My Book Launch

Normally, I'm not the sort of person who likes being the centre of attention, so I was wondering about how I would perform at my first book launch.  Although I'd been jittery and plagued by insomnia a few days before, on the day of the event, a calm came over me, and when I was suddenly there, immersed in all the people who'd come to celebrate and hear me read, it suddenly dawned on me, I'm really enjoying myself!  In a strange way, it felt as though my whole life had been leading to this moment (and I suppose it had, since I've been wanting to be a writer since age six).  Here are a few photos....  A big thank you to all of you who came out to celebrate and to The Japan Foundation for providing a beautiful venue, as well as to my publisher and agent for hosting the event.

A warm hug from my publisher, Sandra Huh

Having some pink bubbly with my agent, Sam Hiyate

Signing books for some old high school friends

Signing a book for my uncle, Bruce Kuwabara

Reading from my book

With my parents

My boyfriend and I ended the evening by wandering with a couple friends over to the bar on the eighteenth floor of the Park Hyatt and got splendidly drunk.  (They felt it was an appropriate venue because the bartender is known to have served drinks to Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler and many other Toronto writers, and I was just tipsy enough not to feel like a complete ingenue).  We enjoyed the view from the balcony of a skyline ethereal and fading, before joining my agent and his friends for a nightcap around the corner.  A memorable evening.
 

Book #61: One More Week ...

Just one week until my book launch ...  These past few weeks, my mind has been oscillating wildly.  I have consulted my doctor, my naturopath and meditation coach about various sleep remedies, with varying results (in the end, listening to the sound of thunderstorms and ocean waves on my iPod seems to work the best).

Of course, I knew this day would come.  And I am excited.  And yet, there is an unnerving side to the self-exposure of having your memoir published, I've discovered, somewhat belatedly.  While having dinner with some friends who are now reading my book, it has, not surprisingly come up as a topic of conversation - particularly, the racier sections.  "Which old boyfriend was that?" one friend asked with an arch smile, trying to decode the changed names.  She'd heard bits and pieces over the years, over boozy dinners, but never as uncut as this.

I heaved a sigh of relief when she reassured me how much she was enjoying it and didn't object to when I changed the topic of conversation.  I guess that's what old friends are for.

Perhaps my insomnia hasn't been helped by what's on my bedside table.  When I haven't been writing, I have been reading Haruki Murakami's tome-like novel 1Q84 and I am now nearing the midpoint.  Although this novel feels experimental and meandering in structure, and may not be among Murakami's finest works, it is nevertheless strangely addictive to read.  It takes the reader on an epic journey through a world, which, on the face of it, is 1984 Japan, but turns out to open outward into a world of double reality.  As one of the main characters, a serial killer named Aomame, reflects: "The streets had fewer passersby.  The number of cars declined, and a hush fell over the city.  She sometimes felt she was on the verge of losing track of her location.  Is this actually the real world? she asked herself.  If it's not, then where should I look for reality?"  Characteristic of Murakami, the world of reality bleeds into another world that is surreal and disturbing and possibly is contained within his protagonists' minds and fantasies, but just as possibly might actually exist.  Similarly, it occurred to me, my own perceptions have been feeling weightless and off centre lately ...  Perhaps this is what the writing life does to you: it dissolves the world into pure, malleable representation, which can quickly take on a life of its own. 

Equally compelling about this strange double world is the quest of the other main character, a writer named Tengo, who has been retained to ghostwrite a novel based on the experiences of a mysterious, almost autistic high school girl, Fuka-Eri, who has lived through some unspeakable childhood in a cult.  But who are these strangely mystical beings called the "Little People" that haunt Fuka-Eri's narrative?  Don't expect this novel to provide a little soothing bedtime reading ...  More likely you'll find yourself up reading until three in the morning, unable to sleep, like me.

Hope to see you next Tuesday at my book launch!

Photo from: here

My Book Launch & Book Giveaway

The book launch for The Reading List is just a month away - I hope that many of you who live in Toronto will be able to make it!

The event will be held:

February 14, 2012 

at THE JAPAN FOUNDATION

131 Bloor Street West

5:30-8:00 pm
RSVP: info@jftor.org or  (416)966-1600, ex. 103

Yes, I know it's Valentines Day...  Drop by for a glass of wine before heading to dinner with your significant other or spend the whole evening with us luxuriating in literary chitchat.  Who knows?  Those of you who are single might even meet someone scintillating and well read...

