in 2006, the nobel committee awarded orhan pamuk its prize for literature based on his discovery of "new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." but the greater value of pamuk's beautifully described but undisguisedly self-conscious fiction lies in its investigation of what are often the merely situational differences between the craft of timely storytelling and plagiarism. the meta-drama of that theme has played out for pamuk himself in the charges of plagiarism that have dogged him throughout his career. and that's not irony, it's the point.
literary theft is not so terrible a challenge to the world of belles lettres as someone like me should generally be thought to argue. i would, rather, go so far as to say that some of best works of fiction are the ones that are aware of their unoriginality. indeed, the legacy of twentieth century literature, including in its non-western manifestations, has largely been to demonstrate the insurmountability of repetition and overlap (be that among peers or across eras). the art of the steal, so to speak, has become a respected and stimulating genre in itself. which is not to recommend outright plagiarism, or advance a system of literary production under which authors are not secure in their rights to their works and to proper recognition and compensation. but stories themselves are cheap, and new ones are nearly as rare as conventional produce at a portland potluck.
but even for that overwritten disclaimer, which was, in case either of us missed my point, meant to indicate that i find absolutely nothing wrong with a book bearing heavy narrative similarities to another work, my humdrum impression of kazushige abe's individual projection (ip from here) has its foundation on those very grounds.
ip is written as a diary, the diary of onuma (no first name given), a late twenty-something film school graduate working as a projectionist at a double feature theater in shibuya, tokyo. the diary format is useful in restricting the perspective of the novel to onuma's personal experience, especially insofar as that enables abe to hide the possibilities that certain events might have been edited by hallucination or that certain characters might be projections of onuma himself -- hide them at least until onuma confronts those possibilities on his own. the novel also begins in medias res, and a diary is an easy vantage from which onuma can narrate the events of the five years between his graduation from film school and his return to tokyo while saving abe some literary face.
those events, by the way, surround onuma's involvement with a private martial arts academy in his hometown, that involvement having begun with onuma and a group of his classmates deciding to shoot a documentary film about the eccentric middle aged man, masaki (no first name given), who opened the academy not long after his arrival in the town. sure enough (which is a slightly more deferential way of saying OF COURSE), onuma and friends abandon the documentary and devote themselves to masaki, the group and to being trained as super spy killers. after the group's ransom of a local yakuza boss for a (dud? we never find out) plutonium bomb and masaki's arrest, onuma is back in tokyo and pulled back into his past by the (accidental? we never find out) death of five of his compatriots in a highway crash. that event is recounted by onuma early in the book and serves as onuma's motivation for relating the story of the academy. oh yeah, and onuma has migraines that he treats with forced, irregular sleep; he entertains himself in the projection booth by splicing frames from a pile of discards into damaged reels; and the movie theater explodes at the book's climax right when onuma starts filling in the blanks he's written. yes. ip is japanese fight club.
i don't think that kazushige abe reads english. actually, i've no reason to speculate in either direction. and, to be fair, i don't think that chuck palahniuk can read japanese. moot points though, really, because the two books were published almost simultaneously. (again to be fair, palahniuk's saw shelves slightly earlier.) and there's nothing to be speculated from the projectionist connection since abe himself is a film school graduate and intended to spend his career in film even after the success of his first novel. what's more, ip is uniquely tokyo with its yakuza and early teenage prostitutes and questionable pornography and never late trains (that fourth one, by the way, really is the most exciting and consistently baffling). i suppose there's a slim chance that abe read fight club quickly and meant for onuma, bored and quintessentially post-industrial, to be projecting tyler durden onto his own experience. i especially like that possibility (understanding its near impossibility) because it's predicated on either of two opposing a priori: that my japanese is insufficient to have caught the appropriate references or that i've read entirely too much into the book. and, ladies, that's why language is worth it.
ip just didn't do it as well. palahniuk's punchy vernacular does a story like this one better. it's the flesh on the skeleton that gives the import of character to the common sentiments of a generation. the anxious sobriety with which abe writes onuma is more appropriate of a simple thriller. maybe i don't have the appropriate cultural cv to appreciate that abe's telling is just more innately japanese.
but i really just say so to be gracious. his debut, day for night, treats the same post-bubble generation -- the first to grow up without want and then see the diminishing returns of a society poorly invested -- and its obsession with fame and the chosen status of the individual, and does so with (very literally) awe inspiringly sophisticated syntax and through a structure that follows from the protagonist's devotion to performance and the eye of the camera. and it's not the case that abe just did his best work early, because his more recent works, as maturity would dictate, exchange the convoluted sentences for an equally impressive diction that -- even for its sometimes confusing erudition -- is perfect in its nuance for telling abe's favorite aspects of japanese society (more alienation, nukes and porn). even better, those works are no less aware of the importance of artistic performance.
i suppose, for one final temper to my initial reaction to ip, that i'm just not up on my philosophy. i still don't know how to correctly translate the title. individual projection might in fact be correct, but in that case, it means less to do with film than psychology in that we should read it literally: the "individual projection" is onuma's diary itself (and there doesn't seem to be any sort of shooting technique or moving picture principle named by that term). but, it's funny, because that understanding should then take us right back to the screen inasmuch as we understand how strongly abe is connected to movie making and how much contemporary psycho-philosophical analysis, pertaining here specifically to what we should assume is happening beyond the "frame" of onuma's diary, has been influenced by film (never finished that book, by the way). and perhaps, that specific connection is why ip has been translated into french, as i mentioned here.
but, then again, maybe ip was just a sensation, and maybe the french are as willing to translate sensationalism as they are to treat it as fine literature in their own language. or maybe, as is pointed out in this delicious essay at bookslut, it's good to have a reminder that foreign books aren't as a rule any better than what's on the domestic market, even if it's easy to romanticize the value of what we read in a foreign languages.
so, it's not displeasure at abe for having written a novel on a duplicate premise that has me against ip, but rather that he didn't do the idea as well as he might have. and, being fair for the last time, chuck palahniuk has kicked that dead horse enough times to bring it back to life. but i'm going to scoff at ip anyway. read the rest.
or wait, you can't. so then second thoughts. who is my audience if it can't argue or, for that matter, take me at my word that the book exists to begin with? i won't deny that criticism is more the projection of the individual than any other art, but suddenly i feel an impassioned sympathy with onuma. and, sadly, it's only the wine that makes bearable that reconciliation.
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