Notes from ‘Underground’

Originally published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, Rey Ventura’s Underground in Japan (Ateneo de Manila University Press 2006) is a faithful narrative of the illegal Filipino worker in Japan shortly after the first EDSA revolt, during which time the writer did extensive research in the clandestine workforce in that country in an attempt to distance himself, in more ways than one, from the Philippine left.

Bookended by an introduction and afterword by James Fenton and Ian Buruma, respectively, the work proper — which would these days be classified under the genre creative nonfiction — has Ventura casting an unflinching eye on the underside of Japan, something which we rarely read because it doesn’t get much sun in the first place. It is not so much Ventura’s highway as it is a collection of parables and episodes in the sordid back alleys and cramped apartments in the Land of the Rising Sun, with its full complement of japayukis, casual laborers, pimps, fixers, and down-but-not-out losers trying to get a life far and away from the accepted cultural mores of the home country.

Ventura, whose swarthy complexion earned him the nickname "Negro," initially enters Japan on a student visa, aided in no small part by a couple of Japanese friends who are companions in the trade of photojournalism. The author is in fact in the process of doing a film documentary on the Filipino illegal worker, the TNT (tago ng tago), and in the course of events becomes a casual worker himself, and the result is this memoir from the underground.

Ventura benefits from a quick-paced, cut-to-cut style of writing, indeed a kind of film noir sensibility which may have been influenced by Fenton, himself no stranger to Filipinos after writing the Granta paperback magazine’s cover story on "The Snap Revolution" and having set up shop for sometime in Quezon province. Much of Underground in Japan, and its impressionistic hard-core realism tilting towards the absurd, would fit well in a publication such as Granta, whose writing and mindset make it the present-day Evergreen Review.

So through Ventura’s slightly jarring and dark camerawork, we get to see the aging mama-san who has gone through three husbands and her coterie of lovers in the same apartment building, the enthusiastic fellow Pinoys hunting for gomi or discarded but still usable appliances in the trash bins after Sunday Mass, the slightly batty young woman with a mission only she can understand, the factions of Pinoys still clustered by region and dialect. Come to think of it, this could be a microcosm of other Filipino communities abroad, with its ribald camaraderie and easy sex, the slaving away for manna as a means of escape and deliverance.

To Ventura’s credit Underground is no mere reportage, because it can readily read like a novel, with the main character (Ventura as first person "I") giving himself up to the authorities in the end, and with a love angle thrown in for good measure, courtesy of a Japanese student in university going by the rather nostalgic name of Mayumi.

There were reports when this book first came out 15 years ago that it was heavily edited, as the original edition even listed its editor almost as prominently as the author, we forget now if it was Buruma or Fenton, probably a little of both, considering the seething poetic license just beneath the surface. And that when Underground in Japan hit the Philippines, many of the real life characters wanted to know Ventura’s whereabouts, not necessarily to thank him. A few also were curious whatever happened to the documentary that was in the works with his Japanese collaborators. Well, maybe this book is the film, in all its creative noir fiction.

Also published by the Ateneo Press last year, in similar pocketbook size and cover art by Ernie Enrique, was Dean Francis Alfar’s Palanca award-winning first novel, Salamanca. If Ventura relied on a stark, almost deadpan realism, Alfar basks in a kind of tropical baroque, the plot flushing through on sheer velocity.

We admit not yet having finished reading it, so dizzy we were by the behind-the-back dribbles, somersaults and alley- oops, a tumbling, grumbling, almost breathless gallery of images. It’s possible that it could have worked better as a graphic novel, the author being a comics auteur and dean of speculative fiction. It does have its funny spots, particularly in the mention of the various obras of the protagonist and polysexual Gaudencio.

Students of college literature classes liked the novel, and professors have rightfully placed Salamanca on many a course syllabus for its instructive quality, full of sparks for classroom discussion and assorted group dynamics.

Alfar’s novel is in the august company of other Palanca award novel winners, like Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, Christina Pantoja Hidalgo’s Recuerdos, and Vince Groyon’s Sky Over Dimas. The novel award is handed out every three years, almost like the Olympics, the next grand prize to be handed out next year.

We’re not sure though if Salamanca breaks new ground, because often the author’s prose seems floating in the air, due not so much to a lack of gravitas as to a flamboyant levity.

Who was it that said the real world is fantastic enough we no longer have to invent a magic realism just to trip the light fantastic? Meanwhile, Erwin Castillo once said, don’t critique, just write your own novel or poem or whatever, because that’s the best way to criticize.

There’s likely more to come from Alfar, because as his lead character says, so long as he’s in love then he has something to write about.

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Erratum: Last April 29 was the third, not second, anniversary of Nick Joaquin’s passing.