A True Novel

Starred review from August 19, 2013
The story-within-a-story-within-a-story at the heart of this novel features a doomed, Wuthering Heights romance set in postwar Japan, with the 20th-century Heathcliff riding the Japanese-American economic wave. Concentric narratives connect and transform into a critical appraisal of commercial expansion and cultural decline. Narrator-novelist Minae begins by recalling her younger days as the daughter of a Japanese businessman on Long Island, where she meets 20-something Taro Azuma, then a chauffeur for an American. It’s the 1960s, a time of opportunity. Years later, Minae meets Japanese émigré Yusuke who describes his encounter in the states with Azuma, now a wealthy man in mysterious seclusion. Yusuke also relates the life story of Fumiko, Azuma’s friend. In a flashback to Japan, we see 17-year-old war orphan Fumiko working as a maid for a woman whose family, in 1956, takes the orphaned boy Azuma under its wing as part servant, part protégé. Azuma grows up hopelessly devoted to Yoko, the illness-prone daughter of Fumiko’s employer. Yoko in turn loves but rejects Azuma, propelling him to America and prosperity, then back to Japan and to her. The Japanese tradition of burning fires for the dead suits the ghostly Brontë-esque finale, but far more notable are Minae’s edgy insights into class distinctions, trans-Pacific cultures, and modernization’s spiritual void. A transparent translation and the author’s stylistic clarity smooth navigation between storylines. Photographs create the sense of browsing through an album—a nearly 900-page album encompassing two continents and several decades.

November 1, 2013
A smart, literate reimagining of Wuthering Heights, moved from the Yorkshire moors to seagirt Honshu, Japan, by way of Long Island. The Heathcliff of the piece--less a tracing of Emily Bronte's novel than an homage, for Mizumura brings plenty that is absolutely her own to this aching story--is an absolute outsider named Taro Azuma who appears in the novelist's life (for Mizumura writes herself into the story, whence its title) as a supremely shadowy figure even as she herself is living in "three separate worlds," somewhere between Japan and the United States, between childhood and adulthood. The trope of insider/outsider is important to Bronte's original and no less so to Mizumura's; Taro becomes phenomenally wealthy and successful, but he can never quite completely attain his Catherine. But then, no one in Mizumura's fictional world seems content or absolutely at home; this is postwar Japan in a time of economic boom ("There used to be nothing but mulberry bushes," says one character. "And now, all of a sudden, we have a huge elevated highway running through it"), but a pall of death and shame still hangs over the land. Mizumura's novel within a novel, with its layerings of wealth, class and star-crossed love ("how could she possibly see someone like Taro except behind her parents' back?"), has all the inevitability of its Georgian predecessor. Structurally, it's as clever as Haruki Murakami's 1Q84; and if it has echoes of classical Japanese literature ("A longing to visit Nagano again left him restless"), it owes as much in some ways to The Great Gatsby as it does to Bronte. Whatever its inspirations, and whatever use it makes of them, Mizumura's book is an elegant construction, fully creating and inhabiting its fictional--its truly fictional--world.

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September 1, 2013

A Japanese writer, also named Minae Mizumura, recalls her privileged expatriate New York childhood, then witnesses her family devolve in adulthood. A Tokyo-based editor takes a countryside vacation and meets an older woman who shares fantastical memories of some of the inhabitants. A village girl becomes an indispensable maid to two intertwined families and spends decades in their service. These narratives converge to reveal the "real story" of enigmatic businessman Taro Azuma, who overcomes impoverished origins and achieves international wealth but remains forever desolate because societal pressures separate him from his only love. Sound familiar? Mizumura affirms some 150 pages in that Azuma's story "recalled...a literary classic set on the wild Yorkshire moors and written...by the Englishwoman E.B.," clearly Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. VERDICT Buried in almost 900 pages of unnecessarily convoluted layers is a sharper, worthier novel about class, gender, mixed-race issues, postwar Japan, generational metamorphoses, cultural influences and exchanges, the definitions and limits of fiction, and more. Though the book won the prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize--Mizumura is considered one of Japan's most important novelists--few readers will have the patience or stamina for this double-volume challenge.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2013
Would Emily Bront''s Heathcliff recognize Minae Mizumura's Taro Azuma as his literary descendant? Mizumura launches this novel as a re-creation of Bront''s classic Wuthering Heights set in twentieth-century Japan, and in Taro readers will see Heathcliff's passionate intensity played out in a life trajectory that parallels Heathcliff's in its defiant ascent from obscure origins and its obsessive but futile pursuit of an idealized woman who dies prematurely. But Taro confronts readers with complex questions totally outside Heathcliff's world. For as he struggles to surmount obstacles in postwar Japan, Taro wrestles with the difficulties of preserving a rich cultural heritage in the aftermath of a crushing national defeat. Indeed, as Taro temporarily leaves Japan to pursue his fortunes in the land of the victors, readers see him jettisoning much of his heritage. (Sometimes Taro looks as much like Fitzgerald's Gatsby as he does Bront''s Heathcliff.) Above the perplexities besetting Taro, the readers see the daunting conundrums surrounding his creator, Mizumura, herself a character in her novel, grappling with the incompatibilities separating Japan's own literary traditions from the potent innovations in Western styles of novelizing. Mizumura meets her literary challenge with impressive sophistication and irresistible emotional power, an accomplishment remarkably well conveyed to English-speaking readers by two gifted translators.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)