The Readers – Books On The Go

Japan with Children (and Books)

Japan is one of our favourite, but all-too-rare, holiday destinations. So smart, so polite and well-ordered, such care taken with everything from handing you a business card to presenting a plate of sushi as a work of art. But I also love the quirky personality of Japan: its hidden bars, pop-rock-cutie fashion and dark crime novels.

We spent four days in Tokyo with Zoe (7) and George (5). I took some Japanese books (aka ‘destination reading’) forgetting that chances to read when holidaying with children are pretty slim. Some highlights below – bookish and otherwise!

View from our room at the Prince Park Tower Hotel, which had long Murakami-esque corridors.

HARAJUKU

We loved Cat Street. Had a great coffee and cronuts at The Roastery. Also excellent burgers and salads at Golden Brown Burgers (recommended by Monocle). Don’t be put off by the ‘burger’ aspect – these were nutritious, with wonderful fresh salads also on the menu.

Yoyogi Park was beautiful to walk through and we would love to see Tomigaya (the area just on the other side of the park from Harajuku), which sounded fun and Brooklyn-esque and was featured recently in New York Times. I think I need to open a file “Things to Do When We Return to Tokyo sans kids”.

We had a sushi dinner at family-friendly Itamae Sushi – it was excellent. There are various locations; our closest was near Shiba Park.

Books: Tokyo Precincts and Tokyo Style Guide have some beautiful ideas for neighbourhood walks.

GINZA

We spent two hours shopping for stationery at Loft, then went next door to Muji for another suitcase. 😉

We adored Matsuya department store and could have spent longer. Lunch tip: we bought bento boxes from the Food Hall and took them to eat on the rooftop (level R in the lift). Very relaxed.

Book: I could not help thinking of Out by Natsuo Kirino, which features factory workers who make bento boxes, and a grisly murder.

FISH MARKETS

We did a tour late morning – would be good to make the 4am commitment and see the tuna auction (another one for the file). There is talk of moving the fish markets to a new location, so it might be one of the last chances to see the original.

A fabulous lunch at Tsukiji Edogin – it’s a five minute walk from the fish markets with excellent produce and space for 9 of us (we had met up with friends from Sydney), and they take bookings. I highly recommend it if you have a group but want to go local.

Winning lunch at Edogin with Penny, John and Gia

Our wonderful nanny minded the kids for us so we escaped with friends Penny and John for a fabulous dinner at Sushi Tsubaki (another Monocle recommendation) with a cool chef, wonderful traditional sushi, amazing fresh fish and flavours.

SHIMODA

Next stop, Shimoda on the Izu Peninsula. Note to self: bring your international driver’s licence (Japan is strict on the paperwork) – a car is recommended. Also, when renting a house, remember that coffee is number one priority! We had to resort to the 7-11 down the hill, which had that filter style that tastes like someone has put coffee dregs into old dishwater. Our wonderful host came to the rescue with some pods on the second day.

You need to seek out the cool spots in Shimoda and (ideally, with a car, which you will have because you’ve taken my advice) beyond. (e.g. a surf shop on our way out which served fantastic coffee; Perry Road near the harbour).

I’m not sure we have quite nailed that area yet but Jason found it super chilled and relaxing so it’s a thumbs up!

Books:

Thanks to The Readers podcast – Simon and Thomas discussed Japanese books in one episode and the listeners had some great recommendations…

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

Beautiful and subtle, this was too oblique for me. Slow-moving, with an unsympathetic protagonist and his lover, a tragic figure. Nuanced writing, thoughtful and humane. There is much to think about and space to read between the lines. I would appreciate it more reading quietly on a train going through the snow country of the title (instead of at the beach with children!).

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, translated by E. Dale Saunders

Contrary to the title, not a beach read! A man is held captive in a woman’s house to help dig out the sand dunes that the house is buried in. This had a nightmarish quality, both with his failure to escape, the heat and the sand (in his food, hair, clothes). Interesting and poetic, with descriptions of thirst and being trapped by sand all too vivid. I admired it.

Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith

I really enjoyed this detective story set in Tokyo. It has an interesting premise (a wife suspected of murdering her husband from afar) and engaging characters: the likeable but flawed Detective Kusanagi trying to solve the mystery with the help of his physicist friend Yukawa. I loved The Devotion of Suspect X too, and am keen to read more by Keigo Hugashino.

Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb

I loved this novella about working at Yumimoto Corporation in Tokyo. Amelie Nothomb has a wonderful, dry sense of humour but also a deep understanding of Japanese culture. Her empathy for her Japanese colleagues and ability to laugh at herself make for terrific, laugh-out-loud comedy and an at times poignant study of the constraints of life in Japan working for ‘the company’.

Bullfight and The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue, translated by Michael Emmerich

I love Yaushi Inoue’s beautifully spare prose and the way he reveals characters slowly, leaving us to think about where our sympathies lie. Small but perfectly formed, these are cut like crystal. Highly recommended.

And I could do a whole post about Haruki Murakami (I read Wild Sheep Chase while I was away, and found the most beautiful little book called Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai – inspiring).

Do you like reading for holiday destinations? I have another one coming up (Barcelona), which has me thinking about books in translation generally. Maybe for another post!

Now back to Inifinite Jest….

The Sympathizer

“He could nail the face to the canvas.”

So said Benjamin West of the portrait painter Gilbert Stuart, whose portrait of George Washington hangs in the Frick Collection.

19181112 — George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, in the Frick Collection

I was reminded of this as I read The Sympathizer the Pulitzer-prize winning debut by Viet Thanh Nguyen. This is strong writing: Nguyen nails the words to the page. A masculine book, but also playful, wise and darkly comic. For example:

“A small nation could be founded from the tropical off-spring of the American GI.”

The humour hides unspeakable horrors, in the way that Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five is funny, until you realise it is walking the line between laughter and tears, and skirting around the shocking events of war that the characters cannot face.

The narrator here and the Sympathizer of the title, or the Captain as he is also known, is a spy in the Vietnam War. He is also a ‘bastard’, born to a French father and Vietnamese mother. So the mask of cynicism such as that worn by Billy Pilgrim is more than a defence mechanism:

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”

How is that for an opening, by the way?

Again later, when the Captain is recruited to work on a movie by a director he calls ‘the Auteur’ (which I now realise is based on Apocalypse Now – would be worth re-watching the film):

“But most actors spend more time with their masks off than on, whereas, in my case, it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face only to realise that the mask was my face.”

War is a significant theme of the book. Whilst he may be in ‘two minds’ as to how it affects him, the Captain vividly describes the experience of having his country – and its families – torn apart. He escapes to America, but writes to Aunt (his contact in Paris) of his longing for Vietnam:

“We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce. Oh, fish sauce!”

Some of my favourite Vietnamese food, from Gondola Gondola in Adelaide (pic Glam Adelaide)

War also exposes the ambiguity of right and wrong, even as some cling more tightly to their convictions (Captain is a Communist sympathizer, but it becomes hard to tell who is ‘right’, when his victims show humanity and his mentor inflicts cruel torture).

Nguyen explores guilt and innocence, as well as loss of innocence. The Captain is interested in the concept of ‘original sin’ and carries Catholic guilt with him, but also considers himself, if not innocent, at least adhering to his own conscience, until events take their course.

“The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted.”

War deals in matters of life and death, and the characters who travel to America survive in different ways. Some live in spite of themselves; others rebel against their culture, such as the General’s daughter, while the Captain adapts, embracing the American traditions, speaking their language, smiling when insulted. As he says in the beginning, “I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”

The Captain’s adaptability is tested, though, and at times he longs for his country, his mother, and struggles to see who is right on either side of the war. Even someone who plays both sides all day long needs a place to call home. There is a line which touches on this, again coating it with humour – from a guidebook on the Philippines:

“The book’s description of the archipelago only made my mind salivate further, for it was ‘old and new, East and West. It’s changing by the day, but traditions persist,’ a description that might have been written to describe me.”

The Captain can laugh at himself. This is what makes him so charming and for me was the saving grace, because the book is confronting and would be too violent or depressing were it not for Nguyen’s light touch. But there is an underlying sadness and disillusionment too, as the Captain knows that ‘traditions persist’ but the country of his youth is gone.

