Villain by Shuichi Yoshida

Shuichi Yoshida was born 14 September 1968 in Nagasaki and during his forty odd years of life has won the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers, the Akutagawa Prize  (nominated 5 times), Yamamoto Prize, the Osaragi Jiro Prize and the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, in fact in Japan he is perceived as a crossover writer, winning both popular and literary prizes. He is the author of nine books and has had some of his short stories adapted for Japanese television, yet Villain is his first book to be translated into English, which was long listed in this years Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Ostensibly, this is a book about the murder of Insurance salesgirl Yoshino Ishibashi, who is found dead at Mitsue pass, a spooky spot known to be the home of ghosts, a place to be avoided if at all possible. Yoshino is the daughter of a men's hairdresser, who’s clientele is predominantly boys and old men, whilst her age group tend to leave the suburbs & travel to the city for their hair treatment. Having left home at the first opportunity, Yoshino’s life is a mix of work & dating, mainly through an online dating site. She boasts to her girlfriends about her boyfriends, but things aren’t that simple, some are boyfriends, some it turns out are clients, although the book doesn’t explicitly say she’s a prostitute, the lines tend to get fuzzy as she makes no distinction between a date and those that pay for her services. It’s through the dating service that she arranges to meet Yuichi Shimizuon, a construction worker, for the second time, having met before in a love hotel. The next day her strangled body is found on the Mitsuse pass.
Yuichi isn’t the only suspect in this crime, Keigo Masui is also suspected, as the victim had claimed they were lovers and it was him she was meeting on that fateful night and he has disappeared. Whilst this is all happening, Yuichi meets another online date & as things hot up they go on the run…….



Although this book is titled Villain, the title is slightly misleading, yes there is a murder and a murderer, but what this book actually does is explore the minutiae of all the lives in and around the crime, we learn of the events that led up to that point in time and follow several paths after the fact. This book explores the generation gap, the dichotomy between traditional and modern Japan, it asks questions about identity, culture & the impact of technology on our lives. This tale is less about villains, than it is about alienation in  modern Japan, less about the murder, than it is about than the search for companionship, whether that’s some fumbled tryst in a love hotel or something deeper. Again, yes there’s a murder and it’s a centre, a black hole around which everything turns, yes there’s a villain, but is it only the murderer?


Villain is the type of thriller that gives the genre a great name, it’s intelligent, thought provoking, it asks questions that are pertinent to the society lived in, whilst doing so in a manner that doesn’t give you a list of pat, generic answers, leaving you to ponder any answers for yourself.


The translator, Philip Gabriel is professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona. He has translated works by Kenzabur­ô Ôe, Senji Kuroi, Akira Yoshimura, Masahiko Shimada, Natsuo Kirino, and Haruki Murakami, including Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore; Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (co-translator); Sputnik Sweetheart; and South of the Border, West of the Sun. Gabriel is a recipient of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2006), and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for Translation of Japanese Literature (2001).

Shuichi Yoshida(Wiki)
Shuichi Yoshida (publishers)
Phillip Gabriel(Wiki)
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011 

MARJANE SATRAPI

    PERSEPOLIS The Story of a Childhood.      

Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s self portrait of daily life in Iran from the age of six until the age of fourteen, covering the period that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic revolution, through to Iran/Iraq war, highlighting the devastating effect it had on the country & its people. We see this through the eyes of  Marjane an intelligent and outspoken child of committed Marxists ("caviar leftists"), and the granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors. Drawn in black and white, the graphic novel found great popularity following it’s release, and was translated into several languages. The English edition was translated by Blake Ferris and Satrapi's husband, Mattias Ripa.



To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I would like this book, my first graphic novel & only picked as an experiment as to whether I’d like such books. As I child I loved comics, read all the usual ones, but I grew up and left such childish things behind (or so I thought). Recently, I’ve seen a lot of Graphic Novels & started to become intrigued by some of them, so after a quick check through the online library I saw this one (having seen the film reviewed on The Culture Show awhile ago).
And yet I loved it, raced through it like an Olympic athlete on banned substances, ruined my literary elitism amongst my work colleagues by going on about “some comic book” instead of the latest translated epic thousand page no one’s ever going to read book, that I normally carry like some badge of office. Loved the stark black and white imagery, the simplicity of the drawings, Loved the humour, the irony, the way the simple everyday reality was put across.


