Takehiko Fukunaga - I'll never wake up until I die, which is bound to happen soon. My experience of life doesn't deserve to be called living

Takehiko Fukunaga, Flowers of Grass. Trans. by Royall Tyler. Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.

Outside Tokyo, a tuberculosis sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward that the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and budding writer named Shiomi. After the stubborn Shiomi insists on undergoing a dangerous surgical procedure and dies in the process, two notebooks turn up in his bedsheets. Flowers of Grass unfolds as the narrator reads them, asking himself if Shiomi's death was a sort of suicide, and learning the details of his late friend's two great loves: for a brother and sister, both of whom reject him.

Fukunaga himself spent seven years recuperating from tuberculosis following World War II, and drew on his own experiences to create a fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence and great sorrow, and how it is possible, seeing reality from the side of death and despair, to still choose life.

A man this ill is certain to die before long. This reality - this sole reality now available to me - is the only life I've been given. After a long period of self delusion, that's the unpleasant truth I've had to accept. I'll never wake up until I die, which is bound to happen soon. My experience of life doesn't deserve to be called living. My thirty years - college until graduation, then a job for a while, then the army, and finally this sanatorium - have run their dreary, futile course. I can neither change the past nor embrace the future. I have no present or future, only a past.

“This is that rarity in Japanese literature, a work portraying an intellectual youth.” ―Akira Honda, critic (from the commentary in the paperback edition)
Ever since its publication in 1954, this work, which critic Akimasa Kanno called “a psychological novel that sheds light on shadows deep within the soul, entwining issues of loneliness, love, egoism, and faith,” has been read by generations of Japanese readers as a classic novel about youth.
The setting is an era when tuberculosis was fatal. Outside Tokyo, a sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward which the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and a budding writer named Shiomi. Never revealing his psychological scars, the stubborn and unfazed Shiomi undergoes a ten-hour lobectomy in what is tantamount to an act of suicide. The reckless plan fails, and he dies.
Two notebooks turn up in the bedsheets. The novel unfolds as the narrator reads the notebooks, asking himself if Shiomi’s death was suicide or not.
The first notebook contains an account of Shiomi’s high school years, when he lost his mother. He feels a strong homoerotic attraction to Fujiki, a boy in the class below his, but suffers when his feelings are not returned. The archery club holds a training camp in a seaside village on the Izu Peninsula, where Shiomi confesses a pure and platonic love for Fujiki. Saying “I can’t be responsible for myself, so I’m not fit to love anyone,” Fujiki rejects him. And then dies of sepsis at only 19.
The second notebook contains an account of Shiomi’s love for Fujiki’s sister, Chieko, just 20. Grieving the untimely loss of her brother, Chieko joins a Christianity study group. Shiomi and Chieko go together to concerts, listening to Chopin and sharing artistic pleasures. In time their feelings deepen to love, and they become intimate. But to Chieko, her heart torn between spiritual love and romance, Shiomi’s love is a burden. He receives a draft notice to go to war and, as a last gamble, invites her to a concert the evening before his departure, but she doesn’t come. The notebook ends with words of despair: “Fujiki, you never loved me. And neither did your sister. I’ll die alone.”
Fukunaga himself spent seven years recuperating from TB in the immediate postwar
era and drew on his own experiences to create a fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence. The courage of the protagonist, who looks at reality from the side of death and despair, and yet chooses life, was enormously moving to members of the author's generation. - www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/374-flowers-of-grass

I've read a fair bit of Japanese literature now, with novels by about twenty different authors under my belt (and short stories by a further twenty or thirty), so it's always a little dispiriting to come across a writer that I've never even heard of, let alone tried.  One such writer is Takehiko Fukunaga, author of Flowers of Grass (translated by Royall Tyler), so I was looking forward to my review copy from Dalkey Archive immensely - because, of course, a new writer may just be a favourite writer you haven't experienced yet...
*****
Flowers of Grass begins in a sanatorium outside Tokyo, where the narrator is recovering from a lingering illness.  He lives in a dormitory with several other patients, including Shigeshi Shiomi, an enigmatic man who appears unfazed by the prospect of death.  When Shiomi dies after demanding to undergo an extremely risky operation, the narrator inherits the only things of worth which his room-mate leaves behind - two notebooks, each one detailing a period of happiness in poor Shiomi's life.
We are then transported from the frame into the real narrative of Shiomi's two love stories.  The first takes place just before World War Two and details his allegedly platonic love for Shinobu Fujiki, a younger student at Shiomi's high school.  Shiomi attempts to come to terms with his feelings for the younger boy during a camp with his school archery team, a trip which almost goes horribly wrong.

