Emily Itami’s protagonist, Mizuki, is a fulltime housewife in Tokyo with an exhausted salaryman husband and two children. On the surface, her life looks fine, but she is miserable.
I wanted this life, wanted my children. I guess that, like with so many other things, I just didn’t count on the fact that opening one door would mean closing another one so firmly.
It seems like a familiar enough premise — dissatisfaction with the result of one’s choices, boredom, an unappreciated wife + mother, an overworked husband — but Emily Itami, in this debut novel, makes a distinctive contribution to the genre. (That is, once the reader gets past the rather dull opening chapter, which is luckily only two pages long.) Itami’s Mizuki is clever, sarcastic, perceptive, and able to view her own life and actions with a detached originality. She is an insider with an outsider’s perspective: she is Japanese, but from a tiny Japanese town, not from intensely urban Tokyo. She also spent several years in New York, so she has an awareness of lifestyles and cultures outside Japan.
Then Mizuki meets Kiyoshi: handsome, independent, a successful restaurateur, and most of all:
he was the first person in years who thought about the answers to the questions I asked him and looked right at me when he replied.
Chapters bounce back and forth between Mizuki’s present and past, but each chapter adds something to the reader’s understanding of the protagonist. The inevitable affair serves largely as a vehicle for her self-examination, and the impossibly perfect Kiyoshi never captures the reader’s attention as much as he does Mizuki’s. That said, it’s Mizuki’s honesty and humour that make the novel appealing, not the details of the affair.
Children often fare badly in novels, from a literary perspective. They are sometimes ridiculously precocious, serving as miniature adults, or are bland creatures in the background that miraculously impinge very little on the adult lives, or are relentless obnoxious brats. Rarely is there a realistic portrayal of the physical and mental demands of small children, as well as the emotional intensity of the parental connection to them. One notable exception is Linda Kiesling’s Golden State, and another is this novel. In Itami’s writing, the two children have wonderfully distinct personalities.
Aki is four years old:
‘Mama, […] even when I’m big, can I still live with you? I don’t want to live anywhere else.’
I assure him he can live with me forever, not bothering to mention the cast-iron guarantee that the moment he’s big enough to live elsewhere, he’ll be in such a rush to get out the door that his shoes will be smoking.
The moment of sentimentality is short-lived. […] By the time we get out the door [..] Aki is in indignant tears because I tried to help him button up his shirt and dissuade him from taking his entire collection of tiny, losable, Anpanman figurines to nursery school.
Eri is ten:
Her school uniform, a standard navy-and-white sailor-collared Japanese number, was almost unbearably adorable when she first put it on, aged six, with her huge red randoseru backpack and her little round navy sun hat. That damned randoseru cost more than the whole uniform put together — it’s hand-crafted, waterproof, unbendable and [in the event of a volcanic eruption or earthquake] Eri can put her backpack over her head to keep her safe.
But Eri is growing up, and the randoseru is now uncool.
Suddenly — and this is one of those thoughts that I don’t think proper mothers have — the uniform, once so cute and innocent, occasionally reminds me of scores of Japanese schoolgirl-related horror films, or worse, the kind of manga porn I sometimes spot men in suits reading on the Metro.
The city of Tokyo is almost a main character in itself. The novel marvellously captures the diverse neighbourhoods and vibrancy of the city, without ever sounding like a tourist guide.
Tokyo is in its full summer inferno when we meet one morning by Gaienmae. I’ve never much liked that avenue of trees, for all that it looks so spectacular. It’s something about the government building at the bottom of it, surrounded by so much space in a city where living quarters are measured out in mat sizes, making it seem like an overfed toad.
Life in Tokyo is indelibly woven into every aspect of the story: Eri takes the subway by herself to school each day (unthinkable for a 10-year-old in America!), and Mizuki makes bento boxes for their lunches, using the
nori cutter to make the seaweed on Aki’s onigiri resemble a panda, and thinking what a competent brilliant mother I am.
It’s those sarcastic, disengaged observations that make the book what it is. And it sent me to Googling each Tokyo spot described, and each item of food.
The fine cultural details entwined into the novel are beautifully done: the horror when an American pours soy sauce over his rice, or the competitive mothers at the preschool discussing ‘the merits of the different rice brands and whose husband prefers which’, or Mizuki’s visit to her small-town home, ‘stepping up onto the tatami in my socks’.
A sharp, honest, original novel about life and motherhood.
I cannot wait to read this book! Thank you for reviewing it. Of late there have been so many good Japanese writers coming up. I have on hold Kitamura’s Intimacies, and also trying to reserve a Tsumura book….currently reading a Sherlock Holmes in Japan novel, of those lost years after the Reichenbach Falls….
And the photos were super bright and colourful in this review – am madly in love with the gingko trees photo you included here!
I found myself doing a lot of Googling as I read this book 🙂
Am so glad you recommended this book. I just finished reading it, and reread your review, and heartily agree with everything you wrote. Yes, the opening chapter or pages were the weakest, far too brittle, too flippant, trying too hard, too self-conscious. I was actually a bit worried the whole book would be like that! But luckily, the tone rapidly changed, far less trivia-mad, and far more real. You are so right, it is less a love story – as the blurb touts it as being – and more a journey of self discovery. I also love that after reading so many books about messed up, melancholy Japanese characters (very well written, many of them!) here we have a protagonist that is happy, wants to be happy, succeeds in being happy.
Yes, the passages about the children rang out with such sincerity and personality. And I adored how Tokyo was so front stage it is almost a character in its own right in this novel – gorgeous! I also loved how Itami put all the names of Japanese foods in Japanese. I loved her conveyance of Japanese culture, how so much that is commonplace in the West as cultural practises, would be seen as coarse, rude, taboo, etc in Japanese culture, so fascinating.
Just the brief mention of the super-perfect lobby of the protagonist’s apartment, was a glimpse into a different culture – how everyone needs to be perfectly presented at all times, how super polite they all are, so well behaved, so internally policing. And of course there was a lovely passage too when the protagonist brings her husband’s forgotten phone to his office and watches the late (or almost going to be late) office working sprinting from the Metro, but still polite, still immaculate in dress, etc. So much about this book was beautifully observed and communicated. Am going to pounce on the next Itami novel with glee!