LIFE IN THE CUL-DE-SAC
By SENJI KUROI
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001. 231 pages, $12.95 (paperback)

Ronald Suleski

Step off the commuter train at almost any station in greater Tokyo, that vibrant metropolis of fourteen million souls, and begin to walk away from the station. Within a few blocks, the colorful and jumbled shops will give way to quiet residential areas. There, behind high walls of limestone or concrete, cozy homes will sit nestled together, each on a tiny lot. The patch of land around each house will be devoted to a garden of some shrubs and gravel, or maybe just a narrow path with miniature bonsai plants set along the edges. If an older home remains, where the family that once owned all the nearby land still lives, it will be larger, with possibly a roofed, formal entrance gate and even an area of green lawn, circumscribed by high hedges or by the shielding walls.

Senji Kuroi has created just such a neighborhood as the setting for Life in the Cul-de-Sac. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, he takes us into the homes, and into the psyches, of the people who live there. He tells a story very specifically Japanese in many of its details, yet one that speaks to all contemporary urban dwellers. The novel, which was first serialized in a literary journal in Japan between 1981 and 1984, appeared as a single volume in 1984, and was awarded that year's highly respected Tanizaki Prize for literature, is considered Kuroi's masterpiece. It is the product of an author whose interest in literature emerged while he was still in high school in the 1940s, just after the end of World War II. By the late 1960s, Kuroi had gained wide recognition in Japan. He is classified as one of the "introspective generation" of Japanese writers, an author who bridges the gap between the politically engaged writers of the immediate postwar years and the later generation who try to explore the inner lives of ordinary Japanese.
For all residents of the neighborhood, the house in which they live becomes the polestar of their emotional well-being. All fear an invasion of the home or a defilement of the purity they feel is needed to protect the area. In one case, the threat comes from the water of an abandoned underground well that could begin to seep up under the floors; in another, an anonymous couple sneak into a building site for a quick round of sex, thereby violating the sanctity of the house even before it is built. When a house is unexplainably dark or a front door unaccountably swings open, a wave of unease sweeps through the neighbors, who notice these things. What they fear is not the physical signs they see, but rather the emotional loss of control in someone's life that is being telegraphed out.
As a rule, Japanese culture values decorum and politeness. The characters in Kuroi's novel exhibit a preference for keeping their strong emotions tightly in check. They smile and nod and utter a somewhat vague phrase even when what they really want to say is very direct and to the point, as Kuroi shows us by allowing us to see what they really would like to say. It is usually the younger people in this story who violate the code of proper speech by using casual terms when a polite set phrase is called for. The adults who hear this lack of proper respect are disconcerted and see it as a sign of the disassembling of once well-defined and comforting standards.
It may be the fate of modern man-because change has become so rapid and so pervasive-for a deep sense of anxiety to pervade daily life. We know now that the early 1980s, which is when the novel takes place, was a time when Japan was racing toward the height of its bubble economy. The yen was super strong, jobs were plentiful, and land prices spiraled upward, making home ownership an excellent investment. The times seemed to speak of confidence and opportunity. Yet in the lives of Kuroi's characters, a sense of deep-seated fear and uncertainty always lurks in the background. Indeed, the life situations that Kuroi's characters confront are a precursor (as the translator Philip Gabriel tells us in his excellent afterword) of the very social concerns that came to the fore in the 1990s: rising unemployment, the challenge of how to care for the elderly, the decline in parental authority, and the emergence of pronounced job insecurity. One of the men in Kuroi's novel knows that the only way he can hold on to his job a little longer is to accept being sent to a distant branch of the company, where he will be forced to leave his home and to live alone, away from his family.
This novel is engrossing and rewarding on many levels. It is a good story about urban life in Tokyo today. The reader is welcomed into the private emotional spaces of the characters and so is able to see beyond the initial fa?ade of an orderly neighborhood. All the details of daily life described in the novel are nicely concrete, yet highly symbolic elements are woven into every page; the symbolic images hold their own and are as relevant as the actual story being told.

As a final note, it impressed me that even though both male and female characters are convincingly portrayed, it turns out that women play the more central roles in this story. Certainly the strong presence of females in all Japanese neighborhoods, guarding their homes and carrying out the business of domestic life, is pervasive. Kuroi has written of women whose determination, perseverance, and strength overcomes their fears and uncertainties. But this is, clearly, a novel for all modern urban people, male and female alike.

Ronald Suleski lived in Tokyo from 1980 to 1997 and was provost of the Tokyo campus of Huron University. He is now on the staff of the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University.