KJ
Selections
The
Clarity of Double Vision
An interview with Mary Yukari Waters,
by Stewart Wachs (from KJ#56)
Photograph
of Mary Yukari Waters by Joanna
E. Morrissey
Though she has always looked Western, her first language was Japanese.
The only child of a Kyoto housewife and an American physicist, author
Mary Yukari Waters spent an uneasy childhood in Japan, teased by classmates
as an outsider. Then in the mid-1970s, when she was nine, her family
left Japan and moved to a small logging town in northern California.
Contentedly blending in, Waters grew up and settled into a seemingly
conventional life: In college she studied economics, then went to work
in Los Angeles as a tax accountant. Through the years, her ties to Japan
had lived on in routine visits to relatives in Kyoto. Nearing the age
of thirty, she suddenly found herself in a "quarter-life crisis."
"It’s sort
of like a mid-life crisis," she says, "except you’re not fifty
when it happens."
Feeling compelled
to broaden her life outside of her job, Waters took a night class in
memoir writing, then another course in fiction, where she met Tom Filer,
her mentor for the next several years. "In Tom’s class I became
hooked on fiction," she says. "It wasn’t a big, flashy moment
so much as a calm, centered feeling."
Perhaps this tranquil sense of balance is the root of the self-assured
prose in her stirring debut collection of short stories, The Laws
of Evening (Scribner, 2003). These same stories, until now published
separately in periodicals, have won her such accolades as the O. Henry
Award, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in The Best American Short
Stories (2002 and 2003 collections).
Despite her background
and heritage, Waters has read few Japanese writers — for fear,
she says, of subconsciously mimicking their style. Yet her characters,
settings and artistic sensibility are so convincingly Japanese that
her stories read as if they were written in her first mother tongue
and later flawlessly translated. Akin to the best of Japan’s,
her narratives are intimate portraits, far more concerned with the unfoldings
of character than with plot per se, and filled with a richly
textured immediacy. Men and women gaze across the gulf of a war that
separates them from lost loved ones and earlier selves. Privately devoted
to memories both vivid and visceral, they fare forward in a world remade.
Mary Yukari Waters
combines imagination with intercultural insight to widen our circle
of compassion. She is now at work on her first novel, also set in Japan.
I spoke with her by telephone in late August (2003).
Like more and
more people you’ve grown up between two countries and two cultures.
How has that affected you and your writing?
I remember as a child feeling that since I was part Irish-American and
part Japanese, I could never look at either Ireland or Japan in a bad
light. And I recall thinking that the more mixed you were, the more
countries you’d perhaps see as home. When you are relatively familiar
with two cultures, especially two as different as America and Japan,
one thing that does stick with you is what these cultures have in common.
You can see which qualities are Japanese and which are just human and
transcend all of that. One thing readers respond to is being brought
to realize, at some point, that a unique or seemingly foreign character
is just like them, struggling with the same issues in a very different
locale. When I read fiction, that’s always a wonderful experience
I look for.
One reviewer has written that you often portray post-war Japanese as
if they were refugees in their own country. What do you think of this
idea?
Yes, I liked her take on it. Although it was not a decision I made consciously,
I can see how that would apply because a lot of my characters do tend
to be traditional Japanese women who don’t have the Western concept
of power. And many of the characters, whether male or female,
are finding different ways to come to grips with tragedy or loss in
their lives. When I was writing The Laws of Evening I never set
out to do a collection about post-war Japan or any particular period
in history. The way short story collections develop sometimes is you
start out with one idea that’s interesting to you, then branch
out from there. So even if all of the other stories travel different
paths, they’re linked by that original sensibility. My earliest
stories for some reason were taking place around the time of the war
or shortly after. I’m not sure why, but I was trying to imagine
myself in that period in Japan. As time passed and I kept on writing,
the stories became more and more chronologically contemporary. Their
order in the book is more or less as I wrote them. This coincidentally
gives a chronological arc to the whole collection.
