december 31 - Everything I read this year

I've never been a very good writer. I think the main reason why is because interesting ideas are never truly linear or able to be placed totally "in memory," and I write linearly and all at once. When I started writing tidbits, I thought that the lack of length pressure would enable me to practice writing. Since I wouldn't need to write full-on blog posts, I'd be free to brain-dump however much about whatever, and this would serve as a base on which I could practice editing and refining of my ideas. Unfortunately, I was quite busy while in college and while working, and I found myself with less ideas I would want to express as words and broadcast under my own name to an unknown audience than I had initially expected. I also started using Twitter even more chronically, and I discovered that if I had an idea while walking in the park, for instance, it was easier to tweet that thought out instead of mulling over it for a while and writing a draft and editing it and then publishing it on my site (which is a pain to do because of my homebrew static site builder, which I should really refactor soon). This year, I also went through some tough family and relationship issues which were difficult to talk about on here (where it is associated with my name and face), but much more easily shit-posted about on my anonymous twitter account. I'll take a small detour within this introductory paragraph to talk translucently about these issues. They were not common issues, but also not rare. There are problems where one feels stronger and more learned after tackling them; I feel no stronger than I had at the beginning of the year, and I have learned little about my own self through the process. I end 2025 confident that although I hadn't grown through my experience, I had at least survived. I also end this paragraph confident that although I will never improve my writing solely through writing tidbits, I will at least be able to use the medium to clumsily express my thoughts on everything I read this year.

I read seven novels by Yukio Mishima¹ this year, and six of them were read in a course on Mishima's literature I took in college at the beginning of the year. Although I did have some qualms on the class structure and over-all level of the class, I thought the professor² was very knowledgeable and I got a lot out of the class. The course was taught using the English translations of the novels, but I decided to read them all in the original Japanese. Although I don't regret this choice, it did make recommending Mishima's books to my friends more difficult—I think Mishima's greatest selling point is his prose, which is strongly dependent on the translator. There are also some nuances which unfortunately can't be translated faithfully to English (like this). On the other hand, I've noticed that I am more engaged when reading novels in Japanese rather than English. It might be stimulating some different part of my brain.

We started the course by reading The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, then moved on to The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and ended the course with reading all four volumes of The Sea of Fertility. I think Temple was a sufficient introduction to Mishima, containing all of the "Mishima themes" of masculinity, eroticism, isolation, homosexuality, youth, nationalism, and death. It was a very cathartic experience, although the middle third which consisted of Mizoguchi being stuck in his own head and undergoing psychosis was a bit of a long lull. Mizoguchi himself was a wuss (the first comparison that comes to mind was Shinji from Evangelion), but he was somehow a compelling wuss (although I was alone in sympathizing with him within my group). In hindsight, I think this is because he ultimately redeems himself through praxis instead of staying stuck within his head. Compared to Temple, Sailor was a more complete novel, maybe the closest to a perfect novel I have ever read. I mean this in the sense that all aspects of the novel are so tightly woven together that any pertubation would make the novel vastly worse. On the other hand, the novel reads almost like a Greek myth—the characters seem to be compelled by nature itself to act as they do, and no other story or course of action could possibly be written about the same characters. I now need to say something about The Sea of Fertility, which I find to be very difficult due to its scope and opaqueness. I found it to be several things at once. It's primarily a depiction of Japan through multiple generations, spanning from just before Mishima's own time to right around his suicide, and the shift in grand narratives that follow this. It's also multiple love stories, and a story about loving a love story. It's also pretty clearly Mishima's magnum opus and his suicide note. There's still a lot I'm figuring out about this novel.

After reading 6 Mishima novels back to back, I decided to take a bit of a break and read something other than Mishima. I ended up reading Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari, a story about a retirement match between an undefeated Go master and an up-and-coming challenger. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the master loses his final match, and dies of old age soon after. The rest of the novel is an autopsy of the master's death through a depiction of the Go match through the eyes of a reporter covering the match. I found it to be an easy and relaxing read coming off of The Sea of Fertility, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had known more about the game of Go.

I entered summer break without an internship or a project, and being pretty bored, I decided to pick up A Face of Another by Abe Kobo. I had read the first third or so while in high school as part of a translation class, but I never finished it and decided now would be the best time. There's a lot of literature about wearing a mask (both literally and metaphorically), but I found A Face of Another to be fairly unique in exploring the question of whether there is the value in wearing a mask in front of someone who knows you are wearing a mask. Ultimately I found the novel to be a bit of a slog (which was the reason why I hadn't finished it in the first place), with the main character spinning off into massive tangents from very mundane observations, but I still find myself thinking about it from time to time.

