Sixers Review

Reiko, I want to thank you for giving us a few moments of your time. I know you're hard at work on your next work, and time, as it is for any active writer is precious. 

Being a believer that the writer can not separate themselves from their experience, I'd like to begin by asking: Where did you grow up and how much of your childhood experience makes its way into your writing?

I grew up in Waimea, on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was a cow town, with one intersection, and there was a ranch in my back yard with a seasonal stream running behind the house and my "own" waterfall where I wrote bad adolescent poetry.  Until I was about 14, we had no television, no movies...entertainment was reading.  That, and the fact that my parents were both writers, should have given me a clue that I would end up as a writer.  Part of my first novel, Why She Left Us, is set in Hawaii, as is much of my third (still in process).

On your blog, writing about your time in Hiroshima interviewing the hibakusha, you say that no one told you the “truth” and what you got instead was “life.” You explained, “I am not saying anyone lied to me. They opened their hearts and shared...They gave me exactly what I needed - a glimpse into a work and an experience I had no other way of understanding.” This begs the questions: What is truth?

What is truth?!  You ask the easy questions! Truth is different from fact and different from honesty. A human construct; we "tell" the truth.  It’s the story we’re convinced of. And therein lies the beauty, the complexity, of the human experience. We tell our stories to explain to ourselves who we are and how we fit into what happened. We stand in a moment in our lives, with our needs and emotions, and in that moment we assemble a series of facts into a plausible story that supports our beliefs.  We may, very sincerely, forget some of what happened; we may suddenly remember other things; we may suddenly understand things in a new light and therefore expand their importance in the story.  And in a new moment, all of this may change. This is one of the central ideas I explore in Hiroshima in the Morning and it came about because I saw the stories of the atomic bomb survivors change on September 11th: the trauma literally gave them access to lost memories, and it also threatened the belief that they had been holding onto, that world peace was the consequence of the bombing of Hiroshima, and therefore their loved ones were sacrificed for world peace.

While writing Hiroshima in the Morning, I imagine there were instances when you were faced with the task of deciding which stories to include and which to leave behind. How do you as a writer decide what to bring to the forefront?

In both my novel and my memoir, I found myself trying to resurrect a past that was forgotten or altered. What endures?  What do we carry with us?  What shapes us?  What has been buried in the silence?  How hard have we worked to forget it?  If you spend enough time with people, the answers to these questions emerge. These events, while traumatic, contain important lessons for us, so there is a huge responsibility to accuracy. I never made anything up. I am not an historian either, nor am I interested in being one.  The touchstone I use goes back to your question about truth. Truth is necessary if the answers to anyone’s questions are to be revealed.

The subject of an individual’s leaving or, "having left," is something present in both of your publications, how much of your first published book, Why She Left Us, resides in Hiroshima in the Morning? We've heard some writers refer to their first work as a "practice run," and others describe their first publication as "evidence of one's struggle to find self." Which of these thoughts, if either, do you agree with or ascribe to?

We writers have our preoccupations, that's for sure!  My first novel is about a mother who left.  The memoir - though you would never know it if you get your information off the internet and the television - is about a mother who stays; who fights to recreate her motherhood in order to make it possible to be in her children's lives.  And in the third book, there is another absent, wounded but loving mother.  All different ways of approaching the importance of 'mother', and the myths of motherhood.

When I wrote the novel, I was not a mother, and didn't want to be one, and it was something of a shock when an interviewer (now dear friend) pointed out the 'evidence' my subconscious mind had put on the page.  The second novel (now third book) was begun just after I had my second child. The mother in that book is a Hiroshima survivor and has kept her past a secret. It has been in final draft form more than once and is still in process, so I can't tell you yet where I am going with that one.  Hiroshima in the Morning is clearer, and puts that "struggle to find self" right up front.  It is about, of course, my own motherhood, and also a tribute to my own, very different kind of mother, who just passed away.

Having had the pleasure of being your student, what I recall clearest, other than your patience and your ear for words, was a question that you’d often, quite candidly, ask at every juncture - for every line of prose, every word, every alteration - as you do in your own practice, you ask your students, “Why?” I, as your friend, have come to appropriate this to your mathematical side, a part of you that calls for precision. This leads me to ask about your journeying. I believe it is the “why” in you that led you on your journey to Hiroshima. How does one quiet for themselves the "Whys" that work against you? What do you do when you feel the world pushing you in a direction opposite of where you, as a writer and as an individual, need to be?

Those are very different "whys"!  Are you asking what you do when you are asked to conform? You don't.  It's very simple.  Why would you?  Why would any person ever think that another person, or a structure (like publishing, or banking!), or a cultural assumption, knows what you need and who you are better than you do?  You are the expert on you, and you have an urgency in your own preoccupations that is important for the rest of us to hear about.  Otherwise, you become a bad copy of a character that someone else has made up.  But if you are true to yourself, and if you go very deeply into the dark or difficult places you are drawn to, if you don't pander to the fear of...say...mainstream editors who don't know what people want to read, only what has sold before, then you come up with something true and necessary.  A work, or an example, that helps to show others that more can be done; there are more paths through the forest.  And that they can, if they want to, start following their own paths so they can get to the perfect place to branch off on their own.

For up-and-coming authors, authors who have novels that haven’t yet been picked up, or writers who are looking to start that first book, what advice do you have, or perhaps more specifically, what would you like to say to them? 

Your work must be urgent to you.  It cannot be safe.  There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year in the US; the ones that make a difference to me as a reader are the ones that made a difference to you as a writer. 

And also, write.  Everyday, because if you stop writing it can be impossible to believe you can write or have ever written, even if you have published a book.  And also, read.  Books are your teachers.  Ask them questions.  They will answer.

One hundred years from now, if someone were to remember you based on what you’ve written, or will write, what kind of writer do you want to be remembered as? 

Someone recently called me a "soul writer."  I don't know what it means, but I like how it sounds.