uncanny fiction – Contemporary Japanese Literature

Yoko Ogawa’s 2024 short story collection Mimi ni sumu mono (耳に棲むもの) is about quiet endings and the unremarked deaths of small things. The tone of these five stories ranges from gentle and elegiac to genuinely shocking.

I’d like to begin with the latter, as Kyō wa kotori no hi (今日は小鳥の日) is one of the most subtle yet surprising horror stories I’ve read in some time. The nameless narrator of this story addresses the reader directly as she welcomes us to the annual gathering of the Small Bird Brooch Society. Small bird brooches can be made in a variety of ways, she explains, but she crafts hers using the real beaks and talons of dead birds. There’s something truly sublime about watching their tiny bodies decay, she muses.

The narrator then explains how her predecessor, the first president of the Society, met his untimely end. His death involves the still-living bodies of small birds, but I dearly wish it did not. After recounting one of the more gruesome scenes I’ve encountered in literary fiction, the narrator cheerfully invites the reader to sit down and enjoy the banquet. She then points out a few notable members of the Society, each of whom has their own method of constructing small bird brooches. Perhaps you, dear reader, will feel right at home in their company.

The collection’s final story, Senkōsho to rappa (選鉱場とラッパ), is about a young boy who lives with his mother in the company housing of a rural ore processing plant. His mother works both the day shift and the night shift at the plant’s cafeteria, leaving him to his own devices. During the summer festival at a local shrine, the boy becomes enamored with a toy bugle offered as a prize at a carnival game. Without any money to play, he’s reduced to lurking at the corner of the tent and praying that, if he can’t win the bugle, then no one else does either.

The next day, the boy takes out his frustration on a stray dog begging for scraps near the back entrance of the cafeteria where his mother works. He kicks the poor animal so hard that he ruptures its stomach, and it dies. Later he returns to the festival, where he witnesses the sudden death of the old woman running the carnival game. He steals the bugle in the confusion and returns home only to realize that the toy is nothing more than cheap plastic that has been spraypainted gold. In his shame, the boy buries the bugle in a closet, just as he buried the dog he killed between the roots of an old tree.

Still, as he sits on the apartment balcony while waiting for his mother to come home, the boy fashions constellations from the lights of the processing plant and imagines the songs he would play in their honor if his bugle were real.

Mimi ni sumu mono reminds me of Ogawa’s first work to appear in English translation, The Diving Pool (2008). Although it’s difficult to classify these stories as “horror,” they’re all subtly but effectively unsettling. When we’re exposed to the small cruelties that hide in the hearts of normal people, we begin to see reflections of their inner darkness in the details of the world that surrounds them. Ogawa’s characters are people who have lost their sense of belonging. The world has moved on without them, leaving a quiet air of desperation and neglect in its wake.

Mimi ni sumu mono is twenty-first century gothic fiction at its finest, but it’s not all bleak. Like the boy in Senkōsho to rappa and the president of the Small Bird Brooch Society, Ogawa remains fascinated by the beauty that gleams through the horrors. At 132 pages, Mimi ni sumu mono is relatively slim, but I believe this collection’s brevity is to its credit. The book is like an art gallery that encourages the reader to take their time with each piece, lingering as long as they like without any pressure to rush forward.

Mimi ni sumu mono was written in collaboration with Koji Yamamura, an Academy Award nominated animator. Yamamura created the companion piece My Inner Ear Quartet, which is described as “a literary VR animated film with an interactive storyline” on its page on Steam (here). This interactive animation was showcased at a number of international animation festivals and won several awards in Japan and abroad. As Yamamura’s animation requires a VR headset to view, I can’t offer any comments, but its trailer on YouTube (here) and the expanded excerpt (here) suggest that Yamamura was successful in capturing the eerie tone and uncanny beauty of Ogawa’s stories.

Yōko Ogawa’s 2022 collection 掌に眠る舞台 contains eight stories connected by the broad theme of “stages.” Some stories are about the world of performing arts, while others take an abstract approach. Ogawa isn’t concerned with glamour, but rather the strangeness of the stage after the spotlights go out.

One of my favorite stories is ユニコーンを握らせる, which is about an actress whose sole performance was cancelled. She lives alone in her old age, comforting herself by repeating lines from a play that never made it past rehearsals. As always, Ogawa’s gentle portrayal of loneliness is exquisitely observed. With each tiny detail of the woman’s apartment, Ogawa paints a portrait of someone who can’t escape her fantasies of a past that never existed.

I also enjoyed いけにえを運ぶ犬, in which a young boy repeatedly stages a performance of enjoying a specific book at a traveling bookseller’s cart for the sole benefit of the bookseller’s dog, who watches the children to prevent theft. This is a story about poverty and negligence and the fear of being forgotten, but Ogawa nevertheless captures the magic of what it’s like to fantasize about books as a kid.

For me, the standout story was ダブルフォルトの予言, which is about a woman who lives in an empty storage room on an upper floor of the Imperial Theater in Tokyo. This woman’s job is to absorb all the bad luck of the performers on stage, sort of like an inverse Phantom of the Opera. Instead of an extravagant man who lives in the sewers and aggressively causes trouble, she’s a plain and boring woman who lives the attic and passively prevents accidents. At least, that’s what she says of herself, but what’s she really doing in the theater attic? And why is the narrator visiting her so often?

Something I’ve always loved about Ogawa’s writing is the lucid clarity of her language, but the style of 掌に眠る舞台 is much richer and denser than that of the author’s earlier work. Instead of being like icebergs, these stories are more like mazes. You have to take your time getting to the center, which is fine by me. It’s always a pleasure to spend time wandering through Ogawa’s signature uncanny spaces.