Latest / Black Ibis Social Club / Episode 4: In the Miso Soup

Transcript

Episode 4: In the Miso Soup · Black Ibis Social Club

• 0:01
  by
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you are listening to The Deceneus Review, where we discuss novels, film, art, and culture from a perspective outside the mainstream.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Review is a Substack Podcast, but you can listen to us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and anywhere else via RSS.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share this episode.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a rainy afternoon here in the Lowcountry, and after giving it some thought, I decided to try something different.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was planning on writing a book review on Substack, but for some reason I only managed to get to the two paragraphs before giving up.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of trying to write the writer's block, I decided to record a solo episode and talk about the book I was writing about.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've been in a mood lately, two moods actually.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: The first mood is I've been not in the mood to read or listen to or watch a lot of American media.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I found myself catching up on a lot of foreign films and foreign television shows
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: and pretty exclusively only reading European writers and the occasional Asian writer.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: The second mood I've been in and these two moods kind of tying together about the topic I'm going to talk about is I've been nostalgic for the time my wife and I lived in Japan.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was triggered
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: In My Nostalgia by my wife discovering an old PC of ours in the closet, starting it up and finding a bunch of her early photography from our time spent in Japan.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: She posted it on Substack and I'll share the link because it's some fantastic stuff.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this bout of nostalgia to over eight years ago when we were in Japan kind of caused me to start watching a lot of Studio Ghibli and a lot of Japanese foreign films like the fantastic Drive My Car, which was an award winner several years ago.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: The main movie that really kicked off a lot of nostalgia about my time in Tokyo and my time in Japan is Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You, which took place in a Tokyo that I was very familiar with, of course as an outsider, but still, seeing Lawsons and trains and everything that is such an integral part of your experience living in Japan was very fantastic, very nostalgic, and it made me want to
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Almost a decade ago, my wife and I got the opportunity to spend several years living in Japan.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it was an amazing experience, and I fell in love with that country, the culture, the people.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, I was never a Japanophile, I was never a weeb.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: I actually disliked and had an aversion towards anime conventions, anime weeb culture, video games, and a lot of things that people in the west
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Japan has a lot of amazing great things about it as a culture and as a country a lot of things that often don't get mentioned we tend to focus on Japan from a anime weeb gamer perspective with the schoolgirl outfits tentacles and you know Pikachu's and all kinds of nonsense like that
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or we tend to look at Japan as a strictly conservative, traditional place.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in reality, in practical reality, Japan is a little bit of all that and a lot of other things that completely get mentioned.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Japan has a great nightlife.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of fantastic bars and izakayas which stay open well into the morning.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: People meet up for drinks.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a nightlife that is very different than the American nightlife, and it's almost a little bit more cozy, but at the same time, it's a lot more lonely and kind of manufactured in certain elements.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also, besides the big buildings in Tokyo and Yokohama, besides all the neon lights of the different districts, you have a culture that is really into the outdoors, into picnicking, hiking, rock climbing, exploring trails through the forests, much more so than the United States because it's a lot more accessible due to the geography of the country.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course there's fantastic restaurants, exceptionally friendly people that will stop and help you if you look lost.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: on-foot or on-train through Los Angeles, for example.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: With all the great things, Japan, like any other culture, like any other country, has a lot of negative elements.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lonely place.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a place that is overworked where employees work six, seven days a week sometimes and often go into work very early in the morning and they don't get home until well past 8 p.m.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: you see this you see you take the trains through Tokyo and there's adults sleeping because they're so exhausted only to go home to very small apartments sleep a few hours to go back to the office it's a culture where nobody goes home early if the boss is still at work
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: so they sit around and do nothing to make sure that they don't look like the first person that's going home it's a culture that's very much obsessed with materialism and status
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: where cities like Tokyo are covered in designer name brand stores, fancy cars, and the kind of materialism you find in New York City or London or any of the major western cities.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that Japan and the Japanese have in common with Americans is that we both have a very isolated worldview which centers us as the center of our own universe.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: We Americans often have a hard time
