"Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks" (and two other stories) by Natsuko Imamura

 Strange stories from Japan which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion.

The first story concerns a girl who, growing up, discovers that no-one will ever take any food she offers them. Ever. This so upsets her that when she becomes a pair of chopsticks, the joy of delivering food straight into the mouth of her owner is transcendent. (In a nod to panpsychism, the flat is full of other girls and boys who have become blankets, doorknobs, rucksacks, reading lamps etc.)

The second story is about a girl who, no matter how hard she tries, cannot get hit. Water bombs thrown at her miss, frisbees are intercepted by dogs ... She starts self-harming and it is all downhill from then on.

In the third story the protagonist spends her youth lying in her bedroom until one night when, despite having lost the use of her legs, she goes into town. There's a sort of weird 'what if humans were domesticated pets' vibe going on here?

Fiction is all about the art of imagining things that aren't actually true. Although I personally prefer my fiction to stay within the realms of likelihood, fantastic stories have a long and honourable provenance, underlying myth and fairy tales and, in literature, classics from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Often, the point of travelling to the edges of imagination is to critique reality, as with Swift's Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine by H G Wells. Each of the stories in this collection could be analysed in that way (the first is about the need of people to feel useful, the second about the fact that suffering is a psychologically necessary part of the human condition?).

I was intrigued by the fact that these stories are told in a dead-pan style as if weirdness is a normal part of the everyday. I've just read Ronan Hession's Ghost Mountain and that has the same style: a stripped-down delivery without embellishment that leaves no room for doubt despite the unlikelihood of the events it recounts. This style, as encountered from the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.") seems to be able to blur the line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Where the protagonist themselves are transformed, the narration is always in the third person. The only first person narrative in which the narrator-protagonist are themselves transformed that I can recall offhand is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. So it is possible but are there any other examples?

I imagine that there are a number of stories nowadays written from the perspective of a ghost (eg Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost), a zombie, a werewolf, or a vampire but this is a genre I don't really know. I believe Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is narrated by the horse. Other examples? Perhaps I need to dedicate a page on my blog to these sort of stories.

November 2024; 178 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God