A True Novel

"Mizumura does something absolutely brilliant; she bases A True Novel on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , a novel about class prejudice and the way that sexuality can be used to gain power in the world. The world of romantic passion that Wuthering Heights presents is quite dark, and the same can be said of the world created by Mizumura. She transplants Brontë’s plot to 20th-century Japan. It’s a story of an upper-class young woman who loves and is beloved by a man who is beneath her socially. The story gets started just after World War Two. The Heathcliff equivalent in the novel is a sort of stepchild. He is an outcast within the family he lives with and an outcast within society at large because he’s not pure Japanese; his father was Manchurian Chinese. The love story starts as one between a girl and boy, and it grows as they grow up. In explaining to the reader how these characters relate to one another, Mizamura is never writing about it as a strictly personal interaction. She details how socioeconomic changes in Japan in the post-war years—the relative status of the different families in the novel and the changes in Japan’s status around the world—shape the fate of her characters and the dynamic between them. Love is also the source of a great deal of comedy, a form that traditionally ends with the coming together of two people in marriage. Shakespeare’s comedies, As You Like It for instance, often end with the joining together that marriage represents. Love is often literature’s resolution to all kinds of conflicts. It’s a satisfying pattern for the human mind to follow. “Love is often literature’s resolution to all kinds of conflicts. It’s a satisfying pattern for the human mind to follow” That said, when we think of the truly greatest love stories, an awful lot of them are tragic. There are so many stories of impossible loves wherein some poison acts from outside to destroy romantic pairings. We like the satisfactions of romantic comedy , but we are maybe even more drawn to the stories of doomed love that we get in Othello , Anna Karenina and many of the other works that jump to mind when we think of love stories."