Paradise by Koji Suzuki
288 Pages. Vertical. $21.95
Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
12.30.06
Paradise, the first novel of Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki is pulpy fantasy disguised as an epic love story that spans ten thousand years and chronicles the ancient migration from Asia to North America. Suzuki is the author of Ring, Spiral, and Loop, otherwise known as The Ring Trilogy and the basis of the recent Japanese (and now American) movies of the same name. Originally published in Japan as Rakuen in 1990, Paradise is being released in the United States for the first time this year.
Suzuki seems to have an affinity for the trilogy: Paradise is divided into three sections, each one set in a different period of human history. Alone, each section is an adventure yarn. “Legend,” the first third, begins ten thousand years ago on the Mongolian Steppe when Bogud, a tribesman with a talent for drawing the constellation of the sacred red deer violates a law of the gods, a karmic offense that results in the kidnapping of Fayau, the girl he loves. She is taken over the Bering land bridge between Asia and North America and Bogud sets out to find her. In “Legend,” Suzuki offers a solidly conventional tale of lost love and the quest to get it back. If that sounds familiar, it should. The epics of antiquity, The Odyssey among the most notable are clearly Suzuki’s inspiration.
“Paradise,” the novel’s second section picks up in 1800, on an American whaling ship in the South Pacific. After running into some paranormal ocean activity—yellow seas, strange and unexplained objects floating by—the ship is wrecked and the survivors wash ashore on an island populated with many beautiful and sexually liberal women and a few docile men (this is a fantasy novel, after all). They are the descendents of Bogud, as evidenced by the red deer carvings on the island’s rocky cliffs. Jones, one of the American whalers falls for one of the women and when a band of pirates lands on the island and incites a melee, he escapes with her, sailing east on a crude raft. Suzuki, often compared to the American horror writer Stephen King, shows in “Paradise” why the two are so closely associated. The images are weird, yet disturbingly simple, like Suzuki’s description of the nearly wrecked ship, which brings to mind a demented Winslow Homer watercolor: “The Philip Morgan, no longer worthy of its name, was leaning at a dangerous angle. The starboard side had lowered, hoisting the harnessed whale on port side high into the air. It would have appeared bizarre from a distance, like some giant flying fish.”
Paradise’s final section, “Desert,” is set in the United States around 1990. Leslie, a New York composer of some renown falls in with a cult leader with whom he plans a spiritual pilgrimage to an underground lake in New Mexico, where Leslie will spontaneously compose a new symphony. Flora, a magazine editor is a fan of Leslie’s music and arranges to meet him in New Mexico for an interview. From the red deer talisman around his neck and her similarly shaped birthmark, it is painfully obvious that Leslie and Flora are meant to be stand-ins for Bogud and Fayau, if not their actual descendants. Suzuki uses the string of improbable events (including an earthquake) that eventually unite them in the New Mexico desert to further illustrate the inexorable march of fate.
Alone the three parts of Paradise are unremarkable. Together they aspire to cosmic significance. Bogud, Fayau, and their progenitors, tossed around the Pacific Rim by the ocean, pirates, and earthquakes are drawn east by fate and the novel’s trilogy of far flung stories are meant to illustrate that even when it seems that chance has taken over, there are greater forces at work. Although Paradise ends with the boy getting the girl, Suzuki’s tidy resolution leaves an intentionally bitter taste—a strange and disturbing vision of history wherein the great migration of Asian peoples across the Bering land bridge and the subsequent population of North America was not random or the product of some Darwinian necessity, but destiny as clear as the red deer in the Mongol sky.