This very strange and darkly comic novel, which was published in the original Japanese in 2005, actually resembles a collection of short stories. Each chapter is connected with the next in ways that are unexpected and each connection hinges on the matter of sex. What strikes me the most at first glance about this novel is that there are almost no reliable reviews of it online. Although it is wildly unconventional, this is unaccountable as it is a minor masterpiece.
But to understand it you really have to understand Japan. This is a country that has been almost completely misunderstood from the beginning of Western contact until today. The products of culture that have dealt in Japanese constructs and that have proliferated in the West since that time have almost all had practically nothing to do with the society that actually inspired them, and this has led to an impoverished marketplace of ideas.
One exception to this rule is the Japanese poet, played by Masatoshi Nagase, who appears at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s film ‘Paterson’ (2016). This is a man who displays an earnest enthusiasm for the artform that is typical of his countrymen, as it is one that shows what truly inspires him. In general, however, the West has yet to properly understand Japan even though the products of some of the archipelago’s most prominent creatives – from filmmaker Juzo Itami to novelist Haruki Murakami – are well-known in places like the US and Europe. The puzzle hasn’t yet been deciphered, so the number of reviewers who would be able to do justice to this book of Okuda’s is severely limited.
At its core are notions of propriety and of desire, and the ways that those two things converge in the popular consciousness. For Japanese people the high-school girls who prostitute themselves for 10,000-yen notes and the reclusive university graduate who never meets people face-to-face will be instantly recognisable, but for many Westerners such things as these, in the Japanese context, may still be novelties.
The works that I was immediately reminded of while reading this book are ‘The Exquisite Corpse’ by Alfred Chester and ‘Edge of the Night’ by Friedo Lampe, both of which I read this year. The first of these books is by a gay American man and was published in 1967. The second is by a gay man and was published originally in German in 1933, at a time when the Nazis banned it.
So the idea of transgression is central to all three of these books and sex is also at the centre of all of them. In Okuda’s book the buttoned-down Japan of popular imagining is hilariously turned on its head and we are privy to a range of commonplace deviances that lie within the realm of sensuality and that include school-girls and erotic novels, karaoke-box establishments used for illicit dalliances, and the transcription service that a young woman operates.
The book opens with a story featuring Hiroshi Sugiyama, a dropout who writes promotional ad copy but who had graduated from an elite university. He builds a relationship with a generously-proportioned young transcriber named Sayuri Tamaki who picks him up one day in a public library and who keeps secrets that, if revealed, would expose her illegal means of support. In the middle of the mix are a housewife named Yoshie Sato who starts performing in porn movies in order to spice up her life and a tout for escort bars named Kenji Kurino who approaches young women on the street in order to get them to work for him in a kind of pyramid scheme. The centre of each chapter stems from the end of the previous one as a result of a dramatic moment that transports the reader across a number of sudden and trenchant boundaries.
But the core of the novel cannot be confined within a mere fictional ploy, regardless of how elegant that device is. Ideas of authenticity and associated ideas of value are examined in this book, and in it we come up against a number of metafictional devices that turn our attention back onto ourselves, as complicit readers. What constitutes “good” art? What is the nature of “real” drama? What is perversion and what is the result of licit desire? What is original and what is a tired trope? How do we, as a community, frame such notions? In the end the narrative reveals its ultimate purpose: to interrogate the individual and the society that sustains him or her. Allied to such concerns are ideas about male and female sexuality, and so this book has some pretty profound questions to put to the reader.
Japan’s vulnerable belly is exposed to scrutiny and to critique in the serial vignettes that comprise this novel, in a way that hadn’t happened before and that probably hasn’t happened since for any community, in the archipelago or elsewhere. But the way that this fascinating and unprecedented novel has dropped out of circulation is frankly astonishing, given its high quality. Admittedly, the quantity of sleaze in it becomes a bit wearisome at times – and this reticence is part of the novel’s appeal – but the author remains in control of his material until the end, where one of the characters who furnishes part of the drama is shown going home with, in her purse, a significant quantity of cash resulting from a clandestine transaction. This book offers a wild ride and deserves to be better-known. Six stars.
