Rebecca Copeland's Blog, page 10

On Missing the Aoi Matsuri

In The Kimono Tattoo, main character Ruth Bennett keeps an eye on the Japanese seasons. She knows when it’s appropriate to wear unlined kimonos or to dispense with long sleeves. Knowing of her fastidiousness, I was surprised when she forgot to celebrate the Aoi Matsuri! The oversight shocked Ruth a bit, too.

This year I noticed that even Kyoto overlooked the Aoi Matsuri. Throughout the last two years, the city has canceled a number of celebrations in light of the COVID pandemic.

In honor of the festival and the city I love so much, I dedicate this post to the Aoi Matsuri.

What is the Aoi Matsuri?Aoi Matsuri Parade, May 15, 2005, photograph by Darwin Cruz Wikimedia Commons

Held on the 15th day of the Fifth Month, the Aoi Matsuri is one of three large festivals unique to Kyoto. (The others are the Gion, held in July, and the Jidai—or History Festival—held in October.) Ostensibly an agrarian rite to ward off malign spirits and pray for bountiful harvests, the Aoi Festival predates the founding of Kyoto. Once the court relocated to the area in 794, the festival transformed into a recognition of the power and prestige of the Kamo Shrines — the Kamigamo and the Shimogamo. On the day of the festival, participants dressed in period costumes process from the Imperial Palace along busy Kyoto streets.

Today the festival calls back to an earlier era in the city’s history when elegant men and women traveled by lumbering bullock carts.

The word “aoi” refers to a plant with green leaves. Usually, the word is translated “hollyhock,” but I prefer the word Edward Seidensticker used in his translation of The Tale of Genji, “heartvine.” The leaf is shaped like a delicate heart.

Heartvine, Wikimedia Commons

On the day of the festival, those in the procession pin the leaves to their caps and garments. Even the massive oxen are decorated appropriately, with bright vermilion cords and festive drapes.

The Aoi Matsuri always reminds me of a dramatic scene in The Tale of Genji, a brilliant episodic court tale attributed to a Japanese court lady known as Murasaki Shikibu. In the scene crowds of spectators come to observe the dashing prince Genji process during the Aoi Matsuri. Genji’s primary wife, Aoi, is among the spectators. She has arrived in a lavish cart with outriders and servants wearing matching attire—quite a spectacle!

Another one of Genji’s paramours is there as well, the Rokujō Lady. She has traveled discreetly in a modest carriage, hoping to remain incognito. Aoi’s men soon recognize Rokujō’s men and the two groups begin to fight.

In the melee, Rokujō’s tiny carriage is pushed back behind the rows of other carts and is damaged. Rokujō is trapped. She cannot leave the parade grounds, and she cannot see her beloved as he passes. All she can do is sit in her carriage mortified, her heart in turmoil.

Tosa Mitsunobu Illustration to Chapter 9 of the Tale of Genji Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Wikimedia Commons

Later in the chapter, Aoi goes into labor with Genji’s child. Her body, weakened by pregnancy, grows susceptible to restless spirits that make delivery difficult.

Noh Costume (Karaori) with Court Carriages, early 19th Century, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons

Her father calls in exorcists who manage to cast out all but one tenacious spirit. We soon learn that this is Rokujō’s spirit. So distraught had she been over her humiliation at the Aoi Festival, she sends her spirit forth—from her living body—to possess her rival.

Aoi will eventually give birth to a beautiful boy, but she will die in the aftermath. Rokujō will henceforth be recognized for the power of her revenge—known either as the epitome of female jealousy or the model of female agency.

This scene from the Aoi Festival and the dramatic passion it unleashes has served as creative fodder for later Noh dramas, films, feminist fiction, and manga!

When Noh actors perform the scene, the man playing the role of Rokujō often wears a robe decorated with a cartwheel motif.

The cartwheel echoes the passion-pitched battle at the Aoi Matsuri. These wheels remind us that the women in The Tale of Genji are irrevocably tied to the wheel of fate, tied to this world by their love, their desire, and their jealousy.

Cartwheel motif on a tea caddy. Author’s photo.

The cartwheel motif is popular in other media as well. Here I share a lacquer tea caddy—used to contain the powdery green matcha tea in a tea ceremony. The lid is decorated with a symbol associated with an “incense matching” game and also has the buried cartwheel motif. Elegance and a gentle reference to the wheel of fate—all is impermanent, especially beauty and love.

The spiritual power manifest in the scene also informs my novel, The Kimono Tattoo. Although not in any way a direct reference to The Tale of Genji, the story nevertheless pulses with the same kind of simmering passion produced by a woman’s pain.

