Ghost of a Smile: Stories
by Deborah Boliver BoehmKodansha America, 256 pp., $25
The erotics of fiction are splendidly varied. And unlike the flesh-and-blood variety, with fiction you may select and dismiss partners according to mood and taste with a minimum of guilt. When you’re feeling lazy, a fat paperback from an airport bookstore will club you over the head and drag you off to its lair. For the stylistic polar opposite, see traditional Japanese fiction, which will perhaps, if you’re lucky, raise one eyebrow at you from the far end of the room. It is up to you to slog over and see what it wants.
Sometimes a happy medium is in order — a seducer who walks right up to the door with a wicked smile and an armful of flowers and sweets. Ghost of a Smile, despite its basis in Japanese folklore, is precisely that: seductive and irresistible, laden with treats, prepared to spoil and thrill you.
Deborah Boliver Boehm is an award-winning American travel writer specializing in Japan, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands. A former magazine editor and sumo reporter, she is also the author of A Zen Romance: One Woman’s Adventures in a Monastery, an account of her life in Japan in the 1960s. She describes this collection as “an oblique tribute to the memory, the legacy, and the benevolent ghost of Lafcadio Hearn,” the 19th-century ethnologist and collector of Japanese folktales.
Even if you don’t like ghost stories, this collection provides plenty of romance, eroticism, and wit along with its pleasant scares. Set in modern, multicultural Japan, the heroes and heroines of these stories range from an English librarian to a Pacific island sumo wrestler to the Francophile Japanese owner of a chic coffeehouse.
The first story, “The Samurai Goodbye,” follows the droll half-English, half-Japanese grandson of a famous writer, who is haunted by an especially bizarre brand of Japanese ghost: one “with a face that was completely blank and smooth, like an egg.” The sly, border-crossing wit of this narrator, who loves semi-sophisticated (or semi-sophomoric) puns (he wonders if one of the egg-faced ghosts he saw was a trick of the light: “a simple case of trompe l’oeil or perhaps [forgive me] trompe l’oeuf“), sets the tone for the other stories as well.
Such border crossings — between languages, between cultures, between the world of the living and the dead — shape (or shape-shift) most of these stories, which is perhaps to be expected from a travel writer like Boehm. Rejection in love transforms a spoiled schoolgirl into a red dragon. Guilt over an adulterous affair turns a sumo wrestler into a werewolf.
What raises these stories above the status of mere feuilleton (and what’s wrong with a feuilleton, anyway?) is Boehm’s smart, exuberant prose, along with her clear, almost Buddhistic affection for these characters’ small failures and triumphs. Her suicidal werewolf mourns the snuffing out of “all that arduous education, all those joyful insomniac nights of reading until I truly couldn’t see straight, all my unique adventures and gaudy mistakes.” So while five of these stories have “what the Japanese would call a ‘happii endo'” — in which the main character finds true love — in the others our heroes find something even deeper, a kind of peace with their own flawed lives. Boehm succeeds beautifully on both counts.
This article appears in April 13 • 2001.