Greg Sanders

Review: Five Women who Loved Love, Ihara Saikaku

Five women Who Loved Love is written in a period of value transition in Japan. There is regular reference to ukiyo which the introduction notes can be translated as either the world of sadness (drawing on Buddhism) or the floating world. The later gets at both the glamor and the precariousness involved in the stories. The stories often felt like an intensification of chivalrous romances involved with breaking of the rules and death. But the chivalry analogy this is not quite right as the characters in the stories are largely townsfolk rather than samurai.  Moreover, the bustling and commercial seventeenth century Osaka is Ihara Saikaku’s home and townfolk are also thus a core audience.

I found the stories often frustrating, often with implicit social critiques that were quite funny but with an at times outright misogynist narrator adding unwelcome commentary on gender relations. As is my present habit I skipped the introductory essay, but in my case this had been a mistake. I’d been left wondering if there was a Tokugawa era version of the Hayes code: the characters can have their bawdy romances so long as they are punished. The end essay helpfully elaborated that the criminal code made affairs or running away with the daughter or sister, let alone wife, of someone of higher stature a capital crime. The five short stories in the book draw, to greatly varying degrees, on the names and sometimes highly dramatized stories of people who’d lived in the author’s era or a generation or two before. The transition to a new era was happening but strict social codes where very much a factor and the characters are often rebels who win some popular acclaim. Even without direct critique, Saikaku tells a story that criticizes these laws and may have skated the edge of what was safe to publish.

I found it most interesting as a cultural artifact, if an often troubling one. For all the death, there's not much graphic violence, though what the women feel forced to put up with is often deeply disturbing with two of the stories involving resigned "my reputation is ruined I may as well have an affair." As the introductory essay comments, the writing style is not novelistic and I found it difficult to get a strong sense of the characters of the leading women, especially at the moment of pivotal choices.

Some of the moralism from the narrator is fairly shocking to me, i.e. complaining about the disloyalty of widows who remarry rather than becoming nuns. That said, while this is a critique of women, he also notes it applies to the male lead in a story who accepts a new partner after tragically losing two pretty young men to sudden love interest death syndrome. The role of homosexuality in Japan in the book is not tied up with in moralism from Saikaku, and the stories show multiple instances including oaths of fidelity and a prominent role in the theater, which was often limited to males by regulation.

I think the audience that might most appreciate it would be those that are culturally curious about classical Japan and want to go deeper than the “oh, Japan” reaction and have a sense of cultural history in a light weight and fast paced set of alternatingly funny, tragic, and always somewhat problematic stories. I’ll close with a passage from the first passage of the first book that gets at the experience of reading these tales and their sometimes black humor. Content warning, blithe treatment of suicide:

Seijuro [just disowned] could only say, “It’s heart-rending,” and thought to himself that he would take his own life, if only Minakawa would not insist on joining him.

She guessed what he had in mind, and said: “You are thinking of taking your life. Alas, how foolish! For, however much I should like to say, ‘Take me with you,’ I still have attachments in this world and cannot. In my sort of work one’s heart belongs first to this man, then to that. Let us simply call our affair a thing of the past.” So saying, she rose and left him.

Crushed by theses unexpected words, Seijuro abandoned his plan of suicide, . “How fickle these whores are! Read any time to cast away old lovers.”

But as he rose in tears to leave, Minakawa came back clothed in garments of white, ready now to die, and clung desperately to him. “How can you live? Where will you go? Oh, now is the time to end it all!” she cried, pulling out a pair of knives.

Seijuro was almost speechless with delight to find his lover faithful after all…

Bird of North America, Urbanite Theater Sarasota, FL

Birds of North America is a two-person play about a father and daughter over a series of autumn bird watching sessions. The father is a staunch environmentalist and prides himself on a scientific mindset and the daughter finds her initial career doing copyediting for a conservative website he rather disapproves of.

The characters, played by Stephen Spencer and Denki Rongé, are both well realized and the bird watching does give a chance to track the world shifting around them. I think Denki, playing the daughter Caitlyn, in particular had a chance to show a lot of emotional range as she tried to maintain an often painful relationship and Stephen showed how John brought the same outlook when he was, by my politics, right and when he was sabotaging his own work or committing one of the most painful acts of mansplaining I’ve seen on stage. The Urbanite theater staging was evocative and had good sound design for the bird watching itself. I’ll definitely keep the Urbanite in mind in future trips. Spoilers after the cut.

