A Roundup of My Summer:
Water Books
- Barron, Sandra Rodriguez. The Heiress of Water. NY: Harper Perennial, 2006
- Bilal, Parker. Dark Water: A Makana Mystery. NY: Bloomsbury, 2017.
- Callahan Henry, Patti. The Bookshop At The Water’s End. NY: Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2017.
- Camilleri, Andrea. The Shaper of Water. NY: Penguin Books, 2005
- Cleeves, Ann. Dead Water: A Shetland Mystery. NY: Minotaur Books, 2014.
- Cuomo, George. Trial By Water. NY: Random House, 1993.
- Del Toro, Guillermo. The Shape Of Water. NY: Feiwel and Friends, 2018.
- Esquivel, Laura. Like Water For Chocolate: a novel in monthly installments, with recipes, romances, and home remedies. NY: Anchor Books, 1995.
- Finch, Charles. The Woman In The Water. NY: Minotaur Books, 2018.
- Gruen, Sara. At The Water’s Edge. NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
- Gruen, Sara. Water For Elephants. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007.
- Harrison, DeSales. The Waters & The Wild. NY: Random House, 2018.
- Hawkins, Paula. Into The Water. NY: Riverhead Books, 2017
- Gregson, J.M. Too Much Of Water. England: Severn House, 2015.
- Lamb, Wally. We are Water. NY: Harper, 2013.
- Locke, Attica. Black Water Rising. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009.
- Moore, Jean P. Water On The Moon. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2014
- Nesbitt, John D. Good Water. Five Star Publishing, 2016.
- Sauma, Luiza. Flesh And Bone And Water. NY: Scribner, 2017.
- Steadman, Catherine. Something In The Water. NY: Ballantine Books, 2018.
- Stracher, Cameron. Water Wars. ILL: Sourcebooks, 2011.
- Suzuki, Koji. Dark Water. NY: Vertical, 2006.
In Japan, I grew up
riding a ferry to and from a mainland and though the body of water is
different, the feel of the Governors Island ferry is the same. The distance between the Manhattan Ferry terminal
to Governors Island is only 800 yards, much shorter than crossing the Japanese
Inland Sea, but I still walked upon patched together diamond plate and smelled
the same diesel fumes from trucks on board.
There is a high school on Governors Island and on my first morning
commute, a teen told me about his life plans of getting the hell out of New
York City when he graduates from the Harbor School. He will work on a tanker as
a mechanic and sail to and from Japan.
My Japanese mother is a
Christian blip in a sea of Buddhists, and because of this, my name was lifted
out of the Christian Bible- Psalm 23rd to be exact. Everyone knows this Biblical poem, even if
you are Hindu, Muslim or Atheist. It is the one recited at memorials and in every
movie funeral.
The lord is my Shepard I shall not want.
He maketh me lie down in green pastures
He leadeth me beside still waters
bla bla bla…
My birth name “Migiwa” is a literal translation of
“beside still waters” in Japanese, and so I decided to read as many novels with
the word “Water” in the title for my summer task. There is a lot of water imagery in
Christianity. Baptisms, renewal,
rebirth, cleansing away of the wrongs of humanity, and this is what I had hoped
to encounter in the books I chose to read whilst sitting in the abandoned
library in house #5 on the island.
However, this is not at all the water imagery I encountered in the books
at my reading table. For example, I
found that the British like to kill off people, mostly women and dump them into
watery graves.
The first book I picked
up for my summer project which I subtitled “the self-imposed island isolation
sentence” was by Paula Hawkins; the same author that wrote The Girl on the Train. This
recently published book titled, Into the
Water, was just as dark, and structurally similar to the earlier train
mystery, with unreliable narrators and chapters divided by individual inner
dialogue; a bit of a gimmick I felt, but it was easy to decipher the macabre
tale.
In present day Beckford,
a small town outside of London, Jules tries to find out if her sister Nel had
committed suicide, or was it murder? She claimed “there are people who are
drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows.…place
of ecstasy, could be for others a place of dread and terror.” So the water
beckons various characters, like a siren’s song.
It is hard to give a
quick synopsis of this convoluted tale, as there are several wrongs and crimes
happening at once. The surprise ending,
(as with the Train book) was not as shocking as it could have been. At the core of the tale, drowning witches
from history are intertwined with present day women who have been thought to
have committed suicides. Unwanted,
problematic, slutty women, or so the community labels them have perished in the
waters. In Beckford, water has an ominous, sinister, foreboding quality. It conjures up witches and brought up
memories of sitting in Jury Duty watching the video of Judge Judith Kay kindly informing
the good citizens about the history of the judicial system. Women were once accused of being witches and
instead of the civilized trials we have today, their fates rested on whether
they would sink or swim- literally. The
accused were tied up and thrown into icy rivers and lakes, and if the women
sank, they were thought to be innocent, but ironically died from drowning
anyway.
