Category: Japan

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First blood to Rampo

 

© Tuttle

 

And another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Japanese writer Hirai Taro, who lived from 1894 to 1965, was such a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s doyen of macabre and mysterious fiction, that he used the penname ‘Edogawa Rampo’.  English-language names sound somewhat stretched and distorted when converted to the syllable-systems of Japanese – my own name is pronounced ‘Ee-an Sumisu’ – and Taro’s penname was basically a Japan-ised version of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’.  Say ‘Edogawa Rampo’ quickly a few times and you’ll find yourself reciting the name of Baltimore’s greatest man of letters.

 

Accordingly, during his literary career, Rampo wrote in similar genres to Poe.  He didn’t merely pen horror stories.  Poe’s name is now so synonymous in the West with tales of terror like The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) and so on that it’s often forgotten how innovative he was working in other genres.  In particular, he helped create the detective story with his trilogy of stories about crime investigator C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Maire Roget (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).  And it was largely in detective and crime fiction that Rampo made his name.  He even helped to found the Japanese Mystery Writers’ Club.

 

Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956) is an English-language collection of nine of his best short stories.  Not only does it take its name from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, described by Wikipedia as ‘a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe’, but it combines stories from those two genres Poe helped to popularise in the early 19th century, the horror and the detective / mystery ones.  It has to be said the two styles mesh together nicely in this collection.  There’s a weirdness in Rampo’s detective fiction that ensures it doesn’t feel that different, tonally, from his morbid horror stories.

 

Among the crime stories, you get villains attempting to commit the perfect murder with schemes that involve living a double life as an invented character (The Cliff), impersonating someone who looks exactly like them (The Twins) and the fear of sleepwalkers that they might do something ghastly whilst moving in a trance-like state (Two Crippled Men).  All three have a last-minute twist wherein the main characters get their come-uppance from someone who’s even smarter than they are, or by a small but fatal act of negligence – the sort of minor blunder that would have Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo swooping down like a hawk.  Talking of Falk’s beloved shabby-but-canny TV detective, The Psychological Test is a very Columbo-esque tale of how a pair of investigators use an ingenious method to get a suspect in a murder case to incriminate himself.

 

Meanwhile, The Red Chamber takes a trope popular in 19th and early 20th century English fiction, that of a comfortable, wooden-panelled gentlemen’s club where the tweedy members congregate after dark and, with the lights turned down, proceed to tell each other scary stories.  In Rampo’s gentlemen’s club, however, things get shaken up when the evening’s storyteller, a newcomer, boasts about being responsible for “the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected’ and proceeds to explain how he did it and got away with it.  Several harrowing twists later, it’s no surprise that the story’s narrator, a long-term member of the club, concludes: “…we unanimously agreed to disband.”

 

The other four stories in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination are macabre ones.  They possess the same oddness and intensity of his crime stories, but cranked up to higher levels.  The Hell of Mirrors is about a man who becomes obsessed with optics, with ‘anything capable of reflecting an image… magic lanterns, telescopes, magnifying glasses, kaleidoscopes, prisms and the like’ and with mirrors: ‘concave, convex, corrugated, prismatic.’  Typically with Rampo’s fiction, this obsession spills over into another obsession, a sexual one.  The protagonist is soon using telescopes to pry through the windows of his female neighbours and using periscopes to ‘get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants.’  The story reaches its climax when he devises a mirrored, optical device so depraved it ultimately induces madness.

 

The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, on the other hand, is the one Rampo story in this collection that veers off into the supernatural.  It reminded me very slightly of the M.R. James story The Mezzotint, though the picture in that story was a spookily lifelike one that recorded a horrific event.  In Rampo’s story, a similarly lifelike picture serves as a testimony to a sad, doomed and one-sided romance.

 

That leaves two stories, The Human Chair and The Caterpillar, which I think are masterpieces.  The Human Chair concerns an ugly and reclusive craftsman who makes a living fashioning luxurious chairs, whilst getting a perverse kick out of imagining ‘the types of people who would eventually curl up’ in them.  Eventually, driven insane by his desire to get intimate with the folk who’ll acquire and use his chairs, he designs a bulky one containing a secret, human-sized cavity, inside which he hides himself.  The chair and its maker end up in a hotel lobby, where the latter gets his jollies from feeling the bodies of the guests rest on top of him.  No one “suspected even for a fleeting moment that the soft ‘cushion’ on which they were sitting was actually human flesh with blood circulating in its veins – confined in a strange world of darkness.”

 

The story is told in the form of a confession, sent as a letter to a famous lady novelist.  While she reads it, she begins to wonder about the suspiciously large and comfy chair she’s seated in, which has found its way to her study after being in a hotel.  There comes a final twist that nullifies what’s happened before – or perhaps doesn’t.

 

The Caterpillar, written in 1929, is an early, literary example of ‘body horror’.  The central character is an unfortunate young army officer so maimed and mutilated in battle that he comes home resembling the larval-form insect of the title.  This puts understandable strain on the officer’s wife, upon whom, totally helpless, he depends for care and attention.  In fact, The Caterpillar is more about the wife than the husband, with the hideous situation gradually pushing her into the realms of madness – of sadistic madness, because she starts taking her woes out on her husband, who can’t do anything to defend himself.  The story works both as a feminist tract, showing the plight of women whom society expects to be wholly devoted and subservient to their husbands, and as a horror story exploiting male fears of emasculation.  It’s a grim and powerful read, packing as much of a punch as it did when it first appeared, nearly a century ago.

 

I think the original Edgar Allan Poe would approve of Rampo’s tales.  They’re deliciously dark and twisted, and frequently ingenious, and sometimes funny too – a lot of the humour derives from how his villains, when telling their stories, like to revel in their own cleverness and degeneracy.  It’s just a pity that Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the only English-language collection by Rampo I’ve come across.  I’d really like to read more of his stuff.  Unlike a certain character played by Sylvester Stallone, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Rampo 2, Rampo 3, Rampo 4 and Rampo 5.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Mainichi Graphic

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Nostalgic wallows 2: youth hotels

 

From pixabay.com / © Hans

 

I’ve been meaning to write about youth hostels since last July.  That was when the journalist John Harris penned an article for the Guardian that was both a tribute to and a lamentation about them.  Harris reported: “The Youth Hostel Association of England and Wales (YHA) has announced the sell-off of 20 of its 150 hostels, and identified a further 30 for possible uploading over the next three years – which, in total, would mean the loss of a third of its properties.  Its spokespeople blame ‘pandemic shutdowns, the cost-of-living crisis and steep inflation.’”  He also observed: “Insiders… talk about how Brexit has hugely reduced the number of school trips to the UK from Europe, thereby hitting a crucial part of the YHA’s revenue.”

 

For a long time, I was a member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), or Hostelling Scotland as it is now, and I assume the situation north of the border is bleak too.  The youth hostel in Melrose, the one closest to my home address in the Scottish Borders, ceased trading some years ago.  Indeed, as far as I know, the Borders region has only one SYHA hostel these days, in Kirk Yetholm.  It’s insane when you consider how the Borders is choc-a-bloc with beautiful countryside and offers great opportunities for walking, hiking and cycling.  It should have half-a-dozen such hostels offering holiday accommodation for outdoor enthusiasts who are on a budget.

