Writers' Responsibility for Social Issues

 No, I think the day is long past when anyone writing stories is not committing a political act and has not a responsibility to consider social issues. I read Dashiell Hammett and Robert B. Parker addressing social issues as much as Joyce Carol Oates or Joan Didion.  I found an email from The New Yorker with this article, Bryan Washington on the Narratives We Fear, and this caught my attention and my conscience:

The narrator names the cat Taku, for a man he knew when he lived in Japan. Japanese themes run through your work—what draws you to that culture?

The answer’s pretty mundane: I’ve been the recipient of—and been deeply grateful for—the kindness and warmth of friends and strangers, locally and abroad, and that will never not be interesting to me. I’m always circling around the idea of what can constitute a “home”—whether it’s a place, a person, a feeling, or something else—and, aside from the greater Houston area, Kansai is maybe the only other place so far where I’ve felt shades of that particular warmth. So swaths of my writing have just been me trying to figure out why that is. (Relatedly: we all have a responsibility to stand against and disrupt the rise in anti-Asian racism and harassment in the States. And we all have a role to play in combatting white supremacy’s vestiges in this country as it targets the most vulnerable folks in our communities. So, if you’re reading this and you haven’t already, please take time to really examine the struggles faced by these communities generally, and the seniors and socioeconomically disadvantaged women in these communities specifically, and what you can personally do to counteract those struggles. One potential step is supporting organizations like the Asian Pacific Fund, O.C.A.-Greater Houston, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, and the Asian Mental Health Collective, among so many others.)

But, probably crucially, I wasn’t the biggest reader growing up, and a significant chunk of the texts I eventually arrived at via my local library were Japanese novels in translation. The works of Yoko Ogawa, Natsuo Kirino, Banana Yoshimoto, and Hiromi Kawakami are inextricable from my understanding of what fiction can be. And I likely wouldn’t be writing today if I hadn’t come across Haruki Murakami’s “Sputnik Sweetheart” when I did. So I’m deeply indebted to the works of those authors, and to translators like Allison Markin Powell, Louise Heal Kawai, Ginny Tapley Takemori, and Morgan Giles (to name just a few folks) for making contemporary Japanese fiction accessible to English-speaking audiences.

And notice the reading of foreign writers. There will be more about this on this blog as time goes by. 

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6/13/21