Murakami Haruki and Sino-Japanese relations

Joel Martinsen at Danwei posted a translation of an interview in the Southern Metropolis Weekly with Lin Shaohua, Murakami Haruki's Chinese translator.

It is a bizarre interview, to say the least, starting with the unironic use of the word "bourgeois" to describe novels like Norwegian Wood. Bourgeois? I guess. And then there's a statement like, "his later works focus on the hard, rigid aspects of being a warrior." If there is one thread that runs through all of his novels, "bourgeois" or post-bourgeois, it is his strong emphasis on humanistic individualism. Lin touches on this — "...He gave an interview with Chinese media in which he said that individual rights and freedoms were to be highly respected, like an egg smashed colliding with a wall. If he had to choose, he would stand on the side of the egg" — but he does not develop it further, emphasizing Murakami's social criticism without spelling out the perspective from which he makes it.

Beyond Lin's critique, however, the interview provides an interesting glimpse at one intellectual's impressions of Sino-Japanese relations, as well as his views of China today. (Emphasis on the one intellectual, because it is far from clear how much one can generalize from the views of someone who translates from Japanese to Chinese.)

While I recommend the whole interview, two exchanges stand out in my mind:

SMW: Is this type of misunderstanding related to the fact that there is an insufficient degree of cultural interchange and communication? For example, before 1949, there were many great masters in China who had returned from studying abroad in Japan - the Zhou brothers, for instance, and Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo. At the time, Japan perhaps had many authors, such as Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichirô Tanizaki who had traveled in China. Are exchanges today not up to the level of the Republican period?

Lin: That is one side. Another side is that Japanese schools do not tell their students true history. I've asked a Japanese high school history teacher whether he had taught his students about the Japanese army's invasion of China. He said he had not taught it, and circumstances were quite coincidental: every time his lectures reached the [second] Sino-Japanese war, the semester ended. Practically all schools were that way. And even if they lectured on it, the class time was quite short. This would be the careful plan of Japanese government agencies. Japanese contemporary literature, too, basically avoids touching on that period of history. So many Japanese young people do not understand history, and they are mystified at the opposition of the Chinese people when they visit the Yasukuni Shrine.

And:

SMW: What is your view of the nationalist sentiments toward Japan that are current in China?

Lin: I only have to mention Japan on my blog and I am subject to frequent abuse. I feel that angry youth are extreme in their sentiment; as the intelligentsia, we ought to look at the whole picture, the good and the bad. We have a responsibility to present a relatively complete Japan. The birth of certain extreme feelings is due in part to the fact that the intelligentsia has not carried out its responsibilities to the full, it has not introduced a complete, objective Japan. As intellectuals, we too have the problem of silence. I feel sad for our intellectuals; in the past they were not permitted their own voice under the pressure of ideology, but it's the commodity economy amid a rising tide that seduces them. There is no moral integrity, no perseverance. Of course we cannot tar them all with one brush; sober intellectuals with a conscience still exist, but in the clamor of the mob, their influence grows ever smaller.

Interesting that Lin actually agrees with Prime Minister Abe and his coterie about the state of Japanese education — although naturally their ideas for ensuring that Japanese students know their country's history are substantially different. (Check out Adam Lebowitz and David McNeill's review of Abe's education reforms at Japan Focus.) But seriously, is Lin's criticism of Japanese education unfair, or spot on?

For those interested in Murakami's thoughts on his own writing — note, strictly literary, not political — check out this recent essay published in the New York Times.

Book of the week

After last week's unexpectedly timely choice of book, I think this week is an appropriate time to step back and recommend a novel. (Everyone could probably use a break from more serious matters after the past week.)

As such, I would like to recommend Murakami Haruki's most recent novel, After Dark, which was just published in English translation (translated by veteran Murakami translator Jay Rubin).

While there are those in the Japanese literary establishment who dismiss Murakami's novels as trite, I find them remarkably appropriate for our anxious age — and morally serious to boot. Murakami is a humanist. Throughout his novels and short stories (and non-fiction) runs a clear thread: after the horrors of the twentieth century, the only morally appropriate belief is humanism, the firm belief that each individual has a right to live as he sees fit without external interference (and without interfering with others). His world view rejects the idea of there being one best way to live, but instead leaves each individual to find his own way.

Beyond that, Murakami has a phenomenal ability to make the bizarre seem normal, and the normal seem bizarre.

Both of these ideas are on display in this latest novel (though at 191 pages it is more of a novella). Set over the course of an autumn evening in Tokyo, Murakami spins a yarn starring a prickly university co-ed, her sister, a teenage bikini model, an amateur jazz trombonist studying to be a lawyer, the manager of a love hotel, a Chinese prostitute and other flotsam and jetsam of Tokyo after dark. The setting is undoubtedly familiar to anyone who has missed the last train and been stranded in Shibuya or Shinjuku. But when used by Murakami as a setting for his story, the mundane becomes eerie, unfamiliar — the Tokyo night won't look the same again.

As for Murakami's humanism, it is probably best voiced by his scruffy, awkward lawyer-to-be, when he tells the heroine his reason for taking law seriously. He explains to her how after watching trials, he went from feeling that a wall separated the accused from him and everyone else to feeling that all are trapped in the same web of conditions; the line between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen is not so clear as one would like to think. He writes: "What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle."

While I cannot say that After Dark is my favorite Murakami novel, it is among his best work, and a fine illustration of how Murakami has refined his craft.

Subterranean Japan blues

The big story, worldwide, out of Japan today was, of course, the assassination of Nagasaki Mayor Ito Itcho. (BBC; CNN; Yomiuri editorial)

The suspected assassin, Shiroo Tetsuya, a local Yakuza boss, seems to have had no other motive than to avenge a trivial wrong.

The coverage within Japan seems to hinge on the supposed threat to democracy posed by the assassination, occurring as it did just before Sunday's second round of local elections. The coverage outside of Japan seems to emphasize Japan's being a gun-free society, with the assassination "shocking" the docile Japanese.

I think the hysteria emanating from Japan's politicians and media outlets about the threat to democracy is way overblown. Japan is not about to enter the "dark valley" again.

What this incident does call attention to is that not far beneath the surface of Japan's seemingly ordered and stable society seethes a murky world of Yakuza, shady corrupt corporate dealings, and far-right nationalist groups and their politician allies, a theme that runs through many of Murakami Haruki's novels (and is stated very clearly in his non-fiction book on the Aum Shinrikyo subway attack, appropriately entitled Underground, which obviously refers to the subway but also to the idea of Japan's social pathologies lying just beneath the surface).

This thread can be found in Bruce Wallace's story on the assassination in the LA Times. (Hat tip: Shisaku)