ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN
ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN is a Japanese-British-Chinese-American writer. She is the editor of the anthology of essays, Good Immigrant USA and her novels include Harmless Like You which received the 2017 Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. Japanese-British writer Naomi Morris Omori speaks to her about her new novel, Starling Days.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
INTERVIEWER NAOMI MORRIS OMORI
PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES LAWSON
As I walk through the streets of Islington in the gloomy British weather of October, the similarities between my two home cities, London and Tokyo, strike me – the fairy lights covering the trees remind me of Christmas in Tokyo and I feel a punch of homesickness in my stomach. It is apt that I am meeting Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, a writer whom I have long admired for her ability to describe the emotional burdens that come with a multicultural identity. We meet at Nekko, a Japanese cafe in Islington.
Inside, I find Rowan reading. Rain trails down the side of the café’s window while K-Pop blares from the speakers, creating an amusingly odd juxtaposition. She’s just spent the day working on a comic about identity, which she’s written and illustrated herself. We order Japanese curry-rice and teriyaki don. Upon arrival, the warmth and smell of the curry immediately comforts me. I ask Rowan where she considers home to be and for now, it’s London. Her mother is Asian-American: half-Japanese and half-Chinese, and her father is British. “Home is knowing my cutlery drawer will always be too cluttered because of my chopsticks and knives and forks,” she laughs. “You bring your own history to certain spaces.”
No one in Rowan’s family was a writer. The early days of her childhood were split be-tween living in the UK and visiting her grand-parents in New York over the holidays. She later moved to New York to study Economics at university. After discovering a passion in writing, she switched to a double major to include Creative Writing into her studies, which led her to write Harmless Like You. Her debut novel kickstarted her writing career and Rowan says that though she’s just completed her Master’s, she’s already been approached by agents in both the UK and the US. I ask her about the process of having to choose an agent and whether this was conflictual towards her identity to which she shrugs. “The crisis I felt was more about deciding to move back to the country I’d grown up in,” she said.
“I wanted to write a book featuring characters for whom race was an issue that appeared under the surface, rather than always being at the forefront of the character’s minds.”
Rowan explains how she came about writing Harmless Like You. “I grew up with a lot of stories about New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” she says these are the stories her mother and grandmother used to tell her. “There were lots of Japanese artists in New York at that time, Yayoi Kusuma, for instance. It fascinated me. I wanted to write those stories into history.”
The influence of family storytelling is evident in Rowan’s writing; the New York she portrays is cinematically nostalgic. An intergenerational story about the complexity of family bonds and the relationship between identity and place, Harmless Like You revolves around sixteen-year-old Yuki whose Japanese family decides to leave New York to return to Tokyo in 1968. For Yuki, New York is home, and despite not having real friends in the city, she decides to stay with a friend who welcomes her into their house. As Yuki navigates the city alone, a separate narrative taking place in 2016 is led by Yuki’s son Jay who’s on a mission to track down and confront the mother who left him when he was just two.
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
STARLING DAYS
I was drawn into the Rowan’s fictional worlds by the indie film-like quality of her writing and was immediately convinced that her next novel was definitely worth watching out for. The exploration of Jay’s character who cradles a fractured identity as fatherhood forces him to explore the cracks in his own self-confidence is moving to read.
When it came to writing her second novel (she gained a two book deal with British publisher Sceptre), she wanted to write about characters of the Asian diaspora. The story of Starling Days follows Oscar and Mina, a newlywed couple who temporarily moves to the UK from New York so that Mina can recover her mental health with the new change of scenery.
“We always talk about mental health is-sues in isolation, but they affect everyone around you,” Rowan tells me. I asked her how it felt to write Starling Days, putting herself as a writer in Mina’s headspace, to which she replies that she went to therapy in order to process the experience. I admire her honesty.
The character of Oscar is half-Japanese and half-British while Mina is Chinese-American. “I wanted to write a book featuring characters for whom race was an issue that appeared under the surface, rather than always being at the forefront of the character’s minds.” She focuses on the uncomfortable aspects of cultural gaps within families. Oscar feels inadequate because of the language barrier between him and his father. “This spoke to my insecurities about my inadequacies,” says Rowan. “Although my ways of dealing with people, my taste in food, come from that culture, I’m not fluent in Japanese.”
When her first novel Harmless Like You was published, I was struck by how beautifully it explored the complicated, intertwining stories of migration, diaspora, ‘family duty,’ and the feeling of emptiness that comes along this constant search for yourself. Despite this, Rowan’s first few characters when she began writing as a teen were like the traditional ones she’d read about – all-white. ‘It didn’t feel true – I came from a family and a world where people were from more than one place,” she thinks back. “As soon as I changed that, I could describe them as my characters rather than feel like they were borrowed.”
“As women we contain many different versions of ourselves. There is pressure to present a mono-identity. We’re afraid of misconceptions.”
Today, the influencers of Rowan’s writing mirror her multi-cultural identity: Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Ruth Ozeki, Banana Yoshimoto. When she was young, Rowan says she used to read the writing of Shirley Jackson, “drawn to the characters who were slightly strange and different, who failed to fit in or succeed.” She empathised with witches – a narrative that comes from the outsider complex.
Our discussion leads to a lengthy list of Japanese writers who have inspired her, like Yoko Ogawa for example. Her favourite of Ogawa’s works is The Diving Pool but she recently enjoyed reading The Memory Police. “Many characters in Japanese novels explain them-selves less than expected,” she says, which allows readers to be more neutral. “I loved Convenience Store Woman for that reason – it deserves the praise it has received.”
Our conversation moves to Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats. I tell her that my experience of reading the book was the first time I was able to see myself, a half-Japanese individual, represented in literature, before Harmless Like You. We shared the experience of not understanding the value of representation in literature until we saw ourselves represented and finally understood what we had been missing.
On a different end of the literary spectrum, Rowan also reflects on Virginia Woolf to which she says was someone who “described a huge importance to people’s interior lives.” There are several echoes of Mrs Dalloway in Starling Days which shine through; Mina’s reflections on vegetarianism are a nod towards My Year of Meats. It’s evident that the variety of stories Rowan has absorbed have inspired her reflections on her creative process: “it’s interesting to see authors arrive at the same issues but make different choices. I am fascinated by the divides and how people try to cross them.”
Mixed-race identities are complex. Racism, the feeling that you don’t fit in, the constant second-guessing yourself, and lack of a sense of belonging late into adulthood are all part of the negative experiences that Rowan has gone through. I ask her about the benefits of having a mixed-race identity to which she replies: “I’m very grateful for all the different stories I grew up with like Momotaro and Little Red Riding Hood.” Her background has also given her the ability to connect with others who share similar stories and questions about their identity.
“As women we contain many different ver-sions of ourselves. We can feel trapped by the ways people perceive us. Women can take hundreds of pictures of dogs and also read The Economist! There is pressure to present a mono-identity. We’re afraid of misconceptions,” Rowan muses.
Later in the day, we part ways. Like the curry-rice which has soothed the homesickness of my stomach, Rowan’s words have soothed the identity crises of my soul.
This profile was originally published in The WOW N° 2, 2019.