CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #5: Books from different countries. Japan.)
This one was an adventure for me. I don’t know a lot about Japanese literature or anime, but my kid is a Japanophile. He’s planning to minor in Japanese in college this (gulp) fall and would like to live there for a couple of years at some point (also, gulp). So, I thought of him when I saw this on the “new” bookshelf at the library and decided to give it a whirl. I asked him about it and he answered with a “Yeah, there is a lot of anime based on that guy’s stuff.” I did a little digging and this book was published in Japan in 2004, has an anime series based on it, and a follow-up book published just two years ago. Apparently, it’s a big deal in Japan but is getting a resurgence here in the U.S. because of a new translation by Emily Balistrieri. Behold the power of a great literary translator!
A college junior in Kyoto finds himself not living his best life. He has not achieved the “rose-colored campus life” that he dreamed about as a freshman and blames his poor life choices for his fate. He believes that the entire course of his life has been derailed by selecting the wrong club to join at the beginning of his freshman year of college. If only he could fix his mistake. (hint,hint,hint)
The novel is broken up into four parts, each one an alternate universe exploring what course his college life would have taken if he had selected one club over another. But which to choose: the film club run by a womanizer of female freshmen, the disciple club devoted to the procurement of strange goods and an out-of-hand prank war, the religious softball league full of unsettling happy people, or the syndicate club based on barbaric library fine collection and black market academic papers?
It’s an off-kilter universe (ahem, galaxy) populated with a creepy best friend, a perpetual student guru, a sex doll, the world’s most amazing scrub brush, and a moth cloud. Each permutation is slightly different but the unnamed narrator ends up at the same obstacle: how to talk to the black-haired maiden.
I know that I didn’t catch half of the references in this novel but I’m not sure that it mattered. However a reader comes to it, the story is still quirky, funny, and somehow both predictable and completely surprising. This may be a straightforward book in its genre but since it was an entirely new experience for me, I dug it. It’s a book about a 21-year-old guy trying to figure his shit out. He just gets to do it in a way we might all envy a bit in a world that is familiar but completely bonkers.