Matsunaga K Sanzō 松永K三蔵. Barisankō バリ山行. Kōdansha, 2024.
Matsunaga shared the 171st Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2024, with Asahina Aki. Born 1980, debuted 2021. This was his second published story. He’s got a well-developed website, and through it he’s the self-proclaimed leader of the “Omoroi Junbun Undō オモロイ純文運動” or “Interesting [in a Kansai accent] Pure Lit Movement,” which claims that “pure literature is interesting!” By which he clearly means, it should be interesting – fun.
This story is a pretty good demonstration of that: it’s highly readable, and tells a story that’s both narratively and thematically easy to understand. This is something that seems to have embarrassed many members of the A-Prize committee, even as they mostly voted to give him the prize. Many of them commented that the story’s not very experimental, even downright orthodox. It’s clearly trying to say something, but it’s perhaps almost self-conscious in its refusal to couch that message in formal tricks. I’d go farther; for vast stretches the story reads like a business novel or keizai shōsetsu 経済小説 – a popular fiction genre set in the corporate world and taking most of its narrative interest from how its characters rise (or fail to rise) to the challenges of their jobs. If you’d told me this got the Naoki Prize instead of the Akutagawa I wouldn’t have thought twice. But then, that’s not a new phenomenon, is it?
The title is a term that will be unfamiliar to most readers; the narrator needs to have it explained to him. It’s an abbreviation of bariēshon sankō, “variation mountaineering,” or hiking “variation” trails or non-trail routes – off-trail hiking, in other words. The story is narrated by Hata, a mid-career salesman in a commercial building renovation company in Kobe. The business novel aspect is in how much detail the story provides on the inner workings of the building and renovation industry; we learn a lot about how Hata’s mid-size company functions both as a subcontractor for larger firms and a contractor that subcontracts to other firms. Hata’s company is small enough that a salesman like him frequently finds himself on job sites, and so we learn a bit about waterproofing and other kinds of jobs they do. We follow the mostly declining fortunes of the company as its president decides they’ll be better off turning themselves into a pure subcontractor serving a single big construction firm; this doesn’t go well, as they find themselves at the mercy of the big firm’s shaky finances, and it doesn’t go down well with Hata and the other salespeople, who have taken pride in cultivating relationships with a variety of partners. There’s a conflict here between pride in one’s own work and loyalty to the way things have been done, on the one hand, and the need to take risks in a changing market on the other. There’s also a conflict between older employees and younger, and between people in the trenches and a president who seems increasingly under the sway of the charismatic leader of the larger firm – there are even implications that they’re both part of a cult, although that doesn’t end up getting pursued in the story.
The mountaineering comes in as Hata ends up joining a company group of weekend hikers. They start spending weekends trekking around the Rokkō Mountains that overlook the city. What starts on a whim becomes more organized and, of course, ends up being kind of an extension of work. This is Hata’s second job – he joined the firm after it became clear he was about to be restructured out of his old job. He fears he was singled out for layoff there at least in part because he’d refused to take part in after hours socializing, so in the new company he accepts every invitation. Which leads to him becoming an avid hiker.
An avid but orthodox hiker. The company club plans their routes in detail in advance, sticks to well-marked trails, and emphasizes Safety First at all times. They also all invest in the kind of expensive, imported, luxury sportswear and gear that seems to be the uniform among hikers in Japan (as the narrator observes).
In contrast to all of this is a fellow salesman named Mega. Hata soon learns that Mega is an avid hiker in his own right, but one who shuns the company club. At last he’s pressured to join for one hike, commemorating the retirement of a senior member, and he shocks everyone by joining halfway up the mountain, emerging from the an unmarked trail, and by wearing cheap unflashy gear. Clearly he’s a lot more serious about his hiking, deeply committed where the others are superficial. This mirrors his attitude toward his job – he’s a lot more knowledgeable about the actual work they’re contracting than the other salemen. He fits in much better with the laborers than the bosses, in other words; and when the company changes direction he ignores it and continues to take care of his old accounts.
All of this intrigues Hata, who eventually asks Mega to take him bari hiking. A long section at the climax of the novel involves their first and only off-trail excursion together. It’s a magnificent experience for Hata, full of glimpses of relatively untrammeled nature and freedom from crowds. But then Hata slips and almost dies on the mountainside, and Mega has to rescue him. Rather than gratitude, Hata is overcome with frustration at Mega’s smug attitude toward danger – he scolds him, and they trek back home in near silence.
As I say, the themes of the story are pretty easy to grasp – they’re right there on the surface. Hata’s previous reluctance to engage in after-hours socializing with work colleagues marks him as a bit of a lone wolf, and in Mega he finds someone who’s even more of one – he’s the real deal. The hiking just shows this off; on their one trip together Mega comments about how it’s the danger they experience in going off-trail that’s real, that makes all the frustrations of work seem trivial. At the same time, Mega somewhat shyly notes that what they’re doing isn’t really bari hiking, because the essence of it is doing it alone.
This makes Hata’s break with Mega quite affecting. It’ll make a great movie scene someday. Obviously Hata is reacting to his own humiliation at having failed to keep up with Mega, a humiliation compounded by realizing that whatever joy and fulfillment he’d been experiencing before that wasn’t the real deal after all. And if pressed I’d have to say that the way the story ends might be what nudges it over the line into pure-lit territory. Hata never sees Mega again after that. Hata immediately gets sick and misses three weeks of work, and when he returns, Mega has had a falling out with his boss and quit. Hata can’t track him down. As the story ends we find Hata himself getting hooked on bari hiking – always going it alone, and always on the lookout for signs of Mega.
Which means it’s a story about going it alone. Individualism and independence. Again, hardly revolutionary; not that it needs to be to be effective.
Maybe the most intriguing thing about the story is the way it describes the sport of bari hiking. It’s presented as what we might call an extreme sport, but with none of the glamor associated with them. Mega isn’t interested in climbing high peaks or famous ones – it’s not about challenging himself against the rock face or the altitude. He finds it most satisfying to wander around between the seemingly innumerable official trails in the Rokkō range, which is after all pretty urbanized (at the end of their survival trek they walk straight up to the JR station). It’s the feeling of getting lost that he’s after, and it turns out you can do that pretty easily anywhere. Again, a pretty transparent metaphor, but an effective one nonetheless.
No, I don’t know what the “K” is for.