It’s been a while since we’ve done an “Ask a Book Question” at The Millions, but Kirk from Texas left a good one in the comments of a recent post:You write a lot about your obsession with The New Yorker… Can you tell those of us that are unfamiliar with the publication more about it, and why you like it so much.I love The New Yorker for many reasons. I prefer to know a little about a lot of things rather than a lot about a few, and so I find the wide range of topics the magazine takes on is appealing. It’s a surprising unpredictable magazine. I also like that the magazine has history, and that it has stayed true to itself by changing only incrementally over the years and for the most part taking pains to make sure any changes made sense. Generally speaking, The New Yorker is guaranteed to provide me with at least one transcendent reading experience per month, often more than that, and very few clunkers. It is exceedingly rare that I quit reading an article halfway through. By that measure alone it beats any other magazine I’ve ever picked up.I could go on about The New Yorker for pages, but instead, I thought I’d let some others spill some ink on their love for the magazine. We’ll start with Emily Gordon, who heads up Emdashes, a blog devoted to a single magazine. I’ll let you guess which one.When I tell people I write a blog about The New Yorker, they’re either excited and ask for the url, or freaked out. The people in the second group get that funny look so familiar to elementary-school students and poets, and say with withering irony, “Wow, you must really LOVE it.” Being an unfashionable enthusiast and advocate of the New Sincerity, I answer simply that I do.In his email asking for my thoughts about the magazine, Max called me “the Web’s pre-eminent NYer expert.” I wish! I’m reminded every time I go to a New Yorker-themed event–especially on the Upper West Side–that there are far more fanatical and expert readers out there, and they usually have a couple decades of subscribership on me, too. In my paying work life, I’m a magazine editor and a book and media critic, so that’s the spirit in which I write the blog. At the same time, I sometimes feel like a roving preacher from a quirky sect, with all the attendant longing for clarity and community, and possibly some of the narrow-mindedness and naivete, too. Meanwhile, perhaps also like an evangelist, I get to experience moments, collectively and alone, of overpowering delight and that spooky but real phenomenon called “flow.” (Also, the blogosphere being what it is, moments of derision, bafflement, and the sound of stone silence.) Man, I sound like Garrison Keillor. My real point is, I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends who feel the way I do, and despite moments of overextended self-doubt, I’m grateful for all of this.But back to the reason for reading it in the first place. I read Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” recently, and wrote down this line: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” That’s probably at the heart of it. I’m a third-generation New Yorker reader, and the magazine’s writers and artists are essential to both sides of family language and lore. When I was at the Daniel Alarcon and Zadie Smith reading at the most recent New Yorker Festival, in a beautiful church-like space called the Angel Orensanz Foundation, I had the strange thought that I was in the only church my parents (who are long-divorced atheists) would ever have attended. I got a little teary thinking about them, in the Church of The New Yorker with its Chastian or Steinbergian heaven, and hey, I was the one who said I was an evangelist. “This isn’t a magazine–it’s a movement.” Harold Ross said that.So what do I preach? That the magazine, far from a bastion of elitism and snobbery, is the site of the most hardworking and stirring journalism available in English, about essential subjects like New Orleans, the global environmental crisis, American poverty, education, and the war in Iraq. Some people will never agree; they think the whole thing is foolish. “Tell me why your project is so compelling or should be to someone like me who DESPISES the culture of writing that the NEW YORKER inspires and finds literary glomming to be complete bullshit,” an acerbic fellow blogger once wrote me, sneeringly. He thinks the publishing-industrial complex needs taking down, not celebrating. I defended myself in the lengthy email exchange, but afterward I felt like my soul had been slapped to the floor, as in that scene in Amelie. I was so outraged but so suddenly unsure of my mission that I thought of shutting down the site entirely, taking my ball and going home, as my friend Tom would say; it’s a little like the way I felt when I heard, just recently, that a New Yorker film critic (for the Goings on About Town listings, which contain some of the sharpest and wittiest