More News from Japan
all news is good news, even when it's not
Let me begin by sharing this beautiful article from the New York Times, highlighting eight people living on the rainbow in Japan.
I talked about the new prime minister a few weeks ago, but Japan's political scene is evolving rapidly. PM Ishiba has dissolved the Lower House, and elections are slated for October 27. His party, the Liberal Democrats, seems to be imploding, with hardline right-wingers coalescing around Sanae Takaichi, an MP the former prime minister, Kishida, nicknamed Taliban for her strident reactionary conservatism. Although Ishiba waffled around for a bit, he has committed to barring party members caught up in the recent slush fund scandal from running as party candidates in the election later this month. (The pervasive corruption is one reason why Kishida stepped down.)
If predictions hold, the ruling party will lose its majority in the upcoming election. A coalition government is likely, and I hope that Ishiba brings the left-leaning members of his party into a coalition with other progressive parties. Support for marriage equality is more substantial among those progressive parties, so I look forward to the election results.
I wanted to share information on staying at traditional Japanese inns with my subscribers this past weekend. That article is still a-brewing, but I spent most of the weekend when I wasn’t tending to my husband, who was down with a nasty cold, revising my memoir’s manuscript.
I’ve lost count of the revisions I’ve completed since the first draft coalesced into being on December 31, 2020—the working title back then was a morose I Should Be Dead by Now; Crying in a Foreign Language is far better. So why do another revision? Especially as I continue querying to find a literary agent?
Three reasons.
I got feedback from Pencilhouse on a chapter I hope to calve as a stand-alone essay. To be brief, the reviewer thought there was too much dialogue. I could see the reasoning there, and although there are critical moments in my memoir—coming out to my mother, running into my friend Peter at the 1987 March on Washington, meeting my friend Cameron for the first time in Japan, throwing my ex out of my apartment, and meeting Hiro for the first time—that require dialogue, there are plenty of other places where I could tighten things up. So I did.
I’ve also recently unearthed many more references on queerness in Japan and knew that some of the citations within the manuscript could be stronger when replaced with better, more relevant content.
Add to that my nerves. It’s hard enough to find an agent for memoir these days. Add to that the unique structure of my manuscript, where narrative and flashbacks are interwoven with source material from historical, academic, medical, and literary references, and the odds of getting an agent who gets my work enough to know how to sell it to publishers decrease even further. And when the manuscript hits the 90,000-word mark? Oof. Another reason to decline. (It’s common for memoirs to clock in between 70,000 and 85,000 words. There are shorter and longer memoirs out there, of course, but for a debut author, it’s a harder sell.)
And so, in addition to tightening the dialogue and replacing some of the citation material (did you know, for example, that Japan only ever had anti-sodomy legislation for nine years near the end of the nineteenth century, and it was a French legal scholar, Gustave Boissonade, who recommended that legislation be removed from Japan’s civil code?), I also decided to remove nineteen chapters (dropping from 257 to 238—my average chapter length is 342 words) that, I realized, didn’t contribute to the overall story.
The total word count has, therefore, dropped from just shy of 90,000 words to a little more than 81,000 words. If I ever need to paste another chapter back in, nothing is gone forever. All the old versions, back to 2020, are on my hard drive.