Yoko Ogawa claims two influences that I have read: Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. Of the first, I recognize the meticulous selection of words, of the second a dreamlike quality which gives their stories a soft, penetrating sadness, like autumn rain. The shared DNA of these three authors does not reside in their lexical choices however, but in their relationship to the world. Their characters have all stepped aside. Either they are ghosts to the world or the world is a ghost to them.

This said, Ogawa’s voice cannot be confused with either Auster or Murakami. Idle, cruel, indifferent but also strangely sensitive, her characters are more anchored in reality. The stories are written in the first person, in the style of a diary. Even when their anchor ventures into strangeness and flirts with magic realism, it never falls into it. As opposed to a Paul Auster who likes to pick his characters at the point where they stop caring, all three of Ogawa’s protagonists care for other people. The Diving Pool narrator cares for the diver she stalks. They both live in the orphanage run by the narrator’s parents. The youngest orphans are sometimes left into her care. She hates them as strongly as she loves the diver. Convinced that she is controlling both, she is brutally brought back to reality when the diver reveals that he knows everything. In Pregnancy Diary the narrator cares for her sister, although not very well, indulging her against medical advice and, although appearing to adapt to the harshness of her sister’s pregnancy, she actually reveals a great deal of indifference, acting as if the pregnancy were a bad dream, as if everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. In Dormitory the unnamed narrator cares for her cousin, with whom she hopes to build a proper relationship, for she has been spending too much time on her own. She also ends up caring, in the medical sense, for the dormitory’s owner, a gentle monster of a man, missing two arms and one leg and slowly dying of crushed lungs. That care, however, is never fully committed. Ogawa’s characters never really love who they care for. They do it halfheartedly, like something they haven’t chosen, something that happened to be on their path and that they were too lazy to refuse or move aside. They barely feel any duty for it. At best they care so as to not feel guilty.

In their non-committal care the three characters give off a feeling of alienation. They are estranged from reality. This is what creates the impression of magic realism – impression, for the stories are real. They are part of our reality. They never deviate from it. The narrators’ alienation creates an atmosphere where everything feels possible, where the most horrible seems the most likely. But reality pursues its course, it is in every aspect the reality that we know, off which they seem to be drifting, into a world of their own. The end pulls them back to reality with some degree of violence. They actually remind me strongly of Georges Perec – the Perec of A Man Asleep.

Yoko Ogawa has also often expressed her absolute admiration for Anne Frank, for the way Frank was able to build a parallel world through her writing in which she could find shelter and solace. Does Ogawa find shelter in her writing? Does she find solace? I doubt it. Her written world is too cruel to offer either, by which I mean that it is too surgically cut out, too coldly detached, at once too vulnerable to horror. Whoever reads Ogawa will hear Anne Frank’s voice, so mature, so matter-of-facts, so brave in the imminence of the unspeakable. The young Dutch child’s Unspeakable is always right here, she can hear it prowl on the other side of the wall. The day the wall bursts open is the day Anne Frank’s writing world ends. Ogawa’s process is the reverse of that. With her writing she drifts, wanders, passes the thin veil between reality and the dark pools on subconsciousness. Suddenly reality pulls her in: this is where the tale and her writing stop. Although their circumstances are radically different, although no matter of comparison can be drawn between the two, there is in Frank and Ogawa the same urgency to write, the same need to carry on existing through writing, the same dread that reality, existence, is always a short call away from catching up and swallowing them. Without writing, one simply ceases to exist. It is not about documenting one’s life. One is very much aware of the insignificance of it. It is about going through the gestures of writing, of imposing words to the formless mass of one’s thoughts, about constantly fighting the entropic blob that is one’s mind. It is about the visceral belief that only words have the power to keep us afloat, that if we stop writing life will submerge and engulf us. This is in the heart of every writer. This dread, this urgency, this belief do not always have the immediate evidence they had for Anne Frank. They are nonetheless the real engines that power our writing.

Les deux premières étaient bien cools, la troisième parlait grossesse donc ça m'a bien donné la nausée.
Mais elle a une écriture très sensorielle, les histoires en soi ne sont pas extraordinaires, je suis sceptique sur sa gestion des chutes mais chaque image fonctionne, le style est vraiment génial.

I dont have much to say other than: this creepy book warmed my creeped out heart. My vocab apparently doesn't have many adjectives but I don't care enough to look up synonyms so that I can seem clever. It's nearly 4 am and I just wanted to declare my undying love for this gorg book and the author's inspiring brain full of ideas that just make me wanna set my notebooks on fire (not gonna do that; there's a fire alarm in my room).

Cheers.

Postscript: Love me some ambiguous endings such as this. Muah!

I don’t read a lot of Japanese literature. I need to amend that post haste. In engaging with Ogawa, a female author, I became more aware of my white American male gaze. These stories are a gentle whisper of storytelling on your heart and mind. And yet, there is an uncanny valley. In part it’s a deft author telling stories of the inbetween-ness of things. In part, it is my mind failing to grasp the magnitude of the uncomfortable, tense malevolence that is expressed. The physicality of being male can typically place these types of emotions in outward, aggressive displays. Here, those same monumental feelings are more internalized and, thusly, can be overlooked, or discounted — I confess it happened to me. And after a few days of thinking on this, I realized that perhaps I’ve missed a subtley of this and other recently read female authors (Renata Adler, Emily St. John Mandel and Octavia Butler). This is the power of literature. Remaining open, one can play with ideas and feelings not immediately accessible. It doesn’t have to be reading W.S. Burroughs (who wanted to use language —almost like magick— to overturn society’s power dynamics) to grow ourselves into better people. That’s why things like DeSantis and book bans and Trump/Project 2025 are so dangerous, they want to curtail the access to the full potentiality of experience. They do not want individuals to be open and thoughtful and egalitarian. They want them in intellectually isolated tribes with moral convictions so profoundly rigid they lose their humanity. To clarify, Ogawa’s “whispers” have nothing to do with today’s shift to populism, oligarchs and strong men. Apologies if that feels like a digression. In short, the way the events unfold in these 3 short tales are *so* different than how my mind works, I almost didn’t see it, or understand just how incredible what was being placed on the page was. I realized it’s my own limits (and my hunch is that those limits are white, American and male), not the author’s talent. But that’s ok. Because one just needs to be open and looking for it. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.