Translated by Angus Turvill. San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press, 2018. 128 pages. $19.95.
Characters in fiction are always haunted by something, which can manifest itself in distinct ways: some by their past actions, others by ghosts. What one remembers or what one has forgotten. Lion Cross Point, the first book published in English by award-winning Japanese writer Masatsugu Ono, draws on these hauntings and more to tell the story of Takeru, a young boy in a new place without his immediate family. As he adjusts to his new surroundings and circumstances, he also must adjust to the opposing weight of what has left him behind and what lies ahead.
Things are hazy from the beginning. The opening line is italicized dialogue from an unknown source that readers later learn is a ghost. From there, Ono relegates the narrative business in favor of the emotional. In the second paragraph, the narrator describes the process of remembering:
His mother’s whisper was like blades of grass, rustling, chafed by the wind. He tried to remember the expression on her face as she spoke, but he couldn’t. Wanting to recall her voice more clearly, he closed his eyes, and when he did so he was grass—dry, sad, tired. The harder he tried to remember her voice the more chafed and torn the grass became. Patches of brown began to appear. Something was eating this wind-blown tangle, eating his mother’s voice. What was it? He peered deep into the green mass, and the brown patches grew. He was probably too young to realize that the pest feasting on the grass was his own longing, his yearning, to remember his mother’s voice.
This is a wrenching and fitting beginning to the book. Takeru has lost his mother, though how exactly is not clear. He has an older brother whom people often mistook for the younger sibling, who does not speak, and only appears in the book’s fictional past. He establishes from the beginning that memory does not come free. What’s worse is that Takeru is aware of this and can imagine it in the language of physical degradation. As noted at the end of the passage, he does not have a grasp on the cause and effect mechanism yet, but he knows that it’s falling apart and he feels there is nothing he can do about it.
Without his mother, he is taken in by Mitsuko, a woman with an unclear relationship to him. She is “of an age at which she could easily have been taken for ten-year-old Takeru’s grandmother.” There is initially some confusion about how long he was expecting to stay with her. He thinks it’s only for the summer. She understands it to be much longer, but she does not impose this on him. The reality will be what it will be, and she acts with mercy in not making him reckon with it yet.
When they arrive at their destination, his mother’s hometown, it is the first time Takeru sees Bunji, the ghost who will speak to him throughout the book. He does not register him as a ghost at first. Not until he sees a photograph in Matsuko’s home does Takeru learn that Bunji is dead, and has been since before Matsuko was born. His ghostliness is surprising but handled matter-of-factly. It is there from the start, weight Takeru holds on his shoulders.
Takeru is burdened by his experiences and has not yet found a language for expressing this. The moments he seems free from them are some of the most beautiful in the book because of their fleeting nature. At one point, his youth shines through discussing a public space near his once-home.
Children called it Zebra Park because of a plastic zebra for toddlers next to the swings. There was a plastic horse and a plastic giraffe as well. Some children called it Giraffe Park but nobody called it Horse Park.
This is an arrestingly innocent anecdote, one that provides little utility except to remind a reader that this is the story of a child who, in all of his trauma and fear, is still a child like any other. Ono continues with the narrative business of the book without lingering, but the impact stays.
In other sections, Ono employs repetition to set the tone. Nearly everyone is two years apart: Takeru and his friend Saki; a man named Ken is two years older than Takeru’s mother; Takeru’s brother is two years older than him but because of his brother’s inability to communicate, people often assumed the other way around; Bunji was two years older than his brother, but people often assumed the other way around because he too was not able to communicate. In some ethereal way, these past and present lives are connected by more than just coincidence. What matters most is that they cannot seem to escape or even know they’re trapped.
Memory is still distortive, but it’s creative too. Takeru asks Matsuko to tell him how Bunji died, but what she’s saying isn’t right, and Takeru starts to remember details that align with him and his own brother—Bunji and Takeshi are wearing the same hats, Takeru mistakes his name for Takeshi’s—and things continue to blur and blur. It’s a remix and reiteration of the book’s opening passage. The reader will feel a bit of déjà vu, but there is no revelation and no resolution. That’s not how this haunting works. The inclusion of the parallel stories serves to unsettle readers just as it unsettles Takeru. Neither have a good grasp on what exactly is real.
Lion Cross Point is ultimately about the processing of unspeakable pain. Unlike Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning Sing, Unburied, Sing, the ghost is not here to teach Takeru, but accompany him. Nor is Bunji like the ghost in Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, which seems to have an agenda of its own. Instead, Bunji is something like a window. Early on, after Takeru learns of Bunji’s suspicious disappearance at a young age, he wonders “how could it be that there was no place for him here, where he’d been born and lived his whole life?” He can’t provide answers, but perhaps he can provide the right questions.
