Cultural Differences and Gender: A Conversation with Emily Itami

12 Jul

“My life’s work, my greatest loves, orchestrators of total psychological trauma and everyday destruction.”

First of all, would you be able to tell us a little bit about how your debut novel came about and what your initial inspiration was?

I wrote Fault Lines after I moved back to London from living in Tokyo while my children were small. I’m half Japanese and grew up in Tokyo before coming to London, but living there as an adult was, of course, completely different to the Tokyo I’d experienced as a kid. I love it there, but I was really struck by how it’s still very traditional in terms of its societal expectations and gender norms. I’d only just recently gone through the mind-blowing identity crisis of becoming a mother, and all the questions that raised seemed particularly heightened in this old-fashioned society. I was also keen to write about Japan, the place I knew as home, the way I saw it, so I think Fault Lines was born out of all those ideas coming together.

What drew you to the idea of exploring domesticity and the cultural pressures that specifically women tend to experience?

When my kids were born, I did find it totally bizarre how my identity, any mother’s identity, was totally subsumed in the baby’s. Suddenly the way that society related to me, people’s expectations about me and my feelings, my capabilities and opinions, changed overnight, and to me, it felt like landing in a parallel universe. I suppose in Japan in particular, there were all these impeccable women around me ‘doing’ domesticity to such a high standard, without fanfare or complaint, and all I could wonder about was what was going on in their heads. I’m too nosy not to write about it!

“Maybe in all those years of happy marriage, Tatsu thought that Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when fault lines started to appear.”

I love this quote and think it’s such an excellent summary of what can happen in a long-term relationship, as it suggests that people’s identities can be transfigured and remodelled within a relationship. Was this idea something that you were hoping to explore?

Yes, definitely - how can people possibly not change over time, go through different versions of themselves, but equally if you’re in a long-term relationship, how do you deal with the fact that, particularly when huge life events like having children take place, suddenly the person you find yourself with isn’t the person you got together with at all? To what extent do you have to change too, to fit in with the new person they’ve become - and what if you can’t? I find it all fascinating (and impossible).

Although many aspects of the book are rooted in Tokyo, Mizuki’s internal turmoil certainly feels universal. She also blames her time in America for exposing her to a different culture, so I was curious about whether you felt it was important for Mizuki to have some distance from Japanese culture in order for her to criticise and critique it?

I think if you grow up in a society and you’ve never known any different, you might be less likely to be constantly looking over your shoulder at other possibilities. Particularly one that functions as well as Japanese society does and has such a huge amount going for it - completely understandably, Japan is a nationalistic place and people are very proud of how they do things. The quality of life is really good and plenty of Japanese people aren’t massively impressed at what they consider to be the barbaric way pretty much everyone else goes about things. Thinking of my own relatives and friends, it seemed much more likely that someone who’d been somewhere else might start to question some of the more restrictive aspects of societal expectations; although equally, to want to live somewhere else in the first place you might have a tendency to think that way – so I guess it’s a chicken and egg situation!

How has your experience of moving from Tokyo to London affected your writing? Both in general and in relation to the creation of Mizuki’s character?

I’ve lived between London and Tokyo all my life, and I do feel like I see the other place in a different light when I’m away from it - maybe not necessarily more clearly (although it sometimes feels that way), but through fresh eyes. Moving also just makes me miss the other place so much - when I first moved to London, Tokyo was the only place I wrote about - it was like I was trying to write myself back to it. I think coming from two places has also given me an outsider perspective - which I guess is a fundamental part of Mizuki’s character.

Despite the fact that your main character is experiencing a time of unhappiness, there are some wonderfully comic moments in your writing. Was this comic aspect tied completely to your characterisation of Mizuki?

What’s that phrase about life being a comedy in long shot and a tragedy up close? I think that mostly when people tell the truth it’s funny – we’re all marching around pretending to be so serious, and presumably inside our heads we all have these ridiculous narratives going on and are thinking about our private embarrassing secrets (unless that’s just me).

Did you ever consider any alternative, more controversial, endings?

I actually knew what the ending would be almost as soon as I thought of the book. I think, given the characters and their lives, it couldn’t have gone any other way.

One critic claimed that your book is the perfect read to “pull you out of any slump and act a little kinder to yourself the next time you ask, “Who am I, and how did I get here?” – which I loved! I wondered if you had read any other books that made you feel like that?

So many! What a happy quote, because they’re my favourite type of books! Maria Semple’s Where’d you go, Bernadette?, of course, and I always come back to India Knight’s My Life on a Plate because it just makes me laugh so much. Rick Samadder’s I never said I loved you was the most brilliant combination of funny it gave me a stomachache; it was so honest and empathetic that it was almost hard to read (except that it wasn’t). I also think Emily Pine’s totally brilliant Notes to Self is exactly that as well.

Have you read any other recently published debuts that have particularly impressed or inspired you?

I recently finished Sophie Jai’s Wildfires, and I loved the world she created, and the simultaneously loving and claustrophobic sense of family. I’m reading Marianne Levy’s Don’t Forget to Scream at the moment - she’s written children’s books in the past but I think this is her first adult book; it’s a memoir about motherhood - she’s put into words things that I wouldn’t say I’d even formulated as thoughts until she articulated them on the page, and all of it is totally recognisable and true. It’s incredible.

Finally, we always ask our authors this question – do you judge a book by its cover? And if so, why?

To some extent… Because I’m shallow and am fundamentally attracted to things that look nice, like a magpie? But also, I suppose because, after going through the process myself, I know how hard people work to make the cover communicate something fundamental about a book, so maybe I’m supposed to? But then again, loads of my favourite books are classics of which I have cheap copies with really awful covers, so maybe not always. What an answer!