The second notebook moves on to a time after the war has started, showing Shiomi's troubled relationship with Shinobu's sister, Chieko.  With the prospect of being drafted at any time, Shiomi is desperate to complete the novel he is writing and convince Chieko to commit to him.  Somehow though, events conspire to keep the young lovers from coming together...

Flowers of Grass is a beautiful story, another of those poignant, achingly-sad novels that Japanese literature is so replete with.  There is the usual conflict between a sorry life and a blissful death, with Shiomi willing to undergo a risky operation simply because he no longer sees the point of living.  This has little to do with his condition; rather, the disappointments he has experienced have left him a shell of a man, one who no longer knows how to live.  As he explains to the narrator:
"Illness has nothing to do with it.  Living is something else entirely.  It's a kind of intoxication.  Everything you have inside you -  reason, feeling, knowledge, passion, everything - bursts from you, burning.  That's being alive.  Come to think of it, I haven't experienced that sort of rapture for a long time.  A dizzy rapture, I used to call it.  It's gone, though, and I might as well be dead.  It means nothing by now if my body happens to die too." p.33 (Dalkey Archive, 2012)
Unable to recapture this sense of living, Shiomi is only too happy to give up on life.
Anyone who has more than a passing knowledge of J-Lit may be a little surprised that Shiomi didn't take his own life, as suicide is a common theme in both literature and real life in Japan (the number of famous Japanese writers who ended their own lives is astonishingly high...).  However, this may be explained by the fact that there is a strong Christian element running through Flowers of Grass.  Shiomi, for reasons initially unclear, was once baptised, leaving the narrator (and the reader) to suspect that his insistence on having surgery may have been an indirect suicide attempt, one which shifts the blame onto someone else.
Fukunaga was himself baptised late in life, and it is possible that he is trying to work through his own religious feelings in his novel.  While Shinobu has nothing to do with Christianity, Chieko is a member of a non-church Christian group, and it is faith which comes between her and Shiomi.  She tries to ignore their differences, but eventually she is forced to make a choice between the man she loves and the path she has chosen in life.
Chieko's quest for eternal life then is contrasted with Shiomi's certainty that death is ever-present.  He is unable to ignore the fact that we will all one day die, saying:
"They - no, I should say we - live with death every day, but I can't pretend to see anything heroic in that.  Every one of us humans walks the valley of the shadow of death.  I knew even then, when the spring sunshine of Heda brightened my youth and the scent of cherry blossoms surrounded me, that death had his eye on us all and awaited us down the road.  People just don't grasp that, though.  The wings of death are always fluttering near, today as yesterday, but people go cheerfully about their lives and notice nothing." p.105

The irony is that in this passage, and in the one cited earlier (note the use of the word 'rapture'...), Shiomi's rejection of life and faith is couched in religious terms...

There's a lot more that could be said about this book, particularly in regard to the constant Japanese issue of the struggle between a longing for individuality and an overpowering sense of responsibility to the group (shown both in the sanatorium dormitory and the archery camp), but I think I'll leave that to someone else to discuss.  Hopefully, in the little I've written here, I've convinced you that while Fukunaga is by no means one of Japan's most famous writers, he is at least, on the evidence of Flowers of Grass, a very good one.
A thought I'll leave you with though comes from the bible quotation in the preface, one which gives the novel its title:
"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass." 1 Peter 1:24

For Shiomi, this is not true - he believes that by leaving something of artistic value behind, his life will become of some worth.  In this sense, perhaps his decline dates not from his illness, or the loss of his chance at love, but from the time he abandons his writing.  It's all a question of when we truly die... - Tony Malone

Takehiko Fukunaga  (1918–1979)  was a novelist and poet. In college he was fond of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont, and was especially influenced by Baudelaire. With Shin'ichiro Nakamura, Shuichi Kato, and other writers of his generation, he formed a literary coterie called Matinée Poétique. While striving to introduce the latest European literary trends, he wrote experimental novels such as Fudo (Climate) and Meifu (The Nether World). He also wrote detective novels under the pen name Reitaro Kada.