University Snakes

This paragraph in American Fuji was taken straight from my life, describing my climb up the hillside of the university campus:

"As [Alex and Michael] ascended the hill, the buildings were fewer and the steps got narrower, until they could no longer walk side by side. Alex hiked behind Michael up a path shaded by cherry trees full of whirring insects. Smashed cherries and pits underfoot forced him to keep his eyes on the ground. A brown snake slithered off the path into wild grass." (p. 67)

I miss the natural wildness of that campus, especially when lawn mowing at my current university not only spews grass pollen into everyone's sinuses but drowns out class discussions. (And I prefer to have campus snakes be literal rather than figurative, but that's off topic.)

Smack Kibble

I'm sure kittens get addicted to this Japanese cat food brand!

Looking back at these old Shizuoka photos, I notice other things, now. Like how tall I am in relation to the ceiling. In the U. S., we're used to supermarkets with high ceilings. In Japan, a ceiling is typically 8 feet from the floor, but this one was about 7 feet, the minimum building code requirement, I believe. No problem getting items off the top shelves!

Sculpture in Hakone

If you only know Japan through books and film, it's easy to get the impression that Japan is one solid city, or that all the art is traditional. This sculpture in the city of Hakone (on the coast in Shizuoka Prefecture) provides evidence of modern art. What do you think this sculpture expresses?

Curiosity

These boys are checking out a water sculpture near a Tug of War tournament held in downtown Shizuoka. (To think they are all adults, now!)

Sakura festival

I promised myself I wouldn't post photos you could find in magazines or brochures in this blog, but I couldn't resist this one of the bright red lantern I took at the annual sakura (cherry blossom) festival held at Sengen Jinja shrine. Wishes are tied to the branches.

Outside In (by Liz Sheffield)

The first time I went to Japan I was sixteen years old. My ability to speak Japanese was limited to singing (off key) the lyrics of a Japanese folk song, "Sakura". During my interview with the sister city selection committee, I sat on my sweaty palms to stop my hands from shaking, but despite my nervousness the committee chose me as part of a delegation to Sapporo. Three brief weeks sparked an interest in a foreign culture that inspired me to return to Japan five years later after I graduated from college.

As the plane landed in Tokyo, I listened to the flight attendant in her high-pitched, polite Japanese and realized I didn’t understand a word she was saying. I got off the plane with three huge, black suitcases, my size nine feet, and a Japanese-English dictionary I would carry with me at all times. I stayed for three years, teaching English in junior and senior public high schools. My ability to speak Japanese improved dramatically. I came to enjoy discussing the pluses and minuses of natto (fermented soy beans) with taxi drivers on my way home after nights out on the town singing karaoke. I got over the fact that, at five feet four inches, I was taller than sixty or seventy percent of the women I met and was grateful to my mother for shipping me a new pair of shoes at least once a year.

Twenty years later, I look back at myself as that nervous sixteen-year-old girl answering questions about how I’d handle people staring at me or what I’d do if I couldn’t explain myself in English. I don’t remember how I answered. What I do know is that returning to Japan as a young woman, and living there by myself, helped me get comfortable in my own skin.

That’s one reason I so enjoyed reading American Fuji. Gaby Stanton makes sense. I understand the life she found and created in Japan. I get it that even though she’s an outsider, Japan becomes an integral part of who Gaby is. Just like it is for me.

Liz Sheffield
Photo of bicycle in the snow by Liz Sheffield.

Sapporo and a Special Guest

Some readers of American Fuji write to me tell me their own stories of living in Japan. If there is anything I learned living in Shizuoka City and traveling in Japan, it is that Shizuoka culture isn't like other parts of Japan. One of the many reason I wrote American Fuji is that Japan writing by Westerners up to that point was centered in Tokyo or Kyoto, which are decidedly different experiences. I wanted to show Japan wasn't only about Buddhist meditation, karate dojos, Japan Inc., or falling in love with bar hostesses.

I remember one Japanese student at Shizuoka University who returned from her exchange year in Omaha, Nebraska and reported that all Americans are devout church-goers who never eat seafood. Just as Omaha is not San Francisco or Boston, Shizuoka is not Tokyo or Osaka. I welcome an opportunity to hear from others who lived in different regions of Japan, and how they related--or didn't--to what Gaby and Alex observed.

My first guest is Liz Sheffield who taught English in Sapporo about the same time I was in Shizuoka. I took a brief winter ski trip to Sapporo and had a wonderful time practicing slalom at Furano on the former Olympic course--until the ski patrol told me I shouldn't. That's me in the pink jacket. I was only in Sapporo three days, so I'm happy to provide Liz's point of view as my guest blogger on Saturday. If you have any questions for her, please leave a comment. Welcome, Liz!

White Heron Castle

And here is the famous Osaka Castle, five stories on the outside, eight stories on the inside. I was there before the 1997 restoration. White Heron Castle is its nickname. Can you see why?

Next week: Sapporo with a special guest.

