Book Review

Letters of Love

Helen Rumbelow, The London Times

THE FOURTH TREASURE

It’s nice to feel as if you are learning something by reading a novel, that you can wake up from a dreamy afternoon by the fire and suddenly find yourself expert in an arcane subject without any exertion.

This can go too far, of course, and the world of literature might be a better place without endlessly detailed descriptions of Second World War tanks, but The Fourth Treasure has a light touch as befits a modern romance about the ancient art of Japanese calligraphy.

Tina, a twentysomething neurology student in San Francisco, hears that her boyfriend’s old Japanese calligraphy teacher has had a stroke. It makes an interesting case for her -- the man’s brain has been damaged in such a way that he cannot talk or write, but insistently tries to communicate through strangely beautiful but unreadable lettering.

If only Tina could understand what he was trying to say she would unlock the secret to a great love story, spanning the Pacific and several generations.

So she needs to learn all the tools of neuroscience and shodo, the Japanese lettering which is more like the mental and physical discipline of a martial art than the Western calligraphy on offer in suburban evening classes.

This curious gem of a book reads like a cross between Generation X and a Japanese wall hanging. Tina’s footnotes on how the brain works and extracts from the teacher’s shodo textbooks run down opposite margins. The real drama, though, is in the illustrations, with some pages taken up entirely with the abstract shapes made by the sick teacher. (And this, incidentally, is the result of another love story, between the author, an American neuroscientist on his second novel, and his wife Linda, a shodo practitioner who illustrated the book.) They are poignantly interpreted by Hanako, Tina’s mother, who knows a lot more about the art of shodo, and its teacher, than she is letting on.

Shimoda’s book has some very finely wrought touches, particularly Tina’s irritating all-American boyfriend who wishes he were Japanese, and the much-reduced lifestyle of the well-born Hanako, who had to become a waitress after leaving Japan.

Yet Tina is a disappointingly blank character, despite being torn between feeling not Japanese enough to communicate with the teacher, and not ballsy enough to protect him from her predatory professors.

The book has no such East meet West anxiety. As all the characters journey towards fulfillment, I found myself charmed by the book itself. The novel is pleasingly understated, but as a I learnt more I found myself more and more affected by the shodo illustrations; understanding, it seems, needn’t always be in the literal sense.

Copyright 2002 London Times