AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik
und Amerikanistik
Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2
Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
A Samurai in Georgia, or the Failure of Intercultural
Understanding
Peter Freese
The article shows that T.C. Boyle’s novel East Is East (1990) is based on a ‘real’
incident and mixes fact and fiction in Boyle’s idiosyncratic manner. It then
demonstrates how artfully the many-faceted story combines the traditional
plotlines of the innocent youth on a search for a better world and the lonely
son on a quest for his lost father with the satiric thrust of a Künstlerroman and
how it connects these narrative strands by means of a tightly woven net of
both direct and implied allusions to many facets of American culture on the
one hand and major aspects of the Japanese samurai tradition on the other,
thus allowing for diverse variations of the chances and pitfalls of intercultural
negotiation. The unusual combination of these narrative strands and the constantly alternating points of view enable the reader to see the events from
contrasted perspectives. And Boyle’s linguistic mastery or what he once called
“the mad, language-obsessed part of me” allows him to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of conveying a depressing truth in a hilarious way and to
embed his harsh critique of American parochialism and racism and his plea
for an unprejudiced attitude towards ‘others’ in a fast-paced, entertaining and
captivating tale.
In many of his fourteen novels, T.C. Boyle arranges his fictitious plots
around historical people and events. Thus, in his first novel, Water Music
(1982), he contrasts the historical explorer Mungo Park with the fictional
figure of the petty criminal Ned Rise and, in an introductory “Apologia,”
grants “the exigencies of invention” precedence over “historical fact”:
As the impetus behind Water Music is principally aesthetic rather than
scholarly, I’ve made use of the historical background because of the joy
and fascination I find in it, and not out of a desire to scrupulously dramatize or reconstruct events that are a matter of record. I have been deliber-
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ately anachronistic, I have invented language and terminology, I have
strayed from and expanded upon my original sources. Where historical
fact proved a barrier to the exigencies of invention, I have, with full
knowledge and clear conscience, reshaped it to fit my purposes. (Boyle
1983: “Apologia”)
Boyle, then, discards the traditional distinction between fact and fiction
and bridges the ontological divide between the historian’s discovery of
pre-existing events and the novelist’s invention of newly made stories
with the strategies of historiographical metafiction. Consequently, for
him the difference between historiography and novel writing is no longer
one of principle but of accentuation only, and in his books, history and
story can freely intermingle because he assumes with E.L. Doctorow that
“there is no history except as it is composed” (Doctorow 1994: 160).
Thus, the fictional plot of The Road to Wellville (1993) revolves around
John Harvey Kellog, the inventor of cornflakes, and much of it takes
place in an imaginative recreation of Kellog’s historical Battle Creek
Sanitarium in Michigan. The action of Riven Rock (1998) unfolds around
Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the reaper and
founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and his wife
Katharine Dexter McCormick, a well-known women’s rights activist and
philanthropist, and most of the action takes place in Riven Rock, the
actual McCormick estate in Montecito, CA. In The Inner Circle (2004), a
novel about the controversial founder of sexology, “all characters and
situations have been invented, with the exception of the historical figures
of Alfred C. Kinsey and his wife, Clara Bracken (McMillen) Kinsey” (Boyle
2005: “Author’s Note”). And The Women (2009) is “a fictional re-creation
of certain events in the lives of Frank Lloyd Wright, his three wives […]
and his mistress,” but “while actual events and historical personages are
depicted here, all situations and dialogue are invented, except where
direct quotes have been extracted from newspaper accounts of the
period” (Boyle 2009: “Author’s Note”).
Boyle’s fictional recreation of historical people and events made his
Paris Review interviewer assume that his “books and stories suggest a lot
of research,” to which Boyle replied:
Yes, I do my homework. Particularly in the historical novels, and I’ve
done four of those to date and am working on another now. On the other
hand, I do agree with E.L. Doctorow, who said that he does enough research to get him going, and then adds what he needs as he works. I do
like to see things – locations, I mean – if possible, but that isn’t as important to me as it may be for other writers. Again, I am writing from the
imagination, for the unconquerable rush of seeing a scene in my head and
transposing it to words. So I spent a grueling three days with my three
favorite drinking buddies in the Okefenokee Swamp doing the research
for East Is East. For The Road to Wellville I spent three days in Battle Creek,
Michigan, haunting the library, walking the streets, poking around the
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
189
graveyard, and being denied access to the Kellogg Company’s offices. That
was all I needed. (Boyle 2000)
One of the topics that recur in Boyle’s socio-critical novels is the tension
between ethnic, economic and ideological groups and the momentous
role which mutual stereotypes and prejudices play in their encounters.
This is obvious in World’s End, which deals with centuries of exploitation
and oppression of Native Americans by Dutch settlers in the Hudson
Valley, and in The Tortilla Curtain, which explores the antagonism
between well-to-do Anglos and poor Mexican indocumentados in greater
Los Angeles. But the most dramatic intercultural encounter is presented
in Boyle’s fourth novel, East Is East (1990), which explores the confrontations of a Japanese half-breed who jumps ship at the coast of Georgia
with southern rednecks, Gullah-speaking blacks1 and fame-hungry members of a writers’ colony and plays off the popular stereotypes of America
held by the Japanese seaman against the ill-founded notions of Asia held
by assorted Americans. Once again, this outrageous plot is not Boyle’s
invention, but goes back to a historical event. In 1974, a Taiwanese merchant sailor jumped ship off Florida and lived in the alligator-infested
Green Swamp near Disneyland for eight months until he was captured by
the authorities and committed suicide before being shipped back home
(see Douglas 1997). This sensational event was widely covered by newspapers and on TV shows and even found its way into Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men (1980). Thus, one can assume that Bonnie Lyons’
vague hint that East Is East “was inspired by a newspaper article from a
friend who dropped by while Boyle was writing World’s End and announced he had found Boyle a subject for his new book” (Lyons 2003:
77), refers to one of the articles about this much talked-about case.
When Boyle was working on East Is East in 1988, he said that it would
be
a novel set in Georgia in 1990, which is not that far away. When the book
comes out is when it’s set. It concerns some of the themes of Water Music:
racism in particular, cultural predetermination, cultural dislocation. It’s a
southern novel written by a guy who knows nothing about the south. It’s
about a Japanese man in Georgia and his trials and tribulations there.
Written, again, by a man who knows nothing about Japan, either. (Adams
1990/1991: 61f.)
This was certainly a self-ironical understatement because most reviewers
considered East Is East an impressive success. In the Raleigh News and
Observer, David Raney, himself a writer from Atlanta, observed that the
novel had “all of Mr. Boyle’s trademark word wizardry while offering,
1
Gullah is a Creole language spoken today by about 250,000 African Americans in
coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The language of the Gullah people or
“Geechees” mixes English with West and Central African languages, and its
vocabulary comes primarily from English, but also has words of African origin.
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like World’s End, characters of depth and asking provocative questions
about American society.” And he stated:
Mr. Boyle assembles a Keystone Kops troupe of minor characters – idiot
sheriffs, ego-driven artists, a rapacious press corps and assorted xenophobic busybodies – on which to indulge his considerable gift for caricature.
The central characters, though, are fleshed out and fully alive. He makes
us laugh at Ruth and Hiro but feel for them, too, and the ending he concocts feels, as in the best fiction, both surprising and right. As the title
suggests, it is gaps in understanding, between couples or whole cultures,
that provide the comic core of East Is East and also its edge of sadness.
[…] T. Coraghessan Boyle has much to tell us about the dangers involved
in holding fixed images, whether of oneself or of races, of nations or of
the future. (Raney 1990)
In the New York Times, Michito Kakutani read the novel as “a hilarious
black farce about racial stereotypes, selfish dreams and ambitions run
hopelessly amok,” and praised Boyle’s “hyperkinetic language and gift for
wild invention to create a rollicking, old-fashioned tale full of cartoony
heroes and villains and deliciously satiric incidents.” He found that
“much of the humor in East Is East derives from Mr. Boyle’s keen sociological eye and his ability to parody cultural preconceptions through
manic exaggeration,” but ended his review with a critical note when he
observed that “unfortunately, the novel’s startling conclusion buys into
just such stereotypes. Though this ending does not diminish the reader’s
enjoyment of all that goes before, it does undermine the philosophical
underpinnings of the book, leaving the reader with a faintly sour aftertaste.” (Kakutani 1990)
In her detailed review in the New York Times Book Review, Gail Godwin, herself an accomplished story-teller, found East Is East “an absorbing
tragedy” told with “consummate artistry” and said:
That we find ourselves laughing all the way to the increasingly inevitable
catastrophe does not in any way blur the book’s impact, for ours is the
laughter of recognition and revelation, rueful and cleansing. All of us who
have ever weighed the desperate desire to belong against the coexisting
need for self-respect will recognize ourselves in Mr. Boyle’s lowly Japanese sailor as well as in his counterprotagonist, the frantically ambitious
young writer Ruth Dershowitz, who becomes Hiro Tanaka’s protector and,
ultimately, his nemesis. That Hiro – the hero – at last does the honorable,
albeit doomed, thing, according to his code, and that Ruth, in marked
contrast, joyfully sells out after a brief pang of conscience, results in a
double catharsis. When it comes to an ending, the reader gets to have it
both ways.
After pointing out sundry highlights of the book’s fast-paced action, she
concluded her comments by observing that “Mr. Boyle gives us an absolutely stunning work, full of brilliant cross-cultural insights, his usual
virtuoso language and one marvelous scene after another,” and by defin-
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T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
ing East Is East as “a novel about the way we appear to others, the way
others appear to us and the lengths to which some of us will go to be
accepted by others – or to become acceptable to ourselves.” (Godwin
1990)
In his review in the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers read
East Is East as a book about “cross-cultural blind spots” in a fast-paced
satire which is “broad rather than subtle, more farcical than witty,” and
he concluded that
while there is a considerable degree of Waugh-like cruelty in the fate
Boyle metes out to his antihero, who follows the example of Mishima to
its bloody conclusion, Hiro himself is engaging enough to provide a
pathos at the end that in no way clashes with the comedy that precedes it.
This is an exuberant reworking of the innocents-abroad theme that goes
back at least as far as Voltaire’s L’Ingénu. (Towers 1991: 31 and 32)
According to its laudatory reviews, then, East Is East is an impressive fictional treatment of “the dangers involved in holding fixed images,
whether of oneself or of races, of nations or of the future” (Raney), and it
contains the “brilliant cross-cultural insights” (Godwin) of a gifted writer
who uses his unique “ability to parody cultural preconceptions through
manic exaggeration” (Kakutani) for the purpose of presenting his readers
with an “exuberant reworking of the innocents-abroad theme” (Towers).
But there is more, and the following analysis will show that Boyle’s novel
‣ is not only a contemporary variation of Mark Twain’s ‘innocents
abroad’ theme, but also a retelling of the search of Voltaire’s
Candide for Leibniz’s best of all worlds and a reconstruction of the
son’s archetypal quest for his lost father;
‣ solves the seemingly impossible task of conveying a depressing
truth in a hilarious way by artfully combining a fictional exploration of the havoc wrought by national hetero-stereotypes with the
satiric thrust of a Künstlerroman;
‣ connects its diverse elements by means of a tightly woven net of
direct and implied allusions to Western traditions in general and
the many facets of American culture in particular and thus opens
additional horizons; and
‣ succeeds in delivering its harsh critique of American parochialism
and racism and its plea for an unprejudiced attitude towards
‘others’ in the form of a many-faceted tale.