In Charles Finch’s The Woman in the Water (prequel to the
Charles Lenox Series), the setting is 1850 London. The upper-class Charles
Lenox, and his trusty valet Graham, live in a flat with their no nonsense
housekeeper Mrs. Huggens. Sir Richard
Mayne, the head of Scotland Yard with his two unlikeable and jaded underlings
are investigating a perfect crime. The
body of water at the center of this tale is the river Thames where two bodies
were found. It could not be any more
similar to Sherlock Holmes, and because this is a British tale with a watery
center, references to Shakespeare’s Ophelia are abundant.
The Brits seem to love mystery series, and in Too Much of
Water: A Lambert and Hook Mystery, J.M.
Gregson shows us another crime. In Gloucester, England, superintendent
John Lambert and detective sergeant Bert Hook, investigate another murder. This
time, a body has been dumped into the River Severn. The narrative jumped around
from character to character, told from third person omniscient and created
doubt about each suspect the detectives encountered. Again Ophelia is presented
to the reader.
A bit further north, I was taken to the Shetland Islands, to the Voe-
the narrow bay of the Orkney and Shetland islands within the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. In Anne Cleeves’ Dead Water, a man named Jerry Markham
is murdered and it is up to retired inspector Jimmy Perez to sort it out with
his partner Willow Reeves from the mainland. It was a tale with many red
herrings, involving environmental themes, amidst blackmail and politics, but in
the end, the crime was committed because of love.
Dark Water: A Makana
Mystery by Parker Bilal was an international spy thriller similar to Ian
Fleming’s James Bond series, but with a culturally diverse twist. At the center is Makana, a Sudanese private
investigator. As with the typical Bond style genre, there is also a petty crook
turned terrorist leader (Jordanian), Secret intelligence agent (British),
chemical weapons expert, computer hacker, and a well connected entrepreneur
(Turkish), all engaged in a labyrinthine plot involving back-stabbing,
kidnapping and revenge conspiracies. The action took place near the Nile River
& the Bosporus Strait, which separates the Black sea from the Marmara Sea.
I realized early on that the daughter in the prologue was alive (not dead) but
other than that, I was lost because there were so many convoluted plot lines
and characters double-crossing one another.
Catherine
Steadman’s debut novel Something in the
Water, was the last British murder mystery in my stack. The story started
out in London but traveled to Bora Bora where the crime was committed. Written in the form of a diary with dated
chapter titles, attractive protagonist Erin Roberts makes ridiculous choices during
her honeymoon with her attractive husband.
But because the story was so easy to read (like the ease of mindlessly
watching television), I somehow ended up rooting for Erin even though she was
so shortsighted and laughable. The pacing was similar to a film script as the
story started in October during mid-conflict and went back and forth in time,
like a Tarantino film mixed with Bridget
Jones’ Diary. There is a surprising
ending, well you could spot it a mile away but still somehow the ending was
satisfying.
Speaking of cinematic chick-lit, Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge took me to Scotland in the 1940s. There was a death, three in fact, but this
was not a murder mystery at all. The characters were three upper-class
Philadelphians with British roots: beautiful Maddie (Madeline Penneypacker) the
protagonist, her reputation tarnished due to her insane mother who had
committed suicide (yet another watery suicidal death of a beautiful woman akin
to Ophelia), Ellis Hyde, her selfish, cowardly husband, and his best friend
Hank. They travel to Glen Urquhart, Scotland on a cargo ship during the war. Similar to the white whale in Moby Dick, the trio
go on a search for the Loch-ness monster.
The two careless, spoiled, wealthy man-childs, dodge the war by escaping
their petty problems in Philadelphia. Their
insensitivity and disregard for other humans is sickening, and the worse of the
two men, get what is coming to him with the help of the River Ness. This story is full of superstitions and
magical thinking, and an engaging tale, but I was a bit disappointed by this
second book by Sara Gruen with Water in it’s title.
The first book I read by Ms. Gruen was Water for Elephants, which had been sitting on my bedside table for
so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
Inviting myself to finally read this book was wonderful because Water for Elephants was everything the
other book was not; historical fiction with a cast of sympathetic characters
who travel with a fictional circus much like Barnum and Bailey during the
depression, traversing the country on a circus train. However this engaging
story did not revolve around actual water.
The only mention was in the beginning of the story when one man in a
nursing home asks the protagonist “Do
you know how much an elephant drinks?” and Jacob Jankowski, the veterinarian
storyteller proceeds to tell a gigantic tale, involving an elephant.
