Life is nothing like a story in a book

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tokyo ueno station book coverTokyo Ueno Station
by Yu Miri
translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles

This is an astonishing novella, packing so much insight and commentary and humanity into so few pages. And it taught me snippets of history as well. I’m really not sure how Yu managed it.

The tale is narrated by Kazu, an old man who has spent the last few years homeless, living in Ueno Park in central Tokyo. He tells his life story, but not linearly. An overheard conversation will remind him of his son. A piece of rubbish will remind him of a friend who died. A rain storm will remind him of a certain day in the past. And so on.

Kazu is an ordinary man, which is of course the whole point. He didn’t become homeless because he’s a junkie or had been in prison. Yu doesn’t spell out the reason he ended up in Ueno Park, but as we see his long lonely life getting sadder and lonelier, we can fill in some of the gaps.

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Sorrow rose from memory’s deepest dwelling place

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Exemplary Tales book coverExemplary Tales
by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

This is my Portugal choice for the EU Reading Challenge. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is best known as a poet but little of her work has been translated into English. This collection of her short stories took me some time to track down but was worth the effort.

The stories tend to have religious or moral themes, which I would usually find offputting, but something about Breyner Andresen’s tone meant they worked for me. It’s a weird tone for stories that are – for the most part – grounded in reality.

The opening story, “The bishop’s dinner”, reads like a Biblical parable. A rich man has two guests in the same evening: a planned visit from the bishop and an unexpected visit from a beggar. The story contrasts how the two visitors are treated, the differing reaction of their host and his staff. The religious undertones are underlined by one character being a bishop and conversations revolving around a local priest, but the tenets of Christianity are far from being on display here.

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K-drama review: You Are Beautiful

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Tae-gyung, Min-ho/Mi-nyeo, Jermy and Shin-woo are the members of fictional K-pop group A.N.Jell.

This has not been a great few months for me, healthwise, so I am always glad to find TV shows that are entertaining, ones that don’t use too much brainpower but aren’t, you know, shit. You Are Beautiful (SBS 2009) perfectly fit the bill.

This light comedy romantic drama starts with a major nod to Sound of Music, as our heroine, a novice nun, runs clumsily late to mass. This is Ko Mi-nyeo (played by Park Shin-hye, who I know from Doctors and Pinocchio – which I loved – and Memories of the Alhambra – which I did not love – among others) and we learn that she is planning to take her vows soon, but her Mother Superior isn’t convinced this is the right choice for Mi-nyeo, and so enthusiastically encourages her to take a leave of absence to join a singing group as part of a ridiculous plan that is brought to her by music manager, Ma Hoon-yi.

Mi-nyeo’s brother Mi-nam has apparently won a talent contest to join K-pop group A.N.Jell, but he then had some botched plastic surgery that means he needs to secretly stay in hospital for a while. Handily, Mi-nyeo is his identical twin, so could she dress up as a man for a month so that the music label doesn’t find out? Also handily, her singing voice sounds a lot like her brother’s, so the only training she needs is to add emotion. Oh, how will she find emotional meaning surrounded by handsome young men?

Mi-nyeo agrees to this plan based on lies and dishonesty both to save her brother’s career and in the hope that if her brother becomes famous, their mother will come and find them. The twins were raised at an orphanage run by the convent after their composer father died, and never knowing their singer mother is their greatest sorrow. Hoon-yi and the band’s stylist Coordi will help keep Mi-nyeo’s secret until the real Mi-nam returns.

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November 2019 reading round-up

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Holly tree

Well, once again I only finished four books this month, but in my defence one of them was massive. We started November with a weekend away in London and ended it with a trip to Glastonbury. Both involved bookshops, as did the weekends in-between in Bristol. I bought far more books than I read this month and I am not sorry (about the first half of that statement; I’m a little sorry about not reading more).

Happy December!

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Wherever I go on the island, you’re with me

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Letters from Tove coverLetters from Tove
by Tove Jansson
edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson
translated from Swedish by Sarah Death

This is a giant warm cuddle of a book. It took me a while to read as the letters are many and to some extent a little repetitive, but I loved effectively being able to hear Tove Jansson speak honestly to the people she was close to. The book only includes Tove’s letters, not the other half, so there is always part of the conversation missing, which also makes it a little bit of a mystery puzzle.

The correspondence is organised by addressee, beginning with letters that Tove sent to her family when she went to art school in Stockholm, and then two long trips to France and Italy to further her art education. Young Tove was very adventurous, sociable and passionate – about art and about people. I laughed out loud at her descriptions of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she was treated awfully and quickly left for a smaller school where she felt she was actually learning.

Her parents were both artists themselves and lived for part of every year in an artists’ colony – a lifestyle that Tove carried into her own adulthood, but it often clashed with her desire for solitude and peace, and this clash is something that is increasingly the focus of her letters. But her biggest fight is always with her own art.

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K-drama review: Abyss

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Abyss poster

Not the classic 1989 sci-fi film, I’m talking about the glossy new tvN/Netflix series Abyss – though it is arguably also sci-fi. Or maybe crime drama. Or fantasy. Somewhere in-between, with a large dollop of romance thrown in. Of course. This show makes little sense but is still fun.

