NOTES ON RECENT
READING
Rebecca Copeland’s THE
KIMONO TATTOO
By Samuel L. Leiter
As those who’ve followed this series since it began on Facebook in 2023 (before it started a new life on Theatre’s Leiter Side in 2024) are aware, the books discussed here are typically non-fiction and theatre-related. Rebecca Copeland’s The Kimono Tattoo (n.p.: Brother Mockingbird, 2021, 357 pp.), however, is an award-winning novel in the literary thriller genre. It does have an interesting reference to the noh theatre, its heroine is a student of traditional Japanese dance, and its chief background subject, kimono, represents a great traditional art that plays a major role on the Japanese stage. Nevertheless, The Kimono Tattoo is not about Japanese theatre (an academic specialty of mine). It caught my eye mainly because I’m a FB friend of its author, a noted scholar of Japanese literature and translator of Japanese fiction.
Because of my “acquaintance” with its author, I’ll not review her book in detail, but will offer just a few notes for those who might be looking for an often intriguing novel set in contemporary Japan by someone whose long residence there stamps her writing with authenticity.
Copeland’s heroine, Ruth Bennett, shares certain
similarities with her creator; both are the fluent-in-Japanese daughters of
missionaries from the American South, and both are professional translators. But Copeland is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, while Ruth,
although she has translated an important recent novel, makes her living as a
translator of commercial brochures and the like for a Kyoto translation service. Then again, the novel is set in this century's first decade, and Ruth does have a backstory involving her having once been on the faculty of an American university. Aside from their missionary parents and mutual academic backgrounds, I have no knowledge of any other autobiographical connections.
Tasked by a mysterious woman (for a substantial fee) with
translating an in-process novel by a famous writer—missing and presumed dead—she
discovers that the book is too close to reality, leading her down one dangerous
rabbit hole after the other as she finds herself enwrapped in a web of threatening
episodes. As several murders, passed off by the police as suicides, occur, Ruth
finds herself enmeshed in a mystery tied to the world of traditional kimono
making and design, a mystery that also involves Japanese tattooing, the yakuza, Japanese dance, child trafficking, a long-lost brother, and Tosa fighting dogs, not to mention
the subtleties of the Japanese language.
The Kimono Tattoo, published only in paperback,
should make good beach reading with its straightforward yet often evocative
prose, its fast-paced action, its vivid characters, and its well-researched
subject matter. On the other hand, its multiple plot threads tend to get a bit
tangled before Copeland unties the knots, the weeds into which Copeland’s
research wanders can hold things back, and some of the far-fetched plot twists
require a firm suspension of disbelief. Nevertheless, if you’ve got a yen for an
intricately woven crime story embroidered with infusions of traditional Japanese
culture, you might want to spend it here.
