The Mahdi and the Islamic State

I've been watching over the last couple of evenings the 1966 flick Khartoum about the Mahdi Rebellion in Sudan in the early 1880s. The film has some small interest in cinema history - famously Charlton Heston was supposed to have taken the role of General Gordon because Laurence Olivier was playing the Mahdi though they actually only share two scenes together. It also boasts a nice turn from Ralph Richardson as a hesitantly conniving Gladstone. It's not exactly cinema gold (although there is an intermission and 'entr'acte') and while there are moments where a blacked-up Olivier's performance as the Mahdi reminds you of his wonderfully stylized Othello, there are also quite a few when he seems more like Bernard Bresslaw out of Carry On Up The Khyber.

It's intriguing though how many similarities there are between the current crisis created by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria with what was going on in Sudan in the 1880s. Then, as now, the creation of such a radical Islamic State committed to sharia law took the West entirely off guard. The Mahdi crushed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under Western leadership sent to quell his uprising and subsequently, armed with their abandoned weapons, proved unstoppable in his determination to take over the whole of Sudan, beheading all those, such as General Gordon himself, who stood in his way. Sound familiar? This was in a country where Britain felt it had already made some civilizing contribution with Gordon rooting out the slave trade when he had been governor in the 1870s.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is the pitting against each other of two extraordinary individuals: the fascinating General Gordon and the Mahdi. Gordon (pictured right)

too was a self-possessed religious zealot with an incredible life story already in place. As 'Chinese Gordon' he had been instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion in 1860s China. In one intriguing, entirely fabricated scene in the film he even offers the Mahdi a sumptuous jacket presented to him by the Emperor of China only for it to be turned down by the Mahdi as the emperor is 'an infidel'.

The curious Western habit of sending out 'men of faith' to tackle religious fanaticism in the Near East seems to continue to this day. The modern equivalent of General Gordon is surely a man like Tony Blair, another self-possessed religious 'visionary', dispatched to the region and, blithely oblivious to the contradictions of his faith and those of the peoples around him, achieves nothing at all, though as the script of Khartoum acutely points out 'vanity was always mixed up with visions'.

Much as I might briefly enjoy the idea of a Blair of Baghdad being holed up with the armies of the Islamic State swirling around him, the grimmer reality is that these days the victims of such blood-thirsty rebellions are those deeply humane and humanistic souls attempting to alleviate, or report on, the distress of the local population. One of the saddest aspects of the horrifying images of the two American journalists killed was learning what profound lovers of Arabic culture they were.

In the 1880s, as now, the initial response to the Islamic State was to avoid military intervention or at least for military intervention to be surreptitious. It took the stranding of Gordon in Khartoum, and his inability to be saved from a grisly death, to galvanize public opinion.

What lessons can be drawn? In Khartoum, Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi grits his teeth and pronounces 'holy war' as if he is talking about some archaic concept from a long time ago destined never to return. The producers in 1966 surely never dreamed how big 'jihad' would be in 2014. 'Jihad' it seems is clearly not going to go away and is likely to periodically explode.

The best we can do I think is not, in the mould of Gordon and the Mahdi, to match intense faith with intense faith, but rather match frenzied religion against a dogged, open-minded secularism that refuses to be displaced.

The Embassy Gig

With a New Year comes, in Star Wars-esque fashion, a new hope, and so, after a fallow period, I am looking forward to some new events for the diversion and entertainment of my many millions of blog readers. We are kicking off in some style with an event next Monday evening at 5pm at the Japanese Embassy in London (on Piccadilly, slightly down from The Ritz) when I will be giving a tour round the Soseki exhibition then leading a discussion about my 2005 book The Tower of London. Afterwards there are rumours of a sake tasting at the embassy rounded off, I dare say, by some wanderings around notable watering holes of the West End.

More details on the event are here:

http://www.japansociety.org.uk/32893/damian-soseki/

Membership of the Japan Society (£45 a year for singles; £60 for families) is required, but this event, and many others besides, are free thereafter.