After reading A Face of Another I got an internship (which turned into my job for some time) and became pretty busy. I wasn't able to get as much reading done, but I still found some time while commuting on the train. I realized I missed reading Mishima, so I started reading The Sound of Waves. This was a very simple novel and a short read; I read it in about 3 hours (mainly on the Caltrain). I found it to be almost an antithesis to Sailor (or is Sailor the antithesis of The Sound of Waves, given the order of publishment?) Shinji and Ryuji are both men of the sea, but they become so for different reasons, and while Ryuji accepts land and women and death, Shinji rejects these in favor of the heroism that Ryuji so desperately desired in Sailor. I think The Sound of Waves is the closest you'd be able to find to a power fantasy for a Mishima novel. I think this is also a good entry point for Mishima, although it's missing a few important Mishima themes.

I had originally planned to take a class on modern Japanese literature by the same professor² when I got back from summer break, and while my gap year derailed that plan, I had already purchased the novels that were going to be read in that class. One of these novels was Factory by Oyamada Hiroko. Factory is Kafkaesque in the way a lot of modern Japanese literature is, using surrealism to poke at the oddities in high-context Japanese society. But Factory innovates from Kafka by seamlessly switching between perspectives of three workers in the titular (?)³ factory. Seamless because there is no indication other than context clues whose story is being told at any given moment. I would like to have said that the effect of this is thre three workers' narratives blending into that of a single commoditized unit of labor, but I don't think the effect was as strong as that (maybe some Marxist lit major could have elaborated on that theme better). But I still enjoyed the novel and its characters, especially their Japaneseness.

The mother of one of my best friends (whom I went to Japanese preschool with) works at a publisher in the Bay who publishes many translated Japanese novels, and when I mentioned to her I was getting into reading Japanese literature, I was sent several books, mostly by contemporary authors. Among the books I was sent was The Old Capital by Kawabata. This is the only novel I read this year in English. I found the novel to be more of what I think post-war Kawabata does best (gesturing towards a shift towards modernization and westernization in post-war Japan), but I found the translation distracting—I caught my brain constantly trying to map the English spellings of Japanese names back into Japanese. I also suspect some of the emotional nuance in the novel must have been lost in translation. I wasn't nearly as compelled by Chieko's predicament as I had expected to be. A lot of the novel came across as just moment-by-moment, matter-of-fact descriptions of the events that happened. I think it might be interesting to read the original Japanese version to compare the two.

The last thing I read this year was Hirano Keiichiro's A Man. Hirano Keiichiro was once heralded as "the second coming of Mishima,"⁴ but I got more Abe than Mishima from A Man. In fact, I found it interesting how both A Man and The Face of Another dealt with the theme of constructed/alternative identity through Zainichi Koreans. I found the mystery aspect of the novel to be the most compelling, while Kido's character didn't feel as fleshed out as I'd have wanted. I did cry at the end.

There were a few books I started this year but didn't get to finish. A close friend recommended Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, and I read the first ten or so pages, but after I started working I was a bit too busy to pick it back up. I also bought The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Sahlins after it was recommended to me by a twitter mutual. There were a few ideas in the book which I found to be valuable—dichotomy between "transcedentalist" and "eminentist" religions, stickiness and fixedness of ontological systems, etc—but these ideas were mainly introduced and (in my opinion) sufficiently fleshed out in the introduction, and the next few chapters of the book felt to me like anthropological bug-collecting ("Tribe A in sub-saharan Africa believes in XYZ and does such-and-such ritual"). I read more of A History of Japanese Buddhism by Kenji Matsuo, but I forgot a lot of the beginning and I want to read the whole thing from the start again.

There are also a few books which are on my reading list. I want to read the rest of Mishima's novels, starting with Voices of the Fallen Heroes and moving onto Kyoko's House and Forbidden Colors. I feel like I should read some Dazai, at least No Longer Human. I'm interested in In Search of Lost Time, but that seems like a huge undertaking. I bought Eclipse by Hirano Keiichiro, which I've been told is the most Mishima of his works. Anna Karenia also seems interesting. Some more authors: Kawakami Mieko. Kawakami Hiromi. Ishihara Shintaro. Tanizaki. Murakami. I also want to learn more about Shintoism, institutional Buddhism, early (pre-Council of Nicea) Christianity. I'm really looking forward to reading some of these books, and hopefully talking about them with my friends.

Footnotes