Well, it took me twenty-five years, six trains, a funicular and a bus, but I finally got to visit Koyasan.
Back in the day, when I came to Japan as an exchange student, I was asked to give a talk to my class about Australia, my family life and so on, and do a general Q&A. One of the questions was which place I most wanted to visit in Japan. When I replied “Koyasan”, the class burst into laughter.
Okay, that was a little mean. So here’s a rough English translation:
What set Yutaka Sawada, a doctor’s son, on the path to circus life was his excitement and fascination at seeing the Yokoda Troupe perform in Asakusa. Abandoning the path towards becoming a doctor, he left home in pursuit of the Yokoda Troupe and found himself on a boat, crossing the ocean to perform in Russia.
It was 1902 and he was sixteen years old.
While I forge ahead on the verse novel, I’ve also been doing research for the adult novel I’m in the early stages of developing. One of my tasks has been to nut out details of the background for my main Japanese character, a circus performer touring Australia during WWII. It’s fiction, so I have a lot of license, but it’s historical, so I want to get the details as ‘right’ as possible so the story rings true.
So I’ve got this circus performer – an acrobat – and I’ve been asking myself what kind of background such a person would come from in 1940s Japan? I had this idea that my character would be from an educated family, someone who’s expected to go on to higher education and a ‘respectable’ profession but is so drawn by the lure of the circus that he turns his back on all that. I’ve been reading and reading and talking to people and following tiny snippets of information down neverending rabbit holes and the clear consensus seemed to be that this was not realistic, that those who ended up in the performing life were either born into it, sold into it, or stumbled into it out of poverty and necessity, that a well-bred son in this era would not-could not do such a thing.
Well, it’s been almost three weeks since I arrived and I am feeling well and truly settled into a happy balance of writing, reading, tramping about and random other stuff. My neighbourhood of Motoyama has turned out to be very congenial indeed – urban and convenient but with regular pockets of green and stillness in the form of local shrines and other ‘time out’ spaces, something I find very necessary living in such close quarters with others. I find myself enjoying the more communal sense of space in Japan, the constant awareness that there is only a thin layer between your own space and that of many, many others, but as it is at such odds with what I’m generally used to I do need regular respite from it as well, and to actively seek out open space around me.
Writing-wise, I’m making good headway on my two projects. My adult novel, The Last Wild Thing, is still in the research and development stage at this point but I figure I have one last major burst of reading to do and can then start to make some real inroads into the writing. My YA project, a verse novel, is steaming ahead in a very satisfactory way and getting my teeth stuck into some poems in a wider narrative context is giving me a lot of pleasure.
It’s official! Duck for a Day launched yesterday, 1 May. Since I’m in Japan, which makes it difficult to serve hors d’oeuvres and sign books in Australia, it launched not so much with a quack as with a whimper, but nonetheless it should be waddling its way to libraries and bookstores near you very shortly.
As it happens, there are two ducks in my life at the moment. There’s the aforementioned
Duck, quacky visage brought to you by the wonderful Leila Rudge …
Meg McKinlay 