Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe

Published in Japan in 2009; published in translation by Grove Atlantic on October 6, 2015

Most of Death by Water is comprised of conversations among artistic intellectuals. Reading it is like pulling a sled up a snow-covered hill, exalting at reaching the top, enjoying the speedy ride down the other side, wandering for a while, and then trudging up the next hill. There are times when the novel is fun and times when it is rewarding, but most of it is tough sledding.

At the novel’s center is the novelist Kogito Choko, the alter ego of Kenzaburo Oe, but Choko is the least intellectual (or perhaps the least chatty) of the characters. His sister and other admirers spend most of their time dissecting Choko’s work or, more often, his life. My impression was that the characters love hearing themselves talk, even when they don’t have much to say -- which I suppose makes the characters realistic, if not particularly interesting.

The novel begins with Choko’s preparation to write the story of his father’s drowning. Since Choko cannot rely on his own memory, which he has either suppressed or is unable to distinguish from his dreams, he needs access to a red leather trunk that, he believes, contains the story of his father’s life. His mother has instructed Choko’s sister Asa to give Choko the trunk ten years after his mother’s death. His mother lives to the age of 95, making Choko a senior citizen before he can claim the trunk. Returning to his childhood home to do so, he consents to being interviewed by The Caveman Group, an acting troupe that wants to incorporate the interviews into stage adaptations of Choko’s work. That setup enables many of the conversations with Choko that drive the novel.

The core of the story is promising. Choko plans to write about his father through the prism of the “Death by Water” section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” As Choko discusses his past and his writing with members of The Caveman Group, we learn about Choko as both a person and an artist. We also learn about the process of making art from the perspective of a craftsman who uses art to reflect himself.

The best segments of Death by Water involve Choko’s attempt to understand his recurring dream about his father’s disappearance in a small boat. According to Asa, Choko’s dim memories of his father and of the flood in which he drowned have been conflated with Choko’s childhood fantasies, which include an imaginary friend named Kogii who is young Choko’s exact duplicate. Choko also wants to view his father as brave and heroic, although he portrayed his father in quite a different way in one of his novels. Choko is unprepared for the reality of his father’s political extremism -- a reality from which Choko’s mother wanted to shelter him. Unfortunately, anticipation of learning the truth about Choko’s father’s death builds and then wanes as the story gets sidetracked by endless conversations concerning the details of Choko’s life, including his inability to make a connection with his developmentally disabled son.

I had difficulty developing the same keen interest in Choko's life that the characters have. No incident in Choko's life and no sentence in his writing seems too trivial to dissect at length. I also had difficulty caring about the acting troupe’s artistic achievements, which mainly consist of having audience members throw stuffed dogs at actors who are performing dramatic readings of Choko’s work.

Key themes in Death by Water include folklore and myth in world and Japanese history, the nationalist movement in post-World War II Japan, the relationship between aging and attachment to (or detachment from) an era, and whether an aging writer (or any other artist) whose best works are thought to be behind him might still be capable of producing something memorable. Rebirth might be the most important theme, as explored through the discussions of folklore and of Japan and as applied to the life of Choko. At least to me, those themes are more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.

The novel might be more meaningful to someone with greater interest in Japan’s uneven transition from “traditional/imperial” to “modern/democratic.” It may be more enjoyable to someone who has more patience than I possess. It is a serious novel, to be sure, but I found it to be more self-important than elevating. If Oe wonders why Japanese readers are turning to modern writers instead of, well, to novels like this one, perhaps it is because they do not want to undertake all the uphill climbs that Oe, despite his sincerity and perceptive analysis of modern Japan, forces them to endure.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Crimson Shore by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on November 10, 2015

New York has been depressingly free of serial murders, but a stolen wine collection in New England gets Pendergast’s attention -- or, rather, the opportunity to earn a rare bottle of wine as a fee gets his investigative juices flowing. Of course, the investigation quickly reveals a more serious crime, one that inspires allusions to Poe. And of course, murders and mutilated corpses soon follow, giving Pendergast the chance to probe the kind of weirdness he relishes.

Constance Greene plays Watson to Pendergast’s Sherlock. I’m not sure what Constance sees in Pendergast (perhaps she admires his ability to move “like a snake” with “feline grace,” “more nimble than any bullfighter,” and with the “uncanny ability to move without sound”), but her burgeoning desire for him plays a key role in the story.

