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"A Note from Naomi" Archives
August 2009
Kokekokeshi
My friend Virginia in Huntsville, Texas, is a fan of chickens. When I had last seen her, which is a couple of years now, some chicks that she had ordered had arrived in the mail. On the outside of the package was the strange message, "MALES ADDED FOR WARMTH." I was told that for small orders of female chicks, males or cockerels are provided free in these mail-order packages. Chickens are, of course, valued for their egg-producing abilities, so males are only useful as insulation.
Virginia, however, has a heart for the Bantam Japanese rooster—grand, billowy creatures with a full comb and tail feathers. We are all familiar with the crowing of the rooster as described as "cockle-doodle-do" but in Japanese, it's "kokekokko."
A comparison of animal sounds in different languages and countries are always amusing. Since I grew up speaking Japanese, I'm familiar with Japan's versions. There's the dog barking ("wan wan" vs. "bow wow") and the frog groaning ("kero-kero" vs. "ribbit-ribbit."
I bring up "kokekokko" here, because I want to crow about a fantastic exhibition that is currently on view in Los Angeles: "Kokeshi: From Folk Art to Art Toy" at the Japanese American National Museum.
Not only do you get to view the different types of kokeshi wooden dolls from different parts of Japan, but there's also modern, contemporary interpretations of the kokeshi from international artists. (Many of the new works are also for sale.) Curated by Maria Kwong, the exhibition is both impressive and dynamic—I'd recommend that you check it out before it closes in October.
Another thing that's quite exciting is the inaugural Tanabata Festival that will be held in conjunction with Nisei Week Japanese Festival. The folktale of two star-crossed lovers is at the center of festivals throughout Japan and even Brazil, but now that tradition comes to Los Angeles. More than 200 tanabata displays with long streamers that resemble shooting stars created by local community members will be hung outside of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo from August 14-16. Definitely make time to witness this historic event.
Kokekokko!
Happy August.
Naomi
July 2009
Meishi Magic Memory Museum
I recently learned that I have a museum in my house and it's small enough to rest in my hands. It's a stack of meishi, or business cards, from my journalism days which I had stored in one of those plastic-sleeved notebook files. I removed them a week or two ago to make room for some new ones, and other than a handful of contacts, the rest had moved on in terms of jobs, situations, or maybe even life.
Some folks had been and remain close friends, while in other cases, I don't remember how I had even received the card. Still others have gone through several different incarnations and identity changes—perhaps I even fall into that category.
Three in this particular stack stand out to me: Kanshi Stanley Yamashita, "Lt. Col., U.S. Army, Ret.," with an address in San Pedro, California. The Colonel, as I liked to refer to him, had received his Ph.D. in UC Irvine after his military stint, and had done a lot of research on Terminal Island, the pre-World War II Japanese colony on the tip of East San Pedro, not far from the apartment that he shared with his wife in retirement at the time that I met him. The Colonel had been raised on Terminal Island and I had asked him to write a piece on that community for The Rafu Shimpo Japanese American newspaper. The Colonel, perhaps due to his military training, had high expectations of me, perhaps even more than I had of him as a contributor. I remember that when I hadn't responded to one of his letters, he marched into the newspaper, clearly expressing his disappointment. I didn't know what to make of it at the time and even wondered how this professional relationship would progress, but as it turned out as it usually does, the article and growing friendship developed beautifully. And I did eventually learn the merits of being more communicative.
The second card is from Dennis Schatzman, a reporter from the Los Angeles Sentinel, "Largest Black-Owned Newspaper in the West." Dennis and I had met in connection to the L.A. riots that had ensued after the Rodney King verdict as well as the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I had started an inter-ethnic relations series, which took us to the Sentinel and the Korea Times. Dennis was such an animated, bigger-than-life person—I still remember his sharp observations on community journalism that I still occasionally spout out today. Dennis taught me to be passionate about what I write about, while not taking myself too seriously.
The last card is of Lillian Baker, an outspoken opponent of redress and reparations for Japanese Americans. I never met Lillian Baker (although I did talk to her on the telephone), but her card was always enclosed in her many letters and articles maintaining that the U.S. detention centers that held Japanese Americans during World War II were justified due to military necessity. This card has her home address in Gardena, California—ironically once the bastion of the Japanese American culture and community.
All three of these people who passed me their card, either in person or in correspondence are now gone. They don't creep into my thoughts on a regular basis, yet my interaction with them did alter me in different ways. That is indeed one of the merits of growing older, you wear many more layers of fingerprints of contact, and I'm glad that I have a stack of meishi memories wrapped together with a long rubber band.
Naomi
June 2009
Your First
They say that you will always remember your first. In my case, I almost forgot.
