The Commoner - Couverture rigide

1
IN THE YEARS BEFORE THE WAR, my family lived in Shibuya Ward, in a large house with a walled garden. The sake brewing company that my father, Tsuneyasu Endo, had inherited from his father grew and prospered under his guidance, making him a respected figure in the business community. My mother’s family was older and more distinguished than my father’s, a fact that she neither promoted nor attempted to hide. As for me, born in 1934, the Year of the Dog, I was an only child and wore the proper skirts that my mother laid out for me each morning. I was fond of tennis, history, and calligraphy. There was, I suppose, nothing remarkable about me as a child, save for my father's love, for it was to me that he always told his favorite stories.

Of the world beyond our garden walls, I had little awareness. I could not yet read the newspapers, and it was only in my teens that I grew to love the radio. Good girls like me, who spent hours each day following prescriptives meant to establish their unimpeachable credentials, were even more inward than they are today. One might say that my childhood insularity was a form of hereditary protection in whose shade, like a pale, delicate mushroom, I grew. The economic depression, omnipresent anxiety, and rising nationalism that had infected our nation and others weren’t things I spent time worrying about. The military was aligned under the Emperor, believing him to be a god worth dying and killing for—in his name a coup was staged and, in China, a massacre seen to its bloody end—while in his walled–and–moated palace in the center of our great capital, His Majesty remained augustly silent. On these matters, as on so many others of terrible importance, I held no opinions that I can recall, and, of course, no one ever asked me to speak my mind.

In the first days of spring, plum blossoms appeared in our garden, perfuming the air, and camellias as red as the furoshiki in which we wrapped our holiday gifts. There were birds, I remember: one in particular, small and yellow with gray–and–black wings, used to sit and sing on the stone lantern outside my window.
WHEN WAR CAME IN EARNEST from the far side of the world, the first major food staple to be rationed in Tokyo was rice. After that miso and shoyu went on the list, then fish, eggs, tofu, grains of all kinds. Soon everything was rationed, and whatever the size of one’s house or the district one happened to be living in, the only way to feed one’s family was to enter the black market and see what could be bought there for five or ten times the prewar price. This was my mother’s job, as of course it was for all the women in Tokyo. Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice. It was not uncommon to see a nearly bald soldier on a street corner begging women he didn't know to add to his thousand–stitch belt. Each new stitch, it was believed, would help prevent him from being hit by a bullet.

Monzen Nakacho, in Fukagawa District, was the most reliable source for black–market supplies. My mother and I went there twice a month. The street was always congested with lines of women waiting to buy this or that. They chatted and picked their teeth; some nursed their babies. The surface distinctions of birth, which only a year or two earlier would have been impenetrable, had by then been all but wiped away by the shortages. My mother, for example, had always been an elegant dresser, but with the war it would have been unthinkable to continue wearing formal skirts, or even traditional kimonos. Monpe, those wide–legged pants, were what women wore, and my mother was no exception. And color? There was only one: national–defense color, the color of uniforms.

Along Monzen Nakacho was a bakery famous for its kasutera. When the ovens were going at full strength, the entire neighborhood smelled like warm sponge cake. Outside the shop, the line of customers would start forming early and keep growing until day’s end. Family reunions took place in that line, and political discussions, and sometimes probably love affairs. To much of this drama, at my age, I was quite oblivious, absorbed in my dreams of kasutera, and of the buttered peanuts and deep–fried green peas that the bakery also sold. I wasn’t the only one: the old women around me, too, seemed lost in thoughts of food, not love or politics or war, raising their walking sticks and shuffling forward and planting their sticks in the ground again, all day long, like herons fishing in a river of silt.

