Book Reviews

The first translation of 'The Red-light District': A major work in English

Reviewed by Ranga Chandrarathne

The Red-light District is published by S. Godage & Brother and is priced at Rs. 650.

The English translation of Mizoguchi's the Red-light District by professor D. A. Rajakaruna is a Commendable effort by a Sri Lankan academic for the first time in the world.

Being the only translation of the classical screenplay of Mizoguchi Kenji's Red-Light District or Street of Shame, Professor Rajakaruna's translation stands out as a major work in English. It was directly translated from Japanese into English and marks one of the decisive phases of the Japanese society where prostitution had been a social scourge. The Red-light District is the only translation available in any foreign language of the original Japanese script.

The film was significant as it is said to have played a major role in the passage of the passing of the Prostitution Prevention Law in Japan. At the time of the film being released, the Japanese parliament, the National Diet was debating the pros and cons of the world's oldest profession. The film was released in March 1956 and two months later the Japanese parliament passed the Bill. It came into effect in 1956.

Apart from its effect on the enactment of laws banning prostitution in Japan, it depicts debilitating economic burden on the prostitutes who lived in post-war Japan.

Mizoguichi's brothel was called "Dream Land" in the Yoshiwara District of Tokyo during the post war period. The films is woven around five prostitutes; Hane (30), Mickey (25), Yorie (26), and Shizuko (18).

The story reveals the crust of the problem which is not the moral dilemma as most of the viewers would think but the crushing poverty that led women to engage in this "shameful" profession according to conventional society at large.

Hane is married and has a small child, her husband is unemployed, Sato Yasukichi (42). He encourages Yorie to give up prostitution and gets married. He tells her," Be a good wife and look after your husband". Whatever happens don't think of coming back. Never practice this profession again. "

The youngest of the six, Shizuko (Ayako Wakao), devotes herself to getting rich. She even gets money by promising more than she could sell. In her final encounter with a client she defends herself; "You are a businessman and you should know better. You live by selling things and I live by selling my body. It's the same transaction. Now you say you have suffered a loss. But how can you say I have deceived you."

One of the final scenes of the film was very much moving. Shizuko is seated in the same chair in the same manner Yumeko used to sit prior to her derangement. The film ends with a pathetic and melancholy scene of Shizoko soliciting clients for the first time murmuring and hiding behind a pillar timidly and shame-facedly.

The Red-light District depicts the plight of five women. The filmmaker Mizoguchi is considered as one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers, perhaps, above Akira Kurasawa. His films depict strong women characters and often centred on feminist issues such as the sacrifices women made for the sake of men.

Mizoguchi is also known as a sympathiser and worshipper of women due to his insatiable passion for adoration of women and his fascination for portraying downtrodden women. Perhaps, he is the most humane Japanese director. He had made several films on the life of geishas and prostitutes.

He extensively deals with prostitution in his films; Osaka Elegy, Sisters of Gion, Women of the night (Yoru no Onnatachi, 1948), Gion Festival Music (Gion Bayashi, 1953), the woman of the Rumour (Uwasa no Onna, 1954), and Red -light District (Akasen Chitai, 1956). However, Red-light District for which screenplay was written by Narusawa Masashige (1925) remains as the best film that deals with the scourge of prostitution in post-war Japan.

It is one of the most potent social critiques on the post-war Japanese society and the scourge of poverty-driven social evils. The film analyses the problem from all conceivable perspectives and also rejects the popular notion that prostitution invariably leads to total misery.

D. A. Rajakaruna, the translator, is a Senior Professor in the Faculty of Arts in the University of Peradeniya. He holds a post-graduate degree in Drama, Theatre and Cinema which was conferred on him by the University of Waseda in 1965.

Subsequently, he had received Fellowship from the Japan Foundation and the Japan Society for the promotion of Science and carried out research in the field of classical Japanese Drama and Theatre at the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto. He was awarded a certificate of Commendation by the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1999.

He is the translator of Ozu Yasujiro's Early Summer and Kinugas Teinosuke's A crazy Page and Crossroads, published in 1997 and 1998 respectively.

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Beyond the Rainbow: Interesting and intriguing

Reviewed by Ranga Chandrarathne

Published by Kandy Books
Available at Vijitha Yapa, Sarasavi Book Shop, Barefoot and other leading book sellers
Price: Rs. 450

I had the prospect of reading the first novel of Sriyani Hulugalle recently. I started on it but unexpectedly sailed through to the end smoothly. It was beyond doubt appealing and perhaps, it stirred up certain personal experiences, it made the reading more stimulating.

