Reading through the hate
AN UNEXPECTED LESSON
I just finished reading a book called The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. I picked it up randomly from a bookstore and thought it interesting enough to buy, and the fact that it won a National Book Award only added to my curiosity. But once I got to reading it, a lot of that excitement was extinguished.
The writing was fine, I just couldn’t connect with the story. I understood what was happening on the surface, but for the entire time, I felt like there was a larger theme that I was missing. Then when it got to the end, I was lost.
I actually felt a bit frustrated because it’s been a long time since I’ve picked up a book and not understood what it was trying to say, or at least not been able to formulate an understanding. With The Emissary, I was stuck.
Then something odd happened.
My daughter asked me if I’d ever watched Spirited Away, an animated Japanese film by an animator and filmmaker named Hayao Miyazaki. When I told her I never heard of it, she told me never to repeat that out loud and promptly sat me down for a matinee.
Not sure how many of you have heard of Spirited Away, but it was absolutely magical. I can’t even begin to explain what the movie is about because so many things are happening at once and all of it is in perfect and chaotic harmony. I genuinely loved it.
Then the odd thing happened.
Almost immediately after the credits started to roll, my mind shifted to The Emissary. Suddenly, the book made so much more sense to me. I better understood the flow of the story, the randomness of the events, even the ending—which was initially the most vexing—became so much more clear.
That experience validated something for me that I knew in principle but was interesting to be aware of while it played out: as readers and writers, we are so heavily influenced by the culture that surrounds us that it shapes the way we’re able to create and consume literature. It’s been years since I’ve read a book by a Japanese author—Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was the last—and I can’t remember ever reading one before that.
Most of the books I’ve read have been by Western authors (British, European, North and South American). I’ve adopted their writing style into my own, telling my stories with a similar cadence, similar structure and with a familiar tone and taste. This I already knew. What I wasn’t as aware of was how my reading was affected. How my proximity to these cultures impacted the way I am able to relate to books that don’t follow those same pillars.
I’m actually a little annoyed with myself because I feel like I read a lot. And up until now, I felt like I read a diverse enough group of authors to appreciate different perspectives and styles of storytelling.
Clearly that isn’t the case.
It also made me think of what it means for my writing as a novelist. I never want to feel limited in my ability to communicate a story, but watching Spirited Away expanded my imagination to worlds that I want to explore. And I’m not saying I’m about to start writing fantasy, I’m saying that I see what is possible when you tell a story that follows a different set of rules, or more accurately, has completely different reference points.
I can’t help but wonder what my writing could be if my reference points were shifted. How can I borrow from the imagination of those authors and adapt it to what I already do well? I already read a lot, but now I will be adding more intention to read far outside of my cultural sphere of influence. I feel like there’s a world of stories out there that can help make me a better storyteller.
Getting back to my reading of The Emissary, I have to give myself credit because I read through the hate. I could’ve easily DNFd the novel and never given it a second thought. But I stuck through it and became aware of something that can and probably will influence my writing.
What about you authors out there? How widely do you read? Do you think you are overly influenced by your cultural reference points and do you try to get outside of those?
Personnaly, I had like a mind shift when I discovered authors from Africa. They twist English and French, they put their own culture and imagination, it's amazing.
I read also lot of Japanese literature and I like the "silences" in there. I don't why, for me it's a literature of silence. And violence.
It's fascinating also because it's not the same things that fascinate or frighten. It depends where you come from. Once I talked with Japanese and they found that western tales where terrible, which are so common to us 😆
Go read as wide as you can.
Nordic literature is fascinating for it's darkness, eastern european for its absurd and dark humour, russian for its reflection on human soul, korean for its delicacy, south America for its magical realism...
This is a far too long comment 😂 tell me if you want specific title.
By the way, great article :) and happy you to see Spirited away for the first time !
After studying Japanese for a few years, I started reading works by Japanese authors in English translation. I think what sets it apart from Western work is that it doesn’t conform to the same ideas of « good » and « evil ». A novel I like is Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. Two short stories are Hiromi Kawakami’s Kamisama- the original version and a short story I read recently on Medium- North Country by Sally Ito. There is an entire untranslated body of work out there. And some great anime too, not only Miyazaki films (which are amazing) but also pieces like Seirei no Moribito and Kado:the Right Answer.