October Reads

Jason is a friend and, by the time you read this, will have interviewed me for his podcast Writers Read their Early Shit, so obviously the following is going to be a touch biased, but I do mean it: if I think negatively about a friends’ work I’m not going to mention it online; better to be quiet than be a self-righteous prick. Anyway, I’m very happy to talk about Jason’s poetry collection, Little Bit Die. Jason, like myself, went through a Beats period and the evidence is there in his writing, from long unspooling lines, to cut-up-esque juxtapositions, and a love of the sound and rhythms of language. The first sequence in this collection stands out particularly, being a series of poems about the death of his friend Stan. At times Jason can build wonderful palaces of imagery but its when he’s at this most prosaic and straightforward that his lines really land, particularly this poem which captures brutally that moment when mortality stops being abstract and becomes scarily personal:

& you always so discreet

when you
went & died
you made
dying true
let it in
& made it real
if you can die
Maho can die
my kids
can die
Max & Patrick & Tom
can die
my kids
can die
O man Stan
that was
a truly
shitty thing
to let me
in on
like that

As he was reading my back catalogue in advance of the podcast recording it seemed only polite to also read his book My Hand’s Tired & My Heart Aches. I’ve wanged on in many, many outlets about the dearth of decent “foreigner coming to Japan” books, since most of them are written by over-excited 23-year-old Americans who spend 10 months in Tokyo and then go home an “expert” on Japanese people and Japanese culture. My Hand’s Tired… (the title is from REM’s “Half a World Away”) is nothing like that. Based on letters (yes, letters) Jason wrote to friends and family when he first came to Japan, this book is a highly experimental kaleidoscope of language, memories, images, sentences following chains of thought wherever they may lead, looping, spinning, all replicating the disorientating feeling of moving to Japan, falling in love, and settling down here. Not for everyone, this one, but if you like the experimental end of the prose spectrum, worth checking out.

Issue 30 of Gutter and it’s still going strong. I’ve waxed lyrical enough on here about what Gutter means to me: suffice it to say this is another wonderful edition, with great stories from Doug Johnstone and Helen McLory. The stand-out piece for me is the first one “Splinter” by Ciara Maguire. I hate choosing the first piece in a collection because there’s always the suspicion that the reviewer only read the first piece and just wrote about that, but here it is actually my favourite. It does a couple of difficult things really well: firstly, it is written entirely in second person, which is a hard balancing act and difficult to sustain. Secondly, it covers a wide period of time almost as if in summary, breaking the “show don’t tell” rule. That both of these things work brilliantly is a testament to the author’s talent. Great stuff.

Tattered Kimonos in Japan was sent to me by the author to review and I’ll be writing about it in more detail for my Metropolis piece, so I won’t say too much here. It’s a fascinating book. Rand is an American journalist who travelled all over Japan collecting personal stories about World War II. From the home front to POW camps and the descendants of men executed for war crimes, it tells the story of the war and the aftermath from typically silent voices. It’s not as in-depth or as scholarly as Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt or Aiko Hashimoto’s The Long Defeat, but as an exercise in oral history it is a great addition to the story.

I’ve been working on this behemoth for a few months, and we’re only up to 1943. I came across John C. McManus on Al Murray’s We Have Ways WWII podcast. He’s an American historian and a fascinating person to listen to (not a given for historians) so I tracked down his mighty trilogy on the Pacific War from the perspective of the US Army. This is part one, and it was hugely engaging. Essentially it goes battle to battle, island to island, but in doing so challenges two big myths about the Pacific War: that MacArthur was anything other than a self-important egotist whose myopic decisions actively damaged US war efforts, and that all the fighting was done by the Marines who later took all the credit. I’d probably enjoy this even more as an audiobook read by the author but the need to flick back and forth to check names and facts overrides that. A report on book two once I’ve made my way through it.