cultural myths and comic book heroes

Cultural Myths and Comic Book HeroesRequiem by Gô Shizuko; Geraldine Harcourt; The Barren Zone by Yamasaki Toyoko; JamesArakiReview by: Phyllis I. LyonsThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr., 1987), pp. 77-84Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488894 .

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Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

REVIEWS

MODERN FICTION

Professor Lyon's review, below, inaugurates a column devoted to fiction in translation. -- Review Ed.

CULTURAL MYTHS AND COMIC BOOK HEROES

REQUIEM, by G6 Shizuko; translated by Geraldine Harcourt. Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha Inter- national, 1985. Pp. 122. $14.95; THE BARREN ZONE, by Yamasaki Toyoko; translated by James Araki. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985. Pp. vii + 383. $22.50.

Reviewed by Phyllis I. Lyons

Anyone who knows Japan knows that August is a month of national memorial. World War II ended more than forty years ago, but it is still a recent event in the public psyche. Shusen, the neutral term for "end of the war," is far less on lips than the emotional senso ni maketa toki, "when we lost the war." Every year, the soundtrucks drive around Tokyo more busily during August, flags fluttering, martial anthems blaring, reminding one and all of the "Northern Territories" which a certain segment of political opinion still considers to be held captive by an enemy with whom a peace treaty has yet to be concluded. The older generation laments with deeper than usual tones of disquiet that the young don't know what it was like and lack moral fiber.

Inevitably, through time, a body of myth has grown in the national consciousness to flesh out the memories of those who experienced that time and, they hope, to draw into re- sponse some of those too young to have known it. I use the term "myth" to refer to those true or near-true occurrences that have been so often-repeated that what matters anymore

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is not the event itself but rather the responses it arouses in the audience. Two recent translations bring these issues to the attention of English readers. Both books were originally written around a decade ago, and therefore decades after the event which they treat. One manages, despite its reliance on stock characters and the material of soap operas, to be a moving account of its dying protagonist's spiritual struggle against a sense of betrayal. The other trivializes a story of great suffering, although it does at the same time tell a grip- ping story. Both offer significant insight into contemporary Japanese national myths in which the Japanese are victims of World War II, and are therefore worth reading although neither is likely to become a classic.

G6 Shizuko's Requiem (Rekuiemu) received the Akutagawa Prize in 1973, and therefore, would seem to have good credentials for being considered of literary importance. Most of the prize judges felt it was in fact a flawed work (Bungei Shunju, 3/73), but all comment that the wartime echoes in it moved them. In other words, shared participa- tion in a cultural experience counted heavily in influencing literary judgment. Go was sixteen at the end of the war, like her protagonist. Also like Oizumi Setsuko, G6 had tuberculosis, although with treatment she recovered by her late twenties. The "requiem" is for the lost and unappeased souls of the dead; but it is just as clearly an attempt at closure for those like G6 herself who lived on, betrayed, to remember the losses.

I have nothing to apologize to His Imperial Highness for. I have done nothing to regret. Why have they surrendered? Weren't we supposed to fight to the last on our home ground? Weren't we going to give our hundred million lives in a fight without surrender? (p. 82)

The novel is obviously antiwar, as Setsuko gropes toward an inarticulate questioning of the value of everything she has sacrificed herself for, but the argument is murky and the author's message remains inconclusive. The novel ultimately does not know what to do with Setsuko as a perfection of morality, except to let her die of tuberculosis exacerbated by overwork, poor nutrition, guilt and terminal gullibility.

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The problem with art, as Aristotle warned us so many centuries ago, is that when it imitates reality too closely it introduces a new unreality of its own. Requiem is the possible made improbable. It tells of the deaths of many people, all of them related in varyingly capricious ways to Oizumi Setsuko and to each other. The plot must surely reflect the experience of many Japanese, perhaps even of the author herself. But on reflection the reader is impressed more at the cleverness with which their separate stories (or rather, their separate deaths, for we never know any characters except as heroic--or villainous--paper dolls) and the diverse layers of flashback are made to interlock than at the immensity of the waste of human potential. If G6 is working to create in us a sense of the neuraesthenia induced by unending catastrophe then the litany of loss achieves its effect.

Naomi and her mother were dead by then; they had died in April. In May it was her father, in June her mother; then Hajime's last postcard had come close behind. In July she'd been notified of Shoichi Wakui's death, and in August Jun Sawabe had died. (p. 19)

That just about takes care of the whole cast of significant characters, except for the evil super-patriot Akiyama sisters. And, of course, it is important for readers distanced by time to know that not all wartime losses were of boys in the field or nameless hordes in the Hiroshima blast or the Tokyo fire- bombing. These are ordinary folk, and the deaths are indivi- dual: Setsuko's mother, to an accidentally well-placed strafing dive by one of a pair of American P-51 pilots who, "grinning all over their faces . . . zeroed in on the ration line . . ."(p. 85); Jun Sawabe, shielding Setsuko's body in a factory raid and ending up, carotid artery severed by shrapnel, bleeding to death right under her futile fingers. Many readers will be moved by G6's requiem for them all; others, however, will often be distracted by the arbitrariness, not of the deaths, but of the characters themselves and the disasters that befall them.

