Book Review: "Masks" by Fumiko Enchi

"Masks" is a book by one of Japan's most prominent female writers of the post-war era - Fumiko Enchi is up there with her male counterparts of Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanazaki as being one of the biggest and most successful writers of modernist Japan. In the novella "Masks", she covers a wide range of modernist topics including: identity, love and the description entailed within realism. One thing I found about this novel is that though the descriptions were often sparse and littered around the book as opposed to one big block like those written in books by authors before her, she has managed to balance the description and dialogue perfectly. The way in which the story is written definitely reflects the changing literature of modern Japan in terms of how men and women are viewed in the course of a relationship.

There are plenty of quotations that I could take from here to show you this almost romanticised realism that comes forth in the writing of the descriptions. But, instead I have chosen a couple which maybe are not my absolute favourite of the novel, but represent this idea in a way that will help you to understand:

"Between them on the narrow imitation-wood tabletop were a vase holding a single white chrysanthemum and an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, suggesting that two men had been in conversation for some time. Both had been in western Japan on business during the past several days and they had met by chance when Mikame stepped inside the coffee shop earlier. Friends since college days, they had greeted one another with the throaty frunts that passed for hellos between them; then Mikame had dropped down heavily across from Ibuki, who was seated alone, drinking a cup of coffee."

Strangely compelling and romanticised realities being seen through flashbacks - this paragraph really accentuates parts of the novel in which we see characters moving with each other. The language often overcome by memories and hopes, but dashed away by the present and all expectation is finally lost.

In the next quotation, the reader will see the way in which the romantic ideals almost overtake the realities. This is often the result of expectation and want rather than outcome and result:

"The medium was a woman of about thirty, dressed in a black mixed weave suit. She was said to have grown up in Manchuria and had a countrified air and a sturdy, rawboned physique. Her expression contained none of the shadows one expected in a woman of psychic gifts. Her speech was slow as if somehow her tongue were the wrong size for her mouth. The spiritualist, a spare and thin-lipped man, seated her beside him in the centre of the room and began explaining to the twenty or so people assembled about communication between this world and the next. Spirits that depart this life, he told them, float ceaselessly through the atmosphere, walking alongside the living and sharing the space around them, even though their bodies cannot be seen, nor their voices hear. Long ago, the ability to hear and speak with spirits had been widespread but with the rise of the industrial civilisation it had grown pregressively rarer. The women who would serve as medium that day was one of a select few who still possessed the gift of communicating with the dead."

In conclusion, we can see that there is a great amount of blending done between the realist and the romantic. Between what is real and what is clearly fantastical. As the book tries to present the unbelievable as believable, we get lost in the characters; their memories and their current beliefs in these ideals.