Also playing a role is the dark history of Massachusetts. Shipwrecks, economic downturns in the whaling industry, troubled race relations, and the Salem witch trials are among the historical tidbits that contribute to the plot. Local legends of witchcraft and ghosts of sailors lost at sea add a supernatural element that is customary in Pendergast novels.

Pendergast’s investigation introduces him to several residents in a small New England town. Those characters are crafted with the authors’ usual deft touch. As always, the story moves at a good pace, occasionally enlivened by fights and other action scenes.

Pendergast is a pretentious sun-of-a-gun and therefore not always the most likable of protagonists, but in Crimson Shore his pretensions are less overbearing than usual. I always like the prose and the plot in these novels more than I like Pendergast, but touches of humor soften his disagreeable nature during the novel’s first half.

Pendergast takes advantage of his ability to see into the past, a superpower disguised as meditation that has always seemed a little odd in these novels, although it is certainly a convenient way to solve crime. Shouldn’t Pendergast’s Sherlockian deductive ability be enough to carry the plot?

The story seems to reach a conclusion with nearly a third of the book remaining. At that point it branches off in a new and, I thought, less satisfying direction. That was a bit disappointing to me (it pushed the boundaries of credibility almost as much as Pendergast’s ability to see the past) but other readers may well have a different reaction.

The ending is unresolved and is clearly meant to set up the next novel, which always strikes me as a cheap way to sell more books. On the whole, I liked the first two-thirds of the story and I always enjoy the authors’ prose, but Crimson Shore isn’t one of my favorite entries in the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Bellwether by Connie Willis

Published in 1996

Bellwether is less a science fiction novel than a novelization of Office Space. Not that it matters, because anything Connie Willis writes is worth reading. She uses a light touch to illuminate human nature. The results are not always pretty but they are always funny.

Sandra Foster works for one of those think tanks that suck up as much grant money as they can while urging scientists to develop anything that might turn a profit. Sandra is a "soft" scientist, a statistician who researches fads. Her value to her employer, of course, is that predicting a fad before it becomes a fad is a key to vast wealth. Who wouldn't have wanted to be in on the ground floor of the hula hoop?

Sandra becomes stuck as she ponders the origins of the bob, a hairstyle that was fashionable during the early 1920s. She decides to help another scientist who would like to be studying chaos theory but, in the absence of grant money, is studying information diffusion. He eventually does that by trying to teach the leader of a flock of sheep (known as the bellwether) a simple task to see how that knowledge is transferred to the other sheep. The project is complicated by the fact that sheep are too stupid to learn anything.

The story has a bit of romance and a lot of humor, most of it focused on Flip, a whiny office assistant who is about on the same intellectual level as the sheep. Bellwether does, however, make two serious points. The first comes from Willis' exploration of fads. Every chapter is introduced with a fad, ranging from fashionable colors to dance crazes to chain letters to coonskin caps. The sheep become a metaphor for human behavior, as people follow a fad until it loses it trendiness and then give their loyalty to the next fad that comes along. The serious point, of course, is that independent thinking is a valuable but scarce commodity.

When Bellwether is not discussing fads, it explores the nature of scientific discovery, which leads to the second serious point. Happenstance figures prominently in "eureka" moments (a spore drifted through a window and contaminated a culture, leading to Fleming's discovery of penicillin), although a variety of unexpected factors have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Science is about hard work but inspiration is not so easy to explain. Willis attempts an explanation in Bellwether, and her thoughts (which partially derive from chaos theory) may have some merit.

Serious thinking aside, it would be difficult to read Bellwether without smiling, so you may need to take some breaks to give your smile muscles a rest. This isn't by any means Willis' best novel, but her second-string novels are better than the best efforts of most writers.

RECOMMENDED

The Hell Bent Kid by Charles O. Locke

First published in 1957; published digitally by Open Road Media on July 7, 2015

The Western Writers of America put The Hell Bent Kid on its list of the 25 best westerns ever written. I’m not sure whether I’ve read 25 westerns in my entire life, so I’m in no position to judge. The Ox-Bow Incident and Pale Horse, Pale Rider remain my favorites, but The Hell Bent Kid is a worthy addition to that list. It is a story of what passes for justice in the Old West, but it focuses upon the changes a young man undergoes as he encounters unremitting violence. I suppose it is a kind of coming of age story, but the young man seems destined to see very little of his adulthood.

