has been adapted by countless filmmakers and screenwriters, librettists and graphic novelists. Kate Bush’s haunting song, “Wuthering Heights,” inspired by Lawrence Olivier’s portrayal of Heathcliff, has in turn drawn a raft of imitations and allusions. Brontë is clearly one of those authors who reach across time and space, although in life she could not have been more isolated, out on the remote Yorkshire moors where she spent most of her brief life. As steeped as her novel is in the landscape and customs of nineteenth-century northern England, it transcends such specifics: like Cathy’s immortal love for Heathcliff, the novel’s emotional power “resembles the eternal rocks beneath.”
proves to be a testament to the universal power of storytelling. Indeed, in her essay
Mizumura describes the book as “a tribute to the possibility of translation as a movement that had always enriched and shall continue to enrich world literature.” Her notion of “untranslatability” has been replaced by a movement of world unity.
Through the night, as wind and rain pummel the house, Minae enters a different reality. This is the enchantment of narrative: the exchange of one world for another, light bulbs for ghost fires. This is the promise of every novel, and Mizumura’s keeps it. -
by Minae Mizumura by chance, and bought it on impulse purely based on the packaging.
I had just sold some used books to Powell’s and was walking the aisles, looking for something to spend the store credit on. The 2013 translation of this Japanese novel, published by Other Press, caught my eye: two beautifully designed paperback volumes in a matching slipcover. Though it had already been out for two years, I hadn’t heard of it. I decided to take a chance. Having now read it (devoured it) I don’t understand why it wasn’t a bigger deal at the time of its release. It’s excellent, and scratches a similar itch to Elena Ferrante’s
novels; it digs deep into complicated personal relationships played out over many years, while at the same time revealing the changing sociopolitical climate and its impact on the characters’ lives.
opens with a 165-page-long preface, which itself reads very much like a novel, establishing Mizumura’s connection to a man named Taro Azuma, who plays a central role in the action of the main part of the book. Toward the end of the preface, Mizumura presents two traditions of Japanese literature: the “I-novel” and the “true novel.”
The “true novel,” on the other hand, is not “true” in the sense of “based on actual events.” It is “true” in the sense of “pure” or “true to the traditional form of invented narrative.” In the preface, Mizumura writes that a true novel “must first and foremost be a work of fiction.” She claims that in this way her “true novel” deviates from the form, but it’s unclear whether that statement itself is to be taken as truth or fiction.
That’s one of the things that fascinated me as I read the book. That 165-page preface, ostensibly the author’s introduction to the novel, forms an I-novel. The author-protagonist of this preface/I-novel is Minae Mizumura. The biographical details of this protagonist Mizumura match those of the author Mizumura. But one gets the sense, particularly after her lengthy explanation of the two traditional forms of Japanese novel, that the I-novel of the preface is, at least in part, contrivance, which then throws into question her claim within the preface that the second, much longer part of the novel, is also true. Because what comes after that preface/I-novel is a very lengthy “true novel.”
This “true novel,” which per the form must be fiction is, per the narrator, a true story as recounted to her by a young man named Yusuke. The story comes to her by chance, it is like a gift and she’s compelled to write it. She can’t help but notice that it takes the shape of
. How much are we to believed is true? Do we accept the narrator as the actual Minae Mizumura and read the preface as her direct, honest address to us? Or do we read the novel as beginning at page one? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There are layers of potential truth and fiction within this book, Minae recounting her experiences with Taro and with Yusuke; Yususke recounting his experiences of Taro and Fumiko to Minae; Fumiko recounting her version of events to Yusuke. It’s all about layers of truth and storytelling. I don’t ever want to find out I’m meant to take it as one thing or another. I want it to be both. I want the possibility of both readings. And ultimately, after 854 pages it doesn’t feel important to know if the preface—the “I-novel”—is true, or if the “true novel” is true, or if they’re both fictions. The tension that’s created in the not-knowing is delicious. -
In America, we are deeply familiar with the emigrant novelist and his travails. He comes here from different places around the world, at different ages, and in different historical eras, but the trajectory of his life — and consequently the trajectory of his fiction — is more or less the same. He may be divided between the old world of his parents and the new one that sparkles and sprawls outside his home. He may bemoan the loss of the man he once was, who did not survive the journey from the homeland. He may find his adopted country ridiculous or grotesque, making every attempt at assimilation a smudge on his soul. Either way, he finds a resolution to his conflicted self in writing — specifically, writing in English, the language of his hosts, so that they might better understand him and his foreignness. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps America’s most famous emigrant writer, went so far as to switch from Russian to English in the middle of his career, whereby he proceeded to show the native speakers a thing or two.
Rare is the budding emigrant writer who rejects both America and its language, ensconcing herself in her room to devour books in her mother tongue. Rarer still that she emerges from the crucible of the American experience as a novelist devoted to expanding our notion of Japanese literature, of all things. That is the strange case of Minae Mizumura.
“The moment one learns English, complications set in,” Felipe Alfau declared in the opening sentence of his emigrant classic
Chromos, an allusion to the complete change in outlook that can occur when you begin thinking in another language. For Mizumura, the situation has been the opposite. In her attempt to showcase and preserve the unique subtleties of the Japanese language — and by extension to “prevent the world from succumbing to the tyranny of English,” as she writes in her essay “
Why I Write What I Write” — she has experienced no end of complications, including one most fatal for a writer: anonymity.
In fact, Mizumura has seemingly gone out of her way to remain a virtual unknown in the country that her family moved to in the 1960s, when Mizumura was twelve years old. “I turned my back to America,” she writes in “Why I Write What I Write.” She continues, “I read and read and dreamed of the day when I would finally go back to Japan and start living a full life — not a shadow of life as I did in the States.” Her first novel,
Light and Darkness Continued (1990), completes the Japanese novel
Light and Darkness, which was left unfinished when the writer Natsume Soseki died in 1916. Soseki may be a household name in Japan — his face for a long time graced the 1,000-yen note — but his completed novels are not widely read in the West, let alone his unfinished ones. Mizumura’s second novel,
Shishosetsu from Left to Right (or alternately,
An I-Novel from Left to Right) (1995), is a kunstlerroman based on Mizumura’s life that is liberally salted with
English sentences and phrases, the point of which is to make it untranslatable in English, since English readers (and only English readers) would not know which passages are meant to be in English and which in Japanese. “I hoped to make readers truly see that the Japanese is a language that is different from the English, different from any Western language, and furthermore, different from any language in the world,” Mizumura writes in her essay “
Authoring Shishosetsu from Left to Right.” Needless to say, neither book has been picked up by an American publisher.
