Fuminori Nakamura's THE THIEF (Tr by Sakoto Izumo and Stephen Coates)

With the bag completely concealed under my jacket, no one could see anything. I put my left hand inside, hunted quickly for the phone, hooked my finger through the strap and slid it into my sleeve.. just as I felt the warmth escaping from my throat, the phone in my sleeve shrilled loudly.

As my January in Japan comes to a close, it has brought me a tightly plotted Western-style thriller with lots of tasty and tense little scenes like the above, amidst all the gentle satire and deeply felt aesthetics that have colored most of my reading this month. The Thief, Japanese superstar Fuminori Nakamura's first novel translated into English, feels more like a Robert Ludlum or Richard Starks novel than any of the graceful and subtle literary fiction I've chosen for myself.*

The titular thief, Nishimura, is a pickpocket of sufficient skill and discipline to live within his means - but his means are very, very ample. He has cultivated a discerning eye for clothing labels and other even subtler details that communicate a person's wealth at a glance, and steals only from the wealthy, helping himself to the cash in their wallets but then dropping everything else, credit cards and all, into nearby mailboxes so his victims eventually stand a good chance of getting their IDs and whatnot returned to them. What a guy. 

An encounter with his old mentor, Ishikawa, alters his simple trajectory significantly, though; almost before he realizes it, Nishimura and an old friend, Tachibana, have let themselves get roped in to helping out a group planning to rob a politician's house and get some documents out of a safe. Nishimura's and Tachibana's job is to subdue and tie up a woman who lives in the house to keep her from interfering or calling the authorities while other members of the group force the politician to give up the combination to the safe. For which each of them will be paid a ridiculous amount of money. 

Easy! 

It all goes off without a hitch, but as they finish, one of the group members lingers behind on a related task, and Nishimura receives a cryptic warning to get the hell out of town as soon as he can. Lying low, he later learns that the politician did not survive that night, and that a series of related crimes all took place at about the same time Nishimura was trying not to ogle the half-naked woman he was responsible for incapacitating. Yikes!

The plot only gets more fiendish from here, which is quite enough enjoyment to ask of a good crime novel, but that's not even the best part of The Thief; the novel's greatest pleasures lie in Nishimura's reveries about his art, its techniques and greatest practitioners, and his impulsive all-but-adoption of a small boy he rescues from a store detective who's been watching him ineptly shoplifting at his mother's urging. The little boy knows a good teacher when he sees one, and soon Nishimura seems to be in danger of becoming an ersatz family man just when all the consequences of his earlier caper start appearing in his life. His shoplifting lessons with the little boy are  charming as hell for all that they're only adding to his burden of guilt and foreboding.

As Nishimura steals wallets, phones and finally an envelope sewn into a guy's jacket (!) through increasingly desperate and cunning means, the reader who is also a movie fan won't be able to avoid imagining Robert Bresson's masterful film treatment of his art, Pickpocket and indeed Nakamura lists the film as source material at the novel's end. Great art begets great art. Nakamura has convinced me I really do need to read more crime fiction.

And that's the end of my literary sojourn through Japan, in January. I enjoyed this so much I decided to do it again next month, but like a fool I posted a poll on Mastodon as to which country to visit next which one person answered, and so, probably because everybody loves a little alliteration, I'll be doing February in France, or more broadly, February in French because I've got some stuff on my TBR that was translated from French but originated in countries other than La France. Including some more crime fiction! Vive la.

*I only came into possession of this copy because a Twitter and Two Month Review podcast pal, Derek Maine, was culling his collection a while back and none of the stuff he was giving away was familiar to me, so I told him to surprise. And he sure did!

Yoko Tawada's THE EMISSARY (Tr Margaret Mitsutani, Narr Julian Cihi)

When bands of elderly Japanese volunteered to help with clean-up at the nuclear plant in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it felt very literary to me. Old men and women putting themselves in harm's way and at risk of much sooner and more painful deaths than they would otherwise expect, in order to preserve the health and genetic heritage represented by younger generations was incredibly heroic and self-sacrificing and epic. I remember wondering what kind of novels or poetry they might inspire. 

I never imagined it would be something quite like The Emissary*, though. 

In the world of The Emissary, the Fukushima story is turned inside-out. An unspecified disaster or Jackpot-style cluster of disasters has caused every nation to become a hermit kingdom, cut off from everywhere else so that each can work to solve its own problems and also insulate the less fortunate of other nations from the rapaciousness of its corporations. 

And in Japan at least, a generation of extremely elderly people are the only healthy humans left, functionally immortal. Their children were born substantially weaker and sicker, and every generation since has been in worse shape. Society has had drastically to change to cope with this reality, even to its holidays. Labor Day, for instance, is now considered a hurtful thing to celebrate when hardly any young people are capable of working, so it's been replaced by Being Alive is Enough Day. Children's Day has become National Apologize to the Children Day, and so on. 

Almost everybody has abandoned cities and the seashore as too dangerous and toxic; most now live in the countryside, near the mountains (of course I kept thinking of that remote part of Hokkaido where A Wild Sheep Chase finishes up) now and struggle to raise. their weak-necked, ancient looking, immunocompromised great-grandchildren, since the generations in between are mostly long dead. It's all very The Sheep Look Up, only the scope is much, much narrower.

Such, though he has elected to stay closer to Tokyo, is Yoshiro, healthy and hale and still jogging every morning in the company of a rented dog** at age 107, whose daughter has migrated to Okinawa and then whose grandson has succumbed to despair and addiction. Yorshiro now lives alone with tiny, sickly Mumei, his strangely wise and philosophical great-grandson, whom Yoshiro is already dreading the loss of as he steeps bread in soy milk; the boy's teeth are too weak to chew bread unless it's soaked and softened.

