Published in Japan Forward 21/01/ 2022

It was thanks to Covid that I recently managed to view the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

The event, which opened in the summer of 2021, had been fully booked until the closing date in March 2022.  With the Omicron variant ripping through the British population, persistent telephoning was finally rewarded. There had been a cancellation and a mid-afternoon slot was available.

A lucky break!

I’m neither knowledgeable about contemporary art nor particularly enthusiastic. What fascinates me is the Kusama phenomenon itself. How did a ninety two year old woman who has been a virtual recluse in a Tokyo mental hospital since 1975 become “the world’s most popular artist”.

That accolade was bestowed on her by The Art Newspaper in 2014 – and rightly so. Her Infinite Obsession retrospective in South and Central America attracted an exhibition attendance of over two million people.

If anything, her stock has risen even higher since. In 2016, Time Magazine chose her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, alongside Barack Obama, Usain Bolt and Caitlin Jenner.

On a freezing cold day in November 2017, five thousand New Yorkers lined up for several hours to enter two of her “Infinity Rooms” (mirrored spaces illuminated with various light sources). The time given each person to experience each box was thirty seconds. Likewise, the wait time was several hours for All the Eternal Love I Have For The Pumpkins, her 2016 exhibition in London.

At the Tate this January, probably thanks to Covid again, reservations have taken the place of queuing around the block. That is not to say I didn’t have to wait in line. About three quarters of my allotted one hour was spent waiting to be admitted to the glittery darkness of the Infinity Rooms, which are just about large enough to accommodate four people at a time.

Londoners did get a better deal than New Yorkers, though. We were allowed a full two minutes inside the rooms, which were titled Chandelier of Grief and Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life.

According to the Tate, these were “exemplary of Kusama’s practice as a persistent enquiry into the phenomenological potential of art.”

To my inexpert eye, the Infinity Mirrored Room looked more like a 1970s disco, while the other room was similar to a “hall of mirrors” attraction at a funfair. Indeed, some of my fellow viewers had  brought their young children who seemed to be having a great time. Literally everyone was taking selfies, including the kids.

Where’s John Travolta?

In some exhibitions, snapping pictures is not allowed. Here it was encouraged. In fact, you could say it was the main point. Thinking deep metaphysical thoughts was out of the question, despite the cosmic message from Kusama inscribed on a gallery wall.

Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars …when we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.

I wasn’t the only one to be underwhelmed by the experience. Adrian Searle, art critic of The Guardian, wrote that the installation reminded him of his “cheapo garden fairy lights”.  Another critic from The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, described her work in harsher terms: “as fun as a fizzy drink and about as nourishing”.

And yet Kusama was a formidable presence in her New York heyday of the late fifties and sixties. That much was apparent from the photos and film footage also on display in the exhibition.

In those days, her main theme was sexuality. Multiple male organs constructed from clay or cloth adorned the various installations and objets she created.

Kusama smiling

Like Yoko Ono, who appeared in New York avant garde circles at roughly the same time, she was a natural-born provocateur with an endless supply of chutzpah. She staged orgies and a gay wedding in her studio, stripped naked in anti-war demonstrations and painted the bodies of her friends with polka dots.

In an open letter to President Richard Nixon, she promised to “lovingly, soothingly adorn your hard masculine body” if he would only agree to “make this world a new Garden of Eden”.

Some of the conventional works were impressive too, particularly the large scale “Infinity Net” series of abstract paintings which she started in 1959.

Kusama the transgressional outsider was a lot more interesting than Kusama the global brand. Her outrageous “happenings” were more entertaining than her pretentiously titled Infinity Rooms; her phallus-encrusted boat from 1963 more memorable than the enormous polka-dotted pumpkins that have rolled off her production line in recent years.

Phallus boat “aggregation”

At some stage, the art of the deal took over from the art of the heart.

