The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  It was in Kumamoto that Hearn first began to perceive the fierceness and sternness of the Japanese character. . . . Such characteristics, however he might respect or understand them, were always antipathetic to his nature, and his relations with the members of the school were for the most part formal. He mentions that the students rarely called upon him, and that he saw his fellow teachers only in school hours. . . .

  The constant change in the personnel of the teaching force of the college, and many annoyances to which he was subjected, caused his decision at the end of the three years’ term to remove to Kōbe and enter the service of the Kōbe Chronicle. . . .

  Kōbe was at that time, 1895, an open port, that is to say, one of the places in which foreigners were allowed to reside without special government permission, and under the extra-territorial rule of their own consuls. Of Hearn’s external life here there seems to be scant record. He worked as one of the staff of the Chronicle,—his editorials frequently bringing upon him the wrath of the missionaries,—he contributed some letters to the McClure Syndicate, and there was much talk of a projected expedition, in search of material for such work, to the Philippines or the Loo Choo Island; a project never realized. The journalistic work seriously affected his eyes, and his health seems to have been poor at times. He made few acquaintances and had almost no companions outside of his own household. . . .

  * * *

  . . . .

  I think it was at Kōbe he reached his fullest intellectual stature. None of the work that followed in the next eight years surpassed the results he there achieved, and much was of lesser value, despite its beauty. He had attained to complete mastery of his medium, and had moreover learned completely to master his thought before clothing it in words—a far more difficult and more important matter.

  * * *

  . . . .

  [I]t was plain that literature and journalism would not suffice to sustain a family of thirteen persons. For Hearn in becoming a Japanese subject had accepted the Japanese duty of maintaining the elder members of the family into which he had been adopted. . . . He referred to the fact occasionally with amused impatience, but seems never to have really resented or rebelled against the filial duties which to the Western point of view might appear excessive. His eyes, too, began to give warnings that could not be ignored, and with reluctance he yielded to the necessity of earning a larger income by reëntering the Government service as a teacher. Professor [Basil Hall] Chamberlain again came to his aid and secured for him the position of Professor of English in the Imperial University of Tōkyō, where his salary was large compared to anything he had as yet received, and where he was permitted an admirable liberty as to methods of teaching.

  * * *

  . . . .

  [Hearn’s] life outside of the university and of his own home he narrowed down to a point where the public began to create legends about him, so seldom was he seen. The only person ever able to draw him forth was his friend Mitchell McDonald, whose sympathy and hospitality he constantly fled from and constantly yielded to. . . .

  Under the strain of constant work his eyesight again began to fail, and in 1902 he wrote to friends in America asking for aid to find work there, desiring to consult a specialist, and to bring for instruction in English his beloved Kazuo—from whom he would never be parted for a day. He was entitled to his sabbatical year of vacation from the university, and while he took advantage of it he wished to form other connections, as intrigues among those inimical to him made him fear for the tenure of his position. . . . An arrangement was made for him to lecture for a season in Cornell University at a salary of $2500, and these lectures he at once began to prepare. When, however, he applied for leave it was refused him. . . . [C]onvinced that it was intended as a slight by the authorities in their purpose to be rid of him, he resigned. . . .

  He plunged more deeply, at once, into the preparation of his work for the American lectures, but shortly before he was to have sailed for America the authorities at Cornell withdrew from their contract on the plea that the epidemic of typhoid at Ithaca the previous summer had depleted the funds at their command.

  Vigorous efforts were at once undertaken by his friends in America to repair this breach of contract by finding him employment elsewhere, with but partial success, but all these efforts were rendered useless by a sudden and violent illness, attended by bleeding from the lungs, and brought on by strain and anxiety. After his recovery the lectures prepared for Cornell were recast to form a book, but the work proved a desperate strain upon already weakened forces. . . .

  To me he wrote . . . “I don’t like the work of writing a serious treatise on sociology. . . . [ellipsis in the original] I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects and flowers, and queer small things—and leave the subject of the destiny of empires to men with brains.” Despite which verdict he probably recognized it as the crowning achievement of his long effort to interpret his adopted country to the world.

  Shortly after its completion he accepted the offer of the chair of English in the Waseda University. . . . Meantime the University of London had entered into negotiation with him for a series of lectures, and it was suggested that Oxford also wished to hear him. It had always been the warmest of his desires to win recognition from his own country, and these offers were perhaps the greatest satisfaction he had ever known. But his forces were completely exhausted. The desperate hardships of his youth, the immense labours of his manhood, had burned away the sources of vitality.

  On the 26th of September, 1904—shortly after completing . . . [a] last letter . . . —while walking on the veranda in the twilight he sank down suddenly as if the whole fabric of life had crumbled within, and after a little space of speechlessness and pain, his long quest was over. . . .

  Acknowledgments

  This novel was a journey—eight years from start to end—that began with a Sea Change Residency (Provincetown, Rhode Island), a generous gift of the Gaea Foundation that gave me not only a room of my own but an entire house for two precious months in March and April of 2010. There, as the Atlantic Ocean crashed and howled, I heard clearly the first line of this novel. Water and wind, I knew, would be the leitmotifs of the story that I wanted to write.

  The following year, a Guggenheim Fellowship afforded me travel to the island of Lefkada, Greece, where I took into my lungs the scent of the Ionian Sea and of ginestra in full bloom, two blessings of Lafcadio Hearn’s island of birth that he never experienced as an adult. I thanked him on the slope of Stavrota, the mountain rising from the middle of Lefkada, for taking me there. Hearn said you’re welcome and told me that my journey was far from over. He was right.

