Kazuki Sakuraba, 2006 [Jocelyne Allen, 2015]
(June 2017)
Red
Girls is a family saga, spanning sixty years in the
town of Benimidori. It’s a company town, built around steelworks owned by the
titular Akakuchibas, and we follow the family’s rise and, if not decline, then stagnation,
as three generations of its women (and the town itself) exemplify the experiences
of post-war Japan as a whole. This fictional community, it’s probably worth mentioning, is located
on the very real, very provincial San’in coast of Chugoku, which is not so very
far from where I live now.
The first section of the book focuses on Manyo,
abandoned in Benimidori by a mysterious tribe of mountain people and raised by
a family of factory workers. Manyo is clairvoyant, and repeatedly sees visions
of a floating, one-eyed man, as well as of other more prosaic things like
accidents, deaths, and economic crises. Following a perhaps not-so-chance
encounter with the matriarch of the Akakuchiba’s, she marries their eldest son
and eventually becomes the ‘madam’ of the clan herself. The second part shifts
to Kemari, Manyo’s eldest daughter. As a teenager she’s a fully-fledged member
of the sukeban subculture of the 1970s and 80s, terrorizing the region with her
motorcycle gang of delinquent girls. Following the death of her older brother
(and heir-presumptive to the steelworks), she ‘grows up’ at the height of the
Bubble, marries a husband chosen by the family for his business acumen, and
then works herself into an early grave as an obsessive artist for a weekly
shojo manga series. The narrator of both these sections is Toko, Kemari’s
daughter, and in the final third she tells us her story, which is that of the supposedly
listless youth who came of age during the lost decades, and who lack the drive
and fervor of their parents and grandparents to Make Japan Great Again.
It’s tempting to label this book as magical
realism, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. I certainly understand the urge
to do so, however, the urge to account for the deftly light touch with which the
fantastical is interwoven with the mundane: a hillside wind so strong it gradually
strips away all the accoutrements of Manyo’s bridal cortège, until she ends up
walking the final yards in a tattered dress; an impermanent grove of wild
roses in a mountain valley containing the coffins of all Benimidori’s suicides;
Kemari’s inability to even see her obsessive, man-stealing half-sister. It’s
also, as with all the better examples of the mode, very well written; there’s a
measured delicacy to the prose which means that, even at more than 450 pages,
this book never feels over-long.
However, the magical realism label doesn’t
really fit, and, as I’ll come to, assuming it does may negatively affect the
reading experience. First, however, there’s the question of just how ‘magical’
it really is, or at least it’s supposed to be received as. Without wishing to disappear
too deeply down the ‘Mystic East’ rabbit hole of bollocks, the paranormal (such
as Manyo’s clairvoyance) seems to be fairly readily accepted as fact in Japan.
I’ve any number of Japanese acquaintances who claim that they’ve seen ghosts,
or are psychic, or can tell the future. Of course, I know a few such people in Britain,
too, but in Japan these revelations are always presented as fairly mundane—tossed
out casually, with none of the defensive or embarrassed edge that suggests
disbelief as a default. Of course blood
type affects personality. Of course
some people know when they’re going to die. Of
course Manyo receives a warning about the Oil Shock from her recently
deceased father-in-law.
So if the magical is not so magical after
all, that leaves us with what? Realism? Not quite, but it does serve to
telegraph the allegorical nature of much of what happens here: If it’s not
quite magic, and not quite real, then metaphor is really all that’s left. This
brings me to the second point, which is that, for all Red Girls’ many admirable qualities (which include but are not
limited to that elegant prose, the entrancing imagery, and the generally
ambitious sweep of tone and tenor), throughout it all I read with mild yet nagging
sense of irritation. Not a major annoyance, but persistent, like when you get
an eyelash out of your eye but the itch continues anyway. I’m still not convinced
I know exactly why I felt like this, but I think it’s to do with how the social
history in the story is integrated and interrogated—or not.
I’m fully prepared to accept that this is a
personal hobby horse, but I’m going to take it for another ride anyway. To
briefly reiterate the basics: Every nation builds national myths about
themselves, which often have a kernel of truth but fail to stand up to closer
scrutiny. One of the biggest of Japan’s national myths is that of harmony, that its people are unified, of
one mind and heart, etc, etc. That there is, to borrow a phrase, a hegemony of homogeneity.
This attitude—Japan’s* uncritical acceptance (and often deliberate propagation)
of what are, at best, broad stereotypes about itself being universally
applicable to one and all—is one that gets frequently rehashed in Red Girls. All too often the main
narrative will be interrupted by a sociocultural infodump presenting a media-identified
trend (and we all know how reliable those are) as though it were a universally
mandated law of the land, followed by a description of one of the characters as
the embodiment of that trend: Kemari as juvenile delinquent and Toko as millennial
freeter being just the two most obvious examples. These infodumps stand out all
the more for being so bald and un-nuanced in comparison to what is an otherwise
gracefully written book.
The final section does go some way towards
the interrogation which is otherwise lacking elsewhere, as (in amongst some fairly
repetitive commentary on how aimless and lacking in passion both she and her
peers are) Toko investigates a shock deathbed confession from her grandmother.
As a conceit for the reckoning Japan’s current youth must make with the choices
of previous generations it’s pretty well done, but it doesn’t really do enough:
by this point of the story the pattern’s been set and this belated attempt at inquiry
and critique feels a little after-the-fact.
I should make it clear that, much as its particular
manifestation here rubs me slightly the wrong way, there’s nothing inherently
wrong with the device of characters personifying wider social shifts. I think
my issue is, to return to the point, that it sits quite uneasily with what I’ve
come to expect from other magical realist ‘growth of a nation’ type novels.
Books like Midnight’s Children, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, and, most obviously, One Hundred Years of Solitude use their fantastical aspects to
accentuate exactly how much fantasizing is involved in these communities, to heighten
their liminality and explore the transitional, (and, indeed, transitory) nature
of building a society and a nation. It’s also notable that all three of those
novels are postcolonial works, and I’ve seen decent arguments made that magical
realism is an inherently postcolonial mode. Red
Girls begins in 1953, just after the end of the American occupation of
Japan, adding to the anticipation that we’re going to get something
recognizably in that vein here as well. But that’s not really what happens; despite
the book having the word “legend” in the title, it is, for the most, not all
that interested in the processes of national mythmaking, just in (re)telling
the myths themselves.
Which, you might decide, is fair enough. It
depends on what you want (or are expecting) from a book, and in general there’s
a lot to like about Red Girls; what
it does, it does very well, but that can sometimes serve to throw what it doesn’t do into sharper relief. If you’re after a well-told family
melodrama, if you’re after a faintly ethereal, other-worldly intergenerational
saga, hell, even if you’re after evocative broad-brush social history, then I’d
have no hesitation in recommending this to you. If you want more than that,
however, then be aware of what you’re getting: The surface imagery is undeniably
captivating, but it’s a book that’s perfectly content to admire the play of
light on the shallows without ever really striking out for deeper waters.
*I recognize the irony of using a singular
metonym here.
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