Play: D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls

A business and scientific true crime story, Radium  Girls, a play by D.W. Gregory, tells the story of young female laborers who used glow-in-the-dark paint to illuminate watch dials. In the heady era of 1918 to 1922 in which the play is focused, radium goes from being hyped as a miracle cure-all to being increasingly recognized the source of the mysterious and horrific source of necrosis that leads to the death of the workers using it. (For a bit of context the play is different than the more fictionalized movie. I’m not sure how closely related it is to the book of the same name).

I had the chance to see the play twice in a high school production with a cousin of mine playing a six-fold role that included the vice president of the U.S. Radium Corporation and scientists on opposite sides of the dilemma. To commemorate the occasion, here’s what I found most interesting in the play.

The play effectively covers the way that profit incentive can compromise expertise. The U.S. Radium Corp ran studies, didn’t like the results and covered them up, and then found a different expert to give them cover. This is certainly not a new story, and as ever shows that trusting the scientific method cannot be the same as trusting individual scientists, as even greats like Madame Curie made terrible mistakes and experts with impressive credentials can be compromised. I think one thing the play does particularly successfully is looking at how people of means and credentials can lie to themselves with carefully chosen vocabulary. Payoffs to victims are a humanitarian gesture and not an admission of fault; payoffs to experts would be a consideration and not a bribe, and for legal and I’d suspect self-justification reasons constantly push back against any suggestion to the contrary. The staging I saw avoided cackling villains and showcased the lines people drew and those they transgressed.

The other strong point of the play for me was showing the costs of rallying public opinion to force change. The lead character ends up estranged from multiple relationships because she’s not taking easy buyouts that would ease her individual financial situation at the expense of the collective struggle. The New Jersey Consumer League leader is shown to have a self-promoting streak, but one in service of justified righteous outrage. That said, notably absent from the play was the labor movement, although it does mention that the jobs had comparatively high pay and recruitment from young women in a way that implied that the biggest limitation to their recruitment was the company’s reputation and not a limited supply of sufficiently skilled workers.

All-in-all, the play left me pondering what potential victims of my choices I was failing to look squarely at and what rationalizations and sanitary language I was employing to help me do so.

Review: Sputnik Sweetheart

This is my third book by renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It’s an intimate tale of three people. Sumire is a college dropout and aspiring writer whose first love is Miu. It’s “an intense love, a veritable torando sweeping across the plains.” Miu is seventeen years older, disconcertingly close to my own age, and a married woman. The tale is told by narrator K, Sumire’s closest friend who shares a love of reading with her, crushes on her, and has a habit of entanglements with somewhat older women that are not strictly speaking single themselves.

That premise could easily go quite soapy, but that is not Murakami’s way.  Instead this is a character study of those three. The otherworldly aspects of this tale are not quick to arrive in a way that might surprise some readers of his other tales. Sumire is the one that stuck with most of us, both in her story and character and the poritons we read of her writing. Yes, this is a book about a writer that suffers from some writer’s block, but not one that bogs down in navel gazing or self-pity. All three characters land for me and the way Sumire grapples with a newfound queer identity and all three manage their role in society and the physical aspects of loves they cannot fully reciprocate proved fertile thematic ground.

At a well-paced 211 pages, I would recommend it to those who find the above appealing, but with three caveats. First, some male gaze is the price of entry. That could be written off to the narrator, but some of my fellow Argo Japan book club members did note that this comes up too when we’re hearing the tale of Sumire in a way that rang untrue. That part might not have bothered me - I’m part of the target audience for much of it - but YMMV and I think it muddies some of the thematic waters. Second, content warning for some sexually related trauma. I think it has a valuable role in the story, but combined with the first point may be off putting. And third, while the core plot resolves as much as one might reasonably expect for weird Japanese fiction, I think I would have been left unsatisfied without someone to talk about it with. To desire such is my default position, but my favorite of his tales I’ve read, Hard Boiled Wonderland, did not require company in chewing over the book to make it a fully satisfying meal for me.

Spoilers after the cut.

Greg’s Montgomery County election picks for those not voting early

The Maryland primary is tomorrow and while I know many of my friends have voted early, apparently only 3% of voters have done so. So if you haven’t voted, haven’t completely decided, and find value in my opinions, here’s my key calls.

