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Keshiki - new voices from Japan #6
At the Edge of the Woods
In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three settles into a house at the edge of the woods where they hope to make a life. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned and Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family’s home to give birth to a second child, father and son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods and processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with a menacing disposition visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.
An allegory for societal alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods sees the Mishima Prize-winning writer’s trademark understatement used to brutal, brilliant effect. A psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the fear, paranoia, and violence of contemporary life.
An allegory for societal alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods sees the Mishima Prize-winning writer’s trademark understatement used to brutal, brilliant effect. A psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the fear, paranoia, and violence of contemporary life.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
32 people are currently reading
6070 people want to read
About the author
Masatsugu Ono
9 books83 followersMasatsugu Ono (in Japanese, 小野 正嗣) maintains a steady output of fiction while working as a professor and researcher of Francophone literature. After doing graduate work at the University of Tokyo, Ono earned his PhD at the University of Paris VIII. In 2001, he published his first novel, Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers. His second novel, Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay), won the Mishima Yukio Prize. In addition to writing other works of fiction such as Mori no hazure de (At the Edge of the Forest), Maikurobasu (Microbus) and Shishiwatari-bana (Lion’s Tread Point), he has also translated works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye into Japanese. Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.
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May 18, 2023
‘I move with the trees in the breeze / I know that time is elastic’
-Fiona Apple
For those looking for a dose of sheer existential dread, At the Edge of the Woods from Akutagawa Prize winner Masatsugu Ono is quite the surrealist foray into anxiety and alienation. A father and son live on the cusp of a dense forest in a foreign country while the mother stays with her parents in their home country during a complicated pregnancy, yet their woodland dwelling is not the idyllic place it would seem. The forest is alive with sounds and menace, objects go missing, strange people appear then vanish, and even the local postman is a cryptic figure with a mouth full of shifting teeth that tell violent tales of imps that lurk in the trees. The short novel, separated in four episodic arcs, reads as simultaneously wicked and whimsical, with surrealist imagery and figurative language that simply soars while unsettling, all beautifully brought to life in English in translation from Juliet Winters Carpenter. At the Edge of the Woods casts a sinister gaze on the violence in modern life, from climate and refugee crises to the anxieties of caregiving as Ono constructs a world where the past threatens the present and the lines between reality and fantasy blur in a novel that viciously tears at your sanity yet still leaves you with a feeling of hope.
‘The sound that came from the woods, piercing the night, was trying to strangle my heart, too’
This slim volume packs quite a punch. It feels at times like an adult fairy tale, other times a surrealist nightmare, but always so poetically poignant as it probes at commonplace fears. The narrator, a father who has found himself increasingly estranged from his young son due to his difficulty handling the frequent tantrums and emotional outbursts of the boy, chronicles his tenuous grip on reality and time as episode after episode of surreal happenings befall him. The forest behind there house seems to be alive, making a constant sound that unsettles hm and the boy like ‘something captured and confined there was seeking to emerge.’ The sound, he decides, is ‘the sound someone makes who’s sick at heart. A sound like coughing. A rope tied unevenly in knots, trying to strangle you from the inside. Escape is impossible.’ Or, perhaps, it is the violence of the past coming from the castle and making itself known in the preset:
By the end of the novel it is the sound of sinister laughter. The novel refuses easy and direct explanation, choosing instead to remain open to interpretations with the uncertainty aiding the anxious effect of the novel. One thing is for sure though, Ono’s descriptions of the forest are exquisite, truly bringing it alive through his prose in ways the make you hear the autumnal crunch of leaves but also finding yourself trapped within its horrors:
The forest hides the castle of old feudal lords where, later, resistance fighters are said to have died and the locals claim imps hide there and steal everything from mail to babies. These stories are always told ‘with a vague smile, so we couldn’t be sure if they were serious or joking,’ though the tales fill the couple with enough dread that, after a miscarriage, the mother decides to return to her parents home for her next pregnancy. Much in the way size is relative and unstable in fairy tales, we never get a sense of the size of the forest, which seems to hide entire villages in its valleys and rolling hills. This aspect appears elsewhere, too, such as the mail carrier being a different size every time he appears, as well as his teeth being larger or smaller, and occasionally with multiple rows like a shark.
‘More was rent by that sound than the night that embraced our helpless selves.’
However, the size of the forest seemingly devouring villages is replicated when the mother looks out her window on the train to see within the rolling hills that ‘village after village appeared, only to then be swallowed in the waves and quickly disappear,’ and civilization being consumed by nature starts to reveal itself as a climate crisis motif. ‘The road didn’t lead anywhere. It just stopped, ’ the mother observes seeing a highway end abruptly from, ‘was it unfinished? She didn’t think so. It had been destroyed. Could the trucks not see where they were headed? Why didn’t they stop?’ The image of humans hurling themselves towards a disaster of their own making is evident, and on the tv the father frequently tunes in to see images of flash floods destroying neighborhoods and lives, bodies floating down rivers as the innocent scream.
‘Individual tragedies were swallowed by the great torrent of death.’
While much of the novel concerns the claustrophobic homefront beleaguered by uneasy interactions with locals, a greater catastrophe is always on the peripheries of the novel. ‘War and armed conflict showed no sign of ending,’ the father observes, with the battles and executions of the past continuing even in the present. His feelings of alienation (a foreigner in the country he now resides) is enlarged by not understanding the languages spoken on the various news channels, but he observes that grief is a great equalizer with no need of language to explain the horrors he sees on the news programs.
