Setsubun and Chinese New Year

The road home at sunset. I didn't actually have this landscape in mind when I named my blog Sunset in Snow Country; I meant for it to refer to the Sunset District in San Francisco, where I lived for five years. I miss the pastel-colored houses and the dim sum shops and the ocean in constant view, and I feel as if I still carry it with me wherever I go. My life is a little piece of the Sunset in snow country, hence the name. So the picture doesn't have much to do with anything, but I still pulled over on the shoulder and jumped out of the car to take it. We don't see the sun much these days.

For the past two weekends I've been going to cooking classes sponsored by the international exchange network, which has ended up being really great. The first one was for a Japanese holiday called Setsubun. When I was a kid I had a book of Japanese holidays and traditions, and over the years I got to experience most of them in some altered form (the mall in Japantown does Tanabata trees every year, I went to an Oshogatsu event at the Japanese American National Museum last year, and of course there's the Cherry-Blossom Festival), but Setsubun was the one that never made an appearance in the U.S., and so going to the event had the weird effect of yanking me out of the commute-work-home cycle and reminding me that I am, right now, doing something that I've dreamed of since childhood. I'd say this happens about once every two weeks these days, and it's an amazing feeling.

Setsubun isn't really a major holiday; it's supposed to be the last day of winter (ha!), and the traditional ritual is to cast out demons by throwing beans. Apparently the Setsubun food we made, ehommaki (a long sushi roll), originated in Western Japan and has only made it to Niigata in recent years. But hey! I was in the newspaper!

If you can't read that, feel free to imagine that I am quoted saying something really cool and insightful and not "HURF DURF MAKING TAMAGOYAKI IS HARRRRDDDD."

Also, despite reading that Japan book over and over, I somehow failed to internalize the fact that people don't just toss beans around randomly on Setsubun. So I was completely surprised when the lights suddenly went out and Suzuki, the university student who did the presentation at the beginning, rushed in wearing a demon costume and roared at the kids, who screamed and pelted him with beans and candy.

Apparently someone in the household (usually Dad) will dress up as the demon and everyone else throws the beans at him. Most of the schools also did bean-throwing, and more than one of my ALT friends actually had to dress up as the demon and get mobbed by bean-throwing 12-year-olds. We just had do-it-yourself ehommaki for lunch:

You take the nori (at the back) and put the rice (it was sushi rice!) inside with whatever you want and roll it up. The choices are tamagoyaki, cucumber, cheese and a cold sausage. There's also miso soup with meatballs, tuna and corn salad, and milk. Believe it or not, this is about as good as it gets.

The most recent cooking class was making Chinese-style gyozas for Chinese New Year, which was great for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that I now know how to make and properly fold gyoza!

It turns out that most of the people there were Chinese exchange students at the local university. Japanese was the only language we had in common, so that's what we used. I got a lot of practice and met some cool people!

Now I'm looking at my notes for what I wanted to write about and wondering if I was on a food high from eating all those gyoza, but what the hell, I'll try. Since being in Japan, I've met people from Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Korea, and most recently Italy and China. Now, I'm from a very culturally diverse city, and at home I also met people of all national origins. But I recently read somewhere (I think it was a comment on Metafilter, of all places) that "Americans see all foreigners as potential Americans," and that really hit home. When I think about people back at home, particularly with my Asian friends, I sometimes have to think pretty hard to remember whether they were actually born in the U.S. or another country, just because everyone was sort of in various stages in the process of becoming American and it didn't really make much of a difference anyway. The most conspicuous foreigners I ever met were two white British guys in my newswriting class who, when we had an assignment to write about somewhere out of our comfort zone and the teacher nixed their plan to go to Hooters, moaned in their posh accents, "But we would NEVAAAHHH go to HOOTERS! It's so TACKY!" (Second place goes to all the French tourists who would pitch a fit because we didn't sell sweatshirts with the GAP logo on them. Seriously, get a life.) Here, though, most of my friends have never been to the U.S., and of course we're all on neutral ground, and living in Japan has suddenly thrust me into the realization that other countries are not just America with some history and funny customs tacked on as an afterthought. Because of these things I'm finding that I'm learning a lot more from them than I ever would have at home. 

