Kawakami’s Parade arrived in the depths of COVID isolation. It is a work that exists on a delicate, almost liquescent narrative terrain (a trademark of her fiction), as though written from a point on the horizon where the eye can’t quite fix points to on place or another. A woman tells a sort-of folktale to her older lover (and former teacher) in modern Japan, about some red-faced creatures called tengu that attached themselves to her when she was a girl. The folktale can’t quite get going and the supernatural element proves to be something of a nuisance. In a short space and from simple means, Kawakami creates something gentle in the full sense of that word given it by the late philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, putting the question of storytelling, and narrative meaning, to us in a place where those things seem on the verge of being hopelessly outmoded. What is left? A strange feeling of attunement in confusion, of keeping on anyway.
First published in Japanese as パレード, 平凡社, 2002; English translation first published Soft Skull Press, 2019
A Personal Anthology 