An Interview with Kyoko Mori

by Mallory Cook

Kyoko Mori writes poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction. Her memoir, The Dream of Water, describes her journey to make peace with her mother's suicide. Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures is a collection of essays about being a Japanese-American in the Midwest. She has also published the novel Stone Field, True Arrow and two novels for young adults, Shizuko's Daughter and One Bird, as well as Fallout, a collection of poetry. Kyoko teaches nonfiction at George Mason University and fiction in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. This interview took place via email after the 2009 RopeWalk Writer’s Retreat, where Kyoko served as a faculty member.

Mallory Cook: You bear the distinction of being a successful writer in all three genres of the craft. Speaking specifically to fiction and nonfiction, how do you differentiate which material will be used for certain projects? Assuming that some part of fiction is grounded in reality and some part of non-fiction is masked behind a story, do you find it difficult to maneuver between the two?

Kyoko Mori: When I use material from “real life” in fiction, I always change one or two crucial details. In my first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, the main character is a twelve-year-old girl who must survive her mother’s suicide. The novel is set in Kobe in the 1960s and 1970s, the time and the place of my own adolescence. But while I found consolation in reading and writing as a teenager, my character, Yuki, is an aspiring painter. I’ve never studied painting beyond my high school art class, but many of my close friends are visual artists. I know something about the process through watching them work and talking to them about it. I also visit museums regularly and read art books. So painting is something I know well, but in an indirect way. As I described the sketchbook my character kept after her mother’s death and the paintings she struggled to complete, the details I invented opened up doors for more invention. Making the character into a painter rather than a writer gave me the right amount of distance and closeness I needed to portray her with accuracy and imagination.

On the other hand, when I started my second book, I thought I was going to write another novel about a Japanese family like my mother’s. I went to Japan for eight weeks and talked to my relatives; I took notes and collected old family photographs and my relatives’ journals.  But when I came back to Wisconsin—where I was living at the time—I realized that I didn’t know my relatives’ stories well enough to write a novel about people like them. I could read their journals over and over, I could call them and interview them a hundred times, and I would still not be able to get inside their stories. The crucial parts of their stories happened long before I was born, and their results were being lived day after day still, in a country that was no longer my home. I had no meaningful access to or perspective on these stories. 

The real story of the book was about my returning to Japan after thirteen years’ absence and realizing that I no longer had a life there. In telling this story, if I’d changed any significant detail—for instance, if I’d written that my grandfather was a store clerk instead of a teacher, or that my father was a government employee instead of an engineer—I would only have been making things up in a gratuitous way. It wouldn’t have opened up any doors of invention. The particulars of my family’s circumstances—my mother’s family lost their land after World War II and was reduced to poverty; otherwise, my mother would never have gone to work as a secretary and met my father, who made good money but was not a genteel, cultured person like her father— were important in this book. That’s how my second book, The Dream of Water, became a memoir instead of a novel.

I don’t find it difficult to switch back and forth between fiction and nonfiction because I only work on one big project at a time. Many of the techniques of fiction and nonfiction are the same: character revelation or development, plot-shaping, scene construction, the balance between exposition and drama. I’m confused about many things in life, but not about the difference between these two genres. In fiction, you make up things to give yourself room for insight and imagination. In nonfiction, you delve into what’s already there, which requires a different kind of imagination—the ability to see the gap between what you knew then and what you know now.

MC: What came first in your evolution as a writer, poetry or prose?

KM: Like most people, I wrote bad poetry in high school—long free-verse rants about how no one understood me. In college, I was reluctant to go back to poetry because by then, I knew how bad those poems had been. So as an English major with a creative writing emphasis, I only wrote short stories. In graduate school, while studying fiction, I took a few poetry workshops because most of my close friends were poets. I wrote poetry for the next ten years or so, mostly between long prose projects, and even published a small-press book of poetry. But poetry was never my best medium: I lack the discipline to sit for hours contemplating and re-arranging those four or five words on a line. When I started writing essays, I found a different outlet for the poetic impulse—the desire to move from topic to topic on the strength of language and imagery instead of “plot.” An essay is like a long poem in which you get to explain a few things. I have not written poetry in the last several years. I still read other people’s poetry and am inspired by their work.