But to understand it you really have to understand Japan. This is a country that has been almost completely misunderstood from the beginning of Western contact until today. The products of culture that have dealt in Japanese constructs and that have proliferated in the West since that time have almost all had practically nothing to do with the society that actually inspired them, and this has led to an impoverished marketplace of ideas.
One exception to this rule is the Japanese poet, played by Masatoshi Nagase, who appears at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s film ‘Paterson’ (2016). This is a man who displays an earnest enthusiasm for the artform that is typical of his countrymen, as it is one that shows what truly inspires him. In general, however, the West has yet to properly understand Japan even though the products of some of the archipelago’s most prominent creatives – from filmmaker Juzo Itami to novelist Haruki Murakami – are well-known in places like the US and Europe. The puzzle hasn’t yet been deciphered, so the number of reviewers who would be able to do justice to this book of Okuda’s is severely limited.
At its core are notions of propriety and of desire, and the ways that those two things converge in the popular consciousness. For Japanese people the high-school girls who prostitute themselves for 10,000-yen notes and the reclusive university graduate who never meets people face-to-face will be instantly recognisable, but for many Westerners such things as these, in the Japanese context, may still be novelties.
The works that I was immediately reminded of while reading this book are ‘The Exquisite Corpse’ by Alfred Chester and ‘Edge of the Night’ by Friedo Lampe, both of which I read this year. The first of these books is by a gay American man and was published in 1967. The second is by a gay man and was published originally in German in 1933, at a time when the Nazis banned it.
So the idea of transgression is central to all three of these books and sex is also at the centre of all of them. In Okuda’s book the buttoned-down Japan of popular imagining is hilariously turned on its head and we are privy to a range of commonplace deviances that lie within the realm of sensuality and that include school-girls and erotic novels, karaoke-box establishments used for illicit dalliances, and the transcription service that a young woman operates.
The book opens with a story featuring Hiroshi Sugiyama, a dropout who writes promotional ad copy but who had graduated from an elite university. He builds a relationship with a generously-proportioned young transcriber named Sayuri Tamaki who picks him up one day in a public library and who keeps secrets that, if revealed, would expose her illegal means of support. In the middle of the mix are a housewife named Yoshie Sato who starts performing in porn movies in order to spice up her life and a tout for escort bars named Kenji Kurino who approaches young women on the street in order to get them to work for him in a kind of pyramid scheme. The centre of each chapter stems from the end of the previous one as a result of a dramatic moment that transports the reader across a number of sudden and trenchant boundaries.
But the core of the novel cannot be confined within a mere fictional ploy, regardless of how elegant that device is. Ideas of authenticity and associated ideas of value are examined in this book, and in it we come up against a number of metafictional devices that turn our attention back onto ourselves, as complicit readers. What constitutes “good” art? What is the nature of “real” drama? What is perversion and what is the result of licit desire? What is original and what is a tired trope? How do we, as a community, frame such notions? In the end the narrative reveals its ultimate purpose: to interrogate the individual and the society that sustains him or her. Allied to such concerns are ideas about male and female sexuality, and so this book has some pretty profound questions to put to the reader.
Japan’s vulnerable belly is exposed to scrutiny and to critique in the serial vignettes that comprise this novel, in a way that hadn’t happened before and that probably hasn’t happened since for any community, in the archipelago or elsewhere. But the way that this fascinating and unprecedented novel has dropped out of circulation is frankly astonishing, given its high quality. Admittedly, the quantity of sleaze in it becomes a bit wearisome at times – and this reticence is part of the novel’s appeal – but the author remains in control of his material until the end, where one of the characters who furnishes part of the drama is shown going home with, in her purse, a significant quantity of cash resulting from a clandestine transaction. This book offers a wild ride and deserves to be better-known. Six stars.
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