the gift of seeming

Mikamé exists so that suspicion could be released into Enchi's book. He is the devil and the reader is Faust; he is a tool disguised as a man.

I was reading a translation of Bashō's poetic travel memoir Oku no Hosomichi, when I reached the endnotes and saw that the translators were using the Japanese book to direct my attention to Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland. Both writers had travelled north, one in Japan, one in Britain, the first in the 1680s, the other in the 1770s, and that light connection was enough to pull the attention of the prose away from Honshu to a place that was otherwise unrelated, long distance between the two nations, and the norths of the two islands are not alike. Akita Prefecture does not have lochs but it has forests, and Samuel Johnson in Scotland became irascible over trees. Where were they? "A tree might be a show in Scotland," he wrote, "as a horse in Venice." He was often scornful, the absence of a tree in Scotland brought out his scorn, he scorned the opinion of a clergyman once in the house of Mrs Thrale before dinner, and Max Beerbohm wrote a short essay many years later, A Clergyman, predicting that the clergyman "never held up his head or smiled again." "This unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he lacked the gift of seeming as if he had."

And Johnson's scorn came out at these absences, the absence of something in the clergyman, the absence of trees in Scotland (Lydia Davis turned that irritation into a story so short that it's mostly a blank page), and the absence of horses in Venice, although I don't think he ever went to Venice, which was beloved of Ruskin, but they keep changing it, said the Victorian writer, anguished: the Venetians wanted to knock down their own old statues and buildings and so he sat drawing a cross carefully and quickly before it could be smashed. From all this I deduce that a person's attention can be drawn to any object or place or idea by any unexpected thing. I had to fend them off, wrote Ruskin. They had a hammer.

Ovid imagined change everywhere in the world, change is the god of Metamorphoses, he rips through the myths like a box of tissues: use one, the next pops out, use that too, the next one segues rapidly into the air; the poet's eye is fixed on transformation, no matter who into what, women into trees, Zeus into a bull, it's the one word he's after -- restlessness -- and it is in me, he tells us in the last few lines, it is inside me, change will kill me, I will die, this theme of change is my death; the poem is a poem of his death but the poem itself will not die as quickly as the poet. A poem can change for centuries and not die. Each country (state, says Hegel, in German), seems to embody certain ideas, and by executing one behaviour or another in the world it gives those ideas new features; justice in one country follows a certain set of procedures, in another country it has another course to pursue, the name of each country illustrates the difference, the name of each country is the title of an essay about that country, the essay sprouting up in every individual mind when the name is said, as the hard metallic knock of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Force (whose nickname is Metro) introduces the subject of the police to the room before the bodies themselves enter to meet their definition. Think of the word as the idea of a painting and the bodies as the painting itself. Is it a bright painting, is it a dark painting, is it a small painting, and though the brain behind the painting is thinking of its own history, the viewer sees brightness or size.

Weeks ago we received a free meal at the Spice Market Buffet in Planet Hollywood where the food has been divided into different areas, Breads in one place, Mexican at the opposite end of the room, Desserts between them, and while I was walking between the counters I saw how automatically people would name a treat as they came up to it. "Tortillas," they said, arriving at the tortillas. There was nobody with them who might have listened or responded but they felt inspired to produce the word. They named the beasts of Eden that were lamb and cake. A man came to a basin of dead prawns lying coiled with their eyes like beach balls, and "Shrimp!" was the word he said to the air as he looked for the tongs. Language had gathered the animals up for him but he could only take away a smaller amount for language is more capacious than plates. Yesterday morning when I saw a woman walk up to the psychology shelves at the library and say the words, "Psychology, ha ha ha!" I thought this was the same phenomenon displayed in the shrimp-man but she was on the phone. Attention is everywhere but gathering it is tricky.






Bashō's book has been Englished more than once with different titles. My version was translated by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu, who named it Back Roads to Far Towns.

Beerbohm's essay is available online.

Davis' short story is six words long, plus four more words for the title, and it goes like this:

SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT:

that Scotland has so few trees.

to know the intensity

Every part of the characters' lives that might exhibit them doing anything other than experience psychic extremities is dead to Fumiko Enchi by about halfway through the book, she ignores those innocent moments when these people scratch their noses -- they are robbed completely; Fumiko Enchi is too excited to care.

Now that she has gone this far it would be embarrassing to her as an author if one or more of the characters were not legitimately involved in supernatural murder.

The last action of a certain character in the final paragraphs is heavy with these implied words, She has been involved in several deaths. "The mask seemed to know the intensity of her grief," the author explains. But if you could see the character without that suspicion laid over her, what would you notice? Nothing spectacular; you'd barely pay attention to the woman. Here she is, she picks up a mask, a baby cries, she drops the mask, and that's the scene. Consider it from a sane viewpoint and you realise that the author might be treating us like dupes. There is no need for anyone to believe that a person who picks up a mask and then drops it is guilty of murder. People look at masks every day, constantly, in Japan and elsewhere, and people drop things in Japan and elsewhere, and babies cry; there's nothing strange about that. Not everything has to be connected, not everything has to imply.

