Barrie Sherwood, Escape from Amsterdam, Granta 2007
By Pete Carvill.
Last year, I spent eight months living in Japan, working as an English teacher, and every couple of weeks I would send out a blanket e-mail to all my friends, recounting the strange events I was witnessing. These e-mails were frequently entitled ‘Japanese Madness’. I wrote of the insane sex shops where it was possible to buy canisters of soiled schoolgirls’ underwear; the collapsed drunk in the street who everyone (me included) stepped around, pretending he wasn’t there; the disturbing collection of rape porn in the local video store; the monsoons and earthquakes that buffeted my tiny, steel pre-fab apartment; Namjatown, a theme park dedicated to cats with a ride called Hell’s Toilet, and the flashing of the peace sign by every Japanese teenager whenever a camera came out that was both endearing in its naivety and annoyingly twee.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery I made about Japan were the Westerners living over there. The gaijin (as we were known) fell roughly into three camps: the earnest backpacker in their early-to-mid-twenties playing out the last vestiges of youth, the same backpackers eight years on who had made a life for themselves within the corporate structure of the big language schools and the middle-aged former backpackers who seemed to have missed the boat home, carried on in their teaching jobs and stayed around Tokyo repeating to the first group, “The girls, man. It’s all about the girls.”
And the quirkiest fact about gaijin, the one thing you would not have bet on? Every one of us – everyone – adored The Last Samurai.
Maybe it’s the gaijin in me but I think The Last Samurai is a great movie, underrated even. But even being an underrated, great movie doesn’t explain why it would be so loved by every Westerner in Japan.
But here’s the cinch, the reason for such slavish devotion: The Last Samurai is about the pre-Westernised Japan of katana and mountain villages, noble warriors and Bushido that we all set out to find. As part of the No Logo-generation that tried to reject capitalist American values, The Last Samurai‘s themes of East-West conflict and the spiritual triumph of the old ways plucked a chord. Or put simply, we wanted to be the ambiguous, undefined last warrior standing of the title.
Alex Kerr wrote an excellent book lamenting the Westernisation of Japan, and the metamorphosis of its landscape over the past fifty or so years to a sprawling, dull concrete mass. The Fall of Japan was more than a diatribe about the urban landscape; it was a sad eulogy for the bygone Japan.
Barrie Sherwood, in his acknowledgments for Escape from Amsterdam, cites The Fall of Japan as invaluable and muses on how he wishes that Kerr’s book had been fiction too.
Escape from Amsterdam tells the story of Aozora, a debt-laden student on the run from crime families in Kyoto, desperate to inherit priceless Japanese heirlooms that will pay off the money he owes from repeated Mah-Jong sessions. Unfortunately, he needs Mai, his sister, as a co-signatory otherwise he will not be able to claim his inheritance. And Mai has disappeared in the direction of serious Yakuza and a Dutch-themed amusement park south of Hiroshima.
Images of construction abound in Escape from Amsterdam. Aozora is seemingly destined to be a crooked bureaucrat for the Japanese Ministry of Construction, and his journey takes him from the rebuilt Hiroshima to abandoned seaside hotels to the rapidly disappearing countryside of Japan to the ominous, sterile and ultimately creepy Amsterdam, all thrown in with lashing of ‘Japanese Madness’ as Aozora encounters life-like sex dolls, Spicy Nan Bread Tacos (think about it) and gun-carrying Japanese motorbike gangs. Everywhere, the erection of new buildings is tainted with corruption and crime, and the lines between good-and-bad are in places blurred, and others non-existent. It’d be a perfect noir novel if it was a little darker, and Aozora is the perfect unsympathetic character for a hardboiled story.
Escape from Amsterdam is illustrated throughout with pictures and photographs that show the locations and oddities foisted upon Aozora. There are pages where comic books and Manga-esque art replace the text, and the epilogue is a touching series of crudely-drawn pictures. Like Japan itself, the novel is a symbiosis of culture yet the intrusions of mass-media don’t feel out of place or render the novel disjointed. If anything, it’s an achievement of Sherwood’s that he’s able to maintain a consistent narrative voice that’s cogent, engaging and wryly funny.
There’s a darker novel – a true noir – to be written about Japan, a novel that would explore more fully the relationship between crime and rapid urbanisation. It’s a novel James Ellroy would write if he lived in Yokohama or Tokyo. Escape from Amsterdam isn’t this novel, but as an evocation of the apparent madness of modern Japan, there’s very little that can beat it.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Pete Carvill is Senior Editor for 3:AM and a former NET Teacher in Atsugi, Nr. Tokyo.
