A Certain Slant of Light

I love Polly Barton’s translations from the Japanese (top favorites include Asako Yuzuki’s Butter and Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are), so when I saw that she had recently come out with Fifty Sounds, a book about translation, of course I jumped on it.

However, as it turns out, Fifty Sounds is really more about language learning - about Barton’s experience of moving to Japan right after college to teach English, and learning Japanese from the ground up while completely immersed in the language - about moving from experiencing a culture as a complete outsider to a participant-observer, feeling confined by expectations (often specifically gendered expectations) that before had seemed distant from her.

(It is clearly intentional that Barton frequently translates works that grapple with expectations for women in Japan.)

It’s also a book organized around Japanese mimetic words, a class of words that is similar to English onomatopoeia (oink, boom), but far more expansive, both in the sense that the Japanese language has far more of these words than English, and in the sense that it has mimetic words for things other than sounds, like yochi-yochi, the word for a toddler’s tottering walk. (Or, Barton suggests, is it just that in English we don’t formally recognize the mimetic quality of certain words - like tottering?) Hence the fact that manga will sometimes have “sound effects” for things that are not sounds.

It’s also, just a little bit, a book about the weirdness of being an English speaker who has become obsessed with Japanese without the usual intermediate step of being obsessed with manga and anime.

What it isn’t really is a book about the act of translation, or a book with much detail at all about any of the books Barton has translated. (Barton does just occasionally bring up an example from something she’s translated - but without telling us which work the example comes from! Maddening.) The book that it is is also very interesting, but I did pine a little for the book that I thought it would be.

Recently littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.

This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.

Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.

They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.

Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?

In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.

The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.

Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.

This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.

And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m glad that I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow first, because I didn’t like his earlier book Rules of Civility nearly as much. I didn’t dislike it or even find it a struggle to read - it flows on like a river while you’re in it - but ultimately it slipped out of my head almost as soon as I’d read it.

However, on balance I liked A Gentleman in Moscow SO much that I’m still excited to read Towles’ new book The Lincoln Highway when it comes out.

What I’m Reading Now

During my childhood, the Newbery Honor book Carolyn Coman’s What Jamie Saw haunted the library displays. I always avoided it (while also staring at it in morbid fascination) because the original cover gives the distinctive impression that what Jamie saw was something nasty in the woodshed.

If I had ever opened the book to the first page, I would have discovered that what Jamie saw was his mom’s boyfriend hurling Jamie’s baby sister across the room (but don’t worry, Jamie’s mom catches her). Mystery solved!

Changing gears entirely, I’ve been really enjoying Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Often I find story collections uneven, some stories great and other mediocre, but this one is consistently high caliber, and I’ve been parcelling out the stories like bonbons.

They’re all contemporary stories inspired by Japanese folktales. Sometimes the magic is front and center, like “Quite a Catch,” about a woman who goes on a fishing trip and catches a skeleton, which releases the ghost of a woman from the Edo period, and then the two start dating. (They’re so cute together!) Other times, the story is a riff on a folktale, like “My Superpower,” a story told in the form of a newspaper column. The columnist muses about how her own history of eczema has given her a sense of connection to the hideous women of folklore.

The stories have a lot of fun playing with form: aside from the newspaper column, there’s also a story in the form a recruitment letter sent from the afterlife to a jealous woman (“The Jealous Type”) begging her to hold onto that intensity of emotion, because they’re having trouble finding people passionate enough to recruit as ghosts these days.

What I Plan to Read Next

Thomas P. Lowry’s The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m barreling along with the 1990s portion of the Newbery Honor project, and this week I read one I really liked! Russell Freedman’s The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane does what it says on the tin in an engaging, informative style. The descriptions of the Wright brothers’ autumns on Kittyhawk as they tested their airplane designs particularly appealed to me - not the driving winds and the infinite sand, but the long happy days utterly focused on their absorbing airplane invention hobby.

Walter Dean Myers’ Somewhere in the Darkness I didn’t find as appealing (Myers’ characters always seem strangely affectless to me), but at least it was short.

After my vaccination I was feeling kind of out of it and therefore in need of something light, so I read the next Mrs. Pollifax book, Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief. This is in fact so light that it’s already slipping out of my head, but it was exactly the level of engagement that I needed at the time.

What I’m Reading Now

Still in the thick of Murderbot! I finished Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy before post-vaccination lethargy made me set Network Effect aside briefly... and then I realized that Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is due in three days, so I'd better read it now if I want to read it. But I WILL return to Murderbot, and am saving my thoughts for a Murderbot post.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job even more than I expected. It’s about a woman who keeps taking different jobs looking for something that is easy, only to accidentally grow deeply invested in each one. The second section (the book has five sections, one per job) has a slight whiff of the supernatural about it, which I was not expecting and found an immensely enjoyable surprise.

What I Plan to Read Next

Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility!