Stranger on Earth

Beauty, sexuality, death. Any reader who opens a Yukio Mishima ( 三島 由紀夫 ) novel will inevitably encounter these abstract subjects. Known for controversial works such as The Sound of Waves, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion , and The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Mishima was a novelist with uncompromising ethics and a stalwart belief in right-winged, nationalist ideals. His writings are sometimes considered emotionally barren and overtly intellectual, distancing the reader from the authorial voice. Forbidden Colours ( 禁色 , 1951-3) is that exception, where the reader, if he chooses to, can almost hear Mishima himself meditate on the power of absolute beauty and the bane of homosexuality in post-war Japan. The novel’s two main protagonists, Shunsuke (an aged misogynistic, heterosexual writer) and Yuichi (a guileless homosexual youth blessed with unparalleled beauty), are the driving forces behind the intriguing plot, which finds Shunsuke, towards the end of an illustrious li...

A Note to the Reader: In writing this piece, I have attempted to avoid spoilers. The plot summary below is of the superficial kind and should not spoil anyone’s viewing experience. For a more comprehensive summary, refer to:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(film_series) As far as cinematic war chronicles go, there is not one that is grander and more urgent than Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth 9-hour-and-47-minute trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61), with David Shipman, the famed British film critic, calling it “unquestionably the greatest film ever made” (984). And yet, ironically, few casual viewers will have seen it, partly due to its off-putting length. This should be rectified. The trilogy carries with it a message as pressing and disconcerting as that of Platoon (1986) or Apocalypse Now (1979), and should be acknowledged by anyone with an ounce of interest in humanist cinema. The film may be more than half a century old, but the protagonis...

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuos.html   In the climax of the novel when Sachiko drowned Mariko’s kittens in a river, Etsuko tried to comfort the child on the riverbank. Mariko was reluctant to move to America with her mother and “Frank” (whom the reader never met). During her attempt to console Mariko, she utters the following puzzling words: “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173, italics mine). This may not sound out of the ordinary at first, but she goes on when Mariko looks at her “questioningly”: “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will” (173). Her language here indicates she has assumed Sachiko’s role, speaking and acting as the child’s mother. In the following chapter, Etsuko “confesses” to Niki that perhaps Keiko’s suicide by hanging was her fault: “But you see, Niki, I knew all...

Make no mistake about Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of uniquely restrained works such as The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . His Japanese background suggests we should see him in the same light as the other Japanese literary colossus: Haruki Murakami. But Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the UK when he was only five, is oceans away from Murakami. He does not deal with time warps, ghostly apparitions or talking cats. His fictional world is (on the surface) realistically rendered, populated by characters with emotions and motives that largely resemble our own. Ishiguro’s award-winning debut A Pale View of Hills (1982) introduces to us an author whose chief concern is the inner landscape – that twilight region of the human mind where shadows threaten to erase reality. The novel’s protagonist Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman residing in England, is having to cope with the aftermath of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide. Her English-born second daughter, Niki, is ...