For example, last week as I was walking down the road I saw a helium balloon rise from the dumpster of a nearby apartment block; and meanwhile behind the wall of a childcare centre someone young began to scream, and if I related these two facts just like that, together, you might think, "The toddler must have seen the balloon, and the apparition frightened them," and so I thought at first, until I realised that the wall was too high and the balloon (which was not fully inflated) was too low. There was no way the child could have seen it unless they had x-ray eyes capable of seeing through walls which I suspect was not the case but seriously, who can tell? Literature reminds me that such things are not impossible.

Consider this: Enchi might be channelling spirit vengeance herself; she's been thinking about it a lot, we know, and it is possible that she has talked herself into believing that the character deserves to be accused of crime; she shouldn't get away with it, this character -- she should suffer with an "intensity of grief." Guilt! thinks Fumiko Enchi: the idea of spirit vengeance has made her dwell on guilt. Someone needs to be accused. The book needs to end like that, she thinks. Guilt needs to be brought to a conclusion. This is the frame of mind that belongs to one of those brooding women who inflict spirit vengeance on their rivals. The rival needs to suffer (the brooding woman thinks) the rival has to feel damaged and disturbed, and why's that? Because the rival is making them feel unhappy, the rival is challenging them, and who is the only challenge Enchi is facing at the end of this book, who is the one person who could make her look absurd? The mask-dropping character is the answer to that question, the mask-dropper could make her look absurd; she could turn out not to have been involved in those deaths after all, she could say, "Spirit vengeance? That's hilarious. You've been reading too much Genji. You don't need supernatural theories to explain an avalanche." She needs to be subdued. So the author from her superior position makes the woman look like a criminal when there might be nothing wrong with her except clumsy fingers.

Never mind though, never mind: put that aside and agree that everybody's expectations have been fulfilled. The author is satisfied because several of her characters are directing evil spirits, the jam has not led me to a worthless book, the knowledge that lay latent in Mikamé's brain has been brought out and vindicated by events, the dormant period of both vengeance and knowledge has ended with the activities that have been exciting the reader for one hundred and forty-one translated pages -- patience has been rewarded in all directions -- we can all be glad like the dinner guest in Charles Dickens' first piece of published journalism who sees that his host's cousin has been asked to make a speech and jumps up to recite the Sheridan anecdote that has been pullulating in his brain since the party began. "Budden," he says to the host, "will you allow ME to propose a toast?" -- Budden agrees -- Jones rises to the status of a conduit -- releasing what? -- villainy, says Dickens, like this: "there is no knowing what new villainy in the form of a joke would have been heaped on the grave of that very ill-used man, Mr. Sheridan, if the boy in drab had not at that moment entered the room in a breathless state" -- the woman of Masks recognise a kindred spirit in Jones -- Mr Minns flees the meal deciding to remove the entire family from his will.


Masks was translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

avalanche

[continued]







Mikamé already knew that brooding women were able to exercise spirit vengeance but that knowledge sat quietly inside him from the start of the book onwards until the behaviour of another character named Yasuko pulled it to the front of his mind, and when he expressed his suspicions to his friend Ibuki the knowledge was drawn out of them into the world, and they became conduits for distrust, which was directed at other characters who had become conduits for spirit vengeance, and so everybody in Masks is directing one thing or another at somebody else all the time without respite and every action is another person's opportunity, as well as an opportunity for some quality to emerge into the broader life of the community, the examples here being suspicion and revenge, and, in addition, whatever emotions come from reading Fumiko Enchi's book, an action performed by me, myself, and brought into the wider world by the earlier action of jam being shifted from its glass jar onto the front cover of the novel, near the spine, and who did that I do not know but I assume it must have been me as well, although how I transferred that jam, and why, are questions I can't answer because the whole episode inhabits a blank area of my memory; there is not even a disturbance to mark the spot where it sank, all hands on deck, and not even an inflatable pool pony left to tell the tale.

Once Mikamé's knowledge has been admitted into the book it is allowed to spread further and the reader is introduced to the idea that an avalanche which smothered a character to death before the story began was part of that vengeance, it was not a natural avalanche after all, even though it looked natural to everyone who did not know about the spirit vengeance aspect of the case, which, as the book went on, went from complete nonexistence in paragraph one, to a towering important fact that threw implications over every sentence, by about page ninety.

Enchi demonstrates the following idea: that every action is revelatory. All of the characters take part in the theme of spirit vengeance, either conducting the vengeance themselves or revealing its existence in other people; they can't have sex without spirit vengeance getting into bed with them; a woman can't take care of her child without spirit vengeance. If a character in Masks had put jam on a book then that action would have been proof somehow of the spirit world's fundamental malignancy. The person who moved the jam wouldn't have to be consciously malignant themselves; they're perhaps only a gateway opening to let the spirit vengeance through. What form will it take? Will there be another avalanche?

What conclusion precisely should be drawn from the jam-evidence I am not sure. But I remember that it took a while for Yasuko to realise that a friend was using her as a door for the malignant phantoms. It is possible that someone is priming me for a purpose and that the memory of M.'s mother's home-made peach jam on the cover of Masks is a damning message I cannot read.

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.