You can learn more about the Aoi Matsuri and hear a reading from The Kimono Tattoo in this Instagram Live video I made on May 14, 2022.

May the Aoi Matsuri return to Kyoto next year—and may the city welcome the return of tourists, too. Until that day, we can always travel vicariously through art.

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Kyoto Thrills: A New Review of The Kimono Tattoo

I’m so happy to have this new review of The Kimono Tattoo in the Kyoto Journal. Many thanks to David Cozy, Kyoto Journal’s Reviews editor, for writing it! —Rebecca

David Cozy is a writer and critic who has lived in Japan for several decades. His fiction and essays have appeared in the Kyoto Journal, The Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Antigonish Review, and Faces in the Crowds: A Tokyo International Anthology. In addition to reviewing books for the Kyoto Journal and the Japan Times, he has also written for Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and The British Journal of Aesthetics.

Kyoto Thrills

An academic out of a job getting by as a translator in Kyoto is approached by a mysterious woman in a kimono who offers her a remunerative job translating a novel, chapter by chapter, as it is written. The ostensible author of the novel, long thought to be dead, is the disowned scion of a family that has been in the kimono business for generations; the novel describes a crime: the murder of a woman with a full-body tattoo designed to look like a kimono. Add that the translator’s brother disappeared when they were both children and you have the threads—or most of them—that Copeland skillfully weaves together to give us a thriller that is thrilling indeed.

That it’s never easy to stop turning the pages of Copeland’s novel is a testament to her skill, especially when one considers the chances she has taken. In choosing, for example, to teach her readers about Japan, about Kyoto, and about kimono, she runs the risk of being pedantic in the worst as-you-know-Bob style. She manages, though, to fold what she teaches us into her narrative in such a way that, far from slowing her story to a slog, it instead makes the feverish page-turning a richer experience.

In addition, she does something that is rarely seen in fiction by non-Japanese about Japan: She gets the place right. The characters seem like people rather than exotic caricatures, and the Kyoto she creates will be recognizable to those who know it, enticing to those who don’t.

Sometimes, perhaps in an effort to paint Kyoto in its best light, she overdoes it just a bit: Surely some Kyotoites live in characterless 2DKs rather than the elegant dwellings in which most of Copeland’s characters reside? We don’t read novels like this one, though, for unmitigated reality, so even the occasional indulgence in real estate porn doesn’t go amiss. It’s more fun to read about rooms done in a “tasteful, minimalist style, a hinoki slab table in the center, and a single cushion,” than the plastic of a unit bath.

The prose in which Copeland tells her story is efficient: It moves things along, and that’s as it should be in this kind of novel. There are, however, moments when Copeland’s writing rises above the merely serviceable as when she describes the mysterious kimono-clad woman who hires our protagonist: “I caught a glimpse of her teeth. They were deeply discolored, perhaps from smoking. . . . The contrast between the decayed interior of her mouth and the genteel nature of her gesture was a bit disconcerting.”

Copeland does something that is increasingly rare in genre writers: she doesn’t seem to be setting herself up to write a series of books featuring her translator-sleuth. The loose ends are all neatly tied off at the end, perhaps because Copeland has a day job as a professor of Japanese language and literature and doesn’t need to support herself by making up stories. Still, this story is so much fun that one hopes she lead us on another Kyoto adventure.

The post Kyoto Thrills: A New Review of The Kimono Tattoo appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Going LIVE: Boy’s Day and Self-Promotion

Writing a book is hard work!

Promoting it may be even harder! I thought when I finished my novel, all I had to do was ship it off to my publisher and then get started on my second.

Wishful thinking.

Once the book was in the pipeline, I needed to work on the marketing. First, there was the cover reveal, then the book release, and after that there’s everything else.

I peddle my wares on Twitter, joining “Writers Lifts” and “Shameless Self-Promotions.”

I created a Facebook page just for my author self and post announcements there as well as on my personal page.

I have this website that I feed regularly with little essays—like this one—and I’ve joined a group on Medium devoted to Japan. I hawk my novel there as well.

None of this feels natural. To be honest, it makes me queasy. I don’t know if it’s the modesty I learned growing up in the South, the self-effacement of my missionary parents, the Japanese inclination to humility, a combination of all these, or just my personal disposition, but I HATE the constant din, din, din of drum beating associated with my own book.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be adverse to others singing my praises—occasionally—though in all honesty that makes me feel itchy, too, when it goes on too long. I’m proud of my work, and I delight in the recognition it receives. But I’d rather not be the horn blower. And I’d rather not be in the room when others are blowing the horns, either.

