Présentation de l'éditeur
It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman—a rising star in the foreign ministry—to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic. Told in the voice of Haruko, meticulously researched and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarified and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other. With the unerring skill of a master storyteller, John Burnham Schwartz has written his finest novel yet.
Extrait
1
IN THE YEARS BEFORE THE WAR, my family lived in Shibuya Ward, in a large house with a walled garden. The sake brewing company that my father, Tsuneyasu Endo, had inherited from his father grew and prospered under his guidance, making him a respected figure in the business community. My mother’s family was older and more distinguished than my father’s, a fact that she neither promoted nor attempted to hide. As for me, born in 1934, the Year of the Dog, I was an only child and wore the proper skirts that my mother laid out for me each morning. I was fond of tennis, history, and calligraphy. There was, I suppose, nothing remarkable about me as a child, save for my father's love, for it was to me that he always told his favorite stories.
Of the world beyond our garden walls, I had little awareness. I could not yet read the newspapers, and it was only in my teens that I grew to love the radio. Good girls like me, who spent hours each day following prescriptives meant to establish their unimpeachable credentials, were even more inward than they are today. One might say that my childhood insularity was a form of hereditary protection in whose shade, like a pale, delicate mushroom, I grew. The economic depression, omnipresent anxiety, and rising nationalism that had infected our nation and others weren’t things I spent time worrying about. The military was aligned under the Emperor, believing him to be a god worth dying and killing for—in his name a coup was staged and, in China, a massacre seen to its bloody end—while in his walled–and–moated palace in the center of our great capital, His Majesty remained augustly silent. On these matters, as on so many others of terrible importance, I held no opinions that I can recall, and, of course, no one ever asked me to speak my mind.
In the first days of spring, plum blossoms appeared in our garden, perfuming the air, and camellias as red as the
furoshiki in which we wrapped our holiday gifts. There were birds, I remember: one in particular, small and yellow with gray–and–black wings, used to sit and sing on the stone lantern outside my window.
WHEN WAR CAME IN EARNEST from the far side of the world, the first major food staple to be rationed in Tokyo was rice. After that miso and shoyu went on the list, then fish, eggs, tofu, grains of all kinds. Soon everything was rationed, and whatever the size of one’s house or the district one happened to be living in, the only way to feed one’s family was to enter the black market and see what could be bought there for five or ten times the prewar price. This was my mother’s job, as of course it was for all the women in Toky
