Book #56: My Return Trip

“And sometimes in this fantasy I buy the house we used to live in, the rambling house down the highway, in the valley.  I have imagined it as neglected, needing paint, new gutters, perhaps even falling apart, everything around it overgrown and gone to seed.”
                                                                                             -Alice Adams, Return Trips

Monday night was a cool, rainy night, and that seemed fitting.  I attended my great aunt Sachi’s funeral, where the pianist played her favourite song, “Here’s That Rainy Day.”  I came home, exhausted from seeing everyone, made myself a cup of tea and stared at my bookshelf for a long time.  I was thinking about her house as I remembered it from my youth: a fascinating, slightly decrepit, rambling house on Gladstone Avenue, with built-in bookshelves jam-packed with books, and more books in teetering piles on the dusty floor.  Although most people probably remember Sachi for her paintings (she used to be a high school art teacher and had several striking watercolours she’d painted, hanging on her walls), I would always remember her first and foremost for her tastes in literature.  She had been a huge influence on me during my teen years, introducing me to authors as diverse as Haruki Murakami and Alice Adams.  In fact, as my eyes swept back and forth along my bookshelf, they settled on a book that had once belonged to Aunt Sachi.  I would like to say that she gave it to me, but I’m pretty sure she lent it to me some two decades ago, and I’d conveniently forgotten to return it.  And now I never would; tears filled my eyes.  The book was Return Trips, a subtle, evocative collection of stories by Alice Adams.

I curled up on the sofa and began reading the title story and was surprised to discover that I remembered everything about it vividly.  It is a story about the cryptic nature of memory and first passion.  The narrator, a middle-aged history professor, looks back on her youthful love affair with a man named Paul, who was fatally ill with a heart condition, so that “Even love . . . was for Paul a form of torture, although we kept at it – for him suicidally, I guess – during those endless, sultry yellow afternoons, on our awful bed, between our harsh, coarse sheets.”  While their affair appears luminous – the love of her life – compared to her troubled two marriages, she comes to realize that her continual desire to remember their affair is more about a desire to revisit a certain moment, or place, within herself.  In the same way that she obsessively circles back in her memory to Paul, she indulges in imaginative returns to Hilton, the southern town where she lived for a short while during her adolescence and found a surprising, enchanting happiness that stands out in sharp contrast to her otherwise troubled youth.  So much so that she often fantasizes about returning to their old house in Hilton and perhaps even staying there, leaving her husband for good.  But when the narrator finally enacts her dream of going back, she finds that the house has lost its magical quality: far from being in a state of romantic decay, it has been modernized and retrofitted to house a bunch of transient students.

These fantasies of return, however alluring, the book seems to suggest, are best kept as fantasies.  Upon being probed too closely, the past yields nothing more than that it is no longer as you imagined.

I found it strangely moving to read this story, while thinking about Aunt Sachi.  You see, for the past few years, ever since I began writing again, I’ve been harbouring an almost obsessive wish to ask her about our family past.  There were certain family secrets to which she’d alluded when I was a child, and I knew she was the one person who’d remained close to my grandfather right up to the time he died tragically, before I was born (I address some of this material in my memoir The Reading List, being published in the spring).  And besides, Aunt Sachi must have known things about my great grandfather, her father, the illustrious Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara.  After all, she’d lived with him at the internment camp in British Columbia, where he was the camp doctor during the Second World War; she had been right there at the scene that has for so long enticed my imagination.  So I often pictured myself going over to her house for tea one afternoon, and perhaps slyly turning on a small digital recorder, while she would tell me everything that I yearned to know. 

But I never went to see her, because I knew that in reality things would not play out this way.

My father had already tried to talk to her – confronting her about some of the demons in our family closet – and she had completely shut down.  Her face blanched; she excused herself.  It had taken them a few years to repair their relationship.

Rereading Return Trips made me feel that I now understood why; the past is best confronted imaginatively and from a distance.

Photo from: here

Book #55: My Book Delayed (& other things making me antsy...)

"It was October and Isabella felt like she should be going somewhere.  Fall always did that to her.  It made her restless, like she was late getting back to school; like she should be registering for classes, and buying pencils and notebooks and folders that matched."
                                                                                   -Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses

Over the past week, three people have asked me when they'll be receiving invitations to my book launch.  Sadly, I've had to tell them that it's now official: my book's publication is being delayed until the spring (February 2012).  I won't bore you with the reasons for the delay - suffice it to say that my publisher promises my memoir The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again will be out this spring, which she sees as a better time to have the book launch anyway.  I can't deny feeling a pang of disappointment when I first heard the news, followed by a whirlwind of anxiety (if publishing a book is a bit like giving birth, the thought of carrying this baby around for an extra few months is disconcerting, to say the least).  But now that I've gotten used to the idea of a spring launch, I'm feeling better and, to be perfectly honest, I'm awash with something strangely akin to relief.

