EVENING CLOUDS
By JUNZO SHONO
Translated by Wayne P. Lammers. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2000. 222 pages, $12.95 (paperback)
Craig Loomis
Having been brought up on the likes of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, many of us have been trained to believe that a work of fiction must possess certain characteristics, the most primary of these being the essence of story, a narrative of events that depends on causality. But Junzo Shono, one of Japan's best-kept literary secrets, challenges readers to rethink what constitutes a novel. Shono was born in 1921, has won both the Akutagawa and the Noma prizes for his short stories, and was decorated with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, an award given only by the authority of the Japanese emperor, in 1993 is often associated with such writers as Kojima Nobuo, Yauoka Shotaro, and Shimao Toshio, who first gained popularity in Japan during the 1950s and wrote specifically about relationships within the new, postwar Japanese family.
Evening Clouds, which received the Yomiuri Prize for literature when it first came out in 1965, is a melange of thirteen stories, or chapters, about the life and times of the Oura family (husband, wife, daughter, and two sons), who for three years have lived in a new hilltop home on the outskirts of western Tokyo. We follow the family as it goes through a multitude of adjustments, in an effort to make the new house a "home," despite the creeping suburbia that has made its way to the Ouras' mountain retreat, as tractors and bulldozers carve out bigger roads and new subdivisions. Throughout the book, Shono, who is well known for his autobiographical technique, weaving his own family's episodes, situations, and remembrances into his fictional family's world, depicts the Oura family's daily routines, rhythms, and assorted adventures. It is not unusual for one chapter to contain ten or eleven images or "snapshots" of the Oura family. Sometimes these images are linked to one another, and, seemingly, sometimes not. In fact, Shono uses the many simple events and situations that surround the family as springboards, allowing the narrator, Mr. Oura, to digress or drift into other remembrances. For instance, one story/chapter, "Sasanquas," begins with a discussion about a drought the Oura family has had to endure and how the plants and trees on the hilltop have suffered; from there it moves on to episodes that deal with, among other things, Mr. Oura's dead father, his youngest son not brushing his teeth, a Popeye cartoon, Mr. Oura having lunch with his older son, and the older son getting a haircut and then forgetting to mail a postcard. A great many themes lurk in these reflections: the suddenness of change, the innocence of youth, the devastation of death, the capriciousness of fate.
Most certainly Evening Clouds will perplex some readers. They will find the fragmentation and lack of action irritating. I can hear them now: "What's the point?" "How do all these images and memories fit together?" "Am I missing something?" Indirectly, these questions bring us back to how we define a story and whether Shono's autobiographical, fractured approach is the stuff of novels.
Such questions imply that a story is, for the most part, nothing more than an intellectual exercise, something to be figured out, a message to be uncovered or solved. Shono is, I think, not concerned with offering stories that insist on this kind of heady dissection. Rather, he is more interested in showing us members of the Oura family as they undergo change and growth within their new home, and he does this by giving us slivers of the commonplace and images of the routine. In many instances, a particular word, sound, or odor will trigger Mr. Oura's memory as to what one of his children might have said two years ago, or maybe how his wife looked the day of their marriage. Not unlike the trees, plants, flowers, and vegetables that are so central to many of his images, Shono's style is alive and organic in the way it slithers, twists, and turns in an effort to capture the moment.
Most importantly, in these snapshots we are reminded of the importance of the bits and pieces of life that we so often take for granted or even ignore because they are so fleeting and less than extraordinary. There is no unsolved mystery here, no philosophical code to be deciphered, just life, in all its mediocrity, uneventfulness, and simplicity. Once readers come to understand this, they will be able to take a deep breath, lean back, and enjoy the simple rhythms of our daily patterns revealed. Therein lies the wonder of Evening Clouds.
Craig Loomis teaches at San Francisco Bay Area. He recently returned to the United States, after teaching at Miyazaki International College in Miyazaki, Japan.