Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki - A Toxic Japanese Love Story

Naomi is a toxic love story, set in 1920s Japan, and one that is surprisingly relevant today. The novel is a classic of Japanese literature by Junichiro Tanizaki and a perfect snapshot of the Taisho Era.

Jin Ping Mei rides again

When, years ago, I studied Chinese at Leeds University, there was a set of volumes that resided only in the stacks downstairs in the Brotherton Library. It was the famous erotic novel, Jin Ping Mei (JPM), also known as The Plum in the Golden Vase, or The Golden Lotus. I have no idea whether it was in translation or in the original Chinese as I never ventured down there to find out. But about fifteen years ago, I was in Hong Kong airport and picked up the complete 1939 Clement Edgerton (and Lao She) translation which, though old, had just been reissued. I read it and enjoyed it enormously. 

For anyone wanting to know more about JPM, there is an extensive Wikipedia entry, which helpfully summarises the story as ‘ostensibly set during the years 1111–1127 … it centers on Ximen Qing (西門慶), a corrupt social climber and lustful merchant who is wealthy enough to marry six wives and concubines…. After Pan Jinlian secretly murders her husband, Ximen Qing takes her as one of his wives. The story follows the domestic sexual struggles of the women within his household as they clamor for prestige and influence amidst the gradual decline of the Ximen clan.’

So much, briefly, by way of background. However, I am not reviewing JPM itself in this post, but a fascinating and detailed collection of essays about the novel, delightfully called JPM – A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature. This is an impressive work of scholarship, with more than thirty contributors from all over the world. The essays shed a fascinating light on Chinese culture and society in the period in which the novel is set and in which it was written – the early seventeenth century. It looks at its travels in translation into the rest of the world, and the processes and challenges of that translation.

JPM is noted (notorious?) for its graphically-described sexual episodes, even though its defenders point out they account for only a tiny proportion of the total text, around 20,000 Chinese characters (汉字). One of the most interesting essays in Wild Horse traces its treatment in China post-1949. Marja Kaikkonen (Chapter 13), writes: ‘The literary histories of the PRC left out any mention of JPM, nor was the book presented in literature classes at universities…. In the early PRC, no one dared to publish JPM until Mao Zedong …had encouraged it. Mao’s comments on JPM are cherished even today: who else would have dared to do it? At a 1957 meeting with high-level cadres, Mao is quoted as having said: “JPM can be used for reference, but the episodes where women are humiliated are bad. Province Party secretaries can have a look at it.”’ By the 1980s, ‘People of the rank of senior editors and above were allowed to buy the book,’ though the extortionate price must have limited its circulation. Although unexpurgated versions are now available in the PRC, Kaikkonen concludes: ‘Whatever those reasons may be, Jin Ping Mei remains as sensitive as a thorn in the flesh.’ This is borne out by Wu Gan’s comment in Chapter 24 of Wild Horse, that JPM ‘…inevitably had some naturalist depictions of sex (some of which are essential for characterization). Such depictions, which take up fewer than 20,000 Chinese characters, can be considered a minor flaw of the novel.’ [my emphasis] 

The same moral sensitivities have faced translators and their publishers: Clement Edgerton translated all the erotic descriptions not into English but into Latin. Confining access to the novel to Province Party secretaries (in China) or those who can read Latin (in the UK) seems to follow the same logic: writing which endangers social morals must only be available to males, and only as long as they are of the educated ruling class. (I can’t help being reminded of the words of the judge at the obscenity trial of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’) 

Wild Horse also includes essays on the sexual vocabulary used in Chinese, the puns and innuendo, and ways of analysing the occurrence of selected words by using corpus linguistics tools. As for the translation process, Keith MacMahon, in Chapter 14, writes: ‘Problems of translation are also a matter of the lack of equivalent words and images, or the mismatch between them. It is safe to say that the repertoire of the language of sex in late Ming China is richer than that of the contemporary English-speaking world, whose lexicon tends to either scientific terminology… or else profanity.’ On the subject of which, Lintao Qi, in Chapter 15, writes amusingly about how JPM has on occasion been adapted/abridged and re-written as pure erotica in English, the exact opposite approach to that of bowdlerisation.

