21. The Housemaid

By Freida McFadden

I had only heard of The Housemaid because of the recent movie adaptation. While on vacay, I found a used copy at Bookshop Santa Cruz for $8.20 USD.  Later, at the San Jose bookstore, I saw the same copy for $10 used in similar condition, so I was stoked.  

The Housemaid was not just a bestseller, it was a #1 NYT MEGA BESTSELLER, as seen on the cover of this paperback edition.  It really was the perfect summer read. The only problem it posed was the nature of its very design: an ultra-processed product in danger of being consumed it too quickly.

Yes, The Housemaid was trashy, but it was also indulgently fun. The superficial, simple-minded writing was just made all the more glaring for me after the beautifully written H is for Hawk. I don't often read mega bestsellers, but some mass fiction writers are better than others. And Frieda McFadden is no Gillian Flynn.  She has constructed a nicely executed plot with a clever twist, but she lacks Flynn's whip-smart wit and intelligence.  Yet despite writing for the lowest common denominator, McFadden is still a cut above the awful Julia Quinn!

There is indeed a whole series of the titular housemaid becoming a professional "helper" for wealthy wives with major husband trouble.  I even found the next book at a bookshop in Kits and had to stop myself from buying it because I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole.  And besides, it was $10!!  Too much for something I can find at a thrift store for less.

 

Like the novel, the movie was also perfectly serviceable mass entertainment that harked back to the trashy domestic thrillers of the 1990s. 

 

12. Looking Glass Sound

By Catriona Ward 

Looking Glass Sound was another well-written novel by Catriona Ward and also the third book I've read from her (the first being the impressive Rawblood and disappointing The Last House on Needless Street). 

 

I felt a bit cheated by Looking Glass Sound.  I was interested in the book because it was influenced by Stephen King's mysteries set in Maine, but the the meta-fictional nonlinear narrative complexity sidelined me out of a good story. I didn't want to constantly wonder what/who was real and what/who wasn't nor marvel at the writerliness of it all.  Why spend time on something that swallowed up my time with overly-complicated authorial wanking?

So I'm going to cheat myself and use AI to help provide an overview:

Looking Glass Sound is a complex, meta-fictional psychological thriller that explores the blurring lines between memory, reality, and authorship. Narrated by Wilder Harlow, it focuses on a fateful summer in Maine involving an unlikely friendship between three teenagers, a serial killer (the Dagger Man), stolen narratives, and the haunting, constantly questioning what is real versus what is constructed. 

Layered Narrative: The book is designed like a nesting doll, where stories are told and retold, with small differences revealing how memory and stories are altered.

Plot Outline: Wilder is an awkward teen spending the summer at his belated uncle's house in coastal Maine during the 1980s.  He befriends a local boy named Nat and a red-haired British girl named Harper.  For some years now, the town has been haunted by two mysteries: missing women and "The Dagger Man" who breaks into homes during the night to photograph sleeping children with a dagger by their throat and leaving behind a Polaroid, as if to say, I could've easily have killed them while you were asleep. 

Meta-Fiction: The story deals with a writer (Wilder) whose work is stolen and published by another, leading to a blurred reality where he is haunted by the fictional versions of his friends, not the real people. 

Key Themes: The nature of storytelling, the obsession of writing, trauma, and the vulnerability of adolescence. 

The Title: Refers to the deceptive nature of stories and reality, much like a mirror image or sound echoing, distorted, off the water. 

This WeirdLit reddit thread was very helpful in breaking down the structure of the novel. If I ever want to remember what the hell I had read, I should read this thread.

Back to the plot outline.  The novel began as a kind of coming-of-age story with a murder mystery as a backdrop, and with Maine as the setting, it was meant to intentionally invoke 1980s Stephen King. The kids stumble upon the bodies trapped in oil drums underwater and the murderer was revealed about one-quarter into the novel. Nat dies, Harper moves back to England and Wilder becomes haunted by the events of that summer.  In college he works out his trauma by writing about that summer, but his story is stolen by his best friend, Skye aka Pierce Montague.

Summary:

We begin to read excerpts from both the stolen story and Wilder’s version, following Wilder years down the road as he returns to the coast to finally write his book. But Wilder is haunted by, he eventually discovers, the characters from the stolen book— not the real people, but the fictional versions as written by the two writers. The books and reality blur and, the deeper you go, the more you start to wonder what’s real and what’s not. Ward takes you on a twisty-turny journey to reveal how stories capture people— trapping them forever. The mystery of the dagger man is but a thread in the larger narrative— the killer’s identity being revealed and re-revealed over and over again. In the end, everything you thought to be true isn’t, touching on how point of view radically alters reality.

