Chorus of Mushrooms

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Three generations, multiple voices, a thousand truths. Hiromi Goto
expertly layers the experiences of an immigrant woman, her emotionally
estranged daughter, and her beloved granddaughter into a complex fabric
and compelling story.

Goto, born in Japan in 1966, immigrated with her family to southern
Alberta in 1969. Chorus of Mushrooms, her first novel, is part of a
fiction series featuring new Western writers. Unlike the majority of
works by Japanese Canadians to date, this novel deals not with the
wartime internment but with the experience of postwar immigrants. It
also touches briefly on the grandmother’s prewar and wartime life in
Japan. Goto, a self-styled feminist writer, aspires to change a society
“still embedded with racial intolerance and ignorance.”

Goto’s grandmother is the inspiration for the fictional Naoe,
transformed with great freedom into a contemporary folk legend. Naoe’s
daughter Keiko has coped with emigration by abandoning her native
language and culture, converting from rice and daikon to wieners and
beans. Keiko’s daughter recovers a Japanese name, Murasaki, and her
heritage through Naoe’s tales. The “true” stories of Naoe and
Murasaki blend with their memories and questions. “Listen, they’re
true if you believe them,” Murasaki tells her husband.

As in any good story, words are the substance, not merely the
decoration of the tale. “I am making up the truth as I go along,”
Murasaki says. She holds her words inside her mouth “until they [have]
swelled and softened.” In a final fantasy, Naoe becomes The Purple
Mask, a rodeo rider at the Calgary Stampede: “You know you can change
the story,” Murasaki reminds us, like her namesake, who was author of
Japan’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. Goto’s words, like her
stories, can be mercurial, and fun.