This has led Mizumura to the “unhappy knowledge” that she sacrificed an audience beyond Japan’s narrow shores when she decided to stick with Japanese. As she asserts in “Authoring Shishosetsu from Left to Right,” writing in an isolated language like Japanese “ultimately means that you may toil till death in an effort to create great works of literature but you are not likely to have even the slightest chance of becoming a truly major writer — that is, a writer whose work, both in the original and in translation, will reach so far into the distance that she will, in the end, be read by millions of her true readers, some of whom will, in turn, create their own works which will engage in a direct dialogue with her, thus sending her words still further into time and space.”
If it isn’t obvious already, Mizumura does not lack for ambition. And she has made a bid for greatness with her third novel,
A True Novel (2002), which was translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter in a gorgeous edition published by Other Press in 2013. It boasts what to many ears will sound like a blockbuster premise: a retelling of
Wuthering Heights set in post-war Japan.
However, Mizumura has hardly sold out to the demands of the global publishing industry. She makes things difficult for the casual reader, beginning her multigenerational saga with a nearly 200-page prologue set in America that ends with an essay on where A True Novel sits in the Japanese literary tradition. As the narrator, a stand-in for Mizumura, explains, there are two distinct strains of the Japanese novel: the so-called I-novel, which preceded Japan’s opening up to the West in the latter half of the 19th century, and the true novel, which coincided with that era and was heavily influenced by Western literature. The I-novel was quasi-autobiographical, fragmentary, almost like a diary, while the true novel was “a fictional world created by an impersonal author — a transcendent ‘subject.’” The craze for the true novel went beyond mere translation, resulting in Japanese authors rewriting popular Western books, like Wuthering Heights, with Japanese characters and settings.
A True Novel is a hybrid of these two strains, taking advantage of and building upon Wuthering Heights’ own innovative use of a narrative within a narrative. For an art that prizes writers who bend and break the rules, it is amazing how tightly Mizumura allows tradition to bind her writing. The narrator even insists that she “legitimately inherited” the right to retell Wuthering Heights, as if it would be unconscionable to do so without a Japanese precedent. And out of these historical wrappings, this chrysalis of inheritance, a form quite new and lovely pokes its head, one that has implications for all authors in the non-English-speaking world.
The book has idiosyncratic charms that may grate the American reader. If the easygoing style of Haruki Murakami, Mizumura’s wildly popular contemporary, goes down as easily as a bowl of instant noodles, her prose, particularly in the prologue, can carry the sour edge of pickled plums or the bitter whiff of fermented soy beans. The narrator can be fussy and pedantic. Her infrequent flashes of humor are of the grim variety. She also seems incapable of forgiving America for the crime of being, well, not her homeland, a common sentiment among emigrants. “The heap of red meat they served on an enormous platter to two small women was a clear reminder that I was back in America,” she sniffs at one point.
But once the book moves to Japan, where the story of two doomed lovers separated by class and race really begins, the prose is unflaggingly elegant, spare, and understated; in other words, it is in keeping with the exquisite refinement that characterizes much of Japanese art. She also draws on Japan’s deep well of ghost and horror stories to suffuse her tale with what amounts to a Japanese equivalent of Bronte’s gothic atmosphere. Here is Mizumura’s rendition of Mr. Lockwood (Yusuke) being confronted by the ghost of Catherine (Yoko):
A gust of wind blew the shed door open.
The night was warm, yet a chill ran through his body. A ray of clear, bright moonlight shone at a sharp angle through the doorway. In that clear light stood a girl wearing a summer kimono. With her frizzy hair flaring out around her head, she stared up at Yusuke on the top bunk, her eyes wild, her tiny fist tightly clasping a round festival fan. The sounds of the “Tokyo Ballad” floated in from afar. Yusuke propped himself on his elbows, holding his breath, looking down at her. In a frenzied voice she shouted something at him, then fled away, her long sleeves fluttering in the air.
The door stood open, moonlight flowing in.
But if Wuthering Heights is Mizumura’s principal inspiration, there are several canonical Western works that are alluded to as well, including The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, Macbeth, Great Expectations, and In Search of Lost Time. Proust seems particularly influential, with the narrator saying she is drawn to this story precisely because it would allow her “to set free a time in the past that had been locked away inside me for so long.” This results in numerous scenes that wonderfully evoke a Japan that no longer exists, supplanted by the sleek modern state that grew out of the post-war era:
Those winter evenings when, after dinner, she and I headed over to my grandparents’ place are still fresh in my memory. My mother held my hand, and in her other hand she carried a pole with a lantern dangling at the end of it as we made our way down the hard, frozen lane, shivering.
My mother was always tense and silent as we trudged along. Only when there was trouble could a bride go back to her former home. When we finally got there, she’d blow out the lantern and nervously, her shoulders hunched forward, slip into the side entrance of the house, which was floored with packed earth like ours.
“Good evening to you,” my mother called out. That was the way people in those parts greeted each other at that hour.
“Oh! Good evening to you too,” O-Hatsu said cheerfully as she appeared at the entrance.
Dirt floors, tofu sellers, clay stoves, paper lanterns, night-soil pits, thatched roofs — all come to life like the Japanese playthings Proust once famously wrote about, those twisted bits of paper that magically expand into the shapes of houses and flowers once they are dipped in water.
