Darkness in Summer by Kaiko Takeshi

Over the past year I have worked with many Japanese students in the writing lab at Alfred State College and have so enjoyed the experience that while searching for my next read, my eyes were caught by this novel – a gift from a foreign exchange student years ago.  And so begins my journey through three novels by Japanese authors.  I also learned that the Japanese always write family name first and have corrected that error from the cover of this book.

Kaiko Takeshi (1930-1989) was a highly acclaimed writer, and the recipient of many awards in his country.  He is noted for standing against the American involvement in Vietnam and being an activist proponent of peace in that country.  Darkness in Summer is, if not a sequel, a novel that revisits the characters from Into a Black Sun.  The novel begins with an epigraph, Revelations 3:3: “I know thou works, that thou are neither cold nor hot.  I would thou wert cold or hot.”

The unnamed narrator could use the epigraph as his motto.  The novel tells the story of this man and his relationship with a woman he had loved, years ago, in Tokyo. They have kept in touch, and now while traveling in France, she comes to visit him.  He is a novelist/reporter; she is completing a dissertation.  They share their lives sexually, but he is too depressed to have feelings for another person.  The turning point of the action happens while they are staying at her apartment in Berlin.

It was not the storyline that kept me reading this novel; it was the writing.  Despite the literal and figurative darkness, the language was lush, pensive, challenging, and erudite:

…you write a novel with words, but words are the ultimate imprecision.  They are facts and matters, and yet they are nothing but obscurity and there is no specific weight in their meanings.  Words can take on any connotation depending on one’s experience.  They are constantly living and changing.  You can’t stop them.  They collapse as soon as you pause to scrutinize them. (66)

I was moved by these words while contemplating the keen precision a translator must employ to bring a Japanese novel to life for the Western reader.

Published in 1972, the novel reflects the author’s interests when the narrator becomes obsessed with reading more about the Tet Offensive.  I would be interested in reading Into a Black Sun to gain a better understanding of the character, but it is not necessary to appreciate this novel.  I have two more novels by important Japanese writers, both gifts from the same student.  This one stands out as a modern contemporary novel reflecting the times in which it was written.

Takeshi, Kaiko. Darkness in Summer. Translated by Cecilia Segawa Seigle. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1973. Print.