Japanese Fiction: Saving the Soul of the East

Japan is losing touch with its soul. This was Yasunari Kawabata 's fear and concern more than half a century ago, and one of the factors that may have influenced his voluntary death in April 1972. The author of Snow Country and The Sound of the Mountain was capable of capturing details that only he could notice and restore. If something as vaporous and promising as "the soul of Japan" could be encapsulated and preserved in perpetuity, the right hand was Kawabata's, of unfailing distinction and ferocity.

The paradox seems to call into question the suicide of the then septuagenarian calligrapher: what could possibly disturb a narrator skilled in those fine brushstrokes that abound, for example, in his collection Tamayura ? An obvious inference: the Japanese can't be so different from Westerners because they write, and what they write—even if it was printed a century ago—resonates in us, and in an imponderable way.

Typical Eastern themes appear in the stories of Tamayura (Seix Barral): requests for permits and marriage (the choice of husbands and wives by parents); tangled ties; men spying on women; objects and clothing whose mere description makes them sophisticated; the unexpected news motive so common in those lands. Underlying this is a silent doctrine: the secret of a fiction, like that of a marriage, is not to tell everything.

The clarifications—a color, a tonality—do everything in Kawabata , and the motifs are definable, but their staging remains in the air, profuse in veils and smokescreens. The closures are ethereal, deliberately inconclusive. Ambiguity and silence cannot be taught. (That is why Shakespeare, among others, would not be a good writing teacher.) Kawabata's prose is of gentle waves, in which a sudden flutter of wings disorients—awakens—a character, and his witness, the reader: "Kagueyama had no intention of lying to Shimako. The young woman had the virtue of not creating in him the need to lie or hide things."

Kawabata seems to have encapsulated the volatility of his lines—or the mystery of that volatility—in a no less elusive phrase: "Before I begin to make an effort to do something, it's already done." The man who wrote as if building a ship in a bottle defined himself as lazy and said the Swedes awarded him the Nobel Prize for his laziness. Mishima already warned that the man who best knew how to use his power without exerting it was Kawabata. (Giorgio Agamben doesn't mention this in his studies on the subject.)

These beloved writers—Kawabata and Soseki, Charles Lamb and Paul Léautaud—continue to operate, as spies are known, from beyond the grave, pulling invisible strings to ensure that certain promising readers don't slip through their fingers. Natsume Soseki must have played a role in inspiring Minae Mizumura , whose first novel was an attempt at an extension of Light and Darkness (Edit. Impedimenta), a serialized fiction that Soseki left unfinished when he died.

Mizumura perhaps caught Soseki's hint—his protagonist is resuming a reading after a break of several days—and raised a difficult gauntlet to fit, that of a master with a crystal pulse, able to portray someone suspicious of what another has said, to interpret and even overinterpret other people's gestures and glances, to paint the body as an unknowable world. Soseki knows or guesses almost everything about his characters (a good doctor should be able to guess you) and crafts reams of dialogue shrouded in the mist of the unspoken. (Or better yet: riddled with holes in the unspoken.)

In Light and Darkness. A Sequel (AH Editora), Mizumura is, like Soseki, adept at concealing feelings and complicating motives. Amidst arranged marriages and suicides, the author establishes cyclothymia as an emotional metronome and provides gentle subtleties such as questioning whether a character has heard a certain answer. It's another (very) Japanese fiction about meddling: the tug-of-war between discretion and indiscretion.

Its pages play, incidentally, with the Japanese lexicon in their favor ( fusuma, furusato, furoshiki ), whose indescribable affability makes them imagine themselves as the only words left floating in a post-nuclear setting. It is in I, a Novel (AH Editora), an intelligent later book about exiles and returns, that Mizumura finds his voice, balancing on the tightrope of his native language, the same one that connects Tokyo and New York, back and forth, with the kitchen of writing on display.

