Smells Like Human Spirit

“Or why should earth, landscape, air-- each filled at every step and every breath with with yet another odor and thus animated with another identity-- still be designated by just those three coarse words?”

Ask almost anyone which of their five senses are expendable and they would almost to a man say, with little deliberation, they would forego their sense of smell. An underused sensory perception, the word “smell” generally has a negative connotation-- if we say something “smells” it is not a generous observation, but one that implies rottenness, decay, or corporeal fumes. But to even describe a disagreeable smell exposes the paucity of our language to describe that odor precisely. In any case, modern life has managed to suppress the stench of living with good sewage treatment, sanitization, hot water showers, and a multiplicity of helpful, pleasant scents (although new unpleasant chemical-based ones have evolved with our technology as well). Few things in this world seduce our noses with their divine essence, and even when they do, not many of us have the time to stop and (ahem) “smell the roses.” 

The German writer Patrick Suskind's Perfume, is one of the only novels I know of that concerns our underutilized nasal appendages. The novel, set in pre-revolutionary 18^th century France, concerns a certain Jean-Baptise Grenouille, “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.” He is born in Paris in a wretched fishmongers' marketplace, abandoned by a useless mother, unwanted and unloved in various homes, becoming a child laborer in a tannery. All the while he is aware of the potency of his nose to pinpoint various odors good and bad and these only had any meaning to him: “It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odors that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences.”

The child gets his big break when he gets a job apprenticing for a déclassé perfumer named Baldini. Once inside a laboratory, with access to all these marvelous ingredients, Jean-Baptise turns out to be a born alchemist in the realms of essences and revives Baldini's business fortunes. But (once more, ahem) the sweet smell of success doesn't mean anything for Jean-Baptise. Now a slight ogre of a man, he recognizes the limits of Baldini's laboratory, wanting to master the arts of distilling purer essences. Moreover, he is exasperated and haunted by the olfactory ravages of Paris, “a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw.” He packs a few edible items and a letter of introduction and leaves Paris for the countryside.

On the way he discovers the righteousness of what a later Frenchman would say, “Hell is other people” and winds up a hermit in a mountaintop cave. Jean-Baptise's story might have ended there but always there was the problem of his belonging to humanity, for for all his olfactory superpowers, the little man himself has no physical smell whatsoever. The novel posits that body odor, for lack of a more precise choice of words, constitutes our human aura (or literally, an essence). Whether we fall in love, trust a stranger, avoid a creep, and other automatic instinctual reactions might have something to do with the other person's smell, even if we are unconscious of it. Jean-Baptise then feels compelled to find another laboratory where he can experiment with different additives to give himself a smell and thus admission to the human race, to have presence among other men: “There was a basic perfumatory theme to the odor of humanity, a rather simple one, incidentally: a sweaty-oily, sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive basic theme that clung to all humans equally and above which each individual's aura hovered only as a small cloud of more refined particularity.”

18th century stinky metropolis

However, Jean-Baptise is interested in composing a more elusive, ethereal scent that is (unfortunately) derived from human specimens. This is where a good novel becomes great, at the expense of empathy for our hero. Nevertheless, Suskind pulls off a remarkable, if not hysterical climax that, for a novel championing the nose, is as visually surreal as anything I've ever read. No one reading Perfume can ever forget the book's final pages and the strange twisted fate of Jean-Baptise Grenouille. I loved the novel so much that when I finished reading it I opened the book and plunged my face into its pages, inhaling deeply. I wish I could tell describe articulately what they smelled like, for in my own inadequate grasp of nasal intelligence, the pages just smelled like paper to me. That's all I got, that and my own idiosyncratic human sour-sweet smell.

Vincent & His Penpal Theo

“I need not overhurry myself, there is no good in that-- but I must work on in full calmness and  serenity, as regularly and concentratedly as possible, as concisely and economically as possible. The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it because I have walked that earth for thirty years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures-- not made to please a certain cult in art, but to express a sincere human feeling.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

Self portrait with bandaged ear

No one did the starving artist bit more famously than Vincent Van Gogh. After various career stints in a picture gallery and bookshop, later as a schoolteacher and a lay preacher, failing or being forced out of every position he ever endeavored, the troubled Dutchman becomes a full time painter around the age of 27. This same time he becomes completely dependent on his younger brother, Theo, for all his living expenses. Never marrying and alienating nearly everyone whom he comes into contact with, Van Gogh lives a destitute, itinerant existence, unable to settle anywhere very long. He is nearly always malnourished, often lonely, and occasionally suffers debilitating spells of depression that late in life take the form of nervous breakdowns (as in the infamous offering of his ear to a prostitute). The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (edited by Mark Roskill) is a curated epistolary collection of his miseries, epiphanies, and banalities, alternately dull and inspiring, an invaluable record of perhaps the most famous painter of all time, who penniless and institutionalized at the age of 37, commits suicide with a gunshot wound to the chest.

Vincent's correspondence reflects his concerns, worries, and interests, which evolved with his art and descent into madness. Early on, in his preacher days, he examines theological ideas piecemeal until later disillusionment turns him into a full-blown apostate (“I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life-- the power to create.”). In his late twenties, early thirties, he struggles in dead-end relationships, falling for women who either fail to return his affections (his cousin Kee Vos) or women of ill repute from the demimonde (the prostitute Clasina Maria Hoornik), confessing his amorous confusion to Theo with, “What a mystery life is, and love is a mystery within a mystery.” He adores certain writers, particularly Charles Dickens, with whom he shares his concerns for social justice. (“But one must learn to read, exactly as one must learn to see, and learn to live.”) And later in life, aware of a movement called Impressionism, he ruminates on what painting means in terms of art, truth, beauty: “Tell him that my great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they become, yes, untruth if you like-- but more truth than the literal truth.”

For someone better known for his pictures than his prose Van Gogh's writing is very articulate, often extremely precise in its descriptions. That might have been due to his bibliophilia (not just Dickens, but most of the great writers of the 19^th century were favorites, especially Balzac, Zola, and George Eliot) but also to his visual background and sensitive nature. In his correspondence it is all peaks and troughs, but his aesthetic appreciation for beauty is vivid and inevitably colorful: “Spring is tender, green young corn and pink apple blossoms. Autumn is the contrast of the yellow leaves against violet tones. Winter is the snow with black silhouettes.” There is a focus to the letters and comparatively little banter. The most banal matters are often due to money. Theo's welfare checks are never enough, as Vincent spends the largess on models, paints, and canvases. Literally, he subsists on stale bread rolls and warm milk (which no doubt had an effect on his physical and mental deterioration, though how much we have no way of really knowing).

An artist of mercurial temperament, nothing quite stays with Van Gogh. He burns bridges with friends and family (his tempestuous relationship with his preacher father is often lamented and Paul Gaughin's famous stay with Van Gogh in Arles had been a disaster). A normal life is impossible due to conflicts of personal views with his various employers (he almost definitely had authority issues) and his ceding of financial independence to his brother (in the arrangement Theo acquired ownership of Vincent's work so that it was more of a payment for services rendered than a support check, though Vincent is always asking for more, swearing on “activity,” insisting that he is not “lazy” or “plodding”). Initially euphoric in new locations, discovering places and subjects to paint, he always becomes disillusioned eventually, save Arles, where its bright, beautiful sunshine inspires him to his most prolific work, though his eccentricities alienates the townfolk and they petition for his removal. The only constant in his life in fact is painting. It is the one thing in life that gives him any joy or confidence, the only way to transcend his miseries, so that Vincent becomes single-mindedly determined “to sacrifice all personal desires, to realize great things, to obtain nobleness of mind, to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of nearly all individuals is spent.”

The road for Van Gogh was long and treacherous, filled with self-doubt (for no one would buy his paintings) and extreme poverty. But it was worth it because he understood it intrinsically as his life's calling ("Blessed is the man who has found his work."), grasping also that all great loves entail some kind of pain: “By painting, one becomes a painter. If one wants to become a painter, if one delights in it, if one feels what you feel, one can do it, but it is accompanied by trouble, care, disappointment, periods of melancholy, of helplessness...” His letters are often punctuated with dreams of an arts community, a utopian vision of cooperation, collaboration, and collectiveness. It's tempting to wonder how Van Gogh would have handled his passions and pain in contemporary life. Would he have felt less alone had he an online community, a way to share his work? Or would he despair at the humbling stats of his Tumblr account, at the inattention due him, at the sheer, voluminous ubiquity of artists and art? Van Gogh is by no means the only unacknowledged genius-- hundreds of others have toiled in anonymity, most of whom only to be utterly forsaken. At least his brother had been one of the most respected art dealers on the Continent (nevertheless, tragically, Theo would die just months after Vincent).

Reading these letters, which is akin to reading the diary of somebody's innermost thoughts, I couldn't help remembering my own capricious fortunes in my twenties while I learned to be a writer, struggling with confidence and money, sacrificing a normal life, a good career, stable income, watching friends from university establish real careers in their fields while I pattered along with the vain hope of expressing--as Van Gogh described it, “a sincere human feeling.” Every artist's journey is a different in the details but the arcs are generally the same-- some make it, some don't, and then there are the exceptions like Van Gogh (or more recently Henry Darger and the photographer Vivian Maier) who become spectacularly beloved after death. On my worst days I've been paralyzed by my own self-doubts, though I've been luckier than Van Gogh in life, having found a way to live and even thrive. Some artists, particularly the more sincere ones, don't do their trade for the money or even recognition, but for love. Maybe you're born, maybe you're made, but however you get there beauty makes you feel all is right with the universe and this helps smooth the kinks of living on the edge, at least for a brief, blissful moment. And it is not extraordinary to be moved by life; in fact, it is something you might know just by looking. As Van Gogh said looking up at the night sky over the Rhone, hungry yet spiritually sated: “And all the same to feel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. Then life is after all almost enchanted.”

Way of the Glass

“Everything everybody does is so-- I don't know-- not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

Nowhere near as beloved as J.D. Salinger's most famous novel, Franny and Zooey is nevertheless a fine follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, once you've finished university, talked a good game, enjoyed a few wild streaks, got a good job, and have come to the realization that for all your good fortune, your education, your friendships, and your loves loved and lost, there is yet something amiss, intangibly off, and the anxiety that this might be all there is. Luckily, I have never suffered the nervous breakdown that strikes the titular Franny, who for all her beauty and intelligence has an acute Holdenesque disconnect from the physical world, leading her to chant “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” a mantra she's learned from a story about a Russian peasant seeking God called Way of the Pilgrim, a book handed down from her older brother, Seymour, the famous suicide in Salinger's short story, “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.”

Franny's existential dilemma is the thread between the two stories (originally published within a few years of each other in The New Yorker in the 1950s), the short “Franny” and the novella-length “Zooey.” The former concerns Franny's disastrous date with her long-distance beau, Lane, on the eve of the big football game with Yale, the latter story with her brother Zooey's attempt to prod Franny out of her misery. Both pieces are dialogue-rich and easy to imagine as theatrical productions, especially as both Franny and Zooey are actors and have an air of the performer, charisma, and a genius for wit (the reader senses the impact such a family drama, especially one so connected to disillusionment of the adult world, would have on contemporary artists, most especially the filmmaker Wes Anderson). As much of a legend Holden Caulfield is, Salinger seemed much more interested in the Glass family, its vaudeville parents and seven children, all of whom were once regarded as child prodigies on a radio program called It's a Wise Child.

Lane, over martinis and snails at a lunch date in an upscale bistro, just wants to talk about some “goddamn” paper he wrote about Flaubert. Franny, chain-smoking and not even looking at her chicken sandwich, recognizes in Lane the supercilious mannerisms emblematic of the culture she is from and which she has begun to despise. It leads to several remarkable outbursts, flabbergasting Lane: “I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting.” Living on nerves and Marlboros, Franny faints in the ladies' room.

In the follow-up novella, Franny is back at the family loft in Manhattan's Upper East Side, refusing to eat Bessie Glass' chicken soup, smoking cigarettes on the sofa, and mumbling sotto voce the Pilgrim's chant. Zooey, her older brother (the two are the youngest members of the Glass family), is a successful TV actor who knows nevertheless that television is a waste of time (and arguably his talent). Like Franny, he has an overactive bullshit detector and some keen legacy childhood interest in spirituality, courtesy of Seymour and Buddy (the oldest of the Glass children), who had evangelized ideas about Buddha, karma, dharma, and the like to Zooey and Franny when most kids their age were engaged in hide and seek. “We're freaks,” Zooey reminds Franny. He too had had his ordeal when the Jesus prayer had overwhelmed his sense of being and he'd considered abandoning his worldly possessions to live as a wandering mendicant. Even at 25 when you're old enough to know how the game is played and play it well, Zooey can't help calling bullshit on his peers, his friends, and even his mentors: “I make everybody feel that he doesn't really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows-- the critics, the sponsors, the public, even his children's schoolteacher. That's what I do. That's the worst I do.”