 

The first youth hotel association I was a member of, though, was the Northern Irish one.  I joined it during the summer of 1982, when I was 16 and temporarily employed on an uncle’s farm in County Tyrone.  I was making plans to go to the French-speaking part of Switzerland that October and work as a grape-picker, and then travel around Europe, and as I didn’t have much money to finance this it made sense to get a youth-hostel membership card that’d allow me to use any cheap European hostel I came across.  The autumn arrived, I headed abroad and I ended up staying in a slew of hostels.  These included ones in Lausanne, Fribourg, Grindelwald, Lucerne and Zurich in Switzerland, in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, in Munich, Ulm, Freiburg and Bonn in Germany, in Brussels in Belgium and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

 

To my young, innocent mind, it seemed marvellous that every city and decent-sized town in Switzerland, Liechtenstein – well, Vaduz was the only town in Liechtenstein – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands should have an establishment where you could get basic but adequate accommodation for a price that was as cheap as the proverbial chips.

 

From those 1982 wanderings, the Grindelwald youth hostel remains most vivid in my memory.  I arrived in the Alpine town one evening when everything was shrouded in fog as well as in darkness and I had no idea what my surroundings looked like.  The next morning, I woke in a hostel dormitory, put on some clothes and emerged onto a balcony.  The hostel was sited high on one side of a valley and across from it, confronting me, was the vast craggy awesomeness of the Eiger.  Wow!

 

From pixabay.com / © Goodlynx

 

There were downsides, of course.  At the time, many of those hostels were strictly run – especially the Swiss ones. They had ten o’clock curfews and the wardens showed their guests as much humanity as Victorian schoolmasters showed their pupils in Charles Dickens’ novels.  In one hostel, I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the inside of a toilet door.  “The warden,” it said bluntly, “is a fascist.”

 

I also met a wide range of humanity in those places.  In the common rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and dormitories, I had conversations with philosophers, poets, communists, anarchists, rabid Irish nationalists, belligerent English football hooligans, drunkards, thieves – a sweater was swiped from my rucksack in Brussels – and more.  I met an old Australian guy who talked about the months he’d spent roaming the Sahara Desert and hanging out with the Tuareg.  I met an American woman who couldn’t understand a single word I uttered – I ’d say something in my hybrid Northern Irish / Scottish accent and, panic-stricken, she’d look to her travelling companion for a translation.  In Rotterdam, on my way from the station to the youth hostel, a guy pulled a knife on me and tried to rob me, and then at the hostel I was consoled by a devout Dutch Christian.  After telling him about my misadventure, he exclaimed, “Thank God for saving your life!”

 

The following summer, I worked in Switzerland again, this time on a farm, and I did a little more hostelling – in the Swiss cities of Zug and Berne and in the French coastal town of Boulogne, from which I caught a ferry back to the UK.  And soon afterwards, I spent a couple of weeks tramping around England’s Lake District and stayed in several youth hostels there: Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Borrowdale.

 

It wasn’t until 1988, when I was in my early twenties, that I was reacquainted with the youth hostelling world. This was shortly after I’d graduated from college in Aberdeen. Needing employment for the summer, I was taken on as a seasonal warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel on Queen’s Road.  I worked under the supervision of the hostel’s head warden, the relaxed and affable Bill Dick, and alongside fellow wardens Andrew Gordon and Paul Hunter.  It was a pleasant summer on a personal level – even my memories of wrestling a lawnmower over the building’s extensive and unruly back garden seem idyllic now.  That said, it was a traumatic one for Aberdeen generally because, on the night of July 6th-7th, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in the sea 120 miles north-east of the city, resulting in 167 deaths.  In fact, some of the guys staying in the hostel were looking for employment in the local oil industry.  Before they did anything else, they had to complete a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) course at the city’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology (now Robert Gordon University) and they’d tell me about how they were strapped inside a mock-up of a helicopter fuselage and then dunked in a giant tank of water.

 

Bill Dick was a laidback boss but one thing seriously worried him.  That was the thought of a fire.  The premises contained cheap plastic furniture that might give off toxic fumes if it burned and, also, the external fire escapes were showing signs of wear and tear.  He’d raised these issues with the SYHA but so far nothing had been done about them, presumably due to a lack of funds.  Thus, Andrew, Paul and I had the procedures to follow in the event of a fire, and the locations of the fire extinguishers and fire alarms, drummed into our heads.

 

From wikimedia.org / © AlasdairW

 

One evening, just after eleven, I was completing a shift at the front desk.  The hostellers all seemed to be in bed and Bill and the other staff had gone out for a drink, save for Nicky, the night-porter, who was upstairs, and Mary, the cook, who was finishing up in the kitchen.  I was wrestling with the usual end-of-day headache of counting up the till – not an easy job because youth hostels in those days (and maybe still now) used elaborate systems of discounts and vouchers that meant guests were often paying less than the official prices.  Then an agonisingly loud, shrill noise pierced through the building – the fire alarm.

 

I grabbed the phone and dialled 999.  Yelling above the noise, I gave the emergency-services operator our address.  By this time, guests were shambling down the stairs, into the front lobby, wearing pyjamas, dressing gowns and other nighttime attire.  “Get outside,” I ordered, even pushing a couple of them towards the door, “get outside!”  Mary appeared from the kitchen – Nicky, it transpired later, was detained because he’d been in the middle of using the loo when the alarm went off – and we headed into the building’s interior in search of the fire.  We didn’t find it.  We did, however, find a fire alarm with its protective glass broken.  Some wanker, who’d probably been in the pub all evening, had smashed it and pressed the activation button inside for a laugh.  Meanwhile, the windows at the front of the hostel brimmed with dazzling white light, as if the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had just landed in the front yard.  It was actually the headlights of a couple of engines arriving from Aberdeen Fire Station.

 

Later, after I’d filled in forms confirming the fire had been a false alarm and a number of disgruntled Aberdonian firefighters had returned to their vehicles, Mary remarked, “My hands are still shaking.”  I realised mine were too.  I felt pretty stupid about summoning all those firemen for nothing, but when Bill returned and heard what’d happened, he assured me I’d done the right thing.

 

I’m sure that later, as health-and-safety regulations became more stringent, the SYHA sorted out the hostel’s furniture and fire escapes.  However, that’s academic now, as the the building was put up for sale in 2022 and I assume Aberdeen, like so many other places, is now youth-hostel-less.

 

During the 1990s I lived in Japan and in 1995 I got a temporary job as a researcher for the Fodor’s Guidebook company.  My assignment was to update and rewrite two chapters in the previous edition of their Japanese guide, about Hokkaido and Tohoku, for a new edition.  As Hokkaido and Tohoku constitute the northern third of the Japanese landmass, this involved a lot of travelling around.  To cut costs, I stayed in several youth hostels – in the cities of Hakodate, Aomori, Hirosaki and Akita, and by Lake Tazawa, which is up in the mountains to the east of Akita City and is Japan’s deepest lake.  The hostels were pretty basic but, crucially, they were warm – I was carrying out this job in March, when northern Japan was still in the grip of winter and buried in snowdrifts.

