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Started several years ago and recently rediscovered on my trip back to Mother England, I just finished Dogs and Demons
and boy was it depressing.
If you don't want to like Japan, Dogs and Demons is the book for you. No, that's a little uncharitable - overall it's a fascinating, well written treatise on the way modern Japan has completely (and in almost every respect) lost its way. Alex Kerr, who is American but seems to have spent most of his life in Japan, goes through almost every aspect of Japanese life and explains why it sucks, and how Japan has sold out its land and its traditions in desperate, misguided bids for industrial power and some mistaken view of modernism that passed away in the 70s.
It is very readable, but if you currently live in Japan, it is not exactly an easy read. Y'know, what with the painting nihilistically depressing portraits of the country in which you currently reside.
I believe Kerr received some stick for being so critical about almost every aspect of Japan, as a foreigner - and to an extent he tempts it. Non-Japanese, when they pop up in the book, are never responsible for the erosion and corruption of Japanese values. Kerr's point is that the Japanese have done that themselves. Foreigners are the voices of reason, who have helped the developing economies in Thailand and other Asian countries advance in a way that respects their heritage, and the foreigners in Dogs and Demons are almost invariably bemoaning the changes they've witnessed, or fighting to preserve some part of Japan that the Japanese government wants to turn into a pachinko parlour. I've gotta call shenanigans on that - it may be the case that some foreigners are like that, but there must be a lot out for a quick buck too, and Kerr's examples are so one sided that he starts seeming patronising to the Japanese pretty early on, relying on a series of Japanese traditionalists and academics to keep him from sounding absurdly one sided in this.
When he turns his attention to modern culture he hits a fair few wrong notes too. He bemoans the infantilising of modern pop culture, the dominance of cutismo and so on, while saying that in the west those trends are only popular with children, never with more important demographics. Even when he wrote the book back in 2001, that would have been crazy. Japan's popular culture, it's 'soft power', is one of the biggest things it has going for it now. In fact I was reading last year about how people were criticising the Japanese government for not taking advantage of that more. Kerr comes across as basically out of step with the times in those areas; and a few other times when he relies on anecdotes rather than facts he seems far too subjective - ranting about things that piss him off rather than real problems.
But that said, when he backs up his points with figures, facts about the hideous knots in which Japan has become bound due to its rampant, corrupt beauracracy (which he does for the vast majority of the book), and the central 'Dogs and Demons' premise (that Japan loves to build gimmicky 'Demons' because they're more eye-catching, while the basic 'Dogs' of everyday services are neglected)... I can't argue against any of that. His story of Japan - basically that it is sick from the roots up and that there's nothing anyone can do about it - is pretty much spot on.
Depressingly enough.
I'm currently reading, and enjoying the good goddamned hell out of, Luke Haines' "Britpop" memoirs Bad Vibes
, in which he comes across as something of a cunt, but a glorious one, and cements his position as one of the greatest living Englishmen.
On David Gray:
"Gray also has a nasty tick for lengthy onstage guitar-tuning sessions. Deoowwwing. String goes down. Boowwang. String goes up. Time passes, somewhere a life flickers out, and somewhere a new life begins. Yeah, strum a chord, see if it sounds OK. Murwaaang! No improvement then. Christ"
On The Boo Radleys:
"I didn't think it could get worse than Gray. I have a lot to learn. Tonight we are sharing the bill with the Boo Radleys."
On Pulp's early albums:
"Pulp's career has run like one of those silent movies showing man's early attempts at aviation. Each Pulp release is like a preposterous flying machine trundling toward the cliff edge, only to break up like balsa wood as it flops into the sea."
He's clearly well aware that he was an absolute bastard for a lot of his career, and a lot of the vitriolic, splenetic ranting can be picked apart, or treated as one man's snooty opinions I'm sure, but he still makes a great many good points about all the shit that was released under the banner of Britpop. And it's great fun to note how many people he takes to just because his hated cellist doesn't like them. For me his best album might be the one as Baader Meinhoff, but I like his entire catalogue, and because I'm only a third of the way through the book I'm on an Auteurs kick at the moment.
Here they are playing a song about Lenny Bruce dying of a drug overdose and dreaming that he's in Rudolph Valentino's funeral motorcade on Jools Holland (who now has two shows a week? sign of the end times people, I swear):
Grand song, and as Haines points out, releasing it as a single made it a great record too. And here's a pretty fantastic video for Rubettes from their last album:
Love the way he's integrated into the video there. And finally he makes the excellent point, that I have seen made before, that deep in every Englishman's heart there is a gaping whole that no love can fill, and a hunger that can only be sated by conquering an empire.
