Looking for Angela Carter's Japan

"When I went outside to see if he was coming home, some children dressed ready for bed  in cotton nightgowns were playing with sparklers in the vacant lot in the corner. When the sparks fell down in beards of stars, the smiling children cooed softly. Their pleasure was very pure because it was so restrained."

These opening lines of "A Souvenir of Japan" were my introduction to the works of the British novelist Angela Carter. Her short story tells of an expat living on the margin in a minute apartment in downtown Tokyo with her younger Japanese lover.

It is surely autobiographical and splendidly evocative for those fortunate enough to have lived in Japan during the 1970s.

Some will instantly compare their experiences then with those of Carter as she struggled to come to terms with a culture of all-important outward appearances and fierce social constraint. Even flowers, she wrote, had to be washed and potted plants brutally contained — "they torture trees to make them look more like the formal notion of a tree."

The difference between what happened then to others and Carter was, of course, in her remarkable achievements. She was already an award-winning author when she arrived in Japan and she used her time to write both stories and longer fiction.

After two to three years in Japan — different authorities differ over how long she spent in east Asia — Carter returned to enhance her reputation. Today her flame is sustained by the constant reprinting of her magic realism writings and by a stream of theater productions, literary reassessments and academic theses.

Yet much remains hidden and there is no full-scale biography where one could turn to learn more about those vital Japan years.

Last autumn, however,one small clue did emerge. While searching in a university library in Tokyo as it sold off surplus stock, I came across a signed copy of Carter's  "The Magic Toyshop." After paying my 100 yen, I found inside an undated letter from the author to "Becky and Suzy"— apparently two friends then living in Tokyo who had discussed fiction together.

Should anyone know of these two individuals, perhaps American expats in the early 1970s, it would be nice to hear from them. I would, of course, return the letter to them and be delighted to learn more of their recollections.

More information of this kind is badly needed if we are ever to get a more rounded picture of Angela Carter. She stands toward the end of  a long line of writers from the West who came to Japan. And among the best for graphic snapshots of a post-war, pre-boom Japan that will soon be unrecognizable to curious arrivals in the early 21st century.