In Praise of Yuko Ishii
Yuko Ishii would have you believe that the words and images she arranges into lines and fragments and rows don’t amount to much. She prefaces each roundtable discussion in our weekly writing group with words to this effect: “I did not think anyone was going to like this.”
Don’t believe a word of it. Focus instead on her brilliance.
Yuko’s work straddles the borders between Japanese history and personal experience with the deftness of a Chihara Shiota crafting supersized installations from thread and ink. Her essays pivot and swerve from the historical/universal to the startlingly particular. In a single piece, Yuko transports the reader from the Ryuan-ji Zen temple of Kyoto to the holy significance of the number three to a devastating medical diagnosis that carries lifelong repercussions.
Yuko’s pieces combine poetry and light and movement with a surprising twist of wry humor that pops out in unexpected moments. Even as she explores the themes of family and loss and culture and women’s health, she takes aim at the notion of self-pity with well-timed barbs. Faced with making health decisions that would have lasting effects, her narrator declares: “Let’s save the world and cure the cancer! Fake it til you make it.”
A hint of the mystic infuses Yuko’s prose. She is poetic and precise, meandering yet straightforward. Her inclusion of scribbled images and Japanese script create liminal spaces where meaning erupts. What she doesn’t say battles for space alongside the printed words that pair ancient tales with contemporary life. She assembles the fragments of a human life in an all-encompassing narrative that includes the voices of many narrators: a mother, a grandmother, Yuko herself contemplating existence and death and COVID-19.
The worlds Yuko creates shimmer like the fading memory of a dream. Indeed, she contemplates dream states in a section titled, Father’s American Dream: A land of excess where fat grows under your skin. The narrator’s exploration of dreams and questions wanders and sways only to land at the most essential query of all:
Do you dream in English?
My counsellor asks me
The right question should be
Do you dream at all?