Terry Watada
Location Toronto 43° 39' 53.93" N, 79° 26' 45.43" W Arts Literature Poetry Theatre Person Moderator
Terry Watada is a Toronto writer with many productions and publications to his credit. His publications include Ten Thousand Views of Rain (poetry, Thistledown Press 2001), Seeing the Invisible (a children’s biography, Umbrella Press 1998), Daruma Days (short fiction, Ronsdale Press 1997), Bukkyo Tozen: a History of Buddhism in Canada (history, HpF Press 1996) and A Thousand Homes (poetry, Mercury Press 1995). His latest publications are his third collection of poems called Obon: the Festival of the Dead (Thistledown Press 2006) and his first novel, Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes, published in October 2007 by Arsenal Pulp Press. He is currently working on a sequel.
As a playwright, he has seen five of his plays receive a mainstage production, starting with Dear Wes/Love Muriel during the Earth Spirit Festival at Harbourfront in 1991. Perhaps his best known is Vincent, a play about a Toronto family dealing with a son with schizophrenia. It has been remounted several times since its premiere in 1993. Most notably, it was produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the first Madness and Arts World Festival in Toronto (2003). The second Madness and the Arts World Festival invited Vincent to be included in its program in Muenster, Germany, during May 2006. His other plays include Mukashi Banashi I and II (children’s plays) and Tale of a Mask. He recently expanded the play into a two-act play. The new version was successfully featured in the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company’s Mega Potluck Play Reading Festival in June 2008.
As a poet, fiction writer, playwright, English teacher, MA in English Literature, historian, and a musician and composer, Terry has distinguished himself as a true Japanese Canadian polymath (he does a number of things). Born in the east end of Toronto in 1951, Watada has clearly transmuted his life experiences into a diverse number of publications which include, among them, an historical work, Bukkyo Tozen: A History of Buddhism in Canada, a short fiction collection, Daruma Days, a children’s biography, Seeing The Invisible, and a poetry collection, Ten Thousand Views of Rain, as well as the successful main stage play, Vincent. He is also a musician who has composed and produced nine albums. His music was very much a part of the movement for Japanese Canadian redress. Terry is dedicated to the preservation of human rights and the elimination of racism and in 1991, Terry was recognized for his activism by the City of Toronto when he received the William P. Hubbard Award for race relations. Terry lives and writes in Toronto.
George Orwell wrote a notable essay, “Why I Write” ...
Let me ask you, Why do YOU write? Basically, I write to define my past, my community, and my culture because, to the age of 19, I hadn’t realized my family had been interned. With family, we went to festivals, bazaars, Bukkyo Kai and shogatsu. I took it for granted. Most of my parents’ friends were Issei — there were Nisei, of course, and I took it all for granted. Certain things were a ‘given,’ there were approaches to situations and celebrations, and I guess they basically did what they were expected to do. The point is, I didn’t know anything. Rikimatsu (Kintaro) was a good friend of my father’s. Always came over for food and drink. I later found out he was Morii’s right hand man. He was scary, he had a deep and gravelly voice, the tip of his nose was cut off, he was a very intimidating person. But he was always nice to me. He gave me money every time I saw him. Five bucks.
What’s made you travel west to Vancouver and The Powell Street Festival for what seems like decades?
At one time I considered Vancouver to be the delta, like the Mississippi delta. For me, it was like spiritually going home. I hadn’t lived there. The first time, I went in ’77 to the Powell Street area and it was a revelation: I felt something—a seismic shift in my consciousness.
President Barack Obama has been sworn in for a second term. Do we really live in a post-racial society? In a word, no. Racism still exists. Obama—through no intention of his own—has polarized the American people. For example, Cokie Roberts [ the journalist], complained that the President was vacationing in an “exotic location” [Hawaii] and not in the continental United States. Doesn’t she know Hawaii is a part of the United States? That blew up everything.
