Reading Pat Conroy in Japan Suzanne Kamata

Reading Pat Conroy in Japan Suzanne Kamata

At the age of twenty-two, I set out from South Carolina for Japan with a copy of Pat Conroy’s The Water is Wide in my suitcase. I was about to spend a year as an assistant English teacher on the island of Shikoku on the government sponsored JET Program. I had no teaching experience, so I intended to consult Conroy’s memoir of educating underprivileged African American children on a South Carolina barrier island for inspiration. Of course, Tokushima Prefecture in the late 1980s, where I was assigned, was not exactly late 1960s Yamacraw (actually, Daufuskie) Island.

Japan was, by then, a highly educated, sophisticated, and wealthy country. Yet, the students that I expected to meet had had little or no contact with white foreigners, just as Conroy’s students had had little experience of the white people who lived on the “mainland” of Beaufort and beyond. My first experience of reading Conroy was The Lords of Discipline at the age of sixteen. I checked the book out of the local public library in Grand Haven, Michigan, after coming across a review of it. I recall being immersed in Conroy’s lush prose during spring break while sprawled across a bed in my grandparent’s trailer in Bradenton, Florida. In my diary, I wrote, “Finished reading The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, an excellent book. The writing and imagery were remarkable. I think about possible story plots and situations all the time. My deep thinking is not something common, it’s of a writer. Or so I hope. Sometimes I feel so different.” A few months later, just before my last year of high school, my family moved to South Carolina due to my dad’s job. I was already a little in love with the state due to Conroy’s prose. I remember my first sight of the Citadel’s white turrets, and the cadets in uniform who were oh-so polite. As an English major at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, I didn’t have much time to read outside the syllabi. But once I’d graduated, I picked up The Prince of Tides. I devoured it on the plane to Boston, where I was going to meet my then-boyfriend’s mother, and two of his sisters. His family was large and Irish-Catholic, like Conroy’s. His mother was an intimidating woman. She’d raised her six kids pretty much by herself, then gone on to become a lawyer. The kids were, or were on their way to becoming doctors, bankers, lawyers. When she noticed the book I’d been reading and asked about it, I couldn’t believe she’d never heard of Pat Conroy. I began to rave about his gorgeous writing. Later, at dinner in an expensive restaurant with my boyfriend, his mother, and her companion who happened to be the cousin of my favorite actor, I was asked what I planned to do in the future. I mentioned that I wanted to be an editor of literary fiction. “What do you mean by ‘literary?’” my boyfriend’s mother asked. I tried to explain that the words were important, more than the plot, that I was interested in beauty. I stumbled over my answer, already aware that being an editor would not be sufficient to impress. Editors didn’t make a lot of money. “Do you mean like that book you showed me?” she asked. “The one by Pat Conroy? Yes!” My boyfriend changed the subject. He seemed to be embarrassed by me. We broke up at the end of summer. A year later, I was bound for Tokushima. I had asked to be sent to a small town because I wanted to experience “real Japan.” I figured that while the large cities of the world have their own unique characteristics, they are similar in many ways, with the same chain stores, the same cultural mixes, and it is easy to remain in a Western bubble. Shikoku, as I would soon find out, was remote, but it had many surprising similarities to South Carolina. They are at about the same latitude, so the weather is pretty much the same – sultry in summer, and mild in winter. Both have wisteria, azaleas, palm trees, sea turtles, and wild boar. Both have small islands off the coast. In both places, people drink tea and are known for their hospitality. Both are bashed with hurricanes/ typhoons on a regular basis. On the day that Hurricane Hugo wreaked havoc on the Carolina coast, I met the Japanese physical education teacher who would become my husband. We were at a gathering organized by a mutual friend. On one of our first dates, I suggested that we go to see the movie version of The Prince of Tides which was called “South Carolina” in Japan. Later, I would bring him to the state with me for an actual visit, although the first time I attempted this, I accidentally booked him a ticket to Bogota, Colombia. (The travel agent had misunderstood me; this was before the internet.) I was in love and I wanted to marry this man, but first, I had to figure out if it was possible for me to have a literary life in the boondocks of Japan. I decided to try. After leaving the JET Program, I found a new job at a local Board of Education teaching elementary school children and adults English. I found a desk and chair set out for garbage pick-up in reasonable condition, and carried then up five flights of stairs to my apartment. There, I began to write a romance novel set in South Carolina. I started to submit the short stories that I had written in college to literary journals across the ocean, always including a self-addressed stamped envelope for the replies. My first literary publication was a short story, “France,” published in Half Tones to Jubilee at Pensacola Community College. I also managed to place a story about a waitress at a South Carolina truck stop in Printed Matter, a journal published in Tokyo. Having come across a few English-language literary journals in Japan, I decided to start one of my own. I put out calls for submissions, asked one of my adult students to design a cover, and published the first issue of Yomimono (translation: reading material). Through this project, I managed to connect with other writers in Japan, becoming part of a community of sorts. Then I decided to try to publish an anthology of stories by foreigners in Japan. I sent out one query letter – to Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley, California, which specialized in books about Japan – and received a positive reply. Convinced that I could indeed have a literary life in Japan, I married the P.E. teacher. A few years later, we bought a house, and it is there on the second floor, were we had wide windows looking out upon our neighbor’s garden, and the river beyond where I remember reading Beach Music. Again, I reveled in Conroy’s gorgeous prose, and the depths of feeling, the epic scope of his storytelling. Around this time, I started writing a novel set in South Carolina. I wasn’t ready to write about Japan yet; I was still absorbing the culture, still learning. And maybe I was a bit homesick. Inspired by my love of 1960s Motown girl groups, especially The Supremes; Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates; the Riot Grrrl movement in the Pacific Northwest; and my own youthful experiences, I began writing a story about an all-girl punk rock band in 1980s Columbia, South Carolina. I called it The Screaming Divas. Although I finished the novel shortly after having twins, and signed with a prominent literary agent, the book didn’t sell. “Since you’re over there, why don’t you write about Japan?” the literary agent suggested. My next novel, Losing Kei, about an American woman in Tokushima who loses custody of her biracial son and tries to get him back, was the first novel that I published. Having a couple of books in print enabled me to get part-time teaching jobs at local universities. One of these was a teacher’s college. I sometimes showed the students “Conrack,” the movie version of The Water is Wide to encourage them to think about their future profession and to teach them about my home state. I discovered that My Losing Season had been translated into Japanese. I bought a copy and loaned it out to students. Japan is a country that cheers for the underdog. Many fathers are strict, many school rules rigid. I thought that they would be able to relate. I edited a couple more anthologies, and wrote a few more books, for young adults and middle grade readers. But from time to time, I would revisit my earlier manuscripts, and revise them. When I heard that the University of South Carolina Press was launching a new fiction imprint, Story River Books, to be edited by Pat Conroy, I submitted The Screaming Divas. To my surprise, I received a lengthy reply from Pat and Jonathan Haupt, who was the director of USC Press.

