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Women Shaping Spiritual Culture in Japan: A Conversation with Laura Miller

What do tarot cards, Taoist paper talismans, and ancient curved beads called magatama, have in common? They all serve as touchstones to the kind of spiritual enchantment that operates on the edges of mainstream religions.

Dr. Laura Miller, Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and professor of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, explores these phenomena in her new book, Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2024).

The result of nearly twenty years of intermittent fieldwork in Tokyo, the Kansai region, Ise, and Shimane, Japan, this work stands as a model of interdisciplinarity interlacing history, art, literature, religion, media studies, and anthropology.

Significantly, the study also gives voice to women and girls as the primary drivers of this religious re-enchantment. Miller argues that they have exerted pressure on shrines, temples, and the media industries to accommodate their interests and tastes in “occult hunting.” Although their importance to the religious life in Japan is often neglected or minimized, Miller notes that they are the ones who have had a major impact on how religious sites, texts, and objects are fashioned and marketed. Her book thus investigates the ebullient way these overlooked participants contribute to the playfulness of religious practice in contemporary Japan.

It’s a treat to have my friend and collaborator, Dr. Laura Miller, with me today to talk about her latest book.

Rebecca Copeland: Thanks for taking time to sit down with me today, Laura. It’s great to have you back on this blog!

You’ve heard me describe your book briefly just now. Please tell us more about it. What is the goal of your study and its chief aims?

Laura Miller: One primary issue I wanted to address was the erasure of women and girls in many studies of Japanese history and religion. I wanted the book to document the gendered nature of occult-religious activities. One form of evidence of the core role that gender plays is that culture producers and religious sites have redesigned objects and media to make them appealing to women and girls.

I also wanted to stress that these pursuits are mainly about practice and ritual and are not about belief.

Many studies of religion continue to focus on “what people believe,” as well as what happens within codified institutional settings. By using different methodologies and theoretical perspectives, I wanted to move the discussion away from the fixation on “belief.” The arenas of spiritual seeking that I describe often fall outside mainstream or institutional spaces and categories. This includes things such as Taoist paper talisman, tarot cards, and magatama beads. I found that for most people the question of “belief” just wasn’t part of their enjoyment and consumption of the occult.

RC: Before we go further, do you want to take a moment to describe what you mean by “occult”?

LM: I use occult as a deliberately expansive cover term that includes things not only recognized as “religion,” but also activities and artifacts that are often excluded or pushed aside as “superstition” or “folk beliefs.” I realized that if I began with the concept of religion, my scope and analyses would carry a lot of cultural baggage and could also exclude some critical data.

RC: I know that you’ve been working on this book for many years, what was the inspiration for it? How did you come up with the concept?

LM: I was always encountering the problem of what people consider an acceptable topic for “serious” academic research. While working on some prior research projects, such as studies of elevator girls, print club photos, or the beauty industry, I received criticism for bringing attention to things people viewed as trivial, which they are not.

In this book I tell the story about the visiting business professors from Tokyo who asked me what research I was doing. When I answered that I was looking at the divination industry, they laughed. They wondered why anyone would bother to study something so silly. It was that dismissive attitude, also reflected in academic and journalistic writing, that motivated me to provide evidence for why the topics in the book are worthy of study.

RC: You were trained as a linguistic anthropologist, and over time realigned your focus with the contextual analyses of cultural history. Although you have never lost sight of the rigor and technical specificity of your initial methodologies, you’ve also engaged with complex textual histories (tracing ancient jewels and Taoist talismans, for example). What were the challenges you faced in working across disciplinary lines?

LM: One challenge was that because of my obsession with detail, I often underplayed the big picture. The type of linguistic anthropology I was doing early in my career focused on transcription and analysis of recorded conversations. That meant looking at very small elements, such as listening tokens, pauses, hesitations, and so on.

For Occult Hunting, I had collected hundreds of examples for each of the different chapters. I loved all my little artifacts and images! I was attached to them and wanted to describe them in great detial. But that meant the reader could become overwhelmed with examples, which swamped the larger points I wanted to make. I needed to force myself to trim and cut.

I also faced a body of writing that portrayed my topics as part of “weird Japan.” I wanted to provide history, meanings, and functions that would de-weird the thinking about these occult domains.

RC: Was there a moment in preparing this book that particularly surprised you? Something you discovered that was completely unexpected?

LM: Well, you were there with me for one of the moments! It was our trip to Tamatsukuri Onsen when I was in pursuit of the magatama bead. My original but incorrect assumption had been that it had become largely symbolic, that it merely referred to things such as ancient Japan, the supernatural, or female power. I was surprised to discover the deep spiritual and meaningful connections people had to the magatama.

Assorted magatama

RC: I remember that trip! I remember the way the magatama craftsmen were so delighted that you had chosen to focus on their artform. The priest of the local shrine even invited you into a museum of ancient artifacts largely off-limits to the public. For a rare moment, I had an opportunity to experience the kind of fieldwork you do. It was magical.

LM: For me it was a revelation to talk with people with intimate connections to magatama, and to experience firsthand the care and appreciation they had for these beautiful artifacts.

RC: What aspect of researching/preparing this book was particularly challenging?

LM: I struggled with discussion of the boundaries between the “religious” and the “secular.” Getting feedback from readers helped me set aside my either-or perspective and allowed me to stress that the boundaries are often blurred and are usually irrelevant for consumers and users themselves. I had been trying to impose my own categories, such as “real” (religious) or “fake” (secular), on my examples and observations. I had been ignoring that for many people those categories are not significant.

I had to deal with the academic models of religion that erased or sidelined activities such as divination and use of magical goods. From an anthropological perspective, everything that relates to the supernatural realm is religion.

Because of my interdisciplinary effort, I needed to explain and justify my logic for using the term “occult” as one that encompasses religious activities and thinking. I expect that many traditional scholars of religion will reject my doing this, but it allowed me to analyze shared themes, meanings, and imagery across categories.

RC: I’ve described this work as the culmination of your career, but perhaps I am foreclosing any future work. Do you have another monograph waiting in the wings?

LM: The new research project I’ve been working on for the last few years is on the explosion of popular interest in kofun—ancient tombs that date from the 3rd century to the early 7th century CE. Fans devote time and economic resources to travel, tours, festivals, and media on kofun. There is also a huge market for cute and novel kofun-themed goods and food.

Initially I envisioned this as a journal article and maybe a research report, but I already have collected massive data and will be doing more fieldwork this fall. There’s so much, and I love all of it. It might be another book after all!

RC: I can’t wait. And if you need a sidekick for another trip, count me in!

About the Author:

Laura Miller. Photo provided by the author.

[Laura Miller. Photo provided by the author.]

Laura Miller is the Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and a professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In addition to Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2024) she is the author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (University of California Press, 2006), and co-editor of four other books.

The post Women Shaping Spiritual Culture in Japan: A Conversation with Laura Miller appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Through Thickets of Memories: On Reading Amber Logan’s The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn

Amber Logan’s impressive debut novel The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn invites readers into a lushly landscaped world of beauty, loss, and surprising discoveries. The novel, written in an elegantly sparse style, follows American Marissa Lennox to her childhood home in Japan, where her commission to photograph a venerable but declining inn outside Kyoto, allows her to confront her own grief and frayed memories. As I journeyed alongside Marissa (or Mari as she is known in the story) I found myself transported back to my own childhood, leading me to past readings, forgotten memories, and a new view of the present.