From the beginning, it was scandalous as I have been going through a similar type of experience that the main character Shani is going through in it, though not indistinguishable. The author has introduced her plot in the back cover of the book as follows:

Another chapter

Shani has to make a life of her own at an early age leaving her infant daughter with her husband Mahen......... Baffled by the desertion, she starts another chapter of her life in an apartment owned by her batch-mate Niru with her devoted maid Leela.

As an ambitious career woman, Shani is confronted by professional jealousy and office gossip....... Can she forget her longing for Nuwan or can she put the past behind her? ........... More than all, how would she face the dilemma of the enigmatic concern of Mahen and the divided loyalty of her infant daughter? How does Shani overcome her travails of the unreasonable demands of her infant daughter, the solicitous concern of her ex-husband and her sentimental relationship with Nuwan?

Unlike some who are supposed to have been rather critical of this book, I liked the story very much. I liked the commencement of the story very much. It got my concentration and feelings totally focused onto it. The way the characters were brought in at different phases was apposite and rational.

What I most liked in the novel was that none of the characters are bad. They react to situations that they were compelled to face in the most humanistic way. These behaviours are 'idealistic' though and I doubt whether in reality, a character can behave exactly like that.

Human deeds are so complex and there are so many prospects (even in the novel) for them to diverge from that ideal coordinates. It seems that the author intentionally steriled them entering to those flimsy regions.

Commands

Sriyani as the authour commands them to perform within the confines allocated by her. I found her dominion perceptible far and wide. I think it confines the novel excavating into inferior depths. This is due to I firmly believe, the author's disinclination to set the novel in a political scenery.

Most of the writers consciously circumvent this and I found she was no exemption. Every situation that we face even in our most clandestine life is politically driven (by nature) because human beings are political creatures.

The averting of such truth in an artistic creation hampers it to explore new knowledge, through the stirring of multifaceted sentiments. It emerges that Shani, Mahen, Anju, Niru, Leela, Deva, Nuwan and Ranil are all alike leaving a little (or no) space for a conflict.

They are all in a position to discuss an issue and arrive at a certain compromise. It is the conflict between characters or ideologies through which a situation can get transformed into a different one. The similarity of the behaviour of the characters hinders such a transformation. Therefore, the story gyrates around the same central point without evolving.

Accordingly, having started the novel in such a clever and highly inspirational way, Sriyani looses the patience and the tempo, at the middle and flashes to the end as if she wanted to conclude it in a hurry. Sex and sexual politics could have played a pivoting role in this novel.

The indivisible love between Mahen and Anju, even after Mahen's marriage to Shani cannot be independent of sexual relationship. It is logical because Mahen even with the knowledge that Shani is exceptionally a good partner to share life with, decided to marry Anju.

In such a scenario, the peaceful separation of Shani from Mahen to me is not logical, unless Shani too has her life elsewhere. It seems that the author deliberately ignored such an intervention. Sexual jealousy is nowhere near either of these two characters. As a result, the characters have become strangely decent.

In Sri Lankan literature, it is only Simon Navagaththegama, who valiantly and most creatively handles the subject of sexual politics in novels. My personal diagnosis is that the author has put too much of herself into Shani. Instead, she should have given the freedom to 'her' to move independent of the author.

If so, she should have explored new relationships, affairs, a love amidst some kind of hatred and even the darker corners of life. Shani, in the novel settles herself in a comparatively comfortable position leaving no room for a discrepancy. The author gives her arguments to mouth.

She ends up giving 'lectures' either to other characters or to the readers like a preacher. I had this habit in the early days of my career and after a concerted effort could overcome that deficiency. Instead of the author driving the character along the preferred path of her own, she should have let the situations to grip her. If so, Shani and hence the novel would have been even more powerful than now.

Interesting character

Ranil should have been a very exciting character, had the author spent more time and thought to reveal him more. For an example, had she whickered a more intimate relationship between Shani and Ranil, after her separation from Mahen, the disclosure of him having AIDS would have been more exploding.

These are some thoughts that crossed my mind after reading the novel. I want to reiterate that each writer has his or her own style of building a story. A novel guzzles a lot of energy and it is easy for someone to find what is not in there.

However, I would like to say, that I honestly enjoyed what was in there and hope Sriyani will venture into more creative writing since she has the ability to bring out the interesting facets of people in her own inimitable way.

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Termite Castle delivers power and passion

Reviewed by Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

It is a long time since I have read a first collection of poetry that delivers so much power and passion.

This particular aspect of the book is not evident in its opening pages. In quiet verses, drawn possibly from the body of his early writing, Asgar Hussein begins by meditating and reflecting upon certain 'universal' themes that haunt us all; and while the reader notes the range and variety of his subjects, it is some time before the poet's authentic and individual voice can be heard.

