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For Perspective

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For Geographical

In late July 1579, an enormous, well-dressed and well-armed African bodyguard stepped off a boat into the southern Japanese port of Kochinotsu.

Yasuke – perhaps from ‘Isaac’ in Amharic – had (probably) been abducted as a child by neighbouring Nilotic tribesmen, sold into slavery, and, by 23ish, already travelled (and fought) through northeast Africa, Arabia, and round the long coasts of both India and China.

His employer was the ‘most important Catholic in all of Asia’, Alessandro Valignano, papal ‘Visitor to the Indies’, here to impress the One True Faith upon the Japanese, and build on unsure Catholic footholds in the country.

But Yasuke promptly stole the show. He needed two beds, wore three men’s clothes sewn into one, and couldn’t fit through basic doors. His was a very noticeably muscular Christianity – and his blackness, far from hindering, had potentially divine connotations among the Japanese.

In the next three years he learned their ‘outlandish’ language, was given away (or sold?) to a mercurial warlord, nearly died thanks to an enthusiastic, festive mob, found himself exalted to the status of samurai, served at the forefront of ‘The Age of The Country at War’ – and then abruptly disappeared from the historical record.

The number of direct and unambiguous references to Yasuke in that record, though, is tiny, and beyond the ninjas, monks and ruthless warlords, typhoons, cliff-falls and disease that make up this undeniably rollicking historical yarn (both films and graphic novels have been fashioned out of it), much of this book is, of necessity, about the Jesuits and/or the Japanese internal conflicts of the 16th century.

The co-authorship of a Tokyo-based academic (Lockley) and a ‘historical adventure non-fiction’ writer (Girard) is not without its problems, either. The narrative leans lustily towards the Game of Thrones end of the spectrum, and the boisterous prose is well stocked with unverifiable adjectives, use of the word ‘likely’, and glimpses of Yasuke’s thought-process which surely cannot be substantiated. The extensive research is amply evidenced, but the delivery (there are no footnotes or attributions, per se) leaves the reader unclear as to which threads are the solid historical warp and weft and which are the more speculative embroidery. The chronology can be quite evasive. And there are sporadic and slightly effortful references to latter-day race/gender/slavery issues, which aren’t really in keeping with the adventure-story tone.

All of this, however, opens plenty of interesting windows into seafaring, high-caste homosexuality, palace architecture, and more – and the considerable endnotes and bibliography will be a trove for anyone who might prefer the sterner, rather more scholarly approach.

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For Geographical

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908
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The Chinese Christian warlord Feng Yu-xiang (1882–1948) baptised his troops en masse, using a firehose.

Vincent Kompany has suffered more than 40 injuries.

Time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.

Poetry must be entered into by a personal encounter, or it must be left alone.

Johnny Cash was in Colombo once.

The children’s insult ‘Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah’ is sung to the tune of ‘Bye, baby Bunting’. It features a descending minor third.

In Milan, there is an interactive neon tennis court inside a church.

The German language has not changed hugely since 1669.

Men’s hair takes on a lot.

A lot of well-respected Japanese writers seem to take their own lives.

You can see the name ‘Cadbury’ on every piece of chocolate.

Queen Victoria knew her Onions.

There are many different sorts of Irishman.
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For The Oldie

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Born two years after the Great Earthquake of 1923, in ‘not too good a section of Tokyo’, Kochan is a sickly child, brought up by stultifying parents and a morbid grandmother.

His first reliable memory is of the ‘night-soil’ man, and he immediately becomes obsessed with tragic lives, particularly in story books: anybody who is ‘fated for death’.

He is furious upon discovering that his favourite doomed knight is actually Joan of Arc. But after seeing a performance by a female magician, he begins to dress up in his mother’s clothing – and by adolescence he is committed to playing his ‘part’ upon life’s stage, ‘without ever once revealing my true self.’

Kochan is a literally and literarily pained young man, quoting Wilde, Huysmans, and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. He edits a Hungarian fairy tale to make the hero’s grisly end more realistic.

He quickly realises his interests are not merely aesthetic. He is aroused by the sight of marauding priests, sweating soldiers, sea-bathers, male in-laws. He stashes away images of (thin-ish) wrestlers and samurai as other boys would hide their porn mags.

Aged 12, he jerks off for the first time – over a picture of Guido Reni’s St Sebastian.

He falls in love with the school jock – ‘because of him I cannot love an intellectual person’ – and falls back out again some pages later, having got an envy-boner at the sight of hairy armpits.

