January caught me hungry for alternate realities and so I quickly submerged myself in books, dipping into one after the other with no breaks in between - Anna Cima: Probudím se na Šibuji (I will wake up in Shibuya), Donal Ryan: Strange Flowers and Leo Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata

I will wake up in Shibuya came recommended from a highly trustworthy source and was gifted to me by my sister for Christmas - sent all the way from the Czech Republic before the Brexit muddy waters, although it travelled for a month or so, journey that usually takes 5 days. Well, troubles of the 21^st century… The book follows a young university student studying Japanese at the faculty I studied at myself. Reading about the old building with ancient furniture and crammed libraries felt like a warm embrace. Jana, the main character, visits Tokyo as a teenager and a thought of her gets stuck in Shibuya as she wishes not to have to leave while the physical Jana returns to Prague and takes up her university studies. The parallel universe was an interesting idea and although I found few tiny nagging faults in the plot (some actions seemed unnecessarily overcomplicated) I gulped it down in 2 days not wanting to put it down. I have certainly learned a lot about Japanese culture and literature, especially thanks to a fascinating story of a fictional writer Kawashita Kiyomaru*.

Strange Flowers is a gentle caress. I am not sure I will be able to do it justice. I am not sure words, in general, can do it justice. One would feel the need to resort to cliches and that feels flawed and misleading. It is a story of a mother and father in a small village in rural Ireland in the 1970s. It is a story of their daughter, her black London husband and their white-skinned son. It is a story of their respective neighbours, of their respective countries’ attitudes, of love and shame and struggle and love again. Each character is full of love, each is gentle and fragile and all you want to do is hold them in the palm of your hand. And all they do is hold each other on their palms, or try to do so the best way they can. I did not want the story to end, I wanted to step into the story and live with those characters. The feelings it awoke in me reminded me of Neil Jordan’s The Dream of a Beast a slim book of 120 pages that I tried to stretch out to last me weeks…

The Kreutzer Sonata was an unknown book to me. I got it as a gift in Czech translation and I came across it being mentioned as part of the TLS’ article on Beethoven’s 250^th birth anniversary. I picked it up as my eyes would fall on it almost every evening as I was cosying up on the couch. It was nicely slim and promised a quick immersion in another story. I did not expect what came at me – a strong feminist message from the mouth of a murderer husband. This came as quite a shock especially as the only other Tolstoy work I read to date was War and Peace, which I gave up with 20 pages to the end because the main character was dead and the women were treated like rubbish. This was more than 20 years ago…

The enslavement of a woman lies simply in the fact that men consider it very appropriate to  use her as an instrument of their pleasure and they crave it very much. Therefore, they liberate the woman, offer her a variety of rights identical to those of a man but they still perceive her as an instrument of pleasure, she is brought up thus since childhood, she is brought up that way also by the public opinion. And so the woman remains the one subordinate, an immoral slave and the man stays the same immoral slaver. [Kreutzer Sonata­ - translation mine]

*I managed to dig out someone of that name on the internet (as you do) when I was checking 'my facts' but now I know that the writer was made up by Cima and has never existed. (11 June 2021)