Araceli Tinajero, Kokoro, una mexicana en Japón. Madrid: Verbum, 2012. 166 pp. ISBN
978-84-7962-711-9.
Our
assumptions about cultural encounter tend to be global, rather than bilateral
in scale. In other words, we talk about the East and the West, or Europe and
Asia, but we do not, outside a specifically diplomatic context, talk about intercultural
relations between two specific countries. We see much discussion of Japan and
the West, but seldom on, say, Japan and France, Japan and Canada, Japan and Mexico.
In US Latino/a studies, the idea of the borderlands between the US and Mexico has
perhaps provided a precedent for an idea of bilateral interaction that is also
critical. But critical analysis has tended to focus on the supranational over
the national. When Asia is involved, there is often an assumption that the
Asian country is the specific case whereas the Euro-American nation can be
represented by an overarching umbrella. Exceptions might be made for
superpowers like the US—there are certainly many books on the Japan-US
relationship—but these books tend to assume the US is tantamount to the West.
There is little consideration of how two discrete national spaces relate to
each other.
In
Kokoro, Araceli Tinajero gives us a feast
of lush, incisive, and poignant writing. But she also meditates on precisely
this sort of bilateral cultural relation, in this case, between Mexico and
Japan. In the penultimate section of the book, “Mekishiko
to Nihon,” Tinajero explicitly narrates some anecdotal
indicators of this bilateral relationship. She cites the extended stay of the poet
Efrén Rebolledo, the more ephemeral
sojourn of Octavio Paz, and above all the thorough
study of Japanese literature made by José Juan Tablada,
who actually brought the haiku as a poetic form into Spanish. Also cited is the
role of Mexico as a staging ground in the attempted Catholic conversion of
Japan in the late 1500s, well known to readers of Shusaku
Endo’s The Samurai. As Tinajero indicates, many Japanese writers have also explored
Mexico. And Japanese culture and literature in general has become more popular
in Latin America in the past decades.
With
regard to Asia more broadly, Mexico was a transit point for the colonization of
the Philippines in the 1500s, and the iconic figure of the china poblana shows the extent of the
Asian influence in Mexico. But Tinajero’s focus is
specifically on Japan. Tinajero demonstrates cultural
engagement operating on both general and specific levels: from Mexico as a
major importer of Japanese products in the 1970’s to Tablada’s
use of specific Spanish words to approximate, but inevitably not match, their
closest Japanese equivalents. There is a philological aspect to Kokoro, as
Spanish-speaking readers gain a sense of the lexical and semantic properties of
Japanese without having to make a serious attempt to actually master the
language.
This
Mexico-Japan chapter sets the tone of the book. First of all, Tinajero, as both a creative writer and a scholar, feels
the exuberance of creation but also the responsibility of notation. In
depicting Japan, she is at pains to pay tribute to the Mexicans who have gone
before her (with a nod to one contemporary, Juan Villoro,
who has written amusingly of Japanese foibles). This provides transparency
about the process, letting readers know of books Tinajero
no doubt read on her way to writing this one. Usually this sort of “literature
review” would be found at the beginning or end of a project. Here, it is placed
in a strategic position of second-to-last. We cannot navigate around it, ignore
it, or see it as only supplementary material.
This
illustrates the book’s renunciation of any authoritarian narrative drive, and prevents
Kokoro from
becoming an official academic treatise on the subject (which it does not seek
to be). But there are compensatory benefits. Though more unified than a mere
collection of feuilletons or sketches, there is no overall hierarchy. One could
see this as “Japanese” rather than “Western”, even as Tinajero
questions both those sorts of binary oppositions, as well as our very ability
to predicate “what is Japanese”. Nor is the identity of the “Mexican”
essentially grounded.
In
a chapter on the Japanese obsession with sumo and baseball, Tinajero
analyzes the ironies of Japan being obsessed with the highly Japanese sport of
sumo wrestling and the highly American sport of baseball, all the while showing
only moderate avidity for the worldwide sport of soccer. This reveals both Japan's
interaction with the world and its adamant distinctness. With all the influence
of popular culture and modernity—as signified by baseball and karaoke—Japan
remains somehow different from the West. Even without essentialism, there are
boundaries to be traversed. Cultural encounter adds something to experience,
does not just reproduce what is already known.
