In honor of Obon, this month we pay homage to the Japan of old, when samurai were the archetype of the ideal man, New Year’s was spent in hiding, and ghosts really did haunt the living. Read these and you’ll know how to treat your ancestors when their spirits come dancing in.
The Door-to-Door New Year Collection Agency
Ihara Saikaku This Scheming World
Translated by Masanori Takatsuka and David C. Stubbs
128 pp., Tokyo and Vermont: Tuttle Publishing
It’s New Year’s Eve in old Japan and the gay quarter’s most loyal customers aren’t celebrating.
It’s not that they don’t want to. One man has brought his straw summer hat to auction so he can afford his usual ration of sake. Another has procured a covey of exotic birds to sell to the well-to-do denizens of Kyoto so he may spend a NYE at home for once. A very desperate man is quarreling with his wife as a show to his New Year’s callers so he may ring in the new year in peace.
What accounts for this frenzied and not-so logistically sound behavior? Why, it’s debt collection season.
In short stories, Osaka-born Saikaku, creator of the ukiyo (floating world) genre of writing, introduces us to Japan’s most mercenary riffraff. With a streak of humor and a dab of compassion, he paints them at their lowest, New Year’s Eve, all overwrought as their creditors come crawling in. Of the aforementioned men, one is ridiculed, another is out of luck, and a very desperate man is able to scare off the bill collectors, for the time being.
Unlike so much of the literature from this time (TSW was published in 1962), here is one that writes from the depths of the Osaka slums but begging to catch a glimpse of aristocratic Kyoto and Edo. It is a world split by wealth—one half with all, the other with none—but united by tradition that makes exceptions for no one, not even when Ise lobsters are as scarce as crimson leaves in springtime (see Story 3).
Recommended stories: The Mouse Messenger, Sensible Advice on Domestic Economy, The Night of Insults
Soaps are for Dishes
Donald Richie Companions of the Holiday
181 pp., Tokyo and New York: Printed Matter Press
Have you ever lived in a place where nothing happens? Some place people might’ve affectionately referred to as ‘the boonies’ or ‘suburbia,’ where the emptiness is combated with sticks and tin cans or television? Then you might have some sympathy for Richie’s characters of 1950s Japan.
CotH takes place in a time before commodified television, when Roppongi still had meatboys and eggmen, and the white man was exotic. A handful of Japanese servants are working under a white master and his mistress shortly after World War II—a most peculiar time, indeed.
The bunch are too proper for sticks, too traditional for TV, and, it seems, have so little work to do they need something else to fill the time. So when the mistress takes a short leave and a girl in a dress, high heels and daytime mascara—a modern girl—turns up in the house, well, that’s some pretty good fodder for gossip.
Modernization. It’s the talk of the neighbors. It simultaneously disgusts, intrigues, and confuses everyone. As a topic under Richie’s direction and modern tone, it is hilarious. The scholar-writer’s insights are remarkable and deftly told, unmasking the Japanese character, the logic behind Japanese language, and the intricacies of human emotion. It’s a tale of love and drama for anyone who is interested in old Japan, hoping to understand the inaka, or is, simply, bored. (That’s when things get ugly.)
The Little Ronin
Helen DeWitt The Last Samurai
482 pp., London: Random House
In England, there is a boy who has seen Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai enough times to memorize entire scenes from it—in Japanese. His name is Ludo, Aged 11.
His introduction to Japanese was a reward for completing some compulsory reading, works like The Iliad (in Greek), Kalilah wa Dimnah (Arabic), Moses in the Bullrushes (Hebrew). It was his mother Sibylla’s deal, because French, Greek, Inuit—no problem—but Japanese was a concern. She knew the syllabaries, and could probably recite stage directions for the masterpiece of modern cinema Seven Samurai da capo al fine, but typing volumes of Carpworld and Pig Fancier’s Monthly is rather time-consuming.
It wasn’t time that kept her from indulging—nay, acknowledging—Ludo’s questions about his father. That her child genius might ever have to accept his father was, after all, Liberace (not the dazzling pianist, but the logic-bereft writer/windbag)—was, simply, shameful. If he could just learn instead from the male figures presented in Seven Samurai, exemplary warriors and gentlemen and visionaries… Idealistic, maybe, but with a little real-life projection and a lot of stalking, Ludo could do anything.
Though the encyclopedic nature of the book is itself a focal point (with pages of foreign alphabets, mini biographies, borrowed text) the story exceeds simple education, and exceeds simply telling a story about the education of a child genius. It’s the result of each choice you make of every day you decide to spend, in a world with so much to absorb, and having the courage, or plain good sense, to carve your own Rosetta Stone when you find yourself in any one of life’s literal and metaphorical ditches. It’s also hilarious.
