“He writes the kanji “hito 人” — “human being” — on his napkin. Then he tells me, “As we learn in school, this character represents two people standing leaning on each other. This is the world of humans. We are not alone and we must know how to coexist with the people around us.”
In this brand new novel, Montreal-based author Aki Shimazaki offers a gentle incursion into her native country, at the foot of Mount Daisen, in a blended Japanese family. Acceptance of others, love and self-esteem reign in this short and tender story that we devour without even realizing it.
On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Suzuko finds an injured sparrow in the garden. It will never be able to fly again, but she hopes to be able to heal it. It could even learn words, she is told, if Suzuko is patient enough. The teenager lends herself without hesitation to the game by whispering, every day, in the ear of this fragile sparrow whose sounds of the Japanese translation, “suzume”, evoke those of her own first name.
She calls the animal Urushi, after a natural lacquer used in an ancient Japanese art, the kintsugiwhich involves restoring broken ceramics. Su-zu-ko, Tô-ru, U-ru-shishe methodically repeats to the sparrow every morning. Suzuko and Tôru, the one she secretly loves, united by theurushi.
Shortly after her birth, Suzuko was adopted by her aunt Anzu, already the mother of a ten-year-old boy, Tôru. The two cousins were raised as brother and sister. Despite their blood relationship, the young girl has had an overflowing love for Tôru since her earliest childhood: gentle, strong, intelligent, caring, he brings together all the qualities. Although Suzuko’s feelings do not seem reciprocal, it seems essential to her to declare her love to her adoptive brother. Will she find an opportune moment and a receptive ear?
Wavering between joys and disappointments, courage and shyness, the teenager skims her youthful dreams in a few months. “I regret not being able to repair his wing in the same way as a broken bowl,” she laments, thinking of the little wounded animal healing in her room. It is that lives cannot be controlled like objects. Human bonds cannot be forced.
The initial situation is clear and unequivocal, the sentences are frank and limpid. A few poetic turns of phrase offer us a pause. In “Urushi” we encounter a writing style reminiscent of other Japanese fictions, such as Tsubaki stationery by Ito Ogawa. The text is full of metaphors and symbols, provoking reflections and meditations that go far beyond the one hundred and thirty pages of the novel, and which inhabit us once the book is closed.
Aki Shimazaki offers, in this final volume of his pentalogy A bell without a clappera short story that stands on its own — no need to go and read “ Suzuran », « Semi », « No-no-yuri » or « Niré » to grasp the scope ofUrushi and its great gentleness, although its soothing tone makes you want to immerse yourself in all the work of the Montreal author.