The fantastic journal Words Without Borders has a new issue online, with lots of delicious literary tidbits from the cutting edge in Japan. Here is the description. 

Guest editor: Michael Emmerich.  This month and next we’re showcasing writing from Japan. In the wake of the events of March 11, 2011, the boundaries between real and unreal, solid and fluid, seem to have shifted; guest editor Michael Emmerich has selected pieces that resonate with the country’s new mood. The pieces in this first part have the texture of a dream, unstable, fleeting, fantastic. In tales of shape-shifting, Jin Keita finds new life in a different form, and Kawakami Hiromi pursues a girl who turns into a pearl. Kurahashi Yumiko takes flower arranging to a new level. Akutagawa Prize winner EnJoe Toh spins a yarn about an oddly familiar galaxy. Nakai Hideo follows an illusionist and finds himself part of the act.  Medoruma Shun receives voice mail from the beyond. Poet Yotsumoto Yasuhiro plays with rhyme and rhythm. And Furukawa Hideo’s young office worker stumbles upon a new world only steps away. The issue is produced in partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation. We thank the BCLT, and David Karashima and the Nippon Foundation, for their generous support. Elsewhere, we present three views of the current Greek crisis from Amanda Michalopoulou, Petros Markaris, and Auguste Corteau.

Image: PHOTOGRAPHER HAL, Flesh Love #27_Lim&Kyohei, 2010, 1201 X 900mm, archival pigment print.

Godzilla makes plans for Tokyo
(Random image found on the net)

House ハウス (1977), directed by ŌBAYASHI Nobuhiko 大林 宣彦

This bizarre and often hilarious Japanese cult classic is perfect viewing for Halloween.  The relatively simple, low-budget special effects are pulled off to unforgettable effects.  (Personally, I will never forgot the scenes with the piano that comes alive and chomps a girl to bits.)  The film is available on the Criterion Collection label. 

BBC News writes, “At midnight in London, and the same time next week in America, bookshops will open their doors to sell Haruki Murakami’s latest novel to eager fans. This is not Harry Potter, it’s a 1,600-page translation from Japanese. So why the excitement?”  Click here to find out. 

ITŌ Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 reading one of her most famous pieces of poetry, “Killing Kanoko“「カノコ殺し」at Western Michigan University in 2008

This poem, written at the time when Ito was taking care of her first daughter Kanoko, is one of Ito’s most famous and frequently anthologized poems. The bold expression of a young mother’s desire to commit infanticide shocked many readers and earned Ito a place in the tabloid newspapers. The words “Congratulations on your destruction” (horoboshite omedeto gozaimasu) repeat and overlap, creating recurring, almost hypnotic cadences that parody the congratulatory message a young mother hears repeatedly upon becoming pregnant or giving birth.

The translation I am reading here appears in Killing Kanoko (Action Books, 2009).

HAKUCHI Shōhei (白痴 Shohei)
Shinjuku 2099 新宿2099

Hakuchi is a subculture artist, who produces images blending traditional Japanese aesthetics, subcultural visions, horror, kawaii culture, and both left-wing and right-wing imagery to produce eerily dystopic visions peeking into the Japanese cultural imagination. 

Here is his webpage. 
Here is his Tumblr.

Lights in Ueno Park, Tokyo
上野公園、東京
February 2011

Traditionally, lots of households in Japan would put up displays of hina dolls お雛人形, representations of the imperial court, for the Doll Festival held annually on March 3.  Fewer and fewer households do it these days because it is difficult for them to find the space and expenses to put up such elaborate displays.  Traditionally, hina doll displays would have many levels with dolls showing different kinds of courtiers and attendants. 

Here are some photos from a hina doll display at the Gajoen 雅叙園, a big wedding facility located in Meguro 目黒, Tokyo.  For two years, the Gajoen has been putting up displays of centuries-old dolls around this time, attracting people interested in seeing the dolls in their gorgeous, lush surroundings.  In these pictures, there are a series of stuffed dolls, flowers, and other auspicious symbols hanging on strings, which dangle down near the hina dolls. 

The Gajoen has a series of older, spectacularly decorated rooms that are truly fantastic, filled with painting, lacquerware, and architectural detailing.  Whereas much of the newer part of the building is full of kitsch, the old portions from the early Showa period were spectacular.  For photos, click here to go to the Gajoen website. 

In Shibuya Station, where I change trains every day, there is a giant mural called “The Myth of Tomorrow” 「明日の神話」 painted by the artist OKAMOTO Tarō 岡本太郎 (1911-1996), the same man who made the famous “Tower of the Sun” 太陽の塔 for the site of the 1970 Osaka Expo.  According to the Wikipedia article about Okamoto, this mural was made for the Hotel de Mexico in Mexico City, and depicts a human being at the moment of a nuclear blast. 

Certainly, its title and strong imagery express powerful doubts about our myths regarding progress leading us to a better future.  In its theme and style, it reminds me of the paintings created in the wake of World War I in Europe, as the artists of the avant-garde were expressing their doubts about the myths of science and industrial progress which they felt had landed them in such a disastrous war. 

I find it incredibly ironic that this painting is located in Shibuya Station, the sight of so many people, so much shopping, and so much blatant commercialism.  How are we to interpret that?  Are the warnings of the last century about the dangers of “progress” just that much more kitsch to stick on the halls of our most commercial sites?  In our era of advanced capitalism (and nowhere is capitalism more advanced than Tokyo), is there any power left in the humanistic statements of the last century? 

I sometimes see people in front of this mural snapping photos, and I wonder what it means to them.  Is it a powerful antiwar statement about the dangers of a technological world, or is it just something cool and dramatic on the walls worth a single cell phone snap?

