by Jayne Joso
I picture a paper Takeo blowing in the wind.
She reminds me that I agreed to think all this through, and tells me that I need not be afraid. She will help me.
She has a bag with her. She takes out some things she believes will be useful, she calls them: essentials.
I do not speak.
I stand up, she motions me to follow her, she places a pair of men’s shoes by the door – they ought to fit, they are my size. I move my right leg and make as if to try my foot in the first one, but withdraw it while it hovers in the air. Her hand is on my arm, it is gentle, it is meant to reassure. She smiles at me. I cannot smile back.
I will not leave my home.
14.
Some weeks have passed. Without company and with so much work to do, there has been no time to think.
Spring has truly come in all its glory and I watch the blossom as it hangs heavy upon the trees in the temple gardens, its life too short. But I no longer worry that I might be seen. At least not on the temple side. I have not spoken with Lightfoot, but we seem to have caught the other’s eye, and have no need of anything more. I wear my bandana, and he shows his fine head. He has his work to do; and these days I try to make the best of the dry conditions to fix what I can inside this place. I find a box of vegetables at my door from time to time, sometimes fruit. Never meat. I would like a little meat, but that won’t come from the temple side. It doesn’t matter, and I do quite well. These days my culinary skills might even impress my mother.
Having put aside all other box-related projects, I am also proud to announce that I have finally spent some nights sleeping heavily in the box dwelling. I had to sit up and had poured myself into it, so to speak, so as not to damage the walls, but the place has afforded me some comfort. Oh, I have that futon here if I wish, and there is a closet full of blankets. But for the most part I’m not cold at all; and though it is more common to sleep laid down, I find the box offers me quite a different experience of sleep. I cannot say anything very grand about it or make out box sleeping to be a superior experience, I am sure this is not for everyone, and I do not attempt to sound elitist, quite the opposite in truth, I suppose that box sleeping by choice is very eccentric, but speaking purely for myself, I have to say, that it makes me feel at home.
What occurs to me now is that I would still like to make a more complex box dwelling. When earthquakes and tsunami strike, people face such trauma. The sea makes itself tall, wades deep onto the land, taking what it will; and shaken by the ground, homes and lives are lost. It is not just the loss of a lover or the shame of losing a job that ails people, though these things trouble people greatly, and the mind at times so fragile. We withdraw and are lost. What is common to each is the need of a benevolent hand, a place of safety.
I would like to make something useful. I would like to be useful. I would like to make a very fine box dwelling that affords some comfort, and offers some shelter, however temporary, for it is in the immediate aftermath of trauma that a person most needs to feel safe. I know this to be true. The boxes must be collapsible of course, easy to transport, easy to assemble, the cheapest things to make.
I will make all the fine calculations for these whilst sitting in my box. I have my notebook.
There is a knock at the door of this falling down place. I had better move fast, if they knock that hard again my roof might just fall in! Even so, I tread carefully, tools and materials lay strewn about, quite a mess in fact.
The knock is on the shadow side, the street side.
I open it with caution.
There is a woman, she is simply dressed; she bows and offers me a box of food.
The food in the box is Korean.
Afterword
Identity:
In this fiction I make the dance again beneath the skin of a man, this time a Japanese man. I shiver myself inside him, I empty my mind to occupy his. I take him as pre-existing, a full life, all his own. I take his shape and the shapes of his thoughts as though I am yokai (a shapeshifter). And I shiver myself then inside the house, inside its walls, its materials, inside its energy as a stage for fiction, inside the possibilities it presents as a dwelling, again as though I am yokai, for I wanted to explore both the human and the house, their space, the rhythms and pulse by which they live, by which they breathe, and the state of their being.
This novel started its life as I began to read Kobo Abe’s The Box Man. I experienced that ecstatic, too rare feeling in discovering a read I would long cherish. In many ways I still do, but it was the first few pages that took my imagination, and soon after my thoughts departed to a book of my own. This was some nine years ago now as I write, and I planned then to write a man and a box of my own design. Abe is a writer I have much admired, as much for his intense imagination as for his literary skill, and the curious reader will find multiple references in this particular work as a celebratory homage to his. Such a reader might also find a web of intricate references to Japanese films, novels and poetry if so inclined, and yet the story is drawn from my own rich and challenging years living in the snow-bound mountains in the north of Japan, my travels throughout the country, and my time later on, living in Setagaya in Tokyo. I consider Japan to be my second home but most deeply, I consider it to be my spiritual home.