I've been reading more, of course. I don't know whether this makes it more or less difficult for me to make strings of words on my own, but I like books, so.
William T. Vollmann's The Rifles
was interesting, moving and I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Since it's subtitled "Volume Six of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes", and Vollman's other works include a seven volume investigation of human violence and a book entitled Poor People
, I had feared it was going to be a little daunting.
It was daunting I suppose, but it was surprisingly easy to read and engrossing throughout. The Seven Dreams series examines encounters between native American people and European colonists, and you can guess the kind of points it makes. In this one Vollman's focus is on the Inuit of Northern Canada, and his thesis is that the introduction of the rifle (which the Europeans traded them for food and assistance since the explorers were utterly incapable of surviving in the arctic circle alone) changed their lifestyle catastrophically: depleting the population of the animals on which they lived, destroying their culture and generally weakening their position in the world.
Then, later, the Canadian government shafted them for good measure.
That may look like something of a spoiler, but really it isn't since Vollman often breaks the fourth wall to address the reader directly and spends whole sections of the book laying this out and accepting that he may be overstating the case, but that he is being as impartial as possible.
Also, the pleasure of the book for me was certainly not merely in the details, but in the way they were presented. It is a dreamlike narrative of an American who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer who can to a sticky end, and who falls in love with an Inuk girl while studying the people of Northern Canada. The perspective shifts from second to third person and back; chapters start in the present day and end in the 1800s and vice-versa; and all the time Vollmann's characters, flawed and desperate every one, make wonderfully human, believable decisions. It really was a fantastic book.
The week I finished it I spent the night on a mountain at the Magical Camp festival, and as it got colder in the evening I kept thinking about Vollmann's characters (and Vollman himself, as he writes in one of the appendices) almost freezing to death in minus 40 degree weather. It'll probably stay with me for a long time.
Hell, by Yasutaka Tsutsui
, was one of the pieces of Japanes literature I borrowed on a whim from the library when I went (I'm gonna get more next week!). He's apparently famous as a sci-fi writer (several Japanese people I mentioned him to knew who he was) but has been highly prolific in any number of genres. Only a few of his books are available in English though, and Hell is a slightly surreal contemporary fantasy work about people dying and going to hell - which in Japanese terms isn't all that hellish, more a kind of limbo where no-one is sure of the rules or conditions for being there. It was short, funny and touching and much better than the other Japanese book I borrowed which was...
... Shame in the Blood by Tetsuo Miura. Written and set in the early sixties, it's described as one of Japan's greatest love stories, but I found the whole thing progressively more and more frustrating and was fucking glad to finish it and put it down. It was mercifully brief I guess (if it had run to 300 pages I doubt I would have finished it) and it has many praiseworthy points. The details of human actions and interactions are excellently observed and I'm sure the tone and the narration really capture certain aspects and attitudes of mid-20th century (specifically post-war) Japan exquisitely. However the story, and the narrator himself (who, sadly, is probably closely based on Miura since the events seem to mirror those of his own life) just annoyed the living fuck out of me, obscuring all the positives.
The narrator comes from a tragic family where two of his sisters kill themselves, and his two older brothers run away from home, one of them stealing the family fortune in the process. Because of this he believes his blood must be cursed, and struggles to deal with it, while falling in love with a woman and slowly... possibly? coming to terms with the fact that he can live a normal life...? I don't want to go on hammering a book that other people have clearly seen a lot of good in, but for me the self-pity was believable but annoying, the structure seemed arbitrary and annoying and the whole thing was inconclusive and annoying.
Actually, I think the biggest problem for me was that I found a set of characters that go through hardships and personal sufferings looking for light or a new start; but who can never find true hope or the truly fresh beginning that they want. But it's not the world that is hammering them down and denying them, as it seems to in some of Denis Johnson's incredibly tragic novels, but their own overwhelming sense of personal shame or belief that hardships must just be endured.
In fact, a lot of the tortured introspection reminded me of the first Evangelion movie I just watched. Except that in that case I could kind of laugh at it and enjoy the giant robots fighting ever more conceptual celestial threats. Shame in the Blood features no giant robots at all! Not one!
It does have a gorgeous cover though doesn't it?
