I have quite a few American friends in Japan, and there’s one thing many of them do that puzzles me. My inscrutable friends separate for the summer, the husband staying in Japan to work and his family going back to America. It’s not at all uncommon (except in this year of COVID-19) for them to leave the day after American School in Japan lets out for the summer. They return just before school resumes in the fall. I always feel so sorry for the poor, pitiful men left behind, and I wonder that it is not a recipe for marital disaster. From that worry, my novel Kintsugi was born.
The name Kintsugi comes from the technique for mending broken ceramics with lacquer. The lacquer is most often golden in color, and it makes the break look as if it has been filled with pure gold. Pieces can end up more beautiful after the break than they were before.
Kintsugi is a story of faithless love, what can happen when spouses are separated, and whether shattered hearts can be mended. The novel follows an American couple, their marriage weak, who separate for the summer, and a Japanese couple, their marriage even weaker, separated by the demands of their careers. When the fates of these two couples intersect, the complications test their characters and relationships. Can they mend them kintsugi-fashion to be better than before, or will they simply have to sweep up the shards and throw them away?
The novel also gave me a chance to explore my interest in Japanese ceramics. In fact, the filename while I searched for a title was Arita Girl. Arita is renowned for its ceramics and was the first place in Japan where porcelain was made. Unfortunately, the novel still has small gaps. They are waiting for me to take a trip to Arita. That is near the top of my list of post-COVID activities, but until I either get a vaccine or somehow catch and survive the virus, it has to wait.
I wrote the first draft of Kintsugi in the spring of 2018. It needed significant work, though, and I revised it the next spring and summer (2019). Now the novel has gotten too long, and I need to cut and tightened it. I was hoping to do that this summer, but other novels (and life) demanded my time. I think it will have to wait for the winter.