would suit one another

This transience in the Heike, the characters pass but the story remains, the reader's transience proves the permanence of the story, we are unbearably destroyed, it unbearably retains itself, meanwhile warning itself that it will pass too. That is its lesson, which it is avoiding.

In Shirley Jackson's Sundial the people are refusing to change and not even refusing, they don't know that change would be possible, they have never thought about it, the proud and crimson notion of self-critique has never occurred to them, and even the end of the world and the death of every other human being is not changing them; the apocalypse won't complete their selfishness, the awesome dynamite of the air leaves them placid.

If they were made immortal somehow by the disaster then they would not change either (because the author has made them changeless), and if you transferred Murasaki Shikibu's characters from the Genji to the modern age they would still refer to people by their titles and by their descriptions (because she has made them that way), the names on their own feel too bare to these Heian souls even though the moderner tells them it is fine, it is a habit now, nobody minds, look you can call me Hiroko, I don't care, I'm wearing a Pokémon hat, but it would be the nature of a name to be ashamed of having been said, when they did it, the word "Hiroko" sounding filthy; they are like polite children who have been required to shout "fuck" and the Shining Prince shines red for he is blushing, he is bringing the old age back in a sluice of blood.

So, stasis in the Shirley Jackson, stasis implied, and in the Heike it is transience implied; the emphasis is on the characters' fortunes, not their behaviour, and those fortunes change. But in The Sundial Shirley Jackson is staring at her people's behaviour and introducing their changed fortune (the end of the world, the destruction of all human life, the firestorm) only as a sort of sarcastic counterpoint.

The reader scans the two books, the reader searches for new lessons since lessons seem to be hinted at or stated in the styles of each, the reader notices that the matriarch of The Sundial and Kiyomori in the Heike are very close to one another personality-wise, they are both stubborn, and the old woman on her deathbed would be calling for Yoritomo's head too, and Kiyomori, if he had been facing the end of the world, would be putting measures in place to assure his ongoing dominance in the new world, as the matriarch does, sorting out her crown and a golden dress, and if the author Shirley Jackson does not respond to her actions by calling her "profoundly sinful" (like the anonymous authors of the Heike regarding Kiyomori) then it is only because she, the writer, has moved into a phase of authorial repose that you could refer to as a cynical shrug. And what small touch or nudge would need to have occurred before she could have written those words, "profoundly sinful," instead of the ones she chose (native to her blood, the words she chose), what rotation on the axis of events, what refounding of cities or nations, the reconstitution of her childhood, the distribution of her feelings in a new direction, pushed there by some event that never in this plane occurred?

The reader looks at Kiyomori, looks at Mrs Halloran, and realises, "Those two would suit one another." This is the moment of inspiration and they announce, I will write a fanfic.

Conjunction! Kiyomori and Mrs Halloran! The fanfic writer pursues that conjunction, the conjunction is the point, the permutations of that conjunction, kinks, romance, murder, or whatever else, the conjunction being an intensifying agent or otherwise species of excitement-food, quick stab to the braincells that then suffer the ancestral memory of their freedom as single-celled organisms millennia ago traversing the nourishing slimes, this conjunction is the vehicle of change, therefore of transience -- the situation, as it has existed up to this point, ends -- the situation before in which Mrs Halloran and Kiyomori were not united and no connection between the Sundial and the Heike seemed possible ends, as, suddenly (genuinely suddenly, I say from experience, since it occurred to me as I was writing that last part of the sentence, "would suit one another" -- okay -- idea!) the connection is possible and likely and even demanded by the thought and why not, in this world where a thought can make anything seem mandatory, pretty much anything; and call that inspiration, call this Georg Trakl's "sweet corpse" at a different register, call it a ruthless magnetism.

for you, reader

Telling M. how the Heike was structured I picked the idea of a television series, saying to him, look, you have one large umbrella-idea that runs from the start to the end, and in this work it is the rise and fate of the Heike clan, the rise so proud and domineering that you wait for them to fail because the laws of life say that everything must fall, gravity, hubris, old age, all that feeling. Then they slip, they slip further, someone burns a monastery by mistake, this error haunts the rest of the piece, they're toppling now, and you wait to see them meet the ground. The slip and then the fall are two sub-umbrellas under the main umbrella, as in a season of television you find one large umbrella -- how are we going to defeat the monster that appeared in episode one? -- then smaller umbrellas -- are those two warriors going to fall in love? followed by the question, is their relationship going to last now that he has discovered she is a werewolf?