MC: Your next collection of essays, Yarn: Remembering the Way Home, will be released this fall. Although each nonfiction piece you’ve written tackles its own stories, you insightfully connect them back to your childhood in Japan and, specifically, your mother’s suicide. Do you believe your drive to write was born from these experiences or would you have wanted to become a writer regardless?

KM: Yarn is made up of long narrative chapters (memoir) and short lyric chapters (essays), somewhat like a cable sweater. The narrative chapters are the background stitch and the lyric chapters are the cable panels: they alternate and highlight each other. My mother’s suicide was a defining event in my childhood. It’s hard to say who or what I would have become if she had survived her unhappiness. Still, I wanted to be a writer long before her death, so I’d like to think I would have found other things to write about.

MC: You did a lot of research concerning the history of knitting and weaving for your new book, and your molding of historical anecdote and personal information progress the stories beautifully. How do you find this balance in your work?  

KM: Yarn is the first book I wrote for which I did any significant research. I started out with the knitting and weaving books I already had and then expanded from there—going to various archives and libraries in Boston and Washington, D.C., buying more books, visiting folk art museums, using some (though not many) internet sources. I don’t excel at research. I learned a lot about how to look up information when I took my graduate class at George Mason University to the Library of Congress for an orientation with Thomas Mann, the reference librarian who wrote The Oxford Guide to Library Research. He presented information-gathering as an exciting adventure of discovery. Still, it’s not my forte. I don’t look forward to going to the library and gathering information. 

 As it turns out, my lack of enthusiasm for research is a blessing in disguise. No matter what you write about and what information you find, the real challenge is in sorting out what you gathered and throwing out most of it. Even though the information you found affects the shape and the tone of your story, it’s the story, not the information, that must drive the piece forward. Having too much information can be almost paralyzing, especially if you don’t know how NOT to use all of it. My instinct is always to find out just enough information to get going, try to write my way around the details that are fuzzy or missing, and only go back to the library if I absolutely need to.  Even so, I ended up not using many interesting things I found out about knitting, spinning, and weaving. But that’s what cocktail parties are for—the details I don’t use in my writing will always give me something to talk about.

MC: Many aspiring writers shun non-fiction because they believe their lives lack an edge of tragedy that so many successful essays and memoirs deal with. Do you agree with this observation or do you think the success lies in how a life is portrayed?

KM: In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway argues that all plots in fiction should include trouble. If your characters went on a picnic and the weather was perfect, the food delicious, and the company harmonious, there would be no story. If they had a big argument around the picnic table or if one of them almost drowned in a lake or got stung by wasps, then there would be a story. 

In nonfiction, too, there is no story without trouble or conflict. But I don’t think this means the writer has to have endured an extremely tragic life. None of us gets through our childhood,  adolescence, and early adulthood—growing up with our family, leaving them to go to college or to find work to get married, losing some of the older relatives as time goes on—without some trouble, conflict, or significant loss. We all have complicated, ambivalent feelings about our hometown, parents, or siblings, no matter how privileged or well-adjusted our families might be. I think that’s enough.

MC: What advice can you give non-fiction writers who struggle with wanting to tell the truth without exposing their families and friends?

KM: Just how much to reveal family secrets, how honestly to portray a family member’s flaws—these are things that every writer has to decide for himself or herself. A lot depends on the relationship the writer has NOW with his or her family.  I’m more careful with people who are my peers—my ex-husband, my friends, my neighbors—than with relatives who were adults when I was a child. With the latter, we were never on equal terms anyway. I didn’t choose to associate with them. If I wrote something about them that I hadn’t actually said to them first, I’m not that worried (what child tells her father that he is selfish?). With my peers—people I associated with by choice in one way or another—I try not to write anything about them that would be a surprise to them if they read it in print. For example, in Yarn, I portray my ex-husband as a Great Procrastinator—it took him several years to paint the outside of our house because every year, he only tackled one side of it. No one who read that in print would be surprised: he knew, our neighbors knew, our friends knew. Anyone who drove by our house during those years would have noticed.