The Shape of Water:
The First Inspector Montlbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri took place on Sicily in
the Tyrrhenian Sea. An important man is found dead,
seemingly of natural causes but Inspector Montalbano has other ideas. There are a lot of characters with Italian
names making it difficult to keep everyone straight. There are Feliniesque
characters of small town life, the mention of mafia gangs, and of course because
this is an Italian story, food is important and mensioned often. The title comes from a parable told by the
detective to the deceased man’s wife:
“I had a little friend, a
peasant boy, who was younger than me. I
was about ten. One day I saw that my
friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot, and a square milk carton on the edge of
a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.
And he answered me with a question in turn.
‘What shape is water?’
‘Water doesn’t have any shape!’ I said, laughing. ‘It takes the shape you give it.’”
The second book I read titled
The Shape of Water was by Guillermo
Del Toro and Daniel Kraus and is better known than the Montalbano series in
this country because it won last years Oscar for best picture. I saw the movie first then discovered that it
was a book written by the director, and expected it to be a screenplay, and was
pleasantly surprised to find a book better than the movie with fleshed out secondary
characters. I got the best of both as I saw the scenes from the film in my
minds eye, as I read. Del Toro, along
with his co-writer Kraus creates scenes of vivid colors of greens and teals,
with other sickening shades of green, not blue.
The featured bodies of water are the Amazon River, rivers in Baltimore,
and a confined tank in the government laboratory. Water is both a cleanser of filth made by
humans and a habitat for all living things inside and out. Each chapter
alternates from the viewpoint of a different character; Strickland the government
antagonist, Eliza a mute, her neighbor Giles, wife of Strickland Lainie, and a Russian
spy named Hoffstetler. In the last
section, three short chapters are written from the point of view of the sea
creature, which totally threw me off as the grammatical structure and
punctuation did not make any sense. I’m
sure the writing was trying to feel stream of consciousness, as the creature
does not speak.
The moment I finished
this book, I saw an alert on my phone about flooding in Baltimore due to heavy
rains, and that some of my Facebook friends living in the area had marked
themselves as “safe”. Art imitating
life.
Skip a few decades
forward and set partially in the same Amazon jungle where Del Toro’s sea
creature was captured, I find Luiza Sauma’s Flesh
and Bone and Water. It is a story I have read and seen in movies before, a
story of class differences and forbidden love; yes it sounds like a daytime
drama (and in fact the characters watched these telenovelas in the book), but
the setting of Brazilian small towns and Marajo islands made the story seem new
to me. The narration begins in the present when Andre, a 45-year-old physician
receives a letter from someone in his past (think Cinema Paradiso). Here he begins to tell his story from age 17
the time after his mother’s death. Water
appears not only in river form, as a watery grave, but also of the heavy
oppressive jungle climate and sweat. The
title of the book: Flesh and Bone and Water
is revealed at the very end of the book:
“Bia
(Andre’s daughter) is a strong swimmer and is soon far ahead- just a black dot
in the water, which is cool, calm and heavenly.
Will I ever swim here again? NO.
Just in my dreams. I lie on my back and float,
as I did back then, and I almost feel the same.
Just flesh and bone and water, just another animal, another Indian
swimming in the Amazon.”
In Attica Locke’s Black Water
Rising, a murder takes place in Houston, in the Buffalo Bayou. This film noir style writing of a black civil
rights lawyer to try and get justice was believable, suspenseful and layered in
it’s telling. The water in the setting
is black and ominous, but the black protagonists are honest and powerful and
tries to overcome oppression, corporate greed and corruption.
I was
reminded of one thing as I read Jean P. Moore’s book Water on the Moon, and that was to avoid books by unknown
publishers. This one was created by She Writes Press. In this story, a plane crashes into house
that had been in the Ravina family for generations, which begins a search for
Lidia’s family past. The “water on the moon” of the title is used only as a
metaphor for the hidden good things in life. It only enters the story because
the day the plane crashed into Lidia’s home, a rocket crashed on the Moon,
which had been looking for water. Water
on the Moon was a predictable romance disguised
as a mystery, with a disappointing ending.
Good Water, by John D. Nesbitt,
was another book published by an unknown press.
Tommy Reeves and Red Armstrong are ranch hands working for a racist landowner
who hates Mexicans. The body of water is
the Graybull River that feeds the reservoir that is controlled by white
ranchers. I thought this would be best
for middle schoolers as a discussion starter for race relations and
environmental issues, and all the explanation of Mexican food preparation and
meals was informative.
The other YA book in my stack was The
Water Wars by Cameron Stracher. In a
future dystopic American Mid-West, the map of North America has been redrawn in
accordance to the availability of scarce or non-existent water. The coastline
has been eroded by global warming or was taken away by greedy governments. Most of Florida and Louisiana are gone. There are water pirates. In this landscape, a
brother and sister try to survive by looking for a kid who is a diviner that
can find water deep in the earth. This book frighteningly shows the trajectory of
this country and how man is destroying valuable commodities. It is every dystopic story rolled into one
from Mad Max to the Hunger Games.
