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3 comments about PICTURES FROM THE WATER TRADE: AN ENGLISHMAN IN JAPAN.

1. I don't remember where I got a copy of "Pictures of the Water Trade," or why, but I know I haven't lost track of it since.

   "Pictures" is a fictionalized account of the author's experience in moving, as a young man, to Japan, and his experience of 'turning Japanese.' He passes through several stages of understanding, incomprehension, accepatance and rejection, examining his feelings and reactions through the prizm of the Japanese language. He explores how concepts and metaphors embedded in a language can change the perception of someone who immerses themselves in it completely. His relationships with co-workers, his roomate and a girlfriend detail these changes. I recall a scene in which he realizes he has begun to bow when on the telephone, and he understands how his personality is changing in response to culture.

   This is a poignant and intellectually challenging work. John David Morley alternates personal, illustrative events from his life with detailed explanations of sociology and linguistics. I am reminded of authors like Neal Stephenson, and Noam Chomsky. Strange and heady company.




2. If John David Morley's use of English does not bring a gasp of pleasure then the contents of his work certainly will. If you have the slightest interest in things Japanese then you are sure to enjoy this remarkable journey of cultural exploration seen through the eyes of a fictional Englishman. It seems very real, and for those who have traveled in Japan the context is set so perfectly. But more than that, it provides delicately woven connections and insights into a whole fabric of Japanese society of which most Westerners will never be aware. Perhaps the author's fluency in Japanese helps him unravel the thinking behind many interpersonal and cultural patterns which otherwise remain opaque to outsiders. To me the book was emotive, and real, with a captivating web of characters and a motion which maintained my interest to the last page.



3. This is a mildly interesting book that explores aspects of Japanese culture from a Westerner's point of view. The cover of my edition describes it as an "extraordinarily evocative, at times erotic," story. Given that the book is ostensibly about the steamy nightlife of the mizu shoubai, one might expect a rather heady description of what goes on after dark in Japan. Despite the title, the book does not particularly concern itself with the water trade. When it does, it is often just a description of the author sitting in some little bar or other drinking. The book does devote lengthy stretches to things like calligraphy and home furnishings, and perhaps it's just me, but I found it rather boring.
   
   It is hard to imagine who the target audience for this book would be. For those with little knowledge of Japan, many of the descriptions lack enough context to make much sense. For persons already acquainted with the culture, the long musings are hardly revealing and some of the author's conclusions are questionable. Ultimately, it feels like the author wrote this as memoir for himself. It should give hope to diarists everywhere that they too can one day be published. There are a few genuinely evocative moments in this book (especially notable was a good description of a funeral), but hardly enough to justify the time it takes to read it.

2 comments about Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life.

1. "Kokoro" is a difficult word to translate from Japanese to English. Heart, Spirit, Way of Being...it is all of these things. Rather than attempt a direct translation, Lafcadio Hearn offers a selection of stories focusing on Japanese inner life, so that by the end you will understand kokoro.

   The stories follow Hearn's particular interests of Japanese folklore and the vanishing culture of which he found himself a part in post-Meji Japan. Each story is a slice of life focusing on Japanese character, morals and feelings. This is what the Japanese people care about, what they think is important, what is inside.

   The selected tales are non-judgmental and non-orientalist. This is no attempt to explain or highlight the "strange" Japanese, but merely a record and an illumination, in the best sense of the term.

   The collected stories:

   "At a Railway Station"
   "The Genius of Japanese Civilization"
   "A Street Singer"
   "From a Traveling Diary"
   "The Nun of the Temple of Amida"
   "After the War"
   "Haru"
   "A Glimpse of Tendencies"
   "By Force of Karma"
   "A Conservative"
   "In the Twilight of the Gods"
   "The Idea of Pre-Exsistance"
   "In Cholera Time"
   "Some Thoughts about Ancestor Worship"
   "Kimiko"




2. Not to be confused with Natsume Soseki's novel by the same title, Lafcadio Hearn's "Kokoro" is a magnificent collection of essays, vignettes, memoirs, and meditations on Japan in the 1890's. Very much a product of the mid-Meiji period, these masterfully-written little literary pieces are nonetheless timeless. Each piece is quite different from the rest, and yet almost all of them manage to start from everyday incidents or obvious observations and gradually spiral inwards to some deeply moving and startling insight into Japanese attitudes, values, and worldviews; more than once this seemingly methodless method allows Hearn to share with the reader certain common opinions and normal spiritual orientations held by average Japanese folks--the kinds of things usually taken for granted and so unarticulated, hence least amenable to documentation and scholarship (especially of the time, but even today). And Hearn does all this with an unpretentious erudition and an understated and balanced sympathy for his subject that, along with his literary flair for wonderfully clear and flowing prose, places his writings here in a category far above the rest. With him we can find none of the unintentional strains of condescension and orientalism so typical of folklore and religious anthropology, for while he's looking with the surprised gaze of the outsider with one eye, his other eye is that of the insider feeling very much at home where he is. The resulting view is visionary--but in subdued and shadowy tones.
   
   Appendix on an Appendix: in addition to the fifteen excellent essays forming the main body of "Kokoro", there's an extensive appendix featuring Hearn's translations of three popular folk ballads: "The Ballad of Shuntoku-Maru", "The Ballad of Oguri Hangwan" and "The Ballad of O-Shichi, the Daughter of the Yaoya". These are fascinating on a number of levels. They provide a tantalizingly fleeting glimpse of plebian drama, remarkable in its very lack of remarkableness. There's a certain sociological angle, as the versions of these oral ballads collected and translated by Hearn are those recited by mountain outcastes in the area of today's Shimane Prefecture. Religiously the first two ballads are key in understanding popular attitudes concerning pilgrimage in Japan--the first demonstrating a creepy (almost voodoo) edge in Kannon faith at Kiyomizudera Temple, the second delightfully exaggerating the rejuvenating benefits of Kumano and its sacred hot springs. Meanwhile, the third ballad is a straightforwardly melodramatic retelling of a true story better known to us today in a more refined and literary version as found in the novelist Saikaku's "Five Women Who Loved Love" of 1686.

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