Record of a Night Too Brief

 
 
Record of a Night Too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami
translated by Lucy North

Pushkin Press

2017

 

 

Record of a Night too Brief is a collection of three kind of longish short-stories by a Japanese author. Kawakami seems to belong to a set of authors who write what I might call magical realism, and who seem to be popular with literary fiction lovers in the US. These stories were published in Japan in 1996, and in America by Pushkin Press in 2017. 

 
I picked it up because of the title and the cover, which is like a wallpaper pattern of lurid pink and cyan mushrooms on a dark blue background. The cover has almost nothing to do with the contents though, and I found myself comparing the title story to the film The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, which for me was a much more satisfying celebration of nightlife.

 
The title story is about one night where the unnamed narrator meets a cute girl, they hang out, kiss, then argue, and break up by morning, all while surrounded by lots of other people who are out on the town for the night. It's told in over a dozen very short chapters, each of which feels like a scene from a dream. At some points, the surreal imagery feels like a metaphorical interpretation of a realistic event. But mostly the strange characters and events need to be taken on their own terms. A lot of the imagery is related to a forest at night. Other people show up as voles and kiwis. I wanted to like this, but it felt unsatisfying. (There is one scene where the narrator and her briefly-girlfriend both have mushrooms growing on them, which is I guess where the cover art comes from.)

 
In "Missing," the narrator's older brother turns into a ghost and spends most of his time invisible and intangible. The family conspires to marry that brother's fiancee to the narrator's other brother without the fiancee noticing the switch. The narrator mostly just misses her brother and experiences erotic longings for him. We also get details about how each family has its own weird rituals and traditions that seem inexplicable to outsiders. The story certainly makes it seem like Kawakami doesn't think very highly of traditional patrilocal marriage.

 
The last story, "A Snake Stepped On," seemed like the best to me, and the publisher's notes indicate that it won an award in Japan back in 96. Hiwako works as a shopgirl at a story that sells Buddhist prayer beads. One day on a delivery, she steps on a snake. That night, the snake shows up at her apartment in the guise of a human woman, claiming to be Hiwako's mother. She also sometimes turns back into a snake or a drawing of a snake. The snake invites Hiwako to turn into a snake too. Hiwako doesn't want to, but can't muster the resolve to say a definitive no, or even ask the snake to leave.

 
Meanwhile, we learn that the shop owner's wife has a live-in 'aunt' who is also a snake. A Buddhist priest they deliver beads to is married to a snake. And Hiwako learns from her actual mother that her great grandfather once abandoned heis wife and kids for several years to go be married to a bird. In the end, the snake physically attacks Hiwako to force her to become a snake too, and Hiwako finally decides for sure that she doesn't want that, and fights back.

 
I think I might like this style of writing, but I probably ought to be more careful to read some more plot summaries and reviews to pick the next one. Then again, every description I've read of the title story makes it sound like something I'd love. There's always an element of risk in trying something new.