Third day - Irena Rey

I read 'The Extinction of Irena Rey' by Jennifer Croft a couple of months ago for my book group (yes, this is how far behind the reviews are). I knew I was going to love it after the first page, and even more so when I discovered she had translated for Olga Tokarczuk. I was perturbed to discover that most people in the book group did not like it very much (more book group issues to come).

So the book is about a group of translators who are going to stay with their author, Irena Rey, to work on her next book. This is her routine, to get them all together so she can supervise ... and control. In the first part of the book they are all just referred to by their language, as the story progresses they learn each other's real names. While the book appears here in English the story is being written by the Spanish translator (presumably in Spanish), and then of course translated by the English translator, a woman who is of course a character in the story. Others in the group did not like the 'translator footnotes', but I enjoyed the light it shone on the relationship between the two women. It's all about the layers. There is lots of talk about translation, and about literature. It's a very intellectual book, lots of obscure references, and vocabulary that I was not familiar with. It starts out kind of normal but then Irena disappears, and her husband, who usually takes care of the domestic stuff, is absent. The translators don't know what to do with themselves. They flail around waiting for her to return, but she doesn't. It wasn't until weeks after the meeting (shows it was a good book because I was still thinking about it) that it occurred to me that it was a grown up version of Lord of the Flies. They are dumped in a strange, scary environment (the house is on the edge of a strange and forbidding forest) without the usual support, they forage for food in the forest, leaders emerge, they create their own rituals, they explore their environment, rivalries develop ... and someone dies falling off a cliff. The whole book had a surreal, dreamlike quality, nothing they thought they knew about Irena or each other turns out to be true.

None of the quotes I noted down seem to make any sense now so I'm just going to give you this long bit because I feel it captures the atmosphere of the book. Book club people didn't like the 'descriptive' bits either so I was left wondering what they wanted from their reading:

"Dawn was impending; already the sky was blueish grey. I took Tropinka Street out of the village, east into the national park, walking carefully so as not to crush any of the infinitesimal frogs that burst from the pine needles half a dozen at a time; like translators, perhaps, they were invisible other than in motion. I shuddered to think what bad luck it would be ifI were to crush an infinitesimal being underfoot.

Because I didn't feel confident in my ability to detect the kugans and other unmarked graves around the forest, I determined to limit my purview to the known dead. Still, I wanted to feel at least a little brave, so I set out for a place I'd never been but that I'd read about, a so-called place of national memory about three kilometres away.

As I walked, I saw that some of the trees wore more strange symbols, white lines with red between them; their paint was fading, chipped. A massive sign at a crossroads listed all the things you weren't allowed to do inside the national park part of the forest: hunt mushrooms, smoke cigarettes, stray from the official path. Yet on either side of the official path the forest floor was soft with moss, opulent, beckoning, extending an almost opiate effect.

To my left, I saw smoke rising, and I strayed a little from the path. Beams of light that were so bright they seemed opaque, almost solid, embraceable, had touched down upon a mossy stump. the rest o0f the tree lay in the grass, the exposed wood rough as though after an explosion - just as Petra had seen in her dream.

I squatted beside it, searching for the fire. But there was no fire, and the smoke must have been steam, abundant and unfurling, the metamorphosing dew the moss had gathered overnight. I watched it a while: It was beautiful, but it was also disturbing. I decided to take a picture, not to keep as a souvenir, but to study later, after I was fully awake.

When I pressed the shutter circle on the screen of my iPhone, the artificial click dispelled any lingering ease. I rose from the ground and felt wild as a hunted animal. Leshy or the archer could be anywhere, I realised - in the moss, in the mushrooms, in the trees. I thought I heard steps, or something that sounded like steps. It was a deer, I told myself. Just red deer grazing.

I remembered the path, and then I saw it, and without thinking of the tiny frogs I leaped across the moss field and retook it. I began walking quickly without allowing myself to turn around. I knew that this was happening because I lost my lucky acorn, and because I had failed to understand Irena, and most of all because none of us had acted - had ever acted - -in time. The steps got louder, and I took off at a run." (p.149-150)

Stay safe. Be kind. May see you later with more books.

Day 2 - Visitor from Japan

Well, I totally failed that. I sat down with the computer yesterday but got distracted. Whatever. 

Today the house has rarely been so clean, not in recent memory anyhow. Monkey sensei's friend Tomoya is arriving from Japan tomorrow, for, shall we say, an extended visit. It started off as perhaps a couple of weeks, but in the end he's staying till August. In Japan you do not quit your job to go off travelling. It's just not done, so it's safe to say he is taking a chance to do this. He wants to improve his English, go to gigs and spend extended periods browsing in record shops. Monkey is very worried that he is so laid back about the whole thing, he insisted I did not need to meet him at the airport so he's getting the bus on his own ... but at least he'll look the right way when he crosses the road.

His mum and dad have made Monkey very welcome when she visits so I wanted to do likewise:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

100 Days to Offload: Day One

Way back in 2020 when the first weeks of Covid lockdown were dragging out I joined in with 100 Days to Offload. I was just looking though old blog posts for the name of a bush in the yard and was reminded of the challenge, and how it did motivate me to write more regularly, to not worry about just chatting and not having anything very significant to say. So I thought I would do it again. No pressure, and no beating myself up.

I have had a lovely couple of afternoons potting up seedling, mostly kale and salad leaves, and then doing some tidying in the yard, rejuvenating old compost with worm compost. Then I turned round and realised that the physocarpus opulifolius was humming with bees and hoverflies, and it made me happy because it's World Bee Day, and I determined to spend more time watching the bees (and other flying creatures) this summer.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

I who have never known men

I am going to get back on track with everything, reading, reviewing, watering the garden, learning Japanese ... I know that's not going to happen but I'll make a start, because the rule says you don't beat yourself up about stuff.

