JOST A MON

Maneater of Kumaon, by Merab Abramishvili. (2005).

Who is this by?

References

1. 'At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from the Caucasus & Central Asia', Sotheby's exhibition catalogue notes, March 2013.
2. Yulia Mikhailova, 'Japan and Russia: Mutual Images, 1904-39'.

That evening, some friends were waiting for me at a bar. What else is there to drink but Saké? I'm drinking Japanese alcohol for the first time. "Watch out," I am warned, "It is very strong." I take a sip, and at once feel myself shaken violently. "You were right, it is very strong!" I say. "No, no!" say my friends. "That is because there was a temblor exactly when you swallowed!"

Africa

Kemsit, the Nubian queen of the Egyptian King Mentuhotep II (2061-2010 B.C.), and her servants; from a painting in her tomb chamber wall

Europe

Ivan Bilibin's Illustration to the Lay of Igor's Campaign (from Wikimedia Commons)

St. John of Nepomuk, Charles Bridge, Prague by dlnwelch, on Flickr

Middle-East

European depiction of the Persian doctor Al-Razi, in Gerardus Cremonensis "Recueil des traités de médecine", 1250-1260. (Wikimedia Commons)

Asia

Emperor Wu dispatching Zhang Qian to Central Asia (138 to 126 BCE), Mogao Caves mural, 618-712 CE (Wikimedia Commons)

Japanese samurai boarding Yuan ships in 1281 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Americas

Funerary Mask, 9th-11th century Peru; (Lambayeque) Hammered gold with cinnabar and copper overlays, cinnabar;  (Wikimedia Commons)

The 400-breasted Mayahuel Aztec Goddess of the maguey or agave (Wikimedia Commons)

And, to round things off, interdisciplinaryment:

Art

Allegoric figure of Fortitude from the Four Virtues by unknown artist (also attributed to Botticelli), c. 1490, fresco, Castle Chapel, Esztergom

Untitled, by Jan van Eyck (or Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife) (Wikimedia Commons)

A Review or Two

Met recently with a noticeably despondent Japanese economist. And boy, did he have something to be despondent about. Moribund politicos, he moaned. Far too populist! No new ideas on how to rebalance the Japanese economy. Massive corporate tax evasion. The yen will enter a long fall like a sumo wrestler. There will be a massive transfer of wealth from the younger generation to the soon-to-retire babyboomers. Their pensions are underfunded. There are no growth prospects. The corporate landscape is filled with zombies. Japanese equities are not going to improve in this lifetime. And who will want Japanese bonds at less than 1% yield? Damnation, death and despair is all that awaits us.

Then he looked at me hopefully and said, 'Maybe India will show the way.'

Right, India. This is your chance. I have spoken.

During the Second World War, it was well-known among Allied soldiers that the Japanese treated prisoners-of-war with horrific brutality. This knowledge served both to terrify the Allies as well as to harden their hearts against the caricatured little yellow men. For their part, the Japanese, impressed with their own daring conquests of South East Asia, held British and Indian soldiers with utter contempt.

There was a massive clash of cultural mores here. As the British noted, you could mow down 95 out of a hundred Japanese troops, and the remaining five would fight bitterly till four were dead, whereupon the last one would kill himself. The Japanese considered it dishonourable to surrender; to die for their Emperor was a worthy cause. Indeed, they found it unfathomable that anyone could surrender, which is why they treated Allied prisoners of war as less than animals.

On the other hand, when they encountered what they considered honourable behaviour on the side of the British, they were moved. After one ambush in which they wiped out a company of Indian and British soliders, they saw the British officer stand up and blow his brains out. They treated his body with deep respect. Another man who commanded a platoon they defeated they treated like a Samurai - they shaved his head, a mark of deep honour.

The Japanese fought with fanatic bravery. Their juggernaut was halted first by British and Indian troops in the North-East of India, at the infamous siege of Kohima in Nagaland. By that time, the Japanese lines were overstretched, undersupplied, and the British had air superiority, and far better armament. Still, the Japanese assault continued. They were indomitable.

