“Ximen was frolicking with Golden Lotus upstairs. At the sound of Wu Song’s voice he farted with terror and pissed in his pants.”

The Goriest, Raunchiest Chinese Classic of All Time

I’ve been reading Sidney Shapiro’s translation (1980) of the 14th century Chinese classic Outlaws of the Marsh, aka The Water Margin (authorship usually attributed to Shi Nai’an, Luo Guangzhong — author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms — or both). It’s highly readable. In fact, I’m finding it addictive.

It’s full of badass characters and it goes along at a clip. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in places. It’s almost all action and plot, with very little introspection or showy writing (though there was a flowery metaphor concerning how the blood flowed out of someone’s head wound). The narration tells you when it’s leaving a character behind or skipping over something. If you’ve read Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, it has some of that feeling of “an Ancient China that never was” but it feels more like a tall tale than a myth — more Robin Hood than King Arthur. Apart from a legend told at the beginning that frames the story, there hasn’t been any magic in it yet, though chapter titles hint that there might be some further on.

The translation uses modern-sounding terms like “grog shop”, with occasional slight archaisms like “clove him in twain” — perhaps with humorous purpose, or perhaps the original dips into slight archaisms of its own? With the vernacular language and the highly organised and bureaucratised medieval Chinese milieu, which can seem like a modern enough world on its own, it feels contemporary as well as ancient.

I remember reading, as a fan of “Monkey”, a translation of Journey to the West, and being frustrated by its slow pace. If I remember right, the translator had cut out a lot of incidents in order to do justice to the details and style of the text within a volume that could be picked up in one hand. I was a kid, and I was expecting the book to be like the TV show. Outlaws of the Marsh, so far, is not unlike a TV show — episodic and busy. The start has a bit of a patchwork feel, as it skips from character to character, though the framing legend helps to ward off the sense of a shaggy dog story. Then it settles down and concentrates on one guy (whose personality reminds me of Monkey) — or at least, it has been concentrating on him for a couple of chapters now. It looks like it’s going to move on to other characters, but hopefully without jumping around as much as it did at the beginning.

Anyway, I’m pretty hooked on the fun of it all. The Kindle edition that I bought is entirely no-frills. It doesn’t even have page numbers, and there are a few typos and ebook conversion errors, but not enough to be terribly intrusive. But it was only $3.49, and it’s 768 pages. Bargain, mate!

“…she will, when needed, chart the rise and fall of the reputation of someone like Sarah Orne Jewett (who wrote about late 19th-century life in the small towns of coastal Maine), a trajectory that went from being “patronized as the epitome of the little woman writer” in her own time to being touted as a “recovered” feminist pioneer in the 1970s and ’80s, and finally, in the ’90s, to being “excoriated and banished by feminist critics for her endorsement of bourgeois values and her political thought crimes.”

Oh dear.

I swear, if anything of my work survives to be studied after my death, and them as studies it co-opt my stuff for their own political agendas, ignoring the spirit of the work and/or the context of my times, I will haunt their houses with blood dripping from the ceiling, breaking crockery, and hideous apparitions in the night. For starters.

From the book’s first couple of pages: “…a lover of Dunnett Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilisation of which her affectionate dreams had told.”

Seems promising.

It took me until nearly 2/3 of the way through Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes to really start getting into it, perhaps because the callow narrator annoyed the hell out of me.

By the end, I wasn’t sure whether I’d read an ‘ordinary’ novel about human relationships — their messiness contrasted with the formalised beauty of the tea ceremony and its paraphernalia (and the reader perhaps encouraged not to judge too harshly but to see the tenderness in a soap opera-ish human tangle?) and the passing of problems from one generation to the next — or one about two haunted tea bowls.

Both, I assume — though I think that how much the ghost story is real and how much metaphorical is left up to the reader (not just the reader’s judgements, but the reader’s tastes and what they would like the book to be?)

In the story’s early stages the attention paid to the tea utensils seems like comfortable territory for a literary novel. They symbolise this and that. Then the attention starts lingering over them (one in particular) to the point of seeming either precious or self-parodying. Then they kind of take over, which made me reassess my reading of the story.

Kikuji and Fumiko, as personalities, both feel like rather ‘empty vessels’, in contrast to Chikako’s awful but alive and self-aware presence. (She also seems to have a meta-awareness of the story, describing herself as the ‘villain’.) At the end, it’s ambiguous as to whether Fumiko has committed suicide or not — but did she just vanish like a ghost after breaking ‘her’ bowl, and is Kikuji’s vanishing into the park also the vanishing of a ghost? He refers to Fumiko as the one ‘who had brought him to life’.

Chikako uses the word ‘witch’ to describe Mrs Ota. In a novel in which every word seems carefully chosen, surely Kawabata had a reason for using a supernatural word like that?

Her birthmark is the sort of thing that characters obsess over in literary novels. In a folk story, though, it might be the mark of a supernatural being, or a witch. But how wicked a witch was she? Was Chikako a villain in the human story, but on another level something more like an exorcist? (Am I speculating too wildly?) At the very end, to Kikuji she is ‘the woman he took for his enemy’. How telling is that ‘took for’?

Layers, textures, invitations to different readings, and effects (hard to pinpoint in words) created by the layers of readings.

Tsukumogami — ordinary objects which acquire souls after 100 years of service (one of my favourite folkloric ideas: see Wikipedia entry for delightful picture). I don’t think the bowls in Thousand Cranes are tsukumogami, just haunted, but their age is emphasised, making me wonder whether their story has been going on for longer than the period of events in the novel.

It’s a short book, and after not digging the first 2/3 I should probably read it again and see if I can get a better idea of what Kawabata’s doing and how he’s doing it.

Le Grand Meaulnes
The Sheltering Sky
The Thief’s Journal
The God of Small Things
Crash

and many more (plus opera)…

Speaking of cheeking literature, I would love to have this book, Literary Blasphemies, by Ernest Boyd. “The best traditions of English letters seem to present to him an endless and enchanting vista of abstract crockery to be broken with loud pagan snorts and bellows,” says this ancient review.

Shogun – James Clavell
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Doc: A Novel – Mary Doria Russell
Monday or Tuesday – Virginia Woolf
Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Homes – Eds. Charles Prepolec and Jeff Campbell
The Country of the Pointed Firs – Sarah Orne Jewett
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Condottiere: A Knight’s Tale – Edward John Crockett
The Sound of the Mountain – Yasunari Kawabata
Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds – James Hamilton-Paterson
The Outlaws of the Marsh – Luo Guanzhong
The Berlin Novels – Christopher Isherwood

Currently reading The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s, by Peter Doggett; James Clavell’s King Rat, and Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes.

Impulse-buying books way more than I did before the Kindle, that’s for sure.

M’Connachie and J.M.B.: Speeches

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/217735.K_J_Bishop

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1777153.Lautreamont

It doesn’t seem to be available as an e-book. But I might have to buy it anyway.

1954 book by Vance Bourjaily and Tobias Schneebaum, about the baby daughter of hipster parents, with a Reactionary Grandmother. It’s awesome. Illustrator Stephen Kroninger has scans on his Drawger blog. (via 50 Watts)