Dragon Palace

By Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen
Fiction/Stone Bridge Press/Paperback/160 pages/$28.43/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3PMAXAx)
4 stars

Japanese writer Hiromi Kawakami provokes with her folkloric and mythical prose in Dragon Palace, which was first published 20 years ago in Japanese and is finally released in English.

The collection of eight short stories is downright bizarre – humans live beyond 200 years, while transmogrifying creatures can shape-shift between animal and human forms – and yet an important social commentary on issues that remain timely today.

Kawakami is a prolific award-winning veteran who has won a global following with more quotidian stories such as the wistful May-December romance of Strange Weather In Tokyo (2017) and the everyday backdrop of The Nakano Thrift Shop (2016).

Readers who may not have been exposed to the more surrealist, magical elements of her storytelling might be in for a shock.

Kawakami’s words – translated by Ted Goossen, who has translated Haruki Murakami and also worked on Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (2020) – are deadpan with a dry matter-of-factness in building a world where laws of time and space do not exist.

The stories in Dragon Palace are bound by a common thread, with such prevailing themes as loneliness and the desire for attention and love, as well as gender disparities manifesting in stark misogyny, fuelled by women who crave male attention.

Kawakami explores the mysterious human psyche through a cast of characters that includes a lecherous octopus; a mole couple who try to help humans who have hollowed out and lost their will to live but have no energy to die; and a 93-year-old man possessed by a fox spirit who lusts after his 53-year-old caretaker and talks about “turds”.

Among the standouts is Sea Horse, the final story about a creature native to the sea but taking on human features after she is tempted to live on land. There, she gets “passed on” from husband to husband, suffering bouts of domestic violence and isolation and, worse, getting used to the trauma.

Over time, she gradually loses her magical powers and forgets about the sea. 

“Trying to remember that which one has forgotten is terribly painful,” writes Kawakami, the agony dripping with every word, a tribute to the freedoms that are lost by real-life victims of violence who are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. 

“It’s like searching for the eye of a tiny needle at the bottom of a deep hole, only worse.”

In Shimazaki, about a 200-year-old woman who falls in love with her ancestor twice her age (and who, quite aptly, works as a life coach), Kawakami writes: “He is sitting right beside me, but still I miss him as one misses something lost in the distant past.” 

They become close, but their age difference never quite bridges the emotional gap in a plot line that brings to mind Strange Weather In Tokyo.

In The Kitchen God, a cheating housewife prays for good luck to a small, three-faced kitchen god whom her mother had told her exists when she was young. She continues to will him to drive her troubled thoughts away, in a coming-of-age tale of a woman struggling with adulthood.

All of Kawakami’s stories in Dragon Palace are so absurdist that they might seem nonsensical and discomfiting on first reading. Yet they are also deceptively clever social commentaries that might well resonate when you least expect.

Many of her characters are in search of a modicum of happiness. But just as in real life, this would prove elusive for some of them.

If you like this, read: Picnic In The Storm by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda (Little, Brown Book Group, 2019, $18.53, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/45ZEcKQ). Motoya, like Kawakami, is a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. She finds the whimsical in the everyday through the lenses of her female protagonists in this collection of 11 surreal stories.