"A Man" by Keiichiro Hirano

Akira Kido is a lawyer in Japan. He handles a variety of cases, ranging from criminal to divorce and negligence. He represented a woman in a remote city in a divorce case whose life had taken on the tragic. After a younger son dying from cancer, she filed a divorce action against her husband. The decree was final a year later.

She contacts Kido again, a few years after the divorce. She remarried, but her second husband had been killed in a logging accident. The problem was not the man’s death; the problem was that the man turned out to be someone entirely different than he said he was. She had contacted his brother, who visited her, looked at photos, and said the dead man was most certainly not his brother.

Kido’s assignment: find out who this man really was, and why did he assume the identity of another man? Kido soon finds himself plunging into the world of family registries, exchanging identities, slimy middlemen, and old, almost forgotten crimes.

Keiichiro Hirano

A Man by Keeichiro Hirano may sound like a mystery or a thriller, and it certainly has some aspects of that genre. But it really is serious, literary fiction, exploring how fluid identities can become (even in this ago of digitized identification) and the deep desire people often have to change who they are. (To be clear: this isn’t a novel about identity and gender.)

Not only does the situation become more opaque as Kido investigates, he finds himself sometimes yearning to escape an unhappy marriage. Once, while traveling on business, he will try on having a different identity, and he discovers just how seductive that can be.

Hirano received a law degree from Kyoto University in Japan. In 1999, he submitted his unpublished novel Eclipse to a literary competition, and it won the Akutagawa Prize, going on to sell more than 400,000 copies. His novels include Farewell to the Departed, Ripples of the Dripping Clocks, Dawn, Fill in the Blanks, The Transparent Labyrinth, At the End of the Matinee, and others. He’s also published several collections of essays and interviews, and he’s been deeply involved in art and music. A Man won the 2019 Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

Hirano’s A Man, translated by Eli William, is a fascinating novel of identity and responsibility, juxtaposed against a culture that can easily embrace fluidity in both.

The saint

After Philippians 1:1-2

The saint is the holy one,

the holy one set apart

by God, the one pulled away

from what surrounds and

strangles, pulled away

to what feeds and strengthens.

It is an identity, superseding

any other designation,

any other label, any other claim,

any other identity.

Before we are anything,

we are saints.

Photograph by Samuel Zeller via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Phoebe Power and “Shrines of Upper Austria”

One of the significant themes in contemporary poetry is identity – with an open-ended definition of that word. Poets young and old are exploring what identity is, using their own lives as a prism. The recent National Book Award winner Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed is one example. The poetry of British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffyi s another. 

Phoebe Power

British poet Phoebe Power, in her first collection Shrines of Upper Austria, explores a different facet of identity, and that’s an individual’s understanding of national identity. The collection received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. 

Power’s starting point is her grandmother, who arrived in England as a new bride married to a British soldier in 1946. Her grandmother was an ethnic German from Austria, which just the year before had been part of Nazi Germany. Imagine her British neighbors, and her new British family. Imagine what she had left behind. The experiences and heritage of her grandmother becomes Power’s by family inheritance. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Identity theft

After Colossians 3:3

We died, it is written,

and yet we are here

in this world, here and real 

as we ever were before. 

It is written that we died,

and more: we died and 

we are now hidden and yet

we are still here and

still visible. How can both

be true? We died to whom 

we once were. We died 

to our old life. We died 

to this world. We died, and

we were reborn, reshaped,

redefined, remade, renewed.

We died, and now we live.

Hidden in him, we will be

revealed on that day. 

Our identity was taken,

obliterated, rose again.

Photograph by John Robert Marasigan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Assumptions

After I John 2:28-3:10

We assume an identity,

we put it on not unlike clothes,

but it is skin. It doesn’t fit

very well, it makes us

uncomfortable and we stand out

in a crowd like we’re dressed

badly or overweight or we haven’t

had a bath and people see us

and pass by quickly, averting

their gaze because we are

different and the want to be

the same and not different. If

you are different you will be

disliked, you will be objectified,

you will be hated. If you continue

and deepen your difference they

will not only turn away or avert

their gaze but occasionally

lash out and strike with the purpose

of inflicting pain and proclaiming

they are not you. Assuming this

going in doesn’t make it easier

but it does make it

understandable

and tells you

for whom to pray.

