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Edge by Koji Suzuki

2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2013.0236

1945-8134

Michael A. Morrison,

Philippine History and Culture

Georgina Harding Painter of Silence Bloomsbury Shortlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, this elegant novel is set in post–World War II communist Romania. Deaf and mute Augustin, a foundling on the hospital steps, uses his drawings to bring to life a past he shares with nurse Safta at her family’s country manor. Harding’s gentle prose elicits a powerful story of remembrance and language. march–april 2013 • 145 Eduardo Halfon The Polish Boxer Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead, & Anne McLean, tr. Bellevue Literary Press According to Eduardo Halfon, “All literature is fiction disguised as memoir. Or perhaps memoir disguised as fiction.” A Guatemalan literature professor relates his travel experiences and personal encounters, employing a mix of finely nuanced prose and humor. Nota Bene and those who are provided with the gift of a compelling tongue. Here, no story stands alone. The legend of Jason and Hypsipyle leads to Sigurd and Gundrun, which leads to the Argo and the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen; stories are doubled, as though perceived through a Viking sunstone. Christopher Willard Calgary Koji Suzuki. Edge. Camellia Nieh & Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, tr. New York. Vertical. 2012. isbn 9781934287385 In Edge, Koji Suzuki devises an inspired premise and pummels it half to death. Suzuki has been touted as Japan’s answer to Stephen King. Wrong. Suzuki may be the answer, but King is not the question. Suzuki lacks King’s gift for weaving seamless stories peopled with multidimensional characters. More important, Suzuki dislikes horror, describing himself in a 2005 interview as “the complete opposite of a ‘horror’ sort of person.” Yet Suzuki made his name with the 1991 horror-mystery Ringu (translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley as Ring [2004], which inspired Hideo Nakata’s sublimely creepy 1998 film as well as innumerable sequels and subsequent variants in diverse media, as delineated by Denis Meikle in The Ring Companion (2005). But Suzuki’s sequels, Rasen (1995; Eng. Spiral, 2005) and Rupu (1998; Eng. Loop, 2006), translated by Glynne Walley, jettisoned the horror trappings of Ringu for those of sf, a development that has continued through Edge. The novel’s major strength is protagonist Saeko Kuriyama. Never having known her mother, Saeko grew up devoted to her father, Sinochiro . He raised her to be knowledgeable and inquisitive, peppering her with minilectures on topics ranging from ancient mysteries to quantum physics. Then, when she was seventeen , he vanished—a trauma that forever warped her psyche. Now, thirty-five years old and recently divorced, Saeko remains obsessed by his disappearance, deeply neurotic, and detached from life. In her capacity as a freelance journalist , she is about to be pulled by the irresistible force of proliferating disappearances throughout Japan into a confrontation with no less a mystery than the ontological structure of the universe itself—which, events hint, may be unraveling. Unlikely as it may sound, the culprit is mathematics. Physicist Naoki Isogai struggles to explain: “Apparently the value of Pi has changed.” Worse, “[t]he Riemann hypothesis has collapsed. . . . It’s a disaster, a nightmare scenario.” 146 World Literature Today reviews In the hands of a master of hard sf like Greg Egan, so arcane a premise might succeed. In Suzuki’s, it doesn’t. One quickly realizes that the novel ’s “science”—incarnated in bits of technobabble like “In scientific terms, what will happen is the instantaneous scattering of all matter at a quantum level. All structure as we know it will be lost”—is wildly wonky. As in his previous novel, Kamigami No Promenade (2008; Eng. Promenade of the Gods, 2008), Suzuki undermines Edge with awkward prose, inconsistent characterization, and inept metaphors. He is irrepressibly redundant, repeating information as though writing for readers with ADD. Further potholes fill the narrative road: information dumps on a wild range of topics, including Japanese folklore, black holes, plate tectonics, the history of hieroglyphs, the origin of sight and the evolution of the eye, geomagnetism, antimatter , wormholes, sunspots, the demise of the dinosaurs, enough ancientcivilization mysteries to delight Erich von Däniken, and mathematics. Lots of mathematics. Still, Edge is worth reading for its insights into twenty-first-century Japanese attitudes toward apocalypse . These attitudes contrast...