In the spring of 2021, critics worldwide were raving about an emerging novelist by the name of Emily Itami, whose debut novel about crushing social confomity and motherhood in modern Tokyo was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. Her first work 'Fault Lines' tells the story of Japanese housewife Mizuki, who is pressured by the unspoken social rules of total perfection and order which dictate Tokyo society, and consequentially escapes her unfortuate circumstances by having an affair with Kiyoshi, an affectionate man she meets on coincedentally on several occasions who provides a stark contrast to her emotionally detatched husband Tatstuya. In an interview over zoom, Emily talks about her experience as an emerging author, balancing pursuing her passion with her other commitments, and the challenges she overcame in her writing career.
When did you first start writing and what inspired you to start writing in general?
I guess when I was really quite young, I was like one of those geeky kids who was keeping a diary all the time. I had terrible diaries all through my teenage years, which should definitely be burnt. Writing stories and plays and short stories and everything. we do this thing called the Drama Festival at my school, which was Henrietta Barnett School, where you'd have to put on a play and I write plays for that. Every piece of bad writing that you could do, I was doing. I was probably nine or ten, maybe, when I first started really enjoying writing. And I think maybe one of the things that first made me, like, writing was coming back from Japan and realising how different London was to Tokyo. I guess it made me see things from a different perspective, which I found interesting and made me want to write about it.
Do you think the bad writing was necessary for the good writing to come along?
Yeah, probably.
So where specifically did the inspiration for Fault Lines come from?
Well, I moved to Japan with my kids when they were very little. So I was living there about seven or eight years ago now. I was brought up in Japan, so I knew Japan, but to live in Japan, and I guess specifically in Tokyo as an adult, it's a very different experience to living there as a kid. the difference in society, specifically the difference in the way that women are treated and the way that mothers are expected to behave, really struck me, and I found myself as a new mother, looking around at this crazy world and how perfect everyone was expected to be, just how insanely high the standards were for the way that mothers were expected to be, I found that really, really interesting. And also, Japanese women especially in the area in Tokyo that we lived in, I think it's fair to say that it's a society where people are quite reserved. When you get to know them, they’re not, but initially, people are very reserved and it's all about appearance, and I couldn't believe that people were not having the kind of thoughts that we share all the time in the UK about whatever our inner thoughts are, or whatever it might be going on inside our heads. It kind of seemed to me that they probably still had those thoughts even though they looked like bottles which wouldn't melt.
So before you moved to Japan, did you ever think that you were going to write a book at some point in the novel?
Yeah, I think I always wanted to. I mean, it always interested me, I always was writing stuff.
How much did growing up in Tokyo influence your writing?
Yeah, I think it made a big difference because I guess it made me think about I was going to say it made me think about home, which was maybe related to this book. I kind of think it gave me a feeling about Tokyo. I think you can get a feeling about a place, for me, anyway, I have more of a feeling about the place through the combination of living there and then living away from it. So I think it's a privilege to be able to see something from both the inside and the outside. So I think that if I'd only lived there for those couple of years as an adult, I might not have had the same really intense feelings about it that I had. because I would think of Tokyo as being my home, and it was somewhere that I wanted to go back to. Whenever I thought about it, I thought I wanted to go home to it. So to have these two different feelings about it, the kind of the childhood experience of it, and this really strong sense that it's a home and then seeing it from the outside of the society was kind of part of what made the book, I think.
Are there any writers specifically that you look up to are there any writers or books that influenced Fault Lines or whatever you’re writing now?
I mean, there are so many writers I look up to.
Fair enough, what are the main ones, off the top of your head?
