The Review of Contemporary Fiction
365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World by Todd ShimodaRod Kessler
Todd Shimoda. 365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World.
Illustrated by L. J. C. Shimoda. Stone Bridge, 1998. 356 pp. $19.95.
What’s striking about 365 Views of Mt. Fuji is this first novel’s very look. Bordering the main text throughout are eye-catching, italicized sidebars and up to five postage-stamp sized drawings suggestive of the Japanese Ukiyo-e style central to Shimoda’s story. The novel has an aesthetic quite apart from its text (one thinks of chic restaurants where as much attention is paid to presentation as to cuisine). Some spreads look crowded and are reminiscent of technical users’ manuals, but typically the artwork is suggestive, hip, even haunting.
There’s more to the look than aesthetics. Yes, the central text presents a linear chronology—a novel of contemporary Japan concerning an art curator who leaves Tokyo to head a private museum devoted to the views of Mt. Fuji painted by a little-known nineteenth-century Ukiyo-e master, Takenoko. But Shimoda breaks free of the linear mode through his sidebars, using them to move the reader through time and point of view. These operate, at times, like footnotes or hypertext links, presenting now Takenoko’s own story, now history, and now the hidden truths of the chimerical Ono family, collective owner of the Takenoko paintings.
The novel explores what it means to be creative and unique in Japan, today and during the late shogunate. By its conclusion, curator-hero Keizo Yukawa reaches a new understanding, especially of self and art. This is, in fact, a novel of enlightenment. Yet, because the protagonist carries throughout his journey something of an excess of ego baggage, readers might find his an enlightenment with the accent on “lite.” [Rod Kessler]