By: Julia Chin

The night was warm, yet a chill ran through his body. A ray of clear, bright moonlight shone at a sharp angle through the doorway. In that clear light stood a girl wearing a summer kimono. With her frizzy hair flaring out around her head, she stared up at Yusuke on the top bunk, her eyes wild, her tiny fist tightly clasping a round festival fan. The sounds of the “Tokyo Ballad” floated in from afar. Yusuke propped himself on his elbows, holding his breath, looking down at her. In a frenzied voice she shouted something at him, then fled away, her long sleeves fluttering in the air.

The door stood open, moonlight flowing in.

        First serialized in the literary magazine Shincho in the early 2000s, Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel was nominated by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project for its English installment in 2013, executed gracefully by literary translator Juliet Winter Carpenters. Marketed as a “remaking” of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), A True Novel resurrects the devastating love story of the brooding Heathcliff and the tempestuous Catherine Earnshaw through the forms of Taro Azuma and Yoko Utagawa, two young children living in postwar-era Japan. Though half-Chinese war orphan Taro is treated as nothing short of a social pariah, he is inevitably drawn to Yoko, who naively tries to adopt him into her world of wealth and privilege, only to find that their socioeconomic difference dooms any possibility of a socially acceptable romance. Following in the shadows of their Victorian predecessors, Taro’s and Yoko’s lives become more emotionally intertwined yet physically distanced as they navigate affairs and adulthood together, cultivating an intense yet idolatrous relationship between the two childhood lovers.

        Years have passed, however, since this torrid affair when A True Novel begins. Working as a literature professor in a state university somewhere in California, Minae Mizumura herself (a metafictional representation of the real-life author) is approached by a young man named Yusuke Kato one stormy evening, who tells her a story unlike any other. Having taken shelter at the remote home of a mysterious millionaire named Taro Azuma a few years prior, Yusuke relates the harrowing experience of his night at the Oiwake cottage, when the proprietor became visibly distressed after hearing of the young girl who burst into Yusuke’s sleeping quarters during the night. Only the day after is it revealed that this was not just any youth, but a girl who has been dead for quite some time: the juvenile ghost of Yoko herself, Taro’s deceased love, has come back to haunt him. As Yusuke pieces together these strangers’ tortuous past from the stories offered to him by Fumiko, Taro’s housekeeper, Mizumura mimics and subverts themes from Wuthering Heights in equal measure. As The Japan Times states, Mizumura’s tale “avoids the trap of slavishly following Brontë’s classic,” thus firmly asserting A True Novel’s legitimacy as a remaking indeed, and not simply a retelling.

        Perhaps the most obvious way in which A True Novel departs from Brontë’s envisionment for these characters is in the adaptation’s significant shift towards realism. Clearly grounded in modernity, Mizumura fills in the somewhat Victorian trope-derived personalities that Brontë provided her with by fleshing out the characters with surprising and innovative details. The aforementioned Taro, for instance, is brusque and gruff due to clear signs of depression upon first introduction, yet he bears almost none of the streaks of cruel vindictiveness that Brontë paints with her iconically tortured Heathcliff. Though much of the action in Wuthering Heights is propelled by Heathcliff’s sadistic schemes to enact revenge upon the next generation once Catherine’s premature death leaves him utterly alone in the world, this revenge plot and most of the protagonists’ heirs are entirely done away with in this remaking. Instead, Mizumura focuses her energies on building nuanced layers of Taro’s psychological interiority as a human being, forming an intriguing character who is sympathetic while still retaining an element of underlying tension and fierceness that readers might expect of Heathcliff’s reincarnation. Consequently, the reader of A True Novel finds themself sympathizing with such an unfortunate soul as Mizumura often divulges Taro’s personal history in often graphic detail. Taro—not just an unconnected orphan picked up on the roadside—was born out of a place of physical violence when a Chinese migrant raped his mother as a war captive. Unlike the kind old Mr. Earnshaw, Taro’s stepmother and her sons constantly beat him in their squalid “home;” and every time, the child wets himself with fear on the sole cushion that serves as his bed. While Heathcliff was rumored to be dark as a “gypsy,” the well-known origins of Taro’s birth and his “tainted blood” follow him from the schoolyard and its bullies across the Pacific to America, where the Japanese immigrant community looks on with wonder and wariness as the pauper makes his millions as an entrepreneur by his mid-twenties. Similarly, Yoko retains Catherine’s cruel haughtiness to a degree, however, Mizumura softens her dislikable edges by humanizing the leading lady. Yoko may take advantage of Taro’s devotion to her—most disturbingly when the little girl places her sandaled foot atop the groveling boy’s head to signify her absolute dominion over him—she, however, does not receive the same spoiled attention that Catherine did in her youth. Instead, Yoko is characterized as the sickly runt of a family whose parents neglect her in favor of an elder daughter, leaving their youngest alone all day with her weary grandmother.

        A True Novel further deviates from the traditional story of Wuthering Heights by adding extra layers to the original frame narrative and rendering them more complex in various ways. In Wuthering Heights, for instance, the story is primarily related to the reader through the medium of Lockwood’s diary. As the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood uses the diary to record the stories that the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, tells him about his new landlord, Heathcliff, as well as his past history with the Linton and the Earnshaw families. In A True Novel, on the other hand, not only does Yusuke receive the tale of Yuko and Taro and their respective families from their maid Fumiko, but he also exists within the larger framework of Minae’s novel. From the start, Minae the novelist functions as the silent but omnipresent narrator writing down what Yusuke has told her, conveyed to him in turn by Fumiko. By casting herself as the metafictional author of this work, Mizumura uses A True Novel to shed light on what it means to be a storyteller versus a reader, as each of the three narrators are presented as being verifiably real humans.