Kuidaore: Eat Until You Drop

While we're in Osaka, let's take a look at Dotonbori where Eguchi mentions "a small bistro that floats lanterns on the waterway." [p. 386] Dotonbori Street runs parallel to the canal. It's famous for its restaurants and imaginative neon signs. It's a lively, friendly street that stays up late. The food choices are amazing, and I understood you actually could, as my Japanese friends told me, go to Osaka and do nothing but eat.

A Room with a View

This view from my hotel room in Osaka is what I had in mind for the apartment Mr. Eguchi described to Gaby on p.386: "I could get you a terrific apartment. You could have a view of the castle. You could watch the maple trees burst into red and yellow from your balcony."

A Poor Boy from Osaka

As I lived in Shizuoka, I gradually became aware that natives who lived elsewhere in Japan regarded Shizuokans as snobs. In American Fuji, Mr. Eguchi says he is "just a poor boy from Osaka." My description of the Gone With The Wind office includes an opinion of one of my university colleagues from Osaka (p.49-50): "The office was filled with cigarette smoke, radio talk show voices, and protruding file drawers that threatened to bring down the cabinets whenever a file was tugged out. This casual atmosphere was attributted to Mr. Eguchi being kansaijin, a man from the Osaka region. Native Shizuokans snubbed kansai people for their relish of food and leisure activities, but Gaby enjoyed Mr. Eguchi's more relaxed style."

My Asian Ark

The tiger sitting on the edge of my black bookcase in Japan is from Indonesia-- a gai-tiger, so to speak. The red cow is a symbol of the northern agricultural Tohoku region of Japan. The Dharma doll has yet to make my wish come true so only one eye is blue. The paper mache tiger is the symbol of the Osaka region. In front, two wooden frogs: kaeru in Japanese, a double meaning for frog and the verb "to return." In Japan, you might give someone leaving the country a frog (not alive, but wood or paper or whatever) to wish them a good return. Below the top shelf animals, I kept my cassette tape collection and big padded head phones. My apartment walls were thin and any noise affected all my neighbors, so, like Gaby Stanton, I blasted Beethoven through head phones directly into my skull. One astute reader pointed out Gaby has a Walkman, which dates the novel. Hard to imagine that ten years ago, i-Pods didn't exist!

Eric Paul Shaffer on Plot and Star-Gazing

Is there a plot in your novel?

The metaphor for the use of plot in traditional fiction is a train ride: start at this station, move along the tracks, sidings, and stations, and end at the destination station. The metaphor for the use of plot in Burn & Learn is star-gazing: there are multiple lights of differing magnitudes that appear in various places in the visible sky, and they make patterns based on the images you can see there or draw there or create there by joining those points together. You can create new constellations or you can apply the ones that seem most obvious. You can compare all of the brightest to each other or you can read them from west to east, north to south, or in a spiral that starts from whichever star you think is the pole star. The meaning is what you make of it; the making readers do is as important as the text, probably more important. Burn & Learn, therefore, is not only a title; it’s the first rule in reading the novel.

As you know, I like to challenge my readers with truth they may prefer to ignore, depicting characters with incurable illness, prejudice, anger, selfishness, and so forth. I believe you kick it up a level and challenge them to change they way they read. I want to tell readers that while your answers sound scholarly, Burn & Learn is a whole lot of fun. It has a playful spirit, with a mix of observation and insight that just makes me laugh. Is that okay?

That is more than okay; I will be delighted when you do that. I especially like the idea that Burn & Learn challenges the way they read. I believe that reading is a much more active activity than we commonly believe, and I hope my novel invigorates its readers.

This photo shows one of my favorite yanejishi because of his demented expression of fear and ferocity with a trace of a smile.

I like his playful spirit, too. Thanks so much for the interview, Eric.

Eric Paul Shaffer Pushes Reality to Its Outer Limits

Let's talk more specifically about Burn & Learn. Are you serious when you claim on the title page of Burn & Learn that your novel is a “sequel” to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine?

Yes, I am. There are a number of internal character clues or cues that correspond with Wells’ tale, of course, and I have essentially transported one aspect of one of Wells’ main characters into one of mine. In my humble estimation, Burn & Learn is a “logical” end to Wells’ novel. My text also answers a number of questions left open by Wells.

Oddly, for a book called The Time Machine, the adventures of the Time Traveler are narrow, even claustrophobic, from a temporal point of view. He hardly goes anywhere or sees anything; in fact, he seems to go only as far as the backyard fence and back. I broadened my canvas and context, even including a chronology of all the significant events of all the time in the world. I also traveled through multiple modes of fiction whereas Wells limited himself to a single mode: science fiction.

Strangely, to my way of thinking, Wells settled for a symbolic or even allegorical tale whose significance seems a little shallow, considering the endless possibilities of time. I decided to maintain a hyper-realistic stance within the mode in which I was working (whether it was native American tales, fables, koans, “realistic renderings of events,” or speaking bookmovie chapters). I focused on surfaces and appearances, and I did so primarily because I visualized every event as a “movie.” Movies are great, but they do NOT show depths; they show surfaces only, and only surfaces that reflect light. All that is revealed in movies is all that you can see or hear, and the same is true of Burn & Learn, although I made it my mission to push that reality to its outer limits.

Next up: Shaffer on Star Gazing