Shimotakahara’s debut novel shares lessons we should have learned by now.
SHIMOTAKAHARA’S DEBUT NOVEL SHARES LESSONS WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED
After the Bloom By Leslie Shimotakahara Dundurn 328 pp; $ 22.99
If the Promised Land calls patience a virtue, I’m, um, pooched. I’d like to believe I’ve got some other things in pocket for doom’s day deliverance — hold- the- door- open decency and Catholic guilt made good in tips beyond budget — but if the big guy’s got an ear on my traffic- jam chatter, eternity’s looking a lot like hellfire for this wicked kid.
I’d been packing for purgatory when Leslie Shimotakahara’s first novel, After the Bloom, landed desk- side: a deep and beautiful story that might well deliver my salvation in its pages. Intricate and lyrical as it is, After the Bloom pulls hard on patience — a slow burn despite a slim spine — but somehow, reading it, I found myself 40 minutes, 10 pages, and 23 words deep in a Dictionary. com k- hole, coming to with a start, cheeks damp, and an unwitting exercise in the virtue itself under belt. Hook, line, and sin: I tore through After the Bloom, speed as it were in a story prone to languish, Shimotakahara writing mystery in long words but clipped phrases, an addictive acrobatic syntax that keeps you dogged enough to endure.
Set first in 1980s Toronto, the book winds back in chronology before sprawling south to California, Japanese internment camps l ending i ntermittent backdrop through the course of 300-or-so pages. After the Bloom follows Rita Takemitsu, whose ill and aging mom has recently gone MIA. The book’s mystery might be traced on pavement but it’s told introspectively, Rita’s search landing her an unexpected lesson in family history along the way. Retracing steps back 40- odd years, After the Bloom plants one petal in Second World War history — an ugly thing already, and worse when it comes back to teach you more, Shimotakahara chronicling oftforgotten stateside horrors of the time.
Poetically told and laced with Japanese folklore, the novel takes cues from a more mythical narrative, parables abounding in its fiction but always with a point. In this Shimotakahara proves her own patience right back, After the Bloom assuming little of its readers in the way of base knowledge, and so giving richly in research to fill any gaps. The book is a generous overview of Japanese internment and master class in the delicate art of offering shouldbe- common knowledge without could- be- grating condescension. Rita’s voice sneaks in with read- me- twice bite, a dry humour that begs double taking and breaks the book’s heft. More might be nice, but maybe less is the idea here: my unspoken privilege — a byproduct of love’s lottery, location and genetic cir- cumstance — made for unpleasant company, blush rising as I read and understood enough about this history to know that I never really could.
In many ways, After the Bloom branches, or at least benefits, naturally from Shimotakahara’s first book — The Reading List, a memoir of the author’s personal experience mining her family’s history, unraveling a not- dissimilar tangle of generational saga. Pain in reliving her own past no doubt plays well in Shimotakahara’s fiction, After the Bloom a stark story told vividly enough to read as hard truth. That hard truth earned Leslie Shimotakahara’s debut a Canada- Japan Literary Prize, recognition enough alone to lend her sophomore effort the credibility its rendering warrants either way.
After the Bloom oscillates between story and something a little deeper, each characters’ actions as allegorical as their thought, both requiring a keen read and contemplation to realize fully. After the Bloom asks a lot — restraint through the wander, maybe a reference book handy for its jaunt — but then again a book like this should: Japanese internment isn’t an easy subject, not least because of its deeply personal impact on our author, but squaring up against a somewhat frightening lack of broader awareness in its readership, too. Not quite ripe enough for history books and not sexy enough for politics, ignorance, or — more kindly — passive remission seems to keep even our own country’s casualties from collective memory. In After the Bloom, as in The Reading List, Shimotakahara joins a rank of garlanded Canadian authors who’ve offered their skill and kindness to casual readers: tough stuff packaged in solid fiction that edifies as it enthralls, emotion indelible and set deep in stories we might otherwise prefer to forget.
There are seven virtues, after all, so maybe I can get a pass on patience. But Leslie Shimotakahara’s novel ticks off at least a couple of more from heaven’s righteous tally: Into the Bloom is a story pursued in diligence, shared in charity, and its author humble for crafting the thing at all. There might be a couple of more on that list, but Shimotakahara has well earned her Earthly praise without them and seems in good shape for entrée vous either way.
You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. — Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston Farewell in Manzanar to