|
|
| photo: Rob Sabal | |
Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. Her work has been translated into six languages. She is a professor of creative writing and the director of the MFA program at Emerson College. After her father's death in 2010, Yoshikawa began writing about him and their relationship, essays that appeared in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Story, LitHub, Longreads, and Best American Essays. These became the basis for her memoir of her father, Secrets of the Sun (Mad Creek Books, February 8, 2024).
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A quest to understand my brilliant, charismatic, and violent father, a Japanese physicist and fusion energy researcher who led a life filled with secrets.
On your nightstand now:
Isle McElroy's People Collide. A novel with a premise that only an author of singular gifts could pull off: a husband and a wife wake up in each other's bodies, à la Freaky Friday. That McElroy is trans makes the experiences of the out-of-his-body husband that much more fascinating, and when the character and his wife feel that old physical pull toward each other in their new bodies--well, I won't spoil the surprise, delight, and oh-no-they're-not thrill of that scene for you. I finished the novel weeks ago, but it's so mesmerizing, smart, and thought-provoking that I still have it by my bed so I can thumb through and marvel at different parts.
Han Kang's The Vegetarian, another novel about a married couple. When it came out in English in 2016, it was an international sensation. I'm almost done with it and all I can think is why the heck did I put off reading it for so long??
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's Digging Stars. I'm about to start it and I can't wait.
Favorite book when you were a child:
E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, because:
- I read it soon after my family had returned to America after a two-year stint in Japan, when my English was shaky and I felt scared and very alone. The book gave me hope that I'd someday find my place and even a friend or two.
- It's a book about the fight against bias, the importance of words, the possibility and power of unlikely relationships, and the departure that awaits us all--the exact themes of my new memoir, so what if my book is about Asian-American people while Charlotte's Web is about the struggles faced by arachnids and swine? Clearly the book shapes me still.
- I have a soft spot for talking pigs. A predilection that not even Animal Farm could cure.
Your top five authors:
With the caveat that this list changes constantly:
Kōbō Abe. Strange, surreal stories that unerringly capture life today.
Toni Morrison. Gorgeous prose; compelling stories; brilliant insights on human nature, history, and life. What more could anyone want?
Marilynne Robinson. Sentences to die for.
Sophocles. I taught Oedipus Rex recently in a class in a medium-security prison for men, and was moved and more surprised than I should have been to see how the students responded to a text written by a Greek more than 2,000 years ago--a story of a man trapped and undone by fate.
Tom Stoppard. What he does with language! I see his plays in the theater whenever I can, but his words are every bit as incandescent on the page. My favorite text of all time might just be Arcadia.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby-Dick, natch.
Books I've pretended I haven't read: the entire Bridgerton series.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Devon Capizzi's 2021 story collection My Share of the Body. Stories that are wise, funny, astonishing, and true. Devon was my student at Emerson, and it was my honor and privilege to work with them. Very excited to see what they do next.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Tale of Genji, Japan's first novel, penned by an 11th-century noblewoman named Murasaki Shikibu.
An experience that inadvertently confirms the wisdom of the saying about a book and its cover. I bought it 20 years ago, and I've yet to open it.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu. It's a manga and I had the Japanese version. It terrified me so much I couldn't sleep at night, but I was obsessed. I read it over and over with a flashlight under the covers, scaring myself silly.
Book that changed your life:
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Genius.
Favorite line from a book:
From Andrew Marvell: "Thus, though we cannot make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run." Because, really, what else can we do?
Five books you'll never part with:
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Sublime.
Hiroko Sherwin, Eight Million Gods and Demons. The propulsive novel that my fearless mother wrote, in English, about Japan, World War II, and five generations of our family.
Maus by Art Spiegelman. A book that drives home a truth that I realized anew while writing my memoir: people, even or maybe especially our parents, are mysterious and irreducible.
The Riverside Shakespeare.
My dog-eared, tattered copy of Little Women.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A.S. Byatt's Possession. A spectacular read--and oh, that ending.
Favorite bookstore:
Bluestockings, New York's only queer, trans, and sex-worker-run bookstore, a cooperative and amazing activist space that is run by my stepchild Matilda Sabal.
Refuge, entertainment, companionship, salvation: books have meant so much to me. As readers and writers, we are all indebted to the work of booksellers. Blessings on your efforts.