Odd Jobs (109 page)

The theme of an older man infatuated with an unworthy love-object is no stranger to European fiction, and especially not in these between-the-wars years when New Women were testing their wings. Proust wrung his hands for hundreds of pages over Albertine’s possible betrayals; Heinrich Mann’s
Professor Unrat
became the classic, searing film
The Blue Angel;
and Nabokov’s
Camera Obscura
cast the demonic young temptress as a movie usherette. Tanizaki pursues the theme, however, with considerably less of a vengeance than these Western romancers, and with more ambivalence and good humor.
Naomi
is as much about growth as destruction. Jōji, “like a new parent who keeps track of his baby’s development,” maintains a doting diary called “Naomi Grows Up.” His early delight in his young ward’s body, as he bathes and feeds and dresses it, has a paternal, almost a pediatric, focus on strengthening muscle and lengthening limb. His pride has the innocence, too, of a movie fan’s, as he observes, when she is still only fifteen, her resemblance, in a bathing suit, to the “famous swimmer Annette Kellerman” as she appeared in the movie
Neptune’s Daughter
, and he is enchanted by the un-Japanese way that “her trunk was short and her legs long,” long and straight, so that, “as she stood with her thighs together, her legs, so straight there was no space between them, formed a long triangle from her hips to her ankles.” On almost the first page he assures the reader that “her body has a distinctly Western look when she’s naked.” Naomi gradually comes to share his admiration and to use her sexual power; their life together is a mutual corruption, his descent into enslavement matched by hers into whorishness. But she is corrupted first, corrupted
by his love. And the results, it is perhaps not too much to reveal, are less dire than a Western novelist would have felt obliged to make them.

Tanizaki writes with an unabashed and undogmatic sensuality rare in the often hectic, guilt-ridden annals of modernism. Jōji’s adoration fastens onto curious details of Naomi—her nostrils, for instance, and her tears, immensely magnified:

Tanizaki understands the fetish-making fecundity of love, and the satisfactions it offers even while giving pain, and its perverse, inverse accountings (“I realized that a woman’s face grows more beautiful the more it incurs a man’s hatred”). Also, he suggests, the intensely cherished love-object embodies an idea and derives her power from a larger field than her own skin. In the best postwar American novel about love, Nabokov’s
Lolita
, the immature love-object represents for both its hero and its émigré author something of the gauche, touching, and seductive New World. Naomi’s Western redolence is most of her charm. “If I’d had enough money to do whatever I pleased,” Jōji tells us, “I might have gone to live in the West and married a Western woman; but my circumstances wouldn’t permit that, and I married Naomi, a Japanese woman with a Western flavor.… I’d be forgetting my place if I hoped for a wife with the majestic physique of a Westerner.” A Westerner must smile at Jōji’s overvaluation of things Western and at the many chapters devoted to the mysteries of that imported Occidental pastime, ballroom dancing. Tanizaki, rescued by an earthquake from the Western-flavored bohemia of Tokyo and Yokohama, clearly had some satirical purpose—his Japanese title translates as
A Fool’s Love
, and Naomi’s dancing and flirting, high heels and grammarless English are no doubt meant to be excessive, as is her pursuit of another Western import, personal freedom. But Jōji never renounces his love, any more than Japan ever abandoned its drive toward Westernization.

Y
UCATÁN
, by Andrea De Carlo, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 213 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

T
HE
S
IGNORE:
Shogun of the Warring States
, by Kunio Tsuji, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. 197 pp. Kodansha International, 1989.

D
OGEATERS
, by Jessica Hagedorn. 251 pp. Pantheon, 1990.

Novels are not just news; we ask some stretch of imagination, some attempt to extend the author’s witness into human possibilities beyond the edge of his or her experience. Three recently published novels—by an Italian, a Japanese, and an American born in the Philippines—each show a brave reach, geographic and otherwise.