Words themselves are key to the novel, with them sometimes appearing in physical space. In the final chapter the father is visited by a dual-figure that feels like a character out of a Haruki Murakami novel—a dwarf who you can simultaneously observe his front and back side—who’s nearly indiscerble language and grammar leaves literal scraps of words upon the kitchen floor to pick up and arrange like a sort of code breaking exercise. When the father finds himself othered, alienated and generally confused by the people around him he describes a conversation as ‘All he delivered were words that did not adhere to the symbols on the page.’ He’s directionless without the language to decode his reality. However ‘words’ take on multiple layers of symbolism in the novel, which also examines how the words we use reshape the world and our rationality for our actions. He witnesses a pyre in the forest from the passing refugees that seem to unceasingly stream through the forest and notes of the burning objects ‘they were not human. Or perhaps in a sense they were indeed human: they were leftover words, words of no consequence.’ We find linguistic escapes from thinking of others as human, using words that dehumanize or objectify people to numb the reality of genocides and other mass tragedies, or to enable these horrors.
‘I had already been invaded to the marrow with distorted thinking.’
As the surrealist scenes pile up, the narrator begins to question his grip on reality. The world he sees and what he believes to be true are becoming incongruous. Though the father is no Jack Torrance from The Shining, instead becoming more passive and detached as the novel progresses, not unlike Murakami protagonists who tend to take mounting weirdness in stride. Truthfully this aspect of the book was weirdly comforting, because looking at the world and politics lately its like “hey, uhhhh…everyone is seeing this, right?” while society is just coasting along as usual. ‘Was the source of this confusion in the exterior world or in me?’ he questions, as he even wonders if he is losing his grip on time. This is critical to the novel, as Ono has an excellent linguistic ability to sashay between past and present, blending it together until time and events are obfuscated like ‘a single event, mixed and rolled out over and over.’
‘The sound that came from the woods, piercing the night, was trying to strangle my heart, too’
The surreal nature of the narrative grants the forest a complex metaphorical impression, and ‘just as I was part of the woods, the woods were also part of me.’ The father is on the cusp of new parenthood, just as much as he is on the cusp of society, and living on the cusp of the mysterious forest full of possibility and potential terror. The forest is also womblike, with the father wondering if the son’s affinity for the forest is also indicative of him seeming to regress emotionally as the new baby draws near, ‘because he wished to return to a time and a place when happiness was not segmented, when there was no need to understand it as such?’ The forest takes on many meanings.
Pregnancy and motherhood are central themes to the novel, depicted as both miraculous and menacing. This peaks when the man witnesses a dead pregnant woman he assumes to be one of the passing refugees being literally devoured by a stomach. There are some unfortunate aspects to this novel’s focus on maternity, however, and there is some awkward objectification of women’s bodies as well as the often eyebrow-raising moments of a man using breasts and breast milk as symbols in horror sequences. Just a strong fixation with breasts that reads as a choice that maybe didn’t have to happen. As well as frequently using overweight women as a negative symbol where it’s like, okay man, uncool, please lay off. This novel very much dives into the apprehensions and fears of becoming a parent, but in a very specific way about a man fearing it will change his relationship with his wife, his current son, while also seeing the world around him as a hostile place and wondering why anyone would want to bring a child into it. Itis a world he sees to believe that ‘the weak had to be expunged, wiped out,’ and his feelings of inadequacy and alienation make him fear his annihilation cannot be far off.
‘if Eros, the giver of love, never feels love himself, then perhaps the Grim Reaper, who brings death, will never know death.’
This novel lends itself to a lot of theorizing, much like a David Lynch film, and the subtle singposts point towards the novel’s inconclusiveness leave a universe of explanation open. Much like the mysteries of existence in general. Who is the pregnant woman, for example, and what do we really know about the existence of the son and mother. When reality is fragile, what clues undo our assumptions? While a fairly threatening novel, there is a sense of hope. Nature still blooms even despite all the poison the man puts down to kill it, and a tender moment at the end with a sales clerk reminds us there is goodness to be found in all the darkness. If I had complained in my previous review on Three that the end was too tidy and convenient, this one says “what about no resolution and little ending?” Which I’m into. Ono is also a translator for Marie NDiaye, and her work and this novel have a tonal kinship that I enjoy. This is quite the blast of existential dread, but a poetically gorgeous short novel that frays the nerves and asks the big questions.
3.5/5
‘Light bestows sleep: I think those are the words of the German Swiss writer Robert Walser. Whereas vast, powerful darkness awakens us. the inviolability of darkness makes us want to enter deep inside it, he said. Darkness shakes us, kindles desires we never knew we had.’
-Fiona Apple
For those looking for a dose of sheer existential dread, At the Edge of the Woods from Akutagawa Prize winner Masatsugu Ono is quite the surrealist foray into anxiety and alienation. A father and son live on the cusp of a dense forest in a foreign country while the mother stays with her parents in their home country during a complicated pregnancy, yet their woodland dwelling is not the idyllic place it would seem. The forest is alive with sounds and menace, objects go missing, strange people appear then vanish, and even the local postman is a cryptic figure with a mouth full of shifting teeth that tell violent tales of imps that lurk in the trees. The short novel, separated in four episodic arcs, reads as simultaneously wicked and whimsical, with surrealist imagery and figurative language that simply soars while unsettling, all beautifully brought to life in English in translation from Juliet Winters Carpenter. At the Edge of the Woods casts a sinister gaze on the violence in modern life, from climate and refugee crises to the anxieties of caregiving as Ono constructs a world where the past threatens the present and the lines between reality and fantasy blur in a novel that viciously tears at your sanity yet still leaves you with a feeling of hope.