Yet in their own camps, the bravery often sagged. One Japanese officer, seeing his men hungry and careworn,  rounded them up. As they stood facing him, he put his hand in his trousers. He ordered them to grab hold of their penises. If it is hanging loose, he said, it meant the soldier was brave and in control. He could scarcely find his own, shrivelled as it was in his terror. As his men looked on curiously, he kept a poker face, and they obeyed him. One of the youngest in the platoon suddenly yelped that he couldn't find his penis. Where is it? he said anxiously, and all the men burst out laughing. It was a rare moment of humour in a war that was savage and quickly getting out of their hands.

For the Japanese, obedience and adherence to the rigid hierarchy of society and army was a paramount dogma. And so it was that the General - Sato - in charge of the invasion of India found himself reviled for disobeying orders and abandoning Kohima and the road to Dimapur after a bitter battle lasting weeks. He realised that his higher-ups had neither the will nor the ability to keep him supplied. Meanwhile, his men were starving to death. 

For years after the war, he made it his penance to go to the families of every one of his soldiers who died under his command, and to beg forgiveness and light a flame in their honour. Rare among the military elite of Japan, he showed moral courage and true honour.

The little country of Georgia has been in the news for a variety of reasons. Most recently, their luge champion tragically died in a practice run at Vancouver's Whistler Sliding Centre. Prior to this tragedy, of course, was the brief but bitter war it fought against Russia. Meanwhile, Stalin appears to be a common object of veneration among the warring parties - both Russia and Georgia (where he was born) are in the midst of a massive rehabilitation of that mass-murderer. Like the Mongols who have reclaimed Genghis Khan, the Georgians want to believe that Stalin, possibly the most famous Georgian ever, is their one claim to greatness. A few months ago, a BBC reporter named John Sweeney (previously famous for losing his temper and yelling at Scientologists) produced a film about the adulation and celebration of Stalin in these countries. Scary stuff.

In a bid to expand its international clout, Georgia has also come up with a couple of other plans. An American teenager is competing in the ice dancing at the Winter Olympics this year for Georgia. (She is half-Japanese, which explains why her elder siblings are also in the field, competing for Japan.) Her dance partner is Georgian, and the Georgians rushed her citizenship through last month so she could compete in Vancouver. (Can't point the finger at Georgia alone, though. I guess their action is not so different from Qatar and Bahrain issuing citizenships to African athletes just so they can have a presence (and possibly a medal or two) at the Summer games.)

What has to take the cake, though, is the recent appointment of a scion of the Habsburgs as Georgia's ambassador to Germany. The ambassador, Gabriela Maria Charlotte Felicitas Elisabeth Antonia von Habsburg-Lothringen, princess Imperial and Archduchess of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia, used to be an avant-garde sculptor, and having lived in Georgia since 2001, has become its citizen. A name like that, says Georgia's president, should open doors (according to the Economist).

Now tell me: Does Saakashvili have a deliciously deprecating sense of humour or not?

For the princely sum of £5, I requested several books via inter-library transfer, and I am somewhat taken aback to note that one of those requests has already failed. 'The book is not available in a format suitable for library use' said the helpful response from Camomile Street Library. Somewhat puzzled, I quizzed the librarian about it. It turns out that she could only get the book in electronic (hence unsuitable) format. 'The British Library, I would have thought, would stock a print copy,' she said, in a perplexed tone.