 

From pixabay.com / © hydroxyquinol

 

My visit to the Lake Tazawa youth hostel was a spooky experience.  I’d phoned earlier in the day from Akita and booked a bed there – a friendly-sounding lady had answered and confirmed the booking – but it was dark when I arrived on the train.  To get to the hostel, I had to walk along a silent, lonely road that had snow banked high along its sides.  Indeed, the wind had sculpted the tops of those snowbanks into weird, twisted shapes that in the glow from the sporadic streetlights, and the attendant shadows, looked like props from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).  Finally, I reached the hostel, entered it… and found it totally deserted.  Its lights were on, but however much I wandered around its interior, and however loudly I shouted, I couldn’t locate another soul.

 

Yet I had spoken to a real human being on the phone… hadn’t I?  By this time, with the wind moaning outside and flinging shards of snow against the hostel’s walls and roof, I’d stopped thinking about Alien and started thinking about the traditional Japanese ghost stories famously transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn.  Maybe I was a character in one of those ghost stories now.  Maybe one also involving the yuki–onna…

 

But after staying there for a bewildering half-hour, I ventured outside again – and discovered a second building close by, one I hadn’t noticed earlier.  Inside it, I found the youth hostel staff, including the woman I’d spoken to earlier.  What I’d entered first of all had been an annex building of the hostel.  I hadn’t been ensnared in a wintry Japanese ghost story after all.

 

After Japan, I lived in East Anglia – one of the loveliest parts of England – on three occasions.  These were for a couple of months in Norwich in 1998, while I was doing a course to get a teaching diploma; for half-a-year working in County Suffolk in 2002; and in Norwich again from 2008 to 2009 while I was doing a Master’s Degree at the University of East Anglia.

 

When I first turned up in Norwich in 1998, I checked into the town’s youth hostel assuming I would then find normal accommodation in a flat or bedsit for the duration of my diploma course.  However, I soon decided that, because it was off-season, I might as well just stay in the hostel, attend the course and do its homework assignments in the usually-quiet common room.  Elsewhere in East Anglia, I have fond memories of staying at the youth hostel in the Suffolk village of Snape and, from there, exploring the tidal estuary of the River Alde; and using the hostel in the north Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea as my base while I went walking in the local salt marshes.  Sadly, all three of those hostels, Norwich, Snape and Wells-next-the-Sea, appear to be defunct in 2024.

 

Also, from 2002 to 2005, I worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  My family didn’t live that far away from Newcastle, being on the other side of the English / Scottish border, and by that time I’d become an ardent cyclist.  Thus, several times, I cycled north from Newcastle to visit my folks.  The journey took the most of two days by bike and I’d break the journey by staying in youth hostels along the way – either in the midge-infested village of Byrness just south of the border in England, or in Kirk Yetholm just north of it in Scotland.  The Byrness Hostel – yes, you guessed it – has given up the ghost since then too.

 

© YHA Alston

 

I also cycled westwards from Newcastle, visited the Lake District again and stayed in some of the youth hostels I’d been in two decades earlier.  While returning to Newcastle I had another eerie hostel-related experience.  Again, I planned to break the journey, this time spending a night in the hostel in Alston, which is said to be the highest market town in England.  To get there, I cycled through Penrith and, afterwards, had a gruelling time getting my bicycle up the mercilessly steep A686 road to Hartside Pass.  It was evening-time when I finally reached the pass and by then I felt about 200 years old.  But, unexpectedly, the road descended gently for the next few miles. I coasted along it, barely pedalling, gradually getting my strength back.  The ride was also discombobulating, though, because the light was fading and everything around me was shrouded in mist.  Finally, I scooted into Alston.  The town had a dream-like quality – almost phantasmagorical as it materialised out of the dusk and mist in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

 

Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the Alston Youth Hostel and – hurrah! – it’s still on the go.

 

After that, I stayed in youth hostels only a few times more, in Edinburgh and London when I had a plane or train to catch early the next morning and didn’t feel like splashing out on a hotel-room.  In the last decade I haven’t youth-hostelled at all.  Nowadays, I’m able to afford less spartan accommodation and, as I’m old, cranky and ‘high maintenance’, I doubt if a youth-hostel bunkbed would meet my expectations for comfort.  Still, though they were called ‘youth’ hostels, I was frequenting them into my forties, long after my youth had ended.  I certainly got plenty of mileage out of them.

 

Now, as John Harris observes, they appear to be heading for extinction, in Britain at least.  Yes, I know, modern phenomena like Airbnb have vastly widened people’s options when they search for and choose accommodation.  But that’s only if people have money.  If you’re to believe the figures, some 12 million people in Britain – 18% of the population – are living in absolute poverty, including 3.6 million children.  I assume the majority of them live in the cities.  I doubt if the existence of Airbnb and the like enables them to travel far from home and see much of the countryside.  Now more than ever, young folk need the humble youth hostel as somewhere to provide a warm berth and a roof over their heads while they wander, and explore, and broaden their horizons – cheaply.

 

And yet, though they’re so needed, youth hostels are being allowed to die out.  That’s another indictment of Britain in 2024, a country where the powers-that-be know the cost of everything but the value of absolutely nothing.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabrinayrafa

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A mish-mash from Mish

 

© Penguin Books

 

Anyone familiar with my wokey, lefty, liberal politics might be surprised to hear that I’m an admirer of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima.  Indeed, I’d probably include his Sea of Fertility tetralogy – or at least, its first two entries, Spring Snow and Runaway Horses (both 1969) – among my top two-dozen novels of all time.

 

Yes, that’s Yukio Mishima, the ultra-right-wing Japanese nationalist who rejected democracy, formed his own militia, and in 1970 attempted to take over a military base in Tokyo while calling on the members of Japan’s Self-Defence Force to stage a coup and restore the Japanese Emperor to his former glory. And who, when it became clear that the attempted coup was a flop, committed seppuku, i.e., ritually disembowelled himself.

 

When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, I remember Japanese acquaintances who leaned leftwards in their politics wincing in horror when I said I liked Mishima’s books. One guy who was in his forties, and had been a ‘New Left’ student in the late 1960s, told me he’d been terrified when he first heard the news that Mishima was attempting a coup d’état.  For a moment, he genuinely feared that Japan was going to end up under the heel of a right-wing, militaristic, Emperor-worshipping regime like the one that’d dominated the country in the 1930s and led it to disaster in the 1940s.

 

And I seem to remember reading an interview with the Japanese composer and occasional actor Ryuichi Sakamoto – now, alas, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto – in which he stated bluntly that he’d hated Mishima and was glad when he heard that he’d done himself in.  This was despite Sakamoto supposedly basing his performance in the 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence on the author, and despite him titling the music he composed for the film Forbidden Colours, after Mishima’s 1951 novel of the same name.

