Cool South Korea?

In my previous post, I asked, "What Happened to Cool Japan?"  My general answer was drawn from personal experiences and observations and somewhat informed by the articles and blogs I've read.  Basically, Cool Japan was smothered by the shrinking economy and the increasing insularity of a society that feels awfully beleaguered.  Although the likes of Murakami Haruki and Miyazaki Hayao have seniority and are somewhat insulated from any backlash against their art and the critical dissection of Japanese society via their well-refined crafts, there's no room for any successors to Murakami Haruki or Miyazaki Hayao.

The side-effect of this is that most of the forms of expression and entertainment have taken on an assembly-line quality, formulaic, derivative, and uninspired.  Occasional flashes to break through the fog, like Attack on Titan, but the overwhelming majority of Japanese intellectual property and immaterial culture is very repetitive and reeks with the pungent hospital-scent of corporate boardroom sterility.

In my last post, I described the process through which a close-knit American anime-fan* subculture evolved--specifically my personal experience of that process.  What I want to emphasize as I write this tonight is how the North American demand for Japanese anime was not matched by Japanese interest in its supply.  The activity was all on our side of the Pacific.  This is one of the reasons why Carl Macek is such a controversial figure--on the one hand, he butchered many of the shows he brought over to the United States; on the other hand, he was instrumental in Japanese anime getting airtime on American television and thereby increasing awareness of anime as a medium for entertainment and storytelling.

*NOTE:  I dislike the word otaku being applied to non-Japanese.  I'm somewhat of a language purist and I don't believe that the word has entered English parlance enough to be allowed a degree of definition shift.  I don't like to refer to non-Japanese anime-fans as otaku because the weight of meaning is not there in the American anime-fan use of the word, primarily all of the social and cultural baggage the term carries with in in Japan.

Throughout much of these developments, the Japanese were utterly passive.  Though the Japanese government and businesses were very concerned with exporting cars and electronics to the United States, they were much less interested in the exercise of soft power when it came to intangible aspects of their culture, such as intellectual properties, narratives, cinema, television, and music.  Although incredibly proud of those novelists and filmmakers that received worldwide recognition, they were much more concerned with the performance of artists and craftsmen domestically and very disinterested in the demands and appetites of North American markets.

That is why I wrote in my last post that we non-Japanese must come to grips with the reality that the Japanese are not concerned with the world beyond their shores.  Streamline Pictures (defunct, 2002), Central Park Media (defunct, 2009), AnimEigo (still around, barely), Manga Entertainment (also still around), AD Vision (defunct, 2009), and Funimation (still around) were all North American companies licensing and distributing anime and Japanese films.  The only two Japanese companies I am aware of that were involved in exporting anime to the United States are Bandai Entertainment and NBCUniversal (which started out as Pioneer, then Geneon, before North America's Universal bought it).  When AnimEigo started letting licenses lapse and most of their translated films and television programs dropped off of Netflix, I knew something was up.  When I started sniffing around, I discovered that after the crash of '08, a huge number of distributors dissolved.  Some of these companies were founded in whole or in part by Japanese individuals who came to the United States, but all of them were headquartered in North America.  When VHS and then DVD/BluRay distribution dried up and people could get their fix via Crunchyroll and Netflix, the licensing and distributing of the anime was no longer profitable.  Granted, things weren't handled as best as they could but the Japanese weren't coming down on fansubbers and non-profit online translator/distributor rackets.  There wasn't enough potential money being lost and the Japanese corporations that owned the IPs were not concerned with what went on in the white spaces on the edges of the map where barbarians and dragons roamed.

We've Come A Long Way Since Madame Butterfly
The fascination began when Europeans and Americans traveled to Japan and were moved to write about the culture and society they experienced.  In a way, however, they inadvertently did violence to Japan in the way that Edward Said describes European scholars did to the Near East in his Orientalism.  In the 1980s, however, Japanese imports into North American markets and Japanese investment in North American infrastructure and the U.S. economy brought about a huge paradigm shift.  This was the first time the Japanese were truly on equal footing with Americans and the American exposure to Japanese culture was no longer through a sort of racist filter the likes of which Orientalism described and decried.

Thus, as a young man, Japan wasn't the land of geisha and samurai, strange tea ceremonies and martial arts, but of brilliant manga artists and talented animators and storytellers.  It was the land that revitalized video game culture after the 1983 video game crash.  There was a mystique about Japan that fascinated us.  The JET program was started by a few Japanese visionaries in order to bring Americans over there and develop cross-cultural communication, not just to teach English to Japanese children.  Nevertheless, the JET program was somewhat of a fluke (albeit one with a lot of staying power) and one of those rare occasions when Japanese leaders realized how important the expression of soft power was in international politics.

