Bangladesh

Brick Lane
Monica Ali

In her Year of Reading the World project, Ann Morgan had to lay some groundwork as to what constituted a book "from" a country. Does the author have to be born there? Live there? Does it have to be written about that place? Does it count if it's written about a different place? The answers, it turns out, were rarely straightforward.

A case in point is my archive entry for Bangladesh. Author Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother but then grew up in England from the age of three. Brick Lane begins in Bangladesh and deals with a young woman who moves from a village to enter an arranged marriage in London with and older man. Should this book of culture clash and the immigrant experience then be considered "English" or "Bangladeshi"? Letters to England from the woman's sister in Bangladesh play an important role in the narrative as well, further blurring the line of where the book might be "from".

There isn't, of course, a clear-cut answer to this question, just my own personal choices as I swashbuckle the literary high seas and shifting sands of place as I plot my course to circumnavigate the globe.

Japan

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
海辺のカフカ, 村上春樹

A Murakami classic from Japan's most famous contemporary author. Murakami has a very distinctive writing style and often revisits the same themes and symbols in his book; so much so, in fact, that a "Murakami Bingo" sheet exists [link]. Playing along, I nearly filled up the entire card! I think it's a big part of the reason many people say Kafka on the Shore is their favourite Murakami book, its filled with the spooky and surreal, enigmatic characters in otherworldly situations, and talking cats that people love. How can anyone help but liking a book with a talking cat?

I've read many of his other books and, having lived in Japan, read many other Japanese authors as well. In some ways, Murakami's fanciful metaphysics make him an outlier to other Japanese authors. Nor does he really delve much into Buddhist notions of dharma, reincarnation, or karma, the way many, such as Yukio Mishima, do. That said, there is a common sense of something that cuts across the Japanese literature I've read and, as I was thinking how to describe it, continually returning to words such as "melancholy" and "futility", I had a "Eureka!" moment. I remembered a Japanese term I'd learned living there: wabi-sabi (侘寂). Wabi-sabi is sometimes described as "beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". There are whole books written about wabi-sabi; Japanese people would generally say it is simply unexplainable. Upon reflection, it really is the indefinite element pervasive to Japanese books.

More about wabi-sabi here.