A Bored Woman in Tokyo Wants Excitement


FAULT LINES
by Emily Itami

How much does a mother’s desire cost? Emily Itami explores this question in a witty and incisive way in her first novel, Fault Lines. Itami’s protagonist Mizuki lives in Tokyo with her husband Tatsuya and their two children, daughter Eri and son Aki. “My children,” he reflects. “My life’s work, my greatest loves, organizers of total psychological trauma and daily destruction.”

Mizuki says her life has been filled with stuffy and suffocating duties: “Japanese motherhood and the housewifery that accompanies it is a cult,” says Mizuki. “And their initiates are very mean to anyone who thinks they can enter without going to the whole pig.”

Mizuki is miserable, her previous personality – a struggling and sexy singer – erased. “I imagined my name in lights before my title was housekeeping.” Thinking of her old website among her mothering duties, she says: “I look almost like I do now, only happier.”

Itami’s prose is distant, perhaps inspired by the character’s removal from her own life – after all, Mizuki is a Japanese woman who writes in English. (Itami’s narrator tells us late in the book about a year of revelation spent in America perfecting his English.)

When Mizuki met a man named Kiyoshi and frisson It’s hard not to enjoy a new relationship. It’s a dream to read about their relationship: they meet in deserted neighborhoods like Kagurazaka, filled with cobblestone streets, French cafes, and historic geisha houses. They taste Camembert, snack on osenbei rice crackers, are in no hurry to watch the dessert being made, and visit an elegant paper shop. Best of all, she adores Mizuki, Kiyoshi being “the first person to think over the answers to the questions I asked her for years and look at me when she answers”.

Worn out by work and (perhaps) the role she had to play, Tatsuya does not question his wife’s going out at night. Mizuki takes Kiyoshi to a fetish club, where she realizes that “the dominatrix has the mannerisms of Eri’s piano teacher.” Lovers eat yakitori at the night market in Ebisu, wander from bar to bar in the arches of Ginza, and wander the “narrow, miserable streets of Golden Gai.” Mizuki is reliving her old self: “We smoke. We do. We swear.” They enjoy the “hedonistic pleasures of the moment”.

Itami’s descriptions of spring in Japan must be savored: Cherry blossoms are “a hyperbolic foam of pink cloud”; Aki and Eri “enjoy throwing them in the air, making blizzards and confetti.” But despite its lush surroundings, Mizuki’s world has fault lines beneath it. “Maybe during the years of their happy marriage, Tatsu thought Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when the fault lines started to show up,” she says. But it is a real earthquake that forces Mizuki to reckon with the consequences of her shadow life.

An editor once told me that the best stories offer an “A” and an “B” ending, but then delight the reader with a surprising but inevitable “C.” Unfortunately, Itami’s novel ends with a boring “B” option. I found myself wanting Mizuki to freely seek pleasure and adventure. Maybe for some, the only way to escape is to open a book and travel unmasked to a magical place like Tokyo in the spring without Covid.



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