I’m going to stick with the races I feel strongly about. For them and the rest I  recommend the League of Women Voters Voter’s Guide at vote411.org which answers from each of the candidates. I also rely some on the Action Committee for Transit’s transit scorecard (I don’t agree with all of the scorecards classifications, but I found the survey answers valuable in their own  right).

Governor: Tom Perez

This one got simpler for me when Rushern Baker dropped out. I chose to prioritize fighting beltway expansion. I think it’s a bad idea on environmental ground and I think the public-private partnership is uncompetitive and based on implausible claims of no risk to Maryland. Comptroller Franchot shouldn’t have let that pass the Board of Public Works as protecting Maryland from bad deals is core to his job. Meanwhile, I’ve liked Perez from his early MoCo days, he has executive experience as Labor Sec., and I think his positions are good in general. From what I’ve read of the polling (including this fascinating ranked choice poll by Maryland Matters) I think he’s got the best chance to beat Franchot. Honestly, I’m not sure who would do best against the Republican candidate, but I think Perez doesn’t have any major liabilities and he’s quite experienced in electoral politics. This is definitely voting with my head, if I went for alignment on every issue I might end up with John King, but I will feel good if Perez wins so it’s an easy strategic vote.

County Exec: Hans Reimer

I explain my logic in greater depth here, but in County races I prioritize affordable housing. I think Hans’ approach will strengthen Montgomery as a city on the hill that can provide refuge to those in other parts of an increasingly divided country and raise enough revenue to provide robust services. Meanwhile, I think County Executive Elrich is all talk and even when it comes to talk he opposed even setting higher goals for affordable housing. It’d be one thing if he was an effective administrator, but there’s a reason he was never Council President and my favorite part of his agenda, an expanded bus rapid transit network, has made little progress. This is a vote from heart, I have friends that are going Blair because he may have a better shot and he gave good answers one-on-one to the Sierra Club. But I volunteered this morning for Hans and will do so the evening of  the election because I believe not he’s the one who is our best choice of leader for these times.

County Council:
At large: Tom Hucker, Evan Glass, Will Jawando, Scott Goldberg
District 4: Amy Ginsburg

Sticking with ACT here. Not in love with the absence of any women in the at large, of the rest Sayles is my pick as I know a few people that vouch for her and her other answers are pretty good, but on affordable housing she isn’t doing anything to stick her neck out for building more housing.

John Proctor is the Villain?

This premier play at the Studio Theater in DC is a tale of an honors English class in a one-stoplight town in Georgia grappling with the Me Too movement and countercharges of witch hunts in the Spring of 2018. If the premise and the  critique it explores of the Crucible sounds dry to you, don’t worry; the play, written by Kimberly Belflower, delivers ample comedy and well-characterized high school drama. Teacher Carter Smith (Dave Register) is excited to transition from sex ed to a unit on Arthur Miller’s critique of McCarthyism and Red Panic by way of the Salem Witch Trials and - once the premise is established - both represents the standard read of the play while engagingly drawing out the students. Try-hard Beth Powell (Miranda Rizzolo) and Atlanta transfer student Nell Shaw (Deidre Staples) have done their homework and are in parallel founding a Feminism Club along with friends, which is met with some skepticism by guidance counselor Bailey Gallagher (Lida Maria Benson) for being potentially divisive. The club quickly gives preacher’s daughter Raellynn Nix (Jordan Slattery) a chance to shine, as Jordan’s slightly spacey line delivery is a source of many laughs and recalled for me Osaka from Azumanga Daioh, while still holding up as things got more series.

The lighter tone of the early play quickly encounters complication, romantic heartbreak and betrayal, the return of missing student Shelby Holcomb (Juliana Sass), and the inevitable arrival of accusations of sexual assault and exploitation at this small Georgian town. Under David Muse’s direction the whole 9 person cast (rounded out by Rsea Mishina, Shawn Denegre-Vaught, and Zachary Keller) delivers the comedic, intellectual, and dramatic beats. To be frank, I’m a bit too out of it pop-culture-wise to track all of the Taylor Swift jokes and analysis of Lorde’s Green Light, but I think it gets the teenaged voice right and got enough to follow along and crack up at a discussion of Twilight in the context of sex ed. The strength of the play is the character work, the interactions of the students and their teacher, the patter and even dance, ideas grounded in real people.

