Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel and the first work of hers that I read. I had never met Karen and would not for another fifteen or so years. That was a good thing. It allowed me to get over my jealousy. I harbored a grudge against her because her first novel was so much better, so much smarter than my own. And why not? Karen Yamashita is smarter than I am. That intelligence permeates this first novel. Its strength is that it is a work from Karen Yamashita.
Through the Arc opens with a man who has a small sphere perpetually orbiting his head. In fact, the story is narrated by the floating ball and by Kazumasa, the man with the head. From there the novel becomes strange. But not really, but really. One not only believes that such a ball exists, believes that the ball has a voice, but believes the story that the ball is surrendering. I believe it. I believe it all. I believe it because it is true. After the first paragraphs of the story, I was willing to follow this story, this writer, anywhere. The prose is sure-handed, unpretentious, seductive, strange, and unadorned, yet beautiful, with turns of phrase that are as natural as the wilderness the novel depicts.
Because of this novel, I will never be able to create for myself a character with three arms. The irritating thing about this is not that I am unable to do it because it has now been done, but because, damn her, Karen has done it so well.
The complications of the novel rival those of Pynchon, but Karen achieves it all so economically that it is difficult to see them piling up until they, well, have piled up. This is done with dry, subtle humor. And like most great humor, Twain comes to mind, it is overlaid onto a landscape of most serious matters.
Through the Arc visits and takes on the real stuff of our times, the destruction of our environment, the out-of-control corporate greed, the betrayal of our own by our own. This relatively short novel, which not short at all, takes on so much, but serves no issue with fleeting brevity. The work presents the whole arc of the story.
Here, whatever passes through the arc, this rainbow, becomes its opposite. By the end of the work, I too had passed through the arc of the rainbow, and I too was forever changed. The novel showed me what it is possible to lose, and it showed me what is possible to save, what is possible for the human spirit, good and bad. As an artist I was shown merely what is possible.
I applaud Coffee House Press not only for first publishing Through the Arc of the Rain Forest but for reissuing it here. I thank them also for allowing me to be a part of this celebration of truly fine art.