Tag: discrimination

Wildcat Dome – Tsushima’s last novel

Tsushima Yūko: Wildcat Dome, transl. Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda, Penguin, 2025

Regular visitors to my blog will know how passionate I became about Tsushima Yūko’s work after reading Territory of Light in 2019 (rereading it in 2024). I then devoured all of her work available in English, which was mostly her earlier stories and novels, all translated by Geraldine Harcourt back in the 1970s-80s, and I expressed some curiosity about her later work, which turns to social, environmental and political concerns. Then I came across Laughing Wolf, dating from 2000, translated by Dennis Washburn, and it showed a marked change from the realism and close observation of psychological and domestic matters in her early work. Wildcat Dome was written in 2013, as a response to the tsunami and Fukushima disaster in 2011, what the Japanese call 3/11, and shows a continued desire to experiment with form and timelines.

It starts off in a present-day (of 2013) that bears a lot of resemblance to our world, except that the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear fallout have been much more severe, Japan seems to be on the brink of destruction, and the danger of a further earthquake and a complete nuclear annihilation is imminent. Mitch is an old man who travels to Japan after the disaster to reunite with childhood friend Yonko, although they haven’t spoken in over a year. He is haunted by three prophecies uttered by a sorcerer in Brittany: the first two have come true already and the third was that ‘Japan will be swallowed up by the sea and a mysterious evil spirit will take up residence there.’ Unsurprisingly, he would like Yonko to leave with him, but she refuses to evacuate.

The story then takes us back in time to when they first became friends. Mitch and Kazu were two orphan boys, likely the result of American GIs raping their Japanese mothers in the late 1940s. They are adopted and raised as brothers by Mama, who works at an orphanage catering for these ‘unwanted half-breeds’, and Yonko is Mama’s niece, who lives nearby and is not squeamish about playing with these children that the rest of society would rather not see.

We then experience how these three friends come together and grow apart, how they individually and as a group (together with some of the other orphans, who have been adopted in the States) navigate the next five decades or so, at times in Japan, at times in other parts of the world. Through their eyes, we also tangentially experience Japanese history over those decades. We witness Mitch and Kazu being sent away to school in England but failing to fit in there and returning to Japan, although they will struggle to finish school there too. We see how others from their orphanage days forget the Japanese language or are conscripted to fight in Vietnam as American citizens. Yonko, the only ‘pure’ Japanese amongst them, engages in unsatisfactory relationships (even marriage) with unsuitable Japanese men, but it becomes clear that these children can only find refuge or a kind of home in each other. Mitch and Kazu have a very deep bond, almost like twins, and it appears that perhaps both Mitch and Kazu were in love at certain moments with Yonko, although the boundaries between friendship and love are kept deliberately blurred in Tsushima’s poetical prose.

But there is another layer to the story, a reason why these friends are unsettled and afraid and can only cling to each other. When they were 7-8 years old, they witnessed the drowning of one of their little orphan friends, a girl called Miki-chan wearing a little orange skirt, who died in the pond near their home. They saw a local Japanese boy, the loner and outcast Tabo, at the scene of the crime and have some suspicion that he might have pushed Miki in. However, since they themselves are outcasts and also the first to report the death, they too come under suspicion. And, just as they think they might have overcome this childhood trauma, another young woman wearing orange is killed in the same area ten years or so later. Several more killings following the same pattern occur over the next couple of decades, and the friends seem to be paralysed by the news: terrified, yet unable to definitely accuse Tabo of the subsequent deeds, nor able to entirely escape falling under suspicion themselves, even if they were out of the country for the later killings.

There are perhaps too many themes packed into this fairly slender book (240 pages): a murder mystery, found families, friendships over the years, nuclear fallout after an earthquake and tsunami, cultural identity and mixed-race orphans (or unwanted children) in post-war Japan and the discrimination they faced, vexed notions of cultural identity and home, the dangers of problems festering when they are unaddressed. Perhaps Tsushima felt that this might be her last major novel and tried to squeeze all she wanted to say into it.

The style also takes some getting used to: hopping from one viewpoint to the other, often deliberately vague, occasionally a bit pedestrian, but at other times quite hypnotic (the orange thread running through the book, the imperfect memories, the descriptions of nature).

Raindrops, glimmering white, slide off each leaf, the sound of the drip, drip striking his eardrums like a song, a quietness that could only be called a raindrop song, a cheerful song.

There are also passages that are directly critical of Japanese society (although attributed to grumpy old Mitch, for example, when addressing the son of one of their childhood friends, who has decided to grow up in Japan):

Japan is a strange, terribly conceited country that hates outsiders, so you have to be careful. You’re likely to be bullied wherever you go because of how you look. Terrible things are lying in wait for you. But I want you to overcome those things. I want you to live. Because those are the wounds of my own soul.

Finally, there are echoes of the earlier Tsushima, the troubled single mother narrator. I can imagine the translation challenges that Lisa faced with passages such as these (in Japanese it is often ambiguous whether it’s the first or third person speaking), and I admire her sure-footed, elegant choices.

There must be people living in those apartments, but as a whole, the building is quiet – here everyone lives holding their breath… The mother isn’t sure exactly who lives here, or how many of these hundred square-foot apartments there are. In one of them is her son, the cold stone, sunk to the bottom of the darkness.

I don’t want to go back in there, the mother things again. Why can’t she just abandon him? She wants so much to do it, and yet. This life she had birthed. It wasn’t as though her son had wanted to be born into this world. But she is afraid of him. She can’t stop trembling. As she approaches the apartment, she feels a scream rising in the back of her throat.

The ending is particularly lyrical and moving, although it is not the complete resolution that English-speaking readers might crave. Moving on is sometimes about sheer inertia and stubbornness, about survival rather than about being healed.

