The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside

by Kazufumi Shiraishi

  But the more significant appeal, as similarly reflected in Mr. Shiraishi’s later work, the 2008 Kono yo no zenbu wo teki ni mawashite (Me Against the World), where the fruits of his years of ruminating on life and love culminate and find expression in a powerful philosophy of his own devising (dubbed Shiraishi Bungaku [Shiraishi Literature] by Japanese literary critics), is that The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside is, without a doubt, as John O’Brien has said of the works of Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, deeply rooted in a sense of humanity and suffering.

  In effect, most of Mr. Shiraishi’s novels share with the works of Ms. Alexievich the theme of the ordinary person at the mercy of the greater evils of our world. Unlike her works, however, where these greater evils visibly manifest as voracious corporate juggernauts depleting the earth’s natural resources or, perhaps, as ruthless and reckless tyrants hungry for power and money, in The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside they make their presences known in trace amounts—in the form of repercussions: as tormented emotions, dazed confusion, and lasting emotional scars, etched deep inside the psyches of lost individuals who endeavor to make sense of their existences—the seemingly random products of some unknown improbability generator at work in the cosmos, as the late Douglas Adams, the doyen of existential science fiction, might say.

  The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside, as its straightforward, unadorned title suggests, is certainly rooted in existentialism. In fact, Mr. Shiraishi’s defining influence is Albert Camus’s The Stranger; he was so struck by this classic when he first encountered it in his formative years that, for a time, he even made the French existentialist’s birth date his credit card’s PIN number.²

  The novel is a portrayal of an unvarnished account of life as it is lived by someone who, without any rhyme or reason, happens to be in Tokyo, making a living as a publishing professional. This sense of abstraction, or this sense of life lived as a nowhere man, if you will, is heightened even more by the story’s occasional, yet remarkable, digressions into explorations of the meaning of place; one that comes to mind is the argument Naoto Matsubara, the I narrator of this I novel, has with his alluring partner, Eriko, a beautiful career woman three years younger than him who works as a media planner in a fashion-related PR firm. Naoto argues how place—as birthright rather than real estate—relates to identity.

  Another excursion into the mystery of place is the scene where Naoto, while staying at Eriko’s family home, is lost in thought, pondering the timelessness of a calendar image of a frigid summit in a faraway land, a place to which he feels so paradoxically close.

  Complementing such existential flourishes, like resonant undertones ringing throughout the narrative, are notes of Buddhist aesthetics. A case in point—an instance when these aesthetics appear in perhaps their sharpest relief—is when Raita and company are disposing his old household garbage into a bonfire on the occasion of his move to a new residence. Echoing the essayist, novelist, and Buddhism expert Pico Iyer’s opening of his book, Global Soul, in which Mr. Iyer witnesses his home, and, by extension, his whole world consumed in flames, this scene with Raita and his friends is bursting with the symbolism of renewal, not only in terms of switching vocations—in this case from a yakitori shop attendant to an employee at a construction firm—but also in the spiritual sense of abandoning a worldly existence, a notion that Raita, driven by his passionate disavowal of materialism,

  seems to embrace more and more toward the climax of the story; this is especially evident when he rejects a talent scout’s efforts to lure him into the glitz and glamor of becoming a so-called idol, or celluloid star, deriding entertainers and politicians as peddlers of the commercialization of self; as people condemned to the psychic strain of managing public personas; as people who sell a brand image of themselves without even giving a thought, to begin with, to the question of the unexamined life—the question of Who am I?

  This calls to mind, incidentally, a scene in Me Against the World, a novel that is decidedly more essayistic, in which its long-suffering narrator remembers how he was amazed, one day in his childhood, by the funhouse strangeness of so many selves—so many flickers of consciousness—reflecting on the question of selves:

  As a child, didn’t you incidentally wonder Why am I me? I did, quite often. Gazing at the large number of strangers every day, I would always tilt my head in wonder at the inconceivability, the mystery, of the fact that I am I. I’d also wonder whether these people were really all that different from me, all of them also supposedly thinking the thought I am me.³

  Another resonant Buddhist chord is struck when Naoto looks back into his days of youth and remembers his first crush, the tender and virtuous, Machiko, who instilled in him, among many other things, a sense of awe and wonder about the mystery of Bon, the Japanese summertime Buddhist festival honoring the spirits of ancestors, inside a temple where he met her. He also remembers how fond she was of an author who explains the purpose of life from the perspective of a daikon radish, and, just prior to her passing, how she waxed philosophical about the unbearable lightness of being, likening death to a passage through a smooth tunnel. Death, incidentally, figures prominently in the novel. Along with other episodes revolving around mortality, not the least of which is about Naoto’s mother, Machiko’s end underscores the notion that—as Salman Rushdie’s character, Saleem Sinai, says in Midnight’s Children— A death makes the living see themselves too clearly."

  Naoto’s relationship with Machiko is one of the several relationships he has that serves as a launching pad for exploring different worldviews, each such worldview colored by the character of the female other in the relationship. If his platonic love for the maternal Machiko can be understood as a reminder of the fleeting nature of life, his avuncular fondness for Honoka (as well as Raita), who looks up to him as her mentor, is a recognition, as articulated by the daikon radish parable, of biological life’s primary directive: growth. His relationship with Lady Onishi, on the other hand, is clearly demonstrative of a worldview that condones a life of depravity and debauchery, whereas his relationship with Tomomi, the single working mother and owner of a bar, is characterized by an awakening of his paternal instincts and a full embrace of the role of guardian, as he demonstrates with his tender and protective feelings for her son, Takuya.

