In the Miso Soup has been called many things, most of them not true. You’ll hear it called, over and over, “The Japanese [Something]”. The Japanese Silence of the Lambs. The Japanese American Psycho (hey, I can grok it). Et cetera. None hit really close to the truth, which is fitting, because the novel’s about looking the other way, and deliberately missing the point.
The story isn’t much. It’s barely even a story. Kenji is a sex tourism guide for thrill-seeking gaijin, and he ends up working for a genuinely odd duck called Frank, an American who claims to be missing a section of his brain, and who might just be the serial killer stalking Shinjuku. Kenji and the rest of the story’s characters (including his girlfriend Jun) struggle to be two dimensional, and mostly exist as sounding boards and emotional foils for Frank, who carries the bulk of the story.
Frank’s a kind of prism through which we see the various contradictory aspects of Japanese society. Prudish, conservative…but you’d never see groups of schoolgirls selling sex to middle aged men in the United States. The idea that Japan embodies “too much, yet too little” has been done before, but Murakami bulldozes it into your head. Frank’s behavior seems abhorrent, but it doesn’t seem implausible that he’d go to Japan to commit these acts, rather than another country. Frank and Japan seem to fit together, in a weird way.
In the Miso Soup plays pretty loose ball with conventions on how to structure a novel. The big climax hits exactly halfway through, and much of the rest of novel is spent in incessant talkiness. Western gore porn novels make a mess and then fade to black. This novel deigns to show the emotional clean-up process afterwards, as well. There’s long periods of didacticism: at a certain point comparisons to Sade seem apt, as Murakami virtually forgets he’s telling a story and just directly reads you the riot act on some philosophical ideas for a page or two.
But the ideas are all compelling and heartfelt ones. Like the more famous Murakami, sometimes you can’t discern what his exact point is, but you can tell there always is one.
Props are due to translator Ralph F. McCarthy, who avoids the tin-eared “upmarket Babelfish” tone Japanese to English novels can sometimes have, and makes the prose eerie, uneasy, and alive. In his hands, Murakami’s version Shinjuku becomes a neon-lit abattoir that disturbs, unsettles, and most of all, convinces. Sometimes Japanese novels hold English readers at arms length because of the translation. Here, it doesn’t, no matter how much you might wish it so.
It’s not especially similar to any Western novel I can recall reading. At certain points, it’s even hard to tell if you’re having a good time. But if you want a compelling journey through the grease-traps of Japanese society, Murakami’s work is very thick soup indeed.
If you’re part of the crowd that wants nothing more than to resurrect Lovecraft and strap a rocket jetpack to his back, then who better to read than Nick Mamatas, Lovecraft superfan par excellence? It’s hard to forget instances like this comprehensive defense of Lovecraft’s prose, and how HPL’s odd word choices like “cyclopean” are actually the ones that fit the scene. It serves as a reminder to never, ever, argue with a superfan about their topic of interest. They’ll make you look like chopped liver.
The Nickronomicon fuses old and new in a way that feels fresh, yet familiar. The familiarity comes from D.M. Mitchell’s impressive but now fairly obscure The Starry Wisdom, another collection that tried to put Lovecraft and postmodernism on the same page (literally), and which I suspect had somewhat of an influence on these stories. One of the Starry Wisdom writers gets a co-writing credit here, for example.
Nickronomicon has all the gore, tentacles, and trans-dimensional spit-swapping you’d expect, but these things share space with Mamatas’s take on the everyman, which are usually writers, downtrodden beatnik types, or fetishistic Lovecraft enthusiasts. At times things get pretty self-referential, with some stories taking potshots at the Lovecraft fandom itself.
“Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights” is a brief but enticing story-through-a-peephole affair that consists of a series of vague and nearly unreadable communications, apparently between HPL and an amateur press enthusiast. Lots of people have tried to the “what if Lovecraft was really on to something?” approach, but I liked this one for its brevity and subtlety. “And Then, And Then, And Then” is even shorter, and revolves around a developmentally challenged person’s encounter with unknown. Again, it’s weird fiction, but there’s a filter in the way – a filter of modernity that doesn’t destroy the weirdness but colors it, makes it seem different somehow.
There’s a fair amount of humor and jokiness. I liked how Mamatas doesn’t treat Lovecraft’s material as fresh virgin snow, but acknowledges that our culture has been strip mining him for more than fifty years (Cthulhu plush toy dolls, and all the rest). The Lovecraft mythos is now shot through with a fair amount of ridiculousness, and he’s not afraid to poke fun at the excesses of fandom, especially in “Mainevermontnewhampshire”, where we see this encounter between a writer and a fan.
“Hi, it’s me,” said the kid, who was actually wearing a tuxedo. “Remember me, from the Lenore Awards banquet, when you won the lifetime achievement award? I wore what I was wearing then in case you came, so you’d remember me.” “You’re my biggest fan,” Sam said. “ … Jeremy?” That was a safe guess. Everyone under the age of thirty seemed to be named Jeremy these days.Jeremy beamed. “You do remember me! I’m so glad I was able to make it. I spent years submitting stories, but finally, one got published. Do you read Dark Somethings, Mister Bey?” It was a photocopied zine that Sam received in the mail every eighteen months or so. He found that the paper stock was good for rolling joints, so appreciated the free subscription.
Ultimately, Nickronomicon rests upon strong and original stories. It’s not the most creative take on Lovecraft, or the best written, but it could end up being one of the most enduring…perhaps because its written by a superfan.
One of the books you’ve read even if you haven’t, because it’s influenced everything. A story about a vampire written before Dracula, Carmilla is set in a castle in Austria, right next door to Hungary, where the word vampire originates in the form of vampir. Hungary also furnished us with a person who was close to a real life vampire: Erzebet Bathory, who legends said bathed in the blood of virgins. Bathory had no immortality, but she nonetheless partook in the vampire contract: great power can be yours, but first you must be willing to feed on blood.
But these ideas are far away from Carmilla, which is whimsical, even a bit romantic in places. Le Fanu’s gothic horror is comforting and cossetting, full of soft corners and velvet edges. Laura, daughter of an English serviceman, strikes strikes up a friendship with an odd girl called Carmilla, who seemingly never ages, and becomes filled with rage when she hears a Christian hymn.
The romantic elements are between two female characters, and although Le Fanu writes for a 19th century audience, he obviously means to imply a sexual relationship. I’m reminded of how Hollywood’s Golden Age took place during the Hays censorship code, and it led to a lot of subtle and clever movies – with directors having to suggest or hint at things rather than say them out loud.
Modern readers will probably find Carmilla to be a bit dated. The conflict and resolution is speedily handled, propelled along by a few chance meetings that could be called very convenient for the plot. When the dust settles, it seems like it was all over much too easily.
Even worse, Carmilla is curiously shallow and unevocative. A vampire story needs an atmosphere. It needs to evoke the chilliness of the Alpine range, or the loneliness of the Carpathian forests, or the stately derelict of a crumbling castle. Carmilla is a “who? whom?” kind of story, driven almost entirely by character interactions, and it lacks the strong anchor of a convincing environment. The world Carmilla evokes is as thin as the paper it’s printed on.
Carmilla is a good example of a 19th century gothic story, but it’s probably more interesting for what it inspired than what it is. Soaring mountain peaks sit atop tons of necessary but unspectacular rock and gravel, and it’s often the same with books. Carmilla wasn’t state of the art even when it came out – The Monk by Matthew Lewis was written 75 years earlier, and is far stronger in most respects.
Le Fanu will probably never escape Carmilla’s shadow, although he published many other short stories and novellas. It’s probably best remembered as a literary version of Blade Runner: a fairly average film that changed everything.
