The Lessons of 3 Generations in Focus

When we call a novel “cinematic,” we usually refer to its quick jumps from one fragmentary scene to another, or to a “visual” quality that readily translates to the screen: sweeping landscapes, car chases, things blowing up. Mako Yoshikawa’s debut novel, “101 Ways,” however, is cinematic in quite a different way: through its handling of focus.

Just as a camera operator can show every pore in a character’s face in close-up and leave the background vague, or, conversely, zoom in on someone approaching from far in the distance and leave the foreground blurry, so Yoshikawa’s story of three generations of a Japanese American family is a story of uncertainty resolving into clarity--and vice versa.

The narrator, Kiki Takehashi, is a graduate student at Columbia University. She studies English literature and, as the novel opens, gets engaged to a promising young lawyer, Eric Lowenson. But she is haunted--literally--by a former lover, Phillip, who died in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas, and whose mute, naked ghost she sees curled up in her closets and under her coffee table.

Viewed symbolically, this specter is an expression of Kiki’s doubts about Eric. He’s a little too self-assured, and Kiki suspects that he has an “Asian-woman fetish,” a belief in the sexual legend, embroidered by generations of American soldiers, that she “possessed a set of keys that would unlock their bodies with a groan, 101 times, 101 ways.”

Yet Eric is handsome, kind and intelligent, and any objections to marrying him would seem to be irrational. Kiki feels that her grandmother and namesake, Yukiko, soon to visit the United States for the first time, may be the only person who can advise her. Unable to wait, she imagines their meeting: the stories, Kiki’s questions, her obasama’s answers.

We too imagine, expecting that, as in an Amy Tan novel, the older people will have access to wisdom unavailable to their Americanized descendants. When Yukiko was 14, her rural family sold her to a Tokyo geisha house. She beat the odds, finding both security and love with a wealthy patron. Her story, set down in journals that she wrote during U.S. bombing raids, is an inspiration to Kiki.

In contrast, Kiki’s mother, Akiko, has led a thwarted life. She refused the marriage arranged for her, running off instead to the States with her cousin, a brilliant physicist who later turned to drink and abused her. She developed crippling arthritis. In Kiki’s view, “[i]t was the weight of unshed tears that clogged and swelled her joints . . . her body is forever racked with the screams she stifled when my father beat her.” But, though long divorced, Akiko hasn’t gotten over him, any more than Kiki has gotten over the loss of Phillip.

Follow your bliss, her grandmother’s story tells Kiki. Play it smart, her mother’s example cautions. “One Hundred and One Ways” seems to offer just those two options--until, halfway into the novel, we realize that Yoshikawa is playing with us, moving that camera around. The Amy Tan parallel may be a false one. Kiki’s imaginary interrogation of her grandmother may be just a way of arriving at her own insights. And if she can get over thinking of the older women as an example--of roads to take and not to take--she may get closer to them.

Yoshikawa, the great-granddaughter of a geisha, writes well, though this slow-moving novel is mostly exposition. At first it’s a close-up--Kiki’s sexy and, it seems, self-indulgent urban life. Then Yukiko’s life in 1930s Japan. The camera keeps moving. One by one, the blurry areas clear up--Yukiko’s marriage, Akiko’s life in America, the beginnings of Kiki’s relationships with Phillip and Eric. At the same time, simplistic things we thought we knew about these people become satisfyingly ambiguous.