When I was seven, my family spent a year in India. I’m sixty-eight now, so the memories of those days are fragmented and come to me in sparks of colors and wisps of fragrances. One memory I do have is of my older sisters reading to me. Our mother must have assigned them to the task as a way to keep me entertained and out of trouble. (As a child, I delighted in getting into trouble!) We read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. I’m pretty sure my sister Judy sat me down for an oration of the Ancient Mariner; and Beth read to me from Jane Eyre. But the reading that was dearest from that year was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

I can’t remember very much of the story now. It blurs together with elephants, red rooms, and Swiss alps. What comes to me when I try to recall the story is enchantment. The story opened new passageways in my imagination and new spaces where hidden gardens became portals into mystery, beauty, and healing.

Amber Logan, in her Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn, captures exactly this mélange of enthrallment. The parallels with Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic are notable. Logan’s protagonist, Marissa Lennox, is an obvious nod to Burnett’s Mary Lennox. She is newly orphaned like her earlier referent, but unlike Burnett’s spoiled Mary, Mari is not a child of wealth. Moreover, Mari is an adult.

An unmarried woman in her thirties with the thinnest of careers managing an art gallery, Mari’s world comes crashing down when her mother dies of cancer. After securing a grant with an art program, Mari returns to her childhood home in Kyoto with the assignment of photographing the once resplendent Yanagi Inn on the outskirts of the old Japanese capital. Once there, caught between the fog of jet lag and an uncanny sense of déjà vu, Mari realizes she has spent time at the inn before. But when? While walking through the inn’s tangled gardens, looking for scenes to photograph, she discovers a lone crane, who leads her to an abandoned island. Although Mari is told in no uncertain terms she is not to venture out to the island, she cannot contain herself. A powerful, unnamed force draws her there, where she will eventually discover the truths about her past.

In Burnett’s novel, Mary Lennox is shipped off to a crumbling manor on the Yorkshire Moors and placed under the care of a crotchety uncle, related to her only by marriage. Here she finds friendship with the gardener, the maid, and the maid’s younger brother, a robust lad who spends his days exploring the moors. At night, disturbed by the sound of crying, Mary wends her way through the dark and drafty manor in pursuit of the whimpers, eventually to discover in a hidden room, Colin, her uncle’s sickly son.

The manor holds other secrets as well; Mary learns of a garden, walled off from the main grounds and left abandoned. It had once been the refuge of Mary’s aunt but upon her death had been placed under lock and key. Unable to contain her curiosity, Mary feels compelled to make her way into the garden, guided by a friendly robin, and then to work secretly with her new friends to restore it. In the process, she is healed of her loneliness, her cousin, Colin, returns to health, and her morose uncle regains his heart.

Logan’s novel proceeds in a similar vein. Her Mari is still in the throes of grief when she lands at the ramshackle Yanagi Inn. She is monitored by an irritable innkeeper, befriended by a chambermaid, and guided by a wise Buddhist nun. Along the way, Mari encounters an elegant heron and a wily tanuki. Her nights are disturbed by mysterious sobbing, and her days are tantalized by the abandoned island, which she and the nun decide to secretly restore.

While Logan’s novel derives inspiration from Burnett’s, it is by no means merely a retelling. Logan’s tale is darkly psychological, slipping into surreal and ghostly flights of fantasy. Readers of Burnett’s work (especially those who like me are decades from their initial reading) will be enticed by a pleasant but at times unnerving sense of familiarity. We feel we’ve been in the story before but can’t quite remember where we entered. Delightfully, our confusion is paralleled by Mari’s own, who wills herself to remember but finds her memories only “itch” on the edge of her consciousness.

I idly picked up a thick stick from the ground, stirred up the dark bottom of the basin, turning the water into a gray sludge. The activity felt familiar, setting off long-unused synapses in my brain as if I’d done it before. I kept swirling, a witch stirring her cauldron, staring into its depths to revive the sensation again. But the image was gone, the moment lost.

Going forward in the story, Mari pieces together the memories that slowly surface from the murky pool of her subconscious. And, like the cauldron in the image above, a dark ominousness hovers around this remembering. What might be lurking in the past?

Although Mari had lived for some time in Japan as a child, the clarity of the past has been dulled by time and perhaps by a forgotten trauma. Small things spark nostalgia. Rice balls, origami cranes, the cries of the cicadas. Memories return to Mari unbidden and out of sequence. Cicadas drone in the background of her waking hours like an eerie movie score—impossibly out of place. The story is set in the chill of early spring, long before cicadas emerge. How could Mari hear them, she wonders?

Their presence signals a second narrative layer in the story. We travel with Mari through the unkempt garden in real time while simultaneously we accompany her into interstitial time, into the reality that exists between memories. For me, this is the magic of Logan’s novel. It allows readers to slip through crevices in the narrative present and to explore these hidden worlds of imagination with Mari.

To this end, Mari’s calling as a photographer is appropriate. Photographs offers tactical evidence of the multidimensionality of time. In a photograph, time is arrested and stories of the past are frozen in ways that calcify them in memory. Mari has lost contact with these frozen stories from her own past because her mother destroyed all her childhood photographs. This loss pushes Mari to reconstruct mental snapshots of her lost past. Moreover, the photographs that Mari produces of the ruined gardens become new narratives of the present, as Mari sees in her digital captures that which had not been visible to her at first glance. New worlds bloom on her computer screen when she uploads her images.

The garden itself takes on richly metaphorical meaning in the novel making it more than a botanical space. The garden represents the power of human consciousness to thrive and grow in different places at once. Mari seeks to restore the “secret garden” of the forbidden island, while at the same time she explores and rejuvenates her own locked and abandoned mental resources.

A magical place, the Yanagi Inn garden becomes a refuge for the wounded. Notably, all the wounded are women. The nun, Honda, who labors quietly to keep chaos at bay, the crane who builds her nest on the island, even the tanuki, Goro—mistakenly gendered male—all are female. There is no male savior. In fact, there are hardly any men in the novel at all. There are a few who exist on the edge of the page—Mari’s father, her ex-boyfriend Thad, and Honda’s boat-builder friend. But, their roles in the story are inconsequential. This is a woman-centered novel. And it is through the labor of two women—Mari and Honda—working to benefit other women that the Yanagi Inn island garden is restored.

We are never told precisely where Yanagi Inn is, other than that it is close to Kyoto. It is unmarked by geographic detail. It is a Japanese space—with tatami and Jizo-san statues—but it is also beyond specificity, making it free to float in the reader’s imagination. It drifts among the moors of England, the bungalows of India, and the mountains of Japan in this reader’s imagination. And, as a result, Mari’s quest for the truth, her pursuit of memories becomes my own. With every corner the protagonist turned chasing her past, so did I. The novel led me back to my seventh year and returned me to the wonder of gardens and the thrill of new discovery.

The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn. CamCat Books (November 15, 2022).

About the Author:
Amber Logan is a university instructor, freelance editor, and author of speculative fiction living in Kansas with her husband and two children—Fox and Willow. In addition to her degrees in Psychology, Liberal Arts, and International Relations, Amber holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
When she’s not writing, Amber enjoys trips to Japan, exploring unusual vegetarian foods, and reading Haruki Murakami.

Check out this YouTube link for a fascinating interview with Amber about The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn.

The post Through Thickets of Memories: On Reading Amber Logan’s The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Bits and Bytes and Cyber Sleuthing: Getting Caught Up in Countdown to Decryption

DC Palter has done it again in Countdown to Decryption. Following close on the heels of his wildly successful debut novel, To Kill a Unicorn (‎Pandamoon Publishing, 2023), Countdown returns readers to San Jose and to the high-octane escapades of our favorite hacker Ted [Teddybear] Haru.

Zipping along the internet highway, buying stolen passwords, and slipping into the depths of the dark web, this riveting cyber thriller has us flying through the pages in pursuit of Bulldozer, Laser-Eye, Grinning Amramson, and other unsavories, all in an effort to solve a murder and vindicate Ted’s tarnished reputation.