‘The sound that came from the woods, piercing the night, was trying to strangle my heart, too’
This slim volume packs quite a punch. It feels at times like an adult fairy tale, other times a surrealist nightmare, but always so poetically poignant as it probes at commonplace fears. The narrator, a father who has found himself increasingly estranged from his young son due to his difficulty handling the frequent tantrums and emotional outbursts of the boy, chronicles his tenuous grip on reality and time as episode after episode of surreal happenings befall him. The forest behind there house seems to be alive, making a constant sound that unsettles hm and the boy like ‘something captured and confined there was seeking to emerge.’ The sound, he decides, is ‘the sound someone makes who’s sick at heart. A sound like coughing. A rope tied unevenly in knots, trying to strangle you from the inside. Escape is impossible.’ Or, perhaps, it is the violence of the past coming from the castle and making itself known in the preset:
‘it was the former residence of the feudal lords who ruled this area several centuries ago. It’s possible that the coughing from the woods was the echo of sounds made there long ago. Sounds of cannon fire to repel enemy troops who aimed to seize control of the land. Perhaps the woods trembled at the unexpected revival of memories of that sound, searing physical memories.'
By the end of the novel it is the sound of sinister laughter. The novel refuses easy and direct explanation, choosing instead to remain open to interpretations with the uncertainty aiding the anxious effect of the novel. One thing is for sure though, Ono’s descriptions of the forest are exquisite, truly bringing it alive through his prose in ways the make you hear the autumnal crunch of leaves but also finding yourself trapped within its horrors:
‘[The trees] pat each other familiarly on the shoulders and back and sometimes wriggle their hips as they hurried ahead… Their whispers spread through the woods like the sound of distant waves. As they traveled, the whispers blotted out not only gaps in consciousness but also the interstices between trees, between branches. Unable to penetrate into the depths of the woods, we would come to a standstill.’
The forest hides the castle of old feudal lords where, later, resistance fighters are said to have died and the locals claim imps hide there and steal everything from mail to babies. These stories are always told ‘with a vague smile, so we couldn’t be sure if they were serious or joking,’ though the tales fill the couple with enough dread that, after a miscarriage, the mother decides to return to her parents home for her next pregnancy. Much in the way size is relative and unstable in fairy tales, we never get a sense of the size of the forest, which seems to hide entire villages in its valleys and rolling hills. This aspect appears elsewhere, too, such as the mail carrier being a different size every time he appears, as well as his teeth being larger or smaller, and occasionally with multiple rows like a shark.
‘More was rent by that sound than the night that embraced our helpless selves.’
However, the size of the forest seemingly devouring villages is replicated when the mother looks out her window on the train to see within the rolling hills that ‘village after village appeared, only to then be swallowed in the waves and quickly disappear,’ and civilization being consumed by nature starts to reveal itself as a climate crisis motif. ‘The road didn’t lead anywhere. It just stopped, ’ the mother observes seeing a highway end abruptly from, ‘was it unfinished? She didn’t think so. It had been destroyed. Could the trucks not see where they were headed? Why didn’t they stop?’ The image of humans hurling themselves towards a disaster of their own making is evident, and on the tv the father frequently tunes in to see images of flash floods destroying neighborhoods and lives, bodies floating down rivers as the innocent scream.
‘Individual tragedies were swallowed by the great torrent of death.’
While much of the novel concerns the claustrophobic homefront beleaguered by uneasy interactions with locals, a greater catastrophe is always on the peripheries of the novel. ‘War and armed conflict showed no sign of ending,’ the father observes, with the battles and executions of the past continuing even in the present. His feelings of alienation (a foreigner in the country he now resides) is enlarged by not understanding the languages spoken on the various news channels, but he observes that grief is a great equalizer with no need of language to explain the horrors he sees on the news programs.
‘ the images on the news programs from different countries all looked the same. Black smoke rose and buildings collapsed. People, too, seemed on the point of collapse. Mothers sobbed or wailed; children bawled, teary-eyed; despair etched irreparable cracks in the faces of the old. There was no need to understand the words’
Words themselves are key to the novel, with them sometimes appearing in physical space. In the final chapter the father is visited by a dual-figure that feels like a character out of a Haruki Murakami novel—a dwarf who you can simultaneously observe his front and back side—who’s nearly indiscerble language and grammar leaves literal scraps of words upon the kitchen floor to pick up and arrange like a sort of code breaking exercise. When the father finds himself othered, alienated and generally confused by the people around him he describes a conversation as ‘All he delivered were words that did not adhere to the symbols on the page.’ He’s directionless without the language to decode his reality. However ‘words’ take on multiple layers of symbolism in the novel, which also examines how the words we use reshape the world and our rationality for our actions. He witnesses a pyre in the forest from the passing refugees that seem to unceasingly stream through the forest and notes of the burning objects ‘they were not human. Or perhaps in a sense they were indeed human: they were leftover words, words of no consequence.’ We find linguistic escapes from thinking of others as human, using words that dehumanize or objectify people to numb the reality of genocides and other mass tragedies, or to enable these horrors.
‘I had already been invaded to the marrow with distorted thinking.’
As the surrealist scenes pile up, the narrator begins to question his grip on reality. The world he sees and what he believes to be true are becoming incongruous. Though the father is no Jack Torrance from The Shining, instead becoming more passive and detached as the novel progresses, not unlike Murakami protagonists who tend to take mounting weirdness in stride. Truthfully this aspect of the book was weirdly comforting, because looking at the world and politics lately its like “hey, uhhhh…everyone is seeing this, right?” while society is just coasting along as usual. ‘Was the source of this confusion in the exterior world or in me?’ he questions, as he even wonders if he is losing his grip on time. This is critical to the novel, as Ono has an excellent linguistic ability to sashay between past and present, blending it together until time and events are obfuscated like ‘a single event, mixed and rolled out over and over.’
