Jackie Copleton – A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

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A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, Book Review, Jackie Copleton, Japan, Nagasaki, Second World War

A Delicate and Redemptive Story of Nagasaki

Jackie Copleton, the author of A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, was working in Nagasaki as an English language teacher in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on that city. This book has in some ways been percolating away for 20 years.

In her foreword, Copleton states her aim, with this book :

When we talk about conflict we tend to divide the warring sides into the good guys and the baddies. This book was never meant to be a story about blame or accusation. I wanted to pull something good from the ruins of the city

It was that stated intention which drew me to this, as it rather suggested a writer of emotional nuance and depth, and the following was the clincher:

The more you research a subject the more it shatters into different interpretations. We view history through the prism of who we are, what we believe, how we see ourselves and how we want to be perceived. We pick through the bones of the past until we find the narrative to suit our needs

So…..clearly Copleton is a thoughtful person with clear aims and empathy and imagination towards different stories, different viewpoints.

But is she a novelist? Resoundingly so

Yes, this book does look at the moment of impact, when the bomb fell, and there is a detailed and searing account of the blast and its horrific consequences. This chapter is stark and terrible, but it is not the big set-piece climax or story of the book

In some ways, this is a story of an ordinary family, leading ordinary lives, with ordinary secrets, lies and cupboards of skeletons. It is the terrible impact of ‘pikadon’ (brilliant light, boom – the sight and sound of that bomb) on those ordinary lives with their ordinary skeletons which the book follows, giving us a picture of Japan through the eyes of her central character. Amaterasu Takahashi, an elderly Japanese widow, living in a retirement home in America in the nineteen eighties. Amaterasu and her husband Kenzo left Nagasaki after their daughter, Yuko and her son, their grandson, Hideo, aged seven, died in the blast. Amaterasu’s story, however starts, aged 15, shortly after the end of the First World War in Nagasaki, in a very different kind of Japan.

When the book opens the elderly Amaterasu is alone, lonely, secretive, living with terrible secrets, and a feeling of guilt. She feels it was through her fault that Yuko was in the direct epicentre of the bomb’s impact, on that day. She, rather than anyone else, caused Yuko’s death. She keeps herself to herself, and since her husband’s death gets through her days with just enough alcohol to take the edge off her unbearable anguish.

The past breaks through when a middle aged Japanese man, dreadfully burned, dreadfully disfigured, unexpectedly knocks at her door and announces himself as that long dead grandson, a lucky survivor of pikadon. And his story, and the story of how in the end he found her, and the documentary evidence he brings, unravels the secrets, the skeletons, the lives.

Interspersed, at the beginning of every chapter, are excerpts from An English Dictionary of Japanese Culture, by Bates Hoffer and Nobuyaki Honna, which take a word which describes a Japanese ethical, cultural or philosophical concept which has no direct Western correlation, and picks it apart, explains it. The concepts chosen are to some extent unfolding in the succeeding chapter

Memorial, Nagasaki Peace Park, Wiki Commons

There is a kind of modesty, an elegance and restraint in Copleton’s writing, in the voice of her central character, the letters and diaries written by protagonists in this story, which rather honours and embraces a country which is now so Westernised – but, also, so strange to Westerners.

I read this as a copy for review, from the Amazon Vine programme, UK and it’s one I highly recommend. The story is one the reader needs to discover for themselves. I did guess quite a lot of what might be going on, probably because I have read some other fictional books with a Japanese setting, so putting two and two together about certain characters, I was not as a reader surprised by narrative. Which made not a jot of difference to my pleasure in the reading.

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Amazon UK
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Amazon USA – digital edition

The digital edition is available in the States, the Hardback will not be published there till December. Available as hardback and digi now in the UK

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David Mitchell – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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Book Review, David Mitchell, Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Exceeding all the wildest accolades – prodigious achievement

Sometimes you come across a book which is so wonderful that reading it is as much of a sorrow as a pleasure – especially when the end of the book begins to come in sight.

This offering by David Mitchell is just such a book. He really is a quite extraordinary writer, his prose is beautiful and clear, extremely well-crafted, at times poetic, without seeming forced or contrived. There is a crystalline, lucent quality to his work, and great and refined tenderness. He’s a writer with vision, intellect and heart. And a quite extraordinary ability to metamorphise into different voices – this was stunningly evident in his first book, Ghostwritten.

In this, his fifth, he stays with one narration, but there are 3 major protagonists in the story; the subtlety of his writing shifts the perspective so that the reader is drawn into all three, separate, stories, and can find each character fascinating, layered and moving.

The book is a kind of love story, in the fullest incarnation of what a story about love might mean. Japanese, Dutch and English culture and history collide as individual stories are unfurled.

Set in an island off mainland Japan in the late 18th and early 19th century, the research which Mitchell has done must have been prodigious, though he wears his learning lightly and the reader absorbs much information without pain. There is a combination of great delicacy in the writing, and some very graphic and visceral descriptions of medical procedures, beautifully done, even though inevitably they are shocking.

Towards the very end of the book, there is one chapter, the 39th, where the writing is of such assured mastery and beauty, and the narrative so profound and full, that it almost becomes impossible to imagine being able to read a book by another writer. Mitchell has exceeded all the accolades he has garnered.

When I reached the end of the book I burst into tears, at an ending so right, so tender, so truthful.

Apparently the book took 2 years to gestate. So I guess there may be a long wait for Mitchell no 6. Time enough to re-read his entire canon.

