That’s ok with me. I don’t have the book in hand at the moment, but will on Tuesday. I read it in English years ago, but I don’t think the stories are that long…. What pace should we set ? There are, if memory serves, eleven stories, so one a week ?
And so our journey into Ogawa’s dark imagination begins.
I read this first story a while ago (mostly to see whether it was going to be manageable without my kindle in built dictionary!), and I found it readable, but very odd and directionless. Nothing really happens, but there are a series of disquieting jolts in perspective, back and forwards in time
But re-reading it slowly this week, I found the story fascinating. It is classic Ogawa in its building of tense and disquieting atmosphere. Each mini section of this story story is much like the chapters of her novels or novellas. She is incredibly cinematic or painterly in her description, frequently ending a scene with a little rhetorical flourish - the pigeons flying, the age-less child, the reeking mouldy cake dripping of the ex-husband’s face, “Two strawberry shortcakes please”.
I was struck by two things in the re-reading.
One was how darkly funny the story is. The humour is very black, often arising from incongruity. (The two scenes with the uncomprehending husband were my favourites).
But the second was the deep pathos [pun intended] of the main character’s pathological grieving. There is this central absolutely awful loss, and we see through the story her response over time. I had been describing the story to my wife, and told her that the main character was driven mad by grief. But actually I’ve been rethinking and I’m not so sure. I think actually there is a fascinating description across this very short story of how her response shift over time. There was of course some very extreme initial responses (the collection of grim newspaper clippings, the episode in the fridge), but then there was the later quiet, polite confabulation in response to the strange mistaken identity phone call. And finally there is the strawberry shortcake ritual. Someone might be tempted to think that all these years later, her annual purchase of the cakes is a sign of her unresolved grief.
But I was inclined to be more charitable. This sort of annual remembrance can be incredibly important for bereaved parents. The rest of the world forgets the lost child, but they never will.
I wondered whether she doesn’t disturb the weeping cake-shop girl because she is fully aware that many people carry around secret sources of sadness, that they need space and time to cry silently. Perhaps that, allowed to sob in their own way and on their own terms, they can find a way to live on.
What do you think? Was this story moving or just strange? Do you think the main character is disturbed, or disturbing?
What was your favourite bit?
(We had a brief appearance in this first story of some 寡黙な死骸 - in the curious clocktower Glockenspiel. Will they return in other stories?)
This story is a bit hard for me and I don’t have too much time. But I read your notes above before skim reading just now, which gave me some confidence. The photo of the shortcake was also very helpful! I actually did get through this in a bit over an hour and having just re-read your notes I had picked out nearly all those points. So thank you very much. If I have time I will try to re-read (probably only some of it) more carefully now that I have an outline.
From what I understood I actually loved this story (although I skipped a little over the descriptions of what had happened to other children), and didn’t think the woman too weird! It seemed to me that e.g. the fridge episode was what she needed to feel close to her child, and I think it is fairly easy to understand that with a stranger on the phone it is just easier to make something up than to explain.
welcome to the book club and to Natively!
It’s great that you enjoyed the first story. You should definitely feel free to join us here any time that you have time. (One of the great things about short stories is that they can be read independent of one another). 小川先生 is generally very accessible in her writing style.
I also read this book a number of years ago, and while I do remember vague outlines of about half of them, much of the detail escapes me, except for this story.
洋菓子屋の午後
General impressions/images: very struck by the phrase 奇形児の頭のように to describe the dried up strawberries on the cake for her son who had died. In general that would be a dark comparison, but particularly in this context.
The commentary of the beauty of the chef’s way of crying and how perfectly it fit the atmosphere of the kitchen.
The scent of orchids that permeates her key moments and meetings since then、perhaps slightly rotten.
It was a touching story, even if externally not much happened. Here grief is presented as a reverse whirlpool. At the epicenter (loss) she was thrown about violently without control. Over time she seems to have gained some distance from the center, but still circling, going under and resurfacing. 12 years later, the same ritual for the anniversary. Some memories will not fade, and time will not heal. These may be ordinary scenes, but what do they show? We learn almost nothing about the main character’s current life, but we still can see her “core” and can reconstruct the rest.
I wondered about the clock tower in the square. Is it just saying time goes on, (while the figurines go through the motions)? Also, probably not too important, as I think it is the buying and taking it home that matters, but I wonder will she do with the 2nd shortcake? Just eat it? I think she is beyond letting it go off?
I’m not sure if there is a particular symbolic meaning. You may be right that it is somehow marking the passage of time both longitudinally (the years since the loss of the child) and acutely (the episode in the bakery has this curious sense of time having frozen, with the silently crying shop assistant, and sounds from outside disappearing).
It does have a curious macabre element, with the dancing skeletons. I wonder if that will recur.
Speaking of recurring - a clocktower features prominently in Ogawa’s 密やかな結晶. It might be a coincidence, or maybe a recurring motif?
What a great image. I’m not sure that I see the central character as still stuck in an endless orbit around the memory of her lost child. Rather, I think the ritual of the strawberry shortcake is a way for her to incorporate the child into her ongoing practical identity. (It might be a more dramatic version of the yearly pilgrimage to a cemetery/grave, but serves the same purpose).