*****
Boyle re-imagines the 1974 drama of the fugitive Taiwanese sailor in the
Green Swamp near Disneyland as taking place in 1990 in rural Georgia,
and he structures his novel’s fast-paced plot according to locality, with
Savannah and the Okefenokee Swamp being ‘real’ locations and Tupelo
Island being a fictional place. But when we combine the facts that it takes
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Abercorn a “seventy-minute drive” (60) from Savannah to Tupelo Island,
that the inhabitants cannot do their shopping on the island but have to
“catch the ferry to the mainland” (123) and go to the actual town of
Darien (26; 115), a small coastal town in McIntosh County, GA fifty miles
south of Savannah at the mouth of the Altamaha River, and that Hiro’s
unlucky confrontation with Olmstead White, the ironically named black
man who speaks “the Gullah dialect of his ancestors” (40), occurs in the
black settlement of “Hog Hammock on Tupelo Island” (41), we recognize
that here, too, Boyle employs his characteristic mixture of fact and fiction. The fictional Tupelo Island is closely modeled on the state-protected
Sapelo Island in McIntosh County, GA that can only be reached by airplane or boat and is connected with what Hiro calls the ‘mainrand’ by a
ferry from the Sapelo Island Visitors Center in Meridian in a twentyminute trip. Today, most of the island is owned by the State of Georgia
and managed by the Department of Natural Resources, with The
University of Georgia Marine Institute on its south end. In the early 19th
century, Thomas Spalding, a Georgia politician and supporter of slavery,
bought Sapelo Island and brought four hundred slaves from West Africa
and the West Indies there to work his plantation and build the Spalding
Mansion. During the Civil War, the mansion was ruined, and the freed
slaves established several settlements. In 1912, Howard E. Coffin, the
founder of the Hudson Motor Company in Detroit, bought the island for
$150,000 and rebuilt the mansion into an outstanding home in which he
received such famous guests as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge and
Herbert Hoover. In 1933, R.J. Reynolds, Jr. of Reynolds Tobacco bought
Sapelo Island, resettled the African-American residents in Hog Hammock,
and established the basis for the university facilities. In 1965, his widow
sold the island to the State of Georgia. Today, the Reynolds Mansion can
be booked by organized tours, and Hog Hammock is a tiny settlement
with a general store and less than fifty Gullah-speaking inhabitants whose
families have been living on the island for generations and whose children now take the ferry to the mainland and a bus to school since the
island school closed in 1978.
When we relate these facts to the fictional geography of East Is East, it
becomes clear that all the details – the ferry to the mainland, the trips to
Darien, the boat tours on Peagler Sound (the fictional equivalent of
Doboy Sound) – are closely modeled on reality, that Thanatopsis House is
Boyle’s fictional recreation of the Reynolds Mansion, and that the name
of the black village of Hog Hammock has even been taken over unchanged. The same is true with regard to the Okefenokee Swamp, the
largest ‘blackwater’ swamp in North America. When Saxby drives there,
“heading for Waycross, Ciceroville and the western verge of the Okefenokee Swamp” (237), and then progresses to “the dock at Stephen C. Foster
State Park” (240) from which he plans to catch his albino fish, his trip
can be traced on a map, because the Stephen C. Foster State Park is as
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T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
much a ‘real’ place as the town of Waycross, the county seat of Ware
County, GA with its 15,000 inhabitants, which Saxby has to pass on his
way from Darien. In the swamp, there really is a “Billy’s Island” (298),
and only the village of “Ciceroville, the ‘Gateway to the Okefenokee
Wilderness’” (287), is a place that Boyle invented.
*****
It has become a critical commonplace that “the choice of a point of view
in the writing of fiction is at least as crucial as the choice of a verse form
in the composing of a poem” (Friedman 1955: 1180), and in a novel
about mutual prejudices such a choice is especially important since the
readers’ evaluation of the fictional events depends on whose individual
perception they are filtered through. In East Is East, ‘America’ is experienced through Asian eyes and the behavior of a Japanese interloper is
judged through American eyes. Therefore, Boyle can only do justice to
both points of view by narrating his story from alternating perspectives,
each of which is limited by the prejudiced perception of an individual
character, but whose totality provides his readers with an overview and
lets them recognize that the novel’s different ‘realities’ exist in the eyes of
their beholders.
The novel is made up of three parts of unequal length and its point of
view constantly alternates between the characters whose names are given
in brackets:
I: Tupelo Island (13 chapters; 198 pages)
1: Small Matters (Hiro/Ruth)
2: The Tokachi-maru (Hiro)
3: Thanatopsis House (Ruth)
4: Hog Hammock (Hiro/Olmstead White)
5: The Squarest People in the World (Detlef Abercorn)
6: Queen Bee (Ruth)
7: Fea Purê (Hiro)
8: Behind a Wall of Glass (Saxby)
9: Rusu (Ruth)
10: The Other Half (Hiro/Olmstead White)
11: Still at Large (Ruth)
12: Parfait in Chrome (Saxby)
13: The Dogs Are Barking – Woof-Woof (Hiro/Royal))
II: The Okefenokee (9 chapters; 142 pages)
1: Everybody’s Secret (Ruth)
2: Four Walls (Hiro)
3: The Whiteness of the Fish (Turco/Saxby)
4: A Jungle (Ruth)
5: Where the Earth Trembles (omniscient voice/Hiro/the Jeffcoat
family)
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6: Tender Sproats (Detlef Abercorn)
7: Cheap Thrills (Ruth)
8: The Power of the Human Voice (Saxby/Ruth)
9: Haha (Hiro)
III: Port of Savannah (2 chapters; 19 pages)
1: Journalism (Ruth)
2: The City of Brotherly Love (Hiro)
This list shows that the half-Japanese intruder Hiro Tanaka and the Jewish-American would-be writer Ruth Dershowitz provide the dominant
perspectives, but that Ruth’s lover Saxby and minor actors like Abercorn
and Turco and even Olmstead White and his nephew Royal also add their
perceptions of the world to the overall picture. Now and then an omniscient narrator takes over to inform his readers about past events such as
Hiro’s childhood (16ff.), the early history of Saxby (111-113), or the
history of the Okefenokee Swamp and “Jackson’s Folly” (265-267).2 But
these are not the only intrusions because Boyle is so intent upon what he
himself once called “the mad, language-obsessed part of me” (Adams
1990/1991: 60) that he frequently oversteps his characters’ limitations
and makes them think or say things that are beyond their capacities.
Unusual and funny comparisons such as that Abercorn feels “his face
reddening like bratwurst on a rotisserie” (294), that Septima is “clutching
at the microphone as if it were a cobra she’d discovered in bed and seized
in desperation” (303), that Saxby is glad about Ruth “shining like a
supernova in the Thanatopsis firmament” (179), that Sheriff Tibbets sits
“chewing his cud and stroking his gut as if it were a crystal ball” (324),
or that a disappointed Ruth experiences the Thanatopsis party as “the
geriatric ball at the 4-H fairgrounds” (164),3 do not fit the respective
characters’ knowledge and language and reveal that Boyle finds linguistic
ingenuity more important than the consistency of his chosen points of
view. This is also true of descriptions such as that of Hiro in the swamp
2
3
In 1889, the state of Georgia allowed The Suwanee Canal Co. to purchase 430,000
acres of the Okefenokee Swamp for $62,101.80 with the intention of draining the
swamp so that its fertile soil could be farmed. Captain Harry Jackson (see 266)
undertook the task of digging a canal from the eastern side of the swamp toward St
Mary’s River. Over a million dollars and twenty-two miles of canals later, Captain
Jackson was no closer to draining the swamp than when he started because instead
of flowing east toward St Mary’s River, the water in the new canals flowed west
toward the Okefenokee’s interior. Consequently, the project was abandoned and
local history refers to the abortive project as “Jackson’s Folly.” – For details see
Tara D. Fields.
4-H is an American youth organization with over 6.5 million members
administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture with the mission of
“engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth
development.” The name represents the four developmental fields of head, heart,
hands, and health, and it is often used as a derogatory reference to rural America.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
195
as an “amphibious Japanese” (321) or of the content of Roy Dotson’s
garage as “an aggregation of household refuse that would make the
careers of any twenty future archeologists” (242). And when Brie Sullivan’s admiration of the writers at Thanatopsis is “trailing off into frequencies audible only to more sensitive lifeforms” (258) and her
adulation of Jane Shine makes her behave “as if one of the secret names
of Jehovah had just been revealed to her” (264), the readers once more
hear Boyle’s sarcastic voice taking over. When Irving Thalamus “extract[s] the dicotyledonous kernel [of a peanut] from the shell” (30) or
when Septima’s voice “float[s] over the sudden crepuscular hush of the
room” at the time at which Ruth is “in the first stages of the metamorphosis that would make her the cynosure of Irving Thalamus’s clique”
(68), the elevated language might still be appropriate. But when the uneducated Olmstead White’s frying oysters “sen[d] up their ambrosial
aroma” (43) and make “a fancy Charleston kind of potted-palm restaurant out of the two-room clapboard shack” (40), both language and
imagery are beyond what he would be able to muster and clearly belong
to the intruding author who is in love with uncommon terms and surprising metaphors. And when the Jewish Ruth muses about her daily
routine that before lunch “it was the Calvary of the morning; after, the
naked cross of the afternoon, winding down to the resurrection and ascension of cocktail hour” (33), the Christian imagery is definitely Boyle’s.
The discrepancy between narration and focalization is most obvious in
the chapters that are told from Hiro’s point of view. Thus, his thirst is
described as “the kind of implacable thirst that shrivels Joshua trees and
lays waste to whole villages in Africa” (35). In his confrontation with
Olmstead White the latter’s howl is said to “have unraveled the topknot
of even the staunchest of samurai” (44). After his discovery of the Coca
Cola sign he goes “faint with gastric epiphany” (47), and he cries out “in
peristaltic anguish” (88) when Ruth forgets to bring him food. With
Ambly Wooster he thinks about “how to dam up the torrent of banality
that lashed her tongue like a whip across her palate” (144) and is relieved when she becomes silent, having “spilled her continents, her
oceans, her worlds of breath” (145). He experiences the furious Olmstead
White as a “transmogrified Negro […] writhing and gasping and choking
out a curse in the thick wadded language of the shaman and the witch
doctor” (146). His childhood dream is “a dream of the cradle, an oneiric
memory, idealized and distilled from a stack of photographs” (184), and
he experiences his three interrogators “shuffl[ing] their feet in unison as
if it were part of an elaborate soft-shoe routine” (225). His lie that he is a
stranded Chinese tourist makes Mr. Jeffcoat produce a laugh “which burst
from an orthodontic marvel of a mouth” (281), and his skin is swollen
“till it felt like a text in braille” (337). Since the uneducated young Japanese neither knows about drought in Africa, oneiric memories and braille
nor about shamans, soft-shoe routines and American orthodontics, these
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Peter Freese
discrepancies between what he can think and say according to his characterization and what he actually reflects on and expresses have an illusionbreaking effect. They constantly remind the readers of the ordering
author behind the scene and thus prevent them from developing empathy
or even identification with the hapless protagonist.
Boyle also oversteps the limitations of Hiro’s uneducated and prejudiced point of view because he uses the ‘Martian perspective’ of the
visiting alien to vent his own criticism of things American. Thus, when
Hiro muses that “this was America, and nothing about these people
would surprise him. Whether they were buffalo skinners, young Republicans or crack dealers, it was all the same to him” (279), the jibe at young
Republicans cannot be his but comes from Boyle who also employs Ruth
and Saxby as his mouthpieces when he has Ruth think that the model for
her story “Two Toes” had “galvanized the attention of the whole slumbering and self-obsessed country” (254) and when he has Saxby criticize the
sensation-hungry Americans who watch the chase for Hiro: “They were
gathered here as they gathered at the site of any disaster, patient as
vultures. They were waiting for bloodshed, violence, criminality and despair, waiting for excess and humiliation, for the formula that would unlock the tedium of their lives.” (293) Similar instances occur when Hiro
denounces his prison wardens as “oafs, drugged and violent and overfed”
and not “pay[ing] attention to detail,” and infers that “that’s why the
factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up”
(226), thus alluding to the eighties when a growing anti-Japanese sentiment had articulated itself in so-called “Japan-bashing.” Even more importantly, Boyle must provide Hiro with some basic knowledge of English
in order to make his plot work, and by doing so he can express another
implicit critique of American parochialism when he has Hiro react to
Ruth’s question whether he can read English by thinking:
He did. Of course he did. And he was proud of the accomplishment.
