by Max Parker
July 11, 2023
Max Parker is a queer writer from the Pacific Northwest currently living in Brooklyn. Max holds an MFA from Stony Brook University, and reads for Split Lip Magazine and West Trade Review. Their work appears or is forthcoming in The Palisades Review, West Trade Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Southampton Review.
Sunrise: Radiant Stories by Erika Kobayashi, trans. from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom; Astra House; 225 pages; $16.00
Erika Kobayashi’s Sunrise, only the second work of the prolific artist to be translated to English, invites the reader to commune alongside a long line of matrilineal power in the face of loss following the development of nuclear power in (and against) Japan during World War II. While death is no stranger in this collection of stories, it is no simple devastation. Loss of life throughout these pages is more frequently than not coupled with birth. It is both nuclear and human, frequently right on top of each other, making it impossible to extricate one from the other. Can birth be a destruction? What new futures does a bomb create? Kobayashi answers by collapsing her generations to one palimpsest of shared blood and knowledge. Stylistically, this concern shows up as repeated dialogue or situations between the present generation and her predecessors, such as a granddaughter feeling the burn of her grandmother’s cremation, a daughter falling victim to the same drug which killed her mother, and a granddaughter dreaming of parallel conversations between her grandmother and herself. The effect is a suggested immortality in shared trauma—that which kills one’s ancestors also kills a part of them, repeatedly.
Sunrise contains eleven stories in total, the majority of which move quickly with punch, and present their history as matter of fact, that which is inseparable from the present moment. Narrators frequently remain unnamed throughout their respective stories, typically identifying the matriarch’s name over their own, the speaker often functioning primarily as a mouthpiece rather than a primary subject. This has both an equalizing and subjugating effect. Each speaker is agent in her ability to share the story of her family and thus actively claim her history, while also defined by her mother and grandmother’s positionality. Individual identity in this landscape becomes an afterthought in favor of the family structure. Halfway through the eponymous opening story “Sunrise,” which involves a lineage directly measured against the blasts of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August, 1945, Kobayashi offhandedly writes, “I should probably mention that the fourth of these daughters was me. For this is the story of my mother.” In translator Brian Bergstrom’s afterword, the reader learns “Sunrise,” in addition to several other pieces in the collection, were originally distributed to gallery visitors during shows in which Kobayashi, who is also a visual artist, included corresponding objects of personal significance such as her late grandmother’s unfinished knitting project alongside her responding continuation of this yarn, a to-scale recreation of the circumference of the world’s first nuclear bomb. Kobayashi, with this context, then becomes a character in her own right, immortalized not only by her predecessors, but by her own written word as well.
It is not uncommon throughout this collection for objects to glow, glitter, or burn—nor is it considered particularly sensational. Nuclear energy and its defining trauma are incorporated into each family’s history as if a character of its own, to the point history infects the present; there is no lineage throughout the collection that does not also contain the corresponding nuclear lineage in Japan. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” readers witness a failed birth in the midst of the Nagasaki explosion. Here Kobayashi is most direct and by result most salient in her linkage of baby to bomb, one dead, one alive: the mother’s hope for her child so strong she becomes fascinated with the creation of the uranium bomb despite its destruction. The miscarried child—“her bomb”—then amplifies the horror of the bombed city, and thus its ongoing impact, localized and personified in the mother’s extreme grief. In perhaps the most striking craft move throughout the entire book, “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey” names only Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not the narrator nor her stillborn child—equating the destruction of the two cities to the “American scientists [succeeding] in their birth” while the narrator continues to be haunted with the lost life of her would-be salvation, her unnamed child.
The collection is dominated by two novella-length stories, “Precious Stones” and “Shedding,” which take up more than half the total page space. These longer works do heavier lifting than the rest of the stories not only thanks to their length and subsequent allowed character development, but also in their implications between recognizing one’s mortality against the natural world—a concern surely on many reader’s minds in a re-evaluated, post-pandemic world. In the first novella, “Precious Stones,” our unnamed narrator visits a radium hot spring to celebrate their mother’s newfound health, her cancer in remission after radiation therapy. This equaling of radiation as a means for both healing and wasting is a common thread throughout the entire collection, though most straightforward here. Meanwhile, our narrator dreams of her grandmother, the two connected by the glow of an ancestral jewel made of radioactive ore. The ambiguity between past and present generations here works more effectively than in other stories since the blending of characters takes place only between waking and dreaming life, a distinction that is often muddled in other stories for the reader to parse on their own between pronouns and muted context. While this muddling is indeed the intention, it nevertheless disrupts the reading experience. When this blurring is allowed space to develop, however, readers are invited into exciting, original moments of ambiguity. As the narrator in “Precious Stones” dreams of her grandmother, the close, first-person narration dissolves the boundaries between their two beings to the point where the narrator’s grandmother literally speaks the same words as the narrator in the same situation. Both seek immortality from a man named Quartz, a radioactive, shining man who sleeps with women in exchange for elongated life. Each woman wishes to be remembered forever, despite her feared averageness. The concern of immortality, then, is kissing the radium and surviving in spite of it, not being defined by this action or one’s limitations but rather continuing on—further perpetuated still in her mother’s cured cancer.
“Shedding,” the second novella-length work, centers on the question of what triumphant death may look like in the face of disease. By borrowing the language of gyokusai, an act of honorable suicide before battle in World War II, the author renders the infected unable to communicate, completely losing their language. The most compelling aspect of this story is not the easy COVID-19 comparison (the characters wear fabric masks to protect against the mysterious transmission), but rather the repeated notice of insects and the subsequent elevation of tension as characters worry (or hope) about the impending possibility they may “shed” and become an exoskeleton of their former self: empty and without real responsibility to humanity (and in turn, their history). Throughout the ongoing panic, Kobayashi turns reader’s attention toward ants covered in dust, flies on sanitary napkin dispensers, and inchworms in the bath, dialing up the anxiety of impending transformation. Not unlike the throughline in “Precious Stones,” Kobayashi frequently presents both the reflection and refraction of existence: it’s up to the reader to accept the death alongside the birth, the expected alongside the overturned, and to accept each as triumphant in their own circumstance.
Sunrise as a collected work stumbles when ignoring its larger contextual elements: Kobayashi is only revealed as an autobiographical source in the translator’s afterword, easy to miss if readers skip auxiliary pages or are generally unaware with Erika Kobayashi’s body of work as a multimedia artist. Many shorter stories here lack stakes and seem to float in mid-air when speaker, subject, and family history are all blended together, or only clarified halfway through the story. Further direct treatment or owning of Kobayashi’s lived reality would have surely helped balance this concern. As it stands, Sunrise shines in its longer narratives, quick-paced but minutely focused in the built world, often repetitive and image driven. Erika Kobayashi boldly equates babies to bombs, waiting to darkness, and lack of eye contact with death. There is urgency here. She asks the reader to reexamine their expectations of connoted reality and in turn take agency over one’s passive trauma. That which is invisible is still present.
©2023 West Trade Review
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“This Invisible Thing Called Radiation”: The Devastating Glow of Immortality in Erika Kobayashi’s Sunrise
FICTION REVIEW
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