Inheritance from Mother by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Abstract

with a revelation about his own personal history, it is not Erpenbeck’s diffident protagonist that makes the lasting impression. Instead, the reader is left with the cold fury of her polemic against Germany and the European Union’s bureaucratic response to this humanitarian crisis, their willingness to allow people who have “survived the passage across a real-life sea” to “drown in rivers and oceans of paper.” In the United States where the Supreme Court has partially upheld the Trump administration’s travel ban and border patrols raid aid shelters for migrants, readers may be surprised by this excoriation of Germany’s relatively generous immigration policies. Yet Go, Went, Gone reminds us that it is the mission of art to engage our imaginative empathy and hold the status quo to a higher account. Robert Lemon University of Oklahoma Robert Lemon, an associate professor of German, joined the department of Modern Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma in 2005. His research focuses on turn-of-thecentury Austria, orientalist fiction, and the works of Franz Kafka. Fiction Minae Mizumura. Inheritance from Mother. Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter. New York. Other Press. 2017 (© 2016). 446 pages. This novel, originally published serially in Japan’s largest newspaper, begins with two middle-aged Japanese sisters discussing the money left behind by their recently deceased mother. “How much do we get back from [the nursing home]?” sister Natsuki asks. And, “What’ll you use the money for?” the other queries. Following this cold open, Minae Mizumura takes up a familiar scenario in modern-day Japan: a fiftysomething woman—in this case, Mitsuki Katsuura, who works part-time as a college language instructor—becomes caretaker for her dying mother. Mitsuki hasn’t yet forgiven the capricious and demanding Noriko for shoving her father into a nursing home and abandoning him in order to carry on with a seedy voice teacher. Nor has she forgotten that in childhood her elder sister, Natsuki, was her mother’s favorite. Nevertheless, duty calls. While dealing with her own failing health and the shock of learning about her husband’s latest lover, she gives in to her mother’s every whim. In the second part of the novel, Mitsuki holes up at an exclusive resort in Hakone she’d once visited with her mother to decide what to do about her unfaithful husband. In spite of the novel’s serious and somewhat mundane themes, a sense of mischief pervades. Mizumura manages to weave in a history of modern Japanese literature, along with echoes of Camus and Flaubert. Sly, and sometimes self-referential, she mentions The Golden Demon, Japan’s first serial novel, which was in fact based upon an American dime-store novel; Wuthering Heights, the basis of her own novel, A True Novel; and Natsume Sōseki’s unfinished serial, Light and Darkness, which she attempted to complete . “She herself was the offspring of a serial novel,” Mitsuki observes at one point. In Japan, Mizumura is known to be a stylistically innovative writer. Both the author and her frequent translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, have commented upon the difficulty of rendering her experiments into English. It is no doubt in great part thanks to Carpenter, then, that this novel reads so effortlessly. Perhaps Mizumura’s most audacious act in writing this story was to make her main character a relatively ordinary middle-aged woman. Toward the end, Mizumura writes, “In the eyes of society , she, Mitsuki, hardly existed. At her age, she wouldn’t even make a good heroine in a novel.” Au contraire. An Inheritance from Mother is a masterful work with the power to endure. Suzanne Kamata Tokushima, Japan Antonio Tabucchi. For Isabel: A Mandala. Trans. Elizabeth Harris. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2017. 144 pages. A mandala is the product of an integrated art; a mandala is made to map the cosmos. But the cosmos comes in many shapes and sizes. Antonio Tabucchi, in his justificatory note about writing For Isabel, recalls a monk who, by sprinkling colored powder on stone, made a mandala of human consciousness . Jung has it that a mandala is “the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which . . . is harmonious.” But what do we have...