Love You to Pieces
Current mood: content
Category: Writing and Poetry

My anthology Love Yot to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, is about to go into production, although it won't be officially published until next June.  Over the past few weeks I've been busy tying up loose ends, and Beacon Press's designer has come up with a cover.  BP asked if I had any ideas for the cover, and I did.  I suggested using work by Angela Buckland, a South African photogapher whose installations often concern disabled children.  Ms. Buckland is the mother of a disabled child, and a photo of her son, from the series "Where's Nikki?" will appear on the front of my book. 

Currently watching : Grey’s Anatomy - The Complete First Season Release date: 14 February, 2006

4:48 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Losing Kids
Current mood: creative

5:59 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

expat women writers in Japan
Current mood: cheerful

This is the full text of an article that appeared in the June issue of Being A Broad magazine:

Women Writers in Japan

By Suzanne Kamata

As a young aspiring writer, I imagined myself in a garret in New York City, the heart of the literary world, or maybe scribbling in a café in Paris.  Japan never entered my mind.  After all, I could speak a bit of French, and England is just across the water, but even after eighteen years of living in Japan, I'm basically illiterate in Japanese.  And yet a number of Western women have settled into successful careers as writers here in the country of kanji.

Holly Thompson, author of the novel Ash (Stone Bridge Press), about a young woman teaching English in Kagoshima, began writing about Japan while in the United States.  She'd first come here with her husband, a dedicated Japanophile.  "We met in New England while I was still in college and we struck a deal: after marrying, I would teach science for several years as planned, then we'd move to Japan.  And that is what we did."

Thompson and her husband taught at high schools in Kagoshima in the mid-eighties.  They later moved back to New York, until another opportunity arose in 1998 for them to return to Japan.

"Japan is now such a rich source for my writing," Thompson says.  She is now at work on a second novel which also takes place in Japan.  In addition to the landscape of this country, she writes that she is happy to live outside her home culture.  "I like the constant challenge to assumptions, the need to stay on my toes.  I think I tend to observe my surroundings more closely as a result."

For Thompson, the downside to living in Japan is the limited access to books and literary magazines in English, and the relative lack of literary events.  "There are a mere handful of English-language author readings I can go to each year in Tokyo as compared to the daily offerings of big cities in North America.  Conferences and workshops focusing on English-language writing are rare, and resources for writers are limited.  Since I write in English, these are handicaps.  But there are networks for writers such as SWET (Society of Writers, Translators and Editors) and SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) in Japan."

Thompson, who currently teaches creative writing at Yokohama City University, adds that a major benefit of living here is "that I can mine this second culture for inspiration as well as my home culture.  Since I go back and forth from Japan to the U.S. and travel to other countries occasionally as well, my perspective is wider than if I were only in the U.S."

In her capacity as regional adviser for the Tokyo branch of SCBWI, Thompson will be traveling to Mongolia to meet with native writers of children's picture books.  Her own picture book, The Wakame Gatherers, illustrated by Kazumi Wilds, will be published by Shen's Books in California within the next year.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, an associate professor at Aichi University of Education, and an experimental poet, has published more than 100 poems in literary journals abroad and online.  However, she recently published her first book in Japan in a unique arrangement with a Japanese publisher.
 
Joritz-Nakagawa says, "Of the overseas book publishers I knew about that publish the kind of poetry I write, none of them were accepting unsolicited submissions due to funding constraints (English poetry books are financially unprofitable) when I checked into it.  An acquaintance encouraged me to make my own book to carry around to show people my work." 

She asked her sister, an established artist/filmmaker to design the cover and consulted with a Tokyo publisher with whom she'd been producing textbooks. 

"I thought the guy I knew there might be willing to help with producing my poetry book and selling it for me.  He said he would.  So, I decided to produce one or two poetry books on my own with his help and my sister's help, and, if I can work out funding somehow, thought maybe I would try to turn the project, called Avant Books Japan, into a publisher of stylistically innovative poetry publishing other authors too, as there is no publisher that exclusively publishes such work in English based in Japan. The first product of Avant Books Japan is my poetry book Skin Museum which came out in 2006."

