Donald Richie has been writing books about Japan for longer than most people can remember. His 1971 book The Inland Sea (Weatherhill Press, Tokyo) was particularly highly praised, and in addition there have been seven books on Japanese film, plus works on literature, gardens, tattoos and the temples of Kyoto.
A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories is a collection of 27 very short tales, few of them exceeding five pages. Indeed, some of them pursue the search for minimalism still further and are themselves mini-collections of even shorter narratives -- Three Stories about Mothers and Daughters, Four Stories about Love, and so on.
The Chuo Line is a rail line in Tokyo, and the opening story that gives the book its title consists of a dialogue between two characters about a point on the line where, in the view of one of them, a particular optical illusion occurs, or rather a moment of fleeting visual beauty. This concern with a brief moment of vision is very Japanese -- fragmentary views of Mount Fuji or of irises in spring sunlight are frequent occurrences in Japanese poems, films and graphic art.
It's significant that Richie chooses to place this item first. It's as if he is, rather unnecessarily you feel, establishing once again his Japanese credentials. Almost all the other stories have plots, however slight. But here is the "pure" Japanese moment, deliberately placed in a non-traditional context -- the other passenger is absorbed in his Walkman -- in order to demonstrate that the experience of an "epiphany" has in no way been banished by modern social conditions.
The blurb on the back cover mentions James Joyce and epiphanies and also refers to Henry James's view of the short story as "a movement towards an understanding." Both of these imply major claims for Richie and his mini-fictions. My experience is that none of the stories here quite comes up to the level they aspire to, but there is plenty to interest the casual browser nonetheless.
Tokyo's trains feature again in the story Commuting where the typical urban experience of being pressed close to other passengers on commuter transport and having to decide just what your relationship is to the people down whose neck you're breathing is considered. The main character develops an obsession with a woman he regularly finds himself next to and one day tries to put a declaration of love into her purse. Her reaction is less than the man had hoped for. In other words, fantasies that develop are frequently at odds with the situation as imagined by your opposite number.
These stories form a mosaic of contemporary Japan. There's a bizarre dancing competition with Tokyo youngsters dressed as Romanians, Bulgarians and Austrians; the feelings of a Japanese housewife who is regularly mistaken for a Filipina; the contrasting mental habits of American and Japanese gays (and another story about gay marriage Japanese-style); a would-be theft from a moss garden; endangered fireflies released outside inner-city restaurants; unemployed men in all-day cinemas pretending to their families that they still have work; a student dressed as Santa Claus in a department store asked by a Western child to stop his father saying "The Japanese make me sick;" and inevitably, considering the brevity of the stories, much more.
It's an old theatrical principle that when constructing an evening of short items you should put your best piece last and your second-best one first. Richie's final tale is certainly one of his more promising. It's about a company outing in which a group of businessmen is persuaded to sample the delights of a hot-spring bath contained inside a cable-car cabin. This is untypically farcical for Richie, more like comic masters such as Mo Yan than this generally laid-back author.
The cabin, rather predictably, gets stuck, leaving the businessmen suspended above the treetops in cooling water. Richie's problem is what should happen next. I'll leave you to discover the development he opts for, but it doesn't equal in interest the initial situation he's so ingeniously imagined.
Nevertheless there does seem something slightly pretentious about the currently fashionable genre of the very short story. It has the same relation to a 20 or 30-page tale that a photo has to a full-length film -- it may say a lot for its size, but it can hardly compete in scope with its more expansive brother. There's also another shortcoming: it can create expectations that run counter to the author's wishes.
Reading these stories, for example, I found myself getting hooked on brevity and wishing they were shorter still. If you can have a story of 1,000 words, why not one of 100, or 50, or maybe just five? But then you run into serious difficulties. To write a story with three characters and a happy ending, all in five words, would be a challenge. "He chose the prettier sister." That would match the criteria. But would it qualify as literature?
All in all, it wasn't possible to find a really striking story here. Nevertheless, the overall impression left by these vignettes taken as a whole was not unpleasant. Richie, on the evidence of this slim book, isn't a master narrator. But his long experience has given him an elaborate set of perspectives on modern Japanese life, and for these we should be grateful.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not