Check out Episode 19 of the Read Literature podcast.
Magical realism is a literary genre famous for unexplained fantastical encounters that pop-up in the otherwise everyday world.
Today, we’re going to take a look at magical realism in Japanese fiction.
We’ll start with defining magical realism, including a look at why that term is difficult and why some people think of it as controversial.
Then we’ll turn to the history of magical realism in Japan and take a closer look at the work of Tomihiko Morimi, especially The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl.
(CW: brief mention of fictional suicide attempt)
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The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl by Tomihiko Morimi (translated by Emily Balistrieri)
More by Tomihiko Morimi:
- “20th Century Hotel” (translated by Emily Balistrieri) (read for free online)
- “Fireworks” (translated by Emily Balistrieri) (read for free online)
- Fox Tales (translated by Winifred Bird)
- Penguin Highway (translated by Andrew Cunningham)
- The Tatami Galaxy (translated by Emily Balistrieri)
- Tower of the Sun (translated by Stephen Kohler)
This episode also mentions:
- The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward Seidensticker)
- includes the story “One Arm”
- Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima (translated by Stephen Dodd)
- People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Ted Goossen)
- Ten Nights Dream: And the Cat’s Grave by Natsume Soseki (translated by Matt Treyvaud)
A Reading List of Japanese Magical Realism
- Hideo Furukawa
- Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? (translated by Michael Emmerich)
- Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (translated by Akiko Takenaka and Doug Slaymaker)
- Slow Boat (translated by David Boyd)
- Hiromi Kawakami
- People from My Neighborhood (translated by Ted Goossen)
- Record of a Night Too Brief (translated by Lucy North)
- Tomohiko Morimi
- The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (translated by Emily Balistrieri)
- The Tatami Galaxy (translated by Emily Balistrieri)
- Tower of the Sun (translated by Stephen Kohler)
- Haruki Murakami
- 1Q84 (translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel)
- The Elephant Vanishes (translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum)
- First Person Singular (translated by Philip Gabriel)
- including the short story “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” (read for free via The New Yorker)
- Kafka on the Shore (translated by Philip Gabriel)
- Killing Commendatore (translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen)
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)
- South of the Border, West of the Sun (translated by Philip Gabriel)
- Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by Philip Gabriel)
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (translated by Jay Rubin)
- A Wild Sheep Chase (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)
- Yoko Ogawa
- The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (translated by Stephen Snyder)
- Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (translated by Stephen Snyder)
- Yoko Tawada
- 3 Streets (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)
- The Bridegroom Was a Dog (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)
- Facing the Bridge (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)
- Memoirs of a Polar Bear (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky)
- Banana Yoshimoto
- Asleep (translated by Michael Emmerich)
- Dead-End Memories (translated by Asa Yoneda)
- Lizard (translated by Ann Sherif)
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot)
- Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi (translated by David Boyd and Lucy North)
- “Droplets” by Shun Medoruma in Southern Exposure: Japanese Literature from Okinawa
- The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward Seidensticker)
- If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura (translated by Eric Selland)
- Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
- Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima (translated by Stephen Dodd)
- The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukio Motoya (translated by Asa Yoneda)
- The Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino (translated by Sam Bett)
- Ten Nights Dream: And the Cat’s Grave by Natsume Soseki (translated by Matt Treyvaud)
- There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (translated by Polly Barton)
- Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima (translated by Ginny Takemori and Ian MacDonald)
- including the short story “When My Wife Was a Shiitake” (read for free via Words without Borders)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Ozeki is a Japanese-American-Canadian, but her book is deeply influenced by Japanese literary history.
Find Out More
“I Am Not a Magic Realist” by Alberto Fuguet.
“The Future of Latin American Fiction” by Jorge Volpi.
“What We Talk about When We Talk about Magical Realism” by Fernando Sdrigotti.
“Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
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“11 Questions You’re Too Embarrassed to Ask about Magical Realism” at Vox.com.
Yasunari Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”.
More about Yukio Mushima’s Life for Sale from Read Japanese Literature.
“Metafiction” at the Oxford Research Encyclopedia Online.
“Conflict in Literature” at KnowYourMeme.com.
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An interview with Tomihiko Morimi.
Translators Emily Balistrieri and Andrew Cunningham talk about Tomihiko Morimi.
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Rihaku (Li Bai in Chinese) via the Poetry Foundation.
The Uncanny Japan Podcast on Daruma.
Information about Kyoto from the Japan National Tourism Organization.
RJL on The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl. This blog post includes a “glossary” of some of the features of Japanese culture that come up in the novel.
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“Literature” at Japanese Wiki Corpus
Japanese Literature at Facebook
Japanese Literature at Goodreads
Other RJL Episodes of Interest:
- Episode 8: Meiji Literature & Japan’s Most Famous Literary Cat. This episode includes an extended look at Japanese literature’s earliest encounters with European modernism.
- Episode 10: Taisho Magazines and Akutagawa’s Vision of Hell. Scholar Susan Napier classifies some of Akutagawa’s work as magical realist.
- Episode 11: The I-Novel, Osamu Dazai, and No Longer Human. The I-novel is the perhaps fullest realization of Japanese realism.
- Episode 13: Literature of Change in the 1960s—Mishima and Oe. Both Mishima and Oe produced works of magical realism.
- Episode 17: The Smile of the Mountain Witch. Minako Oba’s “The Smile of the Mountain Witch” has magical realist elements, incorporating Japanese folk stories in a realistic, modern setting.
Sources
Ashkenazi, Michael. “Tengu” in Handbook of Japanese Mythology. ABC Clio, 2003.
Dash, Michael J. “Marvellous Realism—The Way Out of Négritude” in Caribbean Studies, 1974.
–. “Killing Commendatore; or, What the Hell is a Double Metaphor” at Read Japanese Literature, 2020. (free)
–. “Magical Realism in Penguin Highway” at Read Japanese Literature, 2020. (free)
Fuguet, Alberto. “I Am Not a Magic Realist” in Salon, 1997. (free)
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. OUP, 2019.
Hussein, Sawsan Malla and Brahim Barhoun. “The State of the Debate on Magical Realism and Ben Okri” in Oyé: Journal of Language, Literature, and Popular Culture, 2020.
Kamerer, Tamara. “Fantastic Realities: Magical Realism in Contemporary Okinawan Fiction” in Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, 2014.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Metafiction” in Oxford Research Ensearch Encyclopedia Online, 2017. (free)
Li Bai. “The Solitude of Night.” Translated by Shigeyoshi Obata. PoetryFoundation.org.
Morena-Garcia, Silvia. “Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism” in NYTimes Online, 2022. (free)
Marcus, Marvin. Japanese Literature from Murasaki to Murakami. Association for Asian Studies, 2015.
Volpi, Jorge. “The Future of Latin American Fiction” at Three Percent. (free)
Weinberger, Christopher. “Reflexive Realism and Kinetic Ethics: The Case of Murakami Haruki” in Representations, 2015.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke UP, 1995.
What a fantastic compilation of resources and delivery of a primer in Japanese magical realism! A thousand thanks.
You are very welcome. I love what I do!