Tales of Struggle to Find Meaning in Life

The four curious, compelling stories that make up Natsuki Ikezawa’s “Still Lives” are an admixture of tale-telling and metaphysical, at times mystical, speculation.

The first work of this emerging Japanese writer to be published in English, these stories are rooted in a realistic topography where people conduct business, attend school, eat, ice skate and visit cherry trees in early bloom. Yet each story also departs from these mundane activities as their central characters have chance encounters with a stranger, strike up a friendship that is rich in the exchange of ideas and attempt to grasp, or at least grapple with, certain larger questions of what it means to be a sentient being, an individual, a self--in essence, to be alive.

In “Still Life,” the unnamed narrator, a part-time employee at a dye works, makes friends with Sasai, a fellow employee who comes to the narrator’s aid when he bungles a batch of yarn. “There is no such thing as a process that gives us absolute control over things,” Sasai says by way of consolation. The narrator quickly identifies his new friend as someone who “manage[s] somehow to see the world whole” and trusts him enough to leave his job at the dye works and join Sasai in a scheme to play the stock market. This Sasai does with great skill, eventually confessing to the narrator that he embezzled money from his former employer and that his goal is to make enough to pay it back.

Sasai is a peculiar figure. Virtually his only possessions are slides of mountains, glaciers, rivers and other landscapes, which he and the narrator project on a sheet and watch for hours on end. Sasai has appeared in the narrator’s life, it seems, to instruct him in the importance of forging links between the physical world and what Ikezawa calls “the wide world within”; these links lead to a sense of harmony, and with a sense of harmony it is “much easier to get through the days.”

If all this sounds rather abstract and not wholly grounded in the arc of the narrative, that’s because it is; yet there is an intoxicating quality to Ikezawa’s divagations. The strangers who materialize in these stories have a sage-like tincture to them, something visionary and seductive.

“Uplink” is perhaps the most cohesive story. Another unnamed man visits an unnamed island. He has come to check its meteorological equipment. A relentless wind is blowing. The islanders believe that their visitor can stop the wind. He explains that “the human race may be very full of itself . . . but there’s not a thing we can do about the weather.”

After finishing his day’s work, he retires for the night. Restless, he goes in search of a cigarette and is inexplicably drawn to a woman whose eyes “were eyes he knew, eyes seen in some very distant, very special memory.” He follows her home and, never speaking, makes love to her. As he does, he feels a great force running through him and realizes that his body and mind have become a kind of offering to “some wholly different reality that radiated to every corner of the universe.” Afterward, the storm breaks.

“Revenant” is as haunting as “Uplink” is erotic and dreamlike. The narrator, unnamed once again, is a voluntary mental patient in a clinic where he has remained since his return from Oneiros, the ruins of a Shangri-La-like town in remote Afghanistan. He recounts the story of how he and Pierre, a French cultural anthropologist, journeyed to Oneiros, a place “suffused with the aura of some larger presence,” and where a mysterious, bewitching music plays. In Oneiros the narrator feels he escaped “from the well of ego at last”; the site transmits to him the joy of his own existence.

One evening Pierre tells the narrator about a woman he was once in love with and courted for a year even though there was another man in her life. Rather than compete with the other man, Pierre says, he would have preferred it if the three of them could have “felt our sensations in common, if we [had] all [become] a single living organism.”

Pierre argues that rivalry was introduced to accelerate the evolution of human life but that human beings pay for it with incalculable misery. The narrator demurs. While he revels in the freedom of Oneiros, he recognizes that “the only way we can live is enclosed like that, inside ourselves.” Pierre chooses to remain, and presumably die, in his Shangri-La; the narrator returns to “civilization” but has been deeply altered and rendered mute by the experience.

In “Revenant” Ikezawa allows these two views of the nature of self-hood equal airing; his intent throughout his stories, especially in the three cited here, is not to judge his characters’ thinking so much as to stimulate it--and ours. “It’s not hard to put a part of your mind into orbit. Anyone can do it,” Sasai remarks in “Still Life.” Perhaps, but not everyone does it as interestingly or with as much unusual atmosphere as Ikezawa.