In a park in Tokyo, a young man in a cheap black suit props one side of a plastic crate on to a stick to which a string is tied. Leading to the crate is a trail of hamburger bun crumbs. He sits back. He waits. The bird trap is a failure. The pigeons ignore the bread. A group of women laugh behind their hands.
The slow-paced, staccato opening to Bird Life, the new novel from Wellington writer Anna Smaill, has a palpable tension that permeates this tale of grief, friendship and madness. The crate clatters to the ground, the pigeons take to the sky, the fountain suddenly erupts, an immaculately dressed middle-aged woman walks, one shoe held in her hand, towards a young foreign woman lying eyes-closed on the grass.
If Bird Life were a film, the theatre would already be gripped. Dinah, the young woman in the park, has recently arrived from Oamaru to teach English at Saitama Denki University. She is mourning the death of her twin brother, Michael, a brilliant pianist whose future was cut short through mental illness. As he explained to his sister, “Something down deep in the hammers and wires. Nothing you could do. You would have had to take the whole thing apart to fix it.”
Yasuko, the middle-aged woman, is a teacher at the same institution. Her beloved son, Jun, has left home, where-abouts unknown. Dinah and Yasuko offer each other a way through their grief that is reassuring and potentially perilous.
Smaill and her partner, now husband, novelist Carl Shuker, lived in Tokyo for a year almost a decade ago. Smaill by this time had abandoned her career aspirations to be a professional musician – she is a talented violinist – to focus on writing. In a large wooden home perched above Wellington’s Lyall Bay, she describes the difficulty of that decision. “There was a lot of self-doubt, but because I had invested so much [of myself] into music, it felt when I decided to stop: what do I do with all of this?”
Smaill found the answer in poetry. She completed a master’s in English literature at the University of Auckland, then a second MA, this time in creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington, where she worked on her first book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, published in 2005.
She was awarded a scholarship to undertake her PhD on contemporary US poets at University College London. To cover living costs, she and Shuker followed the well-trodden route of teaching English in Japan.
It was Smaill’s first time in Tokyo and her first time living overseas. “As a foreigner, there is so much you can’t access, or you can’t fully grasp or understand. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sensory detail that was coming in.” She coped by keeping journals and buying her first digital camera, “trying to capture the concrete detail as much as possible”.
Her first novel, 2015′s The Chimes, is anchored in the culture and landscape of London, but draws on that initial sense of dislocation and a certain frustration. “Poetry was very much how I was going to express myself, but I hadn’t written a great deal of poetry,” she tells the Listener. “It was almost like the sheer quantity of material I wanted to process wasn’t easily channelled into poetry at that time. But I never thought fiction was something I would work in.”
The Chimes is a layered novel, set in a dystopian London in which the written language has been banned and memory erased by an immense musical instrument called the Carillon. It was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the 2016 World Fantasy Award.
But her experience of Tokyo continued to gnaw at her imagination. As she told RNZ National’s Kim Hill in 2015, “It seduces you and you can’t get it out of your system. I definitely want to go back there – if not physically then at least imaginatively.”
Eight years later, she has achieved just that. Bird Life, like The Chimes, explores memory and language “and the way the story you tell about yourself constructs your reality and shapes who you are”.
Plot overlap
It is also succinct in its lyricism and complex in its multiple themes and influences.
These include the story of The Magic Flute. Just before returning to New Zealand, she and Shuker attended a performance of Mozart’s opera at the London Coliseum. She knew the opera well but was impressed again by the sudden pivot in the plot, when the audience realises that the Queen of the Night, apparently bereft of her kidnapped daughter, is found to be the antagonist and the supposedly evil Sarastro is on the side of the good.
Could she translate the story into contemporary Tokyo? “I worried away at it for a really long time – I didn’t start writing until 2015 but it was very much this seed in the back of my mind. It is not a step-by-step retelling but there is a plot overlap.”
That overlap is evident in the twist in Yasuko’s tale of her flight with her young son from her father. It is also evident in the unlucky young man in Smaill’s preface, inspired by Mozart’s character Papageno, the part-man, part-bird employed by the Queen of the Night to catch birds.
