Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  In a southern camp where the watery cultivation of rice is the main business, troops of female prisoners share the work. No contact with male prisoners is allowed, but the women can be closely observed: “Lightly, the women walked by, their provocative movements seeming to invite our examination.… If we were to ignore that walk, however, and see them standing stiff as the haughty reeds, would we believe that they were women?… A baggy top like a cloth sack and a pair of pants stubbornly covered all that was specifically female. Sexless, these women had descended to a state even lower than ours. The term ‘woman’ was used only by habit. They had no waists, no chests, no buttocks, as one after another their dark red faces passed by.” Zhang Yonglin, however, one day spies a woman bathing in an irrigation ditch: “With cupped hands, she teased the water up over her body, splashing her neck, her shoulders, her waist, her hips, her stomach. Her body was lithe and firm. From between the two walls of green, the sun shone straight on her, making her wet skin shine like stretched silk.” The vision becomes mystical:

  She bathed intently, completely. She bathed as if to wash her very soul and make it clean.

  She forgot herself, and I also forgot myself. At the start, I couldn’t help looking, indeed my eyes kept returning to that most secret of female places. Then from it, and from the entire picture, began to emanate a feeling, the aura of a powerful force. Here was something magical, that escaped all that man abhorred. Here, almost, was a myth, an archetype that transcended the world itself. Because of her, the world now had colour. Because of her, I now knew grace.

  Astoundingly, when the woman realizes that she is being watched she boldly poses in her nudity, challenging the voyeur to come to her. He cannot, but he does fall in love: “I didn’t exist. All that remained was her image, standing with crossed arms in the midst of that sheet of whiteness: her beautiful, enticing, fertile, glistening body. All that was left in the world was her.”

  He learns her name: Huang Xiangjiu. With the improbability permissible in romances, they meet again, eight years later, at a labor farm to the north, in the bleak province of Ningxia, where the main business is raising sheep. They are thrown together in a task, the rebuilding of a sheep pen. This time, amid the relatively relaxed discipline of a pastoral camp, they talk, visit one another, and decide to marry. In marriage, the imprisoned intellectual, a virgin at the age of thirty-nine, proves impotent. This impotence, the translator’s introduction and the hero’s own expostulations agree, is the central metaphor of the book: “One of the main themes,” Ms. Avery asserts, “is that China’s political system has desexed its population.” Zhang puts it more circumspectly: “Our world had lost its link with human society.” No doubt, to readers who have endured China’s recent history along with the author, the political meditations and the references to “The Stinking Nines” and “7 May Policy” and “The Gang of Four” and “One Hit Three Counters Movement” are meaningful and stirring. Availing himself of the fantastic, supernatural streak in Chinese storytelling convention, the author stages some lively discussions between the hero and his piebald horse, and then a most entertaining roundtable exchange among the spirits of Song Jiang (a character in the classic novel All Men Are Brothers), Zhuang-tz (a Taoist sage who used to be transliterated as Chuang-tsu), and Karl Marx, who briskly informs the impotent husband, “Right now, your productive power has essentially been neutralized. You’re trying to scrape by with words and hot air rather than real action.” But Western readers are most apt to be struck and moved by the novel’s portrait of marriage and its tracing of the pathetic, even tragic, course of an archetypal relation between the sexes.

  Huang Xiangjiu is something of a wanton: she has been sentenced for promiscuity, has gone through two marriages and divorces, and betrays Zhang with the local Party secretary, Cao Xueyi. But she wants this marriage to “work,” as we capitalists say. Not only is she beautiful with her clothes off; she is thrifty, and skilled at the domestic arts:

  Xiangjiu exhibited an extraordinary ability to manage the decor of our living quarters. I was instructed where to nail in the bamboo holder for the chopsticks, where to place a little shelf to put the soap, where to build the platform for the bed, how to pile up crates so they made a handy cupboard, how to make the frame for the stove and the cutting board into one extended surface, where to put the cooking pans, bowls and spoons so that they would be both convenient and hygienic—and at the same time would not take up too much space.

