The Japan Society Review 84
Book, Stage, Film, Arts and Events Review

Issue 84 Volume 14 Number 6 (December 2019)

The last issue of The Japan Society Review in 2019 includes
reviews of five books which, in one way or another, explore theinteractions and encounters of Japan and Japanese culture withthe rest of the world. In Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics
and the Idea of Japan Grace E. Lavery explores how Japan
captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western
aesthetics, from the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s,
to the present day and the lasting influence of Japanese forms
on writers and artists.
Beginning in the Victorian era, Neil Jackson’s Japan andthe West focuses on the architectural influence that Japan andthe West have had on each other. In bringing together the main
themes of Japanese and Western architecture since 1850 the bookshows that neither could exist in its present state without the other.
In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen
exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized theera when Japan’s “total empire” met the total war of World War
II. This monograph examines not only the ideas and ambitions

regarding the Sphere developed by the imperial centre, butalso the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and thePhilippines sought to shape their own future.
In the field of fiction, Ogawa Yoko’s novel The Memory

Police is a dystopian tale about the power of memory andthe trauma of loss. Inspired by the diary of Anne Frank andreminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, Ogawa creates a haunting andprovocative story envisioning the menaces of totalitarianism
and the possibilities for resistance.
Finally, our last review of this issue explores the cookbook
The Japanese Larder by Luiz Hara, a detailed and accessible
introduction to Japanese home-made cuisine. Well illustrated
with beautifully shot photographs complementing every
recipe, The Japanese Larder demonstrates the use of Japanese
ingredients, cooking techniques and dishes in a simple way,
perfect for anyone wanting to try their hands at Japanese foodfor the upcoming festive season.
Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández

Contents
1)

Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea ofJapan by Grace E. Lavery

Editor2)

Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue by Neil
Jackson

Reviewers

3)

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total
Empire Met Total War by Jeremy A. Yellen

4)

The Memory Police by Ogawa Yoko

5)

The Japanese Larder by Luiz Hara

Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández
Francesco Cioffo, Jill Dobson, Laurence Green, Andrew Nishiyama
Taylor and Laura Richardson.
Image: A wood-block print by Utagawa Hiroshige III of Ginza Street andNipposha, Tokyo Ginza, designed by Thomas James Waters, 1872-77, fromthe series Famous Places of Tokyo, c.1875. [The Lavenberg Collection ofJapanese Prints]. From Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue.

