Each week, a reader chronicles a literary favourite. Today, little sonata of things.
Don’t count on Yôko Ogawa to deliver a comfortable, linear story, in which surprises and twists are only there to make you turn the pages. You will be invited on a completely different journey, taken on board by his fluid and clear writing, to unfold like a fabulous origami. “She listens. I think the person who knitted these two words together for the first time is remarkable. She strains her ear to make her eardrum as sensitive as possible, eliminating all that is superfluous, so that it reflects the wave drawn by a thin droplet.
Small Boxes shakes up from the first pages: will we be able to adapt to a shrinking universe, or else, like the praying mantis that the narrator tried as a child to force to live in a box too small for her, will we soon experience a fatal outcome? ? Can we heal our sorrows, soften our losses by locking them in a box? Is death only a shrinkage of life?
Yôko Ogawa patiently composes, word after word, page after page, the plot of her novel, with infinite attention to sensations, to beings, even to the banal tasks of everyday life. She will seek in the recesses of this story in the form of a tale what remains of our child’s soul and invites us to concentrate, we too, by dint of repetition, on what consoles us, reassures us, nourishes us. “Yes. By dint of rewinding, rewinding and rewinding time again, it becomes an arm wrestling match with the past, and the past ends up exhausting itself.
Because that’s also what it’s all about: perseverance beyond mourning to make those we love exist. From then on, the “little boxes” appear as the metamorphosis of a container into a tool of resilience, alongside other life companions that we can share with Yôko Ogawa: literature, the attention paid to the living and the love to those around us.