KNOW THYSELF

Imagine, you could write a genealogy of your own. Or at least describe them in your own version: narrative and reasons. The first story in the collection, Genealogy, offers a unique look into our existence and leaves us with a food for thought. Yamazaki is playing with a fireball of life and her juggle is one of the most playful version of life I have ever read – if Darwin had read this before, he wouldn't have bothered to write a long book on the origin. In mere four pages, we have a history written down; a saga of how sex, stories, art, earth and sky, language and music came into being.

One day, there was a light. The light hit a rock… The rock fell into the sea, and became amoeba, and the amoeba began swimming around.

The second story of the collection The Untouchable Apartment is a story of long separated ex-boyfriend: Hideo Mano, and girlfriend: Kandagawa. The story starts with Kandagawa's dream in which she is unable to touch the physical objects in her old apartment she once shared with Mano. Few days before this, she receives a call from Mano and they decide to visit their old apartment place, in which there is now a vacant lot. They visit the old town where they lived together and go to shops, park and university where they had common share of life experience and lightly reminisce their time together;  now that they have separate lives. Both of them keep a stone from their old apartment lot. But why do they do it? Why do they even meet? What connects separated ex-lovers? Do we really forget what we leave, and do we really love what we keep? We'll find ourselves strolling with the pair, and dwell on our modern believes.

"That time is never going to come. People have always got married, all throughout history. There's never been a time when people didn't marry."

The third and final story of the collection Lose Your Private Life gives the name to the collection: Friendship for Grown-Ups. The protagonist of the story Terumi Yano is a novelist. What we'll know as the story progresses is that she is having difficulties in the progress of her novel, however the conflict starts outside it, when she meets a musician at a program. Musician Matsumoto lives in Kyoto and Yano lives in Tokyo, and their casual talk about their likings start a kind of friendship between them. Only that Yano falls for the musician and wants him to start recognizing her true self, beyond being a writer whom he appreciates. 

I think finding someone you think is so special that you want to marry them is far more amazing thing than creating prose.

As two artists exchange messages and frequent between the two cities, the relationship turns a different way. What results is a thoughtful exploration of how an artist struggles to establish his/her identity outside what is known to everyone or him/herself; it's like opening the Johari window, only that it brings unexpected troubles; or may be not. We have read so much about a doppelgänger identity conflict, but what about the inner world of the writers? The story of Yano may or may not reflect the experiences of all other artists, but it certainly does represent most of them. The conflict of relationship and of identity exploration takes us to a different sphere in the story we believe we know; but we really know it? What is private to a writer and what is not? We dive into their world in the story.

As said in the forward by Aimee Bender, the three stories of Yamazaki captures those fluid moments from our life when all things are possible at a time. I was very much reminded of the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once while reading the Genealogy, especially the lively rocks. We are so many things at a time, we think of so many things at a time, and we try to become so many beings at a time… "Existence is but a brief crack of light…" – These stories are all about us. If you don't see them, read these stories!

Author: Nao-Cola Yamazaki
Original Text: Japanese 
Translator: Polly Barton
Publisher: Strangers Press https://www.strangers.press

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher 

Coming Soon...

Solo Dance
by Li Kotomi

Translated from the Japanese by Arthur Reiji Morris

Coming Soon...

1Q84
The Complete Trilogy.
Series: 1Q84
by Haruki Murakami

Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

Coming Soon...

Monkey Man
by Takuji Ichikawa

Translated from the Japanese by Lisa and Daniel Lilley

Coming Soon...

Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Coming Soon...

Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami

Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Coming Soon...

An I-Novel
Minae Mizumura

Translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Coming Soon...