Skin Museum earned praise from the likes of established poets Paul Hoover and Marjorie Perloff.  Her next book, currently under production, will be entitled Aquiline.  Like Skin Museum, it will be a compilation of poems previously published in literary journals. 

Although most of her work is published in journals overseas, she is very active in the expat literary scene, such as it is, and often participates in readings.  She was a featured reader at the debut event of Four Stories Japan, organized by Tracy Slater, who founded a successful reading series in Boston.  

"I think the English literary scene in Japan is still developing but has promise."  She says that she'd like to see more journals and readings that showcase women's work. "I've volunteered to organize myself one such reading this year (of female authors exclusively) to help fill the gap."

Joritz-Nakagawa is also organizing the first ever Japan Writers Conference, which will be held in October. 
 
Like Joritz-Nakagawa, writer/illustrator Patty Willis lives far from the neon and open mics of Tokyo.  For the past 22 years, she has lived in a small farming village in Ishikawa, which is the setting for her illustrated juvenile novel, The Village Above the Stars.

Willis's parents are from Wyoming, but her peripatetic family moved to South America when she was two.  As a child, she lived for a time on an island in the Persian Gulf.  Later, while studying medieval French for an M.A., she became interested in women's writing, which later brought her to Japan.

According to Willis, "In medieval France, there were windows of time during which women wrote and their works miraculously survived.  Some of these women, such as Marie de France (12th century poet) lived in relative seclusion, much like the women of Heian Japan.  I am fascinated by these lone voices that speak and sing to us over hundreds of years of silence.  The thought that women were also writing in the courts of medieval Japan during a similar era drew me here to study the words and lives of Murasaki Shikibu and the diary writers of the Heian period."

Once in Japan, Willis embarked on the study of the Japanese language and of Japanese literature in translation, which expanded to religion and the underlying folk culture of Ishikawa prefecture.

Willis began writing plays based on Japanese folktales. "When the Woman Who Loved Insects Hid," her version of a classic Heian era tale, debuted at the Festival Fringe in 1987 in Edinburgh, Scotland. This theater piece, with original music composed by her partner and collaborator Mary Lou Prince for traditional Japanese instruments, was performed in theater festivals around the world.

Their beloved cat Angel inspired the story that would become Willis's novel.  After Angel died, she  "was filled with a kind of missionary spirit to find a publisher for The Village Above the Stars."  In an email Willis writes, "My friend Fumiko  Koshimoto had already completed an excellent translation.  Thinking that Angel's story would disappear drove me to ask a friend who is also director of documentaries if she knew a publisher.   She introduced Jushinsha and in about a month, they called and said they wanted to publish my book. The best part of the process was that they loved my illustrations and asked for 15 more!"

Willis's illustrations combining folk and fantasy are indeed reason enough to get your hands on the book, even if you can't read the Japanese.  A self-taught artist, Willis gained confidence viewing the primitive Christian Coptic art of Egypt and  the Byzantine art of Greece.  "That kind of expression made me think I could be an artist, too.  After buying a book full of beautiful, blank paper on a trip to Spain, I took to it like a mad woman, painting picture after picture, expressing my life beyond words.  Painting has been my greatest gift from living in Japan."

While painting, Willis has continued to write.  Over the past year, she has written a novel about a woman named Mrs. Castleriver and her cat Earl Grey, who live in the valley below the farmhouse she shares with musician Mary Lou Prince, and the story of her life in the village, which became intertwined with that of her great-great-great grandmother who pioneered across the prairies in the mid 1800s while working as a midwife.  Her next project is the illustrated story of Mrs. Castleriver and Earl Grey's journey to India.

Willis herself will also be taking a journey soon.  She and her partner will be leaving Japan.  "Three years ago, we bought a piece of land in the Sonoran desert that is in a migrant bird pathway and at night we hear coyotes calling and the snorting of the javelina (a kind of wild boar).  A Great Horned Owl nests in the trees by the house we just built and the day before we moved in, two owlets were born.  I believe in signs and perhaps it was the birth of the owls more than anything that made me think I could leave Japan and return home."

Although Willis is moving on, she has proved that it is possible to surmount cultural differences and language barriers to achieve success in Japan.  These women show us that it's not where we live that matters, but how well we take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves.  For would-be writers, perhaps the first chance at success is the magazine you are holding in your hands.