Then there came the sad day when the bakery could no longer procure even powdered Shanghai eggs, and there was nothing with which to make the kasutera rise or to give it its deliciously soft but airy texture. The sponge cake loaves that everyone coveted were replaced by whale–ham sandwiches. And it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the sound of air–raid sirens, and even the roar of approaching enemy planes, caused but minor distress compared with the fishy, metallic taste of whale ham on the tongue. The smell of freshly baked kasutera, which had sustained us as a people, was suddenly gone from Monzen Nakacho, and from that moment forward the street gave off the faint putrid whiff of a marine graveyard. And still the lines outside the bakery did not shrink. So perhaps it wasn’t the kasutera after all that had held us together in the street, morning after morning, but the solidarity of the line. Perhaps we had come to depend on one another in ways invisible and outside anything we’d imagined or wished for.

I remember a dog in particular, a very foreign and beautiful animal, a borzoi I believe it was. We would be standing in line outside the bakeshop and sooner or later we'd see him being walked by his owner, the son of a local doctor. The dog was so handsome that seeing him was like seeing a Western movie star, Cary Grant or Montgomery Clift. By comparison, the doctor’s son was short and his eyes were set too close together. He was considerably less glamorous than his pet and he seemed to know it, which was rather charming. Everyone who waited in line in Monzen Nakacho was acquainted with the dog and looked forward to catching a glimpse of him.

There was something about him, something other than his well–bred good looks. I remember one day standing in line with my mother and seeing the doctor’s son and his beautiful dog walking not ten meters distant, when suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the animal began to howl and moan. The crying was so plaintive it silenced everyone who heard it. It made some of the women standing in line embarrassed, they knew not why, while others became instantly afraid, and others were struck as though by the death of a loved one. Briefly we forgot about the smell of fresh–baked kasutera, and also about the stench of whale ham. We forgot about deprivation, forgot about the war, forgot to grow up or grow older.

It was a few minutes after the dog first started moaning and howling that we heard the deeper, more frightening sound that seemed to emerge from the very earth around us. We ducked and cried out. The air–raid siren was so loud it obliterated the self; it sent us running from where we stood with such terror that our pasts were momentarily left behind.

This was what the dog had sensed minutes before us, and what his howling was meant to alert us to.

And then, one day, we saw the doctor’s son walking without his dog. My mother politely asked him where the dog was, and he seemed on the verge of tears. He’d been keeping the dog in a crawl space under the floor of his house, he told her, because of the howling and the moaning. But, cooped up like that, the dog barked continuously day and night. One evening an officer came by the house and complained about the noise, saying it was disrupting official military communications in the area. He ordered the doctor’s son to put an end to the noise or risk punishment. As the officer was leaving, he suggested a type of poison that he knew from experience with his own animals was most efficacious. This was the poison that the doctor’s son had given to his dog.

A week later, my family was evacuated to Gunma Prefecture for the remainder of the war. I left my friends in Tokyo and entered a new school. The day we departed, as we were driving away from our large house with its plum blossoms and red camellias, my mother suddenly burst into tears. I stroked her hand and told her not to worry, we would come back. She said it wasn't leaving the house that made her so sad, it was the dog, the memory of that dog in Monzen Nakacho; she couldn’t get him out of her mind.

“Don’t be silly,” my father told her sharply. “We’re losing the war. The country’s being destroyed. Who cares about a stupid dog?”

It was one of the few times I ever knew him to be cruel.
ON THE WALL OF MY NEW CLASSROOM was a huge map of the Greater East Asia Co–Prosperity Sphere. Little rising suns marked those areas where Japan had won great victories, or where momentous battles were then being fought. At the beginning of 1945, when I was ten, another flag went up somewhere near Taiwan. It was the last flag that would ever be pinned to that map, but we didn't know that at the time. Our teacher put it there herself, standing on a chair, after leading the class in singing the national anthem.

The classroom was always freezing, the hard stone floor sending a constant, bone–aching cold up through our thin shoes. Many students suffered from chilblains. All day long we hugged ourselves, sneaking glances out the window at the groups of sixth–grade boys in short–sleeved shirts digging “octopus holes” in the lawn—to dive into if enemy tanks ever appeared and began firing at us. The rest of the boys were off harvesting grass for the military’s horses to ea...