Japan, I feel, as I finish the last work on this book just now in 2016, is facing its own fresh challenges, and its youth seem to have largely succumbed to a nervous conservatism. They travel abroad far less than in the post war years, study abroad in fewer numbers, indeed, of late, it is the student populations of China, India, and South Korea that are travelling the farthest and widest, and from Europe it continues to be the German student population that exhibit the greatest spirit of adventure. There seems to be a lack of confidence among the youth of Japan in recent years, an anxiety, and I am curious as to why this is, or whether it is truly the case. Junichirō Tanizaki, author of the widely acclaimed In Praise of Shadows and the less widely read fiction Some Prefer Nettles, appears to have lived through an earlier, but perhaps similar, crisis of identity, and prior to ‘the great earthquake’ of 1923, which razed both Tokyo and Yokohama to the ground, his interest certainly lay in otherness, in foreignness, and he flirted most specifically with Western ways and tastes, indulging in what he later appears to have rejected as largely shallow and specious. It seems that the catastrophic effects of the earthquake, and the post-quake landscape, tore at something in him, but such is the intensity of the relationship between the elements and nature with the human, at least from my own observations of Japan: the human living in rhythmic, dynamic relation, and respectful awareness of the natural world. And from then on, having experienced the impact and devastation of this earthquake, and at all levels, Tanizaki sought to live the most traditionally Japanese life he could, moving away from Tokyo to the Kansai region of Japan where such traditions were still more widely practised. The translator, Edward G. Seidensticker comments in his introduction to the Vintage edition of Some Prefer Nettles that Tanizaki’s post-earthquake novels reveal the notion that Japanese people can only truly find peace by being ‘as intensely Japanese as the times will allow’, and this idea of being deeply embedded in Japanese culture, or else returning to it, and rediscovering it, is one I find deeply fascinating – in part, and by contrast, because my own relationship with English culture (what is, theoretically, my own culture) often feels tenuous, fragile, and for the most part does not suit me well, and Japanese culture (clearly not my own) seems to offer up a sensibility, an aesthetic, a way of being that I believe I will always fall short of, yet always aspire to and admire. And so what draws my interest is whether a new generation of Japanese people feel similarly to Tanizaki in the 1920s, for is this now their time in history to renegotiate their sense of self, to reacquaint themselves with their own deep, rich, wondrous culture; and is the conservatism that I hint at, truly that? Or is it time for Japan to pull back and celebrate itself and its most admirable qualities and sensibilities? By sta
ying in their own country, are the young people of Japan simply plunging their hands deep into Japanese soil? And what version of ‘Japanese’ will that be? What shape will it take? What depth of cultural engagement will present conditions allow? When I think of these questions I am aware of the ironies, and of my own sweet contradictions, and the limitations of what any of us might truly know, but the questions are exciting ones, and I am curious to slip inside them, move around them, observing more closely, and more quietly, more gently – in my view, that is as much as a writer can do – we then simply shuffle words about, and wait in hope, for some connection with the reader.
On Writing:
There are moments of difficulty for every writer that lie quite outside the spectrum of challenges offered up by the bare page and the shifty, mischievous, configurations in ink that curl about the page, and these, most often, are quite enough. But I think now of Vladimir Nabokov and his work The Luzhin Defense, for despite that particular novel’s success in Russia, the book did not meet with an English translation for some thirty-five years, and this because the author would not give in to an editor who called on him to change the world of his novel from chess to music. The editor in question also called on the author to render the main character as a ‘demented violinist’ in place of the chess-playing genius, Luzhin, and again, Nabokov stood his ground. My Falling Down House met with editors along the way who found it too dark, not dark enough, and then, too international… Most likely it is, too dark, not dark enough, and certainly it is international, but like the chess-playing genius, it has its place, and I would no more bleach nor blot out its centre, its heart, than change its skin. I believe this is called integrity.
Jayne Joso
Tokyo & Toulon 2014, 2015, & London 2016
Acknowledgements
I am enormously grateful to everyone at Chisenji Temple, Niigata, Japan; but I am especially thankful for the kindness, wisdom, and patience of Hiromichi Tamura.
I must offer very special thanks to the local residents of Echizenhama, Japan, past and present, for allowing me access to a number of traditional Japanese homes there – at the time of my research all abandoned and in a vulnerable but beautiful state, and permitting me to make my notes and sketches, and also to photograph these private dwellings. Truly, I crawled and walked and peered so deeply, and everyone I encountered was tremendously patient and accepting. My deep thanks also to my dear friend and artist, Hiroki Godengi, in facilitating this and in sharing his knowledge.
I would also like to thank Kanayo Sugiyama, Kioko Tamura, and Setsuko Taguchi, for sharing, over many years by now, their boundless knowledge of Japanese traditions, culture and nature. I thank Entomologist Dr Ben Price, Curator of Odonata and Small Orders, Life Sciences Department, Natural History Museum, London for all the fascinating detail on the anatomy, and life, and indeed, death of the cicada. I thank Professor of Literature Roger Webster for our invaluable conversations on defamiliarization in literature; architect and academic Joerg Rainer Noennig for our ongoing dialogue on space and place, on process, on the need to make and unmake, to mark the paper and remove, delete, erase, and sometimes mark afresh; and the desire, the requirement and the drive, at other times, to leave the space just bare; Professor of Evolutionary Genetics Mark G. Thomas for too many things to mention; and author Imogen Robertson ‘on cello’. I am indebted also to the authors Lydia Davis and Marilynne Robinson for their own writing and interviews on the writing process.
Thank you to Gwen Davies, editor at New Welsh Review magazine for publishing an early version of the opening to the novel.
My grateful thanks to Bryony Hall at the Society of Authors for contract advice.
To my publisher at Seren, Mick Felton, and all the Seren team, thank you so much for all your enthusiasm and the care you have taken in bringing out My Falling Down House; and to my editor, Penny Thomas, I say, thank you for ‘seeing’, and for plunging your hands deep into the soil…
Huge thanks, of course to all the friends who have supported me emotionally along the way, for you are many, but I ought to mention: June Zhao, Sasha Damjanovski, Lynne Dragovich, Ian Kelly, Glenda Norquay and Roger Webster.
With regard to the cover, a great deal of love and thought went into this by everyone at Seren. Finally, the wonderful figurative painter Carl Randall stepped in and very generously permitted us to use his work. Thank you so very much, Carl. Takeo could not have a finer coat. Carl Randall’s work is frequently exhibited worldwide, and can be viewed online at www.carlrandall.com.
And finally, this book was inspired in part by a young man I once knew simply as Takeo, a man I met in London; and another, older man, that I knew as Mr Tanaka, in Gejo, Niigata, Japan. If ever either of you read this, I give you my thanks, and have celebrated you both in the use of your names.