Category: China

ICYMI: links round-up, July 2021

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ICYMI: links round-up, June 2021

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ICYMI: Links round-up, January–March 2021

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Reviews: Short fiction chapbooks – 2 from Japan, 1 from China

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3 Japanese short stories

Kazufumi Shiraishi, ‘Stand-in Companion’, 2018
Translated by Raj Mahtani
RED CIRCLE, 2018, ISBN 978-1-912864-00-3, paperback, £7.50
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Haruki Murakami, Desire, 2017
Translated by Jay Rubin, Ted Goossen and Philip Gabriel
VINTAGE, 2017, ISBN 978-1-78487-263-2, paperback, £3.50
There are two genre stories in this small collection, one being ‘Birthday Girl’, but more interesting to Kafka readers like myself is ‘Samsa in Love’. Here we have a cockroach that wakes up one morning to discover he is a human named Gregor Samsa, protagonist of Franz Kafka’s most famous story ‘Metamorphosis’. Murakami takes full advantage of this premise but the reader really needs to be familiar with Kafka’s story (which can be found just about everywhere); he unfolds the story as much for insight as for laughs, especially when he experiences his new body’s reactions when encountering a female human who might not be considered ‘attractive’ in the conventional sense.

Ge Fei, ‘Flock of Brown Birds’, 1989
Translated by Poppy Toland
PENGUIN, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7343-9960-1, paperback, $9.95
Ge himself declares about this story in the Author’s Preface, “Whenever anyone complained to me about how difficult it was to understand, I would give the joking response, ‘I don’t blame you. I’m not sure I understand it either.’” This Preface, written thirty years after the story itself, gives context to how revolutionary the story was to Chinese literature when it first appeared, and Ge acknowledges the avant-garde, experimental nature of the writing. It concerns a writer named Ge Fei, who has seemingly poor memory and who has retreated to the Chinese countryside to complete a novel. He is visited by an unknown woman who prompts him to tell the mysterious story of his late wife. The story feels like a dance around the memory of a dream, recapturing certain scenes while improvising others that have less faithful recall, and it binds together in playful fashion the temporal disorientation that is always inherent in stories of circular time and a loosely-grasped reality. Perhaps that makes the sense that Ge is searching for or perhaps it doesn’t; either way, to get an angle on experimental Chinese ‘pioneer’ literature of that era this is a must-read.

Review: Chan Koonchung, The Fat Years, 2009

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This novel has one of the best introductions I’ve come across in a long while: an essay by the sinologist Julia Lovell, in which she both places the novel in its present-day sociological context and also sets the stage admirably for the story to come: in a near-future China a month has gone missing, not only from official records but also from peoples’ memories, and no one could care less. But there’s also a group of unaffected people who collectively try to find out the reason for this cheerful cultural amnesia about certain events the Party wishes to ‘erase’, and something radical has to be done to discover what mark China plans to make on the rest of the world. The Fat Years is only a dystopia on its thin surface – China emerged from something far worse in real life from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution; today there’s no Mao-like figure, the Party is driven more by pragmatism than ideology and has an unspoken contract with the people: “tolerate our authoritarianism, and we will make you rich”. Explored admirably here, the bigger question then becomes, “Between a good hell and a fake paradise, which one would you choose?”, so ‘post-dystopia’ would definitely be a more accurate description. China also has leaders with a variety of agendas ranging from outright fascism to the spread of democracy and Christianity, and these disparate groups are all characterised in the novel. Yes, there are Orwellian undertones, but they only underpin this exploration of China’s very likely future, with good characterisation and a little too much info-dumping. Still, this is a necessary and challenging book.