Americans with their big feet and blustering condescension to the rest of
the world, knew no language but their own. But the Japanese, the most
literate people on earth, learned to read English in their schools, from the
elementary grades on. Of course, since there were few native speakers in
Japan, and since the Japanese system relied on rote learning, the comprehensive skills of the average Japanese were far more highly developed
than the conversational. (153)
*****
The action of East Is East combines several traditional plotlines. On one
level, the novel varies the ancient plot of the outsider’s search for a better
world. In The Tortilla Curtain, the Mexican indocumentado who comes to
California in pursuit of the American Dream, bears the programmatic
name Cándido Rincon, and Boyle explained that choice in an interview
by stating that his name “comes from Candide. Voltaire’s Candide, who
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
197
is, you know, famous in literature. He is the man who bears all this ill
luck, all the ill luck sent upon him. This is why I chose Cándido.” (Freese
1998: 30; for details see Freese 2000) Cándido, then, is a hapless successor of the naive picaro in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide (1759), who
encounters nothing but ill luck in his search for Leibniz’s best of all
worlds. Quite obviously, Hiro Tanaka, the ‘hero’ of East Is East, is on a
similar quest, and like both Voltaire’s Candide and Boyle’s Cándido he
does not find Leibniz’s best of all worlds in the promised land of America,
but stumbles from one misfortune into the next. In the end, the poor
young man who did nothing wrong is “facing twenty-two criminal
charges brought by the State of Georgia and twelve others at the hands of
the INS” (356).4 This is of course an outrageous misjudgement of what
really happened, and Ruth is right when she muses that Hiro’s experiences were “just an escalating series of misunderstandings” and that “he
was nothing more than an overgrown boy, an innocent, a naïf,” whose
deeds were not “criminal” but “pathetic” (357), a judgment which Hiro
himself confirms when, before his suicide, he thinks that the only thing
he was guilty of was “stupidity, naiveté, guilty of thinking the Amerikajin
would accept him in common humanity” (362).
On another and closely related level, Hiro’s odyssey varies the archetypal quest for the father since, like Homer’s Telemachus, the motherless
youth wants to find his lost father, the unkempt hippie nicknamed Doggo
who got his mother pregnant and then left without a trace. At the novel’s
beginning, Hiro enjoys the naïve vision that in America he “maybe even
discover his father in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down
to cheeseburgers with him” (18), and the central role which the absent
father plays in his life is also indicated by the fact that he has not only
taped The Way of the Samurai and some dollar bills to his chest, but also
“his father’s picture” (29). When he jumps into the Atlantic, the text
revealingly reads: “And the sea sustained him, embraced him, wrapped
him up like the arms of a long-lost father.” (21) In the accelerating series
of encounters with unfailingly hostile Americans the motif of the search
for the father is constantly kept alive through passing references. Thus,
when the delirious youth is shockingly confronted with Olmstead White,
“his dead mother and his lost father dance[ed] round him like fairies”
(41), and before he enters the rural grocery store he checks his money
and finds that “the bills were still there, along with the cracked and
bleached photo of his father” (48). During the few happy days with
Ambly Wooster, he entertains the fantasy “of looking up his father in the
telephone directory and inviting him down” (145). When he is impris4
The INS (= United States Immigration and Naturalization Service) ceased to exist
in March 2003, when as part of a reorganization following the attacks of
September 11, 2001, its functions were transferred to the newly created
Department of Homeland Security.
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Peter Freese
oned in the old slave cell he recalls that the sheriff has taken the Mishima
book “along with the picture of Doggo” (218), and when he is questioned
by the sheriff, Abercorn and Turco, it strikes him “how much [Turco]
resembled the photo of Doggo, with his long blond hair and beard, a
hippie for all his military trappings” (222). Lost in the Okefenokee
Swamp, he realizes to his dismay that he can barely recall the faces of
“Doggo” (270) and others, and soon afterwards he begins to curse “himself, his hakujin father and strong-legged mother” (278). When he meets
the friendly Jeffcoats, he is deeply impressed by their togetherness:
“Father, mother, son: this was a family” (284), and how much he pains
for such a community for himself, is confirmed when he sees them paddle
away “in perfect harmony, father, mother, son” (286). When he becomes
seriously sick in the swamp and begins to hallucinate, he remembers that
as an abandoned child he had thought that “his only recourse was to go
to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies”
(340), and when the boat with Ruth and Turco comes closer, he mistakes
them for his mother and “Doggo, yes, Doggo, his own Amerikajin father”
(342). At the novel’s end, while slowly recovering from his terrible experience in a Savannah hospital, he refuses to talk to anybody, contemplates suicide and fleetingly imagines “his father coming to his rescue like
a cowboy on a horse. But it was stupid. Foolish. The burned-out core of a
dream – ashes, that was all it was” (362).
Hiro’s quest for both the best of all worlds and his lost father is ironically undercut because it is presented as his constant search for food, and
that is a topic which plays a prominent role in all of Boyle’s novels. He
once said to a German interviewer that “Essen oder Hunger [sind] Teile
meiner schriftstellerischen Obsession” (Hilbert 1992: 17), and Ted Friend
rightly observed about him that “emblems of man’s corporeal nature – a
morbid fascination with the food that goes in one orifice and the fluids
that come out the others – are a recurrent memento mori in Boyle’s work”
(Friend 1990). In East Is East, however, the search for food is not just one
motif among others since Hiro is primarily characterized as a being that
craves food. “Like most Japanese, Hiro regarded his stomach – his hara –
as the center of his being, the source of all his physical and spiritual
strength. […] For Hiro, though, the hara took on an even more exaggerated importance, for he lived to eat.” (37). The first thing he does after
getting ashore is search for food and locate what he takes to be a symbol
of the promised land, namely “one of the towering ubiquitous refrigerators in which Americans keep the things they like to eat” (38). Throughout the book, he evaluates Americans on the basis of their eating habits.
Thus, when he stays with Ambly Wooster, he likes the abundant food, but
nevertheless criticizes that “the Americans made such a mess of their food
– just served it in a heap, with no thought of grace or proportion, as if
eating were a shameful thing” (144). And when he is imprisoned in the
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T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
old slave cell and given a “Hardee’s bag” (228),5 “it never ceased to
amaze him how the Americans could eat this stuff – it wasn’t even food,
really” (226).
Hiro’s incessant foraging has an important structural function because
it keeps the plot in motion (see Schröder 1997: 83f.). It is a fight about
the correct preparation of a Japanese dish that makes him a prisoner in
the ship’s brig where “he thought of food, day and night” (18), before he
manages to break out and jump ship. Having reached the shore, he is
“focused solely on his alimentary needs” (35) and thinks that there is no
“joy in dignity, in life even, without food” (36). Following the tempting
smell of frying oysters, he confronts a frightened Olmstead White, brings
about the accidental burning of the latter’s hut and thus, in the skewed
eyes of the law, becomes a dangerous arsonist. Lured by a Coca Cola sign,
he tries to buy some groceries in a rural store and thus has his first abortive contact with the natives. Attracted by Ruth’s daily lunch bag, he gets
to know her and thus finally finds someone who is willing to help him
but who also, stupidly misjudging what a Japanese might like to eat, contributes to his eventual discovery. Lost in the Okefenokee Swamp, he is
saved from starvation by the Jeffcoats’ generous offer of food. And when
he finally ends his life by committing hara-kiri, that is, suicide by ritual
disembowelment, he does not use an appropriate weapon but, in a last
and bitter irony, the handle of a spoon he has honed into a blade.
There are only two encounters in which Hiro experiences American
hospitality. When he stays in Ambly Wooster’s mansion and gets all he
wants to eat, he muses that “this was paradise, this was America” (136),
and begins to think that “America wasn’t so bad after all” (145). But this
feeling does not last long because when he sees himself in a mirror, he
realizes that “he was twenty years old and he looked sixty – this was
what America had done for him” (138). When the Jeffcoats treat him in a
friendly and helpful manner, he is surprised: “Gayin: he would never
understand them” (280). Having received food and even a pair of expensive shoes from them, Hiro realizes with wonder and envy that Jeff with
his “hearty, beautifully formed laugh” (281), Julie with her “beautiful
Amerikajin smile” (285), and well-behaved little Jeff form what he has
missed all his life, namely, a functioning family.
*****
East Is East is not only a picaresque novel that unfolds its escape and pursuit structure on two parallel levels by making Hiro both a modern-day
Candide and a contemporary Telemachus, but on a third level it is a
Künstlerroman that offers a hilarious satire on the literary establishment.
5
Hardee’s is the number five chain of fast food restaurants in the U.S., founded in
1960 in Greenville, South Carolina, and located mostly in the Southeast and
Midwest.
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Peter Freese
The depiction of the motley group of writers assembled at Thanatopsis
House, with the established stars among them representing major schools,
probably owes a lot to Boyle’s personal experiences. It is very close to
open parody, and the scene in which Patsy Arena gives a gruesome piano
recital (179) provides the most obvious example. Irving Thalamus, whose
family name refers to a major part of the brain, is “one of the legends of
Jewish-American letters” (123) “whose trade-in-stock – urban Jewish
angst – throve on confusion” (23). Laura Grobian, whose name combines
the name of the woman whom Petrarca idolized with an obscure German
loanword for crude, sloppy, or buffoonish persons, is “the doyenne of the
dark-eyed semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former bohemian school of
WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209-page trilogy set in 1967 San
Francisco” (213), and Peter Anserine, who bears the name of an antioxidant that helps to reduce fatigue, constantly reads books, “always
European, and never in translation” (23) and it is probably no accident
that “the great divorced Brahmin novelist of ideas” (164) shares his
initials with Paul Auster. The numerous lesser writers which circle
around these stars are driven by ambition and consumed by jealousy,
fight desperately for the attention of their idols, and engage in all kinds
of complicated intrigues. And the ruthless fight between Ruth Dershowitz
and Jane Shine assumes almost existential proportions.
Ruth Derhowitz, Hiro’s would-be savior, antagonist, and eventual
nemesis, is a ‘Jewish American Princess,’6 and the fact that this makes her
another ‘JAP’ might well be an additional joke sneaked in by Boyle. From
details scattered throughout the book one can reconstruct her biography:
she grew up in Santa Monica (24, 154) with a father who was an influential “lawgiver” (247). She holds “a shaky B.A. in anthropology from
Sonoma State” (24), spent a year each at Iowa and at Irvine “without
managing to come away with a degree from either” (24f.), and her burning desire to become a famous writer has so far only resulted in “four
intense and gloomy stories” (25) published in unknown little magazines.
Ruth is much better in bed than at the writing desk, and she, who
secretly devours “fat pulp romances” (249), makes strategic use of her
irresistible sex appeal to get the attention she craves. She owes her hardwon place as “queen of the hive” (214) in the Thanatopsis community not
to her artistic accomplishments but to the fact that she is the lover of
Saxby, the son of the house. Her constant “play-acting” (31), her talent
for “playing the game” (106), for “networking” (110, see 114) and for
“getting the feel of the role” (347) she is playing, her losing fight with
6
Ruth’s Old Testament name, her memories of her father having “the look of the
mensch” (247), the sheriff’s question about her: “Was she a Jew? She was, wasn’t
she?” (225), Abercorn’s characterization of her as “the little Jew bitch” (235), and
the enraged Turco’s reference to her as “a lying Jew bitch” (249) imply that she is
Jewish. This is finally confirmed when Septima says: “Well, when my son told me
he was bringin’ home a Jewish girl I didn’t bat an eye” (315).