In the first episode we meet most of our protagonists, but don’t get too attached as there are multiple deaths. Cha Min is a young businessman (and heir to a fortune, natch) who has just been dumped – and fleeced out of money – by his girlfriend Jang Hee-jin. He is devasted and attempts suicide, but as he dies he is approached by two…spirits?..who revive him and hand him a glowing orb they call Abyss. They tell him he can revive other dead people with Abyss but there are rules he will need to follow. Oh, and he has a new body now that is a truer reflection of his soul – he goes from plain/odd looking to very tall and handsome (now played by Ahn Hyo-seop), which in theory gives us some insight into his character.

Min’s best friend since childhood is prosecutor Go Se-yeon. She has been working on a serial killer case, and just as she thinks she’s closing in on the culprit, she herself is murdered. Min is devastated and decides to put Abyss to use but he can’t get to her until after her autopsy, by which time the whole country knows she is dead. Min is considered to be missing (as no-one witnessed his suicide) and is now the lead suspect in Se-yeon’s murder. He has to explain quickly to Se-yeon why she is waking up in a morgue faced with someone who looks like a total stranger and why she really shouldn’t interrupt her own funeral when she doesn’t look like herself anymore.

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My father bleeds history

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Maus cover

The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman

I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind, but for some reason the celebrations surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last weekend made me pick up this book that famously covers some of the worst stories of the Holocaust. It’s a deeply upsetting book that I had to take breaks from to recover emotionally.

Art Spiegelman’s celebrated graphic novel alternates between telling the story of his father Vladek – a Polish Jew – from the 1930s to the late 1940s, and the story of Art’s own relationship with his father in the 1980s. It’s darkly sad and darkly funny. Oh – and all the people have animal heads. Jewish people are mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats (later on, Americans are dogs and the French are frogs). It’s odd and it isn’t really ever explained, but the insinuations are clear.

Art and Vladek have a fractious relationship. Vladek is happy to tell his son details of his war-time experiences, but he also needs someone to vent to about getting old, about arguments with his second wife Mala. It’s uncomfortable to read at times.

Vladek narrates his history in broken English. And it’s a tough story, even in Holocaust terms. Vladek and his first wife (Art’s mother) Anja lived in south-west Poland, near Krakow. They went from owning a large successful business, to having their home and factories confiscated, to being moved to a series of ghettos and then work camps. Vladek was initially held as a political prisoner but was released back to the ghetto, primarily because political prisoners enjoyed some level of international protection.

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The real physics of fantasy

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Fire Ice and PhysicsThis is just a quick note to say that my review of Fire, Ice and Physics: the Science of Game of Thrones by Rebecca C Thompson has been published over at Physics World.

The book is just what it sounds like: a popular-science study of the book and TV series Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, from the materials science of an ice wall to whether an animal the size of the Game of Thrones dragons could actually fly. It’s really well written, and a fun way to approach topics from hypothermia to nonlinear dynamics.

The book also includes a foreword by physicist and science writer Sean Carroll that reminded me that I really should check out some of his books, as he’s very eloquent.

Intrigued? You can read more over at Physics World.

October 2019 reading round-up

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reading at the pubNot my greatest month on the reading front. I blame lupus. I’m partway through two large books, but even so I only finished one full-sized book, plus three comic trade paperbacks. It’s a poor record and means my EU Reading Challenge hasn’t progressed at all. Probably not the best reason to be glad of another Article 50 extension, but yay! We’re still in the EU (for now).

Happy November.

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K-drama review: Descendants of the Sun

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From left: Captain Yoo Si-jin, Dr Kang Mo-yeong, Sergeant Seo Dae-young and Lt Yoon Myung-ju.

I know, it’s barely two weeks since my last K-drama review and this show is 16 hours long. No wonder I haven’t read much. My excuses are twofold: I was a bit brain foggy and I found this series addictive. From the first episode of Descendants of the Sun (KBS 2016), I knew I was in trouble.

After the low stakes of Coffee Prince, this drama was much more serious, but still sweet. It opens with an impressive set piece in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After soldiers from both sides of the border fight with knives in a stand-off that the public can never be told about, the triumphant leader of the South Korean commandos removes the scarf covering his face to reveal our hero: Captain Yoo Si-jin (Song Joong-ki).

Our heroine has a slightly less violent introduction but is still instantly impressive. Dr Kang Mo-yeong (Song Hye-kyo) is a surgeon at a big hospital in Seoul. She’s great at her job but keeps getting overlooked for promotions because she doesn’t have connections. She doesn’t take any shit from patients but does get on well with her colleagues and is willing to suck up to her superiors so long as it doesn’t break her moral code.

Si-jin and his best bud Sergeant Seo Dae-young (Jin Goo) are on leave and enjoying a funfair when they foil a robbery. The thief, Kim Gi-bum (Kim Min-seok, who I know from Doctors and Hello, My Twenties) is taken to hospital, with Si-jin and Dae-young in pursuit when they realise he still has one of their phones. Dr Kang initially thinks they are hoodlums harassing her patient and refuses to let them near Gi-bum (who, for reasons that I could never figure out, has as his next-of-kin Dae-young’s on-off girlfriend Lt Yoon Myung-ju – a military doctor who trained with Dr Kang). But when Gi-bum tries to run away from the hospital, he runs into a real gang and ends up being saved by Si-jin and Dae-young in the pilot’s second excellent set piece.

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