"Grown-ups can live if children die, but if grown-ups die, children cannot live," Mumei pipes up on the morning of the single day in which this novel -- barring lots and lots and lots of flashbacks, some of them quite extended -- takes place.

I make this novel sound quite bleak, and its milieu certainly is, but there are lots of lovely moments amidst the desolation; this is no The Road. Yoshiro is determined to do the best he can by Mumei, has even learned to sew to make clothing that accommodates Mumei's disabilities, clothing that Mumei's classmates frankly admire and hope to duplicate. There's also a brief visit from Yoshiro's estranged wife, come chiefly just to look at Mumei and reminisce with Yoshiro in several graceful scenes; we feel her wistfulness as she rides a rare train back to her lonely home elsewhere in Japan.

Meanwhile, greater forces have noticed Mumei, who is special even among a generation of special children. Mumei is smarter than most, especially when it comes to language (a particular joy of this novel, in which congratulations must go to translator Margaret Mitsutani as well as to Tawada herself, is its wistful playfulness with language and observations on how the changing world has produced changes in language that aren't only caused by Japan's increased isolation and estrangement from other countries and cultures). He is an ideal candidate someday to serve as an Emissary to what's left of international cooperative efforts, if he can possibly survive his childhood. If.

Typical of most of my visits through January in Japan, this short novel ends on an ambiguously hopeful note that it's left to the reader to interpret. The hopeful interpretation, fittingly, requires greater suspension of disbelief but is still bittersweet. Either way, one is left with an ah, me and a desire to Apologize to the Children.

*And yes, elephant in the room, I'm not only a Trekkie but a Niner, so this title was a lot to cope with. 

** Animals of any kind are rare; as someone in the novel observes, the only wild ones left in Japan are spiders and crows.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD (Tr Geoffrey Trousselot)

How could I spend a January in Japan without giving what seems to be the most popular Japanese novel in recent memory a try? Especially if it's a time travel story?

I mean, the elevator pitch for Before the Coffee Gets Cold, is dead captivating: a dingy little basement cafe's secret to modest success is that it can send you backwards in time, but the duration of the visit is only as long as it takes for a fresh cup of coffee to get cold. There are other restrictions even tighter, but this is the one that's in the cover blurb, indeed, the title; I'm not going to spoil the others except to observe that the usual quandaries of time travel stories don't apply here. You can't change the past from this café. But you can do some very special things if you accept the risk. 

Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi made his bones as a playwright and adapted this novel from a stage play, so there is also a limitation on where things take place. It's all about the cafe. And, still very play-like, most of the meaning is transmitted through dialogue, though some exposition is carried out the old fashioned way, too.

You'd think the results would thus be a bit dull, but they're anything but. For instance, among the stories this scenario lets Kawaguchi tell is one about a pair of regular customers, a husband and wife coping with early onset Alzheimer's. The husband has forgotten the wife completely, but with the help of the cafe and its kind-hearted staff, she discovers a kind of hack he concocted to communicate with her beyond the reach through time his failing memory could otherwise grasp. No, you're the one who's crying. I merely have something in my eye.

Kawaguchi's characters all have to be exceedingly clever to get any utility out of this very limited form of time travel. Watching them figure out ways to work within the limitations is as interesting as seeing the outsized emotional impact of their successes is moving. I can certainly see why this little novel has gotten several sequels. It's simply exquisite.

David Liss' THE PECULIARITIES

That he should be considered beneath the dignity of this working man’s beast-child is a bit of a blow. Yes, he is becoming a plant, but he comes from an excellent family, and he doesn’t think the outside world would consider him so bad a prospect.

In the Weird alternate Victorian London of The Peculiarities, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green have become infamous not only for the crimes of Jack the Ripper, but also of The Blind Headsman, Mister Fancy Pants, the Rabbit Hunter and the Fool with a Hook. Also, women occasionally give birth to litters of rabbit kits instead of human babies, the famous London Fog has tendrils that can actually grasp and manipulate objects and people, and there are some people walking the streets concealing under their sober London clothes the green shoots and leaves sprouting from their bodies. 

Welcome to David "The Coffee Trader" Liss' foray into weird fiction. He's as good at the weird as we've always known him to be at straight historical fiction. His forays into comic books have served him well.

"The Peculiarities" is this world's name for a generalized invasion of weirdness that is for-sure happening in London and rumored also to be going on in other world cities like Paris and New York. There's all the weird stuff I mentioned above plus phenomena like people turning lycanthrope, by which is meant nothing so expected as your ordinary everyday werewolf who turns from human to wolf at the full moon, but a human who grows fur and a snout and pronounced canines and pointy ears for good. One thinks of, say, Dog-Faced Joe from Tim Powers inimitable The Anubis Gates. But wait, there's more. Other folks become various kinds of sex maniac and a junior clerk might suddenly try to, say, rape their hated boss in broad daylight right in front of all of the other clerks, and would have succeeded if a few of those subordinates hadn't decided that proper subordinates don't just stand there and watch while their hated boss gets bummed by the lowliest clerk in the office, they peel that lowly clerk off the boss and shove him into a closet like a bunch of god damned heroes, and then meekly go back to work copying out correspondence, checking columns of figures and sorting documents for filing. As it were.

Amid all this madness lives our hero, Thomas Thresher, younger son of a banking magnate, who has always expected that he is to act like a typical younger son of a rich and important man and piss away a respectable but not alarming amount of Daddy's money on cards and whores and booze-ups and pointless Continental tours with other younger sons, only to learn upon Daddy's death that he doesn't get to do any of that any more but is expected to Work for a Living at the Family Business, at which he must start on the lowest rung, as a junior clerk. Which means he is there for the aforementioned near-rape of his detestable boss, Mr. Philpot, by the only guy in the office who was ever decent to Thomas. Oops.

