In America

We’ve been in South Carolina for a few days now, but I haven’t been blogging because I forgot my password and we’ve been busy with family stuff.

Yesterday a big box of books was delivered to my parents’ house and I got to finally see a copy of my first published novel.  Hooray!  Now I hope that people will buy it and read it!!!!

Lilia was very proud of me.  She quickly turned to the acknowledgements page and found her name.  My dad took some photos.  Jio and Yoshi were sleeping. 

 Jennifer has posted an interview with me on her blog.  (Thanks, Jennifer, for your support!)

Relentless

My mother-in-law, who is away on an overnight trip with friends, i.e. a vacation, called this morning at 7AM to remind us to take out the garbage.

The Forgetful Tooth Fairy

I tend to freak out whenever Lilia loses a tooth.  When she was about three, she fell down the stairs and knocked a couple teeth out, and then bumped her mouth a couple more times and knocked out a couple more teeth.  Then, when her front teeth came in, she chipped a tooth and had to get it capped.  So yesterday, when she indicated that one of her lower teeth was loose, I told her not to touch it.  But Lilia loves fairies, and she loves putting her tooth under the pillow and finding a shiny coin in its place the morning. 

Yesterday evening, I was upstairs packing for tomorrow’s trip to South Carolina.  I came down to find my baby girl spitting blood.  She’d apparently yanked the tooth out.  I sopped up the blood, and then at bedtime we put the tooth under her pillow and…the tooth fairy forgot to leave a coin!  Needless to say, Lilia was shocked and disappointed to find the tooth still there.  Maybe the tooth fairy will come while she’s at school…

an interview with me

Nay sent me these interview questions: 

1) Do you use your own personal experiences when writing your books?
 
Yes, definitely.  Probably at least half of what I write is inspired by something that happened within my family.
 
 
2) When you married your husband, did you marry in Japan or your hometown, and why?
 
We had our wedding in Hawaii, which is about halfway between South Carolina, where I’m most recently from, and Japan.  We thought that was fair, and we wanted to go to Hawaii! 
 

3) Are you raising your children to be bilingual, and if so, how are you doing it?
 
Yes.  My daughter is deaf, so we are trying to raise her in Japanese Sign Language and Japanese.  I’ve been speaking to my son exclusively in English since he was born.  My husband only spoke English to him for the first three years of his life.  After he started pre-school, he quickly mastered Japanese, and now he prefers to speak to his father in Japanese.  I think it gets harder and harder to keep up the English once kids get into school.  Luckily for us, there is a private elementary school near our house with an Engish immersion program.  We’re sending him there.
 

4) What is your favourite place in Japan and why?
 
I like Hokkaido because there are lots of wide open spaces.
 

5) If you had the chance to relocate (with your family) anywhere in the world, where would you go?
 
The West Coast of the United States or Hawaii - someplace multicultural where we’d all fit in.  And someplace with good facilities for my daughter.
 

(And now, if you’d like me to interview you for your blog, send me a note and I’ll send you five questions.)

Evita!

From reading my blog, you might think that Gaijin Mama and Japanese Papa never go out together as a couple — and you’d be right!  Last night we almost had a date.  It was sort of not a date because his sister went with us. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had a look at the local newspaper and saw an advertisement for a performance of  “Evita.”  I saw this musical on a field trip to Chicago when I was in high school and I loved it.  I didn’t remember much beyond the bare bones of the story, but I sometimes go around singing, “Don’t cry for me Argentina…”

Yoshi managed to get tickets and we got his mother to babysit.  Our seats were - get this - folding chairs up against the back wall, in the very last row.  It was so far away, that even with my glasses, I couldn’t see the actors’ faces, which actually made it easier to imagine that they were really South American, and not Japanese.  Of course the libretto had been translated into Japanese, and I couldn’t understand everything, but it was still spectacular and moving.

The audience was full of women.  “Of course,” Yoshi said.  “Musicals are a women’s thing.”  See what I mean?

advanced reader copy of Losing Kei

A reviewer wound up with two copies of Losing Kei, and she offered to send one back to my publisher, but I have a better idea…  If there’s anyone in the States who keeps a regular blog, and who would be willing to blog about Losing Kei sometime in January, let me know ( sue kamata (at) msn (dot) com) and I will have that extra book sent to you! 

Gender Benders

This may be the land of ladyboys, but ideas about gender are otherwise firmly entrenched.  At least here in the boondocks.  The notion of girls with trains or boys with dolls is pretty far out.  So I’m always glad when Jio shows an interest in so-called feminine things.  Today, for example, Lilia checked out a bio in manga form of the famous feminist Japanese poet Yosano Akiko.  I suggested the book, and Lilia went for it because of the kimono on the cover.  It’s all about the clothes, you see. Anyway, as soon as Jio saw the book, he picked it up and read it all the way through.  I showed him a book that I have in English about Yosano Akiko and he had a look at it.  And then, very cautiously, I asked, “Was the book interesting?”  And to my great joy, he said “yes.”

Donald Richie’s review of Losing Kei

THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Finding the self and losing others

By DONALD RICHIE

LOSING KEI by Suzanne Kamata. Wellfleet, Mass.: Leapfrog Press, 2007, 196 pp., $14.95 (¥1,554)

Like France, after World War II Japan has hosted a varied group of expatriate writers. Though no Hemingways or Gertrude Steins have yet emerged, expectation remains.

