What’s Samantha Jade Macpherson Reading?
Over the past year, I’ve been working my way through Yoko Ogawa. I started with Hotel Iris, an uneasy read about an unsettling relationship, then moved onto The Memory Police, about an island where inhabitants slowly lose their memories under a fascist police government, and have just finished her collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. I’ve also read her New Yorker stories; “The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain,” is a particular favourite. I have The Housekeeper and the Professor on hold at the library.
I’ve always wanted to be the type of person who reads an author’s whole body of work. I find this idea both glamourous and academically rigorous, though I rarely pull it off. I like the possibility of seeing progression or movement; maybe I’d gain or apprehend something that reading a single work would not produce. This, for Ogawa, is not possible, at least not yet, as not all her books have been translated into English. So instead of a linear progression or staircase, reading her work is more like navigating a constellation of stars with half the sky below the horizon. I make shapes out of what I can see.
Ogawa’s writing is irresistible. I find her characters to be quite cold, which I like. A cool exterior endears a character to me, especially if they’re psychologically tortured, or desperate, as Ogawa’s characters tend to be. At the same time, much of the work is whimsical, almost magical. I’m thinking now of a dark room full of ripe kiwis, a river of rose petals, the ruined remains of a factory that still smells like chocolate, all images from novels and stories that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantastical children’s story.
It’s a strange combination, whimsy and ice, and it creates an uncanny effect, one that is disconcerting. There’s the sense that the world of these fictions, and these characters is unknowable. I will be taken to a place that I don’t expect to be taken. I enjoy the surprise of a familiar image made strange tomatoes covering the street and carrots like hands—but I don’t expect to understand exactly what it means. Much is unexplainable.
Finally, and perhaps of least interest, I’ve discovered strange parallels between Ogawa’s fictional interests and my own. When I looked at the table of contents in Revenge, I was surprised by how many of the stories seemed to mirror objects and ideas that come up in my own work, the project I’m writing now: “Afternoon at the Bakery,” “Fruit Juice,” “Lab Coats,” “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,” “Poison Plants.” All these titles relate though of course the stories are different—to the work I’m doing right now. I cannot explain this either.
Perhaps certain authors find us when we need them. I am extremely grateful that Yoko Ogawaha found her way to me.
Samantha Jade Macpherson is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her work can be found in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. In 2019, she was the finalist for The Journey Prize.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash