What is the connection between artistic expression and the joy of living? How can one best live a literary life? This book is a collection of small word-projects. Each examines a book, a moment, a story that helps to deepen the author's literary adv...
One day, a writer in Japan receives a letter from a young fan who is dying from a mysterious disease. The young fan, Aya, gives the writer a challenge -- come to Nagasaki and help find seven pieces of a statue. If you can help me do this simple thing, she tells him, you will have cured me. What the writer soon finds out is that finding the seven pieces means telling the stories of seven unique individuals: a politician, a soldier, a folk hero, a dancer, an AI, a writer, and the story of Aya herself.
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I want to tell you about Aya. She is the main character of "Statues in the Cloud". There are actually seven main characters, but she is the mainest of the main characters. She is 16 years old, Japanese (but her heart is purely a romantic), and she is dying of a mysterious disease.
She is based on several real people: a young girl I taught when I lived in Nagaski (I met her at the age of 23), another student I met when I lived in Fujisawa (age 32), and a student I teach now in Isahaya (age 36). Think one part List Simpson, one part Amalie, and you start to get close to her.
She loves English; she loves French. She loves French novels, French movies...but she especially loves art of all kinds. To know Aya is to know her art. To love her art.
She has a dark gothic aspect to her character.
Here are some paintings by Edward Gorey.
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When she dreams of a dark energy fog on the top of a mountain, her images come in the shades of Edward Gorey.
She is also a fan of Paul Cezanne.
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Aya also has a disease. I invented the disease, but the closest thing there is to it in real life is Scleroderma. A key to discovering Aya was looking at her relationships with her disease. Her first instinct was to reach out to someone with an imagination like hers to take something as sterile and clinical as a disease and to create a great mythical story around it.
For Aya, all things in the world, even things that seem random or have been sterilized by adults, have magic and meaning.
The key, defining characteristics of Aya are not her intelligence, but rather her bravery and creativity. Most adults fear Aya for her intelligence. However, if Aya were to tell you about herself, she would probably say that she has average intelligence, but that she as a far above average thirst for the beauty in life. Her drive to learn comes from her romantic relationship with the world.
By the time we get to the end of the novel, I would like to think of Aya as more self-assured. At the beginning of the novel, she has few friends and revels in being a kind of romantic loner. But, after coming through her disease -- and a consequence of her relationships with the six misfits of the island -- she realizes that she cannot survive as a loner. She needs friends, however imperfect they may be.
At the end of the novel, I see her kind of in this way.
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More than anything, though, I think of Aya as a kind of imaginary protege. Many of the chapters are written in her voice. She is the co-author of this book because I had to know her and what she wanted from this book before I could really finish it.
And thus, I have to dedicate the book to her. Even if she is imaginary, she is very real to me.
