Asia Archives - Page 4 of 5 - A Geography of Reading

Reimagining Imagery with Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

June 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

A writing professor once advised me to keep writing fresh and to examine the words you use—tears don’t ever really roll down someone’s face. But how can you reexamine every word or phrase you use and still have time to write? Sometimes it helps to look at things from a new perspective and this week Haruki Murakami helped me do just that with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

When I read “network of red lines” as a description of the narrator’s bloodshot eyes, my writing spidey-sense perked up. “Bloodshot” is an easy word. Too easy. You can say “spider web” but that stands out against nearly any paragraph. I loved “network of red lines.” It was concise and vivid and I could picture it and it also didn’t have to interrupt the flow. Except I wanted it to because it made me think about freshening my own descriptions.

A note on translation here: I don’t read Japanese, so I will never know exactly what words Murakami uses, and I am taking for granted that his translator has not run away with the story. Also, “network of red lines” could be the way bloodshot eyes are standardly described in Japanese. Regardless, it was new to me and I loved it.

I read Murakami chiefly for fun, though he is a wonderful and imaginative writer. I am grateful to him for reminding me that language is infinite and even one fresh examination can spawn wonder. I’m off to see if I can spawn some fresh imagery in my own writing. Just as soon as I finish this fantastic book.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Raise the Red Lantern: Mystery in Su Tong’s Garden

May 29, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Su Tong creates a world of magic and mystery in the title novella of Raise the Red Lantern. Though we are never certain if the magic is real or imagined by Lotus, it feels authentic. Su blends the real with the ethereal so gently that even the harshest skeptic can enjoy the mystical elements of the story.

Our first view of Lotus is as she is being carried into the garden of her new home. She seems plain, with her “face covered with dust and looking unbearably exhausted.” We are told that Lotus is very practical, still washing her hair in the sink where her father had committed suicide. This plainness and unflappability lead us to see her as having a cool head and so when she starts to unravel, we naturally think there is great cause. If Lotus had been hysterical from the onset, we wouldn’t trust her ability to separate reason from emotion.

The first inkling of anything remotely spiritual is Joy chanting sutras over her Buddhist rosary, but her sincerity is dismissed by Chen. Then, during the first night Lotus spends with Chen, we get the swirling of her consciousness: “Lotus seemed to fall from a high place into a dark valley where pain and dizziness were accompanied by a feeling of lightness.” Whether this is an effect brought on by the house or by Lotus’s mental state, it feels eerie and gently portends a death in a well.

The concealment of the “Well of Death” in overgrown weeds lends it an air of magic, and the butterflies and the song of the cicadas make it more so. Su increases the mystical quality of the place by linking it in Lotus’s mind with a prior experience under wisteria which “seemed like suddenly waking from a dream.” When “[s]lowly she pulled back a few branches of wisteria,” it is as though she pulls back a curtain separating the real world from a magical one. Lotus hears “the sound of her breathing being sucked down into the well and amplified” and then “[a] gust of wind rushed up,” and the well seems to have taken on life. Lotus is unnerved by the falling of flowers as she leaves it and I was also set on edge.

“Crystalline specks of brightness” on Coral’s face and her hair being covered with dew after a hard frost would otherwise seem unlikely, but Su has established that the rules of the Well of Death are unlike the rules elsewhere in the Chen family compound and by the time Coral is singing The Hanged Woman under the wisteria in a black cloak, I am prepared for anything to happen there. Descriptions like rain “splashing off the aspen and pomegranate leaves with a sound like shattering jade” should also seem improbable, but they are so lovely and we are so wound up in the text that they contribute to the mysterious ambience.

Chen provides a foil for Lotus’s suspicions about the garden. She tells him: “[t]his garden is a little spooky” and he resists her flatly: “A couple of people died in that well, that’s all; jumped in and committed suicide.” But his dismissive response only heightens the reader’s belief in the mystery. Now there is a reason that the well feels haunted and when Chen becomes serious after Lotus guesses the suicides were concubines, she has convinced him a little of the spookiness and convinced me a lot. He may think she’s imagining things, but he also doesn’t want her near the well. This is the part in the story where we realize that it doesn’t matter whether he believes in the magic or whether he mistrusts Lotus’s mental stability, and it doesn’t matter which the reader believes. Both explanations point to the same disastrous consequences for Lotus.

