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Translated books round-up: Mieko Kawakami’s irresistible sweet melancholy

Plus new books from Daša Drndic, Ariana Harwicz, Yukio Mishima and Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami’s new novel is one that is won in its intimate moments. Photograph: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty

Rónán Hession
Mon Apr 11 2022 - 06:00

Among the impressive array of modern Japanese voices is Mieko Kawakami, who was recently listed for the International Booker for Heaven, alongside translators Sam Bett and David Boyd. They also translated her much-discussed – and damn fine – preceding novel, Breasts and Eggs, and this, her fourth translated novel, All the Lovers in the Night (Pan Macmillan, £14.99).

The novel is about Fuyuko, a 34-year-old proof-reader who prefers solitary absorption in her work to the more conventional social preferences expected of her. She befriends an older man, Mitsutsuka, with whom she begins to share a platonic intimacy. Their conversations on neutral topics such as the physics of light soon take on metaphorical layers, and the novel blossoms gently from there.

There are parallels with Breasts and Eggs in the novel’s use of conversations with friends to pick apart questions about contemporary society’s expectations, but the heart of the story lies in Fuyuko’s relationship with Mitsutsuka. There are traces of Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (no relation) and perhaps Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor in their unconventional chemistry.

Ultimately, this is a novel that is won in its intimate moments. In contrast to the many suffocating (western) conventions of romantic storytelling, it is refreshing to encounter a book of such irresistible sweet melancholy.

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A work of perennial relevance

The past 10 years has seen the work of Croatian writer Daša Drndic reach an admiring anglophone audience, as her sublime books have found their way into translation, though not always in the order she wrote them. Canzone di Guerra (Istros Books, £9.99) was published in 1998 and predates many of the superb works that have already made their way into English.

In it we find the gathering of the preoccupations that feature in Drndic’s later masterpieces such as Trieste, Belladonna and EEG: her meticulous Nazi/Ustasha-hunting; her perspicacity on cultural nuances; and her ability to chronicle 20th-century Europe through interlocking personal histories. Drndic’s style is a signature mash-up of fiction and non-fiction, with her own voice commanding the page with heavy doses of mischievous irony. Her core mission, though, is a serious one: that of “not forgetting” – as opposed to merely remembering – what has happened in Europe.

In Canzone Di Guerra, Tea Radan and her daughter Sara have fled to Toronto to escape the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Tea wryly observes the self-congratulatory generosity of the host culture, which creates room for the new arrivals, but only at the bottom. She is equally clear-eyed about the self-narratives of the long-term emigrants: “They say they have come [the men that is, of course] to avoid being mobilised, but on the whole they are over 40. (The 20 year olds who haven’t come have on the whole been killed)”. She adds: “There are exceptions… [but the] local ethnic newspapers don’t print interviews with these exceptions.”

The translation is by Celia Hawkesworth, who has worked on several of the writer’s other books; as before, she delivers a translation brimming with lucidity and personality.

It has become blurb fodder to describe a writer as “essential”, but in the case of Daša Drndic this can be said with seriousness and certainty. Canzone di Guerra, like her other books, is a work of perennial relevance for the reader and the world. Read everything by her.

The dark side of motherhood

Following from the Booker-nominated Die, My Love and its successor, Feebleminded, Tender (Charco Press, £9.99) is the third instalment in Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz's "involuntary trilogy". The books are loosely related in their exploration of the dark side of motherhood, but also work as standalones that can be read independently.

Tender’s unnamed narrator is the dysfunctional mother of a teenage son. There is a co-conspiring closeness to their relationship as they careen from incident to incident, often at odds with authority figures drawn to their chaos. In her affair with her lover, her heart seems only interested in all-or-nothing passion, even if the all leaves her with nothing.

It’s an uncomfortable yet compelling place to be – full of brutal honesty, voiced so convincingly in the translation by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff. This short novel is not linear or arc-shaped; it’s more like a vortex, with the reader dragged deeper into the story as it intensifies towards a climax. While the changes in point of view risk muddying the narrative and dissipating the tension, it is hard to match this, or any of the books in this trilogy, for sheer searing memorability.

A pacy, clever, enjoyable book

The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (Hoopoe/AUC Press, £11.99), by Egyptian writer Hamdi Abu Golayyel, draws its key characters from the Saad-Shin, the Egyptian Bedouin who move between Egypt and Libya. The book's characters are people who live on the margins: the margins of life, the margins of the desert, and the margins of the law.

“There are three levels of Egyptians living abroad,” one character theorises, “the smart guys, who go to Europe, the middling, who go to Iraq and the Gulf, and the completely clueless types with no educational qualifications and no profession, who go to Libya.” So, the story takes us into the lives of the “smart” Saad-Shin who take the treacherous boat journey to Italy, and the “clueless” types who survive in Libya of the Gadafy era.

The Italian thread of the story provides a hyperactive portrait of drug-fuelled criminal entrepreneurship and unprovoked violence. Though engaging, a lot happens without the narrative catching up with itself and extracting some meaning from all the action. The Libyan chapters, on the other hand, have plenty of humour, portraying Libyan society under Gadafy (Leader with a capital L) as a grand absurdist failure.

This is a pacy, clever, enjoyable book, rich in storytelling and adroitly threaded with social commentary. It also offers an opportunity to appreciate and pay tribute to the immeasurable talent of its translator, Humphrey Davies, who sadly died last November.

Violent, abhorrent and insane political views

Yukio Mishima was a star of postwar Japanese literature, but his ultra-nationalism and violent ritual suicide after a shambolic coup attempt make him a controversial figure. It is said that he claimed the 1962 novel Beautiful Star (Penguin Modern Classics, £12.99), translated here by Stephen Dodd, as his masterpiece, though it's not clear why.

This is a story about a family who believe themselves to be extraterrestrials and who hold ordinary earthlings in piteous contempt. The father begins a campaign to elicit the help of others to save the human race, attracting the attention of a rival group of self-professed extraterrestrials, whose contrary aim is the annihilation of humankind. The last third of the novel is packed with dense and lengthy philosophical debates about whether the (apparently undisputed) worthlessness of humans means they should be saved or wiped out.

As a novel it doesn’t work. The voices are flat and indistinguishable; the narrative buckles under the weight of the arguments; and extensive passages present as rational discourse, political views that are violent, abhorrent and insane – “What the Nazis did was a mere rehearsal,” “Only blood will wash away the stench of humans.”

It would be simplistic to attribute the characters’ moral ugliness to Mishima himself, but it is difficult to see past the absence of any countervailing humanity in the book.