writing in the magazine) refers to me as “the New Yorker groupie.” Ow.On the other hand, there are lots of worse things to be. Steve Martin wrote in the magazine this week that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the “high spirits and high jinks” of his early career, “before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.” Maybe The New Yorker, too, is best viewed from one’s childhood coffee table, before it becomes a media outlet, a buzz-worthy blog topic, an online brand, a symbol of what one has, in some senses, lost: the life of Pauline Kael; the grandparents who understood fewer and fewer of the cartoons and became sorrowful about it; the vast possibilities of a future full of limitless writing and reading opportunities. But for now, I’ve got a way of broadcasting my–let’s face it–devotion. Want to be saved? Subscribe. I’m only half kidding.Millions contributor Garth also weighed in with his thoughts on the magazine:I was trying to explain to a friend the other weekend why The New Yorker is the greatest magazine in the history of American magazine journalism. I can think of a few reasons.First, I love The New Yorker for the assumptions it makes about its readership. It assumes that we are bright, literate, patient, and curious about the world. (Okay, it also assumes that we’re well-off and liberal, but that’s less important). It assumes that I, who loathed biology in high school, will be fascinated and moved by 8,000 words on the redwoods…and lo and behold, I am. Rather than tailoring itself to the marketplace, which is how we now think of the publishing place, The New Yorker recognizes that it CREATES its marketplace. Which is why I hate to see it stoop to puff-pieces on Cate Blanchett or Mariah Carey.Second, I find the history of The New Yorker, and its attendant myths, endlessly fascinating. One example: Jamaica Kincaid was doing odd-jobs for editor William Shawn when he decided that she should write for the magazine. She and George Trow and Ian Frazier became an inseparable, and eccentric triumvirate. Later, she married Mr. Shawn’s son Allen.Third, The New Yorker has subsidized a staggering (surprising) number of canonical writers. E.B. White? New Yorker. J.D. Salinger? New Yorker. The Fire Next Time? First ran in the New Yorker. Silent Spring? Likewise. Eichmann in Jerusalem? You guessed it. Oliver Sacks, Joseph Mitchell, Alistair Reid, Janet Malcolm, Calvin Trillin, Philip Gourevich, Pauline Kael, A.J. Liebling, James Thurber, William Steig, the Addams Family, John Cheever, Saul Steinberg… Among the current writers, Elizabeth Kolbert, Georges Packer and Saunders, Nick Paumgarten (the new Ian Frazier), Peter Schjeldahl, Mark Singer, and James Wood (as of last month), are all doing work that may still entertain and instruct years from now. This is not even to mention the art.Each week, The New Yorker delivers a multi-course meal (about four-hours worth) of reporting, opinion, reviews, cartoons, and humorous “casuals” to my door. Sometimes the meal is mediocre, but it’s always sustaining.And finally, Millions contributor Noah brings us home:I don’t have a subscription, though I once did. It started sort of piling up on me, making me feel like an arch procrastinator. I’d like to renew but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. But one thing about The New Yorker: you can pick up an issue, be it this week’s, last week’s, or one from 1987, and it always reads. This is surely a testament to the quality of the writing, but also to the editorial sensibilities that drive the magazine. My most memorable New Yorker article was about Rafael Perez, disgraced and incarcerated LAPD officer, who testified for the state in the prosecution of numerous other LA cops who were part of the Rampart Crash unit, a renegade police outfit that committed numerous crimes. Denzel Washington’s character in the movie Training Day was based on Perez. Perez has also been rumored to have had a hand in the murder of Biggie Smalls. Great article. The cartoons are fun too.
If you have your heart set on Murakami, I recommend you start with Norwegian Wood, the bittersweet love story that propelled him to superstardom. It lacks the fantastic elements of much of Murakami’s more popular work, but it contains perhaps the best depiction of modern Japanese life that Murakami has ever written.
If you really want to learn more about what it means to be Japanese, you might consider picking up a copy of Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki. Kokoro is a, perhaps the, great modern Japanese novel (at least most Japanese would tell you that) in much the same way that The Great Gatsby Is a great American novel. Kokoro trades Gatsby’s wit and panache for a solemn melancholy that I, frankly, find off-putting, but it’s unquestionably one of the most “important” Japanese novels, and a great introduction to the soul of modern Japan.
