Notability Wars

[Note: bed now, school tomorrow. Will add video and fix links tomorrow.]

In case you were wondering what a particularly dramatic sumo match looks like, here:

And, for comparison, one with a dramatic buildup and a slightly dull finish. This is the Lithuanian Baruto (who I believe is the only rikishi in the history of the sport to wear a blonde topknot) vs. the remaining Russian (after the two others got kicked out because the police found a joint in a man-bag one of them had lost).

I really don’t know enough to comment on the theory put forward in Freakonomics that Sumo is inherently tolerant of a level of “strategic losses”, but this did seem like a lay-down from where I was sitting.

Also, it has come to my attention that my mum sometimes casts her eye over this blog, so you may rest assured that “pentacle rex” will never be discussed again, as a cultural phenomena or otherwise.

I don’t want yesterday’s post to go unqualified, and because of the backwardsness of the blog as a medium I can qualify it now and it’ll be retroactive. So, though they don’t exactly share my vocabulary of reference the people I’m living and working with are all a thoroughly decent sort. I had an interesting conversation with Jenny while we both stared, mesmerised, at fat but surprisingly nimble men run into one another on Sunday night. We were talking about books in translation, and I mentioned writers who I really admire for translating their own books, or who write and publish in more than one medium: Haruki Murakami, Gunter Grass. Only those with a similar level of fluency will register the sutbtle tone changes between translations, and only the author themself know exactly what the difference is between the two books.

Sometimes another language can be a means of invoking a style: characters in Gundam tend to drop into English to be flippant, or to reel off pseudoscience or a mishmash of philosophies. Beckett wrote his plays in French -initially at least- because he said “ces’t plus facile d’ecrir sans style” (it’s easier to write without style). But Joyce said that good writers should be fluent in at least one other langauge than their native, because it gives insight into a completely different way of thinking.

With Jenny I was wondering aloud whether I would still call myself a writer, or be any good at it, if Japanese was my native language. After all, being good with Japanese is an utterly different skill to being good with English. Jenny pointed out rightly enough that all this assumes I’d still be “me” if I was born in Japan, and that this assumes that what I like is playing with words, not communicating ideas. Sometimes I wonder.

p

Languages and technology force you into modes of expression, but can be exploited either to create a strange effect, or an eerily familiar one, especially if the medium in question is usually used for the mundane. Keitai Shousetsu or Cell Phone Novels had their third national awards a few weeks ago, with the prize of 2 million Yen going to Atashi Kanojo (I, Girlfriend).

The first page (or screen) looks like this:

It’s become notorious for its staccato grammar: there’s even a spoof website where you can enter a url and it will be translated into Atashi-grammar, complete with meaningless interjections. I can just about follow this first page, but the following translation is from FumiJP:

Me

Aki

Age?

23

Well this year 24

Boyfriend?

Well

Of course

I have

I mean

Why not?

“mitaina”

Boyfriend

is ordinary

well

I’m dating him

Making literature out of a workaday medium is nothing new: the Japanese language is based on a simplified form of Chinese developed among Nara-era aristocratic (read: bored) women, and the hiragana syllabary originally referred to “women’s writing”. Maybe it’s the form of address that’s startling about this text novel: you download it from a hub site (with millions of hits and a supposedly 80% female userbase) and it arrives like a text message, which we normally expect to be extremely personal in the way only a really mundane thing can be.

But this isn’t like making a shopping list poetry, it’s like hearing a voice talking to you as if you’re not there, hearing it answer questions you haven’t asked yet. Hence the personal but flippant tone of the first page: the voice is receding into irrelevence or unreferentiality even as it asserts itself. “I don’t know this person”, you’re thinking. Do desho? “What is their deal?”

Imagine a novel that you signed up for, that was told in emails arriving in your inbox, at different times, from different people. Well, that’s essentially an ARG, and though in this economy I wonder who’ll be willing to invest in an experimental marketing technique with an unproven cost-effectiveness, maybe that’s the excuse ARGs needed to get out of being purely commercial entities and into storytelling.

p

A lot more up-to-date is the news that Das Kapital is going to be made into a manga, with big things predicted for its success and its resonance with a population undergoing its second recession in seven years. The angry and ill-spelled but entertaining and insightful Truth about Japan is a good example of a general sense of disillusionment with market capitalism in general, and because of a general lack of cut-and-thrust in parliamentary politics I’ve heard some say that without the Communist Party Japan would barely qualify as a de facto party democracy.

What I find particularly noteworthy, and which news sites haven’t so far reported as much more than a curiosity, is that Das Kapital is to be digested into comic form. You might as well put on a stage show of Das Kapital. Manga might, I suppose, allow charts and pie graphs or whatever to be provided in expression of economic theory, but the comic format is an almost inherently fictionalising medium. The “format which Japanese adore digesting their information from” [Leo Lewis, The Times] is sequential art, which demands visual storytelling, panel-by-panel. It demands if not character, then definitely drama. That may lend itself to sympathetic expression, to Les Miserables, but not necessarily to theory.

The ambitious comic rendering of Das Kapital is designed to parcel the
complex economic theories of Marx’s hefty original in a format which
Japanese adore digesting their information from; it will also be
compressed into a size that can be slipped discretely into a Chanel
evening bag, or slid into the top drawer of a desk when the bosses are
looking. [Lewis]

I recently came across Tintin: Breaking Free, an anarchosocialist piracy parody, in hard copy in our library: it’s socialist wish-fulfillment, thoroughly entertaining and, in its crappy art and bland prejudice, not a million miles from some genuine examples (a hard copy of which was on display in the library of a Primary School where I work, but which has since thankfully disappeared). It’s like Les Mis in Brixton, and it’s rabble-rousing and visual stereotyping is likely to be closer to the technique of Das Kapitaru Doki Doki than painstaking economic policy.

In Japanese the word for ’sing’ is the same as the word for ’state’ or ‘express’. I reckon that readers who operate in such a language, and who are accustomed to the visual medium with its easy prejudices, will know a good story when they see it, a story with lessons worth taking away. But they won’t be as ready as some Nationals seem to think to convert to a complete dogma the instant it’s presented in a ‘pulp’ format. Most Japanese people think the Public Service Broadcaster NHK’s bland presentation reflects its lack of political bias, but they’re bombarded day and night with fiction and fact-presented-as-fiction, all with something to sell.

Finally, of course, there are no Capitals in Japanese. The People are just the same as people. And the Kanji for ‘population’ is jinkou, a mouth next to a person. Which always makes me think either of vox populi or of Coriolanus, for whom the Roman populace are one giant mouth, obscene in its neediness. With that kind of rich symbolic ambiguity in your language, what would you take at face value?

soured on beer and given to Claims