I’ve always been curious — what kinds of folk music do you like? What about jazz? Folk music ... there’s Bob Dylan ... I tend more toward folk rock, like The Byrds. I just started listening to Free Design, a family group with impeccable harmonies. They moved into jazz more like Billy Cobham or Chick Corea. I love jazz. For a time, I went through the whole fusion movement until I listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. Roy Miya taught me about Bill Evans, and I’ll be forever thankful for this. My most memorable times have been recording with him.
Please talk briefly about your career as an English teacher.
Thirty-two years of teaching freshman English ... and being afforded the opportunity to explore Asian North American literature and film, and teaching the canon ... and looking at this brand new area of study, and kind of a pioneer. There’s forces at U of T trying to get it established—Asian literature as a minor. They already have Doctoral students centring on Asian Canadian literature. With this in mind, in all humbleness, they are about to launch the Terry Watada Special Collections in the East Asian Library at Robarts Library. I get to clean up the basement. I’d encourage all other Asian Canadian writers and artists to donate.
When you wrote your plays—for example, The Tale of A Mask and Vincent—did you start hearing your characters’ voices? ... Could you talk about your playwriting process?
In the two plays, I started with news coverage ... I could read and hear the voices of friends, relatives, police, witnesses. I put them in a context where they’d sound natural. That’s the playwriting process—it takes on a logic of its own. Writing plays are difficult—it’s not the writer alone that makes the play—I mean everybody ... actors, director, stage manager, crew, has to be cooperative.
What movies have you recently seen?
Looper ... I go with my son to see summer stuff like The Dark Knight Rises—and Lincoln—which I loved.
Video games, and ‘gaming’ in general, do you play? Are you involved in ‘gaming’? No! (Laughter) My son is, but I’m not. Besides, it eats up time.
Would you say your writing is in the modernist school?
Yes. I say that because I don’t do a lot of experimentation; because publishers don’t like it, and maybe it’s a symptom of my cowardice. I try to advance the art of writing but I’ve been rejected many times over by publishers and by the public as well. So, writing in a modernist vein allows me to meet reader expectations, yet I can hit them with something new—for example, historical facts, cultural imperatives.
How historically accurate is your book, Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes? Is it largely the true story of Etsuji Morii intertwined with the fictional story of Yoshiko, a mail-order bride from Japan?
The story of Yoshiko is basically true. I’d had this story for maybe a decade before I started writing it. I heard from Issei about an Issei woman who killed her daughter, but Nisei told me the story. For example, I met a woman who sat behind the daughter in school, and Jesse Nishihata—what a resource—he gave me an old clipping from The Province about the police finding the daughter’s body in Vancouver. In my research I couldn’t find another reference to it in the Archives. The police asked questions, but the community closed up. So no one was arrested. The Coroner concluded it was “murder by persons unknown.” The Morii story I found out from rumours, stray facts, unpublished autobiographies, my parents, brothers, family friends, Nisei, but no one had written about Morii comprehensively. So I decided to incorporate Morii in this story as a kind of explanation why she was never arrested.
What are you reading these days?
Haruo Murakami — great writer who’ll probably win the Nobel Prize one of these days—deals a lot with Magical Realism, which I love. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is probably one of the most harrowing books I’ve read. And his latest, 1QR4, is a masterful novel of contemporary Japan. He stays in the present and writes about contemporary issues and situations in Japan. He does not write period pieces.
You started publishing poetry before publishing prose, right? What were your writing concerns at that time?
Yes. My mother’s passing is the reason I started writing poetry: because of the loss of all those stories. She was the reason I started writing music, too. When I asked her how she met my father, she called me Baka. You don’t need to know that stuff. But after much pushing, I got her to open up. The first poem I wrote was A Thousand Homes which became Chisato [mother’s name].
