Fiction: Guilt preys on the mind. It is a form of grieving, except that it is far worse than grief - no concessions are made and there is no sympathy due, only self-disgust, writes Eileen Battersby
Kasama Tsuneo works as an immigration officer in Tokyo. The hours are difficult. At times, he rises, tired, at 4.30am. Raids are part of his job, which is to track down and arrest illegal immigrants. It is bleak but strangely exciting work because he is young and adventure means something to him.
He is still of an age that he can ponder his once-white sneakers: "Every time he did this, it occurred to him that he needed to wash them. A well washed pair of white sneakers makes you feel terrific. And yet he generally wore his out without even washing them once." Tsuneo appears uncomplicated, but he is more complex and troubled than might initially be suspected.
Within a couple of sentences, Japanese writer Taichi Yamada creates a character and confers a developed personality without ever intruding. He has a feel for intimate psychology, ever alert to how a simple obsession can shape, or distort, an individual's approach to life itself. An experienced scriptwriter who has worked in the Japanese film industry, Yamada understands human behaviour and the way in which the imagination can make the mind a terrifying place.
In Search of a Distant Voice, which was published in Japan in 1986, is now being published in English for the first time. It appears soon after Strangers, which though hailed as his English-language debut when published in the US in 2003, originally appeared in Tokyo in 1987, the year after In Search of a Distant Voice. Looking at the two, In Search of a Distant Voice reads as a sophisticated, detached first novel, written in the third person, and constructed upon a shameful act.
Strangers, however, with its Paul Auster-like deadbeat tone, compelling first- person narrative voice and brilliant evocation of the point at which it is no longer possible to ignore not only the loss of youth but also of a credible sense of vitality, is an unsettling study that chips away at that thing called complacency. Yamada's intention may be to leave his reader fully engaged, almost overwhelmed. Harada, the narrator of Strangers, is a scriptwriter approaching 50. Newly divorced and vulnerable, admitting to never having had much interest in his now 19-year-old son, he takes refuge in a past he was abruptly denied by the death of his parents when he was 12 years old.
Both books stand the test of time and the 20 years which have passed since their initial Japanese publications do not render them dated. Yamada is alert to Japanese culture, suspended as it is between the old traditions and the bland slickness introduced by the West. The comparison with Auster is a valid one, although Yamada avoids the use of coincidence which is so central to the at times contrived and even convoluted narratives of the New York writer, who began his career heavily influenced by French fiction.
The presence of Haruki Murakami, the inventive, if at times self-indulgent, Japanese writer who, in the course of eight novels and three collections to date, most effectively placed contemporary Japanese writing shoulder to shoulder with mainstream Western literary fiction, is also evident. Yet Yamada, on the strength of these two economic though telling novels, has his own voice. Far more subdued than Murakami, he tends towards a more surreal, darker sense of unease. Strangers is shocking precisely because it is such a profoundly moving exploration of loneliness. Harada has reached a crisis in his life, his marriage is over and, increasingly conscious of his age, he is far more lost than he realises.
Any one of several factors could be the reason behind his decision to embark on an eerie odyssey back to his childhood. A visit to his home town not only reminds him of long-dead parents, it makes him re-imagine them as the people they were at the time of their deaths in a motorbike accident. Although he is now older than they were, he nonetheless adopts the role of child to his younger parents. It is bizarre and risky, sustained by tone shifts and feelings that have been belatedly articulated, yet Yamada succeeds (although the narrator's dead father ends up sounding like a teenager from a 1960s time warp). Far more sinister is the relationship which develops with a young woman who lives in the building where the narrator has an office, now serving as an apartment. In the balance of realism and surrealism lies the key to Yamada's achievement.
In Search of A Distant Voice is structurally less complex. The central character is a young man whose guilt is rooted in a secret. Unlike the narrator of Strangers, in which an entire life is being deconstructed, the young man's secret guilt manifests itself in the form of a woman's voice.
She becomes his confessor and it is to her that he attempts to explain his actions, including his disastrous treatment of a girl he was planning to marry. The narrative is a personal quest and, as with Strangers, is concerned with the subconscious and the ongoing tensions and fears that preoccupy most of us. Deliberate and intense, Yamada has a tight, controlled prose style and no interest in gags. There is a meditative quality about both novels. For all the philosophy, he is not afraid to use direct conversational dialogue. His grasp of life's blurred edges and the panic that undercuts moments of intense reflection provides these original and unsettling psychological books with energy and relevance.
In Search of A Distant Voice By Taichi Yamada Translated by Michael Emmerich Faber, 193pp. £9.99
Starngers By Taichi Yamada Translated by Wayne P. Lamners Faber, 203pp. £10.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times