Summer Reading: Three Japanese Novels

 

Convenience Store Woman is a novel about—guess what—a woman who works in a convenience store. There’s nothing so unusual about that, but Keiko has been doing the same job at the same store, part time, for eighteen years. She likes it, and she’s good at it. The position is lowly, but Keiko shoulders her responsibilities with utter dedication and professionalism. It’s basically her life.

Keiko knows she’s a little different. In the novel’s opening pages, she relates the story of a schoolyard fist-fight she witnessed as a child. All the kids were standing around shouting “Break it up! Break it up!” Keiko picked up a shovel, knocked one of the belligerents unconscious, and considered she’d done a good job. “I still don’t see anything wrong with what I did,” she tells us.

But Keiko isn’t driven by irrational or antisocial impulses; she just likes to keep order and make sure everything’s in its proper place. Much of the novel—which sold more than a million copies in Japan—deals with the minutia of her day, managing inventory, re-ordering products, setting up special sales depending on the season, tending the cash register, and remaining forever cheerful in the face of customer requests throughout her shift.

If I happen to enjoy reading about such things, it might be because I worked in a book warehouse for twenty-odd years, so I’m familiar with the satisfactions that such work can sometimes provide. That might also explain why I enjoyed the German film In the Aisles (2018).

But just when things start to get tedious, author Sayaka Murata gives her story a twist in the form of a new employee, Shiraha, hired by the manager out of desperation during a busy season. Shiraha is a loser, a slacker, an arrogant miscreant, practically homeless. Needless to say, he and Keiko don’t get along …

Tokyo Express, originally published in 1958, has the look of a mystery novel. It focuses on the question of whether an apparent murder/suicide on a lonely beach on the southern tip of Japan might actually have been a murder. But there is never more than one real suspect in the case, and from the early chapters to the end of the book, Inspector Mihara spends nearly all his time trying to break that suspect’s seemingly water-tight alibi. There are three or four “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” moments, plenty of interviews with subsidiary characters, and lots of analysis of train schedules, all of which establish an atmosphere of mild intrigue. But the fact that the book’s first few chapters focus on the behavior of two waitresses and an eminent businessman with ties to a government scandal would be hard to explain if he weren’t somehow connected to the crime … presuming  there was a crime committed ...

 The Summer House follows the early career of an inexperienced and sometimes dilatory architect, one Tōru Sakanishi, who, by a stroke of luck, gets hired on to the firm of master architect Shunsuke Murai. Murai needs some help: he’s preparing an entry for a competition the build Japan’s National Library of Modern Literature. In the past, he has avoided such competitions, preferring to work with clients who know and appreciate his quiet, subtle style. It’s almost as if he knows he’s approaching the end of his career.

Little by little, Sakanishi picks up the rhythms of the architectural team, which has moved up to a mountain retreat to work on the project together. He’s eager to make himself useful, though the tasks he’s given seldom have much to do with the competition entry itself. It takes him a while, for example, to catch on to the fact that in Sakanishi’s world, it’s taboo to sharpen your pencils after 5 p.m.

As the summer passes, meals are shared, errands are run. We listen in on discussions about furniture design, acoustics, the proper location of fireplaces, and sundry other architectural issues. In the course of his narrative Sakanishi also drifts into lengthy digressions on the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Murai studied as a youth) and the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, whose famous design for the Stockholm Public Library has captured Murai’s interest.

Among the team are two women, Mariko and Yukiko, and Sakanishi takes a liking to them both, adding yet another subtle, almost unspoken ripple to the stream. Murai himself rekindles several personal connections in the mountain neighborhood, where he’s been coming for decades. Meanwhile, under an atmosphere of professional calm and unspoken reverence for the master, weeks pass, months. The competition deadline approaches.

Author Matsuie won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for this, his first novel. He succeeds in transforming what might have been a plodding narrative filled with attestations of respect we can acknowledge but have been given no reason to share into an exotic and atmospheric whole, where relationships between walls, chairs, books, and people are in constant flux, restrained by patience and tact, buoyed by a sense of balance and proportion, fueled an unspoken affection and the passage of time.