Tokyo
by Micahel Mejia
Assistant professor of English, Michael Mejia, publishes TOKYO (University of Alabama Press), a novel in three parts, linked by a single narrative
of disaster, loss, and longing. TOKYO was conceived as a novel that would “investigate, through fiction, the Japan I'd
imagined, while also recognizing that every Japan I imagined would always already
be a fictional one, a Western one,” said Mejia.
Mejia has always been fascinated with Japan, ever since he was a child. Growing up in Sacramento, CA, many of his childhood friends happened to be second- and third-generation Japanese, Chinese and Korean. He was interested in the artifacts in their homes; and became a fan of many Japanese films and authors. “My interest was in Japan's strangeness and seeming exoticism, probably not all that different from the interest of Americans in the mid-19th c., when Japan had been mostly closed off to the West by its military government,” Mejia explained. Much of TOKYO is focused on Tuskiji, the Tokyo Central Wholesale Market, the largest fish market in the world, which distributes more than 1500 tons of seafood, shipped from all over the world, to restaurants, supermarkets, and neighborhood stores every day—just to Tokyo and its suburbs.
“When I first read about Tsukiji in a National Geographic article in the mid-1990s, I was fascinated by the quantities and varieties of seafood represented there, but also by what amounted to a small village (the market employs tens of thousands of people) living an opposite life to the metropolis around them—a 6 PM to noon life, essentially—and I wondered how that life might affect one's personal and community relationships,” Mejia said. This brought him to write a narrative about a strange defect discovered in some bluefin tuna, written in the form of a report by a Japanese businessman, a high-level salaryman at a fictional tuna wholesale company. This piece would eventually become the inspiration for TOKYO’s reconsideration of the Japan Mejia had previously invented, and other unreal Japans imagined by the West.
For more information about the book, visit http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/TOKYO,6854.aspx or https://michaelmejiawriter.com/