Behind the Words: The End of the Road

I like short stories like this, snapshots, little windows. There isn’t much in terms of narrative arc, little you could call plot, and to drag it out for many more paragraphs would be to stretch it too thin, but there’s something there in that moment. It’s almost haiku like.

I enjoy people watching, and inventing narratives to explain what they are doing and why, creating backstories and biographies. It passes the time in airports, it’s good training for novel writing, and I feel that’s what a story like this is, the prose equivalent of overhearing a snippet of conversation in a café and letting your imagination fill in the blanks.

This specific window has been on a strange journey. A friend of mine went backpacking in Africa between high school and university, and has some great anecdotes as a result. He kept a diary and for a while, a couple of decades ago, we discussed turning it into something - a memoir, a travelogue, a script, a novel. It didn’t go anywhere but those scenes, the setting, Africa in my imagination, it all stayed with me, swilling around in the primordial soup from which fiction springs. In the original draft this was set somewhere in Africa. Namibia maybe, where I hear the beaches are beautiful. Then it shifted, refocused, the setting became less important, the specificity irrelevant.

I pitched a short story collection once that didn’t go anywhere, themed around globalisation, the collapsing of borders. Stories set around the planet, characters from everywhere. It would be interspersed with true vignettes about actual globalisation, funny or interesting little scenes about moments when the world took a step closer together. This was part of that concept, a scene played out as the world rotates in front of us. People travelling towards, and away, all these paths converging and parting. My publisher didn’t go for it.

Should short stories every be collected? I sometimes feel, reading a collection, that proximity weakens short stories, like they’ve been uncomfortably corralled into a pen. I once went to a Monet exhibition in Nagoya that was badly curated. They’d chosen a room too small, or had too many paintings for the space available to them, and resorted to displaying them too close to each other, above, below, side by side, inches apart. It was impossible to look at a single painting. Wherever you stood, you could clearly see at least nine works, the colours all bleeding together, the subjects overlapping. A friend said the same thing about a Rothko exhibition recently, blocks of colour wherever you look. A short story collection for me is like eating a whole box of chocolates in one sitting - each may be individually delicious but after a while it becomes less special, mechanical, routine. I love Furukawa Hideo’s work, and about a dozen of his short stories have been translated into English but never collected together. Most have been published in Monkey, an annual literary journal, or on Words Without Borders. Getting one a year, having to hunt down back issues I missed, reading only a single Furukawa story knowing that’s all I’m going to get, it makes each story better, more special, more valuable. Would I feel the same about a full collection, the ability to feast? As a wise philosopher once said, if there are always biscuits in the tin, where’s the fun in biscuits?