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Tokyo, 1940. While Japan's war against China escalates, young Yuji Takano clings to his cocooned life: his beloved evenings of French conversation at Monsieur Feneon's, visits to the bathhouse with friends, his books, his poetry.
But conscription looms and the mood turns against foreigners, just when Yuji gets entangled with Feneon's daughter. As the nation heads towards conflict with the Allies, Yuji must decide where his duty - and his heart - lies.
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Writing the novel, I sought to recreate pre-1945 Tokyo from books and photographs and films. There were moments when I was struck by the sheer oddness and difficulty of what I was doing. Not only was the story set in Japan but the action is seen exclusively from a Japanese perspective. I remembered, however, a similar unease when writing Ingenious Pain, and facing the problem of entering the experience of a man living in the mid-eighteenth century. Was Yuji's world more foreign to me than that? It might conceivably be less so. And what is more fundamental to the practice of fiction than the belief that all of us share some common material, something that remains impervious to cultural difference, or to differences of gender and age? Writing is a tool of curiosity. I wanted to find out how it felt to be Yuji Takano. I wanted to live as a young Japanese poet. I wanted to be twenty-five again!
I started the book in the months before my daughter's birth. Pregnancy, birth, babyhood, parenthood, all quickly assumed an importance I had not entirely planned for. Children toddled or crawled or skipped into the manuscript as though the text's surface was full of half-open doors. Yuji, self-regarding, and imagining himself to be some sort of Asian Arthur Rimbaud, is totally unprepared for them. I thoroughly enjoyed his discomfort; it was, of course, the mirror to my own.
It is January 2008 as I write this, and wet as a Japanese June. My daughter and the novel have passed their third birthdays. The child is pretty much perfect, the novel very much not so. I encourage myself with the thought that imperfection, like asymmetry, is part of the Japanese aesthetic, though who that will convince, Heaven knows. It is time, however, to get onto my creaking knees, and with much formality, and a deep bow, to slide the book across the mats towards whoever that is sitting there so patiently in the shadows... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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