Sayonara, by James Michener. An opinion.
Several years ago while on quasi-vacation in Bali, I found myself arguing with a white woman about James Michener. My initial opinion of Michener was founded on a biased reading of “Tales of the South Pacific” and the eponymous Rogers & Hammerstein musical adaptation. My opinion of the musical was further complicated by my ambivalence toward Rogers & Hammerstein which can be summed up in one question: do queers have diplomatic immunity from accusations of exoticism/racism? [As in, do gays get carte blanche because they’re oppressed too?]
The argument I was making presently had to do with Michener’s condescending descriptions of South Pacific natives which were bolstered, not tempered, by his condescending description of rural American hicks.
The white woman’s argument was that Michener was a known humanist, conservationist and pacifist. He was a lover, not a fighter. The carbon footprint of his misdemeanors was reduced by his pathological optimism… The same argument we use to be OK with Abe Lincoln and T. Jefferson owning slaves.
Ambivalence makes the heart grow fonder.
For the record, the white woman in Bali didn’t win our argument with this genre of counterfactualism. She won the argument because she had closely read several books by Michener whereas I had only read the one… sparingly, at that.
So. Today I want to perform a quick textual criticism of one single book by Michener. A criticism that will involve Fingers In The Throat.
FITT report: Sayonara, by James Michener.
Digest: Sargeants Gruver and Kelly are in Occupation-era Kyoto, and fall in love with local girls despite their best attempts to keep not just a race-based but military class-based pedigree. Gruver (son of a 4 star general), is engaged to marry the daughter of a Corporal. Kelly is about to be courtmartialed for his acts of miscegenation. All but Gruver kill themselves in ritual suicide at the end when a happy ending seems impossible.
Digest and Regurgitation:
1. Expensive Car versus Cheap Underwear
“I had just started to say, ‘I’ve never understood how any self-respecting officer can go with a Japanese girl’ when I stopped short. For straight ahead of our Cadillac was a tall Marine lieutenant coming out of a nylon-underwear shop accompanied by the first beautiful Japanese girl I had ever seen. She was slim and black haired and her eyed didn’t slant.” (emphasis added)
James Michener won a Pulitzer for previous writing; one of America’s highest writing honors. The above excerpt borders on situationalist it’s so absurd. I mean, forget for a second that the first two sentences are just one statement divided in two strange fragments; mentioning the presence of a Cadillac in Kyoto is unconscious capitalist jingoism. So is the nylon-underwear shop: code for cheap lingerie, which is code for low-class sex. As for the last sentence, well if I have to say why I don’t like it, you don’t deserve to know.
2. The Bitch Overpass
” ‘I didn’t know a girl was eating with us.’
‘Didn’t you see Fumiko-san say she’d be here?’
‘The girl on the bridge?’
‘Yeah. She gave me the high sign as she passed on the Bitchi-bashi.’
‘What’s this bitchi-bashi?’
’Bashi is Japanese for bridge. We call the one where the girls pass the Bitchi-bashi because there’s so much lovely stuff there and you can’t touch the merchandise.’ “
Did I mention Michener’s won a Pulitzer?
3. Harakiri sounds a lot like Hello Kitty
“Hana-ogi had acquired, from her Takarazuka shows, a few American phrases which she loved to use on me at unexpected moments but they were so mangled because of the limited alphabet of sound in the Japanese tongue that I often had to think twice to detect her meaning. Once, at the end of a long night when we stayed up to clean our tiny house she caught me in her arms and cried, “Oh Rroyd, I rub you berry sweet.” I was unprepared both for her emotion and her pronunciation and for one dreadful moment I almost laughed and then looked at her dear sweet slanted eyes and saw they were filled with tears and we sat down on the tatami as morning broke and she told me in signs and kisses and strange half-words that she had never thought that she, Hana-ogi—dedicated to Takarazuka and knowing nothing else—would ever discover what it was to… She stopped and we had no words to finish the thought. Then she jumped up and cried, ‘I make you cawhee.’ And she took down the coffee pot.” (emphasis added)
My favorite genre of Asianican Literature is Pidgen-Phonetican Literature. It is statistically impossible for a book not to characterize Asian women as anything more than Cho-Cho-sans if there is any instance of phoneticized Engrish. I dare you to challenge me here.
However, more important than the phonetican language here, is that we’re bearing witness to a new chapter in the long lineage of exoticist fiction(s).
Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve collectively witnessed the birth of The Dojo Bro: the round-eye rice-chasing “black belt in karate” who ties his thinning hair in a pony tail and drinks green tea with chopsticks because THAT’s how yakuza he is. This is the troll on Reddit looking for his next sperm sac-anime pillow cover. And I to tie “Dear HemorLloyd” to the language Michener employs. I guarantee his pronunciations of “tatami” and “Takarazuka” would make dear sweet slant eye Hana-ogi stifle backhanded-laughter as well. Think about it though. If it weren’t for “strange half-words” we’d all be bored to death and sans dojo. Think about it.
Fingers it took for me to throw up: Three, or suree as it were.