 

I won’t deny that I find Mishima’s extreme politics as objectionable and doolally as the next person.  (At least, the next sane person.  In 1990s Japan, there were plenty of Uyoku dantai around, i.e., fascistic dingbats who prowled the streets in flag-emblazoned black vans, ranting and blasting patriotic music out of loudspeakers and generally making tits of themselves, and no doubt they thought Mishima’s ideas were wonderful.)  But I can forgive him for his politics because I find his writing exquisite.  That’s with a couple of exceptions.  Forbidden Colours, a book I just could never get my head around, is one.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A friend and former colleague called Eiji Suenaga told me back then about the afore-mentioned Sea of Fertility novels and gave me some interesting advice about how to read them.  Don’t, he said, try to read them until you’ve reached middle-age.  Only at that stage in your life can you grasp their full significance and really appreciate them.  Thus, I didn’t read them until I was in my forties.  As I said, the first two in the series absolutely blew me away.  However, the third novel, 1970’s The Temple of Dawn, gets rather bogged down with its copious musings on Buddhism, while the fourth and final one, the same year’s Decay of the Angel, feels slightly rushed and sketchy in comparison to its predecessors.  Though to be fair to Mishima, he had rather a lot on his mind by then.  It’s said that he penned Angel’s final lines on the morning of his suicide.  (You can’t accuse Mishima of being a writer who talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.  I mean, he polished off his last novel in between attempting to overthrow his country’s government and ritually gutting himself…  I couldn’t imagine Martin Amis doing that.)

 

One thing that makes Mishima an acquired taste is his bleak intensity.  You don’t read his work if you’re looking for some laughs.  Thus, in Confessions of a Mask (1949), you get a coming-of-age novel, an obviously autobiographical one, involving suppressed homosexuality and graphic, at times violent and macabre, sexual fantasies.  In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963), you get a sect of young boys who quietly go Lord of the Flies, convince themselves they don’t have to abide by the rules of common morality, and start mutilating kittens – with the implication that soon they’ll be doing similar things to human beings.  In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), you get a mentally-ill Buddhist acolyte setting fire to the titular temple, the Kinkaku-ji, in Kyoto – an act of arson that’d actually befallen that temple in real life in 1950.

 

Admittedly, Mishima’s 1954 novel The Sound of Waves is a nice, happy love story.  During my Japan days, I noticed how popular it was among certain Westerners living there.  I suspect they liked Waves because it allowed them to boast they’d read a book by one of their host-country’s most important 20th-century novelists – but it spared them having to grapple with that novelist’s normal, angsty, messed-up stuff.  However, Mishima himself didn’t rate Waves highly. He once brutally dismissed it as ‘that great joke on the public’.

 

Well, I recently read Mishima’s 1968 novel Life for Sale and I now wonder if I should revise my ideas about him and the sort of literature he specialised in.  It’s unlike anything I’ve read by him before.  Unashamedly pulpy in content, wildly episodic in nature, quite outrageous in its plot-twists, the book often feels like Mishima wrote it with his tongue so far into his cheek that it’s a surprise the cheek didn’t burst.  At times, it seems a million miles away from the gloom and seriousness of his other work.  That’s ‘at times’, though.  There are moments when the sombre, highbrow Mishima of old does resurface… But never for long.

 

It kicks off in the conventional Mishima style I’m familiar with.  Page one has the hero, Hanio, attempting to commit suicide.  He consumes “a large amount of sedative in the last overground train that evening.  To be precise, he gulped it down at a drinking fountain in the station before boarding the train.  And no sooner had he stretched out on the empty seats than everything went blank.”  Mishima-esque too is the fact that Hanio is driven to this attempt on his own life by nothing of great significance: “Suicide was not something he had put much thought into.  He considered it likely that his sudden urge to die arose that evening while he was reading the newspaper… he could only conclude that he had attempted to end It all on a complete whim.”

 

Hanio survives, however.  With a rather more nihilistic mindset than before, he abandons his nine-to-five job and puts an advert in a newspaper: “Life for Sale.  Use me as you wish.  I am a twenty-seven-year-old male.  Discretion guaranteed.  Will cause no bother at all.”  And that’s when the fun starts.  The advert’s first reply comes from an embittered old man with a much younger and voluptuous wife.  The wife is currently cuckolding him with a mobster.  The old man hires Hanio – who now considers his life both meaningless and expendable – to seduce his wife and make sure that her mobster boyfriend finds them both ‘at it’: “When he claps eyes on you, you’re sure to be killed, and she’ll probably be dead meat too.”  Hanio does as he’s told, but things don’t go according to plan.  Someone gets killed, but not him.

 

He then proceeds to his next case.  A librarian, “an utterly nondescript middle-aged woman… more like an elderly spinster, perhaps someone who taught English literature at a girls’ college of higher education,” involves him in a plot with some criminals, a rare book about Japanese beetles that’s housed in her library, and a particular type of beetle that supposedly can be ground down and made into a deadly poison.  Hanio, with zero interest in remaining alive, is asked to act as a guinea pig for the newly-manufactured poison.  He agrees, but again the unexpected happens, and again he survives while someone else gets killed.  Meanwhile, in both episodes so far, mention is made of a mysterious, secret crime syndicate called the ACS, the ‘Asia Confidential Service’.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ken Domon

 

Things become yet more outlandish.  Hanio is hired next by a schoolboy who wants him to look after his mother: “She’s ill, but she’ll recover right away with care from you.”  What makes this life-threatening is the fact that the boy’s mother is a vampire.  Hanio soon finds himself living with the pair, having his blood gradually and gently siphoned away by the vampirical mum, but he’s languidly happy as his death seems to draw near: “he truly enjoyed lounging around at home, basking in the family atmosphere.”  This is the most baroque part of the book, but it actually works well.  (Thinking about it, I’m not surprised that Mishima and vampires – at least, those of the brooding, aristocratic sort – are a good match.)

 

The next episode – following another death, again not Hanio’s – is less effective.  He becomes embroiled in an espionage saga involving two foreign powers, ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’, a stolen necklace, an all-important cipher key, and several dead secret agents.  It all feels a bit tired, despite Mishima throwing into the plot some mysterious carrots as a whacky extra ingredient.  The ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’ stuff reminds me of old 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), where the villains were often foreigners, but ones acting on behalf of ‘unnamed hostile powers’, to avoid the show offending anybody.

 

After that, Hanio ends up living in a new, lavish apartment – his ‘Life for Sale’ business has earned him a fair amount of yen by this point – which he rents off a rich, drug-addled hippy-chick called Reiko.  (Reiko’s dotty old mum explains to him that her daughter takes “that drug beginning with L…”)  This enables Mishima, through the character of Hanio, to express his opinion of hippies, which as you might expect is not high.  “They were seekers after ‘meaninglessness’, all right, but he could not imagine them having the guts to confront the real thing when it inevitably came calling.”  Hanio gets romantically involved with the unhinged Reiko who, for all her wild talk, has a worryingly conventional vision of what married life with him will be like: “Daddy comes home every day at six-fifteen, so I have to start cooking.  When everything’s bubbling away nicely, I’ll hurry up and put on my make-up in time for when Daddy turns up…”

 

Hanio eventually flees from Reiko.  In the book’s closing pages, becoming increasingly paranoid, he believes that it’s not just her who’s pursuing him.  He might also have the ACS – the Asia Confidential Service mentioned by characters in the novel’s earlier sections – chasing him too.

