'Commoner' Just Common

The kindest things to say about John

Burnham Schwartz ’87’s new novel, “The

Commoner,” are the things that it isn’t.

It isn’t over-long, over-complicated, or

overwrought; it isn’t slow or boring; it

isn’t bad.

The trouble is, it isn’t particularly

good, either. And if not for its compelling

source material—the story of Empress

Michiko, the first commoner to marry

into the Japanese royal family—the

novel would be much worse. Despite its

vivid subject, Schwartz’s bland execution

produces a book that is curiously unremarkable,

even memorably forgettable.

“The Commoner” tells the story of

Empress Haruko, Schwartz’s fictionalized

vision of Empress Michiko. The basic

plot is one that’s been told over and

over in other forms: exceptional young

woman confronts the world, falters at

first, but eventually finds herself. In this

version, Haruko is a privileged but normal

girl growing up in Tokyo during

World War II. (As Schwartz writes with

characteristic limpness, “One might say

that my childhood insularity was a form

of hereditary protection in whose shade,

like a pale, delicate mushroom, I grew.”)

She excels at sports, and one fateful day

meets and beats the Crown Prince in a

game of tennis. The Prince falls in love

with her beautiful spirit, and so begins

the rest of her life.

Japan has the world’s oldest hereditary

monarchy, and Haruko’s life is

choked with thousands of years’ worth

of accrued ceremony: the 15 kilograms

of traditional clothing Haruko wears on

her wedding day, the seven-day naming

process for her first son. The monotony

and constriction of it push Haruko into

a nervous breakdown, forcing her to

leave the royal palace to convalesce at her

childhood home.

At this point, convention tells us, she

should recover from her mental anguish

and find the strength to carve out a place

for herself, even within the suffocating

environment of the court. Whether or

not Empress Michiko actually returned

from her convalescence with newfound

resolve, for the purposes of the novel

Haruko should at least have returned a

changed woman, whether empowered

or embittered or simply embarrassed.

But things seem to continue essentially

as they were before. When it

comes time for her son, the new Crown

Prince, to marry, Haruko convinces his

headstrong beloved to submit to the

stern hand of the monarchy. Together,

the novel suggests, these two women

will be able to withstand the pressures

of tradition that weighed so heavily

on Haruko alone. But when her new

daughter-in-law begins to stagger under

the burden—committing the faux pas

of entering rooms before her husband

and struggling with the formal court

language—Haruko abandons her: “She

was not the first to run into harsh limits;

I, of course, had been there before

her. But she was the first to innocently

believe—and who could blame her, having

received my solemn promise—that

she might somehow be protected from

the implacable forces set against her.”

The whole novel suffers from

Schwartz’s lack of engagement with the

central character. He doesn’t feel the

need to empathize with her. He plays

around with the facts of her life without

ever assembling them into a character.

His attitude can be embarrassingly reductive,

as when Haruko describes the

Emperor’s reaction to her breakdown:

“The hurt frustration he showed on realizing

his insufficiency—the wounded

perplexity of a deeply practical man

in the face of irregularities of a female

nature (that apparently sound mechanism

which nonetheless may decide, for

whatever reason, simply to cease functioning)—

could not contain itself.”

If all of Haruko’s problems, triumphs,

and struggles can be so easily

reduced to capricious feminine nature,

then why tell her story in the first place?

What’s interesting about a person who

submits meekly to biological weakness?

There is something undeniably compelling

about a person grappling with her

individual identity, but Schwartz misses

it in this novel. What you’ll remember is

not Haruko’s struggle, but how quickly

you forgot it.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be

reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.