by Hiromi Goto
I hunker down between a couple of horse trailers and get my equipment out of my furoshiki. My calfskin boots, my bat wing chaps, my bull rope with two cow bells. Work glycerine and rosin, with my thumb, into the braid of the rope where I will grip. The rosin smells pine sharp and strong as trees. I pull on my jeans and tuck in my shirt. Tie my soft boots on snug so they won’t fly off when I spur. Get out my purple mask from the pocket of my jeans and cover my eyes. Like that other masked wonder, who rode that Hi Ho Silver horse, I can’t remember his name. Buckle up chaps, top myself off with a well-worn Stetson and finally, tug my riding glove on my left hand. Shoulder my bull rope, all coiled up and walk back to the chutes. Cowboys, cowgirls, they leave me room, and I can hear them murmur.
“The Purple Mask! The Purple Mask! The Purple Mask is here!”
Some nod their heads, some tip their hats, and others scowl and spit. When you do something different, not everyone will like you, I’ve noticed. Ahhh, I say, nothing an old woman can’t manage.
“Ladies and gentlemen! I’ve just received a special bulletin. There’s word that The Purple Mask has been seen near the chutes! Now for those of you who’ve never heard of The Purple Mask, you folks from out of town, The Purple Mask is a mysteeeerious bullrider who shows up at the Calgary Stampede and gives bullriding a whole new meaning. No one’s knows who he is, where he comes from. He doesn’t even have a pro card. But lordy, can he ride! He just showed up one year and he’s been coming around ever since. Only takes one ride. Never had a wreck. Plumb mysterious. The Purple Mask is a legend in these parts come Stampede time, and you’re going to get your money’s worth when you see this cowboy ride!”
“Who did I draw?” I ask, before I slip my mouth guard in.
“You drew Revelation,” a cowboy nods. “He’s a bit rank today.”
I tug the brim of my hat, walk up to my bull. Revelation! Mattaku! Such a name for a bull! Why he is brindled, all tiger-striped. Such nasty eyes on his lamb-white face. He snaps his back hoof at my foot when I climb up the side of the chute, and I pull it back so quick he clangs only metal. I dangle my rope down the inside, beside the bull, and the man opposite, he hooks it under and pulls it up over the back. I straddle the bull’s body, my feet still standing on the chute and slip the tail of the rope through the loop and pull it tight. The cowboy who caught up the rope, he leans down to yank up any slack and I pull it tight again. I gingerly lower my body onto the bull. Settle my riding hand, holding the rope with my palm facing upward, and wrap the rope up and around the back of my hand and the tail back into my palm. Fling the trailing end of it toward the front so that a bullfighter can pull it loose if I’m thrown off, away from my hand, and get hung up on the beast. Pound my clenched fist with my free hand, ichi, ni, making sure it’s secure. Settle my weight above my hand, so that my butt isn’t touching. I’m holding my body up with the inside of my thighs. The nervous heat of the bull seeping through the straps on my chaps, the rough cotton of my jeans. My shoulders just over the centre of my clenched riding fist. Stretch out my strong arm, shoulder level, and reach for balance. I nod my head.
The gate is pulled open from the outside, but the bull crashes it to get out faster. Clang of horns on metal. The first lurch is shocking, like always, and I push against the rope so I won’t fly over the bull’s head, his curving horns. He lurches upward and twists into a belly roll and I pull back to keep my position. The clang clang of cowbells only a dim sound in the pounding of heart and heaving pant of animal breath. The brine of his sweat, the lean muscles of his back. He lunges on and dives into a sunfish. I push and pull, my strong arm reaching for that place of balance.
“Woweee! Lookit that cowboy ride! This is where the world meets the West! This is what the Greatest Show on Earth is all about! Hang in there, partner, hang in there, cowboy! This is the ride of your life! Eeeeeeeehaaa!”
