Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a novel following the recovery of an addict, Cyrus Shams, and his desire to make himself a martyr. After his mother dies in a plane shot down by US forces, Cyrus and his father, Ali, move to America to try and leave their grief behind. Ali gets a job at a chicken farm cleaning eggs and tries to support Cyrus until he goes to college. Cyrus attends Keady University where he meets Zee, a soon to be friend/lover, where they start doing drugs, at one point nearly chopping Cyrus’s toe off while high with an axe for a voyeuristic man. However, Cyrus begins to spiral into addiction where he finds himself finally crawling out of with the help of his sponsor, Gabe. While two years sober at an open mic, and attempting to write his book on martyrs, one of their friends suggests Cyrus travel to New York City from Indiana to meet an artist. The artist, Orkideh, is doing her final show, ‘Death-Speak’, in which she sits and converses with visitors on death as she will be dying from cancer soon. Cyrus can see it as a huge part of his book and so enlists the help of Zee to join him in New York for the weekend. While at the museum, Orkideh and Cyrus meet and begin to have a conversation over the next few days about death, martyrdom, other visitors, and addiction. On one of the nights, Zee and Cyrus have a large argument about how Cyrus sees Zee’s life amounting to nothing while he is trying to make something of his death. The following day, Cyrus goes to the exhibit, though finds Orkideh had taken pills and died the night before. Then, after fainting and recovering, Cyrus gets a phone call from the curator needing to discuss Orkideh, where it is eventually revealed that Orkideh is Cyrus’s mother. The curator and Cyrus meet at the park, where she describes what happened to his mother, that her lover got on the plane instead of her, how she fled to America after, and how she built her life as an artist. Afterward, Zee calls Cyrus where they meet at the park. Though, this time Cyrus can see how selfish he was dragging Zee along, not only to New York, but how terrible of a friend he is. The novel ends in a surrealist moment where the city is morphing and changing around them after all the death and the truths that had been revealed.
Along with the main narrative, Akbar weaves moments of Cyrus’s mother’s past into the story as well as dream sequences of famous people talking to people Cyrus knows. Also spread throughout are draft excerpts of Cyrus’s book about martyrs. It’s a really engaging, passionate, and intensely visual novel about addiction, recovery, and friendships. I was deeply moved by the conversations Cyrus has with Orkideh and astounded at the way Akbar pulled in references to religion and the philosophical nature of the inner thoughts of the characters. I also found it especially powerful when a story that is recounted about a man serving two military drafts (one for his dead brother and one for himself) parallels with how Orkideh’s lover dies and she must take her identity in the beginning to continue her life in America. A truly awe-inspiring novel. Final Rating: 5/5
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The Greensboro Review Spring 2024 contains a few stories and poems that I found interesting. First was the story, ‘Trailer Park Gothic’ by Josh Bell, then ‘Mantis’ by Daniel S.C. Sutter, and finally the story, ‘Interiors’ by Leah Yacknin-Dawson. They all had intriguing and memorable characters and I particularly liked the sibling relationship in ‘Interiors’. I also enjoyed the poem ‘February: A Dictionary’ by Weijia Par with the lines “I know every inch of my body/is a danger to no one; I like history; my great-grandpa/survived all the wars for me.” A fine issue.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn is a collection of Japanese legends, songs, girl names, and essays focused particularly on dreams. In the legends, one features a samurai who returns to his first wife one night only to discover that that she had died from his absence. Another features a man who must ride the dead body of a woman in order for her not to haunt him. There’s an essay on cicadas and how the Japanese infuse them into literature. Then an essay on the etiquette and minutia of girl names which catalogue hundreds of names and their meanings. There’s an essay on old songs and the contexts from which they come from. Finally, there are an assortment of essays ranging from how the author levitated in his dreams, to why we fear ghosts, to words he had dictated from a book in his dream. There are weird moments, though I appreciate the amount of detail Hearn goes into on how he categorizes and explains the names, songs, and cicadas.
