I wanted to make July all about reading nonfiction, but that didn’t happen. Some fiction squeaked in. Plus I started more books than I finished, because nonfiction, so now I’m reading nonfiction in between and around fiction. An essay here, an essay there.

On a similar note, August was supposed to be all about Epic Fantasy but I picked up the first 700+ page book in the pile and cracked; my resolve fled and I said, “Fuck no!” Instead August is going to be all about stand alone genre novels. That’s what I’m writing, so that’s what I’m reading. Fuck Epic Fantasy.

On to the books:

Race: How Blacks and Whites Think And Feel About The American Obsession by Studs Terkel.

I can’t believe I hadn’t read Terkel until now. This book was great. I feel like Terkel should be our (USian) default historian, like most citizens should read his stuff and be familiar with it even if you don’t agree with it. And there’s lots here. The whole book is interviews about race relations in and around Chicago from the 50s on into the 80s. A document of lives lived through the death of Emmett Till, the housing protests, Affirmative Action, the closing of the steel mills, and the rise of the Nation of Islam. Like I said, agree or disagree with the speakers here but at least have the conversation to happen. Here’s the quote the book ends on from a mixed race man named Leo:

“I have faith we can mature. Stranger things have happened. Maybe America, maybe the world is in its adolescence. Maybe we’re driving home from the prom, drunk, and nobody knows whether we’re going to survive or not. Maybe we’ll survive and maybe we’ll be a pretty smart old person, well-adjusted and mellow.”

The Star Thrower – Loren Eiseley

I did blather some about Eiseley before and this book is as good as any other to jump into his stuff with. The titular essay is probably his most famous. It’s about encountering a man on a beach that throws dying star fishes back into the sea. But the essay I loved was called “How Natural is ‘Natural’?”. That one read like pure Arthur Machen mixed with Edward Abbey or Henry Thoreau.

“I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. I, the professor, trembling absurdly on the platform with my book and spectacles, am the single philosophical animal. I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light.

I have said this is not an illusion. It is when one sees in this manner, or a sense of strangeness halts one on a busy street to verify the appearance of one’s fellows, that one knows a terrible new sense has opened a faint crack in the absolute.”

Cosmic vastnesses indeed!

Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo – Miyuki Miyabe

So, yeah. This book was why I didn’t finish more nonfiction this month. I was part way through bell hooks’s Killing Rage and Adam Phillips’s Missing Out when this book came along in the mail and I said, oh hey, let me read one of these stories and see what they’re all about. And that led to me reading another one and another one and another one.

These stories are pretty damn f’n great y’all.

Okay, so the only other Japanese ghost stories I’ve read are by Lafcadio Hearn and his wife Koizumi Setsu (and when people talk about Hearn’s Japanese work I think they should mention how it was a team effort between him and his wife), and also the work of Edogawa Rampo.

Miyabe’s are different from both of those.

Hearn and Setsu’s were all about the Japaneseness of the stories, because Hearn’s readers wanted exoticism. Rampo’s work took Poe and the conte cruel and mashed them up with their Japanese equivalents to give you such creep fests as “The Human Chair” and other nutty stuff.

In comparison to those Miyabe’s stories are more grounded in the everyday and mundane. They’re all about the marketplace and the ties of association between merchants in 18th and 19th centuries Edo. Each involves either an apprentice or bonded servant entering a situation where they encounter a ghost or demon. Their stories are intersecting other stories and that sense of indebtedness from one person to another is carried over between the living and the dead. Yeah, there’s nothing here that’s going to make me have to get off a crowded train like reading Rampo’s “The Caterpillar” did, but that’s not a bad thing. For a collision of the mundane and the fantastic these stories are perfect. Check them out.