Can’t hear the crowds or the rodeo announcer. The sound all muffled into background. Only the bull and me, never partners, but never really enemies. My head tucked low and my strong hand reaching. Just reaching for that place. That place of comfort, of safety, where I can float like a ballerina, like a Minoan gymnast. For that place where the bull and I can move as one. The jolt and lurch in my arm and spine, ahhh, this old woman can hold on still. Revelation twists into a lurching spin, and I ride into a storm. A funnel forms from where we spin and spreads outward with dust and howling. Blowing blowing spinning round and cowboy hats swirl in dizzy circles. Cotton candy fills the air, and people duck flying corn on the cob or are splattered with wet smacks of grease and salt. We spin tighter, tighter, an infinite source of wind and dust. The roaring howl of dust devil turned tornado. The wind we churn flings cowboy hats to Winnipeg, Victoria, Montreal, as far as Charlottetown. Weather patterns will be affected for the next five years and no one will know the reason. It makes me laugh and I’m still riding, the bull is still beneath me.
And I find it. I find it. That smooth clear space where the animal and I are pure as light as sound. Where stars turn liquid and you can taste sweet nectar in your mouth. The glide of the animal in your heart and in your lungs and the very blood of your body. The heat of the bull between your legs, riding on a crest of power. Tension and pleasure as fine as a silken thread. The moment of such sweet purity, it brings tears to your throat, your eyes. Makes your lips tremble.
“Thank you,” I say. Because it is a difficult thing to hear. And harder still, to listen. You shake your head and smile. Touch my hair, my face, just so.
I rise from our great purple futon like someone who has been sleeping for decades. Step through the open door. Away from a room filled with the lingering echoes of spoken and unspoken tales.
You know you can change the story.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1994
In the process of re-telling personal myth, I have taken tremendous liberties with my grandmother’s history. This novel is a departure from historical “fact” into the realms of contemporary folk legend. And should (almost) always be considered a work of fiction. Thank you to Kiyokawa Naoe for the stories. Thank you also to Tamotsu Tongu and my family for love and patience.
I wish to acknowledge Kyoko Goto, Yoshiko Gomyo, and Wes Cyr for their part in creating accurate details. I would also like to express my gratitude to Aritha van Herk, Fred Wah, and the strong Calgary writing community for their continued support, and to Mark and Leslie Ellestad for their always encouragement.
Thanks to Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada and the National Association of Japanese Canadians for funding this project, and additional thanks to the Calgary Japanese Community Association for its support.
This book would not have been possible without the invaluable resources found in Richard M. Dorson's Folk Legends of Japan (1981), Julie Piggott's Japanese Mythology (1991) and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2014
Twenty years is a long time. Twenty years is not a long time. Since the first publication of Chorus of Mushrooms my beloved Obāchan and my father have died, my babies grown to become young adults, and I am still writing novels. To riff off of Octavia E. Butler and, for that matter, Heraclitus, life is change.
Firstly, let me thank Earth for sustaining me.
Obāchan, then. Obāchan, now. Obāchan ever, always— your strength, spirit and example guide me through times, troubled and joyful. Your love is a daily presence in my life. Thank you so much.
My father and I had a bet over who would publish their first book. I won the bet with the publication of Chorus, and so he bought me a Yamaha Virago. I am ever grateful he believed in my writing and never doubted that it could be a career as well as a passion. My mother, Kyoko, who is capable of surprising me, still—thank you for showing me the possibilities of soft power, endurance and transformation. My love and gratitude to my children, Koji, and Sae, who have both patiently and impatiently put up with my idiosyncrasies throughout the years. I’m blessed with your presence in my life. I thank you for levity, real
ity checks, and, always, love. My gratitude and love to my sisters, Naomi, Nozomi and Ayumi, who are on their own marvelous journeys yet still support me from afar.
Being a writer means living within a wider community of artists, writers, teachers, activists, elders. It was a life-changing experience to be able to participate at The Appropriate Voice conference and Writing Thru Race. These conferences and the conversations I had with writers there left an indelible mark upon me, informing the way I think and how I approach my writing. The teachers and mentors who have guided me along the way: Denny Ross, Alice Tarnava, Fred Wah, Aritha van Herk, Roy Miki—thank you for saying exactly the thing I needed to hear. Thank you for challenging me, encouraging me, just being there.
