Wuthering Heights: Westminster and Japan

In The Independent, Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson praises reading and shares some of her favourite books.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson: my favourite books

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As an adult:

The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien

John le Carré’s George Smiley series

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

The Japan Times features writer Minae Mizumura.

In Mizumura’s work, the town plays the central locale in “A True Novel,” a retelling of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” set in postwar Japan. [...]

The cottage we’re now sitting in became, to quote the title of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, Mizumura’s very own “room of one’s own” and is where she has written many of her works. Karuizawa also became a vantage point from which to gain distance from her busy life in Tokyo and holds a valuable perspective when it comes to the themes of her work.

“This area has a special history, and when you touch on that history, you touch on a very critical history between Japan and the West,” she says. “You can talk of Japan’s recent history from Karuizawa.”

It was because of this history that Mizumura chose Karuizawa as one of the key settings for “A True Novel.” The fictional author-like figure in the narrative frame describes how she encountered a story that resembled “Wuthering Heights” and recognized it as having the makings of a different novel. Similarly, when Mizumura herself considered how she could even approach writing a love story comparable to Brontë’s classic but rooted in Japan, a “true novel” in Japanese — the answer lay in Karuizawa.

“Here you could talk about love in the Western sense,” she says. “What might seem foreign can happen here.”

She explains that “Wuthering Heights” and other 19th-century novels were what Japanese writers would have encountered as Western literature following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Inspired by the notions of romantic love found in their pages, writers, artists and intellectuals were then naturally drawn to Karuizawa — a place that seemed imbued with the same qualities. Whether this was the product of their projected fantasies or inherently true to the area is perhaps now hard to distinguish — where fact and fiction begins becomes difficult to define when it comes to Karuizawa.

Mizumura’s own novel features numerous locations in the town, from the bar at the historic Mampei Hotel to the scenic Kumoba Pond. This was a very deliberate decision: She wanted the novel, despite its “far-fetched” premise, to feel rooted in concrete reality. To heighten that sense, photographs of the locations — taken one summer by Toyota Horiguchi, a former Kyoto City University of Arts professor whom Mizumura met at Yale — are scattered throughout. These images, taken almost as evidence for the novel’s “real” unreality, depict the changing face of Karuizawa. Among them are shots of summer houses, nestled in leafy, secluded plots, that hint at the bygone summers of their former inhabitants.

Driving through the town’s backstreets, in an attempt to trace the locations photographed for the novel, it becomes clear that many of the houses Horiguchi captured have seemingly disappeared. (Hanako Lowry)

Isliada (in Spanish) shares some poems by Charlotte Brontë translated into Spanish.