The author who got her ducks in a row
After decades living and working in Japan, Angela Jeffs returned to the UK to live in Scotland, where she wrote her latest book, which she describes as a fable for our times
APerthshire-based writer has published her latest book – a fable following the imagined adventures of five Mandarin ducks on an incredible journey from Perthshire to their ancestral roots in China.
Five of a Feather is Angela Jeffs’ third independentlypublished book and first began to find life on the page in Japan, where the author was living at the time.
A former actor, teacher and editor, Angela moved to Japan in 1986. She initially planned to go for a month and ended up staying for 26 years, re-inventing herself as a journalist and feature writer while there.
“I spent my first six months exploring and reading everything about Japan I could lay my hands on,” Angela explains.
“I then sent a tentative letter to The Japan Times asking if I might submit articles to the country’s oldest Englishlanguage paper, and ended up writing a weekly profile for over two decades, and later a column as an agony aunt to the non-japanese community.
“I had no idea when I left London that Japan was about to boom economically. You could say I arrived at just the right time.”
Over the years she helped a company of Japanese women establish a magazine for their ex-pat clients. She was the Japan correspondent for the Hong-kong-based weekly newspaper supplement Asia Magazine, did twice-weekly shifts on Asiavision for NHK, Japan’s state broadcasting company, contributed to Dorling Kindersley’s Eyewitness Japan, and wrote a book about Tokyo for a publisher in Singapore.
“Living on the Shonan coast south of Yokohama, I found myself ideally placed to speed in and out of central Yohohama and Tokyo,” she says.
“I really did experience the best of both worlds, spending my day out and about, and the evening sitting on the beach, a Corona beer in hand, watching the sun set behind Mount Fuji across Sagami Bay.”
Throughout her time in Japan, she was a regular visitor to Forneth, situated between Dunkeld and Blairgowrie and where her mother and her aunt lived.
“I had been visiting Perthshire since 1951, when my aunt married Charles Speid of Forneth House. My mother, a widow, moved up from Coventry to be near her sister in the mid-1960s. After her death in 2007, it was to her cottage that I returned to live with my Japanese husband in late 2012.”
Explaining the story behind the book, Angela says: “All birds are beautiful, but Mandarin ducks seem to hold a special place in peoples’ hearts.
“This may be why they are a symbol of love in China, from where they are considered – except to the Japanese, who claim them as their own – to have originated.
“They are rarely seen in Europe this far north, and one of the last sightings was on Loch of the Lowes near Dunkeld here in Perthshire a few years ago. A male Mandarin visited the loch at the same time of year for a few years but I don’t know if it was ever confirmed to be a missing pet or not.
“Some Mandarin ducks do breed in the UK, but they have been introduced from Asia and escaped from captivity, and the idea of Mandarins as escapee pets added a new twist to a story that I had been considering for years in Japan.”
It was on one of her many trips back to Scotland that she called on neighbours just up the hill and learned they had taken in some unwanted birds.
As she explains in the introduction to the book: “It all happened as written, except that apparently I was told the ducks were ducks, and that the idea they were Mandarins and in any way connected to China was simply a product of my own Oriental-orientated imaginings.”
When told that the birds had disappeared overnight, Angela joked that maybe they had flown home, and the seed of a story was sown.
Several years later she read a short news item in her weekly postal Guardian that a lone Mandarin had been spotted on a reservoir near Bridgenorth in Shropshire, and the story began developing. This clipping was pinned on her noticeboard but was lost in the move.
Angela takes up the story of the book: “I first began writing Five of a Feather in 2010, and was about halfway through when the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns in Japan began on March 11, 2011.
“Picking the book up again some six months later, the storyline changed direction, gathering pace and pretty much finished itself. It almost felt like channelling.”
Having settled in Forneth, Angela had two other books to publish first however, starting in 2013 with a book she had been writing for over a decade. Chasing Shooting Stars is based on tapes made on a trip she made to South America “without any Spanish or any plans, just 107 of my grandfather’s letters to my father – from Buenos Aires to Coventry”.
She says: “In one of the letters my grandfather described his life in Uruguay, where he was born, Argentina where he was a businessman, and family left behind in Liverpool as ‘a mad romp’. I think I know how he felt.”
Chasing Shooting Stars was
“It is a story of courage and transformation that begins on a wintry night in Scotland and concludes half a world away”
followed by a book about her home and life in Japan – Household Stories/katei Monogatari – which was published in 2017.
Commenting on her second book, Angela said: “It came out of the four-level therapeutic creative writing programme, Drawing on the Writer Within, that I began developing in 2003. In one of the exercises I would challenge students to write something on love. Returning home after the class, I thought I ought to set the pace.
“I had the most amazing time in Japan. I worked really hard while I was there but I absolutely loved it – the culture, the people, even the contradictions that at times sent me near crazy – and want to remember it all, and this book is a big part of that. I think it’s true to say that half my heart remains there.
“By contrast my husband has no desire to return. He has no stress in Scotland, he says.
“Being Japanese in Japan is hard. As a Westerner, and an older woman, I enjoyed all the advantages of living in that polite, kind, calm society, but escaped having to follow all the rules 100 per cent. Or was forgiven any errors, as an ‘outsider’.”
Production of Five of a Feather has a similarly international feel to the narrative itself – the book was edited in New Zealand, designed and produced in Canada, with the cover designed by Hong Kong-born illustrator Meilo Lo who lives on Yell, Shetland.
Finding Meilo, Angela says, was synchronistic to say the least.
“I had been stuck for several months, and was searching for an artist who could do a Chinese-style watercolour for the cover.
“A visitor then pointed out that three vintage ceramic ducks hanging on the wall of my studio were flying in the wrong direction, heading west instead of east. As soon as she left I moved them, and within days had found Meilo and got back to work.”
Angela says: “Five of a Feather has been both a multi-cultural collaboration and yet another personal labour of love.
“It is a feelgood story but also a lesson for our times, working on various genredefying levels – as an adventure story, a culturally-diverse map-reading exercise, and Enneagram-inspired lessons in personal development.
“It is a story of courage and transformation that begins on a cold wintry night in Scotland and concludes half a world away in a Utopian spring with the promise of new beginnings for us all.
“And as we decide what kind of world we want in the future, after the global coronavirus pandemic has somehow come under control, it may be even more timely than I ever imagined.”