CALL ME MIEKO

Twenty years ago a b&w xerox of the Balthus painting, Japanese Girl with a Black Mirror, kept me company as I began writing what was eventually published as Miss Gone-overseas. With a colored pencil I doctored the woman's white sash; I made it red -- instead of mimicking the painting's red cloth on the small table.

The image of the Japanese girl on her knees and her long reach for something she wants -- perhaps merely to adjust the mirror -- is what makes her "my" Japanese girl. Miss Gone-overseas isn't sure what it is she reaches for, but she reaches nonetheless. [The curious can learn what her reach achieved in the first piece in my book Overseas: stories.]

It's a common literary envy, that of Melville's bold opening: "Call me Ishmael." One cannot expect such an opening gambit from the pillow book of a Japanese woman in the World War II era. My Mieko never introduces herself. In the two most famous "real" pillow books one never learns the names of the narrators in the text, but only in the titles given by the translator and/or the publisher: i.e., The Pillow Book of Sei Shongaon, and in the English translation of Murasaki Shikibu's with the subtitle, Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. I do admit to considering and discarding Mieko's Diary as a title.

I am curious as to how readers feel about a narrator who remains nameless. To keep her company I also left nameless two other characters, the governor general and the corporal. My personal library diminishes each year (by choice), but one keeper is Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman, an exquisite little novel with nameless characters: there's only the woman, the man, and the child.

It wasn't until the final rewrites that I contrived a way for my narrator to name herself: one brief sentence near the very end when she discards her name to assume another. The name I chose for her is quite similar to my own (the discarded nickname of my youth: Micki). May I borrow a phrase? Mieko, c'est moi.