Lotus starts to go mad and causes Swallow’s death, and then witnesses the murder of Coral, but by then she has lost her credibility in the Chen household. If the story were told in the first person, it would be crucial for the reader to decide whether Lotus is credible or not, but the narrator is credible and the narrator leaves us with the feeling that although Lotus has gone mad, there is something bad about that place.

I have a soft spot for magical realism. I like to read about intersections between the logical world and the spiritual world and I have tried to write about them, but I find I often doubt my own worlds. Su Tong taught me from this story to set the scene well. The reader (especially an American reader) will likely have doubts about the authenticity of the magic. Any fictional world needs to set up its ground rules. Su set up his by providing me with a lot of everyday activity but then seducing me with magical images. Su used the natural resistances of the characters to mirror and then overcome the doubts of the reader. As Lotus comes to believe in the magic of the place, I wasn’t yet convinced, but when Su showed me how Lotus overcame Chen’s doubts, he also overcame some of mine. But even then he left me an out. The story worked just as well if I believed Lotus was mad.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Raise the Red Lantern from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Hisaye Yamamoto: Quiet in a Boiling Bath

May 26, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Family tension seethes under the surface of the title story of Hisaye Yamamoto’s story collection Seventeen Syllables. Mrs. Hayashi has given up her passions long ago for a life of quiet suffering. When she discovers an interest in and a talent for haiku, she adds heat to the simmering boil of her family life. And yet Yamamoto conveys the initial familial tension and ensuing boil over through the careful, almost quiet, use of displaced description and contrast.

Description of the family life and Mrs. Hayashi’s character do not take place how I expected. Poetry is Mrs. Hayashi’s one passionate outlet and she reaches out of her placid shell to introduce her daughter, Rosie, to this expression of her soul. When Rosie responds patronizingly to her poem and subsequent description of haiku, Mrs. Hayashi gives no facial expression-only a response which Rosie takes as either satisfaction or resignation. A different writer would fashion a blowup here and the character’s passions would bubble all over the page. By having Mrs. Hayashi retreat into herself, Yamamoto is conveying the depth of her habitual repression.

A similar thing occurs when the Hayashis are visiting the Hayano family. I could feel Mrs. Hayashi brighten when she talked about poetry and the depth of her passion was portrayed only through her distraction from her husband’s needs. I felt already fear for her that she was engaging with Mr. Hayano instead of his wife. Culturally, I expected her husband to bristle at this breach of etiquette. But Yamamoto does not provide a flashpoint here. Instead she shows a wife backpedalling because she knows she’s in trouble, “I’m sorry…You must be tired.” He says nothing and Yamamoto gives only the spare insight of Rosie who “felt a rush of hate for both – for her mother for begging, for her father for denying her mother.” The weight of his control needs no further description.

The sparseness of detail and lack of blowups forced me to read closely, and in reading closer I was able to see where Yamamoto alludes to Mrs. Hayashi’s tension by describing other events. When Rosie is in the bath after her encounter with Jesus, she sings so as not to think of him “the larger her volume, the less she would be able to hear herself think.” She pours on more and more hot water and then immerses herself slowly in the boiling bath “until the water no longer stung and she could move around at will.” Yamamoto is providing a parallel to how Mrs. Hayashi lives her life – she has tried to stop herself from thinking and immersed herself in this heated situation, but she got comfortable and started to move around. Given the controlling nature of her husband, she must at least subconsciously expect to have the heat on the water turned up. So did I. The tension increases, and because the violence of Mr. Hayashi has only vaguely been hinted at, my fear was even greater. Mrs. Hayashi and Rosie know what this man is capable of, but I didn’t and because Mrs. Hayashi is resigned to her fate, I was forced to worry for her.

