[REVIEW] The Ants By Sawako Nakayasu

93 pages, $17 paperback

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

Do some digging, and you will find that Sawako Nakayasu’s first publications included a translation of popular Japanese poet Hiromi Ito’s controversial postnatal piece, ‘Killing Kanoko’. The poem deals with infanticide, and in it, titular baby Kanoko is murdered in a number of ways: most notably, she is covered with biting ants.

Nakayasu’s ants are, for the most part, friendlier. They aid in divorce settlements, quest for greatness, wear shoes (ashamed), are the displaced victims of human interference.

Perhaps I’ve been reading the wrong books, but I’m refreshed to find that the weirdness of The Ants is not founded on horror, but in size-shifting, perspective shrinking and enlarging over the course of 70+ short, almost-vignette snatches of this insect/human world. Where there is horror to be found, it is handled with the same breezy touch as tourist-trap bickerings, as carrot cakes made ant-home.

‘Ant Farm’ finds the narrator’s body infested with a colony of ants. Rather than horrified, she is “disappointed – and isn’t this the way it goes – I finally get my ant farm and don’t even get to observe it.” Insects in the blood is nightmare stuff, especially for this reviewer, but ‘Ant Farm’ renders that fear mundane, ordinary; “those freeloaders”.

This is not the only classic horror trope that Nakayasu dismantles through whimsy. The subdued body horror of ‘Ant Farm’ carries through into ‘The Cannibal,’ where one horror meets another, and is just as baffled as the rest of us: “When he bites into an intestine, he is startled to find it stuffed with live, undigested ants, and has no idea what to make of this new and bewildering situation.”

In a book about ants, it would be all too easy to lean on horror, to dwell in the entropy that the underlife of insect-kind so often represents. Sawako Nakayasu chooses instead to mess with, subvert and laugh at these tropes; to make small (how do I cross the road?) big, and big (I am a walking ant farm) small: Very cool.

Sometimes, The Ants tips into self-indulgence. Most frustrating are those pieces which seem so taken with their own oddity as to offer little or nothing else. This can be alienating and baffling, as in ‘Happy Holidays’: “…the cat or dog produces out of its mouth not a full set of menacing teeth, but a single, living ant. And is this an offering, salutation, or insult. Or Christmas.”

Too much whimsy can render a passage vague, wispy, and, dare I say it, slightly cutesy. Nakayasu’s ant-prose occasionally seems so hell-bent on its quirkiness as to border on self-parody; nowhere more so than in ‘The Ant on the Ship Coming Towards Me’’s absurd reference to Madagascar (the animated film).

As a result, some of the most satisfying passages are those in which Nakayasu chooses to come back to reality. In ‘Chinese Ants on the Wall’, two bickering souvenir vendors are seen “fighting cracked tooth and broken nail over the possible potential $3 they may or may not receive in exchange for one of their many tourist offerings including a can of Chairman Mao’s Shit.” The evocation is down to earth and earthy, and much needed in the face of 70+ prose pieces worth of almost uninterrupted whimsy.

Prior to The Ants, Nakayasu published Mouth: Eats Color (Rogue Factorial, 2011), Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she (Quale Press, 2005), and So we have been given time or (Verse Press, 2004): all, like The Ants, are their own kind of oddity, and all share a desire to “push up or closer against” both the minutiae and the big picture of life. Most are even less accessible, and less traditional, than The Ants: So we have been given time or is presented as a playbill, including a cast list which features such characters as “Or as in oh” and “his too-kind mother, a goose” and stage directions such as “comma.” and “buy this very expensive painting right now.”

That said, Nakayasu’s earlier works are home to a surreality which transcends the simply ‘quirky,’ which I find artful and satisfying, and there are elements of it that I crave here, too: that’s the paradox. Nakayasu’s ants could benefit from more artful surreality, and more concrete reality, all at once.

There are easily a teeming thousand more wiggling words to be said about The Ants, but I’ll keep it brief: This is a book in love with its own oddness. Read it out of interest. Your mileage may vary. If you like it, read Nakayasu’s earlier works, too.

***

Emily-Jo Hopson lives and writes from mid-Wales, where she is kept company by two mean cats, one aloof hamster, and a large quantity of spiders that all seem like pretty good guys.