When my publisher recommended posting a live video on Instagram, I was skeptical, but, I am an obedient little self-promoter, so I thought I’d give it a try.

May 5th was fast approaching, and I thought I could take the opportunity to “go live” with a brief discussion of the seasonal observation, now known as “Children’s Day” (Kodomo no hi) but earlier known as Tango no sekku (Celebration of the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month—of the Lunar Calendar).

Postcard of Boy’s Day Display

Why is May 5th important in Japan? It’s one of five prominent seasonal celebrations in Japan or go-sekku. The long history of the celebration begins in China, as does much of Japanese traditional culture. Eventually it became part of the Japanese court and was initially known as the Iris Festival of Shōbu-no-sekku. Courtly events revolved around the beauty of the blossoms, the length and shape of the roots, and the medicinal properties of the leaves.

When samurai families dominated the court, the festival shifted to a focus on boys. Unlike the aristocrats, who valued daughters for the perpetuation of political clout, samurai families privileged boys.

A family with boys would fly streamers above their house, shaped like a carp, one streamer for each boy.

Carps are vigorous, powerful fish. We admire them today in ornamental ponds as they come in vibrant colors like oversized goldfish.

There’s a legend of a group of fish challenged to scale a waterfall to reach the opening to a cave at the summit. All the fish gave up, unable to even imagine swimming up a waterfall. The carp persisted, ascended the pillar of water, and in so doing transformed into a dragon.

The carp shaped kites, known as koinobori, that fly over rice fields, rooftops, and riversides, commemorate this legend and the courage of the carp. Koi means carp; and nobori is from the verb “noboru” to climb.

The eye of a koinobori

For my first live event, I collected images of koinobori and other May 5th displays. And then, with a plentitude of “ums” and “uhs” I stammered my way through my presentation—unable to really tell if anyone was listening or not.

I have to say, I enjoyed the live sharing of stories on Instagram more than the self-selling on Twitter.

Let me know what you think.

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For more on the Children’s Day Celebration, read this article by Diane Neill Tincher

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On Drinking Beer Under the Yamanote Line with a World Famous Translator

The elevator ride to the ninth floor left me woozy.  I was already nervous.  What if he turned me down?  

“Enter,” he barked when I knocked on his office door. I pushed the door open just enough to squeeze through and met his gaze. His eyes, slightly magnified behind the thick lenses of his glasses, were icy blue. 

Ed-Seidensticker-Ueno-Fall-2006

Edward Seidensticker, the famed translator of both modern and classical Japanese literature, waved me in.  

“Yes?”

“Oh, hello Professor my name is Rebecca McCornac.”

Whew, so far so good. When I first met Professor Edward Said a year earlier I was so tongue-tied I couldn’t even say my name correctly.  “My name is Beck, I mean Rebecca, uh, Copeland, no I mean McCornac.”  

He stared at me like I was a lunatic. 

“You don’t even know your own name?” 

In my defense, I had just married that summer and was still adjusting to the change. 

Said smiled when I explained my momentary memory lapse.

Now here I was before another literary luminary. Seidensticker terrified me.  He was known to make students cry. In fact, all the famous professors back then made students cry.  Women, men, it didn’t matter. They were equal opportunity terrorizers.  I think they enjoyed it—almost as if they were competing with one another for the vials of tears shed.

When I squeezed myself into Professor Seidensticker’s office, my stomach still trying to catch up after the lightning fast ascent to the 9th floor, he smiled.

“I know who you are.”

Well, it would have surprised me if he didn’t. I was in his Genji seminar that semester at Columbia University, and there were only three of us in the room! Still, I didn’t want to presume.

“What may I do for you?”

“I wanted to ask you to be my dissertation advisor…I mean, if you have the time.”  

He asked me about my proposed topic and when I told him I wanted to work on the woman writer Uno Chiyo, he placed his elbows on the desk before him and tented his fingers just under his nose, almost as if he had decided to take a moment of prayer.  This worried me.  

Uno Chiyo was not an obvious choice for dissertation research perhaps.  Only one of her stories was translated into English, and she wasn’t as well studied as a writer like Tanizaki or Kawabata, both of whom Seidensticker had spent time with. Besides, few worked on contemporary writers at the time, preferring the subject of their study to be already dead, their literary corpus complete. And even fewer worked on contemporary women writers.

Author with Uno Chiyo 1986

I don’t even remember the ride down on the elevator or the walk to the subway where I took the IRT back to my apartment near Van Cortland Park in the Bronx.

In the year that followed I secured a Fulbright-Hays grant and headed to Tokyo.  I spent my days at the Nihon Kindai Bungakukan Library near Komaba Station reading through Uno Chiyo’s twelve-volume zenshū and the long list of journal articles and book chapters devoted to her.  When I had collected enough material and began to draft chapters, I would meet Professor Seidensticker to share my progress with him.

He liked to meet at the Imperial Hotel. 

“It’s not anything like the earlier one,” he groaned. “It’s not Frank Lloyd Wright.”  

He would describe the splendor of the earlier structure as we walked from the glittering lobby of the hotel to the yatai stands under the tracks near Yūrakuchō. We’d find two open stools and there we’d sit, sipping beer and eating yakitori as he read through my chapter.

“You misspelled accommodate again.”  

He was punctilious when it came to spelling and grammar. 

“I don’t know why you can’t get it right. Two c’s, two m’s.”

Back in those days, I typed my chapter drafts on a portable Smith Corona electric typewriter. If I made a mistake I had to backtrack over the word with eraser tape or else use white out. I always got ahead of my hands, thinking faster than I could type. Mistakes were inevitable, awful, and everywhere. It was not difficult to annoy Seidensticker with my gaffes.

But he was incomparably kind to me, even when he was gruff. We never spent long on my drafts.  He read them, grumbled a bit over my mistakes, and then told me to write more.  

“Continue.”  

Once released, we turned to our beers and skewers of chicken. I still have the outline I shared with him, spotted with brown taré sauce.

The dissertation outline, with a taré-fingerprint on the back page

Frequently he would note what I was wearing and compliment me. All my clothes were either secondhand or purchased in bargain shops. One day I wore a pale yellow dress with a flounce at the knee. It was covered in lavender dots and accented with a yellow and lavender striped tie.  (I guess I thought it was attractive! When I try to describe it now, it sounds clown like.)

That’s a lovely shade of lavender,” Seidensticker said. “Lavender is my favorite color.”  

It’s mine now, I wanted to tell him. 

I like beautiful things,” he told me once. “And you are beautiful.”

We hadn’t even started drinking. I suppose his statement might have been kind of creepy. But I understood that he was not making a pass at me. Nor did he see me as “a thing.” He simply liked me. And, I liked him. I enjoyed our time together under the Yamanote tracks drinking beer.

Later, when my marriage hit the rocks, and I was faced with a decision: divorce or leave my tenure-track job to follow my husband in his career pursuit, Seidensticker supported my decision to do the latter. When I had the opportunity to return to the tenure track, Seidensticker was there to encourage me.

Over the years I would meet Professor Seidensticker whenever I traveled to Tokyo for research, usually in the summer. We would meet in front of the Mitsukoshi Department store and walk from there to a Chinese restaurant he enjoyed.  

A number of years later, we shifted to an Indian restaurant.  

As the years passed, Ed (by then I had grown almost comfortable calling him “Ed”) was unsteady on his feet. He walked slowly and with a cane. As the sidewalks were narrow, it was difficult for me to walk alongside him. Pedestrians would push passed us in a huff, elbowing me sharply as they did.  I understood their frustration. But if only they knew that I was accompanying the famous translator of the Tale of Genji, the man who had assisted Kawabata Yasunari win the Nobel Prize in literature. To unsuspecting eyes, he and I were just annoyances.

Ed never entered the world of email. He and I communicated by letters, post cards, and phone calls. I still have the letters and cards he sent me. Now that I am a professor with graduate students of my own, I am amazed by his ability to keep up with these correspondences. I can hardly respond punctually to the emails I receive!

Author’s image. Year of the Dog, 1994

Ed’s feebleness led to a few hospital stays following hip replacements and other surgeries. I enjoyed visiting him in the hospital, bringing him books to read and the latest issue ofthe Economist, his favorite magazine. (He studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder before switching to an English major.)  

We talked about the Yomiuri Giants, whom he hated, the summer sumō tournament and all the foreign wrestlers, gossip from Columbia University, and whatever else we happened upon. As much as I hated to see him in a hospital bed, I enjoyed the afternoons we spent together. In the past when we met in restaurants, we were usually joined by another friend or former student. In the hospital I had him all to myself. That is, until one of his neighbors came by to visit. The man who looked after him the most called him, affectionately, Seiden-san or when they joked, “Seiden-chan.”  Ed was well loved. I enjoyed watching him interact with his neighbor, his defenses down, the crustiness that had terrified me for so long evaporated.

Ed fell in the spring of 2007 on his way into Ueno Park. He never recovered consciousness.  I like to think of his spirit still lingering there, happily, over the traces of the Tokyo he loved so much. His ashes are interred at a Jōdō Shin temple in Bunkyō-ku. Ed does not have a separate grave but his name is memorialized on a stone, along with other citizens of the area.  