There are essays about the translators of JPM into other languages. The first translation was into Manchu ‘…. in the course of [the Qing dynasty’s] assiduous efforts to adapt to Chinese culture’ (Martin Gimm, Chapter 20), only a century after it first appeared in Chinese. But who knew that the first German translation, completed in 1869 by Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, was from the Manchu not the Chinese? Or that the first part of the German translation by the Kibat brothers (both of whom taught themselves Chinese) fell victim to Hitler’s book-burning and had to be done again, in secrecy. 

On a completely different aspect of the novel, Lucie Olivová, a Czech translator, looks at ‘The Architecture of Ximen Qing’s Residence’ in Chapter 23. Translating the most basic terminology, like the word for ‘home’, she says, poses a challenge: ‘In the Czech tradition, house (dům) means a single building, large or small. In sharp contrast, the traditional Chinese house (siheyuan 四合院) is made up of several courtyards arranged along a central axis, with small single buildings surrounding one or more square and oblong courts (Olivová 2008: 82–85). In other words, the traditional house is a compound composed according to given rules that Europeans are usually not familiar with. It would therefore be misleading to use the word dům.’ And that is before she addresses the many different garden features for which we have no equivalent: ‘…lou 樓, ge 閣, xuan 軒, ting 亭, juanpeng 卷棚, etc.’ I know from my own experience as a translator that visualizing a scene and understanding the geography in a novel can be a huge challenge. Whether it is the loess plateau, with its particular geographical features, in Jia Pingwa’s novels and stories, or the ancestral home at number 8, Xi Shu Yuan Street in Nanchang that Rao Pingru visited as a child and describes in his memoirs, Our Story.  It is tantalising when you know that the author has a perfectly clear image in their head, if only they could transmit it to you. But for Olivová and other translators, the author has been dead for centuries. Compounding the difficulties is that fact that: ‘the information that can be extracted from the novel is meagre, fragmentary, and scattered across the text.’ 

In English, the Egerton/Lao She translation has withstood the test of time: it has been republished with the Wade-Giles transliterations replaced with pinyin and the Latin passages translated into English, as The Golden Lotus: Jin Ping Mei (Tuttle Classics), with an introduction by Robert E. Hegel. That was the one I picked up in the airport. There is also now a new and highly-praised translation by David Tod Roy, entitled The Plum in the Golden Vase, in five volumes, (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013), a complete and annotated translation of the 1610 edition of JPM. For anyone making a foray into either of these versions, I recommend Wild Horse as a companion. It will enrich your reading and may even make you smile.

 

Marc Joan on Hangdog Souls

UK-based Marc Joan spent the early part of his life in India, and the early part of his career in biomedical research. He draws on this and other experience for his fiction, which has been widely published. His novelette, The Speckled God, was published by Unsung Stories in Feb 2017; he is a contributor to three forthcoming anthologies: Comma Press’s Mirror in the Mirror; Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’horreur, from Night Terror Novels; Ghost Stories for Starless Nights from DBND publishing. His first novel, Hangdog Souls, was published last year.

Kingdom of Mysore, 1799. A guilt-racked British Army deserter tries to win safety for those he loves — but his reckless bargaining only leaves him trapped between destinies, condemned to facilitate centuries of suicide and murder. Death after death, each death diminishes him, until — a quarter of a millennium later — a Keralan astrophysicist has the chance to annul the soldier’s Faustian bargain. But Chandy John is weakened by his own burden of grief. Will this twenty-first century scientist become just another helpless nexus between undeserved death and undeserved life?

Hangdog Souls is set in the Dravidian heartlands of South India — and in a blurred edgeland where alternative realities elide. Through linked narratives of guilt, shame and the search for absolution, this book takes readers from the arid Tamil plains to the highest peaks of the Nilgiris, and from occult horrors in Tipu Sultan’s kingdom to creeping madness in the world of particle physics.

