capsule reviews
yuko tsushima, junichiro tanizaki, bernard taylor
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Territory of Light (Yuko Tsushima, 1979 / trans. Geraldine Harcourt, 2019)
This is a novel about a woman who is doing her best. It’s not good enough! In fact, it’s kind of bad. She is doing a bad job. But what else can she do?
Having been left by her husband, our unnamed narrator moves into a light-filled apartment with her toddler daughter and struggles to build a life of her own. Though she has a job, an easily accessible daycare, and help from her mother, she can’t keep her head above water for more than a few seconds at a time. She never gets enough sleep. Plus, even though her husband initiated their separation, and even though he’s living with another woman, he whines to their old friends about her unforgiving nature and presents himself as a victim; they call her and lecture her on giving up a good man.
In short, our narrator is emotionally destroyed by her husband’s actions and by the strange social contract that causes everybody to take his side, but there’s no space in her life for her grief. When she’s not at work, she’s taking care of her daughter, who is often destructive in the way toddlers generally are (and, sometimes, in ways toddlers are not, like apparently threatening a baby with scissors). She blows up at her daughter repeatedly, screaming at her, slapping her, ignoring her when she cries at night. She tries to set herself on a better path, and she even might, for a while.
Then she blows up again:
It was not so much hearing her crying as finding myself shouting vile abuse and feeling like smothering her that made me realize for the first time just what the long days ahead would be like. I longed to have my old life back. But there was no going back now, nor any way out. I couldn’t decide whether I’d done this to myself or fallen for a ruse of unknown origin. What I’d failed to see so far, it turned out, was my own cruelty.
When she’s not in the moment, she can see that her daughter’s own erratic outbursts have the same source as her own, i.e., the sudden disappearance of her father from her life and all the upheavals that followed. But in the moment, it’s another story. When we’re reading, we understand that she is trying her very hardest, and nevertheless she is still falling well short of being a good mother. She is often a bad mother.
As she says, though, there’s no way out. This is all rough going and some of the scenes between the mother and her daughter are very hard to read. You know and she knows that there’s harm being done here that is irreparable, though it’s not all her fault (her husband has a lot to answer for). Nevertheless, this book is not grim. Its title is not misleading; there is something about it that is filled with light. Things do get better, even if there are many setbacks and reversions and false starts. It’s often funny even when it’s sad.1 Here, for instance, she imagines a conversation with her boss about her husband’s leaving her:
Along…came the sound of my own voice, asking Kobayashi if I would always have to answer for having happily set up house with Fujino, for having gone so joyfully to the registry office, for having had a child with him so unhesitatingly. Kobayashi seemed to be nodding yes. All at once, countless shadowy figures loomed around me, agreeing vigorously.
Indeed, that’s the sad irony of her husband getting their old friends to call her: she doesn’t really disagree with them. She does think she’ll never find a man as good for her as her husband, “the man I’d believed to be closer to me than anybody.” But having been severed the way they were, things cannot be repaired. Even if her husband made some kind of serious attempt to win her back (he does not), he walked out on her too senselessly for his words to be trusted ever again.
Quicksand (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1947 / trans. Howard Hibbet, 1995)
There’s a particular kind of book that is about being in love with somebody you realize is a totally worthless or even evil person—but it just doesn’t matter. Or maybe they’re not evil, but this other person has absolutely no regard for you—doesn’t matter. You’ll still crawl over broken glass just for a little bit of attention from them.2 For an artist, I suppose these stories set a particular kind of challenge. You need to make somebody going back and back for more suffering convincing—some kind of answer to the question, what are they getting out of this?
Quicksand has been on my to-read list for a few years because Liliana Cavani, director of my problematic favorite The Night Porter, adapted it into a movie called The Berlin Affair.3 And it is—as you can guess from the wind-up—a story about loving somebody who is no good. To this basic, and, for me, already compelling, premise, Tanizaki adds two touches. First, everybody in this story is no good. Second, there are so many lies, which pile up on one another in so many improbable ways, that by the end of the novel you really feel bewildered as to what has happened.
