The Woman in the white kimono
It started as “reading a bit before bed time” on Friday. Then, I spent two sleepless nights finishing this book. The breath-taking prose is lyrical and melts your heart. A magnificent story, which runs on two parallel tracks, about two women, who live in different continents, but their past strangely connected through one man. One is a daughter in awe of her father, the other a besotted lover, who was forced to give up her love. It is a spectacular tale of a young Japanese woman falling in love with an American soldier, and ostracized for fraternizing with the enemy. 1950s is the time when the second world war had ended and Japan was tending to the severe wounds caused by the devastation of the war. America still continued its presence in Japan and the presence of US sailors are not an uncommon sight in that era.
But the relations between the two countries are tense and inter-racial relationships are not something which either of the countries approved. Such couples, who fell in love, were ostracized and were subject to severe criticism They were caught in a situation not very different from the idiom “The devil and the deep sea”.
The story of seventeen-year-old Japanese maiden, Naoko Nakamura, is no different when she falls for an American soldier, Jimmy Kovac, whom she fondly nicknames Hajime. She succeeds in earning the wrath of her family, her father especially, whose hatred is deep-rooted towards the Americans. She gets pregnant, runs away from home and get marries to her Hajime. The sailor, still in early years in his job, is sent away to distant waters. Her family, then sends her to a maternity home, hidden deep behind the tall bamboo fences, which promises to clean up the unwanted weeds in the wombs of young women, who are considered a social taboo in the society.
Naoko is determined to get her child into this world, and raise her as one of her own kin. Can an innocent child and a helpless mother survive in the ruthless Imperial society which looks down upon their very existence with disdain?
Tori Kovac, in present-day United States has lost her father to cancer. Before dying, her father trusts an unopened envelope to his daughter revealing the truth that he was once married before to the love of his life, when he was very young, and has had a daughter from that marriage.
Tori, being a journalist by profession, then travels to Japan to uncover the truth of her father’s past and find out what happened to Naoko and her daughter, who also happens to be her own half-sister. What she discovers is nothing short of horrifying and devastating.
The book makes you cry, not once but many times. I cried for the circumstances under which Naoko gets married, and the painful ordeal she goes through in the brutal maternity home. I cried when Tori uncovers the ugly scam, the arrangements made by the Imperial Japanese elite to get rid of their “tainted” family extensions.
I am not sure if I can ask you to read this book and weep like me, but if you do read it by any chance, I can tell you what we can discuss. We can talk at length about how Naoko is similar to Sayuri (The memoirs of Geisha) and the difficulties they both had to endure alone in their own ways. We can discuss the Japanese customs in detail, right from the proper way of handing over tea to one another, to the salutations before and after the meal. We can talk extensively about the Japanese folk lore, the traditions, the wedding customs the funeral rituals, their Gods, their demons. We can talk about country side Japan, the tall cherry trees and about Tokyo , the most populated metropolis city of the world. We can talk about how words can be so hauntingly beautiful, how they can pierce your heart and one can weep bitterly, but at the same time long for them more to fill your heart with more agony.
I made my choice; I did not rest till I finished the book. It’s over to you now!