Nguyen weaves these themes and more through the story. But the stand-out for me is the language. It is alive on the page, vivid and visual – I can imagine this as a film. I loved the wordplay and found, as I was checking for quotes, that I could keep going endlessly because the prose is so strong. It feels like Nguyen is having fun, but is angry too. He succeeds in striking a personable tone while balancing rage with wit, a huge achievement.

I was inspired to read this as a summer read-along with The Readers. Thank you, Simon and Thomas! I would not have picked it up otherwise.

As a post-script, Nguyen’s latest book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War has been longlisted for the National Books Awards for non-fiction. Watch this space!

Escapist Books

The last time I looked at the news, there was an earthquake in central Italy and women being stripped on the beach in France. And my son asking “who is that little boy?” (the 5 year-old devastated Syrian bombing victim). Even some of the books I’ve read lately have taken an unflinching (brave, and beautifully written) look at war and oppression – I’m looking at you Girl at War and Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Agh! We need to escape sometimes: VEEP and Lillehammer are my television souffles, but I do like a good book. Simon and Thomas of The Readers podcast have read my mind and discussed escapist reads recently. I was inspired to make a list …

Two rules are at play: 1) it can be as light as light as can be, but must be well-written. I want to feel inspired by an author smarter than me, not cringe at cliches or clunky phrasing: No 50 Shades of Gray. 2) nothing too challenging. No War and Peace or Narrow Road to the Deep North (both excellent though).

It’s a tricky balance – I have huge respect for authors who manage it. On the other hand, I agree with Thomas – any book that draws you in and entertains you can be a good escape.

52-13

P.G. Wodehouse: fail-safe, timeless, always lifts my spirits. In the words of Evelyn Waugh, his “idyllic world can never stale”. Harmless but genius writing. This article in the New Yorker explains some of the appeal. We visited Sydenham Hill Wood recently and the guide map said “The Pond .. supports dragonflies and newts” – just the word newt made me laugh, conjuring up Gussie Fink-Nottle. You must read his speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, in Right Ho, Jeeves.
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): escape to outer space, brilliantly conceived. Funny, masterful, another genius.
A good detective story: Agatha Christie or Dorothy L Sayers for classic English crime. Recently I’ve discovered Judith Flanders, who does a great a great crime caper (Murder of Magpies). Boris Akunin has been compared with Sherlock Holmes but has a comic Russian element. And Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series (starting with Death at La Fenice) blends crime, Venice and food – what’s not to love? A good setting can be key. By good I mean not war-torn; ideally a grand hotel by the sea, a bucolic village or a cultural European capital.
Another recent discovery: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. I felt like I was holidaying in a resort by the lake (funny, that), breathing crisp mountain air and Edith was in my ear whispering her observations about the guests. There is some depth and sadness, but it’s treated with a light touch. The quality of the writing is absorbing enough to block out the read world.
Speaking of mittel-Europe, Stefan Zweig – he wrote during troubling times but he illuminates small incidents, details and characters with a humane sensibility and a reassuring tone – as if someone is simply confiding a story. My favourite is The Royal Game, a novella that takes place on a cruise: short in length, an escapist setting, tick, tick!
The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg. Sjoberg collects hoverflies on a remote island in Sweden. Somehow this is one of the most comforting, wise books I have read. I highly recommend it.
Which brings us to Scandinavia: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is everything.
Another means of escape is a sweeping story to immerse yourself in. Some of my favourites are: Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (so excited for her next book The Good People due in October); The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. All have a strong sense of place too, so you really can enter into another world. Bliss!
Actual travel, anyone? I love the travel writing of Dickens, and the slim volume On Travel is full of insights and funny scenes, with his sense of theatre and comedy. Edith Wharton’s Cruise of the Vanadis is a beautiful book and leisurely escape – relax with a coffee and enjoy the Meditterranean islands and Wharton’s eye for detail. Bill Bryson’s early travel writing is clever and entertaining. And for 1970s New York, the The Andy Warhol Diaries are a revelation: fun and name-droppy to dip in and out of, or a full literature experience with Warhol as the protagonist.
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: John Wood’s memoir about starting Room to Read is an antidote to the ‘world problems are overwhelming’ blues. Wood – a self-confessed library nerd and avid reader – is funny, engaging and optimistic. The message: world change starts with educated children. The good news? He is on it.

What are your favourite escapist books?