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
201
“the misery of writing” (24), and her obsession with Jane Shine, the
hated enemy who has made the very career she is dreaming of, makes her
a character who is more than a mere caricature and who thus subverts
the very stereotypes whose encounter fuels the novel’s central action. In
an interview with Ted Friend, Boyle made a surprising comment about
her:
East Is East has a female character – Ruth Dershowitz, an ambitious but
undertalented writer – who, in her zest for fame, her yearnings for love
and bursts of altruism and her ultimate self-deceptions, quivers with the
contradictions and sadness of a real person. Boyle believes she is his pinnacle in character development. “Ruth Dershowitz,” he says, “and I’ve
been saving this for these interviews – c’est moi, as Flaubert said of Emma
Bovary. I had all her anxieties and petty jealousies when I was young and
at Iowa.” (Friend 1990)
Ruth’s small triumphs with the coterie of other writers to whom she artfully endears herself, her bitter fight with Jane Shine, about whom she
says that “all her talent’s between her legs” (117), thus projecting upon
her detested rival what characterizes herself, and her final embarrassing
defeat when her reading turns out to be a miserable failure and her role
as the fugitive Hiro’s accomplice is revealed and puts her to shame, constitute a major strand of the novel’s action. Therefore, it can hardly surprise that a book that is partly a Künstlerroman contains sundry references
and allusions to earlier authors and texts.
The first reference is implied in the novel’s title. In 1889, Rudyard
Kipling, who coined the charged phrase “the white man’s burden,” published his much anthologized poem “The Ballad of East and West,” whose
refrain reads:
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends
of the earth! (Kipling)
The opening line is often read as proof of Kipling’s supremacist ideas
about race and empire, but it is qualified by its context. Kipling maintains
that different regions of the world will remain separated, but the ballad
shows that in an encounter of two strong men representing these regions
the accidents of nationality or race do not matter and that in such an
encounter Asians and Europeans can turn out to be equals. Since Boyle is
certainly conversant with the ballad, the title of his novel only seems to
announce the impossibility of intercultural understanding, but ironically
subverts this notion and implies that, given sufficient education and unprejudiced attitudes, such an understanding might well be achieved.
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Peter Freese
A second referential horizon, which also concerns the interaction of
two ethnic groups, this time between blacks and whites in America, is
evoked by one of the novel’s two mottos:
Bred and bawn in de briar patch, Br’er Fox, bred and bawn.
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus
Joel Chandler Harris lived in Atlanta, GA where he worked as an associate editor for the very Atlanta Constitution, which is one of the papers that
cover the hunt for Hiro Tanaka (28). In 1880, he published Uncle Remus:
His Songs and Saying, a collection of African-American oral folktales and
songs, and had them told in a Deep South black dialect by Uncle Remus,
a kindly old slave, to the children gathered around him. This collection
was so successful that it was followed by eight more volumes. Most of
Uncle Remus’ tales are animal stories, with their main character Br’er
Rabbit being a trickster and trouble-maker who is often opposed by Br’er
Fox and Br’er Bear. In the best-known tale, Br’er Fox constructs a lump of
tar and puts clothing on it. When Br’er Rabbit comes along, he politely
greets the “tar baby” but receives no response. Offended by what he takes
to be Tar Baby’s lack of manners, he punches it and gets stuck. About to
be fried and eaten by B’rer Fox, he cleverly begs him to be killed in any
other way than by being thrown into the briar patch. As expected, B’rer
Fox, who hates B’rer Rabbit for having frequently tricked him, stupidly
does that very thing, and B’rer Rabbit escapes because he is at home in
the briar patch.
“Skin me, Brer Fox,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, “snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar
out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,” sezee, “but do please, Brer
Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,” sezee.
Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ‘im
by de behime legs en slung ‘im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar
wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox
sorter hang ‘roun‘ fer ter see w’at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear
somebody call ‘im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin’ crosslegged
on a chinkapin log koamin’ de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer
Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer
ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out:
“Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox – bred en bawn in a brierpatch!” en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.
(Uncle Remus – Songs and Sayings)
Both the notion of the “tar baby,” which Toni Morrison used as the title
of one of her novels, and the concept of the “briar patch” have become
part of popular U.S. culture, with the latter referring to a place where
rich and powerful people would hate to be, but poor and clever people
can fend for themselves. Boyle makes repeated use of these notions when
he has an elated Saxby whistle “like Uncle Remus himself” (110), says
about Olmstead White that “he moved […] like Br’er Rabbit stuck to the
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
203
tarbaby” (41) when confronted with Hiro, has Turco announce: “I’m Br’er
Fox and this here [the boom box] is my tarbaby” (62), and later has him
say to Abercorn: “What do you think, it’s just a coincidence that he brings
this Nip out here and lets him go like Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch?”
(291f.) Apart from the unspoken implications of each of these references
– Turco’s notion that Hiro will be as much at home in the swamp as Br’er
Rabbit was in the briar patch is an inane misjudgment – the Uncle Remus
allusions place Hiro in the rich literary tradition that deals with the
constellation of a poor underdog managing to outwit his stronger and
more powerful antagonists by means of his cunning ways and thus fulfills
an important function in directing the readers’ empathy.
A third literary horizon is established by means of the unusual name
of the writers’ colony. Soon after Marion Lights, the owner of the
mansion on Tupelo Island, had committed suicide, his widow Septima
converted the mansion into a writers’ colony on the model of “Yaddo,
MacDowell and Cummington” (22).7 Returning to “the poetry that had
been the romantic bulwark of her youth,” she calls it “Thanatopsis House,
‘that mysterious realm, where each shall take/His chamber in the silent
halls …’” (113). These lines are taken from an early American poem
written around 1811 by William Cullen Bryant. Having read the British
‘graveyard poets,’ especially Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Churchyard,” the seventeen-year old Bryant wrote a meditation on death which,
combining Greek thanatos (death) and -opsis (sight), he called
“Thanatopsis.” Later he enlarged the poem, added a final injunction, and
published it in Thanatopsis and Other Poems, the first major book of
American poetry. The final lines read:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustain’d and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. (Bryant 1994: I, 975)
This admonition to trustfully “approach [one’s] grave” led to Septima’s
decision to name every writer’s cabin, in memory of her husband’s voluntary death, “after a famous suicide” (25). Thus, Ruth lives in “Hart Crane”
(25), named after the author of The Bridge who killed himself at thirtytwo; another writer lives in “John Berryman” (204), named after the poet
who jumped from a bridge; and yet another cabin is named after “Diane
7
Yaddo was opened in 1926 in Saratoga Springs, NY; MacDowell was founded in
1907 in Peterborough, NH; The Cummington Community for the Arts is situated in
western Massachusetts.
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Peter Freese
Arbus” (71), the photographer who took barbiturates and slashed her
wrists. Septima’s obsession with suicide might seem to be just a personal
oddity, but it functions as an American counterpart to Hiro’s samurai
notion of an honorable death and shows that the Japanese notion of ritual suicide, which xenophobic Americans might consider an exotic aberration, has its western equivalents. And that suicide is a phenomenon to
be found in all cultures is stressed by the extensive references to the mass
suicides in Masada, Saipan, and Jonestown (261ff.), which span centuries
from Roman times through World War II to 1978.8
A fourth, less obvious chain of iterative references has to do with
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In the same way in which the monomaniacal Ahab pursues the white whale, but revealingly on a much smaller
scale, Saxby searches for the albino version of the “pigmy sunfish” (181)
or elassoma okefenokee and dreams that this hitherto unclassified fish
might eventually even be named after him and become the “elassoma
okefenokee lightsei” (319). The pigmy sunfish really exists, and Boyle bolsters this aspect of his fictional world by having Saxby, after the failure of
his first attempt to populate his new aquarium, turn “to the pages of
Axelrod’s Exotic Aquarium Fishes for enlightenment” (175, see 171)9 and
later having him dream of “going to take his place among the great amateur aquarists of the century: William Voderwinkler, Daniel DiCoco and
Paul Hahnel, father of the fancy guppy” (181).10 But what is more important is that Saxby’s ambition is ironically subverted. During his protracted search for the fish, he muses: “Ahab hadn’t found the white whale
in a day, either” (115), and later even thinks of himself as “a man on the
verge of a special communion with the mysteries of nature and the
whiteness of the fish” (240f.). His fellow student Roy Dotson’s flatboat
has “the legend Pequod II stenciled on its bow, one of Roy’s little jokes”
8
9
10
In 72, the Roman governor of Iudaea laid siege to Masada, a fortified palace in the
south of Israel on top of an isolated rock plateau. When, after several months of
siege, the Roman legion entered the fortress, they discovered that its 960
inhabitants had set fire to all the buildings and committed mass suicide. – In June
1944, Emperor Hirohito realized that the Battle of Saipan would be lost and sent
out an imperial order encouraging the civilians of Saipan to commit suicide and
authorizing the commander of Saipan to promise civilians who died there a
spiritual status in the afterlife equal to those of soldiers perishing in combat. In the
last days of the battle, over 20,000 Japanese civilians committed suicide, some
jumping from “Suicide Cliff” to take the offered privileged place in the afterlife. –
On November 18, 1978, Jonestown, a community in northwestern Guyana formed
by the Peoples Temple and led by Jim Jones, made headlines when 909 Temple
members committed “revolutionary suicide” by cyanide poisoning and thus created
the largest mass suicide in modern history.
Herbert Richard Axelrod (*1927) is a tropical fish expert who wrote Handbook of
Tropical Aquarium Fishes (1955) Saltwater Aquarium Fishes (1987) and Dr. Axelrod’s
Atlas of Freshwater Aquarium Fishes (2004).
Both Voderwinkler and Hahnel are well-known fish experts; DiCoco could not be
identified.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
205
(244), and later it is said: “Their [Roy’s and Saxby’s] eyes fastened on the
stenciled legend – the Pequod II – and both smiled.” (321) The parallel
between Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of the huge white whale and
Saxby’s quest for the tiny albino sunfish insinuates that people’s claims
and accomplishments have shrunk and that what the pampered heir of an
old Southern family manages to achieve is only a miniature version of the
events of the past. And the seemingly unrelated fact that the incompetent
and racist INS representative Detlef Abercorn suffers from the chronic
illness of vitiligo or white-blotch disease and that, therefore, for him the
notion of “legendary whiteness” (243) exists only in the form of unseemly
white blotches of melanin-deprived skin is another subversive comment
on how useless the charged old myth of whiteness has become as a justification of racial superiority.11
Besides the four literary horizons named so far, the novel is punctuated by references to other writers and their works. Thus, Detlef Abercorn
is a fan of John le Carré (54, 56), and when he realizes that the hunt for
Hiro becomes more complicated and that his job is at stake, he thinks
that he better “forget the le Carré […] from here on out it was more like
James M. Cain” (287), thus replacing the rational problem solving in an
espionage novel like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with the conflicting human urges in a roman noir like The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Other references range from Walt Whitman (240), Ernest Hemingway
(213, 355) and Eudora Welty (259) to Samuel Beckett (33), Truman
Capote (213) and J.D. Salinger (259), from William Shakespeare (303),
Elizabeth Gaskell (304), William Wordsworth (309) and Virginia Woolf
(304) to John Ashbery (259), James Baldwin (263), Eldridge Cleaver
(263), Joan Didion (356) and Flannery O’Connor (304). Aesop (311) is
mentioned as well as Pearl S. Buck (304), Gone With the Wind (27, 163,
164) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (167) are referred to as well as The Confessions of Nat Turner (27) and Alex Hailey’s Roots (27), Tolstoy’s War and
Peace (183) and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (251). Kate Douglas Wiggin’s
children’s book Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (235) is mentioned as well as
Dr. Seuss’ bestselling children’s book Green Eggs and Ham (241) and the
fairy tale “Goldilocks” (128). Shakespeare’s Juliet (126) is alluded to as
well as Petrarca’s Beatrice (126), and the description of a Southerner as
“as slippery, low-browed and loose-jointed as a Snopes” (295) refers to
Faulkner.
The dense net of references to assorted authors and texts is complemented by a long list of allusions to such regional newspapers as the
Atlanta Constitution (26), the Savannah Star (28, 294) and The San
Francisco Chronicle (353), and to such nationwide magazines as National
11
Hicks 2003: 45, refers to yet another implication when she reads Abercorn’s vitiligo
as marking “the presence of a white supremacist sensibility within the activities of
[the INS] .”