  Along the way and during the years that followed, I found temporary creative homes, each welcoming in their own invaluable way, at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities (Bogliasco, Italy); Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Helsinki, Finland) as a visiting fiction writer; PowderKeg (Brooklyn, New York); Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Umbertide, Italy); Akrai Residency (Palazzolo Acreide, Sicily, Italy); U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship (Tokyo, Japan); Agnes Scott College (Decatur, Georgia) as the Kirk Writer-in-Residence; Baruch College (New York City) as the Harman Writer-in-Residence; Hedgebrook (Whidbey Island, Washington); Accademia Tedesca Villa Massimo (Rome, Italy); and Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, California). It was at Djerassi, perched in the Santa Cruz mountainside with the Pacific Ocean a blue fringe on the horizon, that I wrote the last line of the novel in May of 2018. This time I thanked not only Hearn but the women whom he had introduced me to: Rosa Antonia Cassimati, Alethea Foley, Koizumi Setsu, and his first biographer, Elizabeth Bisland. They kept his secrets and theirs so close. They divulged so little. They made me work for every word. It has been an honor to be in their company. I miss them already.

  I owe the deepest of thanks to the following for helping me to keep the lights on in my own home as I w
andered and wrote: the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, Janet Silver, Leslie Shipman, Martin Hielscher at Verlag C.H. Beck, and Paul Slovak at Viking Penguin.

  The journey was not a straightforward one, and it took me to unexpected, unrelated-to-Hearn locales such as Helsinki, where, for three months in 2012, I learned to breathe deeply again, read for pleasure again, and found the will to write again. I am grateful for the friends in that serene city by the Baltic Sea: Martti-Tapio Kuuskoski, Outi J. Hakola, Laura Lindstedt and the Lindstedt family in Sotkamo, Donna McCormack, Kay Edwards, José Filipe Silva, Simon Rabinovitch, Taavi Sundell, Antti Sadinmaa, Maijastina Kahlos, Jin Haritaworn, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Marja Utela (and to Annabel Fan for the e-introduction to Marja), and in particular to Oanh Pham, who gave me a glimpse of life at the far northern end of the Vietnamese diaspora.

  I am indebted to Michiko Boyer, who patiently tutored me in Japanese before I left Brooklyn for Tokyo in 2015 (she knew exactly the vocabulary I would need: daigaku, eki, and konbini); Sawako Nakayasu and Manami Maeda at the International House of Japan in Tokyo, who with care and warmth administered the U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship program; Fukuko Kobayashi and Issei Wake for generously helping me to secure housing at Waseda University; and Kobayashi-sensei for traveling with me to Matsue, where I “met” at the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum a Koizumi Setsu who, at last, made perfect sense to me.

  I also raise a glass, again and again, to the following intrepid denizens of Tokyo for the kindness and generosity that they showed to this sojourner who would have been lonely and lost—well, even more lost—during her three months in their beautiful maze of a city without their convivial company: Yoshiko Hayashi (and to Andrea Louie for the e-introduction to Yoshiko); Mariko Nagai; Jon Wu; Jeff Kingston; Machiko Osawa; Leza Lowitz; Roberto Mollá (who was in Valencia, Spain, but in Tokyo in spirit) for the e-introductions to Tomohiko and Tamoko Matsumoto, Francisco Silva, Yumi Uemura, and Makiko Hamabe; my fellow U.S.-Japan Fellow Paul Kikuchi for the face-to-face introductions to Yuki Takabe (now Yuki Ishida), Yukie Higuchi, and Noriko Iwanaga; and Mayumo Inoue, who wonderfully e-introduced himself and introduced me to Kaori Nakasone.

  The end of my stay in Japan was made complete by an invitation by professor Kyoko Yoshida to speak at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where I had the honor of meeting Shigemi Nakagawa, Masahiko Nishi, Riyo Niimoto, Yuki Matsumoto, Keiko Shimojo, Hitomi Nakamura, and Raphaël Lambert.

  A historical novelist is always time traveling, and her best and truest companions are historians and research librarians. The following have gone above and beyond: Thomas Boardman, the library director of Temple University–Japan Campus; at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Information and Reference Department: Tom Moosbrugger (reference librarian), Alex Temple (senior library services assistant), Keith Good (senior library services assistant), and Stephen Headley (reference librarian), who found the date of death for Alethea Foley, an important fact that I had not seen in any of the secondary sources that I had consulted; and Yoji Hasegawa, a historian, an author, and a literary translator, whose book A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi—Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife (Global Oriental, 1997), introduced me to a fully documented woman. Within the pages of Hasegawa’s book there was another invaluable gift, his English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s 1918 memoir, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn.

  The following dear friends read the various first drafts of this novel, and they deserve not only recognition but a medal because they waded through a morass of typos, misplaced modifiers, and grammatical errors that only an English-as-a-second-language writer could make, not to mention the camouflaged plot lines, character underdevelopments, and a narrative chronology that refused linearity at every turn: Barbara Tran, David L. Eng, Jeff Kingston, Kyoko Yoshida, Alan Brown, Lizzie Skurnick, Shelley Salamensky, and Jeffrey Angles.

  Thanks also to illustrator extraordinaire Yuko Shimizu for seeing between the lines of this novel a bird’s nest adrift on the sea and bringing that arresting image to the cover design, and to photographer Haruka Sakaguchi, who presented me with a photograph that made me feel truly seen.

  I save the very last lines for Damijan Saccio, because without him there would not be a first line. We have been each other’s companions at home and abroad for twenty-nine years. Long ago I gave him a postcard of Elliott Erwitt’s 1963 black-and-white photograph of three women waiting next to a “Lost Persons Area” sign, and I wrote on the back of the postcard that without him I would be there. I meant it. I still do.

  About the Author

  Monique Truong is the author of two novels, The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth, and her work has been published in fifteen countries. Her awards and honors include the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.