Yamamoto uses the contrast of the giddy play of the young girls to heighten the effect of the silence of the older women. The girls, even shy Natsu, romp and play and show off Haru’s new coat to the point of barging in on the adults. Mrs. Hayashi shows she wants to be more than the silent, obedient Japanese wife when she engages in the girl’s play, asking to inherit the coat. Mrs. Hayano serves as a cautionary character who, though she spends most of the scene “motionless and unobtrusive,” continues to fulfill her wifely duties in bearing children and fixing tea. This one page explores the full range of female openness within their culture and illustrates how delicately Mrs. Hayashi teeters between childlike bursts of excitement and the expected sobriety of a Japanese wife and mother.

We see from other exchanges that Mrs. Hayashi has not lost all sense of decorum. When Mr. Kuroda comes to deliver her award, her speech is so perfectly written, I could hear the softness of her whispering and the extra syllables she would have added in Japanese to speak in the properly indirect and feminine manner. “It is I who should make some sign of my humble thanks for being permitted to contribute.” Though even here she breaks form by asking to open the package in his presence, a general taboo.

Yamamoto raises tension with the heat, literally. The heat of the day and the imminent tomato spoilage provide atmospheric clues to the coming climax. Everything is hinted at, much like real conversations in Japanese. A character in another story from the same collection explains the culture, “Like a Japanese – quiet.” Yamamoto is softly yelling for me to pay attention. We aren’t privy to the shameful scene in which Mr. Hayashi must surely have thrown Mr. Kuroda out and we aren’t privy to Mrs. Hayashi’s torment as she watches her Hiroshige burn, but we don’t need to be. In the quiet desperation that Yamamoto has built, Mrs. Hayashi’s story and her insistence, “Promise me you will never marry!” say it all. The fire is hotter than ever, but she will re-acclimate herself soon enough, and then she will swim free once more.

Quiet desperation is important in my own writing. My characters often cannot say what they feel most deeply and I struggle to convey the constraints of the world to the reader. I can learn from Yamamoto’s way of “throwing” her tension like a ventriloquist throws his voice. I can also learn from her use of contrast to show the tightness of the constraints.

Though I read this book long ago now, I continue to think about Yamamoto when I realize too late that I am in an untenable situation. I think about this steadily heating bath and how comfortable you can feel before you are boiling. I have a terrible memory for books, but sometimes, when the writing is as strong as Yamamoto’s and when the message is something I need to hear, I carry them with me forever.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Seventeen Syllables from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Life in Greyscale: Ha Jin’s Saboteur in The Bridegroom

May 16, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Ha Jin’s collection of stories, The Bridegroom, the protagonists are powerless to effect any real change in their circumstance. At best they can hope for vengeance by spreading disease or peeing on purslanes. Ha creates this feeling of constraint and hopelessness in “Saboteur” by tightly controlling his delivery of words.

Through his use of short words within short sentences, Ha subjects the reader to a staccato feeling and gives the effect of tight control. “The rice and cucumber tasted good, and Mr. Chiu was eating unhurriedly.” His sentences rarely include more than two short clauses and he uses few words over three syllables. Even when sentences do run longer, the clauses are short as in the following: “During the two weeks’ vacation, he had been worried about his liver, because three months ago he had suffered from acute hepatitis; he was afraid he might have a relapse.” Ha presents the shortest sentences of all in his dialogue. For example, this exchange between Mr. Chiu and a policeman:

“See, you dumped tea on our feet.”
“You’re lying. You wet your shoes yourself.”
“Comrade Policeman, your duty is to keep order, but you purposely tortured us common citizens. Why violate the laws you are supposed to enforce?”

The policeman’s speech is even more clipped than Mr. Chiu’s. It portrays the policeman’s relationship to the authoritarian government. He has to say very little for his consequences to be understood. Mr. Chiu, on the other hand, in his longish sentence, is trying to assert his rights within the very system that is denying them. Though his sentences are longer, he is speaking the same terse language. Although the abruptness of Ha’s sentences could be a function of writing in a second language, they could also be carefully crafted to make the reader feel the tight constraints of the government and by consequence the society that the characters feel.

