Koko
Month: March 2023
Kyoko Nakajima: The Little House
The Little House is a novel that seems prosaic at first but becomes more interesting as mundane events and observations gradually take on a greater sense of weight and meaning. The majority of the story is presented in the form of a diary kept by its narrator, Taki. Taki is writing in the present day, but the events she describes occurred in the 1930s and early 1940s. The Little House is about wartime Japan, but it’s written from the perspective of someone far more invested in keeping a small household running than she is in supporting or celebrating the nation. The war eventually catches up to her, but her story is about resilience, not suffering or victimhood.
At the risk of reducing the novel to its subtext, The Little House is also a queer love story. Taki is employed as a maid in a house in the suburbs of Tokyo, and she enjoys a close friendship with the lady of the house, Tokiko. Tokiko’s son Kyoichi is from a previous marriage, and her current husband is an executive at a toy manufacturing company. He’s a handsome man, but he seems to have no interest in “that sort of relationship” with a woman, which is perhaps why he considers himself lucky to have married someone who already has a child. Kyoichi is bedridden with polio, so Taki has been employed to help Tokiko out around the house. Despite the difference in their ages and social status, they get along marvelously well.
It was clear to me that Taki is in love with Tokiko. I suppose it’s possible that her affection could be read as platonic, but Taki describes Tokiko’s physical appearance with quite a bit more than platonic interest. Taki also delights in her detailed memories of physical contact with Tokiko. These passages may fly under the radar of anyone who’s not attuned to them, but it’s difficult to say that the nature of Taki’s relationship with Tokiko is completely subtextual, especially given that Taki dwells on the fact that one of Tokiko’s closest female friends also had an intense crush on her while they were in school together. To drive the point home, this friend makes direct references to the fiction of Nobuko Yoshiya, who is famous for her stories about young women in intimate relationships.
To Taki’s chagrin, Tokiko is in love with a young artist named Itakura. Under the pretext of arranging a marriage for him, Tokiko meets with Itakura several times, and a romance develops between them. As Japan digs itself deeper into the Pacific War, however, Itakura is drafted. Tokiko is devastated, but Taki prevents her from meeting Itakura a final time before his deployment by means of a small but life-changing act of “housekeeping” that has been foreshadowed from the beginning of the novel.
By March 1944, the Hirai family can no longer afford to employ Taki. She is sent back to her family’s home in rural Ibaraki prefecture, where she becomes a cook and caretaker for a group of children who have been evacuated from Tokyo. This is far less heartwarming than it sounds, and both Taki and the children are utterly miserable.
When the war is over, Taki visits Tokyo again only to find that the Hirai household has been destroyed during the American firebombings. Although she promises to write more about what happened afterward, Taki’s narrative comes to an abrupt end at this point. The reader learns that she stopped keeping her diary because of her declining health, but I suspect that she lost interest in telling a story in which Tokiko could no longer be a central character.
The coda to Taki’s account is provided by her great grand-nephew Takeshi, whom she has mentioned several times, always claiming that he doesn’t believe her story. Takeshi inherits Taki’s diaries after her death, and he ties up several loose ends in the final chapter as he reflects on the nature of the relationships between the various people in Taki’s life. Is it possible, he wonders, that Taki was in love with Tokiko? Takeshi leaves the answer to this question up to the reader’s interpretation, but his careful reevaluation of Taki’s actions in light of this possibility speaks for itself.
Not much happens in The Little House, but the reader is swept along into the family drama of the Itakura household by Taki’s lively and engaging narrative voice. Although Taki’s observations seem trivial at first, the close attention of a patient reader will be rewarded as the details of her story come together to create a portrait of a charming group of people and the historical conflicts that interrupted their lives and relationships. Nakajima handles the legacy of the Pacific War with grace and sensitivity, and The Little House provides a welcome and insightful perspective on the early Shōwa period that is often lost in narratives about wartime Japan.
Compartment No. 6
In a flourish of passive-aggressive self-pity and spite, Vladimir Putin recently claimed that Russian culture was being cancelled in the west. The release of this excellent film proves him wrong: a movie about a Russian character behaving menacingly to someone from Finland, Russia’s vulnerable neighbour, and yet being romantically redeemed. There is a bone-chilling cold in the film’s location – Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west – but a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat story of strangers on a train and of national characteristics starting to melt.
It comes from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, whose 2016 film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki was a lovely comedy about a real-life Finnish boxing champ in the 1960s. His new film is adapted from a novel of the same name by Finnish artist and author Rosa Liksom, and concerns a young Finnish student of archaeology, Laura (Seidi Haarla) who is in Moscow sometime in the early 90s; she has begun an impulsive affair with her professor, Irina (Dirana Drukarova). With Irina’s encouragement, and perhaps because this older woman does not care to have her hanging around much longer, Laura has resolved to make the tough rail journey up to Murmansk where she wants to view the petroglyphs – mysterious rock drawings, thousands of years old.
Sweet-natured, open-hearted Laura gets on this uncomfortable train in the freezing wintry cold, where she finds that she must share compartment number 6 with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a boorish, drunk young guy who is on his way to get a job in a coal mine in Murmansk and is openly abusive, misogynistic and philistine about Laura’s plans. And her phone calls back to Moscow reveal that Irina isn’t exactly pining for her.
Of course, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see that after their meet-uncute, the relationship of Ljoha and Laura is going to thaw, although the obviousness of this trope has lessened in the last month. The romance that flowers between these two young people is in parallel with the romance of a long rail journey, and this is a very non-American equivalent of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise movies. Ljoha’s scowling face and shaven, bullet head make him look a tough guy at first, but it isn’t long before we see him as a vulnerable little boy, never more so than when with Laura welcomes another Finnish guy to share their carriage – a self-admiringly sensitive type who insists on singing and playing his guitar. Ljoha is fiercely sceptical and resentful of this preening interloper, and he is right to be.
In the end, no one wants to help Laura find these petroglyphs that she has set her heart on and travelled so far to see, and it is Ljoha himself who has to step up. Yes, this is a Russian without a Z on his clothes or in his heart, and of course the larger point is that of course, there are millions of Ljoha’s fellow citizens who cannot be tarred by the malign mediocrity of Putin’s chauvinism. There is charm and gentleness in this scene and the movie as a whole.
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