Golden Gate Girls

The other week we had the pleasure of a visit to Flanagan Towers by the Hong Kong-based documentary film maker Louisa Wei (pictured above), ahead of the British premiere of her new film Golden Gate Girls. Louisa will always hold a special place in my affections for her gift of the bust of the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun which holds pride of place in my little exotica room (aka The Raj Room) in England, as well as for sterling efforts single-handedly translating into Chinese my partner Karen's book Pre-animate.

Louisa proved herself the perfect house guest - invisible for large stretches of the day, then suddenly effervescent and stimulating at meal times and splendid in her ability to cope with my rampaging one-year-old daughter when left home alone. Inevitably however the climax of the week came with the screening of her film at Manchester's Cornerhouse Arts Cinema followed by a director's Q and A with the audience.

I must admit to being a little sheepish beforehand as documentary films on Chinese subjects, particularly when made by the Chinese themselves, can in my experience have difficulty straddling the cultural divide and leave you longing for a bit of Hollywood dumbing down. Would I be nodding off fifteen minutes in as the Cantonese came flying at me thick at fast?

I need not have worried as Golden Gate Girls turned out to be a supremely charming and serene, not to say fascinating, experience. The film tells of Louisa's pursuit of the now mostly forgotten pioneering female film director Esther Eng (pictured left) in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s. Eng - a flamboyant, stylish lesbian - made exclusively Cantonese films for the Cantonese community in America and China before eventually abandoning film altogether and reinventing herself as a doyen of Chinese restauranteurs in New York before her untimely death at the age of 55 in 1970.

This was the story of a world within a world, the self-encapsulating cosmos of the Chinese cast adrift in the ocean of American culture. From this thread, so many intriguing sub-plots fanned out that it was difficult to contain one's interest. There was for example the extraordinary story of the celluloid depiction of the Chinese as a whole in 1930s Hollywood - a place where a ban on any depiction of mixed race marriages meant that the casting of Paul Muni as the Chinese lead in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1937) prevented the casting of an American-Chinese actress like the bewitching Anna May Wong (pictured below right) to play opposite him with the part going to the German actress Luise Rainer instead (who subsequently won the Oscar for it). The hapless Wong meanwhile was left instead to play only stereotypical, demeaning roles that caused her to be roundly hated back home in China.

Being Chinese in 1930s Hollywood was clearly a tough gig, and a woman becoming a movie director a mountain to climb, so how did Esther manage it? We followed Louisa from San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hawaii and New York in her pursuit of the answer.

In the Q and A after the film, Louisa remarked that critiques of the film following initial screenings in Hong Kong and elsewhere had depended on the perspectives of the people watching it. Feminists wanted more focus on the story of pioneering female film directors in Hollywood (fair enough, an intriguing subject); others wanted a more personal, human story and encouraged Louisa to go back and put more of herself into the film.

Was it ultimately a story of feminism or gay rights, or the tale of one community trapped inside another searching for a voice?

For me, some of the film's seemingly incidental details were the most arresting. The film is for example accompanied by a most wonderful jazz soundtrack, which not only pulls the subject matter back from an exclusively 'Chinese' context, but anchors it, like the film Chinatown, in the world of 1930s America, while constantly hinting at other communities - such as the African Americans - who were also finding their voices in their own world within a world.

Then there is the extraordinary detail that the baby 'girl' who features in Esther Eng's final film was in fact none other than an infant Bruce Lee. Was this an extraneous detail that could be cut? Absolutely not. For it spoke of the means by which the world of Cantonese film would eventually come kicking and screaming its way into a Western consciousness.

In the end, Hollywood royalty started paying patronage to Esther Eng's eponymous restaurant in New York, which even featured on the cover of the first Madonna album.

If Hollywood is important in twentieth century history as the powerful engine for the universalization of American culture, then here is the story of a sealed-off, exotic pocket of the dream factories. The means by which that hermetic culture broke free and flowed into the current of world culture is for me not just the main narrative drive of Golden Gate Girls, but one of the most fascinating, unfolding stories of our age.

