‘A Snake Stepped On’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Lucy North

I’ve been a fan of Kawakami’s since reading Strange Weather in Tokyo, which is just a beautiful and careful mediation on intimacy. This story, which is fairly lengthy, as short stories go, is a forkloric tale about people becoming snakes and snakes becoming people. It’s eerie, and haunting, and retains all the excoriating insight of Kawakami’s  more realist fiction: 

“Have you ever been betrayed, Hiwako, dear?” she asked, looking up at me seductively. 

To be betrayed, you probably first have to be deeply involved. Had I been deeply involved with anything in my life?

First published in Japanese in 1996. First published in English in Record of a Night Too Brief, Pushkin Press, 2017

‘Runaway’ by Alice Munro

This is a story about an unhappy relationship, but also about cowardice and dishonesty and delusion. It’s also about a goat. In this story Munro has created characters that are fully knowable in their flaws, deeply recognizable, but also injects into the narrative moments of strangeness and absurdity that make the story so memorable.

First published in The New Yorker, August 2003 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Runaway, McClelland and Stewart, 2004, and now available from Vintage, 2006

‘Hills like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway

I return to this story again and again. Honestly, I feel completely ill-equipped to attempt explaining why it’s so good. It’s primarily dialogue, but the dialogue is working to conceal all that actually needs to be said by the characters – it’s the finest portrayal of how people can dance around a subject, circumnavigating candour, resorting to repetition and dogged enquiry, constantly expressing but failing to adequately express. The female protagonist sums it up perfectly: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” she says. The mise-en-scène is a small corner of the world, narrow and claustrophobic, but behind it there’s a whole conceptualised world, shimmering with the elided pain of the characters. 

 “I said we could have everything.” 
“We can have everything.” 
“No, we can’t.” 
“We can have the whole world.” 
“No, we can’t.” 
“We can go everywhere.” 
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.” 
“It’s ours.” 
“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” 
“But they haven’t taken it away.” 
“We’ll wait and see.”

There are gestures to finality, and loss, but the finality of what? The loss of what, precisely? The exact nature of the pain is never explicitly stated, and although the reader can decipher the unsaid conflict, it’s going unsaid makes it more nebulous, more pervasive, more deeply, deeply sad. To conjure pain without explicitly writing pain is something I am never not in awe of.

First published in transition, August 1927, and collected in Men Without Women, Scribner, 1927. Now available in The First Forty-Nine Stories, Arrow, 1995 and available to read online here

‘The Hanging of the Mouse’ by Elizabeth Bishop

This is going to make a hypocrite of me. 
 
I once encountered, in a book of criticism about Bishop, the critic referring to ‘The Hanging of the Mouse’ as a short story. In an essay I was writing at the time, I went to great lengths to absolutely rinse this critic: ‘It’s not a short story, it’s a goddamn prose poem,’ I screamed at the sky. I haven’t changed my opinion about that, but I do think it’s so clever in how it approaches genre that neither me, nor the critic, had the right to classify it in simple terms. The piece is, I think, an incredibly interesting exploration into genre subversion. Like how Rimbaud’s ‘Conte’ (another ostensible prose poem) plays with narrative expectation through syntactic dismantlement, Bishop plays with narrative expectation through the assumption of a familiar tropes: in this instance, the tropes used are those of the fable. In the story-cum-poem, animals gather in a square to witness the public execution of a mouse. What do we expect from a fable? Some sort of didacticism, I guess, possibly wrapped up in folksy cuteness. The last two lines are: “It was all so touching that a cat, who had brought her child in her mouth, shed several large tears. They rolled down onto the child’s back and he began to squirm and shriek, so that the mother thought that the sight of the hanging had perhaps been too much for him, but an excellent moral lesson, nevertheless.” The punchline is that there is no moral lesson: we never find out the reasons for the mouse’s execution, and the mouse itself is a quivering, plaintive, sympathetic creature. The whole piece works to deceive us with its trappings. 
 
(I also think much of the language and turn of phrase used is Bishop exploring her own anxieties about the writing of poetry, but that’s something for me to go on and on and on about another time.)