The American view of Japan, as seen in World War II movies and films like Gung Ho, Mr. Baseball, You Only Live Twice, The Karate Kid, and Rising Sun, and even recent films such as Memoirs of a Geisha and The Last Samurai, are nowhere near as influential to the Japanophile as actual Japanese films and television programs.  We weren't getting our own interpretation of Japan by itself anymore, we were receiving Japan's own self-expression.  We were demanding it.  University courses studying Japanese anime and manga, Japanese language programs, Japanese literature courses, Japanese film studies programs, all began springing up across North America.

Japan was exporting its culture not just to North America but to the entire world.  There was a vast demand for it and countries all over the planet translated and aired television shows like Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z on every single habitable continent.  And yet the Japanese were simply content to ride this wave.  Their insularity made them wholly inattentive to the tremendous political weight these cultural exports gave them in projecting soft power.

The Great Queen Seondeok on Netflix
I lived in South Korea for three years and the South Koreans are, in many ways, just as insular and xenophobic as the Japanese (perhaps moreso).  However, the impact the Hallyu has had on Korean self-esteem and self-image on the international stage has been extremely profound.  A country divided, jockeyed between rival superpowers, and the psychological damage of the Japanese occupation still in living memory, the South Koreans have a very pronounced insecurity complex with regards to their role in international affairs and the strength of their culture.  They're tremendously fragile, which means small victories mean a great deal to them, especially when those victories are against former oppressors like Japan.

So, the Korean Wave is inundated much of the Western Pacific with Korean culture in the form of television drama, K-Pop, and cinema.  Where once the major player was Japan, now Korea is emerging as an exporter of cultural IPs.  Korea was once a blank space on the map for the U.S., a very nondescript culture that was entirely uninteresting and little understood when compared to the gigantic mythological stature of China and Japan in the Western mindset.  Thus, Korea's breakout success with the Hallyu has stunned everyone and opened their eyes to a treasure trove of creativity the likes of which many haven't seen since the bursting of the Japanese bubble and the increasing insularity of Japanese society.

South Korea is determined not to let this opportunity slip away from them.  The South Korean government has been investing in the arts and entertainment industries with a keen awareness that their cultural products are just as important as their cars and electronics.  Although there is a powerful desire to quell dissent within Korean society, the tremendous success of Korean cinema both at home and abroad has given Korean intellectual insurgents a place to go to express their criticisms creatively through art and craft.  Some of the most powerful Korean films I've seen, such as Oldboy, The Chaser, 200 lbs. Beauty, and Secret Sunshine, are powerful commentaries on some of the darker aspects of Korean culture and the Korean psyche.

Is it possible that Korean arts will stagnate as they have in Japan?  Absolutely.  Is it likely that the Koreans are interested in what foreign audiences want?  Nope.  Not a chance.  They're as culturally and socially locked to domestic appetites and tastes as the Japanese are and also just as uninterested in outside input.

So what is the difference?  Money.  The Koreans are making sure they support their projection of soft power financially.  This will slow down the inevitable cycle of artistic vitality--artistic stagnation and give the South Koreans more staying power than the Japanese ever had.

Book Review -- THE ELEPHANT VANISHES by Haruki Murakami

Reviewing short story collections is much more difficult than simply reviewing a novel because you have to assess each individual piece and then somehow analyze the entire collection as a whole. Yesterday's review of Dunsany's The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories went well enough, I guess, for me to take another stab at it, this time with 象の消滅 by 村上 春樹.

I've reviewed a novel by 村上 春樹 (Murakami Haruki) before, my first review for this blog: Wild Sheep Chase. This particular volume, 象の消滅 (Zou no Shoumetsu -- translated as "the/an elephant's disappearance") is a collection of short stories that showcase the author's Kafkaesque style.

This style is heavily influenced by a great deal of irreverent American fiction from the early 20th century. Murakami's written translations Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and My Lost City, everything by Raymond Carver, several works by Truman Capote, and most notably Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. The Chandler connection is something I'm quite familiar with, being a fan of hardboiled noir, and his influence on Murakami's style comes through the story translations by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum. Almost all of Murakami's characters are cut from the same cloth--they smoke Hope regular cigarettes, drink, listen to vinyl records, possess a wide knowledge of music and haute cuisine, and live on the fringes of decent, acceptable Japanese society. However, this doesn't mean that they are all uniform--many of them are extremely unique and outstanding. However, a number of them seem to be little more than stand-ins for Murakami himself, or perhaps projections of Murakami's ideal character--a little bit Philip Marlowe, a little bit Nick Carraway, some Holly Golightly and Fred, and a dash of Holden Caufield, mixed in a uniquely Japanese environment.

Indeed, it is probably easier for an American to identify with Murakami's protagonists than it is for a Japanese person.

Nevertheless, they do suffer from the overwhelming regularity of their personalities--between novels and stories, there isn't a huge amount of difference between Murakami's protagonists. I have a difficult time believing that, if one would switch them between stories, they'd react any differently to their situations. As time grows on, this weakness becomes more and more apparent. In his novels, Murakami's heroes are somewhat better defined, but that is because it is much easier to develop a character's personality in a novel-length work than in a story of 25-30 pages. It isn't helped that Murakami almost universally utilizes first-person narration throughout his stories, but only further manages to make the protagonists appear identical to one-another.

The stories themselves are all infused with a sense of weirdness, often to the point of surrealism. The most outstanding ones are "The Second Bakery Attack," "Sleep," "The Little Green Monster," "TV People," "The Dancing Dwarf," and "The Elephant Vanishes." The more subtle ones are actually somewhat more powerful because of their subtlety-- "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning," "Lederhosen," "Barn Burning," "A Family Affair," "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," and especially "The Silence."

I feel compelled to talk about all of these stories, and indeed I could go on at length, but I'll limit my analysis to just a few.

First, I will discuss the subtle stories, starting with "The Silence," my personal favorite. It describes a student, a boxing champion who almost never raised his hand against anyone, encountering a nemesis in middle school and developing an enmity which would last until high school graduation. This nemesis would avenge himself against the protagonist by indirectly framing the hero of tormenting and bullying another student until they committed suicide. The resulting silence, reflected in the title (沈黙 -- "Chinmoku"), is the silence of complete and total social ostracism. The protagonist effectively becomes an untouchable, invisible, inaudible person--his teachers and fellow students ignore him. This begins to effect him very negatively, especially since ostracism is an incredibly painful experience to a Japanese person. The Japanese value socialization far more deeply than Americans do, and membership in peer groups gives them a great deal of self-worth. Although Americans more-often-than-not are weak and willing to succumb to peer pressure, we have a deep (and sometimes grudging) respect for rebels and renegades who are strong enough to march to the beat of their own drummers and persist, even through friendlessness. Nevertheless, the protagonist manages to get through this experience, but it exacted a powerful spiritual price on his soul. He emerged stronger, but also much less trusting and faithful of his fellow humans, even his own wife and progeny.

This story is incredible, because it is a naked criticism of the herd mentality in Japanese society, the cowardice of individuals unable to break away from collective opinion to do what is right and just, and the use of ostracism as a social punishment. It did a lot to remind me of my own experiences in middle school, a very painful and difficult time for me. It has also comforted me a great deal during my time in Korea.

"No, what really scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the crap that slime like Aoki deal out. How these Aoki types produce nothing themselves, don't have an idea in the world, and talk so nice, how this slime can sway gullible types to any opinion and get them to perform on cue, as a group. And this group never entertains even a sliver of doubt that they could be wrong. They think nothing of hurting someone, senselessly, permanently. They don't take any responsibility for their actions. Them. They're the real monsters. They're the ones I have nightmares about. In those dreams, there's only the silence. And these faceless people. And then it all goes murky. And I'm dissolving and I'm screaming and no one hears."

That's some pretty powerful stuff, even in translation, and it is Murakami's finger wagging in the face of Japanese society as a whole. What is subtle here is the strangeness that is at work; the sense of the surreal is very subdued. However, Murakami's "j'accuse" is loud and unmistakable.

I think it is reasonable that I approach perhaps one more story, although there is something I'd like to say about almost all of them, but that would stretch the length of this review to absurd lengths. "The Little Green Monster" is about an eponymous creature that crawls from the ground and asks the protagonist to marry him. Her reaction is abject revulsion and disgust. This creature, despite its appearance, is actually a very gentle and empathic being, capable of feeling emotions and thoughts. When she realizes this, the heroine focuses her disgust and hate against the creature, effectively killing and dissolving it until not a trace of it is left.

