LIKE FATHER LIKE SON
Second-generation Ferguson writer blazes own trail
The first glint of inspiration for Satellite Love came to author Genki Ferguson as a fairly broad, universal image. It was of a teenage girl staring longingly up at the stars.
“The defining image was someone looking into space, someone making the connection with something far beyond,” says Ferguson, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in Vancouver. “At first, I wasn't sure if it was an alien or this or that. But it all kind of stemmed from an image of looking beyond, out into space.”
It was an image that could have come from anywhere in the world. But in his debut novel, Ferguson used it as a springboard into a specific time and place not often explored by young Canadian writers.
The book is set in 1999, on the eve of the millennium, when the author would have been two years old. Its setting is the fictional city of Sakita in southern Japan, based on a real place in the Kumamoto Prefecture that Ferguson doesn't want to name but where he spent many summers visiting his mother's side of the family.
That initial image came to him long before he had conjured Anna, his imaginative, deeply troubled and occasionally maddening protagonist at the heart of Satellite Love. She is not looking at an alien but obsessing over an orbiting satellite, one that seems to have sprung to sentient life and has become equally obsessed with the teenager staring up at it.
What follows is a charming, strange and occasionally unsettling story about isolation, obsession, faith and connection that confronts heady questions about consciousness and what it means to be a fully aware, sentient being. Without giving too much away, the satellite morphs into Leo (Low-earth Orbit satellite) after being willed to life in human form through Anna's imagination and crashing psyche. Other characters are orbiting this odd love story, most struggling with some form of identity crisis. The General is a blind, deaf and mute resident at a seniors' home with a murky past that includes a wild shootout with police 40 years earlier when he was a stubborn Japanese holdout refusing to accept or unaware of Japan's surrender during the Second World War. Anna is his only friend and they communicate by tapping messages in Morse code while holding hands. Anna's grandfather is kind but floating in and out of reality due to dementia. Soki is a teenage newcomer to Anna's school in the midst of untangling his religious beliefs after his father, a former Shinto priest, has abandoned his faith.
“Writing is kind of like being a magpie,” says Ferguson, who will join author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
on April 15 for an online event presented by Wordfest. “You pick and choose and pick apart stories and make something out of all of it.”
“Theme comes organically, especially in a book like Satellite Love,” he adds. “It really does feel like the characters are talking to you at some point. They have lives of their own. But these characters all exist within you as you're writing. These are all things that I think a lot of us work through: loneliness and belonging. Is there something out there? Whether it be satellites or some sort of animist god in the sense of Shintoism. The characters and these scenes and these ideas were never really set to begin
with. As the characters came to life, these questions were there with them.”
It makes for an impressively assured debut, particularly for a 23-year-old. Ferguson finished the first draft of his manuscript and boldly sent it, unsolicited, to American-canadian novelist and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki, who was impressed enough with the young writer to become an advocate and mentor. In a back-cover blurb, she says Satellite Love “will leave you breathless, charmed and deeply thoughtful.” Ferguson eventually landed a literary agent and a deal with powerhouse publisher Mcclelland and Stewart.
Ferguson, of course, has an impressive
literary lineage and also has strong roots in Japan. His father is Calgary-based, Giller-winning writer Will Ferguson, who married Genki's mother Terumi in the mid-1990s when teaching English in Japan.
Satellite Love began life as a screenplay for a short animated film before he decided he was better suited to be a writer than a filmmaker, although he recently completed his degree in film production at Emily Carr University. Still, he says the novel's structure — and specifically, his choice to tell the story through alternating first-person narration between Anna, Leo, the grandfather and Soki — is directly inspired by his training in cinema.
“One of the things you learn in film is how to make complicated lighting setups,” he says. “You want to illuminate a subject. You want to have more than just one spotlight, you want to add depth to a scene and illuminate different parts of the frame. Anna is very troubled, very lost. She is deserving of sympathy but maybe is not completely an easy character to sympathize with at times. She lashes out and a lot of her problems are her own fault. To create a character like that, I took a similar approach to lighting where there are all these different angles, each viewpoint is like another set of lights. It's how Anna sees herself in some of the chapters and how the rest of the world sees her in these other chapters.”
Genki Ferguson was 14 when his father won the prestigious 2012 Giller Prize for his dark, complex novel 419.
But readers will be hard-pressed to find much stylistic overlap between the elder Ferguson's sprawling, intricately plotted novels and comedic, non-fiction travel writing and Genki's haunting fable. Stylistically, the young writer found more influence from towering figures in Japanese literature such as Yasunari Kawabata and Natsume Soseki than his father. Nevertheless, he has been an inspiration.
“Stylistically, we're quite different,” Ferguson says. “I learned what good writing was from him, but I don't think I learned sentence-for-sentence or style of prose. That came from my own reading and my own exploration. My biggest take-away from living with him was just the writer's process. It was just seeing the working writer, day in, day out, wrestling with plot, taking apart characters and putting them back and seeing the stamina required to write. I think that helped put together Satellite Love.”