Pat wrote: I wanted to like ‘The Screaming Divas’ more than I did and I believe I know what made it not work for me. A girls’ punk band out of Columbia in the eighties excited me and whetted my appetite for wildness and nihilism and drugs. The book delivered on all of that, but there is a caveat that I always warn young writers about. It’s almost impossible to make sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll interesting to anyone who was not there or who did not live deeply in that period—unless the writer can bring the characters to bewildering, stunning life where they burn into the readers consciousness as their songs and passion blaze out in the Columbia nights. I liked the four leads very much, but I failed to love them…Suzanne is a very good writer, but I loved her song lyrics in the book more than her storytelling. I would look for that same intensity and precision in her prose. But I enjoyed my time with the Divas.

Although it wasn’t an acceptance letter, it was clear that these two men had carefully read my story and that they had excellent ideas of how I could improve it. Jonathan offered suggestions of books that I should read, and Pat recommended restructuring the novel. Their vision took my breath away. It was both daunting and exciting. Even now, it remains the best editorial letter I have ever received in my life. It’s still possible that I will someday undertake the major revisions that these two brilliant editors proposed, but in the meantime, I got an offer of publication from Jacquelyn Mitchard for her young adult line, Merit Press. I took Pat’s advice to add more of a sense of place to heart, and incorporated other suggestions, and I wound up publishing the book as Screaming Divas, with Mitchard as editor. It was named to theALARainbow List, and featured on MTV.com, and I was proud of it, but I still thought of that other book that it could have been. I vowed that I would write another novel especially for Story River Books, just so that I would have a chance to work with Jonathan and Pat. Maybe it would be The Baseball Widow, which I had been working on for a long time. Or maybe this idea I had about a World War II socialite spy from Aiken. In the meantime, I had always dreamed of being a featured writer at the South Carolina Book Festival. Now that I had written and published a book set in the state, I submitted an application. To my delight, it was accepted. I was invited to be on a panel with Nina de Gramont (another favorite writer!) and Jeremy Whitley, discussing strong female characters. Of course, I had to pay my own way, and it was understood that I would not need hotel accommodations because I could stay with my parents. By this time, I was employed full-time in Japan as a university lecturer, with a salary and research budget. I decided to splurge on a hotel room where the other featured authors were staying so that I would be at the center of the action. I was probably the least famous person there, and I felt a bit starstruck. I remember peering out at the rain alongside Leila Meacham, and worrying about her hair, which was perfectly coiffed. I remember riding on a shuttle bus with Jason Mott, whose first novel had been made into a television series, and eating lunch at the same table as, if not exactly with, Ron Rash, as he lamented about New York City editors’ attitudes concerning Southern accents. I recall being charmed by Lee Smith as she sat onstage telling stories, and finding myself standing in close proximity to Gail Godwin as she checked into the hotel. Most of all, I remember leaving my hotel room, a copy of Screaming Divas in hand, and crossing paths with Pat Conroy. He was with a couple of other people, but when he saw me, he was immediately curious.

“Who are you?” he asked. I introduced myself as the author of Screaming Divas. I was so flustered that I dropped the book. “I loved that book,” he said to me, and turned to his companions to rave some more. I was surprised that he even remembered it, and I probably blushed. “Here,” I said, giving him the copy I had in my hands. “This is for you.” He asked me to sign it, and I did. Later, I bought his justpublished memoir, The Death of Santini. The line at his signing table was so long that even after I attended another writer’s hour-long session, there was still a thirty-minute wait. I took my place in the queue. From a distance, I watched as he chatted with each person who approached. When it was my turn, he signed, “To Suzanne Kamata, for the love of books and story. Congratulations on the Screaming Divas.” Two years later, the South Carolina Book Festival was no more. I read on the internet that Pat Conroy had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died shortly thereafter, and the Story River Books imprint was discontinued. As you may have guessed, I haven’t yet read all of his books, so I still have something to look forward to, though I regret that I will never have the chance to work with him as an editor. These days, I continue to teach my students about Pat Conroy’s life, and share the story of his teaching on an island off the coast of South Carolina, which is in many ways similar to Twenty-Four Eyes by Sakae Tsuboi, a famous Japanese novel about a teacher and her students on nearby Shodoshima. Pat Conroy was truly a generous soul and I feel privileged to have met him, and to have had him read my work.