Elemental (Calico (3))

“A celebration of both storytelling and translation, Elemental is essential; a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds.” ―Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities

A family’s heirloom stones unearth a story spanning war, illness, and radioactivity. A pipeline installed to protect a town from flooding results in a howling that disturbs the town’s inhabitants. A political prisoner embarks on an epic flight toward freedom, literally blown like a kite in the wind.

A whirlwind of fantastic new writing from Japan, Iran, Norway, Germany, Madagascar, Iraq, Poland, and Israel, this collection of fiction and reportage maps the intimate, ongoing relationship between human civilization and the natural world. Do we set the limits on our existence? Or is it wind, water, fire, and earth that define―even control―us? Borrowing from eco-literature and mythology, Elemental unflinchingly takes up the earth.

After a while, even I grew tired of searching the Hikari-ga-oka sky for falling bodies, and my sisters and I turned our attention downward, absorbed by the depths of the hole being opened in the ground beneath us.

Construction had begun on the Ōedo Subway Line. We’d heard rumors that a spring or the bones of the dead might burst forth, feeding our excitement as we imagined deep down beneath the earth where the Land of the Dead would be. We’d egg each other on, slipping through the tape cordoning off the construction site to see who’d climb the farthest down into the darkness.

“It’s the Land of the Dead, so that means all the people who’ve ever died are down there, and all the animals too!”

“If you eat something while you’re down there, worms get into your body!”

“If you look behind you as you climb out, you’ll turn to stone!”

The four of us peered deep into the dark hole that had so suddenly appeared. But soon enough, my sisters tired of this too, shifting their attention back to shopping and dating, spending all their time in IMA instead of in contemplation of the earth’s depths.

So I was left alone again to peer tirelessly into the darkness at the bottom of the hole. And, from time to time, I’d slip through the tape and see how many steps I could make myself take down into the depths.

The faintly shadowed stairs seemed to extend infinitely into the darkness beneath the earth.

On this particular day, I think I ended up descending farther than I ever had before, having glimpsing a faintly shining light in the darkness. The faint light drew me down toward it, and I felt exalted. I descended farther and farther down the stairs, guided by the light. My lungs chilled from within as the air around me grew colder. My breath would shine briefly white when I exhaled, drifting through the light before the dark swallowed it.

And so, there beneath the ground, in the dark depths of the Land of the Dead, I encountered not the people and animals who’d died before me, but rather the figure of a woman, naked from the waist down, clinging to a man.

―from “Precious Stones” by Erika Kobayashi, translated from Japanese by Brian Bergstrom