J.D. Salinger

Elegantly written, a tad whimsical, and bolstered by strong personalities, Franny and Zooey is not so much about questing for the meaning of life, but a means for getting by spiritually in a secular, consumeristic society. It is well-documented that Salinger himself was exploring oriental philosophies, likely in order to better cope with the horrors he witnessed in Europe during the Second World War. And no doubt it wouldn't have taken very long for someone as sensitive as Salinger to weary of the fame he'd become associated with in Holden. (I wonder if he had a stock answer for when daft strangers queried whether Catcher was autobiographical...) In all likelihood, Salinger had been socially paralyzed by fame and its inevitable protocol, dramatizing an explanation for his own withdrawal from the world. It's possible to conjecture as well that the tepid response to his publications following Catcher caused him to resent the reading public for expecting multiple masterpieces. Or maybe he just didn't really love people. The same loathing of “phonies” found in Catcher is obviously here in Franny and Zooey, only more measured and restrained. No one thinks of Salinger as a people's person, but we don't want to think of him as a misanthrope either; 'troubled genius' is a nifty fit. It will do well to remember that no one is perfect and no one is more aware of that than the sort of mind that might conjure the Glass family and Holden too. Salinger, via Zooey Glass, reminds us (lest we forget): “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.” In the end, it's good enough to help Franny get through her funk and sage comfort for the rest of us when, inevitably, into a void, we ask ourselves what are we doing all this for...?

A Head-On Collision with Desensitized Narcissism

“The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized forever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass.”

I should, I mean, I really, really should like British writer, J.G. Ballard. His stories are based on fascinating premises, narrative hypotheses that tackle the underlying savagery of modern society, particularly, the bourgeois everyman. Nevertheless, I find the dramatization of his dystopian ideas farfetched and silly, wholly unbelievable, and generally perverse without the cold satisfaction of having engaged with something genuinely cathartic. Moreover, his signature prose, celebrated by so many, is clinically detached to a fault, a pallid language bled pale of color or dazzle (all his sentences are competent, occasionally good, but none of them are wonderful). Then there is the trouble with his narrators: careless, diffident, self-absorbed professionals who bed down with numerous attractive women, more than they deserve, considering their absence of beguiling qualities. His most famous novel, Crash, regarding the sexual fetishism of car crash victims, is the ne plus ultra of stylized unpleasant Ballardian narcissism, not very enjoyable but readable as a psychopathic, amateur armchair Freudian excursion.

Crash concerns a certain James Ballard (I'll leave it to the Freudians to handle the author using his real name for his narrator), a successful TV commercial producer living near London's airport in Shepperton (yet another real life connection to Ballard) who suffers a head-on collision, injuring a woman, Helen Remington, and killing her husband. Recovering in the hospital he meets Vaughan, an uber-creepy pathological psycho in a white lab coat and dark sunglasses with a sinewy body and bad complexion. Vaughan introduces Ballard to the underground world of car accident fetishism. Together they steal decent model makes, go joyriding, hire hookers for backseat fellatio, smash fenders while dropping on acid, and fantasize about some ultimate car accident in which Vaughan collides his Lincoln Towncar with Elizabeth Taylor, marrying their flesh with the catastrophic debris of the crash, to wit, “a mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue.” It might sound a bit much, but hey don't you know these are “the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.”

The somewhat unholy trifecta of sex, violence, and technology is hardly a frontier; rather it is an arrangement long explored by artists, philosophers, and sophists, either intuitively or intellectually, for a long time. Ballard's vision is just an extraordinarily extreme and narrow echo of others' and he can be quite literal about it: “Television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the color TV set in our bedroom as we masturbated each other.” Since Ballard has no heart to wear on his sleeve, the outcome of his explorations is a technocratic orifice to be twaddled by numbed phallic instruments. In other words, there is no meaning, no satori, in all this masturbating over the steering column, or in his words: “a marriage of my penis with all the possibilities of a benevolent technology.”

Our narrator, not a very decent human being, is absolutely prolific in describing his titillations. A peripheral character, Gabrielle, car crash victim-turned-pervert “held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris.” (have I mentioned that Ballard never met a metaphor he didn't like?) Ballard, our reliable fiend, discovered that “her crippled things and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities.” But why, Ballard, why? And all right, you might get a hard-on from her crippled thighs, but why should she get off on her mutilated body, a body that can never run, swim, or dance again? Not all your readers are freudian know-it-alls. Is she making lemonade out of lemons or does paraphilia (intense excitement or affection for atypical objects) not need an explanation, existing inexplicably in a vacuum all its own? But it doesn't seem so since for all the actors in this pitiful drama it is the trauma of the automobile accident that activates their bizarre peccadilloes.

James Spader as Ballard-- about to be rear-ended and turned on?

The main problem with fetishism (besides its inscrutable provenance) is it's very much a one-note tune (the same is patently true of David Cronenberg's adaptation of the book in 1996, set in Toronto and starring James Spader as Ballard). It's the same carnal obsession, repeated ad infinitium: “The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality.” (Does that sentence sound familiar, just slightly reworked and tinkered?) Occasionally, the prose gets out of hand to a level of extreme nuttery (“her swollen breasts spurting liquid feces”) but Crash for all its shocking material and complete lack of morality is actually a boring book, just as fetishism, lacking dynamics, is often just a tool's way of ejaculating his weird energy. The most fascinating aspect of Crash, in fact, is James Ballard's decision to name his doppelganger, James Ballard. Is the novel then some sort of confession (not just of fetishism but what of the story's tremendous homoerotic energy)? It takes tremendous effort to create a novel, even something as one-dimensional as Crash. Why then did Ballard bother to write it? What was he trying to tell us? What exactly did the real-life Mrs. Ballard think of the following sentence, “I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections.” For that matter, what did Elizabeth Taylor make of being the locus of his vicious starfucking fantasy? What did she ever do to Ballard besides in all probability provoking in him an adolescent hard-on way back when? Ballard's novel is not morally objectionable so much as it is breathtakingly insensitive. The author's absence of human empathy is nothing short of astonishing. A good companion piece to the novel (or Cronenberg's film) is Warner Herzog's public service short  From One Second to the Next, which addresses the dangers of texting while driving by showing very personal stories of both victims and perpetrators of accidents caused by yet another accoutrement of technology. There are no erections or bodily fluid expulsions here, merely heartbreak, tears and regret, and the sadness of what was to what has become.