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Peter Freese
Geographic (181) and Architectural Digest (345), to such widely read magazines as Parade (6), the women’s magazine Cosmo(politan) and the men’s
magazine Esquire (121), the fashion magazine National Velvet (353) and
Larry Flint’s pornographic magazine Hustler (257). Since the Thanatopsians are keen on having their texts published in respected journals,
there are also recurring references to such outstanding publications as
Harper’s Magazine (256) with its tradition of cultural commentary and the
liberal Boston magazine The Atlantic (121, 256, 311) with its national
reputation, to Harold Ross’ The New Yorker (65, 121, 256) with its rigorously edited short stories and the Partisan Review (121) with its influential political comments. And as the writers assembled in Thanatopsis
House long for positive reviews of their work, they also carefully study
The New York Times (353) and The New York Times Magazine (345) as well
as The New York Review of Books (352). These references greatly help to
anchor the novel’s action in American ‘reality.’
But it is not only ‘high’ literature that plays an important role in East
Is East but also – hardly surprising in a novel dealing with mutual
national stereotypes – popular culture in all its expressions from film and
TV to pop songs and cartoons. Thus, Ruth, who in the Thanatopsis weekly
film program sees Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 surreal movie The Woman
in the Dunes (179) based on Kobo Abe’s novel, thinks of more popular fare
when she considers Turco and Abercorn as incompetent as “Laurel and
Hardy” (161). When she learns that Hiro has moved from one swamp into
another and even worse one, she muses that this is “something out of
Heart of Darkness – or the Keystone Kops. Yes, that was it: The Keystone
Kops Meet Heart of Darkness” (251), using the Keystone Kops in their proverbial meaning as a group criticized for its mistakes growing out of a
lack of coordination despite the investment of energy and activity. When
she is interrogated by the INS agents about her role in Hiro’s flight she
thinks that if this happened to somebody else it would be “comical, like
something out of Dragnet or Miami Vice” (208), thus conjuring up the
most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history
that began as a radio series in 1949, became a TV version in 1951 and
had its latest remake in 2004, and an NBC television series about two
detectives working undercover in Miami. And when she learns that Hiro
has been caught and is now in prison, she thinks of “Alec Guinness
emerging from the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai” (209).
When the thirsty Hiro drinks sea water, he knows he should not do
that because “he’d seen the movies, seen Lifeboat and Mutiny on the
Bounty” (36) and learned what that leads to from Hitchcock’s 1944 war
film and the 1962 film with Marlon Brando. When he runs from the
posse, he thinks of himself as “Tarzan the Ape Man” (198). When he
manages to escape from the prison and passes the sleeping guard, he
steals his fried chicken “as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yucata or
Dirty Harry scratching his stubble” (230), and here it is the intruding
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
207
voice of Boyle that conjures up both Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo
about a masterless samurai and Don Siegel’s crime thrillers with Clint
Eastwood as the San Francisco Police Department Inspector ‘Dirty Harry’
Callahan. In other situations, Hiro tries to imitate Clint Eastwood (50,
279) and Burt Reynolds (50). Ruth hates Jane Shine for pretending to be
Meryl Streep (306), and Hiro reminds her of Toshiro Mifune (66), the
internationally known Japanese actor and director. Abercorn thinks that
down south everybody “talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match”
(288), referring to a character from The Andy Griffith Show. And when he
drives into the Okefenokee Swamp with Roy Dotson, he awaits “something out of The African Queen” (299), a 1951 American adventure drama
with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Olmstead White’s young
relatives are characterized by watching “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (195)
on their VCR, a 1979 musical comedy film featuring the Ramones. Sandy
De Haven thinks that Hiro’s flight is “like something out of The Chase”
(151), referring to a 1966 American film about a series of events set in
motion by a prison break. Young Saxby sees his father as either a kind of
Pecos Bill (112), the cowboy hero of tall tales of the Old West, or as
someone resembling Paul Bunyan (112), the mythical lumberjack with
his superhuman skills. When Ambly Wooster enthuses about “the shadings [Seiji] brought to Billy the Kid” (133), she thinks of Aaron Copland’s
ballet about the famous frontier outlaw and gunman. And when Jeff
Jeffcoat tells his son about Chief Billy Bowlegs (270, 275ff.), the leader of
the Seminoles during their wars against the U.S., he acquaints him with
the ‘Alligator Chief” after whom Billy’s Island in the Okefenokee Swamp
is named. To make the novel’s cultural canvas as broad as possible, Boyle
has Ruth put up a poster by David Hockney (154), the famous English
painter, in her hut, and one of the Thanatopsis artists is depicted as
having “stepped out of a Botero painting” (179) and thus linked to the
Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Finally, the numerous references to
high and pop literature, film, television, folk legend, and painting are
supplemented by allusions to such famous American photographers as
Yousuf Karsh (213), Annie Leibovitz (213) and Richard Avedon (213),
about whom Ruth recalls with envy that all of them did portraits of Laura
Grobian, the most famous of the Thanatopsis writers.
As far as music is concerned, there are some references to serious
music and numerous ones to popular music. The writers at Thanatopsis
with their cultural aspirations listen to musical performances “with the
adagio from Mozart’s concerto or a Gershwin medley” (211). Dotty
Ambly Wooster mistakes Hiro for “Seiji” (132) – an easily missed reference to Seiji Ozawa, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera – and refers to him
having directed “[Charles] Ives, [Aaron] Copeland and [Samuel] Barber”
(133) at Atlanta. When Ruth discovers Saxby together with Jane Shine,
she feels “like Madame Butterfly” (167). Saxby dislikes “Arnold Schoen-
208
Peter Freese
berg” (179), whereas his mother’s favorite is the Venetian Baroque composer “Albinoni” (181). And in the Okefenokee Swamp, Jeff Jeffcoat Jr.
has to play his clarinet, producing “the angst-ridden strains of Carl Nielsen” (275), the Danish composer of concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. These few references to classical music are contrasted with a host of
allusions to pop music, and here most of the references belong to three
major types.
The first is conjured up in connection with Hiro’s mother who, as a
Japanese high school graduate dreamed of forming a band and playing
“American rock and roll” (16) of the sixties. The bands and singers
evoked are Buffalo Springfield (16), the rock group that served as a
springboard for Neil Young’s career and whose best-known song was “For
What It’s Worth”; The Doors (16), the Los Angeles band that took its
name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and was, mainly due
to their iconic frontman Jim Morrison (17), one of the most controversial
rock acts of the 1960s; The Grateful Dead (16), the band from the San
Francisco Bay area that became famous for its psychedelic space rock;
Iron Butterfly (16), the psychedelic rock band known for their hit “In-AGadda-Da-Vida.” And the singers Hiro’s mother admired besides Jim
Morrison were Janis Joplin (16), one of the great solo artists of the sixties
who died young of an overdose of heroin, and Grace Slick (16), the lead
singer of Jefferson Airplane and a major figure in the 1960s psychedelic
rock genre. This music from the ‘wild sixties’ conjures up the hippie revolution against the rat-race of a success-driven society, the possibility of
unlimited self-realization, and the prospect of a better word, and poor
Hiro does not know that by the time he comes to America this music has
become a thing of the past and the prospect of a better world has thinned
into a nostalgic memory.
Another type of pop music is introduced when, after Jane Shine’s
triumphant reading, the reception at Thanatopsis is accompanied by “a
tape of old Motown hits” (306). The bands, singers and songs mentioned
are Marvin Gay (306), who began in the late fifties as a member of the
doo-wop group The Moonglows and became a top-selling solo artist in
the sixties; Martha and the Vandellas (306), who were among the most
successful groups of the Motown roster from 1963 to 1967 and, in contrast to The Supremes or The Marvelettes, produced a harder R&B sound
and whose signature song was “Dancing in the Street”; and The Four Tops
(306), whose repertoire included many styles from doo-wop to hard rock.
And songs like James Brown’s 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”
(307), seminal in the genre of funk, and Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling”
(307) stand for yet another variant.
Still another and totally different type of pop music is conjured up
when, on his way to the swamp, Saxby listens to the car radio. He likes
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
209
“soft rock, Steely Dan12 and that sort of thing” (238), but he cannot find
such music because “once you left the city you got nothing but your hardcore redneck honky-tonk psychodrama” (238), and he is so elated about
having found his albino fish that he sings along with the music in a voice
“that would have cleared the Grand Ole Opry in ten seconds flat” (238).
This refers to the influential tradition of country music as represented by
the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee,13 and the song that is then
quoted is so inane that one expects it to be Boyle’s tongue-in-cheek invention:
I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Glued up on the dashboard of my car. (238)
Once more, however, what seems to be fiction turns out to be fact, since
this song really exists. Its authorship is controversial, but usually Ernie
Marrs (1932-1998) is credited with its lyrics that were published in the
magazine Sing Out! in 1964, and the song became prominent when Paul
Newman sang in the movie Cool Hand Luke (1967).
Of Hiro it is said that “he liked American music, personally, disco and
soul” (144), and then the following examples are named: Little Anthony
and the Imperials (144), a rhythm and blues, soul and doo-wop vocal
group from New York, first active in the 1950s and inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009; Michael Jackson (62, 144, 228), the
King of Pop and most successful entertainer of all times, whose contribution to music, dance, and fashion made him a global figure in popular
culture for over four decades; Donna Summers (62, 70, 144, 161, 228,
350, 357), who gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s and
has sold more than 130 million albums and singles worldwide. Thus, with
psychedelic rock of the sixties, the music of the Motown label, the
country music of the South, and Hiro’s eclectic choices, several very different types of pop are introduced.
Whereas the carefully integrated chains of references to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West,” Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus,
William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
provide East Is East with additional shades of meaning by embedding
particular characters or specific motifs of the novel in larger literary traditions, the enormous wealth of further cultural allusions seems to be just
12
13
Steely Dan was an American rock band whose popularity peaked in the late 1970s
and whom Rolling Stone called “the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”
Since 1925 the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, has presented weekly
concerts with the biggest stars of country music. Having opened one of the longestrunning broadcasts with a one-hour radio “barn dance” on WSM-AM, the Opry
concentrates on country music and presents a mixture of old and new stars who
perform country, bluegrass, folk, comedy, and gospel. It draws thousands of
visitors and millions of radio listeners and is one of the country’s most famous
stages.
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Peter Freese
ornamental. This might be true if one looks at each reference individually, but in their entirety they, too, perform a thematic function. The
passing hints at ‘high’ literature from Petrarca and Shakespeare to Baldwin and Didion, at American folk mythology from Paul Bunyan to Billy
the Kid, and at numerous forms of popular entertainment from western
movies to TV detective series as well as the countless allusions to ‘serious’
music from Mozart and Schoenberg and to popular music from psychedelic rock through Motown songs to Southern country music paint a huge
cultural canvas which makes the novel’s readers recognize that American
culture is extremely diverse and variegated and that thereby constantly
and effectively reduces the very notion of national hetero-stereotypes to
absurdity.
*****
It is the ingenious combination of the satirical Künstlerroman and the related plots of the naïve outsider in search of a better world and the abandoned son on a quest for his lost father that makes it possible for Boyle to
intertwine humor and pathos and to establish a scenario in which to test
the power of national hetero-images. While the world of the
Künstlerroman abounds with references to literature, films and music as
well as newspapers and journals, for the other plot lines Boyle uses the
strategy of firmly embedding his novel’s action in American reality by
means of a string of passing references to people and events from contemporary history. When Detlef Abercorn is said to be “about as folksy as
Bernhard Goetz” (69), this helps to characterize the INS agent by implication.14 The same technique is employed when Ruth feels “almost saintly”
like “a Mother Theresa herself” (126), since the inappropriate comparison
with the Albanian nun who won the Nobel Prize for her humanitarian
work in Calcutta ironically subverts Ruth’s pretense. When Ruth puts on a
special dress for a party and doubts whether it is right for the season, she
consoles herself by thinking that “it was a Geoffrey Beene” (163)15 and
thus reveals the degree of her other-directedness. When Hiro is questioned by the sheriff, the helpless victim of accumulated misunderstandings is asked whether he is “familiar with the Red Brigades” and “the
14
15
On December 22, 1984, Goetz shot four young black men whom he thought
planned to rob him in a Manhattan express subway. This incident came to
symbolize the anger of New Yorkers about the high crime rates of the 1980s and
triggered a national debate on the limits of self-defense, the connections between
race and crime, and the need for vigilantism. Goetz was charged with attempted
murder, assault, and reckless endangerment, but a jury found him only guilty of
the illegal possession of firearms, for which he served a sentence of less than a
year.
