It’s 1952 and New Jersey housewife Daisy Lawrence waits at Mitchell Air Force Base for the plane that brings 18-year-old Keiko Kitigawa from Japan. Daisy is hosting Keiko, who is no ordinary home stay guest but a Hiroshima Maiden – a survivor of the bomb, the recipient of free American plastic surgery to remove her scars, and a poster child for the anti-bomb movement that funded her trip. Once Keiko’s disfigurement has been repaired, the sponsors of The Hiroshima Project will take her on tour to give testimony of the bomb’s devastation. Shaena Lambert has chosen a complex and unnerving period in American history for RADIANCE. Immediately following the Second World War, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, with the most powerful weapon in the world. But the McCarthy Hearings make Americans doubt their country’s internal stability. Keiko’s arrival, only seven years after the end of the war, adds enough disruption to stir emotions to the surface in Daisy’s small world. Her neighbor, once a POW, resents Keiko’s presence. The Resident’s Committee wants to meet about the home stay situation, which Daisy did not discuss with them beforehand.And then there is the Hiroshima Maiden herself, scarred yet beautiful, a vulnerable and passive canvas who engages the imaginations of the Americans around her. A young photographer sees his dead sister in Keiko and courts her. Daisy’s husband Walter finds himself telling Keiko things he’s never told Daisy. Irene, a social-climbing journalist who has attached herself to the Hiroshima Project, believes that Keiko is a cynic who understands perfectly the implications of speaking out against the bomb in exchange for surgery.Daisy is not so sure. Keiko is formal and distant, but Daisy’s generous maternal instincts sense fear in the young woman, a reluctance to recite – and relive – memories of devastation and the deaths of her family. Daisy’s conviction that Keiko needs to back out of the publicity tour propels her from being an amiable and inoffensive homemaker to a determined, if ineffective, advocate for Keiko.Keiko could so easily have been a grateful, cooperative character, but then Lambert’s tale would have been far too transparent. Who is being manipulated? What lies do we tell so that we can face ourselves? The Hiroshima Maiden reveals to us the people around her; she becomes a focal point for their guilt, righteousness, self-delusion and awkward truths. But we catch only glimpses of Keiko’s true feelings, layered between her own guilt, nightmares, and memories of the unspoiled Hiroshima of her childhood. What I Learned About Writing from Reading This BookI believed that for a metaphor to be effective, it had to run through the fabric of the novel, invisible but omnipresent. When I was writing my own novel, I had wanted to use a river as metaphor for memory, but ended up ripping it out. It was just too unsustainable trying to inject watery images everywhere.[And OK, I just really, really wanted the chance to use “riparian” somewhere]For me, the most revealing passages in the book were Keiko's recollections of childhood, especially her time with her grandfather who told ghost stories about bakemono, fox spirits. Maybe it’s because I’m Chinese, but I could not help gravitating to this metaphor of a shape-shifting creature, subject of countless folk tales.In Asian ghost stories, the fox spirit usually takes on the form of a beautiful woman who tricks her way into marriage with a human husband; sometimes she even gives him children. Then one day, after years of apparent bliss, the fox spirit is unmasked, usually by an outsider. The consequences of the man’s relationship with the fox spirit depend on whether the spirit is evil or helpful – yet there is always a wistful sort of ambiguity about the fox spirit, even if it turns out to be evil. After all, she spent all those years playing the part of a devoted wife.The challenge with the fox spirits metaphor is that it needs to cross cultures, to conjure up a world of meaning for non-Asians. But instead of bringing it up and offering context at every turn, I see now that setting up a metaphor can be entirely separate from how it is evoked. Lambert confines mention of bakemono to the Hiroshima of Keiko’s memories: the shrine near their home guarded by twin fox statues, her grandfather's stories about fox spirits, how he could name all the species of foxes. Whether or not you are acquainted with Asian ghost stories, you understand these stories reside deeply within Keiko's being.Thus when Keiko tells Daisy that her mother used to call her ‘little fox child’, she is signalling her unreliable nature to Daisy in the most obvious way possible for a Japanese, yet without revealing herself. And when the fox spirit manifests in America, it is only as a sound, the swish of an animal tail in her hospital room when Keiko hallucinates about her mother. It is a momentary delusion, but after this the fox spirit comes to mind, can’t help but come to mind in all its ambiguity, its true purpose hidden from humans as we realize that Keiko is remaking herself, transforming into the Hiroshima Maiden her sponsors want her to be.Metaphor is so contextual and often specific to culture. If I had chosen to use fox spirits, it’s very likely I would been ineffective; I would have used fewer words while setting up that metaphor – simply because it’s so recognizable to me that it would feel heavy-handed to do more -- and clumsily tried to pull it more frequently into the narrative.RADIANCE reinforces an important lesson: that when you are writing for a multi-cultural audience, you need to create references that are accessible, and at the same time, trust in your readers' intelligence to make the connection. In her novel, Lambert does this by ensuring we understand the personal significance bakemono carries for Keiko, even if we don’t grasp fully the nature of fox spirits. Then, delicately and deliberately, with just the flick of a ghostly tail, she sets the metaphor in motion. Shaena was gracious enough to let me interview her (read here)