  To Zhang, a long-term dweller in abasement, domestic life, however meagrely furnished, has a dreamlike luxury and strangeness:

  Every so often, the tiny tinkling of a sound would reach me. The sound was distant, as though it were issuing from a dream. This sound was the sound of a wife—it could not come from the hands of any other person.… Life is made up of just things such as these: a bed, a bedcover, a bookshelf made from a door, a hook for clothes with its white paper underneath, “Snow-flower” skin-lotion. The world she had created was engulfing me, so that I had the feeling of losing my identity.

  The most elemental things about life with a wife amaze him: “The kang [a heated brick platform that supports a bed] had only one bedcover, but two pillows had been placed at the head of it. How very extraordinary to have a woman’s head on one of them.… She was here beside me. A pile of long black hair curled across a soft white pillow. Two shiny eyes looked upwards into the confines of a narrow space.” The act of sex is rather too elemental; she becomes in bed “a beautiful nautilus, suddenly stretching out sticky tentacles from the walls, wrapping around me and trying to draw me down,” and he realizes that “the first struggle of mankind … was that between man and woman.… It demanded not only strength, but a vital spirit, using emotions and some innate artistic sense in its struggle to find balance, to reach unity and harmony, to achieve wholeness while maintaining its own separate self. In this struggle, I had failed.” He is impotent.

  This reconstruction of the primordial relationship in the context of a drastically desexed culture has considerable freshness for us inhabitants of a culture wherein on all sides sex is implied, acknowledged, extolled, and analyzed. The story of Zhang and Huang should not all be told here, since it has more than one surprising turn. Most surprisingly and illuminatingly, when Zhang sheds his impotence—in the wake of a feat of heroism during a communal disaster, as if his manhood and civic spirit must be empowered together—he begins to think of leaving Huang. Sexual conquest bestows a vitality that enables him to conceive of escape:

  Since I had ceased to be “half a man,” ceased to be a “cripple,” a fire had burned in my chest. All my previous behaviour, including making allowances for her—“understanding” her—was not, as I had thought, the result of education, but the cowardice of a castrated horse. I now realized that the comfort and orderliness of her small household were designed to swallow me up. Now I wanted to smash it and escape: I had obtained what I desired, and now I rejected it. I thirsted for a bigger world.

  And no amorous effort on his wife’s part, no loving stitching of her husband’s clothes or sacrifice of her own food ration to his male appetite, can assuage this broader, as it were political, thirst. A paradox that torments the relations of men and women the world over is caught in three lines of a poem:

  A woman is the most lovable thing on earth,

  But there is something that is more important.

  Women will never possess the men they have created.

  The novel’s virtues—its penetration, candor, and lyricism—are accompanied by some clumsiness and awkward reticence. The author and the hero almost never express the indignation to which their undeserved sufferings would seem to have entitled them. Concerning the cruel confusion of slogans and movements emanating from Beijing, the novel’s strongest comment, put in the mouth of the piebald horse, is aloofly sardonic: “You arrive on this earth, you work, you see things, you eat, you hear all kinds of strange things, such as how in a moment a head of state can become an imprisoned crimina
l, how a small-time hoodlum can become Vice Chairman of the Party of tens of millions of people.… You are personally relatively fortunate, because you’re living in times that are unprecedentedly ridiculous.” Though the times are ridiculous, Zhang never abandons his puzzled attempt to become a good citizen, to find the harmony whereby “man and the world are in a unified continuum.” The other political prisoners rather cheerfully make the best of having their lives ruined. The character of Party Secretary Cao Xueyi, groomed to be that of a villain, falls short of villainy, as if the author had respectfully lost his nerve. Only Huang achieves a vital complexity: she is “charmingly stupid, and laughably clever”; she is harsh, sexual, calculating, tender, superstitious, pathetic, and lovely. She is also, one should not forget, a peasant, and a loyal Maoist, not above threatening her husband with reporting his intellectual divagations to the authorities. Behind their marital disharmony lurks the deep and ancient class distinction between the intellectual and the peasant, bridgeable only in the dislocations of an absurd time. The novel ends after the death of Chou but before that of Mao; so big and red a sunset might have swamped Zhang’s vague farewell to marriage and the laogai.

