Illuminating Fiction

Mary Yukari Waters: What I Will Follow

67 Mary Yukari Waters What I Will Follow Mary Yukari Waters was born in a traditional Kyoto neighborhood where tofu vendors honked their horns each evening, and narrow, crooked lanes led into hidden shrines. This neighborhood is the setting for many of the short stories in her collection The Laws of Evening. The book’s details about Japanese life and culture come mostly from her childhood memory of the ten years she lived in Japan before her parents moved to the United States (she is half Japanese and half Irish-American). Others are based on memories shared with her by her eighty-five-year-old grandmother, with whom she spends extensive time visiting in the city of Kyoto, where they cook, shop at the open-air market, and go bathing at the public bathhouse. The Laws of Evening was a Booksense 76 selection and a pick for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program, as well as a 2004 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. The Laws of Evening was also chosen by Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2003. In her review of The Laws of Evening for the New York Times Mary Park wrote, “Like the spare and prescribed movements of a Japanese tea ceremony, the stories in The Laws of Evening . . . present a deceptively smooth and elegant surface. Underneath this unruffled exterior, however, the smallest nuances convey real depth of feeling.” The Independent on Sunday wrote, “Gorgeous, note-perfect short stories . . . a bittersweet read that transports you into another time.” The eleven stories contained in this collection are chronologically ordered. Nine of them were originally published in Shenandoah, GlimmerTrain Stories, TriQuarterly, Manoa, BlackWarrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Indiana Review, and Zoetrope: All Story. Five of these stories have also been included in anthologies: The 2000 Pushcart Prize Anthology; The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize; The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002; Frances Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Anthology 2; Best American Short Stories 2002; Best American Short Stories 2003; and Best American Short Stories 2004. Waters’ fiction has also aired on NPR’s Selected Shorts and BBC. Mary Yukari Waters is the recipient of a 2002 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. 68 Illuminating Fiction Waters teaches writing at the low-residency MFA program at Spalding University and at the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. She previously taught at UC Irvine, where she worked on her MFA. Prior to becoming a writer Waters worked as a public certified accountant for ten years. At the present time she is working on a novel. Mary Yukari Waters lives in Los Angeles. Our interview was conducted by phone. Sherry Ellis: Loss, upheaval, estrangement, renewal, and reconciliation are some of the themes of the stories contained in The Laws of Evening. When you conceived of this collection did you intend to use these themes as a means of story unification? Mary Yukari Waters: No, not at all. For a long time, I didn’t even conceive of a collection, much less plan out the themes I was going to use. Publishing wasn’t my concern at first. I started writing because I had a demanding and unfulfilling job in corporate tax accounting that I needed an escape from, and because there had been several deaths in my family. Rilke once told his young poet to write about his belief in anything beautiful. I read that passage years after I’d already started writing, and it was only then that I realized it was exactly what I’d been trying to do, in a clueless kind of way, of course. The themes in this collection pretty much coalesced on their own. I didn’t see them until fairly late in the process, and it was so illuminating and surprising to see the pattern that had slowly emerged in my work. I learned a great deal about my own basic preoccupations. For example, I’d never realized how important the concept of memory was in my overall outlook on life. Also, I’d never been fully aware of my fascination with those certain rare people who can successfully transcend the unfairnesses and misfortunes of life. I think it makes sense, in retrospect, that I found myself drawn to that nebulous period in Japanese history between World War II and modern times. Because what Japan went through on a large, national scale—you know...