A True Novel Read online

  “People have generators in their houses?”

  “Apparently yes, when they’re worried about flooding and landslides.”

  We said nothing for a while. We could hear gusts of wind blowing the rain in sheets across the roof; the lights dimmed and brightened several times, making a blackout seem a real possibility. The storm apparently had woken Jim up too: through the blinds in his living room I could see that the light was on. I looked at my watch. It was nearly five in the morning.

  “This rain is really something,” Yusuke said, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed vacantly.

  He murmured, “It was raining like this when I went to Oiwake to hear that story.”

  “Mm …”

  I concentrated on the sound of the rain.

  I had entered so deeply into the world of his tale that it seemed strange to find there was another one—the real one—outside. I sat listening to the rain, and Yusuke started talking again.

  “I didn’t come to California looking for Mr. Azuma, but once I was in Los Angeles, no matter where I was, I’d find myself wondering whether he might be somewhere nearby. Driving around, eating in a restaurant, shopping at the mall—I’d be looking for him. Sometimes I went out to Beverly Hills and those fancy neighborhoods, just driving around and around. Eventually, I settled in the Bay area, but I began thinking he might be in Silicon Valley somewhere. So whenever I came to this area, I’d be looking for him again. I’ve nothing in particular to say to him, though, even if we did meet …”

  Yusuke had left the armchair a while before and was sitting on the floor, hugging his knees, his hands looking abnormally white. For some time, I’d been sitting with my legs to one side on the couch, and was now gazing at those pale hands, close enough that I could reach out and touch them. They were bony men’s hands, not unlike Taro Azuma’s. As it grew lighter outside, it seemed that the rain, like the darkness, was easing up a little.

  “Want to get some sleep?” I asked, speaking to him more casually than earlier on.

  “No, thank you. It’s time I went home.”

  “You can’t drive in this weather. It’s not safe.”

  They would have closed the highways with this rain.

  I tried to convince him that in a few hours it would probably let up, but he insisted on going home. I told him again that it wasn’t safe to drive, promising I wouldn’t try to seduce him or anything. He said he didn’t want to be a bother. Finally, after this predictable tussle, the couch was turned into a bed and a toothbrush and clean towel were produced. I then got ready to go to bed myself, brushing my teeth, washing my face.

  I walked back into the living room, drying my face with a small towel, to find him sitting on the couch—now a bed—staring at the wall. “Good night,” I said.

  He shifted his blank eyes toward me.

  “Will you be able to sleep?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” he said, his eyes focusing on me as I stood in the doorway. “You must be tired too.” He seemed to take in my physical presence only now, when he’d finished telling the story.

  “I am tired, but I still feel too worked up,” I told him, folding the face towel in half, conscious of the way he was looking me over. “I’ll take a double dose of sleeping pills.”

  “You take sleeping pills?”

  “Yup. Halcion. Always.”

  Yusuke stood up and said, “I could sit by your bed and read to you … till you fall asleep.”

  He obviously was thinking of the people in the tale he’d told me.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, I’m serious,” he said, coming forward.

  Was it because he’d been able to talk to his heart’s content? Or just because he was young? His face looked clear in the first gray of dawn, though he had stayed up all night. And on that face was an expression I hadn’t seen there before—an unexpected gentleness. Maybe he thought it would be rude to quickly fall asleep if I was still awake. What an offer, so sweet and ridiculously thoughtful … Smiling widely despite myself, I thanked him but told him his presence would certainly keep me awake. Then I turned and escaped to my bedroom. The sooner I could be alone to savor this extraordinary night, the better.

  WHEN I LAY down on my bed, the tips of my fingers and toes were cold while my forehead and cheeks felt almost feverish. My nerves had been wrought up by the hours of blustering rain. They were wrought up too from being trapped by that rain in a room with a stranger. And there was the tale that stranger told. Yet all these things by themselves could not account for what I felt. I felt that providence was working behind the scenes, and with it rose a sense of elation that made me want to run out into the night. One coincidence had followed another to make a young man come from far away to deliver “a story just like a novel”—and this to me and me only. It was as if, echoing in my ears, a voice from on high was telling me that I really had been placed on this earth to be a writer.

  A miracle, I thought.

