By Lim Wei Khai

Watersong
Clarissa Goenawan
Scribe Publications (2022) / 304 pages / SGD 29.95

Lately, and justifiably (since I have been grounded in Hong Kong for almost all of the past two years), I have developed several bad reading habits. One of them is that I have been taking novels to bed, huddling up next to the blue warmth of Google Maps. I take a perverse pleasure in sleuthing about a protagonist's rituals, pretending they are real people and producing a mental map of their half-deserted streets. It was with a little disappointment, then, when I looked up Clarissa Goenawan's Akakawa, a setting in more than one of her novels, and discovered that it does not actually sit on any Japanese island.

So what can the reader learn about this assonance-riddled place, if not by prowling its alleys on Google Street View? It is "a small town", rent in two by the Aka river. It is atmospherically and deliberately nondescript. In fact, it is actually really "boring" – "'there's not much to do there,' complains Mizuki." What Akakawa is not, as Goenawan takes pains to tell us, is ugly. The banks of the Aka river are picturesque, lined with maple trees. Our first encounter with the town is of the tearoom where our newly employed protagonist, Shouji, meets Mizuki for the first time when she chooses him to be her professional listener. That tearoom, Goenawan tells us, is like one from a "high-end cafe in Daikanyama", a place which does in fact lend itself to Googling and which Wikipedia entry declares itself a pretty and stylish quarter of Shibuya. Even Akakawa's people are not ugly – the town is "safe", with low but not no crime (with several gory outliers), the first of several winks at Singapore's own orderly dysfunction. All this forms a perfect canvas on which Goenawan can throw a plot that borrows a Japanese aesthetic without buying it. The question is then, why Japan? Not least since Goenawan admits in an interview with her publisher that she has "only been to Japan for holidays".

At this point, you might think that my fuss about place is misplaced and that one bad habit (my own at that) does not a bland novel make. After all, you might argue, writers do not need to have lived in a place to write about, for and after it admiringly like an amorous sender of teenage billets-doux. The geographical object of affection can even be entirely fictional and beyond the cordons of any signified. And you would be right. In some of these cases, the place lives in the author instead. Derek Walcott wrote in The Muse of History (1974) that the "snow and daffodils" of English literature "were real, more real than the heat and oleander" of his native Saint Lucia, "perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory." Yet the long shadow cast by the colonial centre that obscured in Walcott's mind the tropical flora and fauna of his home is not the same as that of Goenawan's Japan, which itself looms large over her oeuvre. When a writer invents a setting in a novel (invention signifying both the everyday meaning of creation and the Latin implication of discovery), the setting competes gamely with characters for our attention. In Watersong, the amount of detail that Goenawan serves up sees the setting return so forcefully that it becomes a character with its own dances and divots. The place Goenawan cannot, and does not want to shake off, is not Japan but Singapore. The questions we ask are therefore not why Japan? or why always Japan? then, but why not Japan enough? Watersong shares those indelible marks of the tribe. Liyun, one of the three women whose names involve a character related to water and thus form the central conceit of the novel, is Singaporean – and like any good Singaporean (and Singaporean writer) she leans into the stereotype that we are all fanatical about our food. On an evening out for her birthday, Liyun treats Shouji and the reader to a little disquisition on the rambutan:

'Are you familiar with the rambutan wood they use to smoke the meat?' Liyun asked.

He tilted his head. 'Rambutan is a fruit, isn't it?'

She nodded. 'It's the name of the tropical tree, but also the fruit. Have you tried it?'

'Not yet.'

'I had one in Bali. The skin was red and leathery, and it was covered with short, pliable spines resembling hair. Once you peel the skin, you can see the white flesh. The fruit tastes sweet and juicy.' She bit her lip, seemingly thinking hard. 'Kind of similar to lychee.'

'Interesting.'

'The waiter who served me said he came from South Sulawesi. He said his parents live in a house on a street named Rambutan.' She turned to him. 'And guess what? In Singapore, there is another street called Rambutan.'

'Uh-huh. Do you travel overseas often?'

'Now and then. My brother was the traveller really,' she said. 'What about you?'

'I've never been out of Japan,' he said, and then he thought of Youko.