Yucatán
has as narrator a young Englishman, Dave Hollis; as central figure an internationally revered Yugoslavian film director, Dru Resnik; and as setting southern California and some way-out spaces in Mexico. Resnik and Dave fly from London to Los Angeles to meet Jack Nesbitt, a thick-necked millionaire who has lined up a meeting with Astor Camado, a never-photographed but best-selling author whose four books “tell the same story from four different points of view.… A young New York musicologist of South American extraction goes to Mexico to do some research and meets this Indian witch doctor, who little by little draws him into a vortex of magic practices, until he’s brought into contact with a world beyond, or a parallel world, if you like.” Nesbitt wants to produce a movie by Resnik based upon these books, and the author himself appears and speaks amiably of the world beyond (“A completely empty, dark room. There’s nothing to recognize, nothing happens. There is only this absolute blackness”) and the secret of life (“The secret is knowing that absolutely
everything
is insignificant: love and activity and relationships and feelings, landscapes, desires, plans, et cetera. They’re nothing but bric-a-brac, little pieces of kitsch scattered around. The secret is
not to be there
. You understand what I mean?”). Thus unburdened, he hands Resnik his “stick of power” and disappears from the novel.

Advisers from the other, or parallel world, however, take over, sending messages by pencilled notes “written in a shaky and sprawling hand,” messages like “
Attention, wrongly directed, is dangerous, because it rebounds. We are watching you
.” The world is just one big fortune cookie to these mysterious others. They telephone, too, in voices that are “almost electronic, but not exactly,” with “some kind of expression, underneath,” and function as travel agents, sending our trio of movie makers, and the female companions they effortlessly accumulate, to specified parts of Mexico and back. The characters are not very real, and their actions seem inconsistent and implausible, but perhaps that is the point. We are somehow inside a movie being made, proceeding by jump cuts and changed camera angles, in an atmosphere of agitated stasis. Dave and the woman, Elaine, designated by the voices as “the spiritual girl,” get into bed together in a steamy Mexican motel, but can’t quite make love, because, explains Elaine, “Tomorrow we have to receive enlightenment in the positive place.” Dave narrates:

Frustrating as it is, this scene is one of the more comprehensible ones, and relatively loaded with feeling, or at least with itching.

Everything happens as if to tourists who can’t shake their jet lag. People keep being speechless, and ordering food in restaurants without eating it. Dave is jealous of and irritated by Resnik, with his off-again-on-again charm, his habit of directorial manipulation, his “spoiled superstar” airs. Nesbitt tags along in this increasingly weird project, frequently exasperated but never visibly tired of shelling out money for hotels, plane fares, and, in the end, a battery of expensive musical instruments. The women, like many women in movies, are good-looking but toylike—magnetized toys, drawn to Resnik, whom even waitresses sense to be a starmaker. The dialogue at times seems straight from a B-movie, as do the tropical scenery and the feeble strain of science fiction. Our narrator keeps noting filmic effects, like synchronization and discontinuity: “as if synchronized, we get up”; “the preparation of the flambé seems to go in jerks, like a film sequence from which frames have been
snipped at random.” A wannabe director, Dave stands outside his own actions: “My head is incredibly confused, with overlapping images of three or four possible reactions. I see myself detached, allowing her to leave; dragging her back inside; going out and facing Nesbitt. None of these possibilities is a complete sequence.” Caressing Elaine in a romantic tropical shower, he reflects wonderingly “that of all the situations that have ever happened to me in my life, this is the closest to a film.” Elsewhere, he mentally scolds her for not staying in character: “It’s incredible how little she cares about maintaining any coherence of character; even with respect only to last night, or this morning.”

But Dave and his creator are less into character than into atmosphere, and as an atmospheric seismograph the novel registers some very delicate jiggles: “The abandoned film is in the air: a kind of vibration just below or just above the muffled sounds of the lobby.” The great Resnik, to whose thoughts we are privy by way of italics, broods, “
The atmosphere is disjointed, not fluid, as I had imagined; neither attraction nor isolation is sufficiently strong to prevail over the other
.” Waxing spookier, he lectures his entourage, “People don’t realize how dangerous negative landscapes can be. If you cross them without any kind of shielding, on a motorcycle, for example, they can even destroy you. I’m sure there are people who are dissolved, never found again.” And when the group visits, at the behest of the voices from beyond, the monumental Yucatán ruins at Tis Talan and Atsantil, the negative and positive vibes are exhaustively plumbed. At Atsantil:

