Simon Rowe loves a good story. In fact, he is so fond of story telling that he signed up for an English teacher’s job in Japan and taught his students to talk about the Japanese culture in English. His students learnt English and he became a story teller.
When I read Mami Suzuki, the latest detective novel by Simon Rowe, it was as if I had found a friend in her. Like me, she is a single mother, struggling to make a living and raise her child. She works two jobs, struggles with the loneliness that comes with being a single mother and tries her best to cope with it. Mami Suzuki seemed so real that I had to know from her creator Simon Rowe if he had really met her in real life or if it was a channelling of sorts. Some excerpts from the rendezvous at the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Are you anything like your heroine Mami Suzuki?
(Laughs). Yes to some extent, I am. I am middle aged, I live in Japan but that’s where the similarity ends. Mami is a composite character, a figment of the imagination but drawn from all the women that I know in Japan, who are middle aged, who are working hard (in some cases two jobs), might be single mothers. My wife too is a middle aged Japanese woman. She is very busy too. Mami means true beauty.
So, was this character inspired by your wife?
(Smiles). That is what I will tell her! But it is much more than that. As a foreigner, I guess I can see and observe more details about the Japanese people and a lot differently as compared to the natives. Though I have been here for the last 27 years, Japan still looks new and fresh to me. In a way it is death by stimulation. There is just too much for a writer to take in.
Did Mami walk into your brain preformed or did you have to think her up?
First of all, we start with the motivation. I wanted to tell a story where the character overcomes a lot of difficulties and succeeds in the end. About that time in 2020, I was creating a collection of short stories which was to be self-published through crowd funding. The motivation for the last story came from a leaflet advertising services of a female detective in Japanese language which is very rare. It showed a middle-aged woman dressed in short suit. I filed away this idea but then ideas have a life of their own. They pop up at unexpected times. I was reading detective series like Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander McCall Smith (the author of No.1 Ladies Detective Agency). So the idea came to me of a single mother who lived in Kobe, a place where I live in western Japan. A tale of triumph and adversity. So that is where I found the story. That’s how the character came about and it was built by research which including interviewing some Tokyo detectives as well. The thing is there aren’t many female detectives in Japan so the thing is you need a new spin on the old stereotype of the wine drinking, chain smoking detective with a woman waiting for him in the bar. So, I flipped it upside down. So, now I have the hard working, beer drinking single mother who has two jobs and she has her love interest waiting in the bar!
Mami you say is a work of fiction. However, when one reads the book, it seems as if she is real woman. Did you study single mothers to write Mami?
Mami feels like a woman I know well, although I’ve never met anyone exactly like her. I know quite a few single mothers here in Japan. They are friends or acquaintances of both my wife and I, and so often we hear about their trials and tribulations, but not so much about their triumphs. I guess that was the motivation behind writing this story.
I wanted my protagonist to finish victorious. That is, by the end of the story, Mami retakes control of her destiny by going professional and ridding herself of the male-dominated hotel executive world. To go it alone is very risky in Japan, it takes guts and determination, but there aren’t too many options for single mothers, many of whom have to juggle work and family life to the best of their (financial and emotional) ability. I believe their lot has even gotten worse due to inflation (and wages not keeping pace with rising prices) and the ongoing recession, which means less full time jobs with benefits (although childcare remains sparse here in Japan) and more part-time jobs without benefits.
I find there is more social stigma attached to single motherhood in Japan. My sister, who lives in rural Australia, is a single mother but she is lucky that she has a full-time job (with benefits) which allows her to work from home. There isn’t the same stigma in Australia either.
Japanese single mothers struggle to find childcare possibilities because they must travel to their place of work, which is more likely to be part-time rather than full-time, and therefore not possible to do from home. Japan was ranked 125 out of 146 countries for gender inequality, which is very negative indeed.
I guess the other source of research has been my job as an English teacher. Most of my students now are female (I teach at Kobe Women’s University) and so I often read their very honest stories of family life and relationships with their parents. Writing gives them a chance to say things they wouldn’t say aloud in class. In a way, writing is a cathartic exercise and I feel many of them enjoy it for this reason. I certainly don’t mine their lives for details to add to my stories, but as a whole they give me a feeling for the single parent dynamic which exists here in Japan.
Tell us about your growing up days.
I grew up in New Zealand. We immigrated to Melbourne for the final days of the schooling. I have younger siblings too. I finished the university and I became a travel writer. I was always fond of writing and I realized travel and writing together were really a good way to see the world. So for the next 10-12 years, I travelled around the world. I used to write a story, take photos and make a package and send it to multiple publications and be paid multiple times. We can’t do that now. I had a self-perpetuating existence where I was travelling with a back pack and had cameras and I had pretty wild life. Things I won’t do now. Like take small boats way way up to the jungle or ride a bus to Morocco. A lot of hard travel. It was stimulating and gave me something to write about because I believe if you write a travel story it should be authentic. Like for example, I met this guy who is chef and he makes the best chicken biryani in Delhi. So, it is not just about the food but the man also. With time, the competition became great to the point where I would go to a small island in the Pacific and discover someone from my rival publication was already there. Though I was working freelance, yet the competition was great.
…To be continued
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on April 3rd, 2024
….To be continued
Leave a Reply