As an English language writer of fiction set in Japan, you can’t avoid the footprint of the two Davids, Mitchell and Peace. Both have lived there for extended periods, and though their writing styles are very different, both have succeeded in getting under the skin of its culture and people. In Tokyo Year Zero, Peace’s protagonist is a detective attempting to solve a series of grisly murders in a Tokyo economically and culturally on its knees following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War 2. I remember reading it and being struck by his insertion of bursts of Japanese in the English text, like the onomatopoeia gari gari (scratching), to make his character’s thought process feel authentically Japanese even when he’s writing in English.
While Peace’s prose is based on short, repetitive sentences, Mitchell’s more flowing style conjures the sensory delights that Japan can provide. In The Thousand Autumns, it’s the smells, sounds and sights of Dejima, the Dutch trading enclave at Nagasaki towards the end of the 18th century. His protagonist, Jacob De Zoet, is an earnest Dutch clerk, initially set on making enough money in Japan to go back to the Netherlands and marry his sweetheart. Instead he stays, learns the language, falls in love with a pioneering Japanese medical student, and does battle with the forces of evil both domestic and colonial.
In writing The Hotel Hokusai, I was interested in the same idea of the outsider arriving and attempting to penetrate/negotiate Japan’s historically long-isolated culture. My setting, Yokohama at the end of the 19th century, is another ‘hybrid’ place, like Dejima 100 years on but with Americans and British to the fore rather than the Dutch. Chronologically, my novel is set between The Thousand Autumns and Tokyo Year Zero, and its image of Japan lies somewhere between the barely touched exotic beauty of the former, and the gritty noir modernity of the latter.
T.Y. Garner Writer 