Although there's a lot I want to say about this story, I'll try to keep things brief. This story is about hate, specifically the hatred of anything that is different or unfamiliar. The creature is weird and terrifying at first, but it means no harm and its distinctly human eyes should convey vulnerability and honesty. However, to the "heroine," they convey wrongness and are part of the overall discomfort that this creature's strangeness causes her to react with fear and revulsion. This revulsion is turned into pure hate and destroys the creature, a creature who came with peaceful intentions and love on his mind. Whether this story is about women in particular or humans in general, I can't really answer, but Murakami rarely chooses women as his protagonists, so that may say something. In almost every surrealist story that Murakami writes, things are symbols and metaphors for something else, and in this case, the creature is just that--the strange and unfamiliar. This is a meditation on fear, disgust, and hatred, and the darkness that hides in the human heart--darkness and hatred that can easily lead to murder if the conditions are correct.

Murakami's work is a rebellion against the ordinary. Indeed, he contentiously injects weirdness and absurdity into the immensely average lives of so many Japanese characters in order to shake them up. Through his stories, he aggressively critiques the everyday life of Japanese society--the uniformity and homogeneity, the disingenuousness of Japanese politeness, and the herd mentality that permeates Japanese social relations. Murakami wants to shake up the reader by shaking up the characters.

Murakami also wants to explore other themes that go beyond simple social criticism. He contemplates existentialism and the regularity of life--indeed even the meaningless of it and detachment from love and human contact (in such stories like "Sleep") or pondering what could or perhaps should have been but never was nor will be ("On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"). Loss and nostalgia play definite roles in many of his tales, including the changes in relationships brought about by age, maturity, and marriage ("A Family Affair").

By-and-large, Murakami's stories hold up. They're not as profound as his novels, but they are much more immediate in their impact, and more visceral in the reactions they elicit. Despite his tendency toward repetitive protagonists, the secondary characters throughout his tales are often unique and interesting. The stories themselves are well-crafted. Murakami paces things well, narrating his tales and injecting elements of the strange or surreal at proper intervals to hook the reader and continue to draw them in. Curiosity is a major motivator in reading a Murakami story, and the author channels our curiosity extremely well. He's a master storyteller, and this collection stands as evidence of his ability to spin an effective yarn that not only keeps our attention, but challenges our assumptions and demands that we think a little bit deeper about ourselves and about our world and society.

象の消滅 (The Elephant Vanishes) by 村上 春樹 (Murakami Haruki)
Style B+
Substance A
Overall A-

BOOK REVIEW -- A WILD SHEEP CHASE by Haruki Murakami

Imagine a world kinda like Alice in Wonderland, where a seemingly innocent choice (say, following a rabbit down a hole) leads you into a very bizarre and chaotic world, where things are not what they seem and events do not make much sense, yet follow a sort of twisted, otherworldly logic.

That sums up much of the writing style of famed Japanese author, 村上春樹 (Murakami Haruki), but only in the barest sense. Murakami's writing never seems to get old for me. Steeped in the mysteries and complexities of Japanese culture, myth, and symbolism, unpacking one of his novels can be both fascinatingly rewarding and mindbogglingly challenging.

Published in 1982 as a sequel to 1973年のピンボール (Pinball, 1973), 羊をめぐる冒険 (A Wild Sheep Chase) is the third and final installment of his Trilogy of the Rat. Since I didn't read the previous two works, I know I am missing out on something, here. Nevertheless, A Wild Sheep Chase, like all of Murakami's novels, stands on its own.

The book opens with a funeral, or rather, the reminiscence of a funeral by the main character. When the flashback ceases, the nameless protagonist is finalizing the divorce from his wife. The protagonist is as bland as his namelessness would suggest, except for his acerbic wit and his deliberate desire to lead a boring, dull, uneventful life. In almost every way, he represents the average, cog-in-the-machine, working-stiff salaryman of Japanese society, except for his cynicism. It is this cynicism which evokes Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and we can very nearly see Murakami's protagonist played by Humphrey Bogart in our minds (despite the fact that the novel takes place in early 1980s Japan).

Murakami fetishizes names in many of his books, and it is incredible that this entire novel is comprised of nameless characters. They are given descriptive epithets ("my girlfriend," or "the chauffeur," or "the Rat") but the only character that is ever named is the very ancient and very decrepit cat that the protagonist owns, and he is given a name in a very peculiar conversation by a complete stranger. The discussion invokes such concepts of identity and individuality, and how a name defines a person.

And an astute reader, one who is paying attention, will see little red flags go up throughout the conversation, reminding him or her that none of the characters has actually been given any name. Not until this cat. And never again.