I also want to announce that I will be raffling off two copies of my book to those who wish to participate in this giveaway.  To be entered in the draw, you can do one of the following:

1. Become a Follower of my blog;
2. Leave a comment; or
3. Email me at leslieshimotakahara@gmail.com

The deadline for entry is February 11, 2012.

Here is a brief summary of what The Reading List is about:

Leslie Shimotakahara is a young, disenchanted English professor struggling to revive her childhood love of reading. Her father Jack, recently retired from a high-powered corporate job, finally has time to take up reading books for pleasure. The Reading List tells the story of Leslie’s return home to Toronto to rethink her life and decide what to do next. At the same time, she bonds with her dad over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few. But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever. Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career?

Btw, some friends have recently asked me which novels are included on the reading list that the main character (me) discusses with her father over the course of the book.  Not surprisingly, they're some of my all-time favourites.  Here is the list:

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
2. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
3. Dubliners by James Joyce
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
9. The Professor's House by Willa Cather
10. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
11. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
12. Obasan by Joy Kogawa
13. Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

"An engrossing and charming memoir about getting back to basics: home truths, family, and the life-altering, life-saving power of books."

                                                                                   -Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Book #60: My Holiday Reading

“For weeks the kid been going on and on about how dreadful we sound.  He kept snatching up the discs, scratching the lacquer with a pocket knife, wrecking them.  Yelling how there wasn’t nothing there.  But there was something.  Some seed of twisted beauty.”

                                                                                              -Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Ever since childhood, my favourite thing about the Christmas holidays has been the lazy, languid days of curling up in my bathrobe and doing nothing but reading all day.  And this year has been no exception.  Right now, as I write, I’m wearing my favourite black terry cloth robe, a stack of books teetering on the sofa beside me.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of gift certificates for bookstores for Christmas.  The first book I bought was Esi Edugyan’s Giller-winning Half-Blood Blues.  I read this novel in just a couple days, unable to put it down.  What a pleasure to become immersed in the strange, delicious world of this novel, the underground jazz scene of Berlin and Paris during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths, a “half-blood” musician from Baltimore, whose skin is so light he can almost pass for white.  But just the opposite is true for others in the band, most notably Hieronymus Falk, who, despite being the youngest, is the genius of the group.  Hieronymus – “Hiero,” as he’s known – is a “Rhineland bastard.”  He’s of mixed German and African parentage, fathered by a Senegalese soldier who was serving as part of the French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War One.  Despite growing up being reviled for his skin and relegated to a stateless identity, Hiero has musical talents that win him the name “Little Louis.”  Sid and the others take him under their wing, as a little brother at first, but as Hiero develops as a musician and artist, his remarkable abilities lead to tensions and rivalry.  Particularly where a certain singer, Delilah Brown, is concerned.  Sid becomes enamoured from the moment he first glimpses her strangely glamorous turban and thin, stark body and mesmerizing, pale green eyes.  Although she returns his affections, to an extent, she appears far more enticed by Hiero’s musical brilliance.

This is what I found so compelling about this novel: Edugyan brings to life a slice of history that until now, I’d known very little about, yet she does so through the lens of a set of characters and relationships that are so rich they’re constantly drawing me in.  Who among us can’t relate to the predicament of being jealous of a more talented friend?  Yet what under normal circumstances would simply be clashing egos and rivalries over art and women lead to much larger, tragic events in Nazi-occupied Germany.  Sid’s guilt and tormented conscience over whether he could have done something to prevent Hiero’s capture by Nazi police, in the riveting opening scene, lays the ground for his emotional journey in the rest of the novel.

And now, I've just started reading Chattering by Louise Stern, a slim, elegant collection of stories that I stumbled upon quite randomly a few days ago at a used bookstore on Ossington.  The best $4 I’ve spent in a long time.  Narrated from the perspectives of different deaf characters, drawing upon the author’s own experience, these stories give an intriguing glimpse of what it feels like to be constantly struggling to express oneself through sign language, body language and scribbled notes – heightening the ways in which we all feel estranged from language at times.  Young and surprisingly adventurous, these characters hitchhike with strange men, sleep on the beach, wake up in weird, risky places.  In between stories, I’ve turned my attention back to Haruki Murakami’s tome-like latest novel 1Q84, which is gradually drawing me in….  So much holiday reading to do….