And before you can say "let's all go to a ritual," Thomas is haring off after a mystery, for in his toils at the bank he has noticed that his family's firm has been busily buying up the tiny, inconsequential (to the bank, if not to the individuals) debts of a lot of little people, and won't let any of them pay it back. Thresher's Bank prefers to have something to hold over these people, for reasons that are not at all apparent. The anomaly bothers Thomas, but he doesn't actually do anything about it until he recognizes a name on one of the letters he's meant to file away: the mathematically inclined childhood best friend who, despite actually having been rather a good influence on Thomas, was mysteriously forced out of their school when they were 12. Thomas suspected at that time that this expulsion was at the Threshers' behest, to put an end to the friendship, but never did anything about it until he is reminded of it all these years later. 

And before you can say "let's all draw a pentagram just over there, maybe" he has a crush on his old friend's widow, is visiting wolf-women in unsavory neighborhoods, and is planning to crash an open house of one Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there to consult no less a person than Samuel McGregor Mathers (having already met William Butler Yeats in his initial inquiry about his bank's holdings in petty debts). And also, Aleister Crowley! 

But more interesting than all of this is one of Thomas' companions in mystery-solving, one Esther Feldstein, whose father is in league with Thomas' brother to such an extent that the two have decided that Thomas and Esther should get married! For the good of the bank, Big Brother says. And Esther's father is rich, if nouveaux so, but not so much so that Esther is a catch. For one thing, as her name might suggest, the Feldsteins are Jewish, and this is still the 19th century. So why are these two moderately powerful (if outsizedly so in Thomas' and Esther's individual lives) people trying to pair these two off, their own inclinations be damned? 

But Esther's status as Thomas' hand-picked-for-him bride is not what makes her interesting: she is smart, observant, committed to social justice (it is she, for instance, who notices that the Peculiarities mostly affect poor families, that poor women are much more likely to give birth to rabbits, etc), sure of herself and ready to take action on what she cares about. She is, really, everything that Thomas is not and has never been, and is thus obviously a much better match for him than his friend's widow, but even more so -- she would have made a much better heroine for this book!

But it's Thomas we have to deal with, Thomas' point of view that we get to share as he does mathematical/magical battle with unseen forces, faces down the Elegants (ghostly/vampire-ish creatures that reminded me of nothing so much as the Gentlemen from the famous Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "Hush") and puts his crack junior clerking skills and thwarted mathematical talents to the best possible uses to foil his brother's nefarious plot that does indeed link the family bank to the Peculiarities. He's not such a bad sort, is Thomas. He's just very much outshone by Esther. So it goes.

I would have missed this book completely if it wasn't for Lavie Tidhar's devotion to plugging book bundles for charity (whether they feature his own work or not), so to him, my thanks. David Liss is never one to snooze on. It would be a terrible shame never to have found this. Which, there's kind of room for a sequel? I would read many more volumes of stuff set in this world, whether the hero be Thomas, Esther, Ruby (a wolf-girl who helps them quite a bit) or even some brand new characters. Like the aforementioned Tim Powers, Liss has created a truly original and intriguing magical system and thus a world with room for many more cool adventures. Crossing my fingers for more of this!

Yukio Mishima's THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (Tr John Nathan , Narr Brian Nishii)

My January in Japan has taken me back to another classic, one which is so well known in the west that it has been adapted into a film starring well-known Asian screen idol... Kris Kristofferson? I'm gonna have to actually watch that at some point, aren't I?

Anyway, Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea.

By the way, man oh man does this book have a spectacular collection of cover illustrations as edition after edition has come out since it was first translated into English some 60 years ago. I've shared some of my favorites here but there are so many good ones. Exercise your Google-fu for a moment and go feast your eyes!

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea begins from the point of view of a not-quite pubescent boy, Noburu, who has a slightly unhealthy attachment to his young, widowed mother, so things go off the rails right away when he witnesses a version of the good old primal scene with a strange sailor taking the place of Noburo's daddy. The sailor, we learn, is not just another swabbie; he's managed to save up his pay and come out ahead of some mostly-legitimate business, so as far as stepfathers could go, young Noburo could do worse, but that's not how he and his gang of nearly feral buddies feel about things. At all.

Noburo is Number Three in the rigid hierarchy of this group of schoolboys, with Number One, or The Chief, being a classmate from a wealthy family who has been left largely to his own devices in a vast, nearly empty house, in which he has discovered the dubious pleasures of nihilism. The Chief has been busy training his friends to be intellectually rigorous, cold-hearted little monsters like himself for a long time (a prolonged scene depicting extreme animal cruelty merits a trigger warning, by the way. And it's a kitten!), so it's not long before Noburo's impulse to idolize and idealize Ryuji, who has been all over the world and seems to have done nothing that is not Manly AF, is a thing of the past as The Chief and the gang, who consider fathers to be the most useless and ridiculous things a human can be (unless it's a would-be father)  mock it out of him.

Is that Ludwig Van I hear in the background, my droogs?

Of course, Noburo had already begun to fall out of love with his idea of Ryuji as soon as Ryuji started doing ordinary things on land, showing up in public acting like just this guy, so once Noburo lets his friends persuade him he's the luckiest boy, maybe ever, because his father is dead, well, he's not going to welcome a stepfather with open arms, is he? No matter how happy his mother is to have Ryuji around. If Ryuji is sticking around with mom, Ryuji has given up his superhuman hero status forever, and he has chosen to do so like a chump. Uh oh.

Meanwhile, Noburo's mother, Fusako, really is very happy, for all that she was also extremely fortunate as women in 1950s/60s Japan went; she inherited a thriving imported clothing and accessories store when Noburo's father died, and has manifested as a talented businesswoman in her own right. The argument could be made that she would be giving up more than her son would if she took another husband, but Ryuji is enough of a stand-up guy not to have designs on sponging off her, taking over her business and shoving her to the background, or any of the other things we'd expect a shiftless sailor who showed up late on the scene to do. Ryuji is happy to wear the fine English tweed suits she gives him and to be her dutiful pupil in the import business, and is delighted to start calling Noburo son into the bargain. I mean, these two really lucked out, amirite?

