Profile & Synopsis
Miri Yū 柳美里
Miri Yū ( (1968–) ), a writer from the population of Korean residents in Japan, is popular and critically acclaimed in both Japan and South Korea. Often classified as an author of “I-novels,” she distills much of her own life experience into her works. In Inochi (Life), the first volume of a long nonfiction memoir, she tells of falling in love with a married man and giving birth to his son. Subsequent volumes focus on the head of the theater group she once belonged to, who discovered her writing talent and was also her lover; after he was stricken with cancer, she cared for him until his death. This four-volume series became a phenomenal bestseller.
Yū began her career as an actress and then a playwright; her first novel was published in 1994. She quickly displayed talent, and her 1996 novella Furu hausu (Full House), published with one other work, won two literary prizes. Full House tells the story of a house “where people suddenly appear and disappear.” The narrator is Motomi, a member of a theater group in her mid-twenties whose father has been promising her whole life that he would build a house, often describing his plans to her. He finally goes into debt to build it, but no one in the family will go near the finished house—not Motomi, who is now living on her own, nor her younger sister Yōko, nor their mother, who left home 16 years before. One day the father opens up the house to a family of four who lost their home and livelihood following a business failure. The narrator is appalled at this outlandish idea and feels a visceral dislike for the four newcomers and their reckless behavior, but in the end changes her way of thinking. As long as she herself has no intention of ever living in the house, nor any desire to inherit it, “What difference could it possibly make if another family comes to live there?”
The novella Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema), which won the Akutagawa Prize, symbolically captures the state of the family in contemporary Japanese society. In this work the author deepens her exploration into the themes of family and home. The main character is in charge of the planning division of a garden company. The story begins in her apartment, where her parents and younger brother and sister—the whole family—have gathered to celebrate her 29th birthday. Then a voice rings out: “Cut!” In fact, everyone is here to make a documentary film about family members getting together under one roof for the first time since the mother’s departure 20 years ago. The younger sister, an actress in pornographic films, had planned the documentary with a director acquaintance of hers and then strong-armed the others into participating.
The mother is seeing Fujiki, a married man five years her junior; the younger brother lives with the narrator, the younger sister with the father. Two years ago the father went into debt to build a new house, but then was fired from his job at a pachinko parlor. The mother is now attempting to use the house as collateral for a loan to start a real estate agency. As shooting progresses, the father shouts, “Let’s all live together again!” but the schisms in the family only widen. At work, the narrator asks an elderly sculptor named Fukami to make a vase. In return he asks permission to photograph her bottom, and for some reason she ends up living in his house. When she was in middle school the narrator had been molested by Fujiki; her life has been unsettled ever since, and she is emotionally unstable.
The biographical novel Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August) is based on the turbulent lives of Yū’s maternal grandfather, I U-Cheol, and his younger brother U-Geun. Both were well-known long-distance runners and potential Olympic athletes, U-Cheol having competed against the eventual marathon gold medalist at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. To understand them better, Yū ran in a marathon herself. The onomatopoeic su-su-ha-ha—capturing the disciplined intake and expelling of breath in running—that is repeated throughout the novel is grounded in her hard-earned experience.
U-Cheol was born in 1912 in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, and belonged to a generation that never knew an independent Korea. Forced to speak Japanese and adopt a Japanese name, he lived only for running; but when the planned 1940 Tokyo Olympics was canceled, he lost interest and fell into a dissolute life, fathering ten children by four different women. U-Geun, who devoted himself to the Communist student movement, was executed during the Korean War when he was barely 20. After U-Cheol moved to Japan and became a successful owner of a pachinko parlor, he began running again in his sixties in memory of his brother. The novel also includes a passionate account of the life of a nameless woman from the same village who was abducted by the Japanese at age 13 and forced to become a “comfort woman” to troops in China. This is Yū’s representative work, and a landmark contribution to contemporary literature in Japan and South Korea.
●Japan Railways Ueno Station, Park Entrance
A set of unlikely coincidences links the life of an ordinary man with Japan’s imperial family in this deeply felt work that vividly captures the voices of those who have been left with no place to go.
The first son of a farming family in Fukushima Prefecture, Kazu is born in 1933—the same year as the current Japanese emperor. Soon after the Pacific War ends in 1945, he hires on at the age of twelve with a fishing boat to help supplement his family’s meager income. He eventually marries a girl he grew up with; they have a daughter and, two years later, a son. The boy comes into the world on February 23, 1960, the same day as the first-born son of the present emperor (crown prince at the time), so Kazu takes one of the kanji in the new prince’s name when he names his own son. Three years later he leaves for Tokyo to work as a laborer in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, both to support his own family and to help out his parents and seven younger brothers and sisters. The train from Fukushima takes him to Ueno Station, the northern gateway to the metropolis.
