Maru Ayase has published eighteen books, many of which have been finalists for major awards in Japan. The Forest Brims Over is her first title to be translated into English. Haydn Trowell is an Australian literary translator of modern and contemporary Japanese fiction. His translations include Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada and the forthcoming title The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata.
Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband's art. When a decade's worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui grows at a rapid pace and soon breaks away from her husband by turning into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city. As fantasy and reality bleed together, The Forest Brims Over challenges unconscious gender biases and explores the boundaries between art and exploitation—muse abuse—in the literary world.
The premise of this book is what sold me—a woman, her husband's muse, turns into a forest that overtakes the city—but it delivered on more than just that count. I was immediately intrigued by how the story was about Rui but, like all of her husband's novels that were also about her, the story wasn't written by her. Instead, The Forest Brims Over is narrated by her husband's editor, one of his students, another editor, until finally Rui and Tetsuya share from their own points of view. Right off the bat, you can tell that it's a statement about who has the power, ability, insight to tell our stories, and I just loved that. Ayase wastes no time making her point in this regard.
I was very excited to see the transformation, and the way Rui was going to take over the city, and how her forestation would impact the other characters in the novel. Unfortunately, this isn't the focal point of the point; rather, Ayase focuses more on examining gender dynamics in marriage, the roles of men and women, and muse abuse in the literary world. I also felt a little lost sometimes in this philosophizing (especially near the end), but I knew that if I'd annotated this book and really engaged with it at a sentence level (rather than a broader level), I would have really felt the brilliance of it all coming together. While the magical realism elements are there, Rui's turning into a forest is less of a focus because it's more of the bouncing off point for these conversations to be had. Ayase does, of course, lean into beautiful, melodic language, and the book feels like it's overtaking you the same way Rui's forest does, so despite the magical realism not being at the forefront, it's always lurking and impacting the read.
I definitely would recommend this to anyone looking for a quick read, and one that has a philosophical bend with an intriguing ending!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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