A bottle of Coke appears on the bamboo table, and beside it a round glass tumbler no bigger than a billiard ball. Were they expecting a pair of hobbits for lunch at the fabulously expensive Midtown Manhattan restaurant Sushi Yasuda? Instead, grinning at this spectacle from the seat opposite mine is novelist John Burnham Schwartz, best known as the author of Reservation Road (now a "major motion picture," in book-jacket blabber). What better location to discuss his latest, The Commoner (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), a work of fiction heavily lacquered with fact and purporting to be the story of Japan's most celebrated desperate housewives—its current empress and crown princess.
By now, Schwartz is something of an authority on the Japanese and their quasi-Martian mores—the numb obeisance paid to unforgiving protocols, particularly. A schoolboyish 42, he still resembles the East Asian studies major he was at Harvard, a flop of golden brown hair grazing his forehead. His first novel, 1989's Bicycle Days, grew out of his thesis, a roman à clef about working in Tokyo that wound up scuttling his once certain future as an investment banker. In Japan, he found no shortage of material: There was that time he shacked up at a pricey hotel with an escort he didn't realize was an escort. "It's in the book. Sort of. I didn't know what was happening." Well, up to a point. "One does the best one can. And that's all I have to say."
Let the chef choose what to send out, Schwartz decides, with some caveats: No abalone, and if there is mackerel, let it be Spanish. Saltwater and freshwater eel are confusing near homophones in translation—and while Schwartz wants no part of the former (anago), he will certainly entertain some of the latter (unagi).
In Japan, such fine intra-order distinctions may be made even within the exalted royal family itself. In August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced over the radio that Japan had surrendered to the Allies, also revealing to his people—by safe deduction, since Japan had now lost its first war ever—that he was not, as lore would have it, a god after all. More than a decade after this abdication from divinity came news that Hirohito's son Akihito had elected to take a commoner as his wife. In 1993, Akihito's son Naruhito did the same.
But marriage to a Japanese crown prince can have no fairy-tale ending. In Schwartz's novel, the future empress, whom he calls Haruko, is the tennis-champion daughter of a soy magnate; she eventually loses the ability to speak from the stress of not being able to see her own family again and the constant supervision of her disapproving higher-born dragon-ladies-in-waiting.
Japan's real-life current crown princess, Masako, was the most dynamic career woman of her generation and rumored to be the next head of the foreign ministry. She was a couple of years ahead of Schwartz at Harvard. "I never saw her, but we were probably in Yen-ching Library at the same time," he allows. After failing to birth a male heir, Masako has virtually vanished from the pet-shop window of public scrutiny. As for her husband, Prince Naruhito, "I gather he's a really decent and totally uncharismatic person," Schwartz says. The prince, too, shuffles along in chrysanthemum chains. "Naruhito can never, you know, just pop into a restaurant," Schwartz observes.