‘The sound that came from the woods, piercing the night, was trying to strangle my heart, too’
The surreal nature of the narrative grants the forest a complex metaphorical impression, and ‘just as I was part of the woods, the woods were also part of me.’ The father is on the cusp of new parenthood, just as much as he is on the cusp of society, and living on the cusp of the mysterious forest full of possibility and potential terror. The forest is also womblike, with the father wondering if the son’s affinity for the forest is also indicative of him seeming to regress emotionally as the new baby draws near, ‘because he wished to return to a time and a place when happiness was not segmented, when there was no need to understand it as such?’ The forest takes on many meanings.
Pregnancy and motherhood are central themes to the novel, depicted as both miraculous and menacing. This peaks when the man witnesses a dead pregnant woman he assumes to be one of the passing refugees being literally devoured by a stomach. There are some unfortunate aspects to this novel’s focus on maternity, however, and there is some awkward objectification of women’s bodies as well as the often eyebrow-raising moments of a man using breasts and breast milk as symbols in horror sequences. Just a strong fixation with breasts that reads as a choice that maybe didn’t have to happen. As well as frequently using overweight women as a negative symbol where it’s like, okay man, uncool, please lay off. This novel very much dives into the apprehensions and fears of becoming a parent, but in a very specific way about a man fearing it will change his relationship with his wife, his current son, while also seeing the world around him as a hostile place and wondering why anyone would want to bring a child into it. Itis a world he sees to believe that ‘the weak had to be expunged, wiped out,’ and his feelings of inadequacy and alienation make him fear his annihilation cannot be far off.
‘if Eros, the giver of love, never feels love himself, then perhaps the Grim Reaper, who brings death, will never know death.’
This novel lends itself to a lot of theorizing, much like a David Lynch film, and the subtle singposts point towards the novel’s inconclusiveness leave a universe of explanation open. Much like the mysteries of existence in general. Who is the pregnant woman, for example, and what do we really know about the existence of the son and mother. When reality is fragile, what clues undo our assumptions? While a fairly threatening novel, there is a sense of hope. Nature still blooms even despite all the poison the man puts down to kill it, and a tender moment at the end with a sales clerk reminds us there is goodness to be found in all the darkness. If I had complained in my previous review on Three that the end was too tidy and convenient, this one says “what about no resolution and little ending?” Which I’m into. Ono is also a translator for Marie NDiaye, and her work and this novel have a tonal kinship that I enjoy. This is quite the blast of existential dread, but a poetically gorgeous short novel that frays the nerves and asks the big questions.
3.5/5
‘Light bestows sleep: I think those are the words of the German Swiss writer Robert Walser. Whereas vast, powerful darkness awakens us. the inviolability of darkness makes us want to enter deep inside it, he said. Darkness shakes us, kindles desires we never knew we had.’
November 18, 2022
when i was a child i had a recurring nightmare that i had to cross a large forest in the pitch-dark night, completely alone, knowing that there were dangerous figures just out of the reach of my vision and just beyond the narrow path, and when i had finally reached the outskirts and considered myself safe, i would suddenly notice the eyes of the wicked witch of the west peering out at me. eventually i would see this last image every time i closed my eyes to sleep.
anyway.
what i am trying to say is there is nothing in this life scarier than the goddamn woods.
and also that i was inexplicably afraid of the extremely goofy villain from a hundred year old movie.
and also, yes, this spooked me out a bit.
most of this was kind of Blah, but the last 25% was pretty spot on what i wanted it to be - weird, eerie, perturbing. thematically complex (lots of mother/child stuff here!).
i had a good time!
bottom line: THE WOODS!!!!!
anyway.
what i am trying to say is there is nothing in this life scarier than the goddamn woods.
and also that i was inexplicably afraid of the extremely goofy villain from a hundred year old movie.
and also, yes, this spooked me out a bit.
most of this was kind of Blah, but the last 25% was pretty spot on what i wanted it to be - weird, eerie, perturbing. thematically complex (lots of mother/child stuff here!).
i had a good time!
bottom line: THE WOODS!!!!!
November 18, 2021
Masatsugu Ono’s deeply unsettling novel’s narrated by a father who’s apparently adjusting to life in a strange country, alone with his small son while his wife visits their homeland to prepare for the birth of a new child. Father and son are living in an isolated house on the edge of a small, but dense, wood. A sinister place where nothing’s as it might seem. The wood’s alive with disturbing sounds a fitting accompaniment to a series of uncanny events: mysterious creatures emerge from the trees; objects vanish; pictures on a page come to life; images on the TV screen overflow, threatening to engulf the room. The everyday takes on the quality of a surreal, Lynchian dreamscape and the narrator’s reliability’s increasingly uncertain, Ono’s early references to Robert Walser underlining a sense that the narrator’s grasp on reality’s tenuous at best.
Ono’s constructed a brooding, adult fairy tale, filled with menace, in which bizarre folkloric figures threaten the narrator’s son, and grotesque images surface in buried corners of the wood. The wider world offers no comfort, scenes on the news are filled with desolate, all-too-familiar, scenes: desperate, fleeing refugees; collapsing buildings; and devastating natural disasters. Closer to home there are moments of appalling cruelty. Although the woods reminded me of Japan’s suicide forest with its whispering Yorei, Ono’s made it clear that this is elsewhere, perhaps a psychic space, partly influenced by the stories of people like the Brothers Grimm. But this indeterminate place bears markers of past historical events - a castle that once housed the Resistance, sites suggestive of war and lingering trauma. Ono’s elements slowly combine to form an oblique commentary on the horror underlying contemporary existence. I found Ono’s complex imagery and prose hypnotic, atmospheric and impressive. At times his mix of the weird and the mundane edge towards the Murakami-esque but thankfully without the noir-ish or more self-indulgent, quirkier aspects. This edition’s translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.
