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.

Pachinko, A Book Review

                 

                    “History has failed us, but no matter.”

A compelling family saga spanning four generations, Min Jin-Lee’s Pachinko begins in 1910 in Japan occupied Korea, and ends in 1989; the year Lee got the idea for this epic tale. Pachinko opens with the story of Hoonie, the club-footed and cleft-lipped man marrying a fifteen-year-old in Yeongdo a small fishing village in Busan, Korea. It is their daughter Sunja who carries the story forward as she grows up helping her mother in their boarding house. In due time Sunja falls in love with the rich Koh Hansu, an older man who dotes on her and lavishes her with expensive gifts but his affluence comes from dubious quarters. Sunja falls pregnant, but Koh Hansu already has a wife and three girls in Japan - a truth Sunja only learns after she's carrying his child. Luckily for Sunja, Baek Isak a sickly but a compassionate protestant priest offers to give the child a name and a new life in Japan. Sunja follows her husband, a man she barely knows into an inhospitable country, and as they begin their life in Japan together with Yoseb and Kyunghee, Baek Isak’s brother and sister-in-law, a future full of adversity awaits for them but not without a few snatches of happiness.

Undeniably an engaging read, Pachinko is the kind of book that comes by only once in a while. Lee’s eloquent and smooth storytelling keeps the reader thoroughly engrossed. At the heart of it, two resilient women Sunja and Kyunghee, whose indomitable spirit to live with courage and fortitude under adverse circumstances is the kernel of the story. Lee walks us through the history of Korea and Japan through her characters, and she does it with great finesse. What struck me most about this novel was the outrageously inhuman treatment the Koreans received at the hands of the Japanese during the Japanese occupation. One couldn’t even hold on to their names. The advantage laid in being more Japanese and the Koreans in Japan did everything to be Japanese which tore them apart from their countrymen who wouldn’t have them back in Korea. Another thing that struck me about Pachinko was how the male characters with all their complexities, their inadequacies and their failings, highlight the unflinching tenacity of Sunja’s and Kyunghee’s characters, and even Sunja’s mother Yangjin’s character. Lee’s women struggle, suffer irreparable heartbreaks, but they do not get bent out of shape which is the strength of this 531 pages monolithic work of staggering brilliance.

A sweeping journey through the history of adversity between the Koreans and the Japanese during the Japanese occupation, the division of North and South Korea, and it’s repercussions on the proletariat, Pachinko is a heart burner.

As Lee points out, history always fails the low working class readily sacrificed in the strife between two great powers. 

The House by the Graveyard

Up here in the hilly countryside, where the land is restless, the landscape is always shifting.  The house that stood on the hill yesterday seems to have sunken a few inches. The plates within the mounds and hills are constantly shifting and every year during monsoons, the land slips and slides claiming many lives. Up here, the fog shrouds the land in a way that one hardly notices a shift here and a drop there. Up here, the fog casts an ineffaceable gloom under which the living walk in a silent cortege while the ghosts of the past rise and mingle with the milky air.

 For nine-year-old Rega, her tiny house perched on a small plateau overlooking the graveyard is her lifeline. She was born in that house and in all her nine years of life, she has known that she will never leave this place. The two-storeyed ramshackle is small with several tiny rooms allotted to the siblings. The biggest room belongs to their parents, and as they’d have it,  they have a new addition to the family every year. Rega the eldest, has four young brothers and sisters under her and her mother is expecting again. There had been more than four after Rega and two above her who hadn’t survived the unforgiving winter that seeped through cracks on the walls and from under the doors sucking the life out of infants.

The house is derelict and rickety, and at night when the wind blows, it heaves and creaks and moans. The house overlooks a graveyard, stooping like an aged watchman, watching over the lonely departed whose earthly remains are either interred or cremated on the ground below. A vast plain that stinks of rot and death. Haphazard stone blocks mark a grave here and there and whitewashed tombs stand out oddly like scant teeth inside an old mouth.

On a day like this, when the fog breathes through the trees and creeps into every small crevice and crack, the graveyard is obscured behind the thick white pearly churning, covering everything within it and beyond it. On a day like this, when little children are better off sitting at home by the flickering candlelight poring over a book or by the roaring fireside, their jaws hanging low, listening to sinister tales spun by the elders, of days long gone when ghosts outnumbered the living, Rega is out in the woods nearby looking for Pretty, her goat. Her mother had given them each an animal from their small farm to look after, and while her sisters had got three hens each, her youngest brother the rooster, she had Pretty to take care of. Pretty is due to give birth any time and she has wandered off into the overgrowth below the house in the morning with a huge belly jiggling around her. At around late noon when the daylight begins to diminish, her siblings collect the hens and the rooster and put them in their pens. Their mother serves weary men - on their way back from town after selling the days vegetables, dairy products and eggs - who stop by her shop for tea and snacks. They still have a long way to go before they reach their homes further down in the valley, but for now, they sit and enjoy the small respite.