Speaking of he ending in vague terms, I think Belflower’s script does succeed at her stated intention of challenging the default interpretation of the Crucible, namely that John Proctor as written is not just a flawed hero, but also abusive to servants and crossed a line worse than adultery by having an affair with a 16-year-old in his employ. The celebration of teenaged girl culture is not just fun but celebrates solidarity, a valuable counterweight to “woman beware woman'” stories. However, I felt that some of the more interesting provocations and questions did not have quite enough room to play out. The rousing finale was well-acted and executed but didactic in a way that left me wanting to be more challenged. Even so, thanks to strong characters well portrayed, I was glad to have seen the play.

Spoilers after the cut.

We don’t talk about media in a timely manner

I watched Encanto a few months back and enjoyed it. While ultimately a kids’ film it offered a setting (Colombia), family arrangement (multi-generational and multi-sibling), and protagonist (not the talented one) that were all different from many of the stories I’m told. The first two traits added to its charm but the third was what made the film for me.

Those who have wanted to watch Encanto have probably done so by now, so I’m going to skip right into spoilers and two pieces of criticism that caught my attention.

First, let me turn to a Laurie Penny’s argument that Encanto is a great piece of art that by staying true to Disney story templates whiffs the ending (thanks to Montreal bookseller Moti for passing me this fascinating piece). Laurie traces through how the Madrigal family tracks with ‘dysfunctional family roles’

Spoilers from here on out.

Hans Riemer for County Executive: Saying yes to a prosperous, progressive future

I’ll be attending a rally at Astrolab brewing tonight for Councilmember Hans Riemer to celebrate his endorsement for Montgomery County executive by former Governor Glendening. The event starts in an hour from 4:30 to 7:00 pm at Astrolab brewing in Silver Spring.

I’ve long been a support of Hans thanks to his championing of the Purple Line going back to his critical first Council race. However, while that’s my top issue, I think his larger vision that “It’s time we say yes” for a prosperous and progressive Montgomery County is the right agenda and temperament for this moment that could turn to recovery or fall to malaise.

Here’s three examples of how he differentiates himself from our current executive:

* Addressing the housing crunch by building 40,000 new housing units, including allowing for a duplexes and other forms of multifamily housing where the transportation infrastructure supports. This is on top of Hans support for affordable housing measures.

* Moving to clean energy including allowing rural property owners to build solar. I support the county’s agricultural reserve, both to limit sprawl and  allow for local food. Allowing our rural areas to build more concentrated solar arrays is compatible with the spirit of that initiative and is the kind of work that can be done at the county level to counter climate change.

* Pushing for universal vaccination for county employees, this is a bit backward looking, but I was impressed by Hans takes on pandemic response as I thought he was willing to fight for the most effective policies while still taking learning loss for our schools very seriously.

Hans knows policy and implementation. He has has years of leadership experience on the County Council where his ability to build coalitions was reflected in his getting the most votes of any of the at-large candidates in the last election. I think these are not strengths of our current executive and it does the county the most harm on housing issues and economic growth. It’s not that I don’t think Hans will make mistakes or that I’ll agree with every compromise he cuts, but I trust that he has a larger vision of a successful growing county with widespread benefits and a willingness to listen to data that will use new tax revenue where it will make the biggest positive difference.

Finally, on a pragmatic note, the County Executive race is now a three person one between Marc Elrich, David Blair, and Hans Riemer. I don’t have polling access, but I’m sharing this today because I think the departure of Councilmember Hucker from the race and the endorsement by Gov. Glendening makes this a great time to tune into the race and give Hans a closer look. In general, your vote and voice carry a lot more weight than in national election. The last county executive primary came down to less than a hundred votes. Hans is also running with public financing that means that in county donations are have a 6x match. So if you look and like what you see, even a modest donation will go long way.

Image credit: David Asche Photography from Hans’s website, because I really need to organize my photos better for people searches.

