the melancholy of the tennis boy–more facts only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

Continuing with last week’s Murakami Ryû obsession, I came across something you don’t see often enough with US authors–cocktails named after their works! Something to strive for with the next great American novel. The conceit here is that Murakami’s late night TV blab-show, “Ryû’s Bar,” generated the drinks. Above, we have the Almost Transparent Blue.

Fair enough, very drinky sounding. Let’s see what’s in it: 15 ml eau de vie de framboise, 1 t of green mint, 60 ml of champagne. Seems a bit classy for all those orgy scenes, but maybe Ryû is just a cooler customer than I, and lord knows blue is not a naturally-occurring food color. (Here I’m not getting bent out of shape about orgies, but referring to the clichéd, un-humanish style of Murakami’s prose with the ‘unnatural label. And let’s not even ask about the draft version of this drink, shall we, as I mentioned here.)

What’s next? Well, cutting to the chase, a gin drink, the “melancholy of the Tennis Boy.” I guess the tennis boy is an old-school rummy. Also, this is the cougar drink of choice, say the jodhpurs below, when shaken, not stirred. Why not help him out by setting him up with some drinky stripes. His other ingredients include 1 t of green mint (liqueur, I am beginning to surmise), 10 ml of Pernod, 60 ml of soda.

And lastly–skipping, sadly over such drinky marvels as the “69″ and the “War on the Other Side of the Ocean,” we will truly know when we have bought the fascist farm when we all drink three squares of this, the “Love and Illusion in a Time of Fascism.” Mind you, this is a two-volume novel about survivalist high tech operators in the Arctic Circle in the time of millennial hunter and gatherers, that reads like the dry parts of the Economist. No psychology whatsoevah.

In case you are wondering, after the apocalypse, we will be drinking single malt Laphroaig Scotch and dark beer combos, 30 and 45 ml, respectively.

facts that only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

The train-wrecky prose of Murakami Ryû is known for many things. Murakami published a novel, called Almost Transparent Blue… (『限りなく、透明に近いブルー』）in 1976, and won the big-ticket lit prize of the time, the Akutagawa prize. Critics rumbled, in part for thematic reasons, because they objected to the sex-drugs-rock’n'-roll description of a bunch of decadent youth living in a group house near a US Army base. A more interesting critique was launched by neo-con critic Etô Jun. Soon after, he quit writing reviews after 20 years, in large part because of the fatal drift he felt subculture narrative was succumbing to.

Etô’s really interesting work had to do with Occupation censorship policies, and how the linguistic spaces of postwar Japan continued to harbor Occupants well after the official end of the Occupation in 1952. Murakami was one of his chief antagonists because he found that Murakami did not “express” anything new, merely reflected the “realities” of base culture, and forms of dependency invested in it . This impression was fortified by Murakami’s own camera-style, or as I like to think, cliché-style, realism.

Here is the opening passage:

It wasn’t the sound of an airplane. The buzz was somewhere behind my ear. Smaller than a fly, it circled for a moment before my eyes, then disappeared into a dark corner of the room.

On the round white tabletop reflecting the ceiling light was an ashtray made of glass. A long, thin, lipstick-smeared cigarette smoldered in it. Near the edge of the table stood a pear-shaped wine-bottle, with a picture on its label of a blonde woman, her mouth full of grapes from the bunch she held in her hand. Red light from the ceiling trembled on the surface of the wine in a glass. The ends of the table legs disappeared into the thick pile of the rug. Opposite me was a large dressing table. The back of the woman sitting at it was moist with sweat. She stretched out her leg and rolled off a black stocking.

Despite the succulent marbling of the “blonde woman’s” mouthful of grapes, this image remains in the realm of the neo-pinup, certainly an Occupation leftover. (Parenthetically, I have always liked André Bazin’s essay ‘The Entomology of a Pinup Girl’ as a good breakdown of this genre of image.) The book is most “controversial” in a thematic sense because of the orgy scenes, and because most of the orgy scenes feature Japanese women, African American men, and the narrator, who looks on, capturing the events in the cliché’d narrative fashion I think you can see above. It captures, like a camera shutter in short intervals of time. The organization of the scene is spatial, rather than narrative, meaning an interpretive thread based on an internal, psychologically linked set of associations, one that would give insight into a volumetric space of character psychology.

What I think interesting here is two things, in terms of how image and character work. Etô’s critique of literary dependency is definitely at play. The characters seem to reproduce all sorts of idealized base-based ideas of transgression. A Japanese critic who had his first life as an Americanist, Karatani Kôjin, called the work a ‘Basically base novel, based mainly on the base.” It is a decadent novel, with a saccharine ending, in the form of a frame ending, a nostalgic letter to the women depicted above rolling off a black stocking (in summertime, Southern Japan, mind you). It is also interesting because of the headless nature of character.