This is just one example of the complexity of Murakami's work. The story is a detective tale in which our nameless protagonist must scour all of Hokkaido to find a sheep that does not, indeed cannot, exist, or forfeit everything. Throughout the book, we see him return to his hometown only to find it is completely transformed, and where the seashore once stood, there is a landfill full of housing developments and nothing is as it had once been. The theme of loss is prevalent throughout the book, repeating itself over and over again. The nameless hero is free with nothing to lose, but that freedom is also a prison, because nothing really matters to him in the end. Loss is thus tinged with irony, because abandonment results in freedom, but the result is unfamiliarity. Change is liberating, but that liberation often results in being cast adrift in circumstances that are beyond our understanding.

There are two stories that Murakami writes. The first one is the surface story, in which all sorts of crazy things transpire, much like in a David Lynch film. It is about as surreal as Blue Velvet, but not as much as ねじまき鳥クロニクル (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), which is more comparable to Lost Highway. But beneath that surface story is a deeper one. This one is told entirely through symbols, and believe me, everything that Murakami weaves into this story has meaning. Murakami's penchant for realism, in which he describes cooking, drinking, music, and cigarettes, is tempered by the deep symbolic and metaphysical nature of his narratives. Cats feature prominently in his stories, so an astute reader should ask, "Why is this ancient, decrepit cat the only person in this entire story who receives a real, actual name?" Water also features prominently in East Asian symbolism and in Murakami's work, demanding the reader to pay attention to how the sea was pushed back by a landfill, which in turn was covered with residential development in the protagonist's hometown. The entire time you are reading this book, you should be asking yourself, "What is Murakami trying to say with this?"

There are a million possibilities. And our answers, as Americans, will undoubtedly be worlds different from Japanese readers. The cultural divide will give both the Japanese and American readers vastly different perspectives on such a deep and symbolically loaded work. And I think that is part of the magic and appeal of Murakami.

A Wild Sheep Chase showcases the author's love for (and knowledge of) Western popular fiction of the 20th century. Alfred Birnbaum's translation more than adequately conveys the cynicism and ambivalence that masks the main character's deep sense of loneliness. Though I've not read the original Japanese myself (my reading skill is not quite up to snuff), I've read that Murakami's writing style is so heavily influenced by American prose fiction (especially of the hardboiled detective genre) that it is easily rendered into English. The tone of the book, being a sort of metaphysical and symbolic detective-story, and the dry wit of the main character, display the author's love for irreverent American writing.

When it comes to storytelling, Murakami is quite adept. The short, quickly-read chapters speedily sweep the reader along, while constantly layering on symbolism that can be either overlooked or deeply contemplated without ruining the experience. Some have criticized his characters as bland cardboard cut-outs, but I believe that is a result of a deep misunderstanding of Murakami's purpose. While some have called A Wild Sheep Chase a fable or a myth, I would never regard it as such. Murakami uses the surreal to underscore what is wrong with reality. He is very much the critic, and everything he puts in his books is a comment on Japanese society and culture. The namelessness and blandness of many of the characters is part-and-parcel with Murakami's critique on Japanese uniformity and work-a-day lifestyle. Indeed, the protagonist's life prior to the beginning of his adventure is very much a prison--he goes to work, comes home, eats, sleeps, and repeats the process, simply passing time. The pointlessness of his existence demands the reader to ask if the man is simply waiting for death. Instead, Murakami delivers a Campbellian call to adventure, and the hero leaves to discover just how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

I don't want to discuss the novel in any greater detail, seeing as I've already spoiled a few surprises. As one of Murakami's earliest works (originally published in 1982, and his third novel), it lacks the refinement of 海辺のカフカ (Kafka on the Shore) and the complexity and power of ねじまき鳥クロニクル (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). But it is interesting to catch a glimpse of the author's early work, and by comparing it to his later writings, it is easy to see how he has grown and perfected his ability to create a story and characters, as well as his ability to deepen and broaden his rabbit-holes. This is probably a good introductory novel to Murakami's style. The symbolism isn't laid on as thick, and is not as convoluted and overwhelmingly complex as Kafka or Wind-Up Bird. The surreality of events won't leave the uninitiated reader confused, only curious. Thus, I would probably recommend this novel, alongside ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood) to the novice Murakami-reader.

羊をめぐる冒険 (A Wild Sheep Chase) by 村上春樹 (Murakami Haruki)
Style: B+
Substance: B+
Overall: B+