By the time I figured out what was going on with Looking Glass Sound, I began to lose interest in it. Wilder becomes haunted by the characters from Skye's stolen novel. The ghostly drowned woman that Wilder kept seeing, Rebecca, just kept dragging on and on.  Even though Skye/Pierce was supposed to be dead, Wilder found him in a hole when he tried to kill himself with hemlock. Skye had been trapped there for weeks, feeding on raw crab and cave water!!  Skye and Wilder got back together as old men - one blind and the other missing a hand!  I kept going, what the hell am I reading? Then a supposedly "new" character Pearl was introduced about 3/4 into the narrative. By the time it got to Pearl and Harper meeting at Fairview, I just didn't care that much anymore.  I think the novel had made clear that Pearl and Harper were fictional, with the added meta-ness that other characters were made-up by the characters in the novel. Even if Pearl and Harper were the "real" first-level versions and not meta-authorized creations like Skye/Pierce, I had given up being invested in ANY of the characters. Which was ironic since the friendship between Pearl and Harper felt more constructed than the meta-fabricated characters.  It even felt like Ward was getting tired of her own story, as it was more an overly complex exercise than actual storytelling.

So it turned out Wilder and Nat were half brothers?  Harper really did mercy kill Nat?  Gracie is the daughter of Nat and Harper? Whoop-dee-doo. The reveals came too late!  I felt bad because I had been quite invested in Wilder, but his "true" character had died shortly after his story was stolen by Skye/Pearl.  The older Wilder was actually a fictional recreation by Pearl.  He was never able to get any revenge on or justice from Pearl.  Harper was the tragic figure who lost the ones she loved and the only one who could right some wrongs.  In the end she had her daughter Gracie and they manage to get some kind of reckoning from Pearl.

Back to the reddit thread:  

"But why would that be the case, and why has Ward chosen to write such a confusing book? The theme of narrative ownership and true crime has come up a lot in recent years: The Plot ( Jean Hanff Korelitz) concerns a professor who steals one of his grad students' novel ideas, a decision that comes to enrich and destroy him. In I Have Some Questions for You (Rebecca Makkai) boarding school students re-open the murder case of their teacher's long-ago roommate, while a true-crime podcaster does the same. Trust Exercise (Susan Choi) is a layered puzzle-box of a novel that is about a high school drama class, truth-telling, and feeling your way around in the dark. And then there's the real-life controversies that have rocked the world of letters: a plagiarism allegation lobbed at My Dark Vanessa; the real story behind "Cat Person;" and who could forget the saga of the Bad Art Friend?

Writers are all thieves of a kind, but personal testimony was recently a very powerful kind of currency—subject to counterfeit—and the true crime boom still goes on. We're in the midst of two simultaneous national conversations about authorship (who gets to tell what kind of story) and trauma. Authors are grappling with it in real time."

So I get what Ward was trying to do with Looking Glass Sound.  But did it capture the zeitgeist?  It probably did - I can see how many would consider it brilliant.  However, the meta-fiction genre isn't my jam - I want to lose myself in a narrative, not get confused by it.  I did enjoy parts of it, especially the first act as it had some great fiction writing; lots of lovely passages about the sea, air and land.  The meta parts reminded me so much of House of Leaves and David Mitchell's work.  Talented writers often have the ambition of tackling meta-fiction, but there's always the danger of being burdened by textual slog as the human interest parts of the story get buried under the ambitions of the author to create narrative feats of complexity.  

I acquired this hardcover from https://bookoutlet.ca for only $8 and will be including it in my trade pile when I visit Encore Books on my birthday!

14. Gone Girl

By Gillian Flynn

 

6. Rebecca

By Daphne Du Maurier

I’ve been curious about Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca for some time, but had no compulsion to read it until Ben Wheatley’s 2020 adaptation was released on Netflix.  I heard it was the lesser film compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s version (which I hadn’t seen) so I wasn’t expecting much, but I ended up quite enjoying it.  I’ve basically been on the lookout for a used copy of Rebecca for the past five years.  The books I came across were either too dog-eared or were Netflix editions, which I didn’t want.  Earlier this spring, Olman and I biked over to Encore Books in NDG as I wanted to trade some books I didn’t want anymore and it was there that I found this paperback edition for 8 bucks.  What’s more, they had also accepted the eight or so books I had brought with me.  Huzzah, Encore!

I thought Wheatley did a good job adapting Rebecca, though he kind of modernized it by making the unnamed narrator and Maxim acceptably closer in age.  In the novel, the narrator was about twenty and Maxim in his forties -- their age difference emphasizing her naiveté and inexperience, as well as the imbalance of power in their relationship.  Rebecca was a gothic romance novel with a bit of psychological suspense and Du Maurier brilliantly captured the narrator's insecurities as a young middle-class Englishwoman who suddenly became the wife of an aristocrat and mistress of their estate.  A lot of time was devoted to the interior world of the narrator so you couldn’t help but empathize with her from the start.

The first chapter established the narrator as hired help for a wealthy, older American woman holidaying at an upscale hotel in Monaco. This was how she met the widower Maxim De Winter, who seemed to take a liking to her, despite her humble background. Thanks to Mrs Van Hopper’s sudden illness, she and Maxim were able to spend some alone time together.

    I remembered Mrs. Van Hopper’s warning of the night before about putting myself forward, and was embarrassed that he might think my talk of Monaco was a subterfuge to win a lift. It was so blatantly the type of thing that she would do herself, and I did not want him to bracket us together. I had already risen in importance from my lunch with him, for as we got up from the table the little maitre d’hotel rushed forward to pull away my chair. He bowed and smiled— a total change from his usual attitude of in- difference-picked up my handkerchief that had fallen on the floor, and hoped ‘Mademoiselle had enjoyed her lunch?”

