Tag-Archive for ◊ longing ◊

Author:
• Sunday, May 27th, 2012

Kanegae Hideyoshi was born in Harbin, China in 1926 and his pen-name was Mitsugu Saotome. He studied at Keio University’s Literature Department but left before obtaining a degree.

In 1954, Yamamoto Shugoro, the popular Japanese novelist and short-story writer, accepted to be Saotome’s mentor.

Before writing novels about the Japanese Warring States period from the pre-modern to modern times (1868 to 1912), he was publishing period fiction and historical stories in journals.

In 1968 Mitsugu Saotome was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize for his novel Kyojin No Ori (The Cage Of The Traveller) and in 2006 he was elected chairman of the Japanese P.E.N..

Saotome is well known as a writer of Japanese historical fiction. He claimed that this interest derived from the fact that he was descended from a Samurai of the Aizu-Wakamatsu domain and therefore he had a special affection for Aizu-Wakamatsu, the land of his ancestors.

He was a prolific writer, his novels are very popular in Japan and several of them have been adapted into feature films and television series. Okei was first published in Japan in 1974 and was translated into English in 2008. Unfortunately, Okei seems to be the only novel of all his work which has been translated into English.

Mitsugu Saotome died in 2008 of stomach cancer in the city of Kamakura in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan.

The epic story of Okei is set in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the mountainous town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, during a turbulent internal bloody period of Japanese history. It’s the transitional period between the end of the feudal shogunate, from 1853 to 1867, and the restoration of the Meiji era which lasted from 1868 to 1912.

The shogun had a very strong military power in Japan which relegated the power of the emperor to solely being a religious and political leader. The word Meiji means enlightened rule, which had as its target the combination of Western progress with Eastern established values. The Meiji era saw the disappearance of the Keio period and with it the city of Edo which became the “Eastern Capital” Tokyo and replaced the ancient capital, Kyoto, located in the western part of the country.

Okei, the main character of the novel and the one that stands out against all the others, is a teenage-peasant cooper’s daughter, who despite very strict rules, with class distinctions rigorously enforced, plus the Samurai complex code of honour, falls passionately in love with the young Samurai, Sasanuma Kingo. Her ardent flame isn’t shared by Kingo, being himself in love with Yukiko, the widow of the senior councillor, Jinbo Shuri, who had taken his own life by committing Seppuku (Harakiri) in order to wash his shame, as was the tradition among Samurai when they displeased their master.

The author describes how throughout centuries people had established connections and loyalties to the local feudal lord because his defeat meant the defeat of his clan and how the long established code of manners, loyalties and obedience started to fade from Japanese society and was replaced by new values. Aizu has lived three hundred years of peace before the Westerners violated the eastern land and were hated for it.

Okei, whose character is well developed in the novel, lived a short but intense life. In fact, her forlorn life and death are tragic. She matures too soon due to circumstances which she can’t fathom most of the time. The innocent, hard working, romantic girl becomes more reasonable and acquiescent to harsh reality. She is nearly raped by Edward Schnell when she is asleep in his warehouse loft. Luckily, Henry Schnell, Edward’s elder and wiser brother, who is nearby, comes to the rescue. The two Dutch brothers, Henry and Edward are suppliers of up-to-date arms and canons to the western Japanese. They have dissimilar characters, Edward is frivolous, liking to use Japanese women for his pleasure only and thinks little of them, while Henry is more level-headed, respects them and marries one of them, the widow, Matsuno.

Throughout her life, Okei has to re-adapt. Whether it is due to the war and the starting of a new era in Japan and with it the change of mentalities and new codes, or the emigration to the new world for survival. She has to learn to readjust, like her compatriots, to the American culture in Coloma, California, the El Dorado country, where the big Gold Rush took place from 1848 to 1855, fourteen years before Okei and her rural community arrived in the area.

Until her last breath, Okei was longing to go back to her home in Aizu but realised that her feet took her where she had to be buried, at the site of the old settlement, on top of Gold Hill colony in California.

