Saturday 31 January 2015

The Sound of the Mountain

(January 2015)



“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
-Joe Haldeman

‘Poised’ I think is the word. There’s a fair bit to appreciate about this book, but I think ‘appreciation’ is probably the strongest reaction it’s possible for me to have. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: not every novel needs to be a crash-bang-whizz spectacle of action and destruction, but there’s a fine line between delicate and insubstantial, between introspective and self-absorbed, between subtle and just plain dull.

And, as you can probably guess by now, not all of this kept on the right side of that line. To be fair, this was a much quicker and less demanding read than I was expecting, and if I were to revisit it when I too am an old man having unbecoming thoughts about my secretary and my daughter-in-law while contemplating the imminent arrival of death then I might be far more forgiving of the whole affair, but as it stands it does all feel pretty self-indulgent.

It’s not like the unwarranted lauding of the mundane preoccupations of older middle-class men is a uniquely Japanese quirk – I refer you to the oeuvres of Ian McEwan and Phillip Roth, among many, many others – but in conjunction with what I suppose I’m obliged to refer to as ‘traditional’ Japanese reserve and ambiguity, frankly it just comes across as a bit trite. The language is very clean, but that’s about as highly as I’m able to praise it (though I’ve been subjected to enough shoddy prose of late to reaffirm that clean writing definitely isn’t something to be undervalued), and given that this is essentially a character-study (with occasional shades of State of the Nation splashed about) you get bugger all else in the way of plot or narrative drive so have little choice to but to work with it on a symbolic level. Everything means something else. Isn’t it just so subtle and artful?

I dunno. It all feels a little contrived; if it’s all about the symbolism then frankly you may as well dispense with the façade and address the issues directly. Ooh, he’s having another meaningful dream. Ooh, he’s losing his hair, what could that signify? This one’s going grey, this one went mad plucking his hair out, and this one still has a full head of it. So much hair. So much hair and tits. Tits and hair. Because another thing that makes The Sound of the Mountain slightly harder for me to appreciate is just how misogynistic it is, and in that ingrained, servile, taken-for-granted way that is exponentially worse than straight-up sexist abuse; the values dissonance engendered by both time and culture goes a long way to colouring aspects you might have otherwise regarded more leniently. It does, however, make me view 1Q84’s freaky obsession with Fuka-Eri slightly less harshly, as it appears Murakami was just tapping into an established literary tradition of aged men with unnerving fixations on unsuitable breasts.

I’ve been fairly negative about this so far, haven’t I? In all honesty I can see why this has achieved the status it has, but (irony alert) I think that has as much to do with what it represents as what it actually is. It’s a well-crafted but relatively thin meditation on death and aging set in a very specific section of a society that very few people would ever have had access to (but which conveniently encompasses a significant proportion of the most influential: no one likes talking about old men quite like old men); it thus fulfils the dual criteria for a ‘classic’ in that it addresses a universal theme while presenting a veneer of slight inaccessibility, which then allows readers/teachers/students to feel all pleased with themselves when they inevitably penetrate beyond to unpack its ‘mysteries’.

Look, I’m having a frustrating day, all right? I actually felt fairly well-disposed to this book while I was reading it, but in writing it up I seemingly can’t get away from my more negative reactions. On another day I might be able to be more complimentary but today, unfortunately, is not that day. Ah well.


10 comments:

  1. Oh dear... I was a lot more positive about it when I reviewed it, and I enjoyed my reread too :) The mysogyny side is always going to be an issue with J-Lit, but it's a challenge to fight through the cultural lens and see it as the contemporary reader might have seen it. The key is how much guilt Shingo should bear for the events happening around him - and depending on your understanding of the cultural norms, your answer to that will change...

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    1. Yeah, my 'get out of jail free card' here is that I'm not meant to be writing 'balanced' reviews, but even so I think what I've written doesn't fairly reflect my reading experience. I wouldn't go as far as to say I liked it, but it was definitely a more positive experience than I've cast it as above. Probably should have spent a bit more time finessing it, but I wanted to get something up before the end of the month ;)

      Funny you should mention guilt, though, because for me one of the more interesting of those symbolic themes was Japan's reaction to the war and subsequent American occupation. You could make a decent case for Shingo representing the survivor's guilt of the Japanese middle-class who made it through the war relatively unscathed. I think this was originally serialised in the early 50's, so was written as the American's were packing up and leaving, and it's interesting that the war stuff seems to come across far more strongly in the second half of the book. A discussion for when I'm in a better mood, perhaps...