When it does, it establishes its owner as deeply concerned with language, and possessed of a strikingly original mind. One of the pleasures of this collection rests in the way Asgar Hussein's imagination mints, again and again, the unforgettable phrase: I am cautious, slow, like a snail on the edge of a blade Or, as in 'Waiting', where the earth longs for rain, 'lips cracked', But the sky does not tip its cup.

When this feeling for language links up with the poet's reflections on the passage of time, it does so to a remarkable effect. Addressing Time in poem after poem as the thief of life, Hussein employs a tone which beckons the reader into a conversation that is as fresh in its images as it is unusual in its approach to a perennial theme.

You grow, like a plague you grow;

You swim in my veins

Taking me to the certain mouth

Of your cave - your great

democracy

Of bones.

So far, I have escaped your live wires,

Your mosquitoes, your bolts

Of lightning, your angry fires,

Your tsunami waves and your hordes

Of viruses; You still blow

Cigarette smoke in my face,

And no zebra crossing is completely safe.

How will I enter your territory,

Your state beneath the rubble of epitaphs?

These lines from 'Like an Approaching Shadow' pose questions that everyone must face sooner or later; and those who have managed to elude them up to the present time cannot escape the challenge posed in a poem such as 'Time speaks to Man':

... You play with atoms and genes -You can reduce cities to ash

And tamper with nature;

You know the ways of galaxies,

Viruses and even your own psyche;

But do you truly know me?

Can you slow me down

Or concoct the elixir of life?

`Live in the most sacred places!'

says the poet. 'Study the esoteric works! Perform the arcane rituals!' No matter how much Man tries to call on his skill and genius, ...

Can you prevent your decay

To oblivion and bone as I flow forth?

Shadowed by his master-theme of the inevitable passage of time, Hussein's verse moves from the general to the particular: the mystic who vainly attempts to attain mastery of the `eternal truth'; a forest spirit who laments that urban 'structures' and 'cold tarred roads' have grown up where there was once a forest 'that pulsed like nature's heart'; the devaluing of currency (in 'The Centenarian's Ten Cents' and 'The Inquisition')'; a family home which is now a heap of rubble that even its ghosts have abandoned ('That House'); or a clay hill built by termites that once was home to an intricate civil society but, like everything else that comes under the poet's eye, loses its character with passing time, and its very identity.

Entertaining moments

There are many entertaining moments in this collection, in which the poet's meditations take up the ironies of history. One such moment occurs in 'Of Fungi and Beauty', when the poet notes wryly how scientific research has invaded the sanctity of gomara, the golden beauty spots on women's complexions that were so much beloved by the poets of ancient times:

Village boys would have

Repeated the verses

Under the shade of kumbuk trees,

Praising their lovers

Blessed with such beauty spots,

Ecstatic in their presence,

Like bees drunk on nectar.

Alas, time has destroyed even this, for with the arrival of Dr. Aldo Castellani, the Italian physician who served in Sri Lanka for twelve years early last century,

The old verses lost their flavour

Under his microscope;

Here is a fungus, he announced,

And centuries of poetry

Glared at him with cold eyes.

As the book moves to its end, its mood becomes more sombre. It is tragic but inevitable, as the nation goes through its present period of bloody struggle and flight, that the imaginations of young poets should be haunted by images of war.

Some of the best and most vividly realized poems in this collection take up the subject of death in battle. In `Now that I am a Man', a poem that will live a long time in the mind of this reviewer, we hear the voice of a young soldier who has been forced to 'put away childish things'.

One after another, the playful images of his childhood give way to horrific images of war: the fire crackers of 'after school moments' morph into charred body fragments flung up by an exploding jeep; liquid squirted from a bud changes into metal sprayed at men, 'my finger hard on the trigger'; and the 'winged fruit of so many hora trees', descending like helicopters over a quiet village, turn into a terrible reality:

Now I rush through grass in tumult

Into the iron thing with rotating blades;

It carries me over palmyra trees

Toward my last battle.

And yet there is room here too for meditation and reflection, as in 'Modern Warfare', an ironic overview of war in history. Hannibal, Alexander, Dutugemunu and Elara are eclipsed and forgotten, as war 'loses its memory', its glory and its skill, spurning 'the art of the chessboard and the valour of a wild charge':

Now you can die without a fight

Or kill without risk

War thinks the finger is the hero

Press a button for an airstrike

Press a button for a landmine blast

Or wait at the wrong place

At the wrong time

And die without the chance

For a few seconds of courage ...

Indeed, as Hussein's poems on the subject justly say:

War does not want to inspire epics anymore

But it still needs the horror.