Belly-crawling through hidden passageways and commandeering a taco truck may seem a tad outlandish, but in our current world of cyber-piracy and cult-fueled conspiracies, even these oddball antics ring frighteningly real. A taut plot-driven exploit with fully realized characters, Countdown will have you holding your breath, hoping Ted will crack the code before the baddies crack his last rib.

As the novel opens, Ted is in the midst of an important zoom call, hoping to convince a screen full of suits to fund his startup. Before he can get far into his pitch, however, love interest Sumire bursts into his apartment — “as if she already lived” there — and irrespective of everything, buries her face in Ted’s neck full sob.

After the suits exit the zoom call, taking with them Ted’s dreams of venture funding, Ted pieces together the cause of Sumire’s distress. Her best friend, Joy Miyazaki, a human rights lawyer and daughter of the congressman for Silicon Valley’s historic Japantown, has been found dead in her apartment, presumably the victim of a home invasion gone wrong.

Before her body is even cold, the tabloids are spinning all variety of salacious scenarios, claiming Joy was a drug kingpin. Supposedly, she used her connections in Afghanistan to smuggle nefarious goodies into the country in order to support her Democrat daddy and his liberal agenda.

“Her murder was . . . a hit from the gathering forces of Q, the opening shot of The Storm when the swamp rats surrounding her father would be purged by the patriotic forces loyal to the once and future president.” And so it goes.

Countdown may be fiction, but its plot is tangled with “ripped from the headlines” happenings that are chillingly close to home, and surprisingly current. At one point Ted urges an eccentric, Bezos-type gazillionaire to support his cause, threatening: “I’ll explain to Congress how the Russians are using BiteCoin to finance their war with Ukraine…And I’ll convince the SEC you’re as bad as Sam Bankman-Fried.”

Clearly, Ted has to do something to make things right. He can’t let Joy’s enemies get away with tarnishing her name. Sumire beseeches Ted to find something. “Anything suspicious. An argument with a neighbor. BiteCoin transactions. Someone stalking her. You know, stuff like that.”
And that means hacking. Big time.

Not but four months earlier, Sumire had roped Ted into helping her find her brother, who had gone missing. The experience led Ted down some dark cyber byways where he very narrowly escaped death and was threatened with jail time for wire fraud.

The stakes are higher now. If Ted gets caught again, he could lose everything — not that he has much to lose. He is already living on a shoestring. The only thing of value Ted can claim is his relationship with Sumire. He agrees to do whatever he can to keep her happy.

And so, begins Ted’s hellish adventure. He cyber spies, he snoops, he buys passwords, and he manages to gather an amazing amount of information without ever leaving his living room. Hacking into Joy’s computer is relatively easy, after all, most people use the same password for multiple sites. All Ted needed to do was buy a hacked password she used on one site to could gain access to all others.

He hits a wall, though, when he discovers an important file in her email protected by a password shared only between Joy and the sender of the document. Ted has no way to break the code, and the document, he believes, reveals a terrorist plot.

“Joy. You helped me find my brother in Kandahar and now I want to return the favor. Daesh [ISIS] is planning an attack that will kill many innocent people. Their plan is in the attached file. Use the password you gave me to open it. You must warn everyone. It is a matter of life and death.”

When Sumire learns of the terrorist threat, she convinces Ted to share the information with authorities, who promptly bring Ted down to the police station for questioning. Surely he planted the letter on Joy’s computer and is using it to cover his own culpability in her murder. He killed Joy, they speculate, when she spurned his advances.
Fat chance. Ted never even liked Joy. But the police aren’t buying his story. And the more he tries to break the code, the more guilty he appears.

Normally, Ted would fuel his hacking endeavors with alcohol, saké being his liquor of choice. But he’s made a promise to Sumire (and even to himself) to abstain from hooch. He’ll have to make do with coffee.

If there was ever a time I needed to get the brain juices flowing, this was it. But there was no alcohol in the apartment; I’d promised Sumire that. No Johnny hiding above the fridge, no gin floozies cavorting with the cleaning tonics under the sink, not even cheap cooking sake to nip in a pinch. All I had was coffee. To prepare myself, I dispensed with the coffee dispenser and spooned the grounds straight from a k-pod, using the remaining grit on the bottom to draw a line of warpaint under my eyes. Now I was ready.

Much more is at stake than Ted’s reputation and Sumire’s approval. Given the involvement of Joy’s congressman father, now the United States government is up in arms. Bills are flying fast and furious around Washington, D.C., meant to deprive the technology industries of privacy laws. After all, it’s the protected password that prevents the FBI from busting open the document on Joy’s hard drive and thwarting the terrorist plot. Certain special interests, therefore, are capitalizing on Joy’s murder to force through a “New Patriot Act” that would give the government unlimited access to personal data.

Countdown to Decryption moves with lightning speed through the pursuit of truth. Along the way, we delve into bits and bytes and all kinds of cyber secrets but Palter never overwhelms us with the techno-information he clearly knows so well.

We come terrifyingly close to the political divisiveness and lethal prejudice that haunts our current social realities, but Palter keeps us from despair with his devastatingly dry humor. We have the usual cast of one-dimensional, Dick Tracy-type characters: Combover, Flagpin, Bulldozer, and Laser-Eye to provide comic relief, but we also have careful attention to the portrayal of our leading man, Ted, and his love interest, Sumire.

In his acknowledgments, DC Palter notes that the novel initially took shape in 2001, when he was working at a startup “selling computer networking equipment to customers that included the NSA, DISA, and other national security agencies.” Privacy wars were brewing at the time among direct marketers, network companies, law enforcement, and consumer protection groups. Countdown emerged from this experience.

Although it is technically a “sequel” to Unicorn, the novel stands alone. Readers of Unicorn will delight in meeting old familiar characters, such as Mayeda and the king of crypto — Satoshi Nakamoto — and encountering offhand mentions of elephants and such.

But those entering Ted’s story starting with Countdown will not feel left out. In many ways, Countdown is the more mature of the two, offering even more sensitively crafted characters and a more deliberately paced plot.

All this leads one to look forward to the next installment in Ted’s adventures in hacking.

Countdown to Decryption
‎ Pandamoon Publishing; 1st edition (June 19, 2024)
254 pages

About the Author:
DC Palter is a startup founder and CEO, with twenty-five years experience leading tech companies. He’s the editor-in-chief of Japonica, a journal of Japanese culture, and author of Colloquial Kansai Japanese, a guidebook to the Osaka dialect of Japanese. Winner of the Little Tokyo fiction award, his first novel, To Kill a Unicorn, was named Best New Fiction and Best Mystery finalist in the American Fiction Awards.

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About Exile, Place, and the Power of Collaboration: A Conversation with author Nancy E. Berg

Today’s post takes me far afield from my usual exploration of Japanese arts and culture. Reading a fascinating new book on exile and Jewish literature, and talking with one of its editors, gave me fresh insights into place, identity, and the meaning of belonging. After introducing the book, I share my conversations with editor and friend, Nancy Berg.

Exile and the Jews Literature, History, and Identity, edited by Nancy E. Berg and Marc Saperstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024) as a Jewish Publications Society Book.

The word “exile” undoubtedly conjures forth images of punishment and dislocation. For many the word is connected to Israel and the fate of the Jewish people forced to separate from their homeland. The Hebrew equivalent for the word exile, “galut,” suggests not only the spatial notion of movement away from a homeland, but also the psychological and theological associations of oppression and shame.

But “exile” is even more complicated than this, also containing within it the promise of transformation, growth, and new beginnings. In their richly resourced anthology, Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity (2024), co-editors Nancy E. Berg and Marc Saperstein compile the multifaceted ways that exile has been understood over the centuries and across the world in Jewish philosophical, religious, and literary texts.