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  2. I ended up being disappointed in this book as well. It is quiet, and apparently simple, but there are many depressing themes throughout the novel. I can't get over how happiness was so elusive to each member of Shingo's family. I can't get over how disconnected they are essentially were from one another.

    I didn't even bother to go through all the symbolism and you were pointing out: hair, breasts, dreams...I just seemed to cut to the chase in my review. To which I've linked yours.

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    1. Thanks for commenting and linking! I can see that there could be a decent family melodrama in here. Sadly though melodrama has never really been my thing, and the fact this is all so obviously allusive kind of robs you of the chance to appreciate it just at that level, like he's slapped up big flashing neon signs saying "SUBTEXT HERE" every time some kind of tree is mentioned.

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  3. I am a fan of Phillip Roth, and I will defend the misogyny in his books, where I won't that in Kawabata, Oe, Murakami-tachi, or even Hemmingway, because that in Roth's books is honest: from nakedly sexist characters, or at least immature ones. I am thinking most of 'Portnoy's Complaint'. You're not supposed to blithely read past it: it's written as a character flaw.

    I'm aware Roth's been accused of improprieties (a word I use in lieu of doing a full investigation of the accusations and defense), and so have many other authors. I don't condone them, though I'll note most men (and women) with an opportunity find their morals more flexible than they might have thought. The alleged improprieties of an author are a humid thicket I'd rather not stick my face into very deeply, so although allegations are worth reading to 'meta' reading an author's texts, it's hygienic to keep at the surface of the author's alleged improprieties.

    I haven't come across a Japanese author who writes meaningfully, much less empathetically, about women. Hmm, I don't think I've read Japanese women authors. I'd guess women authors make up the same percentile in Japan as executives, or members of the Diet... In any case, I don't find Japanese, male, authors any more, or less, empathetic, gender-sensitive, class-aware, or skeptical at all of convention than the public I've met in Japan: media reflects it's culture. The exception being Endo Shusaku, a Christian: an outsider.

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    1. Gentle applause for 'humid thicket' :)

      I'm not having a go at Roth per se. Well, clearly I am, but I just saw a couple of his titles on the shelf as I was casting about for names; there's no shortage of other writers I could have chosen to make the same point. Which kind of is the point, now I think about it: it's more the general assumption of profundity in work which is essentially about the prosaic minutiae of the lives of middle-class men than any specific issues with the works themselves. Does that make sense?

      I've generally had better luck with female Japanese authors than male ones. Yoko Ogawa is someone whose backlist I really need to explore in more depth, and Miyuki Miyabe isn't quite on the same level, but also has some interesting stuff out there.

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  4. "Unnerving fixations on unsuitable breasts" is my phrase of the day. Good times. My only encounter with Kawabata was "Thousand Cranes," which I quite enjoyed at the time, but I'm a bit under-read on the Japanese classics otherwise.

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    1. I keep plugging away. At the classics. Not the breasts. I'm not sure how much I'll actually learn, but I feel like it must be doing me some good, y'know?

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  5. "Isn’t it just so subtle and artful?" <-- I like subtlety in my poetry (demand it, actually), but in prose, anything too precious annoys the hair/breasts/dreams right out of me. Elegant phrasing? Gimmie. Beautiful imagery? I'll take two, please. But when a writer makes my head hurt, I'm gone. There's too much other good stuff out there that makes me happy instead of giving me a hissy fit. So THANK you for this semaphore.

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    1. Honestly, if this made my head hurt in that way I might have taken to it a bit better; it's just that everything was so obviously meant to be standing for something else. A kind of ambiguity so contrived and transparent as to be utterly unambiguous, looping back round to meet itself.

      Ah well, they writing was pretty nice, to give it its due. I might have another bash with one of his shorter works, but I'm in not real hurry to do so. (Thanks for stopping by and commenting, btw!)

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