For the last four months I’ve been reading books about and from Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Here are four fiction and four non-fiction, four kiwi, three Japanese and one Australian:
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
An astonishing combination of mysticism and storytelling: how three unrelated individuals, an artist, a factory-worker and a lost child – Maori, Pakeha and both – become a new kind of family. Interpenetrating streams of consciousness carry the story through discovery, loss and redemption.
Though the paperback is fêted on its cover as a ‘visionary New Zealand fable’, that ghettoises it a little – the unspoken assumed universality of European and American fiction covers a lot that’s just as culturally specific. Nevertheless, Maoritanga, especially language, runs through the novel, and when Kerewin Holmes, the artist, says “whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit and inclination I feel all Maori”, it seems to speak for the feeling of Keri Hulme, the novelist.
The book’s spiritual pivot, when three lives in broken orbits begin to spiral back together, is when Joe Gillayley is chosen by a dying kaumatua to look after a small god in a stone mauri. The old man tells Joe:
“By accident or design, when the old people arrived here, they induced, or maybe it arrived of itself, the spirit of the islands, part of the spirit of the earth herself, it rested in the godholder they had brought… something very great had allied itself with some of us, had given itself to us” (p440/1)
which expresses something unique about (Keri Hulme’s consciousness of) Maori people: they are one of the few major indigenous people displaced by Europeans since 1492 whose own history and legends tell of their own canoe-borne arrival on the islands of New Zealand from Polynesia. Yet the feeling of spiritual ownership of the land itself remains complete, perhaps even stronger for the sense of arrival being also the gift of the land.
The Penguin History of New Zealand
Michael King
Immense and valuable five hundred page history of New Zealand from prehistory to the present day. The most exciting part of the book is the pre-Pakeha section, which examines not only the history of Moriori and Maori arrival, but also its historiography. King explains that Aotearoa was not the universal pre-Pakeha Maori name for New Zealand. “Polynesian ancestors came from motu or islands, and it was to islands that they gave names”: Te Ika a Maui (Maui’s fish) for the North Island , and Te Waka-a-Aoraki (Aoraki’s canoe) for the South Island. Good descriptions of New Zealand as a protein larder for its new arrivals: from the islands’ pre-human mammal-less ecosystem, pre-Pakeha settlers eliminated thirty-two species of birds, to Europeans’ more recent nine.
Then comes the story of the white ‘discovery’ and settlement of New Zealand (how did Abel Tasman miss the entire southern coast of Australia to pitch up on the South Island?); from then on Pakeha and Maori stories run in tandem. There’s a little bit too much Pakeha political history of New Zealand on the 19th century and the tedious debates of a parliamentful of pompous and bewhiskered royalist sheep farmers.
White settlers’ impact on New Zealand’s indigenous people was less devastating than in either North America or Australia. Despite the general genocidal impulses of European settlers, and their belief that absorption into white society was the best for a declining race, some Maori peoples, once armed, even had the best of it in the mid-nineteenth century wars. The existence of something like the Waitangi Tribunal is unimaginable in either Australia or the USA.
White New Zealand’s generally-laughable love of the Empire and Britishness (therefore their rejection of becoming part of the Federation of Australian colonies in 1901) has its unbearable consequences in the thousands of Kiwis who put to sea to fight for the motherland in the first world war as ANZACs, to find butchery and betrayal at Gallipoli. The book ends with a description-cum-plea for New Zealand’s unique “good-hearted, practical, commonsensical” tolerance striving towards a joint Pakeha/Maori tradition of mutual respect.
Kiwi Tracks
Andrew Stevenson
Published in the ‘Lonely Planet Journeys’ series of travellers’ personal accounts. Stevenson takes his broken heart from Norway to New Zealand for several months to tramp long-distance walks, beginning with the reputedly most beautiful walk in the world, the Milford Track. The scenery and the walking of it come across vividly, and also awkwardness and surprising encounters of travelling alone. He’s at his most irritating when pontificating about Maori spirituality, or patting himself on the back when the driver of a ride he’s hitched tells him how much he ‘gets’ Maoritanga, and he’s unnecessarily rude about Queenstown bungee jumping types, unaware of his own relative selfishness and impact on the environment. Nevertheless, when he finds what might be love again at the end of the book it’s hard not to feel happy for him.
