Behind the Words: Fuji Rock and Ever After

Archives Series: Vol 1

Fuji Rock and Ever After, which may just be my favourite title for anything I've written, was first published in Gutter Magazine, issue 6, spring 2012. Gutter has been very good to me over the years, publishing a lot of my short fiction and some novel extracts. I reviewed for them for a while and I’ll have an essay in the next issue, number 25. I got my start publishing prose through Adrian Searle and Freight Books, beginning with the anthology The Hope That Kills Us (more on which in the future), then Gutter, and finally my first three novels before Freight *folded*. After the demise of Freight, Gutter was liberated and reborn, and is still publishing the best writing Scotland has to offer. I'm a subscriber and you should be too. Long live Gutter.

Rereading this story now, ten years after writing it, brings back vivid memories of time and place. It's set in Gifu City, although I never specify that in the story; there's no reason to and I always feel that the more details you leave out, the more a reader can bring to the text. But for me, as Kasumi walks to the station and rides the train home, I can feel every step, recognise every landmark. It was a walk, a train ride, I did myself many, many times.

The story was drafted in Pronto, a café in the Gifu Meitetsu train station precinct over the course of a few Wednesday afternoons. I taught a private English lesson in the staff room of a hair salon in Gifu once a week (I still don't remember quite how I ended up with that gig) and invariably had a couple of hours to kill. I was self-employed at that point, running my own school and relying on whatever work I could pick up to get by. The travelling was the worst, but in retrospect it was something of a golden period for productivity - all that down time between jobs, all that sitting on trains and hanging around in cafés meant I had plenty of time for writing. It's no surprise that my first four books - the three novels and my poetry collection, Fractures - were all written in this period. Wednesdays were fun: drafting and an early dinner; the class, which was always a laugh; a few beers with nearby friends. Not a bad way to get over hump day.

I haven't been back to Gifu City much recently. The last time was at the end of 2020 for practice with Homesick Nomad, a promising band that fell apart because of Covid and the restrictions on practice and gigs. Motivation is difficult to keep in the abstract. A year before that I had a nice Italian lunch with Alan Spence, his wife Janani, and haiku poet Ikuyo Yoshimura. Before that... memory blurs.

I've never actually been to Fuji Rock, the music festival in Niigata (nowhere near Mt. Fuji). The year this was published I went to Summersonic, the other big festival in Japan (Reading/Leeds to Fuji's Glastonbury) and saw Garbage, New Order, Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, Death Cab for Cutie and Crystal Castles... that year was very much about the old school which suited me fine.

Fuji Rock is still on my list yet as I age the prospect of mud, young people dancing all night, and chemical toilets doesn't seem so attractive. If there were a hotel nearby... Old punks don't die, they just stand at the back, nodding. Saying that, Japanese festivals aren't like those in Britain. Toilets remain usable. The mud remains nothing but mud. But the possibilities for drama are heightened - at Summersonic in 2012 the stage was struck by lightning just before New Order were due to play. After a delay, they came on to perform a truncated set. Seeing them do Blue Monday and Love Will Tear Us Apart below the retreating storm clouds is a memory that is unlikely to haze any time soon.

This story was one of my first forays into writing from the perspective of a Japanese character. I delayed for a while, in part because I'd seen it done badly elsewhere and worried I’d mess it up myself. One of the questions writers have to contend with when writing in English from the perspective of a character whose internal monologue and spoken language is not English, is how to portray that. You can attempt a transliteration, render Japanese (in this case) in a form and rhythm of English that echoes Japanese forms and rhythms; you can adopt a neutral form, removing idioms, colloquialisms, hints of dialect, accent or period markers; or you can go for a metaphorical, representational approach, focusing on the attitude and intentions of the speaker, the reality behind the language, rather than the specific language itself. That is what I went for here, and have continued with since. Kasumi and her friends talk something like teenagers using English would.

It's an approach I prefer for mainly aesthetic reasons. David Mitchell has written about inventing a "past-ese," a neutral English used in historical fiction, something Mantel does well. Personally, I don't like this in my writing because while it avoids anachronisms that might pull a reader out of the story, it also denudes the language somewhat. I think idiosyncrasies are what makes language interesting. There's no such thing as "standard" English. The Queen's English is still a register, a dialect. The Queen has an accent, we all do. To deny that, for me, is to lose one of the joys of writing.

I won't say too much about the first option above, representing Japanese in a transliterated English. I don't like it because it smacks of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanys, that Peter Sellers-esque representations of foreigners and the funny ways they speak. I’ve read countless war novels that have Japanese characters saying things like "O-Honourable husband" and "Ah-so!" I shudder even to write it here, let alone attempt it in a story.

In all my writing since, I've gone with this metaphorical approach. I avoid anachronisms, and idioms that don't make cultural sense (a Japanese person wouldn't say "it's brass monkeys" or anything similar, Japan not having the naval heritage English language draws on), but I do try to make the language relatable rather than distancing. At heart is my belief that over the centuries and over the continents, we are not all that different. An 18-year-old man from Aberdeenshire in 1943 (Jack, in my first novel), a teenage boy in Dumfriesshire in the 1700s (Murdoch in Silma Hill) and a university student in Gifu in 2011 (Death Note in this story) have far more in common than in contrast. This is where that hideous formulation "boys will be boys" holds true. While morality has changed, while technology has changed, while the way we think and talk about the world has changed, what drives us as humans has changed little - love, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Teenage boys have been teenage boys since the first one took a burning stick from a fire and drew a cock and balls on the cave wall. My approach to translated representation draws from this well, for better or worse. It may not be to your taste, you may prefer the neutral approach, and that's fine - that's the pleasure of literature, it caters to all. But this little essay explains why I made - and continue to make - those choices.

I've updated the story slightly since it was published in Gutter, removing a couple of references that date it, and tightening the language, but I have to say I'm very proud of this piece. It does what I set out to do and I think it has held up well over the decade.

I would write it differently today, and hopefully better, but that cringe all artists feel when they view older work shouldn't be allowed to devalue that work. Janice Galloway once said, in a writing class she ran I was lucky enough to attend, that you do the best you can at the time and then move on to the next thing. I still think this is very good advice and frankly, if Janice Galloway tells you to do something, you'd be a fool to do anything different.