Red Sky, Red Dragonfly

Most works of fiction that take Japan as their subject from a foreign perspective fall unwittingly or wittingly into one or more of several inviting traps: false exoticization, false profundity, false stylization, false sentimentalization, to name a few. Step forward John David Morley, Pico Ayer and Alan Brown. A few writers have the nous and humility to avoid these pitfalls. Step forward Kazuo Ishiguro and Jay McInerney. Step forward John Galligan. Red Sky, Red Dragonfly is one of the best first novels and one of the most "authentic" fictional evocations of this country and its people I have read. While Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World and McInerney's Ransom are convincing largely by virtue of their stylistic austerity and disciplined narrative structures, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly rings true because of its messiness. Former pro ice hockey player Tommy Morrison's life is a mess. He leaves chaos behind him in Wisconsin (his college asked him to take a sabbatical because he busted a colleague's nose; his marriage to a native American with a sackful of chips on her shoulder is in tatters; his relationship with his son is fractious) to come to teach English in Japan's "snow country" for a year. He arrives, limping, bewildered and compassless in the town of Kitayama, where he finds himself cast in a starring role, but lacking a script. The teacher he is replacing, a callow, mixed-up, good-looking Mormon kid called Stuart, fails to show up for his farewell party and Tommy is soon implicated in his disappearance. Galligan parades a Shakespearean gallery of characters. Meet 15-year-old Miwa, peering glumly through her bangs. When Stuart tries clumsily to remove her Mickey Mouse bra, Miwa defends her honor with a kendo sword. Meet Noriko Yamaguchi, the unhappily married secretary of Prince English School whose blue business suit hangs "almost crookedly on her thin frame" and whose manner falls "somewhere between severe and bereft." Meet her mother-in-law, "stout old Mama Yama in red kimono, not more than five feet tall, strong as a beetle." Meet the town tycoon, Yoichi Ono, who salts his Japanese with Biblical English--"Thou shalt very, very kiotsukete"--but is so beholden to the mountain demon that he buys two of every luxury item in which he indulges himself, including a vintage Cadillac--one for himself, one to haul up the mountain as a votive offering at the demon's shrine. The dialogue is spot-on. The brittle exchanges between Noriko and Mama Yama, a prototypical "obatarian," for example, are wince-inducing and hilarious. There's nothing self-consciously innovative about Galligan's style, but time and again you come across passages in which he shows a rare elan, like this one:"When the truck broke free from the tunnel, the train was exactly beside it, slipping forward and back. Around the tracks and the highway collected the pachinko parlors and apartment houses that formed the outskirts of Takata. Then, in another ki

"...until such time as the town had its own high-school, until Kitayama had factories, an airport, the courtesy of a high-speed train. All this was coming soon, the leaders of Kitayama had promised. As soon as the likes of grandfather were gone." Red Fly Red Dragonfly is a poignant story of cultural and generational divide, of old Japan vis-à-vis the new. Now in the hands of the new generation, Kitayama strives to become an "international city," while the old generation stands impervious to change. The outcome is inevitable in today's world. Western culture pervades. Tradition becomes novelty. Red Sky Red Dragonfly is in part a commentary on this outcomeThis is John Galligan's debut novel, a murder mystery, that, in it's delicate treatment of character nuance and small-bore attention to detail, embodies the affectedness of the literary novel rather than that of the typical murder mystery."He had wanted to say a simple clean goodbye, but had swiped his kids skates instead, and not cleanly either... `I just wanted to tell him goodbye.' `You've told him goodbye enough already.'She meant in general." Told from multiple points of view, the movement of the story centers on the main character-Tommy Morrison-who takes a position teaching English in small-town, off the map Kitayama, Japan, leaving behind, among other problems, a critically damaged relationship with wife and teenage son. The plot begins to unfold when Tommy Morrison arrives in Kitayama and learns that the previous English teacher-Mr. Stuart-had disappeared the same day. But it is the development of Galligan's characters and the sophistication of the writing itself that drives the novel. His descriptions are starkly accurate and writ in a finely tuned prose. His dry subdued manner of dealing with much pain and grief leaves us startled and gawking at the page as we ponder the severity of his characters. "In the morning, as an exercise, she hanged herself," begins a chapter. To read John Galligan is to engage yourself into just that kind of unimpassioned shock treatment. Such a voice often lends itself to cynicism, yet the characters in Red Sky Red Dragonfly do not proceed with that defeated spirit of the cynical. Rather, they endure. They subsist. Happiness is indeed a far-off place from Kitayama. Miwa Sato is a Kitayamian teenager torn between a perilous love secret and her loyalty to her grandfather-he who still embraces the traditional ways of old Japanese culture. "`Please--' she began, but she could find no English words to follow. Please understand, her eyes begged him. This is such a small town. Such a small, old place. We cannot change. We cannot catch up with the rest of Japan." Miwa is shy and unsaid. We know of her feelings only in general. Her life is of uncompromised struggle. But she endures. And indeed Miwa Sato may prove to be the heroine of the novel. But this said of Miwa, Noriko Yamaguchi is perhaps the most compelling character. She