In “Foster,” your story in this week’s issue, a man agrees to take care of the cat of his brother, who’s serving a prison term for killing two people. When you came up with this idea, did you worry about pairing the warmth of pet ownership with the horror of murder? Put otherwise, what possibilities did this open up for you?
Totally—I was anxious from technical and thematic standpoints, but I’m always antsy about clarity and precision. Once I had a firmer sense of the plot, its level of difficulty felt like a challenge more than anything else, and also a lot like life as it’s actively being lived. Scrolling through a news feed, we’ll run up against phone-filmed footage of state-sanctioned killings alongside dire GoFundMe requests alongside, like, videos of adorable pandas. I can drive to the puppy day care to drop off my dog, find myself terrified when a cop pulls up behind me, and then elated when a toddler waves at me in the grocery store ten minutes later, with the knowledge that some guy with a gun could walk in and make it a horrible day for everyone. That constant intermingling of American violence with daily minutiae alters the way we approach our individual narratives. But it’s also synonymous with daily life in the States (and that’s just if you’re very, very lucky). Putting that on the page felt difficult in the way that capturing the world as it’s experienced can be difficult.
Music helped, though: I was listening to a lot of Jazmine Sullivan, Hyukoh, and Men I Trust in drafting. And then a song called “From Now On,” by She Her Her Hers, stayed on repeat throughout the very last edit.
The cat comes into the house at a moment of tension between the narrator and his boyfriend, Owen. Does Owen feel challenged, or replaced, or just stimulated?
“Stimulated” sounds right? I think Owen and the narrator are both searching for some semblance of family and belonging, generally, with a more palpable connection to each other specifically. Then this cat shows up. And Taku’s presence brings them together in a way that they otherwise may not have been privy to.
The idea of a queer family is so amorphous for Owen and the narrator that they’re kind of grasping at what, specifically, theirs could look like: they just know that they’d like one, although they’re still very much in the midst of feeling each other out. But I think you can learn a good deal about people by seeing how they interpret care—particularly care for someone or something a lot more vulnerable than they are. So maybe Taku’s presence is both a catalyst and a glue for them, allowing them to reach a plane in their relationship that would’ve otherwise been trickier to get to.
The narrator names the cat Taku, for a man he knew when he lived in Japan. Japanese themes run through your work—what draws you to that culture?
The answer’s pretty mundane: I’ve been the recipient of—and been deeply grateful for—the kindness and warmth of friends and strangers, locally and abroad, and that will never not be interesting to me. I’m always circling around the idea of what can constitute a “home”—whether it’s a place, a person, a feeling, or something else—and, aside from the greater Houston area, Kansai is maybe the only other place so far where I’ve felt shades of that particular warmth. So swaths of my writing have just been me trying to figure out why that is. (Relatedly: we all have a responsibility to stand against and disrupt the rise in anti-Asian racism and harassment in the States. And we all have a role to play in combatting white supremacy’s vestiges in this country as it targets the most vulnerable folks in our communities. So, if you’re reading this and you haven’t already, please take time to really examine the struggles faced by these communities generally, and the seniors and socioeconomically disadvantaged women in these communities specifically, and what you can personally do to counteract those struggles. One potential step is supporting organizations like the Asian Pacific Fund, O.C.A.-Greater Houston, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, and the Asian Mental Health Collective, among so many others.)
But, probably crucially, I wasn’t the biggest reader growing up, and a significant chunk of the texts I eventually arrived at via my local library were Japanese novels in translation. The works of Yoko Ogawa, Natsuo Kirino, Banana Yoshimoto, and Hiromi Kawakami are inextricable from my understanding of what fiction can be. And I likely wouldn’t be writing today if I hadn’t come across Haruki Murakami’s “Sputnik Sweetheart” when I did. So I’m deeply indebted to the works of those authors, and to translators like Allison Markin Powell, Louise Heal Kawai, Ginny Tapley Takemori, and Morgan Giles (to name just a few folks) for making contemporary Japanese fiction accessible to English-speaking audiences.
We meet the narrator’s brother as merely the perpetrator of an awful crime, but as the story goes on that portrait gets shaded. You made a last-minute adjustment to the story, adding a crucial scene of the brothers’ relationship. What was the dynamic you were trying to draw out?
It was a tricky knot to untangle. I think that, for both kindness and cruelty, some of the lightest touches last the longest, you know? I was partly worried that a coming-out scene and its reverberations would overshadow the entirety of the narrative, and partly worried that the scene’s fallout would color both brothers in ways that’d be difficult to build on. But, funnily enough, that was ultimately my justification for including it—no single moment defines any particular person’s character in its totality, for better and worse, and each of these moments exist in tandem with the moments surrounding them. Both brothers are just trying to figure out what it means to be a person living among other people. That’s never-ending work.
All of which is to say that, near the end of edits, I realized that adding the scene was an adjustment that needed to be made to paint the clearest portrait of their relationship possible—I think I was waiting in line at a CVS when it clicked for me—and also that making said adjustment scared me. So I sat on it for a minute. Which was really distressing! But it forced me to consider why, exactly, altering the narrative in that way affected me: because it showed that each character is as capable of conjuring pain as he is of warmth? Because it inched the story closer to a more potent emotional honesty? The narratives that we fear the most, for whatever reason, are entry points to the stories that we really, truly need to tell. That’s where the good stuff is. So I made the change this story needed me to make and stopped worrying about it, because life is too fucking short.