There is beauty in such a laid-back, entranced evocation of atmospheric nuance, and there is a curious authenticity in Andrea De Carlo’s washed-out, flimsy, heartless little movie of a novel. This is how the world seems
as the millennium evaporates: a series of hotel rooms and tourist sights at which we arrive numbed by the journey. If there is a woman in the hotel room, she blends right in, like the objects in Elaine’s friend Rickie’s slide show, “photographed as if their use or normal meaning were unknown.” We have lost touch with the
why
of things, and what is left is fast food for the senses and the humming brain. Mr. De Carlo’s native Italy is perhaps still too saturated with traditional meanings, too full of inhabited historical allusions, so he had to come to the New World, the empty opulence of southern California and Mexico’s death-haunted poverty, for the atmosphere he needed, the flickering bleached shimmer of not-being-there-ness.

Kunio Tsuji, the author of
The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States
, has travelled far geographically—he studied in Paris for four years—and imaginatively, setting this, his first novel to be translated into English, in the sixteenth century and in the mind and voice of a European. The narrative is framed as a long epistle from a nameless Italian soldier of fortune who finds himself for a few years an intimate of the Portuguese missionaries in Japan and of a warlord whom he calls the Signore but whom any Japanese reader, the translator assures us in a preface, would recognize as Oda Nobunaga (1534–82). Nobunaga was a chieftain of the small province of Owari, who managed, by dint of his cleverness and ferocity, to subdue twenty of the provinces around the beleaguered imperial capital of Kyoto and thus to take the first and crucial step in the unification of Japan after two centuries of chaotic civil war. A kind of George Washington, we might say, who had to conquer and massacre rival forces in the states around Virginia, all in the nominal service of a powerless royal government. Nobunaga is not named in Mr. Tsuja’s novel, but his successors in the unifying process, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, are. The only fictional character is the narrator; he, we are concisely informed, murdered his wife and her lover in an alley in Genoa, fled to Lisbon, worked as a porter and lived as a vagrant, enlisted in an expedition to the New World, served as an officer under cruel conditions, joined a Spanish fleet sailing for the Molucca Islands, and spent ten years at sea. He landed in Japan in 1570, at a village where there existed a small Christian church and several Japanese friars. “My first impression of the Japanese,” he writes his Italian confidant, “was of a fair-skinned, courteous people who smiled readily and were extremely clean in their persons. Nor later did I have much cause to revise this
opinion, except insofar as the courtesy and affability of the Japanese is not infrequently tempered with a kind of contempt or condescension, a combination not generally seen among the peoples of Europe.”

Mr. Tsuji, to judge by this stately and lucid translation, maintains his cultural contortion gracefully, viewing the Japanese and their military tumult through the eyes of a renegade Latin. The narrator’s voice seems sometimes prim and pedantic for such a ruffian, but, then, the author has set himself a basically philosophical problem: the humanization of Nobunaga, who was considered brutal and vindictive by even the lenient standards of feudal Japan. George Sansom, in his
History of Japan 1334–1615
, after patiently trying to balance the accounts on this pivotal historical figure, concludes, “He was a cruel and callous brute.” In 1571, Nobunaga’s forces stormed and utterly razed the Buddhist stronghold of Mount Hiei, a fortified complex of temples and shrines of incomparable artistic value; in the words of a contemporary writer, “The whole mountainside was a great slaughterhouse, and the sight was one of unbearable horror.” At the siege of Nagashima, in 1574, he exterminated the inhabitants of five fortresses, despite repeated offers of surrender. Upon the conquest of Echizen, in 1575, Nobunaga dispatched a letter to Kyoto boasting that the streets were so crammed with corpses there was no room for more. The remaining fugitives, he wrote, must be searched out and killed “
yama yama, tani tani
”—“on every hill, in every valley.” In his last campaign, against the family of his old enemy Takeda Shingen, he wiped out all the Takeda kin and roasted alive the monks of the temple unfortunate enough to have sheltered Shingen’s remains.