Note: I originally wrote this review in 2013 for submission to the London Review of Books. The LRB passed, and it has sat orphaned on my hard drive. I figured I should probably put it here.
A review of From The Fatherland, With Love by Ryu Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy, Charles de
Wolf, and Ginny Tapley Takemori
Pushkin
Press, 664 pp
Shinzo Abe returned
to Japan’s premiership in December 2012, after spending five years in the
political wilderness following his resignation as prime minister in September
2007. Promising bold economic reforms as well as constitution revision and a
stronger military, Abe’s message to the Japanese people and Japan’s allies and
adversaries around the world can be encapsulated in the three words that were
the title of his address in Washington, D.C. this past February: Japan is back.
But despite Abe’s
self-assurance, these remain anxious days for his country. Unseated as the
world’s second-largest economy by China in 2010, Japan continues to struggle to
find its footing economically. Its manufacturers are locked into competition
with rivals in neighboring South Korea. Its government continues to rack up large
annual deficits, contributing to net government debt’s approaching 150% of GDP.
Japan’s politicians have discussed new growth strategies for years, with little
or no success. At the same time, China and South Korea have pressed claims to
disputed islands, and the United States, Japan’s longtime ally, is distracted
by problems elsewhere in the world. And all the while, each year Japan’s
slow-motion demographic crisis worsens a little more, with senior retirees
taking up an ever-greater share of the population — and placing ever-greater
demands on the country’s finances.
Time will tell
whether the Abe government will guide Japan out of the economic stagnation of
its “lost” decades. But a newly translated novel by Ryu Murakami, the novelist
and filmmaker who is Japan’s answer to J.G. Ballard and Michel Houellebecq,
suggests that Japan’s problems are deeper than broken institutions or
ineffective policies. Echoing critiques of industrial society dating back at
least as far as Friedrich Nietzsche, Murakami believes that Japan suffers from
a spiritual crisis. Having grown prosperous, he fears that decadence and love
of comfort have prevented the Japanese people from meeting the political and
economic challenges their country faces in the twenty-first century.
Accordingly, Murakami suggests that it will take more than new policies for
Japan to lead in East Asia and the world: Japan needs a revolution of the
spirit.
Like Houellebecq,
Murakami writes “slipstream” novels that border on science fiction, presenting
exaggerated or fractured versions of reality for the sake of social criticism.
Both authors confront what they see as the nihilism at the heart of post-industrial
capitalist societies. Their critiques grapple with Nietzsche’s vision of the
society of the “last man” from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Nietzsche warns that, when society has become too prosperous
and too accustomed to comfortable living, humanity will no longer strive or
compete. Human beings will conform to mass society, none will desire to rule
others, and all will fear hardship and suffering. The pursuit and preservation
of comfort will replace all other values.
The portrait
Murakami has painted of Japan throughout his career is of a country populated
by “last men,” who, filled with ennui, seek their silly little pleasures and
are incapable of acting in pursuit of higher principles. Seeing his society as
dulled by prosperity and “anything goes” post-modernism, Murakami seethes with
anger at the frivolity and decadence of modern Japan.
But Murakami is not resigned to decadence
and decline. His novels seek to shock his readers awake, to force them to see
Japan’s spiritual malaise. He struggles to stir his fellow Japanese to confront
their society’s sickness head on and to embrace a new national spirit less
inclined to conformism and dependence on others. Although From The Fatherland, With Love was originally published in 2005,
its English translation from Pushkin Press is exceedingly timely: it provides a
striking corrective to some of the heady coverage in the world press of Abe’s
return to Japan’s premiership. Even if one disagrees with either Murakami’s diagnosis
or his cure for what ails Japan, his latest novel to be translated into English
is required reading for thinking about deeper causes of Japan’s enduring stagnation.
Set largely in April
2011 — a near-future Japan when it was written in 2005 — Murakami shows Japan
impoverished, isolated, and incapable of acting independently even when faced
with an unprovoked invasion by North Korean forces. Seeing Japan brought low by
a global depression that strains its ties with the US, which has shifted its
attention from its alliance with Japan to improving relations with North Korea
and the other countries of East Asia, the North Korean regime hatches a plan
that seems to serve no other purpose than humiliating Japan. A North Korean
commando team infiltrates Japan and takes hostages at a baseball game in
Fukuoka, a city of 1.5 million people on the island of Kyushu. Claiming to be a
rebel faction opposed to North Korea’s peace overtures with the US and publicly
denounced by Pyongyang, they proceed occupy Fukuoka. The US considers it a
problem for the Japanese government to solve, since the invaders are purportedly
rebels without state sponsorship. The Japanese government itself is initially paralyzed.
Afraid that a counterattack will result in unacceptably high civilian
casualties in Fukuoka or in North Korean terrorist attacks on government
buildings and critical infrastructure throughout Japan, the government eventually
decides to impose a blockade, effectively cutting off not just Fukuoka but all
of Kyushu from the rest of Japan.
The citizens of
Fukuoka are left to cope with the occupation force, which calls itself the
Koryo Expeditionary Force (KEF) after the Korean dynasty that cooperated with
the Mongols to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281. (The invasions, which were turned
back thanks to great storms — the legendary kamikaze,
or “divine wind”— were centered on Hakata Bay, site of present-day Fukuoka.)
The invaders secure the collaboration of local government and police through discriminate
demonstrations of force. The occupiers are careful to avoid civilian
casualties, treat local citizens politely, and win public support by imprisoning
local elites guilty of “anti-social” crimes, such as tax evasion and human
trafficking, and confiscating their assets to fund the occupation. At the same
time, the national government alienates Fukuokans first through the blockade
and then when an ill-considered government-authorized attempt by a police
assault team to take several North Koreans hostage results in the death of
dozens of civilians. Although individual Fukuokans are uneasy with the
occupation, no organized resistance emerges, and over time foreign governments
pressure the Japanese government to lift the blockade so to allow trade to
resume.
Meanwhile, a
fleet carrying 120,000 North Korean soldiers to reinforce the occupation departs
for Fukuoka. The Japanese government deploys the Self-Defense Forces to
intercept the fleet but is unable to commit to a course of action. In Fukuoka, Japanese
collaborators prepare a campground for the arriving army and work to procure
supplies. Everyone is aware that, if the reinforcements arrive, the occupation
of Fukuoka is unlikely to be reversed.
Fukuoka is
ultimately saved by a gang of violent young misfits — according to their
spiritual adviser, a cryptic terrorist-turned-poet named Ishihara, they’re “terror
babies,” who “can’t be compromised or held to any social contract” — who carry
out a plot to eliminate the KEF before the reinforcements arrive. The members
of Ishihara’s gang, who flock from across Japan to the abandoned warehouse he
calls home, all have histories of violence, often against their own families. One
of the older members trains with an Islamic terrorist group in Yemen after
losing an investment job. Many are otaku,
Japan’s obsessive hobbyists: one collects poisonous animals, especially
centipedes and frogs, another collects guns from around the world, and another
is obsessed with explosives. Initially, they have no unifying ideology or group
identity, just their tendencies and an attachment to Ishihara. But as they
prepare to take on the KEF, Ishihara articulates a nihilist ideology for his
protégés:
We live to destroy. There are only
two types of people in this world: those who scrimp and save little by little
to build a breakwater or levee or windbreak or irrigation canal, and those who
destroy the vested interests and the old system and the fortress of evil with
enough emotion and inspiration and fervor and fury and desire and passion
fruits to crack open everyone’s skull and ring their balls like bells.
Where the establishment fails, these loners succeed, serving
as the “divine wind” that defeats the third invasion of Hakata Bay.
At the most basic
level, the novel succeeds as entertainment. Despite its length, it reads
breezily, a testament to the translation work of Ralph McCarthy, Charles de
Wolf, and Ginny Tapley Takemori. The scenario described by Murakami is far
fetched for a number of reasons, but as long as one accepts Murakami’s premises
the novel reads like a better-written cousin of Tom Clancy’s techno-thrillers
(or perhaps a write-up of a government war game). But the novel is worth
reading because of Murakami’s diagnosis of what ails Japanese society.
Murakami suggests
that living in a peaceful, wealthy society — with the lowest levels of
violent crime among large, developed democracies and a military that not only
cannot be called a military but is banned from using arms even in self-defense
when deployed abroad — has psychologically disarmed the Japanese people. Over
and over again, Murakami depicts Japanese civilians freezing when confronted
with violence committed by North Koreans. Most paralyzed, of course, is the
Japanese government, which, from the beginning of the novel, is depicted as
helpless in the face of economic collapse and international isolation.