The Lady Is a Tramp (of the Traveling Variety)

“I had wanted to know how it felt to be a hobo, a radical, a prostitute, a thief, a reformer, a social worker, and a revolutionist.”

--Bertha Thompson

No doubt the most famous book on American wanderlust was written by Jack Kerouac, who might have had a case of dromomania, that is, a psychological need to wander without real purpose or intention, as in (utilizing the lexicon of the times) “just for kicks.” America has always been a huge land, seemingly endless, and there is nothing more American than reinventing oneself in a new town, either legally or dubiously, and starting over. Dromomania is embedded in American DNA, striking the odd native child and setting him or her on a journey-- all Kerouac did was place our cultural pastime in a mythical, romantic context accessible to any sort of dreamer, the young, the penniless, the damned.

Little known today, Boxcar Bertha is the autobiography of one Bertha Thompson, her life story as told to and recorded by Dr. Ben Reitman. Bertha is a plainspoken narrator with immense curiosity, a terrific sense of adventure, and deep roots in the social justice moments in the first half of the 20^th century, involving herself mostly in women's issues and the labor movement. She criss-crossed the country, a la Kerouac, but instead of riding shotgun with a madcap pill-popping drag-racing pothead, did most of her traveling hopping freight cars, sometimes alone, often partnered up with a social agitator beau, or conspiring among other “sisters of the road.” (Last night I watched the Martin Scorsese adaptation of her life's testimony, Boxcar Bertha, from 1972 and starring Barbara Hershey as Bertha-- I was shocked at the fictional liberties the filmmakers pursued, basically ripping off Bonnie and Clyde, turning Bertha into a hayseed moll in a bankrobbing Depression-era gang, ignoring the progressive do-right spirit that marks Bertha as a genuinely selfless champion of workers' and especially women's rights.)

This was in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of labor “agitation,” when workers often martyred themselves against police and a punitive justice system so that future generations might have better contractual rights, fairer pay, insurance benefits, and a decent pension. Bertha participated in these movements firsthand, but her real gift was her engaging, disarming personality, and either with a steeltrap memory or assiduous notetaking, became a reservoir of anecdotal biographies of wandering women from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds. The odd (or dangerous) jobs aside, Bertha worked with researchers, incorporating her firsthand knowledge of the hardships of the road and her encounters there, compiling them into an account of anthropological provenance-- a 35-page appendix presents Bertha's findings on the sociological factors inspiring women to live nomadically, among them the specific differentiation between “hoboes” and “bums” (the former looking for work, the latter all-around ne'er-do-wells).

There is no shortage of characters coming into Bertha's life on her travels-- hopheads, murderers, anarchists, lunatics, punks, and wobblies. She wanders from rustic communes to firebrand union halls, runs with a Midwestern gang of thieves and parties with lesbians, poets, and “spittoon philosophers” in Greenwich Village. In New York City she encounters her father, a middle-aged philanderer running an unsuccessful radical bookshop. It is her first time meeting this wayward man, whom she chastises for failing to take on his parental duties. Defending himself, he identifies two different kinds of men, “'the uterine type'... the good father, home lover, monogamist” and the “phallic type” who “needs women. Any women would do.” He goes on: “there are no solutions to the problems of life. There are no goals. You just go on living and loving and doing the best or the worst you can.”

As much as Baby Boomers like to take credit for the sixties-era sexual revolution, all they'd really done is enjoy mainstream social acceptance of a promiscuous lifestyle. And though Bertha enjoyed numerous partners in “free love” hook-ups, she'd learned early on from her mother that the human body was not a vehicle for sin, but an instrument of pleasure, sharing, in fact, sexual liaisons with men who'd loved her mother. But it is one thing to have an open attitude towards sex, a whole other to be pimped out to “Johns,” which is something Bertha does in order to better understand this underground lifestyle. In a Chicago whorehouse, she turns forty tricks a day, seven days a week, sleeping with several thousand men in six weeks. Nearly all her money is confiscated by her “man,” she contracts syphilis and gonorrhea as well as becomes pregnant! She bears this child of an unknowable father, and her wayfaring instinct stronger than her maternal one, she makes the same choice of freedom over duty that her father had, dropping off her newborn daughter with her mother in a Seattle commune and hitting the road: “There's something constantly itching in my soul that only the road and the box cars can satisfy. Jobs, lovers, a child-- don't seem to be able to curb my wanderlust.” The road is a long one, but eventually for nearly all of us, it has a destination, even for a vagabond as mobile as Boxcar Bertha. But that tired platitude about the journey is true: it really does matter how you get there, and it was the lives of women like Bertha Thompson's that, cumulatively, have made the world a better, freer, more compassionate place.

The Beast Within

“We're English, and the English are best at everything.”

There are few novels assigned to schoolchildren so despairing and damning as Lord of the Flies. The story's central thesis, that there is a “Beast” inside our collective soul liable to wreck havoc on the Earth and murder enemies, is a most pessimistic parable to grasp, particularly for the middle-school reader, aged twelve. The author, William Golding, might have been serving the spirit of the times, that of a narrative beyond Auschwitz and Hiroshima, but sixty years on, the story resonates, as even the holocaust and atomic cataclysms have failed to learn us to be better persons, loving and respecting one another. This remains a world where Power corrupts and destroys, whether it be via military, corporate, or even schoolyard shows of force.

Lord of the Flies could be a metaphor for any badly governed state. A group of boys are marooned on a small tropical island paradise. There is the initial euphoria of independence (there are no grownups and therefore an absence of traditional authority figures), followed shortly by an attempt at republican organization, but which quickly collapses into factionalism, later secession, and finally civil war. From this random allotment of children, the main archetypes of society emerge. There is a natural leader, Ralph; an aspiring warrior-autocrat, Jack; an ineffectual intellectual, Piggy; a sensitive, effeminate, artistic clairvoyant, Simon; workers and/or hunters,“biguns;” and a lumpen-proletariat, “the littluns.” With the exception of Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and the twins, “SamnEric,” all of the biguns are from a choir group, and follow Jack's lead first in dissension and later in secession.