A Man

by Keiichiro Hirano  

Translated from the Japanese by Eli K.P. William  

Drift in the Timeline

One Love Chigusa is set in the year 2091 AD. After a severe accident, Xie Hoyu's body parts are gathered, engineered and brought again to functionality. After his release from the hospital, Xie, now a cyborg, wanders the city in the Greater Beijing with partly restored memory, but he soon loses the confidence to go on living² – a feeling which he had harvested even before his accident. Xie, a frustrated illustrator, never had successful relationship with women, and now in his aimless drifting following the memory of his Quantum Data, he's unable to see the regular appearance of the men and women as he sees them passing on the streets - they have demonic, red and angry faces, and have indicators¹ glowing on their chest. And in addition, he even has delusional visions and experiences, and hears voices of unknown origins, which further troubles him in his new life and reality. As Xie Hoyu faces existential crisis and seeks for a relief, while at a coffee shop, he sees a woman of extraordinary beauty through the display window. To Xie's surprise, the woman could smile and doesn't have a demonic face like everyone else, and on seeing her, his desire to live is suddenly rejuvenated. From that moment on, Xie becomes restless in the hope of seeing her again and knowing her. His days and nights, and even nightmares are filled with the episodes where his urge to meet her becomes even more pressing.

1.       People without religion, ideology or faith, only trust money as the measure of worth and value.

2.      If there was a god, he needed to send Xie a message explaining why he existed, what his purpose was and how he should keep on living in this world. What reason was there? He wasn't capable of anything.

On one such day, while Xie Hoyu is in the coffee shop as usual, the girl reappears, and after following her path, he manages to locate her workplace and decides to wait for her. Meanwhile, we visit a story of despair from his artificially engineered memory bank, and also come across a voice ringing from inside his head that haunts him, and which provokes him to ponder over the Aryan race and history, domination and development in the light of war and science, electricity and nuclear power, and how all these have added to the world of science and technology. After the woman comes out of the plant (Shankal Electric), Xie follows her secretly along the transport network and dark alleys of the city, and even though a sense of futility and guilt develops in him doing this, unable to find a purpose and unable to let go of the motivation to live he developed after seeing the girl, he follows along. As he grapples with the question and meaning of his existence³, questioning his every move, mode and intentions, he finally encounters the woman he'd been following – the woman of utmost beauty, smile and calm. Xie becomes euphoric and is soon filled with inordinate passion for Chigusa. The naïve and pure conversations on love and the sentiments of heart⁴ lead them to develop a close relation. But the story takes a sharp turn, when all the hidden details - odd and strange - start to make meaning towards the end, leaving us with the identities of Xie Hoyu and Chigusa in the midst of a despair, and in the depth of possibilities and further questions.

3.       Humankind – why is it organized like this? Why is it that these creatures live and populate this earth? Does all this any meaning? Sexual reproduction, and creatures that relied on it, was becoming less and less important in a civilization now dominated by cutting-edge technologies. Humans were no more than faded supporting actors, old-fashioned, with primitive ideas, about to leave the stage. Singularity… In the old days, it was fashionable to talk about that. You never hear that word now. It is never on anyone's lips. Why has that happened?

4.       'When one leaves one's own self-interest behind, when one's hopes and decisions are moved by a feeling for others. This is the heart...'

One Love Chigusa has set one foot on the meaning of human existence and love, and the other one on the visions of the future where AI might overtake the humans and for better or worse. The story has everything to be a modern classic sci-fi novella, an existential brainstorm, and a love story that connects the world that we experience and the world that is close at hand. The story definitely makes one wonder and question the sorrows of the existence – excited with the possibilities of the future, and filled with dread for our place on this planet as well. The birth of new realities that will define and weigh our existence and identity can be profoundly sensed in this story set in the future. We're left with the question - Is there any place for love in the far more mechanical world where our core human values may not weigh like now and when they may lose their present identity?

Finally, the 6^th Red Circle Minis has added a new storey to the already towering reputation of the series.

Author: Soji Shimada 
Translator: David Warren
Publisher: Red Circle Authors   
Author's Photo Source: https://www.redcircleauthors.com/our-authors/soji-shimada/ 

Review Copy Courtesy: Red Circle Authors 

... In the Time of Peace

In the rule of the great Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, in Edo period (1600-1868), peace and stability has flourished. The domains are held by feudal lords and one of them is the young Lord Asunaro’s father, and his authority, with the help of retainers, seems running admirably. However, he is troubled when it comes to assuring a successor for his lordship; young Asunaro being an unlikely candidate because of his unruly behavior and disinterest to adhere to the ways for a future lordship. Young Lord Asunaro takes residence in the West Castle of the domain, where arrangements are made for his education and developing skills under tutors – who have hard time¹ teaching him something.

