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.