Summer shivers

The Tanizaki was, as expected, a bit disappointing. He spends much of the novel ignoring his clever premise in order to tell another salacious story of carnal obsession, something he does much better in his later works. Then, having reengaged the plot, he ties it up rather abruptly just as it finally seems to be bearing fruit. In her analysis, the translator tries to milk it for meaning by doing an autobiographical reading. Apparently it was written the same year as Tanizaki's celebrated dispute with Akutagawa, which culminated in the latter's shocking suicide. It's not particularly convincing, but it was interesting to learn about this period in Tanizaki's life and this provided a natural segue to taking up Akutagawa again.

I'd left a single story unread in the collection I bought last year, 地獄変 ("Hell Screen"). Initially, I'd skipped it because I'd recently seen the film adaptation from 1969 but at some point I decided to put off reading it until the Ghost Festival. That came earlier than expected, but then Sunday was cool and misty and seemed ripe for reading something "spooky". I enjoyed it so much that the next day I checked out from work a copy of his 河童 (Kappa). Unfortunately, the supernatural elements in it are entirely window-dressing for a satire of contemporary Japanese society. It's sort of charmingly odd, but not as inventive as I would have wanted.

In any case, it's a quick read and I'll probably be done with it tonight. Then I expect I'll finish up my volume of short stories by Chanelle Benz. Diverse in style and tone, they tend to focus on mixed-race women in harrowing circumstances. In general, I'm finding the contemporary stories more satisfying than the historical ones, with the tale of a woman returning to the South to track down her birth father being my favourite of the lot. This sounds similar to the plot of her first novel, which a friend favourably reviewed, so I may give that a shot as well.

Meanwhile, I've started on There, there, my sole birthday gift (unless you count the miniature of Welsh gin my brother gave me Saturday). The author is Tommy Orange, a Cheyenne from Oakland, and the major figures are all "urban Indians" living in and around Oakland. The format is a familiar intertwining narrative involving at least a dozen narrators. (So far, each has gotten one chapter but it looks like you get to hear from some again in Part II.) It's all competent enough, if a bit exposition-heavy, but I fail to see what the fuss is about, so it may take me a while to finish (especially if I end up getting distracted by something else).