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The Snow Fox is available
at
BarnesandNoble.com.
Certain events are destined to stay with you forever, even the smallest things,
at the time seeming completely trivial, as insignificant as an item on a
shopping list. I sometimes think that even first loves are among these. As
consuming as first loves may be, we tend to think passing time will dull
even those. Yet some first loves remain as indelible as ever. When I was
taken to see Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, my first foreign
film, that event became one of those essential, ineradicable encounters.
Subsequently, I watched the movie at least every year, and during one Christmas
vacation, was watching it again when I began to wonder what happened to the
head samurai after he had helped save the peasant village from maruading
bandits who plundered their crops and threatened their women every autumn.
I wanted to know, in short, what happened after the film ended.
Stupidity can be a wonderful thing. For me, it is probably a necessary ally.
It allowed me to begin working on what was to become The Snow Fox,
suffering as I did from the delusion that I could learn enough about the
world portrayed in The Seven Samurai and then I would write a novel
limiting itself to what I could know about the world of the film--almost
as if the film itself was a time capsule and everything necessary would be
contained in it. I would watch and rewatch the movie. Then, using what
information I could begin writing.
Alas for me, Akira Kurosawa knew everything about Japanese history and he
was particularly well-versed in the Sengoku Jidai, the period of the country
at war, an era that both destroyed and then succeeded the Heian period. And
so what I had envisioned to be a relatively self-contained endeavor forced
me into one of the most intensive periods of learning I have ever experienced.
There were so many things I could not understand, not the least of which
were many tenets of the samurai code. Why was it taken for granted that a
samurai would unquestionably obey an order to murder a member of his own
family if his daimyo, or clan lord, ordered him to do so? Why was
it sometimes possible to disobey if a samurai was ordered to put his father
to death, whereas he had no choice if ordered to murder his wife, children
or any other of his relatives?
The few Japanese I then knew would try to answer my questions, but they were
often put in the position of trying to explain what was, to them, the obvious.
If a samurai were forced to obey an order to murder a member of his family,
why was that puzzling? This, in turn, led to other questions. Why did the
Japanese I knew, most of whom were younger than I am, assume that if one
of their parents fell ill in Japan, they had to return to care for their
parents, even if this meant they would lose the opportunity to win the green
card they had worked for for years? One person I knew went back knowing she
would lose the opportunity to take advantage of a United States amnesty.
One such friend went back to take care of his father even though his father
had beaten him--and his mother--throughout most of his childhood. He had
run away when he was fifteen and lived first in the Phillipines, then in
the Amazon, then in Ecuador. But when his father fell ill, he went back and
he stayed with his father in the hospital until he died and stayed on until
he was sure his mother was strong enough to proceed with her own life.
It did not take me long to realize that the Japanese sensibility--or culture--I
still haven't decided if these are two different things, were entirely different
from mine. Then a Japanese woman told me that she did not believe that the
Japanese sensibility, the Japanese mind, had changed since the time of Lady
Murasaki's The Tale of Genji. At first, I thought this a preposterous
statement, but I was to discover that she was right.
It don't know how many books I had read, how many films by all Japanese film
makers I had seen, when I realized, unhappily, that I simply did not understand
the Japanese mind well enough. It was at that point when I invited two Japanese
students who were having trouble making ends meet to live in our house. I
never found anyone Japanese who struck me as inscrutable, quite the reverse.
In fact, they seemed willing to tell me almost anything. The problem lay
in my understanding what I was being told. What I was coming to understand
was how complex if not unravellable assumptions underlying even the simplest
acts or statements were. I had run straight into what professionals call
"cross-cultural" problems.
Soon after the two college students moved in I found myself involved in amazing
intricacies about who seemed to owe me what. One morning, I said that we
were going to live like a family, and there was no need for Byzantine approaches
to everything. This edict seemed to simplify life in the house, but I soon
learned that we had hardly reached a state of simplicity. And then one day
I realized that I had to learn Japanese. There seemed to be too much I was
losing in translation when I spoke English and the same thing occurred when
one of the students spoke English that had been translated from Japanese.
My demented way of learning Japanese probably helped, not because I learned
to speak in normal conversation because I had an unfortunate tendency to
want to learn to say things like, "There is a ghost (or demon or crazy person)
on the shinkansen," or "There are cats sitting on the clouds," or
"A bird is singing in the cat." One friend warned me that when I got to Japan
I was not going to be able to ask for a glass of water and in fact, that
turned out to be the case. I was forever drawing little, incomprehensible
pictures meant to convey this simplest expressions or problems. Regardless
of how idiotic were my sentences, the mere fact that I was, at least, trying
to speak Japanese led to a kind of hilarious intimacy.
