Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

STANFORD’S ACADEMIC YEAR was divided into quarters, so the time soon arrived for my return to Japan. I exchanged some short emails with Yusuke, but we never met again. Before I left Palo Alto, I sent him a final message in which I said he was welcome to get in touch the next time he came to Japan. I did not see him when I stayed for one evening in San Francisco on my way. I was tempted to take one more look at his smooth face and even started to dial his number, only to think better of it: I needed to keep that miraculous night inviolate.

The university paid me well and, feeling flush for a change, I flew down to Los Angeles and treated myself to a cushy hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood that had just opened. As night fell, beautiful men and women—aspiring movie actors and actresses, no doubt, judging by their cutting-edge clothing, hairdos, and manners—arrived in cars and took over the lobby and hotel restaurant. Sunset Boulevard looked just as it did in movies: palm-lined, with a pink sky spreading above the fronds as far as the eye could see. I rented a car and drove around to look at scenes that were familiar, though I had never actually seen them. I also drove through the gilded neighborhoods of Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood. I even made it all the way to the beaches of Santa Monica, where bronzed pleasure seekers congregated.

California, famous among the states for its ethnic diversity, seemed, as I encountered it, self-segregated. During my short and mildly self-indulgent trip, the clientele I saw in stylish hotels, stores, and restaurants was for the most part white; those who served them were for the most part not only white but tall and blond. They turned on the trained smiles you see on magazine covers, their orthodontically aligned American teeth on full display. Just about the only visible nonwhites were the stocky, dark-skinned Mexican men who got tips as parking valets. Wearing caps in the scorching sun and holding umbrellas when it rained, they stood in line waiting for patrons’ cars to arrive. Maybe the line didn’t move fast enough or they were fed up with standing all day, but I saw in them none of the Latino joviality I naively expected.

America was no longer the same country to which I’d come as a twelve-year-old, yet it remained a place where (outside the universities, at least) people who weren’t Westerners—who didn’t look Western—could not remain unconscious of the fact. Of course, there were signs everywhere promising a different future, but they were still only promises. I wondered whether, for Taro Azuma, it was still easier to live in that kind of America than in the Japan he knew.

“In the States, if you’ve made money for yourself, it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or Asian. Money means everything.”

That’s what he’d told Yusuke. So where was this rich Asian living now? How was he living? Was he still alive?

I left the blazing pink sunsets and returned to Tokyo just as the cherry blossoms were falling.

IT WAS WHEN I finally began to write about Taro Azuma that I came up against an obstacle I had not foreseen. What I had taken to be a gift from heaven was, I gradually found out, not all that simple. The further I progressed, the more insistent the problem became: how to take “a story just like a novel” and turn it into a novel in Japanese.

Here in a nutshell is the difficulty.

The story I was told on that stormy night was merely one of many love stories already told a thousand times. Why turn it into yet another novel? There was only one answer I could think of: it recalled the translated Western novels I had encountered as a girl, especially one that never failed to make a disturbing impression on me every time I read it, a literary classic set on the wild Yorkshire moors and written more than a hundred and fifty years ago by the Englishwoman E. B. Indeed, it was only my intimate acquaintance with this book that made me recognize that Taro’s tale had the makings of a novel.

What I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese. There was nothing wrong with such an attempt in itself, as far as I was concerned. Ever since Western civilization spread in our direction in the nineteenth century, Western novels had traveled with it. Japanese writers, whether knowingly or not, were caught up in the urge to emulate these works—the desire to emulate being the basis of all art. They took Western novels and rewrote them in Japanese, relocating them in their own country. Modern Japanese literature flourished to the extent that it did through this impulse, one perhaps shared with writers in other non-Western languages. I was only reenacting what had been a central project in the modern literary history of Japan; I had legitimately inherited it.

Inevitably, as I wrote on, my novel diverged more and more from the original work that had prompted me to begin. Again, I saw nothing wrong with that—and not only because what had actually happened differed from the English story. However rooted in a desire to emulate, art necessarily takes different forms in different times, under different skies. It is, in fact, through these divergences that new life is breathed into art. My novel, set in the latter half of a twentieth-century Japan crowded with small houses, had to be distinct from one set in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, with its empty heathland. It also had to follow the inner logic of the Japanese language and interact with countless Japanese texts of the past, all the while maintaining a keen awareness of the small place the language occupies in a world dominated by English, an awareness inescapable to someone writing in this day and age. Moreover—my lacking her brilliance aside—we had different temperaments, E. B. and I: she was a gifted poet, I am incurably prosaic. It was no surprise that my work not only diverged from her original but ended up turning it upside down. Even then, I saw nothing wrong with that. In fact I came increasingly to feel that it would be pointless just to transplant a foreign novel and create a fantasy realm that had little to do with Japan, a realm that also had no real engagement with my own language.

The problem lay elsewhere.

Taro Azuma’s was a true story. Yet, because it seemed so close to fiction, the more I went on writing, the more uneasy I felt that something important—something I can only call a sense of the real—was slipping through my fingers. What was at stake wasn’t what is usually referred to as the problem of realism; rather, it was a problem with the “power of truth,” which ultimately determines the worth of a novel. And I couldn’t ascribe it solely to my inadequacy as a writer. I was well into the work when I decided that the difficulty I was having probably came from the difficulty of writing a “true novel” in Japanese.

The term “true novel” once played a crucial role in the development of modern Japanese literature. The period when Japan opened its doors to the West, beginning in 1868, coincided with what might be called the golden era of the Western novel. It also coincided with a period when an evolutionary theory of civilization—one which included the idea that art evolves toward higher forms—prevailed with passionate conviction in the West and spread to the rest of the world. It was inevitable that Japanese novelists would also be moved by a desire to reproduce what they perceived to be the most highly evolved form of literature. For them, and perhaps for other non-Western writers, the type of novels written in nineteenth-century Europe, ones where the author sought to create an independent fictional world outside his own life, came to represent the ideal.

Half a century later, and after numerous experiments, not all Japanese writers were so sure. Some still claimed that, difficult as it had proved in the past, Japanese novelists should continue to aim for what they staunchly believed was the ideal, a fictional world created by an impersonal author—a transcendent “subject.” Others thought that novelists should basically adhere to writing truthfully about themselves, because being true to oneself, and, ultimately, to life, is what ought to embody the highest aim in literature. Some went further and asserted that such writing was the very soul of Japanese literature, where the diary has been an esteemed literary genre for over a thousand years. The controversy led to the emergence of two terms for two different approaches to fiction, one normative and the other descriptive: the “true novel” and the “I-novel.”