Photo from: here

My Book ... & Postcards from Kaslo

On Thursday night, I had dinner with my publisher to celebrate that my memoir The Reading List is now in print.  We toasted and reminisced about the past year we’ve spent working together and schemed about how to make the book launch a fun event.  (It will be at the Japan Foundation mid-February – details soon to follow – you are all invited!)  She gave me my author’s copies, some of which I’ll raffle off on my blog in January.  The books are now perched on a shelf near my desk to give me inspiration as I immerse myself in writing my second book….

Speaking of which, I was very excited to receive a package in the mail last week.  I’d been eagerly awaiting it for some time, this package from the Kootenay Lake Historical Society.  It’s an archive that I stumbled upon on-line when googling “Kaslo, BC,” the site of a Japanese-Canadian Internment camp during the Second World War.  My great grandfather, Kozo Shimotakahara, was the doctor assigned to provide medical services at the camp and he has long captured my imagination; one of the characters in the historical novel I’m currently writing is loosely inspired by Kozo and he also has a cameo in my memoir.  So when I discovered that the Kootenay Lake Historical Society has volunteer archivists who could send me old photographs and newspaper articles, I jumped at the chance – even for just a first taste.  One day in the not too distant future I would love to visit Kaslo and wander through Kozo’s hospital and get my fingers dusty perusing the archive myself….

I feel as though doing historical research is a bit like wandering through an antique/junk shop, where you never can predict what you might find and suddenly desire.  The set of pictures and clippings I received in the mail contain such a range of ingredients, most of which I have no idea how they could fit into my novel.  If at all.  Nevertheless, these facts and images beckon to me and maybe it’s not a bad thing if I just let them tease my brain for months or years to come and let them half-consciously work their way into a future novel, perhaps.  For instance, I found my eyes lingering on an article written in The New Canadian about Kozo’s trailblazing efforts to treat tuberculosis, which had reached near epidemic levels in the Japanese-Canadian community before the war.  The prevalence was six times that of the normal population, largely because the Japanese farming folk in BC were ill-informed about prevention measures, didn’t speak English and were distrustful of doctors.  All too aware of this problem, in 1930, Kozo joined forces with a certain reverend to start a tuberculosis clinic that he staffed by lobbying to have “one Japanese girl” accepted into the nurse training program at Vancouver General Hospital (I wonder who she was and what was her story?).  They even managed to have an X-ray machine donated and sent over from Japan.  “Every Japanese doctor cooperated to the utmost, but among them Dr. K. Shimotakahara, a pioneer medical men, did much to aid in the important steps against tuberculosis,” writes the author of the article.  Those must have been heady days, when the community was in its infancy, and I can only imagine what Kozo must have felt being at the centre of it all. 

But then the war broke out and the Japanese became seen as traitors overnight, ushering in darker days….  I wonder what became of the clinic or whether it was ever revived after the war.  Probably not, since the Japanese-Canadian community was forcibly dispersed and assimilated in the post-war years.  The clinic had likely outlived its purpose … a fascinating blip, a glorious footnote, swallowed up by history.

 
Photos courtesy of Kootenay Lake Historical Society

Book #59: The Other Murakami

"They don't have compensated dating in America," Jun said.  "I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain why Japanese high-school girls sell it."
                                                                                               -Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

I recently went book shopping and bought Haruki Murakami's latest novel 1Q84, a tome-like brick of a book with a close-up of a pale, beautiful, slightly melancholy Japanese woman on the cover, and Ryu Murakami's much slimmer and lighter In the Miso Soup sporting a photo of a woman in black lingerie, her head cropped off, her skin aglow in eerie red light. 

Much as I love Haruki Murakami, there's something a bit daunting about starting a 925-page novel while immersed in my own writing....  I decided to save it for the Christmas holidays and dove into the other Murakami instead.

I have vague, pleasurable memories of reading Ryu Murakami's cult classic Almost Transparent Blue as a teenager and being particularly fascinated by the character named Reiko (perhaps partly because Reiko is my middle name).  In the Miso Soup, his more recent novel, provides the same kind of gritty look at Japan's underworld through the lens of the sex trade, yet this novel provides more reflection and commentary, on the part of the narrator, than I recall in his previous work.  It closely follows the relationship between two characters: Frank, a slovenly, balding American tourist, freshly arrived in Tokyo to indulge his appetite for the sex trade, and Kenji, the twenty-year-old drifter whom Frank hires to be his guide in navigating the peepshows, lingerie pubs, bars and brothels.  While the premise of this novel may not sound overly promising - it could quickly lapse into nothing more than a prurient thrill - Murakami's art lies in his ability to provide an almost anthropological look at the two cultures, Japan and America, which the two protagonists and their strange encounter represent.  One of the most interesting concepts central to the Japanese sex trade, we learn, is known as "compensated dating," where school girls go on paid dates with businessmen - but their activities may go no further than singing karaoke.  Or they may go further; the line isn't clear.  And it isn't only school girls.  Middle-aged, frumpy women trying to pass themselves off as college students frequent the same bars where hookers hang out, vaguely entertaining the possibility of selling themselves, too, should Mr. Right walk in.  What emerges, as Kenji takes Frank through this bizarre, highly stratified underworld, is a picture of a society where the lines between intimacy, sex and prostitution have utterly blurred and money is the only currency of desire.  

