AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

A dreamlike story about an unnamed family beside an unnamed forest.

The narrator of Ono’s latest novel to appear in English refers to his young son, who wants to watch TV, and his wife, pregnant with their second child, but none of these characters receive names. Nor does the country where they live—not their native country—or the language they’ve learned or the refugees the narrator eventually sees tramping through the forest. And yet the lack of names is the least of this mysterious novel’s many puzzles. More obscure are the time frame and the plot. What has happened when? At one point, the narrator and his pregnant wife visit a cake shop—but is she pregnant with their first child or their second? Or is the narrator alone, his wife having gone to her family home to wait out the pregnancy? “I can’t remember what we bought that day or whether we left without buying anything,” he says. “[Those] memories, too, have become doubtful. It’s possible that it was a single event, mixed and rolled out over and over.” Ono’s prose, elegantly translated by Carpenter, is deceptively simple. His references range from Darwin to Mozart. But while the marketing copy helpfully explains that this is a novel about “climate catastrophe,” it’s difficult to know what, in the end, to make of it. The narrator’s son brings home an old woman who quickly disappears. The forest is rumored to be full of imps who steal children—and also mail. The mailman seems to have fangs. How all these details connect to one another—and whether they do—is anyone’s guess.

Beautifully written but puzzling to the point of opacity.