Shailaza's Blog

Tag: Simon Rowe

  • The Kiwi Who Landed in Japan……..2

    Simon Rowe is a New Zealander who has fallen in love with Japan and the Japanese culture. His love affair started in the 90s and shows no sign of abating.

    What made you migrate to Japan?
    Japan in the 90s was a very mysterious and closed country. The yen was very high. They wouldn’t allow the freelance writers and you had to have a visa sponsored. I really wanted to go to Japan not just because it was such a mysterious country but also for financial reasons as I could sell a lot of stories of Japan. So, my mother was the one who really helped me because she was reading a Sunday newspaper. She found an advertisement that was for English teachers in Japan. I applied and they accepted. I had to teach seven hours a night time and they sponsored my visa. So, day time I was writing and night time I was teaching. But if you are clever you can actually use the teaching as a way to learn about the culture because you get the students to talk about their culture. So, they get good lessons and you get a lot of material for your stories! So, you are getting the good oil for your writing.


    When did you meet your wife?
    I met her in Japan in 1997 at a party. She liked travelling but not back packing. I introduced her to back packing and we travelled everywhere. Then we moved back to Australia. We had kids and moved back to Japan. She is a yoga teacher now. Her teacher who is a Japanese person lives in Delhi.

    The bar depicted in Mami Suzuki


    Why do you like about Japan?
    I feel at home in Japan because there is a strong sense of community. We have the children’s association, PTA and soccer association. I have two kids. My daughter is 16 years old and my son is 12 years old and a soccer maniac! At home, we are constantly switching between Japanese and English just like you switch between Hindi and English without even being conscious of it!
    How did you learn the Japanese language?
    I used to go out to the bars and restaurants. Bars are the best place to pick up the language because everyone is relaxed and they will talk to you if you are alone and a foreigner. In my city, western Kobe, they are very social people. It is a quiet city which is famous for Himeji Samurai Castle. So every day, hundreds of tourists, get off the train and walk to the castle and then walk back to the train and they are off. It is a lovely place because it has room to breathe and has beautiful people.


    What is your relationship with writing?
    Oh! I had started reading at a very early age. I read books like Jaws, the National Geographic Magazines, Prison Escape stories. So, I had a sense of a story and then growing up in New Zealand you have sense of adventure and you are outside all the time. So, once you have lived the experience and have stories and adventures, then it is not difficult to write. So, I told my students to go out and have an adventure and then write about it. In the last 6 years, I turned to writing fiction because travel writing became too mundane and then we had articles like ‘the ten best places to have coffee in Rome’ or ‘the five best mountains to climb’. So there was really no story telling involved. For us Kiwis, telling stories is a part of our culture. Writing is really storytelling. Writing fiction gives this amazing freedom to create anything you want. That is really enjoyable.

    What do you like about the Japanese lifestyle?
    Everything is very well organized and predictable in Japan. However, if you look closely, it is really like this double-edged sword. I like the fact that everything is predictable. The trains will run on time, the people will never be late, the customer service is the best in the world. They are very patient people. You expect things to happen because that’s the way it always happens. Therefore, you don’t waste time or get angry or irritated. However, by the same token, it can be a bit confounding when they stick to the schedule and the rules. The etiquettes, the rules and the manners are something that requires many years to learn. You cannot just charge in there and do what you want. Like I was in a train and there was an earthquake. The train stopped for about an hour and nobody said anything. I closed my eyes and all I could hear was people breathing. So, you have to be sensitive to the Japanese culture. The thing about the Japanese people is that they are very social and they love drinking and socializing. But they are very good drunks as compared to Australia. In Australia, drunks can fight and kill each other but in Japan even when they are drunk, they look out for each other. When they get drunk, they get noisy, they laugh a lot, they play instruments and then they go home and sleep. They are very nice natured and super welcoming people with almost zero crime. For an outsider, Japan may appear to be too strict, formal and structured but once you get to know it, it becomes one of the best places to live because there are no surprises. You have to have an open mind and it is all about give and take. Like for example, for me as a foreigner, it was difficult understanding why we needed to give a gift to someone who has given us a gift or why certain customs exist. Now, I have come to appreciate all these customs and rituals.


    Do you like coming to India?
    It is my third time in India and first time in Jaipur. In 1992, I came from Katmandu and went to Agra. This was the time of the Hindu Muslim riots. I saw the Taj Mahal the next day and then there was a curfew and no body could leave the hotel because of the riots. It seems funny that I came the same time that the Ram Temple- Babri Masjid issue happened. It seems strange that I am coming back now when all is settled. It brings back a lot of memories. The first two trips were miserable. I got sick and I saw a man die in a very bad way. He put his head on the railway tracks. These things rather depressed me and I couldn’t enjoy myself. I was on my way to Jodhpur. Afterwards, when I was going to the airport, I asked a young boy to get me filtered water, which he didn’t. He got me normal water and I fell sick again.
    This time though it has been wonderful. Everything has been amazing. I am having the best time. I am enjoying the Indian people, the chefs, the taxi guys, the writers, the poets and the volunteers. They are not afraid to give their opinion. In Japan they don’t do that because there is this sense of maintaining harmony where you don’t have to upset anyone by giving your opinion. No one talks politics. So, I am really impressed. India has really changed but I can’t say the same for the tuk tuk drivers! They are the worst when it comes to driving and the money

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on April 4, 2024.

  • Simon Rowe Loves A Good Story

    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