alexsarll | Summer evenings are the justification for summer (Reply)

I'd never really considered the state of Japan in the forties, but David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero makes a plausible case for it not being very much fun. The characters are more damaged than those in Peace's The Damned Utd; the police system in which they operate makes The Wire look decadently overfunded and The Shield feel like a community relations masterclass. Unusually for a politically-engaged historical work these days, no contemporary resonance seems intended - perhaps because to do so would imply support for the Iraq war, although the relentless, incantatory squalor of it all reminds us all how much is sacrificed in the short term during even the most justified regime change. The one thing that has briefly managed to throw me out of the moment depicted is the presence of characters named Miyazaki and Nakamura. Common family names they may be in Japan, for all I know - but to me they have very specific holders.

Being intrigued by the glimpsed red-top headline "MUM OF 5 IS FIRST LESBIAN BIGAMIST" (and frankly, who wouldn't be), I felt obliged to investigate the story, which turned out to be rather desperate. But one of the participants being called Beddoes reminded me of the poet of the same name - "'Twas in those days
That never were, nor ever shall be, reader, but on this paper; golden, glorious days" - (himself less than entirely straight), whose aunt turns out to have been Maria Edgeworth. Of whom one contemporary divine said "I should class her books as among the most irreligious I have ever read ... she does not attack religion, nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it ... No works ever produced so bad an effect on my mind as hers". Which even within the inglorious field of believing religion to be key to morality, must take some kind of biscuit. And to bring us back from there to the modern news - more fun with islamic dress. Which reminds me, can we maybe make Salman Rushdie a Lord? Or a secular saint? Please?