Mysterious Saetting by Kazushige Abe
Japanese fiction
Original title – Misuteriasu Settingu -ミステリアス・セッティング
Translator Muchel Emmerich
Source – Personal copy
I’m back I had a week where life caught up with book reviewing and so I add another book for the Jpaanese Literature challenge and one from the many books that Pushkin Press have brought out in there Novella se4ries of novels from japan with there bright covers and often eye catching cover art they highlight some of the best writing from recent years in Japan this iss one of two books they have published from Kazushige Abe. A writer who started off studying film and wanted to be a film director, and then, whilst studying film, friends introduced him to writers like Kenzaburo Oe, Richard Bach, William Burroughs and Philip K Dixck, and he decided he wanted to be a writer. He has won several major writing prizes in Japan. This book, published in 2006, is a retelling of the Little Match Girl story set in contemporary Japan.
Nozomi asked why, if she was prepared to share her
poems, she didn’t write them down.
This was a good question, and Shiori was unsure how to
answer. She didn’t know why.
Nozomi was merciless at moments like this.
“Things just spin further out of control when you try to cover up one lie with another, Shiori. Why not admit you can’t write poetry? You’d like to be a poet, but you aren’t one, and, if you ask me, the odds you’ll succeed in becoming a troubadour’ seem pretty slim. They say everyone has the right to dream, but inflicting a ‘right’like that on people seems cruel to me. Just look at you, shooting off lies so transparent even I can see through them, acting like this dumb dream’ of yours is your greatest treasure and you’ll never let it go.
I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life.”
Her sister is her harshest critic
I love the way this story starts off as something normal. We meet Shirori, a teenager with a singular dream, but the only problem is that she is tone-deaf. She is often reminded of this fact, very harshly, by her sister. But she has read off the old-fashioned Troubadours that used to travel telling tales in songs, and is caught up in this dream. But in the latter part of the book, the girl meets the world as she heads to Tokyo to follow her dream and study music. But like many girls like her with dreams and no real sense of how the world works ., she falls foul of those underclass of people that take people’s dreams and twist them so she meets people online that take on her and this seems to be the way the book is heading then we get something that changes her whole future out of leftfield and the book is dark and comic at the same time.
Suzuki-kun was seized with righteous indignation when he heard about all this. He told Shiori he would talk to Nozomi, make her stop. But Shiori defended her sister.
Nozomi had been angry, it was a sort of fit, she told him.
You shouldn’t blame her—it was really my fault for breaking my promise. Besides, Nozomi had said she was sorry at breakfast, so everything was OK now. In reality, Nozomi had never apologized for anything in her life, but in this case a little white lie seemed appropriate.
Shiori was so overjoyed to see Suzuki-kun this con-cerned-he was angry on her behalf!-that she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. At the same time, she didn’t want him butting into a matter that was really between her and her sister.
More about her and the sister !
I think this is one of those books from Japan that has a nod toward traditional stories like the Little Match Girl, but it was also first released as a novel on the phone when it came out. There is a sense of many little things happening that draw the story forward. But then there is also the leftfield turns we get here and there throughout the book. That was a nod to figures like Burroughs and Dick, writers he likes, the urban jungle and cityscapes, both common in their works, and to surreal turns, a thing Burroughs was known for. Dick’s often from the few books I read years ago, like playing with identity and setting, like in Blade Runner, which is, of course, set in a modern city but has light, dark, and comedy at times, and also shifts in reality. But at the heart of this book is isolation inj the big city, one girl’s dream, but also those that will prey on that, all tied up in the book, which is also about Tokyo and going there for a dream like many a teen does in Japan and always will. Nut, maybe not as surreal as this darkly comic book does.
Have you any books that take a surreal turn at times like this book ?
