Something I’ve always found interesting when looking at any book, but especially one made up of smaller stories, is the themes that develop between them. Some are intentional, of course, particularly when each is contributing to a larger narrative. But it’s the more subtle connections that are fun to find, as well as those that are inescapable by virtue of some broad definitional quality, like gender or geography. That’s certainly the case in Dias Novita Wuri’s Birth Canal, a book of interconnected stories rooted in Indonesia and Japan that can’t help but grapple with weighty topics and heavy emotions but avoids Very Special Episode territory.
We start with an Indonesian man of almost Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the story, not the film) levels of longing for his lifelong friend; next, a multi-generational story about an Indonesian girl forced to become a Japanese “comfort woman” during WWII and her modern-day daughter trying to understand the dark, and unknown, parts of her mother’s history. From there, the scars of WWII are still fresh for the former American war photographer, whose marriage is crumbling in part because of his past fixation with the wife of an ex-Imperial officer he knew while stationed in Japan. The book wraps up with a present-day Indonesian woman newly moved to Japan whose struggles with her infertility manifest in an unexpected fascination with a local porn star.
These stories might all be interconnected, but the threads are sometimes tenuous and less-than obvious. They’re also not necessary to dig into each successive story—more easter eggs than a camera panning to the next chapter in a story. If anything, the stronger connective tissue in these four stories is about obsession and common geography. Our Indonesian man is obsessed with his friend; the daughter is obsessed with her mother’s story, and how the unknown parts nonetheless affected the woman who raised her; the photographer is obsessed with the woman, but also because of his actions during their few moments together; the woman’s obsession with the local porn star is a bizarre extension of her obsession with her own infertility. Four, or more, flavors of obsession tumbling around between the covers of this book, most of them blithely existing with the assumption that they’re the only obsession in the story. Whether an intentional theme or accidental, it’s interesting and effective.
The second world war is another throughline, even if the characters don’t realize it. That kind of widespread trauma is sure to leave scars, though not in the ways or number that those scars manifest. Undoubtedly, any place, and any population, has these same kinds of fault lines from things that may have happened long before we were born, from choices by people who can’t imagine those repercussions. And where war tends to be thought of as a man’s game, it’s often the women who suffer most, longest, and most helplessly against the soldiers, both as agents of war and due to the resulting trauma that lingers with these men years after peace treaties have been signed.
The most fascinating thing with Birth Canal as a whole is its dizzying range of vibes that can be pulled out of a narrow cast of characters in a handful of places and only a couple of eras in history. Holistically, it gives an eclectic air; individually, it means some stories go down easier than others. I’m usually not a fan of stories about a young and intellectual young man pining away for some wounded woman, for example. For that reason, Birth Canal started slow for me, but I tore through the middle two stories. The fourth story was a study in reading with dread about the B-plot unfolding beneath the main narrative. Rather than an unevenness in writing, it shows range, and creativity in weaving such disparate stories together with thematic connective tissue.
Ring Reads 