The Laws of Evening

April 28, 2003
The tension between tradition and the "white noise" of Western culture and technology in post-WWII Japan is captured with great poise and delicacy in this debut collection of 11 stories by Japanese-American Waters. As evidence of this clash of cultures, a television rests beside the widow Hanae's family altar in "Kami"; meanwhile, it is only the music of the traditional koto that is in sync with her biological clock (unlike "that tiresome Beethoven, who gives her a headache"). In many of the stories, women contemplate the untimely deaths of their husbands, brothers and fathers, and grow anxious as their children learn who Magellan was, how to use silverware and how to stomach alien foods. Makiko watches her son, Toshi, play dodgeball in "Aftermath," distressed by his willingness to " the ball at his former teammates without the slightest trace of allegiance," just as she is horrified by her nation's reverence for the American soldiers who killed her husband. "Shibusa" features a mother who cannot bear to meet the eyes of an old friend, whose startled look reminds her of her five-year-old's death in a bombing raid on her neighborhood. Several characters who escape death in combat fall victim to cancer or, in one case, food poisoning, which kills a set of identical twins and convinces their mother that imported bacteria is to blame for the tragedy in the title story. Wistful yet optimistic, these tales of inevitable cultural mutation, and of the unspoken fear and shame of an older generation wrenched from its prewar world, herald the arrival of a brave new voice that, like the characters herein, speaks with serenity from a "limbo for which there are no words." Agent, Joy Harris. (May)Forecast:Until recently, the aftereffects of war on the losing countries in World War II have been little discussed. W.G. Sebald's recent nonfiction work,
On the Natural History of Destruction, provoked a surge of interest in Germany's fate; Waters's collection may spark similar interest in post-war Japan. 6-city author tour.