Laura Mauro returns with two stories steeped in Japanese lore, bleak and heartfelt.
Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers | Review | Ben Unsworth
Laura Mauro has been away from the genre for a while, and Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers marks the return. It gathers a short story and a novella, both rooted deep in Japanese culture and lore, and both proof that the wait was worth it. The short story, Shadowsick, follows a young woman at university whose home life gives her little to lean on, and whose head detaches itself at night to fly. It also lends the collection its strange title, drawn from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s Ukiyo-e art.
The novella, Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds, drops a beaten child, or perhaps a man, into the home of a man named Toraji on a snowy night, and lets the two of them come apart together. One story is a warped coming-of-age tale that manages to be uncomfortable and charming at once. The other pulls on the Yuki-Onna myth for something bleak and heartfelt, with Haruki Murakami’s fingerprints all over the mood. Neither settles for easy horror. Both put humans being human at the centre, with the supernatural circling round the edges. If you have missed Laura Mauro, Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers is the book that reminds you why.
Laura Mauro Returns: Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers
Laura Mauro’s return gathers a short story and a novella steeped in Japanese lore, and both refuse easy horror. A flying severed head that is somehow charming, a snow ghost that is genuinely heartfelt: the supernatural always sits second to humans being human, and that is what lingers.
Especially as they may be a goose in disguise as a human.
The same is true of their writing. And so after a break of some 4/5 years – I’m pretty sure their last work published was the novella ‘On the Shoulders of Otava’ in 2021? – their return to the genre is very welcome, handing us a novella and a short story both deeply entrenched in Japanese culture and lore.
But, before someone yells “shut up and take me money!”, let’s actually look at the stories. Spoiler alert: they’re great!
The short story ‘Shadowsick’ is first. Apart from explaining the collection’s enigmatic title (from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s Ukiyo-e art collection), it hits you like a Haruki Murakami-venerating version of LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, except with a very different supernatural aspect. This is a warped coming-of-age tale linked to a bizarre experience affecting the protagonist, a young woman at university whose home life is far from supportive: randomly, at night, her head decapitates itself and allows her a kind of spectral flight.
In some ways, it’s hard to place the horror here because at its best it’s both uncomfortable and charming, despite how backward that paradox so clearly is. Neither the world painted here nor all the characters can be said to be nice, and yet even in the darkest moments lure you in. A number of pages are just illustrations of life in its most uncomfortable form, and as such get you by the throat, because for all there is a supernatural element it is subsidiary to humans being human – with all the ups and downs and disgusts and sillinesses that that entails.
Then there’s the novella, ‘Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds’. Again, we’re in Haruki Murakami country, only the more emotional and mythology-infused side of it. The main character, Toraji, takes a beaten-up child into his home in the middle of a snowy night. So far, so almost Scandi-noir. Then it turns out the boy – or is he a man? – is potentially a drug dealer if not a user too, and so the two begin an unwilling cohabitation. However, at the same time, things begin to break down in Toraji’s life, and the secret in the boy’s head is starting to reveal itself, for worse and better.
We’re very much talking less about urban ennui here and more about snow-laden trauma and the emotional disembowelling of relationships. For which, it must be said, Mauro is an uncouth master of the art. The mythology focus is the Yuki-Onna, made in Western culture probably most famous by the story from Lafcadio Hearn, but it’s really the instigator for a story far more metaphysical and visceral.
The watchwords here really are “bleak” and “heartfelt”, since although the narrative contains a number of overlapping trains of thought, they never get derailed but rather crash in really bizarre ways. It’s never overwhelming though, even if there is a definite sense of claustrophobia and the sense of identity in each character is sometimes almost too strong for a narrative of this kind of zigzagging.
To which I suppose I can only ask: have you bought your copy yet? And, if not, WHY NOT?
Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers by Laura Mauro
After too long away, Laura Mauro returns with two tales steeped in Japanese lore. In Shadowsick, a university student with nothing much to call home finds that, come nightfall, her head slips free of her shoulders and takes to the air. In Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds, a man named Toraji takes a battered stranger in from a freezing night, and something far older than either of them begins to stir in the snow. Two stories where the strange and the heartfelt share a bed, and nobody sleeps easy.
No coffee creams were harmed in this book.
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