Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a collection of six short stories focusing on the lives of samurai, priests, and pre-war Japan. The first, ‘In a Grove’, is about a murder of a man, told through interviews with a police officer, some of them witnesses, the suspect, the wife, and finally the dead man through a medium. On three of the accounts, all of the speakers describe themselves as the killer, all with differing motives. The truth is never revealed, though provides a look at how the world can be viewed differently even if everyone witnesses the same thing. The second story, ‘Rashomon’, tells the story of a hungry samurai who would never resort to becoming a thief, but when he sees a woman pulling hair out of corpses at the top of a gate, he steals everything she owns. Another interesting story is, ‘The Martyr’, in which an orphan is raised by a church, but his duty to the church is questioned when a girl says she is having his child. The orphan is then excommunicated, becomes a beggar, and only when the town burns down does he save the daughter people think different about him. However, the fire burned him so badly he dies by the feet of the girl, where it is revealed the orphan was actually a girl. And finally, the last story, ‘The Dragon’, follows a priest who decides to play a trick on the other priests because they make fun of his nose. He decides to make up the fact that a dragon will ascend to heaven from the pond. From this rumor, everyone from the town as well as the surrounding areas gather to see the dragon, although he knows it to be a lie. However, it turns out a dragon does ascend to heaven and the priest is left wondering if it actually happened.
This collection of stories was fascinating, not only in the stories themselves, but how they are framed. One takes the form of interview monologues, another adds an imagined post script, and another frames the story inside of another story. It was a fun read, especially, ‘The Dragon’, in which Akutagawa displays how lies can manifest themselves into being. Final Rating: 4.5/5
0 Comments
Instructions between Takeoff and Landing by Charles Jensen is a collection of poems that delve into the loss of a mother and contemplations on queerness. The poems are broken up into sections, with the ones under the ‘Story Problems’ sections adapting essay questions/discussions. I was fond of the poems discussing space and the Voyager satellite, ‘The Space Race’, ‘Instructions between Takeoff and Landing’, and ‘The Space Race, Cont.’. I also liked the poems ‘Hospice’ for its form and how it handled its subject matter and ‘Mortality’ for how strongly it worked the speaker’s life into the piece. The collection talks to itself, sometimes questions itself, and in that reflection, it creates intensity in its layers.
Final Rating: 4/5 Maw Appears in the Following Forms by Kiley McLaughlin is a collection of sections all discussing the ways in which three mothers interact and treat both each other and their daughters. There are elements of surrealism, weird dreams, moments at the beach, which all are written poetically and with care. I particularly liked the section, ‘Another Way to Tell It [Ear Tagging]’, with its use of ear tagging of calves and applying it to these characters in an instructional way.
Final Rating: 4/5 When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy is a collection of poems describing the impacts and reverberations of the war in Iran, both as a child and in reflection. There are many moments of depth from ‘They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing. There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People.’ to ‘Interview for Asylum’. The collection exposes and ruminates on the loss of childhood, of friends and family, of hearing, and of joy. It’s a gut-wrenching but needed collection.
Final Rating: 4/5 Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz is a collection of prose surrealist poems that discuss the experiences of a Mexican American living in LA. There are poems about having a conversation on Jupiter, a man riding his bike on the ocean, a lizard man teaching a class, and so many more weird and entertaining situations. The poems I enjoyed the most were ‘Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx’, ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’, ‘Insomniac Moon’, ‘The Stranger’, and ‘Bones’. And I really enjoyed the line, “I put ketchup in my breakfast burrito;” which encapsulates the two cultures meshing into one. It’s a fun and surprising read.
