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    Nagasaki
    Nagasaki
    Nagasaki
    Ebook70 pages1 hour

    Nagasaki

    By Eric Faye

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    In a house on a suburban street in Nagasaki, meteorologist Shimura Kobo lives quietly on his own. Or so he believes. Food begins to go missing. Perturbed by this threat to His orderly life, Shimura sets up a webcam to monitor his home. But though eager to identify his intruder, is Shimura really prepared for what the camera will reveal? This prize-winning novel is a heart-rending tale of alienation in the modern world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallic Books
    Release dateApr 14, 2014
    ISBN9781908313751
    Nagasaki
    Author

    Eric Faye

    Éric Faye is the prize-winning author of over twenty books of fiction, essays and travel writing. For his fiction he has been awarded the Deux-Magots Prize and the Grand Prix du roman from the Académie Française. The Ghost of Frédéric Chopin is his eleventh novel.

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    Reviews for Nagasaki

    4/5

    34 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A quick read (about an hour) but one that would absolutely merit further study.Set in Japan, the narrator is a lonely 50-something bachelor. He starts to think someone's been in his house...and here the reader starts to query his sanity, as he sets traps, measures if the drinks have gone down...and finally installs a camera and fixates on it for hours at work. Does the shadow that crossed the screen mean someone's there?The creepy, intense first section of the book is, in my view, spoiled by the much more prosaic last section.And because it is really just a long short story, it perhaps doesnt leave any lasting impression. But well written and intriguing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      NAGASAKI BY ERIC FAYE is a short wonderful strange book that can be read in an hour. The event in the story actually happened but this is a fictionalized version that was written initially in French. The English translation feels as if it were written in Japanese initially in it short sentences and prose style. I want to share with you what someone else said because he says it better than I. I do recommend this book to you.'Nagasaki' by Éric Faye I'm a big fan of Japanese literature, but there must be many more over in France, where the number of works of Japanese literature in translation far outstrip those available in the Anglosphere Apparently, though, the fascination with Japan doesn't stop there - it seems that for some, the country also provides inspiration for novels written in the French language too...Éric Faye's Nagasaki (translated by Emily Boyce, review copy courtesy of Gallic Books) is a short work based on a real-life story, an event which happened in Japan in 2008. It starts with a man in his fifties, Kobo Shimura, a worker at the bureau of meteorology who lives alone, never having found a lasting relationship. Recently, though, he has begun to feel a little uneasy in his small house, and with good reason - a check on the level of juice in the bottle in his fridge shows that someone has been visiting while he's at work.Shimura decides that he needs to investigate matters further, so he installs a camera in his house through which he can monitor his home from work. Sure enough, he soon sees an intruder in his kitchen, drinking his juice and relaxing in the sun. However, in pursuing the truth about these unusual intrusions, Shimura finds out that matters are much worse than he could ever imagine...Nagasaki is a great little book, one which can be read in an hour or so, but which resonates for far longer. Part of the charm is the voice of the main character, a man who... well, I'll let him tell you himself:"Imagine a man in his fifties disappointed to have reached middle age so quickly and utterly, residing in his modest house in a suburb of Nagasaki with very steep streets. Picture these snakes of soft asphalt slithering up the hillsides until they reach the point where all the urban scum of corrugated iron, tarpaulins, tiles and God knows what else peters out beside a wall of straggly, crooked bamboo. That is where I live. Who am I? Without wishing to overstate matters, I don't amount to much. As a single man, I cultivate certain habits which keep me out of trouble and allow me to tell myself I have at least some redeeming features."p.11 (Gallic Books, 2014)It's a wonderful start to the book, and typical of the first part, in which Faye introduces a man whom time has passed by, a bit of an oddity at work for not wanting to join everyone for drinks at the end of the day.Shimura struggles through everyday life, forcing his way to work amid the noise of trams and cicadas, and life is gradually wearing him down. He's becoming a fussy old man, dull and a little deluded, and the writer (and translator!) manages to show this perfectly, gently mocking his disdain of a centenarian on the television who has never drunk alcohol. It doesn't occur to Shimura that he isn't exactly the life and soul of the party himself.It's when we get to the discovery of the intruder that all this becomes relevant, as the discovery of the woman in his kitchen forces Shimura to take a good, hard look at his life; it's fair to say he doesn't exactly like what he sees. In fact, Nagasaki is less about the crime itself than its causes and effects, with the woman's capture leading to a crisis of kinds for the innocent Shimura:"And that wasn't all. The woman's presence had somehow opened a tiny window on my consciousness, and through it I was able to see a little more clearly. I understood that the year she and I had shared, even if she had avoided me and I had known nothing of her, was going to change me, and that already I was no longer the same. How exactly, I couldn't have said. But I knew I wouldn't escape unscathed." (pp.56/7)In fact, the event is to affect him markedly. Already obsessed with news of the increasing number of old people, and the robots being developed to look after them, Shimura realises that this is his fate - to die alone, in the care of a machine...It's not all about Shimura, though. Faye actually switches the point of view about two-thirds of the way through, and we get to hear the woman's side of the story and her reasons for the home invasions. The writer is attempting to add another angle to the story, showing how easy it is to slip through the cracks without realising and end up with nowhere to go (it's no coincidence that this all happens around the time of the GFC). However, for me, this final third is a little unnecessary, and I would have preferred the story to stick with Shimamura, leaving the woman's motives in the dark. As the Japanese know full well, there's a lot to be said for leaving the reader to figure some things out for themselves...Overall, this a lovely little book though, deftly written with sly humour everywhere in the first half. I particularly enjoyed the focus on the grey Sanyo fridge, with its rather apt slogan of 'Always with You'... There were also some nice Japanese touches, such as when Shimura starts to suspect that he might have to look beyond the purely natural to find answers:"What deity would demand offerings of yogurt, a single pickled plum or some seaweed rice? Never mind that I was raised a Catholic, I often go to feed our 'kami' at the local shrine, but it never occurred to me for one moment they would come into people's houses and help themselves." (p.31)If only it had been the household gods stealing his food ;)Despite my reservations about the final section, Nagasaki is an excellent read, a thought-provoking look at the loneliness of modern life. It's a book which makes the reader think about their own social ties, wondering if they too might be looking forward to empty twilight years. And, of course, the book has one other effect on the reader - you won't be forgetting to check your doors and windows in a hurry...

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Nagasaki - Eric Faye

    Imagine a man in his fifties disappointed to have reached middle age so quickly and utterly, residing in his modest house in a suburb of Nagasaki with very steep streets. Picture these snakes of soft asphalt slithering up the hillsides until they reach the point where all the urban scum of corrugated iron, tarpaulins, tiles and God knows what else peters out beside a wall of straggly, crooked bamboo. That is where I live. Who am I? Without wishing to overstate matters, I don’t amount to much. As a single man, I cultivate certain habits which keep me out of trouble and allow me to tell myself I have at least some redeeming features.

    One of these habits is avoiding as far as possible going out for a drink with my colleagues after work. I like to have time to myself at home before eating dinner at a reasonable hour: never later than 6.30 p.m. If I were married, I don’t suppose I would stick to such a rigid routine, and would probably go out with them more often, but I’m not (married, that is). I’m fifty-six, by the way.

    That day, I was feeling a little under the weather, so I came home earlier than usual. It must have been before five when the tram dropped me in my road with a shopping bag over each arm. I rarely get back so early during the week, and as I went inside I felt almost as if I was trespassing. That’s putting it a bit strongly, and yet … Until quite recently, I hardly ever locked the door when I went out; ours is a safe area and several of my old-lady neighbours (Mrs Ota, Mrs Abe and some others a bit further away) are at home most of the time. On days when I have a lot to carry, it’s handy if the door is unlocked: all I have to do is get off the tram, walk a few steps, pull the sliding door across, and I’m inside. I just take off my shoes, put on my slippers and I’m ready to put the shopping away. Afterwards, I usually sit down and draw breath, but I didn’t have that luxury this time: at the sight of the fridge, the previous day’s concerns came flooding back to me all at once.

    When I opened it, however, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Everything was in the right place, which is to say the place I had left it that morning. The pickled vegetables, cubes of tofu, the eels set aside for dinner. I carefully inspected each glass shelf. Soy sauce and radishes, dried kelp and red-bean paste, raw octopus in a Tupperware container. On the bottom shelf, all four triangular pouches of seaweed rice were present and correct. The two aubergines were there as well. I felt a weight lifting from me, especially since I was convinced the ruler would provide extra assurance. It’s a stainless-steel one, forty centimetres long. I stuck a strip of blank paper to the unmarked side and plunged it into a carton of fruit juice (with added vitamins A, C and E) that I had opened that morning. I waited a few seconds, just long enough for my probe to soak up the liquid, and then I slowly pulled it out. I hardly dared look. Eight centimetres, I read. Only eight centimetres of juice remained, compared to fifteen when I had left for work. Someone had been helping themselves to it. And yet I live alone.

    My fears boiled up again. To make absolutely sure, I checked the notebook where I had been recording levels and quantities for several days. Yes, it had definitely been fifteen that morning. Once I had even gone as far as taking a photograph of the inside of the fridge, but had never done it since. Either I couldn’t be bothered or had felt stupid. That was in the days before I knew for sure; any remaining doubts had now vanished. I had new evidence that something really was going on, the third such sign in the last fortnight, and bear in mind I’m a very rational person, not someone who would believe a ghost was popping in to quench his thirst and polish off the leftovers.

    My suspicions had first been aroused several weeks earlier, but had rapidly disappeared. Yet some time later they came back in a vague sort of way, rather like midges that buzz around in the evening air and then fly off before you’ve quite registered they’re there. The whole thing began one day when I was certain I had bought some food that I then couldn’t find. My instinctive reaction was, naturally, to doubt myself. It’s so easy to convince yourself you put something in your shopping trolley when in fact you only meant to. It’s so tempting to put memory lapses down to tiredness. Tiredness is used as an excuse for almost anything!

    The second time, by chance, I had kept the till receipt and was able to confirm I had not imagined it: I really had bought the fish that had since vanished into thin air. This didn’t make things any clearer though; I remained mystified and no closer to an explanation. I was rattled. The inside of my fridge was, in a sense, the ever-changing source of my future: the molecules that would provide me with energy in the coming days were contained within it in the form of aubergines, mango juice and whatever else. Tomorrow’s microbes, toxins and proteins awaited me in that cold antechamber, and the thought of a stranger’s hand taking from it at random and putting my future self in jeopardy shook me to the core. Worse: it repulsed me. It was nothing short of a kind

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