By Selina Lai, The Roar
[This article contains spoilers for the book Where We Go When Everything We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu.]
An amuse-bouche—consisting of a transcript of accounts of a Godzilla attack, a flyer for a humans-with-demonic-afflictions support group, a strange set of instructions to forget yourself, some tips to identify the state of a fruit by the sound it makes, an impossible travel checklist, and more—introduces the contents of each short story in Where We Go When Everything We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Filled with monsters and spirits, these stories brim with magic, yet do not lose sight of their very real themes of love and loss. Nagamatsu uses these modern portrayals of Japanese tales to explore the complexities of human life in our contemporary era, transforming fantastical, impossible tales into stories we can all relate to. So, as you peel back the magical layers of these myths, you may very well find yourself and your own experiences staring back at you.
“The Passage of Time in the Abyss,” one of these stories, tells of the origin of a modern ghost story about a boat and its crew interwoven with the tale of Urashima Taro. This tale is about a fisherman who rescues a turtle being attacked by children and is rewarded with days at the Dragon Palace beneath the sea. Before he leaves for the shore on the back of a turtle, Urashima receives a wooden box but is instructed never to open it. When he returns to the shore, he finds that many years have passed in a matter of days he spent at the Dragon Palace and his family has long passed. He opens the wooden box, and dies as it contained his old age. The Dragon Palace in this story represents death and where one goes after they die, existing only in memories.
The characters of present day are a boating crew: a grandfather Hori, his two grandsons Tamo and Kogi, and Hori’s first mate Ryu. The family members are still struggling with the aftershocks of Hori’s son’s passing. When Kogi was younger and crying every night about his father, Tamo told him the story of Urashima and that their father was not dead, just stuck in the Dragon Palace unable to return. Now that Kogi is older, he learns the harsh truth of the incident and rejects the story when Tamo tells it to him, though secretly he dreams of his father every night. Kogi, pretending to be a jealous brother, tells the tale with another ending: As Urashima opens the box, he turns into a sea creature. Knowing he must return to the Dragon Palace, he swims into the depths of the sea, and “keeps going in the cold, dark space of the abyss until the soft, pulsating lights of jellyfish surround him, guiding him back to the Dragon Palace.” 1A storm comes and as the boat is tilting, Tamo is caught on a fishing line and pulled into the net. As Tamo dies, he imagines himself sinking towards the Dragon Palace: “Tamo imagines the Dragon palace shining brilliantly below, its kept spires reaching out to him as jellyfish guide his way, and then, shortly after the last bubble of air has risen from his mouth, he imagines nothing at all.”2 As the next day begins, Kogi deliriously imagines Tamo emerging from beneath the waves on the back of a large sea turtle and opening his eyes, as Kogi is unable to deal with the fact that Tamo is dead. Kogi suddenly gets the idea to dive into the sea, trying to reunite with his brother, representative of the alternate ending that he created for the tale. Through the relation of the tale and the story of the boating crew, “The Passage of Time in the Abyss” explores death and the feelings of grief and loss it causes.
“The Return to Monsterland” casts a new light on Kaiju monsters with an intensely human perspective on these creatures of Japanese media. In a universe where Kaiju monsters are real, they are confined to an island nicknamed “Monsterland,” and they originated from the atomic age. They die and are reborn constantly to keep the balance of good and evil in the universe, sometimes attacking, sometimes protecting humans. There are frequent attacks on human habitations by Kaiju monsters, one of which by Godzilla that killed Mayu, a Kaiju researcher. The human characters of this story are the researcher’s husband , who is also a Kaiju researcher, and their daughter Ayu. She was often away for work, thus having a distant relationship with Ayu, who mainly knew of her from her letters. The mother was fascinated with the Kaiju, and had a deep admiration for them, while the father did not know what she saw in these monsters. He seems to reflect upon this with confusion, frustration, and bitterness when describing the call she made to him from the train car Godzilla smashed. He muses over how she didn’t ask to speak to Ayu, a 5-year-old then, and spoke the entire time not about her life and the love she had for her family but about the beauty of Godzilla’s powers.
The remaining family members are forced to confront their feelings about the mother’s death and the Kaiju monsters when they move to Monsterland for the father’s job. The father remembers the memories he has of his wife while struggling to see the beauty in the Kaiju. Meanwhile, the daughter has followed in her mother’s footsteps, moving on from resentment of the creatures for killing her mother to becoming an activist for them. Through the weeks they spend observing the monsters, the Kaiju begin to look more and more humanlike in their eyes. Though superpowered and sometimes evil, they can communicate with humans and are shown having feelings of love, remorse, sympathy, loyalty, selflessness, and sadness.
The description of Minilla (Infant Godzillasaurus) shows that it has sympathy for humans and disapproves of harsh treatment of mankind. The creatures are described to have strong feelings of and desire for friendship, with specific monsters who have centuries of allyship between them behaving just as human friends would. The Kaiju even have enough empathy to self-sacrifice for others’ benefit. The Elias sisters tell the father: “Godzilla is very sad today. Godzilla remembers your wife and is sorry. Godzilla cannot help being Godzilla. … Manda is lonely. Gorosaurus wants to find love.”3 At last, the father reaches out to Ayu, asking her to show him the beauty in the Kaiju in a letter, where he writes that he needs help to move on from the evil image of the Kaiju left over his wife’s death and see the beauty in their both destructive and life-saving powers, able to balance the entire world’s good and evil. He wants to be able to see the value of nature in all its facets. “The Return to Monsterland” is both a piece about coming to terms with a relationship with a family member after their death and the necessity of humanity living in harmony with nature.
These are only two of the heartfelt, eccentric stories of Where We Go When Everything We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu, and even within this review, there is so much left unpacked in “The Passage of Time in the Abyss” and “The Return to Monsterland.” The stories blend monsters and spirits seamlessly into the tapestry of human life today. Though folklore and stories of the like may seem out-of-touch with modern times, Nagamatsu skillfully shows the many connections one can draw from them to our lives. I strongly encourage everyone reading to read this book, full of mystical what-ifs turned to real, bittersweet answers.
The Roar 