1.       ‘But you understand that it does not improve your progress towards attaining the lordship someday soon of you go on cancelling lesson after lesson like this.’

‘Huh. What earthly use are those things anyway? Are you trying to tell me that I’ll get to Daddy’s position in life just by reading and hearing stuff? Don’t be ridiculous.’

Grown tired of the predicable everyday rituals in the castle, Lord Asunaro ventures out one day, outwitting the ladies-in-waiting to meet a group of girls and comes to the conclusion – that his world inside castle-walls is lowly. In the midst of all this, among the aristocracy and lower ranks², the interest has shifted from military to literary, calligraphic and mathematical skills, owing to the fact that fighting skills are not much needed now. While the retainers and samurai from the times before are finding it hard to embrace the quiet – privilege and luxuries are cut off – Lord Asunaro finds it lackluster to prepare for the lordship.

2.       In any other country, it would be unsurprising if the emperor and his aristocrats, incapable as they were of gripping anything but chopsticks or a writing brush, were sooner or later exterminated and the nation seized; the fact that this didn’t happen in Japan was because… despite their military power these people felt a deep admiration for the cultured aristocratic world of the capital, and a yearning to learn its elegant ways.

A blend of historical facts and figures portrayed in the light of an extraordinary time in Japanese history, in which transformation from war to peace opened up new ways of life among the aristocracy, The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro, establishes an anti-hero, who against all odds relished his life and times feeling no urgency to glorify himself in the historical tome. Though small in development, a father-son tension in the ruling class, and a glimpse into the private life of the feudal lords, makes this a supplementary work in understanding the inner world of the Japanese rulers, different from those found in the clamor of swords and battles.

After a maiden gives Lord Asunaro a poem before disappearing, he is so unsettled, unable to reply her in poetry, he dedicates himself to learning to write poems. However, his curiosity and whims are not limited to this: instructors, food-tasters and scholars suffer because of his inordinate ways of trying things and making fun, and he scares the wits out of them. Restless and grief-stricken Lord Asunaro, after exchanging poems with the Maiden he couldn’t forget, submerges himself in his new ‘penchant’ for promiscuity.

With his taste growing in poetry and literature, Lord Asunaro remains at his West castle even after his father dies and brings in lavish lifestyle, décor and even women from the capital to the castle, to fulfill his unrestrained passion for aesthetics and pleasure. Over time, his ‘penchant’ bears him as many as 70 children, overcrowding the castle with his look-alikes. The narrator concludes by putting forward a historical and literary streak with a comic and satirical tone, which extrapolate Lord Asunaro from a feudal lord to a normal man who lived his life amongst riches, leisure and with no need to wage war.

The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro is a tale of Japanese history in which warriors turned into privileged aristocrats and of a feudal lord who found new meaning and ways to  live, in contrast to the bravery-laden warlords, in the leisure obtained from peace and luxury received as an inheritance – much resembling our generation.

Author: Kanji Hanawa

Translator: Meredith McKinney

Publisher: Red Circle Authors (Red Circle Minis)
Page Count: 72pp
Price: $9

Author's Photo Credit: https://www.redcircleauthors.com/our-authors/kanji-hanawa/

Review Copy Courtesy: Red Circle Authors 

Coming Soon...

The Refugees’ Daughter
by Takuji Ichikawa
Translated from the Japanese by Emily Balistrieri

The Difficulty of Self

In the middle of the Night a professor emeritus calls an associate professor of psychology to help him out with engagement in a hunt for finding a seven-year-old boy left by his parents on the side of a road in the mountains to discipline him, only soon to find him disappear from the place. The local authority has set up an incident center to find the child and have included members from different backgrounds, including psychologists.¹ While the search continues, with often fruitless meetings and progresses, the old professor Momose settles in an inn and dwells upon the causes for the lost boy. After formally attending the search Ishida meets Momose at the inn, and there along with Momose's pupil Okubo they discuss or project the psychology of the child A trying to pinpoint what exactly the boy might have felt at the time of being left by the family car.

