one morning like a bird

In this novel by Andrew Miller, a young poet, Yugi, is adrift in 1940s Tokyo, a city in the grip of increasing patriotic fever in the lead up to Japan’s entry to WWII.  Yugi is caught between two worlds – he is fascinated by Western, particularly French literature yet bound through his family and surroundings to Japan.  He is uneasy in both the traditional and the modern worlds, and cannot reconcile the purity of his art with the need to make a living.

Yugi seems to exist in a sort of floating world – he is outside reality and appears to be a detached observer of even his own life.  Meanwhile around him, life is getting crueler and more brutal.  His friends are off to the Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria, propaganda seems to be the only work available to young writers, and when he falls in love with a French girl, bringing him to the notice of the secret police it becomes more and more difficult for him to remain detached.  It’s not till the very end of the book that Yugi finds the courage to make a decision for himself rather than allowing himself to be pulled along by the currents of others.

Andrew Miller apparently specialises in exquisite reconstructions of other worlds and times, and does so fairly successfully here.  The detached and understated language make it feel very similar to works by Japanese authors, like Kazou Ishiguro or Junichiro Tanizaki, as do the varying length of chapters, some of which are only short descriptive scenes and others which cover months at a time.  There are occasional bum notes where a more western feel creeps in, but perhaps it’s better for a western author to not strive to be indistinguishable from a Japanese one.  Andrew Miller also caught me out a few times with some unusual and striking metaphors – describing summer rain on Yugi’s face as a “blood warm slick of atomised Pacific” was one that stuck in my mind.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but I do wish I’d been able to read it at a quieter time – it demands quite a bit of attention and time to absorb and muse on the story, which I just did not have.  Recommended for a rainy weekend when you’ve nothing pressing to do.

One Morning Like A Bird
Andrew Miller
Sceptre, 2008

nine hours north

Adam has reached the last few weeks of a long stint teaching English in Japan.  Marianne, a friend of his girlfriend Sarah, arrives to begin a similar venture.  Adam gets a ‘thing’ for Marianne, begins to draw away from Sarah, becomes confused about who he is and what he wants.

You’ve read this story before, right?  It’s an old plot.  What is different about Nine Hours North and what made it so enjoyable for me is how sparse it is and how few words are needed to tell this old story in a way that makes is fresh and sweet again.  It’s almost a series of poems, each word carefully chosen, around 150 on each page with a title:

exult

What else can I do?
I run.  I shout.
I feel the rain
as it sticks to my shirt to my chest,
feel the tug of soggy denim on my thighs,
feel my head pushed under
the warm-rain waterfall of sky.

This hand-holding water birth,
this mad running baptism -
clutch at the hand that holds you in the rain
and feel the bliss course up
from the unlikeliness of city streets.

Everything short circuited.
All wires crossed,
all boundaries open,
all barricades torn down.

We breathe only in the gaps
between our screams.

We scream only in the gaps
between our laughter.

We laugh to fill the spaces
between every single raindrop.

At first I didn’t think this was going to work. I am not fond of authors who get tricksy with structure (see also diatribes against David Foster Wallace and Cloud Atlas) because I often suspect that it disguises a lack of content.  But in Nine Hours North it works beautifully.  It creates a distinctive voice for Adam and capture the fragility and gossamer of his attraction to Marianne, a thing that hardly exists because it can’t be expressed.  The story seems to ripple outwards from a single point, like a pebble dropped in a still pool.  The number of words there are exactly the number the reader needs to tell the story to themselves.

I really recommend reading this book and it’s easily the best fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Nine Hours North
Tim Sinclair
Published by Penguin

Disclaimer: I think I’ve met Tim Sinclair at one of seagreen‘s birthday shindigs but I didn’t remember this until I’d finished the book.  Tim Sinclair is also the author of the most amusing The Dog Ate My Serial.