TANIKAWA Shuntarō 谷川俊太郎 is so popular in Japan that people have called him the “national poet” (国民詩人).  Every student learns his work in school, and everyone knows at least some of the many song lyrics he has written, including the words for the theme song of the TV show Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム).  All throughout his career, he has been challenging notions of poetry as a stagnant, esoteric form of writing, only meant to be read on the page.  He has experimented with many new forms of oral and visual poetry, which he hopes will stimulate the imagination and people’s interest in poetry. 

Now, Tanikawa is breaking new territory by releasing the world’s first poetry designed to be read by microscope.  Playing with the idea of poetry as a “bitter medicine,” he has embossed poems on what is known in German as oblate (the dissolving paper that people used to use to wrap medicine), then mounted the oblate on slides, which the viewer reads through a microscope. 

I am thrilled by this idea, not just because it is so playful and fun, but also because it plays with one of the principal conceits of poetry, namely that poetry represents an especially intimate and personal form of communication—that poetry represents a vehicle takes the reader into the small world of the poet.  And what symbolizes the attempt to slide into a small, close, intimate world better than peering into the eyepiece of a microscope?   Poetic, indeed! 

Eric Mendes, a senior in Japanese at WMU, and Morgan Medor, a senior in art history at WMU, collaborated to make a fantastic exhibition of Japanese omamori (good luck charms), which is showing this month at the Richmond Center for the Arts at WMU. 

The show contains a wide variety of omamori charms organized by type and style.  For instance, there are omamori for good luck in school, omamori associated with fertility, omamori in phallic shapes, omamori that use designs from Japanese woodblock prints, omamori that show elements of kawaii or “cute” culture, and so on. 

In addition, the curators have put organized the space so that one wall looks like a omamori vendor at a Japanese Shinto shrine.  They have built a ledge at exactly the right height, surrounded it by sudare rolled blinds like you might see at the vending area of a shrine, and put a life-size image of two shrine maidens right behind it.  The result is uncannily real, and great fun. 

Those of you who are in southwest Michigan should definitely see this impressive show!

NPR did a great story on Hello Kitty, which is turning 50 this year. Here is one quote. 

Belson, author of Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, says the company has lasted because of its winning formula: getting generations hooked on cute, even while unintentionally creating kitsch.

Belson says some fans have twisted kitty in many ways “because it’s so pure, it’s become sickly and a pendant of mass consumerism people have come to hate. That’s not something the company would ever want to admit or promote, but it’s something that’s taken on an extra life of its own — or nine extra lives.”

I went yesterday to see a exhibition at the Kyoto Arts Center called 「幻ノ進化論―Saltationism」 (On the Evolution of Fantasy: Saltationism) by the artist EMOTO Hajime 江本創 (b. 1970).  This fun and playfully bizarre show featured a number of startlingly life-like mummies and skeletons of imaginary creatures that Emoto had created and displayed in shadow boxes like scientific specimens.

At the beginning of the exhibition, there was a sign stating that Emoto had just returned from a long trip with an (imaginary) Russian scientist, who had toured the world collecting strange creatures.  Also, there was a large quotation from a seemingly scientific text reminding us that over the billions of years of world history, countless creatures had come into being and gone extinct. Beneath each of the lovingly created creatures, Emoto had placed a label with genus species names, information about where the “specimens” had been collected, plus reflections on the creature and its evolutionary past. Nowhere in the exhibition does the display step out of character to discuss how exactly Emoto made these life-like monsters, helping to preserve the illusion that what one is seeing is a collection of real specimens.  

For instance, the notes accompanying the “ribbed squid” explain it was found in the South Pacific.  Invertebrates such as squid, he tells us, should not have a skeletal structure, but this figure had managed to evolve a bony structure in order to protect its internal organs.  In a humorous touch, he notes that this creature was used among natives of the South Pacific as a penis sheath. 

There was a wall of creatures inspired by Western fairy tales, such as winged demons, mini-dragons, and gargoyles, “collected” from various places in Europe, such as the strikingly lifelike skeleton of a “Dragon” pictured above.  In the text accompanying this and the other dragons on display, he explained that larger ones had apparently come in contact with humans and been largely exterminated, so dragons evolved to become increasingly small.

Also, in another part of the show, he had a number of “creatures” collected from a monestary in southern France.  According to the sign, the inhabitants had treated them as the person-ification of the Seven Deadly Sins.  The one, for instance, associated with avarice was chubby and had big, hungry-looking teeth, while the one associated with lust looked like a big phallus with legs.  (For pictures of this series of creatures, click here.)

In creating a world, full of fantastic creatures, Emoto seemed to be playfully suggesting  how little we know about the natural world.  His shadow boxes and old-fashioned presentations, complete with purposefully aged labels, had a steampunk sensibility, hearkening back to an early moment in early 20th century scientific history when the natural world was still full of mystery, and explorers still traveled the world in search of new discoveries.  The world, he seems to be suggesting, is a strange place, not fully understandable through the operations of science alone, despite our attempts to try.

At the same time, he also seems to be hinting at how important it is to us, as human beings, to try to understand the world (and even the imaginary) through the lens of rationality and science.  Part of the fun and adventure of this exhibition is to show how bizarre it looks when one attempts to apply scientific rationality to things that do not always make perfect sense. 

Interestingly, in this exhibition, the “mysterious world” from which the pieces came was not just the South Pacific, South America, and other “exotic” places, as it was to 19th and early 20th century explorers.  The sources of these strange creatures also also encompassed Europe, which had been made to look every bit as primitive and unfamiliar as the developing world, thanks to all of its fairy tales and weird legends.  At the same time, none of the creatures were supposed to have come from Japan.   Could it be that in Emoto’s eyes, Japan is too rational a nation for dreams? 

For Emoto’s webpage (Japanese only), click here.  The webpages contain an extensive gallery of Emoto’s creations.