Angela Carter (1940–92) and Japan: Disorientations
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24 Angela Carter (1940–92) and Japan: Disorientations ROGER BUCKLEY Angela Carter INTRODUCTION Angela Carter (1940–92) is the subject of immense posthumous fame. Conferences, scholarly theses and literary celebrations ensure that her experimental works are widely known and carefully scruti- nized. After starting out as a journalist in Croydon, she married Paul Carter, read English at Bristol University, began writing novels (start- ing with Shadow Dance, 1965 and The Magic Toyshop, 1967) and then came to Japan as the recipient of the Somerset Maugham prize. Thereafter she divorced, remarried in 1977, taught in the United States, Australia and at the University of East Anglia, while continu- ing to publish novels, short stories and articles at a frenetic pace. Angela Carter’s growing bands of admirers view her work as a heady blend of magic realism, fantasy and purple prose. It is hardly surprisingly, they maintain, that she never won the Booker. Beachcombing for books is its own reward. So the collector patiently tells himself until he spies a nugget in the prospector’s pan and then attitudes suddenly shift. It happened when the library of my University in Tokyo was going through one of its frequent discard sales 245 BRITAIN & JAPAN: BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAITS VOLUME VI and I found myself paying a hundred yen for a first edition of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. So far, so ordinary. Yet when I looked a little more carefully three cherries registered on the fruit machine’s screen; the literary equivalent of a jackpot sent silver dollars cascading onto the casino floor. On the inside cover of my purchase the inscription read ‘For Becky and Suzy from Angela, with love’: on the back dust cover, immedi- ately underneath the publisher’s description of the author, Angela Carter had written in ink: ‘This is circa 1966, before I committed adultery or went to Japan or anything’, and to make the message absolutely clear she had underlined ‘anything’: lastly, there was an undated handwritten letter tucked inside the book that Angela Carter had sent to her two friends on her return from Japan to Britain. Nearly forty years after the event, there remains very little in print on Angela Carter’s years in Japan beyond her short stories, some jour- nalism and a few comments that she made in interviews. Basic biog- raphical information is missing, though her second husband is said to possess material and others may yet be persuaded to be more forth- coming over their own recollections. ANGELA CARTER IN JAPAN Angela Carter’s involvement with Japan matters because it has been frequently seen as a dividing line in her life and career. It is, though, subject to various interpretations, not least because of the striking absence of reliable information on which to build a verifiable thesis. Those that have attempted to look at these years have very little to go on, beyond stating that she spent over two years there in the early 1970s. Professor Sarah Gamble noted in 1997 that Carter had already written three novels before the award of the Somerset Maugham Prize permitted her to travel to Japan. It was, as Gamble writes, a major shift: ‘Instead of capitalizing on her burgeoning reputation, however, she did the unexpected – she removed herself from both a failing marriage and the British literary scene. The Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions gave her the money to travel, so, believing that a writer should get “out and about and around”, she went to Japan and remained there for two years.’1 Yet what she did there and what the impact of Japan may have been on her subsequent writing is controversial. The late Lorna Sage, whose own compelling autobiography surely deserves a prominent place in any decent curriculum on post-war British society, is quoted by Gamble as remarking that Japan was ‘the place where she lost and found herself’.2 All that is certain is that Angela Carter left a collapsing 246.