David Turri's Blog, page 4

The Misery of Reading Les Miserables

The Misery of Reading Les Miserables

Before the movie, there was the musical. And before the musical, there was the novel by Victor Hugo, a humungous work, one of the mothers of classical literature. It clocks in at 2,783 pages.

I have tremendous admiration for the translator of the version I am drowning in – Isabel F. Hapgood (1887). She must have been smoking two packs a day by the time she finished translating it.

I can’t remember when I started it. Two years ago? It dazzled me. For maybe the first five hundred pages. The chapters about The Battle of Waterloo are a work of art on their own.

But then I began to get bogged down. The damned digressions. Hugo just goes off of a tangent for dozens and dozens of pages – about nuns, slang, all sorts of dizzying things. According to Wikipedia, about 955 pages deal with things that have nothing to do with the story.

And the goddamned Barricades…The June 1832 Rebellion in Paris. The barricade make an appearance around page 1447. And he writes, “The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.” On page 1694. But we are STILL in the barricade until page 1727.

A few months ago, I had dinner with an old friend, who is a fan of musicals. She had recently seen the movie. I told her about my struggles with the novel. I still had about a thousand pages to go. I was wondering if it was worth pushing on to the end.

She asked where I was up to in the story. So I told her – all about the adventures of Jean Valijean, Javert, Cosette and the insufferable Marius etc.

She took a sip of wine, shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, that’s about it.”

My flabber had never been so gasted.

But I went home. I persevered. Everyone, mercifully, is finally dead behind the barricade, except Marius. Jean Valijean saves him. But there is no escape. And I’m thinking, Okay, Vic – how will you get them out of this mess?

Jean looks down at his feet and finds – an iron grating into the sewers.

Oh, Victor, come on!

But at least we are escaping the barricades. The chapter ends there. I turn the page. ONTO A DIGRESSION ABOUT THE PARIS SEWERS THAT SEEMS TO LAST FOR SCORES OF PAGES.

I flung the book aside in disgust and revolt. I haven’t been back to it yet; but I will eventually, just to be able to say that I finished it.

Les Miserables has turned out to be a book that I can’t pick up. Unlike Madame Bovary, which I couldn’t put down. A masterpiece of only three hundred or so pages – and, near the end, one of the longest and unique sex scenes in literature.

The Ghosts of Kyobashi

Several years ago, I heard a number of stories and first-hand anecdotes from acquaintances concerning strange, paranormal goings-on in the Kyobashi district of Osaka. Those anecdotes planted the seeds for my upcoming occult novel “29 Argyle Drive”, although this is set far from Japan, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

 I would like to record the anecdotes here.

Kyobashi, the district in which Osaka castle, with its wide parklands, stands, is perhaps the most blood-stained area in the whole city.

Construction of the castle, commissioned by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was completed in 1597. In the winter of 1614 it was laid siege to by the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The defenders, behind the castle’s sturdy walls, resisted an attacking force of more than 200,000 troops. But the unprotected people in the surrounding villages suffered the brunt of the carnage. The Tokugawa forces returned the following summer. This time, they breached the wall and the castle fell.

Later, it was rebuilt, and in the Meiji era, the castle grounds became an integral part of the Osaka Army Arsenal. By the time World War 2 broke out, the arsenal covered several acres of weapon-producing Japanese Army factories that spread into the surrounding districts. Sixty thousand people worked there.　The arsenal became a prime target during the air raids of 1945.

On March 13, during a low-level night-raid, 43 bombers swept over Osaka, dropping napalm bombs and killing nearly four thousand people. There were eight further raids, many of them targeting the arsenal, and a total of ten thousand people were killed.

The most devastating raid occurred on August 14 – the very day that Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies – when 150 B-29s swept over the district, dropping 700 one-ton bombs, and completely destroying the arsenal, killing nearly 400 of the people working there at the time. The most tragic incident happened in the early afternoon when elements of the attacking force dropped bombs directly onto Kyobashi Station. Two crowded train had just pulled into the station when the bombs started falling. More than 700 civilians died, of which 500 were never identified.

My first anecdote is probably an urban legend. But what the hell. I’m a fiction writer. I tell stories.

A survey a few years ago of the most stressful and therefore best-paid part-time jobs for university students in Osaka ranked as Number Two the job of stirring, with long poles, in order to keep them moving, corpses in a large bath of formaldehyde in the basement of a university hospital. The corpses were used for anatomy/autopsy lessons.

At the top of the ranking for stress, however, were the positions offered by the municipal government as part-time night watchmen at Osaka castle and the surrounding parkland. A peaceful job for a university student, you might think. Not so. A top hourly rate was paid because these guys were constantly being startled and frightened on their rounds by apparitions of people who had died during the district’s bloody history.

I’ll move on from urban legend to personal anecdote, but still on the subject of night watchmen.

Ms. T, an acquaintance of mine, is a very down-to-earth Osakan businesswoman. She numbers among her long-standing high school friends two people who are blessed or cursed with second-sight – ESP – the sixth sense. They can see the dead.

The man, while a university student, was employed nights by a business hotel located in the Kyobashi district. Part of his duty was, periodically throughout the night, to check on each floor to make sure it was secure.

There was one particular floor in that hotel for which he had to steel himself, this young man with the ‘sixth sense’, before the elevator doors opened. For they opened onto a hallway swarming with battling samurai.

