him. It is a revolver with four bullets. Over the next several days, he can’t stop looking at it, stroking it, and thinking about using it. ”Once again, its overwhelming beauty and presence did not disappoint. I felt as though I might be transported--that is to say, that the world within myself could be unlocked--I felt full of such possibilities.”
When you consider that there are more guns in the United States than there are people and there are nearly zero guns in Japan, the chances of Nishikawa finding a gun on the street are astronomical, but if he were walking around the right neighborhood in the United States, he might see a small arsenal within the space of a few blocks. I can remember one time I was in LA and pulled into a convenience store to get gas. This was back in the day when you had to prepay, but the pumps were not necessarily set up for credit cards. I was waiting in line at the register behind this kid who couldn’t have been more than ten. He was pulling stuff out of his pocket, trying to find enough change to pay for his Mountain Dew, and among the many things he plunked on the counter was a revolver...as casually as if it were a stick of gum. The attendant merely gave it a glance. He probably had a sawed off shotgun clipped under the counter, so that peashooter was not something worthy of worry.
I grew up with guns. To me, they were just a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. We had a rifle in every vehicle in case we needed to put down a cow that was suffering with a bullet behind the ear or scare off some coyotes who were trying to bring down a newborn calf. We did hunt some, but hunting was more for the leisure classes who seemed particularly fascinated in proving their manhood every year by killing something. During most hunting seasons, we just tried not to get shot by some city slicker from Denver who had more gun than he had brains.
People are fascinated by guns. They might be afraid of them, or they might be obsessed with them, but rarely are people neutral about guns. I get asked frequently by people what it is like to shoot a real gun, as most of the guns they have used have been pixelated on TV screens while playing a video game. Nishikawa should have gone his whole life without ever even seeing a gun, but here he is polishing one every night like a blue barrelled cock. The need to release, to spray those bullets into someone, something, is becoming an infatuation. It isn’t enough to simulate it happening in his brain anymore; he needs the real thing. It is porn versus real life.
He has girlfriends. He seems to be a reasonably attractive guy. One of his girlfriends he calls Toast Girl (he can’t remember her name) because she fixed him toast for breakfast after a night of desultory intercourse. Another one is named Yuko. ”Today she had again been wearing a short skirt, and when she leaned forward I had seen her pale breasts. I felt satisfied with the way I had behaved today. Tomorrow, I thought, I would ask her out for a drink. But then again, if we ended up doing it, I felt as if the fun would end for me there. I wanted to have sex with her, but once we had done it, I would probably get bored.” These scenes reminded me of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less than Zero. World weary kids who think they’ve done it all and seen it all, and nothing interesting is ever going to happen to them again.
Nishikawa is not stimulated by his university studies nor by the flocks of beautiful girls. He has too much free time on his hands and lacks the imagination to know how to fill that time...until he finds the gun.
The tension mounts nicely as we start to realize that Nishikawa is going to do something stupid. I found myself running the possibilities through my head and not liking any of them. He has changed as a person, having that gun on his person. He feels more significant, as if the gun has made him taller and stronger. He does realize that his relationship with the gun has changed. ”I’m not the one using the gun, I thought. The gun is using me.”
The story takes on more weight being set in Japan than if it had been set in the United States. They have such a different cultural relationship with guns than we do. Last year, nearly 40,000 Americans died from gun related deaths. (Interesting enough about the same number of people are killed in car related accidents. It is sort of staggering to think that if we eliminate guns and cars from our lives nearly 80,000 more Americans each year would live longer lives.) If a pandemic hit the United States and killed that many people, there would be panic in the streets. There would be a consensus among all Americans to do something to keep more people from dying from whatever the threat might be...well, except for guns. We love our guns. We love our guns more than we love our children’s lives. Somehow gun ownership became political, and like with anything political in the modern era of American politics, that means that a consensus on sensible gun control is impossible to achieve.
Oh and by the way, the number of Japanese killed by firearms every year is nearly zero. Even lower if Nishikawa had never found that gun.
"Turning, he saw the young girl, still half-concealed and watching him out of one eye. She had one hand over her mouth, trying to hold back laughter. "Turning, he saw the young girl, still half-concealed and watching him out of one eye. She had one hand over her mouth, trying to hold back laughter. An unspeakable emotion washed over him. He felt himself shiver. It was as though he’d caught a glimpse of himself through the girl’s eyes. The way he looked to other people, not the way he looked to himself in the mirror or in a photograph."