But where would the drama be if they all just lived happily ever after, I ask you?

It all ends on a cliffhanger but the denouement of the last scene is pretty much assured; Mishima has just spared us the gory details, which after forcing us to watch what happens to the kitten already, gee, thanks Mr. Mishima. But it is nice to spend some time pondering if there is a way out that wasn't immediately apparent by the time Ryuji and the boys arrive at their destination and he settles down to tell them about his awesome life at sea. Should he maybe have stayed there?

Alla Gorbunova's IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, MY LOVE (Tr by Elina Alter)

Alla Gorbunova's sort-of novel It's the End of the World, My Love has already earned its purchase price by the time the reader gets to a late chapter entitled "A Scary Story" but would be worth that price for this chapter alone, in which a dead woman interrogates her body parts, expresses her gratitude for how they served her in life, but then decides that her last subject, her own head, did quite the opposite of serving her and deserves banishment.

Weird, huh?

A lot of It's the End of the World, My Love feels at least semi-autobiographical. Our narrator is a young woman coming of age in the 90s, in Boris Yeltsin's and Edward Limonov's and Victor Pelevin's Russia, dodging pimps who want to recruit her, falling in love with pretty rock and roll boys with long hair, getting drunk in that special way that only 13-year-olds can get drunk (and if you've never witnessed/participated in that, well, you're more fortunate than a lot of people), ditching school... and then suddenly discovering that she actually has found one thing that she really cares about and wants to do with her life, and that is poetry. Gorbunova first came to prominence as a poet, for all that she writes here in prose; I want to track down some of her poetry now and see what it's like, because if it's anything like this, well, it's probably a hell of a thing.

After telling *a* life story, if not necessarily *her own* life story up until she decides to start taking her education seriously and become a real poet, Gorbunova treats us to a series of bizarre vignettes, too conventionally structured to be prose-poems but a little too brief and spare to be conventional short stories like the aforementioned "A Scary Story" that blend folk tale elements (a character in a story about a maker of pornographic snuff films feels a little bit like the famous Koschei the Deathless, for instance) and the brutal realism that can only be drawn from a world in which, in Mark "Exile" Ames' memorable phrase "people in the provinces were eating each other out of boredom" to create unforgettable scenes that are both funny and horrible.

The best material, though, appears in its earliest section "Against the Law" which shows our teenaged heroine drinking absurd amounts of alcohol with an impressive series of low-life men (one "forgotten beloved" seems to  have conducted their entire relationship in pissed-in pants, reeking of urine) and bitterly cynical young girls like herself in a thriving outdoor market in the country; several times she informs us that this was the happiest time of her life even though she didn't know it at the time. It's hard not to take this as a bitter indictment of our world and what our societies have done to it, and Gorbunova's narrator does not give us an out even as she acknowledges and shares our stifled laughter.

She waxes much more conventionally lyrical in the book's last third, musing over the accomplishments of her ancestors and especially her abiding love for the grandparents who raised her. These passages occasionally wander into the territory of the surreal but are nonetheless sincere and touching. Our narrator has lived a full and varied life and still has more to offer if we but let her. 

The result is a vivid, uncomfortable but utterly fascinating read. 

And I'm never touching vodka again.

Haruki Murakami's A WILD SHEEP CHASE (Tr Alfred Birnbaum, Narr Rupert Degas), with an excursis on giving audio books a second chance and a convoluted/ confessional farewell to Twitter

Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase was originally penned and published some 17 years, and translated about ten years before Neal Stephenson first dropped a big ol' heap of Solomonian-cum-Nazi gold on us, so it's not unreasonable that I feel like, in the latter's character of Goto Dengo, Stephenson could have been making up the back story of the mysterious "Right Wing Figure" who starts the sheep chase a-running? Right? Anyway, that's my head-canon and I'm sticking with it. Yeehaw and pass the Cap'n Crunch.

Of course this mysterious figure also reminds me more than a little bit of Babylen, the protagonist of my favorite Russian novel that only Victor Ginsburg loves as much as I do, Victor Pelevin's hilarious and terrifying Homo Zapiens. Since he, too, winds up being the true king of all media and maybe the secret ruler of the world, or at least his country. 

There are prefigurings, too, of William Gibson's terrifyingly banal Hubertus Bigend -- and the quest upon which this figure sends our narrator is distinctly Bigendian, though it feels more like a sentimental than a commercial McGuffin. Bigend sought the footage because so many other people were, making it a marketing phenomenon we're pretty sure he wanted to exploit; this figure, whom we only come to know as The Boss, is dying and has this last weird little obsession he wants to satisfy before he goes. And it happens to be a sheep.

But so, what about the sheep?

Well, we'll get to that. Something else is on my chest a bit. See, this wasn't my first time trying to engage with this bit of early Murakami; last time I just couldn't connect with it, wrote it off as a regretted purchase. I may even have tweeted that I thought I might be "over" Murakami.*

But what I was really over was the audio book I'd bought. The narrator, Rupert Degas is a fine one and I've enjoyed him on other projects for which his snide, almost hostile-sounding, hard-boiled narrating style that at times almost amounts to a Jack Nicholson impersonation, is right. But it is discordant and weird for a writer so prone to lyricism, playfulness and scenery porn as Murakami. And not in that fun Ez/Ra Embassytown way, either. More like turning over the Phish catalog to a death metal band. 

Also, some character voices, not only all of the women (though the women are... ugh, I don't even feel like getting into it) but also two of the men, are annoying as hell.  Yeah, yeah, one of them is literally known as The Rat, but I was utterly repelled by the excessive rattiness of The Rat's voice and speech patterns. Plus, several characters were given distinctly regional U.S. accents, both choices made to emphasize a stereotyped belief about people who have those accents in the United States. Ugh.