It was a tan hatchback that was absolutely no frills—yes, an AM-FM radio but no air conditioning. During its twilight years, it shook when I attempted to accelerate past sixty miles an hour—especially on inclines like the Grapevine, a highway stretch that cuts through California. As a result, speeding tickets were kept to a minimum, but I did get my share of Hollywood stop violations (no fault of the car).
It was small but still magically had enough space to transport my dorm room furnishings (lamp, rice cooker, linens, books and records, even a bicycle, but no actually furniture).
I drove it regularly to San Francisco from Los Angeles, and later to Little Tokyo from South Pasadena six days a week. Unfortunately, without a proper trunk, it was a magnet for break-ins; one time my dry cleaning was stolen a block from Skid Row. One afternoon in San Gabriel, a young teenage couple tried to carjack me, but I refused to get out of the car. I offered them all I had in my wallet—forty dollars—and that apparently was enough because they walked away from the car with the twenties in their pockets.
I didn't have an endearing name for my first like others seem to have. It was simply a Toyota Tercel, which my father had purchased for me new from the local dealer without any consultation from me or my mother.
"What do you think?" he asked, his face beaming after he drove the car into our driveway.
Tan, although my favorite color to wear at the time, wasn't my first choice for an automobile. But what could I say—this was a gift and it was new. So I naturally beamed back.
Memories of the Tercel have just recently revisited me, as my husband and I visited the Toyota USA Automobile Museum located in a nondescript one-story building in the Southern California city of Torrance. My husband, a Toyota man who has clung onto his 1987 Cressida despite the protestations of his mean wife, was the one who had first heard of the museum on a public access cable channel. The museum was created to commemorate Toyota's 50th anniversary; its first office was established in Hollywood in 1957.
I didn't know quite what to expect from a Toyota Museum in Southern California, but from the moment we arrived, employees wearing hard hats and vests as part of an emergency training session were immediately hospitable and helpful, leading us to the museum curator, Susan Sanborn. Susan herself had called and e-mailed me in response to our request to visit just a couple of days earlier. I was frankly shocked at her efficiency and the general friendliness of the other employees, who really had nothing to do with the museum itself.
Enhanced with signage and historic timelines, the exhibition space had rows of cars, much like a car dealership. Only these cars were not new, but vintage, including a 1959 Toyopet, one of the early models to be introduced to the American market. (Apparently the Japanese executives thought the word "pet" would fly in the States. It didn't.)
There were Land Cruisers, which apparently were widely used by U.S. forces in the Korean War, race cars, Priuses, Corollas, and even a couple of Cressidas. When we left, Susan generously gave me a book, "Quest for the Dawn," which documents the early origins of the Toyota Motor Company. I was later fascinated to read how a innovative man, Kiichiro Toyoda, had a vision to enter car manufacturing in the 1930s from a successful business of creating automated looms for making cloth. At the time he started, most of the cars in Japan were made in the United States.
As we drove home in my husband's Cressida (if we're lucky, it'll retire in the exhibition someday), it suddenly occurred to me that my own first had been a Toyota.
So here I publicly state and apologize, "Dear Tercel, I'm sorry. I almost forgot all about you."
Happy driving this summer,
Naomi
May 2009
Life in Translation/Transition
At one point in my life, I told my husband that I would never teach. "I'm no good at it," I explained to him.
I had tried it before—a summer intensive class in the 1990s—three hours straight. I still feel sorry for the students. It's hard to be up there and lecture for that length of time. It's probably even harder to sit there and listen to the rambling idiot—specifically me.
But since that experience, I keep finding myself in front of people—leading, facilitating, and organizing writing workshops. I like informal, impromptu environments. My mind actually works better when I can quickly respond to a piece of writing rather than plan out a detailed curriculum.
Now I find myself committed to teaching two rounds of a writing workshop, 10 sessions each. This is not an ordinary class, however. It's at a retirement home and is conducted bilingually, in both Japanese and English. Funded through an NEA grant for Creativity and Aging in America, this writing class is organized through Poets & Writers, Inc.
Out come my dusty and tattered Japanese-English dictionaries, their poor spines broken and covers torn. What is personification in Japanese? What is conflict? I take out an old copy of classic Japanese writer Natsume Soseki's Botchan in translation and go to the Little Tokyo branch library to find its mate in Japanese. Locate Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen in both languages underneath a pile of books in our bedroom. ("Why does she call herself Banana?" one of the students asks me. One of the random questions that I must research before the next class.)
In the beginning, I feel like I'm treading water. I haven't studied Japanese literature since I was in Japan in the mid-1980s. In fact, I haven't been in Japan since that time.