    Even the page-boy by the swing doors glanced at me with respect. My companion accepted it as natural, of course, he knew nothing of the ill-carved ham of yesterday. I found the change depressing, it made me despise myself. I remembered my father and his scorn of superficial snobbery. 

After a somewhat odd, whirlwind "romance", spurred on by the fact that Mrs. Van Hopper was planning to travel to New York and drag the narrator along with her, Maxim impulsively proposed to our protagonist and this was where the story got going, though Du Maurier took delight in her unflattering depiction of Mrs VH.  

I can see myself now, memory spanning the years like a bridge, with straight, bobbed hair and youthful, unpowdered face, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and skirt and a jumper of my own creation, trailing in the wake of Mrs. Van Hopper like a shy, uneasy colt. She would precede me in to lunch, her short body ill-balanced upon tottering, high heels, her fussy, frilly blouse a complement to her large bosom and swinging hips, her new hat pierced with a monster quill aslant upon her head, exposing a wide expanse of forehead bare as a schoolboy’s knee. One hand carried a gigantic bag, the kind that holds passports, engagement diaries, and bridge scores, while the other hand toyed with that inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people’s privacy.

… Mrs. Van Hopper, her fat, bejeweled fingers questing a plate heaped high with ravioli, her eyes darting suspiciously from her plate to mine for fear I should have made the better choice.

We’re always aware of the narrator’s constant fish-out-of-water-ness, most especially after she’s been thrown into Maxim’s world. It’s one thing to be an assistant to a gossipy middle-aged American heiress, but quite another to become the wife of an English aristocrat. Even seemingly ordinary details, like underclothes, take on class-conscious significance:

The housemaid Alice had been so superior. I used to sneak my chemise and nightgowns out of my drawer and mend them myself rather than ask her to do them. I had seen her once, with one of my chemises over her arm, examining the plain material with its small edging of lace. I shall never forget her expression. She looked almost shocked, as though her own personal pride had received a blow. I had never thought about my underclothes before. As long as they were clean and neat I had not thought the material or the existence of lace mattered. Brides one read about had trousseaux, dozens of sets at a time, and I had never bothered. Alice's face taught me a lesson. I wrote quickly to a shop in London and asked for a catalogue

of under-linen.

What made Rebecca such an enduring classic was that it was so beautifully written. It was full of evocative prose that was not only vivid and symbolic, but also served to elevate the narrative, such as when the newlywed De WInters were driving towards Manderley and the narrator became overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of blood-red rhododendrons (which were planted by Max’s dead wife):

Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.

The premise of the ghost of Maxim’s wife haunting the Manderley estate sets the gothic tone of the story, and the suspicious circumstances of how she died provided the mystery and suspense.  Mrs Danvers’ repressed yet unhinged obsession with her former mistress, and her barely veiled hostility towards the new Mrs. De Winter added a psychologically menacing atmosphere to the setting.  Mrs Danvers was clearly one of the most memorable villains in fiction.

Mrs Danvers came close to me, she put her face near to mine. 'It's no use, is it?' she said. 'You'll never get the better of her. She's still mistress here, even if she is dead. She's the real Mrs de Winter, not you. It's you that's the shadow and the ghost. It's you that's forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside. Well, why don't you leave Manderley to her? Why don't you go?'

I backed away from her towards the window, my old fear and horror rising up in me again. She took my arm and held it like a vice.

'Why don't you go?' she said. 'We none of us want you. He doesn't want you, he never did. He can't forget her. He wants to be alone in the house again, with her. It's you that ought to be lying there in the church crypt, not her. It's you who ought to be dead, not Mrs de Winter.'

She pushed me towards the open window. I could see the terrace below me grey and indistinct in the white wall of fog. 'Look down there,' she said. 'It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you jump? It wouldn't hurt, not to break your neck. It's a quick, kind way. It's not like drowning. Why don't you try it? Why don't you go?'

So very creepy, and menacing!

Even though it was Wheatley’s adaptation that inspired me to read the source novel, I wanted to recast the characters in my own mind, mostly because Armie Hammer now gives me the ick.  I felt Matthew Goode made a suitable Maxim while a young Carey Mulligan was perfect as our heroine-narrator.  However, I couldn’t find a suitable replacement for Mrs Danvers, mostly because Kristin Scott Thomas inhabited her role so effectively.  

Rebecca wasn’t perfect.  At times, the narrator became over-bearing in her child-like innocence.  I understood that was the whole point of Rebecca, that the narrator had to be blinded by her own youthful naiveté and insecurities, because there was a bit of a twist towards the end… Rebecca was not who she was made out to be, nor was Maxim not who he appeared to be… and the reader is meant to be as surprised as the narrator. Nevertheless, it was still frustrating at times to see the world through her puppyish eyes.