 

Thus, Life for Sale is a mish-mash of crime, spy, horror, romance and comedy themes, leavened with a little of Mishima’s characteristic angst.  If not every episode is successful, that’s not a great problem – a few pages later, another episode arrives, which the reader may enjoy better.  Meanwhile, it suggests the books by Mishima that have long been available in translated form may have given English-language readers a blinkered view of him, i.e., that he was a humourless, cerebral misery-guts who specialised in Literature with a capital ‘L’.  But Life for Sale, whose English-language translation didn’t appear until 2019, gives a rather different impression, that he was less of a literary snob, enjoyed genre fiction and had a playful side.

 

And I hear that last year saw the first English translation of another Mishima novel, a 1962 one called Beautiful Star.  Its translator was Stephen Dodd, who also rendered Life for Sale into English.  Beautiful Star sees Mishima having a go at science fiction.  It’s about “a Japanese family who wake up one day convinced that they are each aliens from a different planet inhabiting human bodies.”

 

Mishima and aliens?  I can’t wait to read that one.

 

© Penguin Books

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Charlie was our darling

 

From beatsperminute.com

 

The death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts on August 24th came as a blow.  Ask me to identify my favourite all-time band and four days of the week I’d say the Stones, at least during the years from 1969 to 1974 when they had Mick Taylor playing guitar with them.  (Ask me the other three days of the week and I’d probably say the Jesus and Mary Chain.)

 

A drummer who’d schooled himself in jazz music but paradoxically found himself thumping the tubs for the self-styled ‘biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’, Watts performed with none of the bombast of your archetypal rock drummer like Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham – of whom Keith Richards once inquired perplexedly, “Did he have to hit those drums so hard?” But his immaculate backbeat imposed discipline on the Stones’ blues-rock sound, reining it in and holding it together when it could so easily have degenerated into sloppy, all-over-the-place chaos.

 

Meanwhile, Watts was endearing as a figure of modesty, decorum and decency amid the maelstrom of outrage, hysteria, decadence, heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels, swimming-pool drownings, Hells Angels slayings, groupies, wild partying, alleged Mars Bar abuse, alleged whole-body blood transfusions, dabbling in black magic and shenanigans with Justin Trudeau’s mum that swirled around the band for the first two decades of its existence.  Among the many, many tributes to Watts this week, one that sticks in my mind is a below-the-line comment in the Guardian.  It was from a guy who’d once worked in a quarantine centre for animals arriving in Britain.  He’d made Watts’s acquaintance when the drummer’s cats and dogs ended up there after he and his wife returned to the UK from tax exile in France.  Apparently, while many owners never looked in on their poor pets for the whole duration of their quarantine, the animal-loving Stone made a point of coming to visit his every day.

 

As tales about Watts’s mild manners and niceness were legion, when he did lose the rag, it became the stuff of legend.  After he passed away on Monday, I noticed Mick Jagger’s name trending on twitter and discovered this was because people were tweeting and retweeting the tale of what happened in an Amsterdam hotel in 1984 when Jagger referred to Charlie Watts as ‘my drummer’.  Watts responded by yelling, “Never call me your drummer again!” and landing a right hook on him.  Such was the force in the punch, probably the only time that Watts exerted as much unsubtle power as John Bonham did, that the lippy one was knocked back onto a silver platter of salmon.  He then tilted towards an open window that overlooked a canal.  Supposedly, Keith Richards grabbed hold of Jagger before he disappeared out of the window, though only because at the time he was wearing one of Richards’ jackets, which the owner didn’t want to see dunked in a canal.  This is recounted in glorious detail in Richards’ autobiography Life (2010).  Therefore, it’s got to be true.

 

For me, the height of my Rolling Stones infatuation came during the 1990s, while I was living in Sapporo, capital city of Hokkaido, the northernmost island and prefecture of Japan.  For the first time in my life, I was earning a decent wage and didn’t feel guilty about splurging some of it on music.  By good luck, there was an excellent wee music shop dealing in specialty, bootleg and second-hand records on Hiragishi-dori, the avenue where I lived.  The shop’s lugubrious owner did very well out of me during the five years I was there.  It was at his establishment that I bought remastered versions of classic Stones albums that I’d only owned previously as crackly, crap-sounding cassette tapes: Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) Exile on Main Street (1972) and so on.  I also bought albums that people had told me were a bit duff, like Goat’s Head Soup (1973) and Black and Blue (1974), though I ended up thinking they were quite good.

 

One spooky Stones-related thing that happened during this period was when I held a Christmas party at my Sapporo apartment on December 18th, 1993, and then discovered that the party-date coincided with Keith Richards’ 50th birthday.  As a result, the evening was more Stones-themed than I’d planned.  I spent an early half-hour of it at my record player, playing and replaying a section of Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, the 1970 live album of the Stones performing in New York and Baltimore.  This was at the insistence of my Japanese colleague Tokunaga Sensei, also a Stones buff, who was convinced that there was a bit of it where you could hear members of the audience shouting in Japanese.  (The cover of Get Yer Ya-Yas Out features the shocking sight of the usually dapper Charlie Watts prancing around in white pants and T-shirt and an Uncle Sam hat.  The album also contains Jagger’s affectionate but accurate onstage remark: “Charlie’s good tonight.”)

 

© Decca 

 

The party got truly Stones-ian later on.  A lady I’d invited from the local hairdressing salon flipped her lid after a few drinks and started assaulting the other guests, while Sympathy for the Devil played in the background.  As Jagger remarked at the ill-fated Altamont concert in 1969, after someone had been stabbed to death in the crowd, “Something always happens when we play that number.”

 

Early in 1995, I heard exciting news.  The Rolling Stones were playing seven concerts at Tokyo Dome in early March as part of their Voodoo Lounge tour.  I hadn’t seen the band live before, so this seemed a golden opportunity to do so.  Unfortunately, I had other commitments at that time.  I’d arranged to do some freelance work with the Fodor’s Travel company, who planned to bring out a new edition of their Japan guidebook and wanted someone to update its chapters on Hokkaido and Tohoku, the northernmost part of the main Japanese island of Honshu.  As I had a break from my regular job during February and March, I’d intended to wander around Hokkaido and Tohoku, doing the guidebook research.  Determined to have my cake and eat it, I bought a ticket for the Stones and planned to spend late February and the first half of March in Tohoku, doing research, but taking a break for a few days in the middle to pop down to Tokyo.

