The World Rectifying Catfish, seemingly, would have something to say about that, as it can hardly be described as an improvement to an already dire situation.
In August 2012, I traveled to Japan with my older sister and my niece, 15 years old, close to Nao’s age. It was over a year after the Fukishima disaster, and we wouldn’t go north of Tokyo, we promised our nearest and dearest, not even to take a quick look around before we headed back south where, allegedly, the fruits and vegetables were still safe to eat. Unfortunately, the numbers depend, as is always the case in these matters, on whose readings you believe, and what their vested interests are.
My niece is one of the many Japanophiles of her generation, having grown up like my own kids watching Ultraman and Sailor Moon and, later on, Neon Genesis Evangelion. She read stacks of manga to the exclusion of much else and eventually pursued this interest into a study of the language. I learned that she knew more than she was giving away when, standing in Tokyo Station one afternoon trying to decipher the way to our bullet train, she removed her ear-buds and said “That way,” calmly pointing to one of the many tentacle-like corridors.
“But how do you know?” I asked. For all I could tell a little map-fairy had whispered the answer in her ear.
“Because it says so.”
“Where does it say so?”
She pointed to one of the countless signs encrusting the overhead beams.
“Right there.”
“You can read kanji?”
My niece nodded. “Some.”
Before we went to Kyoto, we visited the old capital of Kamakura, a town south of Tokyo boasting both a large, hollow Buddha (you can get inside its head) and the important Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū shrine (鶴岡八幡). We visited a man, a friend of my aunt’s, who has been living in Japan for almost 20 years and has learned basic kanji, which encompasses over a thousand characters even though it is the short version taught to children prior to middle school. As with cursive in North America, the longer versions are not taught as much as previously, hence Ruth-in-the-book, Nao and her parents spend a fair bit of time researching the meaning of some of the rarer characters.
A Tale for the Time Being includes footnotes, (some of them in kanji) and as such resembles another of my favorite novels of recent years, Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives Salvajes.
As I get older, I find myself lamenting, books that knock my socks off become rarer. We have just read too many books; it is harder to impress us, and so, a little disconsolately, we head back to some “classics,” read or reread a Russian or two, Moby Dick or Middlemarch if we never got around to them. But the contemporary world is reflected by contemporary authors: that, arguably, is what novels are for and what they do best. They do it better than television or film. It’s the way they can get inside things: a character’s head, the time in the world which the characters are inhabiting (the time that the time beings are inhabiting, as Ozeki would have it).
The footnotes in Bolaño’s book tell us wonderful things, such as which characters in Los Detectives Salvajes are stand-ins for which real-life poets in the Mexican infra-realism literary movement, called Visceral Realism in the book. Another thing the novels share (aside from being immersively rich, dense, and layered) is that both boast a main character, also a writer, who is barely distinguishable from the author. In both cases the writer has the same name as the book’s author, although Bolaño’s poet protagonist has a different first name. Bolaño’s trick was also employed by Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2006. As writers we exist, of course, both within and without our work, and blurring and/or exploring this line can be delicious for the author and intriguing for the reader.
Ellis is perhaps most famous as the author of American Psycho, a book I couldn’t actually finish as I didn’t have the stomach for it. Lunar Park, his sixth novel, is about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, author of the novel American Psycho. Often called a “mock memoir,” it appears to me to be the real Ellis’s way of unpacking the experience of writing American Psycho, and what followed when he became an “overnight success,” much of it unpleasant. Reading it, we definitely feel we are learning something close to the truth about Ellis’s inner life and his outer life as well, but here we are not sure how much. It diverges in several places; for example Ellis-in-the-book has a minor Hollywood actress for a wife. We’re not sure we’ve heard of her, but because Ellis has written about his life as the author of American Psycho with what seems like such relentless soul-baring honesty we assume it is true. The publicists went one step further and created an fan web site for her so that a cursory search would inform the reader that yes, she does exist and is his wife.
The question of where the line between “self-revelation and self-concealment” (as Ozeki calls it) actually lies is addressed in an interview with Ellis on Lunar Park’s web site. Like Ozeki, Ellis decided only partway through the writing to insert himself into the novel as a character, Bret-in-the-book:
Q: We have to start with the most obvious question: the main character in Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less than Zero, American Psycho, etc. People are going to question just how fictional the novel is. What is your intention? How much of Lunar Park are we to believe is true?
