A work of Japanese feminist magical realist satire where the protagonist, a woman plagued with being the muse...
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"A work of Japanese feminist magical realist satire where the protagonist, a woman plagued with being the muse of her writerly husband, turns into a forest, growing as the novel goes on. Reminiscent of Han Kang's The Vegetarian and the mechanics of NK Jemisin's The City We Became. A gorgeous contemporary fairy tale that has the honor of being Maru Ayase's first novel translated from the Japanese into English, translated by Australian literary translator Haydn Trowell. This almost feels like a meta-work on gender, art, and interpretation."
--Shoshana
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Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband's art. When a decade's worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest--and in time, she takes over the entire city.
As fantasy and reality bleed together, The Forest Brims Over challenges unconscious gender biases and explores the boundaries between art and exploitation--muse abuse--in the literary world.
