Lost In Translation

Love In A Fallen City

Eileen Chan is best known for the naughty film version of her novel Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee. However, I was intrigued by what I had read about her books before that production saw the light of day.  But I didn’t get around to reading her short story collection, Love In A Fallen City, until I had already seen the infamous film version. Nonetheless, I found this collection of stories taking place in Hong Kong during the war or after the war very intriguing and exotic.  These were fatalistic tales of sophisticated women and desperate women bound by family, tradition, and society looking for an escape through education or a love match. On one side there’s claustrophobic family relations and power plays about arranged marriages and which matches will benefit the family most.  Then on the other side there’s opium addicts, illicit love affairs, cocktail parties, and bomb raids. It was a really intriguing mix of invented reality for me to lose myself in.

Penguin Classics: Schopenhauer-Essays and Aphrorisms

I checked out Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms, because I am a fan of aphorisms, which are like compact little essays.  I am guessing that Schopenhauer’s disciple Nietzsche acquired this habit from his master.  Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of humanity seemed to sit well with me, for some reason, as I was reading it a few weeks back. There’s an excellent introduction by R.J. Hollingdale that gives insight into the life of Schopenhauer and how his character and personality affected his thinking. Some of this is quite dated, such as his shockingly misogynist mediation on women.  Here’s an example of one of his more thought provoking aphorisms:

Recompense, if recompense is possible can cure the injury done: but that bitter addition, the feeling ‘and that is what I have to put up with from you’ which often hurts more than the injury itself, can be neutralized only by revenge.

Shutting Out The Sun

Shutting Out The Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, by Michael Zielenziger, is a fascinating look at contemporary societal problems in Japan.  The central metaphor of the book is the social problem known as “hikikomori.” Hikikomori is a condition where, basically young men, few women have this condition, withdraw from the world and society by shutting themselves in their rooms and refusing to interact with their families and society. As far as it can be established, this condition only exists in Japan.  I guess anywhere else the parents would knock down the door and tell to get a job or get out; apparently many of the men who suffer from this condition had been bullied at school.  There is no official recognition of this condition and few treatment centers with no government funding. 

I was first inspired to read this book when a friend of mine who was a long time resident of Japan said this book and a recent work related experience changed his perception of Japanese society. My friend is an executive recruiter (headhunter), it has been his belief that people are people and an understanding can always be made.  But one of his placements, a western woman, was fired for being too opinionated. In his words, “fired for trying to make the company better.”  So when he met a young Japanese applicant that had studied in America and said that she could maneuver both cultures due to her experience, he started to think there might be something to that.

Throughout the book he gives other well-supported examples of other societal problems plaguing modern Japanese society. For example, he looks at the phenomena of suicide which continues to rise yearly with over 30, 000 suicides a year.  Then there are the people’s obsessions with goods and consumer society where 94% of women in their 20s have at least one Luis Vuitton product. There are significant problems within the family unit as where in a disproportionate number couples are living in separate bedrooms. According to one source in the book, one in three custom homes is built with separate bedrooms for the husband and wife.

Zielenziger’s discussion of the underlying social reasons for these problems is particularly interesting to me as he discusses concepts like that of the tradition of dependence and social obligations related to communal rice production. Rice cultivation required broad cooperation and meant that achieving consensus and making sure agreements were followed had been matters of life and death.  This collectivist concept survives today and in studies between Japanese and Americans-Americans try to “influence” others to change behavior, while Japanese are more likely to change their behavior.

He also discusses how the collectivist mind set undermines trust of strangers and “social capital.”  Trust is an essential to make society efficient, productive, and responsive to new concepts. A Japanese social psychologist suggests that Japanese collectivist society undermines trust and prevents social capital from accumulating. They have trouble looking outside their the scope of their predefined relationships.

I also found his comparison and contrast of contemporary Korea with Japan quite fascinating, since I have spent some time there as well. Korean culture is similar to Japan, but distinct nonetheless. One observation the author makes in this section is that basic civil liberties are guaranteed, but real choice is absent.  Another observation states that democracy was imposed on Japan from the outside and warped by the one party rule and other factors. The results of this kind of democracy results in a system where dissent disturbs group harmony and deviance from the mainstream can jeopardize one’s live hood.

All in all, Zielenziger’s book is painstakingly research and supported with any number of facts, statistics, and authoritative opinions form people that matter.  He has produced a balanced and though provoking book about contemporary society, which seems to be ignoring some of its greatest social problems.

Gore Vidal Redux

Gore Vidal has another collections of essays out, which show that he still has a exquisite taste and a fine eye for argument and detail. Here's an excerpt from the review by Louis Bayard at Salon:

Vidal's essays, by contrast, have all the strengths of his novels with this additional grace: They don't have to make a show of inhabiting other minds. And so the qualities of the originating mind -- wit, phrasemaking, autodidacticism, a talent to inflame -- stand out all the more starkly.

For proof, we may call up "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal," assembled by Jay Parini, the author's literary executor (more whiffs of the posthumous). That word "selected," of course, implies a certain amount of cherry-picking. Juvenilia, senilia, outmoded usages, casual tribalisms have all presumably been cast away. Or have they? To Parini's credit, more than enough remains to show why and how Vidal gets under people's skin.

