The Wall Street Journal-20080126-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Imagining a Life of Royal Seclusion
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Imagining a Life of Royal Seclusion
The Commoner
By John Burnham Schwartz
Doubleday, 351 pages, $24.95
THE USUAL advice given to novelists -- to "write about what you know" -- is often of dubious value. Any number of impassioned works of fiction have required leaps of imagination: Think only of "Madame Bovary," "The Red Badge of Courage" or "The Confessions of Nat Turner." For his fourth novel, "The Commoner," John Burnham Schwartz leaps with prodigious skill, envisioning life within the secretive Japanese imperial court.
The Japanese royal family is the oldest in the world and, to this day, the most mysterious: The private lives of its members are shielded from outside observers, their doings dominated by arcane traditions and rituals. When the current empress, Michiko Shoda, married Crown Prince Akihito in 1959 (he would become emperor in 1989), she was the first commoner ever to enter the family. Unprepared for its rigors, she experienced a kind of breakdown and lost her voice for several months. Her sufferings were briefly evident but quickly hidden from public view.
Mr. Schwartz has loosely based his narrator, Haruko, on the elusive Princess Michiko. In Haruko's voice he describes her upbringing in a postwar Tokyo haunted by memories of the city's fire-bombing and unsettled by a rush to modernize. Haruko is poised between the new world and the old, educated in Europe but expected to assume the submissive role of the traditional Japanese wife. While her best friend, Miko, moves to the U.S. and enjoys undreamed-of personal liberties, Haruko catches the crown prince's eye and, despite her doubts, accepts his offer of marriage.
In Mr. Schwartz's first novel, "Bicycle Days" (1989), he wrote about Japan from his own perspective, that of a young American outsider. Now, assuming the voice of a Japanese woman a generation older than himself, he tries to shed his American point of view entirely. His book will inevitably be compared with Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha" (1997), but Mr. Schwartz's work is more delicate and graceful. Haruko's voice is -- at least to this American reader -- strangely persuasive, and her world view consistent with that of someone with her upbringing.
Once she enters the imperial family, this lively girl -- an athlete with vague intellectual aims -- is permanently separated from her family (her parents, for example, will never be allowed to meet their grandchildren) and shut behind palace walls, where she is stunned into "mute wonderment at finding oneself trapped inside." Her fresh, appealing individuality now proves a liability, for as her father-in- law, the old emperor, says: "There's only one way to do things, as everyone knows."
Haruko sinks into depression. "Life was, in the end, a matter of limits and laws," she reflects. "Love, too, if it was allowed to exist. I could not forget that I had married my husband out of love. At the time, to do so was considered an unprecedented act of freedom for us both. That it would turn out to be my last act of freedom became clear to me only in stages, as the hidden cost of love." She becomes resigned to her physical imprisonment yet resolves not to let her deepest self feel subsumed. Years later, her son falls in love with a commoner -- a young diplomat whose career demonstrates the possibilities open to Japanese women at the turn of the 21st century. When the couple approaches Haruko for advice, she is faced with painful moral choices.
In an era that has seen the rapid modernization of the European monarchies, including even the obdurate House of Windsor, it is astonishing that the Japanese imperial family has succeeded in preserving its isolation and mystique. Through painstaking research and a humane sensibility, Mr. Schwartz has opened a window on that strange, cloistered world.
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Ms. Allen is the author of "Moral Minority: America's Skeptical Founding Fathers."