Note: Masatsugu Ono’s novel’s not to be confused with an earlier chapbook At the Edge of the Wood which features two of this novel’s four sections.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Two Lines Press for an advance review copy.
Ono’s constructed a brooding, adult fairy tale, filled with menace, in which bizarre folkloric figures threaten the narrator’s son, and grotesque images surface in buried corners of the wood. The wider world offers no comfort, scenes on the news are filled with desolate, all-too-familiar, scenes: desperate, fleeing refugees; collapsing buildings; and devastating natural disasters. Closer to home there are moments of appalling cruelty. Although the woods reminded me of Japan’s suicide forest with its whispering Yorei, Ono’s made it clear that this is elsewhere, perhaps a psychic space, partly influenced by the stories of people like the Brothers Grimm. But this indeterminate place bears markers of past historical events - a castle that once housed the Resistance, sites suggestive of war and lingering trauma. Ono’s elements slowly combine to form an oblique commentary on the horror underlying contemporary existence. I found Ono’s complex imagery and prose hypnotic, atmospheric and impressive. At times his mix of the weird and the mundane edge towards the Murakami-esque but thankfully without the noir-ish or more self-indulgent, quirkier aspects. This edition’s translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.
Note: Masatsugu Ono’s novel’s not to be confused with an earlier chapbook At the Edge of the Wood which features two of this novel’s four sections.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Two Lines Press for an advance review copy.
June 11, 2022
The book evoked a deep unease in me and yet in the end felt redemptive. It honors the strangeness-at-the-edges of everyday family life. It magnifies the terrors of trying to keep a child safe when the world is incomprehensibly strange. The images are startling and breathtaking, however stark and simple the prose.
Then from the darkening sky leaves fell without cease, like mutterings of broken words which, apart from their rejection of meaning, made no attempt to commune. For the most part they were drawn to fallen comrades lying dead on the ground. Some, perhaps unaware that from the moment they left the branch they themselves were dead, took their time falling, scrabbling at the air. Those leaves, due to the weight of the air they scraped away, might make a sound when they struck the ground.
I would say that the combination of unease and redemption was unique but I've read exactly one other book that gave me this precise feeling: Night Theater by Vikram Paralkar. Love them both.
Then from the darkening sky leaves fell without cease, like mutterings of broken words which, apart from their rejection of meaning, made no attempt to commune. For the most part they were drawn to fallen comrades lying dead on the ground. Some, perhaps unaware that from the moment they left the branch they themselves were dead, took their time falling, scrabbling at the air. Those leaves, due to the weight of the air they scraped away, might make a sound when they struck the ground.
I would say that the combination of unease and redemption was unique but I've read exactly one other book that gave me this precise feeling: Night Theater by Vikram Paralkar. Love them both.
June 18, 2022
This is incredibly atmospheric and written with great precision. Ono has a great ability to make disturbingly vivid, uncanny images float up out of nowhere and create a lingering feeling of anxiety. The novel is very short and one gets the feeling that a great deal has been left unsaid. I think it's the right length for what it is, and honestly I can't think of anything to fault this. It's just a small, quiet, frightening work. Masatsugo Ono is a writer of considerable talent and I will interested to see what he does next. Hopefully it is something longer and more ambitious.
November 20, 2022
This was the third novel from Masatsugu Ono (via Two Lines Press) that I've read, and I think it's his best yet.
A father and son live in an isolated house near a forest while the mother has gone to stay with her family to await the birth of their new baby. All the characters are unnamed, as is the country they live in. The natural world has tipped towards chaos due to climate change, but exactly how is unclear. Strange noises emanate from the woods, and the narrative sort of trips along from one uncanny and vaguely sinister incident to the next.
The writing has a strange, quiet edginess to it that's hard to describe, but it definitely kept me invested. Many more questions than answers are presented but that was fine by me. A highly stylized little gem of a book.
A father and son live in an isolated house near a forest while the mother has gone to stay with her family to await the birth of their new baby. All the characters are unnamed, as is the country they live in. The natural world has tipped towards chaos due to climate change, but exactly how is unclear. Strange noises emanate from the woods, and the narrative sort of trips along from one uncanny and vaguely sinister incident to the next.
The writing has a strange, quiet edginess to it that's hard to describe, but it definitely kept me invested. Many more questions than answers are presented but that was fine by me. A highly stylized little gem of a book.
January 2, 2022
Like reading a stress dream
September 7, 2022
This story follows a family of three who are living in a new and foreign country in a house surrounded by a small forest.
The wife then leaves the father and son alone to go back to her home country to prepare for the birth of their baby.
This is definitely a surreal and speculative type of horror story.
The ominous forest that has weird noises coming from it, the unfamiliar area, the isolation.
This story is a mixture of fairy tale, horror, and allegory.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really ✨get✨ this book. It’s supposed to be an allegory for “societal alienation and climate catastrophe,” but I wasn’t able to make those connections while reading.
The structure of the story is very non linear as well, I couldn’t quite figure out if certain things occurred before or after other things.
That definitely added to the surreal and dream like way it’s written.
This book also has some really weird fatphobic parts that were pretty off putting.
Another weird thing is, the author really likes to use the word “breast” throughout the entire story.
Besides those unfortunate things, the writing was really nice and had a really dreamy and magical quality to it.
This is definitely not a book for me, but I think others would absolutely love it!
The wife then leaves the father and son alone to go back to her home country to prepare for the birth of their baby.
This is definitely a surreal and speculative type of horror story.
The ominous forest that has weird noises coming from it, the unfamiliar area, the isolation.
This story is a mixture of fairy tale, horror, and allegory.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really ✨get✨ this book. It’s supposed to be an allegory for “societal alienation and climate catastrophe,” but I wasn’t able to make those connections while reading.
