Tales of Lost Love and the Impossible Life

How does one write about lost love and the anguish that lasts throughout the years.

In the Garden of the Fintzi Continis, Giorgio Bassani painstakingly evokes his own awkwardness, missed signals and opportunities, impetuousness, and self-contempt in a story of first love told against the backdrop of the rise of Italian Fascism and establishment of racial laws that closed opportunities for Jews.

We follow the semi-autobiographical protagonist’s relationship with the beautiful Micol Fintzi-Contini and her brother Alberto. The narrator is the son of a somewhat crass middle-class Jewish businessman, the Fintzi-Continis are born into privilege, the children of an esteemed professor of literature, representative of Ferrara’s separate, privileged Jewish upper class. We follow a coterie of young people who play tennis at the family’s estate a few times a week after Jews are banned from the local tennis club.

Bassani reconstructs the scenes between the protagonist and Micol with such painful precision you feel as if you are witnessing the most torturous moments of your own young adulthood.

I have read the book –and watched the Vittorio De Sica film—many times. One of the strongest images in my mind is a scene from the film in which Micol and young Giorgio are being blessed by their fathers under the same prayer shawl—almost a wedding canopy—in the synagogue.

In both versions, every expectation is thwarted. The reader/viewer expects that Micol and the protagonist—friends since childhood—will somehow grow closer as the narrative unfolds, but this never happens. In the book Micol has a presumed affair with Malnate, an older Catholic socialist, while in the movie this is sexually explicit, and the narrator watches the couple from a secret hiding spot that Micol and the narrator sometimes visited in their childhood.

And what happens to the main characters could not be more different. The narrator lives to recall Micol, her family, and the eeriness of a world on the brink of Fascism. Bassani devoted his life to writing, publishing, and remembrance. But he reminds us that the entire Fintzi-Contini family will be wiped out in concentration camps.

I also think of another semi-autobiographical book, Turgenev’s First Love, in which the 16-year-old Vladimir is infatuated with the 21-year-old Zinaida, a young countess, only to find that she is his father’s mtress.

These are extreme cases, of course. How far can you go to describe thwarted young love?

I went to Japan many times to find it.

One summer many years ago, while I was a student at Colgate University, I met Yoshiko Ohya, a Japanese middle school art teacher who had come to the campus with a group of students from the Kyoto English Center for intense language study. She was older than most of the students and six years older than I was. We spent many hours learning about each other with the help of a bilingual dictionary. I was fascinated by how well educated and playful she was. She was driven by interests that were similar to my own, an autodidact who spent much of her free time reading literature, philosophy, and art, and listening to classical music. She also was stunning, humorous, and exuded a sense of peacefulness that was seemingly an antidote to my own natural freneticism.

Our relationship grew when the next year I was able to study for a semester as an undergraduate in Kyoto. As luck would have it, I lived in a boardinghouse in Sakyo-ku only a few blocks (across Shijo dori and a canal) from her apartment. Except for a period when I went with other classmates to a rural village in Yamaguchi-ken, we spent many of our evenings and weekends together listening to music, reading, walking around the city, going to restaurants and bars. And in subsequent years, when I was working as an assistant to a book review editor of Books & Arts and then as an education journalist, I would visit her for brief periods in the summer.

One year, my boss, Ron Wolk, the editor of Education Week, helped me get a grant from the Japan Foundation to go back to Japan to write a book-length series of articles on the Japanese education system and the challenges in upgrading the system caused by the nation’s history and culture. It was a time when the United States was looking at Japan—then a rising economic power—for ideas about creating more equitable results in education while the Japanese looked to the United States for clues about individualizing learning and bolstering its own creativity, ingenuity, and economic future.

My relationship with Yoshiko was as ill-fated as the characters of the novels I mentioned earlier. There were so many things working against us. The smaller issues were big enough. I was younger, had found interesting work in Washington, DC. I was busy writing a first and only novel and gave up an opportunity to go to graduate school at the University of Hawaii to learn Japanese and Japanese literature. My language skills were not strong enough to have an independent life in Japan. I might have made an adequate living as a freelance writer focused on business, arts, and cultural issues but I would always be an outsider. These issues were moot, of course, because of the two biggest barriers—Japanese customs and Yoshiko’s father.

In Japan, taking over leadership of the family and continuing the family line is generally the responsibility of the oldest male child. But Yoshiko’s oldest brother died of leukemia when she was a teenager and her middle brother had already married into another family, taking that family’s name. This left Yoshiko, who did not want children, to be pushed by her strong-willed father, a former colonel in the Japanese military, to marry a Japanese man. After knowing freedom in Kyoto, she was recalled to her family home ¬(in what is now Hida City, Takayama, near the agricultural research station her father ran.) She would live in a kind of seclusion, for a time through the pretense of arranged marriage proposals to make it look as if she was acquiescing to his wishes.

Any young man with any sense would have recognized the challenges and given up long before I did. I was overly encouraged by the Japanese word 多分 (tabun_, which means “perhaps.” Was there a way we could be together without sneaking around? “Perhaps.” Life is full of possibilities. Who knew what might happen? Worse, I had a false belief in myself and my ability to shape my own future. I was desperately in love not just with Yoshiko but with the dream of the ideal life I wanted to live. A life devoted to study and writing, that would thrive with her by my side, and that was far different from the hardscrabble life I was putting together in America as a journalist and public affairs executive, ultimately running my own company while writing in what extra time I had.

The several poems in this book about Yoshiko don’t begin to do justice to the young woman I knew, who I can aptly describe as a modern-day Emily Dickinson—a witty, mischievous, beautiful, good-natured isolate devoted to art and literature—with whom I lost touch more than 30 years ago.

And while I realize that circumstances conspired against my ability to rescue her from the fortress of her family, I also have felt that I did not do enough to be with her, that—somehow—things could have been different if I was different. That the failure was mine. For after so many years when I could only love her through letters that ultimately became more desperate, I felt my own life withering on the vine, hoping that perhaps her circumstances might change. When I turned 30, I met the woman who would become my wife, and got married seven years later. My wife, who is also my business partner, is as present and real for me as Yoshiko was distant and an ideal. After much delay, I determined to follow the unplanned, stumbled-into life, not the one I had dreamed of, that seemed to be given.

A Japanese friend who began his career in film as an assistant director for Kurosawa, once suggested I make my relationship with Yoshiko into a film like David Lean’s Summertime with elements of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (chasing around Kyoto instead of Rome), but I have not yet been able to distance myself enough to write the story. I’ve lacked the psychological depth and self-discipline to hold myself under the microscope with the clinical courage of novelists as gifted as Bassani or Turgenev. (I have turned to the story only now, reshaping it as a play—the plot a love suicide reminiscent of the works of Japan’s greatest dramatist, Chikamatsu.

If anything, the several poems about my relationship with Yoshiko are meant to show how the past can hover in one’s life, how long it takes to heal, and how we move on with life in spite of our own fragility and brokenness. Our lives are not the works of art that we would invent and somehow control, the “perhaps” of dreams. We often stumble into becoming who we are, experience the reality of life and all of its surprises as the dream we shape through self-understanding and acceptance, rather than living the impossible life we may have wanted.

I offer this book, in part, as a gift to Yoshiko to tell her (and myself) that I have somehow—belatedly—found my way deep into the life I have made. I can only hope that she has found the life that she has always wanted as well.