Contributing to the sparseness of Ha’s sentences is the fact that he uses few adjectives. The adjectives he does use are more often merely descriptive: sunny, stout, and wet. The most dramatic adjectives he presents are athletic, sallow, and spacious. I was left wondering if the setting was as truly unremarkable as he portrayed it, and I felt the disinterest of the characters in the world around them. Mr. Chiu had never been in Muji before, but he notices on no beauty or ugliness, only the activity of people. This led me to believe that the world Ha was writing about was one in which beauty, and by consequence joy, had no place. I felt the flatness of Mr. Chiu’s life.

In a world of arbitrary rule, Mr. Chiu was only able to seek justice through an act of subversion after the fact. Ha highlights the “after the fact” feeling by sending the reader this teletype: “Within a month over eight hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji. Six died of the disease, including two children. Nobody knew how the epidemic had started.” It is a spit in the face, a final laugh for Mr. Chiu, but it is a punch line delivered after all the actors have left the stage. The bare presentation of the facts conveyed feels as unsatisfying as the act must have been for Mr. Chiu. There is revenge, but no justice, for Mr. Chiu.

My own characters are very different from Ha Jin’s. They have hope for a life beyond their circumstance and when they act, it is with the understanding that despite the odds, there are potential personal rewards. They exist in a world worth fighting for, and I’d like to think my sentences convey that sense of beauty and ugliness that come together as life. If I need to present a situation or a character that is tightly regimented, I can learn from Ha’s tight, short sentences, and if I need a world that feels flat and hopeless, I will consider paring adjectives down to the most essential.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Bridegroom from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Embodiment and Disembodiment in The Lover

May 6, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Marguerite Duras throws the reader into the memory of her narrator in The Lover. By switching narration between the first person and third person limited, Duras embodies the experiences of a fifteen and a half year-old girl who takes on a Chinese lover in Saigon. She also conveys the sense of the girl as object which allows the reader to both sympathize with the character and subject her to judgment. This mimics the way the narrator is simultaneously reminiscing about a specific period in her adolescence and also judging herself.

Because the narrative voice doesn’t change when the narrative point of view does, the reader has the sense that the same first person narrator is relating the story from two angles. In one section the narrator describes her shoes: “These high heels are the first in my life, they’re beautiful, they’ve eclipsed all the shoes that went before.” This is followed by a section break and then the very next sentence is: “It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed.” Three sentences later in the same section the narrator is back to first person in describing the provenance of the hat she was wearing: “How I came by it I’ve forgotten.” In each of these sections, the narrator is talking about the same girl and her possessions but the reader is encountering her as both separate and part of the narrator.

Switching back and forth between narrative points of view could be maddening for a reader, but the switch is seamless and gives the reader a much fuller picture of the narrator’s recollections than one viewpoint or the other could have done. The ease of transition is accomplished by zooming in to look at one object (here the shoes and the hat) and then zooming back out to show the same object from a different vantage point.

The key to the reasons behind the shift in perspective is in the following passage: “He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl…The mother hits her as hard as she can.” I was struck by the poignant disassociation in the shift here as the narrator transitions from “my mother” to “the girl.” Moments before, the narrator used the first person to describe the beginning of the incident: “My mother has attacks during which she falls on me…punches me.” “Has attacks” is habitual, not of the moment, and not in scene. But as the description progresses, the specificity of the action as the other brother flees and the mother calms down and the girl lies about her relationship with the Chinese man, makes the description seem like one particular instance. The narrator is separating herself from the girl who is the center of this action. She sets herself apart from the chaos and pain of these relationships as though it happened to someone else. This disembodiment is characteristic of someone who has undergone trauma and is particularly poignant because the character is at an age where one internalizes this type of experience and blames oneself for it.

Shifting back and forth between these narrative points of view is tricky, but Duras managed it well. As a reader, I was able to engage with the character on a deeper level and could feel the shift into third person almost as the narrator’s wince. I don’t think this could be prudently imitated except in the rarest of circumstances because it creates a very specific effect. However, it is important to keep in mind that our characters, being the astute little observers that they tend to be, are likely aware of how they are perceived. There are other ways to view even a first person narrator from the outside, e.g. conveying anxiety at how they are being perceived. In my novel, Polska, 1994, being seen and the perceptions of others is an important part of Magda’s world and I work to show this through how she thinks others are seeing her. Duras reminded me that it is important to consider how my character views herself.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Lover from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.