The anthology—a collection of short texts, poems, excerpts of essays and exegesis by a variety of writers over the centuries—is the first comprehensive collection of the Jewish response to exile. It is a stunning achievement, representing years of collection, annotation, and research. The sheer amount of material covered, from the biblical period to the present, is staggering. The format of the anthology is thoughtful, with ten chapters organized loosely around a central aspect of the exilic experience: exile and the human condition; exile in history; life in exile; and more. Each chapter is then further divided to engage with the exile of the individual and of the community; exile as identity; exile as affirmation; and more.

Nancy Berg, one of the co-editors, is my colleague at Washington University in St. Louis. She and I have discussed our work over the years. I wanted to learn more about the way this anthology came together. With pleasure, I share our conversation here.

Rebecca Copeland: Thanks for taking time to sit down with me today.

Let’s talk about the inception for this anthology, Exile and the Jews Literature, History, and Identity. In your acknowledgements, you note that the spark for the book was first lit when you and your co-editor, Marc Saperstein, taught a class together on exile. Marc is a historian and you are a literature professor. What led the two of you to team up? And why “exile”?

Nancy Berg: Years ago there was an undergraduate major here at Wash U “Literature and History” that intrigued me. Instead of pairing together two courses about the same time and place—one in literature and one in history—which was what was usually done, I thought it could be exciting to have both disciplines in the same course.

Back then, the university encouraged co-teaching. I thought it would be a good opportunity to teach with Marc, who was a historian. I knew that I would learn an enormous amount by teaching with him and trying to keep up my half.

So, we applied for and received a generous grant from the Kemper Foundation. I may have had the idea for the course but Marc had the knowledge to back it up.

RC: Even before this, you’d been drawn to the topic of exile, right? I remember your first monograph, Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (1996), dealt with Jewish writers who in “returning” to Israel, had to leave their homes in Iraq. Ironically, they thus became “exiles” from their Iraqi home and their native language.

NB: That’s right. In writing Exile from Exile I began to understand the enormity and the multi-dimensionality of the concept. And even though it could be argued that exile is the human condition, or the central trope of the modern era and/or the contemporary period, it is the defining experience of the Jews.

RC: Your anthology has made me realized just how important exile is to understanding Judaism. It is not just dislocation or punishment but becomes something far more intrinsic and meaningful. Could you say a few more words about the importance of exile?

NB: The vast majority of history of the Jews took place in exile. Being “at home”—in the ancestral land of Israel, the city of King David Jerusalem—has been true only of a minority of the Jewish people a minority of the time.

Jews became a people in exile. Before exile, they were just another religious cult. Exile allowed Judaism as a religion and as a culture to develop in a way that it could persist over the centuries.

By shifting the focus and the notion of sacred from space and place (Jerusalem, the Temple, and the Holy of Holies) to time (Shabbat and other holy days) the religion became portable and sustainable.

The holiday cycle—commemorating the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert, the granting of the Ten Commandments in the desert, etc.—speaks to the centrality of exile in Jewish life and practice.

Exile has been seen as both punishment and penance—there are biblical passages in which the curses for not fulfilling the commandments intensify, climaxing in exile—but it has also been seen as opportunity.

RC: The way exile turns from a moment of dread into one of “opportunity,” as you note, is fascinating. Do you mean that exile allows or forces transformation and growth?

NB: Exactly. Some of the texts included in the book argue that living in exile allows for repentance and atonement, or that living in exile paradoxically encourages a closer relationship with the Divine. Additionally, the exilic condition is seen as one that engenders resourcefulness, innovation, and creativity.

RC: The different sections in your anthology capture just how complex the experience of exile is. I was particularly struck by your chapter on “Exile of the Other,” which deals with others located in proximity to Israel. What motivated you to include this section?

NB: Jewish texts from the Hebrew Bible onward have always urged consideration of the other, exhorting kind treatment of the outsider “for you were strangers in Egypt.” [See Exodus 22.20, 23.9, and elsewhere.] I find it interesting that from the very first texts, there is the expectation of learning from one’s own experience (or that of one’s ancestors), of leaning into empathy, and of treating the Other—the one who is not you and is not part of the community even as the community is in the first stages of its formation—with tolerance, kindness, and grace.

RC: That really highlights this sense of belonging, something we often associate with an understanding of place.

NB: Yes. In exile there is an awareness of the physics of geography. One person’s belonging to/in a place may necessitate the exclusion of someone else. Thus, it is the responsibility of the one who belongs to look out for the one who does not.

RC: The works included in this section on “the Other” are certainly striking.

Portrait of Russian poet Sophia Parnok (1885–1933).

NB: Yes. These texts are among my favorites. They are among the most literary and most layered. Sophie Parnok’s back story (her childhood in Russia, her lesbianism) is extraordinary for her time and fascinating in the ways it is expressed in her poetry; Lea Goldberg’s “fragments” are so rich and so evocative; Edward Said shows himself to be so much more introspective and nuanced in the brief excerpt from his marvelous travelogue than we usually see in his writing.

RC: You say the texts in this section are among your favorites. Did you have a favorited chapter? Or was there a chapter that was particularly challenging?

NB: One of my favorite chapters was the one on language, since it made me think through how one can be exiled from language or find refuge from exile in language. It is the most “literary” of the chapters; unlike some of the other chapters I don’t think a historian would have come up with it.

The texts that required a good deal of knowledge of Jewish sources were among the hardest to introduce in succinct and clear ways. They were definitely a challenge.

RC: Both you and Marc come to this work from different disciplines. And yet the text reads seamlessly, as though written in one voice. How did you manage to create such coherence?

NB: Lots of discussion and a great deal of revision. So many drafts! We also benefitted from a marvelous editor, Joy Weinberg from the Jewish Publication Society, who was insistent and persistent in the very best ways.

RC: The way you and Marc arranged the chapters and created different organizational units was masterful. Can you describe your process here? How did you decide on these categories?

NB: These categories began in the course we taught (although they have evolved over the years). As a historian Marc imagined that we would organize the course chronologically. Coming from literature, I naturally conceived of the course conceptually; otherwise, it would have just been another history course with some literary ornamentation. I learned a great deal from our ‘discussions’ in preparing the course and preparing the book—some of which got quite lively—and I give Marc a great deal of credit for conceding graciously even while I was learning from his vast erudition.

RC: You organize your entries around so many thoughtful categories: Exile and the Holidays (Chapter 3), for example, and Life in Exile (Chapter 6). Was there a category you wanted to include but couldn’t because of space limitation?

NB: Absolutely. It wasn’t just a matter of space but also of time. Even though the project took longer than either us ever imagined it would, we had to call it finished at some point. There are also texts we couldn’t include because of their length, complexity, copyright, or other logistical matters. And then there are the texts that I remembered differently, or which couldn’t be explicated easily, or just did not fit.
A fantasy I have is a second volume of the anthology or perhaps a series where there is a volume for each chapter. But Marc and I might leave that for others.

RC: Is there anything else about compiling this anthology that you would like to share?

NB: This is not a book I could have done by myself; I hope it stands as a testament to collaboration. But I also hope that it contributes to our understanding of exile and to our efforts to welcome the stranger, as well as to our own feelings of belonging wherever we live.

RC: Thank you for taking the time to discuss your work and your writing process. It is a pleasure to indulge in subject matter that is beyond my own limited expertise. I learned so much!

For more on this fantastic anthology, here is an interview with Nancy Berg and Jewish Publication Society Director Dr. Elias Sacks.

About the Editors:

Nancy E. Berg is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq and coeditor with Naomi B. Sokoloff of the National Jewish Book Award–winning What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans).