エドワード·Gサイデンステッカー

Author’s image. Ed’s name on the memorial stone.

His name stands out from the others that surround it, and yet, it also blends in.  Like Ed. Walking forever the streets of Shitamachi.

Top photo of tree in bloom by Don Kawahigashi on Unsplash

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Put your Earphones On! The Kimono Tattoo Audiobook is Here!

When you write, do you hear voices in your head? Do the words on the page turn color? Do they fly?

When I was writing The Kimono Tattoo, the scenes unfurled on the screen of my imagination. They were most vibrant when I went out for my morning run. There must be something about the pulsing of the blood through my veins, the pounding against my temples that made the scenes rush forward in a tumble of images and voices. Perhaps the intense focus on pushing ahead funneled my energy into the chambers of my imagination. Or maybe it was just the lack of oxygen!

I was excited to see The Kimono Tattoo finally published. Holding it, fanning through the pages, made me flush with joy. But then, there was something almost too final about the moment. The scenes stopped rushing through me. There was a sense of stasis. The running was over.

When I learned my book was scheduled to appear in audio form, I felt a twinge of the earlier excitement. We were moving again. At the same time, I was skeptical. Would it sound right? Would the narrator understand the voices in my head? Would she run, too? What about all those Japanese words? What if she mangled the pronunciation? Truly, there are fewer things more annoying to me than fake Southern accents and mangled Japanese pronunciation!

When I learned my book was scheduled to appear in audio form, I felt a twinge of the earlier excitement. We were moving again. At the same time, I was skeptical. Would it sound right? Would the narrator understand the voices in my head?

A few weeks after I learned the book was being recorded, the narrator, Theresa Bakken, sent me a sample. I was surprised that she’d recorded Chapter Three since it’s the most complex chapter in the book. Its where I experimented with different narrative styles: diary, letter, a story-within-a-story. There are also different axes of time and three different first-person narrators. There was all that and the Japanese words: proper names, terms, and titles. I was certain the audio would be a disaster.

Narrator Theresa Bakken. Credit: Anna Bakken

I loaded the snippet on my phone and curled up in bed, prepared to be disappointed. I was immobile, frozen in place. But Theresa’s voice was warm and textured. It soared and dipped and glided, speeding up here, pausing there. When Theresa came to the line:

The sun was bright above him. I could almost taste the salt in the air and feel the breeze tangling his hair.
Her voice carried the color of the scene, the brightness, the élan. I could taste the salt. I could feel the wind.
Not only did Theresa understand the voices in my head, she established a dialog with them. She entered the words, she traveled through the spaces between the words, she breathed my characters into life. Under her narration scenes sparked and flashed. I was stunned, almost teary as I listened. The novel, my novel was not static, it was moving through space.

Enjoying Theresa’s narration and talking to her later in her Desideratum podcast, I felt I understood for the first time what it meant to translate.

Translation is reading, it is breathing, it is listening. I’ve translated from Japanese to English time and again, but I’ve never experienced what it is like to be translated. My written words now reverberate with a spoken voice or voices. Theresa’s narration gives sound to the many different characters and moods that enter and exit the pages of The Kimono Tattoo. Not in a gimmicky, radio-drama way, but with subtlety and nuance. In her narration, the characters breathe, they get up and move. As one translator to another, I am grateful to Theresa for transporting The Kimono Tattoo into another language, another world.

The audiobook of The Kimono Tattoo is available today, April 26, 2022. Have a listen!

And look forward to the final chapter when you meet Theresa’s surprising Scottish accent!

Learn more about Theresa Bakken and her velvet voice!

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Winner! Pulpwood Queens International Book of the Month for June

Last September, just as I was relaxing into the routine of the semester, a happy surprise popped up in my inbox.  The subject line: Good News! 

It came from my publisher Melissa Carrigee.  

The message was short and sweet (as I’ve come to expect from Melissa):

“I just got a call and your book has been selected as an International Book Club Choice for The Pulpwood Queens Book Club.”

Wow. That was good news!

On Melissa’s advice, I became a member of the Book Club last summer. But to be honest, I hadn’t had much time to explore their Facebook Page, which seemed very active.

They’d chosen The Kimono Tattoo as their featured “international” book for the month of June, Melissa explained. The official title of the award:

The June International Book of the Month by the Official 2022 International Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Book Club Selections

Pulpwood Queens? Timber Guys?  This club looked like fun!  

I searched the internet to learn more.

