Transporting Oneself While Transporting Oneself
Of Literate Polar Bears and Ex-Cops Trying to Cope in Thailand
That’s in essence why I travel (and why I read) I think, because of the contrasts to my everyday life, which in its own way sometimes swings wildly between a slow Tawada pace and a Johnny Mack rush.
Recently, I’ve made a point of reading real books on the subway. Perhaps that’s merely a rear-guard action, akin to wearing a mask in public to ward off flu and Covid, but it makes me feel virtuous for a fleeting moment (or at least for the duration of the ride). Most other riders are on the Personal Universe devices and pay me no heed. But I have been noticing of late other riders more frequently reading physical books, and while they, too, pay me no heed (you really don’t want anyone paying you heed on the NYC subway), I think that we are all responding to some invisible and silent book lovers’ call to action.
Reading while traveling is a singular pleasure, and the time I get much/most of my pleasure reading done. In the past, when I finished a book on a plane, I would leave it in the seat pocket as an offering to the next passenger (though I soon realized that my romantic gesture was ridiculous. No one would want someone’s random cast-off book, and these were certainly treated like trash and thrown away by the cleaning crew).
The books that are sold in airport bookstores are generally not the kinds of books I choose. Not that I’m snobby but I often take the opportunity to bring with me a friend’s book or a former student’s. Nearly every day a friend or acquaintance or former student announces the publication of a book they have spent half a decade or more writing. I know a lot of writers, including two whose books are among the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2023. I have ordered both, but who knows when I will be able to read them? I have a long list to get through. While there’s pleasure in receiving a lot of “likes” on pub date, nothing really beats someone actually reading your book. No one I know writes their books for likes. We all hope that our books will be read.
So, on a recent trip to Japan, I brought with me two books: Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Pinned Butterfly, a thriller written by my friend John McNally under the pen name Johnny Mack. Tawada is one of Japan’s most highly-regarded writers, and I was fortunate enough to meet her and one of her translators once at a conference in Iceland about ten years ago. I’ve been a fan ever since but I hadn’t yet read this acclaimed novel, which tells the stories of three generations of Polar Bears and their upbringings and careers as performers within the Soviet Bloc. This is my kind of book, I thought, as I have loved books with wild premises ever since I started reading Kafka when I was a teen. Furthermore, bringing a Japanese book while traveling in Japan is pretty much my style. I like to immerse myself in cultures even if I only have a few days there. When I was an exchange student in Osaka in my teens, I read Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic, Makioka Sisters, which is set in Osaka on the cusp of World War Two (and might be described as Japan’s Gone with the Wind). There was something magical about walking the streets of Osaka and reading about that same place in a time I would not have been welcome.
For whatever reason, I set the Tawada book aside two-thirds through and haven’t been able to see my way back to it. There were moments I loved, such as the polar bear and trainer who communicate telepathically, thrilling audiences with an inter-species kiss that involved the hulking bear plucking a sugar cube from the trainer’s tongue. But I yearned on this trip for something a bit more fast-paced and well, thrilling in a different sort of way.
And so I arrived at The Pinned Butterfly, which tells the (fast-paced) story of an ex-cop from North Carolina on a 10th anniversary trip to Phuket, Thailand with his wife, who disappears soon after (in a very fast-paced manner). If I were telling this story, it would stop being thrilling right about here – I’d probably start essaying about the tsunami that hit Phuket and other parts of Asia in 2004 and killed hundreds of thousands. Or I would make the ex-cop Brent something of an anti-hero with his own dark past that would weigh down him and the plot alike and you would want to throw yourself off a bridge by the last page. Okay, I’m not serious, but the point is that what I learned in reading this captivating thriller is that maybe everyone but the main character should have a dark past. Everyone else in the book has one: – there’s his ex-cop partner, his wife, the beautiful expat who killed someone in Chicago by mistake, some assorted creepy academics and geneticists, Russian bodyguards, and Thai bar girls (who have more of a dark present than past). Everyone else has baggage except for Brent, the protagonist, who remains throughout the book self-consciously uncomplicated to the frustration of some of the other characters.
All that aside, what I most admired about this book was its very boldness. In a climate in which writers of fiction are told to stay in their lane, Mack/McNally swerves into whatever lane he fancies, whether it’s the point of view of a Thai woman who survives as a “bar girl,” a dying Black veteran, and a white ex-cop. He does so with that elusive but important ingredient in fiction, known as “authority,” the same narrative authority that allows Yoko Tawada to write from the point of view of an East German polar bear.
For me, it was the perfect travel book in that it took me on an alternate trip to Thailand while I was on my own jaunt to Japan. Perhaps it would have been more apt to read Tawada in the Japanese traditional inn (Ryokan) I stayed at in the coastal village of Kinosaki, but I guess I like contrasts above all. That’s in essence why I travel (and why I read) I think, because of the contrasts to my everyday life, which in its own way sometimes swings wildly between a slow Tawada pace and a Johnny Mack rush. Not that I murdered anyone in Chicago or have snatched sugar cubes from anyone’s tongue (not recently, anyway), but I am always in two places at once, in a sense. Somewhere in the world and somewhere else in my head. For a short while in a village in Japan famous for is hot springs since the 14th century, I soaked my cares away while following an ex-cop around as he dealt with the cruelty of others in a way that was so pleasing because such satisfying resolutions are as fanciful as literate polar bears.