  It cannot be easy to translate from a language as grammatically uninflected yet as compounded and forked as Chinese, beset with its ancient tension between the literary and the colloquial, between the spoken and the written. Ms. Avery has made a readable and at times graceful job of it, only occasionally falling into some English impossibility like “The wrinkles that had crawled all over her face bore smiles.” Throughout the book, deftly painted bits of landscape open upon a world of nature that political oppression cannot touch. They serve as glimpses of serene order, signs pointing to the “right track” that follows the traditional injunction “Unite the inside and the outside”:

  A small garden had been made by levelling the land around: the hollyhocks were already tall, though not yet blooming, sprouts of tomatoes, hot peppers and aubergines were pushing up, and between them the yellow earth had been raked fine until it looked as soft as a piece of carpet. Two white butterflies circled blindly in the light, and near the wall was a low apricot tree. This was a regular life.

  In Love with the West

  NAOMI, by JUNICHIRŌ TANIZAKI, translated from the Japanese by Anthony H. Chambers. 237 pp. Knopf, 1985.

  One does not have to have read all the way through The Makioka Sisters to be persuaded that Junichirō Tanizaki was a great writer; even his small fictions have a relaxed rhythm and heft, a directness and simplicity suddenly condensing into poetry and symbol, an imaginative reach that even while encompassing twists of erotic oddity and self-destruction still seems, itself, robust. His is writing at home in its skin, as instinctively realistic and non-fanatical as, say, Defoe’s. Naomi was, we are told in a helpful introduction by the translator, the author’s “first important novel,” the immediate first fruit of Tanizaki’s permanent move to Osaka from Tokyo and Yokohama, where he had been “living a fast life” among “the Westerners who gave Yokohama its cosmopolitan reputation.” The move was forced upon him by the devastating earthquake of 1923, but once he had taken up residence in the older, more conservative city, he seemed to find firm ground as an artist, and indeed became something of an antiquarian as a writer, frequently setting his novels in the Japanese past.

  Naomi, however, composed and serialized in 1924–25, dealt with a very up-to-date issue, the Westernization of popular culture and the Japanese equivalent of the “flapper.” The heroine’s name and “Naomi-ism” became by-words for the modern woman, and government censors and conservative readers found the material so disturbing that the novel’s serialization in an Osaka newspaper was halted in the sixteenth chapter, to be eventually resumed and completed in the magazine Josei. To a Western reader sixty years later, the story is still exciting and even shocking in its mixture of traditional proprieties and casual impropriety, and in its close rendering of the progress of love and corruption, which are seen as inextricably entwined. The hero, Kawai Jōji, is twenty-eight, an electrical engineer with quiet bachelor habits; he first encounters Naomi as a fifteen-year-old apprentice hostess in a café. He is struck by the girl’s name, an odd name written with three Chinese characters: “A splendid name, I thought; written in Roman letters, it could be a Western name.” Her looks, too, seem Western; in Jōji’s eyes she resembles “the motion-picture actress Mary Pickford,” even though she is also “a quiet, gloomy child” with a face “as pale and dull as a thick pane of colorless, transparent glass.” He decides—in a move that combines elements of buying a pet, taking in a needy child, and undertaking a betrothal—to invite Naomi to come live with him. Her family raise no objection; they are shady folk who live behind the Hanayashiki Amusement Park, in the dubious district called Senzoku. The rest is, to a degree, predictable: she grows from a shy, grateful child and servant into a beautiful, slovenly, wanton tyrant and wife, with expensive tastes for Western-style restaurant meals, Western-style social dancing, and Western-style men. The moral would seem to be Nature Over Nurture, or You Can Take the Girl Out of Senzoku, But You Can’t Take Senzoku Out of the Girl. When eventually informed that Naomi’s kin run a brothel, Jōji concludes, “It’s true, then; breeding determines all.”

