Natsuo Kirino's "The Floating Forest" from Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs is the first short story I've read all year. Although I'm not entirely sure what I think of it, I enjoyed dipping my feet back into this literary form and am looking forward to working my way through the rest of the stories in the collections I recently received.
Natsuo Kirino is a highly regarded author in Japan best known in the English-speaking world for her boundary-pushing crime novels (Out, Grotesque and Real World), which have been nominated for and have won various awards. Her crime novels go beyond the traditional as she scrutinizes society's ills and contemporary social issues weaving everything together into an often disturbing portrait of modern Japan. In comparison with my experience reading Out (this was in my early blogging days so I never wrote a proper post about it), "The Floating Forest" is quite tame.
Aiko Ito is the daughter of a famous writer who years later is still trying to come to terms with his rejection of her when she was just a schoolgirl. Shortly after her father's death she's asked to write her memoirs, as there is no one else who can write about the world of such an important and great writer. The request comes from a former journalist who had met Aiko when she was just a girl and is now a publisher. He calls her a woman "who has lived her life walking along a checkered destiny"--having been handed such a fate as hers. She turns him down but realizes she's just been given a new perspective on her life and begins ruminating on his words.
Then she tells us the story of the famous Keiichiro Kitamura and how when Aiko was fifteen he divorced her mother and essentially handed her off to another man, another lesser writer. Aiko was expelled from the Catholic school she had been attending (the story being set sometime in the years after the war), since her mother was branded a loose woman. Aiko only wanted to be able to live with her father but his poor finances don't allow it. Instead he marries not once but twice more. When her stepfather writes a story about Aiko's mother, Kitamura and himself it is so realistic it crushes Aiko with its truths. He promises never to write such realistic fiction again but also never finds the same success in the other stories he tells either.
Aiko's memories and the wish that she will write them down for posterity, something she cannot do, is just the impetus she needs to break with her own painful past and move on. "The Floating Forest", which refers to a floating island of peat with mixed warm and cold weather vegetation that moves with the wind and changes it's height depending on the amount of water is likened to both Kitamura and Aiko's stepfather, and she sees it in herself, too--these extreme emotions which fluctuate, coming and going. "The Floating Forest" is an introspective story of one woman's inner world and how it was formed by her relationships. I'm curious to see how or if these themes are expanded and explored in other stories in the collection.
"The Floating Forest" was translated by Jonathan Lawless.