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ENTRY
Imagining Memory
May 6, 2010
This essay will be presented at the Imagining Memory panel, Hawaii Book and Music Fest 2010.
I just read Miguel Syjuco’s novel, “Ilustrado,” a good novel. In it one of the main characters, a famous older writer, says, “When you get to my age, the most insignificant memories take on significance. Unrationalized blame, casual kindness, random gestures—one day you just need to tell someone about them.”
I think that is largely true, at least it is for me. But why? It must be that the older we get, the more we have experienced, largely these experiences are in great bundles of similarity, like CostCo packaged bulk products. The little but rich memories stand out in their singularity. They produce a visceral emotional response, increasing the feeling of being alive. And when we feel like this we want to share that feeling.
My latest novel, OH!, looks at this idea of memory, emotion, and expression through the Japanese aesthetic/poetic term ‘mono no aware’, roughly translated as the emotional essence of things, most often thought of as the sadness in beauty. Cherry blossoms are the prototypical mono no aware objects, exploding in beauty for only a few days before they die. It is what we feel when we experience something that makes us exclaim “oh!” and express our feelings in poetry, prose, art, or song.
The concept of mono no aware was introduced by the Japanese scholar, Motoori Norinaga, who lived from 1730 to 1801. Norinaga, a physician and expert in Chinese classical studies, was a leader of the national revival movement (“National Studies” or “National Learning”), which focused on studying ancient Japanese texts to rediscover the intrinsic values in Japanese life. “Intrinsic” refers to that which is more purely Japanese, before the great influence of foreign, primarily Chinese, ideas.
Norinaga especially refers to The Tale of Genji as an example of mono no aware. Genji was written in the eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, the court name of the author, a woman distantly related to the powerful Fujiwara family who ruled Japan in the name of Heian-period emperors. Genji is largely about the romantic encounters of “the shining prince,” and is rich with poetic metaphors of longing, passion and sadness. In it, the word aware appears on average once per page-a total of 1,044 times.
OH! follows Zack Hara, a young Japanese American from Los Angeles searching for an emotionally meaningful life while traveling in Japan. Zack finds an ally in a professor and underground poet who introduces him to the concept of mono no aware. The professor, grieving for a missing daughter, assigns Zack a set of mysterious tasks, among them: find a pear-shaped stone, learn of a memory of Zack’s grandfather in his childhood village, commit a petty crime.
As Zack finds out, these tasks all deal with memory and their emotional content. They guide the story and are uncovered gradually, giving heightened power to their meaning to the characters. In the end, the memories coalesce into the idea of the “beauty of any memorable emotional experience.” Here are a few paragraphs from the novel to give you a flavor of this.
The professor gave me a new task. Apparently not satisfied with my artistic rendition of the suicide scene he asks me to write a poem. About what? I asked him. He said, “I know you came to Japan to discover some of your grandfather’s life here. How is that going?”
I told him about Katsuyama and not finding anything there. He suggested that I go back and try to find some memory—maybe remembrance is a better word—of my grandfather. When I’ve found it, he assigns me the task of writing a poem about the remembrance.
It seems like a difficult task. Not just because of my poetry skills. My grandfather left Japan such a long ago. Surely, anyone who would have known him would be dead. And I know only a little about his side of the family. I have a vague recollection of an old genealogical chart. I should email my uncle, my dad’s oldest brother, who keeps a box of my grandfather’s papers and ask him to send a copy.
After a brief, weak protest, I agreed to the task.
The village is quiet when I get there, no one in sight. When I walk past the agricultural cooperative, I hear machinery start up. It sounds like a metallic grinder, maybe a blade sharpener. I walk over to the store, make the floorboards on the porch creak, and hear the old woman yell “Quiet!”
Inside, I nod to her. She says, “Still no Hara around here.”
I laugh and she squints at me like I’m a lunatic. “You have a good memory. How about Shimokihara?”
“What’s that?”
“My grandfather’s real family name.”
“Shimokihara? No, doesn’t ring a bell.”
“How about the big flood in 1925? Do you know anything about it?”
Her eyes get wide. “The flood? I was a little girl then. But of course I remember it.”
I show her the photos I got at the museum.
She nods at each one. Then I show her the news story of the boy named Shimokihara.
She reads it then says, “That’s your grandfather, eh? I don’t remember him or his parents.”
“How about after the flood, do you remember anything about what might have happened to the orphans?”
“No. We moved to another town until they rebuilt Katsuyama. Only a few of us moved back. Hardly anybody stayed.”
“Would anyone else here remember the flood?”
