GARDEN

Oyamada’s stories feature awkward encounters with family members and the natural world.

At what point does domestic drama turn into the stuff of surreal nightmares? In these stories (translated by Boyd, North, and Tejima), characters face awkward and grotesque situations in familiar and pastoral settings. The narrator of “Spider Lilies” recounts several unsettling interactions with the titular plants, calling them “flowers of death” and observing, “I’d always had bad associations with them.” This is one of several stories in this collection in which nature becomes a source of subtle menace. Later in the book, characters will have upsetting and even visceral encounters with things like spider eggs and the hollowed-out body of a dead bullfrog. The opening story, “The Burnaway,” concludes with an image of a burnaway ceremony, a term the narrator keeps hearing but isn’t familiar with, establishing this theme of humanity and nature at odds—but the interpersonal interactions here are no less fraught. The narrator of “Extra Innings” is in a serious relationship with his girlfriend, but their visit to her family’s home turns into a kind of sensory nightmare featuring both disgusting odors and a bathtub teeming with ants. Marriage is at the center of many of these stories, including the newlyweds in “Careless” and the narrator of “The Burnaway,” who is anxious about her upcoming divorce. The prose here is precisely used, though in a few moments to chaotic effect. A moment in “Lost in the Zoo,” for example, features an overlapping set of voices of visitors discussing animals or children—another way in which Oyamada juxtaposes the human and natural worlds. A slow-burning feeling of wrongness seeps through these stories.

A frequently disquieting collection, both physically and psychically.