Meanwhile,
in a small town somewhere in Massachusetts, Florian Rubio’s son Brian is
implicated at the center of a drowning in George Como’s Trial By Water. This poorly
constructed story uses fictional Bottleneck Lake as a metaphor for a dying
organism being killed off by man, which paralleled the teenage crime. The book
had some interesting themes but due to the unsympathetic characters and
unrealistic dialogue it was totally not worth the time to read.
In
Sandra Rodriguez Barron’s The Heiress of
Water, the Pacific Ocean is not a dumping ground but a place that gives
life for a change. The narrative paces back and forth between 1970s El Salvador
and present day Connecticut. This
medical love story, with scientific facts that guides the narrative seemed so
far fetched that I had to keep looking up the research to validate the author’s
details, and indeed they were true. The
story was a bit schmaltzy, but the science was interesting enough for me to
solder on to the end.
A Yeats
poem anchors the narrative in DeSales Harrison’s The Waters & The Wild. By this time, I was using Ophelia as an
adjective: as in, there were many “Ophelianic” suicides- Miriam in the River
Loire (Nevers, France), Daniel also fated to parish in same river as Miriam,
and their daughter Jessica in the “Ophelianic” bathtub. There was abundant water imagery here beyond
the watery grave but also in the tears shed by grief, the “flood of death”, and
in time people got over their troubles just as “water finds its level”. I won’t say any more, as there is a surprise
ending.
I usually avoid
collections of short stories because they are just, well, too short. I get confused reading one story after
another in quick succession, but since it was summer and summertime makes me
nostalgic for Japan, I settled on Koji Suzuki’s Dark Water. I was excited to read this book primarily because it is
written by a Japanese author, and water inevitably has to be a central
character or backdrop when setting stories on this island nation. I chose to
read these short stories only on the ferry.
Cue nostalgic string
music: the Prologue and Epilogue introduces a grandmother telling stories to
her granddaughter, and ties the last story back to the present. This collection includes seven unrelated
eerie stories with water involved. The structure
is similar to Arnold Lobel’s children’s book Mouse Soup, where there are
stories inside one larger story. Here, the sea is a depository of human garbage
and waste, as well as a keeper of stories, where the objects found floating on
the surface become illustrations for the gruesome tales.
1.
Floating Water
There
are bits floating around in a glass of water that comes out of the tap in a new
high-rise apartment that a single mother (YOSHIMI Matsubara) and her daughter
(Ikuko) occupy. There is some mystery
about the place, and later is assumed that the missing child from the past has
ended up in the water tower on the roof of the building and everyone has been
drinking, bathing in and washing with bits of the girl.
2.
Solitary Isle
A
teacher (Kensuke Suehiro) had a childhood friend (Toshihiro Aso), who brags
about taking an ex-girlfriend (Yukari Nakazawa)to a deserted island and leaving
her there while pregnant. The teacher
goes back to this island with a mentor (headmaster Sasaki), called Battery No.
6 nine years later, and encounters a wild child.
3.
The Hold
A
brutish and abusive conger eel fisherman (Hiroyuki Inagaki) with a history of
family abuse beats his wife (Nanako) and his timid son (Katsumi). He kills his
wife in a drunken stupor, and forgets his evil deed until it is too late.
4.
Dream Cruise
Masayuki
Enoyoshi is taken on a yacht ride by the Ushijimas to be recruited into a
pyramid scheme. The boat stalls and cannot be restarted again. Ushijima dives in to see if he can release,
what ever is stuck on the propellers and believes that a little boy is caught
in the mechanics of the boat.
5.
Adrift
Kazuo,
a lifelong seafaring man is on his last tuna-fishing voyage going home, when
his ship encounters an abandoned haunted yacht, empty of its 4 passengers.
6.
Watercolors
Kiyohara,
an inhumane performance manager/director, actress Noriko Kikuchi, Yuichi
Kamiya, fired actor, now relegated to being a sound mixers assistant, all seem
to be in a play within a play, of the horror nature. Water leaking from the top floor slowly drips
to the lower floors.
7.
Forest Under the Sea
Fumihiko
Sugiyama and Sakakibara are spelunking when they become trapped inside the
cave. Twenty years later, Sugiyama’s son
returns to the cave where his father perished.
Laficato Hearn’s writing
was definitely in the periphery as I read all of these eerie tales written by
the same author who wrote The Ring. There is an old Japanese folk tale called
Urashima Taro and the Princess of the Sea, which illustrates the sea as
a place for treasures, and the tortoise is the denizen of the water who needs human
protection. I could spend another few months analyzing each novel, tracing them
back to fairytales or folktales, but perhaps this is a project for the winter.