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding how everybody else thinks.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: How people in different countries look at us or look at each other.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to have a center of the world mentality.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: While the Japanese have a very similar worldview where they don't understand the outside world, outside of Japan, except through a very uniquely Japanese lens.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure you guys have all heard of
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I think is that in order to get a realistic, more nuanced view of Japanese culture,
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend watching movies like The Recent Drive My Car or reading contemporary Japanese literature.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: One such novel I had lying around, my wife actually bought it a few years ago and for some reason I never got around to reading it until last week, is Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup, which was published in 1997.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Ryu Murakami shares the last name with the more known literary writer Haruki Murakami, who wrote Kafka on the Shore, The Winding Bird Chronicle, and a lot of other novels that are pretty popular and well known in the United States.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Ryu is the less literary, more pulp, darker, more violent of the two.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: You could say Ryu is like the Japanese literature version of Bret Easton Ellis.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup is a book about a young man named Kenji who works as a night guide in Tokyo's Kabukicho district of Shinjuku.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: He is basically a sex tour guide.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's a tour guide for foreign tourists looking for sex or looking to experience the Japanese unique sexual trade culture.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: specifically the red-light district neighborhood known as Kabukicho which is in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: what he does is he he advertises in a English language tour guide booklet and American tourists contact him and hire him to escort him to escort them around this neighborhood and he connects them with different experiences in the red-light district for example
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: the host bars, the love hotels, the prostitution, the date girls and the strip clubs, peep shows and all kinds of like seedy kind of dark sexual marketplace experiences that would be very difficult for a foreigner to take part in without an actual Japanese guide.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing to picture Kabukicho, which I've been to and it's not just like a red light district.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like a kind of a wild downtown neighborhood filled with bars and restaurants and
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Japanese version of medieval times but with robots and lasers and fireworks indoor in this completely unsafe environment but it's it's fantastic I actually went and did it twice but Kabukicho the neighborhood is your stereotypical like
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Japanese Fantasy Plays.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Japanese literature to a lot of Japanese anime, video games and that sort of thing because it's such a distinct place that really captures the imagination of writers and both foreign and contemporary and local artists.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: so what Kenji does is he he knows all the hookers he knows all the prostitutes all the all the different host bars and the touts and he knows all the tricks so he takes these guys you know charges them a few grand and he takes them around and he spends the time with them getting them to the right places right so he takes him to the strip club hangs out with them make sure that they're not getting ripped off or you know
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: and he gets a new job he gets a new client named Frank an American named Frank and this guy is weird Frank he comes off as this large frumpy kind of awkward
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: very almost like you know you would describe him as a as an incel of some sort somebody that is middle-aged has doesn't have a lot of luck and experience talking to people or talking to women and he's awkwardly dressed he he's kind of bizarre and clammy looking and he hires Kenji for three nights to take him around Kabukicho and you know find him sex and
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the first night, Kenji goes around with them and this guy is weird.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: He just acts strange and as the night goes through, they go to a strip club.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: They go to a peep show.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: He just starts doing weird things and saying weird, awkward things and Kenji starts catching this guy in lies.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as this is happening, Kenji remembers that several days before,
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: He meets Frank.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: There was a murder in Kabukicho.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: A young prostitute was found dismembered in trash bags.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: He starts obsessing or thinking that maybe Frank had something to do with it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Deceneus Journal.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Completely Fabricated Lies.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So after the first night is over, which ends with a really bizarre, creepy, uncomfortable scene at a batting cage, Kenji goes back to his girlfriend and he is convinced that Frank is this killer.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he is terrified of him because he's also convinced that Frank knows where he lives
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: and that he's going to kill him also if he doesn't continue on with the three days so he goes back for a second night of taking Frank out
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: and the book is this funnel of stress and anxiety as they go from bar to bar CD locales to CD locale and they have these pseudo philosophical conversations about Japan America loneliness and the whole time
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: you're stressed because you know something's going to happen it's all building up to a volcano erupting an earthquake tearing up every reality and it does and that's where it goes because at the end of the second night everything explodes and Frank is the murderer and we get a scene that is one of the most violent bloody episodes I've ever read in a novel