  There was another way too in which the gift Yusuke had brought was providential. I had been struggling to write a third novel, drawing on my childhood. The Japan Taro Azuma grew up in was the Japan of my own childhood, the place to which I had returned again and again in my memory after we moved to the States. Picturing Taro as a child, I heard the high note of the horn in the chill morning air as the tofu seller passed through the neighborhood. I saw my grandmother in her smock crouched outside the kitchen as she fanned life into the coals in the clay stove, the white smoke rising into the twilight sky. I played outdoors forgetting what time it was, the red sun setting behind me as a yellow streetlight came on overhead. The Taro I had known in New York faded and, before I knew it, I was a little girl again with bobbed hair, watching as he ran past me, his neck grimy with dirt.

  If the true story I’d just heard could be turned into a true novel, I might finally be able to set free a time in the past that had been locked away inside me for so long.

  With sunlight coming through gaps between the curtains, I went on staring at the ceiling.

  BY THE TIME Yusuke and I sat down for breakfast, it was bright midday. The news on the little radio reported that both highways to San Francisco had been closed all night and had just reopened. I reached over to switch it off and said triumphantly, “See? You wouldn’t have made it home anyway.”

  Yusuke simply smiled. His face, smooth and without any overnight stubble (this being an Asian face), looked much less troubled, in fact refreshed.

  I soon learned that the night’s rain was record-breaking. When I opened the door to see Yusuke out, my neighbor Jim was standing in front of his house, talking to a man in rain gear and boots, holding a hose. It seemed some work had just been done there. Seeing Yusuke behind me, Jim looked faintly surprised for a moment, then smiled and in his usual bashful way said “Hi,” vaguely directing the greeting at both of us. The storm had been the worst in several decades in northern California, he told us, causing flooding and landslides over large areas; a number of people had even died. Workmen had been in Jim’s place since early morning, as his house too had been flooded. The two of us agreed that the noisy pump in my front yard, whose effectiveness we’d doubted, had, after all, saved my house from disaster.

  ABOUT TWO WEEKS later, a letter arrived from Yusuke.

  That morning after the storm, as he was leaving, I had told him I wanted to turn the story into a novel. His face showed first surprise and then unease. But, after all, he was the one who had delivered it to a person whose pursuit was writing novels: why be surprised, I said to myself defiantly, though I perfectly understood his reaction. It was natural for him to be concerned about the person who had passed it on in the first place. Suppressing my own sense of propriety, I assured him that, to avoid any trouble, I would change the names and settings in the written version so that it would be difficult to tell the identities of the actual people involved. Yusuke simply said, “I wonder,” and pursed his lips. Neither of us spoke for a whi
le. I remembered the sense of elation I’d had the night before and struggled against my own ambivalence, though I didn’t want to push him. Yusuke watched me for a while. Then he seemed to have second thoughts on the matter and said more positively, “I suppose it would be all right. In fact, I can see that it might be interesting.” And he promised to send me a map of the locale.

  When the envelope arrived, inside were two hand-drawn maps and several pages printed from a computer. One of the maps was labeled “Oiwake” and the other “Karuizawa,” and each indicated the location of the relevant summer houses with the word “here.” The text had the title “Notes on the Story as Told by Fumiko Tsuchiya,” though they weren’t notes so much as a chronology. A brief letter was included in which he said that, whereas the cottage in Oiwake had been torn down, the villas in the historic part of Karuizawa (Old Karuizawa) were probably still standing. His email address was given at the end. I typed the “Notes” into my computer, adding them to ones I had already made.

  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.

  From Story to Novel

  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.”

  Now that not only the nineteenth but the twentieth century is over, the controversy is almost forgotten, the volumes of debate collecting dust in a corner of the library, ready to be entombed in the history of our modern literature. Today the theory of art as evolving toward ever-higher forms is dead. All kinds of fiction are recognized as equally valid; the term “true novel” no longer sets the standard for any writers. I myself was only trying to write something inspired by a particular nineteenth-century Western novel, not trying to write a “true novel.” In fact, my work deviated from the idea of a “true novel” in its most basic premise: that it must first and foremost be a work of fiction.

  Even so, I eventually realized that the problem I faced was not wholly unrelated to the difficulty of writing a “true novel” in Japanese. I felt that the uneasy sense I had—that something important was slipping through my fingers—was part and parcel of the fact that I had moved away from my own life, away from the literary tradition of the “I-novel.”