For more information on The Village Above the Stars, visit Willis's website:
http://www.christienaprince.com/html/words.html

http://www.scbwi.jp/
http://www.swet.jp/
http://www.fourstories.org

Currently reading : Origin: A Novel By Diana Abu-Jaber Release date: 25 June, 2007

1:31 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Houston, We Have a Title!
Current mood: happy
Category: Writing and Poetry

Currently reading : Meet the Annas: A Musical Novel By Robert Dunn Release date: 01 June, 2007

10:31 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Midori by Moonlight

Check out my interview with Wendy Tokunaga, the author of Midori by Moonlight.  The book features a Japanese heroine, something of a rarity in women's lit, and lots of yummy desserts!  If you're an aspiring writer, I guarantee you'll be inspired by the story of Wendy's rise from self-publishing to the lists of one of this nation's most respected publishing houses.

Currently reading : Woman on the Other Shore: A Novel By Mitsuyo Kakuta Release date: 25 May, 2007

7:12 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

my interview with Angela Aki
Current mood: happy

My interview with Angela Aki appears in the latest issue of http://www.river-f.com/angela/ magazine.

Currently reading : Once in a Promised Land: A Novel By Laila Halaby Release date: 04 January, 2007

10:29 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Japanese mothers-in-law - menacing or mild?
Current mood: aggravated

This is an article I wrote for the now defunct MAINICHI DAILY NEWS on Japanese mothers-in-law:

Menacing Mothers-in-Law Turn Mild

The Japanese mother-in-law looms large in popular imagination.  According to stereotype, she dotes on her eldest son while exacting daily revenge on her daughter-in-law for her own hardships suffered as a young wife.

In my own family, my husband's grandmother seems to have fit this image.  According to various reports, she forced her eldest son to divorce his first two wives because "the didn't match the household."  She settled for the third wife – but made the new wife's life a living hell.

But times are changing. 

Although it was once customary for eldest sons and their families to live with elderly parents, the proportion of three generation households in the country is now less than 15 percent.  Furthermore, the mothers-in-law of the new millennium appear to be a kinder, gentler breed.

Take Chiho Furukawa's mother-in-law, for example.   Furukawa, 33, shares a roof with her farmer husband, two sons, and in-laws in Tokushima Prefecture.  "She is very considerate of me," Furukawa says of her mother-in-law, Katsuko.  "I think it's because she was treated so badly herself."

Furukawa sometimes wishes she and her immediate family could live apart from her inlaws, but she realizes that things could be much worse.  She voluntarily married into a family of pear growers, although most young women reject farmers as suitors due to the hard work involved in agriculture. 

Katsuko's marriage, on the other hand, was arranged by her widower father and her husband's parents.  She was selected by farming neighbors as a bride for their son because she was known to be a hard worker, according to Furukawa.

The farming life took its toll.  Katsuko was hospitalized eight times due to exhaustion from overwork in her new family's pear orchard.  When Furukawa was a child, she sometimes helped out in her own family's orchard, but she hasn't been forced to farm with her husband and his family. 

Until the birth of her eldest son four years ago, she worked in an office.  Her current duties include taking care of her children, cleaning the house and cooking, but her mother-in-law is by no means a slave driver.

When asked who makes the breakfast, Furukawa laughs and says, "The first one to get up."

Although she gets along well enough with her inlaws, she says that she has no desire to spend her free time with them.  "We're together all day," she says, "so I don't want to go out to eat with them."

Forty-one-year-old Kazumi Tamadani, on the other hand, often goes shopping with her own mother-in-law, Hideko.  They even took a trip to Yokohama together recently when Hideko's calligraphy was displayed there for an international exhibition. 

"She considers me a friend and a daughter," Kazumi says.  "But it's taken 20 years for us to get to this point."

Tamadani found her widowed mother-in-law "very kind" at their first meeting, but discovered after moving in with her and her son that the generation gap was difficult to bridge.  "We eat different food, go to sleep at different times, and take baths at different times," she says.  "The first five years were tough."

