The Challenges of Discussing Kureishi in a Japanese University Seminar

The opening chapters of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia pose some special challenges for a new seminar group just getting to know one another at the start of the academic year. Although the novel’s young protagonist, Karim, is relatively close to Japanese university students in age, he inhabits a world which seems very different to theirs. Describing himself as a “new breed” of Englishman (p.3), he is what in Japan would be known as a “half”: his father is a well-educated middle-class Indian Muslim from Bombay; his mother a working-class white Englishwoman. Living in suburban South London through the 60s and 70s, Karim has grown up with a casual and widespread racism that he has not yet learnt how to confront: “If people spat at me I practically thanked them for not making me chew the moss between the paving stones” (p.53). His favorite uncle, a quiet hen-pecked husband who is always kind to Karim himself, is nevertheless a secret hooligan who spends his Saturday afternoons smashing up public property and hurling racist abuse at the “niggers” in Brixton (p.43). Perhaps it is not surprising that the novel begins with the seventeen year-old Karim experiencing something close to a crisis of identity. In a haze of marijuana smoke at the house of a family friend, Karim witnesses his father having an adulterous affair with their hostess; afterwards, he goes upstairs for some adolescent sexual experimentation with her son, a popular older boy from his school who plays in a band and epitomizes everything that Karim wishes to be.

This is not easy material for Japanese university students to digest. The novel asks them to think about these events from the narrator Karim’s perspective. Karim is untroubled by the idea of some light recreational drug use, which is normal behavior in the music-loving youth culture to which he belongs. Nor does he think of his own sexual activity in terms of “heterosexuality” or “homosexuality”: these are labels applied by other people and they simply do not interest him. What is most upsetting to Karim in this first chapter of the novel is the growing realization that his father and mother are fallible individuals who may no longer be happy together and who, like him, need to experiment and make changes in their lives if they are to be happy again.