The award-winning Japanese writer recalls firsthand how she wrote I have a novelhis literary initiation on American soil.
From right to left, The threats of Mizumura (1951) crossed the map as a child to settle with her Japanese family in the United States, experiencing firsthand the westernization of her postwar country. That “exodus” experience and her subsequent transition to adulthood in New York over two decades is what she recounts. I have a novel, his debut in 1995 now translated into Spanish. There, the dual origin becomes material, as the book combines English and Japanese to defiantly break the vertical direction of the Asian text, giving an unmistakable meaning to its original title, Shishōsetsu from left to right.
gender conceptualist, Mizumura he part in his books of a previous scheme to play with form and cultural transfer: if in the splendid a real novel (2008) tells a forbidden love with Wuthering Heights and the honkaku shoes (fiction proper) as models and in inheritance of the mother (2012) addresses adultery and maternal old age from the morning serial and the echoes of Madame Bovaryin I have a novel the author invokes the self-portrait typical of the genre shōsetsu finely tuned in the wake of Proust. However, the alternation of the supports does not alter the elliptical brushstroke and the enveloping motifs of Mizumura, masterfully dedicated to capturing the gap between three generations of Japanese women, the sensitivity of intimate dramas and the friction between modernity and tradition in a present of boundaries that fade.
The game of mirrors between East and West is particularly accentuated in Yo, a novela, where Mizumura refers to how he learned Japanese by reading the translations of The Little Lord, Little Women y Daddy long legs when capitalist Japan turned its back on its indomitable past. Moving to the United States at the age of 12 only adds to the idealization of the island homeland, to which the narrator will speculate about returning once and for all to become a writer. “I want to be a writer (…) in Japanese, of course”, Minae confesses to her sister Nanae in one of the many conversations they both have in the text, a counterpoint of shared personalities and experiences that serves to draw the difficult foreign initiation into a A thriving America that has never ceased to be somewhat insecure and hostile to them.
“I came to the United States not as an immigrant, but as the daughter of a businessman,” she says. Mizumura by mail-. From the beginning I was offered a comfortable middle-class life. All the more so considering that my stay fortunately coincided with the period when, beyond the civil unrest and the Vietnam War, American society was far less inequitable and violent than it is today. My decision to leave has nothing to do with the country. It had to do with my feeling of loneliness and, perhaps more importantly, that I was already an avid reader of the Japanese language when I set foot on the vast North American continent. My language was my home and I never left it. I definitely could have chosen to stay in the United States if I had been an athletic young woman, or hadn’t been a bookworm from a young age.
– Why did you write your first book in the tradition in the first person?
–Remind Japanese readers of our literary heritage is something I always try to do in my work, and the shōsetsu it seemed like a good place to go. Japanese readers were beginning to forget how the concept of shōsetsu it once played a crucial role, both positive and negative, in trying to define what distinguishes many Japanese novels from European ones. It’s a vague and impossible concept to define, despite how common first-person fiction has become today. However, the tradition shōsetsu still deserves attention; some of our best works, many untranslated, are part of that tradition. Perhaps the uniqueness of the self is what gives all its freedom to confessional writing. The line between fiction and non-fiction is deliberately blurred. Readers see the writer in the figure of that self, but he may very well confess an adultery he never committed.
–How does bilingual book writing make your biography transparent?
–This double membership is the basis of everything I write in Japanese, since unlike most Japanese writers I am always aware that I write in that language. At the same time, I am aware that my Japanese reflects to some extent all my English reading of my long stay in the United States. As for combining English words into Japanese text, it was an idea that came naturally to me when I thought of a fictional account of my bilingual life in the United States.
– Why did you make the bond with your sister the central axis of the narrative?
– The close and difficult relationship that I have had on a personal level with my real sister, Kanae, has been as fundamental in my life as the air I breathe. There was no way not to write an imaginary autobiography without giving it a prominent role. That said, I don’t think I’ve fully explored our bond. Although I tried to be as kind as possible to Kanae in the novel, she was a burden to me and I always regarded her as a cross to carry throughout my life. Unfortunately, earlier this year she died suddenly. I have suffered and now I recognize that she was much more than a burden.
– The computer is an artifact that is often mentioned in the book.
-The computer was an invention that God sent me from heaven. The typewriter is not compatible with the Japanese writing system, and if the computer had not been created I would have had to deliver horrible manuscripts; a real condemnation in a culture that has a long tradition of judging people by how they write by hand. The computer also forgives my obsessive habit of rewriting. As a novelist I would like to capture and describe the times I live in including new technologies, but what I consider “new” becomes old in the blink of an eye.
–Your books often include photographs of places. What motivates them?
–I wanted to emphasize the importance of the visual aspect of what we read, especially since the Japanese written language is itself a visual language. The experience of reading is not limited to the meaning of the words.
His lyrics span decades and generations. What is the cause of this spectrum?
-I am interested in covering a large period of time because I intend to understand the time in which we live. I don’t think we can understand the present without understanding the past. At the turn of the 20th century, many of us shared the feeling that humans were finally learning to live together in peace. However, despite the fact that we are not yet past the first quarter of the 21st century, there is already a clear sign that this has not happened. That ghost makes me sick. The past attracts me more because I perceive it through the veil of nostalgia, but as a novelist I tell myself that I should not evade what is happening in front of me. One of the novelist’s missions is to be a witness.
– The characters of “I, a novel” experience situations of discrimination. Do you think history takes a political position?
Awareness of discrimination has increased dramatically since I wrote the novel a quarter of a century ago, which is good. As a novelist, however, I am not very attuned to current political trends. A writer must engage with what she feels most urgent, with what she sees fit to leave to her mission in the form of words, and not with what she interests her contemporaries and, above all, with what they expect. she is her. to write. In that sense I’m glad I left the United States, maybe I’m paranoid, but I have this uncomfortable feeling that if I stayed and decided to write in English I would feel the pressure of having to write about what it means to be a Japanese woman, writing about race and gender. Literature is much more.
-What did you get to become a writer, an initiation that you portray in the book?
-My novel represents a version, perhaps modest, of In search of lost time. And, if I may allow myself, I have some aspects in common with the protagonist of Proust. We both started dreaming of becoming novelists from an early age, but we long put off the day when we would finally switch to writing; we were already in middle age. Neither could see any future other than being a writer. Proust’s protagonist – like him – is rich enough not to think about other occupations. I wasn’t rich, but luckily I was just a woman. Japanese girls of my generation only aspired to a decent marriage. I have just read, reread and fantasized at my leisure. If I had had to think about “career options” in the beginning like young women do now, being a writer probably wouldn’t have been at the top of my list. So, for both the protagonist of Proust and me, the question was never if we wanted to be writers, but when would we finally start writing. Writing has brought everything into my life. Now that I am older, I realize with greater awareness of how it has brought purpose to my life. Every day that passes seems to be a cause for celebration, because it is another day I can write.
I have a novel, Minae Mizumura. trad. Luisa Borovsky. Adriana Hidalgo, 416 pages.