But it's January in Japan, and I'm not above falling into a good ol' sunk cost fallacy once in a while.

Sometimes it even pays off.

This time, it paid off. I'm so glad I gave it another chance, even though my dislike of the narration still detracted from my enjoyment -- although it occurs to me that since this phenomenon made me take the story in smaller doses, as it were, I might have savored the good stuff more?

And there is so much good stuff. A Wild Sheep Chase is early Murakami, but it already has everything we go to his work expecting. It starts off firmly grounded in reality, as our freshly-divorced protagonist, who runs a middling-successful advertising firm with an old friend, first gets a new girlfriend who has the most beautiful ears in all the world; she looks like an ordinary, even slightly plain, woman if she lets her hair cover those ears, but when she lets them show it's like she's casting a spell.

Meanwhile, his off-handed decision to use a photograph sent to him by his old friend The Rat (who features in several early Murakami novels but about whom I feel still I know nothing; the first two books in which he appears haven't been anywhere near as accessible to me as this one and its sequel, until very recently) in a newsletter his firm publishes, with strange consequences. Suddenly a mysterious, hyper-competent and very precise man who claims to represent a powerful figure in Japan's right wing shows up demanding not only to know where that photo came from but that the newsletter be withdrawn completely from circulation and obliterated from memory, no matter the cost to the protagonist and his firm. At first our boy finds this ridiculous, but his partner, much more connected and business savvy, knows who The Boss is and doesn't want to cross him: do whatever he wants, man, this is serious!

But it's not enough that the newsletter disappear; something that appeared in the photograph needs to appear, and fast. The Boss has weird, possibly supernatural, ideas about this thing and his representative believes that if The Boss dies without finding it, all that The Boss has built, which is apparently most of the socioeconomic structure of modern Japan, could very well collapse. And so our protagonist is sent off with his beautiful-eared girlfriend to find, among all of Hokkaido's 9000-some sheep, one with a black star-shaped birthmark.

The fact that they do isn't a spoiler but I won't disclose how they do it, except to say that it brings them into the orbit of some even quirkier characters and a lot of agricultural history, which the latter had no business being as interesting as it was, which again proves that it's not Haruki Murakami that I'm over. I'm even ready to spend a credit on Dance, Dance, Dance someday, maybe.

*First of all, yes, I know, whaaaaaaaaaaaat? And second, no, I can't look for or link to the tweet. I use, or, I guess that should be used now, a very old third party Twitter client, on which that alabaster lunched, Lonny Emeralds, pulled the plug this week along with all the other third party apps. And this is a bigger problem for me than it would seem at most; it's not just my keen disgust at being forced into his gross, add-riddled, algorithm-deranged version of the service, but also a uniquely dumb conundrum I made for myself over a decade ago, when I created a second Twitter account solely to talk to someone I dearly loved but who felt overwhelmed by my daily firehose of tweets back then. For which I had to create a dummy email address. But then for some reason that seemed good at the time, I switched the email addresses I used for each Twitter account and then, over the years, during which the friend for whom I created what I called my whispering account died giving me no more reason to use it, never got around to switching them back... and forgot the password for the dummy email address. To which my main Twitter account was still linked and has been for years. And I've been happily using my legacy Twitter account from phone to phone to phone, rarely having had to re-enter my password when I got a new phone, and found when I tried to sign into the native Android Twitter app to at least get into Lonny Emeralds' Shitter Twitter, what I'd confidently thought over the years was my Twitter password since I'd last bought a new phone, was wrong. And since I've long forgotten the password to the dummy email the account is linked to, well, there you go. I've made my last post on Twitter. And no, I don't want advice or suggestions, I'm fine with making a clean break. I'm happily tooting over at Mastodon. Join me,  won't you?

Eric LaRocca's THEY WERE HERE BEFORE US: A NOVELLA IN PIECES

The tension between humanity and the rest of existence that we usually call "the natural world" is kind of implicitly the core theme of all of our stories, so it's a little weird how powerfully affecting it is when someone comes along with a book like They Were Here Before Us: A Novella in Pieces that just rubs that tension in our faces. We're really good at ignoring the harm we do to our environs, and the harm that all the other inhabitants of this world are doing to each other while we're wringing our hands/telling each other it's not so bad over the latest oil spill or waste dump, though, so maybe it's not that weird.

As the first few "pieces" of the novella unfold, the reader gets the feel almost of, say, Patricia Highsmith's wickedly fun animal revenge tales, though a bit more anthropomorphized; the beetle who narrates the opening "All That Remains is Yours to Keep" and the chimpanzee telling us of "Delicacies from a First Communion" both share their stories in colloquial American English from a first person perspective, for instance. But by the third "A God Made of Straw" we shift to the third person and we get our first hints of something more explicitly in the realm of speculative fiction going on, allowing us to ask how it is we have become privy to these creatures' thoughts and feelings and internal dialogue, even as the tension amps way up and the scenes of wanton cruelty start multiplying. And oh look, that bird on the very attractive book cover has elements of the Biblically accurate angel about her, doesn't she?

We're nice and softened up and probably still a little in shock as "Bug and Bird are Happy" begins, suddenly concerned with human characters who happen to have cute nicknames taken from the animal world. But look at that cover again; while Bug is our point of view character in this piece, and as we come to understand the pair's bittersweet relationship and the changes cruel time has wrought on it, well, it's not the beetle who's in control of the situation on that cover, is it? Or is this maybe meant to be the beetle who told us the first piece, maybe being punished for its gloating possessiveness? Could that bird with eyes in her wings be a reincarnation of some of the other pieces' victims, getting their own back before the whole story is told? This "novella in pieces" thing demands that we come up with our own way of putting those pieces together. I wonder how many of us end up with the same contraption at the end?