Rega passes the graveyard and enters the woods beyond, looking for Pretty. Her tiny heart trembles a little and it’s not the graveyard she’s frightened of. It’s the tall dark trees that loom over her and whisper over her head as though conspiring against her.  It’s the long winding road that is slowly being swallowed by the dark on the other end that plucks at her nerves. On a day like this, it’s natural for one’s thoughts to wander into dark places inside the head and lift that curtain of what if?

What if something unnatural, something unsightly is waiting behind the trees or at the end of the path?

“Prettyyyyy! Prettyyyyy!” She calls out but the fog rushes in muffling the sound of her voice as she opens her mouth. Rooks fly high above cawing, headed to their nests but other than that, there is a still, compact silence around her and she thinks it strange because the woods are usually never bereft of sound.

“Pretty, where are you? Here girl, come here.” She tries again. Nothing. Heavy silence sits upon her and a voice inside tells her to turn around and run homewards but the thought of the heavily pregnant Pretty tears her heart and Rega knows that she must find her. The wind carries the fog from the hills above and engulfs Rega in its cold wet embrace blinding her and although she is used to the weather and the antics nature plays, she is aware of a presence just a few inches from her.  She is used to imagining ghosts amid the mist hovering in the air, swirling, feetless, but growing up above the graveyard she knows that there are no sinister spirits, only sad lonely ghosts, longing for a glimpse of a world they once were a part of.  She has seen them many times sitting on vestiges of old forgotten graves and she knows that there is nothing frightening about them. But this presence, waiting, watching behind the dense fog is something else. It’s not something that has risen from the dead but from something living, something threatening, something perilous. Rega takes a few steps backwards in the growing darkness when she hears a bleating further down by the bush. 

She sprints towards the direction of the sound and in the middle of a thorny bramble she finds Pretty. She has pushed herself under the overgrowth somehow and has given birth to a fine young calf. Rega tears her way in through the bush, thorns stabbing her, ripping through her hanju and grazing her skin but the pain doesn’t bother her, neither does the danger that darkness brings along. The only thought she has is that mother is going to be happy to see the new-born calf. This means extra income with goat milk and goat cheese and that would please mother very much. The calf would grow up and contribute in its own way. She picks up the slick little body and cradles it between the folds of her chuba, and beckoning Pretty she starts walking towards home. 

As she reaches the landing where she had sensed the presence, Pretty snorts, her entire body becoming rigid. She has sensed it too. Daylight is receding fast and the dense brume swirls and froths, turning darker in shade as the colour of the night blends into it. Pretty’s flanks contract, and breathing heavily, she lets out thick white beams of vapour from her mouth and nose. Suddenly she raises herself on hind legs and sprints towards the direction of the house leaving the calf and Rega behind.

Rega gathers the hem of her chuba in one hand and rushes behind Pretty who has disappeared in the haze. She runs as fast as she could, the tiny kid pressed against her small flat chest. She reaches the graveyard and sprints through it,  looking neither left nor right. Silent graves stare blankly at her and weary old ghosts sitting on the headstones watch her, cheering her on to hurry, like spectators in a race, waving their armless sleeves in the wind. Encouraged by the cheering, she races ahead but something is at her heels, something thick and viscous tangling itself around one of her ankles. She has no time to stop and examine. She must run before it’s too late. Finally, further above, she sees a dull glimmer of a torch burning through the dense murk. She knows she’s close now. Through the accursed fog she can make out the silhouette of the crooked roof and uneven windows glowing yellow from within, glowing with life and with hope, and she knows that she is home any minute.

“Rega!” Her mother is looking down from the window, holding the flaming torch high above her head.

“Quick child! You had us all worried.” Her mother’s voice is a blessing and small bubbles of happiness burst inside her. She is finally home safe and she has a welcoming surprise to share with everybody. She wouldn’t trade this moment for anything in the world even if it meant that she’d have to encounter the stygian danger again, the one that threatened to eat her whole.

The night is dark and the wind savage. The fog presses against the window panes trying to get in but failing.  Her brothers and sisters have all rolled like snails and cashews in the corners of their beds deep in sleep, blankets kicked away. The pale light of the dying embers flickers in the fireplace. A stream of cold wind pushes through the cracks and Rega lies under a thick warm woollen blanket, waiting for sleep to visit her. She listens to her mother’s sonorous breathing behind the thin wall that separates them and smiles. 

