Surprisingly, Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe's works have been slow to be translated into English. This "new" novel was actually published in Japanese in 1983. The translation by John Nathan is excellent - Nathan is also known as friend and biographer of Yukio Mishima, who appears in this novel lightly disguised as the character M.
Oe has written extensively about his son, who was born with a cranial deformity, and how coping with this event gave him and his art a new lease of life. A Personal Matter, written in the 1960s, painfully depicts this life of co-existence, and the books that followed were the so-called "idiot-son narratives".
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a middle installment. Oe's son is now 38. The main character of the book, K, has three children and a wife; one of his children, Eeyore, is severely handicapped. K as a writer and father sets out to make sense of it all by observing and narrating the events surrounding his son's condition. What triggers this is Eeyore's aggressive behaviour as he enters his teens.
K returns to a life-long meditation on the poetry and philosophy of William Blake in an attempt to develop definitions of the world for his son. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that these definitions are as much for the narrator as they are for his son.
His interpretation of Blake's poetry, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, are personal and idiosyncratic, and very far from the genre of How Poetry Can Save Your Life.
The project is flawed: by the end of the novel, Eeyore is as much teacher to the narrator as Blake has become. And while Blake was a champion of the imagination transfiguring reality, K succeeds in a transfiguration of himself and his own situation.
Oe has produced an unsettling book, unsparing in its self-examination and honesty. Biography and fiction entwine almost too closely. Toward the end of the novel, Eeyore is kidnapped by political reactionaries as a lesson to his author/intellectual father. Eeyore is dumped later that same evening in a Tokyo subway and found alone in urine soaked trousers by his parents. In Nathan's afterword, we learn that this actually happened.
Banana Yoshimoto is a popular novelist in Japan, and her new novel, her sixth, Goodbye Tsugumi, unlike Oe's, had no 19-year gap in getting translated from Japanese into English. The novel explores the relationship between two girls, Maria and Tsugami, who grow up together in a small hotel on the coast of Japan.
Maria is the daughter of an unmarried woman; her father lives in Tokyo and is trying to get a divorce so that he can bring Maria and her mother to live with him. Tsugumi, her cousin and difficult friend, lives in the hotel as a young invalid; sharp-tongued, spoiled and petulant, she shows little sympathy for anybody, but remains likable.
After Maria and her mother are eventually summoned to Tokyo to begin living as a family, Tsugami, who is very ill, invites Maria to spend a summer in the hotel, which is being sold. What follows is an exploration of friendship in a kind of lost summer scenario where both characters mature. Tsugami finds love; and Maria, after life as a guest in her aunt's hotel, discovers she has moved on, mentally and physically, to her new home, enrollment in university and family. The summer is played out against a constant backdrop of the ocean, and the slightly out-of-season mood that seaside towns have in season. The writing is understated and sparse, but an elaborate trap that Tsugami sets at the end of the novel threw this reader into Nancy Drew territory.
William Adams was not only the first Englishman to arrive in Japan, but he also managed to gain an honoured position in the imperial court to Emperor Ieyasu and spent the rest of his life there. This achievement makes fascinating reading. The story has already been fictionalised in James Clavell's Shogun, but the facts that Giles Milton produces are more intriguing and interesting than fiction. How Adams actually got to Japan would make a good story by itself.
Adams was a skilled ship's pilot and navigator and got himself on board one of a fleet of five Dutch ships setting out for Japan. They went via Africa, South America and across the Pacific. The loss of life on board was staggering - due to scurvy, tropical disease, starvation and on-board discipline, which involved execution for stealing rations. When they put in for supplies in South America, many were hacked to death by the locals. Only one ship made it to Japan, the Liefde in 1600.
Of the 24 survivors, only six could stand; Adams was among the six. The Jesuits already had a foothold and tried to have Adams executed as Protestant. The Emperor wasn't aware of any Christian division, he was led to believe by the Jesuits there was only one Christian church.
Emperor Ieyasu, having imprisoned Adams and toyed with the idea of killing him, decided instead that he liked Adams, in particular his navigation skills. Adams became his adviser, was granted a country estate and lived to see, perhaps with his own partial influence, the persecution of Catholics. He survived the dramas and intrigue of the imperial court, and later managed to negotiate for both the Dutch and the English stations there.
Adams was a decade in Japan before the English arrived, a ship sponsored by the East India Company. They discovered Adams had gone native and was uneasy with the manners and culture of his own countrymen.
Milton has written a very thorough and absorbing account of this period, witty and accessible; his range of reference is wide. His research has resurrected a few forgotten characters such as Richard Cooks, the head of the English station in Japan, a true and humane eccentric who came to a sad end.
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! By Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan. Atlantic Books, 259 pp. £12.99 sterling
Goodbye Tsugami. By Banana Yoshimoto. Faber and Faber, 186 pp.
£9.99 sterling
Samurai William, the Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan. By Giles Milton. Hodder & Stoughton, 400 pp. £14.99 sterling
Joseph Woods is a poet and the director of Poetry Ireland. His collection, Sailing to Hokkaido, was published last year by the Worple Press