Well, whatever. As I await the rest of the crime novels, I am able to boast of this month's reading. It has been rather good. We can begin with Koji Suzuki's short stories, titled Dark Water. Widely considered to be Japan's equivalent of Stephen King, Suzuki is better known as the author of the Ring - cult-book-turned-cult-movie. In this book, he bases his tales of horror around the Tokyo-Yokohama bay. I should hasten to add that I wasn't horrified by any of the stories, although one or two had a couple of moments of causing me anxiety. The stories are supposedly recounted by a grandmother to a young girl, but little other than the omnipresence of water links them. And of course all the protagonists are somehow flawed, troubled people - if not abusive, then paranoid, or passive-aggressive. The story I liked the best is called 'Dream Cruise', in which an aggressive salesman and his irritating wife take his classmate, a somewhat laid-back and self-satisfied fellow, on a cruise, with a view to recruiting him to their pyramidal sales scheme. Those of you who read my experiences with Amway will note that I have little patience with these evangelists. So the horrors that await the salesman and his wife when they encounter a child's shoe in the sea and their boat snags on something are music to my ears... Suzuki's interested in the people's back-stories, and he expends pages elucidating this or that aspect of their characters. The plots then begin to thin a bit, and it appears as if - story after story - he loses patience, and attempts to wrap it all up. His attempts at a twist at the end are not entirely fortuitous. I can't tell if the prose is leaden because of the translation, or if it is a particular trait of the Japanese short story. At any rate, this is not a book to savour; on the other hand, reading the stories in rapid succession results in a melded confusion. If you have better luck with it, please do tell.

Arturo Perez-Reverte is back with the latest of his Captain Alatriste swashbucklers to be translated into English, The Man In The Yellow Doublet. This is superb stuff, twirling moustaches, withering scorn, flashing swords, love across social classes, all set in the declining Spain of the 17^th century. This is not literature of nuance, but it is exciting, punctuated by sparkling line and verse by the greats of the time: Quevedo, de Vega, Cervantes. The young narrator of the series, Iñigo Balboa, is growing up, as besotted as ever with the beautiful and treacherous Angelica de Alquezar, who has no qualms about loving him at the same time as plotting his and his foster-father Alatriste's demise. Alatriste is the lover of the famed actress Maria de Castro, but the King has his eye on her as well. When the monarch is felled during one tryst with the beauty, Alatriste is fingered as the jealous killer; it later turns out that it was actually the King's double who was murdered. Alatriste then has to investigate the conspiracy that has led him so close to the gallows, and this escapade involves swords and daggers, whispers in the night, and the deaths of old friends. The Spain of Philip IV is a cauldron of competing interests, and mercenaries like Alatriste are mere pawns in a greater game, but true to the genre, the pawns end up saving the day.

Håkan Nesser is this month's obligatory Scandinavian, and I am pleased to say that in his acerbic and sardonic detective Van Veeteren, we have a wonderful winner. As police procedurals go, The Mind's Eye is representative of the genre; what raises this above the usual is the meta-text provided by the author - knowing asides and darkly humorous commentary that enliven the pages. Often, the chapters start with pronouns, requiring some amount of concentration from the reader to decide exactly who is being talked about; unlike other reviewers who found this confusing, I thought it refreshing, serving to keep the story going as well as keeping me alert. Van Veeteren is the classic noir footpad with a troubled marriage and a jailbird son, and has the usual likes (jazz and classical music) one expects from such a detective. He investigates the case of a husband wakes up one day to find his memory gone and his beautiful wife slaughtered. A sparkling set piece in a court enumerates the facts of the case. The husband is consigned to a mental institution where his memory returns, and for no reason I can discern, he sends a message to the killer. Shortly thereafter he is killed as well. The police procedural then takes over and the investigation proceeds meticulously. It is fairly obvious who the murderer is, even if it's not clear for a while what triggered the murderous spree; it is also disappointing that Nesser needs that old trope of Scandinavian fiction, namely abusive parents, to give credence to the tale. Still, this is one of the better crime novels I've read, and I heartily recommend it.

Talking about Scandinavian fiction, and why a supposedly idyllic and peaceful land has been gutted by bloodthirsty explorations of its underbelly, this article from Salon tries to figure it all out.

