Maki Kashimada

I picked this up on impulse at the library even though I knew my Women in Translation Month TBR was already of truly ludicrous proportions, mostly because I was intrigued by the title and the fact that this had won the Yukio Mishima Prize.

Once I got it home I checked the reviews on Goodreads and YIKES! I almost put it back in the pile to return to the library immediately, but that Mishima Prize had its hooks in me, so somehow this ended up in my priority TBR for the month anyway.

Then I started reading, and I could see what a lot of the reviewers were saying. The writing is choppy, terse. There are no quotation marks. The protagonist is simply referred to as the woman. It is not always clear who is speaking, or what is speech, thought, observation, reflection...

And then on page 10, a single paragraph turned that all around. I was all in. (I will add the paragraph at the end.)

Listen. All of those things were purposeful stylistic choices, and maybe they work for you, maybe they don't. Most of the time they worked for me.

The woman is startled by a malfunctioning alarm in her apartment. She asks a neighbor to watch her son and gets on a plane to Nagasaki, obsessed with thoughts of the atomic bomb. Once there, she immediately falls into an affair with a young Russian-Japanese man at the same hotel, where she slowly begins unpacking a lifetime of suppressed trauma.

A meditation on selfhood, and trauma, and gender relations, and healing, and Christianity, and the different ways one can lose oneself.

The quote: "There are always bloodstains when you wrap someone's body with bandages. The same can be said for this woman. They aren't anything special. There isn't anything special about my bloodstains, about my loneliness, about my past, about the injuries and harm done to me by the men in my past. So if I were to write a novel, the protagonist would be a woman like that."… (lisätietoja)

Una premessa: il titolo è fuorviante perché a prima vista crea come orizzonte d'attesa una storia gotica, o un horror. Si tratta in realtà di una coppia di racconti, il primo dei quali dà il titolo al libro (il secondo si intitola "99 baci").
Il primo racconto è la storia di un ritorno sui luoghi dell'infanzia, che mi ha ricordato il racconto di un'altra scrittrice giapponese, "Hard boiled" di Banana Yoshimoto, in "H/H" (ed. Feltrinelli). La protagonista vuole rivedere con il marito, ormai disabile, un albergo dove fu portata quando era bambina. All'epoca l'hotel era di lusso, adesso è ridotto a centro benessere da quattro soldi. Il viaggio diventa l'occasione per ripercorrere la storia del proprio rapporto difficile con la madre e con il fratello, segnato da violenze psicologiche e incomprensioni, con continui flash-back di memoria. Durante il viaggio la protagonista comprenderà che non è utile vivere immersi nel passato ed essere in guerra con i propri fantasmi familiari, ma che conta possedere l'atteggiamento del proprio consorte: vivere il momento per quello che è, qui e ora, senza altra gioia che esserci. Quasi una parabola zen, dove i tratti psicologici sono finemente descritti.
Meno riuscito a mio avviso il secondo racconto: quattro sorelle vivono con la madre, separata dal coniuge, in un rapporto che ha dell'incestuoso e intriso di malcelato erotismo. Quando nel sobborgo di Tokyo arriva uno straniero, S, gli equilibri familiari si spezzano perché tutte se ne innamorano, entrando in competizione reciproca. Yoko, una tra di loro, ha in effetti una breve relazione con lui, prima dell'abbandono e del ripristino dell'equilibrio tra le sorelle. Emerge una sessualità femminile disinibita/esibita, quasi in ottica femminista (nel senso di essere antimaschilista), ma alla fine sfugge il significato complessivo della narrazione.
Il filo comune che lega le due storie sta proprio nei difficili rapporti tra figlie e madri, segnati in generale da aspettative che non corrispondono al sentire intimo delle persone.… (lisätietoja)

Two short novellas that, at first, seem quite different, but on closer reading reveal a common theme of a woman who feels that her identity is formed by those around her, that she has no real sense of self, and who slowly comes to realise the truth of her situation.

In the title story, Natsuko takes her ailing husband Taichi to a seaside hotel that, many years ago, her grandfather had taken her family. The hotel is tired and the paint peeling, but over the course of their stay Natsuko is forced to confront her memories of her mother and her husband, and the trip becomes one where she slowly starts to heal herself, finally able to forge even just a small sense of self-identity.

In 'Ninety-Nine Kisses' we have a tale of fours sisters, narrated by Nanako, the youngest. Quite different in tone to the previous novella, this is a highly-sexualised group of women, including their mother, whose carefully balanced existence is shaken by the arrival of S., a young man whom all of the sisters take a fancy and who ends up having a relationship with one of them. Nanako has always seen herself purely as someone who only exists to reflect or support the others, not necessarily as an individual: 'I don't have my own story. My story is that of my sisters.'

I really enjoyed these, the writing is beautifully slow and descriptive, and it is no surprise that the title story won the Akutagawa Prize a few years ago. It is a story with deliberate echoes of past Japanese greats, a slow meditation on love and the possibility of finding oneself. The second story is quite a contrast, openly sexual and playing with some darker themes. I got echoes of Shirley Jackson, with the strange relationships between the sisters, and it is a nice balance to the title story's theme of a woman finding herself late in life; this time, Nanako's innocent childhood is coming to an end as she is about to enter the world of adulthood.

These may not be for everyone, but I would highly recommend them to fans of Japanese literature who will appreciate the imagery and references to other works, and to those who appreciate a quiet, meditative story rather than a purely plot-driven thrillerama. A definite 4 stars.… (lisätietoja)