Recommended Reads

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The BFS Recommends Into the Beautiful North

N Book cover of Into the Beautiful North, a black and white photograph of a young woman staring out at the viewer o knock against serious drama, but there is something about a story that can blend comedic and serious themes just right: combining the two in the right mix can cause both elements to sing in ways they could not otherwise. Charles Dickens at his best (when he’s writing something I would want to read again, e.g., Little Dorrit) exemplifies this, as does one of the more Dickensian modern novels I have read, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North.

How else could you describe a novel that uses the setup of The Magnificent Seven to skewer the current mess of immigration policies in the United States and Mexico? The very idea makes me smile, but the fun and ridiculousness of the premise is what makes the novel’s examination of some very difficult realities possible. And in a world where the United States has spent millions of dollars on border walls that wash away in yearly floods (and Arizona alone spent millions on an ill-advised wall of cargo containers that it is now paying to take down), what’s less realistic, the theater of immigration politics or a group of young people looking for fighters to help protect their small Mexican town from a drug cartel?

This is all anchored by the novel’s main character, Nayeli, whose interest in finding “Siete Magnificos” is secondary to learning what has happened to her father, who went north for work like most of her hometown’s men but hasn’t been heard from in years. She carries a postcard sent by him from the exotic town of Kankakee, Illinois—the message is equal parts humor and sobering reality, with a picture of a “paranoid turkey” staring out from a cornfield and her father’s favorite words of wisdom: that “everything passes.” Does he mean he’s never coming back, or that he’s only there for a time and will return some day?

With her on the journey are her two friends, Yolo and Vampi, also recently graduated from high school, and her boss, Tacho, who has promised the mayor of the town (also Nayeli’s aunt) to look after them on the trip. Between the four, a reader can easily tease out the reasons why any human would choose or be forced to move from one region to another: curiosity for a new place, boredom with the old place, a longing for someone you love or lost, a longing (or need) for somewhere better than your current situation. Yolo is curious about Los Yunaites and keen to find the young missionary man from California that worked in their town for a few years. Vampi is into death metal (“Soy una vampira,” she says by way of introduction) and equally curious about the North. Tacho may or may not be looking to move elsewhere—he’s a gay man living in a small town that doesn’t like change, and the weight this has put on him is clear around the persona he has created as “grumpy but loving older brother figure” to the trio of women.

The trip north… the trip to and over the border and eventually (unsurprisingly) to Kankakee is full of warmth, humor, and terror. I was scared for their lives more than once. I was surprised and warmed by the people that helped them out of tough scrapes. I was angered—as they were—when seemingly supportive people turned on them. Nayeli, a former soccer star and trained in karate, is obliged to kick ass more than once. It’s hard not to cheer as she is forced to beat someone up, but it’s hard not to feel the direness of the situation at the same time. Things could all too easily move from comedy to real-life horror.

While the novel maybe has a bit of nostalgia for the Mexico that has changed—the towns with so many who have moved elsewhere—Urrea also makes sure to poke fun at the inability of Nayeli’s hometown to accept change, among other shortcomings. Rather than valuing Mexico over the United States, or small towns over big cities, this novel celebrates humans being good to one another, wherever they might be at the moment and wherever they might be from. What is mocked and criticized are the humans and systems that keep people from living their lives and being happy.

In the words of a show that also crossed the United States’ border (this time from the north): “Remember I’m pulling for ya—we’re all in this together.” The debacle of humanity’s approach to immigration and refugees is not going to be easy to get through, but the heart of Into the Beautiful North provides a guide for how we can eventually get there.

On Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Slowly Learning to Live With Grief

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Book Cover for Kitchen, with a woman in a white dress standing shyly, with her arms behind her back. The novel begins with simple delight.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

To break down how much this opening does in establishing its modus operandi as well as its narrator and main character, a young woman named Mikage, would take more than the fifty-seven words of that opening paragraph. In the process, I would probably remove far too much of the pleasure it creates, so I’ll just say that if a narrator or narration uses a parenthetical like the above paragraph does to describe something as potentially bland as white kitchen tile, you’ve got me: I am 100% over the moon and in your corner.

So as the short novel continues and we learn Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother—and that her “grandmother died the other day,” we realize we have been opened up to feel her grief as rawly as Mikage does. The only spot she’s able to sleep in the apartment she shared with her grandmother is the kitchen: “wrapped in a blanket, like Linus.” The joy of that opening paragraph has been shifted and shot through with grief.

This situation can’t (but could!) continue, so it’s with relief that we see Mikage begin to befriend Tanabe, a young man who worked in the flower shop Mikage’s grandmother frequented—and who liked Mikage’s grandmother enough that he helped with her funeral. He lives with his mother, and he arrives at Mikage’s apartment one day to suggest she come live with them for a bit. Just while she tries to figure things out. Mikage is a bit disconcerted—as most would be—but finds herself liking the idea more and more. Unsurprisingly, on her first visit to Tanabe and his mother’s apartment, she explores the kitchen first: it has a lived-in disorder balanced by the quality of its plates and various implements. “It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at first sight.”

Kitchen’s strength is this seeming simplicity. I will admit there are times where either the translation or Yoshimoto’s writing is too simple for me, perhaps missing some of the poetry I prefer or the verve of that opening paragraph, but those moments are few and far in-between. There are far more moments like this for devastating truthfulness:

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night. (p. 75)

So many of my favorite moments are ones such as these—reading, playing games, sitting on the porch and staring up at the night sky—letting those memories of important and unimportant things suddenly resurface in my mind’s eye. It’s why for Mikage—and the reader—that grief is not something you just get over or get through, it’s something that remains, becoming a companion that may hold its peace for any number of days, only to return unexpectedly with something as simple as a glancing outside a window of a café.

Most English copies of Kitchen come with a companion piece within its covers, a long story titled “Moonlight Shadow.” Knowing it was a companion piece, I was expecting to find the same characters as Kitchen, perhaps further along their respective paths, but instead it’s a story of two other young people also struggling with the loss of someone close to them: this time, a significant other.

It’s striking in the way grief plays out in similar ways, just with varied surface details. Where Kitchen’s Mikage obsessed over kitchens and cooking, the narrator of “Moonlight Shadow,” Satsuki, has taken up running to cope with the loss of her boyfriend in a car crash. She runs every morning, even when she’s not feeling particularly well, and has started to lose far too much weight. Hiragi, the brother of her deceased boyfriend, lost his girlfriend in the same automobile accident, and he’s gone to the extreme of wearing her uniform to school.

What “Moonlight Shadow” adds to the struggle of learning to live with grief is knowing that you will continue on past the death you cannot forget. That the one you once did everything with will no longer participate in your life as they once did—that you somehow survived and they did not. The story ends with Satsuki calling out to her boyfriend, hoping he will hear her:

Hitoshi:

I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go.

One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.

The simple things are how we live and love, as well as how we learn to live with grief, and the simple things are how we are able to continue, even as we cannot forget those we have lost.

In Appreciation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Book Cover to Things Fall Apart Sometimes a reader is simply not prepared for the world they encounter within a book’s pages. “This dude is hard to like,” is my strongest memory from my first reading of Things Fall Apart and its main character, Okonkwo. This giant of a man is an often terrifying presence to those around him: opinionated, prideful, and patriarchal as all get-out. In one fit of rage, he even fires a gun at one of his wives, who barely escapes with her life. It would have been hard to be more ideologically at odds with a character than I was with him, and I was left feeling dismayed that I did not connect much to what was considered a great work of literature.

What I didn’t notice so strongly upon that first reading, some twenty or so years ago, was that I didn’t put the book down, even when I was most disagreeing with Okonkwo. The reasons for this are so much more clear to me now, on a second reading. From the very start, Chinua Achebe makes the world of his historical novel come to life—a reader is left feeling like they are living in Iboland, before and during the beginnings of European colonization. And he makes Okonkwo hard not to respect, despite all his faults.

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and nights. (opening paragraph, Things Fall Apart)

It is this careful balancing of contrasts that drives the novel’s power. Okonkwo is as he is because his father was frequently in debt, preferred music to physical labor, and was deemed cowardly by their community. We can even feel sympathy (or at the very least understanding) for Okonkwo when holding to his personal ideal of masculinity and identity costs him dearly. When the village’s oracle states that Okonkwo’s adopted son must die, Okonkwo not only allows this to happen to his adopted son—a boy he loves more than his own flesh-and-blood son, Nwoye—Okonkwo even takes part in the ritual killing so as not to be seen as weak by his clan. And for weeks afterward, the man is unable to understand why he has no desire to work. The killing had to be done, and so he did it. Grief is not in his vocabulary, even if he cannot help but feel it.

The tale is more than a Shakespearean tragedy, however: it’s seen as the defining work of post-colonial literature because of how it uses contrasting details to highlight strengths and weaknesses of Ibo culture before the arrival of Europeans, as well as the damages (and benefits) Europeans brought with them. As Kwame Anthony Appiah states in his excellent introduction to the Everyman’s edition of the novel, “Achebe’s rigorous accounting includes columns both for profit and loss.”

The first Christian missionary to the region develops strong relationships with the community, becoming friends even with those he is not able to convert to his religion. When he becomes sick and departs back to England, his replacement is of the fire and brimstone variety, pushing the community to a violent confrontation that ultimately leads to Okonkwo’s death. Another notation in the column for profit, or benefit, is both missionaries’ objection to the local culture’s tradition of leaving twin babies in the woods to die (twins are seen as evil).

Even with all this careful balancing, there is a clear condemnation of the myopic and biased view of the European colonizers. By the novel’s end, we have seen the breadth of Iboland’s culture: its economy, its family life, its religion, its system of justice, even its love of wrestling (the frenzied, communal description of a wrestling event is not all that different from how a writer would try to bring to life a modern game of high school football). It is a place with its own traditions and values. Some better or worse, perhaps, but not on a qualitative whole worse than that of the Europeans who have recently arrived.

So on its final page, when the novel switches to the European viewpoint of the local district commissioner, a reader is hard pressed not to recoil when the commissioner notes the death of Okonkwo as a mere curiosity or anecdote—something to use in a book he is writing about his experiences in Africa.

One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (final paragraph, Things Fall Apart)

Unlike Achebe’s “rigorous accounting” (as Appiah put it), this is unbalanced accounting of the worst kind. The commissioner has but one column for the Ibo—primitive—and he twists all evidence to fit this or ignores it entire. And Achebe has forced his readers to see this clearly, with no ifs, ands, or buts. What a marvel.

The BFS Recommends Kindred by Octavia Butler

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

There’s always a barrier between a reader and what they read—the reader knows they can always put the book down. This is particularly the case with a subject the reader thinks they know about already, as they’re further insulated from being affected by it, with their biases and previously drawn conclusions. But the best authors find a way to reduce or almost eliminate this barrier, to implode those implicit stances the reader places between them and the seemingly familiar concepts they’re encountering.

Octavia Butler was one author consistently able to do this (go read her story “Bloodchild” if you haven’t already: you’ll thank me), and she did so in particular with her 1979 novel, Kindred. This is the third novel I’ve read in the past couple years that uses a speculative fiction approach to tangle with racism. slavery, and antebellum America, but it’s undoubtedly the best of the lot. While Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer is worth reading for how powerfully it uses its themes of memory and heritage, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad intrigues with a Gulliver’s Travels style journey to explore race relations in America, neither of them wrestled with the these issues as successfully as Kindred.

