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 

Redesigning My Blog (& Life?)

Last weekend, I was strolling with my boyfriend through Grange Park, beside the Art Gallery of Ontario, enjoying the warm, leafy afternoon.  While he was taking photos, I was sitting on the steps of the Grange reading the novel that's always in my purse (that day, it happened to be The English Patient.  More on this soon).  On a whim, Chris took a picture of me.  Later that evening, he pointed out that it might make an interesting banner for my blog, which I'd been wanting to redesign.  I wanted to give my blog a more personalized look, but I'm not sure what my "personality" is at the moment....  Recently, I've been feeling less like a coherent "self" and more like a collage made from those ripped up magazine photos (wasn't it fun to make collages back in kindergarten?)  Whenever I get this feeling, it's a sure sign that another transition period is around the corner....     

In any case, it was lovely to have the photo before me.  I had a moment of pure recognition. 

Chris was very sweet in taking the time to photoshop it and even change the background -unfortunately, cherry blossoms do not in reality grow in Grange Park!   But the cherry blossoms seemed appropriate since they remind me of Japan and my long-lost Japanese heritage.  Ten or twelve years ago, I spent a summer in Osaka and I remember arriving during cherry blossom season.  The petals were falling all over the place, like streamers after a birthday party.  I was both excited and terrified to be in the country my ancestors had left over a hundred years ago.  Yet as the weeks wore on, I became increasingly melancholy.  It depressed me that I don't speak Japanese, while everyone there assumed I was a native.  Rather than confronting the cleft in my identity, I retreated into a shell.  I sat in noodle shops and cried all the time and rainy season went on forever.

Now, once again, I find the Japanese side of myself beckoning to me, mysterious murmurs.  But no longer do I want to visit Japan so much as I want to recreate the imaginary landscape of my ancestors.......

Photo from: here

Book #5: Imagining the Old Neighbourhood through Joyce's Dubliners

Tinsel-shot scarves floated by. Men with jutting bellies swaggered past. I bumped into a shoulder and a face spun around, scrunching up like a bulldog. Swearing at me in some language I didn't understand.

But beneath the show of arrogance: a small, hard kernel of disappointment. I could see it glowing through the lines etched into his face.

As I turned onto St. Clarens, I was thinking about my grandfather, Kaz. I was thinking of him tripping on the cement cracks, whiskey bottle in hand, laughing into the empty air.

By the time he'd moved here in the 50s, he'd reached the end of the line. He'd dropped out of dental school, messed up as a bookkeeper, and had the wrong temperament for managing a dry-cleaning shop. After a while, he stopped trying in favour of strolling up and down the street. That was when he started hearing the voices in his head.

As my own career prospects narrowed, I feared that I had a similar self-destructive impulse ticking away.

And I kept walking. The sidewalk flowed into the distance, an endless white line.

Earlier that morning, I'd been reading "The Boarding House," a short story by James Joyce in Dubliners. I love how Joyce brings to life all the oddballs of Dublin - their funny, sad lives. Take, for instance, this description of Mr. Mooney, the man who owns the boarding house:

"He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour's house."

My grandfather had been a Mr. Mooney. Strange things that no one wanted to talk about had happened on this street.


Photo from: here