The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

I came to know the title of the book a long time ago when I was doing master degree. Around the same time, as I vaguely remember, Amelie, a french film that features a imaginative girl who alters the world for everyone including herself, was a big hit. The title of the book also engenders the same colorful imagination in me. Mango street. What is a street like if it is called mango? Is it always as sunny as its orange and red color suggests? Is it as fragrant as the delicious flavor of the fruit? Is it as colorful as the tropical scenery in which mango fruits are grown?

I didn't get to read the book until last weekend, despite that it had already greatly excited my brain in the early years.

The narrative style is typically feminine, and I doubt if male readers would have appreciated it as much as me. When I shared some passages with K, his viewpoint sometimes appears to be very destructive to the image that the writing has created in my mind. I do love it and like its introduction in which she rationalizes her style and stories. The book is composed of a series of vignettes providing pictures of the residents and friends around the heroine on Mango street. Cisneros writes in a style that is full of humor and color but at the same time laden with inescapable frustration and helplessness.

One of the passages that I heart is that she describes the arrival of a neighbor's wife from his faraway hometown in Mexico.

Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter's arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as a rabbit's ear, then the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. PUsh, pull. Poof!

All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes.

(pp. 76-77)

What a blossom! A full bloom of imagination!

Sharaku in Tokyo National Museum

We went to an exhibition on Toshusai Sharaku in Tokyo National Museum today. The wood prints of kabuki actors in the Edo period Japan are among the most definitive icons of Japanese culture for foreigners.

Sharaku is most known for his half-length portrait of actor Otani Oniji 3rd (the image on the top). The almost satirical caricature of the actor in action is fascinating. The color and the contours that give form to the dramatic moment are engaging.

I was drawn, however, to one of a relatively small collection of the portraits that he drew for his contemporary sumo wrestlers. Daitouzan (the image below) was a popular child wrestler in his time. When he became a professional wrestler, he was only 6 or 7 weighing about 70 kilograms. Though appearing childish in many ways, he was depicted powerful when confronted with his human or ghostly opponents. In spite of his over sized body for his young age, his face is still characterized by innocence and naivety. What would be on his mind when he wrestled? Would he be thinking about the rice crackers after a hard-fought battle?