A few years ago, I read the mathematics-tinged The Oxford Murders by the Argentinian writer Guillermo Martinez, and found that somewhat irritating in its insistence of mysticism around logic and set theory. The writer now comes up with an even more fantastic tale in The Book of Murder, in which, it appears, characters are killed by a mad author and nobody is able to establish that fact. The narrator is approached by a distraught Luciana, a secretary who had briefly worked with him a decade earlier, who accuses the far more famous novelist Kloster of systematically killing off her family in revenge for her own actions that (in Kloster's mind) resulted in his abandonment by his wife and in the death of his daughter. Luciana used to be a beauty but now she is deformed by her paranoia and anguish, and the narrator - a somewhat less successful author himself - finds it difficult to believe her. Still, some vestiges of loyalty to her lead him to accost Kloster who dismisses him brusquely. Inflamed, the narrator decides to put down Luciana's story in the form a novel and threatens Kloster with its publication unless he agrees to reveal his involvement. At this point, Martinez appears to lose the plot and introduces a peculiar agent who is supposed to have committed gross crimes in the town. Suddenly, the book we are reading and the book the narrator is writing become aspects of a single unifying theme; exactly what that theme is I am unable to determine, and just like so many books with interesting premises, this one also meanders into opaqueness and stultification. Read it if you must.

In the past six months of translated criminal roundups, the dominant writers have been Nordics or Italians or French. There are one or two Spaniards, too, in the mix, and Javier Cercas can be added to the lot. His The Speed of Light is not really a crime novel; instead, it is a rumination on the effects of war and war-crimes on a thoughtful intellectual. Its foundation is a horrific assault on women and children in a Vietnamese village by American special forces during the US campaign in Indo-China. The narrator is a Spaniard visiting as a research fellow at Urbana-Champaign, a young man who still has supreme confidence of his own literary ability, which is simultaneously undermined and energised by his encounter and subsequent friendship with a veteran of that same massacre (as he later finds out). Much of the book deals with literary criticism and the shadow of experience on writing; it also details in tawdry detail the fall from grace that inevitably follows success; the nature of friendship is examined in subtle detail. This is a densely written book with much superfluous detail and cascading clauses, and it careens from philosophy to conspiracy theory and back in staccato bursts. But the denouement once again disappoints - it is stereotyped and weak - involving deaths of loved ones as metaphor, and the ensuing search for redemption.

Emil is the much-loved hero of Erich Kästner's series of books for children set in the 1920 and 1930s, and in Emil and the Detectives (Red Fox Classics) we encounter the little fellow going to Berlin to meet his grandmother and cousin. En route, he falls asleep and awakes to find that one of his companions in the train has stolen his money. Naturally, he won't have any of this, but recognising that it was unlikely that any policeman would take his word against that of an adult (and recalling with embarrassment and fear that the police might indeed arrest him for painting a moustache on the statue of a famous man in his village), he decides to follow the thief himself. He then encounters an entire cohort of kids who offer to help him out, and with true Prussian sang-froid, run the thief down. Everything ends well. As far as sophistication goes, I dare say a five-year old might find this entertaining - there's far too much of the smug and upright here to interest any hot-blooded child older than that. Contrasted with the naughtiness and scrapes of William, Emil is a pale imitation. He insists that he will fight anyone who thinks he is a mummy's boy just because he is protective of his mother and far too responsible for his age, but this is too mild a protest to convince anyone. There are a couple of other jaunty boys who are superficially more appealing, and might have made far better heroes. Oh well. When I checked out the book, the librarian sighed 'I loved this one', and frankly I'm baffled why. If this is the sort of book that has been thrust upon generations of British boys by a feminised teaching community, I'm not surprised that they have been permanently turned off reading.

In desperation, I'm forced to return to authors I've read before, and few are better than Fred Vargas, archaeologist-historian-turned-crime-novelist-of-class. Several of her later books featuring the ethereal detective Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg have been translated into English, and recently, the very first one in the series was rendered into English as well. (There was a cri-de-coeur recently about this phenomenon of out-of-order release of translations, and I find it quite irritating that I am unable to follow the development of a character from start to finish just because publishers can't be bothered to publish chronologically. This is especially egregious when the full series is already available in the original language, and still they are translated at random.) The Chalk Circle Man introduces the provincial detective-turned-Parisian-commissioner who can sense evil in people and prefers to doodle instead of following up on clues and interrogating suspects. His evident success (summed up by one of his rivals as ''You sit around daydreaming, staring at the wall, or doodling on a bit of paper as if you had all the time and knowledge in the world, and then one day you swan in, cool as a cucumber, and say "Arrest the priest. He strangled the child to stop him talking."') has attracted various curious individuals, each more peculiar than the other, and all of them in some circumstantial way involved in the latest puzzle that is attracting his attention. All of Paris is agog by a street artist who goes about drawing perfect chalk circles on pavements in various arrondissements, enclosing some object or the other within them - a hat, a mouse, a lighter. Is this the latest break-out art? Adamsberg senses cruelty, however, and keeps alert to any developments, and is proved right when a murdered woman is found one day within one such circle. The investigation then splits into competing hypotheses - is the chalk-circle man responsible for the death? Or is someone following him around to piggy-back off those circles and implicate him? This is a detective novel with a surreal premise: unlike Poirot who uses strict logic, or Van Veeteren, who is a meticulous footpad, Adamsberg arrives at his conclusions mystically, and expects his deputy Danglard to fill in the gaps. Good fun, though.