The structure of the story is very non linear as well, I couldn’t quite figure out if certain things occurred before or after other things.
That definitely added to the surreal and dream like way it’s written.
This book also has some really weird fatphobic parts that were pretty off putting.
Another weird thing is, the author really likes to use the word “breast” throughout the entire story.
Besides those unfortunate things, the writing was really nice and had a really dreamy and magical quality to it.
This is definitely not a book for me, but I think others would absolutely love it!
May 9, 2023
I'm not ashamed to admit I was drawn to this novel first by its beautiful cover, then by the promise of a surreal story of a father and son living near a, possibly, haunted wood. However, what I'm left with after reading all 168 pages of Masatsugu Ono's At the Edge of the Woods is an overwhelming befuddlement.
The novel does have a depiction of a father-toddler son relationship that I found relatable, but by the time I closed the last page of the book I wondered what the rest of it was about. Certainly, there's lots creepy about the mailman with the rows of teeth that seem to roll like waves in his mouth or the confused, partially nude, elderly woman who stumbles across the family's house only to soil their kitchen chairs and leave. The son seems to be lured to the woods. Normal boyhood curiosity or something more? All of the set pieces are there for a compelling horror tale.
It's just this: I wish the creepy amounted to something more than an ambient discomfort and surreality. Give me some substance. Are the imps real? If that doesn't matter to the story, give me something else to sink my teeth into rather than feeling largely adrift for 150 pages. The writing is good, even quite beautiful by times, but doesn't justify the price of admission in my mind.
Still, it's a really good cover.
The novel does have a depiction of a father-toddler son relationship that I found relatable, but by the time I closed the last page of the book I wondered what the rest of it was about. Certainly, there's lots creepy about the mailman with the rows of teeth that seem to roll like waves in his mouth or the confused, partially nude, elderly woman who stumbles across the family's house only to soil their kitchen chairs and leave. The son seems to be lured to the woods. Normal boyhood curiosity or something more? All of the set pieces are there for a compelling horror tale.
It's just this: I wish the creepy amounted to something more than an ambient discomfort and surreality. Give me some substance. Are the imps real? If that doesn't matter to the story, give me something else to sink my teeth into rather than feeling largely adrift for 150 pages. The writing is good, even quite beautiful by times, but doesn't justify the price of admission in my mind.
Still, it's a really good cover.
June 20, 2022
This book didn’t hold my attention at all, and I hate when male authors constantly mention female bodies. This was an uncomfortable read but not in a good way. Kind of a bummer because I’m obsessed with this cover and premise and wanted to read more translated books. Not for me!
March 1, 2022
At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono, translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is a creepy book that catches you at its edges. In it, a mother has left to prepare to give birth at her parents' house. Father and son stay behind in their house beside the dark, strange woods: a place of imps and strange scattered coughing noises. The father does his best in this unusual place to get by through moments of childhood trauma and heartache, feeling helpless in this new-ish place where streams of refugees move through the woods and his son bawls, missing his mother.
It's a strange novel that gave me the shivers. It reminded me of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin—eerie, ambiguous, you're never quite able to pin it down, but the goosebumps and dread build the further in you get. Climate horror and displacement lurk between the lines, flashing across the tv screen, winding through the trees. The father feels helpless in his attempts to understand the world around him, let alone understand his son's reactions to the scenes they're exposed to. He doesn't know if he's doing anything right with his son. He doesn't know how to explain things to him. He makes the wrong choices, gives him too much freedom, drags him away as he throws a tantrum. That isolation builds into the dread of the story, the weird things that come out of the woods and then vanish, leaving nothing but an afterglow, disorienting and troubling.
I was disappointed with Ono's use of fat people. I wasn't troubled with the first fat person who had strangeness hovering around them, since the whole book does, but when a second fat person appeared and was described as huge in a monstrous and dehumanizing way (she's first described as "a great lump of white flesh"), I confirmed a pattern. It was unnecessary and took away from a good novel.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. At the Edge of the Woods is out April 12.
Content warnings for xenophobia, animal cruelty and death, fatphobia.
It's a strange novel that gave me the shivers. It reminded me of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin—eerie, ambiguous, you're never quite able to pin it down, but the goosebumps and dread build the further in you get. Climate horror and displacement lurk between the lines, flashing across the tv screen, winding through the trees. The father feels helpless in his attempts to understand the world around him, let alone understand his son's reactions to the scenes they're exposed to. He doesn't know if he's doing anything right with his son. He doesn't know how to explain things to him. He makes the wrong choices, gives him too much freedom, drags him away as he throws a tantrum. That isolation builds into the dread of the story, the weird things that come out of the woods and then vanish, leaving nothing but an afterglow, disorienting and troubling.
I was disappointed with Ono's use of fat people. I wasn't troubled with the first fat person who had strangeness hovering around them, since the whole book does, but when a second fat person appeared and was described as huge in a monstrous and dehumanizing way (she's first described as "a great lump of white flesh"), I confirmed a pattern. It was unnecessary and took away from a good novel.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. At the Edge of the Woods is out April 12.
Content warnings for xenophobia, animal cruelty and death, fatphobia.
March 21, 2025
I decided to read this book because I had recently read and enjoyed this author’s other book Lion Cross Point.
This was a very interesting read. The book takes place in an ambiguous nondescript country. It was very unnerving and disjointed, creating an atmosphere that is supposed to simulate the feeling of being an outsider and recent immigrant. The disjointed writing combined with the repetitive mentions of notable past events and surreal horror are incredibly effective to these ends. I would say that not much happens is this book and it’s even unclear what is real and what is a paranoid hallucination or nightmare. I think this is a good book to read if you want to experience this kind of uneasiness and horror.