He struggles, naturally enough, to blend in, since he has no idea what other boys are even thinking. (In his defence, mind you, he’s at the sort of pretentious, rigid school where grabbing other boys’ cocks is viewed as a normal playground pastime.)

His anaemia is counterbalanced by a raging blood-thirst. He daydreams, elaborately, of his family being obliterated in an air-raid; of tying a class-mate to a pillar and then stabbing him; of slaughtering ‘many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes’. He has long-since been enraptured by his own death.

A schoolfriend’s sister appears to provide the social cover that he’s needed. The approach of war looks set to grant him what he wants: ‘some natural, spontaneous suicide’.

A tough and compact piece of literature – in the manner of a JG Ballard, say, or Anthony Burgess – the most surprising thing about Confessions of a Mask is that, for all its euphemistic delicacy (‘inversion’, ‘bad habit’, ‘big thing’), this boundary-pushing novel was published only four years after Japan’s atomic cataclysm.

It is also plainly autobiographical. But as an exercise in personal catharsis, alas, it did not do the trick. Two decades, several dozen books, and three Nobel Prize nominations later, Mishima launched a one-man para-military coup, and wound up disembowelling himself. At least one biographer suggests that this was his intention from the outset.

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For The Amorist

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From a Cimabue cherub to Szydlowski/-lowska’s Lenin, simply everyone is pissing.

In pen and ink, paint on canvas, plaster, wood, stone, polymer, block prints, engraving, chamber pots, aquatints, dishware, film, manuscripts, inlay, public statuary, trick-photography, and in a Japanese video game played with live piss; men, women, children, angels, demons, and a limited selection of fauna; in gardens and in brothels, alone or in groups, in fancy dress or civvies; at divine revelations and in diplomatic meetings; onto walls, into wine-cups, into flagons, hats, baskets, rivers, coffins, and all over each other; drunk pissing, child pissing, simultaneous drinking-pissing, horseback pissing, piss sword-fights (obv.), and a boy pissing a urine halo over a young girl’s head. Snow White pisses. Cupid pisses (on his mother!). One doughty soul pisses onto Mars’s helmet – his actual battlegear, that is.

In fact, in the course of Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s nine essays and 137-odd (sic) illustrations, you could be forgiven for thinking no-one ever does anything but piss.

But his survey steers us through the allegorical minefield of alchemical symbolism, homosexual love-codes, the overwhelming preponderance of small boys pissing in Renaissance art, and the entertaining hypothesis of a literal (OK, figurative) pissing contest between Michelangelo and Titian. And under his tutelage we approach a clearer understanding of the medical uses, ethnic ceremonies, trade applications, and other themes that have to do with urine, and the cultural shifts by which the innocence of those earlier acts and images was lost.

‘Christ’s penis’ and ‘fist fucking’ are unusual bedfellows, even in the world of academia; and I’ll have to take Prof. Lebensztejn’s word that ‘this is what imbues the stream of urine with a tortured subjectivity.’ But in Pissing Figures he has found a hitherto unilluminated corner of art history – and let fly all over it as only a French art critic/historian ever could. His deadpan is particularly delectable. Re Bosse’s Giving Drink to the Thirsty (via, yes, a pissing statue) he points out: ‘In the era of indoor plumbing, we rarely if ever consume water like this.’ Elsewhere, a hilarious note records the full mathematical equation for the piss-parabola.

And if Lebensztejn’s treatment of this schoolboy topic is otherwise disappointingly grown-up (no Lebowski’s rug? No Paula Radcliffe?), the unembarrassed orange cover makes the perfect complement to public transport, if only so you might catch somebody rubbernecking at the pics and then say smugly, à la Andrew Lincoln: “Actually, they’re not funny… They’re art.”

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For The Amorist

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908

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Eight wickets for eight runs is the worst batting collapse in Twenty20 international cricket.

St Blaise is the patron saint of sore throats, and of knitting.

Estonian literature suffers from a dearth of stories by trucks drivers and/or prostitutes.

The presidential statues on Mount Rushmore were originally intended to extend down to the waist.

The Athenian philosopher Chrysippus died from laughing at his own jokes.

Richard Nixon once wrote a memo instructing his Secret Service detail to make sure no press took pictures of him with a drink in hand.

Tramps have heels like turnips.

Samuel Derrick, pimp, failed actor and master of the ceremonies at Bath, wrote a novel in the voice of Shakespeare’s ghost.