Spanning three hundred years, the stories in Hangdog Souls weave together the fates and fortunes of multiple characters — individuals that echo through the generations, asking always the same question: What weight can balance the death of an innocent?

Here Marc talks to Asian Books Blog…

China Revisited: guest post by Paul French

Paul French, the series editor of China Revisited, is the bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and Destination Shanghai.

China Revisited is a series of extracted reprints of mid-19th to early-20th century Western impressions of Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China. It comprises excerpts from travelogues or memoirs written by missionaries, diplomats, military personnel, journalists, tourists and temporary sojourners. They came to China from Europe or the United States, some to work or to serve the interests of their country, others out of curiosity. Current titles are: Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey’s 1920s Hong Kong, Macao and Canton Sojourns by Harry Hervey; Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878 / 1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming; Ling-Nam: Hong Kong, Canton and Hainan Island in the 1880s by Benjamin Couch ‘BC’ Henry

Paul has fully annotated each title to provide relevant detail of Hong Kong, Macao and China at the time, to illuminate encounters with historically interesting characters, and to explain notable events.

Here, Paul explains the idea behind the series, and how he undertook research during lockdown. 

Someone is Coming: guest post by T.A. Morton

 

T.A. Morton is a Singapore-based British-Australian documentary scriptwriter with a keen interest in William Somerset Maugham. She recently completed a masters in crime and thriller writing at Cambridge University. Her debut novella, Someone is Coming, was published late last year. 

Philip Goundry is 93 and living out his days quietly in a care home in England when a young researcher from Singapore arrives, wanting to learn more about his former life in Malaya for the Singapore archives. His memory growing fitful, Philip is torn between wanting to unburden himself and staying silent, as he has done all these years, about the sinister and shocking events of his childhood on a Malayan rubber plantation. The truth, however, has a habit of winning.

Here, Morton discusses the inspiration for Someone is Coming, and the research behind the story...

Hungry Ghost: interview with Victoria Ying

Victoria Ying is a critically acclaimed author and artist living in Los Angeles. She started her career in the arts by falling in love with comic books, this eventually turned into a career working in animation and graphic novels. Her film credits include Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Paperman, Big Hero 6, and Moana. She is the illustrator on Disney Channels’s Diana Princess of the Amazons and the author and illustrator of City of Secrets, and the sequel City of Illusion. Her new novel Hungry Ghost, explores the teenage protagonist's struggles with eating disorders.

Valerie Chu is quiet, studious, and above all, thin. No one, not even her best friend Jordan, knows that she has been binging and purging for years. But when tragedy strikes, Val finds herself taking a good, hard look at her priorities, her choices, and her own body. The path to happiness may lead her away from her hometown and her mother’s toxic projections—but first she will have to find the strength to seek help.

Here, Victoria talks to Asian Books Blog.

"Owlish". Nicky Harman reviews a new novel by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce

 

Owlish is the story of Professor Q, a university lecturer in the city of Nevers. He is not a happy man: his wife refuses intimacy with him, his students protest, then disappear, and he is visited by sinister authority figures. He takes refuge in a fantasy world and his life is briefly illuminated by his passion for Aliss, a doll who is introduced to him by the mysterious Owlish. But as the story progresses, the sanctuary he has found for their love affair, an abandoned church, is raided, the doll is destroyed, and his wife Maria reclaims him. In the final pages, it is not the forces of political repression but Maria and their doctor who seal his fate: ‘Professor Q thought of the sky-blue pills he would no longer have any reason to take and almost felt like laughing…He was fast asleep, his upper body collapsed onto the sofa. Maria came to stand over him, regarding his body as she might a placid lake. The sleeping pill had worked quickly…’

This novel draws the reader in on many levels. It is suspenseful: can the Prof find a new life? What will happen to the doll? It is political; there is no attempt to disguise the parallels between the fictitious island, its communities and languages, and present-day Hong Kong – in that respect, it’s wonderfully cheeky. And the language is beautiful – more on that later.