On the non-fiction front, I highly recommend Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan, which provides an excellent, entertaining encapsulation of Japan’s modern history. At a mere 174 pages, you can read it on the plane ride over, and still have time for two terrible movies. For a bleaker take on modern history, you might consider Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons, a dystopic look at Japanese bureaucracy and the country’s appalling environmental legacy. It can be a bit of a downer, but it provides an insightful behind-the-scenes look at what makes the country run.
I would also recommend anything by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, particularly “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids” and “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.”
Thanks a lot Ben! Any recommendations on historical fiction? I’m usually a sucker for those. Kokoro sounds intriguing, too.
But can’t Murakami’s obsession with the West be seen as the crux of post-war Japan? The US occupation force-fed consumerism to the Japanese and I have always read Murakami as the standard bearer of that incredibly complex legacy. If the anxiety and conflict present in Yukio Mishima novels wrestle with how to cope with the loss of certain cultural traditions, the way Murakami’s characters embrace Western tastes speaks to how Japan has changed during the intervening years. Yes, Murakami’s characters love American music and films but their crises of self, as I see it, reflect many aspects of contemporary Japan, especially among the young urban set.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima is a wonderful historical fiction based on the true story of a monk who sets fire to a Kyoto temple.
The Housekeeper and the Professor (novel) and The Diving Pool (3 novellas) by Yoko Ogawa. I had to wait months to get the novel from my library despite there being 8 copies and a short book–really special book.
I’m going to have to agree with Buzz; you can learn a lot about Japan from Murakami. I’ve both lived there, and lived with Japanese friends in America and Murakami was a way towards mutual understanding for sure.
I’d second his recommendation of Mishima, though I’d maybe give a heartier recommendation to The Sound of the Waves
I’d also recommend (and I’ve mentioned it here before) The Road to Sata by Alan Booth. It’s a travel book by a Brit who lived in Japan for most all of his adult life and he really gets at all different aspects of Japanese culture.
And why not read the first Nobel prize winner, Kawabata. Snow Country or The Old Capitol is a good place to start with him.
Kawabata is good… but maybe The Master of Go? Semi-sort-of-non-fiction-fiction about a single Go match which took place just before WWII, stressing both the differing styles and the physical and mental vulnerabilities of the players.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, perhaps? The Makioka Sisters is wonderful (and is sort of historical fiction in that it deals with Japan’s changing culture post-westernisation through the differing actions and reactions of the sisters), but you might get a lot from his essay In Praise of Shadows, which is short and deals illuminatingly and concisely with the differences between western and traditional Japanese aesthetics.
I strongly recommend Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short stories, particularly ‘In A Grove’ and ‘Spinning Gears’.
If you wanted to look at something older, you could take a crack at The Tale of Genji, the sweeping and psychologically fascinating eleventh-century novel by Murasaki Shikibu. That’s rather a long read, though, so maybe instead try the Penguin selections from the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, which is a sort of diary, a collection of her funny and insightful remarks on the characters and quirks of the Heian court of which she was part.
I was actually in this exact situation a few months ago–visiting Japan for the first time, never having read any Japanese literature, and polling my friends as to which books I should bring. I decided to read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” for my first experience with Murakami, because the back cover described it “as an attempt to stuff all of modern Japan into one book,” or something like that. While I agree that for long stretches of the book the characters don’t seem “Japanese” (they could be the alienated inhabitants of any large city), some of the best writing in this novel is an attempt to reckon with Japan’s militaristic legacy and the atrocities of WWII. I recommend it and am looking forward to trying more Murakami soon.
I was interested in also reading something by a female author, and a friend suggested Banana Yoshimoto–unfortunately, I cannot recommend her. I tried her novella “N.P.” and it was terrible–flat writing in a bad translation.
And to supplement things with a foreigner’s perspective on some aspects of Japanese culture, I enjoyed “Fear and Trembling” by Amélie Nothomb, a young Belgian woman’s memoir/novella of working at a big Japanese corporation.
And another friend suggested reading the Pillow Book in conjunction with the “Hagakure” or samurai tales, to get an idea of what life was like for aristocratic men and women in feudal Japan.
Marissa, before you dismiss the Banana altogether pls try KITCHEN. NP I agree is fairly weak. It’s been years at this point, but I remember KITCHEN, particularly the last novella, as being fairly transcendent. I feel a lot of affection for that book.