Marc Saperstein served as principal and professor of Jewish history and homiletics of the Leo Baeck College, London. His dozen books include “Your Voice like a Ram’s Horn”: Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish Preaching, a National Jewish Book Award winner in Scholarship, and Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder, 1933–1945.

The post About Exile, Place, and the Power of Collaboration: A Conversation with author Nancy E. Berg appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Chasing Shadows: On Reading Kunio Yamagishi’s “Return of a Shadow”

Eizo Osada, the protagonist of Kunio Yamagishi’s stunning debut novel, is a shadow, a man without a present. He lives between worlds, between Canada and Japan, between the past and the future, only to discover that he doesn’t live anywhere or hardly at all.

For the last forty-three years he has worked in a foreign country to save money for a family he is slowly forgetting, allowing himself only the luxury of spinning dreams from memories that likely never existed. Eizo’s shadow is born from living on the margins in an unfamiliar culture, a marginal existence that is exacerbated by the horrific circumstances of internment.

Spanning the years 1935-1978, The Return of a Shadow (Austin Macauley Publishers Limited, 2018) depicts the injustices endured by Japanese nationals and Canadian nationals of Japanese descent during and after WWII.

On February 24, 1942, the Canadian federal cabinet issued Order-in-Council P.C. 1486 allowing for the removal and containment of all persons believed to be a threat to the safety of the Commonwealth. The order was general in spirit, but in reality it applied almost exclusively to people identified as Japanese. Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and more meaningful to Canadians, had launched raids on Hong Kong from December 8-25, 1941, killing 290 Canadians.

Just as was true on the west coast of the United States, Japanese immigrants in western Canada had long been targets of discrimination. They provoked the ire of white inhabitants who were jealous over their successes. Few protested, therefore, when the government rounded up the Japanese-Canadians. All in all 90 per cent of Japanese Canadians — some 21,000 people—were incarcerated.

Eizo Osada had set out for Canada in 1935, leaving behind his wife and three small sons in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. He hoped to earn the kind of wages he could not secure in the Japanese countryside. Caught in the snares of a war he does not understand, he is sent to a labor camp. When the war ends, he is given a choice: return to a defeated Japan or relocate east of the Rockies. Having yet to meet his initial goal of earning money for his family, he elects to stay in Canada.

And so the years roll by. Eizo lives frugally, existing only for the promise of reunion with his family.

In 1954, just as he is preparing to return to Japan, his wife Kino sends him a letter suggesting he stay in Canada a bit longer. Still struggling to overcome the destruction of war, Japan has no jobs for a man like Eizo.

And so, he stays.

That was the last letter Eizo receives from Kino. His daughter-in-law, Fumi, writes, though she never mentions Kino. And before long, even her letters stop. Eizo is on his own.

In order to survive, Eizo keeps his head down, refuses to engage with others (after all, it was the hakujin, the whites, who had incarcerated him), and develops an affinity for his own shadow:

Having been a shadow from the society created another deeper shadow within himself. It was a creation due to an extremely long, solitary life he had spent in the huge, inhumane city. The shadow acted as a friend to talk to when he felt lonely, consult with when in trouble, and comfort when in despair: a faithful and indispensable companion who gave advice when he made mistakes and rebuked him for his thoughtlessness. It was created out of necessity. It was his other self and his salvation. To his surprise, the shadow even smiled back at him. This illusive, yet persistent part of Eizo, never twisted his arm against his will (31).

Upon reaching the age of 70, Eizo retires from his last employment. With nothing to keep him in Canada, he prepares for his long-awaited return to Japan. It is 1978. He is nervous about the lack of communication from his family, but eager to finally be able to live his life. One of his three sons meets him in Tokyo and helps him make his way to his rural home. There, the family reunion Eizo had long imagined, does not materialize. His sons hardly speak to him. His eldest is patently hostile, and his wife, Kino, deep in the throes of dementia, does not recognize him.

Eizo comes to realize, shockingly, that his long years of confinement in a foreign country, unable to ever feel at home, have not ended. He is as much a captive and even a foreigner in Japan. He struggles to navigate a culture he does not recognize and live with family members who are little more than strangers. His shadow existence continues.

Author Kunio Yamagishi acknowledges the powerful pull of history motivating his novel. When he first moved to Canada, from Japan, in 1972, he was dismayed to learn about the internment of Japanese, a historical fact never encountered in Japan. He felt the best way to relay the information to others, and the shock he felt when discovering it, was through fiction. Through beautifully sparse prose, he succeeds in making his readers feel the painful sense of injustice and disorientation the incarcerated must have experienced.

Over and above this historical drama, it is the compelling character of Eizo Osada who carries The Return of a Shadow. Yamagishi notes in an interview with Eye-Ai magazine (July 2019) that while he was working at the Japanese Consulate General in Toronto, “I saw an old Japanese gentleman who came to get his old passport issued by the Empire of Japan renewed. He wore a black hat and overcoat and his dispirited figure was etched on my mind. He was a shadow.”

Although The Return of a Shadow is set in a particular place and time, it exceeds these boundaries. It tells the story of all who struggle to survive behind a mask, who suffer in prisons of discrimination and ignorance. A particular scene in the novel struck me more than others. We come across this moment after Eizo has returned to Japan. He has spent an awkward evening with his second son, Tamotsu, and is now parting from him at a train station as he heads to Gifu to see the rest of his family, uncertain of what awaits:

Eizo shivered and tried to shake Tamotsu’s hand, but he had already turned to leave. On the platform Tamotsu stopped. His face was like Kojyo, the Noh mask of sorrow, and when Eizo smiled at him, Tamotsu tried to smile back but failed. A siren blared across the platform. The doors hissed closed and the train began to glide away. Eizo smiled again and waved to his son. Tamotsu responded and then disappeared from sight. Eizo watched the city fly by as the train built up speed, thinking of Tamotsu’s pathetic look (162).

So much of The Return of a Shadow reads like a Noh play, the misunderstandings, the trap of desire, the longing for a past that is only a dream, the continual imperative to return, but without resolution.

Almost all the characters—whether Japanese or Canadian—are caught by history and routed onto paths they cannot control or escape. “Our fears,” Eizo learns, “lie in our being alive, not in our death” (377).

As with a Noh play, we realize that Eizo’s drama will continue, enacted over and over, until he can find his way to absolution. Perhaps then the shadow will lift.

Author Kunio Yamagishi

Author Kunio Yamagishi grew up in Fukushima, Japan, and attended Hosei University in Tokyo. He immigrated to Canada in the 1970s where he worked for the Consulate General of Japan in Toronto. Additionally, he has worked as an investment banker in Toronto, Tokyo, and New York. His publications include short stories, magazine articles, and academic translation work. The Return of a Shadow is his first novel.

The Return of a Shadow by Kunio Yamagishi
Rubery Book Award Finalist
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers Limited, 2018
382 pages

 

The post Chasing Shadows: On Reading Kunio Yamagishi’s “Return of a Shadow” appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Memories of My Monkey Life

“It’s because you were born in the Year of the Monkey,” my mother liked to tell me.

That was how she made sense of my penchant for climbing. My desire to climb anything and everything all came down to the whim of the zodiac.

As a child, I had no fear of heights. If there was a ladder, I wanted to climb it. If there was a toehold pathway to the top of a cliff, I would take it. The high dive at the community swimming pool? I dove from it. The edge of a tall building? I peered over it.

My childhood ascents nearly killed me.

Now as an adult, I shiver at the many close calls. At the same time, I feel a rush of nostalgia for the little girl who knew no limits.

Memories are fragile things. They shimmer across screens of our recollections. Many are layered with the aid of photographs and family stories. The blur of silver nitrate, the wash of light and time, creep into the stories we hold in our hearts, stories told again and again, embellished, forgotten, too. My childhood memories are pressed into an old photo album I used to thumb through. The album washed away in a flood, but the memories linger. They resonate with my mother’s voice.

