Hirano Keiichirō 平野啓一郎. Nisshoku 日蝕. Shinchōsha, 1998.
This won the 120th A-Prize, for late 1998. At the time, Hirano (born in 1975) was the youngest writer ever to win the Akutagawa Prize, although others have since taken that title. This was his first published work, and it was translated into English in late 2024 (I haven’t read the translation, so can’t comment on it). He has gone on to a successful career, and is currently (early 2025) a judge on the Akutagawa Prize committee.
Nisshoku – Eclipse – is one of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time. Also, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, one of the most difficult.
It’s presented as the autobiographical account of Nicolas, a late 15th century French scholar-monk of the Dominican order; it mostly concerns a journey from Paris to Firenze by way of Lyon, early in his career. Nicolas is searching for the remainder of a book of which he possesses half; the book is connected with his interest in certain unorthodox teachings current in the Europe of his day. Nicolas’ ambition is to reconcile these heresies with the true faith – knowledge and truth is what he seeks, and in this he’s more open-minded than some he encounters in this period of the Inquisition. As it happens, his quest for the book ends up being sidetracked, as a superior in Lyon suggests he seek out an alchemist in a small village nearby. Nicolas’ time in the village takes up most of the book. Through the alchemist, Nicolas has a spiritual encounter with what the text labels an androgyne, a hermaphroditic figure that appears to have been brought to life out of the rock within a nearby cave. At the climax of the book the androgyne (which may or may not be fully sentient) is tortured and burned at the stake as a witch, but then somehow mystically transfigured as a solar eclipse happens at just that moment.
As story materials, these are (as the very informative Japanese wikipedia page on the book notes) actually not incredibly far-fetched in terms of 1990s Japanese popular culture. They partake in a kind of quasi-goth (not to say gothic) Occidentalism whose trappings could be seen in a lot of metal bands and fantasy games in the era, and I detected a lot of echoes of Evangelion, too. In different hands, this book could have been a satisfying fantasy novel. That it doesn’t end up that way is where the strangeness and difficulty come in.
Hirano handles this as a postmodern literary meditation (Yomota Inuhiko’s essay in my paperback copy namechecks Eco, Borges, and Yourcenar); his presentation purposely fragments Nicolas’ memoirs, breaking off into ellipses (some really creative ellipses) at key moments, and even leaving two pages entirely blank. And that determinedly literary approach means that this is a heavily philosophical novel rather than a fantasy adventure. And that philosophy is uncompromising: we get discussions of everything from the nature of the Dominicans’ vow of poverty to the subtleties of the Manichaean heresy to the possible mystic geometry underlying the village’s layout, but Hirano often refuses to explain or fully contextualize his narrator’s musings. I can’t imagine how anyone read this before Wikipedia, and I suspect even with Wikipedia, many readers will find it impenetrable. Others, however, will love it.
Hirano’s text is brutally challenging in another way, too. He seems to have modeled his prose after what Mori Ōgai worked out for his earliest stories, the ones set in Europe. This means an extremely rarefied vocabulary involving obscure characters glossed in unexpected ways, embedded in archaic, heavily Sinicized grammatical structures. Again, some readers will love this, while others will come away with a headache (or just give up). The effect is thoroughly foreignizing – you absolutely feel like you’re reading something not originally written in Japanese; but it’s also strangely domesticating, because a Renaissance French text wouldn’t be translated into this kind of language today, but it might have been, a hundred years before. It feels like a Meiji work.