Through Tragedy and Travail, Siblings Reconnect

A BURDEN OF FLOWERS

By Natsuki Ikezawa

Translated by Alfred Birnbaum

Kodansha

280 Pages, $22

Tetsuro “Tez” Nishijima is a well-known Japanese artist who flits around Asia, looking for connection and inspiration. His sister, Kaoru, is a Paris-based film location coordinator who undergoes a strange baptism that leaves her with no more sense of belonging than before. Both have fled Japan, an island they feel is unable to hold their restless spirits. With the exception of occasional visits home to see their emotionally distant parents, these two disaffected wanderers might have remained in separate orbits but for the tragedy that brings them together in Natsuki Ikezawa’s meditative novel, “A Burden of Flowers.”

Tez has become addicted to heroin on one of his visits to Thailand, seduced into trying the drug by Inge, a German accountant and sometime art critic, who hints at the drug’s ability to provide new insights into Tez’s craft. But he finds the drug ultimately deceptive, deluding him into thinking he’s creating a masterpiece when he’s painting with just water. Despite kicking the habit at a Thai monastery and returning home to recuperate, Tez has been left physically weakened and emotionally vulnerable. So when he is thrown together with a second heroin-using European on a return trip to Thailand, he has little ability to resist. Appalled at his own weakness, he flees to Bali and begins a methadone regimen, only to be seduced again by a shady street pusher, who entraps the unsuspecting artist in a trafficking arrest that leads to trial.

As straightforward and as reminiscent of “Midnight Express” as the novel may sound, in the hands of Ikezawa, “A Burden of Flowers” has a meandering quality and an internal tension that comes, in part, from the fact that half of the narration--Tez’s--is a stream of consciousness, distorted by the artist’s drug-induced perception of himself from a distant, third-person vantage point. Here Ikezawa’s writing is affecting and effective in portraying a man who comes to a slow realization of the prison where he’s incarcerated and the hopelessness of his situation: “First blinking yanks a brutal ripcord--a landslide caves in from above, pressing down flat and suffocating. Body a catalogue of pains, pinioned against the wall in some impossible posture, butting into the next body over .... Why’d you have to wake up? .... Quietly switch off the works and let the body slowly rot--how much easier that would be.”

While Tez’s recollections provide the reader with a patchwork perspective of his past and present dilemmas, it is his younger sister’s interspersed narration that binds the novel together. Arriving in Japan for one of her infrequent visits, she learns from her mother about Tez’s arrest and immediately sets off to Bali to help him. For Kaoru, the first glimpse of her brother, squeezed in among the other bodies “just like at a zoo,” is overwhelming, but she presses on, determined to find legal counsel in a country whose police and prosecutors seem only too willing to advocate for a quick death sentence for Tez.

Through her persistence and contacts, Kaoru is able to enlist the services of an elderly Japanese professor with ties to Indonesia who arranges for a guide, attorney and interpreter for her brother. But because Kaoru herself does not speak the language, she too is an observer, which makes the novel’s courtroom scenes as seen through her eyes unaffecting and flat. Moreover, the revelation that brings together the missing threads of the story is unnecessarily tangled.

Yet in spite of the misleading publisher’s hype, which tries to position “A Burden of Flowers” as a thriller, this novel--based on a true story--aspires to more than the typical genre novel. With its allusions to the disconnected siblings and the exquisitely rendered islands they explore, and the characterization of Japan as an island apart from, indeed separate from the rest of Asia, one is reminded of John Donne’s cautionary lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

For ultimately it is the means by which these sojourners find spiritual and temporal connections to themselves and the Asian continent that gives “A Burden of Flowers” its resonance and power. Perhaps Tez says it best, in a letter to Inge summarizing the siblings’ eventual transformation: “... a new destiny opens up and a person chooses to walk that path. Happenstance comes in so many different colours, tangles the strands, cuts them apart only to string them back together. It meshes and twists, sends a shuttle flying across the warps--and before you know it, a life is woven.”