Author on the back porch of the Reid House.

I am on the back porch of the old Reid House. That’s the house my parents moved into when they left Japan and before they bought the sprawling place on South Main Street.

I am dazzled by the sun streaming through the openings in a lattice panel. It casts a crisscross pattern like a checkerboard on the porch floor that trembles with each movement of the lush green foliage dancing in the breeze.

I imagine I stared for hours at that checkerboard, plotting my next move, dreaming of escape.

I was just an infant.

There is a photograph of me sitting in a playpen there. I’m bald-headed and round and because the photograph is over-exposed I’m nearly luminous. Since I am sitting on my own, I must be over six months old, so the photograph would have been taken sometime in August.

I am straining to escape the captivity of my playpen. I have thrust my arms through the space between the bars, my face pinioned there, smiling. In my tiny brain I am sure I can see myself slipping through those bars, like Houdini, and sliding into the summer greenery beyond the porch.

As a child, I never quite understood the relativity of size and space.
I would squeeze myself into places that were obviously too small to accommodate me. I suppose I believed if I tried to pass through them, the barriers would melt away and yield to me or that I would transgress them as easily as Casper-the-ghost.

My concept of size was as tenuous as my concept of height. I would clamber atop cabinets, lintels, and up stairways, without a second thought. Once, when I was three years old I climbed up on the sink in the bathroom and pulled a bottle of baby aspirins out of the medicine cabinet.

Baby aspirins were delicious, you may recall. They were a delicate orange. Candy-like.

My sister, Beth, found me playing with the empty bottle and sounded the alarm. Mother took me to Dr. Wilkerson’s office and had my stomach pumped. They said a high-school football player had to be brought in from the waiting room to help hold me down.

It was Christmas Eve. The doctor told Mother I would have been dead by morning if she hadn’t brought me in. I don’t remember that, of course.

Once, Mother told me, I climbed the tall staircase in the house by myself. She kept a baby gate across the stairway to prevent me from doing just that. Undeterred, I crawled along the outer edge of the stairway, on the thin space where the treads stuck out beyond the bannister. To me, it looked like it was made precisely for little feet—a separate stairway just for a child—and so I began my ascent.

Where the staircase met the second floor, though, the child’s staircase ended, abruptly. I had nowhere to go. I tried to squeeze between the bannister and the second floor but just couldn’t fit. No Casper magic for me.

There was nothing left to do but scream.

Mother came running.

She could not reach me from below as I was way over her head. She couldn’t pull me up over the bannister either. I had wedged myself too tightly.

She called my father.

On his instructions, she pried my hands loose from the railings and dangled me out by my arms away from the staircase, aiming for my father’s outstretched arms. Although he was nearly six foot four, and with a significant wing span, even he could not reach me from where he stood on the hallway below.

“Let her go, Louise,” my father coached. “I’ll catch her.”

And so I sailed down from the second floor, landing neatly in my father’s big hands.

I don’t really remember that episode, though Mother recounted it to me so many times I feel I can see it now.

“You were our little monkey,” she liked to tease.

There was one more misadventure that is still very vibrant—as vibrant as a monkey’s memory can be.

I was two or three. Given my inclination to climb and roam at will, my father had ingeniously fashioned a gate over the top of my crib. It was the same kind of accordion gate they had earlier pulled across the staircase. [It hadn’t worked then. Hope springs eternal, I guess.]

When it was time for me to sleep, my parents put me in my crib and pulled the gate across the top. I wasn’t going anywhere. They could sleep without worry.

I remember lying on my back in the crib and looking up at the gate. When pulled tight, the wooden slats formed diamond-like patterns.

I bet I can fit through one of those diamonds, I told myself.

I bet my sisters are up and having fun right now.

Let’s go!

I sat on my knees and pushed my head up through the diamond, and now my arms and shoulders. But wait? What is this? My arms went through other diamonds. I couldn’t get head and hands through the same opening. This isn’t going to work.

When I tried to pull my head back down, I couldn’t.

I was stuck.

I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t get back down.

There was nothing left to do but scream.

Mother came running.

“Well, Becky! What have you gotten yourself into now?” She tried to push my head through but I was screaming so loudly, she couldn’t get it to budge.

She called my father.

He placed his big hand over my head and twisted it back and forth until he had fit it back through the diamond opening in the gate.

“She could have hung herself, Luther!” my mother whispered.

The next morning, he took the gate off and never again tried to confine his monkey daughter.

Somehow, I managed to survive.

The post Memories of My Monkey Life appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Memories of my Monkey Life

“It’s because you were born in the Year of the Monkey,” my mother liked to tell me.

That was how she made sense of my penchant for climbing. My desire to climb anything and everything all came down to the whim of the zodiac.

As a child, I had no fear of heights. If there was a ladder, I wanted to climb it. If there was a toehold pathway to the top of a cliff, I would take it. The high dive at the community swimming pool? I dove from it. The edge of a tall building? I peered over it.

My childhood ascents nearly killed me.

Now as an adult, I shiver at the many close calls. At the same time, I feel a rush of nostalgia for the little girl who knew no limits.

Memories are fragile things. They shimmer across screens of our recollections. Many are layered with the aid of photographs and family stories. The blur of silver nitrate, the wash of light and time, creep into the stories we hold in our hearts, stories told again and again, embellished, forgotten, too. My childhood memories are pressed into an old photo album I used to thumb through. The album washed away in a flood, but the memories linger. They resonate with my mother’s voice.

Author on the back porch of the Reid House.

I am on the back porch of the old Reid House. That’s the house my parents moved into when they left Japan and before they bought the sprawling place on South Main Street.

I am dazzled by the sun streaming through the openings in a lattice panel. It casts a crisscross pattern like a checkerboard on the porch floor that trembles with each movement of the lush green foliage dancing in the breeze.

I imagine I stared for hours at that checkerboard, plotting my next move, dreaming of escape.

I was just an infant.

There is a photograph of me sitting in a playpen there. I’m bald-headed and round and because the photograph is over-exposed I’m nearly luminous. Since I am sitting on my own, I must be over six months old, so the photograph would have been taken sometime in August.

I am straining to escape the captivity of my playpen. I have thrust my arms through the space between the bars, my face pinioned there, smiling. In my tiny brain I am sure I can see myself slipping through those bars, like Houdini, and sliding into the summer greenery beyond the porch.

As a child, I never quite understood the relativity of size and space.
I would squeeze myself into places that were obviously too small to accommodate me. I suppose I believed if I tried to pass through them, the barriers would melt away and yield to me or that I would transgress them as easily as Casper-the-ghost.

My concept of size was as tenuous as my concept of height. I would clamber atop cabinets, lintels, and up stairways, without a second thought. Once, when I was three years old I climbed up on the sink in the bathroom and pulled a bottle of baby aspirins out of the medicine cabinet.

Baby aspirins were delicious, you may recall. They were a delicate orange. Candy-like.

My sister, Beth, found me playing with the empty bottle and sounded the alarm. Mother took me to Dr. Wilkerson’s office and had my stomach pumped. They said a high-school football player had to be brought in from the waiting room to help hold me down.

It was Christmas Eve. The doctor told Mother I would have been dead by morning if she hadn’t brought me in. I don’t remember that, of course.

Once, Mother told me, I climbed the tall staircase in the house by myself. She kept a baby gate across the stairway to prevent me from doing just that. Undeterred, I crawled along the outer edge of the stairway, on the thin space where the treads stuck out beyond the bannister. To me, it looked like it was made precisely for little feet—a separate stairway just for a child—and so I began my ascent.

Where the staircase met the second floor, though, the child’s staircase ended, abruptly. I had nowhere to go. I tried to squeeze between the bannister and the second floor but just couldn’t fit. No Casper magic for me.