Anyway, LONG POST IS LONG. Sunday deserves its own entry, so I think I shall end there.

3. Yasunari Kawabata: Snow Country

Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

Vintage International, 192 pgs., 1947, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker in 1957

You want to hear about snow country? Let me tell you about snow country. You know, in case you were wondering whether I was qualified to review a book about wasted effort and lots and lots of snow:

(all taken from the front of my house)

Now that that's out of the way, Snow Country. I'll be honest; I didn't like it. This was the book club book for January, and I also know a few other people around here who have read it in English, and all of us have the same opinion: something was definitely lost in translation. It's about the relationship between a geisha and a visiting Tokyo urbanite in Niigata Prefecture in the 1930s, and it was one of three novels for which Kawabata won the Nobel Prize, which I think is the reason none of us have just dismissed it outright. Not only is it critically acclaimed, it's also about the little corner of the world that we've chosen to call home. We want so badly to be proud of it, like we are of our sake and our rice and our Kenshin, but I just couldn't make myself like it. There are some beautiful images contained within it, but the story left me cold.

(See what I did there?)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Kawabata says this:

Yet in the sad, austere, autumnal qualities so valued by the tea ceremony, itself summarized in the expression "gently respectful, cleanly quiet", there lies concealed a great richness of spirit; and the tea room, so rigidly confined and simple, contains boundless space and unlimited elegance.

Kawabata's writing was heavily influenced by haiku poetry, which I think also shares the qualities which he here associates with tea ceremony--wabi-sabi, mono no aware, all those Japanese cultural ideals that have to do with transience and imperfection. I haven't spent much time reading or learning about haiku, but when I have read them (and other forms of Japanese poetry like the waka of the Kokinshu--all in translation, of course), I've generally found them to be pretty accessible, and I'm totally down with the idea of wabi-sabi.

Yet I still couldn't get into this. I think when it comes down to it, I just didn't find the characters compelling enough to invest the time and energy into exploring the book's relationship to haiku, which seems to be its main redeeming factor. The chronology of events was difficult to follow. I don't know a whole lot about geisha culture, which I'm sure impeded my understanding of the book. It was originally published in serial form, and parts of it were written much later than others, which gave it a choppy, non-continuous feel.

I have a hard time accepting cultural relativism in literature. A lot of people who read Snow Country in English seem to explain its impermeability by saying that it's just "too Japanese" to be accessible to the Western reader, but I hate that, and not just because it reeks of orientalism--I want to believe that if it's art, that it will resonate with the human experience no matter who you are or what time and place you come from. Maybe that's silly--I haven't read a whole lot outside of the Western tradition, and I don't have the energy or the desire to really spend a lot of time trying to find redeeming qualities in books that don't speak to me when there is so much else out there to read, so I may never find out whether it's a cultural divide or my own laziness that's the cause. I can say that I found The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea much more compelling, even though I didn't like its characters, either; the writing was much more consistent and I found the story absorbing in spite of myself.

Anyway, womp womp, can't like them all. I finished this quite some time ago and I've actually finished two other books since then, so those entries are coming up, I promise!

Next up: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Overheard at the enkai: Encore edition

SS teacher: Elizabeth-sensei...
JTE who has been sitting next to me and translating for the past two hours: Well, I'll just let you young people talk then! Bye-bye!
ALT: D:
SS teacher: So, you have boyfriend?
ALT: That question AGAIN?
PE teacher: Don't listen to him. He is monster!
SS teacher: No! I am safety! Eh? Safety?
PE teacher: Idiot, that's "anshin." (to ALT) He is liar.
SS teacher: I am... truth! Look into my eyes!
ALT: Do you know the word "creepy"?
SS teacher: No! What means?
ALT: Maybe..... kimochiwarui?

(SS teacher falls on floor moaning in despair at his emasculation while PE teacher points and laughs. Curtain.)

2. Emma Donoghue: Room

Room, Emma Donoghue
Picador, 401 pgs., 2010

I can already tell that the hardest part of this challenge is going to be the blog write-ups. Room is every bit as hard for me to write about as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, though for completely different reasons. It's an easy read, without much to interpret, but my initial reaction to it could be summed up as "Meh." Just as "It's just wrong!" didn't suffice as a grammar explanation when I first began copy editing, though (my writers certainly didn't like it much, anyway), "Meh" won't cut it for a review or in-house memo, especially when many reviewers seem to be raving about the book (it was even shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize). I became a much stronger copy editor when I learned to verbalize why something wasn't working grammatically. Working that muscle.