Thirty-seven years later, Kazu arrives in Ueno once again, this time to join the ranks of the homeless squatters in Ueno Park—land gifted to the city by the imperial family. In the interim, Kazu had continued to labor away from home after the Olympics, with very little chance to actually spend time with his family, even as he provided for them. His son died suddenly at the age of 21, with Kazu having been away most of his life. Only at the age of 60 had Kazu moved back to Fukushima permanently, hoping to enjoy his twilight years surrounded by his wife and his daughter’s family (two grandsons and a granddaughter), but even this period of stability had been cut short when the death of his wife made him a widower at 67.
In November 2006, five years after Kazu joins the homeless camp in Ueno Park, an order comes down for all of the squatters’ cardboard and tarp shelters to be cleared away. The emperor and empress are scheduled to pass by in their private rail car, and the park is being cleaned up for the occasion. When the day comes, Kazu is in the crowd at the side of the tracks watching the two exalted figures smile and wave through the window, and he instinctively waves back. Four and a half years later, when the Great East Japan Earthquake hits the Pacific Coast of Honshu on March 11, 2011, the granddaughter who has taken him in is swept away by the tsunami and, making matters even worse, the subsequent nuclear power accidents render the area where his family had always lived uninhabitable . . .
●Goodbye Mama
A mother is driven to attempt suicide when her solo parenting responsibilities overwhelm her and she feels there is no one to whom she can turn.
The main action of the story takes place during a two-week period from late June 2012, a little more than a year after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and centers on homemaker Yumi Kawase, 38, and her son Yutaka, three, who goes to preschool. Yumi’s husband is away on a long-term assignment in Nagano Prefecture, and she hasn’t seen him in six months. Her mind is also shaped in part by a difficult childhood: when she was just eight years old, her mother had gone away with her little sister, leaving her to live alone with her father; then her father had died when she was sixteen.
Yumi’s inordinate love for her son has made her overprotective, and she never has a moment’s rest as she frets over his every word and deed. Worried especially about the effects of the radiation that was released in the nuclear power accident, she takes care to buy only foods she can be certain are safe, and lavishes attention on the nutritious lunches she prepares for him each morning. But as attentive as she is to these things, nothing can ease her concerns about possible contamination of the sand in the sandbox where Yutaka plays, or the acorns he loves to collect.
Yumi’s descent into her own private hell begins when she learns that the children at preschool are required to sit in a formal kneeling position while eating their lunches. She raises the objection that this is bad for their development because it’s apt to promote bowleggedness, and asks that the policy be changed. The administration brushes her objections aside, and she finds herself isolated from the other mothers as well. At home, she butts heads with the residents’ association of their high-rise apartment regarding the rules for how trash is to be sorted and set out for collection. She then tries to consult with her husband on the matter, but he fails to respond to her email, prompting her to suspect him of having an affair. When Yutaka only reluctantly takes a bite of the dinner she had worked so hard to make and then spits it out, she slaps him across the face in a flash of anger. Soon she decides to stop sending Yutaka to preschool, she begins piling her trash on the balcony instead of putting it out for collection, and she abandons all efforts at parenting and housework as well. Reaching a state of full-blown emotional breakdown, she drops Yutaka off with her mother-in-law and heads for the train platform at Takadanobaba Station on the Yamanote Line . . .
The fears and stresses that torment Yumi reflect those experienced by countless young Japanese mothers following the Great East Japan Earthquake. The work probes the deep, dark loneliness that so often lurks just beneath the surface of big city life.
●Suicide Nation
Fifteen-year-old Mone Ichihara lives with her parents and ten-year-old brother in Tokyo. Recently she’s been thinking about death a lot. Having failed to get into her first-choice high school, she has lost interest in her studies, can’t find anything to do that really excites her, and although she does have a group of four girls she hangs out with, their friendship is superficial and she frets constantly about when the others might decide to cut her out. At home, there is discord between her parents. Her father always comes home very late, and her mother is so focused on getting her brother ready for middle-school entrance exams that she has no time for Mone. Then Mone learns that her mother is thinking of leaving Tokyo with just her brother because she’s worried about the dangers of radiation from the nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima. Mone’s brother is the one who reveals this—not her mother. Feeling neglected and cast out, Mone wanders the city, her ears filling with snippets of strangers’ conversations, announcements over the loudspeakers on the train, and other sounds of every kind. With her mobile phone, she logs on to an online bulletin board for group suicides, where anonymous users post messages looking for others to die with. She chooses three companions and they agree on a plan to knock themselves out with sleeping pills and burn charcoal in a tightly closed car. They meet up and proceed as planned, but Mone wakes up and flees the scene, leaving behind her three sleeping companions. The following day she goes to school as if nothing has happened, and realizes that she feels truly alive for the first time in her life.
