The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest

12 haunting, uniquely crafted short stories about loss and memory from a revered Japanese-Argentine author, available in English for the first time.

“Her stories are a transformative experience... Kamiya makes simple what for others is impossible to express.” —Clarín

In 12 stories of exquisite compression and perfectly-formed images, Japanese-Argentine writer Alejandra Kamiya conjures absences, shadows, and all that must remain unsaid.

As dawn breaks, a woman goes to the market in search of ingredients to make a perfect breakfast for her husband and son, while a subtle note of disquiet grows louder. A Japanese prisoner of war resolutely obeys a command as precise as it is inexplicable: he must dig a pit in a precise location until he receives another command, which never seems to arrive. 2 girls discover themselves through electrically charged games, which they will recall in letters for the rest of their lives.

In prose that is at once serene and shot through with disquiet and mourning, Kamiya creates a fictional world with its own rhythm, where preice, minimal phrasing reveals vast emotional landscapes. Enigmatic yet sharply clear, The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is a book of quietly shattering epiphanies from a unique voice in international fiction.

Revered in Argentina, where her diamond-sharp stories are championed by a legion of booksellers and readers, Kamiya has a strikingly clear and subtle style that will delight fans of Claire Keegan, Yuko Tsushima and Yiyun Li.

• Perfect Breakfast

• The Remains of the Secret

• Rice

• The Names

• Three Chairs

• Fragments of a Conversation

• The Boots

• The Pit

• Out in the Darkness

• The Headscarf and the Wind

• Parting

• As Brief as a Clover

Alejandra Kamiya is a Japanese-Argentine writer. Born in Buenos Aires, she has published three collections of short stories and won numerous awards for her writing, including the Horacio Quiroga Award and the Konex Award. The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is her first book to be translated into English.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the International Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among many others.You won’t wait for the light to slip through the window. You will look at Takashi sleeping beside you. It’s good he’s resting, you’ll think, because he has a long day of work ahead. You’ll get up from the futon without a sound, and walk light-footed across the tatami to the kitchen, and you’ll dress there so as not to tear Hiro and Takashi’s paper sleep.

A perfect breakfast calls for fresh fish and the freshest of all is around the Tsukiji market. It’s mackerel season.

You’ll take the train to Tsukiji for a perfect mackerel.

There, every single one will look lovely to you. That blue reflection, the tiger stripes on black that is wet, always wet, like a recollection that never dries, a memory of the sea.

You will shut your eyes, and choose. You won’t allow yourself to be carried away entirely by what you see.

You’ll travel back home with the perfect mackerel in a bag, hoping for no delays. That would be a loss of freshness. A crack in the smoothness of your plans.

Back home, you will slice the mackerel in half and salt it, so it retains the spirit of the sea. You’ll leave the rice to soak, having washed your hands with that coconut soap Mariko gave you. How lucky you are. How many Japanese women wash their face and hands in the morning with coconut soap?

You will imagine a beach like the ones in travel-agent advertisements and focus your imagination up at the tips of the palm trees: you’ll see the coconuts, the ones they used for making the soap so that your hands could be soft this morning. You will wish that something of this beach and this coconut whiteness might pass into the rice through your hands as you wash it and leave it to rest.

The resting is important. In all things.

To make the miso shiru, you will scent the water with small, dried anchovies. You will imagine the dance of the coconut’s sweetness with the salty taste of the anchovies. As if that same sea that caresses the feet of the palms were doing it now in Tokyo, in your house.

You won’t put many anchovies in the water because otherwise that dance of flavors will turn into a battle.

Next you go to open the natto, and the packet of nori, the one you saved up to buy. Nori of a perfect blackness, death-like, without the green glints of more common seaweed.

There’s something arrogant in that gesture and you will be embarrassed, but the idea of a perfect breakfast will once again convince you that you did the right thing, that just a single component of a different quality would mean the work on all the others was wasted.

Which is also why you will use the tea from the first flush, that tea from the south of Japan. You’ll take the water off the stove before it boils, you’ll just moisten the leaves, and after pouring on the water you will let them rest. They’ll stretch and their flavor will be allowed to emerge, their scent, their green essence in your gray kitchen. You will go to your son’s room.

You’ll stay there a little while, kneeling beside the futon watching his breaths. Truly you could spend all the time in the world here, let the breakfast rot in the kitchen and the rest of the meaningless world fall apart out there and you’d just keep on kneeling beside Hiro’s futon. As if he belonged to you and not to the waiting world, of which he is just one more cog.

You’ll put a hand on his skinny little shoulder. The boy will say: “Hey,” and you’ll answer in a voice neither loud nor quiet that it’s time to get up.

He will rub his eyes and say: “OK, mamá,” and then he’ll pull the covers back up, to laze about for just one more minute. Then you will come back to the kitchen and listen as Hiro and your husband ready themselves for their days that are filled with obligations, the way trees are filled with fruit or flowers.

You will mix the mustard into the natto: a sword dance. A sharp tinkling in your nose.
You will place everything on the table with the same care as every other morning, only now seeking something different.

Not one angle must be out of tune, not one color must clash or be erased, they should flow toward Hiro and his papá.

The scents should seduce like something hidden. The ordering should be pleasant like the voices of the elevator girls in department stores.

You will place a small flower down beside the natto dish. Almost an act of vanity that you will be unable to avoid. A sign, perhaps.

Your husband and Hiro will kneel beside the breakfast. You will enjoy watching them eat. Hiro, a little ungainly as if still nestled in sleep, will rub his face with the back of the hand in which he’s holding the ohashi.

You will crack an egg into his bowl. A whole sun will spread across a small rice world.

You will see Hiro finish waking up as he chews, and you’ll see him realize that this is a perfect breakfast. Your husband will eat everything down to the last grain of rice, every last bit of the natto, every last fiber of the mackerel and he will nod while he does it.

“Oishi,” Hiro will say, and you’ll be content and you will thank him, just tipping your head and smiling more with your eyes than with your lips that do not part. “Oishi,” the boy will say again, and you’ll feel a puffer fish in your chest. Your husband will nod again.

The table will be left empty. Only the bowls, cups, small dishes, all empty as skeletons. And the flower, open like a yelling mouth. Mute of meaning in its beauty.

Hiro will say he’s got English class and he’ll race from the table.

Your husband will wait a little, as if he were resting, like the rice, like the tea. You will rinse your hands to say goodbye to them. You will use your coconut soap one more time.

Hiro will have his backpack and his baseball cap.

You’ll tell him to take it off before going into school.

He’ll nod and tell you his friend’s waiting for him on the next block.

You’ll say not to make him wait.

Your husband, already at the door, will tell you before putting on his shoes that it was a perfect breakfast. You’ll thank him for that.

Alone in the house, you will clean with great care, as always, only differently. Things can always be better. What a lack of humility it would be not to try.

When you have finished, you go sit beside the oven and open the door, which comes down like a drawbridge.

You’ll turn the knob and rest your head on the door as if it were a pillow on which you were going to nap.

The note of apology will have been written already and you’ll have left it on the table.

You will think about sun-filled beaches and very tall palm trees. At their tips you will see coconuts and you’ll guess at their white insides and their scent.

You’ll look at the sea, and feel that strange smell as it comes and goes.