This complex blending of Japanese and Western elements, which ranges beyond literature to touch on architecture, fashion, cuisine, technology, and more, can be dizzying, particularly when the narrative goes beyond the Wuthering Heights template to track the economic rise of Japan in the 1960s and the stagnation that followed the collapse of the real estate market in the 1980s. This is mirrored in the story arcs of Taro Azuma, the book’s Heathcliff, who cuts a Jay Gatsby-like figure in America, and Fumiko, who reprises the character of Nelly Dean, but unlike her predecessor goes on to transcend her lowly station. This is a purely Japanese story sprouting almost literally out of a Western one, which suggests that the purpose of this ceaseless weaving is to underscore the impossibility of divorcing contemporary Japan from the West, particularly America. The two countries first came together in the 1850s, when Admiral Perry forced open Japan’s ports, and then catastrophically in World War II, which remains the defining moment of modern Japanese history.
But what does this mean for Japanese literature? Mizumura has a peculiar tic that might offer a clue. There are several instances in which the narrator swoops down to helpfully explain some aspect of Japanese culture or history that would be obvious to a Japanese reader — very curious for a novel first published in Japan. “In modern history,” Mizumura tells us at one point, “Japan was one of the few countries in Asia that never fell to Western rule.” This would be like Jonathan Franzen pointing out to his readers that George Washington was America’s first president.
Another example:
[S]he also responded to the year-end appeals for donations to charity by NHK, the national broadcasting service; and she regularly contributed to Doctors Without Borders.
Unless the translator is taking great liberties, this sentence has it backwards. It’s superfluous to define NHK for a Japanese audience, but not so with Doctors Without Borders, which is not nearly as well known.
But of course, Mizumura’s audience isn’t entirely Japanese. Writing in Japanese is her extremely roundabout way of addressing the global community where millions of her true readers potentially reside and where determinations of literary greatness are made — a community that is dominated by the West.
This raises some uncomfortable questions about what constitutes a true Japanese novel. As Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, says of the problem with African fiction:
The English novel is written in the first place by English people for English people. This is what makes it the English novel. The Russian novel is written by Russians for Russians. But the African novel is not written by Africans for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to me to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers. Yet how can you explore a world in all its depth if at the same time you are having to explain it to outsiders? It is like a scientist trying to give full, creative attention to his investigations while at the same time explaining what he is doing to a class of ignorant students. It is too much for one person, it can’t be done, not at the deepest level. That, it seems to me, is the root of your problem. Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write.
This is meant to be unduly harsh. But it captures the conundrum of non-English-speaking writers working in an art form that remains Western-centric. It is particularly a problem for writers from countries that share a history with Western countries, as Japan does with America. (America, of course, does not see itself as sharing its history with anyone.)
Paradoxically, for a writer who has prided herself on her untranslatability, who has oriented her whole career around defying the empire of “one Logos,” Mizumura turns this otherwise unfortunate dynamic on its head. In her essay “
On Translation,” Mizumura says
A True Novel seeks to raise “the possibility of translation as the very condition of modern Japanese literature.” In “Authoring
Shishosetsu from Left to Right,” she expands on this notion, arguing that the drive for “universal signification,” through the imperfect process of translation, is what reinforces the “intrinsic and inalienable logic of the Japanese language.”
The Japanese writer, in other words, is not a mere interpreter, an inferior facsimile of the Western one. But she is defined by him, and he by her, locked as they are in an eternal struggle of contrasts. And that is a very Japanese concept indeed. -
Ryu Spaeth
To say that Minae Mizumura's A True Novel is a remake of Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan is not inaccurate, but this only begins to crack open the book. Like the Emily Brontë classic, Mizumura's novel follows an impoverished boy who is haunted by his impossible love for a wealthy but wild girl, and who tries to heal himself by amassing a suspect fortune. But while Brontë wrote at a time when the novel was still a relatively new art form—young enough to be shimmering invention—Mizumura is writing in the dying light. This book, oddly compelling in its confluence of intellect and emotion, is her attempt to deal with the loose ends.
Born in Tokyo, Mizumura grew up in Great Neck, New York, and studied French at Yale. Her essay "Renunciation," on Paul de Man, published soon after the literary critic's death, is considered one of the first comprehensive treatments of de Man's writing. It was adapted from an oral examination presented in place of one she had originally prepared for professor de Man before his death. In "Renunciation," Mizumura, looking at the frequency and sudden disappearance of the word renunciation in de Man, concludes that he had, at the halfway point in his life's work, renounced the possibility of renunciation.
In Mizumura's subsequent, ambitious career, the idea of renunciation would take on new forms through her interest in rejecting, advancing, or otherwise artificially determining the course of language and culture. In Light and Darkness Continued (1990), Mizumura's first novel, she had her fearless way with modern master Natsume Soseki's Light and Darkness, an unfinished classic whose intentions have long been the subject of debate in Japan. (Soseki, for his part, had gone to London in 1900 to study English literature and became an ardent admirer of Jane Austen.) Mizumura's second novel, An I-Novel From Left to Right (1995), was, by her accounting, the earliest instance of Japanese literature, with English intrusions, being printed as a horizontal text. A nonfiction book, The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English (2008), argued that written Japanese should be preserved against the onslaught of English, an act she has been devoted to. From these bare facts, Mizumura begins to take shape as a writer for whom renunciation is immensely meaningful, giving almost physical dimension to writing through one's choices on the page. (In "Renunciation," she wrote, "If a death of a writer makes a difference in the way we read him, one manifestation of such a difference may be the sudden urge we feel toward grasping what we read as having its own history.")
In A True Novel (2002), Mizumura's first book to be translated into English (by Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif), schoolgirl Minae, blasé and blurry in '60s Long Island, finds her way into the life of tragic, rags-to-riches Japanese immigrant Taro Azuma through overheard, mesmerizingly foreign terms like breakfast nook, private chauffeur, and freighter. Minae grows up to become a writer, and she is handed, once again, the story of Taro on a dark and stormy night. An inkling of the plot, "a story just like a novel," can be pieced together through further trails of words like rickshaw man, traitor, Sunday dinner, and rhubarb, which Mizumura often sets off in quotes or italics to denote the change in the air when a strange concept, a new direction, surface. Her sensory, outsider's fanaticism with the experience of language makes A True Novel a book-as-book that self-consciously calls up the sum of books read. Certain readers, nostalgic for Brontë's source material, will abruptly remember the patterns of the room in which they first saw the words moor and Heathcliff, the claimless boy whose single, overpowering name dooms him to be more of an idea than a man. Mizumura invokes Wuthering Heights, but a half-dozen other novels could reasonably be brought up instead: Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby.