The house is old and rickety but it is their safe haven, their respite from the grim world outside. The house holds all of them within its belly, wanting to shield them from savage storms of life. But then, up here, where the fog and the wind and the rain reign, the land shifts and slips quietly and sometimes when the day breaks, a house has disappeared in the night, a family has joined the brood of ghosts in the graveyard down below, and the world moves on, clueless, blind and unstirred by the drudgery of the less fortunate. 

A shadow of a little girl peeking out of a lonely shabby cottage overlooking the graveyard can sometimes be seen by porters and carriers on the way up to town. But they know better. It’s only the shadow from the past.  A trick played by the fog.

My Mister - A Short Story

 I saw him sitting on a low concrete block outside the mall. His head buried between the crooks of his arms and his hands dangling loosely. Slender long fingers like an artist’s or a pianist’s. I had never seen beautiful hands belonging to a man. They were usually either big with knotted fingers or too fleshy. His hands were beautiful, different, and the way he rested his head on his arms stirred an inexplicable feeling within me.

I sat across him, dressed in my regular interview attire and I had just come out of my tenth interview I had been to in the past two weeks. So far, I had faced nothing but rejection. In my twenty-two years of age, I had already faced so much rejection that my hopes of finding a decent job were dwindling. I couldn't study further because I needed to ease the load off my mother’s shoulders back home who ran a small kiosk of homemade snacks. I had to make sure that my younger siblings were well fed.  It had already been five years since my father passed away from a poor heart on a cold December morning. He had only gone out to relieve himself when he had tripped and fallen and that was it. His heart has just given up right there. These five years have been tough for my mother and I've been compelled to find a job to pay the bills. 

I took a sip from my water bottle and continued watching him. A few minutes later, he raised his head and looked around. Perhaps a bit older than I am, the man wore deep frown lines in the middle of his forehead. He wore a serious expression on his face that made him look stern but otherwise he had an amicable face with slender features, pointed chin and wavy dark hair that curled under his earlobes. He caught my gaze and I looked away at once, too embarrassed at being caught. I rummaged my bag instead; looking for something I had no intention of finding. Then I saw him stand up and walk away and I noticed that he had left behind his notebook. I jumped, grabbed the notebook and ran calling after him.

“Excuse me!” No response.

“Hello! Hello!” No response.

“ Excuse me, Mister, you dropped your...” By then I was right behind him and I touched his back with the tip of the notebook and he swung around. His eyes wide with surprise. I saw that he was tall and lean.

“I’m sorry,” I began but he took the notebook from my hand and smiled. Then bowing his head slightly he walked off without a word.

Another day, another interview, another hollow promise of “we’ll be in touch.”

I sit at the same spot filling my belly with water so that I don’t go too hungry. I only have money for dinner. I’m weary from running around and I’m desperate for a job. Anything will do. I remember my mother’s face weathered by sun and wind, standing out in that little kiosk day after day, season after season, her struggles ceaseless. My eyes sting from the pain I feel in my heart and I desperately wish I could do something for her. I was sent to the city to study further on scholarship and I had chosen the subject that I was the best in. English Literature. The scholarship ended when I passed out and at the time I didn’t know that to be able to find a job with such a subject as a background, one must study further and at least have a doctorate degree in hand. So, instead, I geared up to find jobs at office front desks or anywhere that hired people based on good English speaking skills. The only job I couldn't handle was in places that required heavy labour. I’m small and I can’t carry heavy load. My mother toiled day and night and made sure that I never did physical labour at home. She always saw me as working in an office and not sweating my life away doing menial labour.

As I sit here thinking and wondering what I step I should take next, a tiny voice inside says, “perhaps it’s best to go back home and help your mother instead. You’ll find something small to make ends meet.”

As I weigh my options, I look around casually, and suddenly I spot a sign by the lamppost. Help Wanted. There is an arrow pointing towards a cluster of shops. I follow the sign and find myself standing in front of a big bookshop with the same sign at the glass door. Help Wanted. The name outside reads Mary Shelley Book Store. It didn’t take long for me to pick up that, Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame is perhaps the owner’s favourite author.

I walk in and a few minutes later, I walk out and sit on the bench outside. They’ve asked me to wait for a while. The lady who interviewed me looked like a dignified professor with short-cropped silver hair. Perhaps she is a professor who also runs a bookshop. I had used the name of the bookshop as a trump card and I noticed how it impressed her.