Butler accomplishes this by having her protagonist, Dana, be a modern (well, 1979 modern), married Black woman forced to travel back to an early 1800s plantation in Maryland to save her white ancestor, Rufus. By means and for reasons that she is never able to determine, Dana is called to save Rufus when his life is in danger, but is sent back to her own timeline when her own life is put into danger. Her first stop is brief, with her pulling the young child Rufus from a river, providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only to have the boy’s father point a gun at her, causing her to be sent back to her own timeline. But unfortunately for Dana, this is not the only instance where Rufus nearly dies (she’s called back to different moments in his life), meaning she is yanked back multiple times to the plantation Rufus’s father owns. After a few hours or days in her present, Dana is called back to find months or years have often gone by between her visits to Rufus’s timeline

And other than for that first visit, it is often months before she is able to return to her present, meaning she has to find some way to live on the plantation. While it’s hardly the most hospitable place, she has few other options: Rufus’s family grudgingly allows her a place to work and live (tinged with slight gratitude for saving Rufus), and any attempted escape north could cause Dana to be captured by patrols, resulting in her being sold as a slave to someone that is even worse than Rufus’s father (who only whips slaves when they “deserve it,” according to Rufus).

This setup means Dana’s (and the reader’s) previous thoughts and biases about the era are slowly and steadily removed. Octavia Butler said the idea for the novel came to her after a young Black man she knew vilified the generations that had come before them for their subservience to whites and racism, and you can see how the novel implodes his not-uncommon thought process. Dana attempts to soften Rufus as he grows older (and he does seem to respect her), but she is only able to do so much, given his family and the society he lives in. She also attempts to help and educate other slaves on the plantation, but again she is only able to do so much: and eventually the cost to her is great.

Dana is only human, in the end, capable of being whipped, shot, or torn at by dogs, and she wants to live. She wants to get back to her own era, and her husband. Once faced with that reality, the needed compromises to get by are seen and felt by her and the reader—any grandiose thoughts about how she might live or be different from other slaves are slowly worn away. While she befriends some other Blacks on the plantation, other slaves see her as dangerous—if not a spy for Rufus and his father, at the very least a “mammy” or a “whore,” worthy of their contempt.

As she goes back again, and again, the reader is forced to ask (as Dana and her husband also ask), why doesn’t she let Rufus die? But of course, then Dana herself wouldn’t exist. Nor would all the generations between Rufus and Dana herself. It’s not that simple. Ignoring all that, what would it mean for Dana to become a person that lets another die? Where would the separation be between her and Rufus? His father?

For all its dark subject matter—for all the physical, emotional, and mental pain Dana goes through—Butler doesn’t drown the reader in it. This is no small feat, as Amazon’s production of Whitehead’s Underground Railroad shows: its very first episode subsumes the reader in the violence of the era, simultaneously burying much of its main character’s story, making her seem a bystander to the narrative. While these are issues Whitehead’s novel generally does not have, they still highlight the danger in telling a story such as this. It is far too easy to caricature, distancing the viewer through extremes of one sort or another.

Kindred stands apart through its ability to find balance in its narrative. Like Dana, the reader can never stop hoping for something better. Seen in one way, that hope is a chain that enables slavery. Seen another, hope is the thing that makes life worth living.

The BFS Recommends Three by Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant

Book Reviews Recommended Reads Reviews

Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017 Like a great river, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are deceptively slow-moving. Beneath their well-mannered, placid exteriors lie a current one inevitably succumbs to: when his characters finally come to regard the parts of their lives they have buried deep within, the emotional tidal wave caused is like little else in literature.

The Remains of the Day

The early standout that garnered him major attention (an award-winning film adaptation certainly helped), 1989’s The Remains of the Day epitomizes Ishiguro’s modus operandi for almost all of his writing. The main character and first person narrator of the novel is Stevens, a butler of a great English manor house in the early and mid-twentieth century. He is a butler’s butler, a servant so committed to his task that he willingly contemplates changing his serious demeanor to attempt “some banter” with the new American owner of the manor where he works. Mr. Farraday seems to like little joking comments, so perhaps it is also expected of Stevens to respond in kind (though the reader can easily see Stevens is out of his depth here: so afraid is Stevens of offending his employer that his first attempt at humor doesn’t even register as a witticism). More, when Mr. Farraday suggests making a go of running the house with only four staff, Stevens accedes, even though doing so puts a strain on his health—we come to gather that Stevens is advanced in years, and is most probably in his 60s.

Book Cover of The Remains of the Day a watercolor like image of a manor house in the distance With how deferential and professional Stevens seems, it can take some time to realize that for all his attention to external detail, this butler is glossing over some life-altering facts about himself. Our first indication of this is a repeated reference and focus on a former housekeeper at the manor, Miss Kenton. Even though she has not worked there for twenty years in the novel’s present—1956—she seems a fixture in his thoughts and they do keep in touch: something he has not done with other former colleagues he recalls fondly yet cordially.

These indications come in ever-increasing waves, laying bare more and more of Stevens’s past life and work at the house for its former occupant, Lord Darlington. The subtlety with which they are revealed makes them all the more heart-breaking. At the novel’s middle point, Stevens recalls an important international conference Lord Darlington brought together at the house in 1923, attempting to have some of the harsher measures of the Versailles treaty reduced (at the end of World War I, the Allies exacted such extreme reparations from Germany that some historians believe they helped cause World War II).