They fight one another furiously the whole length of the hallway. There is no ‘sound-track’; and the specters themselves are not of aware of the man walking through their midst. Nor are the hotel’s guests aware of the strange scene that plays itself out along the hallway of that floor.

An interesting aside. Ms T.’s friend’s extra-sensory powers remained strong until he got married. They weakened considerably thereafter and disappeared completely with the birth of his first child.

The specters he observed nightly in the hotel corridor can be classed as ghosts, as opposed to spirits. There is a significant distinction. As a character in 29 Argyle Drive explains it:

“A spirit is the living essence of a person that remains in a place. A ghost is merely a psychic impression. It has no life force; it’s just the residual energy of a person, like a recording, playing the same scene over and over. In a groove, if you like. So we can communicate with spirits, but not with ghosts.”

Ms. T’s other high school friend has come into contact with the latter in the vicinity of Kyobashi station. Ms. T arranged to meet her for dinner at a restaurant in the area, located in the basement of an office building. Even as they went down the stairs, Ms. T noticed that her friend appeared to be unwell.

They settled at their table and studied the menu. The restaurant was already crowded. Her friend was suddenly sweating and flushed. I feel sick, she said. I have to get out. They climbed back up the stairs into the fresh air, where she recovered.

“There are things down there. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. They made me sick and they scared me.”

Another acquaintance of mine, Ms. A used to work in one of the office buildings in the area. Often she noticed ghostly male figures standing in the elevator halls. They wore factory clothes, and she believes they are the specters of men who worked in the armament factories that were bombed during the B-29 raids. They cause no trouble, and nobody sees them except her. But there is a locker room on one of the floors that does make the office girls uneasy. They don’t like to be in it alone; and they get out as soon as they have changed.

On the other side of the castle parklands from that building stands another. It’s not a high-rise; less than ten floors. A small company owns it. The top floor is filled with meeting rooms. But ten years ago, that floor used to be a dormitory for new employees – until one year’s new recruits boycotted it. Refused to sleep there anymore. The reason? Their slumber was disturbed nightly by a samurai on a horse galloping wildly through the dormitory corridors. Management gave way; now the top floor is a meeting space, and the new employees sleep peacefully elsewhere.

Mrs. A also has a sixth sense. She once told a group of us during lunch, chillingly, that lost spirits “smell me.” The story she told us was just as chilling.

After a class-reunion that included a tour of Osaka castle and dinner, she and her class-mates adjourned to a Kyobashi business hotel, where they had booked a large tatami room for the night. They had spread out the bedding and were settling down when there was a knock at the door. One of the men went to it, looked out of the peep-hole, but saw no one in the corridor.

A few minutes later, there was another knock. Mrs. A, feeling uncomfortable, hurried to the door before anyone else could get to it. Again, there was no one visible through the peep-hole. But the handle began to turn. Mrs. A grabbed it; a struggle ensued.

Meanwhile, one of her companions had called down to the front desk to complain about the disturbance. The front desk clerk, able to monitor every floor through closed-circuit television screens, said that there was no one in the corridor. Mrs. A won the tussle for the door handle; whatever had been trying to pull it down, let go.

Manager and staff appeared soon after, with profuse apologies for the strange disturbance and an offer to upgrade their room. This was accepted; and they slept well. No clear explanation was made about the cause of the knocking, but they were given to understand that such things had happened before with that particular room.

There seems to be a similar unspoken understanding among the teaching staffs of schools in the area, especially those in the vicinity of the castle parklands, that students are encouraged not to hang around the school grounds in the evening. The teachers themselves don’t linger too late.

In the winter and summer attacks of 1614 and 15, as mentioned earlier, the peasants who lived in the villages around the castle suffered the worst. Men, women and children were slaughtered until the water of the Ogawa River, which still winds pleasantly through the parklands, ran red with their blood; and the river’s flow was clogged by corpses. The male ones without their heads.

The attacking samurai had to take back proof of their kill count – the kubi of the warriors they had slain. It was easier to cut off the heads of the male villagers.

 

 

David Turri: A new and compelling voice…

 

David Turri’s first published novel, Damaged Cargoes seems to emanate directly from a dark recess of nineteenth-century Japan. The story takes place in the enclave inhabited by foreigners in Kobe. Turri’s impeccable eye for the details of treaty port life—the phaetons in which the merchants rode, the long bars where they drank with their consular protectors, the Bund where they walked, the appearance of their warehouses—give his story the kind of texture that reminds the reader of Michener.

 

But it is the way he brings his characters to life that makes the book truly appealing. In the dark, seedy world of the Kobe treaty port, Turri’s characters come alive as they speak. His gift for crisp dialog illuminates the contours of their often tortured conflicts with each other and the outside world with extraordinary texture; the reader feels like a privileged eavesdropper as they reveal their attitudes toward native Japanese and the peculiar pecking order of a society straining to replicate the class hierarchies of the contemporary West.

 

This world is where his themes gestate–redemption’s possibilities, the consequences of greed, the ambivalence of human motivation, all at the complex intersection of Japanese and Western culture. At the end of the book, one cannot help but wonder if these men’s moral corruption is due to their lawless environment or if, a darker possibility, each carries with him a spark of evil, waiting to be fanned.

 

Turri is no mere writer-explainer; this first novel establishes him as a new and compelling voice, a true storyteller. He has given us a marvelous tale, we hope the first of many.

 

Damaged Cargoes