First of all, the Pulpwood Queens motto is “where TIARAS and CROWNS are mandatory and reading our good books is the ONLY rule!” 

The club is the brainchild of Kathy L. Murphy, an amazing woman who puts the “big” in Texas: big hair, big ideas, big heart. Kathy began the book club in her hair salon: Beauty and the Book in Jefferson, Texas. It was the first and only hair salon that doubled as a bookstore. When you think about it, though, it really makes sense. What better way to spend your time under a hair dryer or waiting for your turn in the chair than to read a good book—and then to talk about it with those around you? 

The insuppressible Kathy L. Murphy. Credit: Kathryn Casey. On Wikimedia Commons

In 2000 Kathy decided to launch a book club, one that would be all inclusive. She settled on the name “Pulpwood” because that was the key industry in Jefferson, Texas, and, of course, paper stock is made from pulpwood. The name signaled the playfulness of the group. Kathy’s club does not celebrate snobbery or ostentatious displays of one-upmanship. Her goal is to celebrate writers and to encourage reading. In online book discussions, Kathy often reminds us to be kind. “Support each other. We all need support.”

The club started small (in her May 27, 2020 article on its founding, Texas Lifestyle Magazine columnist Gracie Watt notes that the club initially numbered six.) But before long the club sparked a media sensation and membership grew. Today the club is the largest in North America, maybe even the world, with well over 2000 members and 800 chapters, including 20 in other countries.

Founder Kathy L. Murphy has also evolved. She is herself a published author as well as talented artist. She sponsors the literary magazine, Reading Nation, and runs an annual convention. More information is available on The Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys webpage and Facebook Page.

It is an honor to have The Kimono Tattoo selected as the International Book of the Month for June.  Other International Books of the Month are Veena Rao, The Purple Lotus (January) and The Baseball Widow by Suzanne Kamata, to name just two. 

As author of the International Book for the month of June, I will be invited to share stories about myself and my book on The Pulpwood Queen Presents her Picks Facebook Page during the week of June 6-12. That Tuesday, June 7, I will be the featured speaker on the Tuesday Night Book Club, which is held on ZOOM from 7:00 pm CDT. Join the Facebook group to learn more!

A big thanks to Kathy L. Murphy for her talented leadership and promotion of authors, readers, and the life of books.

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Winner! 2022 Independent Press Award for Multicultural Fiction

“Can you talk???”

A few weeks ago my publisher, Melissa Carrigee, sent me an email with this in the subject line. She hadn’t written anything in the body of the email. But my email system, being ever so helpful, added this little reminder of its own accord:

You may have outstanding tasks for melissac. Would you like to review now?

Maybe it was this automated reminder. Or, maybe it was the sense of urgency in the message-less email, but I felt a twinge of dread creep over me. 

Uh-oh.  What have I done?

I emailed Melissa back immediately.  “Yes.”

She rang within minutes.

“Are you sitting down?”

Now the dread become more than a twinge.  

Oh boy, I’m in trouble. But what did I do?  

I started to work through a list of possible crimes and infractions. Earlier Melissa and I had been communicating about the audiobook of The Kimono Tattoo that Theresa Bakken was recording. I had wanted to listen to what she had done to check for any errors. Had I been too slow to respond? (Note: Theresa Bakken’s narration is brilliant! I’ll post about it when the audiobook is released.)

Other than that, Melissa and I had worked on a post-production edit of The Kimono Tattoo. I’d been annoyed at the number of errors, both grammatical and factual, readers had kindly pointed out. 

Softwear instead of software!  

I’d even let slip a reference to Shikoku as a Prefecture!  It’s not! Never has been. And I couldn’t imagine how I made such a silly mistake unless it happened during a cut and paste operation somehow. 

I read over the novel again. With my eyes clearer, after nearly a year away from the text, I’d found other mistakes.  Melissa worked with me on updating the manuscript and trying to get the e-book version corrected.

She must have bad news about that. All that work and our e-book can’t be updated.

“I’m sitting down.”

“THE KIMONO TATTOO IS THE WINNER OF THE 2022 INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD FOR MULTICULTURAL FICTION!!!!!”

“Wait, what?”

“You won!”

“How?”

“I submitted your book, and you won!”

I had no idea. 

Earlier Melissa and I talked about submitting for a Kindle Award. I entered the contest and paid the fee, feeling all the while that my winning would be unlikely. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. And now here I learned that The Kimono Tattoo DID win an award.  An Independent Press Award.

I was proud of me, but also proud of Melissa. She works so hard for her authors. She believes in us even when others don’t. Even when we don’t believe in ourselves!

“Thank you, Melissa.”