At the same time as this conference, however, Stevens’s father, who has come to work at the manor in his old age, has a stroke and dies. Being a butler’s butler and knowing the importance of the conference for Lord Darlington (and therefore the world), Stevens refuses to cease his duties, continuing to deal with recalcitrant guests. He meticulously details the events of the evening, all while refusing to note the emotional toll it takes on him. In the midst of all the description and dialogue, it is only when a friendly visitor asks repeatedly if he’s alright that we realize the anguish which must be showing on Stevens’s face—and it’s confirmed a couple of paragraphs later, when Lord Darlington takes him aside as well, asking if he has been crying. Stevens just won’t admit to his true, honest emotions, even in the past tense as he recounts the evening.

It’s only at the novel’s end that Stevens can fully and finally admit to the mistakes of his past—to the anger and despair he feels at the trust he placed in his former employer, and what that trust has done to the rest of his life. After a little over two hundred pages spent in this character’s head, the release hammers the reader as hard as it does Stevens.

While there is an element of depression to these final events, the effect is something of a catharsis. Stevens’s life has been more empty than it should have been—and past choices cannot be revoked or wholly repaired—but he no longer pretends the damage does not exist. As another character notes to Stevens in the novel’s final moments while they watch the sun set, everyone is waiting for the joys an evening holds: the evening awaiting Stevens may not quite have been the one he desired or thought he was working for, but it is, nonetheless, one where he can make his own conscious choices.

Never Let Me Go

Book Cover for Never Let Me Go: the lettering of the novel's title, behind which can be seen a young woman's face Where The Remains of the Day is a nod to the well-established “proper butler” and upstairs/downstairs storytelling of English tradition, Never Let Me Go tangles with a different fictional genre: science fiction and dystopia, with a flavor of alternate history. Added to the mix is that somewhat strange—to a middle-class American’s eyes—English institution, the boarding school.

It’s a familiar fictional setting well established in many books, movies, and TV shows, however, so it’s in the slight differences to this formula that a reader begins to track the trouble beneath this novel’s proper British exterior. There’s the sadly reminiscent tone of the novel’s narrator, Kathy, for one, looking back at her days at Hailsham boarding school. There’s occasional hints about the future that awaits the students beyond the school’s grounds, and something seems a little off, or different, about it—particularly when one of the teachers insists the students be told more about what awaits them, which leads to some tense moments with the school’s leadership. And why does the school’s governor seem terrified of the students when she comes in for her monthly visit?

Even as this mystery deepens, we’re confronted by the human problems every person faces at that age. Who am I? What will I be in the future? And what about that attractive other person over there—do I… love them? Do they… love me? In Ishiguro’s hands, adolescence is treated with respect and depth.

Seen through the lens of Kathy’s memory, these events gain a greater magnitude as well. Moments that changed the forward projection of Kathy’s life, and her relationship with other students—particularly Tommy, another boy at school she felt a particularly strong connection to (but sadly never seemed to be able to start a relationship with). As we begin to understand the future awaiting the students from Hailsham, those missed opportunities begin to cut us more deeply, building to an impossible to forget moment, as Kathy looks out over an empty field in Norfolk. To others passing by, that field would have little, if any significance. For the reader, who has walked along through Kathy’s memories of what she had—and did not have—in her all too short life, it’s one they will never forget.

The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant's book cover, dominated by the black lines of a tree's gnarled branches and roots, on a blue background, with a slight shimmering of silver surrounding it. Ishiguro was apparently worried going into this novel’s publication, as it had more overt fantasy connotations, being set in Britain shortly after the reign of King Arthur. Dragons apparently exist, along with other magical creatures, and Merlin recently walked the enchanted isle. One has to wonder if this worry caused him to avoid too much overt fantasy, as other than for an ever-present magic that causes people to lose most of their long term memories, the novel proceeds fairly realistically.

This reluctance is occasionally disappointing. While the title of the book certainly refers to the memory loss many of the characters are struggling with (and its cause), it also refers to what may be an actual, buried giant on Salisbury plain. Beatrice, one of the main characters, reminds her husband Axl of the necessity of passing by the buried giant’s hill in complete silence, also hinting at other sinister forces on the plain, but we never actually see these creatures. While the third person narrator of the book seems trustworthy, this creates a confusion over what is real and what is superstition—and while this is certainly in keeping with the book’s themes, it does feel like Ishiguro didn’t quite want to own the setting he chose. Among other elements, the book does have a real dragon, and Merlin did accomplish real magic with it, so not completely owning or dealing the ramifications of a world where magic and magical creatures exists feels like a shortcoming in an otherwise excellent book.

Being a genre enthusiast myself, I may have noticed this more than some other readers. But on a second read through, it was more noticeable to me, particularly given that the actual magic and fantasy Ishiguro used in the book is potent—delving into the very human and real world issues of loss and memory (are you noticing the similarities his other books?). In the novel’s present, elderly Britons Axl and Beatrice have been husband and wife for as long as they can remember—which is long, but they’re not entirely sure how long. Like everyone else in the book, a magical mist has deprived them of much of their long term memory. People only seem to remember what they see daily (sometimes hourly), and once that is gone, only the most persistent can even snatch at the phantom of a true recollection.

Beatrice and Axl begin a journey to visit their son, who lives in a village a few days away. They’re not sure why he’s no longer living with them, but they are certain they want to see him again. Throughout the course of their journey, they encounter Saxons, who seem to live in peace now with their Briton neighbors—but it wasn’t always that way. People still remember that there was a King Arthur who fought and protected them from the Saxons, but that war seems to be done and over with now.

This general lack of a long term memory (other than for the fuzziest of past, important details) makes for intriguing parallels to the real world. When we live in the now and forget how we arrived where we are, we cling to beliefs and superstitions for unknown, potentially spurious or damaging reasons. But we can also forget enormous pain, and the anger that can come with it. In the course of their journey, Beatrice and Axl meet a mighty Saxon warrior, who they come to a sort of accord with—the Saxon likes them well enough, but inside he holds a sharp hatred for all Britons, due to their mistreatment of him when he was young. Liking an individual but hating the group they are a part of is illogical when looked at in one way, of course, but it’s entirely realistic and human in practice.