  But the most salient relationship, in his angst-ridden life, is his complicated and thorny, yet true, experience with the love of his life, Eriko. At times sexist in tone, and at times a serene tableau of two peas in a pod, this thread of the narrative is an arresting portrait of how love for another person can become so all-consuming that, more often than not, it ends up becoming a case of flirting with disaster. And perhaps that is why the hero remains reluctant—and too jaded—throughout the story to take the relationship to the next level, even after making up with Eriko after the cringe-inducing fiasco at her family home, where a meeting with her parents ends in a fight-or-flight trainwreck.

  In effect, Naoto’s relationship with Eriko is an exploration of domestic bliss; a state of existence he never fully warms to, even at the end of the story. After all, what he fears above all is a false sense of security; a state of mind that would lead him astray from his self-avowed mission in life, which is to seek meaning, or to confirm the lack thereof and embrace the absurd. He had learned the painful lesson that domestic bliss is, like the weather, unreliable, when his mother had abandoned him when he was still a child; when the gift of photographic memory, born of the trauma of this abandonment, had fallen into his lap.

  In sum, if there is any redeeming quality to Naoto’s promiscuity, it is that, for the sake of investigating life’s unvarnished truths, he engages each of his lovers with absolute intensity, even with the lady of leisure, Ms. Onishi; what he lacks in emotional connection with her, he more than makes up for by diving deep into carnal depravity; so much so that he attains epiphanies about female sexuality, as evidenced in his experiments inspired by his insider knowledg
e of a male porn star’s techniques.

  Undoubtedly, it could be argued that Naoto regards women, in general, through sexist eyes. But whether you

  relate to his character or not, what softens the blow of this critique, if it doesn’t altogether nullify it, is the fact that this narrative—this first-person adventure of being Naoto Matsubara, with the richness of its details and emotional resonances—helps the reader engage in a deep sense of self, warts and all. In effect, it’s a portrayal of an unbounded inner life, which more often than not comes at the expense of likeability. It is, in the end, an exercise in not sympathy, but empathy.

  In a morally complex age like ours, perhaps empathy is what we need more than anything else. When so much blood is being shed in the name of one cause or another that promises the individual meaning and purpose—a sense of direction in life—be it a religion, a political ideology, or a lifestyle promoted by an omnipresent, all-encompassing brand touting the promise of instant gratification, perhaps there is no better time than the present for Mr. Shiraishi’s stories to remind us that, with the right kind of eyes, we can see that meaning, in a true sense, resides in the absurd, where freedom can take flight on the wings of imagination; where we are free to make whatever we want of our lives; where, as the eminent philosopher of our times, Amartya Sen says, identity can be seen as a choice, and not destiny; where we can experience, even, a brush with eternal recurrence; and where we, in the end, can find, as Mr. Shiraishi says about his feline friend, an outlet for love and love only.⁴

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude to TranNet’s senior agent, Mr. Koji Chikatani, my guide and guru for so many memorable years, who so graciously offered me the opportunity to translate not one, but two of Mr. Shiraishi’s masterpieces, and whose visionary foresight, encouragement, and patience have been invaluable in bringing the projects to fruition.

  My special thanks also goes to Professor Michael Emmerich, the eminent author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature, and the translator of so many exemplary works of modern Japanese literary fiction, including Hiromi Kawakami’s Manazaru and Gen’ichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara Gangsters, for helping me better understand where Mr. Shiraishi’s oeuvre fits within the larger rubric of Japanese literature.

  To Professor Peter MacMillan, award-winning artist, translator, and poet extraordinaire, whose many works, including his highly acclaimed, prize-winning translation, One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin Isshu), and more recently, Tales of Ise, are truly doing wonders in bringing Japan to the rest of the world, thank you for being so generous with your time and for pointing me in the right direction for researching Mr. Shiraishi’s literature.

  A huge thank you also to Mr. Katsunori Hoshi, musician and producer, CEO of Nippop, all around yushikisha (man of light and leading) and free-thinker, and my dear friend for allowing me to engage in spirited, eye-opening tête-à-têtes on Mr. Shiraishi’s works, often over espressos at a Starbucks in Tokyo.

  A huge thank you also to my wonderful, inspiring family for giving me space and strength.

  A very special thank you goes to Mr. Nathan Redman, assistant editor at Dalkey Archive Press, for his fine-tuning and constructive comments.

  To Sir John O’Brien of the Dalkey Archive Press, no words can do justice to my deep gratitude for taking Mr. Shiraishi and myself under your wing; it is a boundless honor, sir, to be a part of your distinguished and awe-inspiring imprint, home to a truly brilliant and storied constellation of literary luminaries.

  And last, but not least, I would like to thank, from the depths of my heart, Mr. Kazufumi Shiraishi himself for his stories, and for letting me help them flow, at long last, beyond Japan.

  Yokohama, 2015

  1 Ignition, http://ignition.co/1

  2 Sakka no dokusho michi (An Author’s Road to Literature) April 18, 2012, http://www.webdoku.jp/rensai/sakka/michi124_shiraishi/20120418_3.html

  3 Excerpted from Me Against the World, Kazufumi Shiraishi, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016.

  4 ilove.cat, http://ilove.cat/en/11373

  Born in 1958, KAZUFUMI SHIRAISHI is a prolific, award-winning novelist who debuted in 2000 to great critical acclaim with Isshun no hikari [A Ray of Light]. The winner of two major Japanese literary awards (the Yamamoto Shūgorō and Naoki Prize), he currently lives in Tokyo with his wife.

  Born in 1965, RAJ MAHTANI is a freelance translator based in Yokohama, Japan. His published translations include Fujisan by Randy Taguchi and I Hear Them Cry by Shiho Kishimoto, both released by Amazon Crossing.

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