A part of this expectation is the necessity that you know yourself abroad better than you do at home. As an expatriate you are put into a situation where you become a social unit of one or, in Japan, even less. Deciding upon just who you are, of what your individuality consists, is one of the requisites of any personal writing, but being an expatriate writer considerably dramatizes the experience.

Suzanne Kamata, whose first novel we are here considering, knows the milieu of the local expatriate writer very well, having been the editor of “The Broken Bridge: Fiction From Expatriates in Literary Japan” (Stone Bridge Press, 1997), and written the foreword for “Jungle Crows: A Tokyo Expatriate Anthology” (Printed Matter Press, 2007). Consequently she knows the various problems, all of them potentially dramatic, that can be encountered.

Among these is cross-culture marriage and its results. When the woman expatriate enters a Japanese family, self-knowledge had better be one of the consequences. How she reacts to the resulting pressures will influence their outcome.

The American woman in Kamata’s very interesting novel runs into a number of problems once she is married into a rural Japanese family. There is the classic mother-in-law problem (something all brides in Japan, expatriate or not, run into), there are local shibboleths when cancer is encountered (do we tell or do we not), and there is the big problem when divorce comes. What to do about the child.

Kei is beautiful little boy whom his mother cannot bear to lose. Yet, as her Japanese lawyer tells her, no one ever appeals decisions in divorces and she will never get her son back. A friend tells her: “This is not the USA where everyone gets a divorce and then stays best friends. There is no joint custody here.”

She falls into depression, she “marinates” in her emotions. Kei lived in her body for nine months, “matching his rhythms to mine. At birth he left it. Everything afterward was a move further away from me.” Though she recognizes the necessity of this, she does not accept it.

When she phones, he speaks Japanese “as if all the English I taught him have been scrubbed out of his head . . . he’s brainwashed.” Another reaction might have been pleasure that he is adjusting to his life, but this she does not allow herself.

Are we here dealing with an unreliable narrator? I hope so because that would make the novel even more interesting, as in Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” (to choose an august example) where we can never be sure if the first-person narrator is a repressed hysteric or whether there really are ghosts.

Much as I would like to believe in the added levels that such a narrator would provide, I am not sure they are there because the author has kept the heroine very close to the genre pattern for victimized mothers. She hovers at the playground, she hangs outside the boy’s window, staring in, like the stock figure in such hankie-friendly melodramas as “Stella Dallas.” And very affecting she is.

On the other hand, the writer does not always agree with her character and gives us ways to slip past the persona: “After making miso soup for the first time I felt kind of tired”; in her maternal sorrow she muses about Mel Gibson “one eye patched, soaking with sweat” as he runs toward her; at someone else’s wedding “Braham’s [sic] wedding march fills our ears.” What kind of a narrator is this? Would you trust her?

My advice is, don’t. The novel is more interesting when you experience it as the story of an expatriate in the throes of self-creation, trying to decide who she is and making one instructive error after another.

It is a text for all of us. If you do not find it in the bookstore, it is available through www.amazon.co.jp

Dissed!

To give you an example of how unnsupportive many Japanese can be of local foreign writers, here’s a little anecdote.
 
Yesterday morning I stopped by the Tokushima Prefecture Library to return an overdue book. While I was there, I filled out one of those book request forms, requesting my novel Losing Kei.  I figured the library has a budget for English-language books, but they don’t really know what to buy, and since I am a longtime resident and a library patron, and since my novel will likely be of interest to other Tokushima expat residents, they ought to have the book in their collection.  For the record, I have requested many books in the past - books which had no local relevance - and they have always purchased them.  I have also donated many of the hardcover books that appear on the shelves.
 
Well.  This evening, I got a phone call from the librarian I handed the form to.  She asked if I ha requested my own book.  I said yes.  And being a cup is half-full type of person, I thought that maybe she would congratulate me or (ha ha) ask me to speak at the library.
 
Here’s what she said:  “The request forms are for books that you want to read.  Since you are the author of this book, it’s obvious that you’ve already read it.  I will be cancelling the request.”
 
I thought of arguing for its place in the library, but I clearly did not follow protocol and it seemed like a waste of breath.

Santa Lives!

I did a little Christmas shopping yesterday.  I suddenly panicked when I realized that I had to get the “Santa” presents ready before we leave on the 20th for our trip to the States.  See, Santa won’t be bringing my kids’ presents to their grandparents’ house - too much baggage. They have to be all wrapped and strategically placed so that upon our return, when the children rush into the house to see what Santa brought, the presents are there.

I was thinking, rather Scrooge-ishly, about what a pain all this is, and maybe it’d be better just to tell them the truth about Santa (and the tooth fairy) and spare myself the trouble.  But then I thought of myself at the age of 9 (I think), when my next door neighbor and best friend told me that my parents were really the ones buying those presents.  I remember how I wept in the bath when my mother confirmed the rumor.  I’d love to spare my twins the pain!

I was talking about this with Y.’s mother.  She said that Y.’s older sister, who is about ten, I think, has started to have doubts on her own.  She no longer believes that Santa is the one who brings her a Christmas present each year; she thinks it’s some guy who lives in Tokyo.