Can we have a moment of silence for all the fairytales disemboweled by their authors’ insistence that they have a moral message?

The Narnia stories are some of the best/worst out there. Ambivalent? Yes/no. Sometimes, CS Lewis’s imagination takes flight, and Narnia becomes a place of haunted splendor. Other times, Narnia is shallow and facile, with characters in constant danger of puncturing their paper-thin world with an errant swordpoint. CS Lewis keeps using them as a delivery vehicle for his moral views. His fairytale world seems fabricated and unconvincing when you realise that the fauns and centaurs are there to preach the views of a 20th century English professor.

Why does Edmund Pevensie have to die?

What crime has he committed? The word “traitor” is bandied about…who did he betray? He was not a citizen of Narnia. He swore no oath of fealty to Aslan. From his perspective, he met a nice lady who promised to do nice things for his family, so he’s throwing his lot in with her. Sounds fair. Is his crime that he was gullible, easily mislead? For fuck’s sake, he’s a young boy, talking to the embodiment of the devil. She could probably convince Henry Kissinger to eat the turkish delight.

Roger Ebert once said “You can’t have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense.” And it’s hard to view Edmund as a bad person when he’s only doing the things you and I would do, in his place.

Yes, he meets some other characters who speak ill of the witch, but who doesn’t spread rumours about their enemy during a war? What reason does he have to believe the beavers’ and Tumnus’s version of events, instead of Maugrim’s and the dwarf’s?

It gets worse when you consider that the witch’s turkish delight is described as enchanted: you will always want to eat more of it. All of Edmund’s decisions after meeting the witch were made with highly impaired judgement. How does it make sense to treat him as a bad guy, either from the reader’s point of view or from Aslan’s?

CS Lewis is trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents here, and it’s a problem he never manages to solve. You can actually see the exact moment when he gives up, and just declares ex cathedra that Edmund knew he was joining the side of evil.

“She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel. ”

This is shitty writing, and you can almost hear pipes and water mains burst inside the story. You can’t just declare by fiat “this character is evil”, you have to let their actions earn it. Edmund’s don’t. He’s a villain with no villainous acts, a guy on a wanted poster with his crimes reading “he was mean to his sister.”

But the Chronicles of Narnia are still great books, or at least fun books. You just have to indulge CS Lewis a bit. They’re like Saturday morning cartoons where every now and then the super hero jabs a finger at you through the screen and delivers a PSA about saying no to drugs and staying in school. Although in Narnia’s case it’s often more like saying no to school and staying in drugs.

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.

Here’s West Hunter with an example of how following long inductive chains can cause you to arrive at wrong conclusions that perhaps end in Iraq getting buried in a ten-foot-deep layer of white phosphorus.

I would like to supply a similar case.

In 1989, a Missouri-class battleship called the USS Iowa was test-firing its 16-inch guns. Something went wrong. As explosive charges were loaded into the breech of gun turret number two, they suddenly detonated, sending the explosion back into the turret crew. Forty-seven servicemen died in a wash of fire.

How did it happen? The gun barrel in question was cold. No cold weapon had ever caused a spontaneous explosion in all of recorded maritime history. Navy investigators found traces of brake fluid, calcium hypochlorite, and steel wool inside the barrel. The remains of a sabotage device?

The story developed an interesting Brokeback Mountain-esque winkle when it was revealed that Clayton Hartwig, captain of the centre gun, had been in a covert relationship with a sailor in the turret crew. What’s more, he’d been in charge of the loading operation. Was this an act of revenge from a jilted lover? Both men had died in the explosion.

Elaborate theories of sabotage and murder-suicide looked right past the real reason for the explosion. Additional bags of explosives called “trim bags” are normally inserted into the main charge to correct for weight variations. Unlike the explosives in the main charge, the “trim bags” are not tightly packed, making them susceptible to the shock of the gun’s power-driven rammer. The Iowa, incidentally, had a rammer that forced the bagged explosives into the breech 0.6 meters further than regulation guidelines, and with greater force. The explosive charges remain stable under heavy pressure, but the loosely-packed trim bags were very unstable under those conditions.

A second technical inquiry established that the chemical remains in the gun barrel were most likely from a mixture of cleaning fluid, lubricants, and seawater. No reason to suspect conscious sabotage.

Finally, a test rig was built that simulated the Iowa’s 16-inch cannon, as well as the over-ramming. It was done five times, ten times, fifteen times, but nothing happened.

The testers persisted. As Nassim Taleb would point out fifteen years later, you have to make outliers part of your plan. Even if cold explosions almost never happen, you cannot escape the awful tyranny of that “almost”.

On the 18th test, the charge exploded inside the cold barrel, blowing the test rig apart.