The Forest Brims Over

May 29, 2023
Ayase’s inventive English-language debut offers a fantastical account of the gendered power dynamics between a writer and his muse. Author Nowatari Tetsuya based his breakout novel on his wife, Nowatari Rui, who is now heartsick and bitter over Tetsuya’s infidelity with one of his students. She responds by eating seeds meant for their garden and begins to sprout leaves and roots all over her body. Tetsuya draws on his wife’s transformation as inspiration for his next book, which turns out to be even more successful than the last. In addition to Rui and Tetsuya, the novel’s rotating points of view include that of Tetsuya’s first editor, whose long hours and frequent visits to Tokyo’s red-light district cause his wife to leave him; Tetsuya’s new editor, an up-and-coming woman who is discounted by her male peers; and his mistress, whom he uses for inspiration before discarding her. Though some of the characters’ conversations feel a bit didactic, Tetsuya’s use of varied perspectives anchors and deepens the book’s central theme of power imbalances in relationships. This smart and dreamy story will leave English-language readers wanting more from Ayase. Agent: Nagisa Nakasone, Kawade Shobo Shinsha.

June 1, 2023
Writer Nowatari Tetsuya's most famous work is a romance, the main character named for and modeled after his wife but with some editorial freedom. When Rui discovers that he might be cheating on her with one of his creative-writing students, she begins to take root--literally. She sprouts and begins to become a tree, a forest, right in their bedroom. And the seeds she is sowing demand answers about gender roles and the way Tetsuya treats women. Soon, people in their lives, like Tetsuya's editor, Sekiguchi, will have to cope with the way that the writer treats his muse and wonder at their own complicity and emotions as the forest takes over. This surrealist story mixes botanist wonder, compelling characters, a bitter, ironic humor, and a wild, untamable feminine anger that together make the book a thought-provoking and quick read. A modern, feminist fairy tale that deals with the imbalance in relationships and the way muses are exploited makes for an interesting new voice in writing.

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June 15, 2023
In this novel by Japanese writer Ayase, the first of her 18 works to be translated into English, a writer's wife transforms into a forest. Ayase begins with the third-person point of view of an editor named Sekiguchi Masashi, who's visiting the house of Nowatari Tetsuya, a well-known novelist whose salacious debut featured thinly veiled details about his sexy young wife, Rui. None of his subsequent books have been as successful, and Sekiguchi is trying to help him with ideas. While there, he overhears the couple fight, and soon afterward Rui begins to sprout buds and leaves: She's turning into a forest because she suspects her husband of infidelity. Instead of taking her to the hospital, Nowatari writes a novel called Garden. And it's really good! Sekiguchi finds himself in a moral quandary. "This horrifying situation, and the literary work based on it, were ultimately Nowatari's sin. Sekiguchi was just supposed to receive his breathtaking manuscript and deliver it to the world....His job was no more than that, he repeated to himself over and over." Meanwhile, in his own marriage, the editor fails to understand the ways he burdens his wife. In the second section, the point of view switches to the student Nowatari is having his affair with; he loves her "emptiness and purity." Ayase's concerns are contemporary gender roles, sexism in publishing (and society generally), and the relationship between exploitation and art. Her examination has depth and nuance. Male characters reflect on the pressures to compete and the perils of the succeed-or-die mentality. Meanwhile Rui's forest grows and spreads, affecting the entire town. When Sekiguchi moves to another department, the young woman assigned to be Nowatari's new editor asks the writer a single blunt question. A sprightly, compelling tale with magical realist flair in which a novelist's muse takes charge of her own story.

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