Ralph and Piggy want to be rescued, so their priority is maintaining a signal fire. Opposed to this longview, Jack and the choir-kids become “hunters,” obsessed with exploiting the island's most important (and limited) resource, pigs' meat. In true fascist tradition, they become obsessed with the pageantry of their lifestyle, abandoning old clothes for facepaint and dressing as “savages,” unifying objectives with song (“Kill the pig. Cut his throat...”), demonstrating heartlessness towards those of limited utility (the littluns are disposable “crybabies” who “don't hunt or build or help”) and ruthlessness towards their enemies (the abduction of Piggy's glasses, the forced conscription of SamnEric, and of course, cold-blooded murder of ideological nemeses.)

Photo still from the 1963 film adaptation

These may be children but they are innately aware of the talismanic power of certain objects. Piggy's glasses, though they define one of his physical shortcomings, are their only means for starting fire, without which, there is no smoke signal nor means to cook their quarry's flesh. Just as important, the conch, a shell of “fragile, shining beauty,” is the symbol of democracy. Ralph, democratically elected “chief” by the boys, calls a congress by blowing it and in meetings, the person holding the conch is the only one allowed to talk. When Jack and his minions speak out of turn or ignore protocol, links to civilization are undermined and when the conch is finally destroyed, so is the last link to Western humanism severed.

Of course the most important symbol on the island is that of the Beast, whose existence is rumored first among the littluns, affirmed by SamnEric, and whose mysterious representation of evil is availed by Jack for his belligerent ends. Essentially the Beast is to the children what the Devil was to medieval Europe, Communism was to 1950s Americans, and how Islamic fundamentalism serves as a Boogyman for contemporary nervousness-- a threat exaggerated by a power structure needed to justify its more extreme actions. Golding's point, of course, is that the Beast is within, and sets out to dramatize it by making his actors civilized British schoolchildren. Youth is usually conflated with innocence, but on this metaphorical island only a very few are good, a few are innately evil, and the majority morally malleable, unable to think intelligently for themselves, following the will of power rather than reason when given both alternatives: “There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense.” As an inkblot, Golding sees a monstrous id colored in blood staining on our collective tabula raza. Youthful innocence is a canard if the Beast is always there, a potential manifestation from within. For a twelve-year-old reading Lord of the Flies for the first time, this is a rotten apple to consume from the Tree of Knowledge, difficult to digest, but an integral view on human nature we do well to learn and understand.

Good Country People

“Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go 'round.' It's very good we aren't all alike.”
--Mrs. Hopewell from "A Circle in the Fire."

In Flannery O' Connor's story, “The Artificial Nigger,” two bumpkins, a grandfather and his grandchild, take a train from their rural homestead to Atlanta. All his life, the boy has been putting on airs, because even though he was raised in the country by the old man after his mother's untimely death, he had been born in a metropolis. The old man wants to show him that the boy's hubris is unwarranted since the city is no place for good folks. But when they become lost in a negro neighborhood, he too, has his own pride challenged, and he utterly fails in his responsibility as the boy's caretaker and role model, so much so that “now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.” In other words, screwing up has serious life-changing consequences.

Today short fiction has been accused of existential navel-gazing where nothing ever seems to happen. These attacks are not unfair. In our ever-increasing attention deficit disorders, so-called “microfiction” has replaced the classic short story and its meticulous structuring in which setting, mood, character are as elemental as narrative. And what makes good storytelling really? What is compelling about human drama? Same as it ever was: nothing engages a reader like when we have something to lose, whether it be pride, attachments, or love.

In O'Connor's story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find,men and (especially) women deal with loss. In “Good Country People,” a 30-year-old academic gimp living with her mother lets herself be seduced by a hayseed bible salesman for intellectual kicks, only to have the boy doublecross her. The female farmer in “A Circle in the Fire,” has to deal with an ex-employee's adolescent son and his pals arriving uninvited and camping out on her property without politeness or permission. And in “The Displaced Person” a female landowner takes on as tenants a Polish family escaping the Holocaust. The refugee is industrious, the best investment she's ever made, but he wants to marry off a niece to one of the negroes on the farm so he can bring her to America too and Mrs. McIntyre is so outraged at the affront to the South's politics of racial purity she connives to fire him in spite of his diligence. She's willing to lose the best farmhand she ever had because of her ancestral fears of miscegenation.

O'Connor's characters, not always likable, nevertheless represent well our baser human instincts, those of pride and envy, often manifesting themselves in class war or racial violence: “I'm as good as you any day of the week,” the yokel huckster tells the PhD gimp when he triumphantly discovers the source of her vulnerability. Due the thoroughly unequal distribution of wealth in America's feudal south, the haves had much to worry about from the have-nots, who by cunning or duplicity, take what they can get from the other. These characters are flawed, all of them, so much so that there are really no heroes or villains, only fuck-ups. In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” a hobo-cum-huckster named Mr. Shiftlet looking for work on a derelict property, has “a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.” His is a treacherous wisdom: by the end of the story, he has abandoned a blind woman he'd pretended to marry, driving off with the family car.

Flannery O'Connor with two of her pet peacocks

Stories about loss are rarely known for their happy endings. But perhaps Flannery O'Connor knew something about loss-- she'd lost her father to lupus at an impressionable age and was diagnosed with the disease herself when she was a young woman just starting out on her literary career. The knowledge she would die young (she passed away in 1964 at the age of 39) no doubt trickled down into her work, the painful recognition that nothing in life can be held forever, life itself most importantly. Change is the only constant, and those who fail to take this into account will be the most devastated with this inevitable reckoning.

Requiem for a Father-in-Law

Den (1945-2014)

A little over six months after he was first diagnosed with stomach cancer, my father-in-law, Denzaemon “Den” Inaoka, passed away in the early morning hours of Tuesday, February 25^th. He was 68 years old.

