Male and Female Memoir: Part II

I finished two memoirs about Japan recently -- Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING.

Granted, these writers went to Japan at different times -- Iyer in the 1980s and Rizzuto in 2001 -- and for different reasons.  Iyer didn't have any family connection with Japan at all but had been fascinated with the country ever since a brief stopover with his mother when he was young.  And his interest in Zen led him to choose Kyoto for his stay as well as to contact many people practicing Zen. He even lived in a temple himself for awhile.  From my point of view, I have to say, I think his interest was much too intellectual to really lead anywhere, but nonetheless it was a focus for him. 

Rizzuto went for completely different reasons.  She is half-Japanese and she wanted to explore the impact the bombing of Hiroshima had on Japanese Americans who were caught up in that event.  Perhaps these unfortunate people were visiting relatives in Japan at just the wrong time or had left the States rather than live in a relocation camp.  Naturally, she chose Hiroshima as her base.  She didn't know people personally ahead of time but she had several connections, and she had also received a grant to write a book based on her research -- a novel that seems to have been abandoned in favor of the memoir she finally published.

But, although these differences are very real, what strikes me more is the difference in tone.  I have been trying to pin this down, to put in words this difference which I've noticed again and again in memoirs of men and women, and maybe I'm getting close.  I think it is that the main question around which men form their narrative is, "How did this experience change me?" while the main question women ask is, "How did this experience help me discover who I really am?"

Maybe this seems like a subtle difference but, really, I think it makes all the difference.  It seems that men, as a rule, already assume that they know who they are.  Their experience, especially in a foreign country, will add to who they are and perhaps cause them to reconsider things they have always considered true, but the self who is having those experiences is never basically in doubt.

But with women, the result seems almost always to be, "I thought I was this sort of person, but through this experience I have now discovered that I am not that person I always thought I was: I am a quite different person, or maybe I am someone I have not yet completely discovered."  So, for example, with Rizzuto, she went to Japan leaving her family in New York, but her research into the effect of the bomb on the lives of survivors could not be separated from the effect of those she interviewed on her own personal life.  She had thought she was one kind of wife and mother but before long began to question the roles she had played so naturally up until that time.

Iyer's outcome is more modest.  There is no doubt that he has been affected deeply by his experience -- and especially by the "lady" with whom he became involved -- but he goes home with his basic "self" in tact.  Of course, if he'd taken Zen more seriously, that might not have been the case, but one doesn't usually find what one doesn't know one is looking for, and Iyer does not seem to have thought he was looking for a deeper, truer self. 

MALE AND FEMALE APPROACHES TO MEMOIR

I'm still reading both of the memoirs I mentioned in my last two posts -- and some thoughts have been percolating about the difference between male and female writers.  Here we have two excellent memoirs about living in Japan, one by a man and one by a woman, and not for the first time I have the suspicion that there is a gender-based difference in how the author's narrative is approached.  I've seen this difference, too, in two other memoirs, reviewed on the "Finding Oneself Abroad" page of this blog:  MANGO ELEPHANTS IN THE SUN, by Susan Herrera and SURVIVING PARADISE, by Peter Rudiak-Gould.  Although in this case the two stories have different settings, their similarity comes from their being stories of young people fresh out of college who go to a third world country to teach English.

So, I have two sets of books here -- and I don't pretend this small sample makes any kind of definitive conclusion possible.  Rather, what follows is just a hypothesis. (And if this idea is already out there, I'd be interested in knowing.)

It seems to me that women's approach, and the language they use to describe their experience, is self-referential:  "When that happened, I felt so . . .. "  Men tend to skip this kind of analysis.  Sometimes they use language that may imply how they feel -- the "objective correlative," to borrow from TS Eliot -- but often they seem to be more interested in describing the world than in observing how they feel about it.

I've noticed how this plays out in my own little writing world.  I sometimes review books for a certain journal, and after the first couple of submissions, I noticed that whenever I made self-referential comments in my reviews, the (male) editor always cut them.  For example, "I didn't find the dialogue realistic," might be changed to, "The dialogue isn't realistic."

What is the difference between these two statements?  In the first, the writer is stating that she herself had a certain experience but leaving open the possibility that others' experience might be different.  The second statement assumes that the writer can speak for all readers.  And the modesty of the first type of  statement -- if I can call it that -- may be the reason that, according to one study I read, women writers are far less likely to be published in the top literary journals than men are.  What women call modesty may translate as lack of assurance in men's ears.

But it's not just modesty, I don't think.  Relating this back to the memoir question, it seems to me that women are simply more interested in subjective experience than men are.  There are exceptions, of course -- among poets, especially -- but for the most part, this generality seems to hold and to be reflected in the way each gender approaches memoir.


 

Novels, memoirs and Pico Iyer in Japan

I finally started reading Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK.  Despite my having lived in Japan for two years plus a summer, I put off reading this story set in Japan because I thought it was a novel and some critic I read (maybe just an Amazon reader) said that Iyer hadn't lived in Japan long enough to really understand it. 

But when I actually got the book in my hands, I found that it was not a novel but a memoir.  And that makes all the difference.  So I'm asking myself why it would be OK to me if someone misrepresented Japan in a memoir but not in a novel.

I think it's because if I read a novel, I know the characters and plot are more or less made up, but I expect the setting to be realistic (unless it is fantasy, of course).  If a novel takes place in a specifically named location, I expect that the manners, the relationships between the sexes, the street scenes, etc., to be realistically drawn.  I expect even that, through reading a fictional story about a place, I will learn something about it I didn't know before .  The author, in a sense, sets himself or herself up as the authority whom I expect to give me a trustworthy vision of what life is like in that place. 

Strangely, I don't have those expectations of a memoir writer.  I expect that a writer, when using his own voice, is providing a personal point of view.  I allow that the writer had such and so experience in a given place, and that others who go there might have a very different experience and point of view.  The author, in that instance, is the authority only for his own experience.  So even if a given writer's experience in Japan is different from mine -- and from what I've read so far, Iyer's experience, especially in Zen temples, is very different -- I cannot even call it "misrepresentation" because it isn't supposed to be a general portrayal of "how things are."

Iyer's memoir is vague about the time it takes place, but it feels like the 1980s.  At the beginning of Chapter 4, Iyer says that he moved into a guesthouse in Kyoto named I.S.E. -- and suddenly, I am there -- because in fact, I myself lived during the summer of 1984 in that very guesthouse!  Wouldn't it be a remarkable to learn these several decades later that I, unknowingly, once had Pico Iyer for a housemate?

So the streets he describes in this chapter are the same streets I walked along.  I remember especially my first encounter with a talking vending machine where, parched, I made my purchase of a can of beer after coming home late on a stifling summer evening from teaching English in Osaka.  Domo Arigato Gozaimasen -- "Thank you very much!" -- the machine said after I made my purchase. These days it is commonplace for machines to talk to us, but I remember how startled I was that first evening when, breaking the silence of the night, the machine offered its appreciation of my patronage!

Through reading Iyer's account of these streets, though, I also realize how very much I failed to notice.  Iyer has eyes to see and the words to describe what he sees.  And it doesn't matter if the eyes he sees through are different from those of someone else -- certainly they are different from a Japanese but also from other foreigners -- because a memoir is meant to be specific to the writer -- at the same time as it lets us into a world we can now share.