This child's eye view of dethroned Emperors, state sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn, as she does, the history of this fascinating and closed country. Persepolis is a story about growing up and at the same time a reminder of the price paid by the individual during times of war and political oppression. This is a book of minor revolutions, small acts of rebellions, hidden beneath a regime known only for its rigid dogma and fundamentalism.

Marjane Satrapi(wikipedia)
Publishers
An Interview with Marjane Satrapi(bookSlut)

The makings of you - Nii Ayikwei Parkes.

An Introduction


“Almost impossible to do; describing the makings of you” – Curtis Mayfield

You will tell no one
of the Christmas day when you sat
alone in your miniscule studio,
raised a forkful of sautéed potato
to your lips, and closed your eyes;

how savouring that mouthful of electric heat
and some farmer’s zealous labour, followed
by two hours of reading Neruda and Li-Young
Lee, was your only way of remembering
that life’s sack carries pleasure as well as pain.


At that dinner next week you will tell
nothing of how vacuous you felt, nor
will you mention the time when tortured
by your girlfriend’s inability to trust you
you drank cheap whiskey and clawed your walls


while singing along to Curtis Mayfield’s
the makings of you, as though the song’s lush
beauty would save you from depression.
No, you will tell jokes and smile and make
predictably witty and charming comments;

you will tell no one of the day when,
as an ashy-kneed eleven-year-old boy
in boarding school, you surreptitiously
sat on the concrete steps of your classroom
block to pick up a groundnut you had spotted


earlier, cleaned it against your brown shorts
and slipped it in your mouth where you let it sit
for an instant, before you chewed it for six slow
minutes, so you could fool your own stomach
into thinking that life was better than it was.


All these things that make you the man
that you are, you tuck beneath your dark
skin and never share: so nobody really knows
you, although most people say they like you
because of your enigmatic smile.

Biography

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer of poetry, prose and articles, and has published 3 poetry chapbooks: eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999); M is for Madrigal (2004), a selection of seven jazz poems; and shorter (2005), published to raise money for a writers' fund in Ghana. His is also the Senior Editor at flipped eye publishing, and a contributor to many literary magazines and journals, including Wasafiri, Poetry News, The New Writer, Storyteller Magazine, The Liberal, Mechanics Institute Review and Sable. Nii co-edited the short story anthologies, Tell Tales: Volume 1 (2004), with Courttia Newland; and x-24: unclassified (2007), with Tash Aw.


An experienced performer of his work he has appeared all over the world, including at NuYorican, New York; The Royal Festival Hall, London; and Java, Paris, and often leads writing and performance workshops. In 2002, he completed a six-week tour of the US, and he runs the African Writers' Evening series at the Poetry Cafe, in Covent Garden, London. He has been poet in residence at the Poetry Cafe, associate writer in residence for BBC Radio 3, and is writer in residence at California State University in 2007. His poem, 'Tin Roof', was selected for the 'Poems on the Underground' initiative.


His first novel, Tail of the Blue Bird (2009), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best First Book). In the same year, a short story, 'Socks Ball', was highly commended in the Caine Prize for African Writing and he became Online Writer in Residence for Booktrust.


His latest books are ballast: a remix (2009), a collection of poetry shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award; and The Makings of You (2010).


I first came across Nii’s work through a review of his first novel on Winstonsdad’s blog, and although the book interested me, I was excited by the spoken word performances mentioned, I have since ordered his novel because I fell in love with the beauty of his words.


I Would also like to thank Nii, for allowing me to use his biographical notes, so as I could write this piece .


Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Nii Ayikwei Parkes(Wiki)
Nii Ayikwei Parkes (Peepal Tree Press)
Contemporary Writers
A Conversation with Nii Ayikwei Parkes at,
 ImageNations (Promoting African Literature)

pomes ALL SIZES

@pomesallsizes

If you have a Poem/ Poet, you admire please introduce them to me.

All Copyrights are with the Writer/Poet

A Void (La Disparition)–Georges Perec

A Lipogrammatic Synopsis ---- which with artful constraint will focus savor, nay passion and by addition of vigorous acuity and highbrow purport, may transplant mirth as though a frolicking Pan full of ambrosial liquor.