I guess to plan
this you’d have to assume you were going to have a collection
that was going to be published, which seemed presumptuous to me for
a long time. I didn’t go into writing as a second career. My original
impulse was perhaps to prove to myself that there was more to me than
just the working person I had become. When you’re in a job that
demands a lot of hours you work and work and do overtime, then come
home and eat, sleep, shower, and it’s that vicious cycle, and
unless you really make an effort to carve out other areas it can swallow
up your whole life. It’s so easy; you just fall into it right
after college. It’s rather a scary thing. Anyway, I was struggling
with this at the time.
Maybe I can explain
my attraction to writing by telling you about a wonderful Japanese movie
I saw called After Life. The premise is that a group of people
have died and they’re in a sort of purgatory. The staff come in
and bow and say, "We’re so sorry for your loss." Then they tell
these people that they have three days to pick out the one most important
memory of their entire lives. Once they have chosen, it will be re-enacted
and put it on videotape so they can take it with them to their next
world. And that’s all they can take. All their other memories
will be erased. I think there’s something of that impulse in a
lot of writers. You want to be able to say here is a memory, not necessarily
from my own life, but a certain feeling, an insight or mood, a moment
so beautiful or meaningful that I want to capture it forever. And you
may want to place these in short stories so that you almost have an
album of these moments that should be kept. When I first started writing
and wanted to find things that defined me as a person it was natural
I’d go to my childhood and background in Japan. The stories I’d
heard from my mother and grandmother, from that whole side of the family,
had stayed with me.
What really interested
me was being able to take a certain Japanese mindset, and I almost don’t
want to say "Japanese" because I don’t know the rest of Japan,
only the tiny area of my grandmother’s Kyoto neighborhood. For
me, that’s Japan. But taking that certain outlook on life that
people there have, as opposed to the mindset here in L.A., and presenting
it to Americans as something that made sense to them, instead of being
inscrutable and foreign, that was a challenge I had fun with.
I think what I write about is more interesting to Americans than it
would be to Japanese, since I’d imagine they have heard a lot
of this before from grandparents or relatives.
I seriously wonder about that. There’s so much cultural and
historical amnesia in Japan nowadays, right down to the family level.
Hmm. Come to think of it, I have cousins in Japan more or less my age,
and I remember my grandmother saying to me, "You’re the historian
of the family." By that she meant I’m the only one who asks these
questions about what happened in 1942 or whenever. And I wonder if part
of the reason is that I don’t live in Japan. I only come back
every other year, so perhaps I feel more of an urge to get that knowledge
and preserve it. I also have a very talkative grandmother! I find it
sad, though, that you’d have these generations living together
with the younger people having no idea of what went before, especially
since so much has happened in the past generation or two in Japan. Sometimes
I’ll look through the photograph album that I got from my grandparents,
and it’s like looking at an exotic history book. It’s amazing
that these people in old-fashioned clothing are alive today and going
to the supermarket. The passage of time has held so much upheaval. Japan
is remarkable in that way.
While writing these
stories within a Japanese context, two universal issues interested me
most. One was how a person goes about coming to terms with a loss. How
do you deal with your circumstances being reduced through forces beyond
your control? I experimented with that because every character
brings his or her personality and view of life to bear on that question.
The other issue is memory, the way people sometimes use memory in different
ways to cope.
You’ve said that the death of your father when you were twenty-nine
triggered the crisis that led to your writing.
Yes, a part of me was dealing with my own loss. My mother had died when
I was twenty, so it was a tough decade all in all. I think the idea
of rebuilding your life was much more vital to me than it might be to
others my age. It has always amazed me how people who have gone through
wars or other surprising changes actually make it through life and are
eating and drinking, living normal lives. If they didn’t tell
you, you would never know. They’ve adjusted in some mysterious
way. And then you look at people with cancer or other terrible diseases
and you cannot imagine what you’d do, and yet there’s
some transformation or realignment in their brain, something that happens
that allows them to adapt. I’ve always been fascinated by people
who’ve come through adversity because, in a lot of cases, adversity
doesn’t make people better. Sometimes it makes them mean
or cynical. There are certain people, though, who become stronger and
better, and it has always interested me to know why.
(Mary
Yukari Waters’ short story "Since My House Burned Down" appears
on pages 72-76 of
KJ#56.
Stewart Wachs is KJ’s associate editor.)
Copyright
held by the author
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