04/2022 A Man, by Keiichirō Hirano

[Carol]

This is our thread for our April book discussion of A Man by Keiichirō Hirano. Translated by Eli K.P. William. Winner of the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

A Man was the first of Hirano’s novels to be translated into English. (Last year's At the End of the Matinee was the second.)

Who's in? If you read it previously, feel free to share your thoughts and takeaways, too.

[patty]

Pageturner alert! I started this book yesterday morning, and finished it last night. *Four Stars*

[Alan M]

Absolutely I'm in. This weekend is given over to the glory and wonder that is the new Ali Smith novel Companion Piece, but then I'm all in for this one. Looking forward to it.

[Anya]

I've read both, but I definitely preferred "A Man". I wasn't really into the relationship and music aspect in "At the End of the Matinee".

[Carol]

Two interviews are available, a video and a transcript, both from 2021.

The HuffPost YouTube video: https://en.k-hirano.com/huffpost-japa...

The 2021 PEN Ten interview conducted in Japanese, and translated into English. Both versions are displayed.

https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-keiichiro...

The bio inserted at the end of the interview:

Keiichiro Hirano is an award-winning and bestselling novelist whose debut novel, The Eclipse, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1998, when he was a 23-year-old university student. A cultural envoy to Paris appointed by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, Hirano has lectured throughout Europe. Widely read in France, China, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Egypt, Hirano’s novels include the Junichi Watanabe Literary Prize-winning novel At the End of the Matinee—a runaway bestseller in Japan—and the critically acclaimed and Yomiuri Prize for Literature-winning A Man. His short fiction has appeared in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. Twitter: @hiranok_en

Hirano's own site, with a toggle at the top right of the landing page for English vs Japanese: https://en.k-hirano.com/

[Meike]

Thank you very much for the links, Carol! I'm only 20 % in, and I really enjoy the novel - it's a pageturner, as Patty said.

I found another video that seems relevant to me when pondering the text:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ktBx...

Here, Hirano explains the idea that the future can change the past, not the other way around. I also found it interesting that Hirano's starting point were French novels, and what he says regarding music, especially fugues, and how their composition relates to his concept of time axes (as a lover of Bach, I'm here for that). .

[Carol]

Meike wrote: "Thank you very much for the links, Carol! I'm only 20 % in, and I really enjoy the novel - it's a pageturner, as Patty said.

I found another video that seems relevant to me when pondering the tex..."

That's a great find and really interesting.

[Ian]

Long time no comment. I got a reviewers copy of A Man, so I read it quite a long while ago, but can say that I loved it very much… which is why I pushed hard to get my hands on Matinee… which I couldn’t even finish and found it terrible. I’ve come across people who disagree with the second opinion, those most tend to agree this is a great book.

[Carol]

Ian wrote: "Long time no comment. I got a reviewers copy of A Man, so I read it quite a long while ago, but can say that I loved it very much… which is why I pushed hard to get my hands on Matinee… which I cou..."

you've been missed - good to know both that I've got to clear out a couple of books to get to this quickly, and also that I can miss the second one without guilt.

[Alison]

I enjoyed both A Man and At the End of the Matinee—although I found At the End... painful in the extreme and couldn't bring myself to review it. It was nice to read a romantic story about two grown-ups having grown-up people problems, however dramatic.

A year or so back, I wrote a piece comparing A Man and Kawakami's Manazuru as examples of books about "disappeared people". (Here's a link if it would be of interest to anyone: https://readjapaneseliterature.com/20....) Manazuru is more about the people who are left behind.

I loved the question posed in A Man's preface: “Do you understand what it’s like to be honest through lies?” It's a great framing device for this story and for fiction in general.

[Alan M]

So, a few chapters in and I'm gripped. I know that the whole identity/disappeared thing will develop, but what has caught me first off is the whole framing device of 'the story'. Here we have a novel written by Hirano, which opens with a prologue by 'the author' - who may or may not be Hirano - talking about where he gets his stories from, in this case a story told to him by the divorce attorney Kido, who in their first meeting in a bar made up an identity. Then we have the story of Rei and her husband, contrasted with the marriage of Kido and his wife.

The translation says the 'story' of Kido and his wife's marriage, which in English is suitably ambiguous. I'd be interested to know the original Japanese, and if Japanese allows for this ambiguity of meaning. A story of the marriage can simply be a telling of facts, but it can also be a 'story' as fiction is a story.

