By the time he died at age 45, Yukio Mishima had written dozens of books of essays, 40 plays, 35 novels, some 170 stories and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize five times. After a failed attempt to lead a far-right coup, he infamously took his own life by hara-kiri.
For some, Mishima is simply too extreme a proposition – they find it impossible to separate the art from the artist. For those who do read him, the shadow of his final days can fall heavily on his work. There is a temptation to psychoanalyse his writing; to comb the text for foreshadowing references, of which there are many.
Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 254 pp, £14.99) by Yukio Mishima, translated from Japanese by Paul McCarthy, Juliet Winters Carpenter, Tomoko Aoyama and others, is a fascinating collection that eases us into appreciating Mishima’s enviably assured gifts as a storyteller, while also providing a possible insight into his unravelling. The insightful introduction by John Nathan provides a helpful guide to the Mishima puzzle.
The opener, Strawberry, shows Mishima’s dexterity in portraying the intimacy of young flirtation amid the gaiety of a local festival. Stories such as Moon, Cars and Poor Papa are also centred on burgeoning youth. Others, such as The Strange Tale of the Simmering Moon Villa, fall into a Tales of the Unexpected category and show Mishima’s skill with suspense and narrative detail.
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The title story is the longest and bears closest scrutiny. In this vivid diatribe we see Mishima’s powerful rhetorical skills, but also the naivety of his politics. He comes across as a fantasist, externalising his personal insecurities into the grand visions that would spread so disastrously into real life.
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We begin On the Calculation of Volume 1 (Faber, 161 pp, £12.99) by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J Haveland, just as the lead character, Tara Selter, is beginning to live November 18th for the 121st time. On November 17th, Tara leaves her home in Clarion-Sous-Bois where she runs an antiquarian book business with her husband. She travels by train to Bordeaux and then Paris, where she attends a conference, buys antique books and meets friends, accidentally burning her hand on their stove.
On waking up at her hotel on what should be the 19th of November, she sees a man drop a piece of bread in the identical way to the previous day. For the rest of the novel, Tara attempts to come to terms with reliving November 18th over and over again, while all those around her experience it for the first time, every time.
Tara finds that the mechanics of this rift in time are inconsistent. Her hair and nails grow, her burn scar heals, but the items she buys on the repeating day disappear sometimes, though not others. She tries explaining things to her husband but inevitably the day resets and she must explain all over again. Over the course of a year, Tara becomes increasingly detached from her old life.
There are risks to a premise like this. Characters finding themselves out of time are well established in the public mindset – think Back to the Future or Groundhog Day – and the novel needs to avoid overexplaining itself. As the title hints, Balle’s approach is to make this a test of capacity. We see Tara’s psychological capacity to stretch, explore, experience and, ultimately, fill time. The empty space within her, brought about by the inexplicable disappearance of her life’s meaning, floods with a meditative interiority. As a work of slow prose, it is utterly engrossing – beneath Tara’s beat-by-beat realisations, a quiet despair simmers.
This extraordinary novel is the first volume of a seven-part series. I cannot wait to read the next six.
In Honey Hunger (Hoopoe, 284 pp, £14.99) by Omani writer Zahran Alqasmi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth, a beekeeper moves his hives from the mountains out to Bedouin country on the flat desert planes of Juba, where a lifetime of skill is barely enough for him to keep his subsistence enterprise going. This is a landscape novel that seems to sit outside of time, technology and politics. Azzan, the beekeeper, is not battling nature but learning to balance its bounty and precarity. Though he is a solitary outsider, he is welcomed by a local Bedouin leader and encounters a mysterious herdswoman.
The novel broadens out when Azzan joins two old friends to embark on a quest to find wild hives in the mountains, a search that requires guile and honed expertise. The novel digresses into troubled backstories of the three men, with character-building incidents involving family, women and alcohol. The evocative translation shows trust in the reader by retaining many searchable Arabic terms – isbaq, falaj, taawibeh.
Honey Hunger is convincing on the details of apiculture, without feeling overly researched, and succeeds in drawing the reader into a distinctly drawn landscape and way of life.
Whereas in Honey Hunger, the solitude is meditative, in Where the Wind Calls Home (World Editions, 184 pp, €26.09) by Syrian writer Samar Yazbek, translated from Arabic by Leri Price, there is something more traumatic at play.
The poetic and (deliberately) disorientating opening introduces us to a 19-year-old Syrian soldier, Ali, drifting in and out of consciousness. He wonders whether he is witnessing his own funeral or that of his brother, who was killed in an explosion, his few remaining body parts buried in a coffin packed out with sand.
We learn that Ali has been injured by a bomb, accidentally dropped by a Syrian plane on its own soldiers. As he assesses his damaged, benumbed body, he tries to drag himself towards a tree and safety – away from the hyenas that will surely arrive at nightfall.
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As he lies there, Ali relives episodes from his childhood. He was an eccentric, misunderstood boy drawn towards spiritual learning in a land where the oppressive thuggery of the Assad regime is ever present.
This is a tough, melancholy read but worth the effort. The translation pitches Ali’s voice just right, between claustrophobia and intimacy.
Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 111 pp, £12.99) by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, is about Anna and Tom, two ex-pat millennials living a trendy freelance life in Berlin. The novel dissects the habits, tastes, sex lives and activism of the two characters as flat-pack archetypes of the hipster franchise, recognisable whether in Neukölln, Spitalfields, Smithfield or Williamsburg. Their lifestyle is notionally alternative, but quintessentially bourgeois and petty capitalist. Their politics are based on guilt disguised as virtue. Though we are told time passes, the characters seem ageless and unevolving.
The profusion of “would” sentences is used to typify them: “They would sing ironic renditions of Oasis at Karaoke,” “They would send a few sheepish messages to assuage their guilt at some half-remembered thing.” The intelligent translation is carefully attuned to these grammatical choices.
There is a legitimate point being made here about the gentrifying, culturally homogenising impact of this sort of hipster invasion, and while Latronico’s one-sided dissection proves that he knows his enemy well, readers might have preferred some scope to draw conclusions of their own.
Rónán Hession’s latest novel is Ghost Mountain