(Sorry, some spoilers as the book is not really about what happens.)

So, 'I who have never known men' by Jacqueline Harpman was the most weird of reads, and seeing from Wiki that the author was a psychoanalyst explains it somewhat. We start in a bunker prison, in which forty women are held in a cage, without explanation, guarded by men who provide for and punish them but who never speak. It has been years, mostly they have forgotten the outside world. The book is narrated by the one younger woman; having been imprisoned as a child, she is the only one with some curiosity and desire to understand what is happening. She begins to measure time using her own heartbeat and becomes obsessed with watching a younger guard. Just when you begin to wonder where the story is going an alarm sounds and the guards abandon them, the keys in the lock. With some trepidation the women make their way up the stairs out of their bunker to find a strange empty world. 

The description of their existence in the cage was so unremittingly hopeless that I found it stressful and anxiety making simply to read; it was claustrophobic and terrifying in the extreme. The powerlessness and hopelessness, and yet they just lived on. And then they emerge into a world in which they are no less trapped and hopeless. The bunker is mysteriously supplied with electricity, food and water, but little else of use. And no information about the world and what became of it. After a time they decide to walk away, taking supplies. They find other bunker prisons, filled with the corpses of prisoners who had been abandoned without hope of escape. But nothing else. A world of isolated prisons. And in the end I read the book as a metaphor for the human condition, and an examination of what gives life meaning and makes us human. The young woman is almost devoid of personality as she has no experiences and no real connection to other human beings; they were forbidden to touch each other and my mind broke at the notion of such a lack of human contact. They struggle to make some kind of new existence outside but there is nothing in the world for them, so they are tied to the resources available at each of the prison bunkers that they find along the way. The young woman has a yearning to keep looking but the older women want to just settle and live, which is what they end up doing. Gradually, over years, the women die off, until she is alone, and she sets off wandering again.

So all you are left with is questions. Are they really any more free outside the prison? Are we, as people, trapped inside the society we have created, free? What is freedom? What makes a human society meaningful? It was all very existential.

Here, they discover the first of many prisons, it gives a good impression of the dispassionate nature of her telling, she is observing, with very little emotional engagement:

"It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, torments, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they'd fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of artificial night, the door was locked and the guards - of course! - hadn't bothered to open it. The women had tried. They'd died of grief, long before hunger killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spend clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible - sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack there steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee to it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck." (p.90-91)

Stay safe. Be kind.

Reflections on Monkey

When Monkey first went to Japan back in March 2022 she started sending us 'pyjama selfies', because the hotels provide pyjamas for guests, such a wonderful idea. This was our first pyjama selfie and Tish said we looked like we had joined a cult. 

While I had the overarching plan for our trip to Shikoku it was Monkey who worked out the details; she knew when the trains were running, she found interesting places to see and knew when they were open, she checked what the local specialities to eat were. She found the garden and the workshops and the boat trip, and shared her wisdom about life in Japan. She made the whole trip a delight. I could not have done it without her and would not have wanted to do it with anyone else.

She has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of her 20s and to see how learning Japanese and going to Japan has transformed her makes me love the place even more. She has grown in confidence and become a real grown-up, but retains her childlike enthusiasm for everything she does:

dancing on the udon dough ... don't ask me why

insisting on putting on the entire set of Samurai armour

ice-cream pretty much every day

crossing the vine bridge

and skimming stones in the river down below

We rode bikes and climbed mountains together

We managed to balance the things that I wanted to do and the things she wanted to do to create the perfect holiday ... but we hardly have any photos of the two of us together.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Reflections on Reflections

In Takamatsu we went to the famous Ritsurin Garden. It strikes you straight away that Japanese gardens are not like British gardens. There is very little in the way of flowering plants, and almost no 'flower beds'. It's all about the trees (see previous post) and the water. It is what is called a 'strolling garden', you walk around and admire the views. It is created to look like beautiful scenery, and the pools are integral to the plan as the reflections of the surrounding trees are all part of the view. Build for the wealthy it was opened to the public in 1875.

The Kikugestu-Tei tea house dates back to the early Edo period. 

The purpose of the tea house is that you sit in the open sided building and take tea and look out at the beautiful scene that has been created for you.

(and here on the Window Research Institute website is a fascinating film about the wonderful ingeniously designed shutters that surround the building and how they open to allow a view in any direction)

It was a complete delight, one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Go to Japan, take tea in the tea house.

Reflections on Mountains

 

Japan is an entire country of mountains. I think the thing that makes Mount Fuji so iconic is that it stands alone, not in amongst loads of other mountains. Everywhere we went on Shikoku we were surrounded by mountains. We drove up them, down them and through them. We stopped and admired them. We gazed in awe.

This was our view from the restaurant the first full day when we stopped for lunch:

So many mountains ... so we just had to climb the biggest one.

Mount Ishizuchi is the tallest mountain in western Japan, just short of 2,000 metres.

A seven minute cable car ride takes you probably about half way.

then you hike up to a shrine, and back down into the dip. This chart shows that point at 1300m, from where you go almost straight up:

This friendly sign give the 'rules for hikers', stuff like taking your litter home and being careful on the mountain:

In places there are these climbing chains that allow you to cut off some of the meandering route (if you're up to the climb):

It was very early April. We did not anticipate how much snow might remain on the mountain. The wooden steps were buried in places:

... until the path disappeared altogether. This is the point at which we admitted defeat and turned back. We were not well equipped, the last cable car was at 5 and we were not going to reach the top:

It was an exhilarating adventure just to look down from what felt like the top of the world.

View from the castle across the city of Matsuyama:

Go for the food ... stay for the mountains.