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: and everything changes the whole world of Kenji changes at this point he gets caught up in this insane orgy of violence
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: caused by Frank and then everything becomes a strange philosophical you know I came it's hard to even describe it because he is stuck with this mass murderer and he almost becomes attached to Frank the mass murderer in the same way the kid is tied up with the judge in Blood Meridian
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: and thinking about it a lot of the conversations between Frank and Kenji and a lot of the post-explosion portrayal of Frank reminds me a lot of McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Judge because Frank is not just a character he is just like The Judge
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: A Force of Nature, a piece of pure evil that's from the outside yet completely understandable from the inside, very much so like The Judge or Anton Sugar in No Country for Old Men.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: These are villains that make you think about the nature of violence, of murder, of crime, and of loneliness.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the book itself is pretty short.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's about a little bit under 50,000 words, more of a long novella than an actual novel, and it's only divided into three chapters, one for each day, which is basically the introduction night where everything's kind of weird, the tension-building second night that leads to the explosion of violence, and then the third night
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: which takes on a more spiritual catharsis kind of element and it's fantastic it ends on a fantastic note a confusing note a very open-ended note so there's no real resolution which is something you find a lot in Japanese fiction that there is no resolution
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: because Japanese fiction and even a lot of movies and anime tend to be very slice of life very passing in nature there is no direct beginning middle and it's very open-ended and it doesn't tie everything up it doesn't explain it doesn't give you know detailed backstories it's just it just is and we don't know what happens after and we really don't understand
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: what brought this all about but the book itself is not just an action murder novel it's actually in an exploration of of loneliness of Japanese culture Japanese culture contrasted with American culture and
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: and how it's exposed to American culture and it's a exploration of the Japanese hypocrisy towards sex and the sex trade how so many young Japanese women turn to becoming hostesses or pseudo prostitutes not out of the need for money but out of a strange loneliness and
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: where they're just so disconnected and often how materialistic and empty the Japanese culture is behind all the neon lights of cities like Tokyo
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that right there makes the book fascinating because it's something that I saw firsthand during my time in Japan and it's something that never really gets discussed in the idealistic or fantasy version of Japan that most Americans have.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: because Japan is a place just like any other it's got good people bad people it's got homeless people it's got light and beautiful places and it's got darkness and homelessness and murder and sadness and despair just like any other country on this planet and in the miso soup is a novel that really explores that darkness that loneliness
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: the Japanese Sex Trade and the Japanese culture that is lost on the streets of neighborhoods like Kabukicho.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, I highly recommend this novel.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's one you can pick up real quick and read in a day.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: It gives you a great picture of a time in Japanese culture, the late 90s, early 2000s.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: where the sex trade was still very much so free a lot more so than it is today supposedly but it gives you a perspective on prostitution from a very alien to us culture because one thing I found very interesting is
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: living in Japan something that dawned on me is that the Japanese don't have the cultural foundation of Christianity that all Western countries do even the most atheistic or you know a moral cultures like the Soviets during communism in Russia or Eastern Europeans or even
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Northern Europeans who pride themselves in being very progressive and atheistic, they still have a fundamental Christian foundation to the culture that never existed in Japan.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the Japanese approach dating and sexuality from a different mindset than Westerners do.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: and it's hard to describe unless you experience it and you see it first hand but there isn't that level of shame that we have a lot in the West but it's different there's a different feeling to it and this short little novel through some of the conversations with some of the women in the novel some of the different girls that are hostesses and stuff like that
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: You really get a bit of that and you see how alien it is to the point where you as an American, as a Westerner can almost see Japan through the eyes of Frank who is an evil monster but
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I found it fascinating.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I found it fascinating how you can be an American reading a piece of Japanese fiction and almost identifying with the monster in the novel.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, pick it up.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Give it a read.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know what you think in comments, okay?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for joining me today.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed this episode.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Remember to follow, like, and share across social media platforms.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And once again, I'm very much interested in your input and conversation, so feel free to comment on the slip stacks page.