Chorus of Mushrooms

by Hiromi Goto

  SK: This leads me right to my next question, for one of the things that make Chorus such an intriguing book is that it offers different points of entry to different readers. I taught the book numerous times, and I’m always happily surprised that my students, irrespective of their background or age or gender, all find it equally compelling, but often for very different reasons.

  HG: Readers bring with them an expectation of certain elements they’ve come to recognize as story. In Chorus I wanted to open up spaces where the reader might be able to place their own understanding of the text into the reading of the novel as well as engage as active participant in the outcomes of the narrative. All the endings aren’t tied up. The reader doesn’t learn if Murasaki and her mother develop a language they can share between them. I’ve had readers ask me what “really” happened to Naoe. Did she die? Is she alive somewhere in the world? Was she reborn? I think it’s up to the reader. The reader has the agency to imagine not an ending but new beginnings. So the relationship between the reader and the story can be intimate. Part of that intimacy is about reader agency, the reader being able to decide for herself what she would choose for outcomes rather than being a passive recipient.

  SK: Since the early 1980s there has been an influx of Canadian literature about immigrant experiences. What does Chorus tell us about the immigrant experience that is particular to it?

  HG: There has been, and will continue to be, literature written about the immigrant experience. Chorus may be a little different from many of these tales partially because of how I have structured its narrative. It moves back and forth between, primarily, Murasaki and her obāchan but I had a strong conviction that I didn’t want the narrative to be a closed form with a beginning, middle, and end. So, the novel consists of multiple tellings. It has many narrative threads that weft and warp, with strands left hanging or unfinished, so that the cloth has gaps or ragged edges. It also has a particular kind of aesthetic—one that appreciates the imperfections rather than focusing only upon the highly finished object. I was also hoping to convey leaps of the mind rather than a narrative chronology, which I find rather stifling. So the narrator also points to the slipperiness of story, undermining her own authority over the text. Hence that moment when she hands over the conclusion of the story to the reader, inviting the reader to become the writer, inverting the roles and shifting the dynamics.

  SK: All this draws attention to the enduring power of storytelling. Do you think that being able to tell our own stories is crucial to figuring out who we are, how we have come to be where we are?

  HG: The telling of stories is a way for people to articulate their histories, their realities and dreams on their own terms. It’s an act of empowerment and imaginative vitality—a creative resistance against forces that may otherwise distort or misrepresent. Stories can speak back. They can be a springboard for a new kind of discourse, or a momentary resting place for the weary. They can be a kind of food for our spirit and soul. It is so important for us to be able to speak our own stories, and to understand our realities through a language and culture that is specific and contextualized within our histories and to the land where we reside.

  SK: What is the significance that Murasaki, a Japanese Canadian woman, tells her story to a Japanese man? That we—we as Canadian readers—hear the story filtered through his ears?

  HG: It was my hope that the reader would be able to imagine they were the lover being told the story. That is why, for the most part, the lover is addressed as “you.” The reader is situated as the beloved. The imaginary “universal” and presumably “neutral” reader is no longer marked by whiteness. There is a shift in what is situated as the center. The unfixed reader can be a Japanese man—why not?

  SK: This is very important because it unsettles the conventional expectation that the import of a story is better internalized and appreciated when the reader can easily identify with a character. What also unsettles certain expectations in your novel is how the stories are shared, the particular forms through which they are told—from the traditional delivery of “Once upon a time” to the journalistic reportage of newspaper clippings.

  HG: I felt a strong urge not to fix the story into a single form because I feared this would contain what was possible. There is something “finished” about this kind of tale—a sense of closure. I wanted Chorus to be about breaking outward rather than about completion. I wanted the possibility of a chorus of voices. During the writing and developing of the novel I came to the realization that every time I wrote a scene, that scene became fixed and it could no longer be anything else. Each choice I made as an author meant that all the other possibilities were eliminated. This realization created in me a kind of anxiety about the limitations of conventional storytelling—that writing a story meant it became a series of actions that constrained rather than opened up. You could say I had an existential crisis. An odd sort of crisis [grin], but this led me to develop a narrative structure that would offer doorways or pathways to other kinds of stories such as news stories, bedtime tales, plays, etc. The thing is different types of stories function in different kinds of ways. For instance, news stories are often accepted as “true stories”—a great many people believe them to be factual accounts of current issues. But if you shift the vantage point of the reading, say, by looking back to the news stories of fifty to one hundred years ago, we can now see how racist and ideologically loaded they were. I’m thinking of the kinds of articles that were written about Japanese Canadians prior to and during WWII. Japanese Canadians were never considered a real threat to national security, but anti-Asian sentiment was used strategically during this time to forcibly expel Japanese Canadians from Western British Columbia. News stories played their part in casting them in a negative light. The news accounts of that time were far from being unbiased, “true” tellings at all. So what, then, of the news stories we read now? What is the truth? Whose truth do they convey? Whose stories occupy the mainstream consciousness? Who relates a particular story? The modality of the storytelling affects our relationship to the story and how we understand it in a broader cultural framework. By foregrounding a varied sampling of the different kinds of stories we may encounter in our lives within a single novel I’m pointing to the importance of recognizing not just the contents of a story, but also how it is relayed (its form) and how it is perceived.

