Chorus of Mushrooms is the first novel by Hiromi Goto’s and it deals with themes that would be present in all her subsequent works. The novel relates the struggles of three generations of women while they try to adapt to the life of a Japanese immigrant in Canada. Goto makes use of food and the eating habits of these three women to represent how each of them react to being in a space “between cultures” (Hinnerova, 68), and how they construct and understand their identities and their places in the multicultural space of Canada. (Hinnerova, Gunew, Padolsky)
One of the narrators, Naoe, is an old Japanese woman that refuses to be assimilated by the Canadian culture. She speaks only Japanese, even if her words turn out to be only “noises in this place I call a home” (179). She regrets seeing her daughter, Keiko, renounce her Japanese identity, and she sees this happening through the eating habits she adopts in Canada: “Keiko. My daughter who has forsaken identity. Forsaken! So biblical, but it suits her, my little convert. Converted from rice and daikon to weiners and beans." (185) Keiko’s preference for Western food is a reflection of her “fear of being perceived as different” (Hinnerova, 77) and, therefore, being excluded from the community she is trying to insert herself and her family into.
Keiko and her husband decided to blend in the Canadian culture when they immigrate to Alberta; they desired to see their daughter, Muriel, grow up as a Canadian. Therefore, they banned anything that is related to Japan from their house, they would not speak the language and they did not teach it to Muriel. When the young girl has a friend over the house, Keiko leaves them “Oreos for a snack” (1199), something completely different from the gingko nuts that Naoe and her brother used to eat when they were growing up in Japan. The only exception to the rule were the Jap Oranges that Keiko bought for Christmas. However, when Muriel eats too many of them, and her skin begins to turn yellow, Keiko’s reaction shows her fear of being identified as Japanese: “‘Yellow’, she was muttering, [...] ‘Yellow, she's turningyellow she'sturningyellow’" (1175).
According to Hinnerova (74), it is the Japanese food that Naoe sneaks inside the house that gives her the strength “to oppose her child [...] and it constitutes a link to her cultural heritage and her memories that she is nor willing to cast off.” It is also through these secret Japanese treats that she is able to form a connection with her granddaughter and pass to her some knowledge of the cultural heritage that Muriel has been denied access to. It is while she is in her grandmother’s “bed of feasts” (256) that Muriel/Murasaki hears the stories from Japan and establishes her connection with the Japanese culture.
When Naoe decides to leave the family in search of adventures and her true self, Keiko’s life is disrupted “because she suddenly realized her total uprootedness and the artificiality of her constructed identity.” (Hinnerova, 79). The only thing that is capable of bringing Naoe back to reality is the Japanese dinner prepared by her daughter. Keiko’s feelings of belonging in the Japanese culture are revived by the ceremony of eating Tonkatsu with her family and finally teaching her daughter something from their cultural heritage, how to eat using ohashi (chopsticks).
According to Scholliers (7), the sentiments of belonging to a group is not only closed related to the consumption of food and drink, but also to the “preparations, the organization, the taboos, the company, the location, the pleasure, the time, the language, the symbols, the representation, the form, the meaning.” These ideas can be seen in Chorus of Mushrooms when the granddaughter, Muriel shares Japanese food with her grandmother, hidden in her bedroom; and when the Tonkatsu family sits down to eat Japanese food together for the first time, finally establishing a connection between them, even though they do not speak during this dinner, they share more with each other than when they used to eat Western food and talked about things that “would never have the power to linger.” (1269)
Food is used by Goto as a metaphor for these characters cultural identities, they refuse to be a part of a certain culture and embrace another through their choices of what they eat. The three women finally accept their place in between cultures in the end of the novel: Keiko has finally allowed herself to enjoy a Japanese meal once in a while, but she is still connected to Canada through Western food; Muriel learns how to cook Japanese food, but she does not abandon the culture she was brought up to belong to, and eats a variety of different things from both cultures; Naoe learns that she has to embrace the Canadian culture too and leaves behind her stubbornness that only allowed her to eat and get involved with Japanese related things. Through their choices of what to eat, the three generations of women in Chorus of Mushrooms identify themselves with the culture space that belongs to them, not entirely Japanese, and not entirely Canadian, but a space that encompasses both.
Bibliography
Hinnerova, Katarina. “Food as a Transcultural Metaphor: Food Imagery and Ethnocultural Identities in Contemporary Multicultural Women Writing in Canada”. Diss. Masaryk University of Brno, 2007. Dissertations and Theses. Web. 13 Oct 2013
Scholliers. Peter. Food, Drink and Identity. Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages. Ed. Scholliers, Peter. Oxford: Berg, 2001, 3-23.
Gunew, Sneja. "Introduction: multicultural translations of food, bodies, language”. Journal of Intercultural Studies 21.3 (2000): 227-237. Web. 13 Oct 2013
Padolsky, Enoch. “You are where you eat: ethnicity, food and cross-cultural spaces”. Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal 37.2 (2005): 19-31. Web. 13 Oct 2013
Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. NeWest Press: Alberta. 1994. Ebook.
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