In probing these themes, Ishiguro is sharply examining a post Cold War, 21st Century, where democracies the world over seem to be having an identity crisis: turning in on themselves now that they don’t have a clear and present exterior threat to form their identity around (or finding a new enemy within their own borders to form up against). While I could wish I didn’t live in such a seething kettle of repressed racism and hatred, I live in this time nonetheless and a book dealing with such powerful issues is one that cannot be over-valued.

That’s the grander drama of The Buried Giant. Beneath all these larger ideas is a more personal, human factor—ever present in Axl and Beatrice’s relationship. Arguably, Ishiguro’s best use of his fantasy setting is not the breath of the dragon, which has caused the long term memory issues, but the concept of a magical island, accessible only by a mysterious ferryman. Such an idea appears time and again in Arthurian legend, and Ishiguro uses it here to lay bare the human pains and fears we all have about death and losing those we most love. As Axl and Beatrice’s journey ends in an encounter with a mysterious ferryman, I found myself as moved as I had ever been with The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

On the Hopeful Darkness of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Book Reviews Musings Recommended Reads

In a year already marred by insurrectionists storming the U.S. capitol building to dispute the results of an election in which hardly any instances of voter fraud occurred, I find myself comforted by Haruki Murakami’s best novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—and disturbed by its all too accurate portrayal of the dark side of humanity.

Why is it that evil so easily seems to grow? How do the seeds of dissension so easily spread? Murakami’s novel rightly identifies media as one cause, with those who earn its seemingly random favor gaining a strange power to manipulate those around them. At one point the book’s main character, Toru Okada, is warned to be careful: “Those people are always glued to the television set. That is why you are so disliked here. They are very fond of your wife’s elder brother” (pg. 572).

Nor is it just being in media that confers power—it’s also how the media is used. Toru’s brother-in-law is so dangerous because he does not seem to hold any consistent values (other than the increasing of his own power). Rather than being problematic to his supporters and viewers, this lack of consistency actually works in the brother-in-law’s favor, which Murakami notes in a passage that will echo alarmingly to anyone who has paid any amount of attention to modern media (and politics), let alone the past week: “Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things (pg. 75-76).”

It’s not all down to the media of course—hatred and evil find other ways to spread… sometimes in ways that are hard to understand and can almost seem like a tidal wave. In a passage that is by turns hilarious, disgusting, and soberingly accurate, Toru captures this phenomenon by telling the story of the monkeys of the shitty island.

‘Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle […] What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it. (202)

If one can’t tell from the humor of that ingenious passage, Murakami is incredibly apt at making heady moral and philosophical ideas accessible. But he is especially able to do this because of the ordinariness of his main character. Not unlike Bilbo in The Hobbit, Toru Okada is the best possible protagonist for this kind of narrative. He is so utterly normal, so utterly grounded, it’s hard for a reader not to appreciate his stability, even as bizarre, otherworldly things begin to happen. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a Haruki Murakami novel, after all, and that means you’re in for strange, psychic dreams and dark netherworlds that wouldn’t feel out of place on the X-Files or Twin Peaks (as I noted in my review of Murakami’s Wind/Pinball).

Just in the first chapter alone, a strange woman keeps calling Toru on the phone, insisting that he knows her very well, even though he doesn’t recognize her voice or manner at all… before she takes the conversation in a in a racier direction (“Oh, great. Telephone sex,” Toru thinks to himself before hanging up on her). And then the teenaged girl Toru meets while searching for the his lost cat seems to be rather morbidly obsessed with death. Everyone he encounters is a little strange, a little off, and Toru’s equanimity in encountering them all keeps drawing the reader in.

The balance Toru brings only continues as the aforementioned psychics and strange dreams start to arrive in the novel’s narrative. “What does it all mean?” any reader is bound to ask, but Toru’s even-keeled nature and the connections that are revealed between smaller strange events lead a reader to trust that all the bigger ideas and mysteries Murakami is juggling will come together somehow. And they do—thanks much in part to why this oftentimes somber novel is able to comfort me. Even as Toru uncovers a human darkness that grew out of some of the darkest events of World War II—itself one of the darkest times in human history—he finds a group of like-minded souls, individuals that have learned (or come to learn) how to feel for their fellow humans and to help them.

Still, it all seems so fragile, so impossible. Toru Okada is out of work and his cat has disappeared, shortly before his wife disappears as well. And his primary antagonist is his wife’s elder brother, a rising media star and politician that has all the power and all the cards. It begins to feel like there’s no way that Toru can win and unravel the mystery of those missing in his life, no matter what friends he finds on the way.

But if a small group of humans can continue on, healing the world around them—no matter how high the cost—maybe it’s okay to feel some hope as my own life has been hit by a real-life media (kind of) star and politician that is wreaking his own brand of havoc on this world that I love so much. Like Toru, I choose to descend into the darkness again, for those who seem to be lost to it… unless I can help them find their way out.

The BFS Recommends Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends

**Seriously, look at that guy. How can he not make you smile?**

Dance, Dance, Dance is the rare book that makes you completely, thoroughly happy. Not stupid happy, ignoring the sadness and pain life can throw your way, but happily aware: fully cognizant of all the flaws in this world, but still finding it improbably beautiful.

Why does Dance Dance Dance make me so joyful? Well, first, there’s that book cover, which is the edition my local library had, If that doesn’t make you smile a bit, well, umm, what’s wrong with you? It’s a sheep wearing a collared shirt, tie, and plaid sweater vest, for crying out loud.