By the time things wrap up with "When It's Dark Out" all of these themes of cruelty and consumption, of metamorphosis and decomposition and brutality come together for a speed run through a scenario straight out of a story in, say, Cosmic Horror Monthly,  in which a man and his son confront monsters within and without on the way to say a final farewell to a beloved family member. The simple narrative is now elegantly amplified and elevated by the material preceding it, making it feel both claustrophobic and cosmic - a neat trick, that. 

I'll be looking for more of this gentleman's stuff. 

Christopher Ruocchio's ASHES OF MAN (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

I love a lot of things about Samuel Roukin's narration of the Sun Eater series, Christopher Ruocchio's gigantic space opera spanning five novels in the main line and an ever-growing library of side-quels, but what I've liked best is something I've barely mentioned in my posts about these books: his performance as Tor Gibson, series hero Hadrian Marlowe's childhood tutor and, by a remarkable set of circumstances that reunite them a good century after Gibson abetted Hadrian's first escape, friend. Roukin gives this character, who is supposed to be as stoic and emotionless as a Kohlinar- trained Vulcan, an incredible warmth and tenderness that he seems to have saved for this character alone -- without Gibson ever seeming to drop that controlled facade of unflappable calm and unassailable logic. It's quite a feat, and it's why sometimes you take do want an actor for a narrator. 

But so, of course this latest novel in the main line, Ashes of Man, begins at Gibson's grave. Sigh.

"Heroes do break, you know," Hadrian warns us early in the book, just as he has so many times before. Hadrian is one of the most fallible heroes I've encountered in recent genre fiction -- not a bumbler or a fool, but gloriously imperfect and limited despite the superhuman advantages plain old heredity, genetic engineering, corrective surgery/surgical augmentation, and a mysterious godlike entity from the future have given him. He's a well-educated generalist who uses his time wisely but he is still just one guy with one brain and one set of experiences in which to draw -- except when he's not, but even when he is juggling space and time to find that one tiny and astronomically unlikely inflection point that lets him survive the unsurvivable, he still just this guy, you know?

Mostly. 

This latest installment of his sage shows us still more of the amazing universe in which he exists, which is full of all of the coolest bits we love in space opera/ planetary romance; in the first third of this novel a city* straight out of James Blish's classic Cities in Flight descends on a planet Hadrian happens to be on while attending to his cousin, the Sollan Emperor, and the Emperor's vast peripatetic court. The city doesn't come with a population itching to get to work like Blish's "Okie" cities do, but it's still a whole damned city slowly descending onto the ground, meant to replace wholesale one that the Cielcin destroyed decades ago when it laid waste to this planet. It's an incredible thing to have happen, even in these books -- but of course to most of the Sollan Empire's jaded courtiers is just another excuse for a party and some more intrigue. They're barely even all that interested in the legendary Half-Mortal, Lord Hadrian, or his frenemy Bissander Lin, the only guy besides Hadrian to have fought and killed a giant Cielcin cyborg super-soldier!

More incredibly, speaking of Lin, who hasn't appeared for a couple of novels now, good to see you again even though you're still not my favorite, one thing I've really noticed in this last novel is how brilliantly Ruocchio manages character. Not characteristics, not characterization, but characters; several times now he's slipped a new one into the crew several novels before that person really becomes important, or even gets much dialogue, so that when they do come to the fore, when their innate talents are called for or they're called upon to do something "out of character (usually transcending their limitations)" they don't feel new or like they're replacing someone that got killed off or left behind, just finally getting to shine a little in Hadrian's attention, because never forget that while Hadrian has greater claim to honesty than a Severian, say, it's still his subjective view of the story we're getting. So in this novel, Lorian, to name my favorite example of this and the character who prompted these musings (as I noticed that Roukin's voice for him is, well, he doesn't sound much like Warwick Davies or Peter Dinklage, though those are my fan-casting picks), is now fully part of Hadrian's inner circle of planners and doers as he, Valka, Lin and a whole Legion** (replacing the lost lamented Red Company) prepare on direct Imperial order to try to take the fight, not merely to the Cielcin but to the Cielcin's terrifying eldritch gods, which are not abstractions requiring belief to even exist like humanity's gods, but are part of that reality that doesn't go away when you quit believing. They might have an actual physical presence, even a location. And the Empire might have clues that might lead to that location's discovery. Clues they've had since the very first Sollan Emperor, William Windsor the First (the current Emperor is William XXVII but remember the ruling class enjoys ridiculous longevity so the time since William I is much, much, much longer than what we could call a generation. And of course the Emperor hasn't always been a William. Or, necessarily, in possession of a willy, as such), nuked Earth to radioactive slag to save Humanity from the Mericanii and first made contact with the mysterious entity/entities Hadrian knows as The Quiet.

Two other near-figurants from the prior novels come to the fore in Ashes of Man to become proper characters, too, with even more impact on the overall plot than Lorian gets to have, but that's because they are more important people in the books' universe: Olorin, who originally gave Hadrian his light saber high matter sword, and Emperor William the XXVII, but they don't have near the claim on my affections that Lorian does (though how much of my love for Lorian is really displaced affection for Miles Vorkosigan is anybody's guess. There's a reason Peter Dinklage is my fan-casting choice for the role of Lorian if a screen adaptation ever comes to be. And speaking of which, ahem. Make with the clicky and weigh in on that!). William even gets to be a little bit of a hero, though he causes as many problems as he solves as he, Hadrian, Olorin and Valka (and the Emperor's staff and military command) struggle to coordinate the evacuation, not only of the live inhabitants of a world under attack by the Cielcin, but also millions of colonists in cryosleep that have been stored there for seeding future human worlds -- and would thus be the universe's greatest meat locker for the ever-hungry, carnivorous Cielcin hordes.

