No Fairy Tale for a Commoner

In a page right out of “Cinderella,” a prince meets a beautiful commoner, falls in love, and decides to carry her off to his palace. Only, instead of medieval France, it’s Japan in 1959.

Instead of a glass slipper, Haruko Endo has a tennis racket, with which she thoroughly trounces said prince on the court. And unfortunately, central casting forgot to send a fairy godmother, which is a shame, because Haruko really, really could have used one.

Based on the lives of the current empress and crown princess of Japan, The Commoner, the fourth novel by John Burnham Schwartz (“Reservation Road”) taps into the trend of blurring the lines between fact and fiction to pen a melancholy meditation from the viewpoint of the first commoner ever to marry into Japan’s royal family.

Haruko grew up the beloved only child of a wealthy sake manufacturer, whose money enabled his family to escape the fire that destroyed much of Tokyo during World War II and cushioned them from the lean years that followed Japan’s defeat.

Educated at the elite Sacred Heart school, Haruko grows into an intelligent, introspective teen who loves art history and athletics.

Then, at a doubles tournament, Haruko catches the eye of the prince. Over the next few months, Haruko regularly beats the prince at tennis, and the two share a handful of dates off the court – sitting in a storeroom while tea bags are unloaded; dancing at a ball.

When the prince sends an emissary to Haruko’s parents, her loving dad is horrified and begs the emissary to leave his family alone. Unfortunately, true love conquers all, and Haruko is soon hermetically sealed inside the ritualized, highly rarified world of the imperial palace, where she is subject to the whims of her mother-in-law, the empress, and her poisonous assistants.

“Every day, without fail, I entered a room too quickly, spoke too often or too loudly, waved my hands in a coarse fashion, scratched an itch, offered an opinion, bowed to an angle of less than 60 degrees before my parents-in-law, and so forth,” Haruko remembers of her first months as a princess. “I was, at first, under the illusion that my mistakes would be viewed as temporary surface flaws, nicks and scratches easily healed. But as the weeks passed ... I was gradually disabused of my naivete and made to understand that in a world constituted entirely of surface, all flaws run deep.”

After giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown, unable to speak for months. Some 30 years later, when her son falls in love with another commoner – this time a Harvard-

educated woman with a career in the foreign ministry, Haruko finds herself torn between her son’s hopes and the desire to help a young woman whose background reminds her so much of herself.

1 | 2

Next