TONO MONOGATARI

TONO MONOGATARI BY SHIGERU MIZUKI TRANS. ZACK DAVISSON

Critically acclaimed mangaka Shigeru Mizuki’s collection, Tono Monogatari, has been skillfully translated from Japanese by Zack Davisson. The book, which is a beautiful display of gathered oral stories and folklore, demonstrates the importance of handing down stories from generation to generation. What began with the community of Tono telling stories amongst themselves became in 1910 a joint project between Kunio Yanagita and Kizen Sakasi as they attempted to write those stories down to preserve them during a time when folklore was being forgotten. Because of their work, and now the work of Mizuki and Davisson, we are able to remember, learn from, and enjoy the classic stories of yokai.

Brilliant illustrations—both black and white and color—intertwine with folklore, history, and tradition in this collection. The book opens with a brief history of Tono Monogatari and the people involved in making the book a reality. Then, we are taken on a journey with an animated Mizuki as our guide as he narrates the yokai for us. Interspersed between stories are bits of Japanese history that exemplify how these stories have shaped Japanese culture and continue to have an impact today. For example, after reading stories of evil spirits that roam the mountains near Tono, we learn that “travelers today never use the mountain pass called Fuefuki-Toge” because of its reputation. Instead, they will use the newer route, even though it is longer. These bits of cultural and historical information are what make this collection so special. Mizuki puts folklore into context which enhances its meaning. We are able to see the impact that storytelling has, the power with which it shapes life and our understanding of the world around us. Like Mizuki writes, “Whatever the truth may be, it is long lost to time. All that remains are legends.”

Tono Monogatari opens the door to a new way of experiencing Japan’s history and culture. Pick up a copy of this collection, read it, and share with others like the book itself requests: “May the legends continue to be told.”

Drawn & Quarterly.

—Review by Sam Campbell

STORIES WITH PICTURES

STORIES WITH PICTURES BY ANTONIO TABUCCHI TRANS. ELIZABETH HARRIS

“No one can write a book. Since before a book can really be, it needs the dawn, the dusk, centuries, arms, and the binding and sundering sea.” If this assertion from “Story of the Man of Paper,” is true, then Antonio Tabucchi is, in fact, in possession of dawn, dusk, centuries, arms, and the sea because he has written a masterpiece collection, Stories with Pictures, translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris. The book is an extended ekphrastic exploration of the relationship between visual and written art. Each story in the collection opens with an image that inspired it—either overtly, such as in “Faraway,” where the story begins with the mention of the iron bars from the paired image: “My darling, I started painting behind the fence. Strange how iron bars can signal other times,” or subtly, such as in “Flames,” where the connection between three panels of an almost floral explosion of reds and burgundies and the tale of a dying miracle worker requires deeper reading to ascertain.

The relationship between visual art and writing is not the only connection that Tabucchi is interested in. Throughout the stories, the themes of color, composition, time, movement, and music emerge. The book is divided into three sections: Adagios; Andantes, con Brio; and Ariettas. Each section’s stories mirror the musical movement suggested by the section headings: the stories in the opening section are paced slower than the stories in the second and third, matching their ascribed tempos. Tabucchi does not stop there. He includes, for example, the ballet definition of adagio in his story, “Rainy Evening on a Holland Dike,” where he depicts the back and forth between a man and a woman who share a past connection and have reencountered. Each story in his collection is an examination of art, art’s interactions with other art, the way artists create, and the ars poetica. 

Stories with Pictures is a book for artists and art-lovers of all mediums. The stories within, along with the accompanying artwork, are short and engaging. Each one seems to say something new and important about life and the often-unnoticed impact that art, in any form, has in shaping us. 

Archipelago Books.

—Review by Sam Campbell

EXHAUSTED ON THE CROSS

EXHAUSTED ON THE CROSS BY NAJWAN DARWISH, TRANSLATED BY KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID

Critically acclaimed Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s second book, Exhausted on the Cross, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is an engaging collection that examines the idea of history and strips it bare.

Darwish explores countless places in his poetry—from Gaza to Shiraz, from Shatila to Baghdad—and crosses paths with a variety of voices, including the Prophet Mohammad. Nothing is off-limits in this hard-hitting collection. Darwish doesn’t shy away from history, religion, war, love, hate, or anything in between. This collection has something to offer every reader, whether in the mood for something political, something historical, or something that  meditates on the simplicity of moment, such as in "The Beating Rain:" "You wake to rain / beating on the sea, / …waterfalls / creep over the mountain's back, / the sky is a piece of gray." 

Darwish’s collection blurs genre boundaries between poetry, prose, and nonfiction. An early piece of the collection, “A Story from Shiraz” is a prose poem delineating the story of Persian poet Hafez. Alternatively, later in the collection, “This Paradise” is a mere three lines long.

