opinions
Invisible Cities - 02.01.25 / 07.02.25
This book was nothing like I had imagined. Invisible Stories is a compilation of descriptions of cities visited by Marco Polo on his journey to conquer the newly acquired empire of the Kublai Klan - more of a documentary than a narrative. Each place, in its magical eccentricity, is so different from the one before and the one after that imagination and creativity shine through the paper. The conversations between the two are very meaningful and interesting, with a contrast between social discrepancies, ignorance and a kind of naivety. The clash of two very different minds. I really like the wording of the narrative and how the author describes both of them - everything seems more complicated and simpler at the same time.
"In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extention of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them."
"The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the new emblem a new meaning, Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's emblems.
'On the day I know all the emblems,' he asked Marco,'shall I be able to possess m empire, at last?'
And the Venetian answered: 'Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems."
"[...] you return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling? Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; [...] the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed:"
At times, the book seems to focus more on the traveler than the city, and it emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between a visitor and a local, which I found very resonant and true to my experience, because how can you truly know a place in just a short period of time?
"But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now belive they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time."
"But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's essence; for while the description of Anastadia awakens desires on at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastadia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The ciry appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and content.[...] if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agnate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you belive you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."
"Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. [...] you leave Tamara without having discovered it."
"Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score wher enot a note can be altered or displaced.[...] The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember:[...] So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain montionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her."
"I thought: 'If Adelma is a city I am seeing in a dream, where you encounter only the dead, the dream frightens me. If Adelma is a real city, inhabited by living people, I need only continue looking at them and the resemblances will dissolve, alien faces will appear, bearing anguish. In either case it is best for me not to insist on staring at them. [...] It thought: 'You reach a moment in life when among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one finds the most suitable mask.[...] I thought: 'Perhaps Adelmais the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too am dead.' And I also thought: 'This means the beyond is not happy.'"
"A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different coloured inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parables with their still wings, daring to gulp a mosquito, spiralling upwards, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city."
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their world building, as it is the most creative and packed with different and unique places storytelling I have ever seen. However, there is where I think its flaws lie - I couldn't finish the whole thing because of the sheer number of 'chapters'.
Every time I read about a new city, it became harder and harder to remember the dozens of others - or maybe that is the point Marco Polo was trying to make in number 6, 'Memory's images, once they are fixed on words, are erased'. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so overwhelming if I had read a physical copy, which I plan to buy later, but that was my impression. I understand that every city shows us some life lesson, but sometimes the language gets a bit complicated, which made me switch from English to my native language. Still, I don't think it's an easy read, even if it's not too complicated.
"This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."
Harboiled & Hard Luck - 04.12.24
At first, the title of this book reminded me of Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which introduced me to Japanese literature a few years ago. I find they have a similar style of storytelling, the fantastic that sometimes borders on the strange or creepy. This book is a smooth read, two stories that, if I had to choose one word to describe them, it would be 'grief'.
The focus on the character's mourning is present in both stories - the first about the protagonist's girlfriend who has already died but continues to haunt her, and the second about a woman coming to terms with the reality that her sister is dying and that there's nothing that can help her. The contrast between grief over a dead and a living person is very interesting, and it shows how different people can react to death, as sudden as it was written by Yoshimoto.
The book centers itself more on the character's monologues than on the action scenes, becoming introspective and philosophical at times. There are things you have to accept that you won't understand, that are simply unusual, like Chizuru's obsession with cleaning and her ability to see ghosts. The protagonist's relationship with her feels like a broken puzzle piece that they both tried to fit together, something held together with tape that was seconds away from falling apart. I wonder if the hiker was a better person, if her life wasn't so affected by her relationship with her mother, if they could have worked it out.
"You still don't get it, do you? She continued. You always think your own life is the hardest, and as long as life is nice and easy and you're having all the fun you can, everything's fine."
The way Hiker's own mind tries to find closure on the anniversary of her former girlfriend's death is something I've found quite remarkable. I've heard of people who, after losing a loved one, often have a dream in which they say goodbye, and it manages to soothe some of the pain they feel. I think the hiker sometimes saw Chizuru as a sort of sad painting, not human, more like a ghost or a vase of wilting flowers, and it made me wonder if their love was real or not. If she was there because she wanted to be, or if she just needed it.