I wished he would not always treat me as a child, rather spoilt, rather irresponsible, someone to be petted from time to time when the mood came upon him but more often forgotten, more often patted on the shoulder and told to run away and play. I wished something would happen to make me look wiser, more mature. Was it always going to be like this? He away ahead of me, with his own moods that I did not share, his secret troubles that I did not know? Would we never be together, he a man and I a woman, standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with no gulf between us? I did not want to be a child. I wanted to be his wife, his mother. I wanted to be old.

Rebecca was also very English, not only in its awareness of a class-conscious society, but the politeness and propriety that people adopt to mask or avoid unpleasant subjects.  The narrator, in her ignorance, youth and lack of confidence, had built up Rebecaa as this perfect, dazzling, formidable being and had allowed a dead woman to haunt her thoughts rent-free. Rebecca was indeed dazzling and formidable, but not in the way the narrator had conceived.  And nobody thought to tell the narrator that Rebecca was actually a world-class psychopathic bitch because nobody knew what was going on in each other’s minds because everyone was too goddamn English to broach anything that was deemed too unsavoury or sensitive.

They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice, and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness, Maxim would have told me these things four months, five months ago.

In this sense, Rebecca was also a coming-of-age tale told from the unreliable POV of the narrator.  The novel is definitely worthy of re-read at a later point in my life so I’m keeping my copy!  I’d like to watch Hitchcock’s adaptation too, but it hasn’t been available on any of my streaming services.

 

13. Out

By Natsuo Kirino

Olman had first heard about Out (1997) from a podcast on notable crime novels, thought the premise would be right in my wheelhouse (he was right!), and got this for me as a Christmas gift.  Originally, he could only find a used copy of Grotesque, which featured an XCU of a woman’s face in goth-like makeup. It was also a really thick large format paperback, and seemed like a daunting read. Eventually, he was able to find a used copy of Out post-Xmas.

Despite reading the English translation (2004), Out was simply excellent -- Kirino is clearly a skilled writer.  I was immediately drawn into the narrative which made for a gripping read from start to almost finish (sadly, the ending was somewhat disappointing).  Still, I loved Out, which became one of my favourites of 2024, if not of all time.

The novel began with four women working the graveyard shift at a bento box factory in the outskirts of Tokyo. Their friendship was based on how they made an efficient group in the assembly line. The women all looked up to Masako, an aloof, intelligent and somewhat mysterious woman.  In her past life, she worked as an exec at a credit and loan company but got laid off when the Japanese bubble economy collapsed. At home though, she's estranged from her withdrawn husband and teenaged son.  Yoshie, the oldest of the group, is the indispensable veteran at the factory.  At home, she’s a widow burdened with caring for her bed-ridden mother-in-law.  She had an estranged daughter who later came to her for money. Yayoi was the youngest, gentlest and prettiest of the group, whom the two older women had taken under their wing.  She’s a mother of two young children who’s been struggling with a gambling, abusive husband.  Finally, there was Kuniko, an opportunist living beyond her means who dreamt of a better life but was stuck with a dead-end job and an unattractive body.  Kuniko fell into the group by dint of Masako and Yoshie, quickly assessing that fraternizing with them would secure a cushy position in the assembly line.

Kirino described the factory worker life in the same detailed, detached way that she would later use to recount the cutting up of a dead body (getting ahead of myself here!):

The four women always worked together and tried to help each other out, otherwise the job would have been even tougher. The door opened and the workers filed in. They washed again up to the elbows, and their ankle-length aprons were disinfected. By the time Yayoi and Masako finished washing and moved on to the factory floor, the other women had already begun preparations at the conveyor belt…

     “We're starting with curry lunches. Twelve hundred of them. I'll take rice, and you work boxes, okay?” 'Rice' meant being at the head of the line as the linchpin of the whole process, the one who determined the speed of the line. Yoshie, who was particularly good at it, always volunteered for rice duty, while Masako took the job of handing her the containers…

     Beyond Yoshie was a long line of workers: one to even out the rice, one to add the curry sauce, one to slice the deep-fried chicken, another to lay it on top of the curry. Then someone to measure out the pickles into their cup, someone to add the plastic lid, someone to tape on a spoon, and finally someone to place the seal on the box. Each meal made its way down the line, assembled in so many small increments, until at last a curry lunch was complete…

     This was the way the shift always began. Masako glanced around at the clock on the wall. Barely five after twelve. Still five and a half hours of standing on the cold concrete floor. They had to take turns going to the bathroom, one at a time, with a replacement filling in on the line. You had to announce that you wanted to go and then wait your turn, which sometimes took as long as two hours in coming. They'd discovered long ago that to make the job as bearable as possible meant not only looking out for themselves but also working together as a team. This was the secret to lasting at a place like this without ruining your health.