All Visitors Ashore
C. K. Stead
Stead is a New Zealand modernist, a literary generation or two before Hulme, who had his Overseas Experience in London. But this novel is entirely set in NZ, around the Auckland harbourfront strike of 1951, and a small community of bohemians in Takapuna. It’s narrated by an older Curl Skidmore, talking to and of his younger self, a faithless poet living in a seaside shack. It’s about departures too: when a great liner leaves harbour, streamers are thrown from deck to shore by the passengers to hold at the other end, symbolically broken when the ship pulls out; a scene I oddly saw repeated weeks later in Ishiro Honda’s Gojira. Dense and modern, very little Maori influence; less archetypally ‘New Zealand’ than Hulme but just as specific to place and time, the personal struggles of the bohemians for meaning and experience pitched against Sid Holland’s war on the dockers, at one of New Zealand’s darkest and most reactionary post-war moments.
30 Days in Sydney, a wildly distorted account
Peter Carey
On the eve of the 2000 Olympics Carey returns to Sydney for a month from his professional life in New York, to see old friends whom he tries to get to relate Sydney through stories of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is Sydney seen through the eyes of mostly successful and wealthy middle-aged men: writers, artists and adventurers.
Lots of history thrown in: settlement, the jailer-gentry, Macarthur and Bligh, the twelve-metre high shell middens on Bennelong point from which the settlers made lime for mortar. De Selby from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman’s makes several bizarre appearances. Carey is not from Sydney but loves it; is amusingly afraid to drive over the Sydney Harbour Bridge; hates the monorail and the Central Business District; is alarmed by the transformation the Olympics is wreaking upon the city.
Peter Myers gives a lecture on the history of the Sydney Opera House (on Bennelong Point) and its relationship to the world’s other palaces of culture. In particular, Myers displays a doubled-up image of the Royal Festival Hall which shows it sharing a structural aesthetic with the Opera House (the Festival Hall is currently covered in scaffolding, which makes this hard to imagine and verify). Leslie Martin, the London County Council architect of the Festival Hall was key in picking Jørn Utzon as the architect of the Opera House. So the Sydney Opera House is both an Opera House, as European cities have Opera Houses – Vienna’s on the Ring, Copenhagen’s on the water: a (slightly insistent, for far-flung Sydney) demonstration of the city’s achievement in both musical and architectural sophistication, the ne plus ultra of High Culture – and also a post-war Culture Palace like the Festival Hall, Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia (and even the Dresden Kulturpalast and East Berlin’s Palast Der Rebublik), a welcoming, open and democratic spaces for everyone to enjoy what is still ‘high’ culture, with the arrogant bombast taken out of the architecture itself. Perhaps the Opera House, designed by a Danish architect is the greatest and most impressive of all the European culture palaces?
Fix, a white man asks Vicki, who he’s just discovered is an Aborigine ‘where’s your country’, meaning where are your people from, which is taken a) by his fellow whiteys as an excuse to remind him that ‘her’ country was stolen and b) by Vicki as patronising and presumptive. The next morning they get up for the dawn Anzac service and Carey overcomes his youthful objections to its imperial connotations. But later in a café as they watch Howard reconciled with the Turks over Gallipoli when he still cannot apologise for 200 years of Aborigine oppression, she destroys her adoptive white father’s military medals which she wore to the ceremony.
In the Miso Soup
Ryu Murakami
The soup is not just a Japanese kind of hot water that our hero Kenji is in, but specifically miso soup, the mystery of a bowl of foul brown yeasty soup with what look like kitchen scrapings floating in it – Tokyo as seen by a gaijin. A psychopathic, brain-damaged, prostitute-killing gaijin.