Visions of The Gate

I have been intrigued to note that a new translation of Soseki's The Gate is being released by The New York Review of Books in December this year. The Gate is one of those supreme masterpieces of twentieth century literature, a work of such profound subtletly that while being casually dismissed by many an empty vessel ('A Huge Disappointment!' writes one such on Amazon America), it nevertheless remains not only the ultimate connoiseur's choice, but also its author's own personal favourite. The translators of this new edition are denoted as 'William F. Sibley and Edward Fowler'. 'Who they?', I wondered, imagining that they must be a couple of preppy Harvard graduates holding each other's hands on their first book together. Perhaps they were the irritatingly talented faces of the nouvelle vague who I might be hearing a lot more from in years to come.

As it turns out however, the back-story is considerably more interesting. When I googled 'William F. Sibley', I discovered that far from being a young graduate he was in fact an eminent academic at the University of Chicago. And far from hearing more from him, I was startled to realise he was already dead, having passed away in 2009 at the age of 67. Very distantly, a few bells start to ring. I dimly remembered being told a few years back in some emails exchanged with Marvin Marcus (author of a recent book on Soseki) that a 'Bill Sibley' at the University of Chicago was working on a translation of Soseki's first 'trilogy' of novels. Whether he actually got anywhere with Sanshiro and And Then, I don't know, but presumably publishing these first two would be a bit tricky as a rejigged version of Jay Rubin's translation of Sanshiro has been released in the last few years by Penguin (see my blog 'The March of the Penguin') while the previous translator of And Then, Norma Field, was also a colleague of Sibley's at the University of Chicago.

Reading about Sibley and Fowler in the Memorial Symposium address at Chicago delivered by Sibley's erstwhile pupil Fowler (now a senior academic himself in California) made me warm to them both. Sibley sounded like something of a free spirit, a man who while being perfectionist in his pursuit of Japanese letters, never lost sight of the bigger picture, wanting in the early days to blow off academia altogether and just go travelling. He made room in his life for Italian cuisine, Mahler and rock music, and always referred to his big thesis on the Japanese author Shiga Naoya (later published as The Shiga Hero) as 'the fucking ronbun' (ronbun meaning 'essay'). He sounded like the type of guy that could entertain you royally if you went out for a few beers with him in downtown Chicago or Tokyo.

That an intelligent, colourful maverick like this should be drawn towards a work of extreme understatement like The Gate might seem superficially strange, but is in fact entirely apposite. My regret though is that it seems this edition will ultimately lack any introduction from Sibley. When a man like this has been obsessed with a book and a writer for decades, what a pity that they have never actually managed to put into words what it is about the book that so absorbs their interest. Reading Edward Fowler's address, I saw that Sibley had also previously translated a chapter by the Japanese critic Maeda Ai on The Gate and Fowler himself recycles a lot of ideas by the critic Kumakura Chiyuki to explain why the novel is profound. Yet to my mind none of this really gets to the heart of the matter. Analysing Tokyo's Meiji period topography or discussing the way in which Chinese characters segue from one word to another in The Gate are all mildly interesting, but it is not the reason why the novel gripped Sibley and refused to let go. The real reason is because in the 'nothing narrative' of The Gate, Soseki smashes an axe through the surface calm of human consciousness to create a novel of profound unease. There is an entire universe of ideas on the fundamental nature of existence that instantly connects to people around the world, whether in Chicago, Manchester or Manchuria.

Alas, now I suppose we will never know how the book spoke to Sibley. Instead it seems the publishers are drafting in a third person, Pico Iyer, to pen an introduction. Iyer is apparently a prolific travel writer (though I confess is unknown to me) and I suppose if he helps bring a wider audience to The Gate, then all well and good, though I must admit jaded cynicism when it come to publishers' usually lame attempts to parachute in 'celebrity endorsements' for such books.

Briefly immersing myself in the world of Japanese Literature academics in America elicited a couple of contradictory emotions. On the one hand, I thought how great it would be if every day you could hang out with people of similiar interests, where everybody in the field knows each other like members of the local village. There's a lot of back-slapping and bonhomie and references to Ed Seidenstecker and Donald Keene. In contrast, over here in my backwater of England, things paradoxically seem like the Wild West, where books get written on the hoof, in stony solitude, where you scramble to pursue your interests in a sea of utter indifference.