If only she hadn’t murdered an imperial army officer, in panic, fear and in self defence and especially after the Crane Castle had fallen. She was certain that her deed would be considered a crime rather than an act of war and that is why she could never go back to her beloved Aizu. She realised and accepted that she had to submit to her fate and to the fact that the so far trustworthy, Henry and his wife, who was her mistress and friend, left California for Japan without ever keeping contact with her which is a big disappointment for Okei and a betrayal of the trust she had for them.

Touching in parts, violent and bloody in others, it’s a well documented novel with abundant action. A very colourful epic with vividly intense historical details. A good insight into Japanese and American history of the time.

 

 


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Author:
• Saturday, February 26th, 2011

Susan Isaacs was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. She received her education at Queens college. She worked as a senior editor at Seventeen magazine, which she had to give up after the birth of her first child and worked from home as a freelance.

Her breakthrough came with her first novel Compromising Positions, published in 1978 which was chosen by the Book of the Month Club, became a best seller and was later made into a film. In the 1980s she wrote the screenplay for Paramount’s.

She received Writers for Writers Award, The Marymount Manhattan Writing Center Award and the John Steinbeck Award. She is the chairman of the board of literary organisation, Poets and Writers and was a president of Mystery Writers of America. She is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Creative Coalition, PEN, The American Society of Journalists and Authors, the International Association of Crime Writers and Adam Round Table.

Susan Isaacs, New York Times best selling author and critically acclaimed, has written several novels which were translated into many languages. She has also written essays, screenplays and political articles. She has reviewed books for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Newsday.

She married a lawyer in 1968 and became a mother of a son who is now a corporate lawyer and a daughter who became a philosopher. She now lives with her husband in Long Island.

Any Place I Hang My Hat was published in 2004.
Her latest novel, As Husbands Go was published in July 2010

Any Place I Hang My Hat is about Amy Lincoln, who is the main character and also the narrator.
Amy Lincoln is an intelligent, hard working, self made, witty young woman. After obtaining degrees from an exclusive boarding school and excellent universities, such as Harvard and Columbia school of journalism, by acquiring scholarships, Amy succeeds in winning a good job as a political reporter in the serious, prestigious weekly magazine, In Depth. She manages to take herself in hand, pull herself out of the dreary and poor beginning she had and propels herself into a brighter future with a promising stature.

Life hasn’t been kind to Amy, she was abandoned by her mother soon after birth and separated from her father, Chicky, who was constantly in prison due to petty theft. Amy was brought up in one of the poor areas in New York by her shoplifter paternal grandmother, Lil, a part time leg waxer in a beauty saloon for privileged women.

Due to the harsh reality Amy had to face since her birth, she became vulnerable as well as lonely but neither helpless nor without resources. Covering a political fund-raising event, Amy discovers a college student, Freddy Carrasco, who claims to be an illegitimate son of a Democratic presidential candidate, senator Bowles. After meeting with Freddy Carrasco, befriending him and listening to his story, Amy’s long buried yearning to find out the whereabouts of her mother and her maternal family, grows stronger. Now that she is approaching her thirties she goes hunting for the truth and seeking answers about her past before starting a family of her own.

Through her quest and using her reporting competence, she finds a way to arrange a meeting with her grandmother and then her mother. After the confrontation, Amy will discover who she is and what she is, which will help her psychologically and mentally to find “a place to hang her hat”. This place will be with her ex-boyfriend, John Orenstein, the documentary film maker, that she has been longing to go back to.

Susan Isaacs explains to her readers the meaning of the novel’s title when referring to her friend Tatty going back to live with her parents after her failed marriages, although they didn’t care about her. Tatty “claimed she’d come back for the kitchen where she made her cakes. I’d often suggested she was still seeking the love these two ought to have had for her, being her parents. But maybe it was simpler. Everyone needs a place to hang her hat.”

In her book the author adopts a great deal of sarcasm, stereotype characters and sometimes very funny passages to illustrate the interesting personality of her heroine. Despite being anticlimactic, Any Place I Hang My Hat is a pleasant, light hearted, easy to read novel.