The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan [Paperback]

Suzanne Kamata (Editor), Donald Richie (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

Absorbing fiction from Outsiders in a land that does not absorb foreigners easily.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Broken Bridge showcases the literary work of 36 non-Japanese writers, expatriates in Japan who provide 36 windows looking in on the country, revealing a Japan as seen through the eyes of writers who love and live, but who will never completely belong, in Japan. Gaijin (foreigners) to the Japanese, destined always to be outsiders to a certain extent, they all find their own balance between individual identity and conforming to Japanese society. The writers represent a variety of eras (from the occupation on through to the '90s) and they deal with love, dignity, adultery, desecration, and despair in stories that are alternately full of humor and humiliation, happiness and pain. An English teacher in Frank Tuohy's "The Broken Bridge" seeks the author of a troubled essay and discovers, after a series of cultural "mistakes," that the student has killed himself. Drawn with fascination to Miss Yukiya's body and Miss Hama's mind, Morgan Gibson's protagonist in "Is There a God in Your Heart?" looks up for the Big Dipper and falls into a ditch. While the literary styles are diverse, the quality never wavers as these writers explore their adopted country, their inner demons, and their love-hate relationships with Japan.

Review

"This generous, long-overdue collection of unpredictable insights and diverse illuminations reveals a rich, seldom-recognized genre, with many fine exponents represented. Perceptively assembled and introduced." -Kyoto Journal -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880656310
• ISBN-13: 978-1880656310
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,672,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable pictures of alienation, April 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Paperback)

Anyone who writes for a living knows the first and foremost rule: write what you know about. The authors in this collection of short stories certainly know what it's like to be outsiders looking into a foreign culture. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country can identify with these rare glimpses into battered hearts which results from the initial over-idealisation of an adopted culture. The writing is superb and colourful and each story feels like a poignant confession. One thing which is missing; however, is the lure of the culture and the aspects which keep us all living in foreign countries. Hats off to the editor.She did a remarkable job of bringing all these stories together. If you enjoy good writing of any kind, you'll cherish this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining Anthology by Expats, October 28, 2008

By 

Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Paperback)

This anthology was published in 1997 and contained 33 short stories and 3 excerpts from novels. The selections were from 36 non-Japanese authors who'd written fiction in English about Japan since World War II. More than half of the authors were living in Japan at the time the collection was published; the others had spent time there earlier. The goal of the book was to reflect the "variety of the expatriate experience."

More than two-thirds of the writers hailed from the United States. The others included several Englishmen, two Australians, the Irishman David Burleigh, the London-born Swiss/British-Indian Meira Chand, the Japanese-born American Cheryl Chow, the Haitian-born American Michelle Leigh, and a Canadian-born American writing under the fetching pen name "Kate the Slops." Twelve of the authors were women. A few writers were of Asian or African-American background; the great majority of the authors were white.

The best-known older writers included Hal Porter from Australia, James Kirkup, John Haylock, Francis King and Frank Tuohy from England, and Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker and Philip Whalen from the United States. Others who were published novelists in fiction/nonfiction included the Australian John Bryson and the Americans Alan Brown, Alex Kerr and Phyllis Birnbaum. A number of the authors were also translators -- among them, Seidensticker, Kirkup, Birnbaum, Sanford Goldstein, William Wetherall and Ralph McCarthy. There was nothing in the collection to represent Angela Carter, one of the more prominent authors who lived in Japan and set a few presumably autobiographical stories there; "A Souvenir of Japan" might've been suitable.

Twenty-two of the stories in the collection were written or first published in the 1990s. Seven were from the 1980s, five from the 1970s, and two from the 1960s. The earliest was a piece by Seidensticker written in 1961. An introduction by Richie mentioned the difficulty of finding fiction for the early postwar decades, since much of it appeared in obscure and vanished periodicals or was never published.

Richie's introduction also summarized the various approaches of the collection's authors: focusing on the foreigner and his/her relation to Japan; looking at the country through a Japanese discipline like the tea ceremony, ikebana, bonsai or haiku; using the Japanese as a means to define one's own self; or describing a Japanese character from his/her own point of view. It was noted that a number of the authors concentrated on the differences from their home countries, compared the self from their own country and the self emerging in Japan, or sought in one way or another to come to terms with the country. It was claimed that such writing contrasted with that produced by the many expatriates who flocked to Paris but generally avoided making France or the French the subject of their work.

Of the stories concerned more or less with foreigners coming to terms in Japan, enjoyed most were one about a foreign woman trying to make sense of the behavior of the people around her, comparing them to herself, while trying not to worry too much about her uncertain future (Kate the Slops). And one in which a lonely foreign teacher tried to communicate with a woman to whom he was attracted (Gibson). The story by Birnbaum skillfully contrasted cultures and was full of subtle parallels and contrasts between the behavior of Japanese and foreign characters.

Tuohy's work, which gave the anthology its title, also contained many interesting, catty observations. Instead of focusing on one person, it showed a narrator who observed a foreigner and a Japanese acting on differing standards and assumptions, failing to communicate, and ending in tragedy.

