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Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press, 1990. 212 pgs.

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest opens with a memory—a memory, that is, specifically addressed to you. “Brought back by a memory, I have become a memory,” begins the unidentified narrator, “and as such, am commissioned to become for you a memory.” Cryptic as this may sound, it is in this state of ambiguity that the novel keeps us in, asking us to suspend our disbelief as the novel veers into the speculative—and, even, fantastical. But it is this very use of magic realism that allows Yamashita to lay bare the ecological impacts of capitalism and economic exploitation in a sweeping narrative that moves from Japan to Brazil to the US.

The narrator, we soon learn, is none other than the voice of a sentient ball attached to the novel’s Japanese protagonist, Kazumasa Ishimaru. Following a natural disaster off the shores of Sado Island, a piece of debris impales a young Kazumasa, knocking him unconscious. To his mother’s astonishment, the debris becomes “a tiny impudent planet”, inseparably and magnetically bound to her son’s forehead by some force of nature. Eventually, the two find their way to Brazil, where the bulk of the novel takes place. Through prose vivid yet precise, Yamashita paints for us a portrait of the country: of streets full of people dancing to the rhythm of a samba beat, of crowds awaiting the arrival of a messenger pigeon, of weekend vendors selling everything from deep-fried pasteis to lottery tickets and plastic snakes. It is here, in a country home to buildings with “pink and blue paint peeling away in great scabs” and “dogs and pigs and chickens [who scatter] from under the marching feet of the children” that the stage is set for what will soon become a sprawling dizzying set of interconnected stories reminiscent of novelas, or Brazilian soap operas.

At the centre of the novel is the Matacão: a smooth, shiny surface of unknown origin in the Amazon basin that beckons to corporations and religious devotees alike. It is at the site of the Matacão that the novel’s myriad characters ultimately converge. Mane Peña, a native Brazilian, first discovers the surface beneath his farmland, landing himself a spot on a documentary broadcast before heralding a new wave of feather-based healing. Kazumasa and his ball find themselves magnetically drawn to the mysterious surface, becoming the target of profit-hungry investors who hope to use this power to mine the Matacão of its plastic. The young Chico Paco’s pilgrimage brings national and international attention to the Matacão, inspiring hundreds of others to embark on their own. Three-armed businessman J.B. Tweep heads the multinational conglomerate GGG’s excavation of the seemingly plastic, all-purpose material, turning the rainforest into a commercial site and spectacle alike. The consequent industrialisation and displacement of the Basin’s native farmers is part of Yamashita’s larger meditation on capitalism, exploitation, labour, and the natural world. The increasing mining and reliance on the Matacão’s plastic parallels our own relationship with natural resources like oil. With an “incredible ability to imitate anything”, it isn’t long before companies are using Matacão plastic to create everything from facial enhancements to a juicy steak. The material “infiltrate[s] every crevice of modern life”, ushering in an era soon referred to as The Plastic Age. Indeed, the novel writes that “an entire world could be created from [Matacão plastic]”.

But a world made entirely of plastic is not destined to last. As the narrative accelerates into what threatens to be a catastrophic collision, Yamashita imbues her prose with a vividness that, if seemingly unaligned with the destruction it describes, is perhaps perfectly fitted to the climactic crescendo of the final few scenes. The Matacão transforms into a “stage for life and death”, and a carousel of images flash before the eyes: of “the silken wings of an angel emerging among the crack and spray of a sky lit by gunpower”, of a “silver phosphorescent parachute…its bulbous billowy form sailing out across the shimmering night skies with a human candle”. If the narrative devolves into an excess-driven chaos, violence, plague, and devastation, it is to serve the purpose of making, as Fredric Jameson writes, a “discontinuous or surcharged reading of the respective historical moment unavoidable”. Yamashita’s novel exposes what the South African author Rob Nixon calls slow violence—the kind of environmental violence that emerges over time and, consequently, out of sight. The novel imagines the Matacão as a metaphor for this kind of slow violence and allows Yamashita to collapse space and temporality with the ultimate purpose of making visible the ecological destruction that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Spanning continents and timelines, Yamashita plays with scale, taking on the ambitious project of writing the global in all of its interconnected complexity. In order to effect a kind of globality that represents more than just the individual, Yamashita subverts traditional narratological conceits, choosing to privilege the perspective of an inanimate, non-human object over that of the various characters through which the narrative unfolds. Reincarnated as a memory, the ball assumes an omniscience that gives it access to each of these characters indiscriminately, allowing Yamashita to collapse conventional spatial and temporal boundaries that confine the typical novel. Characters separated by geographical bounds are brought together in the span of a single sentence, effecting a wide-reaching simultaneity that would otherwise be impossible in a first-person narrative. If this feels heavy-handed, the narrator anticipates this scepticism, winking at the audience with a self-effacing tone characteristic of the ball: “Well, I am full of such coincidental information, and international at that! But to continue…” Despite its self-proclaimed limitations (namely a lack of human empathy), the ball becomes an endearing presence, bobbing to the beat of a conga and delivering such lines as “but who was I—a ball—to say?” Sections of the novel never quite go by without a reminder that it is the ball’s perspective through which we view the events of the narrative. Through the conceit of a sentient ball-narrator, Yamashita pushes back, teasingly, at traditional third-person narration, attempting to envision a new kind of perspective that might better encompass the globality of the contemporary novel.

In the fallout from the novel’s climactic scenes of destruction, we return to our initial vantage point: that of the retrospective. Only in hindsight can we see the carcasses of economic development, rapid urbanisation, and the workings of capitalism. In place of the once-pristine rainforest are “crumbling remains of once modern high-rises and office buildings, everything covered in rust and mould” and the “acrid stink of tobacco churned in human sweat and cane brandy”. Ambitious in scale and boundless in imagination, Yamashita presents to us a sprawling and incisive portrait of a place—only to bring it to the brink of destruction. By leaving us with only its remains, she lays bare the ecological consequences of our actions, and ultimately underscores the precarity of the natural world we inhabit.

How to cite: Chung, Anna. “A Stage for Life and Death: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/11/arc.

Anna Chung graduated from Princeton University, where she received a degree in English and Creative Writing. Her research and writing interests include memory, identity, and narrative in contemporary Asian American literature. Her work has appeared in Midstory, The Nassau Literary Review, and Princeton Alumni Weekly. [All contributions by Anna Chung.]

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