There was nothing left to do but scream.

Mother came running.

She could not reach me from below as I was way over her head. She couldn’t pull me up over the bannister either. I had wedged myself too tightly.

She called my father.

On his instructions, she pried my hands loose from the railings and dangled me out by my arms away from the staircase, aiming for my father’s outstretched arms. Although he was nearly six foot four, and with a significant wing span, even he could not reach me from where he stood on the hallway below.

“Let her go, Louise,” my father coached. “I’ll catch her.”

And so I sailed down from the second floor, landing neatly in my father’s big hands.

I don’t really remember that episode, though Mother recounted it to me so many times I feel I can see it now.

“You were our little monkey,” she liked to tease.

There was one more misadventure that is still very vibrant—as vibrant as a monkey’s memory can be.

I was three or four. Given my inclination to climb and roam at will, my father had ingeniously fashioned a gate over the top of my crib. It was the same kind of accordion gate they had earlier pulled across the staircase. [It hadn’t worked then. Hope springs eternal, I guess.]

When it was time for me to sleep, my parents put me in my crib and pulled the gate across the top. I wasn’t going anywhere. They could sleep without worry.

I remember lying on my back in the crib and looking up at the gate. When pulled tight, the wooden slats formed diamond-like patterns.

I bet I can fit through one of those diamonds, I told myself.

I bet my sisters are up and having fun right now.

Let’s go!

I sat on my knees and pushed my head up through the diamond, and now my arms and shoulders. But wait? What is this? My arms went through other diamonds. I couldn’t get head and hands through the same opening. This isn’t going to work.

When I tried to pull my head back down, I couldn’t.

I was stuck.

I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t get back down.

There was nothing left to do but scream.

Mother came running.

“Well, Becky! What have you gotten yourself into now?” She tried to push my head through but I was screaming so loudly, she couldn’t get it to budge.

She called my father.

He placed his big hand over my head and twisted it back and forth until he had fit it back through the diamond opening in the gate.

“She could have hung herself, Luther!” my mother whispered.

The next morning, he took the gate off and never again tried to confine his monkey daughter.

Somehow, I managed to survive.

The post Memories of my Monkey Life appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Edited Out: One Dream too Many

“Never start a novel with a dream,” the experts say.

Some go even further and caution against including dreams at all—unless you’re writing fantasy or magic realism.

Why?

Because, they say, dreams are illogical. They jump from one image to another with no rhyme or reason that anyone but a psychoanalyst might understand. They take readers out of the action of the novel, and they don’t move the plot forward.

Of course, for every critic of novelized dreams, there’s a supporter.

Some argue that dreams, when done right, enhance character development. They add texture and usefully foreshadow future events.

Lauren Acampora, author of The Wonder Garden and other novels, is a proponent of dreams in fiction. She also underscores the fact that it is also through dreams that creative works often find their way into an author’s mind.

For writers, plugging into the unconscious provides a direct line to the human imagination in all its splendor and darkness. Indeed, in the midst of composing, it’s often unclear where the words are coming from. Sentences and imagery sometimes bubble up from a hidden well that surprises the conscious, transcribing mind.

She suggests that readers, too, are induced into a dream state when captured by a good work of fiction. “At its best,” she says, fiction:

places a mirror before us, evoking terror and wonder. It affects us on an emotional level beyond language, and brings a frisson of recognition. . . . There’s the eerie sense that the author has somehow entered and seen into us. The best art carries this sense of inevitability, of allegory, myth, dream—a truth that has always been there, that we already know in some deep part of ourselves.

When I was writing The Kimono Tattoo, dreams often intruded into the story. Being a novice writer, I was not aware that dreamy narratives were problematic, and I followed the story wherever it took me—into dreams and down dark tangents. I used dreams to reveal what was really bothering my protagonist, Ruth Bennett. She may have seemed easygoing in her waking life, but when she drifted off to sleep, her anxieties bubbled to the surface.

A few of these dream sequences found their way onto the cutting floor.

Earlier, I shared a number of the edited out sections. Here’s one more, a superfluous dream.

In the scene below, Ruth has discovered that her younger brother, Matthew, is apparently living in Scotland under the name Benniet. He breeds Mastiffs, a dog with wrinkled faces and big jowls. Ruth was twelve when she last saw Matthew, and he was only six. For years she and her parents assumed he was lost forever, and then Ruth met Mrs. Tokuda and discovered Matthew was still alive.

In true “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” fashion, the sequence below also makes reference to the “floating bridge of dreams” poem by Fujiwara no Teika, mentioned in an earlier post.

I took my jeans off and lay down on the bed, staring at the phone in my hand. What’s the country code for Scotland, I wondered. What time would it be there now? I think I recalled that Japan was eight hours ahead. So, if it’s two in the morning here, it’d be six in the evening there. How should I start? “Hi, I’m Ruth. I’m your sister . . . The last time I saw you, you weren’t yet seven. You were chasing a puppy.”

The luminescent arc of his slender neck rose up before me in my memory, gliding white over the silver tracks. And then the rush of the train roared passed in a dark metallic blur. I started to scream as the train slowly morphed into a giant galloping beast, flapping jowls, massive black muzzle, wrinkled brow. Brows wrinkled to signal danger, didn’t they? The beast opened its silent maw, wider and wider, and I peered deep inside searching for a glimpse of the tow-headed boy—his face a tiny dazzling moon. Someone pushed me from behind, hard, and I fell into the darkness, reaching out for the moonlike face. Tokuda laughed. I could see her white moon-like face slide under the water. Her dark mouth, opening wider and wider in laughter, pooled with water. I grabbed her sleeve and fell in after her, sinking with her into a long dark tunnel that opened out into a glittery undersea world. Tokuda was gone. In my hand I held a tangle of sea grass. I walked along the sandy sea bottom. Have I grown gills, I wondered and I touched the side of my neck but felt nothing unusual. Somehow, I was breathing. And walking without the sluggish buoyancy of being underwater. In the distance I saw Matthew. Only, it was not the knobby-kneed little boy I remembered. It was Benniet, the man. I reached my hand up to wave and started to call to him. But when I opened my mouth, my throat filled with water and I choked. I squeezed my eyes together and bent over coughing, gasping for breath. When I opened them, I was on my bed in the house behind the zoo, my cell phone still clutched in my hand. It was 6:30 in the morning.

I swung my legs over the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute. I hadn’t drawn the drapes last night and the morning light streamed across the floor—chasing dust bunnies and bouncing off the assorted books and papers scattered here and there. I could see a slice of blue sky above the zoo and a thin wisp of cloud slowly slipping out of view.

My head felt thick and stuffy, not yet completely awake. I had been dreaming, hadn’t I? I stared off at the trailing tail of the cloud and tried to remember where I had just been and who I was with. It had felt real—just moments ago—and now it was gone. I recalled a poem by the medieval courtier Fujiwara no Teika about the floating bridge of dreams. How did it go?

The bridge of dreams
Afloat in the spring night
Breaks
And above the mountain peak
A cloud slips into the sky

I remembered my university professor telling me the poem was about the brevity of a spring night, too brief even to complete a dream. When the poet awakened, he could sense the dream still wavering in the sky, like a floating bridge, connecting the world of dream with his present. But when he tried to catch the dream and pull it back, it slipped away like a wispy cloud.
I wasn’t certain if I had awoken from a dream or a nightmare. It had seemed so real. Tokuda had been there, hadn’t she? And she had led me to Matthew. There, on the other side of the world.

 

The post Edited Out: One Dream too Many appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Christopher Robin and the Apple Core: My First Dream

Christopher Robin was a good friend of mine. It’s safe to say he was my first friend. No other children my age lived near us on South Main Street. I didn’t have any friends of my own until I started attending kindergarten, just my sisters and their friends.

