Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and An Artist of the Floating World and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle both touch on Japan's ambivalence about its past: feelings of guilt about the country's strident military history coexist with a nostalgic longing for a time when a distinct cultural identity had not yet been subsumed into a globalised world based on the Western model.
(As an allegory for primitive impulses clashing with the tenuous securities of modern life, the image of Godzilla weaving his way around Tokyo's skyscrapers is as striking as that of King Kong thumping his chest after scaling the Empire State Building.) A not-very-subtle example is the Godzilla story, one of Japan's best-known contributions to 20th-century paranoia, wherein radiation from atom bombs results in the birth of a giant primordial lizard that then sets about wreaking vengeance on a metropolis. It's a mistake, of course, to generalise too much about a national character, but a cursory look at Japanese pop culture in the last century suggest the ghosts of a complex past constantly shifting beneath the orderly modern face of the country. One quality that runs through much of the Japanese fiction I’ve recently read is the juxtaposing of old-world mysticism with the banality of modern-day existence: the present in perpetual conflict with the past.
As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Kazuo Ishiguro fan – I know he can’t really be called a Japanese writer (he’s lived in Britain since the age of five), but some of his work (notably The Unconsoled and A Pale View of Hills, my two favourites among his books) blurs the border between the real world and a dream-world in a way that I’ve now come to associate with much of Japanese writing. It’s difficult to track exactly how one gravitates towards certain types of writing over a period of time (in some cases it’s a deliberate seeking out of genres/distinct writing styles, in others it’s a subconscious process, or even just serendipity), but it occurs to me that I’ve developed a certain affinity for Japanese fiction of late, and for some of the themes that run through it.
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