To my koibito, Dana Putnam, so much gratitude for all the ways you share with me, make my life a sweeter, more beautiful place, and for reading my first drafts… I’m such a lucky duck!
My dear friends, chosen family, badasses, community members— your friendship, love, laughter, conversations and support enrich my life. Larissa Lai, Susanda Yee, Chris Goto-Jones, Rita Wong, Joy Russell, Eva Tai, Ivana Vukov, Smaro Kamboureli, Kyo Maclear, Tamai Kobayashi, Edward Parker, Christine Stewart, Graeme Comyn, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, David Bateman, Ashok Mathur, Tamotsu Tongu—thank you.
NeWest Press, thank you for taking on an unknown writer twenty years ago, and for re-issuing this beautiful 20th anniversary edition. My gratitude, especially, to Smaro Kamboureli for her excellent editorial eye, Matt Bowes and Paul Matwychuk for seeing us so well through the many details, and Justine Ma for the lovely cover and design. A special note of thanks to Larissa Lai for writing such a thoughtful and careful afterword, and for first suggesting that the gills of a mushroom would be a lovely image.
My gratitude to Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, The Writer’s Union of Canada, Powell Street Festival Society, The National Associationā of Japanese Canadians, for support in the past and present. Kore kara mo yoroshiku onegai shi masu.
Finally, my deepest thank you to the reader. Writers are nothing without you. Arigatai desu.
AFTERWORD:
LIVING, BREATHING, TEACHING
CHORUS OF MUSHROOMS
LARISSA LAI
It’s so hard to believe that twenty years have passed since the publication of Chorus of Mushrooms. I feel too young as yet to be passing sagely comment on an ancient text. The novel doesn’t feel old either; its characters, its concerns and the stories it tells are still contemporary. But history has jumped registers. The present of Chorus of Mushrooms in its first iteration is still with us. Over it, lies another present—that of its twentieth anniversary. Chorus also touches the second decade of the second millennium. The way it does so can only be described as prescient, since Hiromi Goto could not have known with certainty what futures would evolve or erupt from the moment of the novel’s writing.
Chorus of Mushrooms was originally published in 1994, the same year the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified by Canada, the US, and Mexico. Richard Nixon, Kim Il-Sung, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Kurt Cobain all died that year. In 1994 Tonya Harding’s ex-husband and bodyguard were implicated in an attack intended to break the leg of Harding’s figure skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. That same year, Lorena Bobbitt was acquitted due to temporary insanity for cutting off her husband John Bobbitt’s penis. In 1994, construction began on the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in China, and Netscape Navigator launched the first version of its Internet browser. 1994 was also the year that the conference Writing Thru Race took place in spite of having its funding pulled by then Minister of Canadian Heritage, Michel Dupuy.
Just a few years before, two important achievements for racialized communities in Canada had taken place. The year 1988 marked the success of the Japanese Canadian Redress Movement that included an apology from then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, as well as both individual and group compensations for the unjust wartime detainment of loyal Japanese Canadians and the confiscation and sale of their property. In 1988, the Mulroney government also passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act which was meant to acknowledge and protect the full variety of cultural and racial heritage in Canada, to affirm the equality of all Canadian citizens as outlined in the Citizenship Act, and to redress any proscribed discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, or colour. Though not perfect, these successes were positive steps towards a democratic state. What followed on the world stage, in the year following, were events that, at least to my mind, mark the beginning of international oligarchy’s newly powerful grip on the world economy, and thus on any national frame and the valencing of cultural meanings within that frame. These were the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square of pro-democracy students dismayed by corruption and cronyism in the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall, seemingly so hopeful in its marking the end of oppressive state socialism, turned out to mark the rise of Milton Freedman-style neoliberalism on a global scale. What I’d like to argue here is that this turn not only radically reorganized our economic system, it also reorganized the meanings of social movements and cultural texts. So, for instance, where state apology might, in the old liberal democratic state, have marked the end of an oppressive relationship between the state and its Japanese Canadian citizens, under the new neoliberal regime, the apology is instrumentalized as advertisement to overseas capital for the purposes of investment. Further, it runs the danger of closing off discussion about the ways in which the effects of the Japanese Canadian internment still profoundly mark the lives not just of Japanese Canadian citizens but anyone subject to state injustice. What, under the old liberal state, was justice for its own sake becomes, under the neoliberal state, a cynical gesture for the production of “stable markets.”