But in all honesty the thing that makes the book so happy-making is what happens for its unnamed narrator. This is the fourth book he’s been in by Murakami, and in all of them he’s been emotionally withdrawn (something you can immediately feel and appreciate in his character, even if this book is your first encounter with him). In the first book the narrator appears in, Hear the Wind Sing, another character notes that he’s “Very zen.”

It serves him well, in a way, to float along and not be completely overwhelmed by the waves that come his way: he certainly is put through a lot. But it also keeps him emotionally distant, incapable of reaching his potential or really even feeling love. In the third book to feature the narrator, A Wild Sheep Chase, his wife leaves him at the start, most likely because of his emotional unavailability. But here, finally, in Dance Dance Dance, he is able to awaken: winter has fallen away, spring has sprung. You can see it stirring in the narrator as he reaches out and makes new friendships and even goes through the starts and stops of a new relationship with a hotel clerk.

If I could make a comparison, it’s like seeing a sad friend or relative suddenly grow, changing and reaching out, becoming that thing you always knew they could be. Even now it brings an almost inexplicable smile to my face, and that’s something to note in and of itself. Good literature, good art, should help us understand our fellow humans and appreciate their growths and triumphs.

This is made all the more palpable due to the darkness to be found in Dance Dance Dance. Just like its preceding three books, sadness lurks, as does death, Maybe even more than in the previous novels, and they were hardly carefree affairs.

Despite this, however, the book’s title is always at its center. Early on in the book, the narrator finds and has a discussion with the Sheep Man. Yes, there is a character called the Sheep Man (and despite the book cover above, he probably is only a guy in a sheep suit). But in that improbably Murakami way, he is very much real and very much not ridiculous. His otherworldliness is suggested in how all of his sentences consist of no spaces between the words: strange, but understandable.

In this early conversation, the narrator and the Sheep Man are tired. Withdrawn. The Sheep Man himself is feeling old. But he tells the narrator he can make his way back to life. “Yougottadance,” he says (86).

The narrator takes the advice to heart, and so does the book. Weird stuff keeps happening to the narrator, he keeps making friends (or renewing friendships), but then depression and loss also come along, threatening to derail it all. But he’s justgottakeepdancing, His finding a way to do this and encourage others to do so is part of the book’s magic.

An additional piece of magic happened for me with my library book, however. A former reader had co-opted the old checkout tag to leave a note for future readers, in a manner that feels almost trademark Murakami. His narrators are always getting odd messages or stories told to them, and this one is no different. The weird energy of that note is wonderfully sublime and needs sharing with the world.

“This is an incredible book. Don’t read the blurbs, don’t read the publisher’s description, just read the book. It blew me away. Of course you must read “A Wild Sheep Chase,” first. Then this. Both books are compelling as hell. Right on, brothers and sisters. Knock yourselves out.”

As my fellow reader notes, it’s probably worth checking out A Wild Sheep Chase first, if not Wind/Pinball as well. You can appreciate this one without reading them, but it hits all the harder if you have the experience of all the narrator’s previous trials and tribulations.

Wherever you might be, however good or bad life might be going for you now in the moment, you need this book. You need it like a friend you just discovered and really should have known for your entire life.

Right on, my internet brothers and sisters, right on. Whether you do a little shuffle like this big, awkward Swede or something more graceful, we just gotta dance.

Wejustgottadance.

The BFS Recommends: Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends

Wind/Pinball, by Haruki Murakami Mood. An important factor in any book, but Haruki Murakami is a master of it. “He’s kind of weird?” people like to say, “but he’s cool, too, I couldn’t get this story of his out of my mind.” If you want to get technical in literary terms, he’s a surrealist, which is the fancier, upmarket way of saying he uses fantastic elements in his work (or a kind of magical realism): his books start out feeling like normal, everyday life, but before you know it, there are crazy conspiracies and alternate realities being fitted into the plot quite neatly and naturally.

If you’re a fan of the mesmerizing effect such TV shows as The X-Files, Fringe, or Twin Peaks have (though I have to go from hearsay on the latter), chances are you’ll like the mood Murakami projects in his writing. And there is always something more to Murakami than surreal/genre elements: a truly accessible author, the human condition is always at the heart of of his stories.

There are recurring themes and motifs in all his books (with a quick internet search, you’ll hear quips about lost cats, mysterious women, and a fascination with wells), but each one of his works has a unique focus. They generally have intricate plots and are quite long as well, with one of his more recent novels, IQ84, clocking in at about 900 pages.

His first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, were recently re-translated and re-published after being out of print for 30 years (in a fun double book set, with one novel printed on the first half, and the other printed “upside down” on the other half). And if you’re curious about Murakami, you should definitely give these a look.

These two novellas stand out from the rest of Murakami’s body of work in how short and poetic they are, which makes them an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to see if they’ll like his writing. With only 100-130 pages each, you can focus on how Murakami crafts his characters, language, and mood. Both novellas also have a similar structure, as they are made up of short, chronological vignettes that focus on an unnamed narrator in his college years (or a little after, in Pinball), and his friend, nicknamed The Rat.

Hear the Wind Sing
For those who have ever felt a little lost or unsure if people get them, for those who have ever felt like they were losing connection with those they were once close to, Murakami gives you Hear the Wind Sing. Set during a summer interlude where the narrator is back home from college (but soon to leave again), the narrator and The Rat are feeling equally unmoored. People come into their lives, then leave. The mood is longing, transitory, even when the two are just shooting the breeze in the local bar. The narrator finds himself wondering about past relationships, particularly with one woman who committed suicide a year or so after they broke up. He starts seeing a girl that seems equally troubled, equally precarious.

