What's the attraction of the Woman in the Purple Skirt?

 Unlike much recent Japanese fiction in translation—The Factory, Terminal Boredom, Slow Boat—The Woman in the Purple Skirt takes place in a recognizable, relatively realistic if unnamed Japanese city. 

It begins, “There’s a person living not too far from me known as the Woman in the Purple Skirt. She only every wears a purple-colored skirt—which is why she has this name.” The entire story is narrated by a woman who (mostly) identifies herself as The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan.

The book’s narrator, who seems to have no family or close friends, becomes obsessed by the Woman in the Purple Skirt. They both sound as if they are in their late twenties or early thirties and are single. The Woman in the Purple Skirt commands a bench in a neighborhood park and disappears periodically from the park, presumably to work.

The Woman is a neighborhood fixture and indulges the children who screw up the nerve to tap her on the shoulder and run away, a game we sense the narrator finds charming while envying the Woman’s easy relations with the children.

The narrator plants an employment magazine where the Woman in the Purple Skirt will find it. She’s turned down a page and circled a listing, and after a few attempts to nudge the Woman toward the job, she finally takes the hint. She’s interviewed and is hired as a hotel housekeeper at the same hotel in which the narrator works.

The narrator had hoped that working together would enable her to be closer to the Woman, but it doesn’t work out. “The day after she completed her training, the Woman in the Purple Skirt was assigned to the thirtieth floor, where TV celebrities and idols often stayed. Each floor had specific cleaning teams, which meant I could hardly ever just pop by to see her. It was now extremely rare that I caught sight of her at work. In recent weeks, I was more likely to be able to get an idea of how she was doing from my sightings of her in the park and on the shopping street.”

Until the end of the book, the narrator stays as close to the Woman as she can—close enough to covertly pat the Woman’s butt and tweak her nose on a packed bus—but does not try to make friends. She notices the hotel’s gift chocolates the Woman shares with the children, the smell of the shampoo the hotel stocks in the bathrooms, the rides to work their boss begins to give the Woman.

With the narrator we watch the children play in the park, listen to the talk among the hotel employees, follow the Woman’s moods from a distance. All is not well at the hotel. The manager announces,  “Ten bath towels, ten hand towels, five bath mats, ten sets of cups and saucers, five wineglasses, five champaign glasses, and three teapots . . .. It’s not clear whether these items were taken by hotel guests, or whether they have bon missing within the hotel itself. . . .” Suspicions are raised. Gossip spreads.

Midway through the book I began to wonder where is all this daily minutia going? I’m not going to spoil it for you and tell you where it does go, but hang on for the ride. It’s terrific.

Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima in 1980 where she attended high school. She later moved to Osaka to attend university. She wrote her first story, a novella, while working a temporary job. It won the 26th Dazai Osamu Prize in 2010. In 2017, Imamura received the 5th Kawai Hayao Story Prize for her 2016 book Ahiru, which was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize but did not win. Her next book was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and also lost. In 2019, after her third Akutagawa nomination, she finally won with The Woman in the Purple Skirt. 

The Asahi Shimbun reports that after graduating college Imamura got a part-time job as a hotel housekeeper in Osaka. “She enjoyed the job of cleaning the hotel and she thought it was right for her. One she was told, ‘You should rest tomorrow,’ and she decided to write a novel. She began writing in a messy notebook that was in her house.” It became her prize-winning Koko Amiko, published when she was 29 years old. 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the first of Imamura’s four books to be translated and I would not be surprised to learn that the translator Lucy North (who is not credited on the cover—shame!) is hard at work on one or more of the earlier books. If they are as engaging and thought-provoking as The Woman in the Purple Skirt, I look forward to reading them.

Homeless in Ueno Park

The book begins, "I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered [?], but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end."

So what then is Yu Miri's book Tokyo Ueno Station? It's glimpses of the life of a laborer, Kazu Mori, born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. The book includes history—the firebombing of Tokyo, Saigo Takemori's role in the Meiji Restoration . . . Japanese funeral rituals—the death of the narrator's 21-year-old son . . . a picture of contemporary Japan most tourists don't see—the lives of the homeless . . . and an unusual narrator—"Things like [hydrangeas in bloom] always made me feel lonely when I was alive." 

And because the narrator is dead, it raises questions about an afterlife I'll touch on in a moment.

