Kinshu: Autumn Brocade

This is an epistolary novel, something we don't get too often these days. From the letters we learn of a failed double suicide (the lover dies, but the man survives) and a swift, quiet divorce with few words said between the couple. 10 years after, Aki meets her ex-husband as she takes her handicapped son up a mountain in a gondola. The son is a product of her second marriage (another sad one, it appears), and the chance meeting with her ex-husband makes her remember her earlier anger; surely his infidelity and their subsequent divorce resulted in her lot in life - caring for a mentally and physically handicapped child. Their letters reveal what they failed to say to each other 10 years before, and what their lives have become after the divorce and what they might be after this exchange of letters. Much of the emotion is tender and very real, seldom if at all histrionical - there's an elegance and dignity to the pathos in the novel. Aki's devotion and patience with her son ultimately is of greater significance than what her ex-husband, Yasuaki, has made of his life, never mind that both Aki and Yasuaki are not as happy as they wish to be. Aki, though, is at a better and calmer place in life than Yasuaki who - when Aki first sees him in the gondola - seems depressed, weary and unmoved by everything around him. It's painful for the two of them to revisit the feelings they bore a decade before, but the letters help them, help him more than they do her, actually. The tone of his writing gradually eases into a semblance of acceptance and gratitude. He writes, "And perhaps several years from now I'll get off at Koroen Station on the Hanshin Line, walk through the familiar residential area, and come to your house, right next to the tennis club. Maybe I'll look up at your house, at the big old mimosa tree, and quietly go home. Please keep well." Simple words, but what emotions they heave within the reader.

Teru Miyamoto's Kinshu: Autumn Brocade is a wonderfully written little novel with carefully etched characters and a subtle story. The novel consists of a series of letters written over a year between a divorced couple after an unexpected encounter at a hill station. The characters discuss the event leading to their divorce and how their lives get shaped subsequent to the happenings a decade ago. This is a beautifully written work and is very much in the tradition of works by other Japanese authors like Haruki Murakami and Natsume Soseki

I finished this book literaly in one day. it was hard to put it down, because i kept wanting want to know what's the reply of one sender to another. it talks about bad experience of two ex-husband with his ex-wife, and convalensce. it's a very moving story. I soo much adore Teru's style of writing. its a Gem. Read it Read it Read it!!!

The Japanese are probably sick of Americans describing their novels as delicate. They stuff them full of double suicides, conflagrations, and other sundry deaths and misdeeds, and we send them back with the word 'delicate' on the cover. But we can't help it! Autumn Brocade has all of these things and still revels in its own delicacy! It's an epistolary novel featuring the correspondence between a long-divorced couple that reunited briefly on a lift; each letter peels off another layer of their past relationship and hints at what's happening to them now, until, we are left with the ex-husband in a new business venture and the ex-wife thinking of leaving her current husband. It's a very simple, meditative ending for something that started off with a double suicide. I did love this little book (and it is as small as they can make them!) precisely because it's something no American could have written, but Japanese novels usually have that trait. This compares favorably in my mind with the works of Haruki Murakami, especially his simple(r) slice of life novels (Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood) so if you're a fan, you may want to check this one out.

Through the honest and confidential letters exchanged by a young Japanese couple, now divorced for ten years, Teru Miyamoto examines the many roles marriage plays in Japanese culture as he also contemplates the wider relationship between life and death. This spare but powerful novel lays bare the inner lives of Aki and Yasuaki, her former husband, engaging the reader's sympathy as they discover the depths of their misunderstandings, explore their new but "ordinary" lives since their divorce, and come to terms with their futures. As the novel opens, Aki, aged 35, is taking her physically and mentally handicapped son up Mount Zao so he can view the autumn stars. Suddenly, her ex-husband, Yasuaki, whom she has not seen in more than ten years, enters the gondola. They acknowledge each other briefly, and, when the ride ends, go their separate ways. Aki, however, writes Yasuaki a long letter a few months later, examining the dramatic events which led to their separation--the discovery of Yasuaki, unconscious, in a hotel room, beside a female companion, who is dead in an apparent double suicide attempt. Two months after Aki finally sends the letter, Yasuaki responds, explaining why he was in the hotel room with another woman. In the subsequent six letters which Aki writes over the next ten months, most of which Yasuaki answers, the full impact of the divorce becomes clear. Both have made new lives, Aki as a wife and mother of a handicapped son, and Yasuaki as a man who has failed in a series of business ventures. Here Miyamoto, one of the most acclaimed authors of the past twenty years in his native Japan, explores the meaning of the self, the relationship between men and women in Japan (including the secret strength of women and weakness of men), the emphasis on family pride, and the importance of karma, which controls the outcomes of life and death. Repeating motifs add impact to the novel. The Japanese word "kinshu" incorporates the word "brocade," a repeating image, as is autumn. Aki comments early in the novel that the music of Mozart signifies that "Perhaps living and dying are the same thing." The repeating images of Mozart's music, and karma, a Buddhist concept, in the reconciliation of life and death, add depth and universality. Though a westerner may not be privy to the subtleties of the themes--i.e., whether the author is offering a criticism or simply revealing a reality--Miyamoto's depiction of the suffering of both Aki and Yasuaki, and their inability to share their feelings within their cultural milieu affect the perceptions of western readers. Filled with themes applicable to all cultures, this novel, written in 1982, is the first Miyamoto novel to be translated into English. n Mary Whipple