Photograph by Janko Ferlic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Discovering Who You Are

When did I first decide I was a writer?

Perhaps it was when I was 10, and wrote a mystery story longhand.

It might have been the summer before I started journalism school in college, and I had to teach myself to type (it was a required skill for journalism). Or later that same year, when I received a B+ on my first class assignment with the note, “Not bad for a cub.” Or when the grader for my American history class gave me an A on a test, with a scribbled “well written essay” at the top of the first page.

I know that by the time I was writing speeches for other people, around 1975 or 1976, I was also writing short stories.

For more than 35 years of my career, I’ve been involved in speechwriting. It’s perhaps the toughest job in corporate communications (or any other kind of communications). You’re writing for another person. To do your job well, you have to write like that person speaks. That means you have to listen more than you talk.

Speechwriting is also a rather anonymous, despite the tendency of presidential speechwriters to rush out with a memoir as soon as they’ve left the West Wing of the White House. Someone else takes credit for everything you write in a speech. That is, unless the speech doesn’t go well. Then it’s all your fault.

Most people in communications hate speechwriting.

If you’re writing for the CEO, you have to keep reminding yourself you’re not the CEO’s friend, or even his or her colleague, no matter how friendly the CEO might seem. You’re there as a professional writer. I’ve seen several careers flame out because the writer though he or she was the CEO’s friend, chatting the CEO up, repeating things the CEO said, sharing the CEO’s jokes. All of those activities tell everyone that the writer has a bad self-image, and is seeking to inflate his or her importance.

I didn’t mind the anonymity. I did mind being at the CEO’s beck-and-call on nights and weekends. I did like the largely solitary work. I didn’t like the politics surrounding the CEO’s speeches. One CEO I worked for was so sensitive that he had one hard and fast rule: no one in the company could see his speech drafts unless they came and asked him face-to-face for permission.

That cut out a lot of requests from people to “just give the draft a quick read,” usually spoken with an ingratiating smile.

Speechwriting taught me to write with a voice, and that the best speeches were the ones that expressed emotion in the right way and in the right places. It taught me that the most critical part of the job was not the writing but the listening. I learned to listen, and listen hard. Speechwriting also taught me to interpret, and how, for example, to translate a rant that I didn’t know how to write into a CEO’s unspoken fear of speaking to a minority audience. And it taught me know when the time had come to confront the CEO about his abuse (you don’t do something like that lightly or without a lot of forethought about the possible consequences).

I had also been around the speechwriting life long enough to know that it is very rare for a speechwriter to write effectively for both the CEO and his or her successor. Too much baggage can get in the way, and usually does. So you have to know when it’s time to do something else.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) says that “writing is more than what I do or coach. I discover who I am.” It teaches you about how you think, how you react, what you believe is important, what cannot be compromised, and what is superfluous.

What you read on a printed page or computer screen, no matter what the subject might be, tells you more about the writer than what is written.

Photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Identity Crisis” by Michael Perkins

When it comes to devotionals, my preference is for simple and straightforward with a sharp point. With Identity Crisis: 21 Days of Discovering Who God Says You Are by Michael Perkins, I got all three.

Perkins, who’s pastor of Trinity Church of the Nazarene in Corpus Christi, Texas, has written a simple devotional guide with a thematic point. Based on what he experienced in his own life, he learned that his understanding of himself was not the same as God’s understanding of him. He echoes what may be almost universal thinking for all of us: “I’ve never felt like I was good enough. I never felt like I was smart enough. I never felt like I fit in.”

I’ve followed Michael’s blog for more than four years, and those words in his introduction took me aback? This is Michael Perkins, the guy who has pastored churches, is married to a wonderful wife and has a great kid?

Yes, this is Michael Perkins.

His devotional guide is simple. Identity Crisis includes 21 short devotionals to cover a three-week period. Each devotional deals with a specific characteristic of who God says you are. And then there are two prompts – a prayer and a challenge.

The entries include friend, child, forgiven, valuable, purchased, masterpiece, accepted, chosen, and more. One of my favorites was “letter” – did you know that you were a living letter, an epistle to be read by everyone?

Identity Crisis is a wonderful devotional guide, simple, written in easily understandable language, and speaking directly to hearts. Ours and God’s.

Photograph: Michael Perkins speaking at a church retreat.