What kind of story is this, anyway? Mizumura's Minae comes of age on Anna Karenina as reworked into Arishima's A Certain Woman. Three sisters debate whether their life is more like Chekhov's The Three Sisters (itself a loose take on the Brontë girls) or The Cherry Orchard. Mizumura's slow, dreamlike book world asks ancient questions (is it "impossible for a really good person to get rich"?) and counters Brontë with some progressive, briefly blissful, answers.
But there's another novel in A True Novel: one about the history of the modern novel in Japan. Its Japanese title, Honkaku Shosetsu, derives from the "true novel" that came to be seen as the ideal type in Japan after 1868, when the country was opened to the West—the complete fictional worlds of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens, Brontë. Against the honkaku shosetsu was the shi-shosetsu, or autobiographical "I-novel," perhaps a more purely Japanese form in a land where the diary had been a respected genre for a thousand years. By the 1920s, critics were claiming that no successful honkaku shosetsu had been written in Japanese, opening a new round of challenge. Mizumura gives various linguistic theories to explain the form's problematic practice in Japan while stating that the controversy is no longer relevant—by acquiring a "history," the novel has been broken.
Yet Mizumura's lack of ease with the true novel is, for her, troubling enough to become its own narrative. (This is compounded by the fact that her true novel is based on actual lives and events that happened to match the Brontë bones, unlike the strictly fictional space of the somewhat confusingly named honkasu shosetsu.) Was the author trying to do too much with too little, or was she taking the I-novel way out—and doing too little with too much? It probably doesn't matter. Brontë's teeth-grinding, outrageous characters have not much to do with Mizumura's—who are, of course, unhappy in their own way. But the passive-aggressive, generative heart of storytelling hasn't changed since Brontë's Mr Lockwood entered his own obsession with the thought: "I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself." - Phyllis Fong
Here’s something different: shifting Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights to Japan with the audacity of calling it “a true novel.” But wait a moment—as my mother-in-law used to say—you don’t really mean that, do you? Well, I don’t, but Minae Mizumura does, so let me explain. Mizumura sets up an elaborate façade: the story we eventually read is purported to be what literally happened to a man called Taro Azuma, whose life in many ways parallels Brontë’s Heathcliff. There are also suggestions at the beginning of the novel that Japanese readers do not like first-person narratives, so it is necessary to create an observer/witness who can relate Azuma’s story, though in fact two people narrate the story, one of them being Minae Mizumura herself, the author of
A True Novel and an accomplished Japanese novelist.
The 165 page “Prologue”—narrated by Minae when she is still quite young—begins in New York City. It’s a few years after the end of World War II and Minae’s father has been sent to the United States to manage the American branch of a Japanese optical company. An American businessman who is one of her father’s friends has hired a Japanese male, named Azuma, be his chauffeur. He is described as a young man with no high school education and no family ties. It isn’t long before Minae’s father employs Azuma at his optics factory and not much longer before he’s been moved up to sales, visiting doctors’ offices and getting them interested in the company’s innovate new product: the endoscope. Two facts are important here. First, Azuma said he wanted to improve his English. Next thing we know he has memorized an entire English phrase book. Second, it isn’t long before Azuma is the most successful salesman for the company, making an enormous salary from commissions.
The American doctors Azuma calls on assume that he is a doctor himself because he’s so knowledgeable about the product. Not only has Azuma’s English become so polished but, soon, he is associating with the doctors themselves, picking up their social graces and professional contacts. When the medical company tries to reduce his commission (because he is so successful), Azuma forms his own company. Within a few more years, Azuma is described as “the most successful Japanese businessman in America.” Everyone in the Japanese community is in awe of him. Minae returns to Japan with her family after her father retires, though she, too, has been infatuated by Azuma and met him on numerous occasions during the years her family lived in the United States. More years pass. Minae Mizumura publishes two novels, and then Azuma apparently disappears.
At the end of the prologue when Minae has returned to the United States, a young man named Yusuke (also Japanese) contacts her seeking information about Taro Azuma. He’s attempting to unravel the mystery of Azuma’s disappearance, and he tells Minae the “true story” of Azuma’s early life, which she decides to use as material for her next novel—hence, “a true novel,” based on actual fact and not imagination. And her reason for this? Azuma’s story “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.” So there you have it, at least the pretext for “a true novel.”
It is, thus, from Yusuke’s perspective that we learn about Taro’s early years—before he went to the United States. The second narrator is a woman named Fumiko (ten years Taro’s elder, and the equivalent of Ellen Dean, the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights) who relates the more recent events, after Azuma’s so-called disappearance. And the ploy to get all this started? One night when Yusuke is bicycling in a remote area of Japan, his bicycle breaks down in the midst of a storm. He stops at a mountain cottage, welcomed by the housekeeper and a surly man. The cottage appears to be more traditional than modern. Yusuke notices a computer and a copy of The Economist, perplexing him by their odd juxtaposition with the rest of the setting. He spends the night, avoiding the troubled man, yet in the middle of the night he hears the moaning of a young woman, and when he describes what happened to his host, the man runs off in search of the apparition. The surly man, of course, is Taro Azuma, as you have already figured out.
There are Gothic overtones introduced almost immediately, especially the isolated cottage. Fumiko worked for the upper class family that owned the property, and years ago observed the arrival of their relatives, who were less-well-off. They moved into a near-by hovel where they lived for years. With them was a feral boy of no relation (but said to be Chinese), exploited and overworked by the others. And because of the sympathy of the matriarch of the family Fumiko worked for, that boy (Azuma) became the close companion of one of the matriarch’s granddaughters, Yoko (the equivalent of Catherine in Brontë’s novel). To the consternation of both families, the two of them fall in love. Yet, Azuma is treated as if he is a servant, not worthy of Yoko. When it is obvious that he will not be able to marry Yoko, he departs for America, becoming immensely successful down through the years, beginning with the job as a chauffeur.
