Life behind palace walls is nothing like fairy tale

FOR nearly 15 years the world has watched the antifairy tale of Masako Owada, the cosmopolitan, Harvard-and-Oxford-educated, up-and-coming diplomat who had the singular misfortune to captivate Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan. Like a maiden in a storybook, she demurred three times and at last consented to abandon her career and become crown princess. Japan rejoiced: Here was a woman to lead them into the future, to send a bracing breeze through the airless corridors of the Imperial Household Agency, to frame Japanese traditions afresh.

The imperial handlers were not as keen as the nation to embrace a woman who could speak her mind in five languages, who forgot to stay a few paces behind her husband, who had the audacity to speak in the first person singular. After nearly a decade of marriage she bore a daughter, but she has failed to produce a male heir, her only true purpose. For three years she has rarely been seen in public and is reported to be suffering from profound depression.

But in Masako’s tale, history repeats itself. In 1959, then-Crown Prince Akihito, Naruhito’s father, electrified the nation by marrying Michiko Shoda, a university-educated beauty with refined manners and a stinging forehand. Daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was the first commoner to marry into a family that traces its noble ancestry back to the sun goddess Amaterasu, and within a couple of years she suffered a nervous collapse that rendered her mute for several months. This is the woman who became Masako’s mother-in-law.

John Burnham Schwartz is a keen observer of Japan -- his 1989 debut, “Bicycle Days,” nicely captured the travails of a foreigner desperate to blend in. He is also good at agony -- “Reservation Road,” his second novel, was an unblinking meditation on emotional pain in the aftermath of a child’s death.

“The Commoner” entwines the two strands of Schwartz’s expertise. Fascinated and appalled by the resonating stories of Michiko and Masako, he has written a novel that attempts to give these silenced women their voices back.

It’s a bold, even a presumptuous exercise -- these women are still alive, after all. But for anyone who’s ever sighed with regret over Masako’s fate, or gazed at the forbidding walls of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, it’s one that’s hard to resist.

Schwartz handles the physical details effortlessly, but his silken style lends itself best to the creation of internal life from whole cloth. You can sternly remind yourself every few pages that this is fiction, or you can relax and enjoy the fantasy that you are privy to two of the most private public lives in the world.

From the moment Schwartz’s crown prince notices Haruko Endo on a country club tennis court in the late 1950s, her life begins to morph into something frightening. For one thing, her family’s housekeeper, Taka, won’t look her in the eye anymore. “I’m still myself,” Haruko protests. “Excuse me, but I can’t agree with you there,” Taka replies.

Schwartz gives young Haruko a wise and affectionate father, whose speech to the prince’s go-between upon receiving his proposal neatly foreshadows the horrors to come.

“To lose a daughter to another household is comprehensible; to lose her to another world defeats the mind, to say nothing of the heart . . . ,” he says. “She will never be able to leave that world. She will be sealed in forever.” Not that any Japanese businessman of his era, however wise and affectionate, would have spoken so directly to an emissary from the palace. But this is fiction.

Haruko is indeed sealed away -- her parents will see her three children only in photographs. Though deeply respectful of the “intricate web of ancient history” in which she has become ensnared, she is unprepared for the endless rituals of her new life and the tireless cruelty of the handlers charged with training her.

“I was, at first, under the illusion that my mistakes would be viewed as temporary surface flaws, nicks and scratches easily healed,” she remembers. “I was gradually disabused of my naivete and made to understand that in a world constituted entirely of surface, all flaws run deep.”

Schwartz imagines a woman reared on the “slow-moving pageantry” of an earlier era, unprepared but not entirely ill-equipped for the life she is to lead.

Aside from her early bout of “nervous collapse,” she grows into her ceremonial role and manages to build a deep, if constrained, relationship with the imperial husband, who, unlike her, was “born to be exactly as he was.” In Schwartz’s hands, he shares improbable moments of Western-style empathy with his lonely wife. “We don’t get to have friends, Haruko,” he tells her. “We can’t expect anyone else to understand what it’s like.”

Haruko duly becomes empress and perfects her defenses: “The trick is to appear to kill desire while actually storing it away in a place so private that no greater authority will ever know of its existence. A kind of bunker, as in war.” And then her only son falls in love with Keiko Mori and declares he will die a bachelor if he cannot have her.

The imperial household’s grand steward is apoplectic -- what of the imperial succession? But the empress’ concerns are more personal, divided between her son’s anguish and her unique understanding of Keiko’s sacrifice.

Schwartz makes Haruko a critical agent in Keiko’s persuasion and lets Keiko assume that she has at least one ally. Keiko may not be the first commoner to face the exigencies of palace life, but she will be, thanks to Haruko’s encouragement, “the first to innocently believe . . . that she might somehow be protected from the implacable forces set against her.” Haruko watches her daughter-in-law slide into despair. “It is happening again,” she realizes. “And it is not right or natural, but a crime against nature.”

So now you’ve forgotten it’s a novel, but of course it is, so it needs an ending. Schwartz’s conclusion jars the narrative from sympathetic documentary back to fairy tale. But it’s more merciful, and certainly more entertaining, than the probable fate of the real Princess Masako: the slow, inexorable snuffing of another bright flame, systematically deprived of the oxygen of the outside world.

Janice P. Nimura is a New York-based critic whose work also has appeared in Newsday, the New York Times and the Washington Post.