A Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto

I first discovered Chorus of Mushrooms in a used bookstore. It’s red and black cover caught my eye and the title including mushrooms (in these fungi obsessed times) was enough for me to pick it up and take it home. Little did I know at that time this wonderful piece of fiction by Hiromi Goto won 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada and Caribbean Region, and was co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. The novel tells the story of three generations of Japanese Canadian women living in Alberta, unpacking themes of immigration, feminism, and bilingualism with magical, folkloric elements woven throughout.

In short, I loved it. Treading between novel and prose at times, Chorus was just what I needed in a late summer read. Told mainly from the perspective of Naoe, a grandmother living with her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter (named Murasaki who serves as the second narrator) on a mushroom farm in Nanton, the book is an ode to the power of storytelling and how the stories we tell can become us. There are twists of humour throughout as Naoe and Murasaki tell their stories of themselves and each other. An immigrant story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, the book gives a full life to each member of the Tonkatsu family (yes, as in that tonkatsu) as they experience moments of joy, desire, loneliness, jealousy, and every other emotion in the spectrum. Not just a woeful desire for belonging, nor a traumatic story of immigration.

Overcoming the barriers of language is a central part of the plot as Murasaki – or Muriel as her mother calls her – does not speak Japanese and was raised by her parents to integrate with their Albertan neighbours by never teaching her anything about her cultural heritage or language. Yet, Naoe, her grandmother does not speak English, resulting in many parts of the story being told in Japanese. Yet, all the Japanese is written out phonetically so you can translate it if you wish. Given the novel’s original publication in 1994, it seems like ignoring the point, so I did not bother to translate any of the passages. Instead, from context I was able to fill in the blanks, much like Murasaki herself as she tries to understand her grandmother. After reading “mukāshi, mukāshi omukāshi…” so many times your brain begins to translate. Translation and speaking out loud are equally considered actions in the novel as Naoe says, “What matters are the things you do, the things you say out loud.”

The novel plays with language in many ways. It is a powerful creator of worlds with each narrator seeming to bring life to one another through story.

But stories are also never-ending and limitless – they dictate what is real as much as never affirming anything to be real.

“There isn’t a time line. It’s not a linear equation. You start in the middle and unfold outward from there. It’s not a flat surface that you walk back and forth on. It’s like being inside a ball that isn’t exactly a ball but is really made up of thousands and thousands of small panels. And on each panel, there is a mirror, but each mirror reflects something different. And from where you crouch, if you turn your head up or around or down or sideways, you can see something new, something old, or something you’ve forgotten.”

Hiromi Goto, A Chorus of Mushrooms (132)

The book is made up of the complex stories the grandmother and granddaughter are telling about each other and to each other, “a partnership in the telling and listening” (172), with newspaper clippings and handwritten grocery lists added in between. Sometimes the novel even breaks into a script format, a winding and complex story with a lot to unpack much like the Tales of Genji which Goto cites as a source.

It is Naoe’s stories (or stories about Naoe) that I personally enjoyed most. The grandmother’s many adventures exist in a world of magical realism with her often performing feats of strength or encountering characters from Japanese folklore on the roads of Calgary. It gives agency and empowerment to the elderly character who in so many other tales would be simply resigned to a quiet life at rest in an easy chair. Instead Naoe, is vibrant and abrasive to many, speaking her mind in more than one language and never giving up her capacity for change. As she says herself:

All in all, it is a wide-ranging tale of three women coming to terms with themselves as whole people – whatever that means to them — in this place we call Canada. With much humour, and much heart, it’s a quintessential book about the diaspora of Japan that is must-read.