Tokyo 1940

Andrew Miller, Booker and Whitbread short-listed author of Ingenious Pain and Oxygen, talked to Open Book about his new novel, One Morning Like A Bird. The interview can still be heard here.

It is a puzzling experience.

The novel is about a young Japanese poet coming of age in Tokyo of 1940. Naturally, the interviewer began by asking the author whether he had any special connection or expertise on Tokyo of 1940. In some way it turns out not much: Miller lived in Tokyo "for some time in 1994"; he taught English there, as, he says, "almost everyone else who goes there", suggesting that his was the typical gaijin experience of Japan; by his own admission there is nothing left of old Japan in modern Tokyo; while teaching, he met someone who did remember the fire bombings (still to come at the time in which the novel is set) but "her English was not good enough to learn much from her"; he pronounces 江戸 eat-dough.

On the other hand, he does seem rather well accultured: he is an Ozu Ysujiro fan, a rare taste with most, and a pretty good cultural chronicle of Japan; and he has read his Tanizaki. (He even borrows an idea from Some prefer nettles: a westernizing young man discovering, to his suprise, the ancient and weird world of bunraku; a development which, as the interviewer observes, leads nowhere in the novel; but perhaps Miller is a fellow bunraku fan: all the more kudos to him).

Which leads me of course to my recurrent bafflement about the truthfulness of novels. What does Andrew Miller really know about young Japanese poets of 1940's? And, therefore, why read One Morning Like A Bird? One reason why I have not written a novel about the relationship between Lady Seishonagon and Lady Murasaki, and will not write one about the meeting of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in Paris in 1922, is that I do not believe I can know what they were really like; and that I am more interested in what they were really like than I am in what they could be imagined to have been like.

But what of it? What if Andrew Miller writes a beautiful, sensitive, insightful, wise book about a young man growing up in a time of war? What if it is moving and interesting, provides pleasure and food for thought? Who cares then that the Tokyo of 1940 it portrays is a wholly imaginary city? Why not pretend it is a kind of science fiction novel and that "Tokyo 1940" really stands for the Rings of Saturn or the Empire of the Moon? Miller's discussion of his intention in the novel to describe the moment of unillusion, as he calls, it -- the a sudden sobering up, of scales falling of one's eyes, of confrontation with reality -- has made me want to look into the book: it does seem a promising artistic effect, possibly stimulatory of pleasant philosophical reverie. The author has had such an experience in his own real life, perhaps. Perhaps he can describe it well. Perhaps the truth value of the novel is not all bunk.