She laughs. “I’m the only one left.”
I thank her for the information. I walk back down the street toward the fields I’d seen the first trip. I’m trying to think of a poem. Something that would capture the success of discovering the story of my grandfather’s past, of finding some memory of him, if only in a news report. Writing a poem should be easy, there’s a lot to work with: a son losing his real parents then watching his adopted parents drown, leaving his devastated village on a ship to a new country where he knew no one, didn’t know the language. It should be there.
But I’ve got nothing.
© 2013
May 6, 2010
This essay will be presented at the Imagining Memory panel, Hawaii Book and Music Fest 2010.
I just read Miguel Syjuco’s novel, “Ilustrado,” a good novel. In it one of the main characters, a famous older writer, says, “When you get to my age, the most insignificant memories take on significance. Unrationalized blame, casual kindness, random gestures—one day you just need to tell someone about them.”
I think that is largely true, at least it is for me. But why? It must be that the older we get, the more we have experienced, largely these experiences are in great bundles of similarity, like CostCo packaged bulk products. The little but rich memories stand out in their singularity. They produce a visceral emotional response, increasing the feeling of being alive. And when we feel like this we want to share that feeling.
My latest novel, OH!, looks at this idea of memory, emotion, and expression through the Japanese aesthetic/poetic term ‘mono no aware’, roughly translated as the emotional essence of things, most often thought of as the sadness in beauty. Cherry blossoms are the prototypical mono no aware objects, exploding in beauty for only a few days before they die. It is what we feel when we experience something that makes us exclaim “oh!” and express our feelings in poetry, prose, art, or song.
The concept of mono no aware was introduced by the Japanese scholar, Motoori Norinaga, who lived from 1730 to 1801. Norinaga, a physician and expert in Chinese classical studies, was a leader of the national revival movement (“National Studies” or “National Learning”), which focused on studying ancient Japanese texts to rediscover the intrinsic values in Japanese life. “Intrinsic” refers to that which is more purely Japanese, before the great influence of foreign, primarily Chinese, ideas.
Norinaga especially refers to The Tale of Genji as an example of mono no aware. Genji was written in the eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, the court name of the author, a woman distantly related to the powerful Fujiwara family who ruled Japan in the name of Heian-period emperors. Genji is largely about the romantic encounters of “the shining prince,” and is rich with poetic metaphors of longing, passion and sadness. In it, the word aware appears on average once per page-a total of 1,044 times.
OH! follows Zack Hara, a young Japanese American from Los Angeles searching for an emotionally meaningful life while traveling in Japan. Zack finds an ally in a professor and underground poet who introduces him to the concept of mono no aware. The professor, grieving for a missing daughter, assigns Zack a set of mysterious tasks, among them: find a pear-shaped stone, learn of a memory of Zack’s grandfather in his childhood village, commit a petty crime.
As Zack finds out, these tasks all deal with memory and their emotional content. They guide the story and are uncovered gradually, giving heightened power to their meaning to the characters. In the end, the memories coalesce into the idea of the “beauty of any memorable emotional experience.” Here are a few paragraphs from the novel to give you a flavor of this.
The professor gave me a new task. Apparently not satisfied with my artistic rendition of the suicide scene he asks me to write a poem. About what? I asked him. He said, “I know you came to Japan to discover some of your grandfather’s life here. How is that going?”
I told him about Katsuyama and not finding anything there. He suggested that I go back and try to find some memory—maybe remembrance is a better word—of my grandfather. When I’ve found it, he assigns me the task of writing a poem about the remembrance.
It seems like a difficult task. Not just because of my poetry skills. My grandfather left Japan such a long ago. Surely, anyone who would have known him would be dead. And I know only a little about his side of the family. I have a vague recollection of an old genealogical chart. I should email my uncle, my dad’s oldest brother, who keeps a box of my grandfather’s papers and ask him to send a copy.
After a brief, weak protest, I agreed to the task.
The village is quiet when I get there, no one in sight. When I walk past the agricultural cooperative, I hear machinery start up. It sounds like a metallic grinder, maybe a blade sharpener. I walk over to the store, make the floorboards on the porch creak, and hear the old woman yell “Quiet!”
Inside, I nod to her. She says, “Still no Hara around here.”
I laugh and she squints at me like I’m a lunatic. “You have a good memory. How about Shimokihara?”
“What’s that?”
“My grandfather’s real family name.”
“Shimokihara? No, doesn’t ring a bell.”
“How about the big flood in 1925? Do you know anything about it?”