Minutes later I’m ushered back in by one of the two boys working there.  I find the lady sitting where I’d left her. She smiles at me and announces that I got the job. My heart is a bed of soft spring flowers and I can smell happiness. She explains my job details which to my surprise entails not just selling books but also learning sign language. I’m a bit perplexed at that, and I ask her feeling confused.

“What has sign language got to do with this job?”

She shifts her position in her chair and takes a sip from her cup. “The person who is in charge here is not me, darling, it’s my son and you will have to work with him on a daily basis and the sign language is for that very purpose.” She pauses and studies me.

“You’re not against working with people with a certain handicap are you?”

I’ve never really thought about that. People like us, who have everything functioning as it should, never really think about all that stuff. So her question throws me off guard and the answer that comes out of my mouth is different than I had thought.

“No! No, I have nothing against it. In fact, I would like to extend as much help as I can.”

It's perhaps my desperation for a job that my mouth runs ahead of my head.

“Good then!” She presses the buzzer and a young helper appears in sight.

“Could you ask Nishin to come in?” The boy disappears as hastily as he had come in. She then continues. “So, what do you make of Mary Shelley?”

“I’ve read Frankenstein. We had it in the second year and I really enjoyed studying it.

"Life although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I must defend it."

I quote from a passage that is dear to me. She claps her hands gleefully and I can see that she likes me. 

“Did you know that Mary Shelley wrote more works beside Frankenstein?”

“Yes indeed, she was a biographer and a travel writer too,” I added and the lady raises her eyebrows. I have impressed her.

“You are unassuming to look at but you really are quite the treasure aren't you?.” She adds genuinely and my heart flutters a little because this is the first time anyone has complimented me so lavishly.

Just then the door opens and a man probably in his late twenties steps in and as my gaze falls on him, I recognise him immediately.

With the same long fingers he signs at his mother deftly and the way his fingers move captivates me. Like fish swimming in the water, effortlessly, fins unfurling and curling like magic. I now understand how he'd come to have such beautiful fingers. I suddenly realize that I’m staring at him with my mouth hanging open and I quickly shut it.

“For now, you can use a pad and pen to communicate with Nishin. He owns the bookshop. I only help him a bit.” His mother rises from the chair to leave.

“Oh I’m Kiden by the way, Nishin’s mother.” She extends her hand to take mine and taking her proffered hand nervously I thank her for taking me for the job. She merely smiles and says,

“Thank Nishin, not me.”

She leaves the room with the man and me facing each other awkwardly. I scribble on the pad hastily, thank you for considering me for the job.

He writes back, and his cursive is much better than mine.

You’re welcome, I saw you sitting there the other day and I noticed that you had been to countless interviews. So I thought I could help you a bit.  He smiled.

How did you know that I had been to many interviews? I scribble back.

From your shoes. They were worn out more than your clothes and you are too young to have your shoes worn out like that.

I drew my legs away hastily embarrassed at being found out.

Studying me quietly for a while, he writes again.

“Something told me you would come back there and I pasted the notice on the lamp post just so that you could see.”  

He had a playful expression on his face as he wrote this.

I couldn’t believe that he did that for me. I couldn’t believe that a complete stranger saw me for who I really was and had understood all the battles I’d been fighting inside. I couldn’t believe that in today’s day and age there are people watching out for you finding you at the most desperate hour. For me, he, my mister, came to me as a saviour in my most dire hour.

For the first time in months, I felt like I was in a safe place in this wide big city that had so far been nothing but hostile to me.

For the first time, I understood the meaning of compassion from someone who had lived his life like a stone at the bottom of the sea, in a world bereft of sound.

For the first time I understood the meaning of an open heart and suddenly, life to me seemed beautiful and kind.

* Illustration by Yoshay

No Return

Today is the first day without her and I just cannot bring myself to accept the fact that she is gone. She’s gone off to a faraway place from where I can neither bring her back nor can I reach her, no matter how many journeys I may take. She’s probably still on her way to that place. A place from where there’s no return even if she wants to. When I close my eyes I see her running off at a distance, her hair flowing behind her and I run after her, but no matter how fast I run, the distance between us only widens until she is just a dot far-far away and then she disappears. When I open my eyes everything else moves as it always did. The rain slashes down on people’s umbrellas as it always did. A lonely stray dog shivers in the corner drenched in the rain, like thousands of other stray dogs I have come across in my seventeen years of life. People walking past me have the same expressions as they always do - that neutral blank look when the facial muscles are slagging, unanimated by any kind of emotion. Their feet pattering on the sidewalk along with the rain.

