TURNING JAPANESE

David Galef

THE PERMANENT PRESS, SAG HARBOR, NEW YORK, $16, ISBN 1-57962-010-8

TORAWARE

Robert W. Norris

TOUKA SHOBO, FUKUOKA, \1,300, ISBN 4-924527-93-9

By WILLIAM CORR

Whether s/he has anything of interest to say or not, the writer of fiction is driven to create by an inner daemon which endures no prolonged refusal. By nature, expatriate writers are uniquely alienated, detached, self-absorbed and narcissistic. For the expatriate writer tackling the plethoric material Japan offers, the essentially neurotic compulsion to express oneself in prose proves irresistible.

Has any expatriate bibliophile listed the works of fiction in English set in the Kansai? It would be a surprisingly long list, but most such novels are mercifully forgotten by all but their writers within a year or two. That said, here are two novels crafted in excellent style and patiently honed. Indeed, earlier drafts of chapters in Galef's book have appeared in several magazines, including KTO.

An expatriate writing about Japan encounters an inescapable difficulty: s/he must make the exotic and alien comprehensible to the reader in Peoria without infuriating the reader in Sakai. In this delicate task, Galef and Norris have succeeded admirably. If there is a superfluous gram of daikon or nori for the Sakai reader, there is just sufficient for the Peoria purchaser to appreciate that he is entering an unknown world where different words are spoken and very different rules apply.

Galef's Turning Japanese, arguably the more ambitious and experimental in scope, is about a young male American teacher of English and unrecognized writer resident in Kansai. Norris's Toraware coincidentally, embraces the very same theme yet these are two very different novels in structure, style and characterization.

In Turning Japanese, Galef has created a memorable anti-hero in Cricket Collins, a self-absorbed and insufferable bore who eventually goes gaga on his return to the U.S.A. after a curiously ill-explained breakdown in Shanghai. The novel opens with him resenting the prying solicitude of his dorm mother so bitterly that he becomes a furtive kleptomaniac solely to perplex and infuriate her, conduct which results in his ignominious dismissal from his first job.

By contrast, the central character of Toraware, a thirty-three-year-old drifter, Vietnam vet (they will be with us for another half-century, alas, dear reader) and wannabe writer called Harlan, is a confused but far more sympathetic figure who endures personal and emotional vicissitudes, but for whom all comes right in the end, just as in a fairy tale. Infantile-regressive readers who insist on a happy ending will stick to Toraware, because Turning Japanese ends sadly, albeit with the shadowy half-promise of a happy ending in a chapter one presumes to have been written and discarded after much reflection.

Cricket and Harlan are convincing, polydimensional but decidedly irritating creations; both are introspective and glum more often than not and both have complex and unsatisfactory relationships with Japanese women while avoiding the company of their own kind. This is an underlying implausibility if only because Americans, optimistic and adaptable by nature, are generally able to 'take it on the chin and move on', as V.S. Naipaul so memorably phrased the ideal response to rejection, disappointment and despair.

The delectable camerawork of the otherwise all-too-forgettable and lamentable film Black Rain transformed Osaka into a nightmarish city of gangsters, counterfeiters and whores worthy of George Grosz or Bertolt Brecht. Capturing the essence of an inchoate urban landscape in prose is still trickier: 'a dirty, desecrated, scrounging metropolis where the buildings were touched with a rat-like grimace, the trees had a spiderish look about them, and the people were soot-stained and dead-looking' (from Toraware). Can this hideous vision, suggestive of Bosch, really be Osaka, our beloved Naniwa?

If mirroring one's own culture sympathetically yet accurately is difficult, describing that of another is doubly so. In their various relationships with Japanese people Cricket and Harlan were spared the indescribable horrors of life within the bosom of a Japanese family, where whispered secret conversations about trifles and tiresome squabbles about nothing of any real consequence can alternate with frozen polite silences which last weeks or months. Despite this, both writers have captured the unassuagable melancholy at the deepest core of the Japanese soul.

The Japanese characters in both novels are wholly convincing, no small achievement in itself. The ambivalence and spiritual guilt of Yoshiko, one of the tragic heroines of Toraware, about an abortion she underwent years ago, is perfectly captured. Did Yoshiko ever visit a shrine with infantile stone figures and sob quietly as she wrapped one in a knitted jacket? And who was the real-life model for the TESOL-bore showman who makes a brief appearance at a JALT workshop in Toraware, like Eleanor Roosevelt in a Solzhenitsyn novel? And will Reiko and Herbert fall in love in the sequel to Turning Japanese? Having made their novels believable and their characters into people no less real than Sam Weller or Portnoy, Galef and Norris have succeeded in convincing us of the reality of their vision. Read both.

(November 1998)