Under those umbrellas you find the still-smaller sub-umbrellas or tiny cocktail parasols that run for a few hundred pages, or ten pages, or one page, the story expanding into the realm of the very small as if discovering first its own molecules, then the particles inside the molecules, which sometimes are single chapters or songs meant to be recited or sung; the Heike is a performance cycle, the collaborative composition of many people, which is a point of difference between this and that other long Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji, work of a single woman (though you can assume (along with the scholars) that her daughter or some other person wrote chapters near the end, also how much did it change when the readers who wanted to keep the book decided to write copies for themselves in that age before mechanised printing, with us having only the transcriptions, no original, and the earliest partial, material, and fragile copy dated one century after the author died?), written down, read aloud after it had been written but written first, written prime, written before anything else, existing first in a written form, emerging first like a rising vivid squid that comes like a blushing rosebud into the expressive extroverted part of the world when Murasaki Shikibu began to draw the letters with her brush, starting its life in a bath of ink, George Eliot almost a thousand years later in Adam Bede explaining the theory, "With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader," though the next line about showing us the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope is not in any sense applicable to the Genji, which is about a prince of the Heian period living in Kyoto where people often do not even have their names mentioned because those words said and abandoned to the air and to the ears, not kept safely in the mouth and mind but stripped nude so that they can be thrust into the intelligence of any passing terror, are too accusatory, too brutal, and the author prefers not to turn them into a public spectacle by vulgarly writing them down.

Which leaves the readers righteously confused but at least the nonexistent people in the book have had their feelings respected.

Which is an interesting notion, the politeness of Heian life, in which real people are only mentioned circumspectly by their titles or by a description, so as to avoid the crass nakedness of names and simultaneously to intensify the social-inbred atmosphere of the courtly clique (where you have to be in the know to fully appreciate everything), this politeness applied to fictional characters, whose feelings can't be hurt, who will never judge you no matter what you call them, who will never snub you or discriminate against you, who will never have their revenge even if you call them by a familiar slang, these characters treated as respectfully as if they were standing next to you, or sitting in the building over there, fanning themselves and ready to take offence (increase in politeness equalled by the steady increase of possibilities for delicate offences and insults, one tree with many flowers), and yet they will not know you, the fanning woman will never refer to you as anything at all, not even circumspectly, which means that you will never beat her at this niceness-game, and she will continue to sit fanning in her cage, radiating impermeable manners (since in order to permeate them you would have to extract the character from the book), and beating you. (The characters have never lived and yet they are also Heian.)

the brooding sort of wrath

It is impossible for me to ignore a book with jam on the cover. Jam draws attention, jam is the reason why I have been reading the copy of Fumiko Enchi's Masks that lay on my shelf for months unopened -- jam made me open it -- jam is the equivalent of the most enthusiastic critical assessment or review that anyone could ever write; there is nothing more convincing than jam. Towards the end of the book I came across this paragraph --

Mikamé's failure to explode seemed to grate on Sadako's nerves. She glared at him rigidly. But the aggressive nature evidenced in her unhesitating decision to hire a detective was nothing at all like the brooding sort of wrath that could force a woman's spirit to leave her body and wreak vengeance on a rival. Mikamé nodded, reassured, even as he felt her cold gaze on him.

-- which directs me to a force as strong as jam, namely, literature, since, as far as Enchi's reader is aware, Mikamé's only experience of women who go through the "brooding sort of wrath" that forces their spirits to leave their bodies and wreak vengeance, has come to him through The Tale of Genji (and possibly other unnamed stories from that period of Japanese history: ""Of late he too had taken an interest in the possessive spirits that cropped up in Heian literature"). Literature must have convinced him that he knows the difference between women who channel psychic violence and women who don't; if he had never read about that stark divide between aggressive women and brooding women then he would not have felt reassured. He is convinced of his own safety, thanks to literature. Brooding is the key.

Lady Rokujō in the Tale of Genji broods. At no point in Murasaki Shikibu's book does she hire a detective, or even make some Heian-appropriate motion in the direction of detective-hiring, and as every reader of the book knows, she is assumed to have taken revenge on Genji's other lovers by channeling psychic forces of violence. The memory of this character has reassured Mikamé, who is also a character, though if it hadn't been for the Tale of Genji he might never have worried about spirit vengeance in the first place.

A genuine Japanese man would have encountered the vengeful woman in a story elsewhere too (the woman either spirit-channeling or reappearing after death as mystic angry phantom), because she's not uncommon in Japanese fiction, but Mikamé is a book character, and not a member of any nation, and so I have to agree that he drinks from the source of knowledge his author gives him, which is primarily Genji.

In his two-dimensional fictional book-plane there is nothing to tell him for sure that any kind of spirit vengeance is being directed through any women; there is not even any proof that spirit vengeance is definitely taking place. But reading The Tale of Genji he feels certain, of course he knows that Lady Rokujō is unleashing spirit forces there, because the author directs him to that conclusion. His own author lets her reader know that certain female characters in Mikamé's world are directing vengeful spirit powers, but Mikamé can't read his own book. If he could then he would know, as I do, that his guesses are correct, that spirit vengeance is taking place, and that Sadako is not the cause or the conduit. Give him the power to read himself and he would know whether spirit vengeance was actually taking place and who was responsible.

The literature that he can read, gave him those suspicions, and the literature that he can't read would clean them away. If he knew about this blog post he would wish he could read it; he would be endlessly tantalised by the idea of this person (me here typing) who knows all the answers. In Mikamé's eyes I am an unnatural genius.







[to be continued]

Enchi's book was translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.