I’ve drawn on Japanese literature and culture a few times over the years, and I’ve been asking myself whether I would, could or should do those projects now in the same way I did them then.
I featured some of Lafcadio Hearn’s short stories (In A Cup Of Tea, The Reconciliation and The Woman of the Snow) in two touring shows, Tales of Terror and Spines Will Tingle, back in 2009 and 2010. I adapted Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashōmon and In A Grove back in 2015 as a promenade piece around the book rotunda of the Library of Birmingham. And in 2019, I conducted a Black Country Tay Ceremony as part of a programme of work involving older people in Birmingham.
The storytelling shows were pretty functional, I will freely admit. They were made cheaply and served a fairly limited purpose – I certainly didn’t push the boundaries of storytelling with them, except, I hope, in sharing some texts that would otherwise have been unfamiliar to most audiences. I don’t think I brought them to life in any radical or meaningful way, though.
Even The Ghost Is Lying – the promenade Akutagawa show – I really enjoyed making, and I really enjoyed translating the twists and turns of the story into the physical form of the audience experience, as they navigated along balconies and travelators in small groups while each of my three characters shared their own conflicted version of events.
The Tay Ceremony was not an attempt to restage a Japanese ritual, but was in fact a piece of gentle autobiographical theatre. It used my relationship with tea as a springboard for encouraging my older audience to think about their own relationship with tea, about the traditions and paraphernalia and memories that accompany it. It was a session full of conversation, full of fun, and I loved it.
All of this begs an unavoidable question which is more pressing now in 2024 than it was when I made these shows over the last fifteen years: did I have any right to draw on a culture that is not my own?
The short answer to this complex question is that I still really don’t know. The storytelling show and the promenade piece could (if budget and casting processes had allowed) have been performed by actors of authentic Japanese heritage. Those projects would have gained something from that, for sure.
But was it absolutely essential for those stories to be told by people with a direct relationship to the culture of the source material’s country? I don’t know. I do know that different people will have different perspectives on that.
And as for the Tay Ceremony project – was I respectful or disrespectful for doing what I did, in the way that I did it?
I hope the former is true. It was clear, I think, throughout the piece that I was acknowledging and sharing and drawing on things I’d researched, and that I wasn’t appropriating the traditional ceremony but was instead being inspired to look for parallels and common principles within my own life and experience, and inviting the audience to do the same. But I’m sure many people would say it was not my place to do that.
Where does this leave us as writers? If we must limit ourselves to telling only those stories where we have firsthand experience and knowledge, or which relate directly to aspects of our own identity or heritage, then surely we are closing ourselves off, excluding ourselves from the opportunity to use our imaginations to transcend the narrow parameters of who we are. Countless works would never have been written if this was the rule we had to abide by.
Is there any kind of valid distinction to be made between writing work which features or represents particular experiences or identities, and writing work which is actually about the details and nuances of those experiences and identities?
Let’s use me as an example for a thought experiment – I’m a gay white man. Let’s say I write a book about a gay white male character who goes off to fight a dragon.
In one possible iteration of the book, the focus could be on the fighting of the dragon – the character being gay or white or male is not what the book is chiefly addressing, but those things are all in there. A different iteration could instead focus firmly on that character’s experience of gayness, whiteness and/or maleness – and so there, the dragon fighting is not what the book is chiefly addressing. There’s an important difference between these two iterations, I think. But since I’m a gay white man, it is presumably okay for me to write both iterations.
What if I wanted to make my main character non-binary or genderfluid or female, though? If I wanted them to be black or brown instead of white? If I wanted them to be bisexual or asexual or demisexual or heterosexual instead of gay? Presumably I could still write the iteration where that character is focused on dragon fighting, even though their experience or identity differs from my own. But what if I wanted the dragon fighting to be a backdrop to exploring aspects of that character’s lived experience, an experience I do not share? Is it still okay for me to write that book?
Is there a discreet spectrum of acceptability within all this, in which writers have more scope to engage imaginatively with some experiences and identities, and less scope with others? Can someone legitimately write characters whose gender is different from their own, but not characters whose race is different from their own? Is it okay to write stories which relate to a faith you do not share, but not okay to write stories about a socio-economic class you do not belong to? Are stories set in places we’ve never visited or time periods before or beyond our lifespan problematic because they have to be based on research and guesswork rather than on empirical fact?
How much are we allowed to imagine? And do we get to decide that for ourselves, or does someone else get to decide that for us?