Final Rating: 4/5 Memorial by Bryan Washington is a novel about two men, Mike and Benson, navigating their strained relationship in Texas. After Mike’s mom, Mitsuko, arrives for a trip from Japan and tells him that his father is ill and dying, Mike immediately flies out to see if he can be of any help. This leaves Benson and Mitsuko to live together at Mike’s place for an undetermined amount of time. Mitsuko is initially cold with Benson as he goes about his weeks working at a day care. Benson then gets a call from his sister that their father is always drunk and likely will run himself into the ground. Though, Benson dislikes the idea of going to his father because he had kicked Benson out once he found out he had HIV. One day, the brother of one of the kids Benson daycares for, Omar, begins to take a liking to him. They go on a few dates, which they don’t call dates, and in fact Omar calls Benson over to help calm his younger brother down. At the goading of his sister, Benson goes to his father’s place where he sees the state his father lives in. Then, at a coworker’s wedding, Benson gets the call that his father had fallen down, and Omar rushes with him to care for his father. The whole time, Mitsuko and Benson’s relationship starts to warm up where they cook together. Then, Mike returns home after his father dies.
Meanwhile in Japan, Mike returns to his father’s place where he is coldly welcomed. His father, Eiju, runs a bar mainly filled with locals and is helped out by a clumsy young man, Kunihiko. As his father refuses treatment for his illness, Mike begins to see the deterioration before him. One of the customers that comes in, Tan, takes a liking to Mike where they begin to have an undefined relationship. Mike has a difficult time trying to understand his father, and why he had left their family years ago. Though, Mike also sees Eiju has started to act like a father to Kunihiko in ways that Mike couldn’t experience. Then, one night Eiju passes away in his sleep and the future of the bar is left undetermined. Eiju had given the choice to Mike on running the bar or on giving it to Kunihiko. Though, Mike decides to return to Texas and come back once he is able to figure things out with Benson. Upon Mike’s return, Mike and Mitsuko begin making arrangements and Mike and Benson’s relationship is pulled into focus with the contrast of the relationships they started when Mike was gone. Eventually, it all comes to a head when Benson’s family arrives at Mike’s door with his father planning to apologize for how terrible he was about the fact that Benson is gay. Though, Mike and Mitsuko also arrive at the house a little later with groceries where Mike and Benson cook a large meal for both families. Mitsuko then decides to return to Japan, and Mike plans to follow her, leaving Benson back in Texas. Mitsuko pushes back, telling Benson essentially that going back to Japan is not the right decision for her son and that she thinks Mike staying with Benson is. The night before Mitsuko leaves, they go and spread Eiju’s ashes at a park and go to a restaurant where Mitsuko gets quite drunk. Yet, she tells them through a story of how her and Eiju met that Eiju was cowardly to leave the family and tries to say that Benson needs to convince Mike to stay. The novel ends with Mitsuko at the airport, with Mike intending to leave a few weeks later. The book is structured in a way that pulls the reader very close to the two main characters. First, we get to see what it’s like for Benson when Mike goes to Japan, then from Mike’s perspective in Japan, and finally from Benson when Mike returns. It’s a novel about fathers being terrible to their sons and how those sons deal with the trauma they received. One instance of a father kicking his son out, another of the father leaving his family. I was floored at how well the interactions between the characters are rendered, and the tension riding between their conversations. And while the novel leaves us with a question of whether Benson convinces Mike to stay or not, it shows the depth and nuances of their relationship. A sometimes humorous and witty novel that has left me breathless. Final Rating: 5/5 The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan is about a Malay family living both before and during the Japanese occupation. Two storylines parallel each other, the first in which the mother, Cecily, helps an undercover Japanese officer, Fujiwara, thwart Britain’s stronghold on the country. Cecily provides information to Fujiwara from her husband who works closely with the municipal government. They learn there is a plan to build a port, so Cecily and Fujiwara concoct a scheme to gather as much information as they can on when/where it will be built. Eventually, the constructed port goes up in flames and Fujiwara evades detection by leaving. Along with their schemes, Cecily and Fujiwara begin to have an intimate relationship. Fujiwara then returns with a woman, Lina, who once lived in Bintang, but left because her first husband had been accused and killed for starting the fire. Lina and Fujiwara return, where Fujiwara continues to gather information, while having an affair with Cecily. Both Lina and Cecily become pregnant, and both have girls. However, Fujiwara leaves right before Lina gives birth. Lina waits for Fujiwara to return before giving birth, which starves the child of oxygen, and the midwife has to pull the baby out, scarring her head forever. Lina then dies as Cecily helps her create names for their children.