Very few people have read my book yet (my agent, my publisher, my boyfriend and the sweet authors who wrote endorsement blurbs - thanks Emma, Kerri and Micah!) and I suspect that when my book is out in the world, I'll go through a period of feeling awkward around everyone, even those people who have no interest in reading, much less any interest in my book.  But knowing myself, that's how I'll probably feel.  So there's a part of me that relishes the idea of a few more months of mental peace, allowing me to just immerse myself in writing my next book.

In any case, I've been soothing my frazzled nerves by reading something on the lighter side.  I just finished Girls in White Dresses, Jennifer Close's delightful, humorous debut collection of linked stories.  It's hard to pinpoint what I liked so much about this book, but I have to say it captures a certain mood very well and allowed me to see versions of my earlier selves.  These stories focus on the interlocking lives of a group of friends who move to New York in their early twenties, after graduating from university, but instead of realizing their dreams, they embark on a decade of just kind of stumbling through life, mired in anxiety and self-doubts, while drowning in late-night martinis.  Isabella, the main character, is "surprised to find that she could do her job in a constantly hungover state," unsure whether to be grateful or to take it as a sign of being understimulated in her entry level position at a mailing list company.  Startled by her friend Mary's ability to come up with a "life plan" and apply to law school, Isabella takes the scenic route in searching for her dream job and dream guy - always feeling as if she's somehow falling behind, late at doing everything, like getting married and having kids, envying her friends who seem so much more on track.  But as the author skillfully reveals, these friends who seem on track are actually besieged by other pressures, the fissures all too visible in their seemingly perfect lives.

Ironically, when Isabella finally does come up with a life plan, and claws her way up in the publishing industry, she finds that industry unravelling at her feet.  And worse yet, her boyfriend Harrison - whom she worries she's been dating too long to end up with - is forced to take a job in Boston, presenting Isabella with the dilemma of whether to leave her beloved New York and go with him.  Life in this book is full of these kinks.  In the end, coming up with a "life plan" appears highly overrated; far better to just try to adapt to whatever unexpected turns life throws your way, and wash it down with something strong.  Which is what I'm trying to do (with varying degrees of success) by not over-stressing about my book delay....

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A Japanese Custom

My short story, "A Japanese Custom," was published in this month's issue of MTLS.  If you feel like it, you can read it here.  It's loosely based on the stories that my grandmother, Kayaco, told me over the years....  Growing up, I always loved how she would reminisce at family gatherings about her girlhood in BC, back in the days before the Japanese-Canadians had lost everything, and her spunk never failed to astonish to me.  I wrote this story two summers ago for U of T's Summer Writing School (Alissa York was an inspiring instructor).  Although I liked the story at the time, rereading it now I feel that in many ways this slice of life doesn't do justice to my grandmother.  Oh well.  I guess my feeling of sweaty-palm-dissatisfaction may push me to write a novel about her....

Photo from: here

Book #22: Racy Regionalism

"The xylophone player!  The xylophone player to marry her!  Yonder he is!"  -Eudora Welty, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies"

Not so long ago, I spent four years of my life writing a dissertation whose key insight can be summed up by these two sentences: "It is by nature itself that fiction is all bound up in the local.  The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place."  The citation is from Eudora Welty's 1956 essay, "Place in Fiction," which I stumbled across online.  A pang of sadness came over me - this essay would have been a goldmine back in the days when I was "dissertating"!  At the time, I had become obsessed with regional literature and was trying to show how all modernist art is in fact regionalist in its basis.  But now I saw that I could have saved myself three hundred pages.  Welty said it perfectly in two lines. 

(And yes, there was a touch of nostalgia for my old academic self: cuticle chewing, sleep deprived, masochistic, high on literary theory....) 

Indulging in a blue, second-guessing-the-past moment (the crappy weather wasn't helping my mood), I dug up from a storage box Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. I'd read a few of the stories back in grad school, but hardly remembered a thing about them.  Now, as I began reading the first story, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," I found myself thinking about the way Welty uses dialect and delightful references to local institutions - like "Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi" - to create her signature sense of "place."  But it takes more than just that. 

Her real speciality, it dawned on me, is sexual deviance.  A group of gossipy southern ladies are bound together around the scandal of the idiot girl's sexual initiation.  On the verge of being institutionalized, Lily Daw announces that she is going to marry a xylophone player, who has charmed and possibly seduced or molested her, throwing all the ladies into a tizzy.  Their shock and prurient curiosity charge the story with feelings that are tied to the specific locale. 

This is the kind of racy regionalism that fascinates me.

As I kept reading, I began thinking about my own grandmother, Kayaco, and how much she reminds me of a character from a Welty story.  By contrast to my other grandmother (about whom I was blogging in my last entry), Kayaco is a no-nonsense kind of woman, named after Kayaks River in BC, where her father first lived upon immigrating from Japan.  She is a woman who knows her roots and what she stands for.  But to return to my point, she has a keen eye for sexual impropriety and seems to take a good deal of pleasure in rooting it out.  I remember when I was ten, she told me that her mother-in-law had long had designs on my grandfather.  Incest, you say?  Not quite.  You see, her mother-in-law was actually my grandfather's stepmother, but for decades, she had lived in their house.  The family dynamics were fraught, to say the least.