Finally, if we have one Scandinavian, then we should have another, and Helene Tursten fills the gap with her Glass Devil, The (Inspector Irene Huss Investigation), as poor an example of the genre as we can imagine. This is a very poor effort, I'm saddened to say, especially because in Inspector Irene Huss is an interesting protagonist - a loving wife and mother and workaholic. A teacher is found brutally slain, and when the police go over to his parents' place to break the news, they find that the couple have been murdered as well. There are signs of Satanism (inverted pentagrams and all), and evidence of computer geekery - the hard-drives of the machines have been found completely wiped. It turns out that the surviving member of the family is a daughter (a computer geek) based in London, who has been so stunned by the deaths of her kin that she suffers a mental collapse. Huss is forced to travel to London to interrogate the woman, and there's an entirely pointless addition of a travelogue about the places she has time to visit and H&M shopping she is able to accomplish while she awaits the woman's pleasure. Even more egregious is the several pages describing a gruesome attack on Huss by drug-addled rapists that she is able to repel owing to her Olympic-level jiu-jitsu. What was the point of this? What are the chances that a chance visitor in London will suffer such an attack? Negligible, I'd have thought. The attack does nothing to advance the plot, adds little to Huss's character development, and serves no earthly purpose I could discern. But what really got my goat were the footnotes that dotted the book at various places. The publisher evidently is targeting an American audience, for whenever the text used metric measurements, a footnote would translate into imperial measures. Now consider - how many readers of translated fiction would be unaware of the metric system? It's just a puerile insult to one's intelligence. And, I'm sad to say, the book is no better, falling back on that old standby of Scandinavian child abuse. Evidently there are no other social problems worth addressing in that idyllic land.

Wondering what to do during the quadridecennial year of the Moon landings? Assuming you are not planning a lunar trip yourself, you might as well read a book or five about it. Or watch a likely DVD? Le Figaro offers some suggestions, which I have helpfully (and rather loosely) translated. Stuff for all ages and levels of seriousness. There's film and Lucian and short stories and documentaries and Norman Mailer. Enjoy.

The University of Rochester has declared the winners of the 2009 Best Translated Book of the Year award (sponsored by Melville House and Open Letter Books). Needless to say, none of the crime fiction I'm reading at the mo has even figured in the longlist. Oh well.

The winner in the poetry section is Hiraide Takashi (ably translated by Sawako Nawakasu), for The Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. I'm as clueless as the next person when it comes to poetry, and Hiraide's work requires as much concentration as aqua regia. Here's one example:

Continuous thoughts of packaging ice. No matter what I write it melts, even the
address. If and when it arrives, that person will be gone.

Hiraide's poems are not long; they are epigrammatic and terse. According to some reviewers, he is not so much about emotion as about wordplay and linguistic wallops. Not entirely impenetrable, then. Here's another:

Summoning up my last bit of energy, I shall give a gift to your pale doorway. So that it might become your first bit of food before heading over to the other eye. Whirling tides that are sealed in. And the sun with new bandages. Drupes with wisdom.

Hmm. I expect I'll sample his mots at infrequent intervals, but if anyone gets a hold of this little book, please do post a full review and critique.

