The Commoner: A Novel by John Burnham Schwartz Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Commoner: A Novel
Book Review: Engrossing
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this novel to be a fascinating look at the life of one Japanese woman, her early life, and the enclosed and constricted world of the royal family. It is very well-written and I found the story engrossing.Book Review: Excellent Novel Based on the Life of Japan's Empress Michiko
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the story of Japan's Empress Michiko (and to a lesser extent, her daughter-in-law Princess Masako), thinly disguised as fiction. The names have been changed, along with a (very) few insignificant details, but there is no question that this is virtually, if not technically, a biography. I believe the author chose to publish it as fiction only because of the rigidly protected privacy of the Japanese Imperial Family, who would not have otherwise allowed publication of the book. Thus in this review I am using the real names, not the ones of the characters in the book.
Empress Michiko is highly respected and admired - perhaps even revered - all over the world. And that's all I knew about her before reading this book. I did not know that she was born a commoner, the first commoner ever to marry into the Japanese Imperial Family (much less to the Crown Prince himself) in all its centuries-long history. She did this before Princess Di was even born. And suffered the same difficulties in making the adjustment that Diana did, yet we never heard about that due to the extreme privacy of the Japanese nobility. Michiko even had a couple of nervous breakdowns in the 1960's during which she was unable to speak. A large part of the reason for this was the bullying by her mother-in-law, then Empress of Japan.
Yet unlike Diana, Michiko stayed and toughed it out, to end up as the global figure of respect and grace that she is today. Perhaps it helped that there truly seems to be genuine love between Michiko and her husband. But anyone who's had a long-term marriage knows that that didn't happen by accident, but because the couple worked to make it happen.
And now her daughter-in-law Masako is undergoing the same suffering. For Masako, the cultural shock is even worse. She grew up in the Western world and was accustomed to the freedom and independence of a highly intelligent, wealthy, and highly educated young career woman. She understood (apparently far better than either Michiko or Diana did) what it would mean to marry the Crown Prince. No wonder it took six years of courtship and several rejected marriage proposals before she finally agreed to it under enormous pressure from her own family as well as the Japanese Imperial Family and the entire country of Japan.
The Japanese court is far more medieval and rigid in its protocols, rules, and expectations than the English one ever was. Only those brought up in it are able to tolerate such a life successfully. It seems harsh and snobbish, but as long as they continue in such traditions, previous generations of royalty were probably wise to insist that their children do not marry outside of the nobility.
To give some examples of how harsh the protocol is, Michiko was only allowed to visit her family home once after her marriage. She did not see her parents for twenty years. And her parents NEVER saw their grandchildren in real life, only in photos. That's just heartbreaking.
At this time, Masako - formerly a vivacious, happy, and competent young woman - has been retired from public life for about a decade due to mental instability (Adjustment Disorder.)
The book is not a criticism or dismissal of Japanese culture or of their Royal Family. On the contrary, it shows the beauty and strength of both the ancient culture of nobility and the average Japanese person's lifestyle. It simply shows us (without lecturing) the great contrast between, and thus the incompatibility of, the two. The plight of both young women and that of the Court are described with compassion and respect. Like the author, we come to admire and even be amazed at Michiko's hard-won ability to rise above the situation with dignity and elegance.
The book is very well - sometimes even beautifully - written and consistently interesting. Another advantage of writing this as fiction are the dialogues, and the thoughts and feelings of the characters. These allow for great beauty and character development which would not be possible in a straightforward biography.
The ending is completely fictional.
Since this is "a work of fiction", of course there are no photographs. But the interested reader can find many on the Internet. The ones of Michiko's and Masako's weddings are particularly interesting, especially the video of Michiko's wedding where you can see that it takes two women attendants to help hold up Michiko's multi-layered and extremely heavy traditional dress, so that she can walk.
After reading this book, I wanted to learn more about the true story. Little has been written due to the strictly-guarded privacy of the Imperial Family's personal life. But I did find *Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne*, by Ben Hills. (Not surprisingly, there was a huge controversy over its publication and it was banned in Japan.) I've ordered it and will post a review once I've read it.
(Heehee - as I write this, Japanese music is playing on my local classical music radio station. I've never heard that before on this station. Must be fate.)
(351 pages)
Quotes from *The Commoner*:
"One doesn't stop wanting certain things simply because they've been taken away; one simply wants them more. That's what it is to be young. And later in life it is those youthful desires, sharpened by denial, that are the first of the dreams one is coerced into smothering. The trick is to appear to kill desire while actually storing it away in a place so private that no greater authority will ever know of its existence. A kind of bunker, as in a war."
