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 From A Conversation with Terry Watada, by David Fujino, ''The Bulletin.'' March 9, 2013 [http://jccabulletin-geppo.ca/a-conversation-with-terry-watada/]
+Review of Terry Watada's Daruma Days.
+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.
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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)