The Temple of the Wild Geese and the Bamboo Dolls of Echizen

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 208 pages
• Published by: Dalkey Archive Press March 20, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1564784908
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1564784902
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 8.8 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Two elaborate tales written in the early 1960s by the Japanese author Mizukami (1919—2004) explore volcanic oedipal urges lurking just below the surface of unlikely love triangles. In The Temple of the Wild Geese, set at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains, Jinen, an unhappy, disfigured and lonely orphaned novice, develops a filial crush on Satoko, a recent widow and the reverend Jikai's new common-law wife, which she encourages. When Jikai's excessive drinking clouds his better judgment, Jinen's desire is transformed into brutal action. It's a simple jealousy tale centered on a complex relationship, and Mizukami achieves remarkable psychological depth through detail and stylistic finesse. Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, set in 1924, similarly hinges on a maternal relationship gone sour when a young bamboo craftsman takes his father's prostitute as a wife and insists on treating her as a mother rather than as a proper wife, to the detriment of her health. Readers new to Mizukami's work will be enthralled by the isolated, rural settings of the northern Hokuriku region of Japan, and by his elegant storytelling. (Mar.)
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Product Review
"The Temple of the Wild Geese [was] an immediate success. Its thriller techniques are on a par with those of Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Francois Mauriac, and Leonardo Sciascia. . . . [Mizukami] used his experiences of boyhood and youth as the basis for Bamboo Dolls of Echizen. This is full of the peculiar local colour of a small, creepy village on 'the backside of Japan'. The descriptions are so detailed, they almost give the feeling of reading a fascinating ethnographical study of a primitive and spooky culture. It is a lost world of vicious ghosts, painful obsessions, utter poverty, and the helpless dignity of ugliness. The book became one of Mizukami's most popular works." --James Kirkup, Independent

Reader Reviews
Whenever life gets too bright and cheerful for you, these two signature novellas by Mizukami Tsutomu are the perfect corrective. Both "The Temple of the Wild Geese" of 1961 and "The Bamboo Dolls of Echizen" of 1963 established this author as a writer of serious fiction (though the book in question here marks his belated English debut), and both works are deeply troubling if not disturbing explorations of the human condition in an uncompromisingly naturalist and social realist mode deepened by unflinchingly keen if somewhat datedly Freudian psychological insight. Indeed, the primary conflicts and tensions driving the plots forward in both stories are clearly and unabashedly oedipal in nature, and murky shades of eros and thanatos subconsciously motivate the characters throughout. Most bleakly of all, the graceful and beautiful works of art for which both novellas are titled offer a glimmer of hope and salvation but in the end fail and vanish into obscurity. Rare is it though that such depressingly dreary tales are told with such consummate craftsmanship. Based to some degree probably on his experience in writing popular pulp novels, Mizukami knows how to tell a story so that it reaches out and grabs you, and I found myself compulsively reading through each novella straight through to the bitter end. Even when I could see all too clearly where the downwards spiral was tending. No, sometimes especially then. Adding to this fatal attraction is the author's gift for taking the stock characters from melodrama and detective fiction and fleshing them out believably and complicatedly. There are also interesting fragments of social history to be found here, both in the unvarnished, unromantic glimpse at the sordid side of everyday life in the Zen temples of Kyoto and the straightforwardly realistic treatment of the urban economy's encroachment into outlying rural areas and the resulting commercialization and commodification of folk art that ensues for better or worse (or both, as the case usually is). Finally, when so much of modern Japanese literature is fixated on Tokyo, it's always nice to get a little Kansai balance with works like this set squarely in the old capital of Kyoto and the Hokuriku region northeast of it. Still, the monotonously gloomy nature of these two novellas works against Mizukami just a bit. It's as if he's stuck painting from the same limited palette again and again. This is not to say that what he so compellingly depicts is not an aspect of human life; certainly it is, but it is after all only one aspect when with Mizukami that's about all you get. On a different note, some of his symbolism is rather strained as well as obvious, and he hits you over the head a few times with decidedly unsubtle foreshadowings. The point of view also sometimes seems to fritter about from person to person rather more freely than is normal for serious fiction, perhaps a holdover from Mizukami's prior writing career. All of which just means that what we have here are not pivotal masterpieces of the first order within the realm of modern Japanese literature but rather respectably minor works within that larger field, ones with a consistently sobering vision. Comments (6) | | (Report this)