photo: Carina Fushimi |
Mike Fu is a writer, translator, and editor living in Japan. He has studied in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Suzhou, and Tokyo. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese cultural icon Sanmao was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Paris Review and was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a cofounder and former translation editor of the Shanghai Literary Review, and recently completed his Ph.D. in cultural studies at Waseda University. His debut novel is Masquerade (Tin House, October 29, 2024), a coming-of-age mystery--stylistically daring, with jigsaw plotting, lush sensuality, and a tender emotional core.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
An existential mystery involving a masked ball in Shanghai, a mushroom trip on Cape Cod, experimental theater, Brooklyn dinner parties, and ghosts of all kinds.
On your nightstand now:
I just finished Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn, translated by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle. This is the third book in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy that Mishima wrote before he attempted to overthrow the Japanese government and, failing to do so, committed seppuku. Impossible to sum up, but it's a fascinating series that balances esoteric philosophical musings with beautifully morbid prose and social caricatures. The last 30 pages or so of Temple of Dawn really did a number on me. I'm a bit apprehensive to start the last book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
In elementary school, I was obsessed with The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien for the expansiveness of its world, and the mythologies, languages, and customs of its peoples. By middle school, I was hooked on the gothic horror mysteries of John Bellairs, who remains an underappreciated author in my opinion. His books feature several recurring young male protagonists, each of whom has to confront unspeakable terrors and occult phenomena in small-town, midcentury America--with a ragtag group of misfit friends young and old, naturally.
Your top five authors:
James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, Donald Richie. I discovered their work almost by happenstance, and at very different times in my life. Simply put, their stories have touched me deeply, inspiring me to see the world anew and to write, goddamnit.
Books you've faked reading:
Despite my love of Tolkien, there were huge swaths of The Lord of the Rings that I "speed read" in my excitement to get through them all as a preteen. In my first semester of undergrad, we were assigned Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in conjunction with a screening of The Hours for a cinema class, and my feckless 17-year-old self couldn't get around to it. There were some other academic misses along the way, too, mostly during my first tour of grad school, when dense tomes of continental philosophy and literary theory (I won't name names) had me quaking in my boots and tongue-tied in the seminar room.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith. Kupersmith crafts a wry and unsettling narrative of contemporary Saigon by casting a shiftless Vietnamese American woman in the familiar archetype of an English teacher abroad. But then she dives into layers of colonial history through a substantial cast of characters, a thrillingly twisty plot, and scenes of fantastic grotesquerie. So skillfully executed and memorable, with a damn near perfect ending.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Mr. Ma and Son by Lao She, translated by William Dolby, a novel about a Chinese family running an antique shop in pre-World War II London. Admittedly, I still haven't gotten around to cracking it open, but the Penguin Modern Classics cover and my interest in the author, whom I haven't read much of, justified the purchase. Picked it up at the annual summer sale of Kinokuniya Shinjuku, the biggest foreign-language bookstore in Tokyo (and assumedly Japan, by extension).
Book you hid from your parents:
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I remember checking out this first book, and then the rest of the series in quick succession, from the Cleveland Public Library as a 16-year-old and feeling grateful for its inconspicuous title and cover. These adventures of an unabashedly queer and freewheeling San Francisco community in the 1970s taught me about California before I ever set foot there.
Book that changed your life:
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It was the perfect read for a brutal New York winter in my mid-20s, when I was still mustering up the wherewithal to get serious about writing. Auster's seminal triptych showed me how fiction could be at once playfully reflexive and dead serious, taking weirder and weirder turns while poking at the boundary between the writer and the story itself.
Favorite line from a book:
Oh, I have so many! There's a passage from Murakami's Underground--a nonfiction book about the cult-perpetrated sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995--that has lodged itself in my mind for years. It succinctly captures a motivating factor for my writing:
"Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. 'Storyteller' and at the same time 'character.' It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world." (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)
Five books you'll never part with:
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen Kingsbury--a beautiful collection of stories from a tumultuous era in modern Chinese history.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston--signed by the author at a 40th-anniversary event held in Brooklyn.
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee--I read more than half the book when I was 20 or so and never made it to the finish line, but it's survived quite a few purges, and I've lugged it from Los Angeles to New York to Tokyo. Someday I'll have the maturity to return to it again.
A secondhand copy of A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan--one of the most gripping novels I've ever read, recommended by a creative writing professor long ago.
Another Country by James Baldwin--a wistful, lovely, and delightfully unpredictable novel of race, class, and sexuality set in 1950s New York and France.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. What a wild ride. I love how masterfully he delineates the contours of this world and unspools the characters' fates over the course of generations. And that ending!