The City of Yes

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

The City of Yes is an unusual novel, one that deftly weaves together two
cultures—Canada and Japan—and two centuries through the experiences
and imagination of a young, Canadian language instructor in contemporary
Japan.

In Saitama to teach English, the narrator moves within the multiple
worlds of modern-day Japan, acting out his status as “gaijin”
(foreigner), while observing with fascination the varied Japanese with
whom he comes in contact. Meanwhile, he becomes immersed in the story of
Ranald MacDonald, a 19th-century adventurer who fate cast into a
Nagasaki prison and whose papers and correspondence are held in the B.C.
Archives in Victoria. Through a combination of “history, myth, and
pure speculation,” MacDonald’s year in Japan is vividly
reconstructed.

Peter Oliva’s first novel, Drowning in Darkness (1993), won the Henry
Kreisel Award for Best First Book by an Alberta Writer. In this, his
second, he is as much poet as novelist. The prologue skilfully
juxtaposes crows, lacquer brushes, and black ink, the latter destined to
become “dark streams of calligraphy, tributaries of words that pour
down paper scrolls, opaque screens, and mulberry walls. ... When
narrative begins, a story takes to the air in a cataclysm of winged
intent.”

This intriguing story of parallel journeys, which cast light on each
other and on the human condition, is written with humor, intelligence,
and a marked love of language. Currently at work on his third novel,
Oliva’s new voice bids fair to become a substantial one in Canadian
letters.