People now take in five times more information every day than they did thirty years ago.

Geoffrey Chaucer addressed his 1391 A Treatise on the Astrolabe to his ten-year-old son, Lewis.

The Japanese toilet industry has agreed to standardise complex bidet controls.

Calling somebody a pussy is not illegal.

‘We will die, and who will ever understand any of this?’ So asks Colonel Dorrigo Evans, second in command of the Australian Imperial Force’s 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station, slave worker on the Siam–Burma ‘Death Railway’, and redoubtable hero of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan’s novel is dedicated to ‘prisoner san byaku san ju go (335)’ – his father, a survivor of the railway (and worse) during the latter half of the Second World War. And it has already become a significant bestseller in his homeland, where it serves, among other things, as another brick in the wall against forgetting.

Colonel Evans, a Tasmanian Army surgeon with a fondness for Tennyson (‘Ulysses’, not coincidentally) is mobilised for war – leaving behind a burgeoning affair with his uncle’s much-younger wife. After stints in Egypt, Syria, and Changi Gaol in Singapore, he winds up in 1943 in thrall to the murderous, ‘Pharaonic’ Burma railway (cf. The Railway Man, Bridge on the River Kwai, et al) – a project that, as the Japanese repeatedly relate, the supposedly advanced Western nations have never even dared to attempt.

The flag-waving Alec Guinness types having all quickly succumbed to cholera, this ‘most conventional of unconventional men’ finds himself in charge of a sub-unit of ‘shitting skeletons’ dressed in nothing more than ‘cock rags and AIF slouch hats’, hacking, drilling, digging and lugging their way north through Siam, belaboured by jungle, disease, tigers, metric measurements and pathologically-obtuse, haiku-reciting Japanese officers (Flanagan’s title is taken from Basho, famously a high point of Japanese cultural sensibility).

They live in an unreal reality – ‘north-north-west of no south’ – and the track they are laying becomes its own existential explanation: ‘the Line’, a meaningless, Euclidian progress into hell. Evans, as both unit leader and prison doctor, is solely responsible for practically every aspect of his dwindling band, his jury-rigged amputations and appendectomies cruelly nullified by the coin-toss nature of daily life on the railway. ‘Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all.’

His men – colourful characters, many of them underage and all of them decades younger than they now appear – do what they can to get by (not all of it heroic): stealing food, memorising Mein Kampf or Mrs Beeton, sketching portraits of the prison officers (seemingly a nod to Ronald Searle; but perhaps that is doing someone a disservice). The literally muscular Christian Tiny Middleton embarks on such a Stakhanovite fuck-you to the Japanese that he endangers the lives of his less-able comrades. It is not, of course, an experience that is intended to be survived.

Their Japanese overseers subsume themselves in the only way that seems to work – to the ‘careless fatalism’ of the universe, or the Imperial will (‘a poem of one word’), or the railway’s progress through the landscape – and one of the greatest merits of the book is its unblinking elucidation of the Japanese point of view, especially where the human rights of their Australian prisoners were concerned. ‘Being prisoner great shame. Great! … Redeem honour building railway for Emperor.’ The Japanese commandant remarks that, for him, surrender would have constituted a capital offence. Army psychiatrists will later counsel the Australians not to talk about their time in South-East Asia.

Flanagan exhibits an almost faultless emotional intelligence (especially for the minutiae of infidelity) and a poet’s appreciation of the unsentimental detail. His prose is studded with dark, gleaming gems (a record needle ‘scratching circles of sand into the night’) which bestow the quiet blessing of veracity on episodes perhaps otherwise too outlandish or too harrowing to be thought real.

These are, by his own admission, experiences – albeit proxy ones – that Richard Flanagan has needed to get off his chest for some time, and The Narrow Road is a big book. Perhaps slightly too big. Its somewhat contrary billing as a ‘love story’ never sits right, and in the slower patches around the middle of the novel – dysfunctional Odyssean resonances notwithstanding – one begins to suspect that the author may have originally had two stories to tell, and allowed an only moderately substantial romantic storyline to piggyback on his war narrative.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is, at the time of writing, on the shortlist for Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award – a fitting tribute to the memory, and indeed memories, of Arch Flanagan, the story’s progenitor, who died the day the novel was finished. Just because the world is, relentlessly, ‘what it is’ doesn’t mean it has to lack a certain poetry.

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For Literary Review