Mrs. Murakami’s Garden by Mario Bellatin Reviewed by Shannon Nakai

Mrs. Murakami’s Garden by Mario Bellatin

Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021

Translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary

Reviewed by Shannon Nakai 

In the beginning, a garden was the theater and launchpad for creation, but in the opening line of Mario Bellatin’s novel, Mrs. Murakami’s titular garden is about to be dismantled. This tension between creating and dismantling is suspended throughout the story well into the facetious appendices and translator Heather Cleary’s tongue-in-cheek note. The plot is straightforward, the commentary witty and incisive. Yet, the footnotes and italicized Japanese terms suggest shrewd interplay between author and reader as the inescapable truth becomes apparent: everything, including the country that he has chosen for his setting and the very novel he has projected himself to be “translating,” is an illusion or product of Mario Bellatin’s imagination. (Which seems fitting, considering that this is the illustrious mastermind who once fabricated a Japanese writer to attribute literary inspiration and even went so far as to write his biography; and hired actors to perform as famous Mexican authors at a conference entirely of his own orchestration.)1 Like his character who “gorges himself on pineapple or strawberries and would then spray [famous works of art] with a layer of yellow or red vomit,” so too does Bellatin’s Mrs. Murakami’s Garden desecrate, albeit less overtly, the subjects of decadence, the politics of translation, and its very own existence as a novel.

Originally published twenty years ago by Tusquets Editores, Mrs. Murakami’s Garden interweaves a nonlinear timeline of aspiring art critic and college student Izu, who ultimately becomes the wife and domestic acquisition of novice art collector and business magnate Mr. Murakami. On the surface, Izu’s position straddles the East and the West; she negotiates a wardrobe consisting of traditional kimonos with kilts and fashionable sweaters. She publishes a scathing critique of Murakami’s collection in a prestigious art and culture magazine (thus defying the influence of the “Radical Conservatives” who hover formidably over the academic circles) while attending to her bed- (or tatami-)ridden father. She deliberates between a solitary life as a professional versus a suitable match for marriage. (Two suitors inauspiciously die or disappear, leaving Izu to face the precarious possibility of spinsterhood.) At her constant side on campus are her professor and the editor-in-chief of the art magazine, both who take an enormous level of interest in her. Off-campus, she is attended to and chaperoned by housemaid Etsuko, whose enigmatic presence is further underscored by Mr. Murakami’s scandalous dying request to see Etsuko’s bare breasts one last time. 

We see shadows of the Murakami marriage, as the novel concentrates on scenes leading up to and after it. Within the marital arena, husband and wife seem to embody the ideals of the East and the West: Mrs. Murakami’s traditional garden, emblematic of the traditional domestic life she chooses; the husband’s flouting of Japanese principles by his arguably tasteless curation and his Western car; the negotiation between the Eastern value of loyalty to family (Izu with her ailing father and Murakami with his comically ailing first wife) with the Western ideal of the pursuit of happiness (Murakami with his art collection and Izu with her art criticism); the absurd, perfunctory marriage contract (Izu was allowed, by contract, to retain only her copy of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows). Tanizaki surfaces periodically throughout this short novel; at one point the narrator asserts that this slim black-and-white book (first published in 1933 and hugely influential in architectural and interior design studies) bore a much greater influence on Izu than she consciously comprehended. Tanizaki’s adamant preference for Eastern architecture and aesthetics that eschewed the harsh lighting and garish structures popular in the West were based on Japanese cultural ideals. He saw the proliferation of electric lights and blue-ink pens as a signpost of Americanization, lamenting Japan’s need to “be imitating the West” and “come off the loser for having borrowed,” recalling the outcome of WWII. (Bellatin pays a similar nod to history with the immense disapproval of Murakami’s post-war American car purchase.) In a sense, Izu’s decisions as she pits vocational aspirations against familial and marital obligations may parallel a similar systemic dilemma.

Yet, such critique over East versus West ultimately thwarts itself as it becomes increasingly apparent that Bellatin is playing us. His Japan straddles a boundary, not between cultures, but between reality and illusion. Throughout the novel are constant references to a nonexistent political party, nonsensical footnotes defining cultural signposts that are also nonexistent, and a game of “three white stones against three black stones”—adjacent to Go, an actual Japanese game, but nothing close to the violence that Bellatin’s version espouses. The footnotes themselves are farcical in their placement: the first mention of Etsuko’s role as a saikoku (and also the first footnote in the book) only reads, “See Footnote 5.” Indeed, such a term (and concept) are ludicrous, as the conundrum in the role’s description implies: “A saikoku, really, as the role was understood in imperial times: something between a servant, a housekeeper, and a chaperone. Saikokus performed all these functions and, at the same time, none.” Some terms Bellatin retains do, in fact, exist (the kimono, tatami mats, Kintaro), but the reference to the somobono delicacy, the fuguya baton, or the cultural code that prohibited girls from building snowmen are completely outlandish. My brow never left my hairline as I scanned through the footnotes, later run by my Osakan father (who now owns his own copy of Mrs. Murakami’s Garden).

Placing his narrative in a Japan-that-is-not-Japan is a curious decision. Indeed, Bellatin is not the first to choose Japan as an artificial backdrop for a narrative that rubs against the grain. Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, loosely based on an actual story in Japan, nonetheless juxtaposes Japanese aesthetics and characters against the textures of the Italian language; and Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 nearly all-Caucasian film adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It is set in 19th-century Japan. That Bellatin’s worldbuilding includes non-Japanese items and also Japanese “imports” in Japan suggests a similar interplay between fact and fiction. Add to that the extensive use of italicized Japanese terms. A burgeoning critique in multilingual discourses is the othering of languages by the use of italics. Bellatin hyperbolizes such distancing of the “exotic” by italicizing and defining loan words long familiarized into western lexicon, like kimono and futon. (Haiku also makes an appearance, and Bellatin’s definition is hilarious.) 

The appendix offers superfluous details that may less enhance the meaning or events of the novel than provide a playfully superfluous romp for the reader. In the translator’s note, Heather Cleary vehemently champions Bellatin’s decisions as a translator himself against his would-be critics. (The alleged original author’s name is never mentioned.) Rather, Cleary praises Bellatin’s prowess as a translator for breathing life into the stale original version (it is an exact replica). Recalling William Goldman’s “abridgement” of fictitious S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride, this “translated” novel of Bellatin’s calls into question the colonial politics of projecting, distorting, and reinventing both the texts and the cultures that produced them. His other scathing critique lies in the milieu of highbrow arts that take themselves too seriously; indeed, Cleary outlines Bellatin’s ideal canon in her translator’s note, which includes allusions to his earlier works (“an opera performed by dogs” or the “definitive study of an undiscovered text by Joseph Roth”) as well as scholarly articles written in haikus or “notes toward an aesthetics of ellipsis in epistolary communication.” The invitation is sardonically playful and enticing. As he once stated in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, “To me, literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders.” Mrs. Murakami’s Garden is a witty banter between author and reader, the latter who must check all expectations at the door before engaging in the bizarre experience that Mario Bellatin offers to us as reading. 

1

Mochkofsky, Gabriela. “Mexico’s Literary Prankster Goes to War with His Publisher.” The New Yorker (2015).

Shannon Nakai is a poet and book critic whose work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Cream City Review, Atlanta Review, Image, Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Heavy Feather, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar and Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA from Wichita State University, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Follow her on Twitter @shanviolinlove.

30 December 2021