We aren’t given any information about that. In Ogawa’s stories, the narrators are almost always female, and we have little insight into the internal world of male characters. [The next story is an exception…]
Another strange story that I confess I found baffling on first reading, but which has grown on me on second reading. And then there is something that I realised very belatedly that I think is fascinating and wonderful. But more on that (behind spoiler marks) below.
One interesting element to this story is that this is the first piece of Ogawa’s writing that I have read from a male perspective. All of her short stories in 妊娠カレンダー, the two other books we have read in this club (ミーナの行進, 密やかな結晶), and her most famous novel (博士の愛した数式) have female main characters. Obviously, there is the Professor in 博士 and R氏 in 密やかな結晶. But those characters are seen through the female narrator’s eyes and remain somewhat of a mystery.
So this story is maybe an anomaly. Except of course that we don’t really get much of a sense of the male character here. There is a little bit of the sense of awkwardness of a teenager, the bluff pseudo nonchalance
いいよ。飯食うだけだろ？どうって事ないよ
We have a tiny bit of the acute awareness of the female body (he glimpses and remembers the girl’s pale skin through the edge of her school uniform as she stretches out her arms). But there is not much that we learn about him.
The central episode of the story is notable for what doesn’t happen, what isn’t said. Especially on re-reading, I found it quite poignant and sad. We are told very little about the girl, but piece together something of her exquisite shyness (presumably a function at least in part of the shame of her parentage), her vulnerability. I wondered what it was that made her choose the boy to accompany her, what she had hoped he would do. [Maybe just not being alone with this man her father? Perhaps (I’ve just thought about it), her father had a reputation for taking advantage…] The politician’s behaviour is shocking in its sense of entitlement and power, his insensitivity to the girl’s feelings, his acknowledgement of his relationship to her without any sense of care or responsibility…
もしよかったら、お父さんの分も食べなさい
(Interesting to note that father figures in Ogawa are often missing. Where they are present they are deeply flawed. We have Mina’s own father who died early in her story and her stand in - the amazing (but misbehaving) uncle. In 密やかな結晶 there was only brief mention of the narrator’s father, while R氏 does not exactly impress in his paternal feelings)
We have the very strange グロテスク scene in the old post office.
It is such an odd shift in the story. We go from the emotionally tense and inarticulate scene with the illegitimate father to the girl’s mute anger, and then without warning we have the giant mountain of kiwi fruit.
I’m still very unsure what to make of this. There is no explanation within the story of why or how an abandoned post office could come to be filled to the brim with fresh ripe kiwifruit. I think (like some other Ogawa bits of magical realism) that we probably just need to accept it as a part of her fictional world.
There are some resonances to some of her other work. The girl’s ravenous demolishing of the raw whole kiwi fruit with the juice dripping down her chin is reminiscent of the pregnant sister eating marmalade in 妊娠カレンダー. I think the physical appetite is a way in which these characters’ emotions manifest when they can’t be spoken (perhaps when they are not understood by the character). This is the kind of pathological eating where anxiety, stress, grief etc are expressed in the act of ingestion. (The equivalent of sitting on a couch with a tub of ice cream…).
This links to the title of the story. What do other people think it refers to? I had wondered whether tears are a kind of human 果汁. (If you squeezed us over a bowl, would all our bottled up tears flow out??)
Other resonances
The abandoned post office also links to the abandoned chocolate factory in another of the stories in 妊娠カレンダー
We have brief mention of a タイプライター, which of course links to 密やかな結晶, and the desert at the end of the meal is a strawberry cake.
But the most striking is
that of course [at least I think so] the girl in this second story who is silently crying when she receives a call from the boy at the end (following the notice of her father’s death in the newspaper) - is the same girl as the crying cake shop girl in 洋菓子屋の午後
When I discovered this (and it did take me a while), I was very amused. So we have an answer to one of the mysteries in that first story. Did others spot this straight away?
Do you think we will learn the answer to the strange fruit in the post office? Or will the politician return?
Oh, you’re quite right ! I never thought of that. The opposite (male main character, missing mother/women) has always been obvious for me in 村上春樹’s work, but not so much in Ogawa (though to be fair, I have read a lot more of Murakami’s)
I read this book a long time ago, so i dont’ remember if there are other stories from a male perspective. The two stories I remember best are the first one and… one that we’ll get to later
Maybe she chose him precisely because they barely know each other ? She obviously wanted someone by her side, some one familiar enough (as classmate would be) but who simply wouldn’t judge her because he wouldn’t know enough about her to draw conclusions ?
I, of course, have no explanation for that either…but that’s what make Ogawa’s writing so compelling.
This is (very spoilerish) the whole concept of the book ! and what I found so fascinating the first time I read it, at a time when I did so completely outside of any japanese-learning or Japan-related context.
Surely this is another example of the same process.
Just to add to this I feel that poverty may be an important issue here. The fact that the nameless? girl was desperate to learn the violin and the sheer waste that the politician did not enable that despite being easily able to do so.
I think the frustration over this - plus maybe never having seen or had access to this much fresh natural food, (as opposed to fussy French food) may have led to the kiwi incident.
I agree also that the boy was probably invited as he wasn’t a close friend.
I did also notice the various similarities between this and the 1st story, including the 洋菓子屋 but strangely didn’t think re the crying girl - but I think you are right about this.
There also seems to be a symmetry between the stories, in several ways, and in both cases the telephone seems to kind of bridge time as well as space.
