polutropos

Book #7 from the "Women in Translation" rec list: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith.

 

Trying to accurately describe the plot of this book is an exercise in futility, so I'm not going to bother. All I can say is it centers around Ayami, a woman who is an actress, or maybe a poet, or possibly both, and is on her last day of work at an audio theater for the blind in Seoul. 

 

This is a book I feel like I'd have to read at least one more time all the way through to be able to really discuss the themes and motifs at play. It's an incredibly cerebral novel that never gives up a clear answer about what's happening. What's real or not real changes from scene to scene. Is Ayami an orphan? Did she have a wealthy aunt? Is she the poet from Buha's youth? Is the director the bus driver? Who really got hit by the bus, and who was the murdered woman in the attic? Is Ayami Yeoni? The book leaves you to your own conclusions.

 

This is a book that I feel you'll either love or really hate. I enjoyed the trip, but it's hard to explain why. Reading this felt like running a fever in August; the whole thing is a sweaty, sticky dream where you can't tell if a conversation you had was real or not or real and supplemented in your memory by the dream. Early in the book, Suah presents one of the best descriptions of living through a heat wave I've ever read as she describes being in Seoul at the height of summer. I'm going to quote a few lines here just to give you an idea:

"The midsummer metropolis was a temple of benumbed languor, the home of long-vanished, cult-worshipping tribes. Rarefied sleep sucked bodies into a burning crater lake choked with sticky flakes of black soap ash and honeycomb chunks of grey pumice. In cramped rooms unrelieved by air conditioning or even a fan, if you opened the window hot air heavier than a sodden quilt rushed in, clogging your pores like the wet slap of raw meat, but with it closed the oxygen would quickly evaporate, disappearing at a frightening rate until the air was filled with nothing but heat. Nothing but the ecstasy of ruin."

 

Suah's language is vivid and brilliantly evokes specific, sometimes very obscure feelings. The conversations between characters swerve between the practical and the deeply abstract and philosophical. Overhanging the whole surreal experience is the memory of the military rule of Korea and the ever-present shadow of North Korea. The characters are rarely directly concerned with these things, and yet, their presence crops up: when Ayami describes helicopters flying overhead; the citywide blackouts; when Wolfi, a German tourist, keeps asking to visit a particular area that Ayami repeatedly tells him is inaccessible because it requires passing through North Korea. South Korea isn't really a peninsula, she tells him, it's an island. 

 

It's a short novel, just 152 pages, but I still felt like I'd been on a journey by the time I finished it. I think this would make a great work for discussing in a book club or class, because it's one of those stories where everyone is going to pick up on different details and have different explanations for the various strange phenomena at play. What is this book about? I can't really say. It reminded me a little bit of the short film Genius Loci in how the characters interact with the city and the constantly-changing story landscape. 

 

If you do give it a read, I definitely recommend reading the translator's note at the end, it adds a little something and she explains some of her translating choices. This book, like several of the others from this rec list, presented a translating challenge, I imagine, and I think Smith did an excellent job capturing Suah's surrealist world. This is not the first book of Suah's that Smith has translated and I'm sure her familiarity with Suah's particular writing helped make this such a wonderful translation.

 

Another win from this list!

Crossposted to books 

Book #6 from the "Women in Translation" rec list was Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton. This novel is about a journalist seeking to score an exclusive interview with convicted 3-time murderer Manako Kajii. Kajii is in prison for killing three of her lovers, all older, well-off, lonely men, and with her retrial coming up soon, journalist Rika Machida thinks it's the perfect time for another focus feature on the famous murderess. However, the more time she spends with Kajii, the more she wonders if maybe Kajii is the only one seeing the situation clearly.

 

This book has been billed in some places as a crime thriller or murder mystery, but it's not really, so if you go into it expecting that, I fear you'll be disappointed. The core of the book isn't really whether Kajii killed her lovers or not. What this book really was is to interrogate societal attitudes in Japan, which it does through a lot of introspection on the part of Rika. 

 

Butter tackles fatphobia - Rika notices how much of the disproportionate vitriol leveled at Kajii concerns her weight. The idea that a fat woman could command the level of desire expressed by her victims repulses society, even more so as Kajii considers herself attractive and desirable, and thinks losing weight is a waste of her time. When Rika starts putting on weight too, she suddenly sees other sides to her peers, friends, and even her boyfriend that surprise her.

 

Butter attacks sexism - Over the course of the novel, Rika hones her criticisms of a sexist society that demands utter subservience and perfection from women, while coddling men who refuse to take care of themselves unless a woman is doing it for them. Kajii herself subscribes to this view—declaring in one fit of rage with Rika that she hates feminists—and yet despite having striven most of her life for this domestic ideal, she sits lonely and despised in a prison cell, convicted of killing the very men she claims she was so happy to care for. 

 

But to me, most of all, Butter is about loneliness. Loneliness haunts every character in this book, from Kajii sharing in a moment of vulnerability that she's never had a female friend; to Rika, utterly convinced she'll die alone in an empty apartment like her father someday; to Reiko, Rika's best friend, languishing in an increasingly distant marriage; to Shinoi, one of Rika's sources, who feels unable to reconnect with his estranged daughter or otherwise fill the holes in his life left by her departure along with his ex-wife. Butter shows the extremes to which loneliness can drive a person, and the way it can twist a life up into something ugly and unrecognizable. 

 

Throughout the novel, Rika is seeking connection, whether with Reiko, whom she struggles to connect with as much now that Reiko has left her job to be a cheerful full-time housewife; or with her casual boyfriend from work, whose greatest attribute to Rika is his willingness to leave her alone and not bother her when she doesn't want him around; or even with Kajii herself, who Rika finds herself increasingly desperate to understand. 

 

I really enjoyed the ending of this book, where Rika comes to understand the intention required to build and maintain community, and with several characters moving away from the nuclear family-centric concept of not being alone. Particularly touching was Rika's purchase of a three-bedroom apartment near the end of the novel—to make sure she has room for friends who need a place to stay. It's really touching and rewarding to see these characters come together, touched by Rika's presence in their lives in ways even she didn't fully realize, and going on to touch each other's lives in ways Rika could never have predicted.

 

In many ways, the novel invites you to sympathize with or even pity Kajii, and through Rika's shifting attitudes towards her it does a great job of showing how someone like Kajii could manipulate as many people as she did. Watching Rika be drawn into Kajii's orbit can almost convince the reader at times that Kajii's onto something with her perspective! But the final portrait is of someone so warped by loneliness and feelings of rejection that she had to divorce herself from reality to make life livable, and was willing to hurt people to keep up her fantasy.

 

Butter leaves a lot of things open-ended, which suited me just fine. It felt real, and at its heart, like I said, the book isn't about either condemning or absolving Kajii. It's a lot more about Rika's journey, and the changing attitudes of the cast of characters towards basic assumptions of Japanese society, like the place of women, or the responsibilities of men, or the role of a romantic partner in your life. 

 

I was not as impressed with the translation this time around as I have been with some of the earlier books. Butter retains a lot of the stilted, excessively formal language I'm used to seeing in anime subtitles. The characters often speak in a way no Anglophone speaks, which makes their conversations sound unnatural to the ear, even if I see what they're getting at. I think this could have used another pass to make the language flow better. However, I also think there were some tough aspects of the prose translation, since the book is packed with extremely detailed descriptions of food and the experience of eating.

 

On the whole, a great dive into the psyche of these characters as a reflection of a broader society, and, for me, a satisfying ending! I can see why this book took off in Japan when it first released.