Turning Japanese by David Mura

Author:David Mura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

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The hospital where I met Fumiko Enchi was on the other side of town. The day I went there was gray and rainy. Hasegawa-san, my contact at International House, came along to translate. We had to take two different trains and a bus before a long walk through the streaming wet streets.

As with most Japanese hospitals and institutions in general, the building was dimly lit and distinctly unattractive. The pale graying walls, old furniture, and dark linoleum floors were all in sharp contrast to the contemporary stylishness and electronic wizardry of Japanese stores. The Japanese don’t ascribe to Western notions that a pleasant environment will help people recover. Much of the basic care in Japanese hospitals is performed by relatives, and there’s a sense that illness is something to be kept hidden within the family, a stain not to be acknowledged before outsiders.

I was grateful for the chance to see Enchi, especially considering her condition. Over eighty, she lay on the bed the whole time we were talking, which was to be kept to half an hour. Her face was tiny, too small for her small body. Hasegawa, my translator, wasn’t quite prepared for the questions I wanted to ask. Because Enchi’s voice was soft, difficult to hear, and the interview brief, the final transcript wasn’t very substantial. She kept admonishing me to study in detail the Meiji era if I wanted to understand her novels. But what I remember most is the image of a frail old woman in a white robe, IV in arm, lying on her side and whispering, smiling from time to time, patiently answering the questions of this Japanese man who could speak no Japanese.

I did manage to ask a few questions about Onna-men [Masks], the first novel of hers translated into English, and Onna-zaka [The Waiting Years] Onna-zaka is a novel based on the life of Enchi’s maternal grandmother in the Meiji era, when the neo-Confucian code required wives to submit completely to the will of their husbands. Tomo, the wife of a bureaucrat, is married to a man who not only is indifferent to her but forces her to arrange his love affairs and to share the household with his mistress; later, after tiring of this first mistress, he adds another. When Tomo first discovers her husband’s indifference to her, she feels tormented both spiritually and physically. But instead of expressing this, her features are described as possessing the “tranquility of a Noh mask.” When I asked Enchi about this passage, she said, “For women, hyojo [facial expression or expression in outward ways] means a lot, as you can see by thinking about Rokujo in Genji. Once a woman acquires her own hyojo, that hyojo conflicts with the pressures that come from daily life . . . there is a philosophical contradiction and struggle between what a woman wants and how she acts, which gives her a unique power to become a wraith.” Though many Japanese protest that Japanese women are happy in

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