Are the parallels between the two novels convincing? I’d say yes, particularly the replicated characters and romanticism of Brontë’s masterpiece. That noted, I’m not so certain that the 876 page story will grip Western readers as much as Asian ones. There are quite a few lengthy digressions that add little to the main story. Some of the other anomalies of A True Novel (such as a series of photos of traditional buildings in the country) appear to be little more than superfluous. You may want to read A True Novel out a sense of curiosity, especially if you are a Brontë fan. For most of us, lengthy novels present us with a major trade-off. Should I read two, or three, shorter novels or read the much longer one instead? You’ll have to answer that question yourself.
Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif, the translators, should be commended. -
Charles R. Larson
If you have heard of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel at all, it’s likely for one of two reasons: Either because it has been loosely inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (Mizumura makes a reference in the beginning of the novel to “the desire to emulate being the basis of all art”) or because of its unusual structure. A True Novel is a “nested” novel which, over its 855 pages, unpeels like a giant onion.
There never seems to be a clearly delineated point in this narrative—which centers on a grimly self-made Japanese man, the handsome and Heathcliffian, Taro Azuma—when the story actually “starts”, in the way one expects a traditional novel to begin. In fact, the novel commences with a 165-page prologue by a fictionalized version of the author, who positions the story she is about to tell as “true” and introduces the reader to Taro during the period when she knew him, as a chauffeur working in the US in the ‘60s.
The story of Taro’s life before and after this period is recounted to her by a literary editor named Yusuke Kato, who in turn was told the story after an accidental meeting with Fumiko Tsuchiya, an impoverished woman who became the maid and nanny of the Japanese family that took Taro in when he himself was a bedraggled and bullied little boy. The accident occurs during a rainstorm, when Yusuke crashes his bicycle on his way to the Japanese vacation destination, Karuizawa, to meet a friend, and instead ends up spending the night at the run-down cabin outside of Karuizawa that Fumiko shares with Taro in their latter years.
The story that follows, narrated by Fumiko through the filter of Yusuke’s memory, centers on Fumiko, Taro, and Yoko, the Cathy-like young woman with whom Taro grows up, loves, is rejected by, and, after her marriage to someone else, has an affair with. Fumiko’s own relationship with the younger Taro is somewhat ambiguous through most of the story, and while reading those portions of the narrative indirectly narrated by Fumiko, one would do well to bear in mind that, in Japanese novels just as in Western ones, the narrator is not always to be entirely trusted.
The story of these three characters is itself nested inside an extensive family chronicle tracing the history of the relatively wealthy Saegusa family, of which Yoko is a member and which took Taro in as a sort of ward and servant, and the more-aristocratic Shigemitsu family, which Yoko marries into. And this family chronicle, in turn, rests inside a still-larger narrative of post-war Japan (and to a lesser extent, the post-war US) and, in particular, the class divisions that caused Taro to become first impoverished, and then driven, wealthy and, ultimately, embittered.
The ultra-long prologue is highly artificial in structure, contriving as it does to allow the “Minae Mizumura” character, who has no strong connection with Taro, to encounter him or hear about him numerous times before she finally meets Yusuke, who is her entrée to the stories of Taro when he was young, before she knew him in the US, and also when he and Fumiko are old.
And yet Yusuke’s own “prologue”, telling of his bicycle accident and his meeting with Fumiko and Taro in the cabin, takes another 135 pages, before Fumiko begins the actual story with the words, “I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of digressions.” So many, in fact, that Taro as a child, hollow-eyed with hunger, isn’t properly introduced to the reader until page 430; it could be argued that this, in fact, past the point where most other novels end, is when the novel really “begins”.
If this sounds like a criticism, it’s not. It’s fascinating to watch the structure of this novel calmly unpeel itself, and to reflect upon the patience with which Mizumura reveals the truth about the interrelationship among Yoko, Fumiko and Taro. Taro himself, though inspired by Heathcliff, is a fascinating and enigmatic character in his own right, and his journeys between America and Japan, and between one family and another, draws a compelling portrait of how Japan worked itself out of poverty in the post-war period into glittering prosperity, and subsequently into a kind of aimless and directionless funk in the present day.
The writing, like that in so many Japanese novels, is clear and straightforward (the translation is by Juliet Winters Carpenter), though not without its moments of sensuality, as in this description of Karuizawa:
Wind and fog, pine and birch, horned beetles and stag beetles, slowly rotting windowsills and dirty stucco walls, stairs that creaked with every step, the smell of wood burning in the fireplace, the clink of delicate china teacups on saucers, the laughter of a bevy of lovely women – to Yoko, Karuizawa was a place where these were familiar, established things.
Something of the flavor of the story, and of Taro’s and Yoko’s complex social and romantic relationship, is conveyed by another passage (in Fumiko’s telling), when as children they have a fight and Yoko demands that Taro apologize:
In the white light of the full moon I saw Taro drop down on his knees and, supporting himself with both hands, lay his forehead flat on the ground in an attitude of abject apology. The flashlight he’d laid down shone on the pebbles. I gasped as Yoko slipped off one wooden clog and put her bare foot on his head to press it down farther. There was no need for me to intrude, however. As soon as her toes touched his head, she lost her balance and toppled over, landing on the ground beside him. Now she began bawling even harder, fists in her eyes, elbows sticking out in the air. Taro jumped up, grabbed her by the hands, and pulled her up off the ground. Then he was on his knees again. He took her bare foot in his hands and slipped the wooden clog back on, then brushed the dirt off the hem of her yukata. His slim figure was radiant in the light of the moon. I watched in bemusement as the two children disappeared hand in hand up the dark mountain path…
The difficult path that these two children end up following after this moment – accompanied, at crucial points of the narrative, by Fumiko – is the simple story that this deeply engrossing and sophisticated novel tells in such a memorable and unusual form. - Michael Antman
Juliet Carpenter's lucid and sympathetic translation of Minae Mizumura's A True Novel was published in 2013 and has just been awarded the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award's Grand Prize in Fiction. It was also a runner up for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. It came to my attention when I heard Mizumura in conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides at the 2014 Tokyo International Literary Festival. Eugenides' most recent novel is entitled The Marriage Plot and both works arise out of their authors' engagement with nineteenth century Romanticism, in both senses of the word.
