Music plays part in author Matsuoka's inspiration

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Takashi Matsuoka's historical novel, "Cloud of Sparrows," deals with a Japan just opening its doors to outsiders. Shelley Choy photo

The first piece — he obligingly rises to place it in the CD player when a reporter's memory fails to dredge it up — is Marty Robbins' country pop classic, "Big Iron," one of those twangy story songs about a bad-looking marshall who is mistaken for a gunslinger until he takes the true gunslinger down.

This song, a hit in the 55-year-old's teen years, suggested to Matsuoka one of the novel's characters, a sort of accidental gunslinger, who travels to 19th-century Japan in the guise of a missionary but actually has another purpose.

The identity twist in the song intrigued Matsuoka: The marshal is a killer, but he's judged to be a good guy just because he wears a badge. In "Cloud of Sparrows," too — set in Japan in 1861, just as the country is opening its doors to "the outsiders" — people are not as they seem, and everyone is a prisoner of their status.

The other song he often listened to is the post-war big band ditty "Ginza Kan Kan Musume," released last year on a the "Club Nisei" collection of big band recordings from the glory days of Hawai'i's tea houses and dance halls.

Matsuoka, a quiet, cerebral man with an enlivening sense of humor, is moved to tears as he listens to the sweetly shrill singer's voice. She is describing to her mother the Ginza where she works — looking for "dates," one suspects. "Her jungle," she calls it.

"Think of it. These women, raised to rely on men; everything built on this warrior society. And the warriors have lost, the men are all gone, or defeated, but the women have to do what they have to do," says Matsuoka.

Work inspired tears

The song reminded him of the geisha Mayonaka no Heiko, whose voice is the first the reader hears in "Cloud of Sparrows." Thinking of the beautiful and resourceful Heiko, who lived in a transitional period in Japanese history, and of those post-war women would bring tears to his eyes as he worked.

"Well," he says diffidently, "if you can't cry at your own work, who else is going to cry?"

"Cloud of Sparrows" is not Matsuoka's first book; he had written three or four complete novels before this. But it is his first to be published — and in hardcover by a national house, no less. He is not unhappy to have this one get into print first. The other books, he says candidly, "weren't good."

"Cloud of Sparrows" is something of a gift. Matsuoka was working on another novel, set in contemporary Japan. "Then, I just woke up with it one morning, this book about the great grandparents of the people I'd been writing about," he says. "I didn't dream it ... I woke up with it — the title, the opening, the ending, the key characters ... It was remarkable, a very complete alternative world."

The world is that of Okumichi no kami Genji, Great Lord of Akaoka, the latest in a line of Okumichi clan nobles who are cursed with foreknowledge that, in some cases, drives them mad. Genji-sama's destiny is tied to the arrival of a small group of missionaries, and to that of his bloodthirsty uncle, Shigeru, and his mistress, Heiko. Matsuoka's world of Akaoka is so complete that it even includes excerpts from a supposed secret recorded history of the Lords of Akaoka, the first dating to 1291.

Despite its sudden appearance in the author's consciousness, "Cloud of Sparrows" encompasses experiences and understandings gained over the course of a lifetime.

Born in Japan

Matsuoka was born in Japan and lived there until he was 7, time enough to become bilingual before the family moved to Hilo and then Honolulu. His California-born father had worked as a reporter for the Tokyo Nippon Times and Associated Press; his mother, born Mildred Haruko Tokunaga in Hawai'i, was working in Japan when the two met and married.

A samurai book has been Matsuoka's dream ever since small-kid-time, when his father would take him to samurai movies at the theaters near 'A'ala Park.

"I love being in another time, the contrasts and the similarities. I love the manly men and feminine women," he says.

When he was 12 or 13, Matsuoka told his father that he wanted to be a writer. The senior Matsuoka, by then an official of the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association, advised his son to read, read, read and gave him copies of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."

Later, Yoshio Matsuoka dissuaded his son from entering a creative writing program, offering advice his son still thinks is the best he ever got: "You can either write or you can't. All you can do is hone your ability. What you should do is read and see who you admire, read and see who is no good."

"An ancestor's story"

Read he did, while pursuing various careers, trying law school, doing a long stint as a reporter and editor for motorcycle magazines, traveling, marrying and divorcing twice and fathering a daughter, now 15, of whom he has custody. She was one of the early, and most frank, readers of "Cloud of Sparrows," as was his ailing mother, to whom he read the chapters as though they were serial stories. He jokes with her that he is a late bloomer; she smiles with pride.

In his motorcycle writing (and riding) days, Matsuoka was able to stand on the cliffs above Cape Muroto on Shikoku island and hear the surf below, seeming to echo off the leaves of the trees high above. He thought of his great grandparents, who lived in that prefecture. Eventually, in a tribute, he made the area the book's fictional realm of Akaoka; its stronghold, Cloud of Sparrows, is near Cape Muroto.

"My one feeling about writing this book is of gratitude," he said. "This is an ancestor's story."