We ended the phone call after a few more exclamations of excitement. Melissa has a wonderful way of never wasting time.

I couldn’t ask for a better publisher.

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Southern Accents

My sister has two voices. I noticed this yesterday when we were in town. She has a voice for people she doesn’t know and another for her family. Her outside voice goes up an octave and softens. She smiles a lot in her outside voice and sounds friendly and inviting. Not that she’s not friendly at home, she just doesn’t make that sound.

I have two voices, too. Or more. I find my voice adapts to the people I’m with. When I talk to Dottie at the Food Lion or with Debra at the post office in Creston, NC, I slip back into my girlhood voice when I dropped hard consonants and spoke like a meandering stream. I remember my father would do the same when he was up on his weekend land in eastern Tennessee, the closest he could get to his boyhood home in West Virginia and still keep his job in Wake Forest, NC. He’d pull oil-stained coveralls up over his trousers, drive a rumbling truck, and talk with the locals like he belonged.

But, we didn’t belong there. My father left the mountains when he was in his twenties to go to college and never went back. Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” It’s true.

I always admired the people who carried their accents with them no matter what. 

There was the girl in high school who moved to my town from New Jersey, when her family relocated on account of the Research Triangle. She never let go of Hackensack. I would try her accent on for fun sometimes. 

The effort helped when I moved to New York for graduate school. Erasing North Carolina from my voice was a matter of survival then. Not just to avoid unwanted attention on the streets. There are walking targets everywhere in NYC, and no one really cares how you talk. After all, everybody has an accent. It’s more important to affect an attitude of impatience and crustiness. 

The survival I’m referring to is professional. 

Academics hate Southerners.  Maybe hate is too strong a word, but they see us as limited or narrow or backwoods. I’ve had colleagues erupt in raucous laughter over a “Southern joke” right in my face, as if anyone who says “y’all” spends weekends snake-handling or chewing tobacco and so what if they did? 

My colleagues, for all their handwringing over sensitivity, clearly missed the delicate nuance of different voices, the cacophony of accents that comprise the South.

My mother had a Southern accent. But hers came from Oklahoma. It was nothing like what was spoken in Wake Forest, where I grew up. And that lowlander accent is completely unlike what they speak up here in the mountains. 

Depending on which side of the state you’re from, which side of the mountain even, your accent will differ. 

“I got my own way of livin’ /But everything gets done /With a southern accent /Where I come from.” 

The late Tom Petty has a beautiful ballad called “Southern Accents.” He makes it plural.  He gets it. 

I suspect he had several voices, too.

Photo by Kenneth Baucum on Unsplash

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From There

I have a friend from Summit, New Jersey. She left when she was fifteen. Her parents moved to Raleigh, North Carolina for work, and that’s where I met her. She’s since lived in Washington, D.C., California, and now Virginia Beach, Virginia. She’s never returned to live in New Jersey.  But she will always be “from there.”

I’ve wondered what it would be like to be “from somewhere.”

My sister, Beth, noted the other night that we are not from anywhere. And it’s true. She and I were both born in Japan. We moved to America when she was five and I was newly born. Most people would say we “moved back” but that’s not really accurate, is it?  Our parents were American. They had roots there. But for my sister and me it was a moving away. We moved away from the land of our birth.

As a five-year-old, my sister had already begun to send down roots. When we left, those roots were torn away from the soil of her identity and she had to start all over. I had only rooted to my mother at the time of our departure. I never knew Japan, so settling in Wake Forest, North Carolina was not much of an adjustment for me.

Still, I was never “from there.”

When we were young, my parents would take an annual car trip to West Virginia to see my father’s people. He was “from there.” Although he left the “mountain state” as a young man and never returned to live, he kept his roots there. Daddy was a traveler. I’ve noted as much on my posts here before. His journeying took him to Africa, India, Japan, and points in between. But the mountains never left him. His identity was grounded in the backwoods, digging for ginseng, trapping mink, and leaning into the cold gift of a winter wind. When he took us home to meet his family every year, it was like stepping into a wondrous world of tall tales and lamplight. I loved listening as my father swapped stories with his people, recalling the past, speaking in a language that murmured and rolled like the mountains themselves.

But, I was not “from there.”

I’ve lived in India, and I’ve lived in Japan. I’ve lived in St. Louis now for over thirty years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my life.  But I’m not “from there.”

A few years ago I decided I would move to North Carolina when I retired.  I bought a house in the northwestern part of the state, deep in the Blue Ridge. I’m not from there. But, when I look out the window at the mountain ridges rising softly one behind the other as far as the eye can see, I feel that I am home.

“The mountains are in our DNA,” Beth says.  