The
book also tacitly redefines the Pacific Rim to include the Portuguese --and
Spanish--speaking world, so often excluded from such conceptions, but which
recent work --on the Philippines, Timor Leste, Macao,
the Pacific archipelagoes ruled by Spain pre-1898, the Australian-Latin American
relationship, and Asian-Latin American literature-- has done much to
ameliorate. The new ingredients that Kokoro injects
into the cultural mix shake up our
sense of the set of terms that comprise “East” and “West”. They are another
indicator of transcultural awareness that, in the
past, various purisms kept cordoned off. Tinajero makes what
had previously been a parochially bilateral Japan-Mexico relationship into a
more provocatively transcultural one. She does this,
though, without jettisoning the valuable specificity of the bilateral and
lapsing back into the diffuse generalities of the global.
Kokoro
possesses an
academic integrity about its sources and preconditions. But it also maintains
an observer’s discernment of nuance and detail. The Sabetsu section takes up another sort of
discernment, in the sense of “discrimination,” which this term signifies in
Japanese. Here we are not speaking of pleasing refinement in aesthetic terms,
as seen in Kokoro
in the lovingly rendered “Ikebana” chapter about flower-arranging: but social discrimination,
mistreatment of outcasts. Though the narrator notes that the situation of those
less well off improved during the time she spent in Japan, she suggests that
beggars and stray dogs can be victims of sabetsu. Furthermore, she likens
the discrimination against Koreans to that against Mexicans in the US, and
compares the two relationships as cognate ones of uneasy neighborliness. For
all the delight Kokoro
takes in Japan and its idiosyncrasies, its view is not utopian. The more
negative side of Japanese life is fully related, as are areas such as shiatsu
therapy that are viewed more positively. The Karaoke chapter, where Tinajero translates Japanese karaoke lyrics into Spanish is
hilarious. “Gin gira gin ne sarigenaku”
is translated as “Deslumbrado suavecito.”
In English would this be rendered as “killing me softly with his song?”.
Thus,
even as compared to fairly recent and hip Westerners-in-Japan books, such as the
Canadian writer Sarah Sheard’s Almost Japanese (1985) and the Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et tremblements (1998),
Kokoro is materially grounded. We are a far
cry from old-fashioned Orientalism of the sort that
characterized even such empathetic observers as Lafcadio
Hearn, who, as Roberto González Echevarria
has noted, also wrote a book called Kokoro (“heart” in Japanese, or as close to it as the
translation can come.) Hearn assumed he could convey, to use his subtitle, “Japanese
inner life.” The only inner life that this book feels confident narrating is
the narrators own. But this does not mean the book suffers from clinical
distance or post-Saidian timidity about representing
the Other.
There
is an emotional confidence, a full-fledged, robust quality, which energizes Kokoro. As the very title signifies, Tinajero's book also possesses an intense lyricism, a passionate
yearning. There is no cultural mystification in Kokoro.
The narrative point of view shows a fascination with and longing for Japan. But it suggests that no matter how Japanese it might wish to become, it can never quite get there. There is a sense that desire and object can never converge. This though is not cause for defeat, but celebration. Indeed, the more substantial the book gets --as the narrator is hospitalized, looks for a job, observes the beggars and manual laborers that are hardly part of tourist brochures-- the more the language is lyrical, eloquent, and filled with both desire and loss. The tone of Kokoro, its non-essentialist lyricism, reminded me of the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio, who writes as a Westerner about non-Western lands, in a celebratory way which is not imperialist, but instead takes delight in the very possibility of cultural contact, however contingent. Cultural barriers are not, for both Le Clézio and Tinajero, cause for defeat but a realization that hybridity or transculturation produce emotional consequences. There can be a visionary cross-cultural search that is not essentialist, not mystified. In turn, transculturation can be rescued from the corporate capitalist maw. The Nobel Prize committee’s citation for Le Clézio, stating that he is “the author of new departures, poetic adventures and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond or below the reigning civilization” could apply, in a minor key, to this book as well. Kokoro is fun to read as an offbeat travelogue. But, more importantly, it redefines the very terms in which we think about cultural dialogue.
Eugene Lang College, the New
School