Disappointment and Absolution

What we call happiness is often a matter of resolutely ignoring the worms gnawing away at the deeper levels of our consciousness; true happiness requires excruciating self-excavation, which can often be a perilous undertaking. These themes surface in two recently translated Japanese novels, novellas really, that otherwise have little in common.

Haruki Murakami is best known in the United States for longer novels--like “A Wild Sheep Chase” and last year’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”--that mix cultural criticism, surreal dreamscapes, labyrinthine plots and a low-key preoccupation with the everyday surfaces of life. His latest offering, “South of the Border, West of the Sun,” reaches back to earlier works like “Norwegian Wood” and “Pinball, 1973,” and focuses on human relationships without the postmodern pyrotechnics. It’s a one-sitting mood piece, evoking and exploring a few specific emotions.

Twelve-year-old Hajime, a lonely only child in a suburban postwar landscape of “neat little row homes,” finds comfort in his friendship with Shimamoto, a girl in his class. Cool and self-possessed, she listens as if “she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person’s heart.” They play records together, among them the Nat King Cole album that includes the song of the novel’s title. He moves away; they lose touch. But he keeps her on a pedestal in his memory: With a slightly awed formality, he never mentions her first name.

In high school, the adult Hajime later remembers, “I drew nearer the world, and the world drew nearer to me.” He manages to betray his high school girlfriend, Izumi, only much later realizing “that a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.” He treads water for an unhappy decade in Tokyo, then, seemingly without effort on his part, meets his wife, has two daughters and opens a couple of trendy jazz clubs. As a skin of contentment closes over the past, Hajime seems to have escaped retribution, although an old classmate brings him news that Izumi has never gotten over him. But she is far away. “Everyone just keeps on disappearing,” Hajime reflects. And then one night, Shimamoto walks into his club.

She has always been a faint melody playing in the background of his life, and now she drowns everything else out. She is stunning and keeps reappearing, only showing up on rainy nights, and she refuses to reveal anything about herself. Hajime begins to lie to his wife, utterly possessed by this chance to consummate a relationship that has become part of his private mythology. Without Shimamoto, he is “stuck on the airless surface of the moon.” He makes the decision to sacrifice everything for her.

But Murakami does not write romance novels. This is less a story of transcendent passion than a rather bleak look at the fear of disappointment that inhibits most human interaction. Redemption, in Murakami’s hands, is a matter of recognizing the role you have played in disappointing others, instead of dwelling on the injustice of your own disappointment. Murakami’s matter-of-fact narrator delivers chilling insights on modern mores. Fans of his more elaborate efforts, though, may hope this brief sketch is just an interlude between acts.

“The Stones Cry Out” won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in Japan and is the first of Hikaru Okuizumi’s novels to be translated into English. Though shorter than the Murakami book, it is a more expansive work, delving into frightening territory. It is the story of Tsuyoshi Manase, whose wartime experiences in the Philippines have created twin veins of delight and horror that run beneath the landscape of his life. With a few restrained strokes, Okuizumi tackles the legacy of World War II and the uncertain possibility of absolution.

In the final days of the war, Manase finds himself in a cave full of starving Japanese soldiers trying desperately to survive long enough to die gloriously in combat. They are led by a fanatical captain with a voice like “an enormous claw,” a voice that seizes the dying men “by the guts and bones” and animates even those past caring. Those unable to rise are useless; the captain slits their throats with his sword. “That he had done something horrible, that he had acted despicably, was something that occurred to Manase only long after the war ended.”

In the back of the cave lies a lance corporal, his face like “a skeleton of wires covered with parchment,” his eyes already alive with maggots. “This should be classified as green chert,” he says, picking up a stone from the floor of the cave and delivering a lecture on geology with his final breaths. “The tiny pebble that you might happen to pick up during a walk is a cross-section of a drama that began some 5 billion years ago,” he tells Manase, revealing a vision of the material world Manase takes to heart.

In Japan after the war, Manase owns a bookstore and is successful enough to provide his new wife with “an electric rice cooker, a washing machine, and a refrigerator”--the symbols of postwar rebirth. He devotes every spare moment to geology, becoming a renowned expert on the rocks of his region and spending every night in his workshop preparing sections of his specimens. Stones become a sort of religion: The mineral cycle replaces the karmic cycle, and nirvana is what Manase sees through his microscope, a crystalline vision of “the condensed history of the Earth.”

Manase’s older son, Hiroaki, shares his father’s fascination. When the boy is found stabbed to death in a cave where father and son once collected specimens, the family begins to unravel--Manase’s wife drinks herself into a frenzy, and his younger son is adopted by relatives. The murder fades, “the sketches of the suspect rot[ting] on their telephone poles under rain and wind.” With suspicion for the boy’s death still hovering around him, Manase is increasingly haunted by dreams of a cave in which the maniacal captain instructs him to kill the dying lance corporal: “[P]ull the sword very lightly around, as if cutting through water.”

Smoothly translated by James Westerhoven, Okuizumi’s prose is full of glassy surfaces that tilt to reveal vertigo-inducing depths. His characters are allegorical figures of Japan’s past and present, and his message seems to be that there is no redemption for the horrors of war, no way to lay nightmarish memories to rest. “Manase’s landscapes were worm-eaten. The canvases had black holes that became wider every day.” There are only his beloved stones, hard and unforgiving, but hiding radiance behind their dull exteriors.