Quaint, Exquisite:
Victorian Aesthetics andthe Idea of Japanby Grace E. Lavery
Princeton University Press(2019)
ISBN-13: 978-0691183626
Review by Laurence GreenIn any discussion of Japan, the words Quaint, Exquisite
seem bound to appear at least once or twice, evennow, over a hundred years since Japan first opened
its doors to the world. What is it about the particularaesthetic qualities of the nation that ensure these
attributes still hold such sway over our idea of what
Japan is like, what it represents? Penned by the
University of California, Berkeley’s Grace. E Lavery,
this account seeks to remind us of the excitement
and promise Japan held for the Victorian populace
in particular, when many of these notions were first
introduced. Japan as the ‘Other Empire’ – the world’s
first non-Western modernity. Japan as the marked‘exception’ to the general principle of orientalism – ahigher calibre of exoticism.
Immense in its scope, and encyclopaedic in the
sheer number of touch-points it tries to bring in to its
core argument, this is a dizzying, remarkably ambitious
account (especially considering it tries to accomplish
all this within less than 200 pages). But from theintroduction onwards, it quickly becomes apparent
that we’re not in for an easy ride. Throwing the reader
head-first into hyper-complex ideas of aesthetic
and melancholy, via a stream of big name thinkers(Kant, Bourdieu, Freud, Lyotard and so on), this book
isn’t for the faint hearted, or those with a dithering
attention span. When the opening pages contain aself-acknowledged suggestion from readers to add aglossary of terms, but the definitions themselves only
add further complexity, you know you’re facing somepretty significant problems with clarity.
Much like French theorist Roland Barthes’ The
Empire of Signs, which this book is clearly immensely
indebted to in terms of both style and content, it is
not so much Japan that Lavery is interested in here,
but the ‘idea’ of Japan. Amongst the various vignettes
that Lavery presents, a number particularly stand out.
Early on, we are given a vivid comparison of the novel
Moby Dick – published in 1851 – as an allegory for
American pursuit of Japanese trade, the ‘white whale’2of untapped commerce which would eventually open
to the world following the Meiji Restoration.
We are then given a flavour of the Savoy Opera andthe eccentricity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado. Here,the reverence for a kind of mythological ‘Old Japan’ isstrongest, the obsession with an exoticised ‘exquisite’
so prised by Victorian audiences most palpable. The
stage is set for a period of ripe opportunism for all‘Things Japanese’, as the foremost Japanologist of
the era, Basil Hall Chamberlain, titled his popular onevolume encyclopaedia. We are told of Oscar Wilde’s
love for issuing luxurious limited editions of his works
in Japanese paper – an intensely desirable, premium
commodity at the time. A section on Whistler’s
paintings is charming too. They say a picture speaks
a thousand words, and here it’s literally true – theinclusion of copies of the artist’s works (housed in the
Tate Britain) sells the books idea of aesthetic far better
than pages of dense theorising. The book’s coverimage – Portrait of Emily Caroline Massingberd byJohn Collingham Moore (to be found in National Trust
property Gunby Hall), is also very tastefully chosen; allprim Victorian modesty set against the thrill of pretty
Japanese bamboo fans.
This swell of Anglo-Japanese cultural flow wasn’t
all one-way. Lavery reminds us of author Natsume
Soseki’s presence in London between 1900-1903.
But perhaps most interesting is the case of Mikimoto
Ryuzu, the son of famed pearl magnate Kokichi. We
are given an account of Ryuzu’s exceptional collectorlike passion for the works of Victorian art critic John
Ruskin – something that would ultimately culminate
in a library of material that exists in Tokyo to this day.
Unfortunately, some of Lavery’s other case studies
are less convincing. A section on English language
haiku, referencing Jack Kerouac and an internet memefrom 2012 (“Five syllables here / seven more syllables
there / are you happy now??”), falls particularly wideof the mark. In addition, it must be said that the bookvery much seems to assume prior knowledge of thecultural figures it references – very little preamble or
biographical detail is typically given, and the reader isleft to fill in the blanks. While there’s nothing wrong in
getting the reader to work a bit, there’s a sense thatthe book would have benefitted from a more open,
welcoming tone.
The irony is that the unrelenting nature of
Lavery’s accumulation of disparate sources, all in aid ofconstructing her fascinating idea of ‘aesthetic’, begins
to gradually grow on the reader. But when the booksuddenly switches in its final chapter to a Film StudiesIssue 84 Volume 14 Number 6 (December 2019)style close analysis of Asia Extreme classic Audition
and the films of Quentin Tarantino, it’s undoubtedly
one leap too far. The immense jump not only in time
period, but also medium, feels bizarre, and the volume
would have felt far more consistent – more ‘of a piece’– without this last instalment.
There is a trend, particularly within American
academia right now, for the kind of hyper theorised
discourse Lavery takes with this book, where the sheer
impenetrability almost becomes part of its aesthetic. It

becomes a kind of game, a one-upmanship of amassed
knowledge condensed down into thesis form. But for
all that this approach boasts in style, hip jargon and amultitude of ‘clever’ pop cultural references, it remains
distinctly lacking in simple, old-fashioned readability.
Academic audiences and a more general readershipshouldn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive. Lavery
presents a treasure trove of interesting ideas here, butwith a tighter focus and a good sight more clarity, thiswould have made for a far more engaging study.§

