Confessions of Love

I have been keeping a record of the books I read on my break (along with very brief reviews) on my facebook page. Partly for friends, partly to record my photographs of the books and partly to jog my memory at a later date.

I cam across Uno Chiyo while doing research for my blog (surprisingly I come across a lot of Asian materials when doing the sari blog) and later found her books in a Singapore library. Chiyo's book, Confessions of Love, must be quite popular here because I have seen several copies in Singapore's libraries.

Uno Chiyo was amongst other things a novelist and kimono designer who met the artist Seiji Togo while researching a gas suicide scene for her book. He had just survived a suicide pact attempt and arrived in his best "post suicide pact chic" with a bandage on his neck, the result of a wrongly applied scalpel (both scalpel and gas appear in Confessions of Love). Chiyo promptly fell in love and moved in with the artist. And equally promptly penned a semi-fictional account of Seiji’s love affair and subsequent suicide pact with the pretty daughter of a high ranking naval official. That book is Confessions of Love. Apparently suicide pacts were quite the thing in 1930s Japan, given the restrictive marriage norms of Japanese families at the time.

The affair in the book is all interrupted stolen meetings and inaction until the failed suicide pact. In fact not much happens in the primary relationship in the book between Joji (the fictional Seiji) and Tsuyuko. Between all this the fictional Seiji tries to extricate himself from his wife, makes a second marriage in which he is cuckolded and has desultory affairs with a few modan gaaru (modern girls) along the way. Despite these desperate romantic situations, the book is surprisingly light in tone.

Chiyo’s prose is much praised as supple so it appears the translation doesn’t do her full justice. Neither was I fully convinced by the introductory section which finds the book a subtle indictment of Seiji's weak character, and by extension of the Japanese male.  Despite this the book is a strangely compelling account of an intense but doomed love affair by a writer putting down a tale known to her in an objective manner.

Chiyo died at age 99 proving that "bad girls" go everywhere and live forever:)

Notes: Someone needs to do a literary trail of the train stations that feature in 1930s Japanese books. People are always meeting at railway stations in the books I read - Confessions of Love, Naomi, Quicksand....

Pic 2 was taken in Newcastle. We found the dead bird in the garden one morning. It was perfectly formed and a beautiful vivid red in colour.  We buried it later in the day. And while I am normally not the kind to take photographs of dead things, I felt I had to record the bird's existence. Hence it's appearance alongside the Chiyo book.

Reading

One of the nice things about Singapore is that you get a lot of SE Asian and East Asian "cultural offerings".  Kinokuniya is not too far from my brother's place and it has a much larger stock of titles from the region (including Indian titles) than I ever saw in Australia.  I have been bingeing a bit on translated Japanese books, mostly from the early 20th century and I truly haven't had enough of them whether it is Tanizaki, Dazai or Soseki. There is a lot of non-fiction too, e.g. Essays in Idleness that I haven't got around to. Suffice it to say that one can send a few hours browsing titles.

I haven't read much contemporary Japanese literature, bar Banana Yoshimoto (many happy hours spent at Melbourne University devouring her books).  Almost all contemporary literature shelves are taken up by Murakami, a writer I have never taken to. So when I spotted Strange Weather in Tokyo, I decided to give it a spin. Like so many Japanese books I have read it is written with a spare simplicity but never feels facile or lightweight. Unfolding in bars and trips where a good deal of food and copious amounts of alcohol are consumed, it traces the growing affection between a 30 something woman in the city and the much older teacher she meets by chance. Though not as hypnotic and more quotidian than Banana Yoshimoto, it draws you in and you have finished it in one slow but constant gulp, at one point I was reading it while walking to and fro from the station:) Next up, Manazuru!

Like with Murakami, I don't get the appeal of graphic novels aka comic books either.  I don't mean to diss them but they are just not my thing. Of course the Japanese produce a LOT of this, Kinokuniya in its English section itself has titles that run into several books.  But I was attracted to Oishinbo (Japanese Cuisine) - a bit strange given my usual reaction to books about the preparation of food is:

It turned out to be quite fun, an easy read. informative but never weighed down by descriptions of food. Though getting the hang of right to left reading takes a few pages. And what is with fictional Japanese and Korean fathers, on the 1 to 10 bastards scale, they are doing an admirable job holding up the 10 end:)