Getting Oriented, The Cover

My novel, Getting Oriented: A Novel About Japan, is now available on CreateSpace. I know from my experience as a magazine editor and as a business book writer that the cover is the most important element in engaging potential readers. If the cover looks amateurish, if they cannot read the type, few readers will take the next step which is to read the blurb about the book or pick it up and read the first couple pages.

Getting Oriented is, on one level (the most superficial) the story of a 12-day tour in Japan. The group begins in the old capital, Kyoto; travels to a traditional inn in Hakone, a resort area in the mountains south of Tokyo; spends a night in Nikko, the site of the most lavish temple complex in the country; and winds up in Tokyo. How do you illustrate the diversity of traditional and modern Japan?

My friend Susan Brier, who is a brilliant graphic artist, and I talked about various possibilities. I wanted something that said "Japan" and, ideally, something that said "travel." After discussing the options, we came up with the idea of a bullet train (something my characters actually ride during the course of the story) passing Mt. Fuji. Susan was able to find a color photograph of exactly that and, without having to manipulate the picture, use it as the cover. I believe both the book's front and back covers reflect the quality I wanted the book to represent. I will be interested to hear what, if anything, readers say.

Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere

John Nathan is a brilliant translator of Japanese and he has written a fascinating memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. "Carelessly" is a key word here because by his own account he has abandoned or thrown away one opportunity after another. In some ways, I found it a sad book as Nathan looks back on roads not taken--and on roads taken he might have been better off ignoring. (At one point, when he was rolling in money, he and his wife bought a giant white elephant of a house north of Boston; they were saved only because, after an expensive year in the house, a rock band decided they wanted it.)

Nevertheless, if someone is interested in Japan, in Japanese literature, in the Japanese language, or all three this is a wonderful book, very funny in places and lively and fascinating. Nathan was hired to translate an early Yukio Mishima novel. The title in Japanese, Gogo no Eiko, means something like "An Afternoon Tug." Eiko is the verb "to tug" or "to tow a boat." An Afternoon Tug was not going to work for an American edition, and after trying a number of alternatives, Nathan went to Mishima to ask about it. Mishima had a number of suggestions, one of which could almost be translated word for word and became the English title: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace from the Sea.

Nathan has translated a number of Kensaburo Oe's novels and was with him in Stockholm when Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The memoir includes a wonderful scene of Oe and his family with Nathan and his children in the Oe home in Tokyo. Nathan also tells the story of chiding Oe for writing "the sea urchin raised its head" because sea urchins do not have heads. Oe pointed out that Nathan's translation had confused ウ二 uni, or sea urchin with ワ二 wani, or allegator. That one little eyelash at the top of the first character makes all the difference.

It's been a full, rich life and Nathan writes about it with verve and grace. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Behind the Waterfall

According to the flap copy to Behind the Waterfall, Chinatsu Nakayama, the author, "has been an actress on both stage and television and a member of the Japanese Diet...Born in Kumamoto in 1948, she now lives in Tokyo." The book was originally published in 1980 under the titel Kyoyaku no jikan ("A Child Actor's Time"); the translation by Geraldine Harcourt was published in 1990.

The book contains three stories, "Star Time," "The Sound of Wings," and "Good Afternoon, Ladies." Nakayama tells the first from the point of view of an 11-year-old girl who has been successful on Osaka television dramas and brought to Tokyo to act in what turns out to be a hit play. We see the girl trying to make sense of the adult world, caught up in her own cares and desires, and showing the first signs of wanting more...more attention, more fame.

The second story begins with a young wife telling her somewhat older husband that she has fallen in love with a young man. The husband, who by Japanese standards of the time is a model of marital bliss, seems to take the news well. He will give her a divorce, but to save face he asks that the wife have no contact with her lover for three months. She agrees, then almost immediately breaks her promise.

I found the story fascinating because Nakayama is able to convey both the wife's infatuation with her younger lover (we have a sense that she is experiencing sexual pleasure for the first time) and her strong feelings for her solid, good, reasonable husband. She is being torn in two, and neither the lover nor the husband care.

The third and longest story concerns an afternoon television show and Nakayama, who clearly knows the milieu, tells it from several points of view. The show invites spouses whose partner has run away to make a personal appeal on the air for the partner to return. The show hires detectives to track down the runaways, and tapes them when found. All involved—husband, wife, lover—are brought into the studio and a regular cast of experts analyzes the situation and recommends—or insists—the principals change their behavior. It is a show, in other words, that trades on people's misery for the enjoyment of the audience.

Although Nakayma wrote the story in the late 1970s, one character's justification for what they do sounds timeless: The show's ratings are high, he says, because people love to watch the sordid show. "When I say sordid, I'm speaking in terms of my own personal tastes. I would never be so arrogant as to force those tastes on the viewers. Television doesn't belong to me, it belongs to the public, and it must be responsive to public demand. As the makers of what goes on television, it's our job to deliver what the public wants. One way or another. It can't be helped if in the process the privacy of stupid and ignorant people has to be sacrificed to some extent What does that matter if you look at the valuable services that television as a whole is providing?"

He never explains what that "valuable service" might be. All this before reality TV.

Japanese dialogue in English

Writing dialogue in fiction is...an art?...a talent?...a skill? All of the above? It is tricky because it should sound like speech, but it cannot be an exact reproduction of speech. Real speech is full of verbal tics, dropped thoughts, repetition, and extra words. If you've ever read an exact transcript of ordinary people speaking you know how boring it can be.

Adding to the challenge is that ideally every character should have his/her own way of expressing himself/herself. His own vocabulary, turn of phrase, level of usage, and more. In a way, Japanese writers have it easy because there are words that only men use and words that only women use. Also by verb endings and other grammatical markers, it is clear whether a superior is talking to a social inferior, a man to a woman, an adult to a child, and more. It means that Japanese fiction does not (usually) need a lot of "he said/she said" to make it clear who is speaking and the relationship between the characters.

Another challenge I had in Getting Oriented—beside trying to give each character his/her own voice—was to distinguish the times when the main character was speaking in English and when he was speaking in Japanese or being spoken to in Japanese. I didn't want to clutter the pages with words few readers would understand, so I've put all of the "Japanese" dialogue into italics. And to make that dialog sound different, I tried (not always successfully) to first construct the sentences in Japanese and then translate them into English. I think—I hope—this gives the Japanese dialogue a different feeling than the English exchanges.