But I think that learning Japanese gave me what I needed. I found that the
Japanese rarely use the word "I." In fact, they avoid using pronouns altogether.
"Why?" was not a frequently used question. Even singular and plural often
do not exist. Is a man giving a woman one flower or many flowers? Or is he
giving a flower (or flowers) to many women? There is a vagueness built into
the Japanese language, one which allows a certain degree of ambiguity, and
often, as a consequence, allows people to avoid embarassment. The Japanese
are happy with ambiguity; they believe in isshin denshin, wordless
communication which makes speaking unnecessary. And it may well be true that
the Japanese are more intuitive than people who rely far more heavily on
words. Certainly this would have been true hundreds of years ago when people
lived in small villages and knew one another inside out. It would certainly
have been more true when almost everyone subscribed to the same assumptions,
assumptions that now seem to be breaking down during this generation. But
I wonder how well isshin denshin allows wordless understanding. One
evening, a small argument erupted at a party. The next day, I asked five
people what had happened. I was given five different explanations, but each
of the five believed that he and the others had experienced precisely the
same thing.
And this was only the beginning. The Japanese are not comfortable demonstrating
affection in a way with which we are accustomed. One friend told me that
there was very little touching between many family members. When she was
to go back to Japan in the summer, her father, she told me, would not kiss
her nor would he touch her. I asked her what he would do if his daughter
did kiss him; after all, she had been westernized. Without hesitation, she
said, "He would punch me in the mouth." When we went to Japan, our friend,
with whose mother we stayed, never touched her, nor did she touch him, but
when he unrolled his futon on the tatami, his mother would jump up, take
either her sewing or her ironing into the room with him, and begin working
approximately one yard away from his head. Her happiness irradiated the room.
When I told her what a lovely person her son was, her eyes filled with tears.
But she would not permit her son to see such a display.
As I continued my reading about both the Heian Period and the Sengoku Jidai,
I became interested in the figure of Ono No Komachi, said to be the most
beautiful Japanese woman who had ever lived, and the only woman numbered
among the one hundred best poets of her time, each of the one hundred
contributing one poem to the collection of one hundred poems by one hundred
poets included in the hyakunin isshu. Not very much is known about
her, but she is said to have been very cruel to her suitors. Some of the
few legends that survive about her life became sources for events in The
Snow Fox. The ways in which she expressed her love for Matsuhito, and
in which he demonstrated his love to her, were modelled on the way I had
seen the Japanese behave under similar circumstances. Their sense of guilt,
their sense of duty--these two were comprehensible, finally, through my
understanding of the Japanese friends I had come to know well, and oddly,
it was my learning Japanese that taught me what I needed to understand.
You begin to work on something, to try and understand it, and, if it does
not seem simple, at least it does not seem impossible. For years, I have
been saying that you can understand what you can know and that writing is
the autobiography of the imagination. People say, as if this commandment
were written in stone, Write about what you know. But what do we know? We
know what we have experienced. We think we know what other people have told
us about their lives. This is especially true within families. We assume
that we know what the people around us are like. But does this mean we are
to be forever limited by those whom we encounter? Really, we encounter very
few as we move through our physical lives. Probably in the end, it is true
to say we should write about what we know, but why assume that we can know
only who or what walks in or out of our rooms under ordinary circumstances?
We can learn about other people's lives by observing other people; we can
learn about them by asking them to share our experiences, and when they are
willing to do so, we have expanded what--and who--we know. And if we have
understood those people, imaginatively, as we are destined to understand
even those closest to us through our imaginations, we know those people as
well as we know anyone else.
I may be foolish, but I think in the end I came to understand my Japanese
friends as well as I could understand anyone else. It is a little frightening
to think how many things I still do not know. It took me six years to reach
the understanding I have now, and of course, that understanding is not complete.
In that time, I could have written three Ph.D s. It is not too much to say
that I loved every minute of it, and still do. I am still learning Japanese,
although these days I seem to be struggling not to forget what I have already
learned. I am still collecting and scrutinizing Japanese dolls, many of whom
became models for the characters in The Snow Fox. It was as if one
doll, a Heian poetess, would suddenly begin telling her own story. Then a
somewhat battered samurai doll would have something to say. Kimonos began
to exude their own atmosphere, especially when I began sleeping beneath two
or three of them at a time. And then one day it is like slipping on ice and
you find yourself slipping and skidding into the world of The Snow Fox.
At that moment, every moment of the six years somehow grows golden, a great
adventure, one of the best I have ever had, or ever expect to have
again.
The Snow Fox is available at
BarnesandNoble.com.
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