Yu Miri's background

Miri was born to Korean parents in Yokohama in1968. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children; her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yū along to parties, where Yū was occasionally molested. One of Yū’s sisters became an actress in pornographic films. Yū became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide as a teenager and was eventually expelled from high school."

Nevertheless, she's been celebrated as a playwright and novelist, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) in 1997. She's received threats from Japanese right-wingers who see her as defaming the country and being an ethnic Korean and non-citizen does not help. Gold Rush, a violent story of children in a dysfunctional family, was her first novel to be translated into English.

Kazu Mori tells his story, much of it in dialect in the original, making Morgan Giles's smooth translation even more impressive. Kazu left his wife and children in Fukushima to find work in Tokyo building structures for the 1964 Olympics. Because there was still no work in the northeast even during the boom years, he stayed in Tokyo, returning home long enough to sire a son and a daughter. Eventually he moves back. His son dies. His daughter marries and moves away. His wife dies. His granddaughter moves in with him to care for him. However he thinks, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad,' and slips away to live as a homeless person in Tokyo's Ueno Park.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Ueno, which has the zoo and a number of museums. It is a favorite spot to picnic during cherry blossom viewing. The cops clear the park of the cardboard and vinyl tarp shelters when the royal family has an official occasion to visit. At the end of the book Kazu dies, which is hardly a spoiler because he's told us on page 33 he's dead.

Tokyo Ueno Station is short; you can read it in a single sitting. It's an interesting presentation of what I'm willing to believe is a possible—representative? emblematic?—Japanese life. As such it does not have a conventional plot. But the claim of a dead narrator made me consider.

Questions about an afterlife

Kazu talks as if he were alive and recalling events from his life. But at one point he notices a bird, "and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi," his dead son. Certainly a thorough-going Buddhist could well his son has been reincarnated as a bird. But, if so, why hasn't the narrator been reincarnated? (Okay, maybe he's in the bardo if you want to bring in an idea that does not exist in the book.)

But there's more. The family are Pure Land (Jōdo) Buddhists, and the book emphasizes they are not Shingon, Tendai, or Sōtō Buddhists. In this teaching, "if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Buddhas would surround you and bring you happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us." But there is no indication Kazu has returned to the Pure Land and he does not protect anyone. 

So what is being dead like? Like being being alive but without a body? Like being reincarnated as a bird or some other creature? Or like going to the Pure Land which is "inhabited by many gods, men, flowers, fruits, and adorned with wish-granting trees where rare birds come to rest"? 

I am, I know, asking far too much of Tokyo Ueno Station. None of these questions reduce the power of the book. Giles is currently translating another Yu Mori novel, The End of August, "an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generation." I look forward to reading it.

What childhood was like in Meiji Tokyo

Desperate for more to read and having read through the pile of library books I'd checked out as the library was closing indefinitely behind me, I pulled a small book off my shelves that I'd been planning to read for a while, The Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji) by Naka Kansuke and translated by Etsuko Tarasaki. I believe I bought it when it was published and have had good intentions to read it ever since. It was published in 1976, which says something about my good intentions.

The back cover blurbs the novel as "A modern Japanese classic. The Silver Spoon is an extraordinary evocation of childhood and a memoir of the daily life, folk manners and children's games of pre-World War I Japan." By the book's internal evidence, Naka is evoking the Meiji-era Tokyo in the 1890s.

Naka Kansuke, (1885-1965) was born in Tokyo. Other than living in Hiratsuka (a city between Tokyo and Mt. Fuji) from 1926 to 1932 and evacuating to Shizuoka Prefecture during World War II, he spent most of his life in Tokyo. His father was a steward for the former feudal lord of Imao in Mino province (modern Gifu prefecture), who had a residence in the Kanda district. According to Wikipedia, Naka was one of the students taught by Natsume Sōseki at the University of Tokyo before Sōseki gave up teaching to write for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Sōseki arranged the serial publication in the paper of Naka's first novel, "a nostalgic depiction of his childhood and teens . . . The Silver Spoon. The novel is popular in Japan . . . replete with historical details as well as a contemporary sense of isolation; it follows Naka's psychological journey from childhood to adulthood."

I believe The Silver Spoon would be classified in Japan as a "shi-shosetsu"—an "I novel." There is only the narrowest gap between the narrator's account account in the book and the known facts about the author's life. In the West we would call it a memoir.

As the translator writes in her useful introduction, "The first part of The Silver Spoon consists of fifty-three short sections and deals with the preschool and early-school periods of the narrator's life. The second part, twenty-two sections, deals largely with his early adolescent years at school and ends when the youth reaches sixteen years of age." The past is truly another country, and Meiji-era Japan is perhaps more foreign than most. Here are two examples taken at random from the book:

—"One of my favorite amusements [at a neighborhood festival grounds] was watching the wrestling match between a man and a camel. A man wearing a twisted towel around his head and a fencing girdle would challenge the camel in the manner of an attacking bird, causing the angry beast to kick at him in response. Sometimes the camel lost, its neck pinned to the ground; at other times, the man, having been thoroughly kicked, ran away crying 'I surrender, I surrender!' . . . .

—"Nearby lived an old peddler of millet jelly who did some farming and local trading. When the weather was fine he came without fail, blowing a street vendor's flute as he pulled his wagon. The metallic, discordant sound of the pipe strangely stirred the children. Those in their houses came out; those who were playing stopped their games, some sheathing swords made of broken sticks while others pushed dirty spinning tops down the fronts of kimonos. All rushed clamoring to the wagon. Besides millet-jelly candy and other kids of sweets, the old man sold riddles. Everybody scrambled for these, turning over the red and blue papers to play the guessing games. . . . "

But while The Silver Spoon does describe scenes from childhood, it also shows the narrator at first "as as sickly, introverted child," writes Terasaki in her introduction. "He is often fretful and easily bursts into tears. This could be annoying and tiresome . . ." It certainly was for this reader. Bursting into tears seemed to be the only way the narrator could deal with disappointment, frustration, confusion—life's ordinary bruises. Terasaki notes that "small children, especially those who are sick are often given to weeping. but this trait is especially accepted by the Japanese people, for even as adults they are traditionally accustomed to expressing their emotions, both grief and joy, in tears when the occasion cals for it. Japanese literature is full of such instances." That may be true, but I am afraid it did not make The Silver Spoon less annoying and tiresome for all the pleasures it offers.

My road to KEEP - Part II

I went to KEEP twice in 1957. My father as an active member of St. Paul's East Cleveland Episcopal Church had written to tell me about the organization. He had read about KEEP in, I believe, The Reader's Digest. Because KEEP was Episcopal-affiliated, I asked the Episcopal Army chaplain at the camp about it. He was aware of it, and had a liaison with it in Tokyo. In time, someone from KEEP's Tokyo office telephoned me and I went into the city (my camp was on the outskirts), met with KEEP's assistant director, and they agreed to have me visit. The plan was that I would take take pictures, write a description, and my father would use the material to raise money for KEEP.

The author and the KEEP pickup

It is now sixty-three years later, so my memories are fragmentary and limited. But in early June I obtained a weekend pass to take a bus from my camp to the Narimasu train station, the train to Tokyo's Ikebukuro station, the train to Tokyo's Shinjuku station where I met my guide/interpreter a young Japanese man, Michi who was no older than I. He and I took a train to Kofu, a small city in the central Japanese mountains. From Kofu we took a bus to Kiyosato, the poor rural village in which KEEP was located. The road was an unpaved, one-lane track up the side of the mountain, so narrow that if a vehicle was coming down, the bus had to back up to a spot wide enough for the other to pass.

We stayed in one the camp's cabins, our beds were foam mattresses on the floor. Compared to an Army cot, the ten-inch-thick foam was like sleeping on a cloud. Michi took me on a tour. Paul Rusch wanted more than a summer camp; he wanted to improve the lives of rural Japanese. I toured the hospital, the school, the barn, and on Sunday morning attended the Episcopal church service. No pews; congregants sat Japanese-style on the tatami-mat floor, and the little children were free to run about, even play by the altar during the sermon.

Church service in the KEEP church

I wanted to see more of the countryside, so Michi borrowed a (the?) KEEP pickup truck and allowed me to drive it. The roads were mud and I, totally inexperienced, managed to put the truck into mud up to its axels. Michi managed to obtain help from several local farmers who pulled us out. I wanted to thank them with money; he suggested a big bottle of sake would be more appropriate, so he drove us into Kiyosato and I bought one. (By comparison to the local farmers and Michi, I was rich, although only an Army sergeant; in those days a dollar bought 360 yen; the sake was probably ¥500.)

By 1957, Rusch had imported a dozen or so purebred heifers from North Texas to establish a dairying business at KEEP. Although the Japanese had little taste for milk, butter, cheese, even beef before the war, the market was growing. KEEP's land was too high to grow rice on, too rocky for ox-driven plowing. With a bulldozer, however, KEEP was able to clear the rocks and plant grass for cattle. When I arrived, there was a thriving dairy business and at dinner that night in the virtually-rebuild Seisen Ryo lodge, I was served a glass of the raw milk.

I grew up knowing that unpasteurized milk could kill you, which is why milk came in bottles. Should I insult my hosts by refusing to drink? Or should I risk it? I drank. It was like drinking cream but better.

One other memory from that night: An older Japanese guest, also up from Tokyo (and probably a senior executive in a major corporation; who else do you wine and dine if you need money?), taught me the game of go. It is one of the easiest games to learn in the world. It is, like chess, one of the most difficult to master. We played three games, and while he was patient, he easily wiped me off the board.

A final memory: In August 1957, when the Prince and Princess of Japan were coming to KEEP for the dedication of the new Seisen Ryo lodge, I was returning to camp and our paths crossed at the Kofu train station. The street outside and the station was mobbed; hundreds of people wanted to see the royals. As a Westerner and as a head taller than most Japanese, I stood out, and when the waiting press corps saw me they attacked. What did I think of Japan? Of Kofu? Of the Emperor? Since these radio and press reporters had little—or no—English, and my Japanese was, to be charitable, limited, I probably said something like, "Nihonjin mo nihon mo suki desu," I like Japan and the Japanese, and caught my train.

My road to KEEP - Part 1

The picture below is from a book published in 1969, The Road to KEEP: The Story of Paul Rusch in Japan by Elizabeth Anne Hemphill.

In May 1957 I took the picture below three months earlier at an earlier dedication of the new Seisen Ryo. Paul Rusch is the third man in a dark suit on the right.

I spent most of 1957 and much of 1958 as a GI in Japan. In 1957 was a personnel clerk stationed at a camp outside of Tokyo, and because I was a sergeant I was able to obtain a weekend pass virtually every weekend. Somehow my father back in Cleveland heard about an Episcopal-affiliated organization in Japan, the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project—KEEP, a project Paul Rusch started and headed. He suggested I look into the group. I called the Tokyo office and was invited to visit the project. I went twice.

Rusch (1897-1979) went to Japan in 1925 as a missionary for a one-year stay. He fell in love with the country, the culture, and the people (although he never married) and stayed on, becoming a teacher at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Rikkyo was founded in 1874 as St. Paul's School by the Episcopal Church missionary Bishop Channing Moore Williams. It was a private school that taught Christian Bible studies and English. At that time, Japan was rushing to catch up with the advanced nations of the West, and the field of education also had a strong utilitarian tendency. Today Rikkyo has 20,000 students and 2,700 teachers and staff.

In 1927, on a fund-raising tour in the States, Rusch was exposed to the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, an international lay Christian religious organization with historical roots in the Episcopal Church. When he returned to Japan in 1931, he became active in the Brotherhood and in 1933 was key in obtaining land on the slope of a mountain in central Honshu and raising money with which to build a clubhouse and student center, naming the camp Seisen Ryo (清泉寮), "pure spring hostel." That first building was dedicated in July 1938.

Rusch stayed on in Japan while most Americans who could leave in 1940-41 left. In December 1941 he like other enemy aliens were interred in a former girl's school in Tokyo where they were held for six months and finally exchanged for Japanese who were stuck in America when the war broke out. I found the first half of Hemphill's book—Rusch's life as a missionary, building Seisen Ryo, and internment—more interesting than the second half, perhaps because the life was more interesting.

He returned to Japan with the Occupation as a U,S. Army Lieutenant Colonel in the Civil Intelligence Section, although he never learned to speak or read Japanese. His unit's work laid the background the war crimes trials that opened in April 1946, but "he had no intention of staying in the army any longer than necessary." He intended to restore the camp and remain in Japan.  "The camp had originally been just for the boys who came to the summer sessions; now he thought about the community itself and he called the development plan 'The Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project.'"

