On this, the 119th birthday of Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., I present the first installment of The Knopf Project, aka TKP. What is The Knopf Project? Well, it's my attempt to read each and every book* published by Knopf this fall. Why, you ask? Because I have an unhealthy obsession with Knopf books - because of their content, yes, but also because of their quality as objects. (See this post for the full story!)
So, with that said, Part 1 of TKP begins with a small book, a knowing-whisper of a book, a tale of scorching sincerity, presented in such a tight little package that you may well wonder how in the world Julie Otsuka hid a metal fist inside the spine and managed to sneak up behind you to deliver a shifty right-cross to the button on your chin.
Specs:
Novel, 126 pgs of text, 18th-century Engravers' Oldstyle 205. Average chapter length: 16 pages. Voice: First-person plural, as if the author cut and pasted diary entries from different women discussing their marriages into categorical templates. At times you are listening to someone tell you a tale from long ago, and then are instantly transformed into a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on the intimate thoughts of confused, scared, but brave women, finding their way in an alien culture.
Take the cover off this book when you read it. You will feel like you are holding an old prayerbook, light to the touch, but heavy with wisdom. Take it off and discover the delicate wave blind on red cloth binding.
What's it about?
Japanese "picture brides" coming to California to marry American men, whom they've never met, and what they experience once they get here.
The Lede:
"On the boat the first thing we did - before deciding who we liked and didn't like, before telling each other which on of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, before even bothering to learn each other's names - was compare photographs of our husbands."
Trading cards, essentially, the menfolk who happen to be up next in the deck, only it is the women who will be the commerce of this particular historical transaction - a Netflix of flesh and blood, but this is not a rental agreement; there is no risk-free return.
First impressions:
"The trees were enormous. The plains were vast. The women were loud and tall - a full head taller, we had heard, than the tallest of our men. The language was ten times as difficult as our own and the customs were unfathomably strange. Books were read from back to front and soap was used in the bath. Noses were blown on dirty cloths that were stuffed back into pockets only to be taken out later and used again and again. The opposite of white was not red, but black. What would become of us, we wondered, in such an alien land?"
The women are brought to California to work; companionship, other than providing a sexual outlet for their husbands, is a second or even third-order priority. The first-person plural hides the intimate knowledge possessed by 10-word declarations from our unnamed narrators, who do, however, name each other as individuals at times, but mostly only in death or in shame. Yoshiko, "who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed", fails to learn the word for "water" while working in the fields bent next to her indigent, indentured, husband. "She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and never woke up," Otsuka writes, simple declarations that contain the heartache of a woman, of womanhood, abandoned in a foreign land.
Most of the husbands come across as sexual predators, but this surely isn't Otsuka's point: rather, that in a world where the very language is presented as letters instead of figures, where there is no ability to blend in, and the only intimacy available is between the sheets, it is no wonder that relations, well, aren't relations, per se.
But in such a world, where "we" are "them", and return is not an option, the women ask:
"...for without us, what would they do? Who would pick their strawberries from their fields? Who would get fruit down from their trees? Who would wash their carrots? Who would scrub their toilets? Who would mend their garments? Who would iron their shirts? Who would fluff their pillows? Who would change their sheets? Who would cook their breakfasts? Who would clear their tables? Who would soothe their children? Who would bathe their elderly? Who would listen to their stories? Who would keep their secrets? Who would tell their lies? Who would flatter them? Who would sing for them? Who would dance for them? Who would weep for them? Who would turn the other cheek for them and then one day - because we were tired, because we were old, because we could - forgive them? Only a fool.And so we folded up our kimonos and put them away in our trunks and did not take them out again for years."
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