Review: The Fox’s Window and Other Stories by Naoko Awa

Each one of the stories in The Fox’s Window takes your hand and leads you out of the safety of your home, to the deepest, darkest part of the woods or right down to the bottom of the sea or crouched down tiny under the flowers at the centre of the field. The stories spread their hands and show you something beautiful and terrible and true, and let you look at it. Then they show you how it’s all okay after all, and they lead you carefully back to your armchair again.

Each pleat of the gray skirt revealed a distinct world–A blue lake lay in one pleat. A boat bobbed on the water, and a forest swayed in the distance. The next one revealed a cherry forest. A tunnel of pale pink flowers continued endlessly. Inside, a horse was eating cherry petals. The next one was total darkness.

These are the stories I remember from childhood. Not my childhood, exactly — there were very few rice balls, red-billed cranes and tatami mats when I was growing up in the north of England — but that reaction that stories gave me when I was a child. At the end of each story, I am filled with a sense of contentment: I have gone on a journey, I have lost myself in a world of imagination, and I have been brought safely back.

The suitcase split open, shooting out a shower of cherry petals — more mysterious, more beautiful than the one Ichiro had seen at the village talent show. The petals scattered into the dark air, shining like stars. They were fireflies. The suitcase was full of them.

When I was a child, I loved Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books. Each story in that book was an entirely different world peopled with entirely different characters, and there was no way to know what to expect. I was utterly immersed; as breathless as if I had been on a rollercoaster. For you, perhaps the book that gave you that feeling was The Hobbit or The Jungle Book or Where the Wild Things Are or Harry Potter. There must be a book that gave you such a feeling, of journeys travelled and homes reached, because if you didn’t have a book like that then I very much doubt you are a reader, and if you’re not a reader then nothing I have to say will interest you.

Blue eye shadow gives a woman a mysterious look, but there was a girl who drowned in the blue sea because she used too much of it.

I could say that this book reminds me of Kelly Link and Margo Lanagan, and I could say that the imagery is vivid and poetic, and I could say that I wish I had written every single one of these stories, and I could say that a book of modern Japanese fairy tales is guaranteed to make you look all mysterious and shit.

But that is not why you should read this book. You should read it because it will remind you why you read. It will remind you why you love stories, and why you want to create them for yourself. It will remind you why we do this — why we struggle and get rejected and tap away at our keyboards while sensible people sleep or eat or fuck. It will remind you that we do it all because we want people to feel the way that we felt as children when we discovered what stories were — when, for the first time, we were lost.

Once there was a sunflower who dreamed at dusk.