Geoffrey Beene (1924-2004) was an American fashion designer whose clients
included Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Faye Dunaway and Glenn
Close.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
211
name Abu Nidal mean[s] anything to him” (223). These references to the
Marxist-Leninist terrorist group Brigate Rosse that tried to destabilize Italy
in the 1970s and early 1980s through sabotage attacks, and to Abu Nidal,
the founder of the militant Palestinian group Fatah, illustrate the extent
to which the prejudiced police (whom Boyle grants more historical knowledge than seems probable) misjudge poor Hiro’s importance. When
Saxby elates over the whiteness of his albino fish, he takes it to be “a
legendary whiteness, the whiteness of purity, of June brides, Christo’s
running fence, the inner wrappings of the Hershey bar” (243), and the
incongruity between purity and June brides on the one hand and Hershey
bars on the other is strengthened by the reference to Christo and his
wife’s environmental art work, the 24-mile long Running Fence in Sonoma
and Marin counties in California.
When Saxby remembers that his father was not as successful as he
wanted to be, he expresses that by thinking that “he didn’t exactly unseat
the Rockefellers, Morgans and Harrimans” (112), referring to three of the
most successful dynasties in the American business world. When
Abercorn thinks of Hiro as “a Japanese Manson” (55) and Turco maintains that Hiro is “as guilty as Charlie Manson, Adolf Hitler” (292), they
compare the guiltless Japanese sailor not only with the German instigator
of unprecedented mass murder, but also with an American criminal who
had members of his group commit the ghastly Tate/LaBianca murders
and whose connection with rock music turned him into an emblem of
insane violence and the macabre in American pop culture. And when
Ruth connects her arch enemy Jane Shine to “P.T. Barnum” (309), the
reference to the first American ‘show business’ millionaire, who was
famous for his celebrated hoaxes, implies that Jane’s performance was
also nothing but a well-executed hoax. There are also passing references
to “a Di or a Fergie” (357), conjuring up the talked-about in-laws of the
British royal family, to “McEnroe and Connors” and “Chrissie Evert too”
(232), bringing famous tennis players into the world of the novel, to “Jim
Paciorek, Matt Keough, Ty Van Burkelo” (91), outstanding baseball players admired by Hiro, to “Reggie Jackson” (338), the former Major League
baseball right fielder of whom Hiro dreams in his hallucinations, and to
“Leo Durocher” (87), one of the most successful managers in Major
League baseball, whose famous saying “Nice guys finish last” (87) is
adopted by Hiro when he decides to become ruthless and crafty. And
when Hiro thinks of all the people who will come to hunt him in the Okefenokee Swamp, he mentions Abercorn und Turco and “Captain
Nishizawa” (283). Here Boyle smuggles in yet another passing reference
to the fighter pilot Lieutenant Hiroyoshi Nishizawa (1920-1944) of the
Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, who was probably the most successful Japanese fighter in World War II.
Thus, East Is East not only portrays America as a huge and stunningly
diverse country populated by people that range from blasé New York
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Peter Freese
writers specializing in urban Jewish angst to illiterate southern blacks
speaking Gullah and from racist INS-agents from Los Angeles to taciturn
sheriffs in “Crackerland” (296) and even has a Punjabi named Gobi Aloo
run a motel in Ciceroville (239),16 but the novel also unfolds an enormous
wealth of cultural references that conjure up a wide range of both high
and popular literature, classical and pop music, genre movies and artistic
films, folk legends and fairy tales, and sports heroes, politicians, and
criminals. This very diversity continuously unmasks the notion of
‘national character’ as untenable, and this is why the novel’s central
action, the tragicomic sequence of ever more serious misunderstandings
generated by Hiro’s hetero-images of ‘America’ on the one hand and the
American characters’ stereotypical notions of ‘Asia’ on the other, is constantly exposed as both stupid and dangerous by the multi-faceted nature
of the very world in which it so unrelentingly unfolds.
*****
It has been shown that Ruth, as one of the major actors in the confrontation of mutual national images, is anything but a ‘typical’ American. The
same is true of Hiro Tanaka, who, in the novel’s dramatic clash of ethnic
hetero-stereotypes, functions as the representative of Japan but is the
very opposite of what might be considered an average twentieth-century
Japanese. He is the son of an American hippie who cowardly disappeared
before his child was born and a Japanese woman who fell for the foreigner, descended the social scale to become a despised bar girl, and
committed suicide six months after her son’s birth. Thus Hiro, who grows
up with his grandparents, is not only an orphan but also “a half-breed, a
happa” (17) who is “forever a foreigner in his own society” (17). Since
the Japanese are “a pure race, intolerant of miscegenation to the point of
fanaticism” (17), the big and overweight boy becomes a harassed and
bullied outsider who finds solace in eating – “he lived to eat” (37) – and
in bēsubōru, the American import of baseball which he plays “with savage
devotion” (91). One day, at the age of “seventeen” (91), this unhappy
outsider who dreams of a reunion with his father in a multicultural
America, sees a poster in a bookstore window of “a nearly naked man in
the throes of death” (91). He discovers that this gory picture shows the
author Yukio Mishima and buys his book The Way of the Samurai (93).
Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as
thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gunslinger, the
dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone
man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater,
16
This is an implied reference to the “Patel motel” phenomenon that has made a
major impact on the American hospitality industry. As many as 60% of mid-sized
motels and hotel properties throughout the US are owned by people of Indian
origin of whom almost one-third have the surname Patel.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
213
cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like The
Forty-Seven Ronin17 that were on every school reading list. (93)18
As a child, Hiro had played at being a samurai but later lost interest. But
reading Hagakure, he becomes fascinated by the samurai code of behavior
and recognizes that its adoption would change him from a despised outcast into a proud and self-confident man, from a Hiro into a hero: “He’d
been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it
[…] with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a
modern samurai.” (95)
17
18
The national legend of the Forty-Seven Ronin is based on historical facts. It deals
with a group of samurai who are left without a leader after their feudal lord had to
commit seppuku for assaulting a court official. Having avenged their master’s honor
by killing that official, they are themselves forced to commit seppuku for having
committed the crime of murder. Their story exemplifies the loyalty, sacrifice, and
honor that all good people should show in their daily lives and is retold in
numerous versions.
In “The Art of Fiction No. 161” Boyle said about the Japanese ingredients of his
novel that “I had written two-thirds of the book before I got to Japan – I spent two
weeks there on a book tour, and it was exactly as I imagined it to be. Well, almost.
There were smells I hadn’t anticipated, an essence, unagi smoking in the night,
seven-hundred-yen-a-shot bars in Kyoto, twisting alleys, a pristine lake in
Hokkaido. You want to get the details right, absolutely, but if the truth stands in
the way of a better fiction, then I don’t mind fiddling with it a little.”
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Peter Freese
In the course of several centuries, the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan, the samurai, developed a complex set of rules that came to be
known as bushido (‘the way of the warrior’), and although they made up
less than ten percent of the population, they developed a culture that
influenced Japan as a whole and found its expression not only in a strict
code of the retainer’s death-defying loyalty to his lord and such martial
arts like kendo (‘the way of the sword’), but also in such aspects as the
tea-ceremony and rock gardens, monochrome ink painting and poetry.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, a samurai named Yamamoto
Tsunetomo (1659-1719) retired to a hermitage in the mountains after
thirty years of faithful service to his lord. He changed his name to Yamamoto Jōchō and narrated his thoughts to a fellow monk. In 1716, these
thoughts were published under the title of Hagakure (‘hidden leaves’ or
‘in the shadow of the leaves’). They circle around the idea that the highest attainment of purity is to become one with death in one’s thoughts
and that the resolution to die results in a life filled with beauty and grace
that is beyond the reach of those who only care about self-preservation.19
By the 1930s, the Hagakure had become one of the most famous representations of bushido in Japan, and after World War II its teachings were
taken up by the author, poet, playwright, actor and film director
Kimitake Hiraoka (1925-1970) known by his pen name of Yukio
Mishima. He was a sickly mama’s boy who avoided the draft by lying
about his health, his first major work, Confessions of a Mask (1949), dealt
with the discovery of his homosexuality, and later he expressed his masochistic fantasies by posing in photographs as a drowned sailor, St. Sebastian shot dead with arrows,20 or a samurai committing ritual suicide. But
since he craved a perfect and ageless body, in 1955 he started body
building and became an expert in karate and kendo. In 1968, he formed a
private student army, and in 1970 he and four members of his army
visited the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s SelfDefense Forces. Having tied the commandant to his chair, he stepped out
on the balcony and addressed the soldiers gathered below with a prepared manifesto. He wanted to inspire a coup d’etat, but when he was
jeered at and insulted, he returned to the commandant’s office and com19
20
English translations of Jōchō’s work are available in many editions, even in a
Manga version. The internet offers complete texts under http://chabrieres.
pagesperso-orange.fr/texts/hagakure.html and http://www.rosenoire.org/archives
/Hagakure.pdf. In 1999, Jim Jarmusch released his crime action film Ghost Dog:
The Way of the Samurai about a mysterious mafia hitman who follows the ancient
code of the samurai as outlined in Jōchō’s Hagakure. In 2002, a PlayStation 2
action-adventure game called Way of the Samurai was released, and there is even a
long paper dealing with “Hagakure für Führungskräfte” (http://www.reinerwahnsinn.net/download/Ausarbeitung_HagakureF%FCrF%FChrungskr%E4fte_200
2.pdf) (June 2012).
The picture of Mishima as San Sebastian was taken from http://takimag.com/
article/mishimapaleocon_as_samurai#axzz1VIw9W4JL (June 2012).
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
215
mitted seppuku (‘stomach cutting’), thus acting out what he had learned
from the Hagakure and planned for over a year. Mishima, who was internationally famous for his avant-garde work that focuses on sexuality,
death, and political reform and who was nominated three times for the
Nobel Prize in Literature, has gone down in history as a leading author of
twentieth-century Japan, but while his literary achievements are widely
recognized, his idiosyncratic brand of fascism and his anachronistic
commitment to bushido appeal especially to right-wingers.21 While one
would assume that Jōchō’s archaic rules of conduct as adapted by
Mishima (see Sparling 1977) are anything but an appropriate means of
success for an illegal alien in a foreign country, it is one of the great ironies of Boyle’s novel that it is the very samurai code which enables an
overweight and unarmed twenty-year-old refugee to evade the combined
legal forces of the U.S. for several months.
East Is East is permeated with references to both Jōchō and Mishima
since “like his idol Yukio Mishima, and Mishima’s idol before him, Jocho
Yamamoto, Hiro Tanaka was a man of decision” (11).22 Thus, quotations
from Hagakure accompany him from the very beginning when, swimming
ashore, he thinks of “Mishima and Jocho and the book [= The Way of the
Samurai] he’d taped around his chest” (3), to the very end when, honing
the blade with which he will kill himself, he remembers that Jōchō had
said: “While we live, death is irrelevant; when we are dead, we do not
exist. There is no reason to fear death” (364). Aboard the ship, Hiro
attacks his warden “in what Mishima would call ‘an explosion of pure
action’” (14). Having jumped ship and being close to death after hours of
drifting in the sea, he remembers Jōchō’s advice that “one cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and
develop a mania for dying” (15). Driven by hunger and approaching the
frightened Olmstead White to get some of his oysters, he recalls Jōchō’s
words that “a true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart. He must
push on courageously as though sure to come out on top. Otherwise he is
utterly useless” (43). When he is surrounded by the sheriff’s posse with
their bloodhounds and finds himself in an absolutely hopeless situation,
“all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of Jocho whispered to him
– The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot
topple a man with such conviction” (197), and he makes yet another desperate attempt to escape. Imprisoned in the old slave cell, he thinks “of
Jocho and Mishima. In defeat, there was only one path to honor, and that
was death” (218), and whereas anybody else would have given up, he
21
22
See, e.g., the laudatory entry on the homepage of The Friends of Oswald Mosley
(http://www.oswaldmosley.com/yukio-mishima.htm) (June 2012).
