A Real Novel by Minae Mizumura

Minae Mizumura is the author of 本格小説 (A Real Novel). This book was first published in Japan in 2002 and its English translation is to be published by RandomHouse in the future, but a synopsis can already be found online.

Everyone knows Wuthering Heights to be an absorbing classic. It carries the reader to a realm where everything becomes at once dream-like and harrowingly intense, holds her transfixed in that realm, and even after she has closed the book, won't let her go for a long while afterward. When A Real Novel, a remaking of Wuthering Heights, was published in 2002, readers, critics, and scholars eagerly reported having the same experience. Some even went on to say it affected them more intensely than Wuthering Heights. A Real Novel brings back to life the celebrated lovers. It even brings back to life Nelly, the problematic narrator. It uses the same narrative structure to tell the tragic and yet blissful love story --- though with infinite changes. For A Real Novel is not only a remaking of a classic but a remaking of the English classic in postwar Japan. Hence, interwoven with the central love story is another story that makes the novel absorbing in a very different way. It is a story of Japan: how its prewar social structure, the source of much misery, plight, yearning, splendor, and human drama, gradually gave way to a happy, middle-class vapidness in the fifty years following World War II.

Besides, an extract from the long prologue which opens the book is also available.

The Argentinian publishing house, Adriana Hidalgo, has already published the Spanish translation, Una novela real. La Nación, an Argentinian newspaper, interviewed Ms Mizumura, and Blog Leituras Favre recently reposted it. Here's a summary of the relevant bits of the interview, rather than a word for word translation:

The interviewer considers her work on Wuthering Heights is similar to what Jean Rhys did with Jane Eyre. She replies that they do have something in common, as both and taken it upon themselves to resume a point of view initially left aside by the author. She has been intrigued by the character of Nelly Dean ever since she was a little girl, as she is a sort of black hole in the plot of the novel. Nelly is on a different level than the rest of the characters. She watches and tells, but that's as far as she goes. She loves Heathcliff tenderly and spurs him on in his pride, his ambition and his deep spite.

The interviewer remarks that that makes Nelly responsible for the final tragedy and Ms Mizumura wholeheartedly agrees. Despite Nelly's unconventional, unexpected behaviour, she never feels herself to be at fault, not once.

The interviewer thus describes Nelly as a disagreeable character and asks Ms Mizumura what is it that appeals to her. It is the fact that I can't understand her, says Ms Mizumura. Sometimes she has thought that Emily Brontë - born in 1818 - couldn't be bothered to make Nelly whole as a character. Sometimes she has thought that Nelly is a jealous soul in denial. Readers of Wuthering Heights never know for sure what Nelly is thinking, perhaps not even Nelly does. Thus, she says she conceived the servant in her novel as a problematic character who is aware of not telling the whole story. She can't untangle from the plot, and she knows it. It can almost even be said that the servant is the main character in the novel. Ms Mizumura says she was especially interested in the social changes which took place in post-WW2 Japan, where servants vanished as fast as the pre-war social classes. Suddenly, servants became human beings, great models for literature.

When asked whether she made changes in the plot, she affirms she did, as she added yet another layer, which is her own 'now', as an author who has heard the story from her landlord who in turn heard it from a servant (her version of Nelly). She really likes this new narrative layer, but states that it was rather unplanned. She felt that for readers to stop focusing on the fact that they were reading a novel inspired by another novel, they needed to belive that it might have occurred to any Japanese of their acquaintance. With that in mind, she added as many childhood memories as she possibly could, just for the pleasure of it. However, she didn't want to follow in Emily's footsteps in one thing. Wuthering Heights has something of a myth in it. The story could have taken place anytime, anywhere, and that's why it appeals to so many different readers. A Real Novel is not mythical at all: countries and history had to have a relevant role. Her version of the love between Cathy and Heathcliff is a product of History.

So, we look forward to seeing the English translation out soon. Aren't you curious?

Categories: Books, References, Translations, Wuthering Heights