 

That research trip in Tohoku proved to be one of the most physically punishing things I’ve done in my life.  Hokkaido was cold at that time of year, but I hadn’t expected Tohoku to be so bloody cold too.  Also, in my haste to clinch the Fodor’s job – wow, I thought, here’s my big chance to be a travel writer! – I stupidly agreed to accept a lump-sum payment at the end of it, which meant I got nothing to pay for my expenses while I actually did the work.  Therefore, to minimize costs, I decided to stay in youth hostels and hitchhike around rather than travel by bus or train.  Sleeping in Tohoku’s drafty wooden hostels and thumbing my way along its highways during wintertime proved not to be a good idea.

 

To make things worse, my itinerary depended on what was written in the previous edition of the Fodor’s Japan Guidebook.  Trying to find many of the tourist sites, whose prices, opening times, attractions, etc., I was supposed to be checking and updating, proved a nightmare because whoever had written the previous edition seemed to have been drunk at the time.  Or more likely, hadn’t actually been to many of those places and had just made it up instead.  Getting hopelessly lost became a daily occurrence.

 

Looking back on it now, I can laugh, but there were times when I thought I was going to die or go insane.  Trudging in ever-maddening circles around the castle town of Hirosaki in Aomori Prefecture, trying to find a tourist attraction, until a local explained to me that the streets’ layout was deliberately confusing, designed in medieval times to confuse any attackers who entered the town intending to locate and assault the castle.  Getting a lift in a pick-up truck with an old geezer who’d never spoken to a foreigner before and was so excited by my presence that he might have been tripping on LSD while we whizzed at top speed along the highway.  Venturing up to Lake Tazawa in the mountains above Akita City, arriving at night, wandering into a snowbound youth hostel and finding it inexplicably deserted, and wondering if I’d just strayed into an uncanny tale of the supernatural by Lafcadio Hearn.  Coming into a freezing Fukushima City after dark, discovering that a big conference was taking place there and all the hotels were fully booked, and having to spend the night sleeping among the local homeless community in an underpass next to an open sewer.

 

© Universal Music LLC / From discogs.com

 

It was after the Fukushima episode that – thank God – the time came for me to jump on a bullet train and head down to Tokyo, where I holed up in a hotel and spent the next couple of days in a bathtub with an unlimited supply of beer. Then, scrubbed up and feeling human again, I went to Tokyo Dome to see the Stones.

 

No doubt it wasn’t the greatest Stones concert ever.  The set leaned towards the overly familiar – Satisfaction, Start Me Up, Angie, It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll – although I was delighted that they played Tumbling Dice off Exile on Main Street.  But as a communal experience where you switched your brain off for a couple of hours and just got into the groove, and especially after the wretched, wintry experiences I’d been through up north, it was rather wonderful.  Jagger tried to show off his mastery of the Japanese language, which was funny.  Keith Richards shambled to the front of the stage to sing a song at one point and, looking at the Tokyo masses, croaked, “I don’t see you very often, but when I do, I certainly see a lot of you.”  At his drumkit, Charlie Watts sported his usual expression, half-bemused, half like that of a man nervously eyeing the misfits around him and thinking, “If I just keep on playing, maybe these nutters won’t notice I’m here…”

 

Tellingly, when Jagger introduced all the musicians to the crowd near the end of the set, starting with backing vocalists Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler, working his way up to Darryl Jones (who’d replaced Bill Wyman on bass) and then onto the Stones themselves, it was Charlie Watts who got by far the biggest and longest cheer of the night.  In fact, for so long did the Japanese crowd show their adulation that the poor guy looked a bit embarrassed by it.

 

Then again, with his modesty, humility and politeness, with that hardy gaman shimsasho-type attitude he displayed whilst playing with the Stones for 58 years and, simultaneously, the sense of wa that he had with his bandmates, with his love of a sharp suit and his occasional flashes of samurai spirit – which Jagger experienced to his cost when he got lamped in Amsterdam – Charlie Watts exhibited many of the finest Japanese virtues.  No wonder the crowd that night loved him.

 

From twitter.com/officialKeef

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My life as a tape-head

 

From unsplash.com / © Tobias Tullius

 

I was surprised to hear the news last month that the inventor of the audio cassette, Lou Ottens, had passed away at the age of 94.  Surprised because the audio cassette seemed such an elderly piece of technology to me that I’d assumed its inventor had been dead for many years, indeed, many decades already.

 

I used to love cassettes.  They were small, light and portable whilst at the same time durable and not vulnerable to the scratches and occasional breakages that bedevilled my vinyl records.  Though of course when their tape got caught in the tape-heads of a cassette player, having to free and unravel the ensuing tangle was a pain in the neck.  Much of my music collection consists of cassettes and I suspect I must have something in the region of a thousand albums in that format.  But, like most of my worldly possessions, they’ve spent the 21st century occupying boxes in my Dad’s attic in Scotland.

 

Cassettes seemed old-fashioned even in the days before the appearance of the compact disc, a type of technology that itself must seem prehistoric to modern youngsters brought up in a world of Internet streaming.  I remember in 2019 entering a second-hand record shop in Edinburgh and being amazed, and delighted, to find that it still had several shelf-loads of cassettes on sale.  (The shop was the Record Shak on Clerk Street and sadly, due to its owner’s death, it’s closed down since then.  But at least the Record Shak managed to outlive most of the other record shops that once populated south-central Edinburgh, like Avalanche, Coda Music, Ripping Records and Hog’s Head Music, so in its humble, durable way it was like the retailing equivalent of a cassette.)

 

I was such a tape-head that even during the 1990s, when the CD was supposed to have achieved market dominance, I still indulged in that most cassette-ish of pastimes – creating cassette compilations of my favourite music of the moment, which I’d then inflict on my friends.

 

I also made party cassettes.  For much of that decade I lived in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo, was something of a party animal and would hold regular shindigs in my apartment.  My home was a typically modest, urban-Japanese one, consisting of two normal-sized rooms plus a little bathroom and toilet, but that didn’t prevent me from piling in the guests.  During one do, I did a count and discovered I’d squeezed 48 people into the place.  I even managed somehow to set aside one room as the ‘dance floor’.  And before each party, for the dance-floor room, I’d compile a few cassettes of songs that I judged likely to get the guests shaking a leg.  How could anyone not shake a leg when, in quick succession, they were subjected to the boisterous likes of the Cramps singing Bend Over I’ll Drive, the Jesus and Mary Chain doing their cover of Guitar Man, Motorhead with Killed by Death, the Reverend Horton Heat with Wiggle Stick, AC/DC with Touch Too Much and the Ramones with I Wanna be Sedated?

 

At the party’s end, if somebody complimented me on the quality of the music, I’d simply give them the party cassettes and tell them to keep them as souvenirs.  By the time of my next hooley, I’d have discovered a new set of tunes and slapped them onto some new cassettes.  Who knows?  Maybe those 1990s party cassettes are still being played at gatherings in Sapporo, where the partygoers are no longer young and wild, but grey and arthritic instead.  Surely they’d be considered priceless antiques today – the cassettes, not the partygoers.

 

Anyway, feeling nostalgic, I thought I would list here the most memorable cassette compilations that other people have given to me over the years.