First published in The Complete Poems, 1969

Introduction

I live in the heart of Bloomsbury which is home to many squares and monuments. During this last lockdown, the cherry blossom tree in the far right corner of Tavistock Square burst into bloom and covered the park bench in soft, pink petals, while blackbirds trilled away on the boughs. Gandhi sits in the middle of the square, presiding over empty benches, squirrels, cat sized rats, and rough sleepers camping under over-grown bushes. Around its pedestal, are the remains of burnt candles, dying bouquets and prayers scrawled on scraps and once even a plastic yellow daisy was looped over Gandhi’s left ear. Whether this accessory on the contemplative sculpture made it appear comical or poignant, I’m not sure, but it did make me wonder about the symbolism we attach to both sculptures and flowers, and the contrast between the two – the lasting, sometimes controversial legacy and solid structure of one, and the fleeting, almost instantly decaying quality of the other. Inspired by my daily walks, I set out to look for literary monuments and flowers in short stories, and how they are offered either as symbols or to trigger epiphanies. 

‘Perennial’ by Rowan Beaird

In ‘Perennial’, flowers are used to give a sense of season and place but also illustrate sorrow and the passage of time. A man is grieving the mysterious disappearance of his wife. After planting tulips –some “salmon, others are a hard yellow, several a purple so deep they’re nearly black” – in her memory, he notices they are being stolen: “Three more flowers are missing. They have been snapped off at their base, their leaves two shrugging shoulders… He leaves their remnants and walks over to the planner he has left open on the lawn table, noting the missing flowers with pencil marks. There is rainwater in her ashtray, a dead bee at its centre.” Grief has dislocated the natural passage of time; the dead bee in ‘her’ ashtray symbolises that nature continues its cycle of life and death. Before the revelation of the missing tulips, the man recalls how during his history lesson. 

Last year, he had a student who brought a rose encased in cellophane into his classroom, and she spent the next thirty-five minutes slowly plucking away each layer. She was seated near the back, and he found himself barely able to discuss whatever battle or presidency he was meant to be teaching, so absorbed was he in the flower’s slow disassembling.

In this passage, a flower has a power – a disruptive quality which is capable of interrupting the history of entire nations. Later, he discovers that “two more tulips are gone, broken off at the half-stalk, as if the person were in a hurry”. The author crafts in the symbolism, sentence by sentence until from being ‘real’ tulips, by the end of the story, they have bloomed into having a sacramental, religious significance as “even when they are dying, they are beautiful and unknown”.

First published in Ploughshares 134, Winter 2017-18 and available to read online here

‘Is the Watermelon Sweet?’ by Emily Yang

Similarly, in this strange and compelling long, short story about loss, memory, and desire, a bush of red Chinese flowers is associated with light, life, passion and violence. The narrator notices how “the ixora bushes lining my walk home were in full bloom, the little red flowers speckling the chalky stretch of low-hanging cityscape with an insouciant charm.” She had “lost interest in them”, until she remembers how “you taught me how to suck the nectar out of the yellow tube in the middle, and I abused this knowledge so much I caused myself stomach pains for six hours straight.” The flowers are an essential part of the landscape, lending atmosphere to the story but also hinting at potentiality of illumination and reconciliation which the narrator is grasping for: “The tiny flowers cracked open like the sparklers we’d light during the better Chinese New Year’s.” 

First published in Puerto del Sol, 2020 and available to read here

‘The Flowers’ by Alice Walker

In this very short coming-of-age tale, noticing flowers and picking them, and laying them down are an integral part of the action of the protagonist, in as much as the flowers symbolise the loss of innocence. Myop, a ten year old is on a walk when “she found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.” As she continues, she finds a “wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose’s root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil.” The story, in its brevity and concise detail leaves the reader feeling as uprooted as Myop herself.

First published in Love and Trouble; The stories of Black Women, New York, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1973. Also in the Collected Stories, W&N, 2005

‘Lucid Moments’ by Shashi Deshpande

In the Indian story ‘Lucid Moments’, it is the absence of flowers that is symbolic, and the author uses flowers to emphasise the need to preserve the identity and history of women which often get obliterated. The narrator, Sujata finds herself in a difficult situation as she sees her dying mother babble in a state of mental delirium, seeking to know the name of her own dead mother. As her mother dies, Sujata is left perturbed by her mother’s dying wish. She hopes to fulfil it by hanging a framed photograph of her dead mother. In an attempt to reclaim the lost history of women in general and of her mother in particular, she declares to her niece, “She is your grandmother… Her name was Sumati.” As Sujata hangs her mother’s picture on the wall she says, “There! It’s done. She doesn’t need any flowers or kumkum. It’s enough she’s here.” The suggestion is that, weighed down throughout her married years by her role as a mother and wife, it is only at death, when she was finally without any symbolic embellishments, that Sumati asserted her identity and is liberated.

