The dark side of the sun

In her fourth novel, Radhika Jha gives voice to a Japanese woman, but is she only Japanese?

Author, Radhika Jha with her latest book "My Beautiful Shadow". Photo: Meeta Ahlawat

It could all be said to have started with a dream. “I had a dream, about this woman who’s preparing for a family holiday. And she’s very stressed,” says Radhika Jha, whose latest novel, “My Beautiful Shadow” (HarperCollins) was launched in New Delhi recently. In the next part of the dream, she saw the family leaving in the car, but the woman, who had done all the packing and organising, was not in the car. The family seemed not to have noticed.

The chilling realisation that one’s presence is required only for the convenience of the family rather than any enjoyment of one’s company must have come to nine out of ten married women across the world at some point in their lives.

“I never really understood what feminism was about until I got married,” remarks the author, also a trained Odissi dancer, who has written three earlier novels and a collection of short stories. “You start off thinking you’re indispensable, and the real downer is when you realise you’re not indispensable, you realise you’re not even visible.”

But this novel is set in Japan. It contains aspects of the country’s society, contemporary history and traditions that could only be Japanese. She comments, “The theme is universal, that’s why I felt brave enough to write it.”

She did not intend to write about Japan when she initially went to live there. A novelist needs to get inside the minds of one’s characters, and to do this must have a clear grasp of, as well as fearless opinions on, what moulded those minds, and the effect of their actions.

Obviously a strong conviction set her on the path to writing the story of young Kayo, married to the first man she falls in love with and a mother before she reaches 20, a woman who finds a balm, if only temporary, for her heart’s black hole (“

Makkura , as you must know, means pure blackness in Japanese… a place beyond thought, beyond action…without sound, colour, light,” says the narrator) in the glittering machinations of the consumer universe.

“The dream is one side but there’s a deeper reason why it’s set in Japan,” says the author. On the one hand, she points out, Japan is an “advanced, developed, highly technical world,” and on the other “a society that has held on to its culture.”

Like many eastern societies, this culture gives more importance to upholding the identity and prestige of the group (family, company, neighbourhood, group of friends) than to individual choice. Thus the passion for clothes — shopping therapy if you will — she feels, is a “way of resolving the tension between the individual and group responsibility.”

As in the story of Kayo, it begins “as a form of rebellion and then it takes over.”

To those who don’t know Japan intimately, the intensity and wan beauty of the novel, combined with phrases and sentences in Japanese scattered throughout (the author has learnt the language and speaks it fluently) seem to combine in an authentic voice. What would those who have grown up in that society feel? Radhika says she has had a range of reactions but no one said it was lacking in authenticity.

“Some people got very angry,” she says. Some demanded how she could “write this kind of thing about Japan,” with the sad question, “I thought you loved Japan.”

Some, she says, even said they “never felt it was written by a non-Japanese person.” Significantly, “No one ever said it was written from a Western perspective.”

If there was initial hesitation to write a book about a country that only became her home for six years due to her husband’s posting, now Radhika is set to write not one but two more books set in Japan. “Because I think Japan is the laboratory of the future.”