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The Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters Scribners
book review by Christopher Klim
"Later, she would look back on this moment as one of the turning points of the summer. For it was the first time she had actively colluded against her aunt. Even in her happiness she was aware of crossing an invisible line of allegiance, leaving her auntie on the other side."
A touring novelist is often asked: Did that really happen to you? The answer is invariably no and, if the author is feeling particularly risky, yes. An important task undertaken by a writer is to make connections that are vital but missing from both the personal and the common consciousness. To accomplish this, an author of fiction must mine everything that he or she knows and shoot it through a prism of experience. It is hard to separate the writer from the story, and asking him or her to quantify a specific aspect would be akin to asking you if you just drank the perfect glass of water. What does it matter if it is genuinely authentic and essential?
This is one of the aspects that elevates award-winning author Mary Yukari Water's beautiful and poignant first novel, The Favorites. It is the tale of a group of Japanese women who are working through intergenerational relationships and the decisions that position them inside their personal stories. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford is a half-Japanese and half-American visitor to her mother's Japanese homeland for the summer. Waters understands this experience, and she reveals the cultural and family dynamic as both an insider and a visitor to this exotic locale. She accomplishes this in a way that the well-researched writer or the well-traveled journalist cannot. There are inner circles and outer circles within the family that can only be penetrated by tacit agreement, and there are inside faces and outside faces—wrought by historical, social, and person decisions—that may never be unveiled during the course of lifetime. "Uchi versus Soto: inner circle versus outer circle. ... Uchi meant the few allies in whom a woman could place absolute trust. Soto was everyone else…" Understanding these circles is vital to daily interaction. Treading through them like an American means disaster.
The curiosity of a child compels this foreign understanding, but Sarah suffers a psychological deficit for being half-Japanese and raised abroad in America, and she will continually battle the inevitable barriers from her family and even her own mother. Within this conundrum, the Japanese American contraposition is used, occasionally with humor, as a mirror to Sarah's dilemma. At one point, Sarah and her cousins play a game of "American Emotions," wrought through their skewed perception of American pop culture. "Sarah, wanting to seem as Japanese as possible, had been parodying American movies. 'I love you, son,' she said in a deep voice. 'You are very special to me.'" The idea of the western outward expression of feelings versus the eastern reluctance becomes a haunting theme as the story unfolds.
At the core of the secret family life—which ceremonially and rhythmically turns in beehive fashion with great energy, duty, and honor—is the revelation that due to overwhelming post WWII circumstances Sarah's grandmother was pressured into giving up her newborn child to her nearby childless sister-in-law. Like American Indians, shifting children within the tribe is not unusual, but in Sarah's family, the effects ripple through the generations. For the adopted child, who has let her true identity go unrecognized and unspoken for a lifetime, the result is an impenetrable outside face toward Sarah (her niece), Sarah's mother (her sister), Sarah's grandmother (her true mother), and likely the entire world. Sarah comes of age through this understanding, and only after tragedy strikes the heart of the family is a rare and unexpected connection achieved. So how different are we all in the end?
The Favorites is a novel that requires patience in the early going. We are slowly sipping foreign water here, mixed with drama that we will immediately recognize as our own. For Sarah, the family secrets arrive in pieces and riddles, but the unraveling is so deftly written it leaves the impression that the author was indeed part of the story. The sensory details—the taste, smell, and sight of Ueno, Japan—operate at a master's level. The emotional resonance—the love, compassion, and dignified handling of the characters—forces the reader to take pause in the small moments that so importantly define this family if not Japanese existence in general.
Like any novel that impresses and lingers both during and after the reading, the author's soul resides somewhere within these pages. The writer and story live in harmony and lift the book beyond the ordinary, or just like Sarah observes about Japanese emotions, first as a joke early on in the story and then more poignantly toward the end: "We let them ferment, her mother had said, till you can't tell them apart."
This is essential to understanding the story of how life goes forward, and it does not matter from which spring it was drawn. The Favorites is real, full of the stuff of life that we can all savor.
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