Christopher Robin lived in Virginia. I only saw him when his family came to Wake Forest, North Carolina for some reason. His father and my father were in the same line of work, I guess, preacher-work or missionary-work, I can’t remember.

It didn’t matter.

All that mattered was the fun we had running down the hallway, jumping on the beds, and hiding in my sisters’ closets. I was four or five; he was a year older.

His name really was Christopher Robin.

Except it wasn’t.

His last name was Robbins. But that was a detail that didn’t bother me. To me, he was a storybook come true.

I would line all my stuffed animals up on my bed, and he and I would make-believe them into life. There was Teddy and Panda and Baby Doll. Christopher Robin didn’t mind playing with Baby Doll.

My bedroom was large and drafty. Too large for a little girl. But every room in that rambling old house was large with ceilings that practically brushed the clouds. I had a single bed set deep in the room like a tiny skiff adrift at sea.

Christopher Robin and I sailed the seas on that skiff. We discovered magical islands and tamed dragons. We galloped through the Bad Lands like Roy Rogers on horses that talked like Mr. Ed.

When Christopher Robin’s parents would pack the car and head back to Virginia after whatever it was that had brought them to Wake Forest, I felt bereft. I never knew when I would see my friend again.

And then one night he visited me in a dream.

We’d been playing hide-and-seek, and I was “it.” I couldn’t find Christopher Robin anywhere. Returning dejectedly to my upstairs room, I stopped dead in my tracks. There he was, sprawled across the jumble of blankets atop my unmade bed.

A shiver of fear blew over me.

How on earth had I gotten away without making my bed?

I worried what would happen if Mother found out. She had trained us well. The first thing I did every morning was make my bed. Then I folded my pajamas up and tucked them neatly into my zippered pajama bag. I don’t think they make pajama bags anymore. Some were shaped to look like dolls or flowers. Mine looked like Yogi Bear’s head. Every morning I propped it up alongside Teddy and Baby Doll and my pillows.

Christopher Robin had my fuzzy brown pajama bag on his head.

That’s why I hadn’t found him sooner. I had thought he was one of my stuffed toys.

Christopher Robin was in disguise.

Baby Doll was next to Christopher Robin in the red toy baby stroller I used to push my dolls up and down the sidewalk. The stroller was made of cheaply fabricated tin and was permanently bent from the time I tried to put my baby brother in it. He was a hefty baby.

The baby doll was real. I mean, as I looked closer, I realized it was a real baby. Not a doll. A little girl about three years old. She had a white kerchief wrapped around her arm and tied in a neat bow.

What’s this? I wondered. Why does the baby have a kerchief wrapped around her arm? Is she injured?

I had recently learned to tie a bow. I knew it would be easy to untie. All I had to do, was pull on one of the ends.

I bent down to pull the kerchief loose.

Only it was wrapped round and round the baby’s arm, loop after loop.

I hadn’t anticipated how long it would take to unwind. I pulled and pulled and pulled.

When it finally came away, I found an apple core instead of a chubby arm.

She was a cyborg baby. A Johnny Appleseed Baby.

How odd, I thought to myself as I reached for her arm, wondering what would happen if I pulled the apple core away.

The baby lunged at me, baring a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, long and yellow.

She snapped at my hand.

I jumped back. My movement so sudden I woke myself up.

I can’t remember what happened next. I’m sure I told my oldest sister, Judy, about my dream. She was smart and knew about these things. Surely she interpreted my dream for me.

If she did, though, I don’t remember.

I don’t remember ever seeing Christopher Robin again either

Maybe the snapping baby was just too much for him.

After all these years—well more than sixty—I still remember the tingle of horror I felt seeing that apple core arm.

Maybe that’s why I’m such a fan of mystery fiction these days. And fantastic Japanese stories of magically morphing bodies.

The post Christopher Robin and the Apple Core: My First Dream appeared first on Rebecca Copeland.

Free Falling Through Dreams

Dreams fascinate me.

They roil up of their own accord from somewhere deep in the twisty turns of our minds and pull us down unexpected paths.

We can’t control them.

We can’t make them come to us or even stay.

And usually we can’t understand them. When we try to tell them to others, they rarely make sense. Yet, here we are, spending nearly half our lives walking around in illogical dreamscapes.

In earlier cultures, dreams were the gateway to different worlds, worlds that existed in parallel to our waking one. The ancients believed dreams served as prophesies and allowed communication with gods or ancestors. Dreams were sacred.

I like the way dreams operate in classical Japanese literature. Poets believed the world of dreams was an alternate state where lives could be lived in ways that would be impossible during our waking hours. Lovers could enjoy forbidden intimacies; the living could meet again with the dead. Dreams were frequently liberating and soothing.

If you turned your clothes inside out before you went to sleep, you’d dream of your lover.
If your lover visited you in a dream, it was because you were on his mind (which is the opposite of the way we think of dreams now. If we dream of someone we love, it means we are obsessing over them and not the other way around. I like the idea of a lover slipping into my dreams at night.)

I am particularly fond of this waka poem by Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241):

The bridge of dreams
Afloat in the spring night
Breaks
And above the mountain peak
A cloud slips into the sky

I remember Donald Keene saying in one of our graduate classes that the poem was about the brevity of a spring night, too brief even to complete a dream. When the poet awakens, he senses his dream still wavering in the sky, like a floating bridge, connecting the world of dream with his present. When he tries to catch the dream and pull it back, it slips beyond the mountain peak like a wispy cloud, disappearing into the morning sky.

Usually, my dreams are like that—like a floating bridge—insubstantial and soon forgotten.

Now and then, though, one will linger, usually because it was upsetting enough to sear my memory.

In one dream, I am sitting in my car.

A Japanese woman is next to me. We are having a quiet conversation when suddenly the car begins rolling backwards. I tap the brake. Nothing happens. The car picks up speed. I pull the hand brake, the lever rises higher and higher without any resistance. We are rolling now at a quick clip. I look behind me and see the road give way to a gaping gorge.

Occasionally, I’ll dream that I’m falling and I’ll jerk awake. This is called a “hypnic jerk,” and 70-80% of people experience them. Usually they occur just as you’re stepping between wakefulness and sleep and the jerk will yank you back awake.

This dream was no hypnic jerk. I did not awaken. The car kept rolling backwards until it left the road and sailed into the open space above a deep canyon. My companion reached over to hold my hand. She wasn’t a close friend, but she was someone I had worked with in the past. I admired her. She was smart and efficient and always took care of me. If I was going to die with anyone, I was glad it was her.

Holding hands, we looked into each others eyes, and we knew.

This was it.

We were going to die. There was no escape. We didn’t clamor or scream. I had never seen my friend look so beautiful. She smiled at me, and I felt my heart lighten.

Strange that I could see things so clearly. Weren’t we whirling backwards into a canyon? The rush of air through the open windows should have sent our hair flying around our faces like stinging whips. The skin on our faces should have been propelled forward like rubber. None of that happened.

I prepared myself for impact.

If I lean forward, will that lessen the shock to my back? If I put my purse behind me, will that cushion my fall?

I guess I was still thinking to live.

Try not to tense, I told myself.

Our car made contact with the ground.

It did not crumble or bounce or explode.

We just landed. Softly.

My friend got out. She said she needed to go talk to the people standing outside a local sundries shop. We were in Japan. Since she was Japanese, she thought it would make more sense for her to inquire of them where we might find a place to spend the night. And what we should do with our sky-traveling car? Surely there were parking regulations.

I waited for her to return.

Noticing a drink machine outside the shop she had entered, I pulled some coins from my purse and got out.

Pocari Sweat. My favorite.

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