Hiromi Kawakami
In which I talk about Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami and about how music has influenced the way I think about photographs.
By far the best book I read in 2020 is one that I only finished on the very first day of 2021: Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo. It’s a book about love, about being a misfit and loneliness, and about the delights good food and drink can offer. Tsukiko, a woman in her thirties, meets an old teacher of hers at an izakaya, and through a series of meetings that span the better part of a year they end up falling in love. The story is told through Tsukiko’s eyes. While large aspects of it are very Japanese, the book touches upon he underlying human condition so much that as a reader, one can’t help but feel being a part in it all. I want to read it again, a feeling I’m left with only very rarely.
I don’t remember if I ever talked about an article entitled The Murakami Effect. That article was a real eye opener for me, because it revealed many aspects of Haruki Murakami’s work that I seem to have been only subconsciously aware of (I’m not a fan — I don’t think Murakami is able to craft characters very well in his books: men are usually one-dimensional beings without much of an inner life, whereas women’s roles are typically limited to essentially serve men):
“He creates fictions that are both translatable and embody translation in their themes and methods. His work moves between languages and cultures (and, perhaps particularly, into and out of English) with relative ease and fluidity, with few textual and stylistic impediments or difficult cultural contexts, but, rather, various mechanisms and textual markers that seem to invite and insist on translation as both theme and practice.”
Consequently, if all you know of Japanese literature is Murakami, then, I’m afraid, you don’t know Japanese literature at all. Murakami’s writing is the equivalent of German “Export” beer: it’s distinctly Japanese enough, while at the same time doing away with all the various aspects that make Japanese culture so fascinating and sometimes bewildering for non-Japanese people.
In contrast, Strange Weather in Tokyo offers a lot of those aspects, without producing something “weird” or “cool” (abroad, Japanese culture often is seen as either one or the other — or even both, but almost never as normal). As a reader, you get to partake in two people’s lives, and while they are from a different culture, neither they nor that culture are depicted as weird or cool. They are just allowed to be themselves.
Reading another book by an author you have just discovered and enjoyed always is such a risk. If the book is as good, it’s already not quite as good: the repeated experience without a break in between dulls your senses of what otherwise would have been more enjoyable. If the book is worse… Oh boy. But if the book is better, you hit the jackpot. How many times do you hit the jackpot in life?
There was another book by Hiromi Kawakami that I had been aware of. Its attraction mostly came through the title and less through the description (I find short descriptions of novels even more useless than short descriptions of photobooks: it’s such a thankless task to summarise a book while also having to essentially create a sales blurb).
For a long time, I used to enjoy going to thrift shops. When I still lived in Pittsburgh, PA (roughly 15 years ago), there were so many of them, and they were so good (at least for a while — the good ones closed down one by one). I didn’t necessarily go to find treasures; I used to go because you could find all these things that at some stage had relevance in people’s lives. If you look closely and carefully, there are so many touching details you can discover.
Thus, the title of the book The Nakano Thrift Shop appealed to me. I’ve never been to a Japanese thrift shop, but I imagined it would be similar to going to a US one. I was curious about that aspect. But I was also eager to read more of Kawakami’s work.
And I have been completely blown away.
I mentioned above how Strange Weather was my favourite book in 2020, but I’m enjoying Thrift Shop even more (I’m currently 75% through). It uses some of the same techniques. There are chapters that are presented like short stories — they have titles, and they’re essentially self contained, even though they clearly connect with each other in a sequential fashion. Yet again, the main narrator is a young woman — Hitomi — in her 30s. Yet again, the young woman is attempting to figure out a relationship with someone.
However, unlike in Strange Weather, the amount of whimsy is dialed back. Maybe “whimsy” isn’t the right word, because I’m assuming that in its original Japanese context, what I perceive as “whimsy” might not come across as such. Maybe a better way to say it is that Thrift Shop has more plot, and there are more characters, as a consequence of which the very Japanese aspects of the book take on less of an importance.
Given the centrality of the two main characters in Strange Weather, everything that happens between them becomes incredibly magnified, and this amplifies all the aspects that are different in Japan than in the West (again, this is me, a Western reader). In Thrift Shop, in contrast, there are four main characters, all described through the eyes of Hitomi, the narrator.
Inevitably, the very quotidian activities they’re engaged in become a lot less significant, given that there is this complexity of human relationships. Hitomi works in the thrift shop, and she is interested in Takeo, a male co-worker, even though she’s not quite sure how she wants to go about it. But there also is her boss, who happens to be a rather colourful character, and his boss has a sister, who also helps out. In addition, the boss has a mistress, while the sister has a partner.
