Pulling the truth out of the Darkness (on "A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri)

Interpreter of Maladies

Recently I have been reading immigrant-culture-based literature as those books give me a fresh and complex view point. "A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them.

The story is about an Indian American couple.

The husband, at 35, has no other choice but to remain as a graduate student without any achievement, whereas the wife has been very successful in her career, which has turned their relationship into an unstable one. They are happier when they are occupied with his/her own matters than when they are together at home.

Their situation makes me think what if each other's status is opposite: the husband as a successful businessman, the wife as a graduate student in vain.

To my disappointment, it's not so easy for us, I mean the couple and me, to be free from the obsolete notion: Men should be better at business than women. It almost amazes me how the notion which was once believed to be true at least in Japan, still affects my way of thinking.

As for the couple cited before, what they thought they should be subconsciously has been eroding what they really are. They are suffocating in their marriage.

One night, they get a chance of change; they are informed of a temporary matter, a one-hour blackout for five consecutive days. The wife makes a suggestion that they confess their secrets one by one per night during the power failures.

The information on a blackout reminded the wife of her Indian relatives' favorite pastime during power failures back home. She said they enjoy listening to the stories told by everyone there in turn, which interested her husband, who is also an Indian-American but hadn't known this recreation until then.

Her suggestion of confessing secrets in the darkness makes me think of a Japanese old game called "one-hundred-stories (hyaku monogatari)", which was popular in edo-period starting 450 years ago.

The game goes like this... 5 to 10 people in a dark room tell ghost stories in turn. When the number of all the stories told there reaches 100, something frightening is supposed to emerge.

The difference between this one-hundred-stories and the wife's confess-the-secrets though is that in one-hundred-stories we don't know what will happen until we have finished 100 stories, while in confess-the secrets she thought she knew where her confession would lead her and her husband; she had a big secret to confess and I think she needed a kind of preparation to make that confession.

But there was one thing she missed.

She didn't take it into account that her husband might affect the close of her scenario and he actually did. He made a full confession too.

And like the end of the edo-game, there appears something frightening, a painful truth.