The Wild Geese

Wild Geese is considered a classic in Japanese literature. I started reading modern Japanese literature when we lived in Ukraine, and English language books were a rare find. Wild Geese is a story of both making opportunities and just-missed opportunities. The story revolves around a student and a concubine and the people in their lives, and is not one to read when you are in a happily-ever-after mood. Then again, Japanese lit rarely is.

This love story of a girl who became a lover of an old bill collecter and fall in love with a medical student is a sign of japanese mentality in the drastic changing situation between the periode "Edo" and periode "Meiji". As his first novel "Dancer"in wich he told his uncompleated love in Germany(at that time,having a foreign wife was a taboo), Mori tried to show the example of a conflict of natural feeling of love and the traditional superstition.Why the girl could not acheave her love? In Japan they said that a real love is a love forbidden, but it is sure that what Mori wanted to say in this book is not that beauty.

One small incident CAN be made into an entire novel, as Ogai Mori shows us here. The actual action in The Wild Goose is quite small, even insignificant. But the way Ogai informs us of every thought of every character more than makes up for it. What I found to be truly compelling was the point of view -- the narrator is the best friend of Okada, one of the main characters. Just when it appears that the narrator knows way too much about what Otama (the girl) was thinking, he goes and leaves us with a mystery at the end that brings about what I thought was excellent closure. I would say that the main theme of this novel is "zero reciprocity" -- those of the characters who are in love are never truly loved back, like Otama, who silently longs for Okada, or even Suezo, the man who has taken Otama for his mistress. In this novel, people lie, people cheat, people hide the truth. And people never say what they truly feel. Just like real life. An excellent story.