Suicide has been a frequent theme in author Miri Yu’s writing over the years, and here she brings it front and center. The third-person narrative follows Mone’s point of view, relating her internal thoughts and her interactions with her family. The utter lack of connection between her inner and external worlds, underscored by the random fragments of disconnected sounds she takes in, heightens our sense of her alienation.
●Gold Rush
This tale of a 14-year-old boy who kills his father was inspired by the true-life crimes of a Kobe boy of that age in 1997. The deadly incident sparked intensive discussions throughout Japan about why it is wrong to kill—a deeply philosophical question that forms the backbone of this story.
Kazuki, the protagonist, is in the eighth grade. His father Hidetomo owns a string of pachinko parlors in Yokohama’s Koganechō entertainment district and elsewhere. He keeps stacks of flat gold bars in the basement of his sumptuous home, apparently to dodge taxes. Kazuki’s brother Kōki is four years older, but suffers from the difficult-to-treat Williams Syndrome, a mental disability, and requires full-time care. For many years their mother Miki gave all her love to Kōki, devoting herself completely to his care, but then six years ago she got religion, and when she could not get her husband to give up his pachinko business, she left him. Kazuki’s sister Miho is two years older and in the tenth grade. She wears short skirts and garish makeup and works as a prostitute. Kazuki himself is enrolled at a famous private school to which his father is a major donor, but he rarely attends; he smokes, uses cocaine, keeps bad company with whom he participates in a rape, and generally lives a dissolute life. Seeing Kazuki as the successor to his business empire, Hidetomo dotes on him, on the one hand letting him do as he pleases, on the other declaring that he will teach him everything he needs to know about running a pachinko business—much to the chagrin of the older, long-standing management team that has been in command. When Hidetomo discovers that Miho is prostituting herself, he beats her to within an inch of her life, but he never lifts a finger against Kazuki.
In July, when Hidetomo pressures Kazuki to attend school regularly and tells him he’s going to put him in the school dorm, Kazuki snaps: he bashes his father with a vase, grabs a Japanese sword from the old man’s collection, and hacks him to pieces. Not sure what else to do, he stashes the body in the basement safe and cleans up the murder scene. With Hidetomo missing, some of the managers begin to suspect Kazuki, but living in a video-game mentality, Kazuki is convinced he’ll never be caught and begins plotting his next murder. The only person he reveals anything to is his girlfriend, who urges him to turn himself in.
The narrative probes the question of why and how the boy had come to feel so desperate that he lashed out like a cornered animal and killed his father. Author Miri Yū observes him and the supporting characters with a penetrating eye that bores right through the thick walls of their hearts and minds in this ambitious, unforgettable work.
●On Air
Spanning six years in the lives of three female announcers on NTS TV’s flagship news program “NewsEYE”, the story centers on the ambitions and disappointments, hopes and defeats, and dogged determination of a group of women working in the highly charged and intrigue-filled world of broadcast news.
They are coanchor Ayumi Fujisaki, 26; sportscaster Chihiro Mizusawa, 32; and weathercaster Yuika Mochizuki, 22. Ayumi is in a humiliating adulterous relationship with the program’s chief producer; Chihiro is seeing popular baseball player Daiki Inoue, who ardently loves her, but she is not yet ready to get married; and Yuika contends with the extreme possessiveness of the boyfriend she’s been dating since college, Takumichi Kobayashi.
Though female announcers may seem glamorous, they work in an environment where rapid turnover is the rule, with 30 being considered their mandatory retirement age by many in the industry. Even as these women appear to enjoy favorable winds and smooth sailing in their careers, they find themselves faced with a variety of trials. When Yuika breaks up with Takumichi, he takes revenge by selling revealing photos to a weekly magazine. Their publication leads to her being removed from the show; she turns in her resignation, and disappears from the public eye.
Four years later, new announcer Aiko Yoshikawa steals Daiki away from Chihiro. Although Chihiro is spared a public scandal, she must hide her wounded feelings as she continues reading the sports news on the air.