A True Novel is, on one level, a retelling of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights for a twenty-first century Japanese audience. "Cathy" (Yoko) is the spoilt baby of a large, upper-class family. "Heathcliff" (Taro) is the poor kid of uncertain parentage, taken under the wing of the family matriarch to protect him from bullying at home, who goes to America and makes his fortune. Yet already, even within the novel's acknowledged Western framework, complications arise. Taro is bullied by his stepmother and two elder stepbrothers. So perhaps he is Cinderella, and old Mrs. Utagawa, the respectable widow who is rumoured once to have been a geisha, is his fairy godmother. As with Brontë's novel, there is more than a little of Beauty and the Beast here also, but this, too, is complicated and subverted by Mizumura, for Taro, with his striking, not-quite-Japanese looks, is the beauty and spoilt Yoko, with her frizzy hair and skinny form, is, if not bestial, pretty beastly at times. Then again, when Taro buys an old estate on Long Island and attempts to entice Yoko to join him there, I felt haunted by the shade of Jay Gatsby.
Wuthering Heights is itself a complex, multi-layered narrative, in which Lockwood's rental of Thrushcross Grange (formerly the Linton house) provides a framing narrative within which Nelly Dean recounts the entwined histories of the Earnshaws and their neighbours, the Lintons, to the Grange's new tenant. Mizumura's novel, however, is even more complicated.
Firstly, she adds a further layer of narrative by introducing the author of the novel (Minae) to the story, as well as the core actors and the tellers of their tale. Much of the first volume of A True Novel is taken up with an (auto)biographical account of Minae's childhood on Long Island. The daughter of Japanese emigre parents, she is drawn to the mysterious young man who comes to work for her father's company as a camera repairman by a shared sense of not belonging. There is an emotional and erotic charge to their stuttering friendship which never really goes away, even after the young Taro has graduated from repairing cameras to being a multi-millionaire venture capitalist, and the young Minae has gone to study in Paris and has published her first novel. Though they never meet again, she remembers clearly the time her mother asked Taro to change a lightbulb in her bedroom. This scene lies at the heart of a connexion she continues to feel—and, we realise, he does too—and which leads her to tell readers that the story of Taro and Yoko came to her as "a gift" rather than being something she imagined or excavated for herself. She further reinforces the reader's sense of reading a true story by the inclusion of photographs and a map of the town where the main events of the story take place. The giver of this gift is Yusuke, a young literary magazine editor, who, having heard the story of Taro and Yoko from Taro's housekeeper, Fumiko, seeks out the author as someone with whom he might share the burden of what he has been told.
In a scholarly digression about a quarter of the way through the book, Mizumura explains why she has used this device. The Japanese, she tells us, appearing to speak to a Western audience even though she wrote her novel in Japanese, value the literary tradition of the "I-novel," a form closely related to the diary, in which the novelist seeks after the truth of her own life in her fiction. Without this element, Mizumura tells us, she did not feel she could write a "true novel" about Taro and Yoko, or Yusuke and Fumiko. So she embeds her narrative within the framework of her own "real" encounters with Taro at the same time as her digression on the nature of modern Japanese fiction makes it perfectly clear that these encounters are yet another literary device. The photos, too, are generic—images, for example, of houses "like" the ones in which the story takes place but not of the actual houses themselves.
While there is a sustained fascination in Mizumura's storytelling throughout the novel, it really gets going about a third of the way through with the introduction of Fumiko, long-time maid, housekeeper and friend to the Saegusa and Shigemitsu families at the heart of which the strange, doomed relationship between Yoko and Taro unfolds. Fumiko is the "Nelly Dean" figure in A True Novel but is developed and exploited way beyond anything Brontë does with her housekeeper. Fumiko is an equivocal figure, not well-educated but bright, ostensibly self-effacing but quietly ambitious, a shrewd observer not just of the families she works for but also of postwar Japanese society in a wider sense. Her narrative charts not just a love story but the changing relationship between Japan and the Western world in the postwar era and the decay of old social rigidities in the face of the economic boom of the 1960s and the stagnation of the 1990s. The rise in Taro's fortunes, opposed to the dwindling influence of the old families, is a metaphor for the social change on a grand scale that swept through Japan after 1945. Fumiko herself begins her career working as a maid for an American officer in the Occupation forces and ends it, by means never entirely clear, as a woman of property.
Perhaps she is coy about her advancement out of personal modesty and her acute awareness of class. As she narrates the tragedy of Yoko and Taro, you quickly realise that this story could not happen in modern America or the UK, where class distinctions became fluid and in many ways non-existent after the Second World War. It is the unthinkability of a marriage between the scion of an old and distinguished family and the bastard great nephew of a rickshaw-puller, however wealthy and successful, that places insurmountable barriers between the lovers.
Perhaps, though, Fumiko's unreliability as a narrator springs from another source entirely. Mizumura exhibits terrific skill in her manipulation of information in this novel. Her characters focus on facts. They talk about money, property, railway timetables, the states of roads, the qualities of restaurants. Yet the reader is always acutely and uncomfortably aware of the repressed emotions simmering beneath the surface.
In true Romantic style, Mizumura directs much of the passion in her story into the landscape and the weather. The novel is dominated by rain, snow, oppressive heat, high winds and vicious cold. The weather is always extreme. Travel is always difficult. The volcanic Mount Asama is a constant presence in Fumiko's memory and therefore in the novel. It is torrential rain that delays Yusuke on a recreational bike ride and causes him to seek shelter with Fumiko. Torrential rain again cocoons the author and Yusuke through the long night during which he brings her the gift of the story. Yoko's fragile health is continuously threatened by cold weather. During Taro and Yoko's final encounter, "The madder-red sun glowed in the western sky as though loath to yield its shortening life" and the darkness is "rising as if from the ground." We are at summer's end, winter is coming, in the hearts of the doomed hero as much as in the world around him.
A True Novel is that rare achievement—a good read as well as a serious work of literature with much to say about its times and itself as a work of art, both passionate and coolly analytical. Juliet Carpenter's translation is lucid and readable, yet manages to convey with great sensitivity the subtleties of this story in which nearly everything of real importance remains unsaid. Somehow, while translating a novel which overtly acknowledges its debt to one of the greatest novels written in the English language, she manages to keep its Japanese voice intact.