But slowly, slowly as I go back and forth in my dictionaries (as well as receiving corrections in class), I find myself picking up difficult kanji (Chinese characters) again. To hear the patter of Japanese phonetics again is both soothing and nostalgic. Then as I use some Japanese American works such as Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables, published by a Japanese publisher in English with Japanese notes, and Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California, in both Japanese and English, something resonates with my students. I hear their stories grab hold of the five senses, incorporate an element of surprise and plot. And while conducting a class in two languages can be tedious for both teacher and students, we find our worlds—not only literary—opening up to new sounds, rhythms, emotions, and histories.
Japanese actually was probably my first language. I was born and raised in California, but my Japanese immigrant mother took me to her homeland for a summer when I was three, the prime time for early language acquisition. When I returned to Altadena, I spoke Japanese to a towheaded neighbor boy. The toddler, of course, somehow understood everything I was saying. How much can we understand one another when we really want to!
Happy writing and happy Mother's Day.
Naomi
p.s. For those interested in mystery writing, I'm also one of the co-chairs of the inaugural California Crime Writers Conference, cosponsored by the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime/L.A. It will be on June 13-14 at the Hilton Pasadena.
April 2009
This Victorian Age
In high school one of my favorite classic writers was Charles Dickens. There was just something fascinating about his dark themes, his vivid, sometimes even over-the-top characterizations (especially his use of names), and his complicated plots involving hidden identities and family secrets.
Recently I've been obsessing about him and his work again. PBS has been broadcasting adaptations of his novels, including "Oliver Twist," "David Copperfield," and "Little Dorritt." Dickens' young life is reflected in many of those stories. At the age of 12, his once well-to-do family had been banished to a debtor's prison while he had to work in a blacking factory pasting labels on shoe polish bottles. Over time, his family's luck changed for the better and Dickens himself enjoyed phenomenal success in his lifetime.
Contributing to his popularity as a writer was a new technology—advances in the printing process. (For a fascinating article, see this.)
Most of Dickens' novels were first released in serialized form. Working on multiple projects, he was always on deadline and apparently always met them, aside for a time when he was grieving a young relative's death.
This past month, I've also been consumed with deadlines of my own. Due to the Internet, I've noticed a rise in serial writing in general and have been touched by the trend in my own professional life. I'm currently contributing to my second serial for the Japanese American National Museum's web site, Discover Nikkei, and starting this month, will have a mystery serial, "Heist in Crown City," in the English-language weekly in Japan, Asahi Weekly.
"Heist in Crown City" is set in a high school in a seemingly idyllic town and based loosely on my own teenage experiences in the very Mayberryesque community of South Pasadena, California. What's been great fun in not only working with the editorial staff in Japan is also communicating with the illustrator, who is a Frenchman who lives in Fukuoka. He has a wonderful web site in both French and Japanese.
If you've ever lived in Japan, you'd appreciate this masterful slice of life depiction of a neighborhood sidewalk on trash day.
I can't say that my serial is anywhere close to the league of Dickens as its purpose is to entertain and help students of English, but I must say that it's been quite wonderful to figure out how "spin a yarn" over a series of 25 installments. For writing for pure entertainment's sake is not a bad goal at all.
Hope to see you at the L.A. Times Festival of Books!
Naomi
March 2009
Nature of the Beast
I've been thinking about animals these days. Not because we have them, unless you count the warubozu (bad boy) squirrels proliferating our neighborhood. But because I've been revisiting Japanese folktales that have found a way into my fiction.
The household that I grew up in did not consist of conventional storytellers. There were no long-winded tales told at the dinner table. But because I was an immigrant's kid, I was exposed to my share of Japanese folktales—more told through books than orally. It's ironic that Japan is being so criticized for whale hunting right now, because so many of these traditional stories are all about saving animals from death and cruelty. My all-time favorite, the Tongue-Cut Sparrow, is about a mean old woman who snips off a sparrow's tongue and her husband who comes to the sparrow's aid. In Urashima Taro, the protagonist fights off attackers of a sea turtle and, as a result, is transported to another world. In the Crane Wife, a young man (or old couple, depending on the version of the story) saves a beautiful white crane from being hunted.
I've been using the Crane Wife story in my presentation of my middle-grade book, 1001 Cranes, and I've discovered modern-day interpretations of the tale. There's a Portland-based band, the Decemberists, with its Crane Wife CD, and an anime available on YouTube (it's under its Japanese title, Tsuru no Ongaeshi).
These stories, of course, go beyond animal rescue. The Crane Wife, for example, is all about self-sacrifice and gratitude. This concept of martyrdom is a bit disturbing, but then most folk tales travel in uncomfortable places, especially before we prettify them.
