'Silence Once Begun' by Jesse Ball

After the disappearance of several people in Narito, Japan, in 1977, the police received a signed confession. The arrested man refused to answer questions or ask for food (even when starved) and was eventually executed. Decades later, a writer named Jesse Ball, disconsolate after the breakdown of a marriage in which his wife suddenly stopped talking to him, sets out to record the details of the case. We learn from the start that the confession was false, signed on the loss of a wager, but that the detained man, Oda Sotatsu, did not recant the confession. From Ball’s ‘verbatim’ interviews, we receive various and conflicting accounts from members of Sotatsu’s family and from a prison guard, and the writer sets out to find first Jitto Joo, a woman who was present at the wager and then visited Oda Sotatsu every day in jail (and to whom the writer clumsily tells his own story as a way of attaining hers), and then Sato Kakuzo, the deviser of the confession. Although we learn some ‘facts’ about the case, the motivations of the protagonists, and particularly the part played by Jitto Joo in holding Oda Sotatsu firm to the confession, become if anything more opaque. The more personal the revelations, the less convincing they become. Ball’s very plain style, which at times has the non-literary feel of a hasty translation (it’s not), gives this novel of personal dislocation a surface through which meaning cannot penetrate without losing its authenticity. This feeling of understanding becoming increasingly unattainable through the compounding of immediate details reminded me of the novels of Kobo Abe (The Box Man, The Face of Another).

(Sept 14)