To Read or Not to Read (the Ex-Pat Memoir)?

Recently, I’ve been in a stalemate with a friend over a book. Since I was an English major and so was she, locking eyes and refusing to budge about literary topics isn’t something that is unfamiliar to either one of us – especially with each other. However, this book, and the root of its controversy, comes out of a slightly different place than my usual discrepancies about literature do.

The book is Hokkaido Highway Blues, by Will Ferguson, published in 2003. Although I’ve never read it, I know roughly that it’s about a guy who starts south in Japan and works his way north, following the cherry blossoms as they open up across the landscape of the whole country. As a premise, this sounds interesting enough – hanami is, after all, one of the most magical times in Japan, a time which makes you pause and think, Hey, this weird country might not just be a bizarre, time-warped Saturday-Morning-cartoon-gone-wrong and might actually have some cool things going for it, a time which makes you forgive all the mind-boggling stuff that happens to you in a day because every crosswalk and too-tiny side street looks so damn pretty. The concept of taking a trip across Japan with hanami in mind, maintaining that lovin’ feeling for longer than the short week it lasts in any one place, seems like it would portray Japan at its most lovely and appreciated and impressive, and would probably leave the writer with an indelible sense of the beauty of the country, making the aspects that don’t make sense easier to swallow, and the inevitably interspersed, monologued musings on the differences in culture, and the nature of the Japanese, and the pros and cons of each, and blah blah blah, shimmer a bit more in the springtime sunlight than in the dead of snow-soaked winter.

But like I said, I haven’t read it. Maybe my prediction is all wrong. That’s exactly the controversy. Basically, I’m convinced that all ex-pat memoirs about Japan are essentially the same. My friend says this one is somehow set apart from the others, and from my own experience, and is worth the read. I say I can’t be bothered, now or probably ever, to read it.

Since I am an ex-pat currently living in Japan, I can’t really imagine someone else in my position saying something truly unique that hasn’t been said before, or that I myself haven’t thought or said before, or that my friends and colleagues and I haven’t discussed before, albeit they may be able to say it more eloquently than I have. The idea of reading an ex-pat memoir, even one that is “hilarious,” according to my friend, seems much too much like preaching to the choir, which I do not view as the point of literature (except for possibly satires, but since the book in question is not a satire, nor was it intended to be one, this point does not apply). I read to experience new things, or things from a new perspective, not to read about what I am already experiencing, stylistically expressed. My life, right now and for the last two years, has been Japan and the Japanese, and this is my home (at least for now, it feels like home). I have no desire to have that acute of a degree of form-equaling-content in my reading material and my real world. Why be that meta, I ask? Reading an ex-pat memoir will only confirm what I already know to be true, while simplifying some things (as is inevitable in expressing experiences) and expanding on others. I don’t care to have my own perspective thus affirmed – I would rather have it broadened by perspectives that are not so closely aligned with my own, and I do not think ex-pat memoirs can be anything but so closely aligned with my own. What quotes my friend has chosen to send me from the book have only confirmed this bias to be true.

I’m not anti-ex-pat memoir. If we were somehow talking about the ex-pat memoir of a Japanese in the West, or a Westerner teaching in Venezuela, those I would read, given they are insider’s viewpoints I don’t already understand. The Western ex-pat in Japan, however – I already understand all too well. There isn’t anything new to be said, just the same sentiments said in different ways.


The book in question

I hadn’t realized the depth of my distaste for this idea of reading such a book until its pages were being pushed on me by my well-meaning friend (whose recommendations, it should be noted, I am usually interested in). The idea is almost repulsive to me and seems an absurd waste of time. Granted, I am willing to admit to a certain level of arrogance on this point, seeing as how the idea is so repugnant that I haven’t read even one complete specimen from the genre I am denouncing, outside of essay-type writing and blog writing, my short forays into which have done nothing but confirm my pre-held bias against them. I don’t read them for the same reason I didn’t read them before I came here, and I doubt I will read them after I leave – I want my experience in Japan to be as untainted by the experiences of others, unknown to me, as possible. Although I know this isn’t entirely achievable – as with anything, we all come into adventures with ideas about how they’re going to go – I wanted (and want, and will want) my time here to be as uniquely my own as it can be, with me finding my own way to express my views about culture and thought. Even if they are not the most stylistic, they will be mine, the aggregate of my experiences, and I’d rather have my Japan be thus my own, not an amalgamation made up of the views of many others before me.