Friendship for Grown-Ups A Review

By Nao-cola Yamazaki

Translated by Polly Barton 

“One day, there was light. The light hit the rock. The rock was filled with life, [.]”

An immensely delightful read, Friendships for Grown-ups is a collection of three very short stories that are interlinked with one another. What got my attention was Strangers Press’ artistic format of this chapbook, so beautifully compiled, and of course Yamazaki’s graceful and delicate writing. Three stories that start with an amusing almost comical story called A Genealogy, which is about a rock’s evolution into finally becoming this woman called Kandagawa. An inanimate object such as a simple rock gives -through an evolutionary process – birth to an animate being, a woman whose name is Kandagawa, and who is the protagonist of the second story. I loved the part how as a human Kandagawa goes to the bath house and when she stretches her legs, she remembers how in the past she used to be a fish.

“When she looked at the painted nails of her feet that were sticking out of the bathwater, she though they looked like fins.”

The second and third story focuses on relationships. In The Untouched Apartment,
Kandagawa is having a dream about her previous apartment that she’d shared with her ex-boyfriend Mano. She then gets a call from him out of the blue, and together they set off to see their old apartment. Walking together in their old neighbourhood and visiting their university and restaurant, Kandagawa realises that she no longer is the person she used to be when she was with Mano. Like the coelacanth climbing out of the water onto land in the first story, she has evolved, moved on and become someone else.

“It was a white pebble, about the size of a peanut. She’d chosen it because it had looked somehow pure. She held it under the fluorescent light, and stared at it. It still had traces of soil in it. Unsure whether stones are combustible or non-combustible, she hesitated for a while. Then she threw it in with the non-combustible rubbish."

In the final story Lose Your Private Life, which is the longest out of the three, Terumi Yano who is Kandagawa’s friend, is a writer under the pen name Waterumi. She falls in love with Matsumoto a musical composer but her feelings remain unrequited. This story really struck a chord because it is about defining oneself through the eyes of others. Yano is heartbroken when she realises that Matsumoto only loves her novels and not her as a person. Yano struggles with the separation between the art and artist initially believing that she is separate from all of the novels she’s written, just a girl in love with a boy. Like the first story, Yano too through a difficult process realises that her raison d’etre is her writing and that the art and artist are one, and as the title suggests Yano finds a way to lose her private self, merging with her art.

“I fall in love because I think that unless I fall in love I won’t be able to write properly, but the things I write are a thousand times more attractive than I myself am, so nobody ever likes me as a person, but I’m going to give my life up to writing, so it doesn’t matter.”

I resonated a lot with the second and third stories in a way that it sat so close to me in its reflections. That we are continuously evolving through different phases of our lives, and yet how that change is the only constant is something that we all ponder upon from time to time. It is when you see it in a body writing, it strikes a major chord. Yamazaki’s fine story telling in Polly Barton’s brilliant translation is a dedication to that very aspect of the slippage of time without the realisation of which we have become someone else entirely.

From a distance even dust motes twinkle deluding the human eye - Review of Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni

“I try to be careful, but sometimes I fall in love.” Kaori Ekuni in her afterword of the novel.

Mutuski, a gay doctor bordering on OCD is married to Shoko a highly strung, slightly alcoholic woman. Shoko is aware that Mutsuki is gay when their marriage is arranged but she gives her consent readily. She strongly agrees that Mutsuki continues his relationship with his lover Kon, always coaxing him to tell her stories about Kon and their time together. When Mutsuki insists that Shoko should have a boyfriend, she vehemently denies. She doesn't warm up to the idea about having a boyfriend outside her marriage, but she is alright with her husband having a lover outside the marriage.
Sounds bizarre right? Well I thought so too in the beginning, and it took me a while to get into the story. However, it was much later I realised that I had actually fallen in love with this story and its eccentric female character. Shoko is unstable, fiery and drinks more than one should. She feels she’s culpable in fooling Mutsuki into the marriage and cannot stand his kindness. But the truth  is, she is deeply in love with her husband and with the way he is with Kon, knowing that their relationship goes way back to high school days. She desperately wants to have a part of what Mutsuki and Kon have. She wants to be accepted by the two of them and when she cannot get that through to Mutsuki, she retaliates through volatile outbursts and depressive behaviour.
Twinkle Twinkle is not your ordinary story and the simplistic writing does delude you to the point that it may sometimes even bore you in the beginning but if you have the patience, this gem of a story gets to you even before you realise it. It’s a late bloomer appearing cold and stiff in the beginning to the point of frustrating the reader, but slowly unfolds into this heart-warming story of love and a complete understanding of the other half. It also made me rethink about romantic love and its inevitable tie with physical consummation.
“The feeling I had that I was embracing water came not from the loneliness of a sexless marriage, but from the complex we both had about it – the suffocating need to be sensitive to the other’s feelings the whole time.”
Twinkle Twinkle does address the frustrations of societal pressures of how men and women are supposed to conform to their stereotypical roles of man and wife, but the author’s main intent is to tell a love story between unlikely people, and that, love is not something restricted to sexual preferences or the number of people. Love can bloom between any two or even three very different people.
The author mentions in her afterword that one of the chapters “Sleepers and the One that Watcheth” is based on a painting by Simeon Solomon. I looked it up and the author’s intention suddenly became clear to me.
I must add here that only Japanese writers can write about a topic so sensitive and so fragile with such serenity.  I also must give credit to Emi Shimikawa for her brilliant translation. 5 out of 5 stars from me.