The decay of magic: Karen Tei Yamashita’s postmodern fable

In her satirical, surreal debut novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, karen tei yamashita asks us to believe in magic. She puts forth five original miracles at the beginning of the story: a lucky man named Kazumasa who happens to have a sentient ball floating around his head; feathers that can heal anything; plastic that can recreate life; pigeons that can tell the future; Gilberto, a paralyzed child who learns to walk again. These miracles are all improbabilities in her consumeristic, globalized world, which stretches with little effort from Brazil to New York City to Japan. In a world of skyscrapers and profit reports, these five miracles are fleeting triumphs of one of the few remaining unclassifiable world forces. And, of course, they are quickly exploited: throughout the novel, we see them follow a neat and terrible plot arc of growth, abuse, and death. The mass movements that at first multiply and popularize the magic end up destroying it, and in this we see the larger goal of yamashita's capricious universe. The world bursts with people who ache to believe in something new, who will travel across the world to see a miracle or at least listen to it on the radio. And indeed, the global climate seems ripe for magic, and for brief moments magic springs into being and grows. But ultimately, yamashita's world it can only handle simulacra: organic magic becomes postmodern magic, explosive and manufactured, decaying as fast as it appears.

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