Japan and the West: An
Architectural Dialogue

With Dutch traders as the principal conduit, Jackson
details how everything from book frontispieces tofurniture served to present Europe’s then-prevalent
neoclassical style to the Japanese, while journal
accounts and drawings brought observations ofJapanese buildings and interiors back to Europe. Thisdelicate courtship between East and West sustained
until 1854 when, with the signing of the Convention of
Kanagawa, the ports of Hakodate and Shimoda wereopened to the United States, effectively bringing an
end to the period’s isolationist policies and, crucially forthe theme of Jackson’s book, allowing an intellectualand stylistic dialogue to gain pace and flourish during
the Meiji era (1868-1912) and beyond.
The opening of Japan caused a burst of Japonism
through international exhibitions in Austria, France,
the UK and US in the second half of the nineteenth
century, all vividly rendered in Jackson’s text. Despite
displays ranging from fanciful imitation to faithful
reproduction, these exhibitions generally had thebacking of the Meiji government in recognition of thesoft power they promoted. It is fascinating to imagine
how domestic designers, most of whom would havebeen unable to travel to Japan themselves, would
have drawn inspiration from seeing architecturalelements and motifs on display at these exhibitions tocreate works both inauthentic and innovative, neither‘East’ nor ‘West’. At the same time in Japan, the endof isolationism extended Western-style architecture
beyond the confines of Dejima, even though, despite
overtly colonial appearances, such buildings had
underlying Japanese construction techniques andmaterials (Jackson cites Thomas Blake Glover’s housein Nagasaki as a prime example).
This idea of hybrid design, something which
has Japanese or Euroamerican origins but, ultimately,
through its transposition between East and Westbelongs to neither, is a key theme of Japan and theWest which pervades through the rest of the book.

by Neil Jackson
Lund Humphries Publishers (2018)
ISBN-13: 978-1848222960
Review by Andrew Nishiyama
TaylorIn our age of physical and digital infrastructure, it isdifficult to imagine a time when the corners of the
globe were unconnected or undocumented. There
are few places in the twenty-first century for which
the mere naming of a destination does not evoke
vivid imagery, perhaps with a particular landscape or
natural wonder at the fore. Consider those images forlonger and something more synthetic will begin toadvance: the architecture and built environment of aplace also plays a crucial role in our perception of anation’s identity. How does that architecture emerge to
become characteristic of a place, particularly throughcenturies of ever-increasing globalisation? Does theintroduction of foreign influences enhance, dilute or
eradicate the vernacular of a place?
In 2005, architect and historian Professor Neil
Jackson began researching the Western world’sinteractions with Japan and the resulting impacts on
their respective built environments. Entitled Japan andthe West: An Architectural Dialogue, Jackson’s bookopens with a passage on the first Japanese emissaries
in Europe in the late sixteenth century. Throughtheir gifting of two folding screens, decorated with
depictions of a castle near Kyoto, the envoy provided
the Pope in Rome with the Western world’s first glimpseof Japanese architecture. From this early encounter,the reader is taken to Dejima in Nagasaki during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the sole port
through which Japan tightly controlled its commercial(and, less conspicuously, intellectual) exchanges withthe outside world during the Edo period (1603-1868).
Latest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

3

As the twentieth century unfolds, Jackson draws on
everything from the upscaling of Japanese temple
architecture for modern building typologies, to theJapanese influence on the Bauhaus movement, topost-and-beam residential architecture in Australia
and the US, to the archipelago’s embrace of Brutalism,in order to demonstrate just how interwoven the
dialogue became by the end of the millennium andthe pluralities of its manifestation.
Although the number of individuals involvedin bridging Japanese and Western architecture overcenturies is too great to detail, Jackson seamlessly
incorporates relevant biographical passages for key
proponents, and of particular interest are those whose
works will likely resonate with contemporary readers.
The British architect Josiah Conder (1852-1920), whose
works came to typify the Westernisation of Japan in
the Meiji era, may be best known to Tokyo residents
and visitors for his Kyu-Furukawa Gardens (1917) in
Kita ward and Mitsubishi Ichigōkan (1895), creditedwith beginning the conglomerate’s development of
the Marunouchi business district. Tatsuno Kingo (18541919), Conder’s student, was prolific in his neoclassicaldesigns for the Bank of Japan, notably its headquarters
in Tokyo (1896), as well as the Dutch-influenced
Tokyo Station (1914). Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
occupied a unique position in the dynamic between
East and West: he referenced Japanese architecturein the deep overhanging eaves of his Prairie housesin Oak Park, Illinois (around 1900-1910) before his
approach was introduced to Japan in his commission
for Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel (1923). The inclusion of
the Library at the Glasgow School of Art (1909) by
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) is a poignant
reminder of the work’s importance in British-Japanesedesign exchanges. Concluding with Pritzker Prizewinning SANAA, known in London for their designof the 2009 Serpentine Pavilion, Jackson highlights
the international role of Japanese architects in thetwenty-first century and reflects on whether Japan has
been able to maintain its own architectural traditions
through modernisation and globalisation.
Japan and the West is carefully structured aroundthe Shogun (Edo), Meiji, Taisho (1912-1926) and Showa(1926-1989) periods and the painstaking researchthat has gone in to its creation is clear. Despite its
impressive scale and scope, the narrative is fluid, brisk
and a pleasure to read, adding to the book’s broad
appeal. To those who have visited Japan, the book will
give explanation to the country’s (particularly Tokyo’s)
at-times idiosyncratic urban built environment. To abroader readership, Japan and the West will add depth
to the resurgent interest in the Japanese architectureof popular publications and recent exhibitions. Finally,
to architects and designers, Jackson sheds light oninnovation and originality in the creative process andreveals Japan to be a nation which will always sustain
a unique sense of place and never cease to inspire.§

The Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere: When
Total Empire Met Total War

addition to the historiography of modern Japan
in general and a fundamental contribution to thestudy of the Japanese wartime experience. In what
could be the very first monograph on the topic
written in English, the GEACP Sphere is a very wellconstructed study divided in two main sections
covering respectively the high politics of the ‘core’
and the anti-colonial responses of the ‘periphery’. The
convincing argument put forward by Yellen is that the‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (thereafter the
Sphere) was a ‘contested, negotiated process, onethat bound Japan’s imperial dreams with anti-colonial
aspirations of nationalist leaders in Burma and in thePhilippines’ (p. 11). In this book, therefore, the Sphereis not theorised as the consequences of Pan-Asianist
indoctrination, an economic masterplan, or a mere
imperialist slogan. The Sphere, he argues, was Japan’s
response to the diplomatic challenges that arosefrom the establishment of the post-WWI international

by Jeremy A. Yellen
Cornell University Press (2019)
ISBN-13: 978-1501735547
Review by Francesco Cioffo
If you are looking for a captivating grand narrative
about how the Japanese military elite, intoxicatedby the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and imperialist
megalomania, formulated a coherent masterplan forthe control of the entire East Asian region, and perhaps
the world, this is not the book you were looking for.[1]But if you are willing to question many of the popular
assumptions about Japan in the time of total empire
and total war, then Yellen’s book is definitely the one.
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere(thereafter the GEACP Sphere) is in fact a truly timely
4

Issue 84 Volume 14 Number 6 (December 2019)system and the attempt to build a new regional
economic and political order.
At the core of Yellen’s argument is the idea that
the Sphere never became a clear and articulated
ideology or plan (p. 6). It was a discourse in flux,
negotiated, contested and appropriated by a widearray of actors from both the colonial centre and its
periphery. The life of the Sphere was closely linked toJapan’s fortunes during the Pacific War. Yellen identifies
three main transformations in the life of the Sphere. An
initial phase, in which Japan broke with the post-WWI
order (the so-called Washington-Versailles System)and declared its intention to establish a ‘new order’
based upon its mix of anti-colonial anti-Westernism
and forms of ‘new imperialism’ (granting nominal
independence, while maintaining de facto control
over the colonies). The second phase, at the peak ofJapanese offensive in Asia, the Sphere was idealised
as a political economic hierarchy under Japaneseleadership. In this particular moment, Japan’s ‘total war’
theorists and the architects of Japan’s ‘total empire’conceptualised Asia as an appendage of the Japanese
economy. In these schemes, Japan had to retain mostof the high-skills and capital-intensive products, while
lower-skilled labour-intensive products, along withnatural resources, had to be located in the colonies.
The final phase coincided with the post-1943 period
when defeat was a much more real possibility forJapan. Paradoxically, Yellen notices, this is when more
concrete ideas about the Sphere emerged.
The author makes his argument through six main
chapters. The first three chapters are mainly dedicatedto the high diplomacy in Tokyo and its main characters.
Chapter 1 discusses the formation of the Tripartite Pactand how it was driven by Japan’s fear of Germany,
which posited a direct threat to Japanese interests in
Asia. In Chapter 2 Yellen focuses on Foreign minister
Matsuoka Yosuke who envisioned the Sphere as areturn to forms of ‘old imperialism’ such as the sphereof-influence diplomacy. Matsuoka thought that theliberal consensus of the post-WWI era was crumbling
and that nations were re-forming their own politicaland economic ‘blocks’ and Japan could not be leftout. The third chapter is centred upon the whirlwindof private and public imaginative efforts that tried
to define the Sphere. Most interesting, this section
investigates how Japanese fortunes in the war had adirect impact on how the Sphere was constructed.
With Chapter 4 we enter the second part of thebook and thus the focus progressively shifts away from
Tokyo and towards the colonial elites of the Philippines
Latest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

and Burma. In this chapter, Yellen unravels theincorporation of the two colonies within the broader
Japanese empire, asking crucial questions about why
did these ‘patriotic collaborators’, as Yellen defines
them, actually collaborated with Japan and what were
their real goals?
Chapter 5 analyses the late turn of the Japanese
empire towards a vocabulary of liberal internationalism
aimed at rallying supporters in Asia while seeking
peace negotiation with the Allies. Perhaps more
importantly, this chapter also focuses upon the‘contested’ nature of the Sphere and how nationalist
leaders in the colonial periphery re-appropriated thisrhetoric of liberal internationalism to further theirgoals of national independence. The final chapter
explores the consequences of the previous chapter
by looking into the ‘nominal independence’ grantedby the Japanese to the Philippines and Burma. Local
leaders in fact sought to build up their nation-making
experience and to use the Japanese to form crucial
institutions that were deemed fundamental for the
future independence of these countries.
It could be argued that the limit of Yellen’s book isthat in its portrayal of politicians and nationalist leaders,a good part of the gruesome and brutal details of theJapanese imperial expansion in South East Asia are left
unexplored. Although the author recognises this earlyin the book, it could have helped to incorporate moredecisively into the narrative how Japanese brutality
across Asia influenced the re-conceptualisation of theSphere from the colonial periphery. Furthermore, wecannot but notice that to focus on the colonial elites ofjust the Philippines and Burma has somehow limited
the scope of the study, which, arguably can be muchbroader. In the vast and complicated structure of
the Japanese empire, composed by ‘new imperialist’
polities (Manchukuo, the Dutch East Indies, Burmaand the Philippines among the many) and morecanonical ‘old imperialist’ regimes (Korea and Taiwan),
Yellen side-lines other political groups that were alsopart of the Japanese empire such as Azad Hind, theProvisional Government of Free India formed in exile
with Japanese support.[2] The experience of IndoJapanese anti-colonialism and the contributions ofIndian ‘patriotic collaborators’, such as Rash BehariBose, Mohan Singh and the more notorious Subhas
Chandra Bose, could be also analysed to test Yellen’sargument and to expand its scope to the totality ofJapan’s complex wartime experience.[3]Having said that, the GEACP Sphere is surely awell-argued and excellently structured book that will5

soon become a core reading for the history of modern
Japan. The book provides a detailed introduction to
the historiography of the Sphere and of the Japanese
empire from both the Japanese and the anglophone
perspectives. Furthermore, students will also benefit
from the extensive bibliography gathering primaryand secondary sources, both printed and online, from
more than six different countries, truly making thisbook an example of meticulous transnational research.
Perhaps more crucially, Yellen’s argument
restores the agency of those key actors from thecolonial periphery that have often been silenced dueto the presence of grand narratives too focused on theevents of the ‘great men’ in Tokyo, but also silenced
by the stigma of wartime collaborationism that still
haunts many countries. By proposing a detailed andvaried array of perspectives, Yellen thus decentralises
the history of the Japanese empire and shifts theattention upon the interconnectedness of centre andperiphery. Although we had assumed that the power

