The Power Of `Beauty' -- In An Evocative New Novel, Seattle Author Lydia Minatoya Explores Just What It Means To Be Japa Nese And American

------------------------------- Lydia Minatoya will read from "The Strangeness of Beauty" at 7 p.m. June 29 at University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle. For more information, call 206-634-3400. -------------------------------

In the face of a random, often violent universe, performing small acts of awareness and appreciation creates a mysterious, strange beauty. Japanese call this concept myo - the strangeness of beauty.

Seattle author Lydia Minatoya uses it to explain the process of finding one's center as a Japanese American in her first novel, "The Strangeness of Beauty," which hits bookstores this week.

Crisp and subtle as a bite of an Asian pear, the book is apt to garner even more honors than Minatoya's earlier travel memoir, "Talking to High Monks in the Snow," which won the American Pen Center's Jerard Award for an emerging woman author.

"The Strangeness of Beauty" is the mock-autobiographical "I-story" (the Japanese term for autobiography) of Etsuko Sone, who leaves early 20th-century Kobe, Japan, filled with French cafes, German bakeries, and Italian opera, to move to Seattle, which she expects to find brimming with libraries and museums, humming with immigrant energy and hopping with social mobility. Instead, she emerges from Seattle's Immigration Building to find eroding hills stubbled with severed tree trunks, fish offal in the harbor, and the mud and guts that were much of Seattle in 1918.

Her husband, who has come to bring his expertise with fabric and wood airplanes to Bill Boeing, instead becomes a cook on an Alaskan fishing boat, and soon after is killed in a fishing accident. Then her younger sister dies delivering a baby. Etsuko returns to Kobe, taking the baby back to the austere samurai household of her mother, Chie Fuji, a distant, haughty woman who rejected Etsuko at birth, handing her over to be brought up by silk farmers.

Although the novel isn't autobiographical, the characters have echoes in Minatoya's own family. Her grandfather was a chef on an American freighter. Her mother, born in the U.S., grew up in Japan in the 1930s, caught in a battle between caution and conscience as the culture around her became fascist. Like Etsuko, her mother once worked as a bilingual designer in Daimaru, a Western-style department store.

"Hers was the first generation in 800 years to marry outside a group of fewer than 20 families, all samurai who followed the younger brother of the first Shogun."

Minatoya and her parents were the first nonwhite, and the only Asian, family in the upstate New York town where she grew up. A committee of neighbors came to the house soon after they moved in to say, in essence, "This is a nice neighborhood and we want to keep it that way." Although no direct threats were made, Minatoya does not hesitate to call them "vigilantes."

Minatoya grew up accustomed to answering questions like, "Does your family use forks?" Understanding who she is as a Japanese American has been an ongoing internal exploration.

Her father, a research scientist, decided that in order to fit into a Judeo/Christian society, the family would convert to Judaism, whose family values reflected Japanese ideals. When his gentile colleagues dissuaded him, the family instead became Methodist.

Minatoya won childhood poetry awards, and earned a doctorate in counseling and psychology from the University of Maryland. When the department where she taught underwent a financial crisis, she took a job teaching cross-cultural psychology to military personnel stationed in Japan and China. It is clear in her writing that she has devoted considerable attention to the differences in thought processes of Japanese, Americans and Japanese Americans. It is just such insights that make "The Strangeness of Beauty" so richly rewarding.

Reflecting on her time in Seattle, wondering "what made us Japanese so foreign," Etsuko, narrating her own story, decides it is the Japanese passion for kata, the correct form for doing everything from writing and eating to folding a kimono.

"It was a means of demanding that pride be subsumed by the small, modest steps involved with the perfecting of any attitude or skill," Etsuko writes. "Through the ages, Zen Buddhism slowly reduced the principles of kata - as a French chef reduces a sauce - until every skill contributing to community living was distilled to its basic elements."

Moving to Seattle 15 years ago was a conscious choice for Minatoya, based on the city's rich ethnic mix.

After enrolling in a University of Washington extension course in writing personal essays, she began the reflections that ultimately were published in 1991 as a coming-of-age/travel memoir, "Talking to High Monks in the Snow." The book won the American Pen Center's Jerard Award for an emerging woman author, and received the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award. Former Seattle Times book editor Donn Fry called it "a book of rare beauty and candor."

Still, Minatoya confesses, "I'm never comfortable calling myself a writer." In daily life, she is a counselor at North Seattle Community College, and the mother of two small children. At the moment, she is not writing another book.

"The Strangeness of Beauty" also grew out of a UW extension class.

"For me, writing this book was a deliberate way of expanding the idea of what it is to be both Japanese and American. As in most of life, there's no clear separation into being one thing or the other; it's always `and.'

"People have asked me why I didn't write about the experience of Japanese Americans in the detention camps during the war. When you hear only about the detention camps and the 442nd Regiment, you lose a big part of the idiosyncratic richness and humanity of the Japanese-American experience. I wanted to write about full, funny, human characters."

In the book, as Japan invades Manchuria and word of the butchery of the Japanese army in Nanking trickles back, Etsuko realizes that she must act, and not merely observe. She becomes a member of a small anti-militarist organization, combating army propaganda and pursuing meaning in small ways.

She is astonished and inspired by the bravery of her mother, whose samurai legacy of beauty found in hardship teaches her that something as subtle as the design of a kimono can serve as a form of protest.

Western fiction, Etsuko notes, "seems so tidy and cunning. Like a well-hurled javelin, the story soars upward through its introduction of characters and situation, hits a life-transforming crisis at its zenith, and descends - frequently with perfect symmetry - toward the resolution.

"Everything moves with such elegance toward one pre-established premise! It stands in sharp contradiction to the shape of my life. It was part of what drew me to America. The hope that, like Western fiction, I too could be crafted and molded. And though my life has remained largely formless - a series of accommodations to random occurrences - I have learned something from Western art.

"It's character that propels the plot."

That lesson is amply visible in Minatoya's own luminous writing, which brings home with clarity the critical role of individual action in a time of social upheaval.