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

A classic in Japan that is remarkably popular for its bleakness. The protagonist, we learn in the first chapter, has gone missing. We then pick up on his travels to an isolated village, driven by his hypothesis that it is a prime spot to make his name in his hobby by finding a new species of insect. He has a lot of thoughts about sand, its physical properties, its larger meaning, how we can live around its shifting destructive power. These discussions were the highlight of the book for me as was the physicality of the language, the feel of sand on the skin, the dryness of throat, and separately knowing what it is to be betrayed by sleep.

One early passage gets at the musings:

Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a  fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would stop. Actually in the desert flowers blood and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust. . .

The book quickly takes a turn for the surreal as we see that the outer edge of village involves trekking above huts that exist at the base of sand pits as if an ant lion made an arrangement with a literal carpenter ant. Without giving too much away the story focuses on the man and the title woman in the dunes. She has some depth of character, in what she endures, what what she resists, and how she tries to reach out. However, she ultimately remained a cipher to me in ways that made the novels bleakness harder to bear. More on that after the cut.

Review: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

From my youth I’ve been a Star Trek fan. Core to the appeal to me is the vision of a hopeful future, one with dilemmas and danger but no longer a prisoner to scarcity. The appeal has not faded since I’ve become an adult (happy belated 100th to Gene Roddenberry), and while I do enjoy Deep Space Nine and some nuance in my Trek, I think many attempts to make it dark or mature can miss the point. I was drawn to the Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, because Culture itself is a variation of a utopian Federation-adjacent civilization that explores a range of themes while still believing in the possibility of a diverse and abundant future.

The story starts with the tale of a ship’s computer, a Mind, seeking escape and refuge and only partially finding it. In Culture, the question of whether the Enterprise’s computer is alive is unambiguously yes. Indeed the hyper-intelligent life forms captain their own vessels which display their personality with  ship names like “No More Mr. Nice Guy” or “Prosthetic Conscience.”

However, while the quest to rescue or capture that Mind is the core quest of the book, its protagonist is not just a sort of human, but an ideological enemy of the Culture: Bora Horza Gobuchul. Horza is a skilled infiltrator capable of slowly changing his shape and more to impersonate another. He works for the Iridians, a tri-legged, potentially immortal species both smarter and stronger than most humans but also typically devout, giving rising to ship names like “The Hand of God 137.” There’s no place for other species in the Iridian religion, but he supports them anyways for reasons he explains when competing to win the loyalty of a planet while opposed by  Culture Special Circumstances Agent Perosteck Belveda.

“At least [the Iridians] have a God, Frolk. The Culture doesn’t. . .They at least think the same way way you do. The Culture doesn’t. . .”

“You want to know who the real representative of the Culture is on this planet? It’s not her,” he nodded at the woman [his opposite number], “It’s that powered flesh-slicer she has following her everywhere, her knife missile. She might make the decisions, it might do what she tells it, but it’s the real emissary. That’s what the Culture’s about: machines. You think because Belveda’s got two legs and soft skin you should be on her side, but its’ the Iridians who are on the side of life in this war.”

The novel is not directly about this debate; instead it is full of adventure, often set in epic speculative locations like the a massive ring station that sustains its own ocean and gravity with centrifugal force, or concepts like the absurd game of Danger where players can blast complex emotions at one another and fans will tune into to what players are feeling or be caught in the splash themselves. Whether or not you root for Horza, he is a capable charmer, and he needs to be as he and his rag-tag group of companions face a series of challenges that - despite a captain’s words to the contrary - are anything but “easy in, easy out.”

The tone of this first book is not Star Trek. It’s often satirical, regularly tragic, and frequently more focused on survival than exploration. The start of the story often left me discombobulated, intentionally so I think. One chapter after the one-third mark just put me off, testing boundaries without offering much to hold my interests. For me, the novel truly hits its stride as an ensemble comes together with relationships and competing loyalties shaped in adversity. Indeed, the perspective of the story broadens in the finale as suspense steadily builds and the casualties mount.

Consider Phlebas has its rough patches; at times I had trouble grasping the visuals of some of the settings and wonders, and it took time (and a handy list of names) for me to really come to care about some of the supporting cast. Similarly, as the epigram from the Waste Land that gives the book its title indicates, it helps to have some taste for the outré and the tragic. But for me the story is a triumph that kicks off the Culture series in a such a fitting way, by exploring the perspective of one of its enemies. (For a more critical take, see Abigail Nussbaum). I eagerly look forward to the next book in the series.

After the cut, some light spoilers and a bit of international relations.