The Memory Policeby Ogawa Yoko
translated by Stephen Snyder
Harvill Secker (2019)
ISBN-13: 978-1846559495
Review by Jill Dobson
The original title of Ogawa Yoko’s latest novel tobe translated into English is Hisoyaka na kessho (密やかな結晶), literally rendered in the French title,
Cristallisation secrète. The Orwellian English title
creates expectations that this will be a political novel,
whereas in fact it is something far more elusive andsubtle. First published in 1994, The Memory Police
is now offered in translation by Stephen Snyder, theseventh of Ogawa’s novels and short story collections
to appear in English. This is only a fraction of her full
playlist: since When a Butterfly is Broken (Agehachōga kowareru toki, 揚羽蝶が壊れる時), which took the
Kaien Prize in 1988, Ogawa has published a book or
two almost every year and won a range of major literary
awards, including the Akutagawa in 1990, confirming
her place in the pantheon of contemporary J-lit.
Anglophones were introduced to Ogawa by ashort story published in the New Yorker in 2004. In
what Snyder refers to as his ongoing ‘ethnography’of the publishing industry, particularly the selection
and commodification of non-Anglophone writers intranslation, he describes the ‘discovery of’ Murakami
6unbalance between the two necessarily translated into
Japanese hegemony, Yellen convincingly shows that
there was much more going on under the surface and‘secondary’ characters often held much more power
than we realised.
Notes[1] For just a brief list of the many books on the topic
see www.bookscrolling.com/the-best-books-aboutjapan-the-pacific-war-during-ww2/.
[2] Peters, Aaron (2019). “Comparisons and Deflections:Indian Nationalists in the Political Economy of JapaneseImperialism, 1931-1938.”, Cross-Currents: East AsianHistory and Culture Review, 32: 97–128.
[3] For the controversy of Subhas Chandra Bose’s
grave in Tokyo see https://economictimes.indiatimes.
com/news/politics-and-nation/india-paid-for-upkeepof-netaji-subhas-chandra-boses-mortal-remains-injapan/articleshow/50719763.cms.§

Haruki by then New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb in theearly 1990s as the first step in Murakami’s apotheosis
as an international phenomenon. Snyder mentions
the pressure on J-E literary translators to reveal ‘thenext Murakami’ and suggests that Gottlieb’s successor,
Deborah Treisman, ‘discovered’ Ogawa to develop‘her own global Japanese New Yorker writer’.[1] A
seemingly odd choice: as a writer, Ogawa is nothing
like Murakami. She does not write about apathetic (yetirresistible to women) 30-something men and jazz bars,
and there is nothing in Ogawa’s work that suggests
she aspires to the global cultural ‘cool’ embodied by
Murakami. Compared to Murakami’s signature urban
magical-realism, Ogawa’s world is dark and surreal,
sometimes sexually explicit and violent (The Hotel Iris).
‘Quirky’ suggests levity, and there is none of that in The
Memory Police.
The novel takes place on an unnamed island
where, for the past 15 years, things have regularly
disappeared, not just physically but from memory. Thisdisappearance is enforced by the Memory Police, theonly manifestation of authority. The narrator, a writer,
also unnamed, is told by her artist mother as a child that‘things go on disappearing, one by one’, but is reassured
that it ‘doesn’t hurt’: ‘One morning you’ll simply wakeup and it will be over, before you’ve even realised ...
you’ll feel that something has changed from the night
before, and you’ll know you have lost something, thatsomething has disappeared from the island’ (p. 3). The
Issue 84 Volume 14 Number 6 (December 2019)

