Battle Royale (Koushun Takami)

And we're back!

Where have we been you might ask? Well I've been working, studying, and sometimes working and studying at the same time. Alcott has been flitting around Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Spain... basically she has had a much more exciting few months than me.

To ease myself back into this whole blogging thing (a post which

I may or may not have decided to write because there is laundry to be done) (and a room to be tidied). Anyway. I also thought I would share with you what I think is the most violent book I have ever read. What fun!

A little while ago I reviewed The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - I'm sure you know it. Kids put in battle arena, given a few weapons, told to kill each other. Well I was raving about this book to a reader friend, who said "that sounds just like this Japanese novel I read, you should read Battle Royale". I promptly forgot this recommendation, read it a year later and proceeded to tell the same friend "You know, you'd really like this book Battle Royale".

Anyway, Battle Royale is indeed remarkably similar to The Hunger Games. Set in a dystopian future, where to keep the population in control, some kind of teenager-killing-teenager scenario is implemented. In Battle Royale it is called The Program, and each year a grade nine class is randomly selected to take part. Told they are going on an excursion, their bus is filled with sleeping gas and when the students awake, they have been fitted with metal collars. Metal collars that will explode for a variety of reasons. And then the men running the program pulls their teacher's head out of a sack he is carrying around. And a couple of students are shot before the game even starts. And then the students are each given a weapon (ranging from a machine gun to a banjo to a fork) and told to kill each other. And then they do.

And unlike in the Hunger Games, where teenagers kill teenagers in a very non-graphic way, Battle Royale doesn't hold back. I can't really bring myself to recount any of the violent scenes from the book, but to give you an idea of how affected I was, I couldn't read this book while I was eating as more often than not, something was going to make me feel ill.

My Battle Royale ramblings lead me to ask you this - what books have had induced a strong physical reaction in you? I'm not talking crying at the end of Goodnight Mister Tom (which I do), I am talking putting the book down before you're sick.

7/10

Dance Dance Dance (Haruki Murakami)

I don't think I've ever actually reviewed a Murakami book here before, although I may have mentioned in passing that I love love love him. So great is this love that I may or may not be in a Facebook group called "Haruki Murakami is (almost) God". (I am). The thing about Dance Dance Dance is, even if I had never read a word of Murakami in my life the quote on the front would have made me pick it up immediately- "If Raymond Chandler had lived long enough to see Blade Runner, he might have written something like Dance Dance Dance." Could you imagine a better endorsement?

I think the reason I've never put a Murakami review to paper (or screen as it were) is that he is so incredibly hard to describe.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle- There's this man, and he lost his cat, and kind of lives in a fantasy land, and follows a lady in a pink suit around and then sits at the bottom of a well.

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: There is a man who is on some kind of IT hit squad who goes underground to fight mysterious "things" and is given a unicorn skull. Half the story is set in a strange land where no-one can go outside the city walls and there are herds of unicorns running about.

Dance Dance Dance: Our hero feels he is being called to the Dolphin Hotel, a dodgy, run-down establishment he stayed at with a call-girl called Kiki some years previously. When he returns the dodgy hotel has been replaced by a high end luxury resort- L'Hotel Dauphin. He bonds with one of the girls on reception over a strange experience she had on one of the floors of the hotel. He meets a rather angry teenage girl whose mother has just abandoned her in the hotel. He goes back to Tokyo and reconnects with an old school mate who has become a super-star actor. You spend a large portion of the book vaguely confused about what is going on, which is actually a similar state of being to our narrator. He allows himself to be swept along by all the slightly mad people surrounding him - to interesting ends. A few dead bodies turn up along the way. There is a sheep-man who gives him strange messages. The whole book is an amazing experience.

I realise I've essentially not reviewed the book at all and really this should be an 'Author Love' segment because I love love love this author. He has got THE GOODS! (See tag below!)

Rating: 9/10

Some Prefer Nettles (Junichirō Tanizaki)

There will be a shadow of discontent hovering over this review, I must warn you now. However, for the neat purposes of a chronological format I shall only be addressing the source of my discontent towards the end of the review. If you read Earhart and I mainly for our negativity rather than the disgustingly obsequious prose we regularly dedicate to those authors who are lucky enough to have nestled into our hearts, I would recommend skipping ahead a few paragraphs.

I am on a bit of a Japanese kick at the moment. A friend recently expressed interest in reading more about Japan, having discovered that I lived there for a short period. Being of a reasonably youthful age at the time (I probably couldn't say my r's properly at that point) I don't feel all that guilty about the fact I didn't spend my time reading everything I could lay my hands on from the Japanese Canon. Of course, now that I can, in fact, skip my way through Ring a Round a Rosy with only limited amounts of angst (any child's game referencing the Bubonic Plague will always leave me feeling slightly uneasy) I feel I am ready to take on Junichirō Tanizaki, considered by many to be Japan's greatest novelist of the 20th century.

