夢19話、現実1話、そして （増本綾「夢境之本」）
先般、台湾在住の活版印刷作家・増本綾さんの作品「Nineteen Dreams and a True Story」（中国語名：夢境之本）を入手した。約２０００円で通販中（中国語サイトだけど漢字なので何とかなりそう）。限定５５部。英語の本なので、英語で書いた批評をここに公開する。美術と文学の間にたゆたい、"共有すること"をテーマとする芸術作品です。
Introduction
It was one year later after my quick visit to Taiwan that I obtained a book called “Nineteen Dreams and a True Story” written and designed by Ms Aya MASUMOTO, a Japanese typography artist who lives in Taiwan.
Reading this book gives us a literary feeling, somehow. This essay tries to reveal where that feeling comes from, through discussion on 1) the book design, 2) an analysis on each story, and 3) the style of the stories. (As I am just a poet, and am not an expert on art, it would be appreciated if you would overlook any inaccurate usage of terms.)
1. Book design
A good book which remains in our memory often has a good book design which matches its contents. This article mainly deals with the design of “Nineteen Dreams and a True Story”.
(1) Noble Cover
When you encounter something tremendously beautiful, do you see it familiar and close to you at that moment? Most people may not be able to do so, as beauty itself is power to be respected. This beautiful book “Nineteen Dreams and a True Story” is no exception on that. It has a sea-deep blue cover, which reminds us of clothes of ancient aristocrats. For its nobleness, some readers could remain unable to look closely at it for a while in the beginning.
However, the book will suddenly become like an old friend, once the readers approach it, showing the same respect with which they talk to aristocrats or intellectuals. A close look at its book design makes us notice that the cover has a reserved and uncoloured debossed letters of “Nineteen Dreams and a True Story”. That humble mood of the book design would prove its nobleness of true nobility.
(2) Special font
This book adopts a skeleton-like font which matches the fragile stories scattered around in the book like shells and pieces of woods on seaside.
2. Overview of the stories
This article discusses the 19 dreams and the true story from the book, respectively, while we do not know which one is the true one.
(1) “Find the music box with red velvet inside. The book I read a long time ago.”
A key to read this story would be the word “red velvet”. That colour can be easily associated to blood. Not vivid blood, but dark blood which went around all over our body through veins. It would be feasible to extract from the image of “a book” inside “the music box” a sense of nostalgia, being protected by something which has been worn out after it rotated around our life with the colour of red velvet.
(2) “Drunk too much in the festival, I sit down and see melting candles.”
A “festival” is an event where people gather. It seems that “I” in this story is extremely alone, sitting down and seeing melting candles without talking with anybody. Nonetheless, this “I” would not express any sense of loneliness. Henrik Johan Ibsen said: the strongest man on the earth is the one who stands most alone. This story’s “I” also will stand up after a while.
(3) “News about the deaf conductor.”
How contradict the existence of “the deaf conductor” is! Meanwhile, there was a deaf composer in Japan. Being moved by his life story, the people loved and praised his works so much, maybe more than necessary. Years later, it turned out that he had never been deaf.
(4) “Go to the North Pole to watch whales, I think about kill myself by jump into the sea.”
It is considered as one of the most beautiful ways of suicide to die in a snowy mountain since the body will remain as it is even afterwards. Here I wonder what will happen to a body which falls into a cold sea. It might be eaten by planktons or small shrimps eventually.
Grammatically, it would more appropriate to replace “kill” by “killing” and “jump” by “jumping”, however we would be able to see those grammatical confusions as a sort of psychological confusion of the speaker of this dream.
(5) “Under the flaming sun, I wait for the bus, but it’s not coming.”
Here Comes The Sun, after the icy sea, as the Beatles sang. This story would be one of the most realistic stories in this book.
(6) “Make a pilgrimage, snow in summer.”
Q: Where can we find snow during summers? A: We can find it in higher areas of high mountains.
In his/her wish for a “pilgrimage” to those areas, far from inhabitable areas, we can see her/his will to avoid communications with others.
(7) “Dive into the midnight ocean with a light of fire that doesn’t die out in water.”
This story is similar to the story (4). What differs is the existence of hope taking the form of “a light of fire that doesn’t die out” even in water. A man sometimes dreams sad and sometimes hopeful. That is a life.
(8) “Talk with a stranger, I think the person resembles me so much.”
This story cuts off from our life a scene which everyone has gone through. This is a very personal story, but my soul has been saved once by a person whose soul resembled mine so much.
(9) “Buy donuts on the way back, go down the long stairs, sunset.”
This story is visually vivid and sentimental. Why? One of the reasons of it would be the donut’s hole which remains empty forever. We know very well that it is emptiness that makes our life beautifully bitter and bitterly beautiful.
(10) “An old large hospital, I wait for a blood test. My old lover says he will send a flower bouquet, when i get married.”
From “An old large hospital”, we can imagine a person injured (maybe psychologically). What we can find here is a pray never to come true. How many lovers on the earth would send a flower bouquet for his/her old lover’s wedding? The world in this story is free from hatred. Ideal world.
The essay has pointed out that the owner of these dreams has a special feeling on sea. Additionally, the owner has an extraordinary attachment for “blood”, as the motif of blood appears here and there.
(11) “Go to an interview for part time job that makes graves.”
