The previous section is devoted to an analysis of the Japanese American traveling
“unhome” as embodied in The Floating World. Probing into the complicated implications of
“unhome,” I demonstrate Kadohata’s attempt to re-read the seeming Japanese American
“homelessness” into a position of socio-historical intervention. On the one hand, the post-war dispersion of Japanese Americans seems to render them invisible. The disintegration of their families and communities results in their being removed from any fixed place called “home.”
On the other hand, however, their being specifically no-where ends up—ironically—with the possibilities of their being everywhere in the United States. Infiltrating into the world through their travels and movement, Japanese Americans create spaces through their “unhomely”
existence.
Yet, as I have also pointed out at the beginning of the previous section, the Japanese American family in The Floating World is “unconventional” not only because it is not
territorially bounded but also because it challenges the genetic unity and patrilinear continuity of an idealized modern bourgeois family. Olivia’s is not only a household that sprawls toward the outside but also a domicile that generates the foreign, the unfamiliar, or, in the Freudian term, the “uncanny” from within its own structure. Significantly, the Freudian “uncanny” is precisely “unhomely” (unheimlich) in its original Germany. It adds another twist to our understanding of “unhome” as Freud interprets the prefix “un” not as a “negation” or an
“opposition” but as a “repression.” The “uncanny” is the re-occurrence of the repressed and the forgotten. Freud reiterates that it is not the completely new and the unfamiliar that gives rise to the feeling of the “uncanny. What accounts for unheimlich is rather the return of
“something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). There is as such no sheer opposition between unheimlich and heimlich. “Unhome” sheds light on what has been repressed or forgotten in the process through which the “home” assumes its unified and continuous appearance. It reveals the hybridities in the constitution of a household from within itself.
Freud makes this clear in his assertion: “This unheimlich place [. . .] is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings” (245).“Unhome” restores a “home” to its more hybrid and convoluted shape.
Drawing upon this Freudian insight on the “uncanny”/“unhomely,” I would like to investigate in the rest of this paper the domestic complexities of Japanese American families first in The Floating World and then in Talking to High Monks. As has been noted, implicit in Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” is a radical re-conception of “home” from its within. A home is never as “unified” and “self-enclosed” as may have been expected; it only appears “unified”
and “self-enclosed” after a process of repression. And since this repression is never a
complete process, “repression” in a household actually bespeaks the “return of the repressed.”
A “home” as such is never free from its “unhomely” underside. This explains why an
“idealized domesticity” can only be projected unto the future or embodied in one’s nostalgia.
As demonstrated by the examples of Ichiro and Mura mentioned above, Ichiro dreams about a future family/home, which nonetheless remains not yet achieved in No-No Boy, and Mura has grown to be aware of the existence of a hybrid Japanese American history and identity the moment he comments on his father’s attempt to set up an American bourgeois household. In the case of The Floating World and Talking to High Monks, the question of patrilinearity, the disruption of genetic unity, and the (material) other’s interventions most obviously
characterize the “unhomely”/”uncanny” underside of Japanese American families.
It is quite clear that Olivia’s family in The Floating World is not built upon a strict patrilinear order; nor does this family assume the appearance of a harmonious household of bourgeois idealization. It is by nature a makeshift family originating from the need of Olivia’s mother to find a legal husband when she is already eight months pregnant. If we do not count in Olivia’s real father—Jack, her mother’s extramarital dates, and the other families or individuals they travel with, Olivia lives in a family made up of primarily seven members:
Olivia, her mother, her step-father Charlie-O, her three younger half-brothers born between her mother and Charlie-O, and Obāsan. That this family does not develop out of a clear paternal line is evident in many aspects. First, there is no mentioning of Charlie-O’s background. Though Olivia likes him and addresses him as “my father” (in contrast to her calling her real father “Jack”), the father’s story—particularly the ancestral lineage on his side—is left out by Olivia’s narrative. Olivia confesses that “I don’t know exactly how my grandmother found Charlie-O”; she only later hears from Obāsan that “she’d first brought him to Fresno to meet [. . . her] mother” when the latter is already pregnant (39). Secondly,
Charlie-O is not presented in the novel as a father with paternal authority. The readers are told
that Charlie-O is an amateur painter who sells paintings only “in his imagination” (60). Also, he loves Olivia’s mother yet is “loud and undignified” whereas Olivia’s mother is “graceful and pensive and intellectual” (39). Another thing we know about Charlie-O is that he never owns anything until his purchase of the garage in Arkansas. Worst of all, Olivia once comments upon the power relationship between her parents: “[T]hough my mother was several years younger than Charlie-O, she always struck me as womanly, whereas my father was boyish” (43). Last but not least, the novel never mentions Charlie-O’s last name. Actually, there is no mentioning of the last name of any major father figures in the novel. Neither
Charlie-O and Jack, nor the three fathers of Olivia’s mother are remembered by their last names. In a quite intriguing way, The Floating World presents a world with many fathers yet none of them is powerful enough to head a family with a name-of-the-father.