The Curse of Being a Second-Class Citizen

The frustration of EU citizens living in the UK is easy to understand. Many of them have made their lives here, have contributed with work and taxes for many decades, have raised families here and now feel pushed out. However, as Helen de Cruz points out in this article, it is part of a widespread (and now officially endorsed) xenophobia 

Unless, of course, you are very rich, in which case you can arrange a visa or naturalisation deal, not many questions asked about where your money comes from. But for those of us who are neither wealthy nor (some of us until quite recently) EU citizens, it will sound very familiar indeed. We have always been second-class citizens, even in the eyes of EU citizens living here. The Greeks and Spanish looked down with disdain on the newer EU countries, forgetting that when they joined the EU in the 1980s, the French and Germans looked down on them. And that’s just those of us who have the same colour skin and a shared European history. Can you imagine how they felt about those from different continents and with darker skins? As writer and academic Sunny Singh explains in this Twitter thread, it is disingenuous and requires some intellectual acrobatics to pretend that Brexit is not ‘really’ about hatred of pesky immigrants and foreigners. EU citizens are now experiencing this prejudice for themselves and it’s something that they are not used to – or at least, not since the 1950s/60s. But I cannot feel Schadenfreude. I was the second-class citizen who strove to give my children the opportunity to never have to feel inferior, so it makes me sad. And I also believe it’s a dangerous time to allow hateful rhetoric to create divisions between ‘desirable’ and ‘less desirable’ immigrants.

Lunar House, Croydon

It’s not that English (and Scottish and Welsh and Irish) people are not welcoming individually or in batches, but the UK administration as a whole has not made our lives easy at any step of the way. Think about the humiliations, queues, lack of understanding and incompetence you have sometimes encountered at the Job Centre and multiply it five-fold to get an approximate idea of the frustrations of getting your visa renewed at Lunar House in Croydon (a name that strikes fear in the heart of most of us immigrants or students). The amount of paperwork and official invitations and payments required to get your elderly parents to visit you (and no, they do not want free NHS treatment, as they think that Romanian doctors are vastly superior – or at least those of them still living in Romania, as many of them are working for the NHS). Same applies for other countries: I know many Greeks or Polish friends who go back ‘home’ to get their teeth fixed. Out of the 7 dentists at my local practice, 6 are from an immigrant background (India, South Africa, Vietnam and Greece, in case you are wondering). But you’d better be careful and not stay for too long outside the UK with your medical problems, otherwise you will not qualify for your indefinite leave to remain… Then, because the UK is not in Schengen, even if you have a one-year student visa here, you will still need visas to visit the rest of Europe, often having to prove that you are covered for travel and health insurance, that you have a certain amount per day of spending money, that you have an address where you intend to stay while visiting that country or maybe a letter from a company or conference organiser if you are there on business.

Queues at Lunar House

And of course there are some people (including politicians, who really should know better but cannot resist pandering to the voters) who are blaming immigrants for all of the things which don’t work in their society. There are quite blatant personal attacks in the media and on the street, but even if you haven’t experienced them personally, there is plenty to give you pause for thought. I conducted a sociological experiment during my training courses with a large UK company: in half of the (completely identical) courses I stated I was Romanian, in the other half I emphasised my Britishness. Guess which courses got higher scores in the feedback forms? Then there are the ever-so-subtle, sometimes unintentional questions which give you an insight into a deeply entrenched way of thinking:

‘What a pretty name? What does it mean?’ – why, does Jane or Sheryl mean anything

‘But where are you really from?’ – just because you were born in Watford doesn’t mean you really belong there

‘I thought I detected a trace of an accent there…’ – although they didn’t at all, not until you told them that you were an immigrant

‘What was that language you were speaking with your child?’ – and how dare you speak it in front of us

‘I’d never have thought you were ___, you don’t look/sound/behave like your other compatriots’ – how many of them have you met and got to know

‘No, of course we were not referring to you, you are all right, but all those other ___ should go off home’ – you’re the exception which confirms the rule. but woe betide if you don’t behave!

‘So are you thinking of leaving the country now after Brexit, don’t you feel you are too cosmopolitan for life here?’ – perhaps you should be, you are too exotic and don’t belong

Soon it will be the turn of the British citizens to feel second-class in Europe. My father was a negotiator during the accession of Romania to the EU and he would tell you how hard it is to fight against the combined interests of so many countries. After protecting the interests of Spanish textile industry, Greek fruit farmers, French and British farmers, Swedish and Finnish timber industry, steelworkers everywhere in the EU, there was not much left for Romania to trade. Most of its industries and businesses have been acquired by international owners and so most of the earnings go out of the country. And yet Romanians are still in favour of the EU – because they recognise that the alternative would be worse.

There is a strong likelihood that Ireland or Malta will mop up any of the English-speaking, low-taxation-loving US companies for their European headquarters. If the British negotiators don’t get their act together soon, they will be severely depleted by the EU team – and so a vicious circle of blaming and hatred will start up again.  I’m not sure that the UK can compete with labour in Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, which is still cheaper (and more productive), although giving up on any laws to protect workers’ rights might help.

I’ve become used to being a second-class citizen everywhere I go, even in Romania (because I have spent too much time abroad and speak with a slight foreign accent).  I am less happy that my children might be viewed as second-class citizens too (their Greek name over here, their British passport over in France or Germany). My sons prefer the English language but can speak three others, they support the German and French football teams, love the Greek sea and the Romanian mountains, want to study in France or Switzerland maybe… What we feel is European and we had been hoping that these meaningless nationalistic affiliations would disappear and we could feel loyalty to our local communities and the larger Europe instead.