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Contemporary Fiction Views: Entangled vegetation and ideas [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-05
The young wife of a successful novelist sits at their table, munching her way through a bowl of nuts and seeds. Rui is important to her husband's work. Their courtship was the basis of his first successful novel. She goes upstairs and the novelist continues his meeting with his editor. The seeds she ate germinate and she turns into a plant.
The Forest Brims Over, the first book by Japanese author Maru Ayase to be translated into English, begins as any other tale filled with unexplainable events. Upstairs in their bedroom, Rui sends out tendrils and other vegetation takes over the entire room.
The editor, on another visit to the author, is sent upstairs to water her. Literally. As in watering any other plant. He cannot see her in the midst of the plant growth any longer, but hears her plea for fresh air and sunshine. He makes his way over to the window and opens it. The plants spill out the window and take over the empty lot next door, turning it into a forest.
The author writes another well-received book, about
.. a woman who was becoming increasingly removed from her sense of humanity and the unremarkable, commonplace man who had once loved her ...
It's evident the new book is based on the interior aspect of their marriage, at least from the author's point of view.
The story then shifts to one of the young housewives in the writer's community college class. She has led a sheltered life with an early marriage, two young children and a cheerful mother-in-law who is a frequent visitor. Taking the class and taking the author's interest expand her world. He convinces her that she has hidden depth and that her husband and family don't see her for who she really is. He also talks her into an affair, which ends after he gets enough out of her to write a story that is about a woman who has hidden depth and whose husband and family don't see her for who she really is.
The next section of Ayase's novel shifts to the editor's replacement, another young woman. She goes to meetings with the author at his house, but he sits there with an empty notebook. He asks her to make coffee for them and to go upstairs to find books on the bedroom bookcase. The situation makes her more than uncomfortable. Eventually, she realizes there is more than one way to view the author's first novel about Rui, the book she has loved for years.
She no longer sees it as the love story she thought it was. That view was only an illusion.
As with the young housewife, her husband works long hours and is very unhappy. The first editor's wife only works part-time but is kept far busier than her schedule and pay seem to require. She packs up their two young children and leaves the editor.
Not a single relationship in the novel goes well. With this well established, Ayase changes the book from narrating events to a journey that may be physical or may be completely metaphysical. The author finally goes upstairs. Rui takes him on an adventure through time, akin to the ghosts who visit Scrooge, showing him what he has always been like toward women.
Their following discussion attempts to show how men and women think about what men and women are like, and how those essential differences keep them apart. Not knowing Ayase's other work, it's difficult to know if the discussion is typical of her writing or if it has something to do with the translation (which until this point in the novel is sensitive to tone). The issues are raised, positions are taken, but it is not an actual exchange of ideas. Getting the points across works better with comments made by secondary characters and what happens with the major characters.
The ending shows where Ayase stands.
Even though it is not completely successful, The Forest Brims Over is worth reading as a fable gone feral, and a framing of ideas important to the way people feel and interact with each other.
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