Clara Kumagai on growing up in Cork: 'There weren’t that many multi-racial kids'
Clara Kumagai has recently published her debut novel, Catfish Rolling. Picture: David Byrne
When Clara Kumagai was growing up in Ireland, she yearned to read books that reflected her own heritage as a child of a Japanese father and Irish mother.
“There weren’t many books or stories where I would see many non-white characters, certainly in Irish-published books or books set in Ireland,” she says.
“I can count on one hand the number of stories that had Asian characters and actually all those books came from Canada, and I would have read those so many times. They were really like a window into other kinds of experiences. I would think ‘yes, there are other people like me'.”
Now the 34-year-old writer is publishing her debut novel, Catfish Rolling, which is, in a way, the story she wished had been there for her younger self.
Kumagai was born in Vancouver, Canada, before moving to Ireland with her parents and siblings when she was five years old. She spent time in Westmeath and Cork, before moving to Galway, where her family still lives.
It’s a busy time for Kumagai, who as well as launching her debut novel, Catfish Rolling, is also preparing to move back to Ireland from Tokyo. Her roots in Japan and the time she has spent there have strongly influenced Catfish Rolling, an accomplished and thought-provoking young adult book that threads the country's myth and legend into the story of Sora, a young girl who is dealing with the loss of her mother and her home after an earthquake.
“I feel very strongly that picture books, and literature for teenagers and young people, are just so formative. Seeing yourself in stories can be very validating and educational in lots of different ways. Also, in your teenage years there are a lot of new experiences or new feelings or things you’re learning or understanding for the first time so it’s very rich for literary exploration or for character development,” she says.
Kumagai says she loved her primary school years in Minane Bridge in Cork, where she acquired a “very strong Cork accent”, hints of which can still be discerned. Her secondary school years were spent in Galway, and she then studied English and drama at Trinity College, Dublin, before returning to Canada to do an MFA in creative writing. She has spent the last five years in Tokyo, where she has been teaching at a university. Kumagai says Japanese people are kind, friendly, and generally fascinated by her Irish heritage.
“People are usually pretty interested in where I’m from and they have very good associations with Ireland. They like Irish music — trad is really popular here,” she says.
Kumagai is heartened by how much Ireland has changed since she grew up there in the mid-1990s.
“When we moved over to Ireland, it was an interesting time because that’s when more people were starting to immigrate to Ireland, but there weren’t that many multi-racial kids. We didn’t really have that many people who you could talk to about things, like eating a different kind of food at home or having parents who spoke a different language, it could feel a little lonely sometimes.
"My sister is five years younger than me and when she was going through secondary school, there were students in her year who were from the Philippines, Brazil, Poland, and I felt a little jealous. But it was also amazing, how that could change in a relatively short amount of time. The Ireland I see now is pretty different from what I grew up in and that’s a really amazing thing to see.”
Another big inspiration for Catfish Rolling was the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the country, which triggered a tsunami and resulted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
“It was an uncanny feeling because I was watching the news as it happened and we were trying to contact our family — my uncle was in Sendai which was pretty close. We thought he was going to die but luckily, he was safe.
It was obviously a huge event and something that a lot of the area is still recovering from. A lot of people were displaced and in the Fukushima region, a lot of people had to be evacuated. There are still areas where some people cannot return to.”
Kumagai was also fascinated by the profound temporal changes which occurred due to the disaster.
“The earthquake itself was so big, it actually shifted the earth on its axis, so the year became shorter by a tiny fraction. That was really hard for me to wrap my head around, that it could change the spin of the earth. And those two ideas came together — that idea of time changing and some areas that you couldn’t go to again.
"Some of the people who were displaced said that it was like they were living the same day again and again, they had lost all sense of time. Those were the big influences that got melded together in my mind for the book — and then using magic and folklore was an easier way to process that.”
For now, writing has taken a back seat as Kumagai prepares to move back to Dundalk, where her partner is from. She laughs when she tells me she has blurred her Zoom background so I can’t see the mess in her apartment. Once she gets her books and her cat back to Dundalk, she will be relieved. Then, it’s back to the desk and her next book.
“Part of it will be set in Japan. It is a retelling of Madama Butterfly, the opera but also that narrative. I continue to be inspired by old stories.”
- Catfish Rolling, by Clara Kumagai, published by Zephyr Books, is out now
I really enjoyed Babel by RF Kuang, she’s Chinese but she’s been in the States since she was young. It has been compared to The Secret History. It’s set in Oxford and is sort of magical historical fiction, but a lot of it is about language and translation and colonialism.
I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once a while ago. It was great, I enjoyed it so much. It was really nice to see an Asian cast in such a weird, fun and complicated story. The Irish movies that have been doing so well haven't come to Japan yet, so I have yet to see An Cailín Ciúin or the Banshees of Inisherin or anything yet, I'm looking forward to catching up on them.
I went to see [singer] Rina Sawayama last month and it was the first live concert I’ve been to in a long time, I guess since before the pandemic. I had forgotten how great live music is. It was a big gig here because she's Japanese and has lived in the UK since she was young. It was special for her to have a gig in Japan.
I’m watching The Last of Us at the moment. Those kinds of dystopia are pretty interesting to me — that kind of aesthetic, places that have been abandoned, destroyed or overgrown. I have similar landscapes in my book. It is scary but beautiful seeing nature taking over, I like that vibe. I didn’t play the game or anything but I’m enjoying it a lot.
