Muri

I gotta say, this book, Muri, has been a little bit of a disappointment. When I read that it would be about people living in a merged, rural town in Japan, my mind automatically went to stories of people trying to make it in despite of economic and population decline while dealing with a society moving away from traditions and being left behind by the government. I thought it would reflect something of what I saw in my own town and that there would be some kind of critical analysis of why things have turned out the way they have.

Instead, it's a book about a whole bunch of weak, corrupt, and opportunistic people who live in a town that seems to be driven to slow destruction by their own failings. The most common representative of the demise of the rural town is women. It makes it difficult to read the book knowing that somewhere in the chapter, I'm going to have to get through some part associating women with the decline of society. Usually, it's a single mom lazily living off welfare, whose own fault it is that her past husbands have left her because she didn't act "mother-like". Either that, or it's deceptive women who cheat on their husbands or sleep with their friend's husbands. There's also the middle aged women, who the author almost always associates with wearing overpowering makeup, who herd together, following cultish religious groups or a single activist organizer. Besides this, whenever introducing a female character, the author always writes in detail whether she is good-looking or not. There is only one female in the whole book so far who does not get this treatment, a high schooler trying to get into college in Tokyo.

The second most common theme associated with the decline of the rural town is foreigners. So far, Brazilian laborers are the main target. They wear baggy clothes, fight with the local students (who are also described almost completely as soon-to-be dropouts or people without any future), loiter and mess around with vending machines, and pull knives on people. They get a minimal sympathetic treatment by the acknowledgment that people are racist against them (individually, not systematically) and that they've traveled half-way across the world. In the end, though, like with most of the female characters, the reader never gets a look into their perspective and they remain pretty flat characters. Also, Filipina prostitutes just made an appearance in the book, as part of an entourage to a corrupt male politician (one of the main characters, whose own bad deeds and cheating on his wife is written about without any judgement). There is no mention of the sex trade in Japan for which Japanese kidnap young women from other countries, especially the Philippines, or trick them with promises of acting or singing careers.

All in all, a pretty disappointing read in terms of sympathy and meaningful criticism.

But I keep reading it. I'm not sure why, but I think it might have to do with the writing style. I've been able to get to page 113 at a pretty good speed, which is encouraging, and have been reading a chapter a day for about half a week or so. I like the words the author uses to describe actions and emotions, a lot of which I haven't encountered up until now. It's definitely good Japanese practice. On the other hand, the main reason I bought the book, after the fact that it deals with decline in merged, rural towns in Japan, which was that there were multiple main characters, all of which seemed fairly interesting, didn't pan out very well, either. Most of the characters are pretty flat and uninteresting still, and I'm already a fifth of the way through the book. I could stand reading about characters with which I cannot sympathesize, but if they're not even deep to boot...The author also holds to a rule of devoting one chapter to each character in a fixed order. So, I've read three chapters on each character now, and not much has developed. Still, since I seem to be going through the book and finding some kind of pleasure in reading it, I figure I'll keep reading it. It'd be cool to finish it.

Man, and what am I even talking about? You don't want to read a bunch of paragraphs about a book I'm reading, do you? Sorry if that was boring. I'm listening to Radiohead again.