She recently bought a house here, too, just on the other side of Highway 88.  My brother’s house is across the New River but a forty-minute drive away. 

Here we feel connected to our father and to our mother, who after all married a mountain man. Without even needing to say it, when we watch the sunlight glow and fade along the hillsides, when we see the tracks of deer in the spring mud, or hear the robin’s call, we know we are home.  We are rooted.  We are “from there.”

Photo by Clark Wilson on Unsplash

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Everyone Can See the Wind Blow

I met a man once on match.com. He wanted to go to Paris but told me he couldn’t until he found the right woman.

“What if you don’t?” I asked. “Why not go now?”

“If I don’t have anyone to share the romance of the city with me, I don’t want to go. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

There’s so much about our culture that expects people to be paired up, as if Noah’s ark is our only conveyance through this world. No couple, no passage, no life. I admit, I used to hate going anywhere by myself. I felt terribly self-conscious, as if I were marked for all to see: 

“No one loves this woman!” 

I remember after my first divorce I wallowed in my sorrow, listening to sad songs over and over on my cassette player. “Graceland” by Paul Simon was a favorite. There’s a line that goes: “Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everyone can see you’re blown apart; everyone can see the wind blow.” I was a walking window, my desperate unhappiness blowing with gale-force winds.

All my friends were partnered. They’d send me invitations to their children’s birthday celebrations, bar mitzvahs, and graduations. I used to try to come up with an excuse to decline. Could I find a conference I needed to attend? Could I fall ill? Could my mother?  The rsvp with its blank space for my “plus one” felt like a taunt. It yawned next to my name like a giant window, unshuttered, uncurtained, wide-opened, providing easy access to my buffeted heart, my unaccompanied presence becoming a monstrous absence.

 I would dress to the nines and drive myself to the venue on the dreaded day, down a drink, clutch another, and force myself to smile.  I hated being alone. 

My oldest sister, Judy, was different.  

She tried marriage once.  It didn’t work, and then she made a career of traveling alone. She would spend weeks and months charting her route, raising money, buying the necessary gear, savoring the thrill of the adventure before she’d even left the house. At first she traveled in the United States, going to national parks by herself, camping in areas known for bears. Later she traveled in other countries, but not just any country. She canoed in the head-hunter region of Papua New Guinea, trekked through Pakistan, and sailed with Bugis pirates. My sister was different. She was fearless. She was not like me.

I needed a man. My first husband introduced me to distance running, biking, and triathloning. My second taught me to scuba dive. The man who had just dumped me took me camping in Colorado where we climbed the so-called “Fourteeners,” peaks over 14,000 feet. I couldn’t imagine doing any of those on my own. Now here I was, experiencing an unusual drought in male companionship and exhausted from the effort of trying to meet someone who could offer something new.

When Judy visited me one weekend, I whined about how badly I wanted to travel. 

“So, go alone.” 

“I’m scared. I’m not like you.”

She took me to a bookstore and we spent an hour in the travel section. Domestic. I didn’t want my first solo trip to be international.  And I didn’t think I was ready to camp on my own. But I wanted to hike, and I wanted to hike where the likelihood of being eaten by bears or attacked by locals was minimal.

We decided on Oregon. Not the western side where everyone goes, but Wallowa County on the east where the Nimiipuu people or Nez Perce had once thrived. I’d studied Chief Joseph in high school. Wallowa was far from home but felt familiar.

I stayed in a motel but spent the days seeking adventure in Wallowa-Whitman National Forest and places nearby. 

One day I hiked from dawn to dusk; another I joined a horseback trail ride; on the third I drove my rental car to Hells Canyon in Idaho to raft the Snake River with a guide. On my last night I ate at a restaurant by myself. 

Surrounded by couples and families, I was the only solo traveler. No one paid me much attention. My invisibility was no longer a rebuke. It felt like acceptance. That wind sweeping through the window in my heart was not as strong as I had assumed. Its howling had lessened. I could now hear my own voice as I walked through the woods breathing the damp sweet smell of pine and hemlock, as I bumped over the rapids on the Snake River dreaming of the Nimiipuu people, even as I sat by myself at a table for one on the back patio of the Embers Restaurant, savoring my chardonnay and wondering why I hadn’t done this sooner.

This, traveling alone. It’s now one of my favorite pastimes. My pace, my pick, my terms. 

The window is still open, the wind still blows but it carries me along to new destinations and compels me to try new adventures. I’d go to Paris if I wanted to. But right now, I’m thinking of Scotland. I’d like to walk along the lochs. 

Photo by Holly Mandarich on Unsplash

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