Black Gate

In the entryway of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, there was an inscription that read Gnothi Seauton, Know Thyself. This aphorism has been popular with various segments of Western society, particularly in the last century. When we use it, we typically mean it in the context of self-understanding or enlightenment, of introspection or even psychoanalysis. We mean self-knowledge as a deep delving into our own personality, our tastes, our desires, and our goals.

Which is slightly funny, because that is not at all what the Greeks had in mind when they carved it on the wall.

If we were to translate the intention of the inscription rather than the words themselves, it would read something like, “Remember your place.” Not nearly so satisfying, I’m afraid, but to the Greeks this was an immensely important concept. And from it, we get one of the most critical notions of characterization that we see in modern literature: that of hubris.

Hubris is the idea that there are screw-ups, and then there are cosmic screw-ups. Saying you’re prettier than the girl next door is obnoxious. Saying you’re prettier than the goddess Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, is a grave offense on a cosmic level, and terrible things are going to happen to you. This isn’t (just) because the gods have delicate egos and are easily offended by mean humans. It’s because they are fiercely protective of their status as gods. Were one to read a less religious and more temporal lesson in this, it is also a warning to the majority of mankind to always be cautiously respectful of those who have more power than you and to those in power over others that the gods are above all.

Ovid plays with this traditional idea in his retelling of the myth of Arachne. Arachne is classically portrayed as having broken this most important rule: she has forgotten that she is merely a mortal and that she owes respect to the gods. Arachne is a weaver, one of the greatest who has ever lived. But she refuses to give worship and thanks to the goddess Minerva (the Romanized Athena) as the goddess of weaving, and denies that she has been in any way blessed.

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Darcy Tamayose’s novel Odori was published in 2007, and in 2008 won the Canada Council of the Arts’ Canada-Japan Literary Award for an English-language book. Lush yet understated, Odori uses dreams, ghosts, and the fantastic to frame the story of a woman’s life, told across generations. I think more than most books, it can profitably read in a number of ways; but what for me is most striking is its approach to storytelling and the layering of tales.

In southern Alberta in 1999 a woman named Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier is in a car accident with her husband and children. Caught between life and death, Mai finds herself in another place, a world where her dead great-grandmother, Chiru, tells Mai a series of stories about the land of Chiru’s birth: the Ryukyu Islands, what is now Okinawa and was once a separate kingdom of its own. The stories begin far back in the past, presenting myths and history of the Ryukyus; then move quickly forward to the late 1930s, to tell the story of Mai’s mother Emiko and her twin sister Miyako, an aunt Mai never knew she had. Emiko and Miyako, the daughters of Japanese immigrants to Alberta, return to Chiru and Japan for schooling — but things don’t go as planned, and their stay becomes longer than they expected as the Second World War looms.

Tamayose nicely balances story against story, building the tales of Chiru, Emiko, and Mai as the book goes along. Questions are raised, then answered; and as this is fundamentally an unusual character piece, the result is the depiction of three women’s lives and how they tie together. It is also a story of sea-surrounded Okinawa and landlocked southern Alberta, and how they’re linked by the experience of a family: a story of place and of the distance between places, as it is a story of time and of time outside of times. You can see how character and events are shaped by history — the annexation of the Ryukyus by Japan in the late nineteenth century, the development of an Okinawan community in southern Alberta in the twentieth, the battles of the Second World War. But you also feel how the rhythms of the seasons and the revolving years shape story and experience; and see how those rhythms in fact provide a frame by which the developments of history may be understood. Stories are told, stories are retold, and stories return across time bearing the meaning of the past with them.

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