Birds haunt this story. For Yasuko, the beating of wings and the words – the actual words – of birds signify the return of her “powers”. Birds become “a great and wild disturbance of the city’s frequencies”. Outside her apartment, Dinah confronts a large crow stabbing at a rubbish bag. It looks her in the eye “as if she were nothing, nothing to budge for”.
Such birds are common in Tokyo but they also draw on that mythic tradition of dark-eyed corvidae (ravens, crows, jays and rooks) as cunning tricksters or messengers from the underworld that stalk contemporary literature, such as Ted Hughes’ Crow, or the crow co-narrator in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Malevolent or benevolent? “Neither,” says Smaill. “They are operating in their own realm.”
In Bird Life, as in Porter’s work, grief breaks down the door to that realm. “Grief is a kind of madness,” says Smaill. “It is a transfiguring experience and it forces you into magical thinking, and part of that magical thinking is why Dinah is so … not vulnerable, I don’t feel she is a victim, but she is porous. It is such a relief to her when she encounters Yasuko’s version of reality because it speaks to her sense that nothing is as it seems.”
That divergent version of reality, argues Smaill, is an enduring proposition. “If we had ever experienced mental illness or grief or things that take us out of our day-to-day reality, we have maybe touched on that sense that suddenly the rug of reality is pulled out from under your feet and you see the gaps. We can’t look too closely. Even the idea of mortality – if we think too hard about our impending death, we are not going to just get up and go to the shops.
“We have this idea we are highly rational, but actually, a lot of what we do and a lot of the ways we operate are through denial; there’s this cognitive dissonance. This is where we see that version of the mad genius, that sense of the seer cutting through day-to-day banal reality to something deeper.”
Frame as a touchstone
In many ways, Bird Life is an exploration of the connection between giftedness and mental struggle, and that choice, if there is a choice, of “going deeper” into creativity or reconciling, says Smaill, “with a consensus version of reality”.
That choice is central to the work of Janet Frame, a “touchstone as a writer” for Smaill, and her decision, described in An Angel at My Table, to walk out of the standard two classroom she was teaching at Arthur Street School and never to return. “She had been attempting for so long to straddle her world of imagination with the day-to-day consensus reality world where she is becoming a teacher and trying to fit in to this social existence. In that almost binary moment, she chooses her world and it is a violent choice – that is when she attempts suicide – but she knows how irreconcilable it feels living in a socially accepted reality. The rest of her pathway is finding her way back to a place where she can keep those two in some kind of balance.”
In Bird Life, both Dinah and Jun are seduced by the possibility of following their loved ones beyond banal reality. For Dinah, brother Michael “built the world. And we both lived inside it. He made it up, and I believed him.”
Does she follow him? “That is one of the questions I was trying to answer in the book,” says Smaill. “She is impressionable, she has the ability to follow Michael imaginatively and be captured by his conviction but she can see both worlds. She is a creative person in her own right but she has more of a spectrum of choice.”
For Jun, his mother made the world come alive. “And there were the times when her powers came back. That would last a week, maybe two, before she got depressed. When I was young those times were magic.”
Does he follow her? “There are some kinds of love that are very hungry,” he explains. “It is probably very selfish of me, but I wanted a chance to live without getting eaten up.”
That risk of not finding a way back from “consensus reality” is the premise of numerous myths and literature works. It is the possibility signposted by US poet Frank Bidart, one of the writers studied by Smaill, in his poem The Yoke: “Don’t worry I know you’re dead / but tonight / turn your face again / toward me.”
“There’s this trajectory where you have lost something and you return to a time when you can feel it again but that moment is a stopped time; you’re living in that memory. And if you dwell in that, you can’t progress, you can’t grow because you are rejecting human life.”
Unlike The Chimes, Bird Life is not a dystopian novel, but nor is it a realist novel.
“I wanted it to be as magically real as possible, that in some way honours that sense that our brains are creating fantasy a lot of the time.”
