Harukor, an Ainu woman's tale

Harukor, by Katsuichi Honda, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Selden, with a forward by Japan scholar David L. Howell. University of California Press, 1993. 315 pages including Glossary and Index. Paperback.

This isn't a new book, but in the study of the Ainu, Japan's best-known aboriginal people  it is an important one. Katsuichi Honda (his name on the cover is reversed following Japanese usage, as Honda Katsuichi) a well-known writer, journalist and student of aboriginal people in Japan, Canada and elsewhere, has written a most interesting book.

The first 90 pages are given to the culture and history of the Ainu of Hokkaido. The rest of the book is the fictional account of the life of an Ainu woman named Harukor who grew up in a tiny Ainu village in eastern Hokkaido over five hundred years ago. Using folktales, myth, interviews with elders and extensive study, the author makes this woman, her family and her people live.

The Ainu are no longer just a cultural artifact and tourist attraction; in Mr. Honda's hands they become a living people.

For anyone interested in the Ainu, and for students of aboriginal groups anywhere, Harukor is well worth owning and reading again and again. 

Saving Nathaniel, A 5-Star, Can't-Put-It-Down new novel

Saving Nathaniel, by Jillian Brookes-Ward. Night Publishing, October 2010. 300 pages, paperback and Kindle editions.

My attention was caught by the novel’s first sentences: “She was wet. She was cold. She was late.” With that opening, my attention was captivated. In my opinion, it is one of the most powerful, attention-grabbing openings I have ever read in fiction, and I read a lot of it.

Saving Nathaniel is enchanting and powerful storytelling, with characters that are real people, not clichéd cut-outs. The personal struggles Nathaniel and Megan have are ones that most of us can identify with because most of us have had them at one time or another. I certainly have. But it’s the skill of the story telling that kept me engaged, as in one exchange with Nathaniel where Megan “gave him a look so cold it would have made a penguin reach for a muffler.” It’s the kind of laugh-out-loud remark that makes this story such a richly human one. The author tells the story of Meg and Nathaniel with compassion and skill that draws you in and keeps you there long after you’ve finished the last page. This is a wonderfully wise book. Hopefully it is the first of many by this fine writer.

I can see Saving Nathaniel as a movie, with Helen Mirren in the role of Megan. It’s definitely one I’d watch more than once.

 Five Stars.

A Master Storyteller Tells a Wonderful Tale

Have you ever encountered a writer and become so enchanted with his books that you couldn't get enough of them? I have, and Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado is one of them.

Translated into some 49 languages, several of his novels were made into film (“Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands”, “Gabriela” and “Tieta”, all of which I've seen). Gabriela (1958), The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell (1959), Home Is the Sailor (1961), Shepherds of the Night (1964), Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966), Tent of Miracles (1969), Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars (1972), Tieta, the Goat Girl (1977), Pen, Sword and Camisole (1979), Showdown (1984) and The War of the Saints (1988), I owned, read and re-read every one of them. All of them deal largely with the lives of the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia State, where he grew up. As a story teller, I considered him a Brazilian Charles Dickens, and still do.

When I first read "Tent of Miracles" in the early 1970s, I fell in love with it. Of all of Jorge Amado's novels I have read, this is probably my favorite. I say "probably", because it's hard to pick a favorite out of so many fine works. Reading it again after more than thirty years, I am pulled in all over again to the streets of Salvador, Bahia, following the mulatto Pedro Archanjo in his rambles, his conversations, his love affairs and his obsession with telling the story of his people in four books published by friend and "brother", the miracle painter Lidio Corró.

"Tent of Miracles" is about Bahia's African and mestizo people, their rich culture, their poverty, and their struggle against the racism, with Pedro as their advocate and champion. It's also about his "rediscovery" by the North American Nobel Prize winner and scholar, James D. Levenson, whose attention makes Archanjo the focus of a major "cultural event" that celebrates the 100th anniversary of his birth. The celebration turns out to be a monumental farce in which Pedro Archanjo's memory is laundered and turned into a commercial icon. In 1969 he's still too uncomfortable to the political powers to leave him as he was in "real life", a "donnadie" (Mr. Nobody), a self-educated man of the people whose life ended at age 75 when he died of a heart attack on the way to the room an old friend had given him in a brothel.

It's too bad Amado has been largely forgotten by North American readers; he is far too good for that. It wasn't too long ago that I could find him on the shelves of Barnes & Noble and all of his books on Amazon. Amado, who died in 2001 (he was born in 1912), is one of America's foremost writers. For me, rereading him is like getting together with old friends and taking up where we left off the last time we met. I know exactly what neighborhood I am in, where we're going next, and who we'll meet. I can hear the talk and the laughter, smell the smells of the street and the food, and hear the singing and the sounds of the guitar, berimbau and drum.

If you haven't read "Tent of Miracles", buy a copy and read it. The New York Times called it "a most enjoyable romp", which is like calling a drop-dead beauty "a nice-looking gal": way, way too insipid to fit the reality.

My hat is off to the University of Wisconsin Press for bringing this book out in this fine paperback edition. It sure has set me on fire again!