The government is
virtually immobilized when the North Korean operation begins. The prime
minister and other senior officials are away from Tokyo and have trouble
getting back to the capital. Once the crisis management team takes form, there
are too many officials involved for effective decision making; lengthy lists of
the officials and their full titles read like the dramatis personae of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But it isn’t just
the number of officials involved in the crisis headquarters that handicaps its
deliberations: it is the fear, from the prime minister downwards, of what could
result from an aggressive response to the KEF invasion. The government orders the
blockade as a means of avoiding a costly decision. As one official who had been
fired from his government post notes, “Being outside the frenzy of the round
table, he had become painfully aware of the Japanese government’s inability to
see the big picture — and if he could
see it, no doubt other outsiders could see it too.” The government seems to
spend more time debating how to refer to the KEF (Are they terrorists? Are they
a foreign army?) than determining how to defeat the invasion. But Murakami delivers
an unambiguous message that the problem at the heart of the government’s inaction
is squeamishness about violence:
Resignation was gradually spreading
around the table, like a bad smell. Resignation meant submitting to greater
power, and abandoning any idea of resistance. Power was built and maintained
with violence. A population accustomed to peace had no taste for either meting
out or being subjected to brutality, and couldn’t even imagine what it would
involve. People unable to imagine violence were incapable of using it.
Murakami subsequently describes Japanese politics as
characterized by the suppression of any and all conflict, not unlike what Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra says: “People still fall out, but are soon reconciled — otherwise
it spoileth their stomachs.” In other words, not only are Japan’s leaders
incapable of imagining violence, they cannot even bear verbal disagreements for
long. There is some disagreement as the government weighs its options, but
opponents of the majority quickly fall into line.
Murakami, however,
is certainly able to imagine violence, and in this novel as in earlier novels
he depicts ultraviolence and gore in excruciating and almost clinical detail. Eyes
are gouged out, throats are stabbed, skin is flayed, heads are blown off, guts are
spilled, and arteries are severed. Blood, flecks of brain, and pieces of bone fly
about. The Japanese prisoners taken by the North Koreans are imprisoned in a
parking garage, tortured by their captors and reduced to shells of their former
selves:
Just in front of them someone
moaned in pain and toppled forward, hands on the floor to support his body. The
long shadow of a soldier moving toward him made the man shake his head and
whimper like a child. The soldier grabbed his hair and pulled him upright.
Still held by his hair, he began desperately apologizing, yelling almost
incoherently that he was sorry, as the soldier’s nightstick came down at the
joint of his shoulder.
After hundreds of pages of these scenes, a reader cannot
help but feel numbed. But though Murakami is a self-professed admirer of
Quentin Tarantino, there is more to the violence in From The Fatherland, With Love than spectacle. Murakami is driving
home the point that, although they live in a society that has driven violence
to the margins, the Japanese people still belong to a violent species and live
in a violent world. Japanese are not exempt from the brutality with which human
beings are capable of treating each other. They cannot hide from it forever.
In considering violence,
Murakami presents North Korea as Japan’s foil. Whereas Japan is soft, right down
to its underwear as the occupiers discover when they are furnished with local
provisions, North Korea is rough, austere, and cruel. Murakami’s North Korean commandos
recall watching their families starve, recount their harsh training in North
Korea’s special forces, and are amazed even at the availability of water from Japanese
taps. The North Koreans are physically imposing and menacing, even more so because
they are careful to avoid civilian casualties: there is exceptional power in the
discriminating use of force. Murakami hints that Japan had once been like North
Korea, capable of meting out cruelty as a way of imposing its will on Korea and
other Asian nations. The North Koreans themselves are surprised at how weak the
Japanese are. “Where was the Japan,” one commando wonders, “that once shook not
only Asia but the entire world?”
Murakami’s North
Korean characters are perhaps the most compellingly drawn characters in the novel.
