Michael Hoffman

I was born in Canada and reborn in Japan, quite by accident as is usually the case in such cases. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. It’s an experience that demands to be written about, in one form or another. My chosen form is the story, the tale – short and long, fiction and nonfiction. Fiction and nonfiction – two sides of the same coin. In the Land of the Kami: A Journey into the Hearts of Japan is the nonfiction side. Other Worlds is the fiction side. How can nonfiction resist being fleshed out by fiction, and vice versa? An independent streak in my character drew me to self-publishing – and, consequently, to self-editing. Thoreau said, An editor has “no more right to omit a sentiment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth… I should not read many books if I thought that they had been thus expurgated.” He was right.

Meanwhile, in other news, I write two columns for the Sunday edition of the Japan Times: Big in Japan, on current issues; and The Living Past – tales if you like, essays if you prefer, articles on the soberest assessment, on Japanese history.

Following is the brief Author’s Note to Land of the Kami, reprinted here in its entirety for the light it sheds on the subject:

The stories collected here were originally published between 2000 and 2013, all but three in the Sunday Time Out section of the Japan Times, the three exceptions being Holy Fools, Death I Love You and Wet Sleeves, which first appeared in a bimonthly magazine, now sadly defunct, called The East.

The topics treated are somewhat whimsical. This book would scarcely be justifiable otherwise – there are so many unwhimsical books on Japan, written by people whose qualifications are a lot more impressive than mine. The stories (most of them) arose not from what I knew and understood but from what I didn’t know and wanted to understand: What is Zen? Who was Confucius, about whom we hear so much and know so little? What was it like to be a kid in Japan 10,000 years ago, or 1000, or 500? How did death come to seem, as it did for many centuries, so much more important to the Japanese than life?

I mentioned qualifications. I claim two. One is simply my presence here over many years, which has given me a familiarity with a country and a culture that remain and always will remain, familiarity notwithstanding, strange to me. Another is my ignorance – rather, my willing acknowledgment of my ignorance, the pride I seem to take in a quality others see as a problem, one to be solved with knowledge. Knowledge is good but, like everything else, only in moderation. Let knowledge inform ignorance, not stifle it. There are more questions in these stories than answers.

This is not, as will be clear by now, a work of scholarship. My debts to the historians, literary translators, “Japanologists” who have been my teachers and guides on this journey are many and deep, gratefully acknowledged throughout the text.

Most Japanophiles love Japan for its present – its technology, its manga and anime, its safe streets and punctual trains. There’s not much of that here. I love Japan for its past – not that I would have wanted to live in it, but contemplating it and the evidence it presents of the infinite mutability of human nature has been, and remains, an inexhaustible pleasure.

I drifted to Japan 33 years ago and, somewhat to my surprise, stayed. I sometimes wonder if I would have if not for Murasaki Shikibu and her majestic eleventh-century creation, the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, owing nothing to Japan’s cultural mentor, China, and antedating by a good half-millennium anything classifiable as a novel in the West. It was the first thing about Japan that astonished me.

As for Other Worlds, it’s a short fiction collection, mostly but not exclusively Japan-based. Some of it happens on other worlds. The style veers from fable to realism, sometimes without warning; sometimes the two styles blend; why not? “Granule and Mandolyn” is set on another (unidentified) planet on which there is no death; the two children of the title are shocked to discover that there is a planet called Earth on which people die (whatever that means). “Real Life” is the story of a Japanese financier who loses his job in the economic downturn. “What Happened to Mr. Goto on the Train” is based on an actual event: the rape of a woman on a commuter train while everyone pretended not to notice. “Silence” is a hyper-realistic self-portrait of a 17-year-old loner of very high intelligence. “Sheila” is the story of a Filipina nurse in Japan who “marries,” to satisfy the immigration department, the son of the woman whose caregiver she had been. “Something Weird” is of a man who deserted his wife when she began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s.