"And I had just looked on. In fact, that was why I liked watching her. Her life was like a pale shadow of life, given form by innumerable layers of anguish."
"I never shed a tear over Chizuru's death. Why not? And why was I so harsh to her earlier, in the dream? I should've been nicer, even if it mean lying to myself."
Their relationship was born out of the hiker's desire for a place to live, a need. What was Chizuru's? Perhaps companionship, I suppose. She seemed quite lonely throughout the story, and her reaction to Hiker moving out was extreme. I think they were both unhealthily attached, even if they didn't realise it.
At the farewell, I didn't understand what Chizuru meant by living a 'hard-boiled life', just the general idea of it - being indifferent to other people's opinions. But I really like the supernatural aspect of it, and how it is treated as mundane by everyone. The whole hotel scene and the hiker's encounter with the suicidal ghost seems to me to be a bit of a reflection of her own life.
"Oh, I'll be fine. I said this earlier, but it's true - you have strange nights no matter where you are. And they always pass. You just have to force yourself to act like nothing is wrong, and when morning comes everything is back to normal."
As for Hard Luck, I found it very sentimental, in a different way but similar to the first story. It's different to see someone slowly die in front of you than to hear it on the phone, I guess. I liked that you can see how this situation affects everyone who knew Kuni, the girl who had the stroke - her sister, mother, father, fiancee, colleagues, etc. The scene where the sister goes to collect all her things from her work building was quite emotional and showed us how we can affect the lives of others, even without knowing it.
"All these chores made me even sadder than the sight of Kuni hooked up to the respirator, eyes staring into space. I mentioned that to Kuni's coworker, and he said through his tears that he understood. Being with you is agonizing, he said, because it feels like I'm with Kuni. The way you talk, your gestures - it forces me to admit that she's gone, he said. You make me remember her.
The figure of Sakai, the brother of the patient's fiancee, was someone who brought catharsis to the sister. He comforted her and made her see things from a different perspective, even if he was a bit odd. The main point of the book is sadness, but I found myself laughing at some points.
"I've got it! He looks like he writes manga! Either that or a chiropractor, I guess."
"I probably hadn't cried that way, with that same degree of oblivious intensity, since I was a baby."
"Today is your crying day. Go ahead and cry."
Is a more detailed grieving process that brings two people together. The guilt, grief, scepticism and hurt are portrayed as a healing bruise - ugly, but getting better with time. Having a sibling, it was easy for me to put myself in her shoes. It reminded me of visiting my grandmother in hospital before she died - how helpless you feel and the sadness that clings to you.
"absent presence"
"Sometimes I would burst out sobbing. One evening when I was taking a bath, for instance, I noticed that the Bulgari animal soap she has brought back for me as a souvenir of a trip overseas had lost its animal shape, even though it had seemed like it would last forever, and it was now just a round blob."
"Death isn't sad. What hurts is being drowned by these emotions."
Eventually the narrator finds peace in accepting her sister's death:
"And it struck me that if anything was a miracle, it was this: the lovely moments we experienced during the small, almost imperceptible periods of relief. The instant the unbearable pain and the tears faded away, and I saw with my own eyes how vast the workings of the universe were, I would feel my sister's soul."
It's also about tragic romance - meeting the right person at the wrong time. It teaches patience, not to rush things when everything is so new and fragile. Let time heal.
"We'll go out every afternoon for pasta, and the sky will be clear, and we'll go and see all kinds of scenery. We'll walk until our feet hurt, and drink wine, and we'll sleep in the same room. We'll look out new windows, and feel different from the way we do now with all that summer light pouring down around us, when it's so hot we can't stand it. I'll wait until then - I won't forget you. I don't want things to end like this, only having known you during this strange time. But right now, I just can't think about the future."
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, but I don't know if I would recommend it to someone who has recently lost a loved one. The writing was profound and very easy to understand and I liked the female protagonists a lot. I will probably read more of Banana Yoshimoto's work after this one.