1.       Momose: 'They bring in psychologists even when it is ineffectual, probably so they can demonstrate that they've put together a group of experts.'

The weather, terrain and the thicket makes the search difficult. The members of the search team make speculation where the boy might have headed or what might have happened to him. Ishida has no chance of interviewing the family, whose little ignorance of leaving the boy behind as a punishment led to his disappearance. Soon after another Child Psychologist Agawa joins the Momose's evening meeting, and now they muse over the subjects like animalistic virtue of leaving offspring on their own, fighting for survival and resistance that the boy might have posed to be found as a defiance. While the search team grows and keeps its searches alive the psychologists speculate like detectives but also wander off to subjects of historical tales and fairytale narratives of children being left or killed, Japanese upbringing, a Christian priest's visit to Japanese land, and Japanese introversive and unblemished culture².

2.       Momose: 'What goes on inside people, inside a family, within society, even the inner workings of a nation, they are all peculiar things that are difficult to understand, and always bound to be controversial and unexpected.'

After the child is found out, everything becomes normal like before, the family, the police and media, everyone goes quiet, but Ishida, drawing memories from his childhood, still cannot forget the impression of the boy being left alone.

Based upon a real such event, the novella largely deals not with the rescue mission but weaves the cultural making of the understanding of identity and intellectual inefficiency to practically deal with alienation brooding in the society. We take so much time to understand others but do we really understand ourselves? Backlight is a novella on what is lost and what is found while growing up.

Author: Kanji Hanawa

Translator: Richard Nathan

Publisher: Red Circle

Page Count: 66p

Price: $9.50

We Always Remain Human

In a futuristic world¹, the couple Hayato and Yutori faces the problem of infertility. But owing to the dystopian set up when even UN issues The World Population Explosion Declaration, treating infertility is almost impossible. In fact there are black markets for treatment and possibility of immigration, however consequences are bad if attempts are discovered by authorities except for bearing via natural pregnancy.

1.       Under the current law, the birth of a child born out of wedlock wasn't recognized, and in the event of a mother becoming pregnant with such a child, abortion was mandatory; should such a child be born nonetheless, the authorities were obliged to carry to carry out euthanasia.

In this short crafty prose, time shifts between past and present, but not in ordinary way. In one version amidst couple's ceaseless effort for fertility, Yutori gets pregnant by someone else than Hayato, and by law he must give in to divorce. Hayato, for healing his emotional loss or even for handling other human complexes, asks for a Stand-in Companion²—a humanoid duplicate of Yutori—with authorities. This new partner, with manipulated memory, can live with Hayato for ten years… Yutori, the Stand-in Companion, is convinced that the infertility problem is with her. Hayato, tries to find happiness by inflicting silent disgrace to Yutori, but finding meaning with meaninglessness tires him, until he finds renewed love again. In another version of the story, it's Hayato who makes someone else pregnant, confirming his fertility, and here comes, Hayato, the Stand-in Companion with his side of the story.

2.       The rental period granted for a Stand-in Companion was limited to ten years without the possibility of extension. Strictly speaking, the stand-in program was put in place to promote the independence of people who have lost their beloved in an unexpected event, so there was no room for flexibility regarding the rental period.

The ideas, such as humanoid's rights to request another Stand-in Companion in case the mortal partner is dead and Stand-ins having all the rights equal to human, makes us suspect, with all the interplay with juxtaposed contrary versions and character's psyche that for the purpose of emotional healing a duplicate might live with duplicate in the near future, and even after mortal end humans will live until they find mental and emotional peace.

As can be inferred from the novella, the basic complexes and characters of human beings will find ties with AIs and humanoids, establishing emotional significance being the top value in the futuristic world. When memory and personality can be manipulated, new human side will come to light. The futuristic art will be the art of handling emotional intelligence of people. New realities of the future world might be even absurd than we can imagine. The thought of new ethics and morals set in the future world dominated by technology is as intriguing as this novella with tightly packed surprises. One of the Red Circle Minis, Stand-in Companion is a meditative exploration on human love and relation set in the future world.

Author: Kazufumi Shiraishi

Translator: Raj Mahtani

Publisher: Red Circle

Page Count: 58p

Price: $9