MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT by Wendy Nelson Tokunaga

My knees ached, my thighs were stiff, and my butt tingled as it fell asleep. But my tea teacher, a kimono-clad Japanese woman a good forty years my senior, sat elegantly in this same position on the tatami mat floor, her legs folded at the knees, her bottom resting on her heels. “In tea ceremony we want to express ‘tea mind,’” she said. “Learning how to serve a guest a bowl of tea can take a lifetime and demands a complete commitment. You must carefully learn each step and pay close attention to every detail. You have to do your best to persevere in getting it right no matter how much practice is required.”


In my late thirties I found myself at a Silicon Valley job where I was required to spend the day reading computer magazines and writing summaries of the articles. “Don’t think of yourself as a writer,” my supervisor informed me. “You’re an abstractor, because you abstract the main points of the articles and simply put them in your own words.” My co-workers, however, saw themselves as writers, and many wrote fiction in their free time. I hadn’t written stories since my teens, and the only writing I’d done in my twenties was when I composed songs for the various garage bands I’d put together. Indulging in creative writing after work appealed to me as a way to balance out the prosaicness of abstracting.

With this in mind, I enrolled in a creative writing class at a community college, where we read Best American Short Stories and attempted to write our own. Strict and frequent deadlines helped me become prolific, not to mention the positive reaction from the class and teacher when I read my stories aloud. Most of my short fiction involved my experiences with Japanese culture.

Born and raised in San Francisco, I’d always been intrigued by the diverse cultures the city had to offer, which were so refreshingly different from my white-bread, WASP-y existence. Here you could experience the espresso cafes of Italy in North Beach, the hidden alleys of Hong Kong in Chinatown, the colorful Mexican mercados in the Mission, and the sushi joints and karaoke bars of Tokyo in Japantown.

By the time I got to college I was ready to explore the world further, so when I stumbled upon a psychology class called Japanese American Personality, I immediately signed up. The teacher—a devastatingly sexy Japanese-American guy with silky, long black hair and a sarcastic sense of humor—had us read D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture. From then on, a Japan addict was born. I took every Japanese language and culture class I could get my hands on. I learned to speak the language; I learned to read and write kanji.

When I was in my late twenties, my work with the garage bands led to my first visit to Japan as a winner of the JVC Victor Original Song Contest. A couple of years later I moved to Tokyo to become a rock star, but my dreams of becoming big in Japan never materialized. By the time I returned to San Francisco, however, I’d discovered I had a knack for singing in Japanese, which blew everyone away at the karaoke bars in Japantown. “Are you really Japanese?” I was asked countless times, since I could sing these songs with as much passion as if I’d known them all my life. I entered karaoke contests and won trophies for my singing. I even had an illustrious three-month “career” as a karaoke bar hostess at the Club Mai in Japantown.

By the time I met Manabu Tokunaga, my Osaka-born husband-to-be, in my early thirties, I’d been ensconced in all things Japan for years. He found this amusing and attractive, but he couldn’t have been less interested in Japanese music, movies, or anything else that had to do with Japan. His loves were American jazz and rhythm-and-blues, and he played piano as a hobby. He had moved here when he was eighteen to attend college and study biomedical science. He never wanted to go back home except for a visit, and had never dated a Japanese woman—he was too attracted to Westerners.

When I took that community college creative writing class, I was amazed to discover that I actually had stories to tell based on my experiences with Japanese culture—especially as a woman who loved Japan married to a man who had escaped from it. These short stories eventually made their way into novels, and writing became an even stronger passion as I persevered on my journey toward improving my craft.

One of the questions I’ve always wanted to explore in my writing is why people adopt other cultures. Even though I’d been crazy about Japan, I never made the decision to live there permanently. And few Japanese decide to leave home for good. Sure, there are Japanese who come to the United States to go to school or work for a few years, but they almost always return. It’s difficult to leave the security of a society where roles are spelled out and where one knows exactly what to expect.

But there are some Japanese who can’t wait to escape the straitjacket of Japanese society—who need to break free. My husband was one of them, and so is Midori Saito, the protagonist of Midori By Moonlight. Midori’s strong independent streak is at odds with being a woman in Japan, and she’s known since she was a child that she was a bit different. She was always the nail sticking up, which constantly got pounded down, only to pop up again and again.
Yet it’s not only Midori who seeks a different life in Midori By Moonlight. It’s also Shinji, who has escaped Japan after a family tragedy, and Amber, the mysterious bar hostess who took a different path in trying to break free from the confines of Japanese society. There’s also Shinji’s American girlfriend Tracy, who is obsessed with Japan, and may just end up making her own decision to leave home.

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One of my writing teachers pointed out that a writer has to “take care of her reader. It’s like a contract with binding clauses that must be upheld.” Sort of like the host taking care of her tea ceremony guests, making sure they are entertained and relaxed, ensuring the most pleasant and soulful experience possible.
In tea ceremony you must select the right tea bowls, the most appropriate proverb for the scroll, and the perfect seasonal flowers—all to create the proper mood. In writing a novel you must take care to create the best setting, the right style, the most sympathetic characters—all with your reader in mind. And a tea ceremony, like a good book, should also take a person out of the everyday world.

Midori By Moonlight will take you into a different world. The book offers an authenticity in the same spirit as the novels of Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami, but with the unique take of an American who is firmly entrenched in both cultures. Under the guise of a humorous chick lit novel, Midori By Moonlight goes deeper to explore the themes of being an outsider in one’s own country, the rejection of one’s culture, the Japanese women’s diaspora, and the challenge of being an expatriate.

Midori Saito is the Japanese Bridget Jones and goes through her own Lost in Translation experience. She’s vulnerable, a little bit naïve, and actually believes what she’s read in fairy tales and seen in soap operas and Hollywood movies. But Midori is no pushover. Midori By Moonlight tells the story of a courageous woman who knows exactly what she wants and is determined to get it.
 

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