"Jump With Me" (original art work by Stephanie Schoeller)

Adrienne,

I figured you might want an explanation of my piece of art. Basically the entire piece is filled with bits that made a strong impression on me visually as I read the novel. Firstly is the color. The first chapter of the novel especially mentioned the color yellow a lot and the sand/dust that came in from the Chinese mainland. So, I created a yellow background. The smaller orange space and then the smaller red space are to delineate between the three chapters which I felt was very important because it was the perspective of three different people. The color gets “stronger” the farther into the story we get. The lip sofas in the first chapter were also a strong image for me as I read the novel. The three phrases written on the sofas were repeated concepts in the novel as well and I felt they were very important. In the orange part of the piece, there are 20 drops of water. The spring/pool in the second chapter was a significant location for important events and it was also a strong image. So, I added water drops. However, I also interpret them as tear drops. There are 20 because 4 out of those 20 have faces on them. The statement in the book (however false it may have been) that 1 in 5 people is targeted for a love suicide was another strong image. Thus, the 4 faces out of 20 on the water droplets. In the last red rectangle, there is just a jumping girl. Whether the last lines in the novel are literal or figurative, the image it creates in my mind is very strong. So I have it repeat at varying strengths in the other two sections of color; almost like a mirror. Enjoy! I hope it at least covers something of what you were probably hoping for from me.

-Stephanie Schoeller


To view a larger version of Stephanie's wonderful piece, please click on the image above.

A photo for us from Jim and my office hours this week

Jim loved our pictures and sent me this picture. He was hoping I could fit it into our class photos, but I'm not that talented, alas.

Traci asked about my office hours this week. I will be around, but in and out a lot because of some dissertation defenses, etc. I think the safest time to stop by and actually find me there will be Tuesday afternoon after 2:30 and until 4ish.

C'mon everyone, let's jump! Jump with me!

One last late-breaking extra credit chance

Click on the image to view a larger version. To earn extra credit, you must attend the event and write a short (1-2 page) response paper.

What happens next?

If you want to be a famous novelist, one thing you might want to do (after years of study and preparation) is write an ending for an unfinished novel left behind when a famous writer died. This is exactly how Mizumura Minae made her debut as a novelist in 1990. She completed Sôseki's Meian, the novel he was writing when he died. If you are curious about her Zoku Meian, you can ask me about it and also check out this link about one of her other works. Mizumura was a guest of UI's International Writing Program several years ago, and I'll be teaching her work in the fall. I also took a class with her back in 1991, and she was very smart(!), nice, and funny.

Why do I mention this? Well, I think some novels really invite us to imagine more, to think about what happens next. (This obviously isn't limited to novels that are literally "unfinished.") I think LHK definitely leaves room for lots of speculation and imagination. I often imagine what I'd like to happen next, and maybe some of you will or maybe already are doing this.

What would you like to see happen next? You can write another paragraph or two, describe a 4th chapter, or engage this question any way you'd like.

follow-up links

Shiho alerted us to this link, and Caitlin A. (not "our" Caitlin, but the "other" Caitlin who joined us last night) wrote and asked me to share this link, which includes the photo of the grandfathers of Bush and Abe.

Speaking of photos, one thing Prof. Fujii and I regret is that we forgot to take a picture last night. We did get plenty of pictures with my other class, but he thoroughly enjoyed meeting you all and couldn't stop talking about how bright and informed you all are. I'm thinking we should take a class photo next week and send it to him.

Shiho also mentioned having some trouble tracking down the document Prof. Fujii mentioned. It is tricky to locate. You can go to japan.usembassy.gov/, look under "Hot Topics," click on "Annual Regulatory Reforms," and then access the documents from there, but I think the easiest way to see it is to click directly here and then open the 2006-2007 press release and the "recommendations" (the latter is the document Prof. Fujii meant). Page 8 may be of particular interest.


Finally,click here if you'd like to listen to the interview two members of my other class conducted with Prof. Fujii on Thursday. In the interview, he discusses reactions to the V-Tech shootings at UC-Irvine, his own childhood and family background, and many other topics not covered in his public lecture.

Reminder: Jim Fujii here this week!

Don't forget that Professor Jim Fujii of the University of California-Irvine will be speaking for our class (and others) on Friday. Please don't forget that we will meet in 218 Phillips Hall instead of our regular classroom.

At 6:30, we'll head over to Pizza on Dubuque (around the corner from our class building) for a pizza party with Prof. Fujii.

LHK Chapter #2

Hoshino-san with Sakai-san, the Japan Studies librarian at UI, at last year's New Nationalisms symposium.

This week, I'm giving you a series of questions. You don't need to answer all of them, but I want to give you some points to engage and consider. Feel free to bring up your own questions and ideas too. At the end of this post is some additional material for those of you who can read Japanese.

