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I just reviewed Suzanne Kamata’s novel Losing Kei, a story of an American woman who loses her child to Japanese custody laws when she divorces her Japanese husband.  Suzanne Kamata, like her character, is an American living in Japan for the past twenty-one years with her family and gives a unique perspective to the book.  Suzanne graciously agreed to answer a few questions for us with insight into Japanese custody laws, insecurity in writing,  literacy in Japan compared to that of the United States,  raising a special needs child, and even teaches us how to make miso soup!   Please welcome Suzanne . . .

Maw Books:  Can you share with us how you ended up being an American living in Japan, marrying into the culture and raising a family there?

Suzanne Kamata: I originally came to Japan on the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Program, an initiative by the Japanese Ministry of Education to bring native speakers into the English classroom. I worked as an assistant English teacher at junior and senior high schools in Tokushima Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. I’d asked to be placed outside Tokyo, or other big cities so as to experience “the real Japan.”  My second year on the program, I met the man who would become my husband. I’ve been here ever since.

Maw Books:  Given this background much of your writing is set against a multicultural backdrop and explores the topic of cultural differences.  Share with us how being transplanted and immersed into a different culture has influenced your writing.

Suzanne Kamata: I’ve now lived in Japan for twenty-one years! Even now, I can’t say that I fit in here, or that I understand everything about Japan. I’m always dealing with cultural differences, and this preoccupation makes it into my writing. It’s harder and harder for me to write fiction set in the United States, though I try, sometimes.

Maw Books:  Of all the stories that you have in you, what led you choose the story that you shared in Losing Kei?

Suzanne Kamata: I wrote Losing Kei just after I became a mother, so I suppose all of my anxiety about becoming an expatriate mother in Japan (and moving in with my mother-in-law) made it into that story.

Maw Books:  Losing Kei is about Jill, who wants to flee her crumbling marriage in Japan, but doing so means giving up her own child because she has no custody rights as a foreigner.  Can you share with us a little bit about the custody laws in Japan?  Is there anything currently being done to try to change any of those laws?

Suzanne Kamata: In Japan, there is no such thing as joint custody. I suppose Japanese officials think it’s too confusing or harmful for children to be shuttled between parents. What frequently happens, however, is that children of divorced parents are often cut off entirely from the non-custodial parent. Since I first conceived of Losing Kei, many similar real-life custody cases have gotten attention from the press.  While most of those stories ended badly, rumor now has it that Japan has reconsidered its stance on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which, among other things, protects visitation rights of non-custodial parents.  Perhaps happier days are ahead for international families like Kei’s – and for Japanese families everywhere.

Maw Books:  I hope happier days are ahead.  What was the most difficult moment that you had while writing Losing Kei?  And how you were able to push through it?

Suzanne Kamata: Maybe the hotel scene where Jill loses her son. I suppose knowing that she would pick herself up by her bootstraps and try to get him back helped me to continue.

Maw Books:  How is the reaction to Losing Kei different or the same depending upon whether your reader lives in Japan or the United States?

Suzanne Kamata: Readers in Japan are more sympathetic to Jill. One reviewer wrote that after a year, Jill should have known what she was getting into by marrying a Japanese man. That’s so not true. I’ve lived here for over two decades, but I only learned recently that if my husband died, custody of my children would go to his parents.

Maw Books:  The husband in the book is entirely fictional and in now way resembles your husband, but I know your Japanese husband was concerned that people would think that the husband that you created in the novel is based on him. What do you do to ensure others, including your husband, that not all Japanese men are like the one that you described?

Suzanne Kamata: Hmm.  I guess I’m trying to make up for that now by writing a very sympathetic Japanese male character in my novel-in-progress.

Maw Books:  But based on that question, do you see any of your friends or family personalities influencing the characters?  In particular, the overbearing mother-in-law?