Previously, in the early but capable Light and Darkness: A Sequel , Mizumura was faithful to Soseki's spirit, almost like a writer trained using the Suzuki method to learn to play an instrument, with sticky tape indicating the correct finger positions. But air flows through its chapters, and the reader turns the pages like a transparent curtain barely rippling in a breeze.

It's hard to find a greater contrast to Kawabata, Soseki, and Mizumura than the novels of Ryu Murakami , who are ideally suited to demolishing the seemingly harmless referential apparatus of Japanese literature. He is probably the author who most easily destroys certain images of his country, especially if they are idealized.

The author of the fast-paced Piercing, Audition, 69, Tokyo Decay, and Miso Soup (all from Editorial Abducción) manages a dynamic generic and emotional palette that ranges from brashness to helplessness with a perverse and pleasurable sense of lightness. His early work , Almost Transparent Blue (Ed. Anagrama) is, at first, intentionally inconclusive, a mechanical record of chaos, drugs, and orgiastic sex. Perhaps Ryu Murakami sought to break through the wall of pornography to see if, through sheer persistence, he could achieve something resembling a literary effect (through rhythm, delirium, or thanks to a redeeming particularity, trusting that the contrast with the poetic moments would become more brutal and effective). "The classrooms, seen through the glass, seemed ready to devour us. The desks and chairs arranged in regular rows reminded me of mass graves waiting for unknown soldiers," reads a passage that connects this fiction with the charismatic 69 , about years of initiatory school rebellion.

In 69 and in Tokyo Decline , an autobiographical novel, a seasoned, alert, sly voice transcribes the upheaval or militancy in the Japanese capital and gracefully interweaves period cultural allusions with extremes of muted tenderness and prop violence. There is no shortage of sexual encounters or anatomical anomalies in momentary flirtations, never less than bizarre. A man sets up a casting call for a supposed film only to meet a woman to replace his dead wife in the witty Audition , a pleasant novel of fraudulent simplicity, enlivened by its details.

In Piercing, it's worth observing how an author manages to so successfully craft the protagonist's madness and maneuver unscathed with materials of such opposing temperatures and impulses, honoring the Japanese neutrality toward things, placed on the same level. Unexpected detours are a specialty of Ryu Murakami —they go hand in hand with his versatility; like Takeshi Kitano , he is a screenwriter and filmmaker—and the reader is left feeling disconcertedly grateful for a very rare breed of writer.

In Takeshi Kitano 's book "Child" (Elefanta Publishing House), children tortured by others and schoolchildren who skip school are rife. Teasing and humiliation among children, running away, and the first throes of falling in love. Its beautiful scenes give the impression that anyone can begin to write a story in Japan; the context provides the necessary ingredients. Harder and more elaborate is the atmosphere recreated by Fumiko Enchi in "The Years of Waiting " (Chai Publishing House), from a time when Japan was unforgiving. A novel of solid and sad wisdom, sustained by a cold, objective impiety, it cuts like the edge of a blade.

A young woman given by her parents to a powerful man; a concubine protected by the official wife. Trials, sacrifices, and consent; learning and fear of consequences as melodic motifs. The quality of observation makes the writer: "Although she felt no desire to have his child, being judged as a woman who could not conceive had made her young heart close with a horrible hopelessness, as if she had arrived at a place without accommodation at the end of a long journey."

Other times, other literary ambitions. The patient descriptions seem to soften the cruelty of the facts, but they accentuate it, while Enchi takes all the time necessary for each thing. (It's the opposite of a defect.) Similar in this to Seicho Matsumoto , author of The Sand Castle (Libros del Asteroide), another unhurried composer, who brought to the forefront a common habit in his country's narrative—suspicion—and the most delicate crime writer in the world (not just because his inspector writes haikus). One detail, and another, and another, makes them uncopiable writers. Like Kawabata, Soseki, Tanizaki and company, it can't be achieved with artificial intelligence.