Exhausted at the Cross challenges preconceptions and opens readers’ eyes to alternate ways of viewing the world. So long as you’re human, you are welcome to this verse. After all, as Darwish puts it in “In Constantinople,” “People are simply people / Peel off the languages, and all you’ll find / is women and men.”

New York Review Books.

—Review by Sam Campbell

FAUST: A NEW TRANSLATION WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

FAUST: A NEW TRANSLATION WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, TRANSLATED BY ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTH & FREDRICK TURNER, ILLUSTRATED BY FOWZIA KARMINI

Zsuzsanna Ozváth and Frederick Turner’s translation of Faust: A New Translation with Illustrations is a vibrant rendition of the Romantic classic. While Goethe wrote several influential poems during his lifetime, Faust was the magnum opus he spent sixty years composing and revising. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century, Goethe situates his work within the evolving debate over the nature of humanity. The Enlightenment had emphasized the rationality of humans and highlighted their intellect, but Romanticists countered this trend by exploring the emotional and spiritual complexity of humanity. The first part of Goethe’s Faust confronts these paradoxes as Faust—through his dealings with the supernatural Mephistopheles (the Devil)—simultaneously reaches intellectual heights and sinks into moral depravity.

In his composition of Faust, Goethe resurrected the fifteenth-century stanzaic knittelvers verse form. By the nineteenth century, this verse form was considered somewhat archaic but also had a nostalgic quality. Ozváth and Turner’s translation masterfully mimics this verse form with four stressed syllables and couplets along with more varied rhyme schemes that add interest and emphasis to the dialogue. 

The translators excel at tonal shifts among characters of differing social classes and shifts that capture the development of characters, such as Faust and his beloved, Margarete. Some characters, for example, have a contemporary, plebeian tone, like the Director in the prologue whose comments on how to successfully entertain an audience would sound at home in the Greatest Showman: “Let me tell you, just give them more and always more / That way you’ll never go astray and lose ‘em. / The trick with folk is to confuse ‘em; / To satisfy them, that’s a bore.” To highlight the complexity of humanity, these more conversational moments and the commonplace everyday concerns of characters, like those of the Director interested in making a profitable play, are contrasted with Faust’s lofty monologues, seeking to surpass the limits of human knowledge: “Was it a god who wrote these symbols there— / Stilling my inner rage so sweetly / My poor heart fill with joy completely? / And with a secret thrust lay bare / The powers of Nature to me intimately?” At his introduction, Faust is a scholar who desires nothing more than to pull back the layers of knowledge and understand the most profound mysteries of the universe, but throughout the play his desires draw him in different directions, leading him to become a seducer and murderer and ultimately a heart-broken man who laments ever having been born. 

Ozváth and Turner’s translation gives modern readers a glimpse of what Goethe’s contemporary audience must have felt upon first reading the work. The verse form rhythmically draws us along, singing to us an ancient ballad, while the characters stir our hearts with full-fledged emotions we can recognize in our everyday lives. We as readers are confronted with the paradox confronting Faust and all humanity—the heights and limits of human reason and the depths and strength of human longing.  

Deep Vellum.

—Review by Dr. A. Louise Cole

FOUR BY FOUR

FOUR BY FOUR BY Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore

Sara Mesa’s multi-perspective Four by Four investigates the tangled subordination crouching behind Wybrany College, a Spanish boarding school for adolescents on the outskirts of Cardenas. Told in disjointed timelines, select students spar with privilege as it pertains to class, gender, sexuality, and disability, slinking along the structures that form the bedrock of their school. Students referred to as “Specials” attend on scholarship. “Normals” slide by on waves of parental funds. Celia is a Special determined to return to her mother living in the slums of Cardenas. Ignacio, a Normal, makes a life altering choice in his search for company. Teeny, another Normal othered by fellow Normals for her disability, carries with her a terrible secret after Celia’s disappearance. Despite a seeming oasis of normalcy—impregnable four-by-four walls—the colich (college) seeps with violence until those attending become victims and perpetrators of injustice.

Four by Four is a delectable and modern whodunit (or, specifically, how many did it?) for the analytic mind. Translated into English by Katie Whittemore, Sara Mesa’s evasive and suggestive prose results in a mysterious narrative that thickens with each chapter, each sliver of perspective made more climatic by a substitute teacher who undermines the secrecy shielding the colich. Four by Four is not to be read passively. Mesa demands attention, an awareness on the level of language and social dynamism. “[The assistant headmaster] isn’t saying what she seems to say,” Ignacio observes on the day that Celia’s disappearance is revealed. “[She uses] language like a riverbed to transmit subterranean messages.” So too does Mesa in this story of adolescent navigation of and survival of social hegemony.

Open Letter.