 

© Factory

 

Untitled compilation – Gareth Smith, 1991

I never imagined that in 2021 I’d still be humming tunes performed by the now-forgotten New Jersey alternative rock band the Smithereens or the equally forgotten 1980s Bath / London combo Eat.  The fact that I am is due to a splendid compilation cassette that my brother put together and sent to me while I was working in Japan. Actually, the reason why I’m humming those tunes today is probably because they weren’t actually written by the Smithereens or Eat.  The Smithereens’ track was a cover of the Who’s song The Seeker, while the Eat one was another cover, of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City.

 

As well as featuring those, the cassette contained the epic six-minute club mix of Hallelujah by the Happy Mondays.  No, this wasn’t a cover version of the Leonard Cohen song, but the Mondays’ impeccably shambling dance track that begins with a falsetto voice exclaiming, “Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!” and then proceeds with Shaun Ryder intoning such lyrical gems as, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re here to pull ya!”

 

On the other hand, the cassette contained the hit single Right Here, Right Now by Jesus Jones, which I thought was quite good and which induced me to buy their new album when I saw it on sale soon afterwards in my local Japanese record shop.  Big mistake.

 

Songs from Brad’s Land – Brad Ambury, 1991

Around the same time, I received a compilation cassette from a Canadian guy called Brad Ambury, who worked on the same programme that I was working on but in a different part of northern Japan.  I think Brad saw it as his mission to convince me that there was more to Canadian music than the then-popular output of Bryan Adams.  He must have despaired when several years later Celine Dion popped up and usurped Bryan as Canada’s number-one international musical superstar.

 

Anyway, he made this cassette a smorgasbord of Canadian indie and alternative-rock bands with quirky names: Jr. Gone Wild, Blue Rodeo, the Northern Pikes, SNFU, Spirit of the West, the Doughboys and so on.  During the rest of the 1990s, whenever I was introduced to Canadian people, I’d waste no time in impressing them with my encyclopaedic knowledge – well, my shameless name-dropping – of their country’s indie / alt-rock musical scene.  All thanks to that one cassette.

 

Actually, stirred by curiosity 30 years on, I’ve tried Googling Brad and discovered he has a twitter feed that’s headed by the logo for the Edmonton ‘punk-country’ band Jr. Gone Wild.  So it’s good to know he hasn’t succumbed to senile old age and started listening to The Best of Bryan Adams just yet.

 

© Jr. Gone Wild

 

A Kick up the Eighties – Keith Sanderson, 1993

I must have received dozens of cassette compilations from my music-loving Scottish friend Keith Sanderson and this one was my favourite.  It even looked distinctive because, for a sleeve, he packaged it in a piece of flocked, crimson wallpaper.  As its title indicates, A Kick up the Eighties was a nostalgic collection of tunes from the then recently departed 1980s. These included pop hits, new wave and indie classics, Goth anthems and lesser-known tunes that were both ruminative and raucous: the Associates’ Party Fears Two, Blancmange’s Living on the Ceiling, Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick, Elvis Costello’s Watching the Detectives, Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Killing Joke’s Love Like Blood, Aztec Camera’s Down the Dip and Girlschool’s Emergency.  The collection was disparate yet weirdly balanced, and even songs I hadn’t particularly liked before, such as Rush’s Spirit of Radio and UFO’s Only You Can Rock Me, seemed good due to their calibration with the music around them.

 

However, when I played this cassette at parties, I had to make sure I stopped it before it reached the final track on Side A.  For my friend Keith had sneakily inserted there, like a street-credibility-destroying booby trap, Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran.

 

Japanese and English Guitar Pop – Yoko Koyama, 1994    

By the mid-1990s I was lecturing in a university in Sapporo.  My Japanese students there gradually came to the realisation that, despite being a curmudgeonly git, I had one redeeming quality, which was that I was into music.  So a steady stream of them presented me with cassettes of tunes they’d recorded, which they thought I might be interested in.  I can’t remember who presented me with a recording of the Flower Travellin’ Band, but well done that person.

 

A smart indie-kid in one of my classes called Yoko Koyama gave me a cassette compilation of what she termed ‘modern guitar pop’, i.e. melodic pop-rock stuff with lots of pleasantly jangly guitars.  Apparently, this was a sound that a few Japanese bands of the time, like Flipper’s Guitar and Pizzicato Five, were into.  She’d interspersed their tracks with ones by what she described as four ‘English’ practitioners of the same sub-genre.  These were Teenage Fanclub and the BMX Bandits, from Bellshill near Glasgow; Aztec Camera, from East Kilbride in Lanarkshire; and the Trash Can Sinatras, from Irvine in North Ayrshire.

 

© Polystar

 

I expressed my thanks but observed with some bemusement that the four so-called English bands on the collection were actually all from Scotland.  Yoko smiled politely but said nothing.  However, a year later, she wrote a feature about this type of music for our faculty’s English-language students’ newspaper (which I edited) and made a point of talking about ‘Scottish guitar pop’.  So despite my multiple failings as a teacher, I managed at least to teach one fact to one person during the 1990s.

 

Guns N’ Roses bootlegs – the guy who collected my Daily Yomiuri payments, 1996

While living in Sapporo, I subscribed to the English-language newspaper the Daily Yomiuri, which is now the Japan News.  One evening every month, a young guy would arrive at my apartment door with the newspaper’s monthly bill, which I paid in cash.  (Direct debits didn’t seem to be a thing at the time.)  When I opened the door for him one evening, The Spaghetti Incident by Guns N’ Roses happened to be playing on my stereo.  The guy’s face immediately lit up and he exclaimed, “Ah, you like Guns N’ Roses?”  We then had an enthusiastic ten-minute conversation – well, as enthusiastic as my rudimentary Japanese would allow – about the gloriousness of Axl Rose, Slash and the gang.

 

A month later, when the guy came to collect my next Daily Yomiuri payment, I was immensely touched when he presented me with two cassettes, on which he’d recorded two Guns N’ Roses bootleg albums.

 

Okay, strictly speaking, these weren’t compilation cassettes.  But I’m mentioning them here as a testimony to the power of the audio cassette.  They allowed the Japanese guy who collected my newspaper-subscription money and I to bond over a shared love of Guns N’ Roses.

 

Yeah, beat that, Spotify.

 

From pinterest.com

Posted on

Jim Mountfield rides shotgun

 

© Shotgun Honey

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write fiction of a (usually) dark hue, has just had a short story published in the webzine Shotgun Honey, which is dedicated to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’.

 

The story is called Karaoke and is inspired by the seven years I spent living in Japan – seven years during which, astonishingly, I spent a lot of my free time hanging out in bars.  The majority of those bars were frequented by suited salarymen, staffed by immaculate hostesses and equipped with karaoke machines.  Although I was always too shy to sing at the start of an evening, I’d have somehow overcome my shyness by the end of it – a dozen Kirin beers might have had something to do with it – and I’d be up there warbling into the microphone with the best, or worst, of them.  This was in the 1990s and the English-language selection on the machines was pretty middle-of-the-road and non-raucous – Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Pat Boone and the early Beatles – which meant I was usually crooning stuff like Fly Me to the Moon or Love Letters in the Sand.  Eek.

