Plum Wine

I found this book at a library sale. I enjoy getting books I have never heard of at library sales, maybe partly because of the risk involved. It sounded good: a suspense novel about a young American woman teaching in Japan. Lee Smith called it “memorable” on the cover. I like reading about foreign settings. I myself applied to teach for a year in Japan once, and ended up teaching for a year in France.

In this book review I must be diligent to apply John Updike’s six rules for reviewers, which are well worth reading and following.

Plum Wine is not the book I hoped it would be. It has many merits, such as describing the effects of the atomic bomb on the people who lived in Hiroshima. I learned more than I knew about that particular experience.

The premise is intriguing: a woman who dies mysteriously and bequeaths her scroll-diaries to the American teacher Barbara, who then has to make sense of the gift. It is cute to read about the Japanese people’s efforts to pronounce her name—”Balabala.” But is the book as good as it could be, given what it is? It is hard to pin down what is lacking.

Some of the things that annoy me most about the book are actually very true to life. I was frustrated with the main character because she makes only the most meager, half-hearted efforts to learn Japanese, even though her failure to do so isolates her and magnifies all her problems. However, this seems to be very common among short-term American expatriates.

She has a superficial relationship with the people around her and doesn’t seek their guidance in very important matters. But I experienced a similar estrangement when I lived in France. It was hard for me to obtain guidance from the French people I knew. Whether it is caused by pride or by cultural barriers, this is realistic.

Barbara develops an intense devotion to a Japanese lady she seems to have known only very slightly. This seems contrived to the reader, but it is true that when you are all alone in a foreign country, you can become strongly attached to the people you are thrown together with, especially the other expatriates, without knowing much about their identity back home. We cannot blame the main character for caring deeply about someone she didn’t know very well.

Maybe the most unpleasant thing for me was reading about her unhealthy relationship with a Japanese man. Here Barbara is beginning to get to know Seiji better:

“Would you be interested to see my new work?”
She followed him into the pottery. There were several pieces laid out on a table. All of them had a jagged, unfinished look, a primal quality. “I have made by hand instead of on wheel,” he said as she touched the sharp edges.
“They’re powerful,” she said. “Strongly emotional.”
“Perhaps because I think of you as I make them,” he said. She took his hand and kissed it; he’d never expressed his feelings so openly before.

Of course he turns out to be exactly the kind of cad you sense he is in this passage, and the innocent American girl walks right into his trap. I suppose the story has been repeated over and over again around the world for centuries. It is true and lifelike, I am sure. But I felt like I was taken to a foreign country and then kept in a small room, taken out rarely to see only a few blurry scenes of that world.