Gregory Woods Reviews SNOW AT 5 PM

Gregory Woods reviewed Snow at 5 PM on his Facebook page:

Yesterday, I finished reading Jee Leong Koh’s “Snow at 5 PM” (2020), a book so intriguing I immediately read it for a second time. Himself a fine critic and an even finer poet, Koh splices these two modes together to write a fine, funny, fascinating novel.

The 107 haiku of an unnamed “insignificant Japanese poet”, not necessarily Japanese, possibly Japanese-American, “insignificant” only by an insignificant metric, found in the fireplace of a New York apartment, are translated in 2016 into English by the gay Singaporean poet Jee Leong Koh, a New York resident, not necessarily their translator, possibly their author, who then loses the originals. In 2066, the Jewish Japanese-Korean-American gay trans man Sam Fujimoto-Mayer, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, produces a comprehensive edition of the translations, with commentary on each and all, dismissing previous commentators, often as fascists, along the way. Rosemarie binte Sulaiman provides a Postface and an unreliable index.

The haiku themselves feel casual, sparse, almost offhand—not force-fed with meaningfulness like so many contemporary examples of the form—and are all the better for it. It is the commentary that does the force-feeding of their apparent emptiness. (The acknowledged literary precedent is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Pale Fire” [1962].) The commentaries drift clear of the poems like a detached retina, serving the agendas of those who write them, if supposedly on behalf of the “insignificant Japanese poet”. One haiku is read as both nationalist and anti-nationalist, while any reader who didn’t have the commentary on its context would read it as neither; another gives rise to a crazy, long note on the brevity of poets’ marriages; and so on.

Koh has Fujimoto-Mayer say, of Koh, that his haiku are of an “astonishing quality” and cite another critic who calls them poetry “of the highest order”. Somewhat tempting fate, Koh even has Fujimoto-Mayer tell us how Koh met his accidental death in 2040. Fujimoto-Mayer’s commentaries raise profound literary questions of imitation, plagiarism, translation and evaluation, although their author is not always aware of what he is seeming to say. Jee Leong Koh’s novel is just as profoundly, and much more adeptly, concerned with the history of the passing generations of Americanisation (and, indeed, un-Americanisation), as well as the shifting sands of identity and the politics thereof.

Jailed for an act of terrorism, with no books to hand, Fujimoto-Mayer knows the poems by heart and comments on them accordingly. (With a felicitous slip of the keyboard, Rosemarie binte Sulaiman speaks of Fujimoto-Mayer’s “word-prefect” memory.) It is not surprising that the history of Fujimoto-Mayer’s own family invades and takes over the commentary, since, as we all know, literary criticism is always in some respect autobiographical, perhaps truer when measured against that context than against the text commented on. Like poetry, it is also a fount of chalatanry. But this critic is just as involved in much wider cultural and political interests and obsessions, as is this novelist.

By Fujimoto-Mayer’s time, Donald Trump’s second term is long past. Now the ex-movie star Barron Trump has become the 48th President of the USA. A dystopian New York City has been direly affected by global warming: Wall Street has had to move up to Harlem; now a centre of covert resistance, Central Park is surrounded by watchtowers, supposedly to protect the fresh water supply. Although the location of the poems is the Park in the mid-2010s, the reach of the book itself includes the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor and the subsequent the internment of Japanese-Americans, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians... topics which play off each other with an intricate connectedness.