"DRIVING WITH DEAD PEOPLE" by Monica Holloway

More than ten years ago, I heard about a memoir published with a similar subject, domestic violence, and I wanted to find out how the author and her sisters dealt with it for so long and why their mother didn’t know about it. But I didn’t read it. I think the story took place in Texas.

              Then I read part of this story, DRIVING WITH DEAD PEOPLE nine years ago or so in the memoir-writing workshop I was in with the author, so I knew it was published seven years ago. I wanted to read it but didn’t.

Why do I avoid difficult subjects? Come to think of it, I have a history of avoidance. For example, just before I left Japan in 1970 for the first time, I read a book about Japanese feminists’ struggles and was shocked to find that many Meiji women in kimono fought for women’s rights, and some went to jail. Many female authors died young in the Meiji era (1868-1916). I felt guilty because I knew I was a coward. Those women didn’t escape as I did, but they tackled the fundamental problem of our world. They’ve been on my mind.

Racism is another subject I didn’t know if I could ever challenge head on. At the bottom of my heart, I wanted to be the kind of person who does not walk away from problems that are in front of or around me.

So I read DRIVING WITH DEAD PEOPLE slowly. I enjoyed reading chapter by chapter for the culture was totally different from mine, growing up. For instance, no guns lay around our house or on the floor of any cars I rode on. I probably wouldn’t be able to truly understand the culture and all the issues.

 But I trusted the narrator for her adventurous mind, braveness, and sense of humor. She was the story.

I also read the reviews on Amazon about this book, and I thought some bad reviews meant most of us, including old me, were not ready to read the book. But, I believe, those readers benefited from the reading. If we encountered a strange situation in our lives or heard about one, we could possibly see another dimension to human nature because of the reading, so it might help us act on it.

Suicide is like racism, which adults teach children their prejudice. I was drawn to Wendy’s death. She appeared only briefly in the story but left a strong impression on me. After her death, the narrator tried to eulogize and honor her by setting up something memorable in a display case along the school hallway. Her teacher happens to pass by the hallway. He tells her to remove the display she was working on.

The teacher seems very cold. What will the narrator do or say next? Japanese teachers would say something comforting to her no matter what was the situation of her friend’s death. The narrator is a brave person but she doesn’t protest a word and obediently follows the teacher’s instruction. She wonders what the teacher meant by “epidemic.” We surely need to avoid the epidemic of suicide.

But Suicide is a death of a human. I think we can still honor our friends, without honoring suicide.

This story contains complex issues: domestic violence, female struggles, racism, and suicide. I believe they are all connected. I won’t write about the connection here to make this review short.

As all the good books, this book doesn’t lecture. The issues are global. The author of DRIVING WITH DEAD PEOPLE shows how it was from her viewpoint at the time she wrote. I honor her work because hers is not an easy task.  

Our Yokohama Memoir Class

This memoir class in Yokohama will end on June 24th.  Watanabe Kichio Sensei will be teaching his new essay class starting next month.  Most of the people in the photo joined this class a year and three months ago.  So, I thought this gathering was a goodbye party.

Watanabe Kichio Sensei 渡辺起知夫先生　and me.
I like the way he teaches.  He gives us great freedom to write, but he helps us in editing to make our manuscripts look professional.

http://www.asahiculture.com/LES/detail.asp?CNO=156673&userflg=0
http://ameblo.jp/m-walk/day-20120409.html

I've been learning quite a lot in this class, but it's much more.  I look forward to our meetings.
It'll be sad if we lose this class.

 

By now, I know each classmate quite a bit, where they were born, what school they had gone, and so on.  

 
Here are my two favorite classmates.  They are opinionated and hilarious.   I wish I can introduce them, but perhaps, I can do that when they publish their memoir.  

At the end of this party, one of the classmates asked the group members if anyone would join the new essay class.  They all said yes.  So, this wasn't a goodbye party after all.

“”Up to Sandakan” by Yamazaki Tomoko

I’ve just finished reading this book.  Yamazaki Tomoko is the author of “Sandakan Brothel No. 8” and “Up to Sandakan” is her memoir that came out in 2001.   The story grabbed my attention right from the beginning and kept going until the end.

One thing made me very interested was that her mother was also a teacher of the Japanese traditional arts, Chanoyu and flower arrangement like my mother.   Some of her feeling toward her mother is similar to mine, it made me think.  

I’ll comment on a few things here.

In one of the scenes, the narrator describes how she was fired from her waitress job at a coffee shop.  At the time, she was married to a Korean man in Tokyo.  He came to Japan when he was very young, and at the time she met him, he was a graduate student in Political Science at Tokyo University.  He is multilingual.  Because the legal process of marrying a Korean person during 1950s was difficult, they were common law husband and wife, not on paper.

Anyhow, the owner of the coffee shop told her that she was fired because the owner found out that she was married to a Korean man.  Isn’t that amazing?  The narrator said to the owners, husband and wife, “But you are both Koreans, too.”  They replied, “No, we are no longer Koreans.  We became Japanese citizens.  So, we cannot hire a Japanese woman who married to a Korean man.”

Imagine that!  How bizarre!  At this point, the narrator does not give her thought on this.  She is speechless and totally perplexed.  Me, too.  But there are more than a few points during my reading this book that I could not really understand the feeling of the characters.  I think the issue is so dark, ridiculous, pessimistic, so twisted that nobody, both Koreans and Japanese cannot explain how they feel.  I think those confused people are confused because their feeling is based on what they imagine what others feel.  And their imagination is so wildly yucky dark. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.

For an example, the narrator’s uncle in Osaka to whom she has never met in her life goes to the relative of the Korean husband and blurts out all the prejudiced words.  Of course, I can’t understand why this uncle suddenly appears in the narrator’s life and go charging into a stranger’s house.  It’s so rude beyond any imagination.  It’s insane.  But a sad thing is that the very intelligent Korean husband, although he knows what happened at his relative house in Osaka, never tells his wife about the incident.  She found that out later on.  She doesn’t say, but I think that had a lot to do with their breakup.  You might say it’s because he tries to protect her.  No, I don’t buy that.  Even if that were his intention, I think it works opposite.  For husband and wife, we need to discuss these important matters until we are satisfied.  Otherwise, how could we overcome difficulties together?

The name of the Korean man is Kim Guantek.  He was born in 1930 in Cheju island of South Korea.  He was the head of the North Korean student movement in Japan in 1950s.  Because of much complication, she departs from him one day without letting him know.  She says she left him because she loves him and wishes he can pursue his true passion in his life which is to unite both North and South Korea. 

I googled his name, Kim Guantek, 金光澤, but it’s strange that his name doesn’t come up.  He is a scholar specialized in international relations and North Korea.  He was at Oxford University in the summer of 1967, but suddenly he disappeared and his older brother in South Korea has never heard from him last 30 years.  The brother and his family members were investigated by KCIA.  They found nothing and were released, but the brother had to resign from his high position in the Construction Ministry.