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A review by ratgrrrl
Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto
5.0
This was a true gift of a random grab from Libby.
I'm still going through it with covid, so this will brief, but I've got to start giving these reviews more of a go or the backlog will be absolute hell.
Told through the interweaving perspectives of three generations of a Japanese family who immigrated to Canada and the stories and memories they brought with them, collected, and created over the years, Chorus of Mushrooms is an absolute triumph of storytelling, a beautiful, living love letter to stories, and a masterpiece of fiction that refuses to play by the rules or be pigeon-holed by the 'acceptable' narratives for immigrant stories.
In Acknowledgements 1994, Goto states that she took "tremendous liberties with [her] grandmother's history" and that "this novel is a departure from historical fact into the realms of contemporary folk legend." There's genuinely no better way to describe what this masterpiece is.
This book starts slow and soft, growing like mushrooms in the dark, mycilieal family network from a seemingly simple family drama dealing with the difficulties of identity, culture, and racism with the grandmother, mother, and daughter under one roof, but the caps bloom with a raucous, emotional, heart stirring, heartbreaking, glorious, and ridiculous orchestra into three separate, by eternally linked melodies that play as discordance and harmony with one another. To me, the fungi are more the rhythm section of the outfit, binding everything together, with the chorus (in the Greek dramatic sense) being the stories shared throughout, folklore new and old.
There's just so much in here! So much emotion and experience and pain and joy, captivaty and freedom, truth, fiction and life that it becomes something so much more real and honest for the art and artifice wrought into it. It's a novel that is very aware of stories and narratives and expectations, but not bogged down with following them, while at the same time not beaching itself or losing any coherence or effectiveness in being overly contrarian. I don't feel like I'm making my point very well. What I mean to say is that there is such a personal drive for this book to be what it needs to be that doesn't suffer from that headstrong and passionate focus. It is a distinct break from expected and 'acceptable' stories about immigrant experiences, Japanese characters, and especially women, and so glorious for that.
I'm just a white trans gal stuck on TERF island, so I don't have a lot of experience or anything more to say about that side of things, but I do have a very difficult and now almost entirely broken relationship with my family and the dynamics on display here are incredibly relatable and hit home in many ways.
The folk tales are sensational, strange, and unexpected. I loved them so much and how they reflected the events and added colour and shade. Having reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson recently, I was reminded of how Winterson does something similar, though her inclusions and retellings are separated from the narrative, while Goto weaves the tales in the story into the novel. I don't really have a point here, I just enjoy this element of telling stories with stories and creating additional meaning from juxtaposition.
This truly was a glorious surprise and I will absolutely be tracking down anything else Goto I can get my hands on!
I hope my fever-induced review made some sense at all. My brain is literally smoking and my ears are on fire.
I'm still going through it with covid, so this will brief, but I've got to start giving these reviews more of a go or the backlog will be absolute hell.
Told through the interweaving perspectives of three generations of a Japanese family who immigrated to Canada and the stories and memories they brought with them, collected, and created over the years, Chorus of Mushrooms is an absolute triumph of storytelling, a beautiful, living love letter to stories, and a masterpiece of fiction that refuses to play by the rules or be pigeon-holed by the 'acceptable' narratives for immigrant stories.
In Acknowledgements 1994, Goto states that she took "tremendous liberties with [her] grandmother's history" and that "this novel is a departure from historical fact into the realms of contemporary folk legend." There's genuinely no better way to describe what this masterpiece is.
This book starts slow and soft, growing like mushrooms in the dark, mycilieal family network from a seemingly simple family drama dealing with the difficulties of identity, culture, and racism with the grandmother, mother, and daughter under one roof, but the caps bloom with a raucous, emotional, heart stirring, heartbreaking, glorious, and ridiculous orchestra into three separate, by eternally linked melodies that play as discordance and harmony with one another. To me, the fungi are more the rhythm section of the outfit, binding everything together, with the chorus (in the Greek dramatic sense) being the stories shared throughout, folklore new and old.
There's just so much in here! So much emotion and experience and pain and joy, captivaty and freedom, truth, fiction and life that it becomes something so much more real and honest for the art and artifice wrought into it. It's a novel that is very aware of stories and narratives and expectations, but not bogged down with following them, while at the same time not beaching itself or losing any coherence or effectiveness in being overly contrarian. I don't feel like I'm making my point very well. What I mean to say is that there is such a personal drive for this book to be what it needs to be that doesn't suffer from that headstrong and passionate focus. It is a distinct break from expected and 'acceptable' stories about immigrant experiences, Japanese characters, and especially women, and so glorious for that.
I'm just a white trans gal stuck on TERF island, so I don't have a lot of experience or anything more to say about that side of things, but I do have a very difficult and now almost entirely broken relationship with my family and the dynamics on display here are incredibly relatable and hit home in many ways.
The folk tales are sensational, strange, and unexpected. I loved them so much and how they reflected the events and added colour and shade. Having reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson recently, I was reminded of how Winterson does something similar, though her inclusions and retellings are separated from the narrative, while Goto weaves the tales in the story into the novel. I don't really have a point here, I just enjoy this element of telling stories with stories and creating additional meaning from juxtaposition.
This truly was a glorious surprise and I will absolutely be tracking down anything else Goto I can get my hands on!
I hope my fever-induced review made some sense at all. My brain is literally smoking and my ears are on fire.