Forgotten Treasures

Am ecstatic. FGITW has finally returned The Strangeness of Beauty. I picked it up on a "deeply discounted" table at a book store. $2? Sure. Took is home and fell in love. Started underlining passages I loved, then quit ... a waste of ink to underline the whole book. Loaned it to FGITW about five years ago. After a year, I asked for it back. She was so vague that I thought it was lost forever. Then, in the heat of cleaning out her apartment, she found and returned it, the prodigal book. Started paging through it this morning, and fell in love again.

Reminds me of another bargain basement book that changed me. Walk With the Sickle Moon.

Both Minatoya and Norris are not smooth writers, and I mean it as a compliment. As I read, I want to go slowly. Savor each moment. Linger in the resounding experience. The characters catch and snag my attention as I find moments of kinship, and almost say, "You too?" In short, I find elements of my own shi-shosetsu. And, eventhough I had almost decided not to include text, here is the beginning of The Strangeness of Beauty.

November 25, 1922

It has been said that at any given moment, sixty percent of Japanese are involved in writing a novel. And all of them autobiographical.

This phenomenon, though not new in form (the autobiographical novel is an ancient art), is certainly new in frenzy. There's even a word for it, shi-shosetsu, the "I-story."

Critics have questioned the motivation behind the amateur I-story. Often it seem so futile. Why would so many work so long to create novels meant for their eyes alone? The answer involved social upheaval - in which a sudden infusion of excessive education (the progressive arts and sciences of the last two imperial reigns) has clashed with limits in opportunity, to turn a nation of habitual haiku writers half mad.

The theory is that in Japan, the self-consciousness of modernism has collided with the tradition of reticence - of not burdening others with one's subjective experience - to create a people just roiling with confessional angst.

It's true, I think. There seem to be few people as concerned with being understood as the Japanese.

Unless you consider the Americans.

But I'm delaying. This, of course, is my I-story.

...

The truth is, I write - as do many people, I suspect - only when I'm uneasy; as a way to drag life from the dark clutch of the belly; whereit's experienced, up to the mind's sorting light.

And for five years my life has been placid. Yet as I read this., my memory rises. Write, it urges. Master me. Take me to some brighter place.

I wonder how many narrative therapists there are in Japan.