Delicate story of crisis and shaping one’s own karma

KINSHU: AUTUMN BROCADE

By Teru Miyamoto

Translated by Roger K. Thomas

New Directions, $22.95, 224 pages

REVIEWED BY ANNA CHAMBERS

Near the beginning of Teru Miyamoto’s “Kinshu: An Autumn Brocade,” a very “typically Japanese” book seems to wait for us when we find the following: “The whole mountain wasn’t covered with crimson foliage — patches of bright red flowed past on both sides of the gondola, interspersed with evergreens, trees with brown leaves, and ginkgo-like trees with golden leaves … .

“I was intoxicated with the intense blaze of autumn leaves and definitely felt something threatening in it, rather like the quiet, cool blade of a knife. Perhaps our unexpected meeting reawakened my girlish tendency to fantasize.” We are reminded of the delicate Japanese prints that famously awed and influenced Monet and his fellow Impressionists with their finely detailed awareness of man’s environment and their subtle commentary on the fragile balancing act of human life.

Teru Miyamoto, however, does not simply hew to our idea of Japanese art. His characters in “Kinshu” struggle just as much with modernity and its jarring interconnections and disconnections as any character offered by 20th century European literature. Though the characters do express their emotions covertly — we are well aware that these are not frank, effusive Americans — they are less willing to accede to the inevitability of silence or to acquiesce in the carefully balanced tranquility most familiar to us in Japanese fine art. They seek resolution, and resolution comes through the startling — and sudden — explanations of two former spouses, Katsunama Aki and Arima Yasuaki.

Though he has been winning awards in Japan for years (including Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize) and has had several works translated into French, this is Teru Miyamoto’s first book to appear in English. Foreign film aficionados may remember “Maboros,” a 1995 film based on a book by Mr. Miyamoto. “River of Fireflies,” another film, also uses the story from one of his novels. Youthful obsessions with a beautiful girl, suicides of lovers or spouses and grieving mothers are common in his work. We can be grateful that our first chance at his work in English comprises so many of the author’s concerns. New Directions is to be applauded for their characteristically astute choice.

Arima Yasuaki and Katsunama Aki separated a decade before the novel begins, following Yasuaki’s near death in a double suicide attempt by his mistress. As Aki puts it, “The incident was over and done with, but it was I who remained unappeased.” They meet unexpectedly one fall, in a mountain resort town filled with tourists come to see the turning of the leaves. Aki is so overcome by feelings of longing and distress that she hunts down Yasuaki’s address and several months later, writes him a long letter. Their letters tell us their story.

Letters communicate more than the simple events in the lives of their authors. The reality of addressing an individual interlocutor — rather than, say, simply an anonymous audience of readers — introduces all sorts of considerations of manners, relationship and, indeed, ownership, for letters contain an inherent question of whether we are ever owed a response from those to whom we write.

Mr. Miyamoto handles the epistolary novel well, using these considerations to deepen a fairly straightforward plot, and their letters gradually close in on the central problem of the book: Does the clear influence of the past on the present mean that our present changes will affect our future, our karma? Despite their deep longing for resolution, the two characters know from the beginning that their correspondence will one day end. This is, after all, a brocade, a work that follows a predetermined pattern and, once completed, reveals a self-contained meaning.

The book moves from autumn to autumn. Though these two are not old, they must confront the things that have died in their lives before they can move on. Yet, if the autumn metaphor holds true, it is more a matter of fading and lingering regret than death.

And so return emerges as a key theme. We accept the premise of the chance meeting and a return of acquaintance between these two. But once Aki watches her beloved Mozart Caf burn down and be rebuilt and Yasuaki begins to frequent his childhood neighborhood for business — as both struggle to confront old losses — the need to integrate one’s past into one’s present, to acknowledge its influence, becomes central to the book.

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