by Sawako Nakayasu
Dusie Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
“Mandible to mandible…”
Bugs have always had a way of representing diligence and devotion to industry, have provided a top-down view of polity easily likened to human civilization that underscores something a bit Socialist, but also something more curious than that: you could as easily see an ant hauling a crumb to the queen as see it circling a stovetop for fifteen minutes with no apparent sense of direction or purpose. Either way we’ve been right all along: bugs are extraordinarily human, we’ve always known it, and it’s fun to keep thinking it.
Sawako Nakayusa’s Insect Country (B) is among the best executed in the 2007 Dusie e-chap series from both design and literary standpoints. It’s a follow-up to Insect Country (A), last year’s offering to the Dusie series. Like the last, it’s a tiny little selection of prose poems, this one a delight to look at and to hold. More importantly, it avoids the socio-political traps inherent in personifying insects. More fantasy than commentary, Insect Country (B) represents the power of light-read prose poetry and the power of brevity. It’s not a winding odyssey into a world of fantasy; it’s brief, purposeful and refreshingly bittersweet where a more cowardly writer might have settled for sweet.
When insects are humanlike in Insect Country, they are also very much insect. Take the case of the unlucky ant in “Billboard”:
Due to social upheaval in his home and native land, this ant has been uprooted from home, torn away from his wife and children, tossed into a random urban environment…
It’s not an uncommon story or vision for a personified ant; what’s uncommon is the finish. The ant notices an enormous billboard holding a picture of an ant—and realizes that is his wife. When and why did his wife go into modeling? How do ants tell each other apart? What matters is that they do—and that our lonely ant overcomes “the scales of distance and time by frantically running across her body, touching her here, there, again and more over there…” This is a completely fresh ant-image, emotional but contained. Surely ant will never see his wife again, and we’re made to feel the tragedy.
The opening poem, “Love,” is equally pleasant. It pictures a girlfriend and boyfriend butterfly (I know it sounds kiddie-book cute, but it’s not). The two are very much in love and playing in a train yard when an incomprehensible separation occurs:
One way that this story continues is that a beautiful bouquet of flowers lures the girlfriend butterfly inside an open train door, at which point the door quickly closes and the train takes off…
We’re offered more insight:
The other way that the story continues is that the girlfriend, having grown sick of her boyfriend’s arrogant ways, has already decided that she has had enough of his butter and has decided to start a new life for herself…
Nevertheless the boyfriend, an athlete with “Olympic” speed, chases the train far and wide in a chivalrous, heroic display that…doesn’t end well.
It’s all bittersweet and readable, made abundantly more charming by the minimalist, absurdist insect drawings peppered here and there, attributed to Kenjiro Okazaki. The book doesn’t move mountains—it’s a tiny little selection after all—but it’s worth owning, worth the twenty-minute read once a month. Nakayasu printed only 200 numbered volumes, but it will be published as an e-chap this summer on dusie.org for all to see. If you like to be charmed or like apt rendering of relationship misfires, print your copy. Humanizing insects and humanizing them well also works to insectify humans and simplify our plight and plights—the silly romance and smallness of it all.
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