Some Prefer Nettles was written in 1929, at a time in Tanizaki's life when he was experiencing deep disillusionment with the Western customs he had so eagerly embraced in his earlier career. The novel tells the story of a Tokyo gentleman (Kaname) who has long fallen out of love with his wife Misako. He feels no desire for her whatsoever and we are subjected to these rather depressing scenes where he lies awake at night listening to his wife sob herself to sleep. She has taken a lover and the two plan to divorce, but both are so unbelievably retarded by indecision and cowardice that neither will actually take the first step and initiate the proceedings.

The third player in this low-level melodrama is Misako's father, a traditionalist who holds great faith in the calming and restorative powers of returning to one's Japanese cultural roots. He himself has taken a very young lover (O-hisa) and spends his time lecturing her on how to play the samisen to greater effect, how to pour tea, how to massage his shoulders, how to BATHE PROPERLY (soap is a big no-no, for best results use a bran bag) etcetera. To her eternal credit, O-hisa does not end up murdering him in his sleep. I would have suffocated him with the bran bag.

What follows is not exactly what I was lead to expect, having read the blurb. Of course, one must be very careful when going by the blurb on a Japanese novel, especially one that has been translated by someone who is not the original author. Japanese novels are inherently very different to any Western novels I have read. Plot is a consequence of the natural momentum generated by well-written characters and trains of thought, rather than the driving motive of the author. Like writing a detailed blurb about a book of haiku, it is extremely hard to pinpoint exactly what this novel is about. Yes, a breakdown of a marriage. But also the beauty of a puppet theatre. The purity of white food set against polished lacquer. The poetry of cherry blossoms. The bitter poignancy of a child's premature wisdom.

Try getting any of those past a marketing department.

However, as beautiful and lilting as the prose was, I have not fallen in love with this novel. At 4 in the afternoon today I was at a swimming carnival, pretending to watch whilst actually finishing my novel. I arrived at the denouement and could not believe what I was seeing. The novel finishes mid-thought. Mid-paragraph. Admittedly, at least, it does not finish mid-sentence. I was enraged. So abrupt is the ending, not once did I think that it was actually meant to be like that. I decided I had purchased a faulty copy, missing at least two or three more pages. I came home and started trolling the internet.

I was wrong. The novel ends where it's supposed to end.

Now, there are ambiguous endings. There are sudden endings. But this is a whole different kettle of fish. Having no idea what I am supposed to take from the ending I have flicked through the book again, searching for clues. I have plotted out different ways it could have ended. I have reached a few conclusions, none of which can be substantiated because I have nothing in print to back me up! (And Tanizaki is long dead, so I can't plague him for answers. Typical).

Of course, this is perhaps how one is supposed to react upon reaching the conclusion of Some Prefer Nettles. It is possible that the novel sets the reader up for exactly this reason- to make them have a relatively subdued tantrum poolside and then to make up their own minds. A novel directly in opposition to the spoon-feeding genre.

I'm still nursing some residual anger over it, but I think I understand what Tanizaki was doing. Kazuo Ishiguro says that writing novels should be like writing songs, with no need to justify why something is written the way that it is. This is, of course, only a valid argument if the piece you are talking about is written well; if it is incredibly confusing and rubbish to boot then you can safely begrudge the author the hours you wasted on them. With Tanizaki, whether or not you feel the abrupt ending is justified, I can vouch for the fact that everything you read up until then is worth your time and effort.

I may actually post a link here to Ishiguro's interview during The Sydney Writer's Festival 2009- you can watch just highlights or the entire hour if you wish. (Or, if you're feeling rebellious, nothing at all). I found it extremely interesting and, as an aspiring writer, rather valuable in terms of insight. Ishiguro has often listed Tanizaki as one of his strongest Japanese influences, so this part of the review is not entirely out of left wing.

I have just realised this review is almost as long as the book itself. Clearly I am not Japanese and have much to learn in the art of minimalist prose.

Rating: 8/10.

Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto)

A short and perfectly formed book has inspired in me a short (and needless to say) perfectly formed review.

I often feel with translated works that I am missing out on some integral X-factor that made the original worthy of translation in the first place. I have no great faith in the literary talents of the translator. Say what you like about Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of War and Peace- at the end of the day they didn't write the freaking thing.

However, with Kitchen I suspect the original is just as sparsely written as the version I have read. I mean, there's an economy of words- and then there's Yoshimoto. The anti-Rushdie if you will. The two short stories about mourning and reawakening after the death of a loved one throb with intensity and yearning, although most of the time the characters are talking about nothing more potent than noodles or kitchen utensils. Yoshimoto does not hide behind an impressive vocabulary or complicated metaphors. She expresses herself as if in conversation with the reader. I am so in awe of this. To make the stories so casual and carefree- whilst still maintaining a beautiful, lyrical rhythm- is a gift.

Rating: 9/10.