Like Furukawa, Tamadani married into a Tokushima farming family.  Unlike the younger woman, however, she labored in the fields for 10 years. Then she suffered an aneurysm and was forced to quit. 

These days, Tamadani is once again working hard in the house.  "Every day, I get up at 5 and do my best," she says.  She prepares different meals for her mother-in-law, husband, and son, a junior high school student. 

But Tamadani doesn't blame Hideko for her bout of ill health.  "I realized that if you hate your mother-in-law, she will hate you.  It's important to find the good points in people. Doing something for other people can bring you happiness."

South African Annica Marincowitz found that not even the dreaded foreign daughter-in-law could bring out the bad side of her husband's mother.  "Unlike some other foreigners married to Japanese, I must say that I have never had a problem with her personally." Marincowitz says.  "She was very happy for us when we got married.  I think that was partly because by that time, my husband Fukuo was 34 and not married, and the chances of him doing so must've seemed slim."

Being a long-haired rock 'n' roller who rejected the life of a salaryman – and who works part-time as an English cram-school teacher – he wasn't exactly most Japanese women's dream husband material.

Distance may have meant that Marincowitz's relationship with her mother-in-law was less strained.  "She lives in some kind of old-age home so I never had to do the real chonan no yome thing (taking care of her husband's parents) and live with my mother-in-law, or take care of her or be bossed around by her."

Marincowitz admits that her relationship with her mother-in-law has been short.  She is now seeking a divorce after five years of marriage because she would rather live in South Africa than Japan. 

Even so, her mother-in-law continues to send her birthday gifts – mostly hand-knit sweaters.

"She has only ever been nice to me," Marincowitz says.  "She once told Fukuo that she goes to the shrine every day to pray for the happiness of our marriage.

"I was very touched by that, and I must say that one of the things that makes me sad about the break-up of our marriage is that I feel sorry that she will be disappointed."

Currently reading : The War at Home By Nora Eisenberg Release date: 01 February, 2002

2:26 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Movie of the Week - an essay
Current mood: cranky

It's come to my attention that yet another book about the murder of Shari Smith has been published.  A long time ago, before there were books, I wrote this brief essay:

Movie of the Week

In the made for television movie, William Devane stars as the sheriff.  The other actors – the ones who play Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Shari, her sister, the townspeople – are not so well known.  Watching the movie on video, I think that the young actress who has taken the part of Shari Smith is not as pretty as the original.

The movie is called "Nightmare in Columbia County" – an unfortunate title.  For one thing, there is no Columbia County in South Carolina.  The events took place in Lexington, County, just outside the capital of Columbia.  For another, the title makes it sound like a horror flick.  Then again, I guess it is.

I did not know Shari Smith.  Not personally.  Not well.  To me, she was one of those big-haired girls who flitted through the halls of my new high school.  Beautiful, popular, and outgoing, she was bursting with confidence.  I was an outsider – a Northerner – with the wrong clothes, the wrong hair (short and spiky, not big) and the wrong ancestors.  At lunch in the cafeteria, people still talked about how the Yankees had made off with their great-great grandmothers' silverware.

I had a crush on Shari's boyfriend,a  blue-eyed, All-American guy in my homeroom, and I was jealous of her.  On top of everything else, she could sing the angels out of the sky.  I learned this one day when she soloed during lunch in the cafeteria.  It had something to do with graduation.  I was a senior, so I guess she was singing for me.

She was a junior then.  I had already spent a year at a small Midwestern college when she was kidnapped on the verge of her own graduation.  When I heard the news, I regretted every bad thought I'd ever had about her.

I hated that summer.  The air was hot and still and shrill with cicadas.  I had fallen in love for the first time and had my heart broken, and now I was working the salad bar at Shoney's.  I spent twelve hours a day on my feet doing drudge work – chopping lettuce and tomatoes, wiping the breath marks from the protective glass.  I tried to rest my feet in stolen moments by standing flamingo-style while leaning against the stainless steel counter.  My hair always smelled like grease.  I had no previous work experience other than babysitting and blueberry picking, no qualifications for waiting tables.  My coworkers were convicts on a work-release program.

It was a summer of fear.  Neighbors tied yellow ribbons around their mail boxes.  I read the newspaper every day, desperate for news.  Was she still alive?  Had they found her yet?  And then they did.