     About an hour into the shift, they began to hear sounds of distress from the new woman. Almost immediately, efficiency began dropping on the line and they had to cut the pace. Masako noticed that Yayoi, trying to help out, had begun reaching across to take some of the newcomer's boxes, though today she'd seemed hardly able to handle her own. The veterans on the line all knew that smoothing the rice was a particularly tough job since it had cooled into a hard lump by the time it left the machine. It took a good deal of strength in the wrists and fingers to flatten the little squares of cold, compact rice in the few seconds the box was in front of you, and the half-stooping position made it hard on the back. After about an hour of this, pain would be shooting from your spine through your shoulders, and it became difficult to lift your arms. Which was precisely why the work was often left to unsuspecting beginners - though at the moment, Yayoi, who was anything but a beginner, was hard at work at the station, with a sullen but resigned look on her face.

     At last they were finished with the twelve hundred curry lunches. The women on the line cleaned the conveyor and quickly moved to another station for their next assignment: two thousand special 'Lunch of Champions' boxes.

One night, before Yayoi’s night shift at the factory, her deadbeat husband Kenji came home early as he was flat broke due to gambling away their life savings at a baccarat game.  Their argument quickly ended with Kenji punching Yayoi in the stomach.  Seized with rage and helplessness, Yayoi later killed Kenji by strangling him with her belt. Unbeknownst to her, earlier that night Kenji had also been stalking a hostess at a night club and was kicked out by the owner, Satake, who we soon learn has been harboring a dark secret.

Yayoi’s first instinct was to call Masako to tell her what happened, ie. her dead husband’s body was lying on the floor of their home.  It didn’t take long for Masako to make the decision to help Yayoi by putting the body in the trunk of her car and finding a way to dispose of it.

All this happened within the first fifty pages of the book.  You can probably figure out how the rest of the story would play out with the other women somehow getting involved in this crazy cover up.  Yet Kirino spent so much time inside each character, that you undersood each individual backstory, personality and motivation.  Here’s one of Yoshie:

None of them could get along without her - when you thought about it, that was her reason for living. It was that way too at the factory. They called her Skipper, and she did, in fact, run the line. The role kept her going, helped her survive the dreary work; it was her one source of pride. But the painful truth was that there was no one to help her. Instead, all she had was her pride, goading her to keep working no matter how hard it was. Yoshie had wrapped up everything personal that mattered in a tight package and stored it away somewhere far out of sight, and in its place she had developed a single obsession: diligence. This was her trick for getting by.    

 

Even Kuniko, perhaps the most unlikeable of the four women, was embued with some fairly rich interiority despite being so pathetically shallow. Kirino was able to inhabit Kuniko’s thought processes and flesh out her flaws, motives and desires.  You may not like Kuniko, but you understood her. 

 

     Kuniko popped one of her husband's cassettes into the stereo and a shrill female voice filled the car with a cloying pop tune….At the best of times, she wasn't really interested in music anyway. She had only put it in to mark her liberation from the night's work and to test the gadgets in her car. Adjusting the vents on the air-conditioner in her direction, she put down the top of the convertible, watching as it slowly withdrew like a snake shedding its skin. She loved this kind of moment when something ordinary could be made to seem dramatic and exciting. If only her whole life could be that way.

     Still, she thought, going back to Masako, why do you suppose she always wears jeans and her son's old shirts? Come winter, she added a sweatshirt or some ratty sweater, over which - worse yet she'd throw on an old down jacket with patches of tape to keep the feathers from spewing out. That was really too much. It made her look like one of those scrawny trees at Christmas: her skinny shape, the slightly dark skin, the piercing eyes, the thin lips and narrow nose - no excess anywhere. If she would only use a little make-up and wear something expensive, more like Kuniko's own clothes, she'd look five years younger and quite attractive. It really was a shame. Kuniko's feelings toward the woman were complicated, part envy and part antipathy.

     But the real point, she thought, is that I'm ugly. Ugly and fat. Peering into the rear-view mirror, she felt that wave of hopelessness which always swept over her. Her face was broad and jowly, but the eyes that peered back at her were tiny. Her nose was wide and sloping, but her mouth was small and pouty. Everything's mismatched, she thought, and it all looks hideous after a long night shift. She pulled a sheet of facial paper from her Prada make-up pouch and patted around the shiny areas!

     She knew how things worked. A woman who wasn't attractive could not expect to get a high-paying job. Why else would she be working the night shift in a factory like this? But the stress of the job made her eat more. And the more she ate, the fatter she got. Suddenly feeling furious with everyone and everything, she jammed the car in gear, released the brake, and stomped on the gas. She checked the mirror as the Golf shot out of the parking lot, delighted at the little cloud of dust she left behind.

     She turned on to the Shin-Oume Expressway and drove toward the city for a few minutes before turning right in the direction of Kunitachi. Beyond the pear orchards on the left, a tight cluster of old apartment blocks came into view. The place Kuniko called home.

     She hated living there, truly hated it. But at the end of the day, given what she and Tetsuya, her live-in partner, earned, it was all they could afford. She wished suddenly that she were a different woman, living a different life, in a different place, with a different man. 'Different', of course, meant several rungs up the ladder. These rungs on the ladder were everything to Kuniko, and only occasionally did she wonder if there was something wrong with her incessant daydreams about this 'different' life.

 

Masako, as the “leader of the pack”, was just so wonderfully complex.  She might be the first literary character whom I could really identify with as a middle-aged woman!   Intelligent, calm, resourceful, Masako seemed grounded yet there was something bubbling inside her.  Somehow her life had not gone the way she thought it would.  Something went wrong in her relationship with her husband and son and she doesn’t know how to repair it, or worse, she knows, but is not willing to try.  Kirino made clear there wasn’t much opportunity for smart, resourceful women like Masako in Japanese society. 

But here was where Out disappointed me (spoilers beware!).  It turned out the night club owner, Satake, had raped and murdered a woman when he was a young man named Sato.  He was never caught because he had never repeated his crime nor told anyone.  By Sato’s twisted logic, he saw his victim as a kind of “first love”. And committing this violent act unlocked a dark side of him that he had since kept repressed and hidden… until Masako crossed his path.  This happened because the police eventually discovered Kenji’s dismembered body (parts of which were disposed carelessly by the unreliable Kuniko!).  They originally arrested Satake as a prime suspect because of his altercation with Kenji on the night he was murdered.  This caused Satake to lose his night club business and the quiet yet lucrative life he had built for himself.  His anger woke up the monster lurking inside him, and led him to track down the four women after being released from police custody.  He became obsessed with Masako, who bore some resemblance to his original victim.  There was a cat and mouse setup that eventually led to Satake kidnapping Masako in order to re-enact his first crime inside an abandoned section of the bento factory grounds.

Kirino has also been setting up Masako’s character for this inevitable confrontation.  As the reader, we know that even though there’s no monster lurking inside Masako, there was nevertheless a dark side to her calm, aloof façade that has also been kept bottled up.  There was some prescience in the possibility of Masako and Sato/Satake being unlikely kindred spirits in their obsession with pain and self-destruction. Yayoi's crime had set off a chain of events that were primarily orchestrated by Masako.  After all, she was the one who offered to dismember Kenji’s body inside her tiled bathroom (some blood-curdling imagery in that scene!) and recruited Yoshie to help her in this highly gruesome task. When their crime attracted the attention of Masako’s old work acquaintance, it was Masako who decided that they could earn some money disposing bodies for crime organizations.

Thankfully, Masako still had a desire for self-preservation after being raped by Satake and managed to gravely injure her captor as she tried to escape.  But here was the crazy part: Masako ended up falling in love with her killer/rapist as he lay dying…. like a twisted version of Jane Eyre!  And the attitude to rape seemed very Japanese, almost clichéd, ie. deep-down women want to be dominated by a man.  Masako and Satake were two sides of the same coin, two societal outcasts who’ve been circling one another until they could finally connect, and rather violently too.  I imagine North Americans would be turned off by the ending and from reading some Goodreads reviews, quite a number of them were, while a few loved the way it ended:

abrikosmanden666:  "i completely agree with you. so many ways for them to realize their similarity (if they even have that, idk. maybe just perceived similarity) without it playing out through that torture scene. i had a lot of respect for masakos character and her realizations but i feel like the ending is sort of disrespectful to her character and her principles. and generally i don’t like that sexual assault (especially when it’s this grim) is portrayed as anything good or eye-opening. even if it’s just masakos character finally crossing over into completely insane. there’s other ways to do it “

Otherwise_Design2232:  "It's the perfect ending in my opinion. The point is (I think) that there is something sacred in the intimacy of sharing someone's death. Satake experienced that with the woman he killed before and she did as well. At some point pleasure and pain merge and the outcome is probably unimaginable (although Kiriko did amazing work in putting it into words) . So I believe through the pain, suffering and the extasy of pleasure there is a point where they actually merge together and become one. And that's where the understanding of the other person and the love comes from."

The obsession with death and self-destruction from a women’s POV isn't particular to Japanese lit.  It has also been portrayed in "Western" novels like Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989).

Masako wasn’t exactly a “murderee” like Lise or Nicola Six, but she definitely had the death urge. A Goodreads reviewer’s summary of Lise could very well apply to Masako:  

 

self-destruction as self-actualization

 

The ending wasn’t all bad.  Masako survived, even triumphed, keeping Yayoi’s insurance money that Satake had stolen to start a new life for herself.  The disappointing part was her inexplicably primal connection with a monster like Satake.  The story ended with Masako in the Shibuya district, hoping to get a sense of Satake’s old haunts when he was alive, like a lovesick teenager. Ugh. I felt that Masako could have an affinity for Satake without having to fall in love with him. You could have an affinity with, or attraction for, someone and still hate, or reject, who they are, or recognize that you’d be utterly incompatible together in real life. There was no effing way these two weirdos could’ve had a life together, their “relationship” would’ve been doomed from the start!

Despite my disappointment at the ending, Out had everything else going for it.  Excellent writing, a well-constructed plot, great pacing, a sense of place (Tokyo society in the early 90s), well-developed characters… the dynamic of the four women really anchored the story. As one review noted:

[Kirino] constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.

Even the side characters were well thought out.  Like Kazuo, a Japanese-Brazilian laborer who also worked in the factory.  Kirino was able to flesh out the socio-economic backdrop of Brazil and Japan by describing Kazuo’s personal history in a few paragraphs:

 

Kazuo asked an acquaintance about the situation in Japan and was told that it was the most prosperous country in the world. The stores were full of every imaginable product, and the weekly salary there was nearly as much as he made in a month at the print shop in Sao Paolo. Kazuo had always been proud of his Japanese heritage, and if the opportunity ever arose, he thought he'd like to see the place his ancestors had come from.

     A few years later, he ran into the man he had consulted about Japan, who this time was driving a brand-new car, having just returned to Brazil after spending two years working in a Japanese car factory. Kazuo was jealous. The economic situation in Brazil was bad, with no prospects of improving, and he could only dream of owning a car on the little he made at the print shop. He decided then and there that he, too, would go to work in Japan. If he could last two years, he could get a car for himself, and if he stayed longer, he might even earn enough for a house - and he would see his father's homeland into the bargain.

     He had worried that his mother would be against his going, but when he told her what he was thinking, she agreed almost at once. Though he didn't know the language or the culture, his blood was half Japanese, she told him, so the people there would treat him as part of the family. That was only natural. There were successful Brazilian Japanese who had managed to send their children to college and secure a place for them among the country's elite, but Kazuo's situation was different. He was the son of a barber from the poor part of town, and it made all the sense in the world for him to go abroad to seek his fortune. Then he could return to Brazil with his savings and make a success of himself. He would be following in the footsteps of the man whose independent spirit he'd inherited.

     Kazuo quit the print shop where he had worked for six years, and six months ago he had arrived at Narita Airport. It had been an emotional moment, with him thinking of his father coming all alone to Brazil at the age of nineteen. Kazuo was twenty-five when he arrived in Japan as a guest worker on a two-year contract.

     But he soon found that the land of his forefathers didn't pay much attention to the fact that its blood was running in his veins. At the airport, on the streets, he knew he was seen as a gaijin, a foreigner, and it burned him up. 'I'm half Japanese,' he wanted to shout. 'I'm a Japanese citizen.' But to these people, anyone who didn't share their facial features, who didn't speak their language, just wasn't one of them. In the end, he decided the Japanese as a whole tended to judge most things by their appearance; and the idea of fellowship, which his mother had taken for granted and which involved going beyond appearances, was something few people here were actually willing to follow up on. The day he realised that his face and physique would forever consign him to the status of a gaijin, Kazuo gave up on Japan. It didn't help matters that his job at the boxed-lunch factory was less interesting than the work he'd done at the print shop back in Brazil. It was mindless, back-breaking work that seemed designed to break your spirit, too.

I was wondering if Kazuo would show up to help Masako when she was captured by Satake, and fight him off.  That would’ve been cool (and would've probably made a more satisfying alternate ending in a movie adaptation*), but I realize it was important that the ending be only about Masako and Satake.  Ulimately, it meant that Kazuo was not actually critical to the plot, but he nevertheless helped augment the narrative.

There were so many well-written passages that I couldn’t include them all in this review.  So I’ll have to keep them in my Word document for my own reference.

Kirino’s other novel, Grotesque, is still at my MIL’s house.  I just hope it's still there so either hubs or myself can bring it back someday!

* There was indeed a 2002 Japanese movie adaptation of Kirino's Out, but apparently it wasn't very good, nor did it sound very faithful to the source as it's categorized as a "comedy thriller"!  It's a shame, because I think Out would make a great psychological thriller in the right hands.  Due to globalization, the themes explored in Out are universal and could apply very well to other countries.

3. The Driver's Seat

By Muriel Spark

The 1974 film, Identikit, had been on my watch list for some time with this intriguing description: "Liz Taylor as suicidal spinster; hard to find." 

 

I was sure I'd first learned of the film via Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women, but couldn't find any reference to either 'Identikit' nor 'The Driver's Seat' in the index -- only Secret Ceremony was cited in reference to Elizabeth Taylor (apparently Severin's House of Psychotic Women collection, an unusual DVD box set based on the book, features Identikit).

 

Last October, I finally watched Identikit, about “a flamboyantly dressed Englishwoman cutting a swath through Italy - tourism as exhibitionism, self-destruction as self-actualization.”  I believe it was due to Janisse's efforts that Identikit has been made available on various streaming services, like Prime and Shudder (I streamed it on Tubi). Still not sure whether I actually liked this unsettling film, but I certainly appreciated it as an unusual oddity, with its garish 70's Italo-trash aesthetics and Liz Taylor’s unhinged performance. 

 

The premise of Identikit reminded me very much of Martin Amis' London Fields, which I’d read many years ago and was intrigued by its morbid subject matter, mostly because I was a teenager and I'd never read anything like it before. I realize now that Amis was likely influenced by The Driver's Seat when he wrote London Fields:  both Lise and Nicola Six are ‘murderees’ by their own design.  As a reader also observed: Amis tends to get excoriated for his creation of Six, as if she’s the creation of a misogynist. Yet is she really that different a creation from Lise?  

 

After having watched Identikit, I wanted to get my hands on Muriel Spark's novella.

