David Mitchell on the imagination

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you're 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic are strong and deep. 

There is a Wordsworthian tinge to David Mitchell's account of children and their extraordinary power to imagine stuff into being.

I am reminded of the poem "Ode To Intimations of Immortality" by Wordsworth upon reading Mitchell's view. 

(Never mind the fact that the crux of the poem--the power of the imagination and the terror of mortality wrought into the texture of our lives by experience was totally ruined by the English professor who first brought the poem to my attention in college. She was Indian, a Punjabi married to a Bengali and had a million-page "notes" on the poem that she regurgitated to us in class). 

My own childhood fantasies differ from the sort that Mitchell uses as examples--the magical turning of fur coats into fir trees.

Mitchell grew up under the influence of the C.S. Lewises, while I grew up listening to "ghost" stories. My imagination went berserk in large spaces (the house I grew up in was exceptionally spacious and empty) and I saw shadows flitting across rooms, or imagined trees to be habitations of amorphous ghouls that would jump on me were I to walk under one.

But I don't quite subscribe to the popular notion that experience stunts imagination. The notion of the purity of imagination is a tad romantic to me; I don't see eye to eye with Wordsworth on this either. In my own case, I never was a very imaginative child, but experience has sharpened/heightened my imagination over the years. May I say that experience has been a generative agent in making me into a far more imaginative person than I ever was a s a child.

As a child I avoided trees altogether.

David Mitchell..

...Is a literary figure who is "trending" these days because his novel Cloud Atlas is getting a second life in film form.

So why not follow Mitchell's suggestions on which Japanese author's to read?

Mitchell, a British novelist, has lived in Japan and made a living teaching English there. His caveat (how humility-filled it is!) is "My students taught me more about Japan than its authors, really."

Till the time I make contact with the real Japanese in real Japan, I'd go by Japanese novels recommended by Mitchell.

The Doctor's Wife is a historical novel on the status of women in Japan

Grass For My Pillow looks at Japan's bruised relationship with its post-World War II history

One Man's Justice is about the war

Runaway Horses is the second volume of the tetralogy Sea of Fertility

The Makioka Sisters is a Jane Austen-like guide to navigating the complex and demanding marriage market in Japan

Yet, upon being asked which authors, dead or alive, would he personally want to meet and have a party with, Mitchell surprisingly excludes naming any Japanese authors. He mentions Chekov, Issac Bashevis Singer, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

For a self-confessed Japanophile, the list looks awfully Europhilic.