Hokusai’s Brush by Katherine Govier got a good review in The Globe and Mail in 2012. Generally speaking, what are your thoughts about Govier and Frances Itani, who both have written fiction about Japanese characters and aren’t themselves Japanese? I haven’t read the Govier book. I’ve read Itani, but although I’d never stop them writing about JCs, I was personally disappointed. In Requiem, Itani’s novel, she had the characters talking in what I call ‘chop suey dialogue.’ I can’t exactly quote it, but I was appalled. ‘Number one son.’ Who says that? My father didn’t. As a final statement: anybody can write about anything, but you have to have sensitive, knowledgeable critics who know the subjects in these books to evaluate them truly.
From A Conversation with Terry Watada, by David Fujino, The Bulletin. March 9, 2013 [1]
Review of Terry Watada's Daruma Days. [2]
Faces of Love
Terry Watada (Author) Daruma Days. Ronsdale Press (purchase at Amazon.ca) Evelyn Lau (Author) Other Women. Vintage (purchase at Amazon.ca) Reviewed by Karlyn Koh
How is love remembered? In very different ways, both Evelyn Lau and Terry Watada explore aspects of the power of love across the passage of time. Lau’s Other Women re-works themes of thwarted love and obsessive passions which may be familiar to readers of her earlier autobiography and poetry. These themes are organized around the story of Fiona’s twisted affair with Raymond, a married business man, and her downward emotional spiral when the affair terminates. The novel is very much a persistent tracing of their brief encounters and Fiona’s protracted longing for Raymond in his absence.
While the title explicitly alludes to Fiona’s status as the mistress in a marriage, the novel also loops together other triangulations in order to explore the dysfunctions, compromises and yearnings in the chase for love. In one scene, Fiona observes her friend Martin and his wife Jill as they go through the rites of domesticity and new parenthood. Prior to his marriage, Martin had been in love with a woman who did not love him in return. As this particular chapter unfolds, we are drawn to the incommensurability between "true passion" and the security which domesticity provides. What is the nature and value of finding the "right person" and "true happiness"? "I guess that depends whether or not true passion is important, right?" notes Martin. Martin eventually assumes the comfort of domestic bliss: "Getting married, having kids—it’s incredible when you find the right person. It isn’t like anything you have ever known before," he tells Fiona. Yet it is clear that what precisely does not have value within the domestic economy is that which also haunts this ideal. Fiona continues to obsess about Raymond even as she listens to Martin. "I was thinking of the time you [Raymond] had used the same words to describe your marriage; it was at the beginning of our affair." Other Women is about the remains of love and desire which do not fit into paradigms of coupled relationships, and which haunt the fringes of domesticity like grotesque and pitiable figures. Enmeshed with the trian- gulation of actual relationships in the novel—it is littered with other stories of extramarital affairs and unrequited love— is the palpable presence of suppressed desires, loss and excess passions inserting themselves in a marriage or similar bond. These haunt the domestic and form a third which always threatens to disrupt the sta- bility of the two.
The threat of and potential for violence persist in relation to this excess. After the affair ends, Fiona has increasingly intimate and violent fantasies of Raymond’s wife, Helen: "I wanted to strip Helen naked, to familiarize myself with her body, her responses . . . I had to know: what was it about her that held your love?" In one particularly troubling scene, she fantasizes that Helen is raped. In her desperation to exorcise her pain, Fiona resorts to inflicting violence on Helen. By perpetrating violence, it seems that Fiona is meting out the pain she feels. She transfers all her desires onto Helen so as to attain an illusionary intimacy with Raymond. The vicious image of rape functions according to this perverse transference: "The image of the stranger rubbing his face between Helen’s breasts . . . the marks like petals he pressed with his fingers on her skin; the exposure of her vagina in the parking lot... —this seemed the closest I could come to you, this seemed the only place I could find you where you dwelled." Violence and pain haunt the scenes of love: the novel also incorporates familial and adolescent memories in which love is denied or absent, and sexual intimacy abused. In this way, Other Women dwells ceaselessly on the smothering memory of love’s violent limits.