Her eyes get wide. “The flood? I was a little girl then. But of course I remember it.”
I show her the photos I got at the museum.
She nods at each one. Then I show her the news story of the boy named Shimokihara.
She reads it then says, “That’s your grandfather, eh? I don’t remember him or his parents.”
“How about after the flood, do you remember anything about what might have happened to the orphans?”
“No. We moved to another town until they rebuilt Katsuyama. Only a few of us moved back. Hardly anybody stayed.”
“Would anyone else here remember the flood?”
She laughs. “I’m the only one left.”
I thank her for the information. I walk back down the street toward the fields I’d seen the first trip. I’m trying to think of a poem. Something that would capture the success of discovering the story of my grandfather’s past, of finding some memory of him, if only in a news report. Writing a poem should be easy, there’s a lot to work with: a son losing his real parents then watching his adopted parents drown, leaving his devastated village on a ship to a new country where he knew no one, didn’t know the language. It should be there.
But I’ve got nothing.
© 2013
COMMENTS
Number of comments: 1
click here to add a comment
Lee Witte
Memories are weird things, we need them but they can also deceive!
click here to add a comment
Lee Witte
Memories are weird things, we need them but they can also deceive!
ARCHIVE
date (comments)
Review: Paprika
April 21, 2013 (3)
Review: A Straight Road With 99 Curves
March 30, 2013 (1)
Gripping writing
Feb. 28, 2013 (2)
Review: Salvation of a Saint
January 19, 2013 (2)
2012 in review
December 30, 2012 (2)
Review: Ninja
September 30, 2012 (2)
Review: My Postwar Life
August 21, 2012 (1)
New interview with Colin Marshall
July 15, 2012 (3)
Book events
April 25, 2012 (2)
Subduction
March 14, 2012 (8)
Review: A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard
January 14, 2012 (1)
Review: Plainsong
December 20, 2011 (3)
Review: The Devil's Disciple
November 29, 2011 (2)
Haruki Murakami
October 5, 2011 (2)
Busyness and demons
September 25, 2011 (2)
Characters: The Bully
July 30, 2011 (3)
Review: Manazuru
June 28, 2011 (2)
Deadlines!
June 24, 2011 (2)
Review: Butterfly's Sisters
May 18, 2011 (1)
Review: Isle of Dreams
April 20, 2011 (2)
Cades Award for Literature press release
April 12, 2011 (2)
Japan and other news
March 29, 2011 (1)
Borders bankruptcy
February 17, 2011 (2)
2010 review
December 17, 2010 (6)
Congratulations Mario Vargas Llosa
October 7, 2010 (2)
OH! wins best book award
September 23, 2010 (2)
Review: Kissing the Mask
August 22, 2010 (1)
Jonathan Lethem: Writing at the margins
July 12, 2010 (2)
Review: Love in Translation
June 22, 2010 (3)
Jose Saramago
June 18, 2010 (0)
Marketplace of Ideas interview
June 11, 2010 (2)
Imagining Memory
May 6, 2010 (1)
Upcoming Los Angeles events
April 7, 2010 (2)
Time and energy
March 30, 2010 (2)
Review: Botchan
February 28, 2010 (2)
J.D. Salinger
January 28, 2010 (1)
2009 Reviewed
December 31, 2009 (5)
Review: The Word Book
December 12, 2009 (1)
Chaat and Chat event with OH!
November 6, 2009 (2)
Home at last
November 2, 2009 (2)
Los Angeles events
October 17, 2009 (1)
Poets and poetry
October 7, 2009 (1)
Time + place
September 24, 2009 (1)
The future of books
September 23, 2009 (1)
October book tour
September 6, 2009 (1)
Blogging at Powell's Books
August 28, 2009 (2)
The evolution of an idea
August 3, 2009 (1)
The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey
July 9, 2009 (2)
Tour debrief
July 2, 2009 (3)
Book tour events
May 18, 2009 (3)
Simply in the mood
April 24, 2009 (2)
Book tour
April 8, 2009 (6)
The Necessary Book
March 2, 2009 (2)
"Murder Makes the Magazine"
February 7, 2009 (3)
John Updike
January 27, 2009 (2)
2008 misc. (good news, bad news)
January 1, 2009 (3)
Publishing woes and query letters
December 13, 2008 (4)
Punctuation compunction
November 16, 2008 (3)
The Fountain of Youth (and other Ideas)
October 10, 2008 (2)
David Foster Wallace
September 14, 2008 (2)
Ending it all
September 12, 2008 (2)
The mystery of plotting, the plotting of mysteries
August 29, 2008 (3)
Blocking out the block
August 20, 2008 (3)
"What kind of books do you write?"