A few? Well, now I can't think of any of them. I mean, I really love Anne Patrick, for example, the American author, because I just find her writing so kind of empathetic and beautifully observed. Barbara Kingsolver, she’s great. But I really, really love stuff that manages to be funny and get to really truthful things while making you laugh. Because I feel like it’s quite easy to make someone cry. To pull someone's heartstring so that they feel sad is relatively easy but to make them laugh and have a good time, but also see something that's true and sad and at the same time, for me, that's the kind of writing I like. Recently, I've been reading a lot of Katherine Heiney. She wrote Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser, and I thought those were totally fantastic. Standard Deviation is a story about a family whose son has ASD and a kind of really irreverent look at family life. Oh, and Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason, she’s the best. I mean, that wasn't out when I was writing fault lines, so I guess it didn't influence fault lines as such. But occasionally when I read really sad, particularly kind of Misery memorial things, not to downplay, there are, of course, very skilled ones, But I do think that making people feel sad you can do because there’s quite a lot of sadness that you can draw, whereas lifting people up is a tricky thing to do.
So do you have a creative process when you sit down to write?
I just finished my second book. I feel like I'm maybe a bit green on the process to be able to I feel a bit fake to say whether I have one or not. I feel like maybe I could tell you in ten books time, but for now, I mean, the reality of trying to write with family life going on and I guess teaching and everything else is that you write it when you can. And sometimes things occur to me and I end up finding myself writing them while sitting at the bottom of the stairs, while the children run around me screaming about bath time or whatever. That's just the way it is. And sometimes I can sit down and manage to sit down for a few hours at a time, and when I do, that makes me extremely happy. But it's a combination of what you can get away with.
Do you have a routine when you’re in the process of writing a novel?
Well, yeah, because I still have to go to work. Which I also find good, because, you know, Elizabeth Gilbert, she wrote Eat Pray Love, I quite love the way that she talks about creativity. She said in her book called Big Magic, which I think is great, that trying to get your art to make money for you is like yelling at a cat to pay your rent. It just doesn't make any sense. You can't guarantee that it's going to do it, which I thought was a great way to think about it. She said it's a good idea to just keep your normal life going so that you then don't put pressure on whatever it is that you're trying to make to have to pay the rent, which I think makes sense. So, anyway, so I am continuing to work and do everything else, which is a long winded way to say I can't do it every day, because that's just not possible. I don't know if there is, maybe there is more of a secret to it than it seems there is to me. To me, I just need to sit down and be quiet. That's it. And as many hours as I can get, sitting down and being quiet with no one bugging me is always necessary.
From your experience, what are the main challenges of starting out as a writer?
I think you need to deal with rejection, like, a lot, and you have to not mind about dealing with rejection. It seems to me that you have to want to do it because you want to do it and you have to not mind that maybe it will never get published and maybe you'll never make any money. The challenge of realising that it might not happen is quite difficult. I guess you have to believe that it's worth doing because it's worth doing regardless of whether or not it succeeds, and you have to be prepared to keep going. I actually think that's just the hardest, just to keep going.
Leading on from that, do you have any advice for any people staring out in writing novels or just any creative endeavour in general?
Yeah, I think keep going, keep going. Just don't stop. And also don't believe, maybe just don’t believe that anything is the look beneath you. Whatever it is, just be prepared to do it. I did a lot of random writing, and I think that was good. You can practise and you can get your experience in and you never know where anything's going to lead you.
You've sort of answered this question already when you're talking about you and you little hint of your second book, but are there any upcoming projects for the future that you can tease?
The plan is that the second book is going to be out next year. And then after that, I hope I can just keep writing. We'll see how it goes. But that would be the dream.
Next question is a little bit personal, so answer to whatever degree you want, but they say that life imitates art, so to what extent is Fault Lines based on your own real life experience?
I'd say it's not autobiographical in that I'm very different from Mizuki, and also none of the events that happened in it are true. But obviously, I do have children, and I have lived in Tokyo, so I guess it’s my observations of the city that I was thinking of, and my experience of having kids and what that’s like. But it's just kind of I think that's the extent to which it's autobiographical, none of the events and none of the characters are autobiographical.
You can purchase Fault Lines at any good book store, and you can read more about Emily and her work on her website: https://www.emilyitami.com/
