Recommend: Yes.
Review is limited in nature due to being written while on holiday in Japan.
Of Dogs and Walls has been published in the Penguin Mini Modern Classics series. I am a massive fan of this series. Each book costs $2.50 (except for one I found at Gleebooks Glebe for $8, which I did try to suggest was mispriced). This is such an inexpensive way to introduce yourself to an array of influential authors – a low risk testing of the waters into literature.
Here we get two short stories from Yuko Tsushima. Both are similar in characters, featuring a single mother, her daughter(/s) and an intellectually disabled son. Both stories start with something very small – an aquarium toy in the first and a family pet in the second – and build into an emotional dissection of family. To some extent, the similarities were a weakness. I don’t think the characters were literally the same between the two stories, which is the natural first presumption. Rather, these were just character types that were very familiar to the author and therefore were repeated. But the stories are so structurally interesting that I was easily able to put this concern aside.
The way the narratives weave from a very literal beginning (going into the pet store and admiring the aquarium toy; recounting a lineage of family dogs) into a picture of great depth is breathtaking. Perspectives were very malleable and time flowed inconsistently, neither clearly flagged. From one sentence to the next decades could shift or the character point of view could jump, yet it happens so smoothly it sometimes takes a few more sentences to figure out you are not where you were when you started the page. I believe it was this that made each short story felt as though it was its own rich world.
Of Dogs and Walls was Japanese fiction in a form I don’t often encounter: spare, haunting but also deeply relatable.
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