Meanwhile, Ayumi discovers that “NewsEYE” lead anchor Toshihiko Ishikawa, whose incisive commentaries often sway public opinion, is a drug user. Even as political coverage at NTS increasingly sides with the opposition, she contacts a leading member of the ruling conservative party and hands over the incriminating evidence—Toshihiko’s American Express card bearing drug residue. Placed under police surveillance, Toshihiko is caught red-handed and arrested. In the course of things, the chief producer with whom Ayumi has been carrying on an affair is demoted, and Ayumi herself announces her retirement on the air.
Two years later, NTS cancels the scandal-ridden “NewsEYE” and launches “Press Report Re:” in its place. Chihiro is tapped as the lead anchor. The inaugural broadcast features a segment on three former female announcers. First is Ayumi, who stood for national office and was not only elected on her first try but named Minister of the Environment. Next is Yuika, who was driven to the brink of suicide by scandal, but has rebuilt her career as a DJ on community FM with the help of a man who runs an announcer training school. And last is Aiko, who married Chihiro’s former lover Daiki and moved with him to New York, where he now plays big-league ball.
●After the Rain and Dreams
Twelve-year-old Ame Sakurai lives in Tokyo with her father Tomoharu, 28, an entomological photographer. Tomoharu has gone off on a trip to Taiwan to photograph insects, and Ame begins to fret and worry when he stops calling. Finally, two weeks after his last contact, Tomoharu abruptly shows up at home. He was pursuing a butterfly in the mountains when he fell into a pit and nearly died, he explains.
When Ame burns herself in the kitchen one day, their neighbor Akiko Koyanagi comes to her aid, and after that Ame, Tomoharu, and Akiko become friends. Ame even fantasizes Tomoharu and Akiko getting married. But then Akiko’s decayed corpse is discovered in the neighboring apartment: betrayed by her fiancé, she had killed herself a month earlier. Ame and her father had befriended Akiko’s ghost. Ame is unsettled to discover that neither her father nor Akiko actually appear in the picture they had taken of the three of them together.
In the midst of these developments, Ame sees her mother Tsukie, 38. Tsukie reveals that Tomoharu is not her real father. Ame is the product of an affair Tsukie had had with a married architect named Nagashima. When she became pregnant, Tsukie decided to raise the child on her own, and told Nagashima they were through. But on that very same day she met Tomoharu, then a middle-school student living in a children’s home after having lost both of his parents at an early age, and they subsequently fell in love. As soon as Tomoharu turned eighteen, they officially got married, but not long after that Tsukie resumed her relationship with Nagashima. She later divorced Tomoharu and married Nagashima when his divorce from his wife was finalized. Now Tsukie wants Ame to come and live with her and Nagashima, but Ame refuses.
Ame has only one close friend among her classmates, but when his parents get divorced, he moves away to Kobe, his mother’s hometown. Ame is fond of a particular tree that grows in an open space between buildings, and wants to give it a name, but then it gets chopped down as construction starts on a new apartment building. “Everybody and everything I look to for support is disappearing,” she laments.
Then Tomoharu’s younger sister calls to tell Ame that his body has been found in a pit in the Taiwan jungle. Ame and Tomoharu’s ghost return to an amusement park they had visited together when she was three. They take a ride on the ferris wheel, and when the gondola reaches the top, Tomoharu tells Ame about the Buddhist teaching that the souls of the dead remain in this world for 49 days after death. This is the 49th day since he died, he says, and then vanishes.
Although cast as a tale of the supernatural, this is first and foremost a story of the love between father and daughter, told in powerful, lyrical prose.
●Tiles
This gripping psycho-thriller depicts with unrelenting horror the madness and murderousness that lurks in unknown corners of the big city. The unnamed protagonist is a mentally unstable magazine designer. Recently divorced, he moves into a one-room apartment near the tracks of the Yamanote Line that loops around central Tokyo. He has a hard time getting along with others, and clashes, one after the other, with a clerk at the convenience store, a neighbor housewife, and the superintendent of his building. The only thing that seems to interest him is a female character in a serial novel that appears in a weekly magazine, who spends day after day languidly making love with her guy.
Then the man begins laying tile in his apartment. It is to be a mosaic of the ancient Battle of Issus, and he has help from a young woman, a design school student named Saiko he chanced to meet. The two work in their bathing suits with intense concentration for hours on end, saying very little. Slowly taking shape in tiny fragments of colored tile is a picture of blood-stained warriors and their steeds in battle.
Emoto, the elderly owner of the building who has more time and money than he knows what to do with, approaches his tenant and asks if he might like to “have some fun.” The man says he’d like to meet Kaori Natsumi—author of the serial novel he’s so fond of. Together they cleverly lure the writer to the tiled apartment, and the man engages her in conversation. But he becomes increasingly worked up as he speaks with her and in a fit of agitation cuts off one of his fingers, then grows even more agitated at the sight of the blood pouring from the stump and kills Kaori with his tile cutter.
