Songs for Ghosts, the second novel from Clara Kumagai, is full of longing, love and heartbreak, inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly . . .
Once upon a time, there was a popular Japanese storytelling game called Hyakumonogatari kaidankai. It was often played in the summer, because in Japan that is when the dead return—and when chills cool us in the humid heat. The game is this: one hundred candles are lit and participants tell stories of ghosts, the uncanny, the spooky, and after each one is told a candle is blown out. When the very last candle is breathed into darkness, something happens.
There are not quite one hundred stories within my second young adult novel Songs for Ghosts, but it does draw on folktales, histories and classic narratives to tell the tale of two young people adrift in the world. Like my first book, Catfish Rolling, it is informed by own multiracial identity and the quest for belonging that many young people embark on—no matter their cultural background or where they may call home. It is inspired, too, by the real and the fictional, and by Japanese stories both ancient and contemporary. I could go into all the fascinating research I got lost it, the interviews with artists and historians, the field trips to Nagasaki but for now…
…let us light just ten candles. Here is the first story: Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, one of the most enduring and often performed operas in the world. I first saw it in 2016 and the music was gorgeous, the heroine Cio-Cio-san moving and tragic. But I left troubled by the dynamics of race and gender, and with a lingering question about a particular character: what happens to Cio-Cio-san’s son? Her son, like me, is half-Japanese and his story was unfinished. It haunted me, followed me around for years, so it is no wonder that it became a ghost story. (Now, blow out a candle.)
A second story: the retelling of Cio-Cio-san’s narrative, not as a loyal and a submissive wife, but as an intelligent, strong, and rather rebellious young woman. Inspired by the writings of early Japanese feminists, who similarly fought for personal and social freedoms, I decided to recount Cio-Cio-san’s perspective in the form of a diary. She relates her thoughts and experiences herself, in a diary that she begins in the early 1900s. This diary is found by a queer Japanese-American teenager called Adam, over a hundred years later. Adam is caught between heartbreak, cultures and relationships, and the diary catches him, too. And so the haunting begins, leading Adam to a summer in Nagasaki as he tries to solve the mystery of the diary, and of his own identity. (A breath exhaled, a flame snuffed.)
A third: a butterfly; not the delicate insect that Cio-Cio-san is named after but the surprising emblem of a famous family in Japanese literature, the Taira clan. Their story is the Tale of the Heike, Japan’s 12th century epic which survived through oral recitations, accompanied by a stringed instrument called the biwa and traditionally played by sight-impaired travelling musicians. As well as entertainment, these performances were believed to serve another purpose: to appease the dead. And so, instead of singing as a soprano, my Cio-Cio-san plays the biwa and learns its power. (Another candle is extinguished.)
A fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, as there were many old Japanese stories that have shaped my writerly self. They are recounted in the novel: the weaver and the cowherd, the farmer and the fox, the mizuame, the beautiful lady with the lamp. (Douse a light for each, see the shadows grow.)
An eighth: that I am drawn to telling these stories to a young adult audience because folktales contain messages pertinent to growing up. Despite their brevity, simplicity and (occasionally) their absurdity, they demonstrate truths about promises, love, honour, wisdom. They have survived so long because with each recounting something new can be revealed, even more so when stories cross cultures. (Quench a candle, watch the smoke whisper away.)
A ninth: a secret. There is one folk story that I invented myself, which a reader may guess at. It was possibly the most enjoyable short story I have ever written. (Yet with another candle gone dark, can it be seen?)
The tenth and final candle in my round: Songs for Ghosts is a novel of echoes and reverberations across centuries and countries and oceans—of legend, of families, of love and heartbreak. (The last flame is put out, the room plunged into darkness.)
Something does happen; our eyes adjust. What we see are all the places where light has crept in. There are the stories, scattered and germinating, reaching and growing towards the light. Enough light to read by, to play new music by—some Songs for Ghosts.
(c) Clara Kumagai
About Songs for Ghosts by Clara Kumagai:
From the author of Catfish Rolling, Clara Kumagai, a second novel full of longing, love and heartbreak, inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
Turn the page, strike a chord.
There are restless ghosts to be appeased…
When Japanese-American teenager, Adam, discovers a diary in his attic, he is enthralled by its account of a young Japanese woman’s life. A hundred years separate them yet she, like Adam, is caught between cultures, relationships and heartbreak.
She also writes of the ghosts that have begun to seek her out, which Adam dismisses as fantasy – until he too, begins to be haunted. It leads him to Nagasaki, trying to solve the mystery of the diary, and his own identity.
And the ghosts gather…
Order your copy of Songs for Ghosts by Clara Kumagai online here.
