Congratulations and Celebrations

 

The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a story about how two people fall in love and get married and how strangers meet in the most unlikely places and find some connection.

Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels. She has no luggage with her. The hotel has been booked for a wedding party for the entire week but Phoebe is not there for the wedding. She is depressed and suicidal. When Lila the bride meets Phoebe, she is worried that her elaborate destination will be ruined by this stranger. She has spent months accounting for every detail and every possible disaster except for someone like Phoebe.

Phoebe remembers the Victorian Hotel from some magazine that she read while waiting in the fertility clinic. She imagines the Cornwall Inn, a place she has never been to be a happy place.

Two years ago after their final visit to the fertility clinic ‘ when they found out that the embryos had been bad, it had all been a waste‘, she was pregnant and then ten weeks later she was no longer pregnant.

She found the Cornwall Inn online. She said to her husband, Matt,

“At the Cornwall, we can go sailing on an America’s Cup winner.”

She wanted to sit in the hot tub while staring the ocean and he had said that they could slurp oysters and somehow laughed at the same exact time. She had all these ideas about what they could do. ‘They could paddleboard with seals. Go on a “water journey ” at a nearby spa. Visit Edith Wharton’s house one the Cliff Walk . Do yoga by the ocean, not that she had ever done yoga.But she liked the thought of becoming a woman who casually did yoga by the sea.’

‘She made a detailed spreadsheet of excursions, because she was a researcher by profession.’

‘She loved the way Matt indulged her. They were very similar -he was a researcher , too, thought he would never call him that. He was a philosopher. ‘

Phoebe teaches literature while Matt teaches philosophy. They work at the same university. They only aspire to be normal. But Matt is not with her on this trip.They are now divorced.

At the hotel lobby, Phoebe sees a long check-in line. All these guests have come to attend Lila and Gary’s wedding that is to last a week. Lila enters the lobby wearing a glittering sash that says BRIDE, and she has ‘gift bags hanging from her wrists like bracelets made of woven seagrass‘.She hugs every guest and hands out the seagrass bags. She also gives Phoebe one of those gift bags and a really strong hug. Lila finds out that Phoebe is not there for the wedding party when they are both taking the elevator.

‘Phoebe walks into the elevator and feels relief when the doors start to close. Finally to be getting away from the wedding people. To be doing something for a change. To have a key to a place that is not her house.

” Hold the elevator!” a woman calls out.

Phoebe knows it’s the bride before she sees her. She yells like she deserves this elevator. But nobody deserves anything. Not even the bride. Phoebe presses the button to close the doors, but the bride slides a hand between them. They don’t bounce open like they’re supposed to, may be because the Cornwall was built in 1864. An old hotel has no mercy, not even for the bride. ‘

Inside the lift, Lila discovers that Phoebe is not her wedding guest. As the week progresses, both women will soon find their best-laid plans derailed and Phoebe and Lila become unlikely confidantes to one another.

Lila’s mother is a curator and she is working at her mother’s art gallery as her assistant. That is where she meets Gary when he comes in to purchase a painting. She tells Phoebe that she never understands why her mother is obsessed with art. Then when Phoebe says years ago,she used to have ‘clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us fell alive‘ but now she can’t stand the sight of her books nor ‘bear the thought of reading hundred of pages just to watch Jane Eye get married again‘. Lila thinks that she has found kinship in Phoebe like they’re old cousins when Phoebe actually cannot explain the kind of darkness that she is feeling and how ‘literature cannot save her in the end‘. As the week progresses, things start to look up for Phoebe. Not only she gets invited by Lila to attend the wedding party, she even becomes Lila’s maid of honour. This is how unpredictable life can be as things can change in an instant.

Alison Espach is a prolific writer and she is brilliant at describing the characters, their behaviour and inner lives. The narratives are keenly observant of social construct and wickedly funny.

I have always been a fan of serendipitous meet and I believe that if there are people whom we are meant to meet we will somehow meet and share some connection and sometimes in a way that you least expect. Life itself is a celebration if you are open to new experiences. Things may not turn out the way you plan, but when you keep heart open, you evolve and grow to become the person you want to be. There is no such place as a happy place if you are not happy. If you are happy, you are happy anywhere.

The Wedding People is darkly funny and romantic. It is a delightful story about life-altering chance meetings.

Modern Love

 In Fault Lines by Emily Itami, Mizuki, a Japanese young woman is married to Tatsuya. She appears to have got it all, a perfect life -two beautiful children, a hardworking husband and they live in a beautiful apartment with views from balconies in Tokyo. Since his recent promotion, his mind never leaves the office, and he comes home late. Mizuki waits up for him, cooks and never complains. Mizuki has a job where she gets to meet clients a few times a week. Her official title is Intercultural Consultant and her main role is to act as tour guide for the foreign visitors and foreigners who have been relocated to Tokyo. She has got the job through her 'glamorous French friend, Eloise, who, despite having lived and worked in Tokyo for years, still assumed everyone around her was as straight- talking as they are in Paris and couldn't understand the constant miscommunications'.

Here is a narrative in Mizuki's voice about examples of miscommunications.