  SK: Did you grow up with some of the stories in Chorus?

  HG: Some of these stories I’ve been told, some I have read, and some of them are made up. I wrote an alternative ending to the creation myth of Izanagi and Izanami, for instance, because I wanted to re-imagine the story with the female figure being the active force rather than the passive one. And I expanded the tale of Issun Boshi beyond its traditional ending that concluded with a marriage, to an imagined life after the ceremony. Some Japanese readers have asked me about this scene—why I turned a traditional “happy ending” into a sad one. Because, often, a “traditional marriage ending” is not necessarily a happy one for a lot of people . . . And this is one of the things that excites me about writing—engaging with the different possibilities of a story, the capacity—often the necessity—to change it. Story is not inert. So the folk legends and fairy tales in Chorus are not necessarily representative of traditional Japanese legends. The tale I retell or recreate may have had its beginnings in ancient Japan, but it goes through various permutations under my pen, as it were, when it’s filtered, for instance, through immigrant or feminist concerns.

  SK: So, does the fact that Naoe’s daughter, Keiko, doesn’t seem to be interested in these stories speak to her ambivalent relationship to her cultural inheritance, to her attempt to emulate what she takes to be an “authentic” multicultural subject?

  HG: Yes. How people react to and adapt to new environments and peoples differ wildly between individuals, even within members of the same family. Keiko’s response to external forces that frame her identity as “foreign” or “other” is to assimilate. This is a stra
tegic response that many immigrants turn to in order to create a sense of a greater measure of comfort in their daily lives.

  SK: Names—naming and re-naming—are very important elements in the novel. For example, Keiko adopts a Canadian name, Kay, while Muriel becomes Murasaki, a direct reference to the classic Japanese novelist, Lady Murasaki. Why all this attention to names?

  HG: I wanted to direct attention to how the act of naming can be a highly loaded intervention. Who names? Who is named? Was a name chosen based on the whims of the person who does the naming or for the sake of the named? So complex! I play with naming in Chorus to illustrate how this act can function in different ways. Someone can be named in a way that subjugates—their true name disregarded, they're given instead a new name to impose a new identity. This is the case with the Tonkatsu family assigning “Canadian” names to the Vietnamese refugees who come to work at their mushroom farm. Or take the Book of Genesis where Adam names the animals, an act that affirms his position of power over the mute beasts. On the other side of the spectrum, naming oneself can be an act of liberation. If a person has had unhappy or traumatic associations with their given names, rather than being forever tied to an unwanted past, they may create a new name for themselves to better reflect who they are.

  SK: If names are important in this novel, so is food. Why did you choose food as one of the major tropes through which to tell this story?

  HG: I think food is very important for all kinds of reasons. Physically we must all eat food so that we can be nourished, so we can live. But think about it—it’s something we ingest, and it becomes part of our bodies. This idea really resonates for me on so many levels. Biologically, it’s fascinating. And it is a very rich metaphor, too. We bring into our bodies something that is not of us, that is entirely separate, and it becomes part of us. We are physically capable of eating the foods of diverse peoples and cultures, although some of us may not because, say, of cultural taboos. I find all this fascinating! Not to mention that food is one of the few equalizers, one of the first ways that a person from one culture experiences something from a different culture. The host can offer food to a guest, and from there a conversation may arise. It is an act of hospitality and welcome. And, of course, our relationship with food can also convey a lot about our everyday reality—the choices we make about what to eat and why are about control. Think about Kay, Murasaki’s mother, who decides to disengage with her culture of origin by refusing to eat traditional foods. But beyond this, food is also a source of sensual pleasure, and I really wanted to illustrate the link between sustenance, the body, and the pleasures we may arrive at in meeting these needs.

  SK: Food, then, as both a means of assimilation and a means of resistance. It can connect characters with their past but also accentuate their differences in relation to their present. Would it be fair to say that food in this novel is like an umbilical cord that is cut off but the memory of which persists—a kind of phantom limb?

  HG: It’s interesting that you connect food to memory. For the people who were lucky enough to have been raised in a mostly stable home, many of our memories of home/hearth/family can also be linked with food. What was our favourite food as a child? What did your parent make best? To this day I cannot make miso shiru as well as my mother makes it. I try to recreate the broth, but it evades me. And maybe this is, as you say, because my memory of this food is a kind of ghost. Which has me thinking about hauntings. Maybe food, especially for those who have experienced significant shifts culturally, geographically, politically, be it through immigration or colonization or forced migration, is a perpetual kind of haunting which we try to exorcise or ritualize. For Keiko/Kay, her own cultural foods are something she drives out of her daily life in order to fit in, while Murasaki is left to invent her own relationship to foods of her cultural background. When her mother becomes spiritually and psychologically lost after Naoe embarks on her adventure, Murasaki invents her own healing ritual by feeding her mother her own name. In Chorus food is both sustenance and metaphor, a ritual of self-affirmation.