My advice is to write without censoring yourself too much while you’re working on your first draft. Then take things out, change names, alter details, etc. to protect people’s feelings and privacy, if that becomes desirable or necessary. Unless you’re going to show your first draft to a lot of people who know your family and friends, it’s more important to protect your work at this early stage than to protect the people who may or may not be included or identifiable in the final draft.

MC: You’ve now lived in the United States longer than your native Japan. Do you still pick up on American nuances or have you adapted? What is it like when you travel to Japan?

KM: The cultural differences I notice in my present life are more about the geographical regions or socio-economic backgrounds within the U. S.  I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in my early forties after spending twenty years in small towns in the Midwest. Now I live in Washington, DC.  In the Midwest, most of my friends came from working-class families and hadn’t flown on an airplane till they were in their mid-twenties; out east, many of my friends and neighbors have graduate degrees and travel to foreign countries on business. Their outlooks on life are significantly different. 

In Cambridge, people didn’t make eye contact with strangers on the street, much less exchange small talk about the weather as most Midwesterners do. The regional differences within the U. S. seem to me just as potent as those among countries. In D.C., I live in a co-op building where we have to make group decisions about getting our windows and fences painted or hiring a landscape architect to improve our grounds. In these discussions, people’s attitudes about frugality and luxury, about what is necessary and what is desirable, are influenced by so many complicated factors: where they grew up, how they grew up, how much money they make now, to what extent they were formed by or rebelled against their childhood backgrounds. A person’s national or ethnic background is only one of the factors in determining how he or she makes the important personal, financial, or career decisions of his or her adult life.

I haven’t been to Japan in the last ten years so I’m not sure how I would react to being there. 

MC: At the 2009 RopeWalk Writer’s Retreat, you mentioned your writing relies heavily on the support of your cat, Ernest. In what way has Ernest affected the way you see the world? What kind of advice does he give?

KM: I live with two Siamese cats, Ernest and Algernon. Although I’ve been to one artists’ colony— the Ucross Foundation— several years ago, I work best in my own home, with Ernest and Algernon sleeping on the couch behind me or sitting next to me on the desk. They model and embody the calm but constant energy that I need to write: I’m sitting still but my mind is roaming everywhere. Also, once I have a draft that feels presentable, I like to read it to them. If they fall asleep, it’s meant to be a compliment. I also practice for my readings this way, especially if it’s a group reading—so as not to take up 25 minutes when I’ve been asked to read for 15 minutes.

Though both cats are very helpful in supporting my daily practice of writing, Ernest is my go-to cat for extra inspiration. Every morning before I start writing, Ernest and I do our “Siamese Mind-Meld.” We put our foreheads together, and all the great ideas he’s been shaping and refining in his elegant wedge-shaped head are transferred into mine. Ernest holds a very high standard. He is an obsessive cat—every detail is important to him. One year when we lived in a house where a robin was building a nest outside our window, Ernest sat watching that nest for weeks while Algernon—totally oblivious—slept in another room. Ernest has taught me a lot about sitting with an idea for weeks and months and waiting for it to take shape and flight.

MC: Can you tell us what you’re reading these days?

KM: I’m about 3/4 way through Robert Bolano’s 2666. I wasn’t so keen on the first two parts (whose main characters are academics) but because the book was a gift, I kept going. With the entrance of a journalist character, nick-named Fate, the book really picks up. This character has a larger potential for getting into trouble than the academics did. 

MC: What’s next for you?

KM: I tend to be very secretive about what I’m working on, at this early stage. I have some short story and essay ideas, and I hope one of them, when finished, will lead to a longer project. I’m afraid that if I talk about my projects too much, I might jinx them before they begin. It’s like letting the air out of a hot air balloon. I won’t even tell my best friends about what I’m working on or how it’s going. I don’t show my drafts to anyone until the piece is formed or solidified enough to try out at a reading or to send to my agent and to prospective editors. When I was a young writer, I found it very useful to be in a writing workshop, but now, I’d rather work on my own till I get the piece to a certain stage. Until then, only Ernest knows.