Room is told through the eyes of Jack, a five-year-old boy who lives with his Ma in a single, locked room. Unlike some of the more negative Amazon reviewers, I wasn't bothered by Jack's childish narrative voice (he talks about "hotting" the thermostat and measuring his "heavy"), but neither was I particularly impressed by it. Nor was I a fan of the constant references to Dora, Spongebob, et al--I suppose it does lend an air of realism to things, but it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose, unlike in the works of say, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, where junk mainland pop culture is a metaphor for the mainstream's cultural domination over Hawaii. The subject matter gives the book some artificial suspense, but so many pages are devoted to Jack and Ma's daily routines in Room that it becomes dull very quickly. I thought the idea behind Room--a young girl abducted and isolated, a boy born and raised in confinement, the bond they form and the readjustment they must go through after their escape--was compelling, but there was so much more the author could have done with it. Overall, disappointing.

I'm about a week ahead of schedule, so I'm going for something slightly more ambitious this time. Next up: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

1. Yukio Mishima: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima
Tuttle, 181 pgs., 1963, translated by John Nathan in 1965

Before I start here I feel compelled to mention (because SOMEONE will throw a fit if I don't) that although I started reading this book in 2010, I didn't pick it up the whole week I was in Tokyo. By the time the trip was over I had lost the thread of the story (not to mention any hope of understanding anything deeper), so I began again from the first page yesterday and finished it the same day. I officially read the whole book in 2011, so I don't want to hear any more whining that I'm cheating. Better step up your game, bitches.

That said, my goal this year is to not only read a lot, but also to retain what I've read. There are so many great books that have passed through me like sand simply because I read them and then put them back on the shelf without a second thought. For me it takes thinking, rereading, supplementary materials, writing, and discussion to fully digest a book, so I'm hoping to blog all the books I read this year to get used to thinking about literature. I'm rusty--I've been out of school for a year, and I haven't taken a good literature class since I was 18. But I'm hoping that this will force me to have something smart to say about each book I read this year, and that, like a muscle, the ability will grow with repeated use.

If we're going to extend the metaphor, though, picking The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for my first book of 2011 is like running a marathon without training. It's not Finnegan's Wake, but I found it pretty damn inaccessible in parts. The back cover text alludes to Mishima's belief that Japan "will only become truly great once more when she forcibly purges herself of all Western influence." Without reading that, I could have taken the book as an isolated tale of disillusionment and insanity, but that blurb taunted me into trying to discover an allegory in the characters' lives (which is an interesting comment on how the cover material influences how we experience a book). Part of the problem is that I can't find any information on Mishima's nationalist views. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was strongly influenced by Western literature--so did he only resent Western military influence as opposed to cultural influence, or was he just a contradictory figure?

The book centers around the relationship between Noboru, a 13-year-old boy; his mother, Fusako; and Ryuji, Fusako's lover and the titular sailor. Fusako clearly stands for Western influence--she runs an upscale import clothing shop, and has Ryuji wear expensive Western suits and take English conversation lessons so that he can take over the business. And the sailor Ryuji would be Japan, caught between his seafaring life and vague notions of future "glory" on one side, and a domesticated life on shore with Fusako on the other. It's with Noboru that the allegory idea begins to break down for me--as the character who takes it upon himself to restore Ryuji to his former heroism, he would be the character most strongly identified with Mishima's own views, but he and his gang are deliberately presented as childish, and the gang's chief in particular is both completely insane and strangely helpless, his insanity the obvious result of his parents' neglect. All of the characters, in fact, come off as pathetic, which is why I want to read it as a tale of social decay and not an expression of Mishima's political views.

The prose is beautiful, and the book is quite short, though it's too disturbing to be described as an easy read. I bought another Mishima book, The Sound of Waves, when I was in Tokyo--it sounds quite different from this one, and I'm excited to read it.

Next up: Room by Emma Donoghue