Novelist Yu Miri visits Fukushima students

June 18, 2015

Novelist inspires Fukushima students with candid tales of her troubled past

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201506180010

By MASAKAZU HONDA/ Staff Writer

MINAMI-SOMA, Fukushima Prefecture--When novelist Yu Miri confided that she was expelled from high school for smoking, running away from home and attempting suicide, students listening to her tale were stunned.

“Your teacher was astonished when I told this and said that ‘there is no student like you at this high school,’ ” a smiling Yu said to students at Odaka Technical High School here.

The 47-year-old writer was giving a special Japanese language lesson on June 16 to first-year students at the request of Yoshihide Idogawa, a teacher at the school. Yu became acquainted with Idogawa after she invited him on a local radio show that she hosts. Yu has been doing the radio show since 2012, a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster was triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

Yu, who was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for her novel "Kazoku Shinema" (Family cinema), told her life story by way of answering the most common question posed by students: "What inspired you to become a novelist?"

“I am a South Korean national,” she told the students. “My parents came from South Korea. Since I was born and raised in Japan, however, I can hardly speak Korean. My name is pronounced as Yu Miri. I was named Miri because my grandfather toiled to find kanji characters that are pronounced the same in both Korean and Japanese.”

After her parents were separated, Yu continued, she and her brother followed her mother. Another brother and sister lived with her father.

The high school she attended was a Christian missionary school known for its female students who came from wealthy families. But Yu was a problem student.

After she was kicked out of school when she was 16, she ran away from home again. She joined a theater group in the hopes of becoming an actress after she was mesmerized by a musical she saw in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. But Yu later turned to writing plays after she experienced setbacks in her acting career.

Taiki Sugioka, one of the students who attended the class, said he was struck by the writer's candid tale.

“I was impressed,” said the 15-year-old, who is in the industrial chemistry course. “She is not called a novelist for nothing. She discussed her past candidly and openly.”

After she told about her past, some students were asked to tell the class what they like to do the most and what they dislike. They were among the topics she asked them in advance to discuss during the lesson. She also offered tips on how to compose good sentences.

Yu said she received a good response from the teenagers.

“People age 15 or so are in the most impressionable age group,” she said. “I saw in them great earnestness that they do not want to miss anything.”

Yu moved to Minami-Soma in April to explore the theme of the displaced, such as many students at the school. The students at the school have been forced to take classes at a makeshift building, away from their school. Radiation levels in the area where their school is located, within 20 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, are too high to allow them to continue their education there. Many of the students attend the makeshift school while residing in temporary housing.

She is expected to give three more lessons by the end of next March.