The passing mention of another samurai, “Musashi” (335), refers to Miyamoto
Musashi (c.1584-1645), the founder of a specific style of swordsmanship and the
author of The Book of Five Rings about strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still
studied today.
216
Peter Freese
ponders that “perhaps he wasn’t defeated yet. It was all in the interpretation, wasn’t it? Small matters should be taken seriously, Jocho said.” (219)
He actually finds a way out of the cell, and during his flight he recalls
that “a true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart” (231). Hiding in
the trunk of Saxby’s Mercedes, he waits “like a samurai, like Jocho, like
Mishima” (267), and when he jumps suicidally into the Okefenokee
Swamp, he “invoke[s] Jocho, inflating his hara” (269). When he becomes
ill and feverish, he feels the pain “tearing at him like Mishima’s sword”
(334), and when he is faced by a huge alligator, Boyle makes him think
that “this was a situation that might have taxed Jocho himself” (336).23
*****
Hiro Tanaka derived his extremely selective, one-sided and often factually wrong hetero-images of ‘America’ from the popular culture which
the U.S. exports to the world in the form of movies, TV series and pop
music on the one hand, and from his fractured memories about his
American father on the other, which he unduly generalizes when he
thinks that “like all Americans, he was lazy, stoned and undisciplined”
(16). Rejected in Japan as a “Gajin. Long-nose. Butter-stinker” (15),24
Hiro knows when he swims ashore “that there were people there, Americans, with their butter-stink and their pots of ketchup and mayonnaise
and all the rest” (4). Thus, he adopts the very stereotype he was a victim
of and applies it to the Americans, as when he later meets Ambly Wooster
and notices that she carries “a sickening odor with her, the odor of the
hakujin, the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers – only worse” (134).
The self-styled samurai’s image of ‘America’ is curiously contradictory.
On the one hand, he dreams of the U.S. as a land of liberty, equality and
unhampered self-fulfillment in which members of all races are welcome
and even a half-breed like him can ‘make it’:
[…] the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes
and worse – or better, depending on your point of view. In America you
could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo
and walk down the street with your head held high. If his own society was
closed, the American was wide open – he knew it, he’d seen the films,
read the books, listened to the LPs – and anyone could do anything he
pleased there. (17f.)
23
24
Further references to Jōchō and Mishima can be found on pp. 4, 18, 19, 20, 44, 48,
85, 86, 132, 282, 363.
Gaijin, literally “outside person,” denotes a “non-Japanese” or “alien.” It can refer
to nationality, race, or ethnicity, but since the Japanese nation is taken to be
composed of a single ethnic group these meanings usually coalesce. Some take the
word to be pejorative and offensive, others think that it can be used neutrally, but
in Japan it is taken to be politically incorrect and avoided. – Since a person’s
eating habits influence the smell of their sweat, Europeans and Americans who eat
a lot of dairy products are called “butter-stinker” (bata-kusai) by the Japanese and
Chinese. – “Long-nose” is another all-purpose word for Europeans and Americans.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
217
Thus, the young man who at home had been a scorned outsider, dreams
the popular immigrant’s dream and thinks that America is a country
“where everyone was a gaijin and no one cared” (95) and where he too
can find “a new way to live” (95). He envisions big multicultural cities
where “every face was different – they were white and black and yellow
and everything in between – and they all glowed with the rapture of
brotherly love” (95), and he plans
[…] to get to Beantown, the Big Apple, to the City of Brotherly Love;25 he
had to blend in with the masses, find himself a job, an apartment with
western furniture and Japanese appliances, with toaster ovens and end
tables and deep thick woolly carpets that climbed up the walls like a
surging tide. Then he’d be safe, then he could play miniature golf and eat
cheeseburgers or stroll down the street with an armload of groceries and
no one would blink twice. (99)
When Hiro imagines “a distant wide sun-streaked highway” that leads to
“all the glorious polyglot cities of the land of the free and the home of the
brave” (99), or when he is dead set on beginning “a new life” (131) in
one of “the great mongrel cities” (131) even if he has “to walk all the way
to the City of Brotherly Love” (131), all the traditional clichés from the
American metropolis as the proverbial melting pot through the Horatio
Alger version of the American Dream to the Marlboro Man riding into the
sunset coalesce and seem to confirm the expectations which he and his
shipmates had exchanged about “America with its movie stars and rock
and roll and long-legged women and beef [and] the Amerikajin in their
mansions with four bathrooms and their Cadillacs with whiskey bars in
the back seat.” (337) But Hiro soon learns the hard way that the reality
differs greatly from his wishful version of ‘America,’ and eventually he
has to admit that “the City of Brotherly Love was an illusion, a fairy tale”
(218), a “naked cheat” (267) and “a fraud” (280) and that the U.S. is a
“Buddha-forsaken country” (219) where he is “a prisoner in perpetuity,
hopeless and defeated” (218).
On the other hand, however, from the moment he gets ashore Hiro
knows from the American films and TV series he has eagerly watched at
home that the very country which he envisions as lovingly multicultural
is also thoroughly racist. And, ironically enough, he reveals himself as a
racist. Thus, when he encounters Olmstead White, the illiterate black
with the inappropriate name, “he knew, as every Japanese does, that
Negroes were depraved and vicious, hairier, sweatier and even more
potent than their white counterparts, the hakujin. They were violent and
physical, they were addicted to drugs and they thought only with their
sexual organs.” (42) He shows some inkling of Southern segregation
when he ponders “that Georgia was in the South where the Negroes
25
At another occasion, Hiro adds Chicago, “the Windy City” (47) to Boston, New
York and Philadelphia.
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Peter Freese
harvested cotton and the hakujin made them use separate toilets and
drinking fountains” (46), and of both black slavery and Indian ethnocide
when he describes his cell as “a relic of the times when the Negroes were
shackled and the red Indians butchered” (220). Thus, Hiro who runs
away from Japanese racism and hopes to be accepted in a pluralistic
America, makes disparaging racist remarks about blacks and in doing so
contradicts his very dream. But it takes a long series of failed encounters
and months of suffering before the harmless naïf who is wrongly charged
with two dozen crimes resignedly recognizes that he was guilty of
“stupidity, naiveté, guilty of thinking the Amerikajin would accept him in
common humanity. He was wrong, and that was his crime. He had failed,
and that was his fate.” (362)
The most frequently mentioned trait of Hiro’s self-contradictory image
of ‘America’ is its all-pervasive violence. When he first contrasts Japan
and the U.S., he thinks of America as “dangerous, yes. Seething with
crime and degeneracy and individualism” (18). He remembers “all those
American movies with their tattooed gangs and the feints and thrusts of
their knife fights” (20), and therefore thinks that as a prisoner he will be
“brutalized by the half-breeds and child molesters and patricides that
infested the dark gaijin cells like mold” (47). Obviously, he has not only
seen gangster films but also many Westerns because when, in one of the
funniest scenes of the novel, he tries to pass as an American in a rural
grocery store he imitates Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood and addresses
the perplexed salesgirl with “Mothafucka,” because he believes that
“Americans began any exchange of pleasantries with a string of curses”
(50). When he runs away from Saxby, who wants to help him, he thinks:
“Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for
sport, mugged old ladies in the street” (52); when the sheriff’s posse
chase him with bloodhounds, he thinks of them as “Americans. Killers.
Individualists gone rampant” (196f.); and when he is caught and put in
the old slave cell he muses:
They shoved him, abused him, humiliated him, made him walk the
gauntlet of them as if they were red Indians in the forest, jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a Chinaman. Yes. But
they weren’t red Indians. They were white-faced and black-faced, blueeyed, kinky-haired, they stank of butter and whiskey and the loam that
blackened their fingernails, and it was they who’d exterminated the red
Indians with ferocity so pitiless and primeval it made the savages seem
civilized. […] this was American violence, bred in the bone. This was the
mob, the riot, this was dog eat dog. (216) […] there was no glimmer of
humanity in any of them. […] They were hunters. Killers. (217)
To the man who finds himself on a swampy island, the violence of the
people he encounters seems only to mirror what he experiences as “the
wilderness of America” (45) and “a wild continent” (130) that is “vast
and untamed and seething with bear, lion, wolf and crocodile” (45).
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T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
Thus, not only the people are dangerous but also the country is frighteningly inhospitable: “Now he was in America, where nature was primeval,
seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where halfcrazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree” (130f.).
When, later, he runs into the Okefenokee Swamp, “as far as he could see
there was nothing but water, muck, creeper and vine, the damnable unending fetid stinking wilderness of America” (268). And when he contracts swamp fever and begins to hallucinate, he has “to crawl back up
the orifice of America the primitive” (334), thinks of all Americans as
“beasts” (334), and even understands the huge alligator that confronts
him as “the dinosaur that was America” (338).
*****
Whereas Hiro’s hetero-images of ‘America’ as both a multicultural paradise welcoming all ethnicities and a dangerous wilderness populated by
bloodthirsty, racist and superficial individualists with bad eating habits
are based on how the U.S. depicts itself in the pop culture it exports
worldwide, the notions that the American characters of the novel have of
Asians in general and Japanese in particular are based on ignorance and
xenophobia and hardly go beyond Ruth’s initial remark that Hiro “looked
different somehow” (8). Detlef Abercorn of the INS, a man who has professional experience with foreigners and should know about their cultures, is an outspoken racist not only with regard to all kinds of ‘aliens’,
but also Americans from regions other than his Californian home. Having
worked in Los Angeles, “the innermost circle of INS hell” (53), he remembers “Guatemalans shooting at Salvadorans, Hmong tribesmen
microwaving dogs, Turks and Iranians setting fire to carpet stores and the
like” (53f., see 294) and consequently thinks that arresting a lonely Japanese in Georgia, even if he is classified as “IAADA – Illegal Alien, Armed,
Dangerous and Amok” (53), will be simple, and instead makes insulting
remarks about backward Southerners: “A Nip26 in Georgia? These people
ate weasel, picked their teeth with their feet, grew right up out of the
ground like weeds, like kudzu; the poor dumb Nip – Japanese – wouldn’t
last a day, six hours even.” (54) He states that he “never had a problem,
not that he could remember, with the Japanese. […] They never entered
the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and
more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories
and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels”
26
“Nip” is a derogatory term for a person of Japanese descent that was used by
American soldiers in World War II. It is short for Nipponese, from Nippon, the
Japanese name for Japan.
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Peter Freese
(56). Abercorn’s dwarfish helper, the crazy Lewis Turco, “an ex-LURP27
and part-time special agent” (56) who is thought to know everything
about Asians, is certain that catching a Japanese is no problem:
“What you got to realize about the Nips is they’re the squarest people in
the world. I mean the hokiest bar none. […] They’re all part of this big
team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real
hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they’re
superior to everybody else, they’re purer – that’s what they think. Nobody
but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down. […]
Squarest people in the world.” (61, see 228)
Having thus spouted the widespread clichés of Japanese kaizen (‘change
for the better’), the Japanese philosophy focusing upon the steady improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, and management,
he outlines his crazy plan that he will catch the fugitive Hiro with pop
music (62) and later explains to Ruth that he will use a designer T-shirt
as bait (161). Thus, the two representatives of the federal law know
absolutely nothing about the man they are supposed to arrest, and that is
the major reason while they abjectly fail in their pursuit.
