Contemporary Authors

• Pull Me Under: A Novel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2016

1. Pull me under : a novel LCCN 2016017823 Type of material Book Personal name Luce, Kelly, author. Main title Pull me under : a novel / Kelly Luce. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9780374238582 (hardcover) 9780374715090 (ebook) CALL NUMBER PS3612.U2495 P85 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail: Stories - 2013 A Strange Object, Austin, TX

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/magic-everyday-interview-kelly-luce/

  QUOTED: "She’s biracial, haafu, which in Japan can and often does make one an outsider. Just look at the recent news of the backlash to the new Miss Japan, who has an Indian parent, and Ariana Miyamoto before her [a Miss Universe winner, whose father is African-American] — a lot of backlash with regards to purity of blood being part of what makes a “true Japanese.” I witnessed mixed-race kids in my schools bullied in subtle ways as well. I imagined there would be a lot of anger in a child who always felt “half” and never whole."

  The Magic of the Everyday: An Interview with Kelly Luce
  R. O. Kwon interviews Kelly Luce

  123 1 3

  JANUARY 6, 2017

  I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Kelly Luce’s writing in 2013, with the publication of her debut story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. The book was published by what was then a new press, Austin-based A Strange Object, founded by Jill Meyers and Callie Collins. I’d trusted their taste for years, and I was delighted by Luce’s stories, which mixed surreal inventions — death-predicting toast, a life-changing karaoke machine — with emotional truths.
  Luce just published her first novel, Pull Me Under (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In it, she explores a differently surreal condition: childhood, and the way it shapes our eventual adult selves. The protagonist of the novel is Chizuru Akitani, a sixth-grade girl in Japan who is tormented by a bullying classmate. She eventually stabs and kills her bully. The rest of the book follows Chizuru, now known as Rio, as she grows up and lives with the repercussions of her act.
  ¤
  R. O. KWON: What led you to telling this story about a biracial girl in Japan who kills her bully?
  KELLY LUCE: Going back to the beginning: I lived in Japan for a few years and while I was there, I taught in public junior high schools for a while. While I was at that job, I learned about this phenomenon in Japan known as kireru — which means “to cut” or “to snap.” It was, and still is, this phenomenon of young children, often under 14, committing violent acts for seemingly no reason. Kids who were otherwise well behaved, got good grades, didn’t make waves. There was a boy who beheaded a classmate in the next prefecture when I was there. He was the same age — seventh grade — as the kids I was teaching.
  Oh, god.
  Another aspect of this phenomenon that caught my attention was that it happened with female students, too. You think of kids “snapping” in western culture, and you think Columbine, et cetera. In the West, it’s always men. (And it’s usually guns, but that’s another conversation!) It became this question for me, as a person interacting with kids in Japan who were this age on a daily basis. What would make a kid do this? Why does this happen in Japan, a relatively crime-free and peaceful country, and nowhere else? And by nowhere else, I’m referring to the male/female ratio of violent outbursts, and the young age at which kireru attacks often happen.
  That’s where Rio came from. She’s biracial, haafu, which in Japan can and often does make one an outsider. Just look at the recent news of the backlash to the new Miss Japan, who has an Indian parent, and Ariana Miyamoto before her [a Miss Universe winner, whose father is African-American] — a lot of backlash with regards to purity of blood being part of what makes a “true Japanese.” I witnessed mixed-race kids in my schools bullied in subtle ways as well. I imagined there would be a lot of anger in a child who always felt “half” and never whole.
  I’m curious about the slow unveiling of the central kireru scene, when Rio kills her bully. You keep going back to it, spiraling around it. There’s narrative suspense! How did you think about releasing information?
  I reluctantly realized that the book was not truly about the events of Chizuru or Rio’s childhood. The real story was Rio as an adult, living with this in her past, so that’s how the novel is framed and paced. But we needed to see what led up to Chizuru committing this act. So I wrote those episodes leading up to the stabbing — the escalating bullying, the details of what’s going on in her home life — and then found that they actually naturally fit into the present action of the novel as brief flashbacks.