Watada’s Daruma Days is a collection of intertwined short stories which speak a different vocabulary of love. Touring the internment camps of World War II in the interior of British Columbia, Watada was struck by both the beauty of the landscape and the horrors of history. "Every camp," Watada comments, "seemed haunted with ghosts of the past." In Daruma Days, Watada brings out the complexities of memory and love caught in the midst of injustice, complicity and loss. He does this by revisiting precisely those haunted sites with a spirit of honour and a heart of hope.
In "Kangaroo Court," a young couple, Tetsuo and Tomiko, fall in love at a camp in Lemon Creek. Even as they endure the mundane inhumanities of the camp, they find a measure of strength and hope together. Pointing to the mountains sur- rounding Lemon Creek, Tomiko tells Tetsuo that their future is on the horizon, outside the camp. "’One day we’ll be free to really make it on our own. We’ve got to look to what’s beyond those mountains!’" says Tomiko. However, their romance is threatened by Isamu Sasaki, the unscrupulous and powerful "village chief" who wants to marry Tomiko. Spurned by Tomiko, Sasaki eventually puts Tetsuo on trial in a kangaroo court comprised of the former’s men. Folded into this scene are echoes of the internment of Japanese Canadians. As the story unravels, there is a sense that justice will prevail, not through silence or violence, but in speaking out and moving forward. "Kangaroo Court" closes with Tomiko reading a letter from Tetsuo, who is recovering in a hospital. Questions run through her mind: "What kind of man steals from his own people? What kind of man hurts another so badly the victim may never fully recover? And what would have happened to me?" And then she reads Tetsuo’s proposal of marriage in the letter. Hope and future possibilities are not diminished finally; instead, "[Tomiko] envisioned a cane, a wheel-chair perhaps. Holding the letter to her breast, she gazed at the distant mountains and the horizon came into focus. She smiled."
These stories are about strength in the face of severe adversities and injustice, but they also refer to complicit figures like Isamu Sasaki and Etsuji Morii in "The Daruma." Further, Watada addresses the internal conflicts and struggles in the workings of community. In "The Brown Bomber," Kimiko struggles with the rejection she grew up with on account of her dark skin. "’Hey Brown Bomber! Kuro-chan, kuro-chan You’re a dirty Negro baby.’ Young kids bobbed and weaved in and about the line, jeering all the while. No one shouted a rebuke. All eyes turned away. Kimiko’s own eyes trembled but not in self-pity or hurt. Her dress would never be free of the dust, she thought." These taunts persist in the camp to which she is sent. There, she struggles with the irony of being picked on by the very people who are victimized by racism: "We’re all in the same boat here. A Jap is a Jap. Maybe they need to pick on me...to make me a kuro-cha ... to feel better about being here." Against the wishes of her mother, Kimiko finds love and hope when she marries Frank Johnson, a Black jazz musician. Their departure to New York resounds with both irresolution and optimism: she can only escape the stigma of her skin and the shame associated with her marriage by leaving her family and her country.
Watada’s stories mingle tensions and collusion together with grace, courage and hope. Indeed, by revisiting this tangled mix, the possibility of peace appears to be less beyond grasp. In the final story, "Message in the Bottle," the narrator reclaims a letter which his father had written to his family in Japan when he first arrived in Canada. Not being able to put the letter in the mail, the father stuck the letter in a bottle and threw it into the sea. Miraculously, after a series of interceptions, the letter "found its way home," just as the father "found a home after weathering the storms of history." And, many years later, his son would find the letter among his dead father’s belongings. Daruma Days is like this letter—charged with much love and hope. Its stories, having survived their varied and convoluted journeys, are sent out to sea once more; they are letters of a writer who takes the chance that they may arrive at the different distant and unknown shores others call home. Similar reviews
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MLA: Koh, Karlyn. Faces of Love. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 18 June 2014.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #159 (Winter 1998), Gay and Lesbian Writing in Canadian Literature. (pg. 183 - 185)