The Depths of Hamamatsu: On Tomoko Yoshida’s “Dunderhead”

---

Patrick Preziosi is a writer and used book dealer born and based in Brooklyn, New York. His work on literature, music and film has appeared in Bandcamp Daily, Screen Slate, Commonweal, We Jazz, and more. He runs the used bookstore Red Hook Books with his wife, Tanya Chernyak, in Brooklyn.

The release of Dunderhead, a three-story collection from the 92 year old Japanese writer Tomoko Yoshida, is too compact, too self-contained, too––quite literally––small (with a trim size of 7 x 11 centimeters), to signal a larger, overarching reconsideration of contemporary literary translation’s attentiveness to scale, of which the risk of becoming totally circumscribed by page count seems to subtly increase each year. But, an inaugural standalone print collection in English at such an advanced age nevertheless suggests newly symbiotic relationships for authors and their translators; Yoshida, assisted by Naoto Ogino, a neighbor turned fan turned catch-all publisher and agent (but still a neighbor, fan and friend, first and foremost) and translator Adam Sutherland, can now penetrate the English-speaking literati while maintaining a more than reasonable degree of privacy. No book tour, no podcast appearance, just a handsome little volume of brilliant writing that in its scope and perfect, nearly-inhuman execution can dwarf whatever it may sit next to on the shelf.

Yoshida herself still writes, though her relative prolificness slowed in 2003, her output relegated to many of the smaller avant-garde journals she herself, with the help of her husband, the poet Kira Nin-Ichi, edits. If we can belabor a point of comparison here, stretching it for all its worth (and only because Yoshida deserves such laudatory analogies), the private, inveterate micro-scribbler should make readers feel something akin to discovering the troves of writings by Robert Walser, or even Kafka. Novels exist, but they are inextricable from their short-form, jewel-like counterparts.

Yoshida’s father, a military colonel, pulled his family across Japan, Manchuria and even the island of Sakhalin during World War II, before he was eventually detained by Soviet troops, never to be seen by his daughter, then 13, again; while still a teenager, she wrote to one Yukio Mishima, asking to stage one of his plays, and the author agreed; when Mishima served on the Akutagawa Prize jury in 1970, Yoshida was the winner, and she’d win more awards from there, among them the Kawabata Yasunari Literature Prize; she’s tried stints in Tokyo and other “cultural centers” so as to better establish herself in the Japanese publishing industry, but tiring quickly of self-promotion and legalese (according to Sutherland, in a conversation I had with him), she returned time and time again to her native Hamamatsu, Shizuoka; only one story outside of Dunderhead has appeared in English, “Husband in a Box” (translated by Margaret Mitsutani), published in Two Lines Press’ Japanese writers anthology, Unusual Fragments.

Such biography seems to pit a modest and pragmatic sense of self––a mingling of self-renunciation and self-preservation––against the outsized vicissitudes of art and history. It makes sense then that Yoshida’s writing prioritizes condensing events rather than expanding them. The title story, in its 132 (7 x 11 cm) pages, lays varying time periods atop themselves, as relevant details latch onto one another and then proceed to echo from thereon. The two bookends, “A Quiet Summer” and “Beggars’ Valley”, move with a cruel, matter-of-fact linearity, casually dispensing with spiky and discomfiting detail so as to better move the narrative along. Children are whacked upside the head by grocery store employees, armpits are shaved by mysterious neighbors, an impossible amount of crustacean shells––the meat sucked clean––accumulate in a building’s shared hallway. “I glanced quickly at his plate. It was all clean. Good. That meant he’d taken his medicine (a tasteless, odourless poison I’d stolen from the locked cabinet at the pharmacy where I worked the odd shift).”

When I spoke with Sutherland, he shared that even in Japan, Yoshida is not what would be considered a household name. Many of her books are out of print, and her being revitalized in her own language was something of a happy accident when Ogino stumbled across some books of the author’s at the Hamamatsu local library. Going to work on collating these stories into newly edited anthologies (released by his own small publishing house, Keibunkan Shoten), Ogino has led something of a one-man mission to reestablish Yoshida. A surplus of shorter works without a “crowning” novel at the center unfortunately––and unjustly––seems to lessen the chances of sustained accessibility, even in the author’s own language, despite awards won, or high-profile champions such as Mishima, or in the case of Taeko Kono, author of Toddler Hunting and Other Stories (her only English volume), Kenzaburo Oe. Kono’s work resembles that of Yoshida’s, as she also treated her stories as steam-valves for repressed transgressions. And like Yoshida, Kono, born in 1926, also spent her young adult years under the auspices of the Japanese military, with stints in a munitions factory at 15.

The war, for both authors, is approached from the periphery, struggling towards an inscrutable center, a black-hole of abstracted depravity and violence, like the ominous naval pageantry of Kono’s “Full Tide”, or, in the story “Dunderhead,” a swirl of petty-gangster memories of pre- and post-repatriation Manchuria. In a windblown Hamamatsu, a middle-aged man named Mokuhei treks across the backroads of his neighborhood to check on his onetime black-marketeer “partner” (a term Mokuhei balks it), the older Nakase, who is rumored to be in ill health.

Along the way he thinks back on their time between Manchuria and Japan, the violence wrought by Nakase that Mokuhei was witness to, and consequently feels his age:

These days, he often sensed black specks floating at the edge of his vision. Stare at anything white, and there they were: not so much black specks as squashed mosquitoes or bits of lint gliding across the corners of his eyes. As for the ringing in his ears, he didn’t mind that so much. He heard it louder at night than in the day: a chorus of countless crickets swelling beneath his pillow. He had a memory of his father turning to him one winter’s evening when he was still a child and whispering, Listen, the crickets are chirping, and him not being able to hear a damn thing.

Nakase himself suffers from a “gammy leg,” a suppurating wound that’s left a never healed-over hole. There’s no indication of any past criminal glory, though; the breakdown of the physical body isn’t contrasted with any sort of interpersonal largesse between the two men, but rather rough and fruitless and exhausting work, enlivened only by obligatory bloodshed. The best Mokuhei can say about Nakase is that, at one point of relative comfort, he was, “greasy and overweight.” So why does Mokuhei decide he wants to see Nakase again?

The Hamamatsu landscape perhaps offers an answer. In all three stories, Yoshida writes of her town as one of ugly concrete eruptions in forbidding swaths of nature that vacillates between smothering heat and intense cold. While discussing Hamatatsu dialect with Sutherland, he explained that it was the sort of inflection that is undoubtedly present, but still abstracted enough to impede a 1:1 translational decision. To convey these working class speech patterns in English, Sutherland turned to Harold Pinter, an apt comparison, as the playwright’s hardscrabble bleakness and peripheral apocalypses––which he also shared with those like J.G. Ballard, Derek Raymond, and more––finds an analogue in Yoshida. The large empty lots, the endless corrugated iron fences, abandoned vehicles filled with scrap metal and bales of cotton, the wandering, seemingly parentless children, dredge up fractured imagery that could belong both to the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fallout from postwar repatriation (or lack thereof) that binds the two men of “Dunderhead.” This sudden influx of nightmarishness practically cracks the story open from within,

The thin sheets were rusting from the bottom up, the corrosion streaking upwards in lines that, for a moment, reminded him of tongues of flame. Not just flame. In between, in places where the rust blistered like bark, ready to peel and crumble, other shapes appeared. Something wounded and unmoving, hunched. A headless bird. People tied up, black fluid trickling from hollow eye sockets, merging with the flames. A woman writhing as she crawled, clutching a lump of rotten meat to her chest. The meat glimmering a silver-grey. That was all the flies. The child in her arms a half-melted mess…Onwards people marched, tossing things aside, urinating and defecating as they went, anything to avoid falling behind…To their rear, the flames, and out in front, yellow soil and yellow grass stretching all the way to sky. He hadn’t felt the urge to vomit.

A similar climax, an involuntary outpouring of emotion and memory occurs when the two men finally meet in the present day of the story. The sins of the past overlap with the willful amnesia of the present; it’s almost as if the past is taking on more solidity, as the present feels to be decaying backwards. Published in 1977, “Dunderhead” follows the Japan-China Joint Communique––a formal renewal of diplomatic relations following WWII––by five years, and stands as one of the greatest pieces of short fiction of the 20th century.