In my search for inspiration for my next middle-grade book, I've discovered a wonderful online exhibition from my neighborhood museum, Pacific Asia Museum. It's called the Nature of the Beast and explores the depiction of animals in Japanese art from the Edo Period, with integration of modern-day representations, including manga. I've always been a fan of art from this period of time, and the museum does a fabulous job in presenting information and paintings.
Children are still listening to fairytales and folktales, thanks to teachers like my girlfriend Jane Shirk, who integrates music and crafts in teaching a multi-week class for 4-6 year olds.
We talk about Shakespeare, Poe, and others as being the classics everyone needs to read, but for me, folktales happily were my early foundation.
Happy spring.
Naomi
February 2009
Just Run
I'm doing two things that apparently a lot of Americans have embraced this year.
First of all, I'm running. A lot. Enough to hopefully finish a half-marathon within three hours and 30 minutes (can you imagine running for more than two hours?). I've done 5Ks and 10Ks years ago, but nothing this long. I'm blaming my friend Amy, a vivacious mother of three who's ran her share of marathons and half-marathons, for being my inspiration. If Amy can find time to train with two little ones under foot, I have no excuse.
What I'm learning is that there are some parallels of training for a half-marathon and writing a novel.
- It's awful when you first start out. Those first one-mile, two-mile runs are killer. Your body is not used to what you're putting it through, and neither is your creative mind when you are starting to tackle a book-length manuscript. You feel ecstatic when you first decide, but when the cold, hard reality descends, training/writing is very hard.
- It takes discipline, a little at a time. When I wrote my early drafts of my first novel, I had a very intensive full-time job. I needed to work on my manuscript daily, usually before I went into work. A little at a time, a few pages at a time. Running is the same way. The first week, 13 total miles, the next week, 15 miles, and so on.
- Once you get on a roll, it's magic. The first time I was able to run four miles without stopping, I was so encouraged. Just a few weeks earlier, I was huffing and puffing at the one-mile mark. Page after page you complete, and then before you know it, you have 100, 200 pages. Amazing.
- You need to be in community to measure your true progress. I was elated at completing four miles on my own, right? Then two days later, I ran with a group of people at a formal training for the half-marathon. Guess what? I failed miserably in the beginning. Our practice run started off with a hill and you know what, I hadn't trained on any hills. I was out of breath and my head and stomach began to ache. This was a reality check, and sometimes this can happen to you as a writer when you share your work with an instructor or a critique group. I learned that I needed to practice on inclines, and you might discover that you need to work on plot or the beginning of your novel.
- You need a cheerleader. I was struggling on this group four-mile run and you know what happened? Our "coach," a young man, stayed back to see if I was all right. He told me to rest my hands on my head to relax any cramps. Within a few minutes I was encouraged, and finished the run. In terms of writing, you need your critics (your reality check), but you also need someone knowledgeable in your corner who wants to help you.
- Sometimes you need to reassess. After training hard for a month, I've had to rethink my goal of running a trail race with Amy. This race is apparently comprised of one large hill after another. Since I'm always running towards the end of my training group and that hills are a challenge for me, I've decided to change over to the road half-marathon that finishes in the same park as the trail race. Sometimes with a manuscript you may decide that it's in the wrong genre (or "container" as I like to call it). Summer of the Big Bachi had started off as a "literary" novel and then morphed into a mystery. 1001 Cranes was first conceived as a women's novel, and then became a middle-grade book. Give yourself the freedom to change.
In terms of the second thing I've embraced, I'll elaborate in next month's note.
We have a winner for our Year of the Ox Contest: Denise Damrow, president of the Friends of Signal Hill Cultural Arts, who requested a copy of 1001 Cranes.
Thank you for participating! Keep visiting here because there may be other free book contests in the future.
Naomi
January 2009
OXOX Ox
For the Japanese, the Year of the Ox has officially started. (Most of Asia will be celebrating the new year on January 26, based on the Chinese lunar calendar.)
No resolutions here, just a few things to look forward to in 2009:
I'm currently in the middle of doing research for two possible projects—one a thriller based in Africa, where I spent three months in the 1980s, and another middle-grade book. Both will be a challenge, but I welcome the chance to grow as a writer. And there's always the development of the next two Mas Arai mysteries (#5 and #6) that are always on the back of my mind.
For you, my website visitors, I have two New Year gifts:
- A free download of my short story, "The Chirashi Covenant," which was in Megan Abbott's anthology A Hell of a Woman. Only available in January!
- A chance to win a free autographed copy of any novel (either one of the Mas Arai mysteries or 1001 Cranes) that I've written (your choice) and an additional gift to commemorate the Year of the Ox. Just e-mail me your name with the book you'd like. In the subject line of the e-mail, write YEAR OF THE OX CONTEST. Deadline is January 31. Only one winner will be chosen.
Again, Happy New Year!
Naomi
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