August 8, 2008 (2)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 4
July 21, 2008 (3)
Show and tell
July 14, 2008 (3)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 3
July 7, 2008 (7)
Advice for first-time writers (Barry Gifford and me)
June 30, 2008 (6)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 2
June 18, 2008 (3)
To be or not to be
June 10, 2008 (6)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 1
June 3, 2008 (6)
Virtual unreality
May 31, 2008 (4)
The purpose of this blog
May 21, 2008 (5)
Review: Paprika
April 21, 2013 (3)
Review: A Straight Road With 99 Curves
March 30, 2013 (1)
Gripping writing
Feb. 28, 2013 (2)
Review: Salvation of a Saint
January 19, 2013 (2)
2012 in review
December 30, 2012 (2)
Review: Ninja
September 30, 2012 (2)
Review: My Postwar Life
August 21, 2012 (1)
New interview with Colin Marshall
July 15, 2012 (3)
Book events
April 25, 2012 (2)
Subduction
March 14, 2012 (8)
Review: A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard
January 14, 2012 (1)
Review: Plainsong
December 20, 2011 (3)
Review: The Devil's Disciple
November 29, 2011 (2)
Haruki Murakami
October 5, 2011 (2)
Busyness and demons
September 25, 2011 (2)
Characters: The Bully
July 30, 2011 (3)
Review: Manazuru
June 28, 2011 (2)
Deadlines!
June 24, 2011 (2)
Review: Butterfly's Sisters
May 18, 2011 (1)
Review: Isle of Dreams
April 20, 2011 (2)
Cades Award for Literature press release
April 12, 2011 (2)
Japan and other news
March 29, 2011 (1)
Borders bankruptcy
February 17, 2011 (2)
2010 review
December 17, 2010 (6)
Congratulations Mario Vargas Llosa
October 7, 2010 (2)
OH! wins best book award
September 23, 2010 (2)
Review: Kissing the Mask
August 22, 2010 (1)
Jonathan Lethem: Writing at the margins
July 12, 2010 (2)
Review: Love in Translation
June 22, 2010 (3)
Jose Saramago
June 18, 2010 (0)
Marketplace of Ideas interview
June 11, 2010 (2)
Imagining Memory
May 6, 2010 (1)
Upcoming Los Angeles events
April 7, 2010 (2)
Time and energy
March 30, 2010 (2)
Review: Botchan
February 28, 2010 (2)
J.D. Salinger
January 28, 2010 (1)
2009 Reviewed
December 31, 2009 (5)
Review: The Word Book
December 12, 2009 (1)
Chaat and Chat event with OH!
November 6, 2009 (2)
Home at last
November 2, 2009 (2)
Los Angeles events
October 17, 2009 (1)
Poets and poetry
October 7, 2009 (1)
Time + place
September 24, 2009 (1)
The future of books
September 23, 2009 (1)
October book tour
September 6, 2009 (1)
Blogging at Powell's Books
August 28, 2009 (2)
The evolution of an idea
August 3, 2009 (1)
The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey
July 9, 2009 (2)
Tour debrief
July 2, 2009 (3)
Book tour events
May 18, 2009 (3)
Simply in the mood
April 24, 2009 (2)
Book tour
April 8, 2009 (6)
The Necessary Book
March 2, 2009 (2)
"Murder Makes the Magazine"
February 7, 2009 (3)
John Updike
January 27, 2009 (2)
2008 misc. (good news, bad news)
January 1, 2009 (3)
Publishing woes and query letters
December 13, 2008 (4)
Punctuation compunction
November 16, 2008 (3)
The Fountain of Youth (and other Ideas)
October 10, 2008 (2)
David Foster Wallace
September 14, 2008 (2)
Ending it all
September 12, 2008 (2)
The mystery of plotting, the plotting of mysteries
August 29, 2008 (3)
Blocking out the block
August 20, 2008 (3)
"What kind of books do you write?"
August 8, 2008 (2)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 4
July 21, 2008 (3)
Show and tell
July 14, 2008 (3)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 3
July 7, 2008 (7)
Advice for first-time writers (Barry Gifford and me)
June 30, 2008 (6)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 2
June 18, 2008 (3)
To be or not to be
June 10, 2008 (6)
Theory of Satisfaction: Part 1
June 3, 2008 (6)
Virtual unreality
May 31, 2008 (4)
The purpose of this blog
May 21, 2008 (5)