Reflections

Reflection: The Guest Cat

Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat (New Directions, 2014) leapt to the top of my to-read list for the most practical reason: its slim and tiny self made it ideal for slipping into the single backpack I brought to Europe. With a little luck, beauty will reveal itself within the most practical decisions, within the most commonplace, as is so powerfully depicted in The Guest Cat. Hiraide is a poet by trade, so when Chibi the cat (“Little One” in Japanese) falls asleep on a sofa, she looks “like a talisman curled gently in the shape of a comma and dug up from a prehistoric archaeological site”; when Chibi runs away to avoid being touched, her “manner of rejection was like cold, white light”; and when Chibi repeatedly bumps against a window in the middle of the night, she looks “small and white, with eyes wide open, like a bird striking a lighthouse.” This poetry like prose, which is often prose at its best, goes on without pause.
 
In The Guest Cat, a married couple live and work in a small cottage in Tokyo, quietly alternating between writing, tending the garden, and observing Chibi. Chibi is a stray cat that is quickly adopted by a neighboring family, though she makes regular visits to the couple, much to their delight. Change happens here and there——an emperor dies, friends fall ill, a job is left, a house is sold——but the overall day-to-day plays a steady beat that somehow feels far more significant than any such changes. The book embraces an ease that stems from waking up to nothing short of your everyday, and it embraces a beauty that stems from an entirely present natural world. Just three pages into the book, I began to underline every mention of the garden’s various inhabitants.
 
There is the zelkova tree, as well as pine, persimmon and plum; there is mistletoe, saffron, Daphne odora and reeves spirea; there is the Japanese bush warbler, Blue Admiral, cicada and skimmer dragonfly; and of course there is Chibi, Cal and Mrs. Muddy, the wayward cats. Nature is not merely a collection of props on a stage overwhelmed by a human cast. Rather, nature stars right alongside us and together we share deeply felt moments. It is noted that “the garden was like a forest to Chibi,” and indeed the garden takes on the grandeur of a forest even to the reader. The couple continuously monitors its changing colors, sizes, textures and sounds, reminding us that the world feels far less lonely when we consider all that is actually alive around us.

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The Guest Cat
By Takashi Hiraide
Published 2014 by New Directions

Reflection: All Stories Are Love Stories


There is a special place in my book-filled heart for Elizabeth Percer, and I’ve been waiting for her latest, All Stories Are Love Stories (Harper, 2016), for well over a year. I reached out to Elizabeth after reading her first novel, An Uncommon Education (allow me the pleasure of introduction), and among the emails we exchanged during that time, she shared that she was working on a book centered around a major earthquake and fire hitting modern-day San Francisco.
 
All Stories Are Love Stories reads like a preemptive eulogy of San Francisco, a glorious city at the mercy of the merciless San Andreas Fault. We perceive roads, sidewalks and buildings, even people around us, to be such permanent things, carefully placed fixtures of the here and now. When those fixtures are also legendary, like the Golden Gate Bridge, Castro Theatre or Painted Ladies, they give off an eternal quality, as if lifted from the pages of a fairytale. That all of it perches atop the softest ground, under which pressure builds unabated, almost feels like a betrayal. Modern-day San Francisco may worship at the alter of technology, but ultimately answers to the unquestionable authority of nature. It is only a matter of time, and in All Stories Are Love Stories, that time is the evening of Valentine’s Day. The book spans just 24 hours, but as experienced in crises, time breaks open and behaves erratically, so that while on one page, a minute feels like an hour, on another, a millisecond changes ever little thing.
 
Rather than a sweeping story of a city in crises, the story zeros in on the lives of Max, Vashti and Gene. We meet all of them hours before their lives are upended, so that once the earthquake hits and the larger story of disaster unfolds, it is interrupted only by stories from these characters’ pasts. This is not about people in the midst of happily ever after when disaster strikes. This is about people in the midst of pain, confusion and heartache when disaster strikes, making it feel all the more ill-timed. You will enjoy these characters, especially Franklin (Gene’s partner), who says things like this:
 
“Our city is dying. The soul’s sucked out of her. And I don’t care if speaking the truth makes me unpopular.
It’s a hell of a lot better than that crap you were dishing up. I mean, a twenty-first century Gold Rush? Millennial prospectors? You kids are nothing but starry-eyed naïfs with overworked vocabularies” (107).
 
Perhaps rather than a eulogy, I should describe the book as an homage to San Francisco: Ina Coolbrith Park, Nob Hill Masonic Center, Grace Cathedral, Brunswick Hotel, Transamerica Pyramid and Huntington Park, among others, all make an appearance. I remember the five minute drive from my apartment in Berkeley to Aquatic Park, from where you can see both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, entry points to a floating city shrouded in fog. It is enlivening to be connected to something so grand, and though this book reminds me of that feeling, it also reminds me of all there is to lose. Whether it is a life, a relationship, a passion or a city, All Stories Are Love Stories explores the permanency of things, and offers shining examples of what may outlast even disaster.

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All Stores Are Love Stories
By Elizabeth Percer
Published 2016 by Harper

Reflection: Girl Through Glass

The trouble I have with coming-of-age stories is that I prefer to linger in the past and shy away from the present. To stay within the past is to observe a life before its turning point, before the possibilities that initially appear infinite abruptly narrow to one. In Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson (Harper, 2016), chapters alternate between past and present, so each time I arrived at a present chapter, I hastily skipped ahead to remain in the past: in the 1970s, in Mira’s youth, in the esoteric world of New York City ballet. But the present continuously resurfaced to rudely interrupt the past. Sensing such inevitability, I soon only allowed myself a peek before dutifully flipping back to the present.
 
Mira Able is a quiet 11-year-old whose devotion to ballet demands the utmost obsession. The book brims with knowledge of ballet, citing famous figures, prestigious schools, Edgar Degas, and the physical toll: “Her bones will knit together in new ways. Her hands will grow strong, her fingers blunt, and her feet rough and calloused as tree bark.” As Mira ascends through the ranks, she forms a relationship with Maurice DuPont, a strange, wealthy balletomane who renames her Mirabelle, and then Bella. He becomes her mentor, saying such fanciful things as, “If the dark is coming, make it your friend” and “She is not beautiful but she moves towards beauty.” Halfway through the book, it is obvious that Mira’s relationship with this older man will determine how the story unfolds, a rather uncomfortable setup. Why does the man hold so much sway? Presently, Mira is a professor of dance who goes by Kate Randell, and the author perfectly paces the stories of both past and present until they converge, revealing the much dreaded turning point.
 
Obsession is tireless and exhilarating, and ballet puts obsession on full display. How bizarre that ballet is some kind of girlhood rite-of-passage, when what it demands and celebrates is so specific and often unattainable, “some old dead guy’s idea of beauty.” But of course it is more than that. The strive for perfection, for mastery, is nothing short of inspiring. The author does an exquisite job of merging ballet’s many faces into one, a portrait of great beauty and greater sacrifice. Or is it the other way around?

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Girl Through Glass
By Sari Wilson
Published 2016 by Harper