Giles Murray on Gush: “Watery, But Certainly Not Grave”

Gush is, as far as I know, the first time that English-language readers have been able to read the fiction of the Japanese poet and social activist Yo Hemmi—thanks to the translation work of Giles Murray. I had a look at the title novella earlier this week, and as Murray discusses in this essay explaining what drew him to the story, it’s a very unusual story, narrated by an insurance salesman who spots a woman shoplifting some imported cheese from a Tokyo supermarket. As she’s leaving, he notices a puddle of water on the floor; when they meet again soon after, she explains that the water builds up inside her until “I know I’m doing something bad, something I shouldn’t, [and] that’s when it comes out.” Of course, this “urge to spout water,” which she views as “a horrible, weird disease,” is basically female ejaculation… but, as our protagonist discovers when he embarks on an affair with her, for this woman it takes place on an epic scale. And, he soon realizes, the source of her deepest shame is also the source of his greatest pleasure. In the wrong hands, this could be crude and farcical, but Hemmi (and Murray) turn it into a melancholic story of the waning strength of impulsive love. (And there are still two other Hemmi stories for me to read after this! I’m looking forward to that.)

Alex Kerr, the author of two books on the arts, economy and society of Japan, believes that traditional Japanese culture was defined by the tension between man-made order and the disorder of nature. Stone gardens are one example he gives: Inside the garden, all is cold, sterile, gray and orderly; but immediately outside looms a mountainside heaving with great shaggy cedars, red-leafed maples and gaudy pink camellias. The artful austerity of the garden would be nothing without the wild fecundity of the natural world to set it off. Present-day Japan has erred too far on the side of sterility, artifice and order, argues Kerr, a loss of balance that has been detrimental both to the arts, and to society at large.

The existence of a handful of artists still able to channel Japan’s old earthy and instinctual side gives Kerr grounds for hope. One of these was Shohei Imamura, the movie director best known for The Eel, the 1997 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner. Prior to his death in 2006, the last full-length feature Imamura made was an adaptation of “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge,” a 1992 novella by Yo Hemmi. This novella has finally been translated into English (in a collection with two other short stories) under the title “Gush.”

What attracted Imamura to film Hemmi? Following Kerr’s thesis, the answer must be his story’s earthiness—or more precisely, its wateriness. For whenever Saeko, the female protagonist of “Gush,” makes love with her insurance salesman boyfriend, she spouts two liters of love juice (the “warm water” of the original title), a condition which causes her no little inconvenience. Imamura’s film ends with Saeko making love at the seaside and orgasming with such profusion that a rainbow forms in the sky—a memorable scene with which the seventy-five-year-old director affirmed his lust for the life he was soon to depart. Seeing Imamura’s film was what made me want to translate the book.

As a work of fiction, “Gush” is both charmingly odd and oddly charming, naïve and winning despite its erotic subject matter. Delightfully incongruous similes abound. As the two protagonists make love in their cramped seaside cave, Saeko’s love juice seeps into the water attracting a swarm of mullet who cover the sea “like a well-laid wall-to-wall carpet.” When the insurance salesman says something not to Saeko’s taste she stares at him as though he “were a pig that had suddenly started talking Hindi.” Hemmi also deploys snatches of pedantic detail to deft comic effect. As the insurance salesman strives to empty Saeko of her water through his energetic love making, he self-aggrandizes, seeing himself as a key figure in the hydrologic cycle of precipitation, accumulation, evaporation and precipitation, at one point painstakingly calculating that he has pumped Saeko of the equivalent of “more than thirty-three big bottles of Evian. Or more than twenty-seven of those 1.8L bottles of soy sauce.”

Hemmi also pokes gentle fun at the overwrought earnestness of the salaryman world, with its company songs, its pep talks and its “I must try harder” mentality, but “Gush” is considerably more than comedy for comedy’s sake. It examines how shame is an inseparable component of pleasure, and takes a sideways look at the unfathomable way in which desire ebbs and flows, strong as a river one day, volatile and fleeting as a puddle on the scorching concrete of a parking lot the next.

11 February 2011 | in translation |