I recently read an article that outlined a few modern Japanese masters for fans of Murakami, and I was delighted to find two very short pieces with a gorgeous emotional impact that I read back-to-back. They just so happened to be perfect for sequential reading as they were both deeply similar in tone, theme, and character.
Mieko Kawakami’s HEAVEN was about a young friendship between two lonely, ugly kids and their blossoming infatuation with one another as they discover they aren’t alone in their misery of being relentlessly bullied by their classmates. I enjoyed the book for most of it but was pretty noncommital until the violent beauty of the ending of the piece that really blossomed the buildup of their friendship, meandering thoughts on beauty, and the horror of nihilism in interpersonal adolescence and sexuality. It is somewhat of a difficult book to describe, but the payoff at the end is remarkably Eastern in its internality and character interactions. A quick read that satisfies, presenting an accurate description of the loneliness and despair of being young and alone in the face of the brutal confines of school and the mobbing heard instincts of some youth to be true villains with no motivation but to humiliate and own another human being.
Meanwhile, Yukio Mishima’s STAR is a different meditation on youth that springs from the collective ownership over the youth of teenage heartthrobs. Our main character in this book is a newly minted young movie star who navigates a relationship with his assistant while avoiding the leering mob mentality of the fangirls that swarm every moment he is outside. This is another meditation on the meaning of being perfect and what beauty is in a different context – where his assistant is not particularly pretty, but is a pure person, while costars are gorgeous and can’t stand to be alive, instead performing on the verge of an overdose at every turn. Directions on how to be the character he is meant to be are contrasted with the very real demands of who he is as a human being and what the public want, and it is all under the guise of his fleeting popularity and the specter that at any moment it will be taken away by the simple act of getting older. Another short novel that presents a particularly Japanese lens on child stardom, the blurred lines in connecting with others while being a public and private persona, and the meaning of how we spend what is left of our days, Mishima captures the muted psychological interiority with laser-focused genuineness.
While both books and authors are different in their own ways, they are thematically tied with a thread that made reading them alongside one another a great exercise in the tormented world of Japanese youth awakening to a new self-consciousness. Absolutely for fans of Murakami, Shinkai, Miyazaki, Kurosawa, and others who enjoy the distinct cultural interiority that Japanese and other Eastern art provide in unique, character-driven stories.
Photo by Alan Light, courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Garrett Zecker 