These are all exiles from TV drama, types we recognize and may even weep with briefly as we watch each episode, and afterward chuckle in appreciation at the manipulative

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craftsmanship of their depiction. Naomi is the plucky young hoyden who sees things as they are and is not at all impressed by the propaganda although she feels inadequate for not being able to believe like Setsuko, whom she idolizes like a Takarazuka fan. The men are all (save for the truly shadowy throwaway figures like Setsuko's father) Japanese comic book heroes with various equivalents of manly furrowed brows, from Naomi's father who dies blind, toothless, and broken in prison because he would not convert politically, to Setsuko's brother Hajime who goes off to war, leaving his toy trains behind, because "I'm a simple fellow, I know. To lay down my life for my country, and His Majesty the Emperor; that says it all" (p. 9).

And Setsuko herself. She's the model student and drafted factory worker, not intellectual but a moral giant, willing to be educated by the book-reading Naomi (even if Naomi is only fourteen years old) but with a rectitude that does not come from books. She discovers only when it is too late that she may have failed a moral test of her own defin- ing, as she realizes that her fierceness may have caused her to abandon Naomi whose bravery is more egocentric and fragile. (There is, incidentally, one of those common but ir- ritating Japanese literary tricks used in narration of Naomi's education of Setsuko, deplored as well by the Akutagawa Prize judge Yasuoka Sh6tar6: running reference to another novel, in this case Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibault, a minutely detailed account of loss of faith. Notice: loss of faith. The vivid death of M. Thibault to uremic poisoning following kidney failure--the only memorable part of the novel, ac- cording to one of my French literature colleagues--may be the inspiration for one of the truly fine passages in Requiem: a beautiful, lyrical meditation on the invasion of tuberculosis bacilli into the tissues of the lungs [p. 119].)

There may indeed have been people who felt that way and acted that way, people who believed and gave of themselves to the last degree, civilians as well as soldiers. And disillusionment is painful for all that it may make a new "healthier" commitment possible. Yet this novel is about thirty years too late for its simple characterizations not to seem simplistic, and we end up with fairy tale, not moral challenge. However, despite my inability to suspend disbelief

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for the above reasons, I found myself at times pulled into the story. One moment that lasts as the novel fades is the moan from the otherwise inarticulate Masako Hayashi as she is re- minded of her baby sisters while on the long march back to Yokohama with Setsuko and her other factory mates following the massive May 29, 1945 bombing (p. 62). And anyone who has ever heard the old recording of an interview with the Hiroshima Maidens (where one of them describes herself standing in the river with her other burned classmates, all of them screaming, Okasan, tasukete kure! Tasukete kure!, and the interpreter breaks down, unable to go on translating) will superimpose the emotion of those remembered voices onto an episode from Requiem.

Crying "Mother!" the girl in front darted from the lines and hurled herself at one of the figures by the road who were gazing urgently in their direction. "Mother! Mother!" she cried, while the figure simply held her tight and nodded. When the line had passed, though, she bowed her head deeply toward the rows of backs. (p. 64)

Requiem is an important book, to be read as an example of the ambivalence that still invades so much of Japanese public as well as private mythogenic thinking about history and national life and purpose.

From quite a different perspective is the myth world of The Barren Zone to be observed. Yamasaki Toyoko (James Araki, the translator, must have it on good authority that she pronounces it "-saki" instead of the "-zaki" found in the three current literary biographical dictionaries and the book-end information in the original four-volume Fumo chitai [Shin- ch6sha, 1976-78]) is a writer with a charmed literary life. She has survived multiple accusations of plagiarism and goes on cheerfully to write a continuing stream of blockbusters and to get them turned into TV mini-series. Yamasaki is a great storyteller; she seems to have a genius for zeroing in on important topics (Shiroi kyoto [The Great White Tower, 1963-65] is an expose of the medical profession) and then muddying the waters so that they turn into nothing more than a "good read." But who are we to sniff at a good popular novel?