A: My intention? My intention was to write a book that I thought was interesting, meaning there was no intention at all.
The genesis for the book began in 1989 and changed a lot in the ten years before I began writing it. I first wanted to write a book that, I suppose, paid homage to a genre that meant a lot to me growing up (Stephen King was an idol of mine) and which was concerned with a house that was haunted. And it was really that simple.
Bret Ellis was not the main character at that point, though the narrator was a writer and he was married and he did have children. And as I thought about the book—and as my own life became more complicated with age and experience—I realized that the book I had been planning was really about what it meant to be a writer.
Sure, it was a ghost story and there were monsters and demons and I enjoyed playing with the traditional trappings of the genre, but I was also at the stage where the process of writing began to matter to me as material—and I think this happens with most writers.
And that was a big jumping off point and energized me when I was having problems with the outline of the book.
I don’t want to demystify the events that take place and I don’t want to have to clarify which things are autobiographical and which things are less so. But it is, by far, the “truest” book I’ve written, in terms of the majority of events that happened.
It’s up to each reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occurred.
Indeed.
The North Pacific gyre is a more or less circular set of currents that course north from Japan in a clockwise fashion across the Pacific to the west coast of North America, south to California and west to Asia again. In the center lies the Hawaiian archipelago, and just northeast of there lies the great Pacific garbage patch—or the eastern one, anyway; there are actually two.
The gyre is important to the plot because it brings things from Japan: low-level radiation from Fukushima (or not, depending on whom you believe); a Hello Kitty lunchbox stuffed full of letters and diaries; and a Japanese crow.
That August my sister, my niece, and I backpacked from Tokyo to Miyajima, staying in hostels and budget hotels— admiring, in proper weeaboo fashion, countless Shinto torii climbing the hillsides in a shadowy pine forest; screeching young women in French maid outfits in the densely neon-coated streets of Akihabara (where the novel opens); herds of miniature deer strolling freely though a village on the sea; crows.
Yes, crows.
Traveling, our senses are drenched each day in the new, and we open, porous, to impression. We are supposed to be interested in Kinkaku-ji, Mishima’s golden temple in Kyoto but it turns out we like Hiroshima more; the tourist guides urge us to explore Ueno Park but we fin
d ourselves standing on a street corner in busy Shinjuku looking at the remarkable crows. “They must be a different species of crow than our crows,” I remarked often, and I turned out to be right. Oliver-in-the-novel tells us the native species in Japan is Corvus japonensis, a subspecies of Corvus macrorhynchos, the large-billed or jungle crow. We learn that the crows:
use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles, which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. Tepco has special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests.... Ladies stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.
It is important to understand how smart Corvus japonensis is because one particular jungle crow is pivotal to the plot and a major part of what makes this novel magic realist or speculative fiction.
What is the half-life of plastic in the gyre? Oliver discusses the science with the retired anthropologist Muriel, while Ruth’s attention strays to all-encompassing metaphor; the gyre and the Internet are the same, she decides, each is a bearer of memory. An enormous patch of plastic detritus, brightly colored and ground over time small as pixels floats in the Pacific, just as every web page ever made is out there still, drifting in the vast lonely stretches of the Web.
I have never met Ruth Ozeki, but my husband and I knew Oliver-in-real-life well; he is a former student of Doug’s and a fellow artist. When Oliver-in-the-book pontificates on the gyre, the Neo-Eocene forest he’s planting, or the concurrent feeding and electrocution of oysters in a bucket, his personality is established on the page so vividly it is as if we were in the same room together. The Oliver Ruth describes is so precisely the Oliver we remember (just a little older) it’s almost uncanny. Intruding into the descriptions of their life under the dripping trees is the story of the Hello Kitty lunchbox and its contents and Ruth’s dream-time intervention, assisted by a crow, in Nao and her father Haruki’s lives. These fictional characters tell us that while the novel imitates in part the form of shishōsetsu, it is only in part. We can read the novel as a wink to the genre, a kind of sly nod rather than an example. But in the end it also doesn’t matter.
The central metaphor of the book is about time and information. I found the following passage astonishing, describing a warning from 600 years ago that was ignored at enormous cost:
What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns and up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings: do not build your homes below this point.