This lack of a paternal name may appear to some readers as an echo to the anxiety of ethnocide many Japanese Americans have suffered since their traumatic experiences during World War II. To be noticed, however, is that the lack of the name-of-the-father does not seem to pose an issue of special concern to most characters in the novel. In a sense, The Floating World is written in a way to counteract the worries of Japanese American ethnic extinction. The novel presents a family that can develop and grow despite the lack of the father’s name or a clear paternal lineage. One of the most obvious examples is that, although the marriage between Charlie-O and Olivia’s mother is marked by endless problems, Olivia’s family continues to grow and thrive. In addition to Olivia, three sons are born after Olivia’s mother marries Charlie-O. Even when the family falls apart because of the marriage problems between the parents, the community comes forward to organize for the children a makeshift family. Olivia and two of her younger brothers are sent to stay in Nebraska with Charlie-O’s friend as their “foster parent” when Charlie-O and Olivia’s mother are broke (12). And when the parents come back to stay together again, they pick up their children and continue their family life on the road. This makeshift nature of families is also seen through the life story of Olivia’s mother. Olivia’s mother grows up through three households with three different fathers, ending up remembering little about her real father. In fact, the father Olivia’s mother remembers the most is her second father, Bill; similarly, Olivia is in better terms with
Charlie-O than with Jack. “I spoke to [. . . Jack] only a couple of times,” Olivia confesses,
“Charlie-O was the one who was ‘Dad’” (151).
Briefly, characters in The Floating World are concerned more about the makeshift communities that may emerge anytime on the road in response to their needs of company and help than about genetic unity or patrilinear order that defines a traditional bourgeois family. It
is the everyday trifles, not paternal lineage, which bound people together. Olivia points out that it always takes her by surprise “how naturally and quickly new people covered the surface of [. . . her] life” (152). To her, a car accident on a bus station is able to cause the formation of a community on the road by bounding together a group of people from different places and with unknown identities. Moreover, despite the apparent differences in personality between her mother and Charlie-O, she claims that they “matched” because they “lived in the same world, used the same shampoo, ate the same foods” (43). Olivia is also interested in the
“unplanned quality” in the emergence of the Japanese American community in “Arkansas: “It is as if a giant had taken a bunch of houses and thrown them randomly on the ground, and people took up residence wherever the houses happened to land” (96). Here, so long as there are people around and communities available, who cares about patrilinearity? Near the end of the novel, although Olivia inherits from Jack his vending-machine route, the patrilinear implications of this episode are also cast into question. First, it is Charlie-O who accompanies Olivia, though only halfway, to undertake her fist journey of servicing the route. Moreover, when Olivia encounters what she claims to be the “ghost” of Jack on one station of the
vending-machine route, she finds she has so little to tell him that she pours out the news about her three half brothers in a tone that casts Jack to be an outsider of the family she is truly concerned about:
Did I ever show you any pictures of my brothers? Walker’s pretty quiet, but he’s not really shy, the way he used to be. He just doesn’t like to talk to people if they don’t interest him. Ben’s the opposite. He has too many friends. Walker and Ben are in high school. Peter’s in grammar school. He skipped a grade because he’s so smart.
(160)
Olivia even talks to Jack’s face: “If it weren’t for you, maybe my mother would have loved my dad more” (160). Indeed, after saying this, Olivia starts to worry about her work in the station and “forgot about Jack” (161). The return of the “real” father as a ghost ends up being a mere bluff. As he is simply forgotten, fading into the background of a dark night, the daughter appropriates the vending-machine route to be her own