“When the sun sets and the lamps come on in the streets, I often think about all the people living in the city. Most of them are strangers, but I know they’re connected by mysterious threads I can’t even imagine… I think that if I could trace them all to their source, they would lead me to a mysterious, shadowy place at the very core of the city.”
Tomihiko Morimi has chosen Japan’s old capital, Kyoto, to be
the setting of this book as he spins four clockwork spooky stories revolving
around a curio shop called Hourendou and the legend of kitsune as its central
theme. There are magical lanterns, wild parties, rain, a beast wearing people’s
faces, rain, a water-craving monster, and lots and lots of rain. It’s a circus
of a novel—exotic, bizarre, and thrilling. It reminded me of Guillermo del
Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities where a certain, insignificant item
connected to the curio shop can have a domino effect on the lives of the
stories’ characters.
The four short stories are quite independent of each other,
but they share the universe of Kyoto. They are as follows:
1. Fox Tales (4.5/5)
Mutou, a sophomore student decides to work part-time at a
curio shop called Hourendou. His job is basically about making deliveries
to clients. One of them is called Amagi, a recluse living in a large mansion at
the top of hill. Amagi keeps asking Mutou for favors, exchanges of items of
little importance. One item after another until Amagi gets his hands on
something unexchangeable.
It’s my absolute favorite. Morimi has invested tons of time
to build up a kind of ambience that is eerie, suffocating, and extremely tense.
However, the structure of the story doesn’t allow for a pronounced ‘shock value’
since readers knew from the very first pages that the temperamental Amagi was
up to no good.
2. The Dragon in the Fruit (2/5)
An unnamed character, also a student in a university, is infatuated
by a senior student. The narrator retells the fascinating stories his older
friend used to tell him before he vanished.
3. The Phantom (3/5)
Again, an unnamed narrator works as a tutor to the younger kid
of a liquor store’s owner. As the narrator goes to the Nishida Spirits where the
house is, he develops a habit of walking down the intricate maze-like alleys of
the neighborhood. Meanwhile, a rumor has spread that a ‘phantom’ has been
attacking passersby at night.
4. The Water God (4/5)
An unnamed narrator, the son of one of three siblings, waits
patiently along with his uncles during the wake of his grandfather for the arrival
of the family’s heirloom preserved by Hourendou.
The collection of Fox Tales isn’t about invoking a negative
reaction through fear or horror or shock. All what Morimi was trying to do was churning
the humdrum texture of everyday life to make it more layered, meaningful, and
mystical.
To do so, Morimi has made ‘a departure from the departure
from the departure’ when it comes to the source material. Many Japanese writers
tend to take a traditional folktale, or an element of it, and turn it into
something new, something cute (like Vulpix in Pokémon) or powerful (like the
Nine-Tailed Beast in Naruto). However, Morimi wants to return to the original,
awe-inspiring, bizarre, and even sinister nature of Japan’s traditional
folktales, kind of like the Grimm Brothers’ original tales. (Hence, the second
departure).
Even so, Morimi feels that by duplicating the source material would betray what the text intended which is to brush the monotonous reality with a stroke of charm and magic. So, he created his own monsters keeping the spirits of the old in them. (the third departure).
Fox Tales is very rich in Japanese culture and its
symbolism. How couldn’t it be when the setting is in Kyoto with all its shrines
and temples and festivals and rituals and vending machines and the neon-lighted
stores upon stores fighting for space in its alleyways?
One of the issues I’ve encountered was the subtlety of the
theme buried within the folds of the four stories.
“What is the reading of a text except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests…”
—Italo Calvino (If on a winter’s night a traveler)
In light of the previous quote, I had so much trouble trying
to thematically glue the four stories together. Indeed, there are some bridges
between them, but they’re so shaky and insignificant in the grand scheme of
things. All I could come up with are sub-themes concerning the minor characters
like maturity, compulsive lying, imagination, the monotony of everyday life, the
influence of history and its tales on the present. Perhaps, the missing piece that
could bind the tales is the necessity of the spiritual/magical in our daily
lives.
________________________
Summary:
Due to the relatively long span of its tales and their open-ended
nature, Fox Tales might not receive the reaction it’s asking for. In
other words, it might not be to the majority of the readers’ liking.
That doesn’t mean Fox Tales is not a book unworthy of
reading. There are so many tricks and hidden meaning and even some cunning and
clouded plot twists up its sleeve for serious readers up for second reads.
Fox Tales is all about that dark corner in everyone’s mind about the uncanny and the unsolved that wish for no explanation lest they lose their magic. It’s like Spirited Away meets Junji Ito meets One Thousand and One Nights in the sense of stories within stories.
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