By the time I arrived in 1957, 800 acres had been added to KEEP's original land. There was a church, a 20-bed rural hospital (the only medical facility in a couple hundred square miles of rural, mountain landscape), an experimental farm, a vocational school to teach Western agricultural techniques, a nursery school, and a library.
                                                   —To be continued

Just what you want, a transgressive first novel

Thanks to my interest in all things Japanese, I picked up a copy of Hillary Raphael's 2004 novel I [Love] Lord Buddha at a book sale recently. According to a Wikipedia entry last edited in October 2018, "Raphael (born April 12, 1976) is an American novelist, fashion and children's book writer. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City." At Hunter she won the MFA Thesis Prize for the novel, which was published by now defunct Creation Books.

"Although Raphael wrote cult transgressive fiction under her own name, she has made a complete pivot," says Wikipedia. Since 2014 she writes and illustrates children's books under the name Shoshana Banana. Her debut title Family Ties was named one of the Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015 by Tablet Magazine. Her second children's book, Picture a Chinchilla, incorporates vintage textiles. [Her third}  Levi & Aya was published in 2016."

In a 2005 interview to promote I [Love] Lord Buddha, Raphael said, "I have been, professionally: a model, dancer, hostess, journalist, grant writer, bartender, diplomat, waitress, dance critic, CEO’s personnel assistant, backpacker, fashion trend scouter, kept woman, and editor, over the years. I’m originally from New York, but have been resident in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, Rome and Mexico City for long stretches and have travelled throughout the world, from the Sahara to the Himalaya, the Negev to the Alps." She was, at the time, 29 years old.

Asked whether she thought the Japanese male’s motivation for attending a hostess bar—the world of I [Love] Lord Buddha—is the same as a foreign man's, she said, "Lingerie and hostess bars have always been an accepted part of Japanese culture, however I think their current incarnation is more standardized and business-like than it has been in the past—you could say the industry has standardized—and therefore reveals itself in a fresh way even to the Japanese. As for Nihonjin vs. Gaijin clients: the difference boils down to expectation paradigms. Japanese go to hostess bars because they want the service provided there. Foreigners go because they are fence-sitting vis-à-vis the idea of seeing a whore, and would like some risk-averse, easy-ingress prostitution. They are confused. A high-end hostess does not waste her time with foreigners unless they are obviously special."

I [Love] Lord Buddha is, to quote the back jacket, "set in the late-90s Tokyo; it recounts the history of the Neo-Geisha Organization, a sex-and-death cult with an anti-consumerist, pro-hedonist, sub-Buddhist ideology." I quote the back jacket because Raphael does not make it easy for the reader. The 187-page paperback consists of 92 chapters. She does not use capitals to start sentences or for most proper nouns (tokyo, japanese) but uses all caps for the main character HIYOKO. Chapters may be in the first or third person, narrative or haiku, apparent non-fiction or transcribed interviews.

Raphael writes the book from the inside; i.e., with the knowledge that an American woman would gain by working in Tokyo's water trade—promoting drinks and entertaining men in hostess bars. (For another view of that life, read People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Perry.) Hiyoko (or HIYOKO) (formerly Heather Peterson) is a charismatic hostess who recruits other foreign bar hostesses into a cult-like organization and (I believe) initiates a mass suicide to make a point. Not every woman follows Hiyoko. Here is Angelique, an older hostess who think Hiyako is a fraud,  at work:

angelique crosses her legs in a practiced fashion, and looking over yamada's head, makes eye contact with herself in the beige-tinted mirror of the club. she likes to judge herself objectively in moments like these, when she's fully dressed and made-up for work, natural, busy, and taking a light drag on her lite cigarette, and holding the smoke in her lungs, she carefully considered her face. "i'm well preserved," she concludes, "for my age". yamada gently shoves an ashtray toward her, she starts slightly, trying to delicately ash her cigarette, which is burning down to the filter. "anjyariku-chyan, are you dreaming?" "indeed, about you!"

I [Love] Lord Buddha is not an easy read but it does have its pleasures, although I'm not sure I agree with the back jacket that the novel "paves the way for a new literature of undiluted aesthetics and ecstasy." I'm not even sure what that means. I was happy to see that Raphael did use capitals in her 2008 novel Ximena. 

The translation reader's dllemma

"Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of the Oriental literatures," writes Jorge Luis Borges in a fat collection of Selected Non-fictions edited by Eliot Weinberger. "Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage:

"'A man condemned to death doesn't care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.'

"Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus:

"'The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.'

"Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my mind."

Mysterious? Skepticism? How about outright disbelief?