It is interesting. My experience, like others here, is that the content of the story isn’t what I had expected. From the framing, I had imagined that the stories were all going to be the different perspectives of the hostages about being prisoners, their fear, their anxieties, hunger, privations etc etc. But instead (at least from this first night), they are stories/memories told by the prisoners - about their previous lives.
I noted elsewhere that Ogawa was inspired by Paul Auster’s radio series and book based on the ‘National Story Project’. Auster’s idea was to collect together stories from the public that were ‘true, but sounded like fiction’, or to use another descriptive phrase ‘brief, true and close to the bone’. I haven’t read or listened to it, but it sounds as though the project allowed a kind of collective sharing of important stories and anecdotes. Maybe these stories allowed other people to have tiny glimpses into the lives of others? Maybe they create a tiny fragment of immortality by allowing the people in the project to live on after their death??
I presume that Ogawa’s stories are not true at all. But they seem to have the same form. And I think that perhaps they have the same function. I imagine Ogawa being struck by the events of the Japanese embassy hostage crisis, and wondering about the lives of the individuals concerned. Perhaps at the time there were brief descriptions of people who had been taken prisoner (Woman, 53 year old interior designer…) and was inspired to wonder what stories the people involved would tell about their own lives. I think maybe the book is her imaginative exploration of the power of anecdotes and stories to bring flickering briefly to life a real sense of someone’s life who we might otherwise just be aware of as a name in a list or a picture in a newspaper…???
I loved this first story. It took me a little while to warm to it. The narrator reminded me a lot of the narrator (Tomoko) in Ogawa’s wonderful novel ミーナの行進. Tomoko is a similar age - on the cusp of puberty, and has a similar vivid imagination and mixture of wise understanding and naive mis-understanding of the adult world she is observing. In this story, our narrator has this dark fantasy that the ironworks is actually a factory in which the world is actively being melted down and destroyed . I don’t know how much she believes in that fantasy, but the final strange dream that inverts her perception seems to be a chance for her to revisit with adult eyes and reinterpret her childish imaginings.
I enjoyed too the character of the ironworks apprentice. He too is a curious mix of half child and half adult. Forlorn and somewhat pathetic through most of the story, it is nice to see him undergo a transformation by the end (even if it is only ? a dream).
It will be interesting to see how the stories tie together (or don’t) and whether they connect with the external tale about the hostage taking.
My guess (from reading a number of Ogawa’s books) is that there won’t be any neat ending or explanation. That is not her usual way…