Listening to the madman humming in the shower as he washes off the blood, the terrified Emoto considers how to cover up the murder. He gets some shelving boards, which the man uses to build a three-sided frame against the wall. As the old landlord wipes up the blood after they put Kaori’s body inside, the man boards up the top of the frame and begins laying tile all over the outside, thinking he can use the resulting oblong box as a low workbench. The story ends with the man and Saiko lying in their bathing suits on the mosaic in the room where the murder occurred.
●The End of August
Author Miri Yū takes up the turbulent lives of her maternal grandfather I Uchoru and his younger brother by 13 years, I Ugun, in this novel, weaving an exquisite tapestry that mixes fiction with her own family’s biographical details and the broader history of Japan and Korea over the span of a century on either side of World War II.
Born in Korea in 1912 when the peninsula was under occupation by Japan, Uchoru belongs to a generation that has never known an independent Korea. Japan established an oppressive administration over the colony, forcing Koreans to learn Japanese and adopt Japanese names. Miryang, where the first half of the novel is set, is a town that has produced many anti-Japanese activists, but Uchoru’s primary interest in life is long-distance running; he in fact competes on par with Son Gi-jeong, the winner of the marathon at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But when the 1940 games planned for Tokyo are cancelled, Uchoru abandons his running career. He now cares only for his business and womanizing, having one affair after another and fathering ten children with four different women. For his part, Ugun joins a communist student group. At the tender age of 23, he is executed in South Korea amid the internal conflicts on the newly divided peninsula following the end of World War II.
Uchoru moves to Japan after the war and sets up a successful pachinko business. Then, in part as a tribute to his younger brother, who had also been a runner, he takes up running again after the age of 60, with his sights set on besting the record for his age group. Alongside the two brothers’ stories, Yū offers up a deeply felt portrayal of a nameless girl from the brothers’ hometown who was abducted at the age of 13 by the Japanese in power and sent to work as a “comfort woman” for their troops in China.
To better understand the heart and soul of the two athletic brothers with hopes of Olympic glory, Yū communicated with the spirits of her ancestors through a psychic medium, and ran a full 26-mile marathon herself in Seoul.
“I want to do something worth dying for,” says one of Uchoru’s classmates in deciding to cast his fate with the anti-Japanese resistance, and it is with this same sentiment that the two brothers lived out their turbulent lives. Yū brings to life a slice of people’s history not yet addressed in literature. Mixing Hangul with Japanese, and written with the cadences of prayer, folksong, and the chirring of insects, her prose takes on a musical quality that complements the story to superb effect. The work is both a memorial stone and a milepost in contemporary Japanese and Korean literature, and is without question one of Yū’s greatest achievements.
●Family Secrets
“Why do I hit the child I love?” Author Miri Yū reveals family secrets and the dark feelings she has struggled with for much of her life in this raw, unvarnished record of a series of intensive counseling sessions she underwent.
Yū, 41, lives in Kamakura with her nine-year-old son and her 26-year-old lover. Tormented by bipolar disorder and insomnia, she has a history of exploding in anger at her son, abusing him both verbally and physically. Beginning in August 2009, she undergoes counseling with clinical psychologist Hirokazu Hasegawa, a child abuse and family pathology specialist.
Yū is shaken when told by Hasegawa that both her father’s domestic violence and her mother’s unmotherly treatment of her children constituted child abuse. He tells her that the absence of maternal love in her own upbringing has left her without a sense of motherhood for herself. In the course of relating her dreams to Hasegawa, Yū learns to identify the Jungian “wise old man” archetypes in them.
During her final counseling session on January 25, 2010, Yū describes a dream suggestive of death and rebirth. This dream, too, includes a sage-like figure. Upon listening to her description, Hasegawa declares their sessions finished, saying the wise old man will awaken her and help along the road to recovery.
Yū’s condition worsens after that, and she is tormented by a death wish as well as both visual and auditory hallucinations. On March 31, she turns off her cell phone and visits the Gumyōji district of Yokohama, where she had lived as a child. There she begins opening up to her internal sage about the pain she is in. As she does so, she gradually comes to understand how she has been piling blame on herself within the confines of her family, repressing her true feelings. Then she brings her narrative to an end by saying, “I am grieving for myself.”
--
参考：http://www.booksfromjapan.jp/authors/item/2603-miri-y%C5%AB