Posts filed under 'fertility'

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

June 24, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Kathryn Raver

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Title: Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

November 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

. . . the tension of the story's thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.

After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022

Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.

Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.

During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details. READ MORE…