Mailbag: Kawabata's "Canaries" & More

Plus, when Mountain Dew gave me a pager

Welcome back, everyone! Man, we’ve got a great mailbag ahead. But first—next week I’ll be sharing the first “Omnibus Mailbag.” That means paid subscribers will get all posts from the previous six months, plus a few extra bawdy questions and answers. Hoorah! Okay, let’s do this week’s mailbag ...

What book or short story have you assigned most in your classes? –Garth H., Vancouver, WA
Hmmm. Hmm hmm hm. What book or story have I assigned most? My first thought is “Canaries” by Yasunari Kawabata. It’s only a page or two long, so it makes for good in-class reading. “Canaries” is in the book Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, which collects Yasunari Kawabata’s short work. (We’d call these stories “flash fiction,” but that’s a more recent American term.) “Canaries” is an epistolary story, written as a letter to the narrator’s former mistress. He expresses regret over their affair, notifies her that his wife has died, and asks for permission to bury the two canaries that she, his mistress, gave him as a gift one year earlier.

The story works well in class because the canaries operate as an obvious symbol, man. Students pick up on it pretty quickly. But the longer you dwell in the story, you more you realize how complex it is. As an epistle, it has no beginning, middle, or end—yet we glean a satisfying narrative. There are three total characters (not counting the two canaries), and they each seem to impact and affect the other two. The language, translated from the Japanese, is plain and accessible, which gives the final sentence an astounding force. For such a brief story, “Canaries” holds up to scrutiny. That’s why I keep coming back to it. You cannot “solve” or “unlock” this story, but instead must endure the pity, confusion, and grief right alongside the narrator. Ouch. To me, “Canaries” is a blade that remains sharp after many uses.

Do you drink pop? –Quill N., Omaha, NE
Sure, I drink pop. I drink two cans of pop per week, give or take. Pop goes well with burgers, hot dogs, pizza, and tacos. None of these are health foods, which, neither is pop. I would argue, in fact, only a few select beverages qualify as “health foods.” Basically it’s water, beet juice, and anything besides alcohol that tastes like shit. If you buy a drink at a gas station, you better believe it’s loaded with sugar, caffeine, or now, strangely, protein. As a brief aside, protein is being added to so many items these days that it’s beginning to feel like just another chemical. Protein in juice, protein in breakfast cereal, protein in white bread? Hey, if you want protein, just eat some fuckin’ beef jerky. At least then you exercise your jaw.

Anyway, back to pop. I’ve always liked pop. As a teenager, I probably drank a tanker’s worth of Mountain Dew. Back in the mid-90s, you could collect Mountain Dew UPCs and exchange them for a pager. I’m talking pager like beeper, before cell phones were common. My friends and I all had Mountain Dew pagers, but we basically used them to send “58008” to each other. That’s the code you would punch into a digital calculator, which, when turned upside down, read “BOOBS.” (As teenagers, we would have found so much trouble if we’d had smartphones.) Years later, my friend Matt was drinking a 20-oz. Mountain Dew every day, which was like three hundred calories. After he got off work, Matt would go to the gym, climb onto the elliptical, and sweat, wheeze, and pant for an hour. The display bar, he noticed, would tell him he had burned exactly three hundred calories. Eventually he was like, Um, working out kind of sucks. Maybe I just don’t drink Mountain Dew anymore?

These days, yes, I drink pop. It’s a nice little treat in the evenings. But I wouldn’t say I need it. Sometimes Claire and I will even split a can of pop. Six measly ounces of Coke Zero, that’s it? Yeah, but don’t worry about me. I’m getting plenty of sugar and caffeine elsewhere. I have no shortage of indulgences. Pop is low on the list, but I do drink it, and I do enjoy it. I could write much more on the topic, Quill, but let’s move onto our final question.

Shasta: Nobody’s Favorite Pop … but here’s a fun fact: Shasta still makes a grapefruit-flavored pop. I don’t know where you buy the stuff, but Shasta is living the wild life. I just wasted some time DuckDuckGoing all the Shasta flavors.

Say we win a million bucks in the lotto. What are we going to do with it? –Hank and Eleanor T., Underwood, ND
That’s up to you, Hank and Eleanor, you lucky ducks. I know enough about your region of North Dakota to say a million bucks should go pretty far. In the town of Underwood, you could probably buy a full city block, bulldoze it, and build a prairie mansion it its place. You could name your street after you and even get it paved. No, one million dollars ain’t what it used to be, but you could spend it freely and live a more comfortable life. Your money, of course, will go farther in Underwood than it will in Minneapolis or even Fargo.

If, however, you already have everything you need, consider this 90/10 proposition. Invest 90 percent of the money, allow it to accrue compound interest, and after fifteen or twenty years donate it to a university. They might name a dormitory after you, and for years afterward, punk freshmen will be doing all sorts of unspeakable things in “Hank & Eleanor Hall.” The other 10 percent, spend it now on something fun and frivolous. Like a motorized dirt bike! (That’s what I’d get, anyway.) From one Midwesterner to another, you might have difficulty even spending $100,000 on one-time goodies. Luxury, to us, is a new showerhead. We’re not trying to impress anyone. But hey, this is your fake money, so you can fake spend however you want. Live it up, Hank and Eleanor. It’s not every day you fake win a million dollars in a fake lotto. We’re all very fake happy for you.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take it easy until next time. And please, feel free to submit a question! If I don’t know the answer, I’ll still act as though I do.