  SK: Exactly. In the scene you’ve just referred to food plays a restorative role in the private domain, but food, as you’ve already suggested, also has a public function. I’m thinking of all those scenes where food—from grocery shopping to sharing a meal with someone in a restaurant—takes on a different meaning, becomes an integral element of the dialogue that unfolds in a public space.

  HG: The making and consuming of food can be an intimate act, especially when it is linked to the home—the familial and the familiar—and one’s cultural connections. In this sense our connection to food can be experienced as a private engagement. We can be nourished in this way, both body and spirit. When we step outside and intersect with the procurement of foodstuffs (which have also moved through geographical, cultural, and historical locations) our relationship expands from the personal to the communal. The intimate engagement with food happens in a larger social framework, one that is three-dimensional, and as a result we are implicated in a vast narrative. Consider the history of salt, for instance. Or sugar. Illustrating the intersections that are part of our engagement with food also echoes the way in which naming is treated in my novel, as well as the nature of story-telling. There is no definitive telling of anything. We are always in the state of one and many simultaneously.

  SK: Talking about salt and sugar, why mushrooms, why a mushroom farm?

  HG: I grew up on a mushroom farm in southern Alberta and so this environment informed me on many levels. It was tied to family, labour, exhaustion, economics—but when I began thinking about all that as a writer the potential for metaphor and the magical became a transformative possibility. A mushroom farm is an enclosed and specialized space. Its temperature, humidity and light need to be precisely controlled in order for the mushrooms to flourish. So an environment “foreign” to the dry prairie must be manufactured in order for growth to happen. If we think of this as metaphor in relation to immigration and immigrant experiences, there is an interesting kind of resonance between two disparate things. The prairies are usually depicted in colonialist terms, especially in early prairie literature—homesteading, breaking the sod, farming, ranching, etc. The mushroom farm in this setting disrupts the colonial narrative in a different way. Instead of the default pairing of prairies to wheat, for instance, I’m asking the reader to imagine prairies alongside mushrooms. This isn’t to say that mushrooms are “better” than wheat but, introducing a different “crop” in the narrative of settlement unsettles a master narrative. You could say that my having the Tonkatsu family run a mushroom farm is also a way of showing how immigration participates with colonization—we are not exempt.

  SK: Let’s shift to another aspect of the novel that I find equally important. Chorus is as much grounded in reality—and realism— as it is in the magical—and fantasy fiction. I have in mind the amazing transformations Naoe undergoes. Here is an old woman, her skin as dry as parchment because of the dry cold in Alberta, taking off in the middle of the winter, and having the time of her life. Not only does she pick up a stranger on the highway—the kind of thing grandmothers are known to warn their grand-daughters against—but she takes this stranger as a lover and, what’s more, by the end of the book she has become a mythic figure.

  HG: When a story is written in a realist form the narrative becomes confined to what can only be perceived as physically possible in a material world. Writing, for me, is a great deal about creative imagination as well as play (even while speaking to very real and important issues). The imagination is a powerful instrument for change. Our lived physical lives may be caught up in a life that may not be of our choosing, but our imagination will always make it possible to dream of other ways of being. Bringing elements of the magical or the transformative into literature is a way for me to express the possibilities of all things.

  SK: What kinds of writing excite you as a reader but also inspire you as a writer?

  HG: I go to different kinds o
f writing for different reasons, and lean toward fiction more than non-fiction books, but I do read a lot of news stories and articles on the sciences, scientific discoveries, disease, the environment, human psychology and animal behavior. These topics can serve to inspire me as a writer. When I read fiction I often want to sink into a story and enjoy the story-ness of it—to experience a character’s world in an immersed way, something I find deeply satisfying. For me a fully articulated and successful novel is like a 4D simulation experience, with the fourth dimension being time. Not only can we experience unique lives and diverse geographies, but we can also travel in time. Nothing else that humans have fabricated comes close to this level of immersion and transportation. Currently the writing that excites me the most is feminist speculative fiction. This kind of fiction can imagine different kinds of worlds and social relationships, and I find this very inspiring both creatively and personally. Some of the contemporary authors in this field that come to mind are Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joan Slonczewski, Nalo Hopkinson, James Tiptree Jr., Larissa Lai, and Kelly Link. I’m also very much interested in the works of writers of colour outside of speculative fiction, like Dionne Brand, Sherman Alexie, and Kyo Maclear. Ultimately, I’m most inspired when narratives take me to places I’ve not ventured before, when they have me thinking of familiar things in unfamiliar ways. I’m looking for stories that don’t re-inscribe the normative world that is perpetually trying to recreate itself. I’m looking for texts that offer a glimpse of different ways of being—I aspire to do the same in my own writing practice.