Bored housewife Sonoko Kakiuchi, trying to distract herself from the end of an emotional affair, glimpses Mitsuko Tokumitsu at an art school. Sonoko has been working on a painting of the Goddess Kannon, but she keeps painting this stranger’s face instead of the model’s. Rumors that they’re in a lesbian relationship begin to circulate, even though they’ve never really spoken to each other. Does that strike you as an unlikely and fairly thin basis for such a rumor? Well, put a pin in that.
Sonoko and Mitsuko meet properly and decide to become friends, despite all the gossip; then they become lovers; then it turns out that Mitsuko has a lover (male) already; then it turns out he’s gotten her pregnant and perhaps her whole affair with Sonoko (right down to those affair rumors, which Mitsuko herself started) has been an elaborate cover for her trysts with him; then it turns out he didn’t; then it turns out he did; then it.… And don’t forget about Sonoko’s husband, by the way. Sonoko might want to, but others are keeping an eye on him.
As I already said, at a certain point everybody’s lied so thoroughly about so much it becomes hard to know what’s what, and the confessing of lies becomes a currency of trust that is, of course, usually just preparing the way for even more lies. The story is narrated to us after the fact by Sonoko to a novelist (presumably, Tanizaki), who occasionally introduces documents into the story, and these documents mark the only things in the story I suppose we can be absolutely certain happened.4 In other instances, documents are alluded to but are not produced—does this mean Sonoko really saw them, or is she just making them up?
What is ultimately most interesting in this novel is not its picture of obsessive love but the way there’s no solid place to stand as a reader. Sonoko, with her disarmingly chatty voice, cannot quite be the naive mark she wants to say she is, because, as we already know, this isn’t even her first affair. Yet she’ll also say that, unexpectedly, in a move that is indistinguishable from either soul-searching or strategic truth-telling. Nobody knows who they are or where they’re going; they all regard themselves as victimized by the others and often they are right.
Up next with Tanazaki: The Key.
This Is Midnight (Bernard Taylor, 2019)
The first story in this collection, “Out of Sorts,” is a wonderfully nasty little story with a twist so clearly forecasted that the delight comes in watching it happen. After that story I settled in for a good time. But actually, this was a rare complete miss for me from Valancourt, aside from that first story—I don’t think I’ve disliked something I got from them so much in a while.5 I genuinely loathed it.
Much like “Out of Sorts,” of these stories have twist endings, and in that sense suffer from being collected if you’re going to read the collection cover to cover. Still, that’s not really the issue. The issue is that in most cases they neither achieve the ability to be really shocking nor the pleasure of watching things click into place. They often feel like the B-tier children of SNL and Tales from the Crypt: in one story, a shrewish harpy woman plots to murder her husband and it fails and then he murders her with an axe because she keeps cooking his breakfast wrong (ho ho). In another, a heartless selfish mother lets her daughter bleed to death rather than stop watching her soaps. In another, an absent working mother lets her children be preyed upon by an alien.6 In some stories, like “Cera,” there’s a kind of structural problem to the whole story that makes the twist ending, when it comes, feel completely redundant.
I’m still open to reading Bernard Taylor’s novels—because I am, how do you say, stupid—whenever they pop up as the Valancourt deal of the month. But I heartily hated this.
At one point the narrator has a dream where a popular girl from her school asks her why she’s a loser; she responds: “Can I help it if I’m a loser?”
Lena Andersson’s Willful Disregard (2013) was a slightly-viral-in-lit-circles book like this, about a woman who completely torches her life for somebody wholly unremarkable who really doesn’t seem like he’d notice if she got run over by a car right in front of him. Reading it was—and I mean this as a compliment—one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. It was like being shut up in a box without any air. For a while I wanted to write about it but I frankly don’t even want to open it again.
That movie has no official American release as far as I know, but it does have a low quality version you can watch through MGM on Amazon. But I wanted to read the book first.
Even then, some of them are letters, and since everybody is so willing to lie to one another, there’s no real way to know that these letters represent something that actually happened.
I think the last book from Valancourt I really disliked was The Smell of Evil (Charles Birkin). Still in that instance I think I sort of respected what Birkin was doing even though I hated it.
You may notice a pattern here. Don’t worry though—in another one the evil bitch mother gets stabbed to death by her baby. So you see, all sorts of things actually happen in these stories.