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hardcover $32.50
Columbia University Press
Paddyfield.com
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More reviews by Bill Barron
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Grass for My Pillow by Saiichi Maruya
SAIICHI MARUYA's GRASS FOR MY PILLOW (originally published in 1966, but now out in a new translation by Dennis Keene) tells the story of Shokichi Hamada, a Japanese draft resister during the Pacific War.
Hamada's life as a mid-level clerk in the 1960s in a newly prosperous and increasingly self-confident Japan is intertwined with his reminiscences of life on the run roaming rural Japan under a false identity (Kenji Sugiura) more than twenty years earlier. This daydream-like technique is effective, as one finds oneself literally at two different places and times at once. The intertwining of Hamada's and Sugiura's lives and the description of the society that each inhabits build up a forceful yet nuanced portrait of the changing man and a changing Japan.
The vividness of the wartime scenes contrast sharply with the more mundane concerns of a 40-something clerk. As the novel unfolds, however, the relationship between the two periods in Hamada's life becomes evident. The cautious clerk, inclined to doubt he can trust those around him and unable to become emotionally close to anyone (even his wife or lover), is arguably a logical extension of the young man who did something so terrible that he could not afford to risk getting close to anyone or having the luxury of feeling in control. He had cast himself adrift during the war years and never really reconnected, becoming "a mere fragment of a man".
- He had gone against the most powerful of all commandments our society imposes, stronger than the commandment not to steal, stronger even than the commandment not to kill. He was a man who had gone against the stream.
As with much literature from a place far away in distance or time, what makes GRASS FOR MY PILLOW an enjoyable read are the minor incidents which point to deep cultural differences. In one scene in the early 1960s, Hamada sees a well-dressed man running toward him pursued by an angry group in casual cloths. Hamada freezes because he is unable to grasp the fact that the man running away is a thief, "... for he was so neatly dressed, well built and his face? had nothing mean or contemptible about it". Yet his co-workers see his actions as those of a coward. And after years of anti-militarism in post-war Japan that tended to exonerate the drafter resister, now in this newly resurgent Japan his war time record is now recalled and seen as simply an early sign of his cowardice.
In literature (or cinema) from several decades in the past much of this sort of thing is unintentional. (How many of us are really aware of our most basic presumptions?) In Maruya's case, it is part of the writer's craft, employed to remind us how different the values and presumptions of the world he's describing are from the those of our own time and place.
GRASS FOR MY PILLOW is a well-crafted story of a man and the society into which he was born, of the conflict between individual and the collective will. And while Japanese society is arguably an extreme case, this is a telling story of how profound yet subtle the process of such rebellion tends to be.
This is not to suggest that the plot is predictable in either detail or even in general direction. The particular situations and challenges faced by the young draft resister and the 40-something clerk continually add unexpected overlays and a richness to the story that go well beyond the basics of the plot. Maruya's skill lies in part in keeping the reader feeling he is always learning more about the man Hamada and his society right up to the novel's end.
Bill Barron
14/11/2002
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Bill Barron teaches at The University of Hong Kong and has traveled and worked extensively in East and Southeast Asia. He is a writer and photographer on a non-commercial basis.
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