In the process, inevitable tragedies occur, both for some of the tiny handful of beloved ongoing characters who have survived the prior novels and for some new friends, as is inevitable in any decent series concerned primarily with war. We're used to grieving with Hadrian by now, but by novel's end he feels like he's been dragged back to the beginning and taken us with him, without even the faint hope that, say, a pal frozen in carbonite out there somewhere can lend us. I'm still all in on this series and am already looking forward to my habitual "I've got to refresh my memory of all the prior books by reading them again" before the next one comes out which is... when? This time I don't even have a title to watch for, to mark as "To-Read" on StoryGraph or pre-order. HELP!!!!!

But for now, excuse me. I've used up this box of tissues and need to find some more. *Sob*

*And when I say "city" I don't mean some cute little portable mini-city like London in the film adaptation of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, I mean a big freaking city. The Sollan Empire only makes things to one scale, and it is stupefied. I mean, Hadrian routinely travels light years of distance aboard ships he casually mentions are over 50 miles long! You think it's a long walk down to the chemist's but that's just peanuts compared to...

**Who, by the way, is led by a fellow goes by the name of Sharpe.

Sayaka Murata's CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN (tr Ginny Tapley Takemori, narr Nancy Wu)

I've met more than a few people who, at a certain point in their careers, look back fondly on an early job they had in which they earned less but also had much less responsibility and didn't "take the job home with them." Maybe they weren't yet truly on their own and dependent on those low wages for survival so much as for pocket money; maybe they were enjoying the advantages of youth and health and single-hood and didn't have as many needs. 

Of course, at the time they were actually holding down these starter jobs -- newspaper delivery, fast food clerk, temporary office worker, gopher, apprentice in a trade, etc -- they probably didn't appreciate it as an idyll their older selves might one day be nostalgic for. They dreamed of proper career jobs in the field in which they majored in college, or one in which they weren't at the bottom of the hierarchy, or, yes, one in which they actually made enough money at to live on because, while the work paid and made physical demands on them as though they were still 18 and healthy, time had gone by and circumstances had changed and capitalism's many cruelties were making themselves felt (if indeed one had been privileged enough not to have always felt the lash).

Keiko, the heroine and narrator of Sayaka Murata's gem-perfect Convenience Store Woman, isn't like that, though, would not relate. She has taken that entry-level job and held on to it, for a myriad of reasons the novel explores with a deadpan tone and a perfect eye for detail, just like the probably-neuro-divergent Keiko herself employs.

 

In her pre-convenience-store life, Keiko displayed childhood tendencies toward a certain psychopathy, breaking up a playground fight by bashing a combatant over the head with a shovel because it was the most efficient means available of achieving an end to the scuffle, as her classmates were clamoring for, for instance. Loving parents doted and fretted and sent her to a counselor but to little actual avail --  the effect wound up being to persuade her that she needed to learn to perform humanity better, rather than to help her develop empathy. She then used her superior observational skills to build a repertoire of normal-seeming behaviors and reached university-age without causing anybody to feel they Need to Talk About Keiko ever again...

Until she settles into her first job at age 18, as a worker at a newly established convenience store, at which the new employee training takes no social skills or work habits as given and even trains her how, for the first time in her life, to affect a genuine-looking smile. At last Keiko, as she repeats to us many times in the telling of her story, feels she is "a cog in society" and is content...

For 18 years...

When the action (such as it is) properly picks up, Keiko is 36 years old and has not changed a bit apart from committing that great sin we all do, of getting older. She is, therefore, still unmarried, childless, and has not advanced a bit in her career, not even to be a shift supervisor or third key person. She knows exactly what is expected of her, performs her duties perfectly, and never lets the mask slip. The convenience store is her perfect little world and she is fine with things as they are, living the reality those nostalgiacs wishing for simpler times dream of, but actually content with it in a way they wouldn't be if they got their half-assed wishes.

But of course, this means she is actually Not Normal. So people start fretting over her again. Sure, she's not scooping up dead birds in the park and suggesting they get grilled up into parakeet yakitori, but she's still single. Oh noes!

Her solution to the problem is as deadpan funny as she is (only intensified by audio narrator Nancy Wu's bright delivery of each razory observation). I won't spoil the delight of this very short read (just over three hours as an audio book) by elaborating on it, though it's not really the point of the book; the point of the book is Keiko and her blunt clarity about what she sees, her minute analysis of what makes the people around her tick and the wildly successful strategies she adopts to keep them from seeing her as anything apart from the perfectly reliable, perfectly normal person she seems to be, a grown-up Wednesday Addams who has chosen to keep wearing her Halloween disguise. Remember that psycho killers look just like everyone else. 

Is just that some murder with wit -- intentional or un- -- rather than with a conventional, physical weapon. 

Veteran translator Ginny Tapley Takemori made some fantastic choices in bringing this Japanese story to westerners, starting with the decision to leave some words in the original, notably the greetings the store's workers diligently practice and energetically repeat when interacting with customers, notably irasshai, which I've always just seen translated as "welcome" in movie subtitles, but delivered by actors as sounding more like a command.* Leaving this term in the original, delivered by a narrator who has a lot of experience with words in Asian languages like Wu (rather a lot of my audiobooks by Asian authors, or authors of Asian decent, come to me in Wu's voice), lets the reader -- or especially the listener -- experience the word and absorbing its context, its subtle difference from just "welcome" in a way that just using the English word with all the other English words doesn't. We remember, even if we've never been to one, that a Japanese convenience store, home of the tamago sando, isn't quite the same as a Kum & Go or a Loaf & Jug. As Keiko describes it, it is a haven of order and cleanliness and expectations being exactly understood and met by all parties (or at least most of them), a bright white box in which the world makes sense. 

I might stay in such a place, too.

*From the University of Pennsylvania's language website: Both irasshaimase and irasshai mean, more or less, “Come on over!” or “Come on in!” In its modern incarnation, used primarily to greet customers who have already entered a store or restaurant, the nuance of irasshaimase is closer to “Welcome!”

