Anna Smaill’s second novel is set in a contemporary Tokyo of long commutes, convenience stores and drab lookalike apartment buildings. It’s also a supernatural city, capable of an unsettling strangeness amid the uniform array of salarymen and school kids, reflecting the essential loneliness of some of its inhabitants.
There are two point-of-view characters: Dinah, a young Kiwi who arrives in Tokyo to teach English, and her chic older colleague Yasuko, who begins to take care of the adrift new arrival. Both carry invisible psychic burdens. Dinah’s twin brother, Michael, a mercurial personality and musical prodigy who ruled their childhood, has killed himself. In Japan, she can’t escape her memories and guilt, and before long Michael materialises in her tiny apartment, able to talk to her and wander the streets with her in the evenings.
Yasuko is unlike the other teachers, with their petty concerns and staffroom politics. She has had “powers” since she was 13, able to feel the Earth’s currents and converse with creatures. A cat speaks to her, calling her a silly girl, and, like Alice passing through the looking glass, Yasuko is led into an alternative universe of enigmatic declarations, “irritating riddles”, advice and warnings.
Yasuko’s “powers” emerge in intense episodes that her family interpret in a different way, as depression or psychosis. Unlike Alice, Yasuko doesn’t dismiss her experiences as a dream or as imagined in any way, and this has consequences for her: estrangement from her father, the loss of her job, a fractured relationship with her son, 21-year-old Jun. “Power was not an easy thing to own,” she realises. “The world was sharp, and everything had a texture that brushed up against her.”
Dinah’s own looking-glass world has been formed by Michael, before and after his death. Growing up, he was the gifted one and she “was just the one who listened, and watched”. They were “mirror images of each other”, even sharing dreams. Before he reappears in her life, she is convinced that her apartment building and the nearby park are empty. She moves through the mega-city in a bubble of misery, and is often a less interesting, less surprising, character than Yasuko.
Bird Life is a meditation on grief of different kinds. Yasuko tells a pregnant coworker that motherhood is “a kind of grief” that “starts because each breath they take contains the world in which they never lived at all. And also, the world after they have ceased entirely to exist. As soon as they take that first breath, that is what is loaded into your shoulder bag. Every moment, including their death. What can you do, except carry it?”
With such an intense mother, it’s no surprise that Jun wants to escape into student accommodation after Yasuko bombards him with texts. Dinah decides to help by meeting (and berating) Jun. He is blandly handsome and conveniently fluent in English, and the sexual tension between them becomes yet another taut wire in Dinah’s on-the-edge life.
Her own grief is a raw wound that she seems incapable of tending. She eats and dresses carelessly; she sleeps on a bench in the park. For Dinah, birds are like any of the inhabitants of Tokyo, indifferent to her suffering. A crow pecking at a rubbish bag outside her building “just looked at her with its black eyes, looked deep at her as if she were nothing, nothing to budge for”.
In The Chimes, Smaill’s first novel, a dystopian England is wracked by an unbearable sound. In Bird Life, the unbearable takes visual form. Dinah is beset by migraines, their “dark shape” suggesting the crows: she feels “the black wing rise in her head”.
For Yasuko, the birds speak and the world spins and throbs and bristles. On the roof of the Seibu deparment store, Yasuko visits a magical shack – a “strange encampment” – to buy birds, fish and beetles for at-home conversations. She shares her past with Dinah in fairytale form: she was a princess with great powers; the king was jealous; she and her young son “disguised themselves and disappeared into a neighbouring land”.
Like The Chimes, Bird Life is richly imaginative. Readers should not be deterred by the book’s stilted prologue, or think too much about the rules governing Michael’s non-ghost-like reappearance. This is Tokyo, where an “omamori charm”, a protective amulet, dangles from a school girl’s bag.
Bird Life asks us to be open to different ways of seeing and hearing, to different ways of navigating the world.
A longer version of this review will appear on nzreviewofbooks.com
A longer version of this review will appear on nzreviewofbooks.com