When was the last time I used a pencil? I can't remember. I use a (ball-point) pen almost daily, but only to scribble a small note or telephone number. Writing longhand has died a quiet death. In fact, the last time I tried it, my writing came out all wonky and my muscles ached with the unaccustomed strain. Far easier to type out a missive and print it and sign it and send it. Who writes anymore these days?

Therefore it comes as a surprise to me that the great pencil makers of the world - the likes of Faber-Castell and Schwan-Stabilo and Staedtler - are moving higher up in the value chain by manufacturing luxury pens. These houses, established in 1761, 1855, and 1835 respectively, find themselves outgunned by cheap Chinese manufacturers of pencils, so they come up with innovative designs and fancy inks and designer biros and fountain pens.

My fascination for these companies is occasioned mainly by their longevity. To survive in their essential business for two or three centuries implies several things: they produced high-quality products in niche markets that others found it difficult (or uneconomical) to break into; they innovated constantly and adapted to changing demands for their products; they had managers with foresight. And, in the case of family-run enterprises like Faber-Castell, they had clear lines of inheritance established in favour of capable successors, so that the companies were not broken up on the death of their heads.

In this, a long-lived company is not that different from an imperial dynasty. Inevitably, the most dynamic royal family ends up producing pusillanimous incompetents or debauched wastrels who exhaust their realms. Unless kings of quality ruthlessly establish their heirs by culling the deadwoods, and unless there are successors of ability to take over the enterprise, it is doomed to failure.

Consider, therefore, the famed glass-making company of Barovier and Toso that has been in Murano for seven hundred years. Nineteen generations of the family have run it and it has prospered despite severe competition from (and cheap counterfeiting by) less illustrious glaziers. Will it survive into the next generation? The prospects are not bright. The current head, Jacopo Barovier, joined the family concern reluctantly several decades ago. Now he finds that his siblings and children are not keen on running the show. He is philosophical about this. They have had a good run.

The oldest extant family-run concern in the world is Japanese. This is an example of an extremely niche market in which the company has a monopoly. Founded in the year 578, Kongo Gumi are contractors and builders and restorers of temples. The current head is the fortieth of the dynasty to run it. Interestingly, the Kongo family was brought to Japan from Korea to build the Shitennoji Temple in Osaka. A far cry, I guess, from the rampant discrimination Koreans have faced in the last century or so from the Nipponese.

The next oldest family concern is also Japanese. It is an inn, Hoshi Ryokan, in Komatsu, run by the Houshi family since AD 718. The first European outfit that enters the list is a French vineyard that dates back to AD 1000. Château de Goulaine in Brittany also runs a museum and offers its chateau for formal events.

For a comprehensive list, check out the site¹ in the Reference section.

I'd like to mention Ede & Ravenscroft, tailors set up in 1689 and surviving to this day in the City of London. This is not truly a family concern - from its history, it appears to have changed hands several times, although each time to an associate or apprentice of the owning family. It was founded by the tailoring Shudalls and appears to have been taken over by an Ede, who then married into the Ravenscroft wig-making family. Hence the double-barrelled name! They have been involved in dressing up the Royal family for twelve successive coronations, starting with that of William and Mary in 1689. If the Royals can wear their outfits, I don't see why I can't. In fact, I did! I have a (very small) soft spot for this traditional concern because they were the purveyors of the elaborate gown I had to don for my graduation from Cass Business School. Buggers socked me a pretty penny, but it was worth it in the end.

Reference

1. The Oldest Family Companies in the World.

The Japanese never cease to surprise. As reported by Reuters, Kazuhiko Minawa, an inventor, designed an aquarium with aluminium panels inside from which cables were laid to a nearby Christmas tree. He placed an electric eel in the tank. Every time it struck the sides of the tank, six hundred volts of electricity would surge through the electrodes and power the lights on the tree. It took him a month to design the system, he said.

"If we could gather all electric eels from around the world, we would be able to light up an unimaginably giant Christmas tree," he added.

Environmentally friendly power! goes the cry in Japan.

Visit the Aqua Toto Gifu aquarium in Hokkaido to check it out yourself.

And if you want a comprehensive explanation on how an electric eel generates its power (to stun or kill its prey, not to light up Christmas trees), you will find no better source than this.