Book Sense National Bestseller!

“Out of this heart-wrenching history, Schwartz has woven a delicate, elegiac tale, intensely moving and utterly convincing.
He has imaginatively reconstructed the private story while remaining largely true to the scant details that have been reported to the public. Schwartz has written about Japan before and he has established himself as a master of mood in more recent fiction, that like The Commoner is fused with terrible sadness.
Schwartz has clearly done extensive research into the lives of the empress and crown princess and seems, as well, to have had extraordinary access to the Imperial Household Agency.  He vividly evokes the secrets and ceremonies of the imperial palace.  It’s magical to have the curtain imaginatively lifted on these mysteries.”
–New York Times Book Review

“Schwartz has written a mesmerizing novel full of tenderness and compassion, one that convincingly invests the Japanese empress’s voice with all the nuance it demands.”
–Washington Post

“[An] impressively imagined and often exquisite act of ventriloquism....Though he calls his main character Haruko Endo, and changes a few names and details here and there, Schwartz recreates the [Japanese empress'] story, from within, with such fidelity and in such detail that it becomes hard to tell how much of his tale is fiction, how much thinly disguised fact.... As in a Japanese room, nothing is out of place and no detail is accidental in this book.... One of Schwartz's achievements is to take us into corridors and rituals that have almost never been revealed to the public. Particularly affecting is his account of the current emperor, as seen through the eyes of his warmhearted young companion.... Throughout the novel, indeed, Schwartz gives faces and convincingly nuanced voices to people we otherwise know only as mutes and distant silhouettes-to such an extent that it's hard not to think that he must have had an inside source.”
-The New York Review of Books

"A subtle, finely wrought fiction that evokes Jane Austen.... Schwartz has followed up his highly praised novel Reservation Road with a tour de force; the creation of a wholly convincing Japanese heroine by a male American writer reflects the triumph of imagination over experience."
–San Jose Mercury News

"[Schwartz] finds the heartbreak, the wistfulness and the poignancy within this world, demonstrating how easy it is to be trapped.... The monarchy depicted in The Commoner is rife with secrets and the Japanese notion of saving face, which makes the ending something of a contradiction. It both breaks with tradition and upholds it, a devastating throwback to the country's past and a move toward something resembling modernity."
–The Philidelphia Inquirer

"Life inside the walls of Japan's Imperial Palace has not been kind to the commoners who've married there. [And] an American taking on a fictional memoir about a living Japanese empress is a gutsy move, but Schwartz makes it work. He pulls the reader into a vibrant world, rooms swimming with color but also minds battling the conflict between emotion and expectation. Haruko's voice is real [and] as she struggles to address the challenges that arise from that pivotal decision to join the royal family, she must come to terms with not just who she is but the parts of her that are important to keep. So while the external details of life in the palace remain stunning, it's Schwartz's grasp of the internal struggle that resonates after the last page is turned."
–Denver Post

"Schwartz pulls off a grand feat in giving readers a moving dramatization of a cloistered world."
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"John Burnham Schwartz leaps with prodigious skill... His book will inevitably be compared with Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, but Mr. Schwartz's work is more delicate and graceful.... Through painstaking research and a humane sensibility, Mr. Schwartz has opened a window on [a] strange, cloistered world."
–Brooke Allen, The Wall Street Journal

"John Burnham Schwartz is a keen observer of Japan–his 1989 debut, Bicycle Days, nicely captured the travails of a foreigner desperate to blend in. He is also good at agony–Reservation Road, his second novel, was an unblinking meditation on emotional pain in the aftermath of a child's death.
The Commoner entwines the two strands of Schwartz's expertise. Fascinated and appalled by the resonating stories of Michiko and Masako, he has written a novel that attempts to give these silenced women their voices back.
It's a bold, even a presumptuous exercise–these women are still alive, after all. But for anyone who's ever sighed with regret over Masako's fate, or gazed at the forbidding walls of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, it's one that's hard to resist.
Schwartz handles the physical details effortlessly, but his silken style lends itself best to the creation of internal life from whole cloth. You can sternly remind yourself every few pages that this is fiction, or you can relax and enjoy the fantasy that you are privy to two of the most private public lives in the world."
–Los Angeles Times

