Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel (originally published in 1995, newly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) is exactly my kind of book: it takes place in one day and features little else but two sisters talking to each other about their lives. The central conflict is that one sister, Minae is contemplating moving back to Japan after living in the U.S. for twenty years, but she can’t quite commit to it. If she does decide to move back, she is worried about breaking the news to her sister. That’s the whole question of the novel, plot-wise, but within that structure lie so many questions and ideas about race, language, writing, culture, assimilation, family, and education, just to start.
The novel’s title comes from the Japanese literary genre called the “I-novel,” a confessional form that’s loosely autobiographical. The main character is also named Minae Mizumura, living a life very similar to Mizumura’s own. In the novel, Minae’s family moved from Japan to Long Island when she was twelve and she’s been in the U.S. ever since. Now she is a graduate student at an unnamed university (which can only be Yale), trying to work up the courage to take her oral exams in French literature and figure out what she wants to do next. Her parents’ marriage has broken up. Her mother is in Singapore in a new relationship, her father is in assisted living, and her sister is in New York City, working as a sculptor and trying to make ends meet. She and her sister are very close, calling each other multiple times a day, and Minae knows that if she leaves, her sister will struggle on her own.
Through the course of the novel’s one day, the twenty-year anniversary of their move, Minae thinks about her past. Much of the novel is backstory: her memories of Japan, their move to the U.S., her time in high school and college, her experiences in graduate school. She tells us her sister’s story too: how she rebelled against their parents and made herself as American as she could. Minae, on the other hand, has always been obsessed with Japan. Rather than trying to fit into her new country, she spends her time reading Japanese novels and dreaming of returning permanently one day.
She’s scared to return, however, and this is the real source of conflict: who is Minae, exactly, and what does she want out of life? She realizes that the reason she has put off her oral exams so many times is that when they are complete, she will be free to move wherever she wants. Then she will have to make a choice and this terrifies her. She has felt such yearning for Japan for so long, but what if she moves there and ends up unhappy? She begins to wonder whether all her years of reading Japanese novels were a big mistake. She had decades to immerse herself in English and integrate into the U.S.: did she waste that opportunity, an opportunity many others would be very glad to have? She’s realizing that she what she really wants is not to be an academic, but to be a novelist. If she had spent more time studying literature in English, perhaps she could write in that language and have a wider audience. But she didn’t, and now she feels paralyzed, unhappy with her present, uncertain about the future. At the age of 32, she feels like her life hasn’t begun yet. She’s in the wrong place, speaking the wrong language, in the wrong career, trapped by family obligations, and full of loneliness.
An I-Novel has some wrenching descriptions of one particular form of “wrongness”: being Japanese in a culture that knows nothing about Japan and sees her only as Asian. She is shocked to discover that she is considered “Asian,” as she had never thought of herself that way. She’s Japanese, part of a culture that, for better or worse, sees itself as distinct from other Asian countries. One of her sister’s darkest moments is when some white high school friends set her up on a blind date with a prep school boy, and she is thrilled to be included and excited about the date until she sees that this boy is Korean, and realizes she was only invited along because her friends thought one Asian person would naturally want to date another. They should be perfect together, right?
Through their whole lives the sisters have consoled each other — they understand each other in a way no one else can — but family is also a burden. As the sisters talk on the phone throughout the day, Minae contemplates family as both a source of comfort and a trap:
I had no desire to start my new life in the style of the “I-novel,” that confessional exposition of, often, too-binding family ties.
This quotation gets at the dilemma of family and also another major theme: the fragile boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Minae (the character and maybe also the author) does not want to live in the pages of an I-novel, even though she has been doing just that, not least because she is a character in a novel of that name. At stake is what it takes to become a writer: it might require escaping the I-novel in order to write the I-novel.
The novel also includes photographs that feel like documents of a life actually lived: we come across pictures of Christmas decorations and leafy avenues on Long Island and desolate New York City street scenes. We are perhaps meant to understand these as taken by the character Minae, or possibly by the author herself. The two intersect at so many points it’s impossible to tell. The photos feel like pictures in a Sebald book: enigmatic, haunting, breaking the illusion of fictionality.
The novel is formally innovative in ways hard for English readers to grasp. First, the book is full of English words and phrases and was promoted in Japan as the “first bilingual novel.” In a note at the beginning, Juliet Winters Carpenter, the translator, writes about deciding to print these passages in bold, as a way to indicate to English readers where these words and phrases occur in the original. Then, the book was published left to right, instead of horizontally. The translator’s note explains that this is so readers of the Japanese don’t have to turn the book around each time English words appear.
