Tag: gothic fiction

At the Edge of the Woods

Kathryn1 Comment

In the woods, there is a castle. The castle was once the residence of the landowning family that ruled the area. During the war, it was the headquarters of a resistance movement. Now it sits empty and abandoned. The castle is so deep in the woods that most people couldn’t find it if they tried. No one tries, however, as the woods are filled with child-snatching imps. Strange noises come from the woods, and occasionally strange people as well.

Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods is a novel about dread and anxiety. There’s no plot, nor is there any sort of story. Instead, Ono presents four episodes in the life of a father left alone with his young son while his wife is away. There’s no chronological order to the four chapters, which all occur at roughly the same time, and there’s no meaningful change in the personalities of the characters. Rather, the story development involves the slow intensification of an atmosphere of foreboding.

The nameless father who serves as the narrator is Japanese, as is his wife, who is pregnant with their second child. The wife has flown back to Japan to visit her parents, leaving her husband and son in an unspecified European country that reads as Germany-coded. The family has taken up residence at the eponymous edge of a vast forest in a rural area dotted with small towns.

The country is now at peace, but its neighbors are not so lucky. Long lines of refugees stream across the borders, seemingly unhindered by local authorities. It’s entirely possible that some of these refugees have camped out in the woods next to the narrator’s house, but it’s difficult to say for sure. It’s equally difficult to specify the origin of the odd sounds constantly emerging in the forest.

Characters drift in and out of the narrative, leaving behind very little of themselves save for strong emotional impressions. The disabled daughter of a bakery owner has good intentions but struggles to make herself understood. The postal worker who delivers the mail relates grotesque stories to the father, who suspects the man might be reading and discarding his wife’s letters. A neighboring farmer has always been kind to the narrator’s family, but his son reports that he once saw the man tie a dog in a burlap sack and beat the poor creature to death.

Perhaps the most striking of these characters is an elderly woman that the narrator’s son invites into the house. She appears seemingly from nowhere, and she vanishes just as mysteriously. While she’s in the house, though, she becomes a living symbol of the narrator’s anxieties regarding his ill-fitting role as the solitary caretaker of a young child in a foreign land:

Overcome, the old woman buried her face in her hands. She trembled violently, and a sob escaped her. I looked up. The kitchen windows were all closed. And yet in the air there hovered the sour smell of decayed leaves from deep in the woods, leaves that would never dry out. Steam rose from the old woman. The steam was not from her tea. A puddle spread at her feet. (20)

In his “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick neatly summarizes the genre as an expression of the fear that the horrors of prior eras will not remain comfortably in the past. At the Edge of the Woods presents the readers with a range of Gothic tropes to heighten the sense of uneasy suspicion that, even in the most progressive of European countries, there is no escape from misery and cruelty. While the back-cover copy of At the Edge of the Woods calls the novel “an allegory for climate catastrophe,” this feels like a bit of an interpretive reach. Instead, Ono seems to be suggesting more broadly that, even in our bright society sustained by futuristic technologies, we’re never that far away from the edge of a large and unknowable forest.

At the Edge of the Woods can be difficult to read, and it’s probably not for everyone. Speaking personally, though, I love this book, and I’ve read it on the winter solstice every year since it was published in 2022. Ono’s writing is gorgeously atmospheric, and the legendary Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a dazzling job with the translation. If you appreciate the sort of quiet, eerie, and darkly suggestive Japanese Gothic writing typified by Yoko Ogawa’s short story collections Revenge and The Diving Pool, I’d recommend At the Edge of the Woods as the next step on a shadowed path into the liminal spaces in the penumbra of modern civilization.

Retrograde

Kathryn3 Comments

Retrograde collects five short stories and one novella written by a young Osamu Dazai and gorgeously translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada.

The novella, Das Gemeine, follows a 25yo student studying French literature who aspires to become a writer himself. While hovering around an amazake stand in Ueno Park and hoping to catch the attention of the young woman who works there, the narrator meets another student, a violinist who barely attends class at all. The violinist’s friend, himself a painter, warns the narrator not to believe any of the violinist’s tall tales about his supposed talent.

The three young men decide to start a literary journal together (along with their pathetically unattractive acquaintance Osamu Dazai), but petty personality conflicts crash the project before it can get off the ground. Feeling hopelessly at a loss in letters and in love, the narrator meets a sad fate that may not have been entirely an accident.

One of the many myths surrounding Osamu Dazai (the author, not the character) is that he considered himself to be a failure rejected by the mainstream literary establishment. For better or worse, I can relate. I know from personal experience that, as an outsider, you often find yourself placing your work in the hands of upstart editors organizing projects that may, in all likelihood, never see the light of day. More often than not, things fall apart precisely because the creative team had big dreams but no practical skills to realize their ambitions. 

I myself am something of a coward who immediately walks away from that sort of unpleasantness, but my familiarity with creative collaboration mishaps makes me respect the truth of the story Dazai tells in Das Gemeine, which is remarkably well-observed. The characters in this novella are deeply frustrating and more than a little cringe, but they’re 100% real – this is exactly what it’s like to work with creatives in their twenties who build castles in the air but haven’t yet developed the artistic discipline to commit their visions to paper. Bless their hearts.

The five shorter stories in the collection read like something that the narrator of Das Gemeine might actually have written. A 25yo man dies tragically and is mourned by his beautiful wife. A college student sits for the final exam of a French literature class he never attended. A high school student obnoxiously flirts with café waitresses but swiftly loses a fight with a grown man who’s not interested in his sophomoric bullshit. A teenage boy experiences a sexual awakening when the circus comes to town. Each of these stories is only a few pages long, and their unguarded sincerity contributes to their charm.

The closing story, “Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle,” is about two sisters in love with an idealized version of a man who only exists on paper until the strength of their shared storytelling summons his ghost to appear under their window… perhaps. I appreciate this story’s clever touch of Todorovian fantasy, and I’m always here for unapologetic gothic pathos. This aesthetically luxurious story is classic Dazai, in that it’s exactly the sort of work that’s contributed to his popularity among generations of students. I myself am not immune, of course, and this is by far my favorite piece in the collection.

In their “Translator’s Afterword,” Takada describes Dazai’s writing style as “a casual conversation with someone familiar,” and they explain that they want their translation to feel as if they’re “doing this just for you,” the reader. Takada gets the tone exactly right, rendering Dazai’s straightforward prose into an invitation to sympathize with the writer and his characters even despite their naked sincerity. I’ve never responded to overly “literary” renditions of Dazai’s prose, but I found myself flying through this translation. It’s fantastic.

I also want to highlight the care and attention that One Peace Books has put into the layout and typeset of this book, giving the words on the page exactly the room they need to breathe. Retrograde is a lovely object to hold in your hands, so much so that it might even spark the same youthful enthusiasm for literature that Dazai so aptly captures in his early fiction.

Much love to Leo Elizabeth Takada and One Peace Books for breathing fresh life into these classic stories from the 1930s. Retrograde is an admirable achievement, and I hope it brings the work of a fascinating author to new readers.