Poured Over: Julie Otsuka on The Swimmers
“I sketched out some of these pool scenes a long, long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, but just you know, a few paragraphs. And then I don’t know, I put them in a drawer somewhere….” It’s been twenty years since Julie Otsuka’s sublime debut, When the Emperor was Divine, almost ten since the collective voice of The Buddha in the Attic. Julie’s third novel, The Swimmers, is just out, and she joins us on the show to talk about her elegant, witty and elegiac new book and its “soft beating heart,” the joy (and comedy) she found writing about this community, writing in pencil (and more of her creative process), silence and memory, and more.
Featured books:
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on you favorite podcast app.
From this episode:
B&N: …I think at one point you talked in a previous interview about reading your work out loud, while you were working. Do you still do that?
Julie Otsuka: Actually, I did not with this novel, because I thought that would slow me down. And yet, this is the novel it took the longest to write. But I really did that when I was writing Buddha in the Attic, because I was just super tuned into the rhythm of the language. And that novel, it really came to me almost like a song or like a chant. Whereas with Emperor, that really came to me visually, very much just as a series of pictures that I could see in my head. …I didn’t read this aloud, I don’t think at all.
B&N: There’s a detail though, that I love about Alice because it says so much, that her husband wishes she had learned to cook. And by that he means Japanese food. She’s great with meatloaf and macaroni and cheese and tuna noodle casserole and Campbell’s Soup. She is a woman of her time, she knows how to cook all of these things that she would want to eat because being Japanese…People stopped speaking Japanese, they stopped using tea sets and wearing kimono. And all of these things were destroyed because of what happened when people went into the camps. And then also when they came out, there was nothing left.
Julie Otsuka: Yeah, I mean, there’s literally nothing left, since they burned many of their positions, or they gave things away or, or things were stolen from the warehouses, or they were kept during the war. And I think after the war, a lot of the young people that came out of the camps, when they themselves became parents, like my mother, they made an effort to raise their children in as all-American away as possible. And so I was raised, you know, eating all American food. We had Japanese food, I think once a year on New Year’s. My grandmother would come over and make this amazing spread of sushi and sashimi. But yes, there was a real attempt made to erase, any cultural traces of Japanese, I think in many, many families, and memory is hard.
B&N: And memory is part of what’s very hard for Alice, as well as we go through her journey. When we first meet her, she’s just a swimmer that everyone knows is a little different.
Julie Otsuka: Yes. And everyone in the pool, though, in a way, is a little different. You know, they’re all just a little–they’re all in their own special ways. But I almost wanted to introduce Alice to the reader without the reader realizing that it was going to end up being her story. I just wanted to show her as a fairly content swimmer in her world, and just as part of the community and as one of many, because I think that when we meet people or characters with dementia, we often forget that they’ve had very full lives up until this point. So I really wanted to paint a picture of the world that she came from, and the pool seemed like a good stand-in for the world. And it’s to show her as part of a community of people.