If you like your fictional feasts seasoned with umami, Silence Once Begun should tempt your tastebuds.
Sweet, bitter, sour and salty are standard flavours in western fare. Umami is savoury and hails from the east. It’s hard to get the right balance of flavours in fiction as in food … but in Silence Once Begun Jesse Ball achieves it. Here are five umami elements in his new novel to tempt you to try it.
1. It’s told in multiple voices
Oda Sotatsu is in prison awaiting execution and the records show that, since his arrest, he’s only said two sentences in an interview with the authorities. They are, ‘Is it possible that I could see it? I would like to see the confession.’
In trying to get to the heart of why Sotatsu was convicted and incarcerated, an American teacher (a fictional character called Jesse Ball), gets transcripts of the interrogations Sotatsu was subjected to. Ball also conducts interviews with Sotatsu’s family members and with Sato Kakuzo and Jito Joo who involved Sotatsu in a wager that led to his demise.
Ball’s wife retreated into silence before their divorce and this is one reason he is intrigued by Sotatsu’s case.
Ball (the author) uses these multiple accounts to show readers the slipperiness of truth, the nonsense of objectivity and the limitations of justice systems. The differing accounts Ball (the investigator) uncovers are overlapping and paradoxical, disparate and divergent. Together they add up to a rich and complex picture of what has happened and who is to blame for it.
2. It’s like true crime … only better
Senior citizens vanish from their homes in a Japanese fishing town and a playing card is found on each of their doors. The 29-year-old thread salesman Sotatsu loses a card game to Jito Joo and signs a confession to say that he is responsible for the disappearances. Jito Joo takes the confession to the police and Sotatsu is arrested and imprisoned. He maintains a vow of silence even as his execution looms. Sotatsu begins a hunger strike, or perhaps he is being starved by his guards? Jesse Ball starts researching the case and the intrigue deepens …
3. Its prose is sparse, mesmerising and poetic
This is the novel of a poet. My first response was to gather all of Ball’s most poetic phrases and to try to make a new poem from them. This small act of curation meant I wouldn’t ‘lose’ his elegant images and phrases. I wanted their taste to linger!
Here’s a titbit from the poem …
I imagined him at the gate
A still lake in a country of still lakes
Steadily darker and in a yard of shadows
And here’s a few sentences from the book …
‘He looked at me and it was like I had lit him on fire, like he was an effigy I had set on fire at a festival. He knew what everything meant. I knew what everything meant. I said, I am coming here every day. We have a new life.’
4. It’s been favourably compared to Rashomon
Silence Once Begun is similar to Akira Kurosawa’s iconic film Rashomon in that they both involve characters that provide alternative and contradictory versions of a crime. Ball says, ‘I didn’t actually think of it when I was working on it, but I always loved Rashomon. I’ve always favoured anything that creates a more accurate — or should I say ambiguous — picture of things.’
Ball’s book is dedicated to the Japanese writers Kobo Abe and Shusaku Endo. Reminiscent of Endo’s 1969 novel Silence, Silence Once Begun shows the power and futility of silence.
Japan intrigues many non-Japanese authors as a fictional landscape but not all make it such a convincingly real yet dream-like place as Ball does.
Ball told the Paris Review, ‘I don’t really think Silence Once Begun takes place in Japan so much as it takes place in this imaginary Japan, the one I’ve found in those novels — in Shusaku Endo’s books or Kobo Abe’s. It’s more like Kafka’s Amerika to America. It isn’t really America, so much as a fictional place.’
5. Its author teaches lucid dreaming and lying
As well as being the author of three other novels, Jesse Ball teaches classes on lucid dreaming and lying in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA Writing program.
The dreaminess of Silence Once Begun is a large part of its appeal. It’s not a fictional attempt to narrate a dream and I was glad because such attempts often fall flat. Ball’s book is buoyant! It captures the essence of dreams in that they can’t be rushed, often defy logic and involve the strings of the rational mind coming adrift.
Here’s what Ball told the Huffington Post about lying …
‘There’s a myth about “fact” being objectively valid. When something transgresses that, we call it a lie. I think we fear being manipulated. All I can say is, it’s best to act in ways that aren’t harmful — which may involve lying. In fact, we lie all the time. Lies and truth-telling are just ways of interacting with the world rather than being morally judged acts.’
And here’s a bonus endamame or two to chew on …
- Don’t be put off by the odd typesetting. It’s easy to be annoyed by the vertical chapter headings but try not to let it spoil what should be an enchanting experience.
- The characters are as intriguing as I imagine a traditional Japanese home would be, with doors opening on to knowledge about characters without cluttering their minimalistic, calligraphic feel.
- Ball told the Paris Review that he wrote the book when going through difficulties and this meant the easiest thing to do was to have a central character that was called Jesse Ball. ‘It’s an attempt to reconcile my experience of these painful events with the world that I hope exists … a place where a person can have a meagre place, and not be sent away.’
This is slow food. Give the narrative and photos time to work their magic and you’ll feel simultaneously replete and desirous of more.
Seek the umami. Chew on it. Savour it.
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