It is Ambly Wooster, the rich old lady suffering from senile dementia,
who expresses in one of her endless monologues what average Americans
in the eighties knew about Japan:
“You’re so clever, you Japanese, what with your automobile factories and
your Suzuki method28 and that exquisite Satsuma ware – busy as a hive of
bees, aren’t you? You’ve even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of
course you’ve got your beers – your Kirin and your Suntory and your
Sapporo – and they’re every bit as good as our lackadaisical brewing
giants have been able to produce, but sake, sake I could never understand,
how do you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why,
it’s the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and
what have you, and all because you’re not afraid of work, back to the
basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you had won
the war – I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in
the street, millions of homeless, AIDS, but of course you have no crime
whatsoever, do you? I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the
witching hour and past it, well past it” – and here the old lady gave him
an exaggerated wink – “helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find
27
28
LURP is the phonetic transcription of LRRP = ‘Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol’,
a small four to six-man team in the Vietnam War on highly dangerous special
reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory.
The Suzuki method is an educational strategy that aims to create great abilities in
its students through a nurturing environment. Its major vehicle is music education,
and it is modeled on an early childhood education focused on factors Shinichi
Suzuki observed in native language acquisition: immersion, encouragement, small
steps, and an unforced timetable for learning material based on each person’s
developmental readiness to imitate examples and internalize principles.
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
221
but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy – manners, that’s what you people are all
about.” (133)
And she, too, refers to the Japanophobia of the times when she finds it
“so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as robots living in
rabbit hutches” (134). One need only add Roy Dotson’s observation that
“From what I’ve heard of the Japanese – they’re pretty resourceful, aren’t
they?” (321), and the severely limited range of what the educated Americans in the novel know about Japan is complete. Even a well-meaning
liberal like Saxby reverts to ingrained clichés when he discovers Hiro in
the trunk of his Mercedes and shouts after the fleeing man “you Nip, you
Jap, you gook!” (320)29 Olmstead White’s uneducated nephew Royal,
who erroneously thinks that Hiro has killed his uncle, calls him “you
gook son of a bitch” (198), and upon Hiro’s arrest the Tupelo Islanders
are “jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a
Chinaman” (216).30
What is crucial for the novel’s plot is Ruth’s attitude towards Asians in
general and Hiro in particular. At the very beginning she stupidly remarks about the naked man in the water that “he looked different somehow” (8) and thus introduces the concept of ethnic and cultural ‘difference’ in a rather inconspicuous way. It is in this context that Hiro’s
desperate yelp is called a pre-linguistic utterance that “transcended the
puny limitations of language and culture” (7), thus implying, in the same
way as Rudyard Kipling did in “The Ballad of East and West,” that despite
their cultural differences all humans share basic feelings and needs. When
Ruth later thinks about the naked Asian she and Saxby encountered at
night, she muses:
Chinese. She thought he was Chinese. But then she’d never traveled any
farther east than the sushi bars of Little Japan or the chop suey houses of
Chinatown, and to this point in her life she’d never had any need to differentiate one nationality from another. If the sign outside said Vietnamese, then they were Vietnamese; if it said Thai, then they were Thai. She
knew Asians only as people who served dishes with rice. (27)
By then she has learned that the fugitive is a Japanese, and since she is
working on “a multiple point of view thing about a Japanese housewife
who’d tried to drown herself and her two young children in Santa Monica
Bay after her husband deserted her” (26), she welcomes Hiro’s appear-
29
30
First used in the 1920s, “Gook” is a disparaging slang term of unknown origin for
an Asian person, especially for North Vietnamese soldiers in the Vietnam War.
“Chinaman” denotes a Chinese man or, in some cases, a native of East Asia. In
older dictionaries, like “Englishman” or “Frenchman,” the term has no negative
connotations, but modern dictionaries consider it offensive and Asian American
organizations discourage its usage.
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Peter Freese
ance as providential for her own purposes and cannot stop thinking about
him.
Boyle’s admission that “Ruth Dershowitz […] c’est moi, as Flaubert
said of Emma Bovary,” is confirmed by the fact that like him, but with
disastrously different results, Ruth bases her fictions on real events. “Two
Toes,” an “old, half-finished story she’d been meaning to rework” (254),
is based on a news story about a real incident, namely “the story of Jessica McClure, the eighteen-month-old girl who’d fallen down a well shaft
in Texas and wound up wedged tight in a pipe less than a foot in diameter” (254).31 And her present story “Of Tears and the Tide” (118, see
188) also deals with a tragedy that “had been in all the papers” (26).
Since Ruth lacks the necessary imagination, she makes only slow progress, and when Hiro starts stealing her lunch buckets, she convinces herself that his appearance will provide her with creative inspiration. But
she also thinks about him as “her secret, her pet, her own” (66), and
since he has seen her naked in the boat, “he stirred something in her, he
did” (66). Although he is still only a vague image to her – “Blink once
and he was Toshiro Mifune,32 blink again, and he was something else”
(66) – in her fantasies she begins to turn him into “a creature that needed
to be stroked and appeased and comforted – an exotic and fascinating
creature” (69) and, what is even more important, into a welcome weapon
in her fight for dominance among the other writers. Sometimes she thinks
that “maybe he was dangerous, […] Maybe the reports were true. He was
a foreigner, after all. He had different values. He could be a fanatic. A
maniac. A killer.” (72), but she nevertheless hopes that he will come
back. Working on her Japanese story, she muses that Hiro is “a living
story, a fiction come to life” (119) and convinces herself that “she needed
him” (119). But he disappears, and thus there is “no cross-cultural attraction there, no communication. No seduction” (119). When he re-appears
and they start talking, she promises to help him, and when he is washed
and cleaned, she finds – the counterpart to the “butter-stinker” motif –
31
32
Once again, this is not Boyle’s invention but a true case that gained nationwide
attention. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_McClure (June 2012): “Jessica
McClure Morales (born March 26, 1986) became famous at the age of 18 months
after falling into a well in the backyard of 3309 Tanner Dr. Midland, Texas, on
October 14, 1987. Between that day and October 16, rescuers worked for 58 hours
to free ‘Baby Jessica’ from the eight-inch-wide well casing 22 feet (6.7 metres)
below the ground. The story gained worldwide attention (leading to some criticism
as a media circus), and later became the subject of a 1989 ABC TV movie. As
presented in the movie, a vital part of the rescue was the use of the then relatively
new technology of waterjet cutting.”
Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) was a Japanese actor who appeared in 170 feature
films. He is best known for his collaboration with filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, from
1948 to 1965, in works such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and
Yojimbo, and also popular for portraying Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s
Samurai Trilogy.
223
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
that his “odor wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. Just different” (157) and
turns him into “her own pet” (158). Caught in her stereotypical notions,
she buys him “dried fishheads, bark shavings […], flat black mushrooms
[…], bamboo shoots” (190) which she considers typical Asian food but
which he heartily dislikes. Finally, attracted by his otherness and wanting
revenge for Saxby’s alleged flirtation with Jane Shine, she even sleeps
with him (169, 185) and justifies that to herself by thinking that she did
it “for the novelty, yes, and because the moment was right” (209). When
her role as an accessory is revealed and she is interrogated by the furious
representatives of the law, she denies having been intimate with Hiro,
argues that she “needed him for this story [she’s] writing” (202), and
swears to Septima that she had only been “using him for a story, for research, for art” (316), thus gaining the admiration of her co-writers for
doing what is considered dangerous field research. But when poor Hiro is
in jail, she thinks about beginning a new story and “forget[s] all about
the Japanese and their weird rites and customs” (210). In the end, accepting her failure as a fiction writer, she mutates into a journalist and secures a contract for a book about Hiro’s adventures. Thus, she is just
“playing another role, using him as she’s used him before” (362) and
once again betraying him for egotistical reasons.
*****
Mixing fact and fiction in his inimitable fashion in East Is East, Boyle
offers a composite action which intertwines the plotlines of several traditional genres. His picaresque tale unfolds ‘on the road’ and arranges the
protagonist’s experiences as the subsequent stations of a life journey. But
what is traditionally the accidental movement of the picaro as a lowerclass survival artist through various strata of an inhospitable society is
here made goal-directed and transformed from an additive story into a
causal plot in which the naïf protagonist’s progress is caused by his incessant search for food. This surface motivation, however, is enhanced and
charged with additional meaning because Hiro is not just a hungry outcast driven by the demands of his insatiable hara, but both a latter-day
Candide on his search for Leibnitz’s best of all worlds and a contemporary
Telemachus on a quest for his lost father. This combination of well established plotlines not only opens additional contexts, but provides the basis
for an exploration of the encounter between mutual national stereotypes
and for a demonstration of what can happen if unfounded self-images and
expectations clash with a faulty reality.
The contradictory expectations which Hiro has derived from the image
of ‘America’ exported all over the world by the U.S. mass media let him
envision the U.S. as a country that is both a multi-ethnic paradise ready
to welcome any immigrant and a world of racist violence between white
law-enforcers and black criminals. Since the real America which the de-
224
Peter Freese
luded half-Japanese, who is himself a prejudiced racist, encounters in
rural Georgia is a parochial world of rabid racists with stupidly prejudiced notions of Asia, the increasingly dramatic confrontations between
the naïve ‘alien’ and his xenophobic ‘hosts’ cannot but end in a disaster.
Consequently, any attempt at intercultural understanding fails dramatically since the hopeful young immigrant who is looking for a better world
and the inhabitants of this world who reject anybody who is ‘different’
are both victims of their ignorance and the stereotypes they harbor of the
respective ‘other.’ Because the Jewish would-be writer Ruth Dershowitz
with her contradictory aims and urges is the very opposite of a ‘typical’
American, because the half-breed Hiro is anything but a ‘typical’ Japanese, and because the novel accumulates an enormous wealth of cultural
details to show that America is a richly diverse and variegated country,
the very notion of national hetero-stereotypes is unmasked as completely
unfounded and reduced to absurdity, and it becomes painfully obvious
that the disastrous failure of communication between East and West
could be avoided by the simple strategy of a better education.
The ‘message’ of East Is East, then, is a very pessimistic one, but the
book is nevertheless extremely funny because it thrives on comic exaggeration, caricature, and situational comedy, and the major vehicle for
these aspects is yet another plotline that Boyle incorporates into his book,
namely that of the satirical Künstlerroman. The motley group of writers
and would-be artists coexisting within the limited space of Thanatopsis
House constitutes a veritable microcosm of the literary scene in the contemporary U.S., and the charged mixture of ambition, jealousy and intrigue among these people allows Boyle to lash out at human shortcomings and to create, especially in the hilarious subplot about the
competition between Ruth Dershowitz and Jane Shine, brilliant examples
of situational comedy. Moreover, this strand of the plot makes a broad
range of literary allusions possible and thus contributes to an enriching
contextualization of the action within larger cultural contexts by relating
the American-Japanese encounter to Rudyard Kipling’s ballad, making
Hiro another Br’er Rabbit trying to survive in the briar patch, turning
Saxby into an ironically reduced replica of Herman Melville’s Ahab, and
contrasting, through William Cullen Bryant’s poem and the names of the
cabins in the writers’ resort, the samurai suicide motif with a western
variant.
It is typical of a satirical text that none of the numerous characters
earns the readers’ unconditional empathy because all of them are driven
by questionable characteristics ranging from alarming ignorance and
blinding vanity to boundless ambition and rabid racism, and because
their weaknesses are farcically exaggerated and relentlessly exposed by
the sarcastic comments of the intruding author. With the exception of
Ruth who comes close to being a ‘round’ character, the other actors
remain ‘flat’ or even are, as Olmstead White, Turco and most of the writ-
T.C. Boyle’s East Is East
225
ers, mere caricatures. What makes the novel a success is not only its artful combination of a fast-paced action with a high degree of suspense, a
broad canvas of unobtrusively integrated references and allusions that
establish numerous horizons of additional meaning, and a wildly inventive linguistic performance, but its creation of a unique amalgam of
pathos and comedy, of the sad story of a naïf immigrant’s unwarranted
destruction and the hilarious exposure of a group of vain American writers. It leaves its readers with the frightening insight that our world would
be a much better place if we were able to do away with our cultural preconceptions, our faulty self-estimates and our mutual national stereotypes
and open ourselves to what we often talk about but rarely manage to
realize, namely, open-minded intercultural communication.
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Peter Freese
Amerikanistik
Universität Paderborn