What's wrong with this picture?: An independent, cosmopolitan young woman, educated at Harvard and Oxford, proficient in six languages, who is on the fast track to becoming a diplomat in spite of a male-dominated society, gives up her career, her freedom and even her identity to marry the crown prince of Japan and enter the sequestered halls of a 2,600-year-old monarchy.
Happy princesses are for fairy tales. In today's reality, a royal wedding seems to mean anything but a happy ending -- maybe just an ending, period. Case in point: The ever-popular Diana makes the perfect poster-princess for "happily never after."
In the latest royal expose, "Princess Masako," Ben Hills chronicles another princess' public misery.
Often referred to as the "Japanese Princess Di" --more so now for the unfortunate parallels in their lives -- Japan's Princess Masako is indeed a trapped soul. Certainly royal watchers somewhere will care and want to know more, but this is not the book to read.
Although his biography praises him as "one of Australia's leading investigative journalists and foreign correspondents," as well as a Walkley Award winner (described as "Australia's Pulitzer" in the same bio), Hills is utterly disappointing in both his research and writing.
To avoid Hills' cringe-inducing insertions of his jarring opinions, might I offer the basic story? As the firstborn daughter of an ambitious, peripatetic civil servant, Masako Owada spends her formative years overseas. She graduates magna cum lShe returns to Tokyo and begins a promising diplomatic career in Japan's Foreign Ministry. She's invited to a royal reception, where Crown Prince Naruhito reportedly falls in love with her at first sight. She's not ready for royal romance and escapes to study international relations at Oxford. Before she finishes her graduate thesis, Masako shocks family and friends by agreeing to marry Naruhito, who has not-so-patiently waited for her for five years. The powerful Kunaicho --the Imperial Household Agency, which controls all things royal in Japan -- disapproves of the match. Masako is a commoner, in spite of her family's long samurai history. She is not a traditional Japanese woman -- she's ambitious and accomplished, she's seen the world and been an active participant. But Naruhito will not relent. In 1993, he marries Masako with promises that he will guard her from the suffocating traditions and expectations that keep the royal family as virtual prisoners in their own palace. He hopes that she can help forge a more modern, open role for Japan's long-hidden royalty. But Naruhito's promises fail Masako. She virtually disappears, kept cloistered until she provides a male heir. After the birth of the royal couple's daughter, Aiko -- conceived through in-vitro fertilization, a shocking royal revelation -- Masako succumbs to a deep depression. The Kunaicho spin calls it "adjustment disorder," but insiders know that Masako is anything but well, with little hope of recovery: Why get better only to stay trapped in a gilded cage? -- or to quote Hills, "a luxurious safari park, in which the royal couple is the pampered last breeding pair of an endangered species." Undoubtedly, Masako's story is compelling. Wading through Hills' verbiage is not. Unable to gain access to Masako or her family -- and certainly not the royals -- Hills spent 15 months traipsing the world, interviewing more than 60 Japanese, American, British and Australian sources. Even so, instead of any truly relevant insights, we find out which interviewee was "good-looking" and "not the sort of bubblehead you find on US television," which of Masako's advisers toured Africa with Angelina Jolie and Bono, and which Harvard professors "have BlackBerries dangling from their belts and mete out their time like Manhattan lawyers." Hills seems to enjoy inserting his unwanted opinions. He insists that a Harvard degree did not make Masako "some sort of reincarnation of Albert Einstein" and that "the majority of Harvard students graduate with some sort of honours," referring to " a simple cum laude" as a "humiliation." All this to explain that with a Harvard degree, Masako "would be unfairly burdened down by the weight of great expectations." Perhaps in translation, "Princess Masako" will find an audience among Japan's most devoted royal watchers. But at least in English -- Australian English, even -- the teeth gritting necessary to get through the 300-plus pages of wearing prose is hardly worth the challenge.