This story gives us a complicated feeling. Is the part time job for digging graves a creative job? Or is it something to put an end to someone’s life, which is far from creativity? A grave digger would be one of the people nearest to both death and life.
(12) “Stormy night, get lost in the forest and fall to the dirty sea from the tree.”
There are sometimes spatial jumps in dreams. In case of this story, the visual scene jumps from “the forest” to “the dirty sea”. Using the word “dirty” would imply that the owner of this dream has a negative image on the sea. We cannot read more than it from this line. However, from the previous stories, it is obvious that the owner of these stories has a special feeling towards sea. The owner might have grown up in a town close to sea, otherwise the owner has never seen sea, being grown up in a mountain or desert area far from it.
(13) “Look up Arabic words which are similar to Hebrew.”
Some of us may know that Arabic and Hebrew are brothers born in the Middle East, while some of us do not. This story sheds a light on a question on the general nature of dreams; whether we can dream or not about what we do not know.
(14) “Find some old books in Yiddish at the lobby of hot spa. I realize that here is Vilnius.”
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, which used to have a good population of Jewish people who spoke the Yiddish language. In this story, we can here see the common languid atmosphere of those who are at risk of extinction. They are; “old books” which are on the defensive in front of digital books, “Yiddish” whose many communities emigrated from Europe to the US, and the vanishing typography culture itself by which these stories were printed.
(15) “The café where I always go in my dream, order cream soda.”
Everyone has this kind of café or other places in his/her dreams.
(16) “Cyrillic letters, after taking a bath, R gave me toothpastes.”
The understanding on this story may vary in accordance with how we call it. When we call it just a dream on one hand, it has a romantic mood, coming from the vague relationship between the owner of this story and Mr/Ms “R”, as Cyrillic letters are what we can hardly understand while it seems familiar to us, compared to Hebrew, for instance.
On the other hand, when we see it a figurative story, “R” suddenly starts to look like a head letter of “Russia” and have certain ideological implications. It might be one of the negative habits of literal readers to disassemble stories into words and seek unwritten meanings which authors did not always mean.
As to this story of the book, it would be more appropriate to adopt the first understanding, as it makes the story brighter.
(17) “J 22, popcorn and churros are sold out in the movie theater.”
Dreams sometimes have trivial details like the number of the seat “J 22”. For the same reason mentioned above, it would be more kind to read this story as just a dream.
(18) “In the Vienna Woods, refreshing wind, see the new work of Egon Schiele.”
As dead artists do not publish new works, we cannot see a new work of Egon Schiele theoretically. However, everything is possible in dreams, where we can meet people who passed away and see new works of old artists. This story has a purely positive mood in comparison with the other previous stories.
(19) “A light blue ring which perfectly matches with my light blue hair.”
We cannot be sure that this story is a dream or a true story. Meanwhile, we can know that the owner of this story has a certain sense of beauty, in respect of using colours, as we have seen it in the story (1).
(20) “Meet my dad at Roma to go to Vatican.”
It seems that this story’s owner is trying to see the deep inner side of his/her own mind. Through his/her trip, Vatican will be found in Roma. Then what will be found in “dad”?
(21) “Sinking deep into the ground.”
This story is too short to be analyzed, however, one of the possible interpretations is that the story is expressing physical or mental exhaustion of its owner.
3. Style of the stories
On the basis of what has been discussed in the previous articles, this article put a focus on the writing style of the stories.
(1) Attachment for the past
By reading though the stories above, it would be pointed out that the book’s author has a certain attachment for the past in general, taking forms of blood, sea, old books, and typography itself by which those are printed.
(2) Influence from Japanese poetry
Because of compactness of each story in this book, some readers might be reminded of the Japanese “Haiku” poetry, especially when we take into consideration that the author is Japanese.
Assuming that there is a line of Haiku composed of ten words, for instance, the line should have much more than ten words usually do. There is always literal compression in Haiku. In the same manner, the stories in this book also are more eloquent than what they look.
Conclusion
The discussions in the previous articles could lead us to a possible conclusion; this book conveys and shares with the readers the author’s attachment for the past, by means of the beauty of the book design including the fragile font used in the book, wonderful contents of the stories, and Haiku-styled compactness of the stories. Being shared with the readers, the author’s attachment for the past gives us a literal feeling.
“Sharing” would be a substantial key to further approach the nature of this book. In its cover, the author says: “this book is about 19 dreams and one true story. I won’t tell which one is true. All the stories are typeset with metal types and printed one by one by a vintage hand press. I hope you can feel the intimacy and love from this book”.
As some of you might have noticed, this book has 21 stories actually. 19 dreams, one true story, and what…? Let us revert to the very first page of this book, where we can find a dedication saying “For My Accomplice.” Although we cannot reach a clear-cut answer, we can guess, from this dedication, that the author and the reader would be accomplices by sharing the fact that the book has 21 stories while it claims 20 stories in its book cover.
Even after reading these stories and this essay’s interpretations on them, the readers must remain unable to tell which one is “true”. However, it would be not necessary to reach an answer to it in this book. What is important is “sharing” with the author, in addition to the author’s special attachment for the past, the ambiguity of the stories and the strange number of stories.
This is a book and an art work at the same time, from the viewpoint of the firm inseparability of its contents and its design.
Tokyo, 24th July, 2020
all photos: https://www.paperwork.tw/products/nineteen-dreams-and-a-true-story-夢境之書