His last few years had found him in and out of hospitals. In early summer of 2012, Den suffered a critical neck injury from a bad fall. Rehabilitation entailed wearing a metal halo to stabilize his cervical spine. Then, on May 11th, the day my wife and I were married in a traditional Buddhist ceremony at Kurama-dera in the hills north of Kyoto, Den passed out while taking a bath and was taken to the emergency room. Shortly thereafter the infection from his pneumonia became sepsis and he was induced into a coma for nearly a month. We were all very happy when he survived this ordeal, only to be utterly devastated when a cancer diagnosis shortly followed during his convalescence. Due his previous sickness, he was too frail for chemotherapy or surgery, and his condition slowly deteriorated until he could no longer even hold in water without vomiting. Through it all, he never complained, and we were grateful that at the very least his passing meant an end to his suffering.

Some years before this, in March, 2005, by chance or perhaps by fate, I met my future wife, Ariko, in Tokyo. She had just returned to Japan after a decade in New York City. We liked each other immediately, and after just one weekend together she invited me to come visit her in Kyoto, where she was staying temporarily with her parents. I made the trip down and was treated with perfect Japanese hospitality. I was charmed meeting Ariko's father, Den, this dapper gentleman with a crown of handsome white hair, elegantly modern in jeans and collared shirt, the Colorado state flag affixed to his sport coat lapel. We all went out for dinner and drinks and afterwards ended up dancing in the family living room to Al Green. Den loved American soul music and romantic crooners, with a special soft spot for Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra. When we sang karaoke, he did Sinatra's “My Way,” which is how he liked to tell us was his philosophy for living.

Den loved the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where he skied whenever possible. He also loved Lake Biwa in nearby Shiga, where he often waterskied. Into his sixties he was still competing in his age bracket and until he got sick he had been an effortless athlete on the water, gliding free and strong, forever young. He truly loved waterskiing, mentoring young competitors and investing his own money in endeavors to help those in whom he saw both potential and his shared love of the sport. Indeed, Den wanted his legacy to be one in which he was remembered for shaping and sponsoring this community.

My father-in-law was also Denzaemon, head of a soba restaurant/ cake patisserie business dating back to 1465, when his ancestors first arrived in Kyoto. Even with a culinary pedigree going back to the middle fifteenth century, running a family business is challenging and when you're in a position of power, enemies often pose as friends and take advantage of a man's generosity (he could never say no to someone's request for help and inevitably then some people took advantage of his kindness). No matter how fortunate one man's life might seem, there is tremendous pressure in living, in handling one's regrets and mistakes. Perhaps Den internalized more pressure than he knew how to bear. In later years, we worried over signs of alcoholism. Yet while Den drank a bit much for his own good, he was only ever his worst enemy. He was as gentle as any man I'd ever met.

Though we dined together often through the years, we didn't converse all that much. For a man born into distinct privileges, he was quite soft-spoken. Neither did we have a lot in common (I don't ski or play golf and our politics diverged). He often preferred television to conversation, especially action movies (particularly James Bond). However, from the very beginning, my father-in-law never begrudged his daughter's choice in love, in spite of my foreignness, my slipshod Japanese, and my financially insecure career avocations of writing and photography. In fact, he welcomed all of our friends, Ariko's, mine, friends of friends, so that through the years, dozens, if not hundreds of visitors, most of them foreigners, shared a cigarette, coffee, or tumbler of Suntory whiskey in his company, breaking bread with all of us, regardless of origins, shared interests, or the human need for privacy. His door, always open.

His last night before getting sick was the day before our wedding ceremony. I had about fifteen friends who'd flown in from overseas for our moment. Den took all us guys to one of my favorite restaurants for dinner and afterwards we headed out to Gion where another fifteen people, Ariko's girlfriends, joined us for two hours drinking with geisha and enjoying a traditional dance performance. It must have cost him a fortune, but if it did, he never let on. Den had even checked into the Kyoto Hotel so that all my friends visiting could stay at his place. It was a five-day wedding party that lasted until the dawn every morning. We did not yet know how precipitous his condition was going to deteriorate-- mostly we'd been sad that he'd missed out on a hell of a party and, moreover, wouldn't be able to perform at our wedding reception. He'd recently taken up tap dancing and the plan had been for him to tap dance to Sinatra's classic, “Come Fly With Me.” Such stage ambition was part and parcel of his cavalier charm, the old gentleman athlete challenging his physical limits, doffing his quiet spot in the corner for a brief shining spotlit moment.

His last days he grew very thin, eventually confined to bed. It was difficult for us to witness this man, once so physical and agile, laid low with illness. Sixty-eight years is not that young, but it is not that old either. He had managed to live a full life, with all the triumphs and tragedy that goes into such living. He takes into the next world some secrets, some regrets, much fondness and his generosity. But like so many with exceptional presence of character it is difficult to feel he is truly gone, as if his spirit remains here among us, someone felt, more than seen, wandering these familiar streets that he lived and walked on for nearly seven decades. As a son-in-law who entered his Big Picture late in life, I am grateful for the small co-starring role I had, especially the good memories-- there were many-- that he has bequeathed in passing. 

On William Faulkner's Light in August

“And so is it any wonder that this world is peopled principally by the dead?”

“Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.”

Perhaps the only literary task more difficult than reading William Faulkner's novels is writing about William Faulkner's novels. Somehow, in spite of a liberal arts education, I'd managed to avoid him in school only getting to read The Sound and the Fury in my late twenties. This was an overwhelming experience. So much so that I immediately reread it. I then internalized Faulkner's prose and paid homage to him the worst possible way, co-opting his style and riddling my own novel with cryptic stream-of-conscious self-indulgent preciousness. Writers should really never attempt to plagiarize another's signature method, but most of us learn that the hard way (via significant revisions and clarifications). His 1932 novel, Light in August, is not as complex or revolutionary as his more famous work, but it is hallmark Faulkner in its structural intricacy, multiple point-of-view narrative, racial violence, and Southern Gothic atmosphere.

How does one even begin to summarize Light in August? No other American writer is so adept at putting together such a multi-layered story composed of minute jigsaw pieces, assembled, seemingly willy-nilly across decades and perspectives, but always with Faulkner there is method in apparent madness. Lena Grove, heavy with child, is in Jefferson, Mississippi, looking for Lucas Burch a wildcat good-for-nothing who ran out on her in Alabama. Instead she finds Byron Bunch, working at the local planing mill. Byron doesn't tell her about an ex-coworker named Joe Brown, which is where Burch is hiding under an assumed name. This "Joe Brown" is living in the woods with a “foreigner” named Joe Christmas, only Joe is not an immigrant but a troubled drifter handling his mixed heritage racial identity with decidedly indelicate emotions. Brown and Christmas share a shack adjunct to a plantation house owned by a New England “carpetbagger” spinster named Joanna Burden. The crux of the story is her murder and the torching of her mansion the day Lena arrives in Jefferson. The main suspect in the crime is Joe Christmas, especially when it is learned by the townfolk Christmas has “nigger blood.”

