Hon no mushi

Ironically, it was after I traveled to Japan that I began reading Japanese writers. My husband introduced me to Murakami, and I discovered the short stories of Hisaye Yamamoto in one of the anthologies I was assigned to teach.

Upon arriving in the Northwest I reconnected with another teacher I had met while participating in the JET Program in Japan. She immediately got me to join the Pacific Northwest JET Alumni Association, and I immediately signed up for their book club. Be sure to click on the link for a great list of Japanese authors and titles.

This month’s book, published by Seattle’s Chin Music Press, is Why Ghost’s Appear  written by Todd Shimoda and art by LJC Shimoda.

Mizuno Ren, an entomological illustration specialist, has disappeared. His mother hires a private investigator to find him. The search leads him to spurious fortune tellers, government clerks, travel agents specializing in sex tours, and, yes, a doppelganger.  Throughout the search, the detective feels his own soul splitting apart as he speculates on another case he investigated 20 years before.

Returning again and again to Mizuno’s mother, the detective finds her a much more complex personality than he had first thought. He observes “most people, nearly all I should say, are quite simple. They’ve developed a routine in life, they exist by four or five rules, have four or five experiences on which they’ve defined their lives.”

I kept waiting for the narrator to reveal himself, ala The Sixth Sense, to be an obake, but that never happens. I think. Like a lot of Japanese fiction, this novel is mystical and sometimes mysterious. 

Act Your Age

You would think reading a book under 100 pages would be easy. Well, the reading was easy, but the finding was harder. I finally turned to the NYPL blog for suggestions. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button comes in at 52 pages. 

Mr. Button realizes something might be amiss with his newborn when he encounters one horrified look after the other as he makes his way to the nursery.  When he sets eyes on his firstborn, he discovers not a squalling infant but a puzzled old man of 70. They bring Benjamin home and find instead of weaning him from bottles, they must wean him from cigars. As Benjamin grows older, his visage grows younger. At 20, as he appears to be a distinguished man of 50. He begins working for his father’s hardware company and marries a young woman. However, as his wife Hildegarde ages, Benjamin himself grows younger and soon finds her wrinkles displeasing. Hildegarde moves away, leaving their son to look after his father. Soon Benjamin is young enough to be playmates with his own grandchild. And as he passes into infancy, he remembers nothing of his life, but only perceives the comforting presence of his nurse.

Fitzgerald pokes fun at the social mores of the day. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m curious whether the tongue-in-cheek tone of the book was captured on screen. First Benjamin is discriminated against for looking too old for college, and then he looks too young for the military service.  As he grows younger and more energetic, he finds fault with his wife for acting her age. She, in turn, accuses him of being stubborn and not wanting to “be like any one else.” His son also finds fault in his father’s “refusing to look sixty.” They seem to think age is merely a state of mind. However in Benjamin’s case, it is only a state of body.   

Faith and Politics

“Read a book about politics in your country” seemed appropriate for this week’s challenge.

I first came across Sojourners when I became a Jesuit Volunteer. Every house had a subscription to the magazine that included articles on faith and justice. The founder, Jim Wallis, has written several books, so I turned to him for week’s challenge.

The Great Awakening explores the idea that some of our country’s largest reforms such as the civil rights movement have come out of religious faith. His book is both field guide (chapters include How to Change the World, and Why: Rules of Engagement) and call to action on the day’s issues (poverty, hunger, environmental collapse, race, family, war). Admittedly when faced with chapter after chapter of issue after issue it can all become a little overwhelming. That’s his point, I think. Being a person of faith shouldn’t be comfortable.

He ends the book with a chapter on hope and the passion of the kids he meets who want to solve specific problems. “When the really big offences are finally corrected, finally changed, it is usually because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake…the moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us.”

So as I look to my eight-year-old who was disappointed when Bernie dropped out of the race and asked me if Hillary’s husband was once president. And I look to my eleven-year-old who indeed finds the idea that some kids don’t get to go to school or have to walk miles for fresh water unacceptable.

And others, as Wallis mentions, who are “bright, gifted and committed.” 

I heart libraries

Looking for a new series for my third grader, I headed to the reference desk.  The librarian directed me to an online database called NoveList Plus. (note: This is a subscription service, but your library might offer it as well.) We did a search for his current favorite, The BFG, and a list of “Read-alikes” popped up in the margin. 