        Minae, for instance, spends a significant portion of her prologue musing over the differences between the Japanese tradition of the “I-novel” versus the Western-imported “true novel.” The watakushi shōsetsu or “I-novel,” on one hand, arose out of a literary movement towards naturalism in early twentieth-century Japan, featuring nonfictional first-person narration that often evinces dark truths from the author’s past. Conversely, the honkaku shōsetsu or “true novel” was first attributed to the European novels that gained popularity in Japan following the Meiji Restoration and the nation’s active strides toward Westernization as it turned the corner into twentieth-century modernity. The true novel features all the hallmarks of Western classics like Brontë’s: sensationalized plots, heightened melodrama, and, above all, fictional beings. Thus, A True Novel’s title per se serves as a reflection on transnational literature, as Mizumura’s voice speaks on behalf of the collective of national culture, explaining how it can be quite difficult for many Japanese writers to find the sort of compelling veracity in fictional true novels that make up the core component of I-novels as fragmentary memoirs true to the author’s life events. Minae Mizumura set out to write A True Novel drawing inspiration from the canon of English literature, and yet, she has included true facts about herself and her life in it, a readily distinct mark of the I-novel. Thus, Mizumura artfully blends the Victorian sense of fictionality together with the Japanese I-novel, opening up a dialogue between what has often been dichotomously referred to as the cultural East/West divide.

        Moreover, despite existing within the “fictional true novel,” Yusuke and Fumiko, the two other narrators apart from Minae, both display a sense of catharsis through storytelling, closely imitating the sense of confessional release a traditional I-novelist might experience by finally purging and sifting through their painful memories of the past on the page. For instance, it is both surprising and noteworthy that upon seeking out Minae, Yusuke confesses, “I didn’t want to know more about [Taro]. I wanted to talk to somebody about him” (165). Taking a cue from Wuthering Heights, A True Novel becomes especially concerned with the notion of both spectral and psychological hauntings. However, the hauntings do not relegate themselves to the Taro-Yoko romance and its surrounding participants alone. Branching out, Mizumura reflects Brontë’s Gothic theme back at long standing literary traditions in suggesting that players external to the story, narrators as it were, remain haunted by the lives of the story’s characters long after the narrative has ended. While Yusuke has only met Taro a couple of times during that week in Oiwake and never catches a glimpse of Yoko again after her first spectral appearance, he becomes absolutely obsessed with Taro’s life story. He tells the tale of Taro Azuma to Minae three years later, and he implies that he has experienced sleep deprivation, a loss of appetite, and anxiety since the story was first related to him by Fumiko. A True Novel validates the vitality and longevity of stories themselves: they cannot die and rest, they must continually be migrant and passed along to another, almost like a creature living off of a variety of hosts in order to sustain itself. 

        Mizumura herself points out another obvious difference between her book and Brontë’s: “[W]e had different temperaments, E.B. and I: she was a gifted poet, I am incurably prosaic.” Indeed, readers may be either pleasantly surprised or horrified to discover the sheer ease of readability that comes with A True Novel. Though the novel presents itself in two wieldy paperback volumes amounting to a total of over 900 pages, the story is an easy page-turner. Unlike her Victorian inspiration, Mizumura retains a degree of sophistication and poignancy without necessarily delving into pages upon pages of rich, dense text describing setting or the minutiae of mundane activities. Certainly, the sheer ease of readability may earn A True Novel some credit amongst a community of contemporary readers in 2020. Nonetheless, the avid Brontë fan may find herself slightly disappointed at first. If expecting a whirlwind novel recreating Heathcliff and Catherine’s star-crossed romance in Japan, the reader will be disheartened to find out that Mizumura’s work takes its sweet time getting around to the love story. Indeed, the novelistic narrative related to Yusuke begins somewhat slowly with a 77-page autobiographical “chapter” detailing Fumiko’s childhood, the postwar-era economy, and her various temporary occupations as a teenager. This lengthy episode, appropriately titled “Fumiko,” seamlessly falls into the Japanese standards of the I-novel, as nothing significant happens, and the reader must be patient and work bit by bit through the mundanity of Fumiko’s everyday life. However, the reader might change their mind once Fumiko’s protagonist status comes to the forefront of the novel, elucidating Mizumura’s authorial endgame.

        For Mizumura, Fumiko is not simply a slightly younger version of Wuthering Heights’ Nelly Dean, but a chance for Mizumura to further toy with the Western novel’s tradition of narratorial self-consciousness. Through the aforementioned, unabridged autobiography, Fumiko is shown to have a certain depth of character that rivals the characterization of figures like Taro and Yoko, who would traditionally be considered the “main characters” without batting an eye. Like Yusuke, Fumiko appears to pass on her story out of compulsion rather than desire, and there is a vague uneasiness lingering in much of the story’s shadows that hints that the reader is not fully comprehending Fumiko’s level of attachment to the stories she tells. Neither included within the characteristic love triangle nor their familial relations, Fumiko might be traditionally resigned to the Victorian trope of the tell-all housekeeper, but there are secrets whispered between the walls of the Oiwake cottage and some things that have too often been left unsaid. While the Western tradition of true novels has historically adopted a predominant focus on the bold and dramatic protagonists, Mizumura’s novel leaves much to be learned about the cleaning lady.

        With great ingenuity, A True Novel complicates the canonical Wuthering Heights with unexpected complications in what scholars of English literature already considered a twisted and savage plot. Moreover, Mizumura’s work serves as a commentary on the state of world literature, working between two very different traditions of the Western true novel and Japanese I-novel, making readers question all the narratival expectations that they bring to this book concerning who is intrinsic to and who is excluded from the narrative. Truly, A True Novel is an homage to the Victorian aesthetic, Japanese culture, and the power that our stories hold over us, all wrapped up in one gorgeously subtle ghost story.