If the novel has a central figure it is Christmas, whose biographical provenance has the shadow of peculiarly Southern violence cast over his life from its very conception, predestining the bloodletting to come: his white grandfather murdering his black father; the death of his mother due to childbirth complications; the murder of his adopted white father; and before Joanna Burden's own demise, the numerous victims of sexual violence and barroom brawls. Joe Christmas abandoned the chance for a normal life when he slammed a chair over his adopted father's skull. On the run, a handsome tramp, he makes a life out of starting over, following a road that “ran through yellow wheat fields waving beneath the fierce yellow days of labor and hard sleep in haystacks beneath the cold mad moon of September, and the brittle stars: he was in turn laborer, miner, prospector, gambling tout; he enlisted in the army, served four months and deserted and was never caught... He owned nothing but the razor; when he had put that into his pocket he was ready to travel one mile or a thousand, wherever the street of the imperceptible corners should choose to run again.”

Joe Christmas's running takes him to Jefferson where he works a low-wage job at the local planing mill. He operates a small, careful bootlegging business in the woods and has a tumultuous sexual affair with his benefactress, Joanna Burden. An older woman, nearly menopausal, their talk is mostly perfunctory, but Joanna opens up to Christmas one night, telling him about her origins, an abolitionist heritage, tough, moralizing New England stock, and her family's almost spiritual calling to help blacks (as if the cause entwined itself with the family's namesake): “I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of the cross.” Before she was born, Joanna's brother and grandfather were murdered in the town square in an argument with Sartoris, an ex-slaveowner. Christmas cannot comprehend why Joanna's father never struck back, eye-for-an-eye. But Joanna feels her father understood well enough to “respect anybody's love for the land where he and his people were born and to understand that a man would have to act as the land where he was born had trained him to act.” Thus one man's self-restraint is as natural as another's resort to violence-- Faulkner seems to be describing us as products of purlieu, which makes for inevitability in both peacefulness and destructiveness. In Joe Christmas, we have post Civil-War black-white racial relations boiling over in a single man, whose entire history is composed of sexual exoticism and senseless violence. And Joe isn't even positive regarding his black lineage. "If I'm not, damned if I haven't wasted a lot of time."  In a good novel, good people make bad decisions-- it's a lot more complicated with an anti-hero.

The reader is never entirely clear whether Joe Christmas was responsible for the murder and mutilation of Joanna Burden, as Joe Brown is as slippery, mendacious, avaricious and irresponsible as any two-bit shyster one is likely to encounter in Faulkner's invented Yoknapatawpha County. But if he is flawed, he is in bad company, as the men and women in 1930s Deep South led hard, wasted lives, spiritual dissipations manifesting themselves physically. The local sheriff is “a tub of a man, with the complete and rocklike inertia of a tub.” Gail Hightower, a disgraced ex-preacher and confidant to good-hearted Byron Bunch, has “that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed.” The crisis occurring in the town of Jefferson is a confluence of catastrophic decision-making, people acting against their best interests, incapable of clarity. In such circumstances, tragedy begets tragedy, and so it goes when men, not only members of communities but descendants of historical hatreds, follow through on their prejudices to the bitter end.

Bill in his younger days

Reading Faulkner is an intense experience. It also requires anachronistic levels of concentration-- it is impossible to grasp the complexity of his storytelling in short bursts of one- or two-pages read. You don't read Faulkner with music on or between tweets. His convoluted syntax, multiple narrative perspectives, and time-tooling can intimidate even the most experienced readers, and occasionally even fans like myself feel like shouting, “WTF, Bill?” when he goes really far out. (I've even wondered how much whiskey was in the tumbler for certain passages only to be humbled when a seemingly random flight-of-fancy is revealed as an integral clue to the puzzle of a man-- someone once connected the work of the novelist to that of the architect, and it is a good metaphor, for good writing, no matter how complex, finds a way to utilize every brick in its structure.) But for all the confusion and mystery, the effort is rewarded to us with not a glimpse but a long linger in the darkest areas of the human heart. Our inner life is somewhat wiser than we were when we started, and maybe tougher too.

A Man Named Hirohito & His Legacy

"He is a little man, about five feet two inches in height, in a badly cut gray striped suit, with trousers a couple of inches too short. He has a pronounced facial tic and his right shoulder twitches constantly. When he walks, he throws his right leg a little sideways as if he has no control over it. He was obviously excited and ill at ease, and uncertain of what to do with his arms and hands."

--journalist Mark Gayn describing Emperor Hirohito 

on one of his postwar goodwill tours, March 26th, 1946

The American novelist, William Faulkner, famously said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” His subject matter was black-white race relations and the legacy of slavery in the American South, but his words serve the Japanese experiment in twentieth century imperialism, the scars of its militarism yet unhealed, and the descendants of the rulers and the oppressed nursing respective grievances. World War II ended nearly seventy years ago, the blood spilled long since washed away, but a new nationalism in East Asia is drawing up a stale and divisive rhetoric, taking arrogant postures, and pretending history is malleable and can be recast according to one's manufactured political persuasions.

The American historian, Herbert Bix's biography of Japan's most notorious emperor, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Harper Collins, 2000), is an 800-page tome indicting Hirohito in no uncertain terms for the war crimes for which he was never prosecuted. Like an attorney who will leave no doubt in the reader's mind, Bix carefully assembles a narrative, beginning with Hirohito's grandfather, Meiji, and how his constitution allocated tremendous authority to the Chrysanthemum Throne. Nearly a hundred pages of the book are citations of evidence reflecting Japanese militarism and a racist philosophy propagated by Japanese intellectuals and historians that led to the colonization of Manchuria, sexual bondage in the Korean peninsula, and an irrational war of conquest that nearly caused Japan's total obliteration. Every step of the way, Hirohito authorized or failed to punish the inhumane crimes of his military establishment. Moreover, Bix argues it was Hirohito's self-centered maneuvers to preserve his throne and avoid just punishment that prolonged the war unnecessarily long after Japan's cause was lost, and that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians is the emperor's burden, as much as it is that of the Americans who authorized the atomic apocalypses.

