‘Chorus of Mushrooms’ by Hiromi Goto

Reviewed by Jenny Heijun Wills

Twenty years since its initial publication, Hiromi Goto’s groundbreaking feminist and magic realist novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, is re-released with a thoughtful afterword by another brilliant Asian/Canadian writer, Larissa Lai, as well as an author interview conducted by the insightful literary critic Smaro Kamboureli.

Drawing on a number of conventional literary Asian/North American elements — intergenerational conflict, interwoven folk legends, thematic interplays of food, language, and assimilation — Chorus of Mushrooms is uniquely set in rural Nanton, Alberta where the Tonkatsu family owns and operates a mushroom farm.

As Lai astutely points out, Goto’s novel focuses on “the ways in which Japanese Canadian subjects emerge in relation to state, citizenship, and social life… and out from under the shadow of wartime internment” and yet continue to be affected by that history. It is a novel about transformation, re-invention, and cultural flexibility that, while in some ways shaped by history and convention, is also innovative, experimental, and abstract.

The three generations of women represented in the novel, Issei, Nisei, and Sansei, share complex relationships with one another in their diverse experiences of Japanese Canadian cultural identity. Obāchan (grandmother) Naoe understands but refuses to speak English, Keiko (her daughter) wilfully forgets the Japanese language and customs with which she was raised, and Murasaki/Muriel (Keiko’s daughter) contemplates her Japanese Canadian identity and her ancestral roots.

On the surface, Goto’s characters express their frustrations with each other’s stubbornness; Naoe ponders, “It’s funny how children grow inside your body, but they turn out to be strangers,” when Keiko seems to reject any connection to their Japanese ancestry. And whereas Naoe is disappointed by her daughter’s choices, Murasaki resents that she has never been exposed to any form of Japanese culture from her parents.

What might potentially be the most challenging relationship, that between Naoe and her granddaughter—as Murasaki cannot understand Japanese and Naoe’s “lips refuse and… tongue swells in revolt” of speaking in English—is in fact one of the more profound connections. Despite their language differences, grandmother and granddaughter share a secret form of communication, first through physical touch and inflection, and later by telepathy.

Language is the central thread that ties these women together, as they invent systems of communication independent of the words they do not (and cannot) share. When Murasaki is a young girl, Naoe remarks, “She cannot understand the words I speak, but she can read the lines on my brow, the creases beside my mouth.”

At night, snuggled under the covers and sharing forbidden snacks of rice crackers and dried squid, Naoe offers her young granddaughter stories that are magically deciphered. “I snuggled my head in Obāchan’s bony lap and closed my eyes to listen,” Murasaki reminisces. “I couldn’t understand the words she spoke, but this is what I heard. Mukāshi, mukāshi, ōmukashi…” (18), which means “in ancient times, in ancient times, in very very ancient times” (see Eleanor Ty, cited below, p. 157). The story continues, “translated” into English, Murasaki’s interpretation of her grandmother’s Japanese words.

Even the strained relationship between Keiko and Naoe is given momentary reprieve when they turn away from word-based language and toward tactile communication:

Keiko and I, our differences remain. But there are times when one can touch the other without language to disrupt us. Daughter from my body, but not from my mouth. The words we speak leave small bruises on the skin, but what she utters from her face doesn’t always come from her heart. Sometimes, we are able to touch the other with gentle thoughts and gentler hands. We still have our hair days, and she still asks me to clean her ears. Such a fragile, trusting thing, to have one’s ear’s cleaned by someone. It’s not something you can ask of everyone. It is more a woman contact, something that boys grow out of. But old women will turn to their daughters to have their hair looked after. Grown women will still turn to their aged mothers and ask to have their ears cleaned. As long as Keiko asks me to, I know she trusts me.

Because Keiko’s relationship with Naoe depends almost entirely on tactile communication, she is most damaged by her mother’s sudden disappearance. After living with her daughter’s family for years, Naoe decides: “Keiko and Murasaki need to grow without my noisy presence and I need to live outside the habit of my words,” before departing without notice from their lives.

Murasaki is able to continues the conversations with her Obāchan, hearing Naoe’s voice (speaking in English) in her head, but Keiko suffers until her daughter (under Naoe’s telepathic guidance) nurses her with Japanese dishes and asks to have her ears cleaned. Mother and daughter, formerly unable to communicate despite their shared language, adopt a language system based on physical interaction in order to overcome their emotional silences.

Goto’s text ends up being a postmodern commentary on culture and language. In the case of the former, characters realize that there is no singular “Japanese culture” that can be evaluated as authentic or otherwise. Regarding the latter, Chorus of Mushrooms disrupts our formal understanding of what constitutes shared language and exposes the ways that people who can literally understand the same words struggle to communicate with one another. And while the novel focuses on the trying everyday interactions between all three characters, love and trust undergird their kinship in ways that extend beyond generational and cultural differences. New communication practices are established and cherished.

The supplements included in this twentieth-anniversary edition reflect upon the continued recognition of Chorus of Mushrooms as an undeniably important novel both within the classroom and beyond. Larissa Lai’s afterword meditates on the historical contexts within which Chorus originally appeared in 1994 and the ways that it registers with readers in 2014, commenting on how the “critique of race, racism, and racialization that unfolds in the novel” are newly significant because, “[s]ince the shutdowns of the early 2000s, and the rise of the concept of ‘post-race,’ these conversations, never easy, have become even more difficult.”

Equally as noteworthy is Smaro Kamboureli’s interview with Goto that invites the author to reflect upon the novel’s ongoing success, its impact on diverse reading audiences, and a variety of themes, including “names—naming and re-naming,” consumption and food, and the “enduring power of storytelling.” Combined, this novel, afterword, and author interview provide an insightful conversation about language, history, race, culture, and storytelling that makes this new edition a celebration of the initial book and the meaningful ways it continues to impact its readers today.

Work Cited: Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Print.

NeWest | 272 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063484