Final Rating: 4/5 Rupture by Adrie Rose is a poetry chapbook focusing on the experience and time after of having an ectopic pregnancy. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Rupture’, and ‘The Bell’. The poems also experiment with form through erasure and spacing.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is a novel about an older Japanese man living in Lima where he feels suspicious of the world around him. Thus begins his tumble into insanity where he believes people are watching him, he hears birds but they’re not there, and he sees his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, appear before him as a ghost. Katzuo loses his job at the university he works for because he’s become too old, and so he spends most of his time ambling around the streets, lost in thought, and trying to embody Etsuko Untén. Then one day, as he is on his walk and his condition has worsened, he sees a boy. Katzuo goes up to the boy, and exclaims the boy’s beauty while undressing. This causes Katzuo to be institutionalized, and a medium is brought in to diagnose his problems. It’s revealed that many of Katzuo’s hallucinations (the birds and Etsuko), are manifestations of the terribleness of the war and Etsuko’s continual desire for Japan to win.
The novel is full of descriptions, moments, and intriguing sentence structures that create a sense of Katzuo’s insanity. I enjoyed how there came to be a reason for what happened to Katzuo and it felt like I could understand the character fully. Final Rating: 4.5/5 The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara provides a strikingly deep look at Frank O’Hara’s work and his life. Most of the poems provide an almost diary-like feel to them which creates an intimate view of O’Hara’s thoughts. It seems he was consciously trying to push back on the conventional idea of what poetry was at the time, as can be seen through the continual iteration of titling many of his poems ‘Poem’. There is a wide breadth of poems that I enjoyed, though found ‘Poem [Let’s take a walk, you]’, ‘1951’, ‘Steven’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Poem [Pawing the mound with his hairy legs]’, ‘Two Dreams of Waking’, ‘The Anthology of Lonely Days’, ‘Three Poems’, and ‘Rogers in Italy’ all to be particularly interesting. And I really enjoyed the lines in ‘Rogers in Italy’ that goes, “And now at last I am/alone again and night, at last, has come.” Throughout the poems, there are thoughts about paintings, other poets, his mood, and his sexual encounters both with men and women. Also, the essay, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ was interesting.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a woman and her older brother who is handicapped. Their father and mother travel to California where the father is trying to get out of writer’s block, and believes being a writer-in-residence will help him. All the while, the woman, Ma-chan, the older brother, Eeyore, and younger brother, O-chan, continue to live in Japan. Ma-chan has taken up the responsibility of caring for Eeyore, taking him to music practice at Mr. Shigeto’s, taking him to his job at a handicap workshop, and eventually to swim practices with Mr. Arai. Throughout the novel, Ma-chan worries that Eeyore will either have his fits out in public, will be hurt by other people, or will act out his sexual urges. None of this comes to pass, but her worries become real when it’s alluded to that Mr. Arai was involved in two deaths on a cruise. They continue to get swimming lessons with Mr. Arai, until one day when Mr. Shigeto approaches him about an incident and then gets beat up. Finally, as Ma-chan talks about her dreams of marrying a Mr. Arai, Eeyore discusses this with Mr. Arai. Mr. Arai then decides to take them to his place, where he attempts to have sex with Ma-chan, but is beat up by Eeyore. The novel ends with their mother returning home and the father still toiling away in America.
Ōe creates such an interesting narrative through his use of Ma-chan’s voice, the discussions of movies, music, and of Ma-chan’s worry. It’s a novel that highly contemplates what it means to care for a disabled family member, and shows in some instances, the reverse (i.e. the care giver needs to be the one who is cared for) is true. This occurs while Eeyore protects Ma-chan from an oncoming crowd at a train station even while he is having a fit and in the last moment where Eeyore beats up Mr. Arai to save Ma-chan from being raped. It’s a compelling novel that shows the breadth of the care siblings have for each other. Final Rating: 5/5 The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook by Jay Aquinas Thompson is a nonfiction chapbook detailing the days, weeks, and months after the death of their mother. It recounts the moment they encountered her body, her life, as well as ruminations on Christianity. I particularly liked the lines, “When people asked me how grief felt, I’d say it didn’t feel like anything, it wasn’t a feeling; it was a metabolism.” and, “God is a fire victim on bedrest: from each burn point an angel is born;” It’s a deeply moving chapbook on how Thomson views their mother’s death, how their child, Finn, deals with these emotions, and what it all means within the context of religion. Thomson finishes off by writing, “There’s no and then I realized…moment in grief…”
Final Rating: 5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|