Much like in Strange Weather, there isn’t all that much happening besides a series of mostly pretty ordinary events. There’s a trip to pick up some stuff here, some food there, there’s the boss telling yet another quirky story, etc. Where I found myself engrossed in the increasingly heightened relationship between its main two protagonists in Strange Weather (where every utterance ended up taking on larger meaning), in Thrift Shop, the characters seem much more fully formed with all their quirks.
Maybe this ties in with ideas we have of Japan in the West, many of which are either way too simplistic, way too idealised, or way too stereotypical (or all of those three). This is not all that different from the kind of small talk I’m used to in the US regarding Germany: there’s good beer, and they make good tools. Add in Saturday Night Life’s Sprockets, and you’re all set, right?
I guess what I’m after is that such an approach reduces people to caricatures. However, it’s hard not to do that, even if you have the best of intentions. After all, there is an element of Sprockets in Germany (plus, the beer is fantastic). But there also is just so much more, including a lot of stuff you could never imagine. The same is true for Japan or for any other country in the world (if I hadn’t given up on learning Polish when I ran into all their numbers sounding the same to me, I might be writing this same email about some Polish author).
The Nakano Thrift Shop deftly cuts through the idea of defining or seeing people based on where they are from, to have a reader focus on how we are all united through this stuff we mostly deem irrelevant or embarrassing: our inability to sort out every human interaction perfectly, our struggling with personal connections, our surprise at having made a connection, etc.
It’s a supremely touching book.
One of the earliest formative experiences in my life was listening to Jean Michel Jarre. When I was ten years old, Equinoxe was released, with Equinoxe 5 becoming enough of a hit that I would hear it on the radio. The music was so different than pretty much everything else I was hearing. For a lack of a better word, it sounded futuristic.
But there was something else. I realised this only very recently. At the time, my expectation was that music was this entity that came in small, finite morsels: three or four or five minutes of one song, and then it was the next. Songs might be related in some ways on an album. Still, they were distinct.
My mind was absolutely blown when I listened to the whole of Equinoxe. The first time, I fast-forwarded my way to part 5 (I was somewhat confused about the lack of distinctive track titles). And then something happened. Before I knew it, there was part 6, and they had been fused. There was no strict separation, no silence. On its own, it might sound weird, even though I now think it’s far superior:
If you have good loudspeakers, the track begins with a pretty hefty bass sound. The cascading notes take you right into what ends up being this incredibly catchy initially slightly syncopated section that gets more and more complex.
All of this might come out a lot more clearly if you listen to it the way it was intended to. The following is a version using the best of today’s technologies — headphone will bring it out best, even though you won’t get the full bass (listen to about four minutes to get the idea):
It still gives me goose bumps listening to this. It’s just so brilliantly done. And I think many years later, the same idea would be so obvious to me in the world of the photobook: if a musician can blend one song into another and create a larger entity that’s not just a catalogue of sorts, why wouldn’t this be an obvious way to treat photographs?
A few years later, the remix came along. Suddenly, a song would not merely be what you would hear on the radio (and possibly its slightly longer version from an album). Instead, the same song would appear in different variants, possibly produced by different people.
For me, this completely dissolved the idea of the singular author, rendering music as something that is more collaborative than based on individual genius: it’s not the song that matters, it’s what something does with it. So suddenly some German electronic music (made by a pair of very wealthy young men who hired two others to form Kraftwerk) transforms into this:
How genius is that? This brings you here:
And then back to Germany:
I could keep going.
Whatever you want to make of all of that music, for me, there were two main lessons (even though they only appear as such to me now): songs can be more than their own isolated entities, and songs engender other songs that, in turn, do the same.
I’m convinced that experiencing this has shaped the way I think about and deal with photographs. This is why I have no patience for photographers who insist on their pictures being these pristine, isolated entities. That’s why Tupperware-model photobooks (glorified catalogues) bore me. So much more is possible.
Crucially, more often than not it’s the context that determines how and what a picture communicates, a picture that almost never arose out of a vacuum.
Well, this is my first email this year. I was going to send it a littler earlier. But you probably heard we almost had a coup here. It was upsetting (to say the least). I never imagined I’d be living in a country like this, but here I am.
So with all that’s already happening, I hope that you’re not only safe and well, I also hope that you’re able to take good care of your mental health.
Twenty twenty one ought to be the year where we’re kinder to ourselves and to one another.
Thank you for reading!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
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