All this matters in relation to Chorus of Mushrooms. It matters because this novel was one of the first by a younger generation of Asian Canadian writers to address the ways in which Japanese Canadian subjects emerge in relation to the state, citizenship, and social life more broadly under liberal conditions of legalized equality and out from under the shadow of wartime internment. It may matter that Hiromi Goto’s family, like my own, came to Canada as part of a later wave of immigration. Our lives are still touched by the history of the Japanese Canadian internment, as much as by the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act, but differently from those of our colleagues, friends and teachers, like for instance, Roy Miki, whose family was interned and who was born in the uprooting. One might think of us as belonging to the earliest edge of the wave of immigration from Asia that deepened in the 1990s and continues at my time of writing. Many students who study this book now will both recognize and not recognize the Canada that Goto portrays. The social and familial dynamics that unfold in the novel surely have not changed so much. And yet the stance of the protagonist to those who misread her in the supermarket, at school, or in romantic relationships might seem to mark an era. The dream of democracy is sold abroad more aggressively than ever. But what of the racialized subject who expects justice and equality, and who grasps both history and social nuance? In its indignation and outrage, this novel asks something of its readership and of the broader social world through which that readership moves. In its asking, it illustrates a hope—that its desires might be met and, in that meeting, this country might become the democracy we have all been waiting for. The desires that show themselves in the disappointments experienced by both Murasaki and her obāchan Naoe show us the negative outline of the country that we could have, the country that Canada still promises to those whose money or labour it wishes to attract.
The texture of the moment has changed. We’re twenty years older, yes. But more than that, the context for this novel has changed. With the broad political shifts that I’ve attempted to lay out came a broad cultural shift, one that is harder to describe because it was as much about a feeling as it was about a s
et of events, or a change in forms of governmentality. Certainly there was a sense of empowerment in the air and a sense that something new was beginning—a sense of emergence. There was an energy. That energy may have come from real concrete political victories including the passing of the Multiculturalism Act and Japanese Canadian Redress. Those of us who were “twenty-something” in the 1990s may or may not have registered those events concretely. Perhaps those who were graduate students in those years did. Those of us who were hanging out in the various cultural communities that circulated around certain individuals— Paul Wong, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Jim Wong-Chu, Zainub Verjee, Himani Bannerji, Sunera Thobani, Richard Fung—and/or certain venues— the Vancouver Status of Women, Video In, the Western Front, the Minquon Panchayat, Fuse Magazine, Asian Lesbians of Vancouver, the Women of Colour Collective in Calgary— simply felt that something exciting was happening and wanted to participate in it. Certain small corners of some universities were also vital places. The English Department at Simon Fraser University, the Creative Writing unit at the University of Calgary, OISE, York . . . I’m sure other activist/writer/critics can name other places. The point is that there was a feeling of embodied presence for young racialized people, a sense of coming into self and coming into community that did not seem possible in the immediately prior moment. Though we were given support and critical tools by teachers and mentors, there was also very much a sense of making something for ourselves. The language of the thing we were building was as yet unformed. When it erupted, it could often be quite imprecise. Sometimes it was overly theoretical. Sometimes it was vague. Sometimes it was naive, or essentialist. But even the most unwieldy of language was meaningful because it helped build community. We were naming, feeding and growing a zeitgeist. What is valuable about Chorus of Mushrooms, then, is that it was one of the earliest of those rare texts that eloquently named and narrated an energetics, an ontology, and a sense of embodiment. It made a place in history for young Asian Canadian women and their grandmothers where there had been none before. It made tangible and articulate an eruptive force that many of us were seeking a language for.