Modern Japanese militarism has its origins when policy leaders began debating the kokutai, an archaic rarely-used concept nowadays. Kokutai are the best possible principles of Japanese state and society. Alas, it was inevitable that conservative ideologues would win the interpretation to ensure a status quo of the nearly feudal hierarchy that defined the structure of Japanese society for most of its history. Kokutai was then coupled with kodo, the “imperial way,” a political theology that declared the divine right of the emperor, who embodied moral goodness. The court, the military, and conservative political operatives could then utilize their reactionary agenda via imperial decree, as the emperor could make palatable even the most ruthless policies.

Hirohito was an amateur marine biologist. Small in stature, shy, and awkward, he was not a strongman. His personality was easily overshadowed by his arrogant generals and court advisers. Nevertheless, he was intelligent, detail-oriented and had been inculcated by court tutors to take divine right seriously, and that it was his responsibility to take part in political affairs, legitimizing Japanese militarism to the poor farmer sons who would have to leave their homeland and their families for dubious acts of violence in China, Korea, and Taiwan in service of the Emperor.

Because of WWII's total destruction, it's easy to overlook the trauma of the first world war. After Versailles, the US and Britain, via the League of Nations, put together a number of international treaties outlawing wars of aggression, most famously the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928. Japanese leaders interpreted that as an Anglo-American initiative to consolidate their vast colonial holdings (a fair argument-- they also called Europe on its hypocrisy, declaring peace overtures while resorting to violence to keep its multitudes in Africa and Asia in line). The Japanese imperialist philosophy, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, wanted to rid Asia of European colonialists (as well as their pernicious cultural influence). The war in Asia-- beginning in China, and spreading to Britain's and France's holdings in Southeast Asia, as well as the United States' colony in the Philippines-- was justified as Asia for Asians, though the new hierarchy would indubitably place Japan at the top.

Every step of the way, Hirohito rubber-stamped his generals' advances. As emperor he could have cautioned or refuted militarism, and initially he sometimes did feel outrage at aggression, but overwhelmed by other, stronger personalities, he admitted “it can't be helped,” whether it was the political assassinations, repression of radicals, the Nanking Massacre, Pearl Harbor, or allied bombing of Japanese civilians, Hirohito decided to continue an unwinnable war waged with morally dubious values.

There is no question that Hirohito had absolute power. There is also no doubt that by summer of 1944, Japan would lose the war. Their ally, Nazi Germany, had been invaded at Normandy, and it was certain that the Soviets would turn their attention to Japan once Berlin fell. Moreover, after a spectacular blitzkrieg in late 1941, early 1942, Japan lost every single battle against the United States beginning with Midway, sustaining heavy casualties (to surrender to the enemy was seen as an act of ultimate shame-- better to die for the emperor). The US had closed Japanese sea lanes, in the process removing access to vital natural resources, as they slowly moved the Pacific war towards the home islands. In fact, the army and navy were in such dire shape, the only major losses the Americans were incurring by 1945 were kamikaze attacks and suicide charges. Thus, thousands of young men were being asked to die needlessly in the emperor's name. Why did Hirohito permit this? Why didn't he stop the war after Tokyo was firebombed on the night of March 9^th, 1945 (in which 100,000 civilians were killed)? Instead they passed out bamboo spears to women, children, and old men in the event of an amphibious American invasion. They sent thousands of balloons charged with explosive across the Pacific (almost none of them reaching the U.S. and none detonating over population centers) Meanwhile, dozens of Japanese urban industrialized areas would be bombed in the five months between Tokyo's firestorming and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why did Hirohito persist, causing so much unnecessary death?

Self-preservation, of course. The Americans wanted unconditional surrender, like they'd had with Germany. The atomic bombs and the Soviet declaration of war (happening the same week, a very bad one for Japan) spelled the futility in no uncertain terms. On August 15th, 1945, Hirohito gave his famous radio address announcing Japan's surrender. But the emperor needn't have worried. Though he had to give up his divinity status, US leadership (under the guidance of General Douglas MacArthur) was more concerned with total destabilization brought on by his abdication (they were quite concerned about communism and radicalism). During the Tokyo Trials, Hirohito was not brought up as a war criminal and the infamous, Hideki Tojo, became the fall guy, the villain, taking the rap for the emperor (supposedly the emperor wept the morning Tojo was executed). Hirohito received all the credit for surrendering and none of the blame for the catastrophe. He kept his throne, collaborated with the Americans for the reconstruction of Japan, and approved of the famous peace constitution written by the Americans “forever” renouncing war. Hirohito would reign for another 44 years, in what would be one of the greatest economic booms of any society on earth, creating a middle class, a strong safety net, and progressive values, where once there had been almost none.

The famous photograph of MacArthur and Hirohito

Bix has presented irrefutable evidence from various court sources and testimony regarding Hirohito's war guilt. American leadership made a calculated choice not to prosecute him for these crimes. Bix's immense and laboriously composed book is not necessarily a judgment on either the emperor nor Truman and MacArthur. It is not saying that Hirohito was a "bad" man. History is too complex for such trite conclusions. But it is conclusive that the emperor was complicit in giving his imperial seal on some of the worst excesses of Japanese war crimes. And moreover, his failure to act decisively in the certainty of defeat inexorably led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. This is not up for debate or revision. This is what happened. But how to imagine a Japan had Hirohito been tried and punished like his beloved general and prime minister, Tojo, is one of those pathways history turned away from. 

So we return to Faulkner and the presence of the past, our contemporary time and a new nationalism ascendant in Japan's far right government. The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is playing a risky game of brinksmanship with South Korea and especially China, quarreling territorially over a few rocks near Taiwan and revising history, absolving Japan of its criminal past. It is terrifying to consider how clumsy Abe is diplomatically, moreover, how poorly he is mistaking his agenda as that of a populist's. Japan's far-right is a vocal community, but they are a distinct minority, and the vast population of Japan does not seem very politically inclined, and would certainly be outraged by any sacrifice induced by (yet another unwinnable) war with China. Perhaps he is thinking his security treaty with the United States means U.S. armed forces would do his dirty work? I don't think any US president would commit American boys to China for a few uninhabitable rocks and Japan's reactionary misguided historical viewpoint. And certainly, almost no Japanese today will be willing to die for their emperor. That ideological cult is in the dustbin of history. He is no longer a god, he is just a man, a flawed one, like all of us.