—Review by Kaitlyn Yates

TROPIC OF VIOLENCE

TROPIC OF VIOLENCE BY Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

In her third novel to appear in English, Mauritian-French author Nathacha Appanah has written a dazzling glass mosaic reflecting still-colonial France whose shards are edged with blood. Tropic of Violence unfolds on Mayotte—a French overseas territory between Madagascar and Mozambique—evoking the island’s dueling mix of precariousness and invitation.  Appanah’s prose is filled with Morrison-esque lyricism, multi-generational narrative, and cutting tragedy. 

The story turns around the arrival of an orphan named Moïse—the French rendering of Moses—by his adoptive mother and nurse, Marie. Wanting a child and left by her husband, Marie finds the miracle of Moïse beached on Mayotte’s shore. His life, though, more closely resembles a curse. Embroiled in the ongoing scrum for significance in gang-ruled “Gaza,” Moïse tries to pry himself out. That escape, with France as the final slumlord, is a fantasy.

Geoffrey Strachan, whose career as a translator has garnered as many prizes as Appanah has for writing, delicately relays a choir diverse enough never to meet shoulders under the roof of one language. Reading of these lives is like wading in the warm waters of a mile-high cataract. There’s pleasure in every sustained moment, but you find yourself urgently attuned to the fate of a place whose pristine allure is thanks only to neglect.

Graywolf Press.

—Review by Ryan Chamberlain

CARS ON FIRE

CARS ON FIRE BY Mónica Ramón Ríos, Translated by Robin Myers

Mónica Ramón Ríos’ revolutionary novel Cars on Fire is an electrifying collection of stories that magnifies characters at the intersection of identity, culture, and language. Ríos uses these intersectional characters to shed light on the normalized violence that trails immigration across the globe. The collection organizes the character-focused stories in three parts: “Obituary,” “Invocation,” and “Scenes from the Spectral Zone.” Ríos opens with “Imprecation,” a short foreword that binds the lyricism of Spanish nomenclature to storytelling, imbuing a litany of names with distinctive identity. This precedent contrasts with the contents of the collection: the following stories strip all characters therein of names and leave them with only their most identifying attributes.

These are stories bereft of sound—infrequent dialogue is embedded imperceptibly within paragraphs—but which reverberate with noise that lingers long after finishing. Themes of violence, identity, and silence neatly bowtie this collection, such as the story aptly named “The Ghost,” featuring a rather silent and restless character close to the protagonist who lingers long after he’s welcomed, but who also forever remains offstage within the periphery of the narrator’s life, voiceless without the telling of the story in which he inhabits. Too, in the story “The Head,” a failed Chilean Marxist at a university’s Spanish department metaphorically and literally separates her body from her head as a symbol of leadership and sacrifice in a final “poetic” act. The violence that visits these characters is viewed indifferently, as if occurring to someone else, watched as if on TV.

What is not so obvious for the characters, but obvious for the reader and intentional on part of the author, is the omnipresence of violence. These characters are forced to reconcile their identities in a world tied heavily to politics and the growing, paranoid aversion to immigrants in the US. Ríos’ intention is clear. “When you live in an adopted country,” says Ríos, “when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.” Cars on Fire offers a critically cohesive, even if varied, take on South American Latinx identity that is unmistakable, necessary, and, by extension, revolutionary in its existence.

Open Letter.

—Review by Kaitlyn Yates

GARDEN BY THE SEA

GARDEN BY THE SEA BY MERCÈ RODOREDA TRANSLATED BY MARUXA RELAÑO & MARTHA TENNENT

In Garden By The Sea, Mercè Rodoreda chronicles the events of six summers in Geneva, where a wealthy couple and their friends pass the time swimming, skiing, filming, and throwing elaborate parties. The family’s gardener, who often learns intimate details secondhand from other family employees, observes their entangled lives and passions with a quiet curiosity and records their story. One summer, a new villa is constructed next door, and with the arrival of the owner and his family, the lighthearted evenings turn to the direction of lost love, nostalgia, and the cost of working one's way up in the world.

 The story itself is familiar, reminiscent of other explorations of love and class. However, the gardener, as the focalizer of this novel, offers something unusual and moving in his perspective. Rather than judging or criticizing the residents of the villas for their entitled and often strange, self-destructive behaviors, he observes them in the way he observes his garden, simply marking the passing of time, and the necessary changes that are brought by new seasons. Near the beginning of the novel, he explains himself by saying: “This tree…has witnessed much grief and much joy. And it does not change. It has taught me to be what I am, with each leaf like a sickle, and each bud a lead box holding a velvety red flower.” Through this temperate tone (broken only in moments where he discusses plants, suddenly passionate) the gardener maintains a practice in attentiveness and compassion, and alongside him, the reader does too. Lush and meticulous, Rodoreda (alongside translators Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) creates a sensation of the repetitions of life, and the moments that stand in sharp contrast.

Open Letter.

—Review by Joy Clark