The other 2 novelists who are big at the time (putting aside all those even who are merely compelling or interesting and not big) are preoccupied with psychological space–the kind of 3-D space that exists between your ears. Murakami Haruki is all about ears. His heads open up into volumetric universes whose spaces are explored through genre, and which may co-exist simultaneously without cancelling each other out, as in a surrealist space. His characters go into wells and forests to find themselves.

Nakagami Kenji, on the other hand, features a classical acephalic character as his main protagonist. “Acephalic” in the sense that engaged existentialist critics, for one, loathed as hopelessly trivial, a position also taken up by proletarian and other far-flung movement-based critics. Akiyuki is a construction worker who digs and digs for thousands of pages, yet never builds anything–not even a chicken coop, or a shed. Not anything. His character always delivers completed thoughts, that are never incomplete, and never in-process, in the nature of Murakami’s. Many of which are occupied by his father, whose eyes he can feel, and which he wants to “burn out of their sockets” in The Cape, and elsewhere.

The “ready-made” nature of thought here has an attachment to the patriclan that is hard to shake. Its dependency and Occupation is oedipal. You can’t tell here, but the father is a mad imposter, a charismatic and dissolute figure who has made up his own from-ruination creation story, in the ashes of the war. He is a Thomas Sutpen figure, with all the attendant anxieties of how his offscreen past will bring down the monument he is trying to build, a vast land empire. You also can’t tell here, but he is a figure only possible in the postwar era, when government legislation was passed to enable improvement of living conditions in buraku areas.

So, in contrast to this “other” Murakami and to Nakagami, Murakami Ryû has developed a style that is all about connecting dependency (economic, military, security) to commodity culture, through depicting images as clichés, as they move from base to local site.

The original title for his book, that fact I was recently surprised by, spells this out bluntly in typically Murakami-like vulgarian detail. 『クリトリスにバター』。Butter on clitoris (possibly plural, it’s hard to tell, and the orgy scenes don’t make this distinction any easier.) Butter is the post-Meiji signifier for anything Western, a very slappy shorthand for neo-colonial domination, via the senses (smell, in particular). It’s the image of the female characters’ bodies as pieces of toast that really took me aback. (Not to mention the passivity of the narrator, in contrast with his active fetishism of both soldiers and chicks.) Here the initial title captures the senses of sexual and capitalized dependence quite…nicely doesn’t seem the right word, but precisely anyway. This seems a much better title to me, though it does not capture the Vaseline-y tone of the rueful aestheticism that frames the book, when it narrates the goings-on as distant past.

indicator species of Glendale Narrows

A series of weird activities has been afoot in the micro-climate of Atwater Village where I live. I live within spitting distance of both Griffith Park and the LA River, and often walk or bike around. The river bike path, the Glendale Narrows part, is especially pleasant at twilight–you see teenagers sitting eating potato chips riverside, yuppies on fast bikes with tons of gear zipping past, kids with training wheels, regular joes like me on their chop-shop bikes. I like it because you can zone and just ride, and observe the epic infrastructures of water treatment plant, huge warehouses, walls of graffitti.

I am not sure why I didn’t notice that major islands of the river have, apparently, been clear-cut of the thatches of Arundo and cottonwood trees in the last couple of weeks. (I’m not completely up on the Renaissance court intrigues of the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council, but people are pretty upset about it here.)

Saturday morning I had actually been pretty up-close-and-personal with those very trees, and stumps, since I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the riverbanks, with a bunch of other people, as part of the annual Friends of the LA River river-salvage event. I had hoped that the haul would yield at least a good toaster oven, if not the Jacuzzi that was harvested a couple years back, according to Blake Gumprecht.

There was lots of free stuff on Saturday, and I am pretty sure I worked off my worth in free t-shirts. Actually, I don’t even want to think how many years out-of-school it will be before the phrase “free stuff” stops warming the cockles of my heart. But I had no sightings of real “urban indicator species” such as the shopping cart. Much of my haul was actually junk food wrappers and, perhaps not surprisingly, toilet paper. Yikes. There were other species missing, like birds. But when I heard about the recent wave of avian botulism, I was a little weirded out. It seems like a pretty big deal in the bird world, and while I am not technically avian, I might have fished around that muck a little more cautiously, had I known. I was kind of puzzled that neither the tree-cutting nor the avian botulism topic was evident at the event itself, but maybe there was a word-of-mouth thing I didn’t tap into.

Actually, I think the cleanup could do with a little more implementage–something sophisticated like dowel rods with hooks on them. The image that comes to mind is that picture where Walt Whitman is sitting in overalls on a chair, in his incredibly messy study, with a big hooked stick, staring at a pile of papers, wondering what to stab next.

As you go upriver, the scene gets a bit more epic in its mix of Hoover-Dam-type modernism and human structures. And sometimes you can see the river…I wouldn’t say undulate, but it sometimes moves.

(They clear-cut windmills, don’t they! Oh Glendale!).