Book: Rainbirds/The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida/Watersong
Author: Clarissa Goenawan
Publication Year: 2018/2020/2022
Genre: Fiction
Country: Singapore
Book: Suicide Club/ The Great Reclamation
Author: Rachel Heng
Publication Year: 2018/2023
Genre: Science Fiction/Historical Fiction
Singapore, it is fair to say, is a country punching above its weight. Since achieving independence in 1965, the small island state has grown into one of the richest countries in Asia. Along with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it was named as one of the four Asian Tiger economies, but has since outstripped its contemporaries in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This is not without its problems. Island states generally become wealthy by serving as tax havens for the mega-rich and Singapore is no exception. However, it is also one of the world’s most important trade ports and an international centre for banking. Unsurprisingly, it is also one of the most expensive places in the world to live.
In turning to our Singaporean authors, we find something of that spirit of internationalism. Indeed of the five books under consideration, only one is actually set in Singapore. That novel, The Great Reclamation (see below), will at least tell us something of the history of country.
Clarissa Goenawan is perhaps the perfect Reading the World author. Born in Indonesia to Singaporean parents, she lives in Singapore, but has presumably spent time living in Japan. given that each of her three novels published since 2018 is set there. It isn’t easy finding information on Goenawan’s biography online, which, given the issues facing females writers that we have identified elsewhere in this project, is probably for the best. Despite being set in Japan, all her books were originally published in English.
Having read a reasonable amount of contemporary Japanese literature in the recent years, it is easy to see in Goenawan’s work many of the same tropes and social concerns found in the work of native Japanese authors. Of course, no one writing fiction set in Japan can escape the influence of Haruki Murakami (see: Reading Murakami). Yet it is possible to find in Goenawan novels connective tissue to modern Japanese authors such as Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, Mieko Kawakami, Natsuko Imamura, Natsuo Kirino and Yu Miri (see: South Korea) amongst many others. How many of these authors Goenawan is aware of or has read is anyone’s guess.
Her first novel, Rainbirds, published in 2018, is in one sense a murder mystery in the same vein as Natsuo Kirino’s 2003 novel, Grotesque. When Ren Ishida’s sister is murdered in a provincial town, he must travel there to put her affairs in order. However, he ends up accepting a temporary position as a tutor at the same school in which his sister worked. As he comes to know the residents of the town, its dark underbelly reveals itself, offering tantalising clues to the circumstances of his sister’s murder.
It’s good first novel, rich in detail and characters. The rich politician who offers Ren free accommodation in return for reading to his listless wife. Rio; the student with whom he forms a strange friendship. There are also dreams and flashbacks to growing up with his sister, Keiko.
That said, the entire novel is told in flashback. The events take place n the 1990s and Ren narrates the tale much in the same way as Toru Watanabe in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, looking back after many years. Like many of Murakami’s novels, the conclusion is deliberately ambiguous. It is for the reader to decide what conclusions to draw.
None of these things are unique to Murakami’s novels of course, but par for the course in Japanese and South East Asian literature. The supernatural is employed at various points in the work of many of the writers mentioned above: Although writers like Natsuo Kirino are able to introduce the viscerally horrific and grotesque without reference to the supernatural.
Indeed, for most of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, the supernatural is entirely absent and the novel is again reminiscent of Norwegian Wood in many of its elements. It also has elements of Greek tragedy in that we are told about Miwako Sumida’s death in the novel’s prologue. The narrative then spins back in time to show how the tragedy unfolded. The supernatural only comes into play in the novel’s third act.
On balance, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is Goenawan’s most accomplished novel of the three (although, as the first novel of hers I read, this might be a case of the First Love or Point of Entry Fallacy). Unlike the previous novel, it is told in the 3rd person with the point of view switching to different characters as the novel proceeds. Despite the tragedy that underpins it (perhaps, in fact, because of it), it is also the book with the most clear conclusion. Which might also be its most un-Murakami-like feature. In the land of Haruki Murakami, ambiguity is king (see: Reading Murakami for more on this). It is a reminder that South East Asian literature is not defined by one man. Other Japanese writers (and novels set in Japan) are available.
Shouji Arai is forced to leave Akakawa when he strikes up a friendship with the wife of one of the town’s most powerful men, who is physically abusive to her. He is forced to leave his girlfriend, Yoko, behind, who disappears. A shadowy voice on the phone threatens to kill him if he continues to search for her. The years pass away as he works as a journalist and becomes embroiled in a complicated platonic relationship with Liyun after she moves into his apartment. She occupies much of the novel’s second act.
As a child, Shouji was told by a fortune teller that he will meet three women with water symbols in their names (i.e. the Kanji pictograms used in Japanese script and borrowed from Chinese). One of these three women might be his soul mate. One might also drown, as seen in a recurring dream that prompts his mother to take him to the fortune teller in the first act.
Where The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida was largely unambiguous, many elements of Watersong are vague and, like Rainbirds and the oeuvre of Haruki Murakami, one is left to draw one’s own conclusions.
It is another novel that opens in the mid-90s and runs to beyond the millennium. It allows for noir-ish throwback plot devices like Shouji using pay phones to try and contact Yoko and being threatened by the voice on the phone. Set any nearer in time and much of the mystery could be solved through Facebook, Twitter and Zoom.
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| Clarissa Goenawan |
Rachel Heng’s two published novels occupy the years either side of the world in which Clarissa Goenawan’s books are set. The second, The Great Reclamation, takes place in Singapore between 1942 and 1965. Her first novel, 2018’s Suicide Club, takes place in New York in the not too distant future.
In this version of NYC, people now live for centuries. Certain lucky individuals have the chance to live forever. However, their behaviour is heavily proscribed. When ‘Lifer’, Lea Kirino, is hit by a car, she is suspected of attempting to harm herself and is placed in special measures and monitored.
The accident is triggered by the apparent vision of her long dead father. However, it is no vision and as he is revealed to be alive and re-enters her life, her world starts to fall apart. The titular Suicide Club is revealed to be a secret society dedicated to risk and the rejection of immortality. She enters their circle to bring them down, but comes to sympathise with their cause.
Suicide Club is a meditation on the concept of everlasting life. It asks the question: how much life is too much? For all that religion promises immortality in the everafter, does anyone really want to live forever in anything so sterile as the heaven that is portrayed in most religious texts (as Talking Heads put it, ‘Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing. nothing ever happens’)?
Extending one’s lifespan by a few centuries, even a millennium or two, might be desirable. Anything beyond than that and surely boredom would be bound to set in (look at the listless, sterile lives lived by half the vampires in vampyric fiction). Seemingly even the prospect of immortal life is too much for many ‘Lifers’ to bear. Hence the Suicide Club.
Like Watersong, it’s a decent first novel. Like Goenawan’s proximity to Murakami, Suicide Club has similarities with many of Philip K Dick’s best meditations on the future of humanity’s relationship with medicine and technology (although obviously many PKD’s references have not aged well). Whether humanity will survive long enough to worry about such matters is something which has still to be decided. If AI doesn’t get us, our self-destructive instincts just might.
And so we come, finally, to Singapore and Heng’s 2023 novel, The Great Reclamation. Rather like Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic), The Great Reclamation is a historical novel told through the lives and relationships of one family.
Ah Boon is born to a fisherman family during the 30s in the declining years of the British Empire and its hundred year sovereignty over the island. In 1942, the Japanese invade and occupy Singapore and carry out the kinds of atrocities committed throughout their sphere of influence.
As a child, Ah Boon has little interest in fishing, preferring to play with his neighbour, Siok Mei. However, as the post war period begins and they grow older, Siok Mei becomes part of student protests against the government. Ah Boon submits to his fate to be a fisherman like his father, but soon becomes jaded and instead applies for a job with the same people to whom Siok Mei and her activist boyfriend are opposed.
This effort placed the government in direct conflict with the fishermen and other Singaporeans who had lived in and around the coastline for generations. Many were relocated to government built housing, but these, at least to judge from events in the novel, were poorly ventilated. It should be remembered that Singapore lies just one degree above the equator. It is therefore a hot and humid country. Ah Boon’s Uncle refuses to relocate, preferring to feel the sea winds coming in through the floorboards of his beachfront home.
Ah Boon’s talent as a child and into adulthood is his ability to find mysterious islands that seem to move with the phases of the moon. He is thrown into conflict between his community and his employers, who want to mine the islands for their sand; between his unrequited love for Siok Mei and Natalie, his wife and former boss. As the book concludes in 1965 with Singaporean independence as an island and city state, Ah Boon finally picks a side. The rest is history.
In terms of this project, The Great Reclamation is clearly the best of the five books we have considered. We travel to learn something about other parts of the world and Heng’s 460 page novel certainly delivers on this remit. However, I have a soft spot for Japanese literature and The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a fine example of the genre, even if Goenawan is not a native Japanese writer. The two books therefore sit at the top of the pile, not that such considerations are particularly relevant. Opinions are only ever subjective and what appeals to me might not be what appeals to you.
What is less of an opinion and more objective is how gratifying it is to find two Singaporean women writing and releasing novels. All five of these books came out within five years of one another from 2018 to 2023. Hopefully one can look forward to many more novels in the coming years. I seem to say this with each new country we visit, but it remains a truth universal: I will be reading Clarissa Goenawan and Rachel Heng’s books long after this project ends.
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| Rachel Heng |
