Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

Overview

In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay and "opened" Japan to trade with America. As entertainment for the treaty-signing ceremony, Perry brought a white-men-in-black-face minstrel show—and thereby confirmed the widely whispered Japanese belief that trade with the American "barbarians" could only lead to cultural ruin. Yet the pawns in this clash of cultures—the minstrels, Ace Bledsoe and Ned Clark, and the Japanese interpreter, Manjiro Okubo—are just slightly more curious than cautious. Within the minstrels Manjiro sensed "the subtleties of spirit that reside in all good men." When Ace and Ned are unwittingly made part of a Japanese plot to undermine the American presence, Manjiro helps them escape into the countryside. Pursued by samurai, torn between treachery and loyalty, Manjiro and the minstrels (along with family, friends, and lovers) make their way across Japan, fleeing a showdown with the samurai that gradually becomes inevitable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941088791
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	05/27/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	666 KB

About the Author

Richard Wiley is Professor of English and Associate Director of the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His previous novels include Soldiers in Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Fools' Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, and Ahmed's Revenge.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• Part One: Edo
  • 1. Dutch Learning
  • 2. Oh, What I'll Find There I Don't Know
  • 3. Accident upon Accident
  • 4. Whitman Sampler
  • 5. Approach of the Outside World
  • 6. Tell Him I'm in Mourning!
  • 7. He Didn't Care about the Neighbors Anymore
  • 8. Don't Get Up on My Account
  • 9. A Word Overheard Is a Word Forgotten
  • 10. The Pavilion of Timelessness
  • 11. Where Has My Heart Gone?
  • 12. A Fly in the Ointment
  • 13. Three Tulips in a Boat
  • 14. Under the Falling Wisteria
  • 15. The Experiment of America
  • 16. Rumors
  • 17. Fine Mornin', Ain't It?
  • 18. Commodore Perry's Anxiety
• Part Two: Odawara
  • 19. Everything Wrong Everywhere
  • 20. Saved from the Realm of Absolute Calamity
  • 21. "Kambei"
  • 22. Angelface
  • 23. Hired for a Bad Cause
  • 24. Whoa, Nellie
  • 25. Come to Me, My Dear, Come
  • 26. I Guess There's Hooligans Every Damned Where
  • 27. Twenty Questions
  • 28. Allergic to Pain
  • 29. Einosuke's Anger
  • 30. Japan's Conundrum
  • 31. An Earlier Walker than His Uncle
  • 32. Extra Circumspect, From Now On
  • 33. Behold, Your Defeated Lord
  • 34. We Can't Have This
  • 35. Is It Easier to Go or Be Left Behind?
  • 36. Incense or Prosthetics
  • 37. Irony Provides Relief
  • 38. A Fetish without Many Followers
• Part Three: Shimoda
  • 39. Keiki and the Planting, Ueno and the River Trout
  • 40. The Wind and Intransigence
  • 41. Hide This in Your Wagon
  • 42. The Omen of the Crows
  • 43. I Have Not, Particularly, Saved Myself
  • 44. Life Is Short. Fall in Love
  • 45. Strength and Flexibility
  • 46. I Am Taking You Home
  • 47. Knowable People
  • 48. Not Selling Chestnuts
  • 49. Outraged Periods and Exclamation Points
  • 50. It's a Poor Life Anyway
  • 51. Alas, We Are Defeated
• Afterword

What People are Saying About This

Russell Banks

Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show is world-class historical fiction. It takes us to a place, mid-nineteenth-century Japan, that's long ago and far away, and makes it contemporary and intimately familiar. It's a wryly told tale, full of wonders and surprises, written with grace and authority. Richard Wiley is one of the few American novelists with the will and the ability to penetrate a culture not his own with the requisite alacrity and intelligent respect. If there is such a thing as global fiction, Richard Wiley is writing it.

Editorial Reviews

In 1854, when the U.S. Navy's Commodore Perry sailed into Edo (now Tokyo) with the grand goal of opening Japan to trade, he brought major change and minor entertainment—a black-face minstrel show that amazed and perplexed its audience. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Wiley, shifting perspectives with deft ease, follows two fictional white minstrels, Ace Bledsoe and Ned Clark, as they confront Japanese society, while he subversively engages the reader in a deeply allegorical reading of cultural exchange. Ace and Ned come under the wing of interpreter Manjiro Okubo, whose powerful family is locked in an old clan rivalry. The rivals' plot to kidnap musicians sets off a train of events romantic and tragic, with touches of Keystone Kops: with tantalizing authorial discretion, lovers enjoy one another, villains flash lethal swords, beauty balances bawdy, and rivalries and enmities explode. (Readers need not have read Wiley's PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Soldiers in Hiding, for which this novel is a way-back prequel.) This absorbing and immensely pleasurable book achieves momentum through Wiley's fluid style, the lightness with which he bears his learning, and the vitality and wit with which he brings a vanished world to life. (Mar.)

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