Hmmm....  I got out my notebook and began taking notes. 


Photo from: here 

Book #14: Chance Encounters through Munro

There is a certain kind of woman whom Alice Munro often writes about, and for better or for worse I identify with her. Sophia Kovalevsky, the heroine of "Too Much Happiness" (the final story in Munro's latest collection by the same title) exemplifies what I'm saying. Sophia is a mathematics professor in late nineteenth-century Stockholm, "an utter novelty, a delightful freak, the woman of mathematical gifts and female timidity." So does Juliet, the Classics grad student at the centre of "Chance," in Munro's earlier collection Runaway. This type of woman, who fascinates Munro, is someone who could be attractive to men and lead a normal married life, if it weren't for one little problem: she possesses a strange, burning passion for some esoteric field of study.

I remember having this moment of recognition four years ago, in the library of the college in small town Nova Scotia, where I had ended up as Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature (the "Visiting" was an important part of my title, just so I wouldn't forget not to become too comfortable beyond my two-year contract). Au contraire.

It was a Friday night, and I was supposed to be working on my Faulkner article (for I was intent on publishing my way to greener pastures), but instead I found myself sitting in the lounge area, where Runaway had been discarded on the table. Randomly opening the book, I found myself reading "Chance" and immediately I recognized myself in Juliet. Her social awkwardness - hyper sensitivity to when men are flirting with her - leads her to blow off a homely stranger who later kills himself. And then, when she does meet a man who interests her, Eric, her attempts at flirtation go no farther than repartee about Greek tragedy.

Yet at her core, she craves a normal life - the life of a happily married woman.

Or does she?

When Eric asks her why she majored in ancient Greek and Latin, she says lightly, "Oh, just to be different, I guess," but deep down, it's more than that. She considers these languages her "bright treasure." But the closer she gets to Eric and the ordinary happinesses and burdens of domestic life - motherhood, housework - the more her treasure risks slipping away. Juliet reflects:

"Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away."

Tears stung my eyes. Here I was sitting in a deserted library, while all my students were at Piper's Pub getting hammered, and all I could think was: what will become of me?

I had done everything to hold onto my bright treasure - all those brilliant, long dead authors. I had broken up with lovers at a moment's notice to throw my books in a suitcase and jump on a plane. I had moved to a town where walking to the supermarket meant getting covered in slush as I trudged three miles along the highway (I still have not learned how to drive).

Yet flickering in my chest was a rivalrous doubt. Yearning for the life of just an ordinary, happy woman.


Photo from: here

Book #10: The Missing Leg in Anthony De Sa

Sometimes I find myself thinking about my grandfather's old girlfriends. Is that weird? But everything about his life is weird. He died of some mysterious, unspecified illness before I was born, and my father only ever refers to him by his first name, "Kaz." Where other girls had grandpas who'd been struck down by cancer, all I had was this faded, black-and-white image: a man with a vivacious smile and a debonair wave to his hair. The photo must have been taken in Japantown, before the war.

According to my great aunt, Kaz was quite the "bad boy" - drinking, womanizing, leading a louche existence when he was barely out of high school. Apparently, there was a jazz singer named Lily, whom he fell in love with. My great aunt giggles as she remembers this, but something nervous and almost hysterical undercuts her show of boisterousness. I want to know more, but her lips tighten, and she says mockingly, "Look at Leslie, so bemused, taking it all in."

Perhaps these childhood memories have something to do with why I'm tantalized by Anthony De Sa's Barnacle Love. This collection of linked short stories tells the tale of the Rebelo family, beginning with Manuel, a young fisherman, fleeing the insular confines of his Portuguese hometown. He washes up nearly drowned on the shores of Newfoundland, ready to make a new life, but where does he fit in? What does it mean to follow his dreams? Caught between tradition and the surging pulse in his blood, he falls under the spell of a fisherman's daughter, who, despite being a cripple, is strength and sexuality incarnate:

"Her hands blur as they weave the leather straps and secure the metal brace to her thigh - the moulded cup meets the hardened flesh where her leg should be. He's not sure how he feels about it - she is not whole. But when she brushes by him he is caught in her smell of cotton sheets and the peppered sweetness of cinnamon. There is intrigue in her difference - something fragile that needs his tending. Manuel wants to hold her, touch her."

With her missing leg and her slight figure - so slight that she appears almost an apparition when he first sees her - she represents mystery and the beauty of something lost. Her atrophied flesh and severed bone embody something unknowable about her past, in the same way that Manuel's own ties to Portugal are being torn away.

I find myself wondering about my grandfather's past and what it must have been like growing up in the shadow of Japan. He bristled under his father's expectation that he carry on the family tradition by becoming a doctor. I remember my great aunt alluding to his thwarted musical talents. She said that his personality dissolved after the war.

I want to ask my dad what happened, but something stops me. He already looks edgy, lying on the couch, flipping the channels, and I haven't said a word.

So instead I simply ask him if he would like to read Barnacle Love.

Photo from: here