Wind is the recurring motif, as the title suggests. It makes characters feel more connected to each other and the world than they ever have before; it makes them lonelier than they could possibly believe. It’s a characterization I can appreciate, as I’ve found there are few things like wind to suggest a person’s current mood and emotion. On a good day with the sun shining, there is little better than to hear the wind soughing through the needles of a pine tree—the world and you are in communion, connected. But on a bad day the same wind might blow hollow, reflecting the emptiness inside you in an echo chamber of depression.

For all its quiet loveliness and truth, there are some odd vignettes and inclusions in Hear the Wind Sing. It’s not as well-crafted as Murakami’s later work, but it’s still the writing of a masterful author. In his introduction, Murakami notes that he wrote the novel in the early hours before dawn, after returning from work at a jazz bar he and his wife owned. The bar was struggling and just finding its feet, while he was in the last years of his 20s and trying to find his way.

This book is the feeling you have when you awake (or can’t fall asleep) in the small hours of the night, mind humming with ideas, filled with a nameless longing.

Pinball, 1973

For those who have ever wondered where they were headed or if what they were doing matters, for those who have ever wondered why things have to change, Murakami gives you Pinball, 1973. Told in short, chronological vignettes similar to Hear the Wind Sing, we once again follow the small biographical ins and outs of the nameless narrator and The Rat. It’s set a couple years after the previous book, and the nameless narrator lives in Tokyo, while The Rat is still bumming around the narrator’s hometown, drinking beer at the local bar and living off of his rich father’s money.

The unmoored feeling of the previous book continues, but with a feeling of loss and damage, accentuated by the fact that the narrator and The Rat never meet. We get the feeling they’re still friends, but they’re apart. And the season is fall: change is in the air.

In one haunting segment, The Rat stares at an old, small lighthouse at the end of a pier. He’s longing for something, but something also feels wrong: as another section notes, “we could sense something nasty lurking just out of sight.” When I read, no, when I saw The Rat watching the old lighthouse, I was like, “This is me, at the end of grad school in 2004.” My maternal grandfather had passed away earlier that spring; I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my life or what it all meant. I spent hours walking by Lake Superior, staring at the waves and Duluth’s lighthouses. I didn’t yet know that my father had cancer.

It’s a feeling I’ve had at other times in my life as well. The truth told in the mood of this book still astounds me.

There are still weaknesses, I suppose. Being Murakami’s second book or novella, there are some bits that seem a little off to me. But even then you can see his progression as an author: themes and images are coalescing for him, which will reappear, fully formed and developed in his later work. Surreal elements which were not about in his first novella begin to make their appearance in the unnamed narrator’s hunt for a pinball table he was obsessed with playing during college. I think every reader will have a different take on the meaning of the strange warehouse the narrator eventually finds the pinball machine in, but there are undoubted echoes of his relationship with a woman that is now dead (possibly the same woman mentioned in Hear the Wind Sing). There is always some doubt or guessing to Murakami’s work, as with all great literature, but more is probably unclear here than there should have been.

Another Murakami trope, mysterious women, appear in the guise of two twins that live with the narrator for awhile. They seem real and they do not seem real at the same time. Their entrance is unclear: did the narrator meet them somewhere one night and just wake up next to them in the morning, unable to remember how he met them? Or did they literally appear out of nowhere? You could read the text either way. They do have substance, other characters in the book see them, but they are undoubtedly not like the other women in the book, who are struggling just as the narrator and The Rat are struggling.

Whoever or whatever the twins might be, they seem to be there to help the narrator deal with an unnamed trauma (probably the woman who has died, but again, the novel is a bit unclear on the details), and then they go away when he is able to deal with it, or at least bring it to terms. I’m still not sure if the twins are a weird thing for Murakami to include or if they are a perfect fit for the novel’s feeling of transience, but I do know I feel more ambivalent about them than the other mysterious women that tend to pop up in his books.

Regardless of its shortcomings, however, Pinball is a beautiful read. What feeling is it? Unlike with Hear the Wind Sing, I’ll let Murakami take us out on this one, as there is no way for me to capture it perfectly.

“{The Rat} was as powerless and lonely as a winter fly stripped of its wings, or a river confronting the sea. An ill wind had arisen somewhere, and it was blowing the warm, familiar air that had embraced him to the other side of the planet.

One season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. You might run to the open door and call out, Wait, there’s something I forgot to tell you! But no one is there. When you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. If you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? I might pass the message along if I get the chance. No, that’s all right, you say. It’s no big deal. The sound of wind fills the room. No big deal. Just another season dead and gone.”

A BFS Review: Mystery My Country

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Mystery My Country Cover Page I’ve been remiss this past week and forgotten to post about Issue 8 of Split Rock Review going live! A colleague of mine, Crystal Gibbins, started up Split Rock about four years ago, and it’s been a great privilege to serve on the editorial staff since 2015. As with many other web-only literary magazines, most of our pieces are on the shorter side (fiction can be at most 2500 words), but we generally have a great mix of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction to check out. In Issue 8, we even have a short graphic narrative/novel this time around!

As I have with a few other issues, I reviewed a book. This time it was Robert Vivian’s Mystery My Country, and wow… words are just so hard to describe this collection of short essays. I’ll let the review speak for me, but reading these essays is something akin to jumping into a frozen lake. I’m still not sure how sitting in a sauna until you’re almost uncomfortably hot can make it possible for you to run out through the snow and jump into a large hole cut in the ice without once feeling the burn of the cold, but I know it’s possible. It’s a rush and a relief, all at the same time—and that’s the closest metaphor I can find for the joy Vivian’s work creates in its reader.

BFS Reviews: The Samurai by Shusaku Endo

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Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Photo credit: Lorianne DiSabato / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Many of the initial readers of The Samurai focused on its sense of adventure, where a low-ranking Japanese samurai (think knight, for those of you less familiar with medieval Japan) travels to Mexico, Spain, and ultimately even Rome in the hopes of developing trade between Japan and Spain.

And who can blame them? Adventure tales are adored for good reason—oceans are traveled, mountains are crossed, rivers are forded—they grab hold whether every pebble passed is described in delightful detail or whether whole swathes of the journey are memorably glossed, like an Indiana-Jones-style-line traversing a colorful map.

The stakes are also high in this historical adventure: in early 17^th century Japan, the low-ranking samurai and three other envoys are ordered by their feudal lord—the Shogun—to voyage to Nueva España (Mexico) to open trade relations between Japan and Spain. This goal is more difficult to achieve than first surmised, however, and the envoys journey to Spain and even Rome before they can begin to return home. In the meantime, tumultuous seas, harsh deserts, Indian uprisings, and political machinations have to be endured, all made worse by their dependence on their translator, a wily Franciscan monk who may or may not have their best interests in mind.

Now, it can’t be denied that this is one appeal of The Samurai, but selling it as an adventure tale only captures a portion of it. While there is pageantry and drama to spare in a journey that takes years to finish, the real strength of The Samurai lies in its focus on the individual.

The novel’s main character, the titular samurai, is the overlord of a tiny fiefdom of three villages, surrounded by marshland. Lesser writers would struggle with making such a man’s life interesting, yet Endo makes Hasekura Rokuemon’s existence beautiful in its desolation. Rokuemon looks like the peasants that work in the three villages he rules, and he works just as hard as they do—he is not one of those idle samurai with time to paint or write poetry. The only music is that which can be found in a harsh life of labor:

It began to snow. Until nightfall a faint sunlight had bathed the gravel-covered river bed through breaks in the clouds. When the sky turned dark, an abrupt silence ensued. Two, then three flakes of snow fluttered down from the sky. As the samurai and his men cut wood, snow grazed their rustic outfits, brushed against their face and hands, then melted away as if to underscore the brevity of life.

Endo’s writing consistently reminded me of Japanese woodcuttings and paintings, with their clear black lines and sharp colors that imprint even simple scenes with a vividness that cannot leave the eye.

All too soon, Rokuemon is torn away from this world that he cherishes, leaving his ailing uncle, wife, and small children behind. While the ache of this never leaves Rokuemon, it is tempered with the joys he takes in the journey—the broad expanses of the sea, the tableaus and cacti of Nueva España, the immense cathedrals of Spain itself—all are colored by the simple delight Rokuemon takes in the them.

Nor is simple a derogatory adjective when applied to Rokuemon. While he wishes he were wily and canny, like one of the other envoys (or the Shogun, who sent him on the diplomatic mission), he knows he isn’t. All he can offer his steadfastness, his loyalty, his ability to work.

The beauty of the samurai’s simplicity and steadfastness is heightened all the more by being surrounded by schemers. It’s unclear if the Shogun truly wishes to establish trade relations and encourage Christianity (which he has recently begun to persecute), or whether he wishes to gain something else from the mission. And while the Franciscan monk who accompanies the envoys is aware of this possible duplicity, he is also willing to go along with it, all for the sake of Japan’s soul: if Christianity can only take root, it will be worth it.

This Franciscan monk, Father Velasco, is the other individual at the heart of the novel. Like the samurai, he comes from a warrior’s family, but unlike the samurai, he is a cunning manipulator. He truly wishes to help Japan, but his mind and ego constantly get in the way of his more noble intentions. He needs to be the one to save the Japanese, not the rival order of the Jesuits. He is the only one who understands the Japanese and can lead them to salvation, no one else.

If Rokuemon is made wonderful by his honest simplicity, Velasco is made relatable by this struggle. He is consistently told by church leaders that there is no hope for Japan—the Shogun most certainly will continue to persecute Christians, as he has been for the past several years. But Velasco won’t give up; he feels responsibility for all the Japanese Christians and martyrs. He has faith where other church leaders do not, and his belief continues while the Pope falters in the face of international politics and declines to pressure Spain into trading with Japan (or continue to send missionaries to Japan). While Velasco’s actions are at times tainted by pride, faith is at their root, not sin.

These two individuals—samurai and priest—eventually find themselves united in their faith against the mammoth institutions they represent. After years of traveling for his Shogun, Rokumon returns to Japan to find Christianity wholly outlawed. Unfortunately (or not so unfortunately?), he was baptized in Spain, for the sake of his mission and his Shogun. As a result, he is viewed with greater and greater suspicion by the authorities, no matter why he became a Christian.

That’s the great tragedy as well—he didn’t particularly believe in Christianity during his journey. He couldn’t understand how people could worship a broken man on a cross. That man wasn’t noble or lordly, like the Shogun. But in his persecution, he begins to understand and believe. The Shogun doesn’t understand or care for him, nor do the other high-ranking samurai who express sympathy for Rokuemon’s situation but do no nothing else. They aren’t the ones who are eventually jailed or executed.

As for Velasco, he ignores the orders of the Pope and returns to Japan, fully aware he could be executed for preaching there. Inevitably, he is captured, and he learns of Rokuemon’s execution before being martyred himself: it is a seemingly bleak ending, looking at those facts. But in the willingness of these two to go against the inertia of their respective leaders and organizations, it is a moving picture of hope.

The Samurai is one of the best evocations of faith I’ve read from an author of the modern era, but even if this doesn’t appeal to you, Shusaku Endo’s portraits of these two very human individuals should. As this world of ours is more and more characterized by its monolithic institutions that too easily forget the people that make them up, this novel’s embrace of that which makes us human is something all the more to value.