Or so it sometimes seems, as if the unfortunate result of "globalization" (a trendy phrase when I lived in Japan, and the stated goal of our teaching) were that one place is now indistinguishable from the next. And the settings were as vividly detailed and idiosyncratic as the characters who peopled them.īut those books are set (and were written) in the past, before "the dream of constant connection" (to quote a cell phone ad), when the same dull series of chain stores and fast food restaurants had not yet spread from region to region, town to town, even country to country, bulldozing the landscape, burying the old independent businesses, and leaching the local color. Salinger, to My Antonia-I now recognize the extent to which the characters in these books were shaped by setting. I say "realize" because when I think back on the books that grabbed me as a young reader and made me want to become a writer-from Jane Eyre, to the stories of J.D.
I had to set a novel overseas to realize the importance of setting in fiction.
As it is, I worry about having gotten it right, wondering if Japanese people-in particular those from the region-would recognize the place as I described it. While I like to think that I have a pretty good imagination, there's no way I could have imagined a foreign setting (let alone one as vivid and weird as Shika) without having spent a fair amount of time there. The novel is set in Shika, the nuclear power plant town on the Noto Peninsula where I lived for a year, after graduating from college. Since my novel, If You Follow Me, came out this month, I've been surprised by the number of readers who have asked me if I've ever been to Japan.
She is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times Book Review. Malena Watrous is the author of a novel, If You Follow Me, which was the winner of a Michener-Copernicus Award (and of a Glimmer Train Fiction Open prize in 2001).
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