Most of the stories in the collection employed straight realism, more or less. Stylistically more adventurous ones from the 1990s included a hallucinatory tale about the love and longing of a cross-cultural couple (Leza Lowitz). And random scenes between a Japanese man and a foreign woman, as if taken from an experimental film (Michelle Leigh). One or two others featured magic realist devices like apparitions that kept crossing a narrator's path (Laurel Ostrow), a face that appeared on a computer screen to embody a narrator's hopes and fears (Elizabeth Balestrieri), or a Japanese "kami" in its shrine mulling changes in the worshippers over the centuries (Christopher Blasdel).

Bryson's story was from the early 1980s -- before the bubble, in the forgotten days when Japan's economic growth was feared. The only tale set in the corporate world, it cut back and forth between a business meeting of Japanese and foreigners and the Japanese firm's elderly president, who sat at home brooding over his son's death in the war while his monolithic company marched forward at the expense of the doomed foreigners. Porter's work from 1970, written in his usual baroque style, had buried within it an interesting tale about the shift over time in the relations between an aging Occupation soldier and the housemaid he'd married decades earlier. One of the more complex and interesting was Francis King's story from the 1970s that moved between an older foreign woman's return to Kyoto after two decades and her encounters with people, places and emotions in the past. She found that her formerly skinny houseboy had turned into a thickset businessman in a suit.

I'd agree with the reviewer who wrote that the anthology was thin in stories that conveyed -- lyrically or otherwise -- the lure of the culture and what kept expatriates in country. Some of the stories might be taken to hint at attractions like the simple kindness found most often in the countryside (Karen Hill Anton), the sense of living tradition, compassion and propriety (Joseph LaPenta, Chand). The pull of what was excitingly strange (Leigh, Lowitz), physically intoxicating (Eric Madeen) or a screen on which one could project one's emotions (Morgan Gibson).

Something else that felt too infrequent in the collection was a view of life from the perspective of Japanese characters. The most serious and thoughtful stories of this type, in my opinion, were one from the 1970s in which an unhappy, materialistic Japanese woman was helped by a wiser Japanese neighbor to gain a clearer understanding of what mattered (Chand). One in which an aging master of ikebana defended old values (LaPenta). Richie's series of six encounters among various sets of Japanese or foreigners, written mostly in the 1980s, which showed more or less humorously their misunderstandings and absurdities. And the drama of a young woman married to a foreigner whose mother helped her to reconcile with her father (Holly Thompson). (Other stories from a Japanese point of view included those by Kirkup, Wetherall, Kerr and some of the vignettes by McCarthy.) Works that focused on Japanese characters with insight and a lot of dark humor were Seidensticker's and Alex Shishin's. Humor directed at either foreigners or Japanese was present in a number of the stories to some degree, when not being displaced by frustration or worse.

Naturally, a number of stories put Japanese and foreign characters into some kind of dialogue. Rarely in the conversation, though, was equal weight given to the two sides' differing points of view or a meeting of minds allowed to take place. A work that came close was the one by Lowitz, which for all its unreality at least described the perspective of each lover from the inside.

In the collection as a whole, a handful of stories felt like they could've been set almost anywhere, or contained narrators absorbed with themselves to a point that wasn't understood. Among tales from the 1990s by some of the younger writers, some focused more narrowly on one individual's concerns or experiences, were less ambitious in structure, or seemed to have less of note to say than the others described. It was a surprise that only one story in the anthology was set in the corporate world. But overall, the book was very enjoyable, with a range of skillful authors and much that would interest expats and others.

Some excerpts:

"He was of that generation that had come to Japan seeking enlightenment rather than wealth; but the more he meditated, the more he wanted to fall in love."

"His Japanese colleagues who taught English, all thoroughly modernized, smiled when he asked them about Buddhism. 'For funerals,' one said, others laughed, and that was that."

"'[The mystery of Japan] is a mystery for us too,' Miss Yukiya said. 'I have been trying to understand it through tea ceremony.'"

"[The Japanese participants] undertook the whole project with the extraordinary concentration and discipline which they brought to every task in which honor was involved . . . the intense fury of the will which hides behind all the decorum and docility."

"The Japanese and Americans often find exactly what they want in each other. Theirs is a marriage, born under clouds of disaster, that has proved to be of great convenience."

"I could not help being reminded of the severe shock a Westerner's appearance must have given to a Japanese seeing one for the first time."

"Years ago, when she first came to Japan, Susan remembers thinking how Japanese women had seemed like ciphers, unreadable masks. Their smiling faces . . . had seemed to parody true emotion. Over the years Susan has learned to read these masks, to see beyond their bright exteriors. Slowly she has learned these women's languages, and slowly she has discovered that she is just like them."

"I always thought Americans were supposed to be cheerful and positive, always joking, but he certainly wasn't like that. Mostly, I guess, I felt sorry for him... Read more ›

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb selection of best foreign writing about Japan., October 8, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Paperback)

This is a superb selection of the best short stories written by expatriate writers living in Japan. It is also the first such selection and promises some rare treats to readers unfamiliar with both the writers and the topic. There is a broad range of both topics and literary styles, by both well-known and previously unanthologized authors.