Years later once the Japanese occupy Malay, they take Cecily’s son, Abel, and force him to work at a camp building a railroad for transport. At the camp, Abel is beaten, raped, and thrown into a chicken coop where he becomes an alcoholic. Abel is then forced to kill the person who took him from his home. He meets a slightly younger boy, Freddie, who likes to draw and who helps Abel in his drunken stupor. As the war begins to wane, Freddie leads the rest of the boys in creating an exit plan while Abel is barely able to stay alive. Once Japan surrenders, Britain bombs the camp they stay at, killing Freddie in the process. Finally, Abel returns with Freddie’s drawing to a home that has seen so much loss. In the time of Abel’s disappearance, the two remaining children, Jasmin and Jujube, try to survive under the occupation. Jujube works at a teahouse serving Japanese soldiers where she meets Takahashi, a school teacher, who is not violent like the rest of the men. They begin to have a friendship, though it’s strained when Takahashi discusses his daughter back in Japan. Cecily, knowing that young girls are taken by soldiers to be workers at a brothel, disguises Jasmin as a boy, cuts her hair short, and hides her in the basement when soldiers come by. One day, another girl, Yuki, finds Jasmin in the basement where they begin to have a friendship. Jasmin then leaves the basement with Yuki where they go to the brothel where Yuki is held. After returning, Jujube finds out Jasmin has been leaving the basement where she becomes furious and that causes Jasmin to run away. Jasmin goes to a storeowner to get Yuki’s blood off her pajamas where she meets Fujiwara. Fujiwara takes her into a mansion where she stays most of the day and at night returns to the brothel to meet with Yuki. Jasmin convinces Yuki to join her at Fujiwara’s mansion where they get discovered by Cecily who was looking for her daughter. Fujiwara returns to the house as well where it is revealed that Yuki is his daughter he had with Lina and they fight about what is to happen to the girls. As the adults talk, Jasmin and Yuki run away to the brothel, but once it’s set on fire they hunker down in a wheelbarrow where they are burned alive. Fujiwara, Cecily, and Jujube run to the fire and search for the daughters, but soon realize they have been burned up. In the end, once Abel returns, they watch as Fujiwara surrenders. Finally, the family receives a letter from Takahashi with flowers drawn in calendar dates and they hang it next to the drawings and the tin with bones the family believes are Yuki and Jasmin. This novel is deeply tragic, devastating, and powerful in the way it renders the occupation, the violence, and the relationships of the characters. It confronts questions of colonialism, and shows that any occupation completely devastates a people. The novel also weaves the past and the present seamlessly through Cecily and her children’s eyes. I am completely floored at the depth and breadth of which these characters are explored and how they confront oppression in all of its forms. While reading, I was reminded of the novel Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim which also confronts Japanese occupation and violence, though in Korea. I am utterly astounded at both how Chan wrangles the subject matter and how she explores how the characters navigate devastation. Final Rating: 5/5 Blackouts by Justin Torres is a novel about a young man returning to the bedside of an older gay gentleman who is dying. It’s a story framed within the context of both a conversation as well as archival images and text that is blacked out. The discussions of the men range from the author and researcher, Jan Gay, and her work in the book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns all the way to their own lives, their sexual encounters, and loves they experienced. In the end, the old man, Juan, begins to forget everything, and then dies in the young man’s arms one night.
What Torres does absolutely well here is the blurring of fiction and non-fiction—of lies and truth. Jan, the book, the studies, and some of the characters are firmly from history. However, Torres plays with us when the speaker discusses Juan and if he ever met/talked with him. Though, I don’t feel that whether Juan existed or not is what’s important, rather it was the connection the speaker and Juan had and their conversations which provided an outlet for them to digest their lives. I also found some of the novel’s framing to be interesting, particularly when they start describing their lives and memories as movie scenes. The novel feels as though we are peeking into such private moments, and I appreciate the vulnerability and humor of the characters. Final Rating: 4.5/5 Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe follows the lives of fifteen reformatory boys as they are transported to a village to bury animals and then abandoned. They arrive at the moment where a soldier has defected and the remaining soldiers are sent out to look for him. The soldiers aren’t able to find the defector, but a larger more pressing matter occurs when a woman and loads of animals show up dead with bloated stomachs. The villagers see this as a plague that they must escape, so one night when the boys are left in an unlocked shack, the villagers leave. The next day, the boys find the village empty and learn that the exit out of the village is blocked off by a guard, so they are stuck there. While in the village, the boys gather food from the houses and try to survive in the cold winter. They go ice skating in the center square, they kill birds and have a feast, and the main character meets and then has sex with a girl that was also abandoned. The defected soldier is shown to them by one of the village boys, Li, who had stayed behind. The main character’s brother then finds and adopts a dog, but when it bites the girl, she comes down with the plague and eventually dies with the defector caring for her. The boys believe the dog had the plague, which causes one of the boys, Minami, to kill it. Then the main character’s brother runs away and never be seen again. The next day, the villagers return to berate and throw the boys into a shack, while the men search and find the defector. The villagers stab the defector and then send him with the military police, while the rest of the boys are beaten into submission and told to never mention the plague or their abandonment. The main character retaliates, which causes the villagers to send him away where they try to kill him. The novel ends with the main character on the ground in the forest ready to take on the villagers searching for him.
