Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 22 Sep 2018

Lion Cross Point by Masatsugu Ono

In his recently published memoir reflecting on how reading has shaped his life and ideas, Edmund White talks of his passion for Japanese literature and has this to say:

“Japanese fiction, with its stillness, its perverse eroticism, its affectionate observation of daily habits, its acceptance of death, had a big effect on my writing and an even bigger one on my sensibility.”

Although I feel I’ve come to it quite late in my reading life, I’m beginning to understand exactly what White means. The more I read, the more I’m astonished by the craft and understated artfulness that the best Japanese authors offer – although I’m also aware that some of the quiet beauty of many of the texts  must also be attributed to the abilities of the translator who is a co-conspirator in these enterprises.

Coincidently, this year the Cheltenham literary festival has made east-west exchange a theme of many of the events they have planned and there will be a particular focus on Japanese literature post Murakami. The rising generation of Japanese authors will, I expect, have the chance of getting more exposure to a Western audience than any that went before them – globalism and a push for more diversity in publishing, alongside a new respect for the role of the translator, has given foreign language authors their best ever chance of gaining a substantial foothold in a country like the UK that has been infamously reluctant to read non-English texts.

One of that new generation is Masatsugu Ono whose reputation in Japan is already well established. Lion Cross Point  is the first of his books to get an English translation and it puts down a real marker for the future. Delicate and spare, its just 120 pages, the writing is simultaneously lyrical and brutal, concrete and enigmatic. Nothing here is quite tangible – the boundary between reality, illusion and memory is often confused. We are asked to accept the unexplained, to not expect that backstories will necessarily be revealed or that characters will be explained as they simply come and go. We are also presented with the simple truth of the capacity of humanity for savage brutality and parallel acts of empathy and kindness that require no reward.

Much of the confusion or lack of conventional narrative structure comes from the fact that we are seeing the world as experienced by a child – ten year old Takeru who has come to be cared for by Mitsuko, an elderly woman who is taking him away from Tokyo and back to the village by the sea his mother had originally come from. Takeru is befriended by a young girl, Saki, who lives next door to Mitsuko – although the relationship between them all is never really clear and we don’t know how Takeru has ended up in Mitsuko’s care. Takeru is also spoken to periodically by the ghost of a young child, Bunji, who it turns out disappeared many years before at Lion Cross Point on the coast near the village Takeru is returning to. But the ghostly Bunji causes no distress – his presence is more that of a guiding spirit than a haunting presence. Bunji’s role seems to be to provide instructions in a way that only Takeru can here:

“He knew the person whose voice it was would be there when he opened his eyes. He was always there. Bunji. His face, with its little eyes and nose, forming its usual expression—a smile? confusion?—looking down at Takeru. Or perhaps Bunji wasn’t looking at Takeru. To Takeru, those eyes seemed to look inward, inside Bunji. But how can somebody’s eyes, that only ever point outward, look within?”

The story that unravels is a distressing one and Ono seems to be concerned to explore the emotional and psychological damage of domestic violence on Takeru, his learning-disabled brother and his mother.

Writing for the 3am magazine, Tara Cheesman-Olmsted provides a perceptive overview:

"However, Ono’s greatest achievement is the character of Takeru himself, a ten-year-old boy who is exactly what he should be—a child. Not precocious or wise beyond his years, but one who experiences first-hand the Buddhist maxim that life is suffering. The answer to the question of how Takeru comes to live in the village without his brother is a stone Masatsugu Ono drops into the still pool of this story long before we enter it. We encounter the concentric ripples of grief and regret radiating outwards in the text from that original point of impact without understanding what caused them. And when the revelation comes, it is clear that at the heart of Lion Cross Point lies a tragedy. A tragedy made all the more heart-breaking because it is punctuated by acts of human decency performed by strangers. Those acts of kindness are what remain tangible and corporeal for readers, scattered as they are among so many intangibles in Masatsugu Ono’s storytelling."

I found the combination of deft stillness in the writing style combined with the intensely tragic portrayal of an abusive and violent relationship remarkably affecting – the atmosphere of the book has stayed vividly with me.

I’m looking forward in October to hearing the author talk about his work but I’m looking forward even more to seeing more of his work translated. This particular edition is published by Two Lines Press and the translation has been done by Angus Turvill – copies are available to order on line if you can’t order one from a local bookstore.

Terry Potter

September 2018