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Below illustrations by Linda Shimoda.

A Novel of Past and Future

Collaborative ‘Fourth Treasure’ revamps genre

By Neela Banerjee
AsianWeek

There are rumors that the novel is a dying form. Disregard them completely. The Fourth Treasure (Nan A. Talese, Doubleday Books) moves fluidly between modern day Bay Area and 16th-century Japan; the finer points of Japanese calligraphy and the molecular structure of neurotransmitters; destructive love affairs and the humor of casual sex — capturing the multi dimensional nature of life. A collaborative effort between Todd Shimoda and his wife Linda — who illustrates the book with striking Japanese calligraphy and brush strokes — The Fourth Treasure gives the novel a much-needed push into the 21st century.

Shimoda, a third-generation Japanese American, received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in science and mathematics, and now works as a cognitive scientist at Colorado State University, where he teaches mainly information science courses. Never formally trained as a writer, Shimoda has always been interested in fiction and penned a number of unpublished novels over the years. In the early 1990s, as the Internet was getting off the ground, Shimoda became especially interested in hypertext fiction, a web-based genre that mixes the “Choose Your Own Adventure” idea with multiple — sometimes abstract — points of view. Though intrigued by hypertext’s theory, Shimoda found it difficult to follow many hypertext stories and wanted to improve on the form.

The Fourth Treasure focuses on Tina Suzuki, a neuroscience graduate student at UC Berkeley, who was raised in San Francisco by her Japanese immigrant mother. Tina has never met her father and knows very little about her family or her culture. When Tina’s white boyfriend — an amusing Japan-o-phile of a character who practices numerous Japanese cultural arts and doesn’t seem to do much else — informs Tina that his Japanese calligraphy teacher has suffered a stroke but continues to try communicating through his painting, Tina takes the sensei on as a research subject.

As Tina juggles with the sensei’s cloudy mind, her relationship with her mother, who has recently developed multiple sclerosis, and the romantic pull of a fellow student, the story reveals the sensei’s tortured past and the history of the ancient Daizen inkstone, one of the foundations of shodo, or Japanese calligraphy. The book’s margins include notes from the sensei’s “instructor’s journal” — “The quality of a calligrapher’s brush (one of the treasures of a calligrapher) is one of great importance. Most high-quality brushes use the breast hairs of Chinese sheep” — and notes from Tina’s neuroscience classes.

Shimoda himself took neuroscience classes while getting his Ph.D. at Berkeley and said the idea of the book came from the study of the mind/body connection and its parallels to Linda’s study of Japanese calligraphy, and how the emotional state of the mind affects physical functions.

Shimoda grew up in Colorado, raised by his Japanese father and European mother. He says that he did not identify with his Japanese roots until much later in life.

“I mean, [the Asian culture] was there, but on a day-to-day thing, it wasn’t really emphasized that much. My cousins and other Japanese Americans were the same way — they didn’t really embrace the Japanese culture,” he said. It wasn’t until Shimoda lived in Japan in the mid-1980s that he really began to study and embrace the culture.

“The character of Tina is fairly close to my experience in a lot of ways, even though she is a woman,” Shimoda said. “Tina really rebelled against the Japanese side for a while, and to explore that I really wanted to do it in a mother/daughter relationship [to express more emotion].”

Linda Shimoda’s illustrations lend a voice to the sensei in an hauntingly supernatural way. The paintings, accompanied by brief, haiku-like verse, capture his state of isolation perfectly.

Using their unique non-collaborative collaborating process, Linda worked on the art for The Fourth Treasure over one year. For the first time, she said, she experimented with titling her pieces with interpretative verse such as, “The belly of regret has soft legs.”

“When Todd gave me the first draft, it was, well, ‘magical’ is the only word I can use to describe it,” Linda said. “It was very instinctual to see where the art should go. I felt like it served as an inner [monologue] for the sensei.”

Todd added, “When Linda and I do books together, it really helps to have some other perspective. It adds another whole way of looking at the story.

“I think more and more books are going to have some visual element to them. I don’t know if that is the age we live in or what,” he continued, “but it gets people to pick up the book.”

Reach Neela Banerjee at nbanerjee@asianweek.com.