But then there's the other side of the coin. I also can't help thinking that this whole world of well-heeled academia is a trap, that locks minds within the narrow parameters of often perversely defined disciplines. By constantly focussing on the word 'Japan', for example, academics become mouthpieces and lackeys for Japanese critics (themselves often highly parochial in their vision) instead of opening their minds to larger, more universal possibilities. In the end someone outside the field has to be dropped in to explain everything to a wider readership in the West.

In the ultimate irony, with a depressing lack of vision or orginality, the University of Chicago has inauguarated an annual 'Sibley Translation Prize' despite there already being a similar prize run by New York's Columbia University (Chicago's prize is for works up to 15,000 words; New York's for books). Wouldn't it have been a lot more fruitful and innovative if the University of Chicago offered the prize instead for an original critical essay, to reward someone for thinking for him or herself, for being able to do what Sibley himself tragically never could - to explain what it is about a literary work that speaks not just to a closetted discipline but to the larger world?

I rather suspect too that on some level or other Sibley was probably of the same opinion - wishing to drop out of his university position, blow off his academic 'ronbun', hit the road, go travelling and mull the deep, deep reasons why a novel like The Gate kept swirling and swirling round his mind. You can read the full text of Fowler's address here.

Save Aidan

Towards the end of last year came the disturbing news that Aidan O'Connor, a long-term resident of Kansai, all-round good egg and erstwhile culinary correspondent for Kansai Time Out, was battling with leukemia. Worse, it transpired that his only hope for survival lay with a bone marrow transplant from overseas, an expensive procedure not covered by the terms of his medical insurance in Japan.

The situation was grim and particularly distressing given that Aidan has a young family and had just moved to the countryside and was setting up his own small restaurant. His closest friends in Japan have rallied round and put together a campaign called Save Aidan designed to raise enough money to give some support to Aidan and his family and to help finance the transplants which are his only hope for survival. They also hope to draw attention to the wider problem of there being no bone marrow bank available for non-Japanese in Japan.

You can read more about the moving story of Aidan's battle with cancer and the Save Aidan project here.

Pre-animate in Chinese

The patter of little feet and the putting to bed of a new book has kept me away from blogging for a while but, ah, so much to catch up on...

One noteworthy event in the Flanagan household last year was the publication in Chinese of Pre-animate, that masterwork guide to animation by Karen McCann, the mistress of the house. Rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of royalties rolling in from a potential market of 1.5 billion readers, I was even more dazzled by the means by which this book came about.

Karen has a friend from her days as a lecturer in computer animation in Hong Kong called Louisa Wei, herself a professor and film producer. (Louisa was already the recipient of my eternal gratitude for once sending me from Shanghai a heavy metal bust of my literary hero, Lu Xun, which now proudly adorns the mantlepiece in my home in England.) But this time round, without any prompting, Louisa took it into her head to get a Chinese version of Pre-animate published and wrote to a publisher in Hong Kong. They politely declined offering some reason about not being sure about how well it would sell or how suitable it would be for a Chinese audience. It's the type of brush-off you get all the time from publishers and if anyone else but Louisa Wei had received this letter, they would have just taken it with a shrug and moved on.

But Louisa Wei is an extraordinary woman. She then wrote back to the publishers, doggedly dismissed their arguments and urged them to reconsider. Amazingly, the publishers then wrote back and said, 'OK, we'll do it!' The next thing you know Louisa, who was heavily pregnant, translated the whole book in her spare time and saw it through to publication just about the same time as her waters were breaking.

When the Chinese edition dropped onto our doormat in England, I marvelled that anyone could be so lucky to have such a one-woman whirlwind acting on their behalf.

Meanwhile, for anyone interested in reading Pre-animate in English, you can find it here.

The Restaurant of Love Regained

You can hear me discussing The Restaurant of Love Regained and other literary matters on today's Open Book on BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012f8np.html

The Restaurant of Love Regained is a debut novel by 37-year-old Ito Ogawa that was published three years ago in Japan and is just being released this month in English in a translation by David Karashima. The book has sold over 800,000 copies in Japan so it will be interesting to see how it fares over here.

It's the story of a 25-year-old girl who comes back to her city flat one day and discovers that her Indian boyfriend has disappeared, taking with him all the couple's possessions. Her dream of their having their own restaurant one day is in tatters and, distraught and penniless, she heads back to her home village in the countryside that she ran away from ten years earlier. There, traumatized and unable to speak, she makes an uneasy peace with her estranged mother and decides to set up her own makeshift restaurant, preparing wholesome home-made food to order for just one person or group at a time.