Whereas at times his Japanese characters — the shrewd reporter, the dithering
politician, the selfless doctor — seem like caricatures, the North Koreans are
fully fleshed out. One gets a clear sense of the mixed emotions they feel when they
encounter Japanese prosperity for the first time and the ways in which they
have been marked by their lives in spartan North Korea. In the afterword, Murakami
discusses the extensive research he conducted on the North Korean regime and
everyday life in North Korea, including interviews with refugees from the north
living in Seoul, and it shows in the manner in which he presents the
perspectives of the North Koreans. Murakami does not, however, evince sympathy
for the North Korean regime itself. As troubling as he feels Japan’s decadence
is, North Korea just practices a different form of decadence, using the power of
the masses to inflict equal suffering on all. There is no value, he suggests, in
hardship for the sake of hardship.
In that sense, Murakami
is not nostalgic for prewar Japan. He does not have any illusions about the violence
Imperial Japan inflicted on others or on its own people. The cure for the soul
sickness that ails Japan is not authoritarianism, xenophobia, or militarism. In
the novel, Murakami is dismissive when he describes Japanese right-wingers who
want Japan to acquire nuclear weapons and remilitarize.
Rather,
Murakami’s prescription for overcoming decadence and moral torpor is not unlike
that of Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists. As Sartre writes in “The
Republic of Silence,” during the German occupation, individuals learned that
there were values greater than life itself, values worth dying for if
necessary: “At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace
little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life
and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with
death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: ‘Rather
death than…’” Faced with decisions with mortal consequences, individuals learn that
there is more to freedom than satisfying their every desire.
Along these
lines, Murakami depicts Fukuoka and Kyushu prospering in the aftermath of the
invasion, with local governments making much-needed reforms to lessen their
dependence on Tokyo, reducing their unemployment rate, and developing their own
relationships with Japan’s neighbors in East Asia. By contrast, he suggests
that the central government learned nothing from the incident, with the economy
still in depression and Japan still isolated internationally. In the epilogue, one
character finds himself wishing that the occupation had continued, with the
implication that it might have forced the national government to learn the same
lessons as the citizens of Kyushu.
Murakami’s
response to the 3/11 disasters in Japan suggests the important thing for him is
hardship, not violence. As he wrote in the New
York Times on March 16, 2011, “But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one
thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed
us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own
prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe.” He
wants the Japanese people to be forced to make choices about what matters to
them, to make tough decisions and sacrifices instead of dithering or letting the
national government or other countries make decisions on their behalf. His
credo is, in short, a kind of hopeful existentialism, which he believes is the
only way Japan will thrive in an era of economic uncertainty and a new
multipolar global order.
The two years
since 3/11 surely must have disappointed Murakami, as politics quickly returned
to business as usual in Tokyo and as the hardship endured by the citizens of northeastern
Japan faded from the headlines and remained a local concern. And it is
difficult to believe that the Abe government will satisfy Murakami. It is
revealing, of course, that Abe chose to declare that “Japan is back” to an
audience of alliance managers in Washington, D.C., suggesting that whatever steps
Abe takes to strengthen Japan’s defense capabilities, he will do so within the
confines of an alliance within which Japan is the junior partner. But even in Abe’s
much-vaunted economic program — widely known as “Abenomics” — there are signs
of the old bad habits which lead Murakami to despair. For all its boldness in
monetary policy, the government has been reluctant to outline radical reforms
when it comes to how the Japanese economy functions. A strong-state
nationalist, it is unlikely that Abe will greatly reduce the dependence of
prefectures and local communities on the central government or allow
individuals greater autonomy. But then, it is clear in From The Fatherland, With Love that Murakami believes that Japan’s
spiritual revival will not be the result of political programs or directives
from Tokyo. The best that Tokyo may be able to do is step out of the way of Japan’s
local governments and citizens.
However, the aftermath of 3/11 contains a
dispiriting lesson for anyone distressed over the health of postindustrial
societies. There may be no escape from the society of the “last man.” Once
people have come to enjoy a certain standard of living, it may be difficult to get
them to think about anything else for very long. There may be nothing more for
politicians to do than to distribute resources and try to keep the pie growing (or
prevent it from shrinking too much). Frivolity may be unavoidable, even in the
face of natural disasters and other tragedies. It may be that, once they’ve had
a taste of prosperity, human beings have no interest in Sartre’s “austere
virtue.” In that sense, From The
Fatherland, With Love is a tragic thought experiment, an illustration of
how difficult it is to rebuild society on the basis of hopeful existentialism. Nietzsche
may in fact have the last laugh.
