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Wednesday reading, on a Wednesday.
The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami (trans. Allison Markin Powell). This is a quiet, odd book that observes the actions and stories of various people who work at a cluttered secondhand store in the Tokyo exurbs. I almost called it "meditative", in line with its quietness (and a cliche of Japanese lit), but it isn't. It is distinctly not ruminative; there is very little reflection and consideration going on. What it is, is carefully observed, down to how someone's scent shifts as he takes a seat and what a woman's eyelids look like when she winks. Characters are as carefully examined as the mundane objects that come through the store; emotions are felt, but rarely explained. Traits, insights, tics: all these aspects of characterization bob up out of dark waters briefly, before sinking away.
In the final chapter, when Hitomi, the narrator, has been out of touch with the shop denizens for a few years, she wonders:
The narrative resists some easy shortcuts, particularly in making the characters more likeable/appealing. Hitomi states the absence/negative of positive emotions a few times: she is not fond of her boss, she does not empathize with an older woman. These negations are neither hostile nor off-putting; their absence does not imply the presence of bad feeling. They are simply factual. A book that wanted to please its reader, tug some heartstrings, be quirky and cute, would, for example, make her very fond of Mr. Nakano in his pom-pom cap and complicated love life.
I am currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore.
*
In Now We Fight for the Future: It's Time to Become a Radical, Joshua Hill describes both how we got to the current moment (ever-growing inequality and the atrophying of civic life beyond voting) and what is necessary in order to move forward. Referring to Grace Lee Boggs, he writes, "Protest is not enough. We need visionary organizing, both in that we must tell a different story and in that we must deliberately build organizations that work to transform society. The story we have to tell is both about solidarity and our enemies."
Sarah Schulman's forthcoming book describes solidarity like this: "Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter. It is based in learning to evaluate the state of the world by the collective, and not only by our own individual experience. Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams."
The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami (trans. Allison Markin Powell). This is a quiet, odd book that observes the actions and stories of various people who work at a cluttered secondhand store in the Tokyo exurbs. I almost called it "meditative", in line with its quietness (and a cliche of Japanese lit), but it isn't. It is distinctly not ruminative; there is very little reflection and consideration going on. What it is, is carefully observed, down to how someone's scent shifts as he takes a seat and what a woman's eyelids look like when she winks. Characters are as carefully examined as the mundane objects that come through the store; emotions are felt, but rarely explained. Traits, insights, tics: all these aspects of characterization bob up out of dark waters briefly, before sinking away.
In the final chapter, when Hitomi, the narrator, has been out of touch with the shop denizens for a few years, she wonders:
Could Takeo have died on the side of a road?This sense of thoughts and emotions happening, only to pass, characterizes the book as a whole.
That would serve him right! I thought at the idea of such a thing. But my smugness was soon dampened by the realization of how troublesome it was, just to feel that way—how troublesome it was, really, just to be alive. I wanted nothing to do with love! I wanted the stiffness in my shoulders to go away. I could probably put a bit of money into savings this month. These thoughts drifted by one by one, like tiny bubbles.
The narrative resists some easy shortcuts, particularly in making the characters more likeable/appealing. Hitomi states the absence/negative of positive emotions a few times: she is not fond of her boss, she does not empathize with an older woman. These negations are neither hostile nor off-putting; their absence does not imply the presence of bad feeling. They are simply factual. A book that wanted to please its reader, tug some heartstrings, be quirky and cute, would, for example, make her very fond of Mr. Nakano in his pom-pom cap and complicated love life.
I am currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore.
*
In Now We Fight for the Future: It's Time to Become a Radical, Joshua Hill describes both how we got to the current moment (ever-growing inequality and the atrophying of civic life beyond voting) and what is necessary in order to move forward. Referring to Grace Lee Boggs, he writes, "Protest is not enough. We need visionary organizing, both in that we must tell a different story and in that we must deliberately build organizations that work to transform society. The story we have to tell is both about solidarity and our enemies."
Sarah Schulman's forthcoming book describes solidarity like this: "Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter. It is based in learning to evaluate the state of the world by the collective, and not only by our own individual experience. Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams."
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