WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
Novel explores how life changed for two girls
The Translation of Love Lynne Kutsukake Penguin Random House Canada TORONTO Perhaps it was because Lynne Kutsukake’s JapaneseCanadian parents were sent to internment camps during the Second World War.
Or perhaps it was her career as a librarian specializing in Japanese studies that helped frame the novel arriving this month. Or maybe it was her simple desire to create a story about the shadow war can cast over people’s lives long after it ends.
So yes, all these factors played a role in the genesis of her debut novel, The Translation Of Love.
But crowning them all was its 64-year-old author’s discovery of an extraordinary fact about U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the U.S. occupying forces in the years after the war.
“I hope readers will stop and think about the impact of war — particularly its immediate aftermath — on people,” Kutsukake, soft-spoken but quietly eloquent, said. “There are always lingering effects that pass down. There’s also the way in which we all, as ordinary people, are caught up in a larger history we don’t even realize we’re part of.”
But she goes on to say the real trigger for the book came when she learned MacArthur was flooded with letters from ordinary Japanese seeking his help during that country’s postwar recovery.
“He received some 500,000 letters from Japanese citizens, which just astounded me,” Kutsukake says. The letters covered a multitude of topics — ranging from the need for land reform and despair over missing family members to the cost of soy sauce.
“I started to think — wow, this would make a great story. Then, I asked myself what kind of person would write a letter, and then I got this idea of a 12-year-old girl ...”
That 12-year-old girl would be named Fumi and she would begin coming to life in 2008 at the Banff Centre, where Kutsukake had enrolled in a writers’ workshop dealing with the problem of getting a novel’s first chapter right.
Up to then, she had published only short stories, one of which had been a finalist for the coveted Journey Prize. “But I didn’t know how to write a novel,” she says now. At Banff, she was required to write an opening scene for a longer work. “I had to submit 20 pages of ‘something.’”
So she wrote about two girls meeting in a Japanese classroom in 1947. One of them, Aya, was a lonely Japanese-Canadian child, recently released from a British Columbia internment camp and repatriated back to Japan with her embittered father. The other would be the prickly Fumi, seething with resentment over being told by the school to take this social pariah from Canada under her wing.
That 20-page assignment gave Kutsukake the confidence she needed.
“The workshop was only five days, but it was very special,” she says. “It gave me the encouragement to think I could continue. It was wonderful to be there.”
She proceeded to create a story about the development of an unlikely friendship between two girls from different cultures — a friendship fuelled by Fumi’s anxiety over an older sister, Sumiko, who has gone missing, and the help Aya gives her in writing a letter to MacArthur asking for his aid.
Knopf Canada has named to Kutsukake to its New Face of Fiction honours list in this, the 20th anniversary of the program. But she sees herself as a late bloomer. “So much got written and so much got tossed,” she says modestly.
Her need was to sustain an individual human dimension within a broader tapestry.
“When we think of (the Second World War), we think of all the big things that happen. But underpinning all that are these separate individuals who have become part of that history,” Kutsukake says.
She introduces the reader to a variety of characters: The missing sister, Sumiko, consumed with loneliness and guilt over the path she has taken; predatory GIs ready to exploit and then abandon young Japanese women who have fallen into their orbit; a kindly schoolmaster who faces his own challenges in adjusting to Japan under postwar occupation; Japanese-American soldier Matt Matsumoto, who works for the occupation forces, translating thousands of letters addressed to the general into English; and Nancy Nogami, a lonely typist pursued by her own demons.
Beyond this is a wider portrait of a devastated city — one that takes the reader from the offices of the U.S. occupation forces to seedy black market alleys and dance halls. And looming over the entire story is the almost mystical presence of MacArthur.
“I wanted to write about that occupation period. Then, I decided I would have a 12-year-old girl writing this letter to MacArthur seeking his help. I decided she needed a friend. And, of course, this friend would be someone who could write English in order to help her. And who else could that be but a Japanese-Canadian girl who has been sent back?”
So the wartime detention of Japanese Canadians also haunts the novel, even though it is set in Tokyo.
“You can never forget,” says Kutsukake, who was born after the war ended and her parents were released.
“It’s something people are thinking about more and more — perhaps because of potential persecution of other groups, whether Muslim Canadians or other groups that can be targets. The injustice that was done is something Japanese Canadians can’t forget. The lesson to be learned is never to let it happen again.”