Pure Inventions [Paperback]

Rarely has a book rested so cleanly on the plinth of its first page, an epigram from Oscar Wilde: The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. This isn’t just the usual deployment of a brilliant, apt quotation, thrown up like sand in the face of reader and reviewer alike to dispel doubts of cultural inadequacy and allow the author an easy getaway down Goethe Lane.
Rather impressively, King’s use of fin-de-siecle Wilde as an overture sets in play all the major themes and minor motifs of this exceptional, cunningly made novel. For the sake of argument, let’s suggest that these themes and motifs are: Japan, purity, invention (including art, lies and imagination), country (or nation), and people; so that their shadow opposites are: America, the impure (fake), truth, exile, and fictional characters. In short, the epigram is the nutshell; in a sense, it is the Poundian poem of the novel, rendered in one or two clean imagistic (and Asian) brushstrokes.
There is a certain tendency in prose fiction of the last few decades (call it the postmodern Canadian default mode) to construct (and then open out) a narrative based on historical events, with the interlinked, often unlikely aspects of the character’s lives made to work through issues and themes like elegantly tailored finger puppets. For example, the latest novel from an Ontario author may very well be about life in Krakatoa just before the volcano erupts, or it may be about the manufacture of the very first X-ray machine-with life, love, and hopefully the First World War thrown in for good measure, as a cast of several dozen intermingle, some from Orillia, some from Copenhagen. So it was that my heart sank upon opening Pure Inventions to discover that its series of elaborately-but, as it turned out, deliciously-contrived interlocked stories were about life in the “floating world” outside Kyoto, and the “real” love child borne of the troubled union between the “real” Madame Butterfly (a Japanese courtesan) and her American naval officer. My prejudgment was off the mark.
I confess to Geisha overload. There are only so many times that the exotic, erotic, and no doubt esoteric elements of such a painted life can be served up in Western fiction before Mr. Edward Said’s ghost will rise like Banquo and spoil the buffet. Haven’t these poor, glorified sex workers been orientalised quite enough already?
Mr. King, however, subverts the very idea of Orientalism, of the ‘Other’, and of historicism, by contriving to make his book an essay on Japonisme, or, described otherwise, a literary biography, made up to appear as a novel. Though exploding genres in fiction is nothing new, with this book King seems, almost uniquely, to have carefully folded and packed every kind of prose into its stylish well-travelled portmanteau; the reader is never sure whether they are about to pull out a kimono, an essay on Japanese woodblock prints, or a mini-biography of art-collecting Boston Brahmins circa 1900. This is Pure Inventions’ formal artfulness, but also its vulnerable spot-for its prose style is very strange.
It is strange because, for a book saturated with a keen understanding of the aesthetic implications of Wilde, Henry James, Pound, and Van Gogh, its prose is rather flat. This works in some ways, for the startling shifts between time and place, indicated simply by a date like “1880” before the start of a paragraph, creates a lean tension in the dramatic unfolding of events. But once our chief protagonist (of whom more in a moment) has reached puberty, let alone America, his conversations with millionaires, playboys, and artists on the nature of creativity, desire, and suffering cry out for the astonishing wit that was Wilde’s signature effect; and then again, the detailed descriptions of interiors, noting the quality of the upholstery and the type of cutlery, as it were, are “accurate” but never more than that.
The prose, and the novel, come alive most during descriptions of the Japanese prints which supply the underlying myths that drive the fiction. At these times, one is put in mind of W.G. Sebald’s similar contrapuntal use of (photographic) images inserted into the text of his equivalently uncategorisable works.
For a novel about a man who escapes Japan to live in America, the reader is less transported on occasion than she should be. Nonetheless, where the prose may come across as curiously abrupt, it might also be viewed as mirroring either the flatness of the art invoked, or of most biography itself, which always seems to make do with what’s available, and no more. Either way, the novel is a paradox Wilde himself would have invented: a sexless novel of sensuously-rendered ideas.
To be fair, it’s not entirely sexless. It is at this point that the critic is called upon to perform the exhausting digestive function of summary, a bit like rolling the universe into a ball, or lobbing Prufrock to some light-haired lady. Pure Inventions is “about”-and this is satisfying to think on-the son, Hiroshi, of a Japanese courtesan, Yoshiko, who, Blanche Dubois-like, eschews reality in favour of images from a more genteel, traditional past, now faded; but Hiroshi is also the half-American son of a caddish father.
By opening the novel exactly 101 years before the writing of this review, June 1905, and in London (where I am while writing it), King is able to place his fictional characters in an unusual mirror-gazing on the even more unreal stage, where Madama Butterfly is performed in Covent Garden, before “dour Mrs. Eliot” (the now deceased naval officer’s official wife) is to bring Hiroshi to Boston.
Let us stop here for a moment and reflect on how wonderful this all is. I love what King achieves here. At the precise moment when young T.S. Eliot is departing for The Milton Academy, preparing for Harvard, where his own bildungsroman-like life will evolve into an exploration of art, symbol, and time, studying with Santayana and reading Symons (which will lead him to Pound), Hiroshi is leaving for Boston, with an Eliot. All of Pure Inventions is layered like this, with opposite subjects attracting, merging, and diffusing.
In fact, King’s novel is the mirror image of Wilde’s late-Victorian masterwork, The Picture of Dorian Gray, infused as that was with a faddish French fascination for surface, form, and “absolute Japan”: DG is the study of a corrupted aesthete whose decadent portrait does all his living for him (like Villier de L’Isle-Adam’s famous servant), whereas PI is the study of a redeemed artist whose inauthentic artworks expose him to virtue. As in Wilde, and other works of the period, troubled artists, doubles, half-brothers, light and shadow, multiply and descend, in madness and murder; social and secret identities are seen as out of joint, as masks are ripped away and seething urges exposed. It is operatic, it is melodramatic, and it is mainly irresistible.
Indeed, King’s luxuriant plotting exceeds my reviewer’s ability to fully expose it, but let me continue to say that Hiroshi-tutored by his mother’s exquisite perfections of fiction, raised in a polite but demanding brothel (the young courtesan’s pre-pubescent sexual initiation is not rendered)-moves from being a forger of the fugitive colours that saturate the woodblock prints rich collectors crave (and wherein miniature depictions display all the past and future aspirations of Japanese culture) to being their authenticator for a museum, to, finally, becoming an artist himself.
Despite, or because of, its stilted style and abbreviated time scheme, Pure Inventions manages, artfully, to be that nearly impossible thing: a page-turner that illuminates, moves, and charms on nearly every page, so that one wishes to linger even while racing ahead. In the process of enjoying King’s many impure and improved inventions, the reader is transformed-if not utterly, then fairly completely- into an expert on beauty, truth, and given all there is to know about Japan, love, and the soul of an artist whose ship (literally and symbolically) finally hoves into a berth deep and wide enough to hold both worlds, East and West.
Todd Swift (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Set in nineteenth-century Tokyo and twentieth-century Boston, Pure Inventions tells of the incredible adventures of Hiroshi — prankster, forger, authenticator, and artist. The son of a Japanese courtesan and an American naval officer, Hiroshi never feels at home in his native Japan. Torn by his mixed heritage, he is constantly compelled to reinvent himself, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In its vividly detailed recreation of the adventures of its enterprising, tortured hero, Pure Inventions is a story of various kinds of estrangement: from parents; from one's native land; even from one's best self-interests.