Reading strange

(Shoichido Kurihara, Japanese maidens at shrine entrance, 1930s; found here)

Ages ago – last summer? – I signed up excitedly for Dolce Bellezza’s sixth Japanese Literature Challenge. I’ve always fancied reading more from that land, but never quite got further than Murakami, some Japanese poetry and a couple of historical novels written by non-Japanese. The gods of Japanese literature appeared to be on my side, since I found a copy of Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata) in my local charity shop. Hurrah! And then they withdrewn theif favour and I lost it. So small a book, so messy a house. Months passed, with the occasional twinge of guilt. But just the other day, I found it! Hampered by a sudden onslaught of work and sick child, I am trying to finish it and post about it before the end of the challenge (erm, the end of January).

What I wanted to write about here though was something about the novel I hadn’t expected to encounter, and that was my inability to visualise it. It was written in the 1930s and set in the mountains. In the first scene, three people are sitting in a train. What would they be wearing – Japanese or Western dress? The train reaches a mountain village. What sort of houses make up the village? What sort of a brazier has a quilt over it? Where exactly are we anyway?

I like to imagine a story as I read it, stitching together the picture from scraps the author lets fall here and there. Of course my visualisations are vague and almost certainly inauthentic. For instance, I don’t suppose that that the samovars or Petersburg or Russian steppes I imagined when reading Tolstoy and Dostoevesky more than twenty years ago bore any resemblance to the real tea urns or buildings and landscapes. (In fact, I thought of all samovars as about the size of a wardrobe, silver and wildly Baroque in style, decorated all over with grotesque heads and figures and garlands and cherubs, and with sometimes a sleeping serf beneath them.) However, somewhere over the years I had been exposed to just enough Russian nineteenth-century culture for this not to be a hindrance.

Japan in the 1930s, on the contrary, feels very alien to me. Slowly I am piecing something together. Most of the characters wear kimonos. The windows are made of glass (I had wondered if they would be paper). But there’s still a lot of white space, vagueness, a blurry shape where a table might be. Perhaps this is appropriate for this particular novel. It makes reading a little different though: more attentive and slow, I think. It’s not unlike my experience of reading De aanslag. Then I thought about all the imagined worlds we create when we read a novel or a poem, or listen to a piece of music. I wonder where all those worlds are? And are some more valid than others, because more ‘accurately’ imagined? How far do the pictures of the mind’s eye affect the interpretation?

I suppose I could search through the internet and find photographs and maps and music to supplement my fuzzy fantasies, but I feel strangely reluctant (although I have started, by looking for a picture for this post); I don’t know why, other than to say I am enjoying the strangeness. But then, is that not a way of exotifiying the novel? Would such a reading be in some way ‘wrong’, or at least ‘flawed’?

How do you read books you can’t visualise? Or does that never happen?

Comments

[litlove]

It is precisely for this reason that I don't read as many books from other cultures as I should! I really struggled a few years back with a non-fiction book about Buddhism that was supposed to be excellent. But the guy kept travelling around Buddhist sites in a certain part of India and I just could not see them at all. It was quite dense, difficult prose and this inability to at least conjure up a scene in my mind by way of compensation completely threw me. It was one of those books that didn't last more than twenty pages with me!

[Catie]

I think I usually read strange places like I read strange words- glossing over, then making up a meaning in context, and then feeling fairly confident with the meanings/concepts. I suppose this is a flawed method- sometimes I get a concrete idea, but I get it wrong. Sometimes I turn to a dictionary. I like the idea of immersion, but in a sense maybe this involves taking too much from my own head, not enough from the text. But I like the way a place or time period can become more and more familiar through reading.

[Alex]

Helen, your post makes me realise once again that I am simply not a visual reader. I would have no problem with this book because I simply don't 'see' any book that I read. I'm not quite certain what I do instead, but I know it isn't a visual process. Is there anyone else out there who feels this way and can explain where our understanding of a book comes from? I think I'd better do a post on this myself. Thanks for the nudge.

[AJ]

I don't really "see" books either -- not even to the extent of visualizing what characters look like. But then I am the sort of person who prefers that words stay with poems and not make the leap to music lyric ... like my music purely non-verbal.