Despite the lack of some big overall narrative there are still a lot of themes like parenthood, the violence of war, being an unwelcome outsider, etc that give you a lot to think about as you try to figure out what a surreal event in the story represents in a larger context.
I found this book to be unexpectedly relevant in today’s world of incredible violence and human suffering particularly in Palestine. The book takes place no where in particular but you can see how the past and present real world horrors influence the writing.
This was a very interesting read. The book takes place in an ambiguous nondescript country. It was very unnerving and disjointed, creating an atmosphere that is supposed to simulate the feeling of being an outsider and recent immigrant. The disjointed writing combined with the repetitive mentions of notable past events and surreal horror are incredibly effective to these ends. I would say that not much happens is this book and it’s even unclear what is real and what is a paranoid hallucination or nightmare. I think this is a good book to read if you want to experience this kind of uneasiness and horror.
Despite the lack of some big overall narrative there are still a lot of themes like parenthood, the violence of war, being an unwelcome outsider, etc that give you a lot to think about as you try to figure out what a surreal event in the story represents in a larger context.
I found this book to be unexpectedly relevant in today’s world of incredible violence and human suffering particularly in Palestine. The book takes place no where in particular but you can see how the past and present real world horrors influence the writing.
December 6, 2022
Eerie and unsettling, a surreal tale of a world torn apart by disaster, emphasizing atmosphere and incidents over plot, and personalized by the unnamed father and young son and the unnamed mother who has left their house at the edge of the woods to have her second child in her home country, countries which are also unnamed. A chill permeates this book, which is beautifully written but also puzzling in its opacity.
Read
August 6, 2024...The terrors in Ono’s world seem unfamiliar and strange. Until they don’t. Like an image that slowly resolves into focus, the occasional appearance of people in unexpected places becomes a full blown refugee crisis like the ones that rock the contemporary world. The narrator is paralyzed by the tide of displaced people, “continuous and thick”, rushing past his remote home. He cannot help them; he cannot even speak to them in a language they can understand.
No single disaster drives these refugees. Violence. Climate change. Other people’s greed. At the Edge of the Woods puts these realities of the contemporary world on full display and presents them as what they are—horrors. It reads like a horror novel or a supernatural thriller because it plunges the reader into her own helplessness in the face of the mass suffering of other people...
Read the full review at Asian Review of Books.
No single disaster drives these refugees. Violence. Climate change. Other people’s greed. At the Edge of the Woods puts these realities of the contemporary world on full display and presents them as what they are—horrors. It reads like a horror novel or a supernatural thriller because it plunges the reader into her own helplessness in the face of the mass suffering of other people...
Read the full review at Asian Review of Books.
February 15, 2023
Erm…
sorry what now !?
Despite what you might think, I honestly hate bashing a book…
BUT, this was truly beyond Confusing and pointless -both in plot and writing.
Such a shame as I usually love mysteriously surreal, translated fiction.
Ah well, can’t win ‘em all!
1 sad star
sorry what now !?
Despite what you might think, I honestly hate bashing a book…
BUT, this was truly beyond Confusing and pointless -both in plot and writing.
Such a shame as I usually love mysteriously surreal, translated fiction.
Ah well, can’t win ‘em all!
1 sad star
May 9, 2022
An absurd and severe nightmare just lurking at the edge of the woods. I will just abandoned everything behind if I was this man. Better run for your life...
June 10, 2022
really creepy and unsettling. a quick read that felt like a fever dream. tw: fatphobia and animal abuse
July 25, 2022
OMG! What a cool book. This was a really crazy read— weird, supernatural stuff happened throughout, but it was set in a normal, everyday environment. It was eery, but so interesting. I had no idea where it was going the whole time, and don’t know what happened at all 😂 there wasn’t a huge, clear plot, and it felt like the characters were almost stuck in time. I’m sure I could have figured out some of the symbolism and messaging in the book if tried, but just watching all of the weird stuff happen was good enough for me on this read.
April 29, 2021
If you told me in 45 pages it was possible to do what Matsatsugu Ono has achieved here, I’d laugh at your unrealistic optimism. Conjuring a wood that is both magical and sinister, Ono sets the scene of a man and his son living At the Edge of the Wood, the pregnant wife/mother absent as she’s gone to her parents until the birth... treading a fine line between fantasy and an unreliable narrator, you decide which..
I had no real expectations going into this, except for some fairytale vibes (doesn’t disappoint!), and was absolutely blown away. This was perfect on a late quiet night of contemplating, savouring both sections over cocoa... And I’ll be thinking about our narrator and what his actual situation might really be for a long while...
I had no real expectations going into this, except for some fairytale vibes (doesn’t disappoint!), and was absolutely blown away. This was perfect on a late quiet night of contemplating, savouring both sections over cocoa... And I’ll be thinking about our narrator and what his actual situation might really be for a long while...
April 16, 2022
light bestows sleep: i think those are the words of the german swiss writer robert walser. whereas vast, powerful darkness awakens us. the inviolability of darkness makes us want to enter deep inside it, he said. darkness shakes us, kindles desires we never knew we had.a phantasmagorical tale, masatsugu ono's at the edge of the woods (mori no hazure de) — his third book now available in english — offers the eeriest of milieus. with a vaguely threatening (or merely spooky?) setting, the japanese author's latest spins foreboding like gossamer threads, presenting just enough to be unsettling, but too veiled to provoke outright terror. with enigmatic encounters, mythlike creatures, impending misfortune, and an uncanniness that enshrouds the entire story, at the edge of the woods exists at the boundary of irreality, leaving narrator and reader alike to wonder whether it's all in their imagination or if something wicked lies in wait.
*translated from the japanese by juliet winters carpenter (kōbō abe, shion miura, minae mizumura, et al.)