A True Novel will haunt me for a long time. And Taro Azuma has definitely found his way on to my list of favourite literary heartthrobs! -
Sarah Bower
The narrator recounting the central story in A True Novel warns:
"I'm afraid there'll be a lot of digressions."
"That's all right."
"A lot. Really a lot."
"No. It's okay."
She isn't kidding -- but the reader, if s/he's made it this far (we're on page 307 here ...), likely would have similar words of reassurance for her. After all, it's already been a digressive ride, with this narrator, Fumiko Tsuchiya, already the third new perspective from which the narrative has been presented, and anyone who has gotten to this point is clearly willing to put up with being led on this very roundabout path.
The author -- the first of the novel's narrators, leading readers through a short Preface and a long Prologue -- reveals early on that this is to be a novel about a man named Taro Azuma, and he figures prominently, though still as a secondary figure, in much of the introductory section. But to say that story proper is a long way in coming is an understatement: it's only on page 425 that Fumiko gets to the point in her account where she can say:
That was the prelude to our having Taro involved in our lives.
In her brief Preface, Mizumura describes how she came to write this novel, a story brought to her and recounted by a Japanese visitor (Yusuke Kato, we later learn) and with a man she had known in her childhood and: "whose life had taken on the status of legend among Japanese communities in New York" -- said Taro Azuma -- at its heart. But the Preface also notes that she soon found herself facing:
the difficulties inherent in writing a modern novel in Japanese based on the story I'd been given.
Mizumura's solution is unusual -- and, yes, digressive. It is also, ultimately, effective -- even if how it all works is not immediately (or, indeed, for many hundreds of pages ...) clear. Nevertheless, while Mizumura takes the long and very circuitous route, her story-telling along the way is also consistently engaging, so while
A True Novel long remains a somewhat puzzling read, she does good job in continuing to hold the reader's attention all along.
A True Novel is being marketed (and reviewed) as, as the American publisher
has it in bold type: "A remaking of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan". It makes the book sound derivative and seems almost desperate, as if the only way to make a foreign work of fiction palatable to English-speaking readers is to present it as simply an exotic variation on a reassuringly familiar work (
Pride and Prejudice in the Pampas ! the Mongolian Bridget Jones ! etc.). Confusingly, too, then, the reader isn't quickly transported to postwar Japan but rather finds him/herself in ... 1960s Long Island, with the novel then rooted almost entirely in the United States for its first 150 or so pages (true, all in what is still the Prologue, but nevertheless ...).
At the end of the Prologue there is a brief section in which Mizumura describes the transformation 'From Story to Novel', and here she does acknowledge the debt to Brontë’s work. She pointedly mentions neither the title nor the author's full name -- though she certainly isn't hiding the identity of what she describes as: "a literary classic set on the wild Yorkshire moors and written more than a hundred and fifty years ago by the English-woman E.B.". She even goes on to admit:
What I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese.
As the preceding 150-odd pages to that point have already made clear, that didn't quite work out. Foundational though Wuthering Heights might be in Mizumura's conception, she found herself going rather a different way -- certainly in her approach to the story but then also in the story itself. Here's where it gets interesting -- and where the title of the novel, 本格小説, or even the English A True Novel proves to be a more significant indicator than perhaps originally perceived.
Mizumura notes that she writes in a Japanese tradition of 'true novels' and 'I-novels', and it is in this tradition that A True Novel must be situated. As it turns out, A True Novel is a Japanese remaking of Wuthering Heights -- just not quite in the way that reductive description might suggest. Mizumura has fashioned something entirely novel -- new and different -- here, something in which outlines and shadows of Wuthering Heights can be perceived, but which is much more than just a 'based-on' novel. She has also fashioned a distinctively Japanese work, a modern novel rooted in Japanese literary tradition (and that -- as if to add to the challenge -- begins and long remains in an America locale).
In drawing back the curtain as to how she came to write the story she makes the core (technical) question -- "the difficulty of telling a real 'story just like a novel' in Japanese" -- explicit, yet the success of the novel lies largely in the doing, rather than showing. This is a novel of technique, and there's a reason (or several) for Mizumura's arguably ridiculously long Prologue. Describing her childhood on Long Island in the 1960s, she presents herself as a girl unwilling to assimilate, clinging to Japanese rather than embracing the American. Even in how she presents the girl she was, she is situating the author she becomes; so, too, the books she reads and refers to are old and/or classic ones, and she doesn't mention anything modern or American; the books the girl loses herself in are from the Contemporary Japanese Literature-series, which is contemporary only in name, since they were published: "almost two decades before the end of World War II".
In describing how Yusuke came to hear Fumiko's story Mizumura has him meet a group of sisters in 1995 who played a role in that story; one asks him whether he has read Hori Tatsuo's 1930s novella The Beautiful Village [美しい村], and, when he says he hasn't, notes:
I'm not surprised. The younger generation doesn't read novels like that anymore now, do they ?
But young Mizumura did -- and, with A True Novel, she is even trying to write one which, in many ways, is 'like that'.
Literary tradition and appropriation are already hinted at long before Mizumura mentions the similarities she sees in the story she wants to tell and Wuthering Heights: she mentions, for example, as a young girl, being reminded of: "Takeo Arishima's A Certain Woman, a novel that reworked Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in a Japanese setting". A True Novel is full of such small scenes and observations that prefigure later revelations, with even a small task like changing a lightbulb coming back to haunt the story. With these subtle echoes she expands upon, and the echoes of Wuthering Heights she works into the novel -- such as Fumiko being modeled on and playing a similar role as Nelly Dean, or Yusuke seeing a girl in a doorway, much like Lockwood saw the ghostly apparition of Catherine at the beginning of Brontë's novel -- Mizumura shows considerable skill in her intricate construction.
The substantial Prologue introduces both the author and her subject, but it stands somewhat separate from the story-proper, the one Mizumura (says she) wants to tell (it is, of course, all of a piece). Here she describes her childhood and teen years on Long Island, brought there along with her sister and mother by her father when he was sent to set up and run the American branch of a Japanese optical instruments company. Japan was rapidly industrializing in the 1960s, but they largely feel this only at a distance. They are in a vanguard of a new Japanese business and working class abroad, but Mizumura does not so much chronicle the closer-to-home change of her father and his business as focus on the more extreme example of Azuma. (The American turmoil of the 1960s also gets rather short shrift here, with Mizumura's perspective remaining doggedly Japanese.)
