Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash by Eka Kurniawan — street fighter

Read article : Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash by Eka Kurniawan — street fighter

Jakarta street fighter Ajo Kawir has one big problem. Or, you might say, one little one. He is impotent. It’s spelt out in the second sentence of Eka Kurniawan’s novel and expounded regularly over the following pages.

It wasn’t always so; as a boy he enjoyed peeping at the local madwoman, Scarlet Blush, through her window. Her husband was executed by police before her eyes, and is buried in an unmarked grave in her garden. But young Ajo and his best friend Gecko don’t care about that; they have discovered they can spy on her in the shower. One night two policemen arrive on a motorbike and enter the woman’s house. The boys watch as a bizarre scene unfolds; one of the men throws Scarlet Blush into the bathroom and roughly cleans her. Gecko escapes, but the soldiers catch Ajo and force him at gunpoint to witness something so traumatising that he later becomes impotent. As an adult, natural lust is channelled into violence; he’ll get in a ruck with any man who looks at him the wrong way. Most of all, he would like to get his hands on the two policemen from long ago, whom he nicknamed Scarface and Clove Smoker.

There is little change of register in the switch from comic to tragic material; the writing is dispassionate and matter-of-fact, without wasting any time on hand-wringing. The many scenes of combat in the book, however, are gleeful and cartoonish. Ajo takes on an air of invincibility, and becomes the talk of the village: “This kid is going to turn into the most terrifying fighter I’ve ever known.”

As an adult Ajo becomes a truck driver (the book’s title is spray-painted on his cab). He’s willing to stick up for women oppressed by violent men, which makes a turn in the story all the more ironic: the most fearsome combatant he encounters is the beautiful Iteung, a female bodyguard with whom he immediately falls in painful love. “More than an hour passed as they knocked each other around, landing blows. Ajo Kawir’s cheek was split open, the girl’s nose was dripping blood, and their bruises — don’t even ask.” At times it’s more like reading a treatment for a Tarantino film than a novel, complete with jump cuts and temporal juxtapositions; three styles spliced together, by turns a soft porn flick, a manic road thriller and a martial arts movie.

The cut-up technique means that characters are in prison before the scene that reveals why they were sent there. A new character is casually mentioned as though they’ve been there all along; only later do we read about their first encounter with Ajo. Under the dazzling stylistic effects, the actual plot seems negligible and can in fact be reduced to one essential question: will Ajo ever be able to overcome his affliction?

Ajo’s impotence and his reaction to it could be intended as a metaphor for Indonesia’s lower classes, assailed by corruption, unmanned by poverty, with no recourse except recreational and by extension political violence. His bodily quietude fosters a sense of otherworldly calm in Ajo for a while. But it seems religion is not the answer either. It’s a blast of a book, by turns beguiling, horrifying and silly. Whether or not a political fable is intended, the squelch of blood and the crack of breaking bones tends to muffle any deeper message.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker, Pushkin Press, RRP£12.99, 224 pages