Shari Smith was dead.

Cora, the tall African-American woman who was doing time for bad checks, had a scoop. She and I worked the salad bar together.  While we refilled the dressing, she said, "I know someone on the police force.  He said they found her in the woods wrapped in plastic."

None of this made it into the newspapers.  Twelve years alter, I watch the made-for-TV movie and find that it was true.  Shari, who'd been a diabetic, had died that very first day for lack of medicine.  Her abductor had dumped her in the forest.  From the movie I learn that he had been calling the Smith family for weeks and telling them that their daughter was okay.  He called on the phone and said that he was in love with Dawn, Shari's sister, a local pageant winner who'd one day be runner up to Miss America.

I was nineteen years old.  I went out at night, went dancing, and hung out with my friends at the Capitol Café, eating brains and grits.  I went home at three a.m.  People told me stories about escaped convicts creeping into the houses of innocents.  The night janitor at Shoney's was a murderer.

I'd spent most of my life in Grand Haven, a tourist town on the shores of Lake Michigan.  The entire time I'd lived there, only one local murder made the headlines.  It was a domestic squabble, or a crime of passion – nothing that affected my sense of safety.

A boy I'd known in elementary school died in a freak snowmobile accident.  Another died of cancer.  But I'd never known a murder victim, not even remotely. Shari's death was a shock I couldn't absorb.

I went for walks – long walks to clear my mind, along the tree-lined country road.  It's all tract housing now, but then the pines were thick all the way to Scrub Oak Farm, where the cows grazed on an embankment.  There was corn across the road.  The only jarring part of the walk was a house mid-way with a yard full of dogs.  Whenever I walked past, the dogs started barking, lurching, straining at their chains.  I crossed to the other side of the road when I went by and tried not to wince.

I heard a lot of rumors that summer.  I heard that the man who lived in the house with the dogs was a suspect in the murder of Shari Smith.  I heard that the murderer had chosen his next victim, and that she was blonde and blue-eyed.  Well, so was I.  I stopped taking walks.

The second victim was a little girl who lived in a trailer park. She was found a few days later, and then Larry Gene Bell, an electrician, was arrested.

The man was clearly insane.  During his trial, a year later, I was working at the local newspaper.  Accounts of Bell's courtroom antics filled pages of print.  When asked a question, he'd say, "Silence is golden."  Once, he stood up and proposed marriage to Dawn Smith, who sat horrified in the courtroom.  Someone on staff at the newspaper said that the murders had been good for business.  I couldn't tell if he was being cynical or not.

By the time I watch the made-for-television movie, Larry Gene Bell is about to be executed.  I am living in Japan, which boasts one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world.  I am past the age of victims favored by serial killers.

At the end of the movie, a photo of Shari Smith flashes on screen.  It's the photo that appears in my high school yearbook.  How out of date that Farrah hairstyle looks, I think.  And no one would wear blue eye shadow like that anymore.  It happened all so long ago.  It is dark outside and I am alone in the house.

Currently reading : Buffalo Boy And Geronimo By James Janko Release date: January, 2006

6:08 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Losing Kei available for Pre-order!
Current mood: happy

Losing Kei is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com!  Hooray!

Of course, it's best if you buy books from your local independent bookstore, but if you're stuck on an island in the Pacific like me, you might not have much of a choice...

Currently reading : Losing Kei By Suzanne Kamata Release date: January, 2008

4:43 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Daruma
Current mood: creative
Category: Writing and Poetry

Daruma

I'm all for rituals, so I decided I'd begin my next big writing project with one. I bought a papier mache daruma doll and colored in one eye, as per custom. Often, Japanese politicians color in an eye of a daruma as they embark on a campaign and then color in the other eye after they've won the election. I'm going to color in the other eye after I've finished the novel that I've just begun to write. (It may be a long, long, time, but I look forward to that day.) In the meantime, I've thought of some other little things I can do to mark my progress, such as bottle of champagne after every 5,000 words. It'll have to be the cheap kind, though.

Currently reading : Midori by Moonlight By Wendy Tokunaga Release date: 18 September, 2007

5:35 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment