Japan in the Supermarket of the Kiwi Psyche (Critical Essay‪)‬

The 'minor chaos' (1) of Carl Shuker's The Method Actors (2005) richly deserved the praise it received on publication. Harder to assess, though, for criticism, is the book's place: is this part of the cohering of a style or a perspective, a reworking of tradition, or an achievement quite on its own? Bill Manhire, endorsing the novel on the back cover of my paperback edition, makes a comparison with William Gibson, (2) but Shuker's linguistic ability, careful attention to Japanese situations, and gift for dense specificity mark him quite separately from the author of Idoru or Pattern Recognition. Closer instead are the two Davids, Mitchell and Peace, English authors who have, in recent years, produced important novels investigating the representational possibilities in English of Japanese historical and political dilemmas. If Peace's Tokyo Year Zero (2007), with the prose intricacy of a Kurosawa film, uses the great range of onomatopoeia Japanese offers to give something new to his realism, Mitchell's Number9Dream (2001) shares with Shuker an interest in the delirium-effects contemporary Tokyo can produce, the strange intersections of the historical and the decontextualised contemporary. Mitchell's novel is a complex piece of ventriloquism, with Japanese characters--like the Germans in the war movies of memory--speaking an English that, in the world of the narrative, they cannot understand. The Method Actors, in a complicating move, combines narratives of Japanese experience with narratives of gaijin (foreigner) perplexity and dislocation. (3) Combining a familiar trope of New Zealand literary treatments of Japan--dislocation and distance--with innovative material, The Method Actors is a major event in contemporary literature. It offers a useful vantage point from which to assess the cultural logic informing the presence of Japan 'in the supermarket of the Kiwi psyche' (4) and in recent literary production. Shuker's novel circles around multiple missed meetings and missing persons, misunderstandings and lost intimacy: blockages and gaps travel with the Japanese in New Zealand fiction. In Vivienne Plumb's 'The Woman Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep' (1991) (5) linguistic ability brings with it communicative breakdown and, as the woman's unexpected proficiency in Japanese gives her prophetic abilities, the language divides and destabilises her home life. Japan and the Japanese are associated then as much with distance as they are with difference. In Vincent O'Sullivan's 'Table for Three' Keiko watches Wellington 'from the other side', and Wellington harbour stands as a symbol of social as much as physical difference. (6)