Parade by Hiromi Kawakami

Parade 
by Hiromi Kawakami
translated by Allison Markin Powell
Soft Skull Press, 2019

Hiromi Kawakami’s latest work begins with a pen-picture of contentment. An older man and a younger woman have just finished a meal on a Saturday afternoon. The glass doors of their tatami room have been flung open, and as they sip barley tea and lie together, surrounded by a choral warmth, the sound of cicadas filters into the room. After a time, the somnolent shimmer of the insects’ cries and the woman’s postprandial drowsiness flow together, easing her into sleep. When she wakes, the man asks her to tell him a story, preferably one from long ago. Casting back into her childhood, she settles on a tale, and begins to tell it. 

You don’t really need to be aware that Parade is a loose sequel to Kawakami’s previous novel, 2017’s Strange Weather in Tokyo, to enjoy the former, since it stands on its own as an enrapturing display of writerly grace and restraint. The protagonists of Parade are Tsukiko and Sensei, the star-crossed lovers at the center of Strange Weather, though the new book isn’t really an elaboration of their relationship so much as a breathy aside, a glimpse into the quieter, unlimned moments that constitute their relationship. Consequently, there’s a slow sensuality at the core of Parade, a product of Kawakami’s relaxed faith in the blessedness of the quotidian. Time unfolds on a human scale, marked by minor intimacies. 

You often get the impression, reading Parade, that time has been loosened somehow, as though Kawakami were stringing it up leisurely on a washing line, careful to place her clothespins just so. At only seventy-nine pages, the book is an alchemical feat of miniaturization, a distillation and bottling-up of the essence of a summer afternoon; her slight, subtle prose turns so casually away from excess detail that the resulting image of reality is imbued with a curious weightlessness. We’re left with an ash-skeleton of sorts, or whatever remains after a lazy afternoon has burned away—the fibrous weave of a rotted-through leaf, say, or the hollow lambency of a cicada shell. 

The book’s framing narrative—a midday lunch—quickly gives way to Tsukiko’s story, an airy medley of folktale and allegory. As a child, we learn, she was awoken one night in her room by a clamorous tussling of colors: “Something dark red and something pale red were arguing with each other.” The forms in question, she discovers, are tengu—mythical beasts typified by “human bodies, red faces with long noses, and wings.” The tengu begin to follow Tsukiko around, and their presence, as far as everyone else is concerned, is unremarkable. At breakfast, they get excited by the margarine spread on a piece of bread, and Tsukiko worries that her mother will lose her temper, but her mother simply admonishes her, explaining that the tengu only want to lick the margarine.

At school, Tsukiko notices that most of her classmates have their own spirit companions—a badger, a sand-throwing hag, and “a rokurokubi woman with a very long neck.” Eventually, a restlessness kicks in among the spirits—they wander about the classroom, and begin to fall ill, a fate that seems connected to the ostracizing of Yuko, a young girl in the class:

It must have been during the second school term when the one with the pale red face seemed to fall ill. She looked thin, and even lost all interest in licking the margarine. She wasn’t drinking any flower nectar either. Both of the tengu liked nectar. When the azaleas by the side of the road were in bloom, the tengu would cling to the base of the shrubs, slurping up the nectar from the flowers greedily. They wouldn’t pluck a flower to taste the nectar, the way you and I might—they knew how to extract it deftly while leaving the blossoms intact on the branches.

Tsukiko’s story is ultimately inscrutable, but in a distant, melancholy way—its intent seems to be hidden behind a milky fog. The curious method of nectar extraction employed by the tengu—characterized by a supremely light touch, which hardly disturbs the flower itself—is mirrored in the sensitive way they bestow their touch on Yuko, so that “the spot on Yuko’s body where they had touched her would sparkle,” like “a nighttime parade.”

The portal of touch, and the curious gestures through which we reveal our thinnest intentions and gauziest emotional velleities, are Kawakami’s real subjects in Parade. Enigmatic motions abound, as when Tsukiko burns her fingertips while preparing lunch and, in a superstitious cure, brings them to her earlobe to soothe them. Later, after waking from sleep, Sensei examines Tsukiko’s palm for wit lines and taps at the skin. “It was the same kind of tapping that one might do while singing a lullaby,” Tsukiko observes. “A certain warmth spread through me from the spot where he was tapping.” Throughout Parade, the wilful, refractory flow of emotional states is interrupted by these concretizing moments of touch—a dab of skin, in Kawakami’s vision, is a site of transmutation and magnification.

Kawakami’s no stranger to the urge to revisit and update previous fictions. After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, for instance, she folded the catastrophe into the overall plot of her first short story, “Kamisama.” Similarly, Parade isn’t really a sequel to Strange Weather in Tokyo, but rather an offshoot, a fictional waiting room where her characters interact outside of the confines of their more carefully constructed home novel. In a brief afterword, Kawakami justifies her writing of Parade, explaining that she was nagged at by the question of what life was like for her characters in the narrative interstices of Strange Weather: “I wonder how Tsukiko and Sensei really spent their time, day by day.”

“The world that exists behind a story is never fully known, not even to the author,” Kawakami explains. There’s a joyful sense of liberation in this sentiment, an affirmation from an expert that our basest fictional hope—that the written life goes on beyond the final word—is grounded in truth, but there’s also a fine sadness in it, as delicate as an autumn rain. In a sense, Kawakami’s admitting that the world of the story is inbent as well, that it contains, fractal-like, a constellation of hidden moments that we can never know, actions and incidents that might have bloomed in the isabelline infinities lying between the chapters and sentences we do possess. The nested dreaminess of the text—its air of rapt involution—is partly a result of this desire to transcend narrative time. 

Kawakami has always been interested in the quotidian, a fact that, along with the peculiar mission of Parade, helps to explain the book’s fascination with the liquid amber of wasted days—with the phenomenon of time slipping by, unremarked and unmourned, so pointless would be its mensuration—and its situation in the île joyeuse of a summer afternoon. The crepuscular pathos of the in-between drives the book forward, but what redeems Parade from the accusation of preciousness is the sense of sacred mystery that surrounds Kawakami’s descriptions of contact, an essential reverence that allows a finger tapped upon a palm to burst into a circlet of flame. Kawakami’s depictions of haptic connection are stones dropped into a pool, reverberations in the empty vase of the self which, though they fade and leave us with no definite image of our desires, are enough, for a time, to fill the hollow vessel of the flesh, and to restore to the spindly architecture of the novel some measure of the sonority of being.

—Bailey Trela is a writer living in Bushwick.