islanders simply acquiesce to these disappearances,quickly forgetting. When birds are ‘disappeared’ atthe beginning of the novel, the narrator notices a‘small brown creature’ flying overhead, which almost
triggers a memory of her father, an ornithologist, butinstead she comes up against a mental void: ‘I realisedthat everything I knew about [these creatures] had
disappeared from inside me: my memories of them,
my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word
“bird” – everything’ (p. 10). Her attempts to hold onto
her fleeting memories are futile, her mind wiped likea hard drive attacked by a malignant computer virus.
In the market that afternoon, she sees people freeing
their pet birds from cages, dazed but compliant. It is
impossible to grieve for what cannot be remembered,and the islanders soon get on with their increasingly
minimised lives.
There are a few exceptions, however: people
whose memories persist, among them the narrator’smother, who is already dead when the novel opens, andthe narrator’s editor, known only as R. As more people
are taken away by the Memory Police, the narrator
decides to hide R., whose memories put him in danger.
(Ogawa has referred in interviews to her childhood
fascination with the diary of Anne Frank and the
preparation to make the hidden cupboard habitable
is described in some detail.) In return for being hidden,
he attempts to restore her memories by showing her
items that have already been ‘disappeared’—a ferryticket, a music box—and sharing his own memories,
but even the discovery of old objects hidden by thewriter’s mother inside her sculptures fail to summon
anything more than a dim recall: ‘The swamp of mymemory was shallow and still’ (p. 230).
Parallel to the main narrative is the protagonist’s
own novel-in-progress, which begins as a romance
between a female typing student, who attends classes
in the bell-tower of a church, and her typing teacher.
One day, her typewriter breaks, and her teacher invites
her up to the top room, behind the clock face, where
he carries out repairs. She finds she is unable to speak;her voice is now trapped inside her broken machine
and the student herself is trapped inside the belltower.
When novels disappear, thus depriving the writerof her livelihood, she gets a job in a spice shop. R. takes
her manuscript into safekeeping in the secret roomand encourages her to continue, but she can barely
manage to write the letters of the alphabet. Struggling,
she manages to finish her novel for R’s sake. Treatedlike a doll by her teacher, stripped and washed andLatest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

dressed up in bizarre outfits, the imprisoned student
becomes so helpless that she is unable to cry out whenanother student comes knocking on the door. Her
captor mocks her: ‘You’ve already been absorbed into
this room.’ When he lures another young woman up
to the bell tower, with another broken typewriter, thestudent is completely erased, prefiguring the writer’s
own erasure.
Throughout the book, other things disappear—roses, photographs, fruit—but there is no protest,
no questioning, and no explanation of what power
the Memory Police represent. Since maps have‘disappeared’, nobody knows the full extent of theisland or what lies beyond. There is mention of a
successful escape from the island by boat, even thoughboats ‘disappeared’ years ago; someone had retained
a memory of boats and was able to repair and sail one(p. 114). Hearing about this escape, the narrator cannot
quite imagine how these people crossed the water, so
completely has the concept of a boat been expunged
from her mind. Otherwise, the islanders submit to theirfate, even as, towards the end, they start to disappear
themselves, body part by body part.
Like the protagonist of her novel, the writer
becomes increasingly disembodied, despite R.’s
attempts to revive the disappeared parts of her bodyas well as her memory: ‘One after another, he tossed
pebbles into the swamp of my mind, but instead ofcoming to rest on the bottom, they continued todrift deeper and deeper down, without end’ (p. 270).
Eventually, her body becomes merely one of the‘disappeared’ objects hoarded in R.’s secret room. He isleft with her memory, denied the solace of forgetting.
Read as a political allegory, the novel is frustrating.
It demands a more subtle approach. As a disturbing
fable about the importance of memory, which forms
us, and the tragedy of its loss, and how those who insist
on remembering—or who are unable to forget—in
the face of general amnesia become outcasts, thenovel has a melancholy power. Admirers of Ogawa’s
work will find much to like in this latest translation.
More literal readers may simply find it baffling andbleak.
Notes[1] Snyder, Stephen(2016). “Insistence and Resistance:
Murakami and Mizumura in Translation”, New England
Review, Vol. 37, No. 4.§