•

That isn’t to slight the other two stories included. “A Quiet Summer” links together decisions both passive and malicious made by its narrator, with the first-person voice obscuring events even if––or because––it’s so plainspoken. “Beggar’s Valley” reprises the first-person, conversational idiom of the first story, though now with a sneakier sense of  control, events being rearranged as the narrator sees fit, not unlike the structure of “Dunderhead”.

Threading the three stories together is the precarity of lower-class living, where the boundary between communal and personal space is often blurred, if it even exists. The boarding house bathroom of “A Quiet Summer,” the site of the aforementioned non-consensual armpit shaving, isn’t, “…cleaned yet, by the looks of things: soap crumbs and bits of tissue littered the changing room floor, and there was a strong odour of limescale. There were no windows, so I had to make do with the light coming from the bathroom proper.” Although it’s only the narrator herself present at this moment, the presence of other tenants, hemmed in by one another, manifests itself in the bathroom detritus and its paltry facilities. And in “Dunderhead,” Mokuhei and Nakase are practically burrowing back into Hamamatsu, making their beds in storage rooms or hallways.

Then there’s “Beggars’ Valley,” wherein the narrator Tokuko Kani (“That’s right, Kani: as in the word for ‘crab,’ same kanji character and all. Go ahead and laugh.”) works at a cylinder factory, which is depersonalizing for just how unremarkable it is. There’s no real sense of worker drama nor intense physical strain; the work is embodied only by the anonymous final product. “A cylinder is something that goes on a motorbike, so they tell me. They’re silver, with a shiny gleam to them.” Anything for Kani not to resemble her mother, who’s a traveling merchant, already looking 60 at 45.

This final story offers a concise image of the sliding-scale of impoverishment that Yoshida often applies to her work, how signifiers of societal security are merely nominal, more often than not; a home and a job and a spouse don’t necessarily account for much. Kani uses her “paltry pay packet” to rent a room suspended over a bamboo grove, living in an extension tacked on by her landlord. From her south-facing window, Kani peers down into the swath of grass that leads up to the local railway. Seemingly overnight, the eponymous squatters’ camp pops up in the valley below.

Yoshida nests layers of voyeurism in these stories, bringing forth the despairing circumstances of interpenetrating layers of poverty. Her use of atavistic and animalistic imagery––like the crabs and other shellfish of “Beggars’ Valley”––furnishes the prickly sensation of various, teeming lives all collected atop one another, with little recourse for privacy or independence. Kani’s view allows her to timestamp the arrival of the small community. “Until recently the clearing was always empty, but then, about a month ago, a dozen or so people started living there. One morning I looked out my window to see four new ‘houses’: bagworm-cocoon-like shanty things hastily cobbled together out of wooden planks and sheets of iron.” The insertion of “cocoon” suggests less a profound evolution than another permutation of transience.

Kani tracks an escalating interfamilial drama that happens to mirror her own way-of-life, even if she herself doesn’t acknowledge the symbolic similarities. When  she comes face-to-face with one of those “shanty things”, it’s as if she’s willfully preventing herself from crossing the threshold to identification. “Even with the door open, it was too dark for me to make out anything inside. Just once, as I sat watching, I caught the glimpse of the head of a figure hurling something outside from the doorway.” Clapboard cabins and plastic sheet huts emerge overnight just as quickly as they disappear. By the end of the story, Kani’s immediate nextdoor neighbors similarly seem to vanish into thin air.

Yoshida’s characters aren’t exactly proud to be downtrodden, though there’s a projected atmosphere of thrifty contentment, which occasionally mutates into a gleeful anarchism, enacted modestly, on an interpersonal level (like the powdered poison from “A Quiet Summer”). The three stories may bring to mind the “proud beggars” of Albert Cossery, though Yoshida doesn’t write with his Anglo-Saxon (by way of Egypt) romantic noblesse. She neither fetishizes nor elevates, both of which would be all the more condescending, especially if compared to what she achieves in Dunderhead.

But Mokuhei should have the last word: “Once-in-a-lifetime experience. Oh, that’s good. Experience. That’s got legs, that does. Eh? Gotta use the old noggin, yeah? Well, you don’t, I suppose. You just worry about being dead.”