The art and craft of Julie Otsuka

(Representational image) Short novels can contain universes. (Image: Jay via Unsplash)

As contemporary European writers know, short novels can contain universes. In the best of these works, every word is chiselled, and the release of information is precise and patterned. This is certainly the case with Japanese-American author Julie Otsuka. In less than 200 pages, her novels portray sequestered lives with vividness and grace.

Otsuka’s work is also notable for her use of the first-person plural to give voice to entire communities. “We used to live in the desert,” recalls a member of an interned Japanese-American family during World War II in Otsuka’s debut, When the Emperor Was Divine. “We used to wake, every morning, to the blast of a siren. We used to stand in line for our meals three times a day.”

Her next, The Buddha in the Attic, dealt with the predicament of Japanese “picture brides” who travelled from their homeland to marry immigrants in the US. “On the boat we were mostly virgins,” is how it starts. “We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall.”

Otsuka’s use of the first-person plural is marvellously flexible. From similarities, the novel goes on to establish differences: “Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine.”

The author employs the same technique in The Swimmers, her new work. Where the earlier novels were based on past episodes, this one is set in the present day; where the others stayed with a community from start to finish, this one starts with a community and goes on to focus on a specific character.

The swimmers are a loose group of city dwellers, members of an underground swimming club. Their aquatic activity is a balm for aboveground afflictions. In the water, these professors, HR managers, finance professionals, advertising personnel, retired folk and others find that “bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories reawaken, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside…”

The first section is given over to the idiosyncrasies of this motley crew. Here and later, Otsuka makes use of another device: the list. In this, she combines the banal and the eccentric with accuracy and wit.

Among the swimmers, for instance, are “a winner of the green card lottery, a two-time nominee for Outstanding Professor of the Year, a nationally ranked go player, three guys named George (George the podiatrist, George the nephew of the disgraced financier, George the former welterweight Golden Gloves boxer).” Those to be avoided are “middle-aged men who insist upon speeding up the moment they sense they are about to be overtaken by a woman, tailgaters, lane Nazis, arm flailers, ankle yankers, the pickup artist.”

A crack appears in this idyllic space, literally and metaphorically. A hairline fracture on the floor of the pool plagues the swimmers with the sense that something is amiss, in the water and out of it. The crack spreads and grows but the pool authorities, despite investigations, cannot find the cause.

Like an adroit swimmer reaching the end of a lane, the novel now takes a flip turn. It zeroes into the life of one character, Alice, earlier described as a retired and forgetful lab technician. It turns out that she is suffering from dementia, and the rest of The Swimmers deals with her predicament and the impact on her family.

The first-person plural drops away as Otsuka describes Alice grappling with short and long-term memories. She remembers her best friend’s telephone number, but not that the friend has been dead for years. She does not recall what she ate for dinner last night, or when she last took her medicine. And then: “As the days slip by you will begin to forget more and more. Your terrible childhood during the war. All the beautiful gardens of Kyoto. The smell of rain in April. What you just ate for breakfast.”

At other moments – and this can be bemusing to begin with – the novel’s second-person narration addresses Alice’s daughter, a writer beset by memories of earlier times. Throughout, the prose is restrained and quiet, with a lightness of touch even during affecting situations. In ironic passages dealing with the care home, for instance, we’re told: “Problems we would rather not deal with are referred to as ‘nonissues’ and forwarded to the Care Quality Committee for further study and consideration.”

One admires the skill with which this is pulled off, but the novel does suffer from a crack of its own. The links between the first section about the swimmers and the later parts dealing with Alice aren’t as cohesive as they should be. It’s as though one of the swimmers breaks ranks to pull ahead of the rest and the writer follows without a backward glance.

In another work, this may be a fatal flaw that brings down the entire enterprise. That would be too harsh a judgement in this case, but it does makes The Swimmers less powerful than Otsuka’s earlier novels. It remains a lesson in how a writer can employ and rise above literary techniques to create an affecting testament.