GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
The Strangeness of Beautyby Lydia Minatoya
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999, 380 pp, $23
A renunion in Kobe of three generations of Japanese and American women.
EXCERPT
t has been said that at any given moment, sixty percent of Japanese are involved in writing a novel. And all of them autobiographical.
This phenomenon, though not new in form (the autobiographical novel is an ancient art), is certainly new in frenzy. There's even a word for it, shi-shosetsu, the "I-story".
Critics have questioned the motivation behind the amateur I-story. Often it seems so futile. Why would so many work so long to create novels meant for their eyes only? The answer involves social upheaval -- in which a sudden infusion of excessive education (the progressive arts and sciences of the last two imperial reigns) has clashed with limits in opportunity, to turn a nation of habitual haiku writers half mad.
The theory is that in Japan, the self-consciousness of modernism has collided with the tradition of reticence -- of not burdening others with one's subjective experience -- to create a people just roiling with confessional angst.
It's true, I think. There seems to be few people as concerned with being understood as the Japanese.
Unless you consider the Americans.
But I'm delaying. This, of course, is my I-story.
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