Ha Seong-Nan's FLOWERS OF MOLD (Tr by Janet Hong)

Today I bought a dress with lots of buttons. After I'd done them all up and was about to button the last one, I discovered there was no hole to put it through. I looked in the mirror and saw the back of my dress was wrinkled around the neck. I'd put the third button in the fourth hole. So I had to undo them all and start over. As I was doing them up, I had a thought: When did the button of my life go in the wrong hole?

First of all, let's take a moment and bask in this book cover. Open Letter Books, the American publisher of Ha Seong-Nan's short story collection Flowers of Mold, give good book cover. Some of the best in the business, for my money (so much of my money!). But lest my typical reader jump to the conclusion that I did at first sight, Flowers of Mold is not fungal fiction, nor is it weird fiction. It's down to earth and domestic and literary and grounded. Very, very grounded. And occasionally a bit gross, because...

Whether it's drawing profound metaphor from everyday annoyances like in the passage I quoted above or painting entire word portraits of the wear and tear daily life exercises on things we're all too tired or demoralized to even try to make to last these days, Ha Seong-Nan is the greatest poet of kipple since Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard.*

The stories in this collection are thematically linked through various explorations of what we've thrown away or allowed to wear away or destroyed through inattention to detail, both in material terms and in terms of the misused, if not outright wasted, potential of individual human lives, which should make Flowers of Mold an absolutely exhausting and maybe nauseating read, but there are little bits of humor here and there that shine through. We get to watch a lot of people trying to dig up things after misremembering where they've been buried, which is always at least a little bit funny, for instance, and several times Ha lets us enjoy watching everything build to a Mexican shoot-out of a climax with just enough comic timing to let us know that she's in on the joke. But for every little chuckle, we get a lot of weariness and despair even as we wonder if, like Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories a few years ago, we're seeing quite as many individual characters as we think we are. Might these all be about the same thin, pretty but uncertain woman who can't seem to find a place in this world, and the same tired, kind of creepy and washed-up-before-his-time man?

Except, of course, there are a few stories like my favorite "The Retreat" which have a larger cast of characters, tenants all of a run-down building in a middling location who are getting ready to go on the building's annual retreat with the owner when the rumor surfaces that he's probably going to sell the building out from under them and never mind that the fried chicken lady just spent all her money renovating her restaurant on one floor, or that the academy upstairs probably couldn't afford to relocate or that everybody's been faithfully paying rent for years and years. But of course the guy who runs the academy could be our washed-up man, who has, in other stories, to take a job as a store detective-cum-mannequin in a store, a car salesman, a second-rate writer of advertising copy, couldn't he? And maybe the lady on the other floor who makes her precarious living keeping a handful of barflies happy is the same we see mysteriously showing up as a stage magician, a model (several times), a failed gymnast? Even her names (or at least her family name) are similar as we proceed through the stories -- Choi Sun-ae (in "Your Rearview Mirror"), Choi Jiae (in the collection's title story "Flowers of Mold"), Choi Myeong-ae (in "Toothpaste")... or maybe they're sisters? "Choi" isn't the rarest surname in Korea, but this still feels like a deliberate choice. See what I did there.

Meanwhile, don't crack this one open too close to mealtime, unless you've got a very strong stomach. Ha is a poet of kipple, but also of just plain refuse:

The foul stench came from the dumpsters. Uncollected garbage was piled around like pyramids around the apartment complex. At night, rats came out to gnaw at the trash. Liquid leaked from the bags and flowed down the asphalt and hardened in chunks. To avoid getting his dress shoes dirty, the man leapt over the stains like an athlete competing in the triple jump event.

And this isn't even from the story in which we meet "the man" as an anthropologist of garbage, whose sorting through his neighbor's trash has given him the kind of insights into their inner lives we mostly associate with hackers and spies. That's in the title story, "Flowers of Mold." Our garbage vaulter populates a later story, "Early Beans," the title of which I'm still struggling to correlate with its story, which explores the descent into corruption of a human soul as much of the mere stuff with which he interacts as his day goes way, way off track long before he gets on a train. 

But lest I still Ha as merely an artist of decay and abandonment, she (and translator Janet Hong) has a way with livelier things, too, as our triple jumper gets caught in a flood of small energetic bodies bursting out of a school at dismissal time:

Each child was like a lightning strike. With lightning, there are no warnings. There are only two ways to avoid getting electrocuted: you have to lie flat on the ground or put up a lightning rod. He drove with his foot resting on the brake pedal to ward against this human lightning, which could strike any time from the alleyways...

I'll never head-on-a-swivel through a school crossing in the afternoon without thinking of this passage again, I'm pretty sure. 

And speaking of things I'm not going to forget in a hurry, there's one story that needs a definite trigger warning, the collection's second, "Nightmare" in which not only the story's other characters but the very environment itself all seem bent on making its very young protagonist disbelieve the sexual assault that is the story's inciting incident. 

The world Ha shows us is thus very squalid and, no story ends on what we'd call a hopeful or inspiring note. Indeed, I can imagine some readers being dissatisfied that many of these stories do not resolve so much as just stop, often on an arresting single image or the sight of a van load of people driving off to a hinted-at destiny we don't get to witness, but I'd argue that these non-endings give the collection more verisimilitude, as well as reminding us that it's not just the achieving heroes and the problem solvers who are always deserving of our admiration, but also the ordinary schmoes slogging through it all, like Dick's boob-heroes or Ballard's passive observers, barely making it through by chance as much as anything, but still intending to schlep through it all again tomorrow, not so much out of the hope for better things as out of the uncertainty that there's any other way to be. 

Not the worst note to begin a new year on. 

*Her characters, however many there are or aren't, all seem like they just emerged from the building in Ballard's High-Rise and at least one of them totally returns home to that building at the end of his odyssey, anyway!