Profundity almost never works when it’s sought after, but a little farther on, the following (almost throwaway) paragraph jumped out and quietly stunned me. I had missed it the first time around and am glad I gave the book a second read because this passage alone was worth the price of admission.
These images, a miniscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff we’ve forgotten.
And everyone we used to be, but forgot or turned our backs on; the vids and web pages and LinkedIn accounts that remember us and show up on someone’s search somewhere, sometime, without us ever even knowing.
This is the kind of notion, I told my professor husband, that people who are academics rather than novelists build an entire course or thesis around, eventually publishing a non-fiction book written in abstruse academic language expanding (and expounding) on one idea, usually not nearly as good. It is lucky my husband is an artist first and makes real things in the real world, objects that take up space and humble us and make us think, or he might have been annoyed.
Ursula Pflug lives in Ontario. This essay was funded by the Writers’ Reserve Program of the Ontario Arts Council.
Works Cited
Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Delacour, Jonathan. “Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity.” the heart of things, 22 April 2003.
Doyle, Jessica. “An Interview with Ruth Ozeki.” Abebooks, undated.
Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.
——. “Q&A with Bret Easton Ellis.” Lunar-Park.com, undated.
Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Saito, Mary and Antoni Slodkowski. “Japan’s homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up.” Reuters, 30 December 2013.
Photos
Friends of the NYRSF family: Andy Sawyer, Michael Swanwick & Farah Mendlesohn at LonCon3, August 2014.
Photo by David G. Hartwell.
Jane Austen accepts the Hugo Award for
Best Mary Robinette Kowal impression,
LonCon3, August 2014.
Photo by David. G. Hartwell
Editorial
Pointing and Seeing
A miscellany of thoughts this time.
Last month’s editorial on the World Fantasy Award statuette crowded out any other concerns, so I wanted to note that NYRSF has now completed 26 years of monthly publication, 2 full years in electronic publication, and 1 full year in our less eyestrainy layout. Thank you, all, as always.
One of the harsh realities of the pleroma of distraction in which we live is that it’s a constant struggle to attract new readers, and NYRSF has not been doing as good a job of that as we would like. The best way to cultivate an engaged audience is through word of mouth, so if you read and enjoy NYRSF, either in magazine format or on the web site, please let your friends know! Our electronic versions are drm-free, so you can loan them out to people who would find them interesting. Spread the word.
We’re making NYRSF individual issues more readily available. Starting with this issue, the Draft2Digital service will publish NYRSF through various online retailers such as B&N (for the Nook), Kobo, iBook, and Scribd. Subscriptions will still be available exclusively through Weightless Books, because they’ve been wonderful to us.
That said, we’re thinking of holding an actual subscription drive, and we’re soliciting ideas. What premiums would you like to see? If you’ve been on the fence about subscribing, what would help you clear the top? Let us know!
On an unrelated matter, I’m very happy to mention that Bernadette and I are attending this year’s World Fantasy Convention in the Washington DC area. Bernadette was a regular attendee back in its formative years, but I’ve only been to the Saratoga Springs instance back in 2007. If you’ll be there, give us a shout!
Finally, this time, a memory. When I was around 9 years old, my maternal grandparents took me to Key West. (They lived in Homestead, Florida, so it was just a day trip for us.) For years, I thought my only memory of the trip was seeing Ernest Hemmingway’s house, which is a museum to the author but which primarily interested young me because of its population of polydactylic cats. Recently, though, I had another memory come back to me. I was pondering genre boundaries in the wake of Paul Kincaid and Nina Allan’s appearance on last week’s Coode Street Podcast
ing at Key West’s Southernmost Point while my grandpa Bob gestured. “Over there is the Atlantic,” he said, sweeping left, then with a gesture to the right, “and over here is the Gulf of Mexico, and this is the exact point at which they meet.” And the dark waters of the Straits of Florida stretched before us, warm and green and heedless of the distinctions we draw.
It is possible to overstretch metaphors. Metaphors are wheelbarrows; overload them and they fall over. But it’s particularly amusing to me, writing this now, to realize that Key West’s Southernmost Point, the locus of this misguided attempt to divide this-against-that, is itself a false witness: Standing at the Point, one can look south and immediately see parts of Key West further beyond.
But it is our nature to split apart and bring together, just as it is the ocean’s nature to flow.
—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 Page 9