Back Reviews Reel: September 2015

In my reviews of three years past, I evoked classical love as well as a modern dystopia starting my tour in Japan and returning there via New York and Germany. Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo centres on a doomed love in Tōkyō of the 1920s. About 30 years later and thousands of miles east, the famous protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote frequents well-to-do circles to find a husband to give her the happiness and glamour that she yearns for. In futuristic Germany of The Method by Juli Zeh, on the other hand, a woman who lost her brother finds herself prosecuted by a relentless State for letting herself go. The protagonist of The Changeling by Ōe Kenzaburō, the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, takes to imaginary conversations with his late youth friend and brother-in-law on the other side with the help of tapes.

- - - - -

First released in 1935, Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo is a Japanese classic hardly known in the English-speaking world. The narrating protagonist is an admired, though poor painter who has just returned to Japan after several years in Europe and finds himself more than ever thrilled by the beauty of Japanese women. Despite all, there is only one who really rouses his passion, an eighteen-year-old upper-class girl who makes him brazen advances and with whom he falls in love before long. Alas, they live in Tōkyō in the late 1920s and he is too much beneath her station for her family to approve of him as a suitor, so they meet in secret. When her parents arrange a marriage for her, they elope, but return home sobered, and yet, they can’t bear staying apart…
Read more »

- - - - -

The setting of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote is New York City during World War II. Eighteen-year-old Holly Golightly has come to the buzzing city in search of a husband, but she isn’t inclined to take just anyone. Consequently, she refuses to marry her permanent suitor and entertains relations with many men whom she meets frequenting the same places as the rich and the powerful. She “allows” them to give her pricey presents and even money for expenses because she needs to make a living somehow. However, she keeps them at a distance seldom granting them more than just her company. As her husband-to-be she fancies the fiancé of her roommate and in fact, things have taken a lucky turn into the right direction, when Holly gets into conflict with the law…
Read more »

- - - - -

The life of future Germans in The Method by Juli Zeh is based on science and on very strict rules warranting safety in every thinkable aspect of human existence including health. Not once in her life Mia questioned the immense extent of stately control that the system implies, but then her brother is found guilty of rape and murder although she is convinced of his innocence. Alas the DNA proof is irrefutable and the best that she can do for him is to provide him with the means to commit suicide. Her brother “leaves” her his imaginary Ideal Beloved who constantly drives confused and grieving Mia to let herself go completely. Her “harmful” behaviour attracts the attention of the authorities and eventually of the country’s chief-ideologist who sets out on a crusade against her…
Read more »

- - - - -

Old-fashioned cassette tapes in a small duralumin trunk play a central role in The Changeling by Ōe Kenzaburō. The Nobel laureate‘s literary alter ego Kogito Choko always liked to listen to the chatty monologues of his high school friend and brother-in-law and to pretend talking to him on the phone pressing the pause button every so often, but when the latter commits suicide without warning the tapes become his obsession. It doesn’t take long before his wife and son begin to worry about him. Encouraged by a remark on one of the tapes, he finally prescribes himself one hundred days of quarantine and accepts a guest lectureship in Berlin. However, even so he can’t stop thinking about his late friend and the event in their youth that made him change so radically…
Read more »