I lived in downtown Osaka one summer several years ago, during my undergrad days, and I recall being both baffled and intrigued.  Perhaps it was just the area where I ended up living, but the sex trade seemed to be absolutely everywhere - hostess bars tucked between the flashing lights of Pachinko parlours, swarms of garishly made-up girls in stilettos and mini-dress uniforms running into the streets accosting the men.  It perplexed (and saddened) me because I guess I held some naive, stereotypical views of Japan as a fairly traditional society.  Instead, I found myself immersed in a place where selling sex and sexuality seemed very much in your face and integrated in everyday life.

I don't know whether I ever quite came to terms with that summer in Japan, but Murakami's critique of the extreme loneliness and hollowed out existence that seem to be driving both his Japanese and American protagonists (the latter turns out to be a psychopath) made for a fascinating read.  In the end, the novel suggests that Frank and Kenji, though they come from very different cultures, may be equally screwed up.  In one of the final scenes, after Frank has gone on a killing rampage, Kenji searches his memory trying to explain what the word bonno means in Buddhism: "I think it's usually translated as 'worldly desires.'  It's more complicated than that, but the first thing you need to know is that it's something everybody suffers from."

Photo from: here


 

Book #58: Writing Unrest

“My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being.  And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration.  Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.”

                                                                                                 -Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is replete with all the ingredients I’ve always loved in novels: intrigue, sexual secrets, and a complex matrix of desire kicked into gear by a missing piece of writing.  No wonder that it recently won the Man Booker prize.  This elegant, 150-page novella opens with the main character, Tony Webster’s glance backward at his high school days in 1960s England, a place where he and his admittedly pretentious clique of friends got high on Baudelaire and Dostoevsky and debated grand questions like the origins of war.  “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,” says Adrian Finn, the genius of the group.  Thus, early on, the novel establishes its fascination with the limitations of history and memory and writing – themes that Tony obsesses over, particularly as he gets older.

But “history” in this novel means personal history.  Personal history of the most intimate kind.  When the boys grow up and go off to university, Tony gets a girlfriend, an elusive beauty named Veronica who strings him along for several months until he dumps her – only to discover that she’s hooked up with his old pal Adrian.  Incensed, Tony has a vague recollection of penning a nasty letter.  Shortly after, Adrian kills himself for reasons that aren’t at all clear.  Through a strange turn of events, decades later, Tony comes in contact with Veronica when it turns out that her mother has in her possession the late Adrian’s diary – again, for reasons that aren’t at all clear – and she has left it in her will to Tony.  It might contain the key to the secret of why Adrian couldn’t bear to go on living.  Yet Veronica has stolen the diary, setting the stage for a bizarre series of emails whereby Tony attempts to wrest the diary from her.  Instead, what she sends him is his old letter – replete with his callow, biting (yet hilarious and sardonic) words.  He is brought face to face with the cruelty of his younger self and the disastrous consequences his writing unleashed. 

While the ending delivers a perverse twist, the most interesting aspect for me is Tony’s unraveling upon confronting his own former words.  It is as though he repressed all memory of his writing; the letter seems as alien as if another person penned it, yet his writing is unmistakable.  Fear of confronting and despising but nevertheless being forced to take responsibility for a former piece of your own writing strikes me as a fear that is especially resonant with writers.  It certainly is with me.  Here we are in November, a few months before my first book is set to be released, and I find myself waking up in cold sweats, tormented not so much by the possibility that readers won’t like my book, but rather by the possibility that two, five, ten years down the road, I may not like the book.  Like Tony, I might barely even recognize my writing … or who knows?  Perhaps a disastrous train of events is about to be kicked into gear in my personal life, as a result of its publication. 

Paranoid?  Me?

But what’s written is written.

So as Barnes says in the final sentence of his novel, “There is great unrest,” yet what can a writer do except keep on writing?

Photo from: here