A search for my pre-teen resulted in these “Read-alikes”...

Once I had found books for my kids, I headed over to the shelf labeled “Lucky Day.” On it sit copies of current bestsellers and popular titles (you know, the ones with 87 people on the waiting list). If you happen to be in the library on your lucky day, as I was, you can check out anything on the shelf. The one caveat: no renewals. I checked out copies of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible:A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. 

Swoon.  

The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop

“Fine, she’d said. Fine. Then on a whim: If you find a job, I’ll go.” So sets off the events that take Charlotte and her family from the comforts of England to the sunny promises of Australia. Her husband Henry does find a job and soon Charlotte is tending to two small children in a strange land. Although she takes small delights in the smell of freshly line dried laundry, she misses her work as a painter. When a friend sees promise in a portrait she paints of Henry, she begins imagining a different life. Away.

Meanwhile, Henry, the son of an Indian mother and English father, faces prejudice at work as he is overlooked for a teaching position and relegated to a smaller office. Seeking to console Charlotte, he applies for a position in England. Before he can tell her, he is called to India to say goodbye to his dying mother. Charlotte is then left with the perfect opportunity to say her own goodbyes.

Bishop’s depicts the conflicts of marriage, the dissatisfaction of motherhood, and the impossibility of returning home. With her lyrical descriptions, she transports the reader to England, Australia, and India with poetic ease.

#firstworldproblems

You’ve all seen the hashtag. The kid didn’t get into the gifted program. The furnace is on the fritz. Her vacation will be in Miami rather than Paris. The housekeeper quit.

Enter Eleanor Flood.  In Maria Semple’s new novel Today Will Be Different, a once-upon-a-time animator of a popular TV show is now writing her graphic memoir and shuttling her 8 year-old son from private school to make-up counter. She and her surgeon husband (with a side gig on the sidelines at Seahawks games) have agreed on Seattle for 10 years for him and then back to New York for 10 for her. In the meantime, her mantra is “today will be different.” And the day of this novel is. 

With her customary wit, quirky flourishes, and uncanny depiction of the familiar, Semple has created another character, like Bernadette, that will stay on your mind long after you’ve closed the book. Despite the (first world) problems Eleanor encounters, her desire to do better and be better resonates with thrilling (and depressing) accuracy.  

The Play's the Thing

When my daughter was three and my son an infant, I realized that when I was driving, I could not easily understand what they were saying from the back seat. This, along, with my husband’s frustration of always having to repeat himself, sent me to an audiologist, who strongly recommended my getting hearing aids. After a short period of adjustment in sorting out important sounds from un (no, the click of the car lock should not be as loud as the ambulance siren approaching), now it is usually just a matter of remembering not to get them wet and having batteries on hand. Although the world is not louder, it is much, much crisper.

   

Despite that, I still prefer to turn down the sound and turn on the Closed Captions when I’m watching a TV program or movie. I don’t lose any of the nuances of the dialogue, and I’ve noticed most captions tone down the profanity.  Are those of us reading CC considered a gentler folk?

Therefore, I thought this week’s challenge of reading a play would be familiar. Not being in tune with the theater world, I first referred to this list.One of the only plays the library had from the list (in book form) was Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The play features one set and two casts of characters from separate time periods. In earlier scenes, the characters appear only in their own time periods, but as the play progresses, they soon cross paths with each other.  

In addition to contrasts in period, the action plays off contrasts in math versus literature, Newton

versus Byron, and experience versus research. The cast of the 19^th century looks to the future in creating a legacy. The cast of modern times is preoccupied with looking back to uncover the mysteries of the past.

Since I probably haven’t read a contemporary play since my Neil Simon phase in high school, I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading the stage directions, both in setting the scene, and in instructions to the actors.

Stoppard delights in both the lines his characters say and how they are directed to say them. I loved his stage directional asides (see the scene in which Hannah interrupts as her rival and critic Bernard reads from his lecture) almost as much as his word play. He frequently creates scenarios to amuse the audience whereby lines such as “Oh, no! Not the gazebo!” allude simultaneously to sex and landscape design.

Having read this play, I’m curious about actually seeing it performed live. However, unless the actors are mic’d, I might have to stick to the book.