At the edge of the woods

This haunting, memorable tale from Ono (Echo on the Bay) follows a father and son living at the edge of a whispering forest. In the present day, the father raises his son in an unnamed country where he'd moved with his wife. After she returns to their home country to await the birth of their second child, the father contends with strange phenomena, as though living in "a peculiar abyss of time and space." The forest beyond their house seems to speak, letters never arrive, and the letter carrier regularly changes size and shape and blames the missing mail on imps. After the narrator's son wishes for a grandmother, the pair is visited by a half-naked old woman tormented by memories of her husband and the son they conceived during a war. With allusions to France, a nearby farmer recounts the death of his older brother, a "Resistance" member betrayed by neighbors. And both the narrator and his wife encounter long caravans of migrants, people who "no longer had a home and were forced to wander, lost, forever." Eschewing chronology and plot, Ono's immersive narrative accrues insights about the nature of violence and mercy. It's an accomplished work by a masterful writer. (Apr.)

A dreamlike story about an unnamed family beside an unnamed forest. The narrator of Ono's latest novel to appear in English refers to his young son, who wants to watch TV, and his wife, pregnant with their second child, but none of these characters receive names. Nor does the country where they live--not their native country--or the language they've learned or the refugees the narrator eventually sees tramping through the forest. And yet the lack of names is the least of this mysterious novel's many puzzles. More obscure are the time frame and the plot. What has happened when? At one point, the narrator and his pregnant wife visit a cake shop--but is she pregnant with their first child or their second? Or is the narrator alone, his wife having gone to her family home to wait out the pregnancy? "I can't remember what we bought that day or whether we left without buying anything," he says. "[Those] memories, too, have become doubtful. It's possible that it was a single event, mixed and rolled out over and over." Ono's prose, elegantly translated by Carpenter, is deceptively simple. His references range from Darwin to Mozart. But while the marketing copy helpfully explains that this is a novel about "climate catastrophe," it's difficult to know what, in the end, to make of it. The narrator's son brings home an old woman who quickly disappears. The forest is rumored to be full of imps who steal children--and also mail. The mailman seems to have fangs. How all these details connect to one another--and whether they do--is anyone's guess. Beautifully written but puzzling to the point of opacity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The woods was an enormous, mysterious orchestra that played musical fragments, never revealing the piece in its entirety, a piece that yet seemed endless. The light, the breeze, the birdsong, the shifting shadows--they were not the soloists. The soloists were my wife's hands, gently rubbing our son's back. As if hesitant to move forward through time, her hands went back and forth. Perhaps all along he had simply wanted his mother's hands. Wanted to reclaim them from the unborn baby. Hands that lovingly stroked her round, protruding belly. Before, if he said he felt sick, those hands would unfailingly remove him from the child-safety seat and hold him against her breast. Now that place was taken up by her large belly. The belly intimidated him. Even when he lay with his head in her lap, his body stiffened and his eyes squeezed shut in pain, the pressure of its insistent reality never lessened against his cheek. I took to telling him not to play in the woods. I was firm. He paid no attention. Still, I couldn't tie him to a leg of the table, and there wasn't any actual danger that required special alertness. Nor had any of the stories I made up to simultaneously threaten and amuse him become real--stories that imps in the woods stole children and ate them, or that if he wandered onto a certain path he could never return, or that once he heard singing in the depths of the woods, he would instantly lose his memory and never remember Mommy again. Then why couldn't he go into the woods? Where was the danger? Watching TV, I didn't really get what was happening. It was as if my linguistic ability had decamped. The satellite antenna made it possible to tune into programs in multiple languages, but they all sounded equally remote and unapproachable. My son didn't seem to mind a bit if he couldn't understand the language spoken on TV. Kiddie programming was all the same, no matter what country it was produced in: sing together, dance together, make things together, be astonished together, laugh together. Similarly, the images on news programs of different countries all looked the same. Black smoke arose and buildings collapsed. People seemed on the point of collapse, too. Mothers sobbed or wailed; children bawled, teary-eyed; despair etched irreparable cracks in the faces of the old. There was no need to understand the words. Excerpted from At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.