As his country is torn apart by social and political anarchy, Anton Vowl, known capricious kook and insomniac, is missing. Ransacking his Paris accommodation (turning all up and down, all in & out), his top, top pals scour his diary for hints to his location. At first look, nothing is in plain sight, all is myopic, but Vowl's inclination for word play, notably  for "lipograms" (compositions in which a particular symbol, pictograph or syllabary is A.W.O.L.) is commonly known. But as his chums start to work out Vowl's word labyrinth’s, tracking through various trails amongst Vowl’s data, his companions start to go missing, 1 by1 by 1, and with  mystifying Fortuna. Through this story you and I follow Vowl’s cohorts, trailing (magnifying glass in hand)  through a Gordian knot of distractions, convolutions & fog bound motifs, forming a Rubics squarish form of a madcap roaming, with foul play and slayings a constant quandary and a garishly Faustian conclusion. A Void is a philosophical whodunit, a bloodhound, P.I., a shoofly  story, chock-full of plots and unfolding's, of trails in pursuit of pathways, it’s as though Dr Watson’s brainy companion was caught running through a phantasmagoric vista, with  brushwork by Miró * or his kind .

All of which affords this books author occasion to display his virtuosity as a lingual magician, acrobat, and lugubrious buffoon, a mad calculus doctor piling word upon word in a foolish, rash, cloud-soaring ziggurat, a monstrous burj of Babil.

It is also a flagitious  garrulous  stunt: a 280 odd folio fiction that on no occasion  puts to work a  particular symbol that falls twixt D and F.  Adair's translation, is also mind-bogglingly astounding  and full of dark art, it also constricts it’s wording choosing to follow its original  authors lipogrammatic constraint and in doing so fashions a book that has no ilk, no comparisons, that  lights its own trail with  lamps and flash bangs, prior to skipping, dancing, tripping, prancing, 1 instant a figurant or Prima, anon a hippopotamus, an aardvark. A non-tabloid with an autonym such as “Chrono”  broadcast this summary  "a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humour, pathos, and loss.".

                                                  

------------------------------------------------------------

The Biography

Georges Perec was the only child of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz – Polish Jews who emigrated to France in the 1920s, moving to Belleville,  a working class district of Paris. Perec’s father  died in 1940, as an enlisted soldier in the French army and his mother perished in a concentration camp, probably in Auschwitz. From 1942 he was raised by his paternal aunt Esther and her husband David Bienenfeld, a successful pearl trader and was officially adopted by them in 1945. After graduating from a boarding school, Perec went on to study history and sociology at the Sorbonne and started writing reviews and essays for the Nouvelle Revue Française and Les Lettres Nouvelles. Between 1958 – 59 he served in the army, on discharge he married  Paulette Petras and spent a few years in Tunis, working as an archivist at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory attached to the Hospital Saint-Antoine where  he remained until his literary activity allowed him to support himself financially. He died of cancer at the age of forty-five in 1982.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965. His most famous novel, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual), was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as "novels”.

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Details

A Void is Gilbert Adair’s translation of the original French novel La Disparition (The Disappearance) by Georges Perec, written in 1969 as a  lipogrammatic novel, it is written in its entirety without the letter E, following Oulipo constraints. Georges Perec was a member of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), in English, Workshop of potential literature, a Paris-based group of writers founded by Raymond Queneau in 1960. Oulipo attempts to expand literature by the use of formal patterns from other domains such as mathematics, logic or chess, these constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspirations. Perec himself has used palindromes, lipograms & the  Knight's Tour .

By choosing this constraint you deprive yourself with one essential article “The” and approximately two thirds of the English language, In French Perec’s native language the situation is even worse, with only around an eighth of the vocabulary left  for use

Warren Motte, writing an article on Perec in the literary magazine Context, interprets the themes of the book as follows.

"The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of écriture ["writing"]."

“In French, the phrase "sans e" ("without e") sounds very much like "sans eux" ("without them"), another encrypted reference to loss”

In the afterword of this book Georges Perec, states

“But I ought admit right away that its origin was totally haphazard, touch and go, a flip of a coin. It all got out of hand with a companion calling my bluff (I said I could do it, this companion said I could not); and I should admit, too, that so inauspiciously was that launching pad, I had no inkling at all that, as an acorn contains an oak, anything solid would grow out of it. Initially I found such a constraint faintly  amusing , if that; but I stuck to my guns. At which point, finding that it took my imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and byways”.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

An Opinion

Georges Perec goes on to say that he couldn’t stop thinking about it to the detriment of all his other projects, now in my small way I came to understand this obsession, whilst writing the synopsis and final conclusion although they only total 500  words it also became all absorbing, left me constantly working out  word combinations,waking from dreams with half remembered solutions, possible replacement for my usual language choices, scouring dictionaries, thesauruses etc., trying to find the right words to convey the idea of the tale and my joyous love of it. Georges Perec is seen as a literary experimentalist, who was intrigued by the question of form, he once suggested that his work was dominated by four major themes “a passion for the apparently trivial details of everyday life, an impulse toward confession and autobiography, a will toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories” This book is a fantastic, capricious, incredible, wonderful, hallucinatory, delight, it made me think, it made me laugh, really laugh.

                                                                                                                                                      

A Final Conclusion - In which with sly confabulation and brash hubbub, I solicit your  appraisal.

Now that my cunning articulation has put this locution/opinion within thy company, I’m surmising a grin with stunning alacrity has burst upon your physiognomy, if this is so, if my ruminations upon said book bring forth a liking, a passion, nay an anxious torrid compulsion to own this fantabulous work, may I humbly but with burning ardour applaud your  scholarly, highbrow smart thinking and  acclaim your accord, thus with jovial  thanks I go forth and part your  auspicious company.

Thanks Parrish.

I read this book in tandem with Gina Choe At  Gina Choe blogs books in translation and she has written a fantastic post on this book, she also has a bit of an Oulipo mania, so has a wealth of other information on this fascinating subject. Please take the time and check  her site out.

Georges Perec(wiki)

OULIPO

Georges perec(Scriptorium)

OULIPO(UK)

* Joan Miró

Shall I compare Thee to a wee song ( Literary Blog Hop: July 7-10)

The ladies of the blue bookcase have chosen a fantastic question for this hop & one that allows me to write about a favourite subject – Poetry,  the question is -
“What is one of your favourite literary devices? Why do you like it? Provide a definition and an awesome example.”
Answer – Sonnet.
The Sonnet is a form of poetry of European origin, particularly Great Britain and Italy. By the thirteenth century had formalised into a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter with a prescribed rhyme scheme, the term comes from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto both meaning little song, or little sound and  traditionally its subject matter was love. There are three variations most commonly found in English, although there are others occasionally seen.

1• The English or Shakespearean Sonnet: a style of sonnet as  used by …. Shakespeare, Although it’s  named after Bill Shakespeare, this is merely due to the fact that he is considered its most famous practitioner and not due him introducing it. This was probably Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, though his were chiefly translations of Petrarch (more of him later) and it was down to  the Earl of Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter and its structural division into quatrains, that has come to characterizes the typical English sonnet, with its rhyme scheme of - abab cdcd efef gg

Sonnet 18 (Part of the Fair Youth sequence).

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date,

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare.


2•  Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet: a form of sonnet created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian school, it was rediscovered by Guittone d'Arezzo he took it to Tuscany, founding the Neo – Sicilian School, other Italians Poets that favoured this style was Dante Alighieri & Guido Cavalcanti. But the reason it’s known in English is down to Petrarca, commonly known in English as Petrarch -an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often referred to as the "Father of Humanism. This style was also used by the likes of John Milton, Thomas Gray,William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the early twentieth-century American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay also wrote most of her sonnets using this form. Its rhyme scheme is - abbaabba cdecde  or  cdcdcd

Number 33 (Sonnets from the Portuguese)

Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear

The name I used to run at, when a child,

From innocent play, and leave the cow-slips piled,

To glance up in some face that proved me dear

With the look of its eyes. I miss the clear

Fond voices which, being drawn and reconciled

Into the music of Heaven's undefiled,

Call me no longer. Silence on the bier,

While I call God--call God!--So let thy mouth

Be heir to those who are now exanimate.