7

The Japanese Larder
by Luiz Hara
Jacqui Small (2019)
ISBN-13: 978-1911127628
Review by Laura Richardson
The Japanese Larder: Bringing Japanese Ingredients intoYour Everyday Cooking is the second cookbook by Londonbased Le Cordon-Bleu trained chef and founder of The
London Foodie blog, Luiz Hara. Hara specialises not only inJapanese cooking but also in the so-called “Nikkei cuisine”,
a hybrid of Japanese and Peruvian cooking created by
Japanese migrants to South America in around the 1900’s.
Peru has the second highest population of Japanese
residents in South America, second only to Brazil, and theimpact the community has had can be felt all over. The
influence on food in particular is hugely significant andsince the arrival of the Japanese and the introduction of
Nikkei cuisine, fish has become a staple ingredient in the
Peruvian diet. Beyond South America, the popularity of
Nikkei Cuisine is now flourishing throughout Europe (onevery good example of this is Indo Kitchen in Stockholm).
Alongside Nikkei cuisine, the growth in popularity ofJapanese food in general does not appear to be slowing
down. What were once little known ingredients, things suchas miso, tofu, mirin and rice vinegar, can now be spottedon the shelves of many of our well known supermarkets.
So, it’s no wonder that so many of us, having picked up
something to use in a specific recipe, find barely usedbottles and packets of ingredients sitting in the back of ourstore cupboard months later with no idea of what to dowith them next. The Japanese Larder can help with that as
it goes beyond being simply a recipe book and rather is an
informative introduction to a wide and varied range of thoseJapanese ingredients. It is designed to enlighten budding
home cooks on the many and sometimes unexpected ways
in which traditional Japanese ingredients can be used.
The Japanese Larder is divided into seven chapters.
Chapter one begins with key Japanese seasonings: soy
sauce, miso, dashi broth, sake, mirin and rice vinegar. This
comprehensive introduction helps to provide the reader
with a deeper understanding of each ingredient, allowing
them to go on to try and recreate some of the recipesfeatured throughout the remainder of the chapter. Recipes
like Mackerel in Soy and Balsamic Glaze (using soy sauce) and
Slow-Braised Pork Belly (using miso and sake). Through thefollowing chapters we are introduced to Ferments, Spices andCondiments, Rice, Noodles and Tofu, Fruit and Vegetables,
Beverages and finally Sauces and Marinades. Each chapter
features recipes using the ingredients detailed, a break fromthe usual ‘starter, main, dessert’ format that we may be used
to seeing.
Alongside relatively well known dishes like the ever
popular katsu curry and traditional recipes like Oyakodon(simmered chicken and egg over rice, literally translated as“parent and child donburi”), Buta no Kakuni (braised pork
belly) or Soboro Gohan (minced chicken and egg on rice),
Hara introduces the reader to his own creative recipes inwhich he cleverly combines Japanese ingredients withmore familiar flavours like parmesan cheese in his Udon
Noodles, Truffle Butter and Parmesan, Marmite Chicken andSalmon cured with maple syrup. These combinations may
seem surprising to some but this creative approach is sureto encourage the reader to be more experimental with theircooking. The result is recipes that will appeal not only toconnoisseurs of Japanese food who are seeking something
new but also to anyone who has never tried Japanese food
before and perhaps for one reason or another were a little
afraid to do so.
The Japanese Larder also explores Japanese foodtraditions, one example of this being tsukemono (Japanesepreserved vegetables), a staple in the Japanese diet usuallyeaten as a side dish. Recently fermented foods havebecome a huge phenomenon with health food specialists
in the West too. It is said that increasing our intake of the
probiotics contained in ferments improves our gut health,which in turn is believed to improve both our mental as well
as physical health. This makes tsukemono and fermented
food an apt addition to the book.
Something that certainly sets The Japanese Larderapart from other Japanese cookbooks is Hara’s instructions
for making your own ingredients like tofu and udon noodles.
This is perhaps not something that many readers will haveconsidered trying before. Accompanied by step by step
photographs, the instructions are easy to follow, surprisingly
simple, and may even prove to be more cost effective thanbuying premade packaged items. Intentionally or not, thisencouragement to create more of what we are eating fromscratch is another trend that Hara has tapped into.
The book itself is striking with its silk fabric binding andis filled with beautifully shot photographs complementing
every recipe. It is then finished off nicely with snapshots
taken around Japan, offering us a little glimpse into
Hara’s travels. The star of the front cover is the Onigirazu.
A particularly fun recipe to try, Onigirazu can only bedescribed as a cross between an Onigiri (Japanese rice ball)and a sandwich. It is made by layering a sheet of rice with anumber of fillings, like avocado, salmon, egg or even slightly
more unconventional options like cheese and pickle. This isthen topped with another layer of rice and wrapped tightly
in nori (seaweed) creating a sandwich effect.
The Japanese Larder helps to expel the myth thatJapanese food is complicated to make and brings a range of
new and exciting dishes to your dining table. As well as therecipes on offer, I am sure it will also inspire readers to go on
to try and create their own dishes, combining ingredients
they may have never considered using before.§