The Goddess Chronicle (2008) – KIRINO Natsuo

原文名：女神記
作家：桐野　夏生
発行年：平成20（2008年）

Many creation myths rely on a man. Those that don’t—like the one laid down in the Kojiki—requires the woman to know her place: subservient to the man. Indeed, in the text of the Japanese creation myth itself, the woman is punished for speaking out of turn. She literally is not allowed to have thoughts or ideas before the man does. Needless to say, this has informed a great deal of contemporary Japanese society. In The Goddess Chronicle, Natsuo Kirino interrogates this tale: what’s in it for the woman?

On a tiny teardrop island in the middle of the ocean two sisters are born. The older, Kamikuu, is destined for great things, while the younger, Namima, must live her life according to a strict set of rules laid down for women. But when one terrible event splits the two sisters forever, Namima finds herself in a place quite unlike anything she has ever known.

Nanima’s discovery that her older sister is the embodiment of purity, coincides with her realising that she is destined to be the representation of impurity. Without any action from her, society has forced her into a role she has no desire to play. From a young age, she is reminded that she is impure and dirty—an ugly woman with no place in polite society. Though, at first, she accepts her lot, as she grows older, she begins to rebel. In a neat flip of the Christian creation myth, it is a man—actually, a boy—who encourages her to rebel, to eat the forbidden food, and to reject her societal rules. Quickly, the two fall in love.

When Namima is (inevitably, perhaps) killed by her husband for his own selfish purposes, she is transported to the underworld, where she finds herself in the company of Izanami, the original female god who, with her husband, Izanaki, created the world. Izanami is filled with bitterness and rage at the world of men. For Izanami, this rage comes from being treated so poorly by both her husband and the creation god itself. Killed for speaking out of turn, she must now tend to the underworld as the goddess of death. Meanwhile, her husband is allowed to continue to wander the earth, sleeping with women and populating the world. Understandably, pain and anger infuse every single one of her actions.

By placing these two women next to each other, Kirino invites us to consider the pain women face at the hands of men. For Nanima, the pain is physical—her man saw her only as a biological tool, a vessel for his child to continue the family line. For Izanami, her crime was thinking outside the box. Both of their lives have been ruined by gender constructs beyond their control, by a world that sees women having a specific purpose and place. Any deviation from that line will quite literally result in a hell beyond anything on this earth.

This is a novel about violence against women, both physical and psychological. Kirino reminds us that, though this may be a myth, it is a myth that has shaped so much of what we believe today. It is a message to anyone who is listening: women have, since the beginning of creation, had to carry a burden far beyond what should be allowed, and perhaps this should be examined more closely by those in power.

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Sworn Virgin (2007) – Elvira DONES

To say that we have a woman problem is unfair, but it something that we should all keep in mind, particularly with the recent conclusion of Women in Translation month: women seem to be disproportionately under-represented when we talk about translated fiction. I’m not totally sure why, but while And Other Stories can be commended for many things when it comes to translated fiction, to this point (four years in), they have only published one lady writer in translation. Odd.

Fortunately, the one novel they have published in this category is a good one.

It’s 2001, and Hana Doda has arrived in America to live with her cousin Lila. But Hana isn’t just dealing with entering a new culture—for the past 14 years, she has lived as Mark, a man in the Albanian mountains. Here in America, though, she will reclaim her former life as Hana, a young woman with hopes and dreams that have been suppressed for more than a decade.

Rather sensibly, Dones does not linger too long on either the way in which Hana becomes Mark, nor even the life Mark leads. She is not concerned with the titillation of a cross-dressing character—she is concerned with the emotions and thoughts of a real person who has made an immense sacrifice to ensure her own safety and survival.

What emerges from this novel is not just the truistic fact that gender is a social construct, but that navigating between the two is supremely difficult. Mark was never anything more than a construction Hana used to get out of a tricky situation, but he was a mask that she wore for 15 years, and one that she became used to. I’m not sure she was ever comfortable behind the mask (very few people ever are; and the only time we are given a glimpse into this life, the situation does not end well), but she learned what the mask entailed.

When Hana comes to America to make a new life for herself, ready to free herself from the cocoon of male identity she has spun, she finds herself stepping into a whole new world. Not America—Hana is too smart to let a small thing like culture shock get in the way, and she takes to the American daily routine like a duck to water—but to the world of female. Her guide, though, does not seem to realise just how big a transition this really is. For Lila, being a woman means conforming to a certain list of rules, regulating what must be done, what must be worn, and what actions must be taken. For Lila, there are two teams: Team Man and Team Woman, and never the twain shall meet.

It would be tempting, I imagine, for an author like Elvira Dones to ride on the coattails of her inherent otherness (an Albanian writing in Italian), but to her credit, she does not. She takes a tiny piece of Albanian culture—the idea of the burrnesha, or sworn virgin—and weaves around it the inherently human tale of the universal search for identity. If one were the kind of person to exaggerate wildly from a sample size of one, one might say: if this is what women in translation can offer, let’s get moving to find the rest of them.

 

The Commandant (1975) – Jessica ANDERSON

Expectations are a funny thing. If a book is marked as a ‘classic’—particularly as a forgotten classic that needs re-evaluating—a reader can be forgiven for expecting something quite special. This is particularly relevant considering my past encounters with Text Classics—forgotten Australian novels that Michael Heyward thinks deserve a wider audience. For the most part, I have enjoyed reading old Australian novels. So when I read the blurb for The Commandant, I was expecting a novel full of fireworks and fights, of complex moral ambiguity.

The first scene is a promising opening. On a ship from Sydney bound for Moreton Bay, several women are discussing their future lives. Of particular interest to us is Francis, whose sister, Letty, is married to the commandant of Moreton Bay: Patrick Logan. Mr Logan has recently come under fire in Sydney for his perceived bending of the rules when it comes to the punishment of the convicts for whom he is responsible.

But Letty is friends with a journalist who has made claims about Logan; claims Logan has refuted by filing suit against said journalist for defamation. Letty, being the naïve teenager she is, has spent so much time with the journalist’s family, she has been caught up in his truth, and believes Patrick Logan to be a monster, a throw-back to a time that has passed, and needs to be forgotten. I think it’s safe to say that, were she alive today, she would be what some people might disparagingly refer to as a latte-sipping, inner-city, bleeding heart lefty. So, of course, the most exciting thing the novel can offer is the confrontation between a man who believes what he does is right, and a woman who believes what he does is a crime against humanity.

This clash between Frances and Patrick never eventuates quite like I imagined it would, though again, perhaps my expectations were getting in the way of reality. Despite Francis’ willingness to shout loudly her opinions on the ship journey to Moreton Bay, as soon as she meets the man in question, she finds herself barely able to talk. She is, of course, only 17 years old, and Patrick Logan is, if nothing else, a physically imposing man. For Francis to be struck so dumb by the encounter immediately sets up the dynamic of the relationship between the two characters in a way that one might not otherwise expect.

There can be no question that the whipping of convicts—particularly with a cat-o’-nine-tails one hundred times—can be anything other than a vile abuse of power and position. But Patrick Logan never seems to overstep the limits set in place by colonial law when it comes to punishing his charges for their wrongs. And he is certainly not a bad man—yes, he has a bit of a temper, and is not exactly a revolutionary when it comes to penal reform, but not everyone has to be. The promised fight between a lefty on her moral high horse and a traditional man willing to follow the law in order to meet out punishment for people never happens.

Instead, there is talk. A lot of talk. Which, in Anderson’s defence, is something she does very well. All the dialogue in the novel is perfectly pitched, particularly the idiosyncratic speech patterns of Frances’ sister, Letty, whose lisp

It all seems to come to a head about halfway through the novel, when the talking stops, and something actually happens. Frances, who has already crossed social mores, is sexually assaulted by Martin, a young man who works as a gardener for the Logan household. The next events are strange. Frances is blamed for the attack, because she led him along by talking out of turn. Then she pleads for him not to be punished, not with the whip. Of course, Logan assures her that only the appropriate punishment will be given. Of course, the ‘appropriate’ punishment is whipping. The chance to turn this into a journey about Frances having to deal with an actual crime committed against her, and how she deals with punishment, glitters hopefully, like a diamond in a boulder.

But this interesting side road comes to a halting stop when the section ends, plunging us into the final third of the novel, which opens several days after the second ends, and we finds ourselves plunged into the middle of the bush just outside Brisbane, where a search party are looking for Patrick Logan, who has gone walkabout. The momentum built up in the last section surrounding the sexual assault and the subsequent fallout is completely lost as we go into the bush with this group, and spend fifty pages looking for the body of a dead man. It’s an odd choice, and for me, not one that paid off. Again, though, maybe this was just because I was expecting more page time for the clash between Patrick Logan and Francis.

That is the central mystery of The Commandant: why would Patrick Logan, a man so ostensibly committed to the law he has been tasked to uphold, go by himself into the bush? Was it to find the convicts that had escaped the camp to live with the Aboriginal tribes? Was it to escape the gossip surrounding his impending trial? Did he not want to go to India with his regiment? There is never a satisfactory answer, but to be honest, that is not the problem. The problem is that I was never invested enough in any of the answers to particularly care what the answer was.

Does anyone really change by the end of the novel? Have any of these characters learned anything? Frances goes back to Sydney, having seen the punishment Logan (and by extension, the law) hands out, and doesn’t like it. Logan himself is dead. Letty is a widow, and has to move back to Sydney with her children. It all kind of fizzles out in a weirdly anti-climactic fashion.

Expectations are unavoidable. Why read anything if you don’t already have some (at least vague) idea about what you are getting yourself into? But sometimes expectations work against you. The Commandant is a passable historical novel, notable particularly for the fact that it is set in Brisbane, not Sydney. But I’m not sure it’s a classic that deserves to be read for generations to come.