Back from my travels (more of which next week) with a set of short stories originally published in 2015. The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is the first book by Japanese-Argentine author, Alejandra Kamiya, to be published in English. It comprises twelve brief pieces, several just a few pages in length but they’re not to be gobbled up. As ever, I’ll pick out my favourites.
That blue shimmer, the tiger stripes on black that is wet, always wet, like a recollection that never dries, a memory of the sea.
In the delicately evocative, unsettling opening story, Perfect Breakfast, a woman prepares a meal for her sleeping son and husband, each ingredient carefully chosen and meticulously prepared with love. The Remains of the Secret sees two girls, the closest of friends who play richly imaginative games, split apart by their fathers’ rivalry leaving one heartbroken. Wondering how much time she might have left with him, a daughter decides to ask her Japanese father about his life before he came to Argentina to escape the war in Rice. Coming upon chairs arranged as if part of an intimate conversation on the family porch, a woman misses her father in the poignant Three Chairs. Fragments of a Conversation sees a housemaid and her employer exchange confidences, their relationship increasingly intimate but never equal until the housemaid makes a choice. In The Boots, a woman confides a guilty secret only to be told a much bigger one in return.
The sofa was the place of what could not be said. I would hit the cushions every day to plump them up, as if nobody had ever sat there.
Kamiya’s eloquent stories explore themes of loss, family, heritage and motherhood in understated yet often poetic prose. Characters experience sometimes devastating epiphanies, pulling the reader up short. Several stories explore Kamiya’s own heritage, tinged with a quiet regret for not asking about her father’s life in his native Japan. Parting couples the theme with motherhood, as a woman waits for the imminent birth of the son she names Kenta, to whom the collection is dedicated. The longest piece, The Pit, which sees a lone Japanese soldier continuing to execute a specific order, not knowing the war has ended, was only the story that didn’t quite work for me. A small criticism of what is otherwise a superb collection, beautifully translated by Daniel Hahn. I’m hoping Pushkin Press will consider publishing more of Kamiya’s backlist in English.
Pushkin Press: London 9781805334910 160 pages Paperback (NetGalley)
Discover more from A Life in Books
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.