"To lose a daughter to another household is comprehensible; to lose her to another world defeats the mind, to say nothing of the heart. And, once she has committed herself, it is for life. She will never be able to leave that world. She will be sealed in forever."
"You're my daughter - courage isn't a choice for you. Consider it an unreturnable gift from your ancestors. You might think you don't want it now, but when you're my age you'll be thankful."
"But life is not an echo, endlessly returning the past to us so that we might read and reread in its fading variations the meanings we cannot keep ourselves from wanting."
"I have never known a goodbye that was as it should be."
"I've discovered something: it is possible to recover from a catastrophic loss without ever getting over it."
"Because, after a certain point, there is no coming back. For me, that point was Simon's death. For Kenji, it was the fire that destroyed his face. We have all lost something, those of us who are a little strange."
Book Review: From Freedom to Subjugation in a Luxurious Setting
Summary: 4 Stars
If you like prince and princess stories, this one will probably appeal to you.
In all of the fairy tales about prince and princesses, the authors wisely end the story after they fall in love or marry by saying some version of "and they lived happily ever after." But do princes and princesses really live happily after marriage? The harshly publicized marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana suggests that it's not inevitable that it all works out.
Why? Royal persons of all kinds are figureheads subject to lots of arbitrary rules and restraints that would drive a normal person crazy. If the person married isn't from that background, can depression be avoided?
In The Commoner John Burnham Schwartz bases his fictional story on the public events in the lives of the Japanese Imperial family. Using good imagination, he describes what it might have been like to leave a carefree life to become the consort of the Crown Prince.
His narrator is Haruko, the bride of the prince. You'll feel like you are reading about a slave's life in places. Many people will find this book evoking tears of sadness or regret on Haruko's behalf.
The book's main strength is making Japan and the Imperial family accessible to Western readers. That strength carries the first half of the book which is by far the more interesting part.
The book has a few weaknesses:
1. Everything is built up around dramatic scenes, and the tone is always too high to reflect real life.
2. The book's resolution is a weak one that doesn't adequately deal with the issues the author raises.
3. Other than Haruko, the characters are not as well developed as they might have been. As a result, the story is often flat unless some visceral event takes place.
4. Haruko's life becomes an occasional sketch of a scene after she becomes a mother. With so many blank places, Haruko becomes distant to us.
Book Review: Hard to put down
Summary: 4 Stars
A most fascinating look inside the Japaneses Imperial household.
The book starts by engaging you with scenes among the population during the final years of WWII.
You will then find a book of fiction that parallels the actual recent and sad happenings among the Imperial family. The author does an extraordinary job of painting a picture, in words, of the surroundings within and outside the Palace. He successfully includes the Imperial household, with all its intrigue and bureaucracy, along with the fascinating recent history.
Finally, the engaging story of star-crossed lovers makes it so engaging that it is hard to put down.
(You come away wondering if a similar book could be written about Princess Di and her relationship with the British Monarchy.)
Book Review: His Daughter-in-Law Elect
Summary: 4 Stars
John Burnham Schwartz's roman à clef about the Japanese imperial family takes as its centerpiece one of the most startling stories of the continuation of ancient royal tradition into the twentieth century: the life and career of the current Empress Michiko, the first commoner in memory to marry an heir to the throne. The empress's life has been paradoxically both intensely dramatic and intensely stultifying. Despised by the court insiders (and supposedly in particular by her imperial mother-in-law) for her common birth and unfamiliarity with court customs, and worn down by the dullness of court routine and the strictures of imperial tradition, the empress allegedly had a nervous breakdown in the early 1960s after the birth of her first son, losing her voice completely for several months. Then, when her husband succeeded to the throne and her son wanted to marry another commoner (this time an Oxford-educated career diplomat), she saw her own new daughter-in-law go through the same horrors she had three decades previously and then even more when the young woman cannot produce a male heir.
Schwartz has as his narrator the empress, here known as "Haruko." The names are changed not to protect the innocent, but rather because Schwartz varies from the story of the current empress particularly at the end, where he imagines a different fate for the current crown princess heroically engineered by her kindly mother-in-law. There's little here critical at all of the current empress or of her husband, son, or daughter-in-law: only the emperor's dead parents are treated as in any way less than fully sympathetically (his mother is basically treated as a wicked witch). As a result it seems almost impossible that the crown princess (here called "Keiko") could get into the emotional fix she does, since everyone here seems constantly brimming over with high promises and kindly intentions. (Surely there could have been a more balanced and honest way to tell these women's stories, even as told from the empress's own perspective.) The best thing about the book is its lovely prose style, which seems simultaneously elegant and understated, as prettily befits its subject. And where else will you find a novel told from the point of view of an actual living empress? That rarity alone makes it worthy of attention.