Ōe never seems to disappoint, and even with such a heavy and depressing book, there are beautiful moments and relationships that blossom. I was also intrigued with the way Ōe approaches the characters’ sexualities. One of the main characters, Minami, is shown as explicitly gay, discussing having sex with soldiers, doing his “morning make-up” which involves his butt, and his blunt lewd comments. There are other moments of sexual ambiguity among the boys watching their erections in a group together and displaying their penises to villagers. And it also occurs when the main character and the defector “…tasted a small miserable pleasure in each other. Silently we bared our poor goose-pimpled buttocks, losing ourselves in the motion of cunning fingers.” The main character’s sexuality is even more ambiguous when it’s shown he also thinks about and has sex with the girl. This openness to sexuality, particularly in the fifties when this was published in Japan, does seem quite out of the ordinary, but not an outlier (as one only has to look at Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask). It’s a dark book that gets worse as it goes, in displaying the villager’s brutality and the way life affects each character. However, it’s one that will stick with me. Final Rating: 5/5 The Company of Strangers by Jen Michalski is a collection of short stories about frayed relationships, queerness, and the ways in which love inhibit and enhance life. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Loneliest Creature on Earth’, ‘The Long Haul’, ‘The Company of Strangers’, ‘The Goodbye Party’, and Scheherazade’. I loved the way ‘Goodbye Party’ provides an outlet for Sam’s grief through the dogs that will be put down and how he contemplates how his wife’s passing will affect his son.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck are two novellas focusing on the lives of people in California. The Pearl is about an indigenous couple whose child is stung by a scorpion, so they request the aid of a doctor. However, the doctor only treats patients who can pay, and the family, Kino and Juana, are poor. To see if they can find money to pay, they go out into the bay and dive for pearls where Kino discovers one the size of an egg. From then on, people of their village and the town try to steal the pearl or kill them. The doctor returns to help the sick baby, but is really out to get the pearl. Kino first tries to sell it to the pearl buyers in the town, but they give him a terribly low price, so he decides to go to a city in the north to sell it. Before they go, their home is burned down, and they must evade trackers until they reach a cliff. Kino understands they will soon find him and Juana, so Kino decides to kill the trackers at night. Kino crawls down from the cliff, and attacks the men, but a rifle goes off in the direction of the cliff. Once Kino kills the three trackers, he returns to Juana and their hidden child, but find that the child has been shot in the head. Kino and Juana return to their village where they lost their home, boat, and now child. They arrive to the shore and, knowing that the pearl has only brought with it evil, throw it back into the water.