The way people see us is always different than how we see ourselves. No one has more information about us than we do about ourselves. What we know about ourselves can become part of our reflection which can have a positive or negative influence on the face we present the world.
I often want to say to people, “What do you see when you look at me.”
For Yoshinobu Mikami, this has even larger implications. He is not a handsome man, but he is married to a very beautiful woman named Minako. Their daughter, Ayumi, takes after him and suffers from the comparisons to her mother. Psychologically, this is more devastating to the family than they even realize. Ayumi suffers from Dysmorphophobia, a body dysmorphic disorder that leads to extreme behavior. ”Punching herself in the face. Using her nails to tear at it. I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate this face. I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!”
Then she runs away from home.
Mikami is trying to adjust to his new job of overseeing Media Relations with the press. He misses being a detective, but he wants a job that will allow him to be more readily available for his wife and daughter. The pain of experiencing his daughter’s aversion to her version of his face is exponentially worse because of his own inherent self-consciousness about his own appearance.
”This unfortunate face.”
The police department is still investigating a kidnap/murder of a 7 year old girl that happened 14 years ago and is referred to as Six Four, designating the year in which the crime occured. The ransom was paid, but the girl was killed anyway. The visit of a high level official necessitates that Mikami visit the father of the murdered girl, Amamiya, to see if he would allow the official to visit him while in the area. A completely political event that shows the impact that this heinous crime had on Japanese society.
While talking to Amamiya, Mikami catches the fleeting hint that something went wrong with the early days of the investigation. He is embattled with a potential boycott by the reporters which is proving to be a distraction that may lead to his own removal, but he wants to put all his attention on the Six Four case. As he pulls the strings that lead him from investigator to investigator, he is starting to unravel bits and pieces of information that only encourages his continued pursuit of the truth. Something went wrong, but what?
Soon he is caught up in the politics of a high profile case, and investigators have instructions not to talk to him. His old rival, Futawatari, is showing up everywhere half a step ahead of him. Meanwhile, Mikami’s wife is getting phone calls that are silent, except for the sound of someone breathing. Could it be Ayumi? Or something to do with his unauthorized investigation?
When another kidnapping happens, modeled after Six Four, all 地獄 breaks loose.
This book was a huge bestseller in Japan and across Europe. Hideo Yokoyama is highly regarded in his home country, and I can see why. This book is certainly longer than the standard mystery. It is a slow burn, so if you are looking for Yakuza knife fights and running gun battles with evil kidnappers, you are going to be sadly disappointed. Through Mikami’s tenaciousness, we experience Japanese police procedures in depth and also how many layers there are in place to protect those at the top from the unsavory elements of police work at the bottom. Wrapped around all of that strife is Mikami’s own feelings about his job, his daughter, his wife, and his own place in the universe.
Whenever I open the pages of this novel, I feel like I am showing up to work at Media Relations to help Mikami battle the disgruntled press, his politically minded superiors, and the closed lipped investigators. I, too, feel Mikami’s growing unease as he starts to believe that he may be in the middle of a coup d’etat. His fortitude in bearing the burden of his existence through all the strife and strain of his professional and personal life is frankly admirable.
“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of an“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”
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Japanese Painting by an unknown artist of the Christian Martyrs of Nagasaki.
The Jesuit priest Francis Xavier born in SPAIN, but representing PORTUGAL arrived in Japan in 1543 to save souls. The Japanese were Buddhist, not “heathens” without a proper religion. The Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans, not wanting to be left out of this mass conversion opportunity, sent their own priests to compete with Xavier. Later, the Protestants from the Netherlands also wanted their share of souls in Japan, or was it something else they wanted? For the priests and ministers who went to Japan, I’m sure their objective was saving the souls of the Japanese because anyone not embracing the “true religion” was going to hell. The governments they represented, on the other hand, were not worried about saving souls but about making a fortune on trade. Whoever won the war of religious conversation also won the trade war. The Pope was called to intercede at different times, granting the Portuguese exclusive rights to Japan or later allowing the Spaniards to compete with the Portuguese.
This was big business.
These men of God were the first assault team of the invading West.
The Japanese, at different times over the following century, rounded up the priests and their most fervent converts and shipped them off the island. They made it against the law to be a Christian. There was an overabundance of martyrs, as heads were separated from bodies. Christians were suspended on crosses to be speared to death or drowned slowly with the rising of the ocean.
