482
PARTISAN REVIEW
Of course there's nothing mysterious about the title of
T.
Cor–
aghessan Boyle's new novel,
East Is East.
3
Kipling's phrase provides an
ironic counterpoint to the fate of Hiro, a young seaman from Japan.
The son of a Japanese bar maid and an American hippie who vanished
from Kyoto before the child was born, Hiro, brought up by his grand–
mother, has been a lifelong victim, tormented by his xenophobic
schoolmates as "a half-breed, a
happa,
a high-nose and butter-stinker -
and an orphan to boot - forever a foreigner in his own society." On the
Japanese freighter where he is an assistant cook, Hiro's life is humiliating,
though his sense of worthlessness is somewhat alleviated by the stern code
of honor he has discovered in the work of a seventeenth-century samurai
and his twentieth-century disciple, Yukio Mishima. Taunted beyond en–
durance by his crewmates, Hiro literally jumps ship off the coast of
Georgia and swims to Tupelo Island, which is inhabited by both red–
necks and senile old ladies who think he is Seiji Ozawa , and where he is
befriended for a few days by an ambitious and untalented writer, Ruth
Dershowitz, a member of the artists' colony on the island. (Why Boyle
appropriated the name of the talented Harvard law professor for this
mediocre lady is hard to fathom.)
Hiro dreams of finding his father and losing the stigma of a half–
breed: " ... the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and
mulattoes and worse - or better, depending on your point of view.
[n
America you could be one part Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo
and walk down the street with your head held high ." Most of the time ,
alas, Hiro, starving and hunted like a mad dog by the rednecks and two
demented immigration officials, hides out in the swamp near the colony,
where Boyle has a high old time describing the insects and brambles that
tear the pathetic fugitive to ribbons. When he is finally captured, Hiro's
only recourse is to repeat the
seppu-ku
fate of his samurai-guru, Mishima.
Like a juggler, Boyle keeps several narratives and comic intentions
spinning without a miss. There is a fierce versatility to his imagination,
and a verbal ingenuity - no minimalist he - that does not entirely avoid
self-indulgence when he pulls the throttle of his language all the way
out. You can hear him clearing his throat as he launches into a swelling,
seething cadenza, with its resonant echoes of Joyce and Melville, about
the great Okefenokee swamp:
Vast and primeval, unfathomable , unconquerable, bastion of cotton–
mouth, rattlesnake and leech , mother of vegetation, father of
3East Is East.
By
T.
Coraghessan Boyle. Viking. $19.95.
