I proofread cereal boxes. I can’t help it. I also review books, so I rarely pick one up for pleasure. When I do, and it works as well as M. Thomas Gammarino’s Big in Japan, writing about it is natural – particularly when I discover that Cleveland Heights–native Bruce Rutledge, who founded Chin Music Press in Seattle in 2002, published it. Stumbling across it at Mac’s Backs on Coventry Road should have been a clue.
The $15 paperback has a rough texture, beautiful art by 19th-century master Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and its subtitle, “a ghost story,” is embossed. Work and thought went into the presentation. The type is easy to read, there’s a smattering of art, and it’s a nice book to handle.
The bonus is the story, an anti-Nick Hornby saga of a prog-rock band that aims to strike global gold by touring in Japan (shades of Cheap Trick, anyone?) The hero is Brain Tedesco, an obsessive who’s way too hormonal and way inexperienced. He drops out of the band (its name is Agenbite, a tribute to James Joyce) after it reaches Japan. The band goes global while Tedesco goes in-country. In addition to being scatological, bawdy, disgusting and vivid, the book offers a cool, fascinating look into a culture that comes to absorb Tedesco. Big in Japan is some of the best fiction about rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve read in years. Rutledge's own story is inspired, too.
Born in 1963 in Cleveland Heights, he grew up in the heyday of Coventry, hanging out at Record Revolution, Irv’s Deli and Mac’s Backs. A 1981 Heights High alumnus, he earned a degree in English from Kenyon College in Gambier, graduating in 1985. Then his life turned.
“My buddy and I were talking about going to Alaska and working on a fishing boat or getting this teaching program in Japan,” he recalls. “The program came through, I expected to spend one year and then come back and get a real job, but I ended up staying for 15 years. It totally changed my life.”
Of WASP extraction, he’d spent his whole sheltered life in Ohio. His stay in Japan “opened my mind to different ways of thinking and communicating, to a culture that’s rich in tradition,” and he learned “to figure out what I liked and didn’t like about my country.”
Rutledge married Yuko Enomoto in 1992, and after her parents died, they moved to Seattle. “I had long thought about setting up a small press to do books about Japan and other topics,” says Rutledge, who also works as a translator. “It needed to happen where the cost of living was a little bit easier to get by on a small press salary. Seattle isn’t cheap, but it’s much more affordable than Tokyo.
“I just thought it would work out best for us in a midsized city on the West Coast that’s kind of bustling. I don’t know if our marriage would have survived too many Midwest winters. The other thing is Seattle appealed to me in terms of running a small press. It rains a lot, there are lots of cafes, lots of bookstores. Generally speaking, this is a pretty bookish town, which worked out pretty well for us.”
Rutledge’s parents have moved to Seattle. Rutledge hasn’t been back to Cleveland Heights in more than five years. He staged Chin Music’s first reading at Mac’s Backs, in 2004. “Because I’d always gone down there as a kid, I called (owner) Suzanne (DeGaetano) when our first book came out, and she was really supportive, I came back and did a reading there," he says. "Our first book was an anthology of art and essays about what it’s like to live in Japan. Basically, I just wanted to do a reading there because I used to go there and buy used books.
"My first copies of Updike, of Graham Greene, I pretty much picked up at Mac’s Backs used.”
In the introduction to Kohaku, the inaugural Chin Music book he showcased at Mac’s Backs, Rutledge explains that chin music is “quintessentially American,” noting flappers used it as a synonym for gossip, and baseball announcers occasionally drop the phrase “when a pitcher like Kerry Wood throws one of those high-and-tight fastballs that is meant to tell the batter: ‘Next time, it’s your noggin.’ ”
What are the joys of owning a small press? “The pleasure is really, especially now when I feel so little edgy fiction is being published, and I get a manuscript like Gammarino’s Big in Japan and I think, 'Wow, this is an edgy novel,' and he tells me he can’t get anybody to bite – to me, that’s the exact reason I wanted to look at it,” says Rutledge. “When I get a manuscript like that, that is such a thrill. When you think about midwifing it, that’s fantastic.
"I worked as a freelance writer in Japan for a while, so I’ve always been interested in stories. Weeding through manuscripts and finding ones that really shine, that’s the ultimate pleasure for me.”
