February 11March 23Matt Denault

“Are you okay?” That is the question asked, in one form or another, in nearly all of the stories that comprise Christopher Barzak’s new mosaic novel The Love We Share Without Knowing. It is a deceptively simple question. It is a question that you ask when you can sense that something is wrong, but you don’t know what, or what to do. It is a question that you may be asked when you are not behaving in accordance with someone’s idea of “normal.” And it is a question you might be asked when you are haunted. So many of Barzak’s characters are all three of these.

Teenage Elijah Fulton’s family moves to Japan due to his father’s job with Sony. Resentful of the move and missing America (“Genki desu ka? Are you okay?” asks his sister, p. 7), Elijah takes up running to “get away from everything” (p. 1). One day Elijah gets lost in the forest and finds a secluded shrine; a fox (or perhaps a kitsune, a Japanese fox spirit) emerges and leads him home. Some time later, Elijah rebels by taking the train to Tokyo. Again lost, and unable to identify the train home, Elijah is once again rescued, this time by a Japanese girl named Midori who is dressed as a fox. But when Elijah tries to contact Midori the next day, he learns from her father that she committed suicide more than a decade ago.

Kazuko was best friends with Midori when they were teens; now in her 30s, Kazuko lives in a loveless marriage and works a thankless job organizing foreigners come to Japan to teach English. Still haunted by Midori’s suicide and the death of the plans they had made, she forms a confederacy, a suicide club, with three other alienated and disillusioned Japanese (“Doshita no?” one asks another, p. 31: “what’s the matter?”).

Meanwhile, a group of four Americans who teach English for Kazuko’s company find a measure of friendship in being strangers in a strange land together. Some find resolution to what made them leave America; some do not; one, the narrative suggests, may find the sort of love that slowly becomes a part of you before you realize it (“What’s the matter?” he is asked on p. 133). Another American, lonely and empty (“Are you okay?” he is asked, p. 58), finds the sort of love that is fast and desperate. He seeks to capture all of his Japanese lover, then is captured by him in return. He is saved by a Japanese girl who says she’s trying to save herself; her name is Ai, which means love (“What’s the matter?” she is asked, p. 86). Another Japanese man who is struck, or cursed, with blindness (“Are you okay?,” p. 91) may not be so lucky, despite the efforts of an American woman—one of the four friends—who is hired to save him by conversing with him in English.

There’s more, but you get the idea: The Love We Share Without Knowing is not a travelogue of the physical world. Rather, Barzak’s novel is a story suite of personal and cultural degrees of separation, that works as a single piece more by the accretion of emotion than by linear plot. It is as much about America as Japan: in particular, how the interchange of the two cultures, the differences and commonalities revealed, throws into relief the complexities of the 21st century world of which that interchange is part. It is a balancing act. There is a surface-level balancing of nationalities and cultures, genders, sexualities, ages. There is a balancing of different types of love. There is a balancing of lingering and leaving, including a gentle, non-judgmental effort to grasp the idea of suicide (if Barzak’s first novel One for Sorrow tried to come to terms with the murder of a young person, The Love We Share Without Knowing seems focused on death, figurative and literal, as a choice of the young).

There is also an effortless balancing between contemporary life and traditional fairy tale—including between American and Japanese fairy tales, and the way the two often don’t mesh. In a sequence that spans several stories, an American man and his Japanese partner compare the very different types of “sleeping beauty” fairy tales in each of their cultures. The American then seems to fall victim to the Japanese version of the tale; yet, in a clever reversal of the American tradition of the story, he is awakened from his lengthy slumber by a Japanese woman’s kiss. The American rejects this fairytale interpretation, however—albeit ending with a line that, in evoking another fantasy tale, shows how alienated from his own life story he remains:

It had almost been a fairy tale, his life here spent asleep and dreaming. But he wasn’t Sleeping Beauty, and his kingdom hadn’t frozen in time while he slept. It had kept on going. It had kept tumbling and tumbling. (p. 204)

If fantasy is a genre that tends to speculatively literalize its metaphors, while general literature encourages a more direct reading of metaphor as meaning, The Love We Share Without Knowing hovers, ethereal, somewhere in-between (unsurprising, given Barzak’s association with the Interstitial Arts Foundation). Some story elements, such as ghostly Midori in the first story, demand to be read literally; other elements, fantastic effects such as characters stricken with blindness or coma-like sleep, suggest a more metaphorical reading. Each impacts our reading of the other, haunting the other, producing a ghostly effect in the text itself. As readers of the text, we thus can’t help but experience some of what Barzak’s millennial generation of characters feel.

Indeed, I don’t know if people who have grown up in the post-Cold War years have a stronger literary advocate than Christopher Barzak. Half of this is that Barzak gets it: it’s not that Barzak’s young characters are apathetic, it’s that they desire to feel strongly and truly in a time when all existing cultural systems of thought and action have been revealed as simplistic, confining, and false. Too often cultural traditions seem at war with a desire for self-awareness and se