400 Books, 398 to go

Kanehara Hitomi's Snakes and Earrings was number 399.
I've been a bit obsessed with time, mortality and limits lately. Calculating based on my average over the past two years of 9 novels a year, for the 45 or so years I have left I should be able to read 405 books. I've rounded that off to 400, just to give me some extra rest in my later years, but that's pretty much the aggregate sum. All this means is that I don't have time for crappy books anymore, even though I just read one.

Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize in 2004 along with Wataya Risa. At the time, they were 21 and 20, respectively. There have been pointed criticisms of the selection of both of these excessively photogenic young writers, on the grounds that the Prize was trying too damn hard to drum up interest among the under-25 crowd, who are notoriously more concerned with comics, TV, and games. I can detect however, a minor parallel with the hot-selling novelists of the early '80s, namely the oddly-paired Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu who rode the economic wave (and materialism?) of their times. Critics were equally merciless to them, on basically the same grounds. One critic even remarked that Murakami's Norwegian Wood, published as a red & green two-volume set in the fall, sold more for its Xmas-time marketability than for its content. (My response? ridiculous). But really, focusing too much on the economic structure of the publishing industry is condescending to authors, and perhaps not too useful to readers either.

Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings is going to sell. I'm nearly certain of that. It's brutal, it's lurid, it portrays an underworld that we can be titillated by as well as moralize over. But it's also empty. It reminds me of Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue (the 1977 Akutagawa Prize-winner), which also reveled in the confused, nihilistic youth-culture of the '60s. And, in fact, Kanehara names Murakami Ryu as a primary influence, and somewhat nepotistically, Ryu was on the Akutagawa Prize selection committee. What bothers me most however, is how old-fashioned this call to action sounds, how often we hear that "the kids today are out of control," how "society's moral frabric" is in jeopardy.

Which is why I find Wataya Risa (and Haruki as well) so much more compelling; their stories are about characters who, bemused, self-deprecating, do find some shred of meaning. They can tell a story about people who are lost, with humor and a measured sense of wonder at how we put up with such absurdity. Really, the social message is muted, if present at all; but in comparison with all the overwrought hand-wringing about today's youth out there, isn't that in itself a political statement? Their likeable eccentrics seem to call out not for radical solutions, but for a greater tolerance for eccentricity.