Gaby is a 36 year-old
divorcée living with a "shameful illness;" she suffers from
an intestinal disorder. This is not a secret from the reader, who
learns it early on, but from the rest of the country—that
supposedly homogenous, yet judgmental lot who seek to shun what
is different, especially a foreign woman with a secret. Like so
many of her generation, Gaby can't seem to find a job in America
("An American university would regard me as out of touch"), and
her life climbing the Japanese academic ladder also seems fruitless;
she is suddenly dismissed from Shizuyama University without any
explanation.
Now trapped between both worlds and really part of neither, Gaby
makes ends meet by selling fantasy funerals to rich Japanese clients.
Herewith Gaby sets the leitmotif for the novel. "Expect the unexpected,"
she cautions us, "This is Japan"—which is a clever way of
saying, "If you don't understand where the author is going with
this, don't worry. The author may not either."
Enter Alex Thorn, an American psychologist and author of self-help
books, who uses the promotion of his latest work,
Why Love Fails,
as an excuse to investigate the sudden and unexplained death of
his only son, Cody, a foreign-exchange student. Cody's body was
shipped back to America, minus its heart; a small detail no one
bothered to mention on the invoice. What happened? Why won't anyone
in Japan answer his letters?
Alex meets and falls in love with Gaby, the token foreigner at "Gone
With the Wind" funerals who is thrust upon him to find out what
the "crazy foreigner" wants. As Gaby's boss, Eguchi-san, explains,
"You both speak English, you'll be able to understand each other.
To be sure, Alex's connection with Gaby is a well-drawn and captivating
display of emotion. We learn a lot about his failure as father,
husband and professional, making him a complex but sympathetic character.
But Ms. Backer clearly wanted to do more than entertain us with
a love story. Alex is also the all-too-familiar character on the
gaijin, or "foreigner," landscape: book smart but not necessarily
street smart; savvy with interpersonal relationships, but an empty
vessel when it comes to Japanese culture. Like other Western novels
on Japan, his character quickly degenerates into a Doctor Watson
to Gaby's Sherlock Holmes. "Things work differently here," Gaby
informs Alex. Ms. Backer, or rather Gaby, even quotes Kipling's
bromide, "East is East and West is West."
Had it chosen to deeply examine cultural stereotypes,
American
Fuji would have been one of my top choices for books on Japan
in 2002. Sadly, what ensues only reinforces the cross-cultural divide
with supporting characters that are all operatic excess, sound and
motion.
Among the Westerners, Americans always seem sensible—the paragons
of virtue. Others foreign residents are not so flattering. For example,
there's Lester Hollingsworth, a pompous blowhard from the U.K. who
teaches English in the "Berlitz league." He supposedly represents
the Casanovas of Japan, more interested in chasing teenage skirts
while drunk than ideas, sober. Michael McKenzie, a naive Australian
pretty boy who was handed Gaby's university position, joins him
in the "international goodwill" league: "I didn't come here to date
white women," he tells Gaby.
Among the Japanese, women are either bubbly or busybodies; the men,
farcical or fascists. Gaby's boss, Eguchi-san, fancies himself a
connoisseur of the West by fashioning his English to Beatles lyrics.
Her colleague, Nishida-san, is less cosmopolitan. "Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
and we Japanese are forced to bow and scrape for those white {expletive
deleted}. No Yankee favors!" he spits.
Then there's Marubatsu-san—one in a long line of talking villains
who seems more comfortable spouting stereotypical invective than
advancing the storyline. From xenophobia ("Many gaijin come to Japan
to steal our wealth, not to learn from our culture."), to misogyny
("All women are deceptive."), to chauvinism ("You white men believe
you can get whatever you want from Japan. But we Japanese are children
of the emperor, descendants of the gods. We will rise again as a
people and make the world acknowledge our superiority."), he roughly
hits all the sensitive issues. Entertaining, sure. Penetrating,
not really.
Most novels seem to worship the plot more than the situation, and
read like a series of predictable outcomes. Stephen King's book,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (paperback edition, Pocket
Books, 2002), swims in common sense by recommending situation rather
than plot. He argues that if you do a good job of visualizing your
characters, it is best to put them into a situation and see what
happens, instead of chaining them to a plot structure.
Sara Backer uses the elements of plot, but only on the surface,
as the need to write the quintessential "non-fictional fiction"
is still alive and kicking since the days of Michael Crichton's
1992 bestseller,
Rising Sun.
Has Ms. Backer captured the real "Japan"? Well, that depends. Fortunately
(or unfortunately), such a place only lives in the mind of its author—and
even then it is subject to an eventual re-write.
Paul J. Scalise. “Cliches ‘R’ Us: Rehashing Familiar Fiction About
Japan.” The Asian Wall Street Journal. November 29, 2002.
Pg. 7.