Mitchell has the most beautiful understanding of human nature, its frailties and its glories, and a mastery of the craft of writing equal to the high content of his work. Style AND substance, by the barrel load

I was reminded how much I value Mitchell’s writing, and this particular book, by coming across another blogger, reviewing her past wonderful reads, and this was the one: see Roxploration’s review of it

I originally received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine UK programme

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Amazon UK
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Amazon USA

Susanna Jones – The Earthquake Bird

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Book Review, Japan, Psychological Thriller, Susanna Jones, The Earthquake Bird

Author In Search of An Ending

This, the third novel I’ve read by Susanna Jones, is in fact the first novel she wrote. And it shares the strengths and the weaknesses of the other two (though curiously, less of the major weakness. More of which later)

Set in Japan, a strange country, a different culture entirely, for most of us, her strange and alienated female central character Lucy Fly, a misfit in her own country and in her own family, has found a home, and assimiliated in Japan, where she works as a technical translator. So there is an undercurrent of everyone speaking different languages, and trying to understand and communicate with each other.

Lucy has a Japanese lover, not quite a conventional boyfriend, as both he and she have large no-go areas in their relationship, which seems predicated on that being fine, and that the strength of the relationship is in fact that weirdness and unfamiliarity to each other.

Into this mix comes an equally, though differently alienated English ex-pat, another rather gauche drifter, Lily. We know, right at the start, that Lily has been murdered, and Lucy is the prime suspect. The story unravels backwards and forwards as Lucy revisits, in her mind, and makes the stories of all their pasts.

The strength of the book is in the interesting, well crafted characters, the sense of strangeness and dislocation, uneasy and unsettling.

However, like those other two books, as I approached the end of the story, and where it was going to go, my overwhelming sense was of disappointment. An ‘oh – so what’ , as the structure and journey Jones has been carefully building ends with a slight feeling of having been cheated. Curiously, as THIS is her first book, she managed the ending rather better than in the other two I’ve read. I obviously can’t say what the ending is, for fear of spoilers, but somehow her endings are too mundane and not really in keeping with what is, for the most part, a sure, fine imagination and mastery of the craft of writing

The Earthquake Bird Amazon UK
The Earthquake Bird Amazon USA

Ruth Ozeki – A Tale For The Time Being

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A Tale For The Time Being, Book Review, Japan, Quantum theory in fiction, Ruth Ozeki, Zen Buddhism

A meditation on cherry blossoms, suicide, Hello Kitty lunchboxes, cats, bullying, ancient Buddhist nuns, crows, kamikaze pilots, Marcel Proust, quantum theory and much much more.

Ruth Ozeki’s wonderful novel will not leave me alone, but continues to playfully and seriously engage me

Ozeki is a Japanese/American/Canadian, and an incredibly fine writer and a Buddhist priest.

This novel is written in two voices. The first is that of a 15 and then 16 year old Japanese girl, Nao. Nao was born in Japan but her parents moved to America when she was 3. She feels American to herself. Now they have moved back to Japan and all is not well. Japanese culture is remarkably weird to her, and her experiences are pretty horrendous. Nao begins to write a diary about all the things which happen to her, but she is also trying to write the life story of her great grandmother, an 104 year old feminist and Buddhist nun.

The second voice is the voice of Ruth, a Japanese/American/Canadian writer who has moved from Manhattan to British Columbia with her husband.

The novel is the journey of these two voices and their worlds. The plot is elliptical, flowing, lateral, sideways, patterned and playful.

I’m deliberately saying nothing about how these worlds and voices connect and form something lovely – tender, horrendous, shocking, charming – because this is a book which demands the reader to have the experience, be surprised, be amused, be sickened, be saddened, laugh, cry.

Part of what Ozeki is exploring is reality itself, time, beings in time, writers and readers, lots about mathematical theories, but mainly expressed through the deep and playful view of Nao’s grandmother – oppositions and paradoxes are all held. As old Jiko says :

Up, down, same thing 

Oh and there are lovely little footnotes to help you learn Japanese phrases and recognise kanji

How can you not be intrigued by a book which starts with one of the main characters sitting in a French Maid Café, Fifi’s Lovely Apron (soon to become Fifi’s Lonely Apron), in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to Edith Pilaf.

However, be warned, this switches from light to dark and back again, repeatedly – it is, after all, about everything in time.

In also exploring the connection between writer and reader – who is it that is writing, who is it that reads, and the inevitable co-creation arising, she does far more than play elegant but empty writerish games. Neither writing nor reading are wholly dynamic or receptive acts; many writers report the sense of character arising and dictating their story – this is also something actors are familiar with. The logical sense may say I, it is I that does the writing/performing, but there is another sense in which some other self observes writing or performing arising – and even a sense of the self that observes being inhabited by the what is, arising.

And – (this is surely the difference between reading and being read to, or being an audience in a live performance and being an audience for a film) the reader is inhabiting and co-creating what is read – the sense the reader receives from the book will be fed into and affected by the reader themselves – the reader is IN time, the reader pauses, does other things in their time, perhaps with the book tangling away at them, then returns to read, and the new now the reader reads from changes what is received. In live arts, the collective and individual now of the audience co-creates the performance which is in progress.

Another way of describing this, reeling in something from John Fowles’ The Magus:

Water or Wave? How does this become that – and isn’t it and and, as well as either or

Up, Down, Same Thing; Not Same, Not Different

I am now buying Ozeki’s earlier 2 novels. What I particularly like is her ability to inhabit some serious debates about all sorts of topics, from the environment, to warfare, to mathematical theories but to explain clearly, playfully, engagingly. A light touch serious writer, sage and fool combined.

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine programme UK. And what an amazing gift it proved to be

A Tale For The Time Being Amazon UK
A Tale For The Time Being Amazon USA