Tot Lohman, only 18, is released from custody to work on a ranch. Lohman killed Shorty Boyd in self-defense, but he expects the Boyds to seek revenge and he wants to get it over with so he gets the rancher’s permission to leave. He plans to find his father, a former lawman who is now cooking for some cattle rustlers, but encounters obstacles during that quest, most of them involving the Boyds. From conversations Lohman has along the way, we learn quite a bit about his family, although few of his kin are still alive. It is a harsh land Lohman roams.

Lohman isn’t a typical western hero. His mother was a Quaker and Lohman has inherited her nonviolent nature. Still, he lives in a violent world, he has great skill with a rifle, and he isn’t unwilling to defend himself. He is a simple man doing his best to understand a complex life. What he comes to understand haunts him. Lohman is “pulled this way and that” as he comes to terms with his destiny.

Much of the story is told in Lohman’s sparse voice. Some of the story is revealed in letters or statements composed by other characters. The landscape and the hardscrabble lives of the people who populate it are vividly drawn. Horses have more value than people, reputation is more important than reality. Dialog and strong characterizations, like the setting, are the novel’s strengths. The change in Lohman’s personality -- he is more confident but less innocent in the novel’s final chapters -- is convincing.

Westerns are often tales of morality. Justice is usually the dominant theme. The characters in The Hell Bent Kid debate law-and-order, some believing that justice (in the form of vengeance) should be meted out by those who are wronged, others advocating the more civilized belief that nothing is less just than inflicting punishment without a trial. “But it’s a tough country, big and tough” one of the characters observes, and toughness is not the best environment for nurturing morality.

Still, there are good and decent people in the novel, the kind who understand the true meaning of law-and-order, the kind who strive to bring moral order to a big and tough country. Unfortunately, the good and decent are always at risk; the powerful too often prevail. All of those realities of life are encapsulated in this brief, stirring novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Hot Countries by Timothy Hallinan

Published by Soho Crime on October 6, 2015

“We all need friends at times. Doesn’t much matter who they are.” That’s just one of the truths spoken in The Hot Countries, the latest and best of the Poke Rafferty novels. Poke’s friends -- people he might have identified as acquaintances rather than friends before this novel -- are the key to this novel’s success.

Timothy Hallinan writes circles around a number of more popular thriller writers who are just phoning it in. I have never been disappointed by a Hallinan novel. Hallinan’s Junior Bender series is fun, but his Poke Rafferty series probes the human character in greater depth.

In The Hot Countries, Hallinan focuses on aging collateral characters who no longer have a purpose in life and seem incapable of searching for one. Hallinan is a master at writing about people living in emotional pain, people in a state of decline, people who have lost themselves. Fortunately, he balances the darkness with humor and with glimpses of human decency.

Arthur Varney shows up in Bangkok looking for Poke Rafferty. Varney wants something from Poke, maybe a couple of things, both relating to people and events found in The Fear Artist and For the Dead. Like all Poke Rafferty novels, however, The Hot Countries can easily be read as a stand-alone.

One of the strongest characters in The Hot Countries (other than Poke) is an old veteran named Wallace who has been destroyed by love more than war. Seeing Varney takes Wallace into his tortured past, giving Hallinan a chance to tell the veteran’s story. A couple of other strong characters are children, particularly Treasure, a girl who has suffered a violent life, some of which was detailed in earlier novels. She’s a kid who is dedicated to survival, but during the course of the novel, circumstances cause Poke to wonder whether he has misjudged her.

Hallinan has a gift for describing Bangkok, from the fat raindrops to the grim tourists and grizzled expats who choke its streets. He also has a strong grasp of Thai people and culture, of bar girls and the foreign customers who never bother to probe beneath the smiling fantasies that occupy a week or two of their lives. Hallinan’s prose is descriptive, fresh, and engaging, but it’s also honest. He describes Poke (a travel writer) as staring at his laptop “as he tried to find his way to a sentence he believed.” I love Hallinan’s novels because, unlike so many current crime writers, Hallinan always writes sentences I can believe.

Astute observations of human nature combine with escalating tension in a novel that is alternately chilling and moving. The ending couldn’t be better. The Hot Countries is exactly what a thriller should be -- a novel about the triumph of the human spirit that features ordinary people in threatening situations who reveal their strengths and flaws as they strive to overcome adversity. It is the best novel I’ve read by Hallinan. He is now permanently enshrined as one of my favorite contemporary crime writers.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED