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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2170 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I've finished The Handmaid's Tale. It's a book I'll have to read again sometime, since there's clearly a lot which I haven't noticed. Can't say it ever came together for me, but maybe that's because I didn't really understand its thrust. The tone throughout was sterile, which was probably intentional, given the motifs of waiting and idleness. The world itself never made a convincing dystopia; it was way too lax in just about everything, and the sense of fear of reprisals or of other people never became more than a literary suggestion. The writing was quite good.

It proved as curious as Atwood, who has not been a predictable simpleton when it comes to politics. On the one hand, it could be read as a screed against the religious right, but the picture is always muddled by something, like the quoting of the communist from each according to his ability. The last chapter muddies the picture even further, making us wonder to what extent this is to be taken as history or myth. As a myth, it may be something of value, something worth a closer look. As a history, it is laced with what seems like old arguments among old activists which seems to limp on eternally, even up to paranoia over viruses.

Going to try some Agatha Christie next, which perennialy seems to be collecting dust on my shelf.

Mishima's Runaway Horses.

I unexpectedly ended up enjoying Spring Snow, so I quickly picked up the next part of the tetralogy. It's also quite good, though I can understand why people generally praise the first book over the second - having a conspiracy instead of a romance as the main plot probably didn't have as wide an appeal, and right-wing terrorist as the main character was probably a bridge too far for many. I can more easily identify with the protagonists in Runaway Horses: Reactionary fencers obsessed with death and middle-aged white-collar profressionals, and everybody's an autist. Yeah, that's my cohort alright, more so than the effete noblemen of the first book.

Haven't quite finished it yet, so please don't spoil it.

Also from it, RE everyone's favorite culture war topic:

Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to be required to give constant proof of one’s manliness—to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today.

To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak. But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.

Read the four years ago, like many enjoyed the first most. Mishima--I tell someone I've read a good deal of Mishima--and they sit up, impressed. If I say I've read a dozen Murakami novels they shrug. What I have to then admit is that I read in translation, in English. Mishima's kanji and word choice is apparently miles away from Murakami's more accessible prose, and to read Mishima in Japanese suggests a strong command of the language. Like comparing say Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King as an English reader. I say all this not knowing if you're reading in Japanese, English, or German.

I am glad I read the books, though, without spoiling, I will say they did get weird. Then again Mishima was, by my reckoning, a pretty big nutter, and I use that term in the Commonwealth sense of "fucking nuts." I do enjoy much of his writing though. I recently lent a friend a copy of Ai no kawaki or Thirst for Love and I believe his response was "Wtf did I just read?"

I wonder if Mishima had Italian and German (so post-Axis) contemporaries, with the same sort of experiences and talents as he had.

I feel like Mishima's particular form of narcissistic suicidal homosexuality would be difficult to percolate anywhere.

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