It's an account of someone who has lost everything starting over again and getting back to basics - rediscovering the wonder of nature and the home town she had left behind. Through the craft of cookery and the intimacy of serving food, the heroine begins building and re-building a host of new and old relationships. Her restaurant provides emotional therapy not just for herself, but to everyone in the village - from a stray rabbit to a lonely spinster - and ultimately is the means of reconciliation between mother and daughter.

The central idea is how love and affection can be transmitted through food and how joyous it is to make people happy through serving people dishes oozing in natural flavours. It's a rejection of some of the evils of modern life - the breakdown of families, the fast food culture, the obsession with profit and en masse uniformity - and a return to the provincial, the family, local flavours and simple pleasures.

The author Ito Ogawa (pictured right) is a lady of many talents.
As well as writing adult fiction, she has written books for children and is also a member of a musical group Fairlife for whom she writes lyrics.

The book is not something I would have usually read: I devoured it while simultaneously scrutinizing Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy and its lightness of touch and easy readability could not have been in greater contrast to the dense prose and heavy philosophizing of Mishima. I did however find a lot of interest in it and both watched the film of the book and listened to the Fairlife musical album associated with it.

There's no doubt that the novel has struck a chord with Japanese female readers in particular, who can readily empathize with a central character for whom life had not gone as she would have wished. On one level, the book connects to recent bestselling fiction in the West such as Joanne Harris' Chocolat and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love in the common theme of rediscovering oneself and finding love through food. However the book is also very much a part of the strong tradition of popular Japanese female writing by authors such as Banana Yoshimoto and Amy Yamada.

The book is indeed a symbol of the power of Japan's female readership. A few years ago, the bestselling book in Japan was called The Dignity of the State and was a very nationalistic male polemic, warning against the dangers of Westernization and calling for a return to samurai values. But the following year this was trumped by a book called The Dignity of a Woman, which sold 3 million copies, and appealed to the huge female reader market. The appeal of that book was to offer advice on how a Japanese woman should conduct herself in the modern age and suggested a fairly traditional agenda of conducting oneself with decorum.

The Restaurant of Love Regained also falls into this category of post-feminist Japanese writing. It is feminist to the extent that the heroine has the independence to fend for herself and set up her own restaurant; but it is also traditional in its appeal to time-honoured Japanese values - and a woman's place is still in the kitchen! The heroine actively rejects the apparently sexually liberated lifestyle of her mother and feels kinship instead with her grandmother - indeed she goes through life with her talisman of a rice bran miso pot passed down from her grandmother.


The appeal of the book is instant and universal - we all dream of having time to cook - but I also read this novel as an interesting metaphor for modern Japan itself. On the surface everything seems cosmopolitan and international: the heroine has been living with an Indian guy and worked in a Turkish restaurant and picked up recipes for Iranian pomegranate curry. But then she takes all this experience back, along with her grandma's traditional miso pot, to a profoundly Japanese setting - her little restaurant in the countryside and starts making international cuisine there. So it is very typical of the Japanese way of managing to absorb influences from around the world and yet, by keeping its core values, transforms them into something distinctively Japanese. The world is enfolded into Japan and is then seen through the microscopic. In the dishes concocted in a provincial Japanese restaurant, we can taste Indian aromas, dreams of Turkish mosques and fantasize about Iranian plains.

The one additional thing I might say is in relation to the heroine's rather 'hands-on' (and occasionally excruciating) manner of sourcing and preparing meat, which manages to be distinctively Japanese in its ability to be delicate, aesthetic and brutal all at the same time. There is something quintessentially Shinto-Buddhist in the perception even of meat preparation as a sacred rite, representing the transfer of nourishing life force.

There is also an accomplished children's fable enfolded into this novel - the story of the owl who hoots twelve times at exactly midnight every night and is the unchanging, comforting guardian of the heroine is a clever metaphor for the hidden wisdom of a parent looking out for a child (albeit in an occasionally irritating way) - and is really a children's story threaded into the text of this simple, but often quite profound book.