At the Edge of the Woods

When his wife returns to her parents' house to have their 2nd child, an unnamed narrator & his son are left to manage by themselves. Instead of absence, what the father & son begin to notice is a strange noise opening up between them, reverberating through their home, their television set, & the books they read at night. The wood outside their home hums with it, too: leaves fall from branches which are already naked, trees wriggle when walked past, & the hills on the horizon rise & fall in a building rhythm. 

Ono's stories teeter on the edge of something unsayable, exploring repetition & contradiction to sketch compelling, otherworldly characters. The strange sound which hums through the twinned narratives is distilled in Carpenter's translation, which masterfully employs the rhythms & echoes of the English language to convey Ono's sense that something is coughing, laughing, turning under the words on the page.

Design by Nigel Aono-Billson.

°°° 

An allegory for alienation & climate catastrophe unlike any other

In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three is settling into a house at the edge of the woods. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned & Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family’s home to give birth to a 2nd child, father & son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. 

Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods & processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with gnashing teeth visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.