THIS IS A REVIEW OF "THE DAY HE HIMSELF SHALL WIPE MY TEARS AWAY," THE FIRST NOVELLA COLLECTED IN THIS BOOK

I will not soon forget this story, but I'm damned if I can speak in an intelligent way about it. It's about a man dying of cancer and dictating the story of his childhood during the war. But it's stranger and uglier than that, like his childhood was a small animal and someone wrung its neck and its corpse went dancing and stinking around for 35 years and then got cancer and decided to tell its story. I mean, this guy gets a visitation from a bristling grinning lewdly lolling barbabodhisattva on the first page and does he flinch? Fuck no! He throws his shaver at the bearded obscenity and goes "I'M CANCER" and scares it back to monster's nirvana. The style is meta- and meta-meta-, and underneath the distancing and scarequotesing is something I could only describe as Lynchian Japonesque, the horrid godparent of Eraserhead and Tetsuo the Iron Man. But the parts about childhood banish that early garish awful from large swathes, I think the bulk of the narrative, and we get instead the narrative of the author's Happy Days of childhood, all mixed in with General Ishiwara and the Mukden Incident and a brother killed trying to flee over the border but legitimately Happy Days for all that, with that idyllic Japanese rural childhoodness. His parents ruin it, by being grownups torn apart by grownup stresses, and the venom that cancer man has for his mother and a certain party should give any parent, especially any parent who's working hard to get over wounds and resentments and figure out what kind of plausibly functional scenario to knit together in which for their small child to grow, pause. No wonder the narrator waits for the emperor to wipe his tears at the end--he's the only parent who's never disappointed, who could never disappoint (so the book finds time right at the end also to pithily explain, you know, totalitarianism). I felt like I graduated to a new level of nippo-ostranenie (疎外) with this one, and I loved it. ( )