Gather the north flowers to complete the south,

And catch the early love up in the late.

Yes, call me by that name,--and I, in truth,

With the same heart, will answer and not wait.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.


3•  Spenserian Sonnet is a variant of the Shakespearean form in which the quatrains are linked with a chain or interlocked rhyme scheme, abab bcbc cdcd ee.
This was named after Edmund Spenser the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and then followed by a couplet.


Our Spring's Release


Until these snow drenched groves step out from shade,
Where deeper cast they find descent to dread,
The earth, from red to white, whose winds have made
Like near a tomb, shall lie while warmth lies dead.
And sleeping blooms ere lost will find their bed,
Where hopes of yearned and yet yearned love still lay,
And rested love may stir to raise her head
So soon recall her place and fly away.
These winds will never heal by Winter's sway,
But call the sun to beg for her bright hand,
That flowers laugh aloud while rivers play,
And life may soon make claim to lifeless land.
    So longing light the world grows darker then -
    But destined to release our Spring again...
David Zvekic



Apart from these well known forms there are others, like the Occitan of which the sole confirmed surviving sonnet in the Occitan language is  dated to 1284, and is conserved only in a troubadour manuscript. also there’s Caudate sonnet, Curtal sonnet, Pushkin sonnet, and the Brazilian sonnet and With the advent of free verse, the sonnet  has become to be seen as somewhat old-fashioned, although this has not stopped it being used by poets such as Wilfred Owen, John Berryman, George Meredith, Edwin Morgan, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, George Sterling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico García Lorca, E.E. Cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Joan Brossa, Vikram Seth, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jan Kal, Ernest Hilbert, Kim Addonizio, and Seamus Heaney

Just to finish this post I thought I would  mention The Sonnet Sequence, a series of sonnets in which there is a discernable unifying theme, while each
retains its own structural independence. All of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, were part of a sequence,

Sonnet (from 50 Sonnets)

Not if you crawled from there to here, you hear?

Not if you begged me, on your bleeding Knees.

Not if you lay exhausted at my door,

and pleaded with me for a chance.

Not if you wept (am I making this clear?)

or found a thousand different words for “Please”

ten thousand for “I’m sorry”, I’d ignore

you so sublimely; every new advance

would meet with such complete indifference.

Not if you promised me fidelity.

not if you meant it. What impertinence,

then, is this voice that murmurs, “ What if he

didn’t? That isn’t his line of attack.

What if he simply grinned, and said, I’m back?”

Eleanor Brown.

pomes ALL SIZES

If you have a Poem/ Poet, you admire please introduce them to me.

James Joyce

Giacomo Joyce.

Giacomo Joyce is the link connecting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, it pivots between the end of one and the beginning of the second. It is a love poem that is never recited and an attempt by Joyce at the sentimental education of a dark lady, and at the same time this is also his farewell to one phase of his life, whilst at the same time exploring a new form of imaginative expression. It was written in Trieste, possibly around July/August 1914 and was left there by Joyce, later being rescued by his brother Stanislaus, after it was acquired by an anonymous collector

 “My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking

through a quagmire.

 

Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul

and fair, on which my shame shall glow for ever. Quiet

and cold and pure fingers. Have they never erred?

  Her body has no smell: an odourless flower.

                                       

                                                   On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark

                                          languor-flooded eyes: weariness.”

 

Giacomo is a beautifully written episode of autofiction, covering an illicit love affair he had in Trieste, it was never published during his lifetime because of potential repercussions.

This  book is a short story of 16 pages, it’s a fragment of a dream, it’s a series of sketches, each a love note, a promise, a wish. This book is poetry where desire is the omnipresent deity. But this is desire as reminiscence of past love and of a lost past.

“ Before his death Joyce said he would write something very simple and very short, he was thinking perhaps of how he had solidified the small fragile, transitory perfection of his Triestine pupil into the small, fragile enduring perfection of Giacomo Joyce”

The copy of this book that I have, has an introduction by Richard Ellmann,  facsimiles of the notebook pages (16 page story/poem) & notes on the work

. Giacomo" is the Italian form of the author's forename, James

James Joyce(Wiki)

Richard Ellmann(Wiki)

James Joyce(Centre)

Richard Ellmann(Music in the…)