When they arrive in the United States they hear of and meet Azuma, who works as a chauffeur for an American businessman. Only twenty or so at the time, he impresses Mizumura's father with his ambition and eagerness to learn, and soon Azuma is working for him as a camera repairman. Over the next few years, through hard work and great ambition he rises up to become a successful salesman, and eventually moves on, branching out and continuing to rise in the business world, amassing considerable wealth. Throughout, he remains something of an enigma, especially his personal life, Mizumura piecing together impressions from her encounters and what she heard about him while she is in her teens. Finally, he seems to simply disappear.
Azuma re-enters Mizumura's life decades later, in the (near-)present-day, when Yusuke shows up in Stanford, where she is teaching for a semester, and presents her with his story. He encountered Azuma more recently, back in Japan, and Yusuke's account fills in some of the present-day blanks about what became of him, but Yusuke's real gift is that he also brings Fumiko's story -- the heart of the novel, and the story behind the mysterious Azuma's childhood and youth, and what brought him to America. (Fumiko's story also extends to the near present-day, complementing Mizumura's account of the 1960s and 70s, and then filling in the rest up to the near present-day, when Yusuke appeared on the scene.)
Fumiko comes to Tokyo in her teens, and starts work at an American military base in 1951. In 1954 she comes to meet the three sisters of the Saegusa family, then in their young prime, and she becomes the maid for one of them, Natsue. Natsue is married to Takero Utagawa, a doctor -- though one more interested in research --, and the household also includes his only surviving relative, his stepmother, as well as his and Natsue's two daughters, Yuko and Yoko.
Relatives of a helper Utagawa's father had, Roku, move in with him in the small neighboring house. A husband and wife, they come with three boys -- the youngest of whom is Taro Azuma. They are desperately poor, and pretty unpleasant -- and young Taro gets the worst treatment (in part also because, as it turns out, he is not their son but only a nephew). Eventually, the older Mrs. Utagawa takes pity on the boy, and since Yoko and he are the same age and are in the same class in school and seem to get along (Yoko being otherwise slightly neglected by the family, her mother and older sister Yuko spending more time with the rest of the Saegusa-clan) he comes to spend a lot of time in the household.
Yoko and Taro remain very close, but of course the story-book romance doesn't quite work out. Class issues are part of it in a rapidly changing Japan, and social mores also play a role. When Utagawa gets an academic appointment in Hokkaido, distance (and the attempts to cover it) also becomes an issue.
While Yoko and Taro's relationship is the central thread, Fumiko also chronicles the fortunes of the Saegusa clan, especially their summer-times in Karuizawa (which is where Yusuke came across all of them). A True Novel is a sort of large-scale family-novel, too, concentrated on the three sisters (Natsue, and her sisters Harue and Fuyue) as well as the Shigemitsu family, where the handsome son Noriyuki seemed destined to marry one of the three but died in the war, while his nephew, Masayuki -- who bears an uncanny resemblance to the eternally idolized Noriyuki -- naturally figures in what happens with the next generation. While Fumiko only loosely keeps track of the ups and downs of the families, there's enough here to give the novel quite a bit of a saga-quality.
As readers have known from the beginning, the Yoko-Taro romance hits a major roadblock when Taro is about twenty, and he heads off for America. Fumiko's story explains how it came to that -- and then also fills in the details of what happened in his absence. Fumiko also recounts what happened after Mizumura lost track of him in the United States, as Taro also resurfaces in Japan -- not settling down, but visiting frequently -- and he again figures in some of the characters' lives. Tensions about his role(s) -- which also include that of (generous) benefactor -- remain throughout, and while it is Yoko's relationship with him that drives much of the story, Fumiko's own very complicated but lasting ties are also significant.
In one conversation the young Mizumura had with Taro on Long Island she expresses her own eagerness to return to Japan, and she asks Taro whether he isn't also eager to go back to where they came from. He tells her:
Why should I go back ? There's nothing for me there.
It suggests that, at age twenty, he had cut all his ties, emotional and real. As it turns out, things are a bit more complicated, as he eventually does find himself drawn back -- at least intermittently. Yet his relationship with Japan and the Japanese remains always, at best, ambiguous. He was an outsider as a child, and he remains one throughout his life. The Saegusa-sisters, as 'insider' as it gets, are the contrasting element of traditional Japan (even as that moves towards its own decline and collapse), and Taro's interaction with them remains uneasy. So too he sums up his contempt of the Japanese in general to Yusuke, late in the day, when pretty much all has been said and done:
"Shallow...," the man echoed, before saying simply, "They're beyond shallow. They're hollow -- nothing inside." He brought the champagne glass level with his eyes and studied the bubbles in it. "Like these bubbles ... barely there at all."
A True Novel is a sweeping, sprawling novel of Japan in the second half of the twentieth century. Through her three different story-tellers -- Mizumura herself, Yusuke, and Fumiko -- and their experiences and observations she effectively chronicles the rapid social and economic changes the country has undergone, and the novel is of interest for that alone. It is also impressive in its narrative approach(es) and style -- a creative and engaging telling.
The characters of Taro and Yoko are slightly problematic: their stories are presented second-hand, via these observers (Mizumura, Yusuke, and Fumiko), whose narratives nest within each other (a significant portion of the novel is, after all, Mizumura's account of Yusuke's account of Fumiko's account ...), and both characters are often at a considerable distance from any of the narrators. They remain elusive figures -- and hence also their passion isn't quite as enthralling as it might be with characters who have been brought closer to the reader.
Still, this is an impressive, even grand work, and the sort of long novel that is a pleasure to slowly watch unfold -- a treat for fans of those big Russian-family novels, or an older generation of Japanese writers (so: more Tanizaki, less-to-none of the Murakamis). Not everyone will have the patience for this kind of thing, but it's certainly worthwhile. - M.A.Orthofer
“‘You been to the peas?’ the old lady said, and Clara leaned over to pass them to me.