Perhaps that was inevitable. Like Andy Warhol, Kusama never saw artworks as holy creations separate from ordinary reality. At the Venice Biennale in 1966, she exhibited an installation of mirror balls without being invited and then sold them off for two dollars a pop. “Why can’t I sell art like hotdogs or ice cream,” she declared. Now she sells packs of two souvenir mugs for £52 at the Tate and signs up to a collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

In the early years of this century, Kusama’s work was handled overseas by the Gagosian Gallery whose proprietor, Larry Gagosian, was described by Forbes magazine as “the P.T. Barnum of the art world.”  In 2013, she switched to the rival mega-gallery of David Zwirner. Between them, they have powered Kusama to extraordinary commercial success. In 2009, her works grossed $ 9.3 million at auction. In 2019, they grossed $98 million.

No amount of  “eternal love” could save this pumpkin from a 2021 typhoon

It is no coincidence that 2009 also marked the start of the era of unconventional monetary policy, by which central banks drove down interest rates to unprecedentedly low and even negative levels. Elevating asset prices was an explicit policy goal, successfully achieved as prime real estate, tech stocks, crypto currencies and collectables such as art took off for the stratosphere.

Put together the additional wealth that has accrued to the super-rich and the selfie-friendly appeal of Kusama’s recent productions and you have the background to her rise to superstar status. But you need something else too, an ability to satisfy a widespread yearning as transmitted by the herd mind of the internet.

Adrian Searle of The Guardian explains it like this – “Many people are hungry, I suppose, for some kind of transformative, mystical or even transcendental experience, and one that requires neither fasting nor drugs, let alone months or years of mental and physical preparation.”

In other words, it is secular religion. All you need to join the congregation is a cell phone and the willingness to stand in line for a few hours. The Deity of course never appears in person, as is usually the case with deities.

Kusama remains extremely prolific. “I want to paint 1,000 and 2,000 paintings,” she says. “I want to keep painting even after I die.” That is quite possible since her team of Japanese fabricators can create new product from her ideas and her dealers will certainly be happy to sell it.

Polka dotted tentacles…

On the day of my visit, the other galleries in the Tate were as silent as a morgue. On the way out, I asked one of the staff why Kusama was so uniquely popular. He answered with a laconic shrug and a single word. “Instagram.”

Meanwhile, the Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition at the Tate Modern has been extended until June 12th 2022. For hardcore fans, there is an evening viewing that includes a £75 dinner.

Pumpkin pie is not on the menu.

Published in Japan Forward 16/9/2021

“I was born in a place absurdly deep in the countryside. It was a tiny settlement inside a mountain.”

“In a mountain?”

“Yeah. For generations my family line were its guardians. It was said the gods lived there because it was a sacred mountain. There was an uncut primeval forest of virgin beech trees that had been growing there continuously for eternity.”

The first speaker above is Monkey Man, one of a group of misfit schoolkids with secret superpowers. Like Spiderman or Batman, he hides his face when righting the world’s wrongs. The mask he uses is the likeness of Son Goku, the Monkey King from the sixteenth century Chinese novel, Journey to the West.

Older readers may remember the Japanese TV series featuring “the magic monkey” which became a cult programme overseas in the 1980s. Younger readers are more likely to know Son Goku from the “Dragon Ball” manga-anime-videogame franchise.

The Monkey (red tunic) with the Pig and the Water Buffalo, protecting the priest on the westward journey

Red Circle, the innovative British publisher, has come up with a second original novelette from best-selling writer Takuji Ichikawa. Appearing two years after The Refugee’s Daughter, Monkey Man is a “Young Adult”-type fantasy tale, but one clearly grounded in contemporary concerns about environmental degradation, excessive corporate power and alienated youth.

Monkey Man and his pals are “awakened”, meaning that they have a different ethical sense to ordinary people, who suffer from “the misery virus”. The rough kids at school mock and beat them, but they never resist. Instead, they have developed a videogame which rewards altruistic behaviour  –  you win by giving away points to other players. According to one girl, traditional shoot-‘em-up videogames are for “old blokes who live in the world of stone age CPUs. Our generation is cooler and smarter than that.”

Ranged against the awakened youngsters is “The Complex” of mega-corporations, the military and politicians. Its roots “spread out like a sticky, slimy, fungus-like mould and it uses manipulative language to sell completely unnecessary products to consumers that were actually nothing more than poison for the mind.”

Even worse, having engineered an enormous wealth gap, high-ranking members of The Complex are now trying to increase inequality in lifespan. They kidnap one of the Monkey Man’s friends and attempt to use her superpowers to rejuvenate a geriatric CEO of an enormous industrial group.

Ichikawa is a great admirer of teenage activists Greta Thurnberg and Malala Yousafzai, and Extinction Rebellion is explicitly mentioned in Monkey Man as a model to follow. The sometimes naive political message will not suit everyone, but it does reflect some of the unease that many, not just idealistic youngsters, feel about the way the world is going today. An apt symbol of our era was the richest man on earth, tech oligarch Jeff Bezos, taking a space journey for sightseeing purposes, while multitudes of ordinary workers were stuck in cramped accommodation suffering the stress of Covid lockdowns.

Bezos space oddity

In a recent interview, Ichikawa said “I like stories that undo all boundaries. Dream and reality. Past and present. Me and you. And me and the world. As well as life and death.”

That phantasmagorical quality is present in the strange, magical world of  Monkey Man. The references to Son Goku and the Japanese animist tradition connect the story to age-old folk tales. It’s an absorbing read in its own right, with some of the charm of a Hayao Miyazaki anime film, and it also provides an intriguing picture of an ethical outlook that, judging by the author’s commercial success, commands widespread interest.

The crisp translation is by husband-and-wife team, Daniel Lilley and Lisa Lilley.

A compulsive writer who claims to have thousands of unpublished manuscripts in store, Ichikawa sold a million copies of his mega-hit “Be With You”, which went on to become a TV series and then a successful film that was remade for the South Korean and Chinese markets. The book has been translated into several languages, including English. Its success in East Asia may owe something to the themes of karma and rebirth which are also found in Monkey Man. 

From the Korean movie version of “Be With You”

Clearly a writer who understands the zeitgeist, he himself was a misfit at school and was much later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In his writing, his sympathy for the marginalized and “different” is obvious. Interestingly, he claims to have never indulged in that standard solidifier of group dynamics, karaoke singing. His favourite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, fabulist and poet Kenji Miyazawa and outsider artist Henry Darger who lived and died in total obscurity, leaving behind 20,000 pages of extraordinary fantastical writing.

Takuji Ichikawa

Red Circle’s mission is to publish original contemporary Japanese literature in English. Like all their previous books, Monkey Man has not previously appeared in any language, Japanese included.  Other Red Circle publications include works by well-known writers such as mystery doyen Soji Shimada, Naoki Prize winner Kazufumi Shiraishi and the late Kanji Hanawa, a scholar of French literature and prolific short story writer. All are well worth exploring. “Monkey Man” is a welcome addition to the Red Circle roster.

Published in Japan Forward 8/8/2021

The 32nd Summer Olympics will be remembered for the steely-eyed resolve and ingenuity that Japan displayed in successfully staging the Games under the shadow of Covid-19, which has made such a mess of our economies and societies.

In such circumstances, the ability of great sporting events to lift our spirits is particularly precious. Replacing the virus as the top news item, if only briefly, is a gold medal achievement in itself.

Some critics, including athletes, have complained that it doesn’t feel like a “real Olympics” because of the lack of audience and the constraints on social mixing, which were indeed unfortunate and unprecedented. At least the quiet in the stadium was a lot more dignified than the fake crowd roar injected into spectator-less Premier League football (soccer) games in Britain.

Drone display illuminates the Tokyo night

Indeed, the empty Olympic stadium and the stunning drone display of the earth in orbit neatly summed up our world today, with its ever more sophisticated technology and weakening social bonds, both tendencies being accelerated by the pandemic.

In reflecting the era in which it took place, Tokyo 2021 was as “real” as any other Games. The truth is that the modern Olympic Games has never been a purely sporting event. Right from the beginning, it has always held up a mirror to the political and social reality of its era.

The founder, Baron Coubertin, conscious of France’s loss of status in nineteenth century Europe, copied the sporting ethic of British private schools, which he saw as key to the British Empire.  By banning professionalism, he excluded working class athletes who had competed for prize money.

Statue of Baron Coubertin in Tokyo

Berlin 1936 signalled Nazi triumphalism and the clash of ideologies. Tokyo 1964 heralded the rise of Japan as an economic superpower. The shocking atrocities that occurred at Munich in 1972 ushered in an era of terrorism which has never ended. At the height of the Cold War, the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games; the Eastern bloc returned the compliment in 1984 at Los Angeles.

As for our era, it is a strange one, marked by Covid and the extraordinary response of governments everywhere. In the background is a backlash against the excesses of globalization and the rise of an assertive China determined to challenge the geopolitical status quo. Meanwhile, fear, anger and distrust are instantly magnified by social media.

War with no bullets

Several of the episodes from the Tokyo Games seemed particularly redolent of the shifting values of today’s world. The transgender female weightlifter who was male until the age of 35; two high-jumpers preferring to share the gold medal rather than face off in a decider.

Then there was the American gymnastic superstar who dramatically quit mid-contest on grounds of mental health; the Japanese actor whose role in the opening ceremony was cancelled at the last minute because of an inappropriate skit broadcast 35 years ago.

Meanwhile, a gold-winning badminton player was blasted on Chinese social media for dedicating his victory to “my country, Taiwan”.  Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce, the denim-clad bard of the oppressed working man, became an Olympic equestrian.

Jessica Springsteen competing in Tokyo

There were also plenty of the marvellous athletic feats that the Olympics were designed to celebrate. Who could forget the Italian winner of the 100 metres sprint, who took up the event just two years ago; the Japanese brother and sister both winning gold medals in judo; the Norwegian 400 metre hurdler whose record-busting time bettered the British record for the equivalent flat race;

Other great stories were the 13 year old Japanese girl who struck gold in skateboarding, and the Philippine weight-lifter, apparently a trenchant critic of President Duterte, who won her country’s first ever gold medal.

13 year old gold medallist Momiji Nishiya

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.” That was the opinion of English author George Orwell, writing in December 1945 after an ill-tempered tour of Britain by the Moscow Dynamo football team.

What Orwell left out was that “war minus the shooting” is greatly preferable to “war including the shooting.” Recent Olympics have had their fair share of problems – financial corruption, doping, etc. – but as sporting jamborees go, the Games are fairly benign.

Good will is helped by the large variety of sporting contests on display, which mean different things to different countries. For Japan, judo is the crucial sport. For East African countries, distance running is all important. Over the years, Britain has harvested medals from sports that you can do sitting down – cycling, horse riding, rowing and kayaking.

By boosting the number of events, the International Olympic Committee has cleverly ensured that many countries will go home happy, with “a record haul” of medals.

“Imagine no Olympics”:  a bleak prospect

As the drones rotated in the Tokyo night sky during the opening ceremony, a disparate group of remote singers broke into John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

At first sight, it seemed a strange choice. After all, if there were “no countries”, as the lyrics posit, there would be no Olympic Games, at least not in their modern form which is built on sporting nationalism. “No possessions” hardly fits the bill either, with some of the more photogenic star athletes on multimillion dollar sponsorship contracts.

In retrospect, though, John Lennon’s fifty year old song – jointly credited to Yoko Ono as of 2017 – suited the occasion. It is now a secular hymn, not a radical political programme. And as is the case with most hymns, people listen with respect or boredom then carry on regardless with their flawed human ways.

Yoko with Paul McCartney

That applied to the mercurial Lennon too. In an interview just before his death, he explained his idea of socialism. “I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich.”

That is a proposition that would probably command a lot of support in the Olympic movement and indeed in most of the member countries.

Critics of the IOC and the Games make some good points, as do critics of the United Nations, which has many obvious flaws with little prospect of being fixed any time soon. Yet to delegitimize the U.N. or withdraw from it would be a terrible mistake, as the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, suggests. The same could be said for the Olympics. Despite its many shortcomings, it helps to hold us together.

Since Baron Coubertin launched the first modern Summer Games in 1896, there have only been two outright cancellations, in 1940 and 1944. In other words, “no Olympics” has historically signalled apocalyptical destruction and the reconfiguration of global power by violence.

Jesse Owens receives one of his gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

So far, the confirmed death toll from Covid-19 is 0.002% of the fatalities from WW2 relative to population, and our countries and institutions are still intact, more or less. Yet staging such an enormous global spectacle with so much medical, logistical and financial complexity presented a Herculean task.

Japan pulled it off. By maintaining the continuity of the Olympics cycle, and thereby reassuring us that one of the most familiar markers of the modern era is still intact, it performed a useful service for us all.

Yes, these Olympics were different from all others. That is because the world is different, and we are different too. The winners are all the athletes who took part and all the people who watched and enjoyed their performances.

Now the baton passes to Paris. Let’s hope the 33nd Summer Games takes place in healthier circumstances

Published in Nikkei Asia 10/6/2021

One of the most mysterious incidents in the annals of sensational unsolved crimes that dot Japan’s post-war history concerns the confectionary company, Ezaki Glico.

In March 1984, company president Katsuhisa Ezaki was abducted from his home and an enormous ransom was demanded. He made his escape some days later.

The criminal gang – which dubbed itself “the Monster with 21 Faces”, after a villain in a series of early 20th century mystery novels – then threatened to poison the company’s products. Shortly afterwards, a “fox-eyed” (ie. narrow-eyed) man in a baseball cap was caught on a security camera tampering with confectionaries on shop shelves.

Over the next 18 months, the Monster widened its focus to include chocolate maker Morinaga and several other food companies, while mocking the police in a series of letters to the media. Thanks to timely warnings, nobody was injured but the companies suffered severe losses as they were forced to make repeated product recalls.

On Valentine’s Day, some cyanide-laced chocolates were found bearing the label “poison inside,” while some unlaced chocolates exhibited the hardly reassuring label “no poison inside.” The fox-eyed man was sighted on numerous occasions, but always managed to slip away.

After one mid-ranking police officer committed suicide by setting himself ablaze at his place of work, the Monster called an end to its activities. Rumours swirled, but no hard information emerged about the criminals’ identity or motivation, and it is not known to what extent the companies met the extortionists’ demands.

Such is the background to Kaoru Takamura’s best-selling mystery novel “Lady Joker,” which has just appeared in English. The translators who undertook this gargantuan project are Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida.

Given the story’s length and complexity – over thirty main characters are listed in the dramatis personae – it was inevitable that the book should be published in two volumes. By delaying the second volume until 2022, Penguin Random House will be keeping English-language readers on tenterhooks for many months to come.

It is well worth the wait for anyone interested in a panoramic portrait of modern Japanese society, including its dark corners, as well as fans of intelligent mysteries.

Takamura’s novel began as a serial in a weekly magazine, running from 1995 to 1997. At the time, most of her readers would have had clear memories of the Glico-Morinaga affair. They might also have been aware that the statute of limitations had passed in 1994 without a single arrest being made.

The author substituted a beer company for the food companies in the actual case, shifted the action from the Kansai region of west Japan to Tokyo, and moved the setting to the mid-1990s, with the criminal gang calling itself “Lady Joker.”

Tainted beer

At the time, there was speculation that members of Japan’s burakumin minority group, the target of discrimination for centuries, were involved, and that people with political connections had advance knowledge of the sabotage and profited from swings in the share prices of the companies.

Takamura fleshes out these rumours, giving the Lady Joker crew not only credible motivation, but also something close to justification. She also incorporates some of the Monster’s clever moves. Notably, a young man enjoying an intimate interlude with a girlfriend in a parked car suddenly finds himself dragooned into collecting the ransom – and is duly grabbed by the waiting police.

“Lady Joker” features few action scenes and no bloodbaths or car chases. Conventional story elements, such as the planning of the crime, are skipped over. Instead, Takamura makes brilliant use of changes in viewpoint to explore the inner turmoil of her large cast of characters.

She takes us into the mind of a chief executive who is making a huge bet on a new product; a disaffected cop who hates his arrogant superiors; a child growing up in an impoverished burakumin community in pre-war northern Japan; and an ambitious young reporter aiming for the scoop of a lifetime.

An appropriate graveside offering: Hinode Beer

In the end, nearly all of them – criminals, cops, journalists and high-flying businessmen – appear to have “drawn the joker” in life. They struggle vainly with their organizations, their own mistakes, and social injustices. Redemption is fleeting, if it comes at all.

Takamura studied French literature before joining a foreign trading house in the mid-1970s. Her writing is highly realistic, giving convincing depictions of horse-racing fans, blast furnace technology and stock market scams, as well as the organizational dynamics of the police, press and major companies.

Like America novelist Tom Wolfe, she believes in experiencing what she writes about. In her preparations, she gambled at the race track herself and was on the spot at the press club attached to the Tokyo police when a gruesome triple murder occurred. A native of the Kansai region, she probably knows more about the Glico-Morinaga affair than has been publicly revealed.

In recent years Takamura has abandoned the mystery genre in favour of literary fiction – which is perhaps unsurprising, given her preference for psychological and political exploration rather than tension-building and twists. The point of Lady Joker is not “whodunnit,” but “why?.”

An excellent TV version of Lady Joker, comprising seven one-hour episodes, appeared in 2012. Although some details, such as the prevalence of employment discrimination and the influence of “sokaiya” corporate extortionists, appear a bit dated, the story holds up well for the 21st century.

The “sokaiya” extortionist having the last laugh

As for the real-life mystery, there must be several people alive today who know exactly what happened but continue to hold their peace. In his autobiography “Toppamono” (Bulldozer), tough guy Manabu Miyazaki, described the many factors that led the police to consider him the prime suspect.

Son of a yakuza and former member of a violent underground arm of the Japanese Communist Party, he indeed bore a striking resemblance to the fox-eyed man who police considered the ringleader. Yet Miyazaki was able to provide a satisfactory alibi and is now a well-known literary figure himself. The Monster’s sleep is untroubled.

Miyazaki in the mid 80s (l), police identikit of the “fox-eyed man” (r)

In her novel, Takamura muses about a coming era where companies will be expected to follow socially responsible principles, not just the pursuit of profits. This is already happening in the shape of the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) investor agenda which is increasingly influential in many countries, Japan included.

Yet human nature does not change so easily. Economists John List and Fatemeh Momeni of the University of Chicago have found that employees of socially responsible companies are more likely to lie and cheat than others. Likewise, tech companies that publicly supported Black Lives Matter had 20% fewer black employees than average.

Corporate and other institutional scandals are not going to disappear in Japan or any other place. Behind the façade of planet-saving virtue, the age-old temptations of greed, lust for power and desire to hide unpleasant realities are as common as ever. That is great news for the writers and readers of intelligent mysteries, if no one else.

“LADY JOKER, Volume I,” by Kaoru Takamura, Penguin Random House.