HOME
nwasianweekly.com
August 28, 2004

A Quick Look at Books

Sayonara, Gangsters, by Genichiro Takahashi, translated by Michael Emmerich. Published by Vertical Inc., 2004.

When the new manager of Seattle’s Kinokuniya Book Store sent over Takahashi’s book, I was intrigued by the artfully crafted silver cover of oval cutouts that revealed a strange and nonsensical title. Poking around on the Web, I quickly learned that I might be onto not only a literary wonder, but a new publisher as well. If you are looking for cutting-edge literature from Japan, Vertical Inc. and Takahashi are good places to start.

Rocketing readers into a strange future, Sayonara, Gangsters is one phantasmagoric episode after another. Mixing insight and the most improbable experience of possibility, Takahashi takes aim at all assumptions. Incredibly funny and wise about literature, life, death and sex, he is Lydia Davis pacing on the Eastern horizon coupled with Tom Robbins’ love of mirth and the mad muse.

Here, the poet Virgil reincarnates as a refrigerator — and explains why. “Sayonara, Gangsters” is also the name of the protagonist poetry teacher who lives in the basement of a building that has a river flowing on its sixth floor. He dreams he’s a racehorse and buries his living daughter — just to describe a few tidbits of the story. Takahashi takes you into another realm — if you are willing to go there — and slips thought into new shapes.

This author is already well known to Japanese literati as a postmodern writer. His other works include John Lennon vs. The Martians, A*D*U*L*T and The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature. Also a literary critic, he is the author of The Maybe-It’s-Not-Literature Syndrome.

Originally published in 1982 in Japan, Sayonara, Gangsters is the author’s first full-length work to be published in English. The work is translated by the hot-shot translator Emmerich, who first came to notice as the translator for another unique contemporary literary voice, Banana Yoshimoto.

First published in Japan in 1982, the book won the Gunzo Literary Award for First Novels and Takahashi won the Mishima Yukio Award in 1988. Vertical, his American publisher, calls him “the best-kept secret of readers of Japanese ... until now.” —AMS

Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World, by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu. Published by Back Bay Books, 2004.

This is the wonderful memoir of a young girl, Namu, who grows up in a remote, mountainous region in China. Despite all of the deprivation and poverty described, this is one of the most enchanting stories I have read in a long time.

Namu is part of a little-known culture in which the women control the customs of love, family and property. Marriage is viewed as “anti-family” — a concept diametrically different than the one many U.S. citizens and politicians have about family. In an especially surprising twist on relationships, in Namu’s village, all offspring (both male and female) remain in the mother’s home their entire lives. Her village is the ultimate feminist utopia, where women have a life of extraordinary freedom — including complete sexual freedom when they reach the age of maturity.

Namu and her co-writer, Mathieu, beautifully convey the emotions that occur in a society that is vastly different from the West’s. The story describes the exoticism of a girl who is discovering her femininity and of a mother and daughter engaging in universal conflict that ultimately drives them apart. Readers, too, will marvel at the descriptions of the stark beauty of the remote reaches of the Himalayas, where Namu lives.

Ultimately, like most young people in almost every advanced or developing society, Namu comes to realize that her restricted environment is too unbearable for her future. How she reaches that conclusion is the point of the whole story.

This book is a worthwhile read, especially for young women on the own road to discovering their own femininity. —CPR

Ann-Marie Stillion can be reached at annmarie@nwasianweekly.com. Carmen Palomera Rockwell can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com

Send correspondence to:
Northwest Asian Weekly • P.O. Box 3468 • Seattle • WA  98114
Tel: 206.223.5559 •  Fax: 206.223.0626 • Email: scpnwan@nwlink.com
Please bookmark this site: www.nwasianweekly.com.