According to this article in the International Herald Tribune, there's a new novel being released today that's roughly based on the life of Japan's Empress Michiko, the wife of reigning emperor Akihito. "The Commoner," by John Burnham Schwartz, is said to chronicle the life of "Haruko Endo" (Empress Michiko's literary doppleganger), as she becomes the first commoner to marry into the imperial family. Much like Michiko, Haruko is subject to great criticism upon her entry into the royal household, and is stripped of basically all her freedom.
And yes, this is another glimpse into the evocatively lamentable life of a 20th century Japanese woman, brought to us straight from the pen of a white, Harvard-educated, American man. This passage comes directly out of the Tribune article:
Doubleday has already gone back to press once, taking the total copies in print to 30,000. Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, said she expected the novel to sell well.
With its Japanese theme (and white storyteller), the comparison to Arthur Golden's best-selling "Memoirs of a Geisha" is inescapable. "The Commoner" is "a kind of sequel, if you will, to 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' " said Steve Shapiro of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas.
Like Golden, Schwartz enjoyed a privileged childhood...
OK, stop there.
That Arthur Golden managed to write his novel in the voice of a Japanese woman, and this worked out for him, is really more of a freak accident than an indication that the white American male of today might possess some innate understanding of the Japanese female psyche. Schwartz's whiteness is an obstacle here, not a selling point!
And yet this is not to say that I'm not off to go buy his book, right now. What? It looks interesting. And I am a royal-family-following geek.
I'll be interested to hear what you think of it after you've read it.
Posted by: Melanie | January 24, 2008 at 01:02 PM