The Restoration of Emily

Naomi Brun is a librarian assistant in Communications and Community
Development at the Hamilton Public Library and a book reviewer for the
Hamilton Spectator.

Kim Moritsugu is a Toronto-based writer who has published four novels.
This is surprising, for The Restoration of Emily has all the attributes
of a first work of fiction.

A young novelist is often told to write what she knows. As a result,
the protagonist tends to be of the same age, gender, and marital status
as the author, and elements of the plot are generally embellished
anecdotes from the writer’s own life. This construct can create a good
story, but more often than not, the lack of distance between the author
and her work blinds her to potential problem areas in the writing.

Moritsugu and her protagonist, Emily Harada, share many things in
common. They are both middle-aged Japanese-Canadians living in Toronto.
Moritsugu has two sons, while Emily has one, but if the dedications on
the back page provide any indication, both are single parents.

In The Restoration of Emily, Moritsugu attempts to paint a portrait of
an unorthodox woman in a mid-life crisis. Harada is an established
architect with a comfortable home and strong relationship with her
teenage son. Unfortunately, she feels rejected by her ex-husband and
isolated from the world in general. There are few people she actually
likes, making it hard to find a place to fit.

Harada specializes in restoring old houses, making them better and more
convenient than they were in their original state. Moritsugu tries to
draw a parallel between this activity and Harada’s quest for meaning.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. She emerges at the end of the novel no
wiser than she was at the beginning, so nothing of Emily has been either
restored or improved.

The Restoration of Emily would be a much better novel if Moritsugu
focused on writing a really good story rather than on creating a work of
literary fiction. Its greatest strengths are the ease of its language
and the moving relationship between Harada and her son Jesse. Its
greatest weaknesses are the unlikable protagonist and the failed attempt
to be a piece of high art. It is a passable novel, but not the
masterpiece it sets itself up to be.