'When she recounted examples, the problem was blindingly obvious -she was hearing 'yes' when her Japanese friends and colleagues were saying 'no'. When we gaze into the middle distance and make sympathetic, affirmative- sounding noises, it means' no'. When we rephrase your question, or agree with your sentiment, it means 'no'. And most obviously, but apparently most perplexingly to Westerners, often the answer ' yes'- clearly, evidently, incontrovertibly - means 'no'. '

- Fault Lines, Emily Itami

Ghibli Studio, Tokyo

While MIzuki had always meant to become a mother, she did not set out to become a housewife. Once upon a time, before Tatsu and the kids she had dreamt of her name in lights.

When she was sixteen years old, her dad had sent her to New York on a student exchange programme. After spending one year attending an American high school , she finds herself at odds with her own culture. While she feels pride in the complexities of Japanese culture, she also feels entrapped with all that has been imposed on her by the culture.

New York was a revelation for her. She was staying with the Michaelsons who were nonchalant about things that would have had her parents keeling over. She was surprised that she could 'do a maths lesson in anything other than a long-skirted school uniform and sometimes there were teachers you could call by their first names and flirt with'. When her host sister, Cassie and her got drunk at house parties, Cassie's father commented that he was glad they had 'had fun and kept it control.'

Cassie's mother's job had something to do with arts sector in the city. She would kiss her daughter absently on the head 'while she rummaged in her bag for the $20 Cassie needed, still on the phone to someone important.'

During her year in New York, Mizuki found out that she had a taste of performing and singing before an audience and liked it. When she arrived home, she could not keep up with her kanji and Japanese studies and was no longer the daughter her parents had said goodbye to. She wanted to pursue her singing dream so she went back to New York for three years before returning to Japan.Her mother wept that her morals had been corrupted by America. Now that Mizuki is a mother, she sometimes feels like she misses her mother even when they sit next to one another.

Marriage was not on her mind until she met Tatsuya. They have been together for sixteen years, which is over half her life. Her elder daughter. Eri is ten going on eleven and her son Aki is four. As it happens in most marriages, the man assumes the role of breadwinner as the woman assumes the role of homemaker. After two kids, they settle into their routine, she feels like she is stuck in a rut.

In her voice, Mizuki muses,

'If i'd had a career, I could change jobs, apply for a promotion, do something. If i'd stayed in New York, I could have had it all couldn't I ? But I am a Japanese Housewife, a proper, old -school job for life, and you only get to choose your colleague once.'

'I love beautiful things, beautiful people , the magnetism of someone you can't take your eyes off. It used to be fun morphing into that person, tending to all the details that make the fantasy, but now I can't imagine it. It isn't as if I've turned into Jabba the Hutt; physically I don't look all that different. But nothing about me is inviting or mysterious or alluring. And where would I be luring anyone to - a den full of Hello Kitty tea sets ? When would I be giving the come-hither eyes - on my way back from the supermarket, on my pink mamachari bicycle, with bags of groceries loaded onto the front and back baskets? In my anorak, dripping wet, at the door of Eri's ballet class with tis distinct children's aroma of funky shoeboxes? '

'One day i'd remember to be both competent mother and radiant beauty. Tatsu would once again be prostrate at my feet and I'd be full of the serenity of Venus. '

‘How many times have I wished I could be outside myself, outside all my limitations and neuroses, so I could make a different decision and live a different life? Now, when I remember what I wanted before I met Kiyoshi, I think it was just to start over, to do it all again for the first time, or maybe not to do it at all. To have a clean slate. To be somebody else. But then there would be no Aki, no Eri, and life doesn’t work like that, does it? So I’m not leaving Tatsu for Kiyoshi, because that might be love, maybe, but it isn’t happiness, not for me or for anybody else.’ 

- Fault Lines, Emily Itami

In the story, Mizuki meets Kiyoshi, a restaurateur and in him, she rediscovers freedom, friendship, a voice and the neon, city lights that she has always loved. To her, Kiyoshi is somebody who's succeeding in doing what they dreamt of doing, an impossible thing. Unlike her 'pedestrian floundering' and failing efforts to pursue her singing dream , his dream is a reality and he is proof that you can build castles in the sky.

Emily Itami's writing is lyrical,dreamy and descriptive.

Here is how the story begins.

'The whole Kiyoshi situation started a long time before he was ever in the picture. The way a calligraphy painting begins before the first black stroke makes it onto the page. Begins when the painter collects together scroll and brushes and grinds up the pigment, or even before that when he (or she- and yet , int this country, it's almost invariably he) has an idea in his head of what to paint. So , the scene was already set, the pigment crushed, the painterly hand posted. '

Emily Itami's writing is also insightful in that Mizuki's musings and observations are totally relatable. For Example, 'On occasions, my whole life can feel like a pile-up of unintended consequences.' I feel that way on occasions too.

Muzuki is torn between her traditional duties and role as a wife and mother, societal expectations of women and her own unfulfilled dreams. Fault Lines by Emily Itami is a modern tale about a mother's love for her children, collision of old and new traditions and a woman's identity. The book is shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.