3.5 stars
April 26, 2022
If you are looking for a nice relaxing book, with a plot that develops from a to b and on to a satisfying conclusion then, boy oh boy, this is definitely not the book for you. Masatsugo Ono's wonderfully unsettling and eerie novel, expertly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is full of the unexplained - sounds, visions, events - but written in beautifully crafted prose that just gets under your skin.
With nods to the horror genre, but with devastating modern commentary on the world's refugee crisis, this is a timely and important work. We are all, somehow, living at the edge of the woods as troubling and horrific events are played out just beyond our sight and somehow beyond our understanding. Here there is no happy ending, no neat resolution, just a father and son in a house surrounded by strange noises. The final scene leaves everything up to the reader's imagination, a brave and skilful decision by the author to leave everything unexplained. A very strong 4, almost 4.5 stars. Definitely a book that deserves to be read.
With nods to the horror genre, but with devastating modern commentary on the world's refugee crisis, this is a timely and important work. We are all, somehow, living at the edge of the woods as troubling and horrific events are played out just beyond our sight and somehow beyond our understanding. Here there is no happy ending, no neat resolution, just a father and son in a house surrounded by strange noises. The final scene leaves everything up to the reader's imagination, a brave and skilful decision by the author to leave everything unexplained. A very strong 4, almost 4.5 stars. Definitely a book that deserves to be read.
March 31, 2022
At the Edge of the Woods manages to be both terrifying and beautiful. The experience of reading this book is so strange, so uncanny valley. Little happens, and what does happen is never entirely clear, and yet I couldn’t put the book down. Ono, through translator Juliet Winters Carpenter, weaves a spell with his exquisite prose and atmospheric descriptions of "the woods," a dark fairytale-like borderland that never forgets.
December 29, 2022
I read about 23% of this book and I am confused as to what I even read to begin with?! It was downright whiplashing and made absolutely no sense! It bounced everywhere and at one point I think but not certain it bounced from husband to wife without warning and I had no clue whose perspective I was reading for a split second.
Maybe if I'd give it more of a chance it might be a decent read but I cannot make myself read not even another paragraph. It was complete rubbish!
Maybe if I'd give it more of a chance it might be a decent read but I cannot make myself read not even another paragraph. It was complete rubbish!
January 1, 2023
I honestly couldn’t tell you what this book is about. The writing is definitely not my preferred style and it reads like slam poetry. Everything was a metaphor, but for what I’m uncertain, and every other sentence was a drawn out simile. I know it’s translated from another language, so I’m sure a lot of nuance got lost in translation.
May 23, 2023
I really don't have any idea what I just read. Either it's a weird book or i just don't have the intelligence level to understand what it was trying to convey. Agreed with the other review that said it was like reading a fever dream.
Read
February 1, 2022Stopped reading as soon as the graphic description of a man beating a dog to death happened . No thanks
October 24, 2022
DFN at 68% percent wasn’t really feeling this one not all that creepy as I was hoping for just weird than anything
December 8, 2022
If you think this would be interesting to read, just know that it’s not.
April 10, 2023
"Was the source of this confusion in the exterior world or in me? I tried not to think about it."
This was a quick 4-5 hour read that is either a novella or four heavily-overlapping short stories involving the same characters. At the Edge of the Woods is... experimental for sure. I'm waffling between 2 and 3 stars because while I wasn't a big fan of its weirdness, I think the weirdness was done fairly well? Reading this book feels like being stuck in one of those strange dreams that's not quite a nightmare, but is still deeply uncomfortable, suffocating, and uncanny.
Masatsugu Ono plays around with a vague sense of time, and presents an intentionally unclear chronology for the events that occur. The characters seem to struggle against their own emotions, overwhelmed by a mounting sense of despair and helplessness in a world bombarded with constant natural disasters, violence, and refugee crises. The mere witnessing of horrors is presented as a horror in and of itself, yet the characters seem to ask themselves: is it even possible to look away?
The writing style (as translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) provided regular interludes of stunning imagery:
"He chattered on like one possessed, till I wondered if he might have eaten a weird mushroom. Joy and excitement rolled around on his tongue instead of food."
"Night was plastered against the window where the curtain hadn't been pulled, spying on us with bated breath. Trees in the yard, having shed all their leaves, stood blacker than darkness; the blood vessels of Night, they pulsated soundlessly."
"Tremors shook the surface of his body in ripples. He mumbled something, but because he was shivering, the sounds disintegrated on his tongue before they could coalesce into words. The sounds were broken, unintelligible; they were the sound of something breaking."
"The fly buzzing around the room, pushed away by the stream of light pouring through the window, clung persistently to the farmer's and then my sweaty skin as if asking again and again how to get out the window."
"The yard was full of puddles, each striving to absorb the sky and woods. It was as if the ground were scattered with mirror fragments reflecting countless worlds."
"With the trees stripped bare, the view opened up, and my gaze would have thrust deeper into the woods had not my terror of encountering a withering gaze in return made me look away."
"Light slowly filled the window, as if someone had tipped over a big jar of morning. Leaves lying flattened on the ground, having borne the weight of the night--which grew longer and heavier each day--were now pierced by millions of needles that the sun showered down."
"He threw himself at his mother, landing horizontally in her arms. With perfect confidence, as if taking a step down and flinging himself into an abyss were one and the same, he yielded his whole being to her. She of course accepted him with her whole being. The mother clasped the child and the child the mother, warm and close. Eternity condensed in their embrace. Two bodies that had been separated, joined again as one."
"The flies flew off in a frenzy, drawing characters in the air that disappeared as soon as they were formed, like incantations of a devil."
I'm not inclined to re-read this in the near future, but
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