I already miss her. I miss her so much that I want to stand on top of this bench and cry out to her wherever she is. My arms already ache from not being able to hold her. The memory of the smell of her hair when she rested her head against my chest, sting my eyes and suddenly everything is swimming in my tears. Soon people are going to come after me. Her family. I did something I shouldn’t have but I had to keep my promise to her. One day, she playfully said that if she ever were to die before me, then I should scatter her ashes in a place high up in the mountains from where one could see the sun rising on one side and setting on the other. A place from where one could see the mountain ridges. A place where civilization would never intrude. I had held my hand over her mouth and chided her for having even thought that she and I’d be separated like that.

I clutch the urn sitting on my lap. I haven’t peeked inside it. I can’t. I can’t see her in a heap of ashes. When I took the urn from her family and ran, it was still warm against my belly. I knew that warmth. She had pressed herself against me thousands of times and we had shared our warmth promising each other to always love each other like that. I’m angry at her for leaving me so suddenly like this. I curse her for being so reckless and not thinking that she was as responsible for her life as she was for mine. Please come back and save me, is all I can say at the end of my angry rants because no matter how hard I lash out, the fact that she’s never coming back makes me so desperate that I end up grovelling. I am cracking up and all that I held inside is seeping out. Soon I’ll be broken and I’ll be in pieces and I won’t be able to pull myself together. Before that happens I must make it to the mountaintop. I must make her wish come true. My only goal now, my only purpose in life is to take her to the place she wanted to go to.  I will never be able to say goodbye because of all the times I spent with her and those memories hover above me and inside me. I will never say goodbye. I love her too much to even spell the words. I will never forgive her for leaving me like this. I’m that angry at her.

The rain has stopped and the sun peeps from behind the clouds to warm up and to dry everything that the rain has left cold and wet. I walk up to a store and buy a rucksack. Then I ease her gently into the rucksack and walk out of the store with her pressed against my back. I can feel her hands circling my chest from behind. She’s still warm and that warms my heart. Outside, I hail a taxi to the town that lies closest to my destination.

Illustration - Yoshay

A Chance

A Chance

He sits across her in the subway. His eyes wouldn’t have fallen on her had it not been the book she was reading. Her face hidden behind the paperback with the title I know you printed in big bold letters.  He in his late thirties is plain, quiet, shy and uneventful. Single and resigned to a life of bachelorhood, he has fought his battles and has made his peace. Now headed home like every other day in the same subway, through the same route, with many familiar faces around him except this one. Except, this person sitting across him because he has never seen someone with a book in this subway before.

A rampant thriller.

No a mystery.

It must be speculative. He guesses.

Romance? Maybe?

He never read romance novels. He wouldn’t even come close to one. Most of them were flimsy and ridiculous.

Well, what kind of person reads romance novels? He wondered.

His gaze moves over to the fingers holding the book. Small hands with neatly manicured nails painted in a nude shade.

Yellow stockings and naughty boys in patent leather. Who wears patent leather? It’s loud and garish. Her legs are slightly plump and he can judge that she is small.  A few heads shorter than his hundred and eighty-one centimetres.

He is curious. He wants so to see her face.

Why? He wonders.

It’s not like he wants to talk to her. He could never be able to talk to a woman again.

Never. Not since her. Not since the day she abandoned him for another.

Despite all his attempts and endeavours to keep her happy, she had packed up one morning and left without a goodbye.

Why then, after three years, is he sitting across a woman and wondering what she looks like?

The subway slows at a station. Elm Gardens the sign reads. The book shuts and he sees her looking straight back at him.

Round and bright, she’s got a baby face. Her lips pout like a sleeping infant’s and are moist and pink. Her cheeks are flushed probably from reading all this while. But it’s her eyes. They’re incredible. Dark and slanting, they’re marvellously arresting. Long curled lashes curtain them as she gazes down.  He realises that he has been staring but he can’t help it. He can’t move his gaze away from her. People rush to get out at the station. She pushes the book inside a cloth bag and stands up. He stands up as well although this is not his stop. As people rush towards the door she disappears amidst the crowd. He gets pushed outside and he realises that in the chaos he has lost her. He stands on the platform of an unfamiliar station and looks for her amidst the sea of faces. He is looking for that one face in a million faces. The doors shut and the tube slides away leaving him behind.

As the tube moves further into the dark tunnel, the white halogen light inside stands out against the growing darkness and he sees her sitting on the seat he left behind. Those dark eyes looking straight back at him.