The Red Pony is about a boy, Jody, who lives with his family on a ranch. One day, his father gets him a pony for him to take care of. However, when it rains, the pony comes down with an illness it can never recover from. All the while, the ranch hand, Billy, reassures Jody the pony will survive. Following this, an old man arrives to their ranch claiming he lived there before and plans to stay there. Jody’s father, Carl, is reluctant to house the man and tells him he can only stay the night. The next morning, one of their oldest horses is gone with the man. After seeing how well Jody treated the pony in its illness, Carl decides to breed one of their horses and give the colt to Jody to care for. Jody takes a female horse to another ranch where it’s breed, and Jody impatiently waits for the colt to be born. One morning, Billy wakes up Jody telling him the horse is about to give birth. Though, as Billy is prepping, he realizes the colt is turned the wrong way around, and must kill the mother horse and cut open its belly to allow the colt to survive. Finally, later on at the ranch, Jody’s mother gets a letter saying their grandfather plans to arrive. Jody is excited while Carl dislikes the grandfather’s stories because he’s told them many times before. Thus, Carl believes the old man is living in the past. In the end, the grandfather explains that the stories weren’t exactly what he wanted to convey, but rather the feeling of being a leader of a strong team. These two stories were striking in the way they rendered setting, dialogue, and people with precision. I was drawn into the tragedies of both stories, and liked the way The Pearl zoomed out in time in the end to frame the story as a legend. The Red Pony also does something interesting in that each section felt like its own small story, and I wasn’t sure if some of the characters/ideas would come back. What happened to the old man who stole the horse and rode into the ridge above the ranch? Does the colt survive after its birth, and why doesn’t it pop up later on? There are a lot of things left unresolved, but I felt that it worked. I really enjoyed this read although both stories described loss after loss without much reprieve. Final Rating: 4/5 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a thirteen-year-old boy, Noboru, who is in a gang while his mother is a widow. One day, his mother is invited onto a vessel to help out an actress where they meet Ryuji, a sailor. Ryuji is in port for a few days, and begins to take a liking to Noboru’s mother, Fusako. Over the course of those few days, they sleep together while Noboru watches through a peephole from his room. Due to the gang’s hatred for fathers and the adult world, Noboru is conflicted because he adores Ryuji’s profession and idolizes him, while also disliking the fact that he doesn’t fit the standards of the gang. On one of the days Ryuji is still there, Noboru and the gang capture a stray cat, kill it, skin it, and crush its organs in their hands. Upon returning from their killing, Ryuji sees them, but doesn’t suspect anything. Once Ryuji’s leave is over, he returns to his ship, the Rakuyo, and sails away. Ryuji returns in the winter, where he intends to stay on land due to his love for Fusako by proposing to her. However, Ryuji is still heartbroken about leaving his sailing life and likes to tell stories of his tales whenever he can. Everything comes to a head when one night Fusako and Ryuji are making love in the dark when they spy the light of the peep hole and find Noboru sleeping there. Once he’s found out, Noboru believes Ryuji will give him a beating (one Fusako even directed), but is likely even more shamed when it results in a comforting talk from Ryuji. Betrayed by his idol, Noboru goes to his gang with all the wrongs that Ryuji committed, and the gang concocts a plan to drug and kill Ryuji. The day of the wedding, Noboru lures Ryuji out to meet the gang by the docks, where they get on a train, hike through a tunnel, and arrive on a desolate hill overlooking the sea. Ryuji is somewhat suspicious, but enjoys the fact that they were interested in his sailor tales, so he begins discussing all of his adventures. While he is speaking, Ryuji begins to second guess his decision to stay on land. Then, Noboru offers him tea laced with sleeping pills, which he drinks, and the gang’s plans are set in motion.
In this novel, Mishima has concocted a deftly violent, intriguing, and impassioned piece of literature. There are moments that are rendered in absolutely terrifying detail (i.e. the cat scene), and his understanding of violence, love, and betrayal are striking. What interested me was the near irony of belief of some of the boys in the gang and the way they treated fathers. Fathers, in their eyes, were scum and because they were scum, nothing they could do would save them from their own being. While some of the boy’s hatred stemmed justifiably (i.e. parents beating them or absent), it was noted at least one of the boys had a loving father that prayed with them. From an outside perspective, this type of thinking is completely illogical, though when Ryuji began to step into the role of being a father, he was lumped in with the rest of them. I found it to be an interesting take on how the identity of someone can be what people hate even though they did nothing wrong. In this case, Fusako had an agency look into Ryuji’s past and found nothing but an upstanding sailor and man. Mishima thus constructs an ideal man: no debts, faithful, hard-working, doesn’t reprimand, strong, and outgoing. And yet, the ideal is still the death of him in the eyes of the gang. In some ways, the gang’s thought process is contradictory in that the boys couldn’t be alive if not for their fathers and yet the boys utterly despise them. Also, Mishima even goes out to say that the boys come from well-to-do backgrounds commenting on their large lunches, and yet Mishima demonstrates an evil inside of the boys. The structure of the novel leads itself to being masterly crafted, with not only the seasons factoring into the tone of the novel (i.e. summer = passion, winter = violence), but in the way the novel expertly cuts off once the reader knows the inevitable. After having read only a handful of Mishima’s novels, I can certainly tell I will enjoy the rest. Final Rating: 5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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