1. In Inoue's chapter, the word "Majesty" always appears in bold print. This word does not appear in bold print in Iroha's chapter. How do you interpret this?

2. Colors are often very vivid and described in detail in this novel. For example, we encounter lots of variations of the color yellow (turmeric, gold, lemon etc.). Which colors strike you as significant and why?

3. Compare and contrast the personalities of Inoue and Iroha.

4. Where does Iroha go after the "incident" at the Sleeping Café? What is this place like? Does it remind you of anything?

5. How do you understand the incident at the café? What do you make of Mikoto's words and actions?

6. Explain the title of the second chapter.

7. How do you understand the relationships among the following: Inoue's document, subsequent incidents, media attention, politics, and social problems?

8. Shiho mentioned that she interpreted the word "okami" (which I translated as "Majesty") as a woman shopkeeper and not as an emperor at first. How is her understandable reaction addressed in the second chapter?

9. Where does Mokuren's money seem to come from and how do you understand the various work she does?

10. For those who know Japanese: Kisaragi and Udzuki are the names of two characters in Chapter Two. Februarie and Abril are unsatisfactory translations of these names. What might be some different or better ways to translate these names?

11. What do you think of Iroha's mom? Why?

12. What roles do the mass media play in the second chapter? Describe an example that supports your answer.

13. What can you say about the political climate during the "Love Suicide Era" (or the years following the incident involving Inoue and Mikoto)?

14. What would a "world without Majesty" be like?

15. How do you understand the scenes Iroha sees in the water?

16. I think this novel raises some really important questions about "security." More specifically, I think it challenges some contemporary notions of "national" and personal "security." What do you think? Do you agree/disagree and why?

17. Do you think the concept of "celebrity" is important to this novel so far? Why or why not?

18. The word "Japanese" only appears once in the novel. When? Where? Is that important? Why or why not?

19. Who is Terujirô Kishi? Does his name seem important to anyone? What do you think of him?

20. As I mentioned in class last time, this is a really richly layered novel. Which themes and issues raised in Chapter Two seem the most important to you and why?


Those of you who can read Japanese should check out Hoshino-san's blog and home page. You can also read the following post and perhaps tell your classmates about it:

私の長篇『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』は、いわば現代の「堕落論」とも言える。小説の最後のフレーズはそのように受け取ってほしい。[Note: If you finished the book already, please don't give away the ending when/if you write about this for your classmates.]

　では何からの堕落か？

　第1章では、語り手たち神隠しあった者らは、ある啓示を得る。霊的な超越者との一体感といおうか。それは流行りの言葉で言えば、「美しい国」である。その啓示に従って語り手たちは、「美しい国」の住人となるべく、個人である自分を捨てる。

　第2章以降に主役となるのが、「美しい国」の住人になる資格を最初から与えられていない者たちである。「美しい国」がじつは周到な排除のうえに成り立っていることが、最初から弾かれている者たちの目に映る光景として、明らかにされていく。しかも、突きつめるほど、「美しい国」を信じた者たちを含め、じつは誰も住人となる資格など持っていないことがわかってくる。

　では「美しい国」をどうしたらいいのか？　そんなものは本当にあるのか。

　そこで「堕落論」の登場である。「美しい国」などどこにもないのだ、排除を謳う啓示とは幻影に過ぎないのだ、誰もがそこから排除されているのが「美しい国」なのであれば、排除された者たちの溜まり場たる現世へ立ち返って、目を覚ます以外に居場所はない。

　その意味で、『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』は、「美しい国」から下りよ堕ちよ、と呼びかける書である。

　むろん、『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』には、「美しい国」という貧しい言葉などどこにも出てこない。啓示としてある以上、それだけの強さと喚起力のあるヴィジョンとして登場する。1章の語り手たちがまがりなりにもその世界へ飛び込んでいこうとするだけの、道理と強い磁力のあるヴィジョンとしたつもりだ。

　そんなことを、近々文庫化されるためのゲラを読み直しつつ、考えたのだった。
2007年3月3日（土）

Let's all take a moment on her birthday ...

... to wish a very happy birthday to STEPHANIE!!!! And a very belated happy birthday to JASON! And while we're at it, we can wish an early happy birthday to Prof. Jim Fujii!

Virginia Tech

In 1997, I was visiting an elementary school in a suburb outside of Tokyo for some research I was doing. A student asked me to visit her music class, and the teacher agreed. I sat in the back of the room, listening as the kids played their recorders. While the kids played, an earthquake hit. It was substantial enough to knock some things off a shelf and rattle chairs and music stands. The teacher kept directing the students as if nothing happened. After the song was over, she put down her baton and gave students instructions for the next class. The kids looked around while they played and afterwards too, searching for signs of validation of what they'd experienced in their classmates' eyes. Maybe my presence somehow made the teacher uncomfortable enough not to acknowledge the reality that they'd all just felt an earthquake. I can't know. But I do know that it was weird for the students to experience something real and have their teacher act as if nothing had happened. I think the kids would have been less freaked out if she'd simply said, "That was an earthquake, wasn't it?" The memory of that day was enough to convince me I should do away with my class plan on the first day of classes at UC Irvine in late September of 2001. I told my students, all of whom were first year undergrads starting their college careers, to talk about how they felt about current events, especially their fears. Since then, at UCI and Stanford and now UI, I make it a habit not to act as if we lived in a vacuum when wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, shootings, etc. happen. This post is for you all to share your thoughts, feelings, and responses to recent events at Virgina Tech. Given the subject matter of some of our readings, I think it's especially important to acknowledge the news. While it's always the case, for this post in particular, I ask that you be very sensitive and generous with one another. Try to keep your comments focused on how you feel.

Extra Credit Post (includes lots of spoilers)

Questions:

1. Does Yu Miri challenge stereotypes of "teen killers" in this novel?

2. Describe Kazuki's thoughts on the police and schools. Do you think his views seem reasonable? Why or why not?

3. Why does Kazuki fire Shimamura, the housekeeper? What is significant about this?

4. When the father (Hidetomo) is beating Miho, the narrator says, "When words lost their meaning, violence was the only thing you could count on." Describe two things that strike you as significant about this statement.

5. What is Kazuki's father (Hidetomo) doing immediately before he is killed? What do you think is significant about this detail?

Ideas to Consider:
Remember when I showed you the clip from GO and talked about the word kireru? What does that word mean again?

Although this verb is frequently invoked to describe inexplicable rage or sudden violence, the kireru moment we watched together was, in my interpretation, a response to cumulative stress. He “loses it,” but he loses it for a reason – or multiple reasons.

Now, this word was hard to miss in the late 1990s in Japan, a time when it seemed like teenagers everywhere, especially boys, were ready to go ballistic. While it may have seemed as if suddenly there was a problem, that a volatile presence had been introduced into a peaceful society, it's not as if youth violence had never happened or been represented before. In fact, a literary legacy of violent youth is evident throughout the history of modern Japanese literature. We've encountered it in Sôseki and Ôe, for example. So, the image of the teenage killer in the late 1990s had its literary (in addition to historical) antecedents.

Occasionally, these histories were acknowledged, as was the case with an advertising campaign for Gold Rush, which was published one year after the 14 year-old "Sakakibara" boy in Kobe killed the other children. The promotional band around the cover of the hardback edition of Gold Rush asked, “Why did the 14 year-old youth kill?” While Kazuki is VERY different from the boy in the news, Yu Miri was clearly responding to the real-life case. Underneath this question about why would a kid kill, there were three years with corresponding authors and book titles:

1956: Mishima Yukio, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
1980: Murakami Ryû, Coin Locker Babies
1998: Yû Miri, Gold Rush

At the same time that we might have been encouraged to see certain representations of youth violence as new, therefore, we were also periodically reminded, here for the purposes of assigning Yû Miri a place in a literary lineage, that we had seen this sort of thing before.

For the Japanese media, stories about youth violence come marked in advance with the promise of sensational violence or lurid spectacle -- surer paths to sales and profits than thoughtful articles that discuss the complexities of young people's experiences. Just this past New Year's, it was impossible to avoid stories about a a boy who killed and cut up his sister (who was an aspiring model/actress/singer, I think).

But the story shifts if we look to different tellers -- like kids:

Four months after the “Sakakibara” murders, an anonymous boy who was 14, the same age as the killer, was quoted in a national news magazine as being heartened that, at least, this tragedy might motivate adults to think seriously about how ninth graders feel and what life is like for them.

In letters and articles sent to newspapers, many other Japanese youth expressed similar sentiments. For example, in a letter to the Asahi Junior High School Student Newspaper in 1998, a 13-year old girl responded to yet another headline story of youth violence. Here are some excerpts from her letter.

My first thought was that a junior high school student just like me has murdered somebody again. I was shocked, but I also felt sympathy. It’s strange for kids to be expected to live up to principles and standards that adults can’t live up to. [. . .] We hear news stories about corrupt politicians and all sorts of unethical scandals. How can a society led by adults like that raise good kids? [. . .] I’d like [adults] to understand that they do have some responsibility in this. Because they are the ones making a society that leads people to crime. [. . .] Before they worry about banning the sale of knives or other weapons, they should work on fostering a better society. I want them to make a society where we can believe in something. But maybe this is just idealistic dreaming.

Do you think she is overly idealistic? Does her reaction make sense to you? What do you think a girl who feels this way might think about the novel?

Yû Miri (柳美里) was born in 1968, so she's the same age as me.

Links for further reading:
"A rebel in Japan clings to her freedom"

"The Supreme Court Can't Stop Gold Rush"

The author's website (in Japanese)

"Dead End Kids"