Suzanne Kamata: The overbearing mother-in-law is not based on my own mother-in-law, but on other mother-in-law stories that I’ve heard over the years. Several women I’ve talked to said that they came close to divorcing their husbands because of their mother-in-laws.  Another character, Eric, is a composite of happy-go-lucky surfer guy babe-magnets that I’ve worked with over the years.  One in particular went through a kind of spiritual transformation. He started out as a curry-and-rice-eating lad, and became a urine-sipping yoga teacher.

Maw Books:  A urine sipping yoga teacher?  Yikes!  What was the best piece of writing advice that you received while writing Losing Kei?

Suzanne Kamata: My publisher made some very good editing suggestions which I incorporated.  I tend to be subtle to the point of obscurity. At his suggestion, I also cut a scene where Jill goes back to her husband  – and is rebuffed. I decided that that was out of character.

Maw Books:  I don’t know how I’d feel if she went back.  That’s interesting to think about.  What is the greatest comfort or joy in being a writer?  And what’s your biggest insecurity?

Suzanne Kamata: Writing is fun, and there is always joy in finishing a story or an essay or a novel. It’s also very satisfying when readers respond to my work, when they enjoy my stories and love my characters, or when they find something that they can relate to. Of course not everyone likes the same thing, and negative reviews can make me feel bad for days. As for my insecurities, I worry that fans of Losing Kei (including my agent) will be disappointed by my work-in-progress.

Maw Books:  Can you tell us a bit about Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. What inspired you to put together this volume of writing and why was it so important to you to share these stories?

Suzanne Kamata: My twins were born 14 weeks premature and, as a result, my daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy. When she was diagnosed, I was eager to read stories concerning families of special needs kids. I found a lot of “don’t worry, be happy” type essays – and I acknowledge that there is a need for uplifting, inspirational material – but what I really wanted to know was how having a child with special needs would impact my marriage, my son, my life. I wanted an idea of what was to come in the years and months to come. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and I wanted to hear it (or read it, rather) straight. I also wanted confirmation that others had gone through the same emotions – anger, sorrow, grief – that I had, and somehow survived them. In conversation, most people don’t want to hear about the difficulties. People say “You must be a saint,” or “Bless your heart” or “You must be so strong.” Nobody wants to hear about what a drag it is to be caught in the rain with a wheelchair.

I often turn to literature to make sense of things, but I couldn’t find any literary collections on the subject. I decided to put the book that I needed together on my own, and as I got started, I discovered that there were others hungry for just this kind of book. As I wrote in the introduction, Love You to Pieces is intended to be a portable support group for readers  in far-flung places, but I also hope that it will help relatives, teachers, and caregivers to understand the lives of families of special needs kids. I think it also stands alone as a literary collection.

Maw Books:  Your newest anthology, Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is a collection of stories as the title suggests about raising children within two cultures.  What has been your experience raising children who are bicultural?  Difficulties, highlights?  And how has those experiences shaped your worldview on parenting?

Suzanne Kamata: I’ve found that raising children bilingually isn’t as easy as most people think.  So much effort is required! Also, I’ve found that my son’s identity is constantly shifting. Sometimes he identifies as Japanese, sometimes as American, sometimes as mixed – which is fine. My identity shifts quite a bit, too.

It’s hard to say what kind of parent I would be if I were raising monocultural kids in suburban America, for instance, but here, I often feel that I am parenting in opposition to Japanese culture. Where we live, at least, in rural Japan where there are few foreigners, ideas about gender roles tend to be very conservative. My son sometimes says things like, “Even though she’s a girl, she’s a doctor.” I can’t imagine a kid raised in the U.S. saying something like that!  I’m always trying to remind my children that there is a world beyond Japan, that there are many ways of thinking, and many different kinds of people.

I find sometimes that it’s hard to maintain my authority because I’m a foreigner. For example, my son’s second grade teacher told the class about the time he saw a ghost. My son was very scared and I tried to reassure him, but of course he didn’t believe me when I said there was no such thing as ghosts.

