Two years ago, Japanese expatriate Junichi Kinoshita, who has lived in Taipei for 20 years, was almost sure he would move back to his hometown in central Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, until he learned from a friend of a novel-writing contest sponsored by the Taipei City Government.
Kinoshita had always wanted to write, but he had never thought of doing it in Chinese. He told his wife, who is also Japanese, that he would like to accept the challenge and write the novel as “closure” for all his years in Taipei.
“If I had written the novel in Japanese, I could have finished it in just a month,” he said.
Photo: CNA
“Doing it in Chinese, though, was a much tougher proposition and I struggled with it for a year-and-a-half. Day after day, rewriting and editing until I was happy enough with it to send the final version,” he said.
NON-NATIVE WRITER
On March 13, the 70,000-word novel, the title of which roughly translates as Dandelion Floss, depicting the inner worlds and lives of five Japanese expatriates living in Taipei, won this year’s Taipei Literature Award, making Kinoshita the first non-native writer to receive the honor in 13 years.
Winning the award came as a complete surprise for Kinoshita, although the title and the major themes he portrays in the novel are thoughts and reflections that have occupied his mind for a very long time.
“Every Japanese person comes to Taiwan for very different reasons,” he said. “I have asked many of my Japanese friends why they chose Taipei as their second home, but very few of them have been able to come up with an answer.”
Kinoshita, born in 1961, first visited Taiwan when he was a sophomore at Tokyo Keizai University. He said his first encounter with Taiwan opened up the door for him to learn Mandarin, as he was amazed by how the Taiwanese look so much like the Japanese, but frustrated by the language barrier that gave him few opportunities to talk to local people.
He paid his second visit to Taiwan the following year, spending a few months that time, and decided to postpone his senior year of college and study Chinese in Taiwan.
“My parents were furious when they found out I had taken two semesters off to go to Taiwan,” he said.
He returned to Japan to finish university and, like most Japanese, got a job at a big trading company soon after graduation to begin his life as a salaryman. He stayed on the job for six years until one day in 1989, he made up his mind to quit his job — and Japan — and relocate to Taiwan.
During the last 20 years, Kinoshita has worked as a teacher, an editor and a reporter, jobs he thought would bring him closer to writing his own novel. He had already published a book in Japanese of tips on traveling around Taiwan.
He said he has seen many Japanese come and go over the last two decades, many of whom were unable to develop a sense of belonging during their Taiwanese sojourns.
“The Japanese are more of a collective society. We are polite to people we meet, but we don’t mingle very well with the locals and we are very emotionally reserved,” he said.
“One of the major differences between Taiwanese and Japanese is that Taiwanese are very hospitable — sometimes maybe even ‘too friendly’ — which can sometimes become some sort of emotional burden to Japanese expatriates,” he said.
Kinoshita has put his observations about his countrymen into the novel, creating five fictional characters representing five groups of Japanese people who would be most likely to come and live in Taiwan, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
The five protagonists are a Taiwanese-Japanese, a chef, a teacher who came to Taiwan to escape Japan’s strict societal rules, a flight attendant who falls in love with and marries a Taiwanese businessman and a young man assigned to work in Taiwan by his company.
Each have their awkward moments when they first arrive in Taipei, feeling overwhelmed by the hospitality of the people, and when they finally get used to the way of life, are faced with the choice of returning home or staying a little longer.
‘JAPANESE AT HEART’
“Maybe it is something personal, but for me, as a Japanese who lives outside Japan, my heart, or my soul, still belongs to Japan,” one of the characters in the novel says.
Kinoshita also coined the term “the heart of Japanese people” in his novel. He explained the term as “something very abstract, something that is only understood among Japanese people.”
He tried to explain further, saying that “‘the heart of Japanese people’ refers to the closed circle of trust between each other, and for expatriates living in Taiwan, there is always the hesitation and doubt about why they ended up in Taiwan. The ultimate questions remain: ‘Where is my next destination?’ and ‘When will I return to Japan?’”
Just when all five characters are confounded by the big questions in their lives, the author kindly offers his own suggestion at the very end of the novel, saying through one of the characters that “I think every expatriate is following some kind of mysterious calling from their heart. There is some predestined relationship between a person and a city. One leaves the city when the affinity ends, be it a few months or 10 years, it just happens.”
PREDESTINATION
Kinoshita says he finds the concept of the idea of predestination very interesting. He is sure there is a special affinity between Taipei and himself, and that winning the Taipei Literature Award ties him even closer to the place he has called home for 21 years.
“The award is huge encouragement for someone like me who has always looked for the opportunity to write a novel,” he said, adding that he plans to write a second novel, also in Chinese.
However, at least part of his heart remains in Japan.
“I am supposed to be overwhelmingly happy [about winning the prize], but I am not. Half of my heart sinks whenever I think of the turmoil the Japanese are enduring back home [from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami],” Kinoshita said.
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