"A bittersweet story narrated by Haruko Endo, a brewer's daughter who marries into Japan's cloistered Imperial Family, Burnham Schwartz's fourth novel expertly evokes the sense of powerlessness and isolation that mark both royal life and bad marriages. Inspired, according to the author, by the emotional struggles of Japan's fragile Empress, the former Michiko Shoda, and of her daughter-in-law Crown Princess Masako, a Harvard graduate defined in court circles by her inability to produce an heir, The Commoner is an artful meditation on the limits of love and duty. No happy endings here, but with a spare prose style that perfectly mirrors its setting, this novel will thrill readers who crave literary romance."
–People

"This story is as ethereal and sensual as a Japanese watercolor, as magical and dark as a fairy tale."
–Booklist

"[The Commoner] paints a carefully researched, evocative of picture of a country that emerged from World War II with everything blown apart but its moat-protected heart.... Schwartz opens a gilded window into a seldom-seen world and the traditions that have sustained a monarchy through centuries, only to threaten the young lives needed to carry it into the future."
–USA Today

“Brave is the novelist who casts a narrative in a voice that traverses gender and a cultural divide. John Burnham Schwartz makes the gambit pay off, impressively, in The Commoner, a masterfully researched exegesis that pulls back the curtain on the post-war Japanese Chrysanthemum Throne.... Schwartz does a superb job of conveying the painful sense of isolation that comes from living in a cloistered world where servants hover and prescribed rituals and schedules are etched in stone.... [The Commoner] casts a graceful and stylish light on lifestyles that are royal in title and little else.”
–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A mature, polished Schwartz returns to the Japan of his successful first novel, Bicycle Days, in The Commoner.... [His] beautifully wrought prose enhances the dramatic effect in portraying the anachronistic, cloistered imperial prison."
–Rocky Mountain News

"The beauty of the story, besides the meticulous research, is the human dimension.... Schwartz has written a powerful, instructive book about the pervasive effects that a strict code of rigid conformity and silence can have on two women once destined for an entirely different fate than the one they now live."
–Tampa Tribune

"Schwartz's tale of how Haruko's life unfolds is a fascinating look inside the Japanese monarchy, and a moving look at how one woman loses her life– not her physical being, but who she is.... Schwartz keenly portrays Haruko's bleak emotions–the loneliness, the bitter sadness, the resignation to her fate–with a grace and depth that befits a princess."
–Wichita Eagle

“A writer of great skill, Schwartz has made the imperial family entirely believable, especially Haruko, the future empress.... Schwartz has to be meticulous with the traditions and customs and historical references. He has to make them believable. And the has to weave his fiction around all that. A difficult task, but Schwartz has been able to produce a wonderful novel that reveals a world with roots in reality."
–The Toronto Globe and Mail

"John Burnham Schwartz's fourth novel is told with elegance and historical accuracy.... Woven with language that is both touching and telling, the myth-like tale of Haruko's life comes full circle in a very epic sense.... Ultimately, Schwartz's novel is a graceful narrative flight circumscribing the internal struggles faced by women from all cultures whose loyalty, duty and honor to oneself and one's legacy are more important than the oldest traditions, however noble or common they may be."
–Bookslut.com

"The author effortlessly speaks through the eyes of a female born and raised on foreign soil. He enters her mind and her heart, and he shares them with us most intimately. And like any story of oppression, the reader closes the book with a mixture of satisfaction and sympathy."
–BookReporter.com

"As an author who has aimed for a clean, transparent style throughout his career, Schwartz finds his perfect subject in this tale of Japanese royalty. Fans of Memoirs of a Geisha and royal gossip will savor it.... Ultimately, the ...