There is enough, too, to show that Vidal was, in some respects, well ahead of his time. His defense of homosexuality as "a matter of taste" (in the midst of the '60s), his calls for limits on executive power, his attack on "the National Security State" ... these still walk the razor's edge of topicality. Mere weeks after the Iraq war was joined, Vidal was calling attention to the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Some 15 years before Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great," Vidal was declaring that monotheism was "the great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture."

Dangerous Liaisons

I originally picked up Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos De Laclos because I had enjoyed the film version based on the play by Christopher Hampton starring Glenn Close and john Malcovic. Then earlier this year I read Milan Kundera’s book of essays, The Curtain, in which he praised the novel, so I felt it was time to read it.  It was a fascinating novel written as a series of letters, which was an effective way of letting the story unfold. De Laclos was masterly in subtly reveal the characters intentions and motivations through the letters, but at times it was a bit of drudgery to get through all of the subterfuge as well. But also challenging, in that you had to remember who the people were that were being addressed and remember what they had written to other people previously.  I plan to re-watch the film soon and note the differences between the respective works. 

Chinau Achebe

There's a tribute to Chinau Achebe and his great novel, Things Fall Apart, in the New Yorker.  I've read also a book of his essays, Hopes and Impediments, as well and find him to be an intriguing critic as well as an accomplished novelist. Here's an excerpt:

The myth holds another lesson as well—one that has been fundamental to the career of Achebe, who has been called “the patriarch of the African novel.” There is danger in relying on someone else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated accurately only if you speak with your own voice. With his masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart,” one of the first works of fiction to present African village life from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country’s history from generations of colonial writers. Published fifty years ago—a new edition has just appeared, from Anchor ($10.95)—it has been translated into fifty languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

Penguin Classics: All My Sons

All My Sons by Arthur Miller is another volume form the Penguin Classics library.  I really was impressed by his seminal plays Death of A Salesman and The Crucible, but I haven’t read anything else by him, so I decided to check this out.  It is a sort of classic family tragedy that Miller makes into a sort of classic American tragedy.  It has all the elements: lies, subterfuge, hubris, delusions and denial.  A family friend Herbert Dever takes the fall for Joe Keller when parts from their machine shop prove to be defective causing the death of many men. Keller escapes the punishment and becomes a wealthy man.  Several of these themes would be further developed in Death of a Salesman: fathers and sons, business ethics and personal morality. The question at the center of this play is what is acceptable to do in business for the sake of family that is engaging in morally suspect business, for example designing missiles designed to kill people for MacDonald Douglass.  This seems to be one issue that doesn’t seem ambiguous to me; there are plenty of things one can do to pay the bills that don’t compromise one's morally.

Penguin Classics: Common Sense

I recently learned that Meiji University has the English language Penguin Classics collection in their library for lending. So I will supplement some classic literature to my reading diet. At first I chose some slimmer volumes like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I’ve been wanting to read something by this American radical for sometime and given his connection with America’s independence and the recent viewing of John Adams made it seem like the right time to visit it. There’s a comprehensive introduction by Isaac Kramnick that provides a lot of useful information and background details about Paine and the context from which this writing was produced. His radical sense of equality and anti-hereditary ideas seemed to have influenced the do-it-yourself frontier spirit or vice versa. I find it interesting to learn that John Adams was truly a conservative at heart and was distrustful of Paine. He is a man of reason, a secular humanist who felt that science and reason ought to reign, and therefore eminently admirable in my mind.

Palestine

I recently read the graphic comic novel Palestine by Joe Sacco. Sacco goes to Israel (the West Bank and the Gaza strip circa 1992) to find inspiration for a comic series based on his interviews of Palestinians in order to get the other side of the Israeli-Palestine problem. He adds his personal commentary and shows himself warts in all, he has little trouble accepting the hospitality of refugees who invite him into their home and feed him. But I feel as though he loses part of his argument since he doesn’t present enough context to what is a very complex question. Obviously, killing and jailing kids for throwing rocks, forcibly bulldozing homes, harassment, torture, and intimidation are wrong and unjustifiable. But what led to those policies? For example, are we to assume every person that he interviews that says that he ahs been to jail is innocent? Because there are Palestine revenge killings against collaborators, suicide bombings, and terrorism. Both sides have blood on their hands. In fact, he sort of addresses this issue when he befriends two Israeli architects on vacation in Jerusalem late in the book, but acknowledges it would take another book to present the Israeli side of things. But Sacco does have a point about the Palestinian cause being underrepresented in the American media, since the government is so pro-Israeli. I have an Aussie friend who has adopted the Palestinian situation as his pet clause, which is somewhat incomprehensible since he is of Irish descent and there seem to plenty of more clear cut cause to rally around. I think it has something to do with anti-American government feelings that often crop up with certain Brits, Aussies, and so forth. Especially given that they have done the same things to the aborigines but somehow that doesn’t compute with my friend. Anyway, a fascinating personal look at complicated situation.

Persepolis 2: The Story Of A Return

I recently finished reading the follow-up to Persepolis with Persepolis 2: The Story Of A Return by Marjane Satrapi. The film covered both books and beyond. But I enjoyed revisiting the story of Satrapi returning home and trying to find out who she is she is. She is torn by her culture, her intellect, and her emotions. It is a story that shows warts and all. It also shows how difficult it must have been to live in such a repressive culture. It is inconceivable to me to put up with the strict Islamic laws and lack of personal freedom. I guess we take a lot for granted. Satrapi had to learn a lot of her life lessons the hard way-it must also be difficult to be so head strong and always have to do things your own way despite the consequences.