First published in Intrusions and Other Stories, Penguin India, 1993

‘Sunflowers’ by Cecilia Davidssons, translated by Henning Koch

‘Sunflowers’, a Swedish story, focusses on a mother’s illness. Told from a child’s point of view, every aspect of sunflowers is essential to the narrative structure of the story, in as much as they are symbolic of what is happening in a family’s life as they try to cope with the mother’s deteriorating health. The father plants thousands of sunflowers in the field opposite the house and when they are in full bloom they look “like an army of mute individuals”, and are “so high” that even passers-by from the village, as the narrator tells her mother, “are talking about them”. Sunflowers are a delight for the senses – both the taste and sight, as the narrator’s father points out: “In the right quantity it’s a superb herb,… sweet and salty in just the right combination.” Throughout there are allusions to the life-giving force of sunflowers. In the hope that that will revitalise her mother the narrator cuts three of them for her to see, “so that she’d get a sense of how it must look down by the lake. Like in a fairy tale or a painting by Van Gogh. More beautiful than Van Gogh.” But her mother protests, as if to say she has accepted her illness and her life can’t be prolonged by anything and says, “Sunflowers don’t want to be put in a vase”, suggesting that her spirit can’t be contained. Out in the fields, in a vase, and also a bunch, or “their stalks wrapped in wet kitchen roll”, the author provides visuals of sunflowers at their best – in art, photographs, alive in the sunshine at noon and drooping in the afternoon heat. The end of the story brings an unexpected twist, but the lasting image is that of a glowing sunflower field, set in the wider landscape of things, with “mute life under the surface…”

First published in Swedish in Höga berg, djupa dalar (High Mountains, Deep Valleys), 2015. Available to read on Thresholds here

‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf

Throughout ‘Kew Gardens’, which has been described as a modernist short story, the narrator returns to the very English flowerbed, focusing on a snail as it moves through the flowers offering a ground-level perspective of the world on a hot, July day. The story relays the unfolding of a moment or a series of moments, rather than a grand, unified narrative or plot. Flowers and shrubs and the garden are essential features in this story, but they are not named, and despite the precise descriptions they are not easily identifiable: 

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red, blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour.

The narrative shifts from the flower bed to the couples walking past in turn, four couples – a husband and wife, an old and a younger man, two women, a courting couple, none of whom have much communication between them. Are the unnamed flowers supposed to signify something or are they just there as ‘real’ flowers in the environment of the story? Woolf remains elusive about this.

First published privately in 1919, and collected in Monday or Tuesday, Hogarth Press, 1921. Later collected in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, 1944. Now available in an illustrated edition from Kew Publishing, 2016, The Mark on the Wall and Other Stories, Oxford, and Selected Stories, Penguin Classics

‘Forest Life’ by Federico Falco, translated by Jenifer Croft

‘Forest Life’, an Argentinian short story, is an ode to the pine forest and flora and fauna where Wutrich and his daughter, Mabel live. When their home is threatened, Mabel is under pressure to marry a Japanese man, Saikoti, who grows flowers in greenhouses on the plains, a day’s drive from the mountains where she and her father live. Wutrich moves into a nearby eldercare facility, where he longingly reminisces about the life and environment he has lost: “Four hundred and fifty thousand pines, he said. We transported them on horseback. And then, all these years… All those pines up there, he said, growing so slowly you wouldn’t even notice it.” Mabel herself finds, in her new home amongst other Japanese immigrants, her eyes becoming “lost in that ground with a single tree”. Over the course of the story, a subdued relationship develops between Mabel and Sakoiti. They come to recognise that their union was only possible because they were both displaced, through deforestation and immigration, to live in a new environment. Falco uses precise descriptions of the landscape to reflect his characters internal experiences. Flowers and trees – nature’s profound beauty, cyclical deterioration and rejuvenation, and rootedness – mirror the character’s interior lives, their memories, and aspirations. He examines the stillness of human existence, its stoicism and how minute details and private inner worlds connected to nature, reveal a sophisticated philosophical way of living and being. 

First published in English in A Perfect Cemetery, Charco Press, 2021