This is less ambitious and has a smaller scope than Coin Locker Babies, but if you think of Murakami as the ‘author’ of Takashi Miike’s Audition, and therefore a spawner of ‘extreme Asia’ cinema, then the book makes more sense, and even more so given it was written in 1997, before Audition was released.
Young sex-tour guide Kenji, with sweet and innocent 16-year old girlfriend Jun, meets fat American Frank who’s disturbing over-friendly, and Kenji suspects him almost straight away of having killed a prostitute he’s read about in the papers. The suspense isn’t in realising that Frank is the killer, but in Kenji’s attraction to him, fascination masked as fear of being unable to escape (he sticks a fragment of human skin to Kenji’s door), and wondering how far Kenji will let him go.
The murder scene in the omiai pub in kabuki-cho is coldly over-described – as tourists are dismembered and die the narration flits from one to another, describing exactly how bits of them are hanging off or flopping about, too much like a set of effects instructions for Miike.
Frank, is a super-killer like Ichi: hyper-violent, hyper-reflexed, unbeatable and again, the suspense doesn’t lie in whether he can be stopped, only in Kenji’s growing complicity. When Frank finally leaves Kenji on New Year’s eve, carefully explains the Miso metaphor and leaves no clues to link Kenji to anything, it all ends rather flatly.
Frank’s self-told backstory is entertaining: brain damage, killing, being drugged up and the desire to walk until he gets lost, and the novel has one gorgeously striking image. When Franks flips into his killing state, something happens to his face, which Kenji describes as like a gnat leaving a flower: the almost-imperceptible sudden disappearance of something you didn’t notice until its absence provokes you.
Strangers
Taichi Yamada
This carries a big quote from David Mitchell on the front and the inner dustflap carries on to claim that here Haruki Murakami meets Paul Auster. It’s got some of the laconic style of Murakami, but none of the depth of either. It’s a ghost story with two sets of ghosts and a twist: a girl from protagonist Harada’s apartment building who kills herself after he refuses to have a drink with her and then returns to begin the relationship that could have been; and the ghosts of his parents who reappear in a neglected corner of Asakusa.
Harada is a professional screenwriter, and in one of the best moments his friend and colleague Mamiya confesses his attraction to Harada’s ex-wife. What happens subsequently is described by Harada as the kind of emotional cliché that they as professional writers sought to avoid, which lets Yamada off the hook by not only letting him write a knowing clichéd scene, but letting the knowingness happen in his characters’ shoes.
But it’s just a ghost story – it doesn’t have the resonance of Auster’s New York Trilogy, the length and lives involved, or the extended metaphysical sequence at the end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist is actually fighting for something more real than the bizarre world he’s entered. There’s no metaphor, and the supernatural is entirely on the surface (the ghosts disappear like ghosts should, his parents’ apartment is of course a vacant lot when he goes back to it). Best read in a single sitting, at the pace of a film, for its action and suspense.
Wrong about Japan
Peter Carey
Carey takes his son, a hardcore Japanophile and anime addict to Tokyo. They agree to avoid the ‘Real Japan’ of tea ceremonies and Kabuki, for the weirder Japan of anime, manga and fanboys.
Charley’s friend Takashi who hangs around with them, works in a donut shop, and dresses like a character from Mobile Suit Gundam. Carey discusses him as an Otaku, but he also uses the term ‘visualist’, also describing the Sunday gangs in Harajuku, to refer to the implicit visual ethic in the concentration on appearances by people who dress up for recreation. Peter and Charley also meet a proper otaku, a transsexual called Yuka who worked on Gundam.
Carey discusses the more obvious art-film anime classics like Grave of the Fireflies, and at the end they miraculously meet Hayao Miyazaki himself, at Studio Ghibli. Along with some slightly leaden analyses drawing Japanese history, the War and all that into his discussion of anime, Carey’s point seems to be that the Real Japan is the one of anime and visualists, rather than the ‘traditional’ Japan.