  The theme of an older man infatuated with an unworthy love-object is no stranger to European fiction, and especially not in these between-the-wars years when New Women were testing their wings. Proust wrung his hands for hundreds of pages over Albertine’s possible betrayals; Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat became the classic, searing film The Blue Angel; and Nabokov’s Camera Obscura cast the demonic young temptress as a movie usherette. Tanizaki pursues the theme, however, with considerably less of a vengeance than these Western romancers, and with more ambivalence and good humor. Naomi is as much about growth as destruction. Jōji, “like a new parent who keeps track of his baby’s development,” maintains a doting diary called “Naomi Grows Up.” His early delight in his young ward’s body, as he bathes and feeds and dresses it, has a paternal, almost a pediatric, focus on strengthening muscle and lengthening limb. His pride has the innocence, too, of a movie fan’s, as he observes, when she is still only fifteen, her resemblance, in a bathing suit, to the “famous swimmer Annette Kellerman” as she appeared in the movie Neptune’s Daughter, and he is enchanted by the un-Japanese way that “her trunk was short and her legs long,” long and straight, so that, “as she stood with her thighs together, her legs, so straight there was no space between them, formed a long triangle from her hips to her ankles.” On almost the first page he assures the reader that “her body has a distinctly Western look when she’s naked.” Naomi gradually comes to share his admiration and to use her sexual power; their life together is a mutual corruption, his descent into enslavement matched by hers into whorishness. But she is corrupted first, corrupted by his love. And the results, it is perhaps not too much to reveal, are less dire than a Western novelist would have felt obliged to make them.

  Tanizaki writes with an unabashed and undogmatic sensuality rare in the often hectic, guilt-ridden annals of modernism. Jōji’s adoration fastens onto curious details of Naomi—her nostrils, for instance, and her tears, immensely magnified:

  I wished for some way to crystallize those beautiful teardrops and keep them forever. First I wiped her cheeks; next, taking care not to touch the round, swollen tears, I wiped around her eyes. As the skin stretched and then relaxed, the tears were pushed into various shapes, now forming convex lenses, now concave, until finally they burst and streamed down her freshly wiped cheeks, tracing threads of light on her skin as they went.

  Tanizaki understands the fetish-making fecundity of love, and the satisfactions it offers even while giving pain, and its perverse, inverse accountings (“I realized that a woman’s face grows more beautiful the more it incurs a man’s hatred”). Also, he suggests, the intensely cherished love-object embodies an idea and derives her power from a larger field than her own skin. In the best postwar Amer
ican novel about love, Nabokov’s Lolita, the immature love-object represents for both its hero and its émigré author something of the gauche, touching, and seductive New World. Naomi’s Western redolence is most of her charm. “If I’d had enough money to do whatever I pleased,” Jōji tells us, “I might have gone to live in the West and married a Western woman; but my circumstances wouldn’t permit that, and I married Naomi, a Japanese woman with a Western flavor.… I’d be forgetting my place if I hoped for a wife with the majestic physique of a Westerner.” A Westerner must smile at Jōji’s overvaluation of things Western and at the many chapters devoted to the mysteries of that imported Occidental pastime, ballroom dancing. Tanizaki, rescued by an earthquake from the Western-flavored bohemia of Tokyo and Yokohama, clearly had some satirical purpose—his Japanese title translates as A Fool’s Love, and Naomi’s dancing and flirting, high heels and grammarless English are no doubt meant to be excessive, as is her pursuit of another Western import, personal freedom. But Jōji never renounces his love, any more than Japan ever abandoned its drive toward Westernization.

  Far-Fetched

  YUCATÁN, by Andrea De Carlo, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 213 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

  THE SIGNORE: Shogun of the Warring States, by Kunio Tsuji, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. 197 pp. Kodansha International, 1989.

  DOGEATERS, by Jessica Hagedorn. 251 pp. Pantheon, 1990.

  Novels are not just news; we ask some stretch of imagination, some attempt to extend the author’s witness into human possibilities beyond the edge of his or her experience. Three recently published novels—by an Italian, a Japanese, and an American born in the Philippines—each show a brave reach, geographic and otherwise.