Margaret Mary Parker aka Daisy, a suburban housewife in New York State commandeered by her erstwhile school friend , Irene Day, into looking after Keiko Kitigawa an eighteen year old Japanese Hiroshima maiden who came to the USA for surgery on her deformed face . Keiko was chosen to be given the opportunity of surgery as part of the Hiroshima Project headed by Mr. Atchity and Dr. Carey because she was a beautiful young woman who spoke excellent English and had the intelligence to recognise this was a way to settle in USA and leave behind a place where her mother, grandfather and neighbour had died. The uncle and aunt who were responsible for her didn't love her and she felt totally isolated. Also because she was racked with quilt (survival) and did not help a lady with a baby at the time of the bombing Keiko developed into a manipulative girl who wanted everything her own terms. As the story progresses you wonder whom is more manipulating -Keiko or the Project. In all of this childless Daisy gives her love and commitment to Keiko but all in vain.The inhabitants of Riverside Meadows were great – they could be representative of any Residents Association in any part of the world. They all kept themselves to themselves until there was a possibility the outside world was going to turn their world upside down. Walter going to prison did it and Joan Palmer was the Lawrence’s defence and stopped the Residents Committee kicking them out of Riverside under the ‘grave misconduct clause’. Joan turned from enemy to friend, talking about Keiko and the Project, the snub by Keiko and the gathering of 800 people at Carnegie Hall who listened to Keiko and how afterwards she had sung with Paul Robson. None of this was shared with Daisy who poured so much of herself into the care of Keiko after her operation.Trying to bring the event of 6th August 1945 to my attention was ill-conceived using the Hiroshima Maiden is the tool. The novel never really me to think there was any reason for Keiko to destroy, or at least try to destroy Daisy without some sort of half-unravelled life. Ultimately I didn’t get it. Hiroshima I got, the guts of the story I got, but put the two together and they remained two stories running in parallel.The story unfolds as life does – with ethical issues speeding up the process only for it to de-accelerate when least expected. The dream that Daisy had for this girl to become a ‘daughter’ was unrealistic with Keiko having no relationship with her at all, always calling her Mrs Lawrence, never showing any warmth, no instinctive clutching for a person full of empathy and care. The reader was always trying to get some contact between Keiko and Daisy and that was why I finished the novel. It never came – perhaps that was the author’s intent.The American characters seemed very real – even dear Tom the photographer and especially how I imagined 1950’s American sophisticate – Irene and home loving Daisy who was destined to remain childless. The real problem was with Keiko Kitigawa who I could only see as some sort of spectre, unreal, untouchable, uncontained. It felt as though you could walk right through her. She lied, she cheated, she manipulated as they all did but she didn’t seem real, not young or old, even getting Walter into jail was something she felt empowered to do.Hiroshima’s Maiden was chosen by sponsors to come to the USA and have her disfigurement removed. Keiko seemed the ideal choice when she was examined by Dr. Carey and talked to by Mr.Atchity at the bomb Casualty Commission at the end of 1951. beautiful, good spoken English, eighteen, said all the right things to the men interviewing her, but she had her agenda , it seemed to get away from ‘survivors’ guilt, her aunt and uncle, her own conscience for not helping the woman with the child. The men also were not as they seemed, the great and the good who were prepared to prey on this young person‘s shattered life. The story took me from March 1952 to December 1952, all about Keiko in America although details about Tom and Daisy continued until 1968. So where is the end? I guess it is the moment Keiko and Daisy meet for the last time near Irene’s apartment, just before Keiko goes on her tour after the Hydrogen Bomb Test on the Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Do You like book Radiance (2007)?
I started by reading Shaena Lambert's short story collection The Falling Woman and was drawn nearly all the way through, an accomplishment by Lambert to snag this impatient reader. The emotional subtleties and ambiguities in Radiance were altogether heroic -- how easy it would have been for a writer to nudge the reader into "liking" the good guys, "disliking" the bad guys — but here there are no black-and-white characters in sight. The fox allegory, the story that Keiko tells to Daisy and retells to herself is perfect. The Japan of pre-Hiroshima reads (not that I have even been to Japan) as though Lambert herself had been Keiko, standing on her grandfather's rock, peeking over a fence, staying home from school that day, having lied to her mother about being sick ... when the plane flew over. What Keiko the child did and what she didn't do; what Keiko the eighteen-year-old does and doesn't do -- absolutely absorbing and haunting. Even Daisy, "Mrs Lawrence", the homestay mother, climbs great internal heights in this engrossing novel. The writing is clear, crisp, undazed and unfazed; never overwrought, and frequently intensely beautiful. A book to ponder for a long time.
—Holley Rubinsky
The whole time I was reading this book I kept hoping it would get better. After only 100 pages in I was already fighting to finish, telling myself that I would get more interesting, but I didn't. Well written? Sure. Engaging? Not so much.On the cover they liken Lambert to the talents of Munro and Proulx, and I can see the comparison in the story telling. I had never read any Lambert before and the book was selected by my book club for the month of November. At the present we have yet to discuss the book, but I can tell you that I have few nice things to say.It was just plain boring! I can see how this book would have been better as a short story, but as a 300+ page novel...well...zzzzz :(
—Kahla