 

As Shotgun Honey is about crime, however, the story features yakuza gangsters as well as karaoke-singing.  Incidentally, the three main characters are named after three people I knew in Japan.  Mr Ashikawa and Mr Hiraizumi were both teachers at the high school where I worked for the first two years – Mr Ashikawa was a calligraphy teacher and he’d answer the staffroom phone with a memorably singsong cry of “Ashikawa desu!”  Maybe that’s why I made his fictional namesake a talented singer.

 

The character Umeki, meanwhile, is named after a lovable rogue I had in my classes while I taught at a university in Sapporo, which was my job for the subsequent five years.  Let’s be tactful and just say he wasn’t the hardest working of my students.  A week before I left Japan, the real-life Umeki invited me out for a few drinks and we ended up in one of his haunts, a bar whose interior resembled Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s penthouse in Diamonds are Forever (1971).  I think he was keen to create the impression that he lived the lifestyle of an international playboy, but I can’t help suspecting that today he’s become a grumpy and greying Kacho-San (‘Section Chief’).

 

For now, Karaoke can be read here.  This story comes with a trigger warning for lovers of alcohol, who may be traumatised by the fate that befalls a 21-year-old bottle of Hibiki Whisky.

 

From unsplash.com / © Alex Rainer

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Time to learn about Hearn

 

© Tuttle Publishing

 

As we approach Halloween, I thought I would re-post some blog entries about my favourite ghost and horror-story writers.  Here’s what I wrote about Lafcadio Hearn in 2014.

 

19th-century writer Lafcadio Hearn surely had a confused sense of identity.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that he had to travel to Japan, considered by westerners at the time to be the ends of the earth, before he found some cultural peace.

 

He was born in 1850 to a Greek mother and an Irish Protestant father, but was reared in Dublin by a great-aunt who fervently embraced Catholicism.  Later, he was later dumped in an austere boarding school in Durham in northern England.  It was during the unwelcome rough-and-tumble of boarding school that a playground accident cost him the sight of his left eye.  At the age of 19 he arrived in the USA, where he found employment as a journalist.  First he worked in Ohio, where he lost his job with a Cincinnati newspaper for committing the crime of marrying, briefly, a black woman, and then in New Orleans.

 

In 1890, he found his way to Meiji-era Japan where he worked as a school-teacher and university-lecturer whilst doing his best to chronicle the minutiae of life in a traditional and, to him, exotic Japanese culture that was fast vanishing under the wheels of Western-inspired industrialisation and ‘modernisation’.  Nowadays, to the Japanese at least, he is the most accomplished foreign scribe who ever attempted to describe their country in writing.

 

Since Hearn’s death in 1904, the Irish – who are good at doing this – have claimed him as one of their own.  So to me Hearn will always be the oddball wandering Irishman who got, and seized, the opportunity to record for posterity the details of life in old Japan just before it changed forever.  But in fact Hearn finished his life as a Japanese citizen.  He’d married a Japanese woman called Koizumi Setsu, fathered four children and taken on the Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo.  He strikes a solemnly Japanese-looking pose with his wife in the monochrome family photographs of the time.  His head is always in profile with the right side of his face towards the camera, so that his disfigured left eye is out of view.

 

Nowadays, some historians and cultural commentators chuckle at Hearn and at how he hankered after a disappearing Japan that, as an outsider, had never belonged to him anyway.  Indeed, one wonders how much the old Japan described in his writings was embroidered by his own fanciful yearnings.  There’s also an irony in how the Japanese were happy to adopt Hearn as their foreign champion after they’d modernised themselves and dumped the very culture that Hearn was so preoccupied with.  In a way, Hearn’s writings have become the literary equivalent of a holiday brochure, advertising an ethereal version of Japan that now exists only in the imaginations of tourists.

 

But nonetheless, I admire Hearn’s writings greatly.  The descriptions of late-19th century Japan in his journalism, with their gaudy colour and intricate attention to detail, are startlingly evocative.  In our modern digital world, where you can point your phone at just about anything and instantly preserve its image in pixels, the business of writing detailed descriptive prose no longer seems necessary.  It’s probably become a lost art.  But when it was necessary, Hearn was one of its greatest practitioners.

 

© Tuttle Publishing

 

Hearn was instinctively drawn to stories about ghosts and the uncanny, perhaps because of his pedigree.  The supernatural is another thing that the Irish are good at.  Accordingly, his books In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, in which he recorded the weird and creepy folk tales circulating in his adopted country, are among the most famous works in his canon.   What I like about Hearn’s stories, or, more precisely, about Hearn’s retellings, are how commonplace the supernatural elements seem among the human tableau of medieval Japan.  The ghosts, spirits, goblins and demons don’t suddenly and unexpectedly intrude into the world of men and women.  They’re already there.  If they don’t quite exist alongside the Japanese people, they certainly inhabit the forests, mountain gorges, snowy plateaus and crumbling Buddhist cemeteries located at the edges of their existence.

 

Hearn’s tales also make a fascinating bestiary of the creatures of Japanese legends and folklore.  The story Mujina, for example, contains a being called a nopperabo.  In Japanese folklore this is almost perfectly human in its form and dress, apart from its face, which is as smooth and featureless as an egg.  Meanwhile, in the story Rokuro-Kubi, the title creature is a type of goblin with a detachable head.  Once detached, the head can flit about through the air, this way and that, like a giant bumblebee.  (Incidentally, in Japanese folklore, there’s another type of rokuro–kubi with an elastic neck that can stretch to grotesque and snake-like extremes.)

 

Perhaps the nastiest of Hearn’s supernatural beasties, though, appears in Jikininki, in which a travelling priest called Muso arrives in a village plagued by a hideous monster that materialises whenever there’s a death and a corpse becomes available for it to feed on: “…when the hush of the night was at its deepest, there noiselessly entered a Shape, vague and vast; and in the same moment Muso found himself without power to move or speak. He saw that Shape lift the corpse, as with hands, devour it, more quickly than a cat devours a rat – beginning at the head, and eating everything: the hair and the bones and even the shroud.”

 

I lived in Japan for much of the 1990s.  I encountered several foreign residents – gaijin as the Japanese referred to all us foreigners living in their country – who reminded me slightly of Lafcadio Hearn.  Seduced by Japan and its culture, they’d become ardent ‘Japanophiles’.  They’d ended up as a sub-species of gaijin that ordinary gaijin sniggeringly described as “being more Japanese than the Japanese.”  Such foreign types never seemed to me to be particularly happy.  Unfortunately, when you fall completely in love with a place, you become disillusioned when the place then spurns you by daring to change, losing what it had that attracted you first of all.  And at times there seemed no place in the world more capable of bewilderingly rapid and sudden change than Japan.

 

This certainly happened to Hearn.  Towards the end of his life, he wrote wearily that, “I felt as never before how utterly dead Old Japan is and how ugly New Japan is becoming.  I thought, how useless to write about things which have ceased to exist.”  Well, they may have ceased to exist by then, but I for one am glad that poor old Hearn bothered to write about them in the first place.

 

From the Asian Review of Books