Kuhaku, The Book

Preface

In September 2002, I was stuck in traffic in the cramped back seat of a Benz 190 on a grey day along a very grey stretch of highway heading toward Hakone. We were going to Fuji Reien, a sprawling graveyard at the base of Mount Fuji, where I was to represent the family at a ceremony for my late father-in-law. My wife, Yuko, was in Seattle, pregnant and unable to make the trip back to Japan, so I was sent to say a few words in my most polite Japanese, slip an envelope thick with ten-thousand yen notes into the priest's hands and pass out gifts to the few relatives in attendance.

In the back seat of that Benz, as my late mother-in-law's sister plied me with convenience-store sandwiches, canned coffee and snacks, I reflected on the decade and a half I had spent in Japan. I met my wife here, became a father, had wonderful times with her parents before they died. Japan is where I played softball and baseball -- not well, but with religious zeal. It's where I was forced to sing karaoke. It's where I taught at prestigious universities, edited a weekly newspaper and a monthly magazine, wrote a book and also suffered through some of the most mind-numbing translation and proofreading jobs imaginable. It's where I drank with low-level gangsters, soaked in outdoor baths in the snow, crashed Akira Kurosawa's birthday party and had my lip go numb with blowfish venom.

While the Benz inched along in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Tomei Expressway, I began to envision a book of essays about my time in Japan. But later, I rejected that idea. It's been done to death, I thought. We've had James Fallows and Lafcadio Hearn present their takes on Japan. Who needs the views of another lanky Westerner?

But what if I brought together a group of writers -- a mix of Westerners and Japanese -- who probably wouldn't even get along if they were stuck in the same room? What if the stories focused on how things are, not as yet another Westerner thinks they should be? Reportage trumping armchair analysis, I thought as we traveled toward the cemetery.

Those fleeting thoughts on that grey highway were the seeds that grew into this imperfect, democratic book. They also are the reason I founded Chin Music Press in October 2002. It seemed to me at the time -- and still makes sense today, I might add -- that as media conglomerates expand faster than Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they are giving small publishers an opportunity. We can present books that are difficult to categorize but fun to read -- something they are increasingly unwilling to do these days because of their obsession with the bottom line.

- Bruce Rutledge, 2004