Small Spaces

I’ve called this blog smallspaces. This title came to me after watching films by the Japanese film director Naruse. I discovered his work in an exhibition at the Barbican The Japanese House about post-war Japanese domestic architecture. The premise and crowd puller of the show was a recreation of the iconic Moriyama House (consisting of ten individual units, some as small as a bathroom, filled with the owner’s objects such as books, music and records, crockery) by the architect Nishizawa who specialises in small space interventions, buildings in the narrow spaces in between buildings, synthesizing tradition with modernism, ‘ingenious solutions to the constraints of living in the world’s largest metropolis’. Tokyo being a case in point, one of the most built up and over populated cities in the world. With urban flight, we are all headed that way.

Anyway, back to the films.

While Ozu’s visually seductive films about family relationships are more underplayed domestic dramas, more traditional and idealised, Naruse’s films are grittier, more melodramatic working class dramas, which look at unhappy families, stale marriages, unrequited passion and the effects of social change for his female protagonists in post war Japan.

Here is a weblink to Naruse’s films.

The films are often adaptations of novels. Sound of the Mountain (1954), the film that inspired this blog, is based on a novel by Nobel prize winning Yasunari Kawabata, in which an elderly man, whose daughter’s marriage has failed is forced to watch his son’s marriage fall apart before his eyes.

There’s a terrific sense of containment in this film using interior shots, people having conversations in small, low ceilinged rooms, every shot tightly framed by narrow corridors, passageways or room dividers, so creating an intense psychological pictorial space in which the characters connect (or don’t connect) with each other.

While watching Naruse’s films, it occurred to me that all my novels to date feature small spaces, confined places of deep psychological meaning to the characters who inhabit them. Angel in Dark Shadow, a young girl falling for a boy and meeting the ghost of her mother’s memory in an abandoned beach hut among the fossils of the Jurassic coast. Jack and Kiki in White Night, teen runaways holed up in a log cabin in the Adirondack mountains, forced to face their demons against the gathering snowstorm outside. And my latest heroine, Esther, who flees from her small trailer to her even smaller little house in the woods, where she and her young siblings play at happy families to escape the tyranny of their mother’s drug pushing boyfriend.

In Naruse’s domestic interior scenes he often focuses on the small details of everyday objects and rituals of eating, cutting from a conversation which is light in tone to a more ominous exterior shot, revealing a darker underlying tone. Telling a story though visuals. This is how novels work best too. The everyday things that we do and that surround us in our homes take on psychological significances – there is meaning in a statue on the mantelpiece, or a salt cellar on the table. Often these significant moments happen at mealtimes, where fractious families gather to argue overtly or covertly over the dinner table, the punishment of eternal tea time in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

In my novels small spaces are places of sanctuary, of memory, love, conflict and yes, places where food is consumed. In White Night, lovers Jack and Kiki are starving, and have to do battle with each others demons in order to survive not just hunger and the weather, but each other. They have to cut up a deer and eat it. In my current novel, Esther brews limocello tea following to her dead Grandmother’s herbal recipes, and later has to gather and cook edible plants in order to survive.

Why am I attracted to small spaces? Perhaps because as writers, we often seek out those intimate spaces to work in: study, shed, bedroom, bed even. Like the Japanese House, ‘privileged spaces for fantasy and creative expression’, where we can take refuge from the outside world and try to turn our obsessions into universal themes.