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I speak thus flippantly about The Barren Zone out of a probably unprofessional sense of indignation that the novel betrays its premise and its promise. It is no business of a critic to talk about what a novel "should" be; but somehow to turn into an entertainment a story of "the spiritual agony of the tens of thousands of unfortunate Japanese" who get sucked into the maw of Stalin's Siberian slave labor camps at the end of World War II, to use "the vehicle of fiction to pre- sent truths that historians have been unwilling to verify and relate" (p. vii) as a plot trick so as to add complexity to quite another and far more lightweight story, verges on insensi- tivity, if nothing else. Yamasaki appends a 22-name list of "Survivors of Siberian Prisons Who Were Interviewed;" one of those listed survivors, Imai Genji (a typographical error in the translation has his name "Ganji"), was so furious at Yama- saki's appropriation (so he claimed) of his Shiberiya no uta (Song of Siberia), that he wrote a 255-page line-and-verse account of what he called her "plagiarism" (Yamazaki Toyoko no "toyo" jiken, San'itsu Shob6, 1979). This could have been Japan's entry into the distinguished company of Russian novels celebrating the triumph of the human spirit against enormous, brutalizing odds in the gulag--and instead it re- veals itself as manipulative trash, entertaining, to be sure, as a James Clavell novel is entertaining, but an insult to the named and nameless victims whose stories Yamasaki uses.

For the fact is that this novel is really about Big Busi- ness. It pretends to be an expose of the dirty tricks of the trading company world; but it is actually a celebration of its excitement, its adventure, its sexiness. For what is more sexy than power? If the novel didn't take itself seriously, it would be a pretty good ironic commentary. As it is, it still is a pretty good airport-and-supermarket-stand novel, of a totally fami- liar sort. Consider the opening passage:

Daimon Ichizo, president of Kinki Trading Compa- ny, began each working day in his office by looking out at Osaka castle, below which the Dojima River flowed sash-like and eternal through the sprawling city. . . Once the fortress of the mightiest of combata- tive feudal lords, the citadel called up visions of war in

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Daimon and fired the aggressiveness that sustained him in the world of business.

. .. Through gold-rimmed glasses Daimon glanced with satisfaction at the Audemars Piquet watch on his thick wrist. At that hour night covered the whole western hemisphere. But the other half of the world was astir, and his thoughts quickened as he imagined his three hundred agents carrying on Kinki's business in all those foreign cities.

Barrel-chested, five feet six inches tall and weigh- ing one hundred and sixty-five pounds, Daimon showed the vigor of a man much younger than his fifty-six years. His smooth face still glowed from contact with the brisk December wind outside. (p. 1)

While Araki has done some rearranging, editing and height- ening, Yamasaki has provided all those things that Japanese novels traditionally don't: who, what, where, even what he looks like. There is none of that obliqueness or allusiveness that fascinates or irritates Western readers of serious Japa- nese fiction. This is not a haiku novel.

The Barren Zone is a translation of only the first (1945-1956) portion of a four-part novel that spans Japan's entire postwar period until the early 1970s. The novel does not shy away from the ugliness in its businessman heroes; in fact, it rather glories in their vulgarity, for those are people making it in the "real world." It does speak of personal costs exacted in this world, but only because they sap a businessman's creative energies: frustrated, lonely wives of New York-based expatriate trading company executives, their neurotic children not receiving adequate education in Amer- ican schools (pp. 344-49). And not all employees are equally fired up, successful or happy; Hanawa Shiro is positively blasted (pp. 354-57) and Kaneko loses disastrously in what I must confess was a heart-pounding thrilling battle between rivals to corner the cotton yarn market (yes, Yamasaki can make minute-by-minute stock market quotations exciting! See p. 232 on, with the climax at pp. 309-18).

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Yamasaki is no piker when it comes to research (it may in fact be her enthusiasm for it that gets her into trouble). But despite all the research and seriousness of the underly- ing Siberia theme--surely a metaphor for the unhealed scars of the war--The Barren Zone fails to be more than a comic book adventure story about the seduction of innocence by postwar capitalism: Iki, a military officer of high principle kept for eleven years by the Soviets, has been recruited upon his repatriation by Daimon because his old-boy army-day friends are valuable resources as the Defense Agency pre- pares to choose a jet from among candidates backed by rival trading companies. This is a post-Lockheed novel, and the references are right up front. All that Siberia stuff is, in the end, just a trick to get Iki on stage in interesting costume, although it feeds right into the rhetoric of the nationalistic soundtruck crews one sees on the streets of Tokyo.

Siberia, "the barren zone," runs through all four novels. The saga ends in 1972, with Iki returning there after sixteen years to perform a requiem for his comrades whose bones lie eternally in its frozen soil. Both Requiem and the complete Fumo chitai end with voices from beyond the world of the protagonists. The dying Setsuko hears incomprehen- sible foreign words: the Occupation has arrived at her bomb shelter. Iki, at the end of Volume 4, hears the words of the late Col. Tanikawa: "Live on and be a witness to our history" (p. 331).

Both of these novels play on cultural heartstrings tuned to the myths of a people whose war experience still haunts them, and are therefore important for providing insight on the sources of some of Japan's political stances. In a sense, they are the two sides of a national debate: Requiem says there must never be another war, The Barren Zone shows the determination to make up for the defeat in the last one. G6 speaks sadly of the losers; Yamasaki, of the survivors, triumphant in business if not on the battlefield.

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