Mokusei!: A Love Story by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"It was a passion that would burn him down to his roots and through which all that came before and after would fade, because this time it was love first and foremost and only secondly a story."

A slim and slight novella from my favorite author. Cees Nooteboom's Mokusei (1982) should really be called a short story as it fits on 86 largish-print pages with wide margins. Mr. Nooteboom focuses only on three motifs in the story, and they are some of the main themes in his opus: love, the nature of the past, and fascination with Japan.

The beautiful and beautifully told story of Mr. Presser, a Dutch photographer, who falls "head over heels" in love with a young Japanese woman, is a sweet tale of love predestined to fail, if one wants to equate not achieving the "happily ever after" with failure. But even so, and despite the memories and the pain, isn't having lived and not loved a greater failure?

The love story is intermingled with meditations on the contrast between a visitor's preconception of the country they visit and the reality of that country. Mr. Presser's friend, a Dutch cultural attaché in Japan, warns him that it is virtually impossible for a foreigner to understand Japan and it is not even the matter of "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The visitors

"[...] know a little, which is really nothing, about Japanese culture, but that doesn't bother them, they have something better than knowledge, they have an idea about Japan."

Naturally, the passing of time and the way that the past exists never escape Mr. Nooteboom's attention:

"Long ago, and at the same time a sort of yesterday. For that kind of time no verb tenses exist. Memory flows this way and that between the perfect and imperfect, just as the mind, left to itself, will often prefer chaos to chronology."

Some time ago I reviewed here J.M. Coetzee's The Good Story where he writes about human relationships as interactions between projected fictions. Nooteboom mentions people's multiple masks instead:

"Three masks she was now wearing, one on top of the other, the Asiatic, that one of her own impenetrability, and the third, equally unrevealing veil of sleep."

One must praise the superb translation by Adrienne Dixon. To sum up: what would be a great book for most authors is just a good one for Cees Nooteboom.

Three and a half stars.


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