off guard. Here as throughout the novel,
Ogawa’s imagery is empowered by the beau-
ty and simplicity of her prose, which, in
this elegant translation by Stephen Snyder,
evokes a mood of elegiac sadness that blan-
kets the twists and turns of the story and lin-
gers long after the novel ends in inevitable
dissolution.
Ogawa has written over twenty books
and won several major awards: notably
the Akutagawa Prize (1990) and the Shir-
ley Jackson Award (2000). Only four have
been previously published in English, all
sensitively translated by Snyder. They are
nothing if not diverse. The Housekeeper and
the Professor (2003; 2008) is a charming
domestic story about number theory. Hotel
Iris (1996; 2010) tells of a sadomasochistic
affair between a teenage girl and a griev-
ing widower. The Diving Pool (1990; 2008)
is a triptych of novellas about painfully
isolated women driven by their inability to
connect with others to casual cruelty and
even sadism, while Revenge (1990; 2013)
is a mosaic novel: eleven obliquely linked
stories that share a common setting and
some recurring characters and motifs. What
unites these works are a fascination with
violence and the grotesque; a willingness to
plunge readers into a surreal hyperreality,
and Ogawa’s style: always restrained, even
calm, no matter how grotesque the material.
Ogawa offers no explanations for the
inexplicable “laws of the island.” None are
needed. For she is using the machineries of
The Memory Police to vivify a philosophical
inquiry into the nature of self, the role of
memory in its construction, and its inevita-
ble dissolution as age erodes, denatures, and
eventually destroys memories. The richness
of characterization, the subtly poetic imag-
ery, and the strangely compelling nature of
the leisurely plot make The Memory Police
singularly unforgettable.
Michael A. Morrison
University of OklahomaXuan Juliana Wang
Home RemediesNew York. Hogarth. 2019. 240 pages.Xuan Juliana Wang’s debut collection of
short stories, Home Remedies, brings the
contemporary Chinese and Chinese Ameri-
can experience into profound, funny, and
sometimes surreal focus. Organized into
three sections—Family, Love, and Time and
Space—the collection’s twelve stories span
generations and class, but much attention
is paid to China’s Strawberry Generation, a
term coined for millennials who bruise eas-
ily, overprotected by parents during main-
land China’s one-child policy, who escaped
hardships faced during the turbulent years
of China’s Cultural Revolution. As the par-
ents’ difficult pasts loom quietly on these
pages, the millennial generation’s levity
standing out in sharp relief.
Through lightness and humor, the mil-
lennial characters try to invent their own
futures and identities while testing the
boundaries of the real. In “The Strawberry
Years,” Yang, a recent immigrant from Bei-
jing, agrees to introduce a Chinese actress
to New York as a favor to a colleague. With
her numerous Livestream fans, the actress
becomes even more popular in Yang’s
Brooklyn apartment, reminiscent of theTV show Beijingers in New York. She slowly
takes over his room and his friends, displac-
ing Yang from his own life, as we wonder
what will become of him.
Maggie, the second-generation Chinese
American narrator in “Future Cat,” owns
a wine-aging machine that can mature not
just wine but a snail, avocados, her cat, and
eventually herself. As she shuttles toward
age, she reflects on her family: “Her own
parents had spent most of their lives try-
ing to become citizens of this country. She
knew there was always a price to be paid,
higher than anyone ever anticipates.” Not
wanting to revisit both her and her parents’
sacrifices, she states, “She just wants to live!”
“Days of Being Mild” depicts bei piao,
twentysomething drifters in post-Olympic
Beijing who confess, “We are not good
at math or saving money but we are very
good at being young.” They make semipor-
nographic music videos to shock Chinese
viewers and earn fans in the West. They
drift though life lonely and aimless, search-
ing for consequence; as a coda, “Fuerdai to
the Max” reveals the consequences of too
much aimless privilege among the fuerdai,
the second-generation rich.
Time expands and contracts in these
stories, which offer glimpses across gen-
erations, too. In “Algorithmic Problem-
Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships,”
the first-generation Chinese father fears
his second-generation daughter’s indepen-
dence. His best means of understanding her
requires parsing their relationship through
algorithmic code. The parental relationship
in “Mott Street in July” represents a “Chi-
nese love,” one of sacrifice and suffering,
yet when an oracle grandmother tells the
mother her luck has changed, the parents
abandon their children to join the sto-
ry’s invented “Fish Generation,” America’s
unwanted immigrants.
Xuan Juliana Wang’s innovative and
magnetic voice offers new perspectives on
immigration, on the complexities of culture
and imagination, love and technology, and
the surrealistic visions of the new Chinese
generation—perspectives so different fromBooks in Review
86 W LT SUMMER 2019