An I-Novel is my third book by Minae Mizumura. I read A True Novel back in 2013—a 880-page retelling of Wuthering Heights set in Japan and the U.S.—and then her nonfiction book The Fall of Language in the Age of English back in 2015. Also available in English is her novel Inheritance from Mother, although I haven’t gotten to that one yet. She’s such a fascinating writer! Her Wuthering Heights retelling is excellent and her nonfiction is important for understanding world literature and how the dominance of English has changed everything.
An I-Novel is a book that crosses boundaries: between fiction and nonfiction, between languages and cultures, between words and images. Ideas from Mizumura’s nonfiction float in and out of her fiction, and now that I’ve read three of her books, I can see more and more connections among them all. I think I’m going to read everything of hers I can get my hands on.
Don’t Forget About
Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Two Lines Press, 2014, originally published in 2005): Although Self-Portrait in Green is totally unlike An I-Novel, it also is in part about genre, lying somewhere between memoir and fiction. I reviewed it for a site that focuses on fiction, but she wrote the book upon being asked to write a memoir. Who knows? The book’s narrator meets a series of women in green, each one possibly an aspect of the narrator’s psyche. Through these figures, NDiaye explores anxieties about family, creativity, and art. It’s a strange book — as all NDiaye’s books are — and also a beautiful portrait of one woman’s mind.
Publishing This Week
Small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read (in most cases) and am adding to my TBR:
If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani, translated by Elizabeth Harris (Archipelago): The story of a young man whose mother left her home in Italy to build a business in Romania. Now he’s traveling to Romania for her funeral and contemplating his life and modern-day Europe.
On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated by Lytton Smith (Open Letter): a best-seller in Iceland, this is nonfiction on climate change based on interviews with experts and also including history, mythology, travel writing, and personal takes on the subject.
White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, and Writing by Jennifer De Leon (University of Massachusetts Press): this one I have read and I reviewed it here. It’s an essay collection on becoming a writer and growing up the children of Guatemalan immigrants.
New on the TBR
New books acquired:
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (Unnamed Press, 2020): an impulse buy at my local bookshop after one of the booksellers recommended it to me.
Distant Fathers by Marina Jarre, translated by Ann Goldstein (New Vessel Press, publishing June 22, 2021): a review copy from the publisher, an autobiography about life in twentieth-century in Latvia and then Italy.
Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, translated by Kaiama L. Glover (Archipelago, 2017, originally published in 1957): the story of two sisters growing up in the Haitian Revolution. This and the next two books I bought because the publisher was having a sale.
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump (Archipelago, 2016, originally published in 2006): the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda.
A Change of Time by Ida Jessen, translated by Martin Aitken (Archipelago, 2019, originally published in 2015): a novel about a woman dealing with life after the death of her husband.
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
Finna by Nate Narshall (One World, 2020): poems. I got interested in this book after listening to this interview Nate Marshall did on Commonplace Podcast.
Permafrost by Eve Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanchez (And Other Stories, publishing this April, originally published in 2018): a novel of a woman’s search for freedom.
Currently Reading
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, originally published in 1967-1971): an autobiographical trilogy. I’m reading the first book now and am now sure yet if I’ll read all three in a row or take breaks in between.
The Cormac Report
Cormac goes to bed around 7:30, which seems like it might be early for his age, but he doesn’t actually fall asleep until later. I honestly have no idea what time he falls asleep because he spends time reading and writing and then goes to sleep whenever he feels ready. As far as I’m concerned, this arrangement is perfect: I get some evening time to myself; he spends his evening reading and writing.
He’s taken to bringing stacks of books into his bed, like whole series of books, sometimes two series. The other night he needed all the Last Kids on Earth books in bed, all seven of them, plus a pile of kids’ biographies. You never know when you’re going to be in the mood for nonfiction, I guess. I don’t get him up in the morning, so I don’t know if he actually sleeps with these books in his bed (which is a twin size, so not huge) or if he puts them down on the floor before falling asleep, but he must sleep with some of them because they frequently get lost in the covers. It sounds uncomfortable.
I had this abundance in mind when I got to the first few chapters of Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical book Childhood (the first book in her Copenhagen Trilogy) and read about how her mother didn’t like it when her father read books and didn’t like it when she did either. She and her mother felt shame when they registered her for school and the woman who registered her didn’t like the fact that she could read already. This was inconvenient. It was her father who gave her Grimms’ Fairy Tales at age five, “without which my childhood would have been gray and dreary and impoverished.” I think about how reading was discouraged, how few books she had, what a difference this one book made, and how difficult her childhood was generally (but easier than her parents’ childhoods!), and I feel sad.
I know Cormac is having a privileged childhood, but this detail really brings it home. How amazing it is that Cormac practically swims in books, that many of us practically swim in books. It’s good to be reminded of it now and then.
Have a good week everyone!