Originally a poet, Taeko Tomioka turned to fiction later in her career, after the breakup of a long-term relationship and a return to her native Osaka. She moved in with her mother, from whom she had originally run away, reviewed her life and began writing fiction. (Film scripts as well. The first time I heard of her was as scenarist for Masuhiro Shinoda's 1968 "Double Suicide.") Among the first of her post-poetry works to appear was this 1975 volume of short stories, "Dobutsu no sorei."
In an interview included in this collection, Tomioka says that what she was writing then called for the descriptive prose of narration rather than poetry. The lyrical style was not sufficient for the critical, analytic voice that was emerging.
The themes changed as well. No longer was she singing the song of herself; rather she was expressing the need for what she has called "a quasi-family."
This in part explains her interest in movies. Each is made by a unit of people grouped about the director -- "in the manner of yakuza organizations." They live together and "there is a strong sense of family." Tomioka liked this experience well enough to make another film with Shinoda, "Gonza, the Spearman."
Both films are based on plays by Chikamatsu, and Tomioka, who had been familiar with the Osaka bunraku since childhood, could read the scripts and knew the music as well. As she has said, "This Kamigata dialect is my mother tongue and it is also the basis for my sense of language."
In addition to being familiar with the rhythms and rhetoric of bunraku, Tomioka was also able to see in the conventions of the puppet play something very near her conception of what life now was. Those who have seen "Double Suicide" will remember the black figures of the puppeteers watching the actors with unnerving neutrality, themselves unable to assist, there only to direct ordained movements.
The characters in Tomio-ka's later fiction are similarly controlled by forces neither we nor they comprehend. In the short story "Time Table," which concludes this collection, the narrator compares herself to the bunraku puppeteer. In managing a fashion show, "I had to work behind the scenes as a 'kuroko,' an anonymous puppeteer in black. I had to work out the arrangements for the hall, the master of ceremonies and the entertainment of the guests."
As author, Tomioka regards her characters with a similar neutrality. "The Funeral of a Giraffe" is about a mother and daughter who are confronted with the body of the man who gives his name to the story. "The Days of Dear Death" is about another mother, this one getting old. Other stories are about other family members, real, false, imagined. And all endure the unnerving, implacable and neutral gaze of the author.
There is no sentimentality whatsoever in these stories and there is very little sentiment either, if by that we mean a thought or view or attitude based on feeling or emotion rather than reason. Tomioka's world is one where cause leads to effect and there is no mitigation.
She has said, "I have an admiration for those who have the ability to do away with the ego and live as animals [dobutsu]," and yet, at the same time, "the basis of my thinking has always been that people should be able to experience life more deeply."
These aims are not antithetical, but animals are not reflective -- and neither are Tomioka's characters. Rather, they experience a fruitful tension between the aims of a contemplated existence and one that is simply existed. This dynamic creates the viability of the Tomioka story. We are shown the bars of our cage and it is a rare author who can do this.
And she apparently does it with a certain style. Her translators speak of her interest in modernist prose, of the influence of bunraku rhetoric, but their work contains no indication of this -- it is in workaday, modern, colloquial American.
She certainly does it with a disconcerting power, however, and this comes through. So much so that one disconcerted critic (Publishers Weekly) described "records of numb lives, bad sex and failed intimacy." This posits that some lives are different and in any event fails to recognize that such truth about the human experience can lead to great literature.
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