They were glorious martyrs, some secretly hoping they would even be remembered as saints.
At the peak, there were estimated to be 400,000 converts. The Japanese were obviously receptive to the white man’s God.
Now we flash forward to the 17th century and the beginning of this novel. Christianity has been banned, and if there are any priests left on the island, they are hiding and practicing their religious incantations underground. The Portuguese priests know of one legendary priest by the name of Christovao Ferreira. They don’t know if he lives or is martyred, but there are rumors that he has apostatized and now works for the Japanese.
Apostatized? It couldn’t be true. What man of God would give up his faith and deny his spiritual Father?
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Liam Neeson is Ferreira in the Scorsese film.
Jesuit priests Rodrigues and Garrpe have been selected to be the next wave of Portuguese priests to go into Japan. What they know about the state of their religion in Japan is based on sketchy information from travelers and exiled Japanese Christians. The environment is known to be hostile to their intentions. They have no idea if the converts are still practicing Christianity or have been forced back to their old religion. Will they be embraced or will they be handed over to the authorities?
They have lots of time to ponder their reception while on the ocean voyage from China to Japan. Courage works much better if needed spontaneously. A situation presents itself. You are forced to act, and with any luck you prove heroic. For these priests who are almost assured martyrdom, the death and courage to face it are still abstract thoughts. Death is never just death. How can one prepare for the myriad of ways that one can be expired? Will their faith sustain them through the pain? Will they be strong enough to remain true?
They have one friend, a Japanese Christian named Kichijiro who guides them from village to village to find friendly Christians. These people are ecstatic at finally having a priest in their midst. Baptisms are performed at a frantic pace, and sins are confessed with true relief. Any doubts that Rodrigues and Garrpe may have felt about the insanity of their decision to come to Japan are quickly cast aside.
Kichijiro, the one they rely on the most, is…(view spoiler)[ Judas. He is weak. He is scared. He folds his faith into a small box and tucks it to the back of his heart. This is the moment that will measure the rest of his life. This is the moment he will never be able to live with. (hide spoiler)]
“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”
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Andrew Garfield plays the Portuguese Jesuit priest Sebastian Rodrigues.
As Rodrigues sits in prison listening to the moans of tortured Japanese Christians, he ponders the silence of God. He prays fervently to him, not for himself, but for these people who believe in this God enough to die for him. ”You came to this country to lay down your life for them. But in fact they are laying down their lives for you.”
Where is God? Why doesn’t he answer? Why does he turn his face away from the piteous cries of his children? Why is he...silent?
There are many ways to break a man, and Rodrigues will face choices that have never been considerations while he has been dreaming of martyrdom. Rarely does life follow the script that we write in our heads.
Martin Scorsese read this book and read this book again. For nearly thirty years, he has been trying to secure the financing to make the film. Finally, in 2016 his dream has been realized. The movie had a small release on December 23rd, 2016, and will be out for wide release on January 13th, 2017. There is already Oscar buzz for best picture. I know his intention with the film, like the book, is to strip away everything but the meaning of spirituality. The purity of faith. I hope the people who see movies will support his labor of love, but I also hope that the reading public will also read the book that inspired the movie.
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Martin Scorsese’s quest has finally been completed. The POWER of books!!
I’m not a religious person. I can’t think of anything more senseless than religious wars. There aren’t enough differences between any religions to necessitate blood being shed in the service of the God, a God, a pantheon of Gods. People who seek out martyrdom and are willing to strap bombs to themselves to blow up innocent people in a market place are, in my opinion, in for a rather nasty surprise. We all make our God out of wholecloth. He isn’t the exact same entity for any of us, but my version of a creator is not one who rewards those who hurt the weak. These “martyrs” don’t kill people for a cause, though they may say they do. The real reason is their own selfish desire to better their position in the afterlife.
The martyrdom that Rodrigues seeks is only based upon his own destruction, but even that is a prideful wish of achieving immortality as a martyr for the cause. He soon learns that no man is an island. His death, if he can achieve it, can not be the clean, glorious quietus he most passionately desires.
This is a book about courage, about faith, about everything that is important to most people. It is a book that resonates with readers and haunts them for decades, exactly the same way it did Scorsese. It certainly left this reader with much to ponder and the chance to reconsider the consequences of all my actions. The best of intentions can have dreadful results for the very people you are trying to help.
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