Murakami Ryu: From the Fatherland, with Love. Transl. Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Pushkin Press, 2013.
I ‘may’ have mentioned before that I used to love the dark, twisted tales of Murakami Ryu, and that I liked him more for his social and political commentary than the shock and gore elements he likes to pile on. So this chunky novel from 2005, which imagines a 2011 Japan in economic and political freefall, was bound to appeal, especially since it is set in Fukuoka, a city I intend to visit as soon as I can. (Murakami is from Kyushu and several of his books describe that tension between Tokyoites and those deemed to be ‘provincial’).
Murakami imagines a Japan where economic stagnation has led to the country becoming insignificant on the world stage. The US dollar has plummeted since the US committed to the War on Terror, and the new administration formed by Democrats is seeking to improve ties with Europe, China and Russia. (All of this sounded plausible back in 2005). So they are withdrawing their troops and increasing the price of grains that they are exporting to Japan – which leads to that country feeling abandoned. North Korea perceives Japan as ‘a dying elephant that lacked the will to heal itself’ and sees this as an opportunity to start a top-secret operation ‘From the Fatherland, with Love’, sending a small elite group of special forces to hold the residents of Fukuoka hostage. The North Korean government will officially call them a ‘rebel army’ faction and disown them… until they send more troops along and occupy Kyushu, making it independent from Japan, and thus trapping South Korea in the middle.
The Japanese central government is just as ineffective as they expected, and the local population is cowed by the terrorists but also angry at their own government for leaving them at their mercies. The only people to show any initiative are a band of frankly quite psychotic, violent young Japanese misfits who’ve found a home of sorts with an aging off-grid rebel. At first they rather admire the ruthless invading forces, but then they decide to fight them through their combined know-how of poisonous insects and reptiles, guns, explosives and boomerangs. But before we get to the final showdown, there are many, many pages of research notes which the author could not bear to throw away and therefore incorporated into the book. When those notes are about politics, I can sort of go along with it, but when there’s lots of detail about explosives or guns or army uniforms or torture methods, I really think that those could have been pruned and been all the more effective when used sparingly.
There is also a huge cast of characters, not all of whom are clearly enough differentiated or even necessary. (There is a glossary at the front of the more important characters, but… even that is so over-filled that it’s hard to keep track of them.) At some points, there were simply long lists of names and job titles of all the politicians who participated in an emergency meeting and I pitied the poor translators who had to possibly research every single name (which could be read in a number of ways in Japanese) to guess which one the author meant.
Yet in spite of these digressions (which I have to admit I frequently skimmed through), I raced through the novel: its blend of suspense, political commentary and sarcasm is exactly my cup of tea, although I no longer have the stomach for Murakami’s descriptions of violence (which in this book includes not just youth crime and fighting, but also North Korean army training methods and torture and an execution squad). As always, he offers an alternative picture of Japan which is so far removed from the currently highly popular theme park vision that most tourists want to see. His descriptions of homeless camps in Japan after a long period of economic downturn are certainly drawn from life (see also Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Park).
…the homeless are the easiest people in the world to kill. Kids are scared of becoming failures themselves in later life, and the media reinforce the fear by depicting the homeless as shameful losers in a winner-take-all society, people who’ll never get back on their feet and will have to scrounge for leftover food, wearing dirty rags, smelling to high heaven and living in cardboard boxes till they day they die. After bank accounts were frozen and inflation had set in, the poor came to be scorned even more openly. Some kids probably reasoned that if it was all right to look down on the destitute, it must be all right to knock them around as well.
Although the book is very much rooted in its (fictionally dystopian) Japanese setting, there are parallels to other countries that are experiencing economic decline and problematic politics that feel all too relevant today.
The mayor and the KEF commander kept repeating the words ‘peace’ and ‘coexistence’. It was to coexist with the citizens of Fukuoka, and to bring true peace and prosperity to the city, that they had come from North Korea. They had not invaded Fukuoka and intended no harm to its citizens, but any individuals or organizations hostile to the project… would be punished. It was a transparently contrived rationale, which Yamagiwa felt he’d heard before. It wasn’t all that different from what the Americans had said after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact Saddam Hussein had made similar announcements after invading Kuwait. The Japanese military had probably said something of the sort while establishing their rule over Manchuria.
It’s good to see that Murakami’s hippie protest stance has not softened over the years. Most of his social critique is voiced by the rebellious youngsters, although they are considered (and indeed are) criminals, murderers, arsonists and so on. No one’s definition of normal, and yet they rattle off some of the best home truths:
Hino’s teachers, the attendants at the institution, and other adults had always trotted out, like a mantra, the proposition that nothing was more precious than human life. Great numbers of people were being killed every day in the continuing upheavals in the Middle East, and tens of thousands of children were dying of starvation in Sudan and Ethiopia and other African countries. But these authority figures never spoke about the preciousness of those lives – apparently only the lives in their immediate circle counted. What were children supposed to make of people like that telling them how to live?
The darkness of the subject matter is lightened by humour. Two scenes that come to mind are the North Korean soldiers attempting to make small talk or marvelling over the tissue packs being handed out for free by taxi drivers. This book won’t be to everyone’s taste, and it could certainly have done with some serious editing, but I enjoyed its craziness a lot more than I initially expected. Kudo points to Pushkin Press for translating such a mammoth work (as well as several other works by Murakami Ryu) and for the striking cover art.
findingtimetowrite 