Maw Books:  That was a fascinating answer!  A three part question about literacy in Japan:  How is literacy different in Japan and the U.S, especially for children?  Are there different teaching methods that work or don’t work? What is expected of a student in Japan that you wouldn’t find in the U.S?

Suzanne Kamata: The Japanese written language is composed of two phonetic alphabets – one for Japanese words and one for words borrowed from foreign languages – and Chinese characters (kanji). Kanji can be read in different ways, and there are really no clues as to how to pronounce a character, so in order to learn the Japanese written language, you have to memorize a lot of things. While I think that rote memorization can be really boring, it seems to work with Japanese kids. Japan enjoys a literacy rate close to 100%.  I can’t tell you exactly, but it’s the nineties – much higher than that in the U.S.

Maw Books:  A question that I ask of every author I interview is to share a recipe with us, especially if it appeared in their book or is a family favorite.  I later make and blog that dish.  Is there a recipe that you would like to share with us?

Suzanne Kamata: In my novel, the main character’s mother-in-law teaches her how to make miso soup.  We eat a lot of miso soup in our house, too. It’s very easy, healthy, and there are endless variations. I usually use boil a sauce pan full of water (or use fish broth), and then chop up whatever vegetables are on hand and then throw them in the water and boil until tender. Some combination that I like are julienned carrots, sliced onions, and dried seaweed; daikon radish and green onions; and tofu and dried seaweed. After the vegetables are as tender as you want them to be, scoop some miso (I use about 1/3 cup) into a strainer and push it through with a spoon or something.  You can also make the miso paste dissolve by stirring with a spoon or with chopsticks. There are many kinds of miso here in Japan. I use a reddish one with dashi (broth) already included.

Maw Books:  We eat a lot of Asian food in our house.  I’ll be sure to pick up miso paste when we are out next.  What are three books that you loved as a child?

Suzanne Kamata: Little Women, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland

Maw Books:  And what are three books that each of your children love?

Suzanne Kamata: I asked my son, and he said the biography of Ichiro that he recently read, the Vampirates series, and WINTER OF THE ICE WIZARD by Mary Pope Osbourne from the Magic Treehouse series.

My daughter loves the Miki Falls series by Mark Crilley, Momotaro, and Cinderella.

Maw Books:  Have you found that growing up in different countries, that your children’s reading selections or habits are different then what yours was as a child?

Suzanne Kamata: I was never all that interested in comic books, but my children love manga, and my son learned to read Japanese via manga. I was worried for awhile that he would never progress beyond comics. (There are a lot of adults in Japan who only read comic books, not novels.) However, he now reads novels. He really loves the Vampirates series. He reads a lot, though, which I think (hope) he got from seeing me read.

Reading is harder for my daughter because of her disabilities, but she definitely has an interest in books. She likes books with lots of pictures, such as manga.

Maw Books:  What the last book you read, what are you reading now and what do you hope to read soon?

Suzanne Kamata: I just finished Sound + Noise, a novel by Curtis Smith, one of the contributors to Love You to Pieces. He’s a wonderful writer, and I appreciate that he writes about unglamorous types, such as families with disabilities and middle-aged people falling in love. I’m currently reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch, which I requested from the local library. They also ordered The Help by Kathryn Stockett for me. I will read that next.

Maw Books:  What are you working on now and what can we expect from in the future?

Suzanne Kamata: I’m working on a novel that I’m calling The Baseball Widow, another family drama set in Japan. I’m pretty close to finishing a first draft. I also have the beginnings of a couple of young adult novels which I hope to work on next.

Maw Books:  Anything else you’d like to share?

Suzanne Kamata: I really enjoy your blog! Thank you for having me as a “guest.”

Maw Books:  Thanks Suzanne!

Links of interest:  Suzanne Kamata website.  Maw Books review of Losing Kei.
Losing Kei is available from your local independent bookstore, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.

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