Darkness of a summer
Darkness of a Summer ( Japanese 夏 の 闇 , Natsu no yami ) is a novel by the Japanese writer Takeshi Kaikō, which is mainly set in Europe and Germany . The original edition appeared in 1972, the German edition, translated by Jürgen Berndt , appeared in 1993.
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The locations of the plot are not explicitly named, but it quickly becomes clear that the main characters, a Japanese woman and a Japanese woman, are in Europe, in Germany. He's forty, she's around thirty and they haven't seen each other for ten years. The two meet in a European city, possibly Paris, stroll through narrow streets, through parks, watch people, and the name Oblomow is mentioned. And they sleep together. She has broken away from Japan and uses a Chinese term to describe herself as “a child grieving in loneliness,” recounts her doctoral thesis. When he talks about the restaurants in town, she confesses that over the years, in Germany, with potatoes and sausage, her taste buds have been a little dulled. Finally, she suggests moving in with her, "to the small capital of the neighboring country". After all, she could bake a universally praised pizza. And so they move to Bonn, more precisely, "to the suburb with the diplomatic missions", to Godesberg.
In Godesberg, from the balcony of her apartment, he was amazed to see the greenery surrounding the university guest house. But he shows little inclination to go into town, to get to know the people. He prefers to lie inside on the sofa, getting used to the German schnapps. He is so repugnant about every encounter that the thought of having to shake hands with someone makes him sick. So when visitors come, he hides in the kitchen. - She, on the other hand, has a lot to tell about the university and the difficult years before it. She is making progress with her doctoral thesis, wants to meet people, give parties.
He dreams, wakes up, wondering why there is so much written about sex (which he does) and so rarely about sleep. He remembers his first stay in Vietnam, a terrorist attack and a visit to an opium cave , the deep sleep afterwards.
Then a whole chapter is devoted to fishing. While the man explains the art of pike fishing to the woman at a mountain lake - Kaikō was a passionate fisherman. - the story brightens up a little. Together they amuse themselves at the Japanese colleagues who already see the rewriting of texts from a western horizontal line arrangement to an eastern vertical one as an achievement.
Unlike the quoted Oblomov, who finally becomes active when he falls in love with a woman, the hero in this story awakens when he (around 1968) learns of new developments in Vietnam. He diligently collects information in Berlin and decides to set off. She implores him to stay in vain, complains that for him it was just a kind of "waiting room" between two trips. On the last evening they board the ring line of the Berlin S-Bahn, once a model for the Yamanote line in Tokyo. There are not many passengers, and so they travel in a kind of ghost train from the light west to the dark east and back again and again. The book ends with the laconic statement “Tomorrow morning, ten o'clock”.
Post Comment
Kaikō received the school education of his time, which also included classical Chinese, was otherwise completely integrated into Japanese society, as can be learned from the story "Blue Monday" published in 1969. Later he went abroad for newspapers and became a globetrotter. Here Kaikō agrees the reader with the first sentence in Japanese: “Back then, too, I was traveling again.” The short dialogues are also colored male or female by a syllable at the end in a Japanese way. There are the rich possibilities of phonetic allusions in Japanese, and the seamless integration of Chinese quotations succeeds.
But the book deals only marginally with Japan. And Europe and Germany, too, only form the framework for the story of an intensive relationship in which man and woman ultimately (have to) go different ways. Kaikō renounces any drama, above all wants to reproduce the sense of time, just as Ihara Saikaku did 300 years before him, when peace finally came after the Japanese civil war , which he also wishes for Vietnam. Perhaps "really living" is Kaikō's motto when he precedes the book with a verse from the Book of Revelation , which ends with the words: "Oh, that you were cold or warm."
Remarks
- ↑ Chinese "孤 哀 子" .
- ↑ Vietnam is the only specific location that is mentioned in this book (the middle one of his Vietnam trilogy).
- ↑ "About the darkness of a summer ". Conversation between literary critic Sasaki Kiichi (1914–1993) and Kaikō as a supplement to the Japanese edition. First published in the 3/1972 issue of the Shinchosha magazine “Nami”.
- ↑ Aoi getsuyōbi ( 青 い 月曜日 ), first published in 1969 in the well-known culture magazine “Bungei shunshū”, later as a paperback.
- ↑ Bōtō ( 冒頭 ), a detached introductory line that joins in without being too weighty.
- ↑ "About the darkness of a summer ". Conversation between literary critic Sasaki Kiichi (1914–1993) and Kaikō as a supplement to the Japanese edition. First published in the 3/1972 issue of the Shinchosha magazine “Nami”, page 8
Book editions
- Kaikō Ken: Natsu no yami ( 夏 の 闇 ), Kinyosha, 1972.
- Takeshi Kaikō: darkness of a summer . Edition q, Berlin, 1993. ISBN 3-86124-228-1 .