AN I-NOVEL

A genre-defying meditation on emigration, language, and race.

When Mizumura’s novel was first published, in the mid-1990s in Japan, the text was printed not vertically but horizontally, from left to right. It was considered, as Carpenter, Mizumera’s translator, attests, a “bilingual novel,” alternating, sometimes midsentence, between Japanese and English. The novel plays on the concept of shishōsetsu, which according to Carpenter is “a confessional autobiographical genre.” Lest this all sound too theoretical: Mizumura’s narrator shares a name and other autobiographical details with her author and, over the course of a single day, reflects on her experience moving to the United States with her sister and parents. She’d been 12 at the time, and now, 20 years later and a graduate student, she still hasn’t definitively decided whether or when to return to Japan. “The gulf,” she says, “was not between me and America. It was something more like a gulf between myself and my American self, or between my Japanese self and my American self—or, to be still more precise, between my Japanese-language self and my English-language self.” Mizumura is an elegant guide to her narrator’s thoughts, which are both intimate and discerning. She tells us, “For me, America was as relentlessly cheerful and devoid of poetry as an ad for Kodak color film.”  As she alternates between the mundanities of her day—what to eat, when to make a phone call—and more philosophical reflections on racism, xenophobia, and linguistic alienation, Mizumura’s narrator (and her author) produces a brilliant document that seems, if anything, more relevant today than upon its original publication.

Mizumura’s work is deeply insightful and painstaking but never precious.