It is worth noting that Shouji's monotone emotional unavailability here, and perhaps more broadly in his relationship with Liyun, is pointed and inadvertently hilarious. Goenawan is a funny writer, even if not always intentionally so. Goenawan also evokes pity for a character in the same accidental manner – you do not want to feel sorry for a person like Liyun, who takes advantage of a drunk misunderstanding to inveigle herself into Shouji's life against his will. Youko, Shouji's ex-girlfriend/missing partner, never quite leaves his thoughts and the reader cannot help but feel quite sorry for Liyun, who, for Shouji, seems to serve primarily as a tool for triggering fond memories of another woman. These tragicomic elements perhaps reveal some slightly clumsy writing. More to the point on place, however, is how Shouji becomes a vessel for Liyun (and, one might say, Goenawan) to describe and explain her heritage. The international market might not know what a rambutan is, but if Shouji pays at least a modicum of attention to this alien hairy fruit and banal tales about its attendant arterial progeny in South Sulawesi and Singapore, then the overseas reader might be tempted to accord it the same respectful curiosity as Shouji does. In a separate episode, Liyun's skilful handling of Peranakan cuisine, with its accents of "tamarind" and "dried shrimp", also gains Shouji's glowing approval. Goenawan adorns her novel carefully with these asides, never allowing herself or her readers to lose sight of its Southeast Asian provenance.

The other side of this coin is that Goenawan's Japan is little more than a backdrop, and no character – not even the ones who are ostensibly Japanese – feels like any more than a tourist in their own environment. Forget the billet-doux, we are reading a postcard. Eri, described as a sister-like figure to Shouji, shares a bucket of KFC with Shouji because "it feels like Christmas" – such a reference feels a little on the nose, a twee pop culture reference wielded by someone who wants to prove that they know a place well. Goenawan's description of the also fictitious Kisejima is propelled by the same self-justifying momentum of a writer believing themself to be cosmopolitan and, in so believing, try to make their mark on the global reader – but the attempt to paint a vivid picture of life abroad with its blend of the invented (Kisejima) and the real (Ryukyu Islands) falls flat and the passage reads more like a dated travel brochure:

Kisejima, 2000. Located south-west of Kyushu, Kisejima – also known as Kise Island – is part of the Ryukyu Islands. Famous for its pristine beaches, beautiful coral reefs, and the diversity of its aquatic life, it is a popular destination with beginner and experienced divers. Because of its location, the weather is warm most of the year.

There are moments when the prose breathes more easily and the reader is not saddled with these gestures of explicit self-justification, but the desire to bring Singapore level with the interested eye a reader might bring to Murakami's Japan still bubbles to the surface. When Shouji springs a visit on Liyun in Singapore towards the end of the novel, we get a careful glimpse of the MRT doing its laps behind a set of high-rise buildings: "an overhead track peeking through a tiny gap between two apartment buildings". The vista is a comforting and comfortable one – like Liyun, Goenawan is at home here, and the reason is that such a view is not an uncommon sight in any other Asian metropolis. Indeed, the omniscient narrator straddles their own and Shouji's point of view to remark that here, "high rise apartments stood in close proximity, not unlike in Tokyo". This similarity serves as a piece of justification for Singapore appearing in a piece of "world literature", which paradoxically ends up making its presence unheimlich.

Perhaps I am unfairly critical of what is fundamentally a passable engagement with the mystery genre, even if it recycles several tired tropes about a "woman's intuition" and "fragile" Japanese wives. A woman disappears in strange and violent circumstances, a young male graduate looks high and low for her, the unexplained romantic devotion, the emotional repression; even the final psychoanalytic tribute to the authority of the Father (whether that be Watersong's own demon father Mr Satou or the translated modern Japanese canon) – so far, so familiar. Yet if a novel is to be praised as "atmospheric" in two out of three of the quotations on its blurb, and many reviewers point frequently to the beautiful shared "worlds" of Goenawan's novels (Samantha Toh in QLRS; Balli Kaur Jaswal on the blurb of the review copy), then we should take those claims very seriously and look at where exactly Goenawan situates her novel and her reader in the world of her text.

Where I have found myself, then, is in a narrative that struggles to be convincing. It is too preoccupied with its scenery; too self-conscious to be an efficient vehicle for plot. Where the novel lacks in persuasive verisimilitude, it also fails to make up for in serious emotion so character development dissolves away as well. Goenawan's Japan sits and preens itself behind a cloud of unknowing while her Singapore stares on like a jealous rival. Shouji loves but "doesn't understand" Youko – yet despite his numerous declarations (and demonstrations) that Youko is an unutterable mystery to him, Shouji rather strangely also feels like, with her, he is "finally home". Such is the state of this novel's covetous relationship with place: it stays in the comfort of the shallows, pretending at something real, something deeper – but never quite getting there or knowing how to do so. Then somewhere on that journey, it lost a reader.

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