A Master Builder

Tsutomu Mizukami is unknown in English, though his two most famous works have long been available in French. Now “The Temple of the Wild Geese” and “Bamboo Dolls of Echizen” (Dalkey Archive Press, 208 pages, $22.95) have been translated by Dennis Washburn and collected in one volume. Equated in Japan with other mid-century greats, such as Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith, who brought high literary values to the mystery genre, Mizukami helped pioneer intelligent detective fiction in Japan. His greatest years of output — during which time he wrote both novellas collected here — came in the early 1960s, when Mizukami discovered in himself a colloquial Japanese landscape nevertheless rife with modernist sexual symbolism. It is a landscape — inclusive of detective fiction, perverse sexuality, and Buddhist mythology — that is well known to American readers today, practiced as it is by Haruki Murakami and manga artists.“The Temple of the Wild Geese” (1961) is the slighter of these two novellas, both in length and in merit, but it establishes the parameters of Mizukami’s imagination very distinctly. The story is set in a remote corner of Japan where, in the 1920s, a pre-industrial way of life predominates, interrupted only by the increasingly militaristic laws issuing from the national government.These circumstances mirror Mizukami’s early youth in the Fukui Prefecture. Called the Appalachia of Japan by Mr. Washburn, the region connotes both charming isolation and haunting weirdness. We soon learn that, among other things, the priests in this region keep common-law wives, and that intercity travel is conducted by horse and wagon. Drawing, in “The Temple of the Wild Geese,” on his own experience as an impoverished child who was sent to live with Zen priests, Mizukami tells the story of a sacral household that is set for a fall: Jikei, more Rabelaisian monk than ascetic priest, has made his temple available as a love nest to the wildlife artist Nangaku. Nangaku is Jikei’s favorite drinking partner, and they are frequently joined by the young mistress, Sato. When Nangaku dies, he asks Jikei to look after Sato — and Jikei in time makes Sato his own mistress.Described largely from Sato’s point of view, the temple is an eerie place built out of overt literary symbols. Nangaku’s murals of wild geese seem to writhe with anger, at haunting moments, while a kite, another kind of bird, sits on the temple’s roof and fills Sato with ill premonitions. But nothing bothers her so much as Jikei’s odd young acolyte, Jinen. An orphan, sent to the temple like young Mizukami because he had nowhere else to go, Jinen seems to be the archetypal Mizukami hero: short, with an oversized head, attractive to older women though not to Sato, and underestimated by everyone. The priest Jikei soon disappears — and Mizukami ties up what started as a work of atmospheric symbolism with a Holmesian knot.Echizen — the ancient name for the Fukui Prefecture — comes to fuller life in “The Bamboo Dolls of Echizen” (1963). Here, Mizukami invents Takekami — a narrow valley so damp that mushrooms grow on rooftops and in the road, which itself smells of mildew — and takes us inside the home of Kisuke, master bamboo craftsman and maker of baskets and birdcages, which reminds a visiting art dealer of “the inside of a dingy parasol.”Mizukami’s descriptions of bamboo — growing in 10 varieties around Kisuke’s steep-roofed house — and of the intricacies of Kisuke’s technique, are a writerly treat. In their straightforward approach to complexities, they recall Hemingway’s descriptions of Italian food: “To joint bamboo, you tap a hard, pointed iron rod into the knot of the bamboo and then pop the joint, all the while being careful not to scratch the bark. After that you pass a slender rod of bamboo grass wrapped in sharkskin through the inside to smooth the joints.”Over this exquisite scenario, Mizukami constructs his plot. Kisuke, who, like Jinen, is uncannily boyish, eventually finds a wife in Tamae, a former prostitute who once loved his father. Kisuke never sleeps with Tamae, to her disappointment, and instead insists that she act as his mother. Despite the explicitness of Kisuke’s psychology, there remains much that lies below the surface — exactly how does this surrogate mother inspire Kisuke’s magnificent bamboo dolls, and just how does Tamae resolve her sexual love of the father with the son’s unusual request? The thrilling success of his bamboo dolls carries the story — and makes a queasy Oedipal nightmare into an enthralling fairy tale.Born in 1919, Mizukami died in 2004. As a cultural envoy to China in 1989, he inadvertently witnessed tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, and suffered severe heart trouble as a result of the shock. He kept writing, but retired to the country, and began to learn pottery and cultivate bamboo.blytal@nysun.com

A Master Builder

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