 

While reading the book, much of the mystery surrounding Lise’s motives was gone having already watched the film adaptation, which was incredibly faithful to The Driver’s Seat.  However, the book did provide a tiny clue into her erratic and unconventional behaviour (that seemed to be missing in the film):

Her lips are slightly parted: she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was 18, that is to say, for 16 years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and judging mouth, a precision instrument.

Lise seemed to have undergone some kind of long-term health issue and her death-wish may be due to the fact that she had some form of terminal illness, which she hadn't divulged to anyone.

A Letterboxd reviewer for Identikit took the words out of my mouth:

I was struck by how incredibly faithful the film is to the source, even adhering closely to the clever way the book plays with time. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's images support the text wonderfully right from the opening shots of nude mannequins with heads covered in shiny reflecting foil. There is a constant motif of bright backlighting as well, reflecting the harsh personality of Lise, forcing your eyes to adjust and create definition. All lovely ways of reinforcing a story that centers around the concept of identity, and how we form and control the way we are perceived.

Much like Identikit, I wasn't sure whether I liked The Driver's Seat, but I certainly appreciated its oddness, its unsettling-ness, its frankness, as well as its leanness, much like this reader: 

 I decided to reread a book that is one of her shortest, most memorable and certainly starkest…  The Driver’s Seat (1970) is 101 pages long (in the irksome style of technology manufacturers who describe their products as “7.2mm thin”, I suppose I should say it’s 101 pages short). That is important because first, it shows that Spark has no interest in padding out her story – it is not one of those novels that is really an abruptly promoted novella – and second, because it means the story has almost no middle. It’s lean and hungry. There are many books whose beginnings or endings are praised, but how often do we say, The middle of that book? I couldn’t get enough of it. When you see a book without a middle – Patrick McGrath’s Dr Haggard’s Disease also comes to mind – it’s likely that rather than having only a beginning and an end, what has really happened is that the author has followed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to “start as close to the end as possible.”

The Driver's Seat,was very much a dark, existential journey (physical and psychological) of a woman who lived a conventional life who comes to realize she doesn't have much to lose, and is looking for a way to end her life in her own terms, yet is still limited in agency due to 20th c. (patriarchal) society.  It was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.  I would definitely read more Muriel Spark, if I come across her other books.

10. Dead Calm

 By Charles Williams

Olman had been searching for a used copy of Dead Calm for years, and ended up buying himself a new trade paperback.  I realized this was the source for that Aussie thriller with Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman. I remember having watched Dead Calm on VHS in the 90’s and recall parts of it quite clearly, probably due to its streamlined premise and execution. It was a memorable thriller but I never thought to look up the American source novel.

 

What I appreciated most about Charles Williams’ Dead Calm were two things:  its efficient and economical writing style and how refreshingly non-sexist it was (rather unusual for a genre thriller published in 1963).  It also makes the story rather timeless, which is no surprise how well it adapted into a film 25 years later.  The major difference between the book and 1989 film is that the film is even more pared down, as it only features three of the five characters: John, Rae and Hughie.

 

John Ingram is portrayed as an overall competent person; both physically and mentally tough and fairly woke for a fortyish dude of his time.  His beautiful wife Rae, though less worldly, also demonstrates intelligence, courage and perseverance in the face of extreme situations. The older woman, Mrs Warriner, is a flawed yet complex and capable character.  According to John Ingram, she’s worth fifty of the other two men in the book, who embody some of the worst traits of masculinity, from extreme immaturity to toxic narcissism. They are exactly the kind of people you don’t want to be trapped with on a boat in the middle of the ocean, whether it’s in danger of sinking or not!

 

My only complaint is how the narrative is structured, or not structured. The pacing is quick from the get-go. The first chapter introduces Rae and Ingram alone on their honeymoon aboard the Saracen, and within the first chapter, the third character is also introduced.  This is obvs not a character-driven story, but still, a bit of setup would’ve been nice.

 

Then when Ingram boards the Orpheus and discovers the two people, Hughie takes off with Rae, who then becomes captive on the Saracen, leaving Ingram and the others stranded on the slowly sinking Orpheus. This is when the narrative is split between the occupants aboard the Orpheus and Saracen with the POV shifting between the characters on each boat as they struggle to overcome their obstacles.

 

The conventional method would be to organize the POV into separate chapters, or into sections within a chapter. However, the POV shifts seamlessly from one paragraph to the next and there is nothing in the text to distinguish each POV shift, not even a single line space to signal that a POV change had occurred.  At least, this is the case in the Overlook Duckworth 2014 trade paperback edition that I was reading from.

 

It was so disconcerting that I wondered if it was done on purpose to confuse the reader? I mentioned it to Olman and he had noticed too, though he claimed he got used to it after a while.  When I tried to look for an example of this odd editing choice online, I discovered that the pdf version I found used *** to demarcate the POV shifts!!!

 

Example: https://100vampirenovels.net/pdf-novels/dead-calm-by-charles-williams-free/17-page

 

So now I’m wondering if the lack of section demarcations was a printing error with this edition?

It does make you realize how bad formatting can have a detrimental effect on one’s reading experience.  But it didn’t detract too much from my overall enjoyment of Dead Calm.