I can't wait to see how it all develops.

(And Alison, thank you for your comments and links to your article. It's a shame that Manazuru isn't widely or cheaply available, but your comments on the 'johatsu' sent me off down a rabbit hole of Google searches...!!!)

[Alison]

Alan wrote: "So, a few chapters in and I'm gripped. I know that the whole identity/disappeared thing will develop, but what has caught me first off is the whole framing device of 'the story'. Here we have a nov..."

I am always honored to prompt anyone's descent into a Google rabbit hole.

I think I checked Manazuru out of the library. I used to live someone there was a great interlibrary loan system.

[Alan M]

Not going as quickly as I'd hoped, but I'm getting there. Really enjoying it - the slow development, the mystery, most of the philosophical musings on identity and so on... At the moment, however, what is stopping me from loving it - rather than enjoying it - is the feeling that I'm being force-fed the theme, what the book is 'really about'. I like books where you have to work a little bit, to explore what is going on, what we should be thinking.

Here we get 'THIS IS THE MESSAGE' - as successive characters think about and talk about identity and how it affects them. Rei, for example, we are told doesn't normally philosophise about stuff, but we are only told this after we have a page of her doing exactly that about identity. And then her son goes on and on about 'my surname's changed from this to that to this to that'........

I just wish it was a bit more subtle. Hopefully the plot will develop and take over from the 'message'.

[Lynda]

This book started off really well...I was hooked. Then it started going all over the place and lost me (sadly). It would bring me back, lose me again, bring me back..... Not a great read for me.

[Agnetta]

I am half way thru listening to the audiobook.
I am not enjoying it much, possibly I might have enjoyed it more in paperformat, not sure.

My main complaint is I do not really like that there is a narrator, who apparently has access to the exact thoughts of some of the characters (but not all of them, apparantly, or he is just not bottered by reporting on all of them ?), but limits himself to reporting only that : the exact whimsical thoughts of a few chosen characters. He is an omniscient narrator, but never gives us more deep insight in the why or the how .... I would enjoy more if in such a setup the characters would relate their experiences in the first person. Also some characters are reported more in detail, others less.... I just think I would have preferred first person narration, possibly with several POV maybe.

possibly the reason is in the prologue. The omniscient character is not really omniscient a la Tolstoy, he is just a guy who met Kido in a bar, so he dares to impersonate and invent Kido's and Rie's thoughts, as he has more knowledge about them, but not the thoughts of the other characters? The setup does not convince me much. Eihter the narrator knows all... or he knows only what he investigated/heard/imagined, but that would then not include the exact thougths Kido had every minute of every day....

For me there is also too much direct speech, reporting the exact and complete conversation between characters while these conversations are not especially interesting or sparky. Boring.

Then i have been irritated that some story lines get covered , and than at a later time, revisited, and amplified with more detail... but actually it is just a repetition. Boring. exg. when we learn about how Rie lost her son. First time it is quite shocking. But then , in a later chapter, it gets revisited, with more details, so that this time we can REALLY understand the impact on the couple and the tragedy for the child.... but I already realized that the first recounting. Ok, i did not have the exact details, but i already had received the full emotional impact.

My 4th complaint is : too many topics and story lines, too much philosophy about each of them, and limited emotion on my side.
The author tries to show each topic with it's nuances, nothing is black or white, but the subtleness does not come naturally out of the events being described: it all gets explained with much detail thru this internal philosophical comments from the characters.

It is a novel that makes me realize it is REALLY difficult to write a good novel, especially with readers like me. Makes me think that if I were the author I would like to tell to myself : well, I dare you, write a better novel if you can. And I would have to admit I could not. But as a reader this does not work for me... Could it be cultural gaps or translation ?

I thought the prologue and first chapters were quite ok, promising story line. After that Kido's internal philosophizing started and.... boring. :(

[Agnetta]

Reaching the end and more and more disappointed. Yet another topic got introduced : dead penalty. More musings about that. The only parts I mildly enjoyed was the actual story of Daisuke and Hara. All the intellectual opinions from Kido about great variety of topics were of no interest to me. They were not very enlightening, same kind of opinions I may have myself. The conversations between the characters were rather banal. Only element that was mildly interesting to me was the character swap. Overall rather boring to me.