  I experimented with dropping them into various parts of the present action. I remember well the advice of an early writing teacher, John Dufresne: only jump into a flashback if the flashback is more interesting than the present moment. Get out, and back to the present, as soon as you can. I tried to get the flashbacks and the present action to come to a head around the same time. Though that isn’t something you can force.
  What do you mean by that — it isn’t something you can force?
  I mean imposing structure on a novel. Trying to force two threads to weave perfectly together. It’s zoomed-out in intention; I think readers can feel that and will call bullshit. Forced elegance feels weird. I don’t want my novel to be prom. I want it to be a messy, ecstatic dance party in a barn.
  I first came across your writing with your story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. Your novel is very different from the collection, especially in its swerve away from the magical-realist elements in Hana Sasaki. Was that an early choice, or did you just find that fortune-telling toasters had no place in the novel?
  I actually dislike all these terms and think they’re misleading, but, yes, I knew from the beginning this wasn’t going to be a novel with magical-realist or traditionally speculative elements. The idea — that question about character and motivation I mentioned earlier — was the seed for the book. It was obvious that it had nothing to do with psychic appliances or talking coins. That collection doesn’t have magic in every story, either.
  I also think it’s really hard to carry a magical-realist conceit through a whole novel, at least for me. There was so much that was surreal about Rio’s story, there was no need for anything else. It would’ve been gauche and undermined the whole thing. It never crossed my mind. So much of what drives my writing is the magic of the everyday, which I think is present in spades both in Hana Sasaki and in this novel.
  That maybe sounds corny but I’m really interested in how far belief can carry people.
  Is there a part of writing you find especially satisfying, something that makes you think, “Damn, this is why I got into this.” Or maybe you have many parts? Or all of it might be like that for you …
  [Laughs.] All of it, I wish! Writing is mostly mental torture, because it takes all my energy to dig deep and find the words, the combination of sentences, the scenes, to express something that there aren’t words for. I feel like Whoopi Goldberg when she’s acting as a medium in Ghost: I’m using all my energy to try and get there. The best part is when I find myself typing something I love, and I never knew I thought it before I wrote it.
  The act — the physical act — of writing is one of discovery, and it can be incredibly satisfying to put words to a feeling or experience. Words you can look back on forever and say: that’s how it was. And you know that other people, at least some other people, will read it and recognize it and get something from it, too.
  I’m not religious, but I always think of writing as a practice of faith. It’s a small miracle, or at least a moment of grace, when you get it right, and that moment is priceless.
  I grew up very religious — though I’m not at all religious anymore — and writing, at its best, can feel not unlike worship at its best. Faith falters, though. When you get stuck writing, what do you turn to for help?
  That’s tricky to answer, because I’m always thinking about what I’m working on. I don’t write linearly, from start to finish, so I can always just write a scene I know, or think I know. When I’m stuck in terms of decision-making, like, “What should happen to this character? What kind of ending is this story asking for?” I try to let my gut guide me into reading things that will help me answer those questions. I also listen to music. I try to turn my body into a tuning fork for the story.
  Of course I also revise constantly, so if I don’t have anything I’m confident writing fresh, I revise raw stuff I’ve already written, and the act of revision takes me a layer or two deeper, and sometimes opens doors. I also like to reread favorite poems and stories. I get in trouble for not reading the new stuff because I like to read my old favorites a zillion times. It reminds me that it’s possible, you know? That powerful, moving writing is possible to create.
  What are some of your old favorites?
  When I need to be reminded that straightforward, fairly simple language can produce tremendous emotional effects, I read Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” in particular. And any number of Stuart Dybek stories, or Lois Lowry’s The Giver.
  If I want to remember how it feels to be explosively in love (and who doesn’t), I read Nico Alvarado’s “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls” (seriously, it’s hot), or Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” or “Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love?” by Ailish Hopper. Stephen Dobyns’s “How to Like It” is one of my favorite poems ever. I could go on but I’ll stop there.
  Speaking of Tim Riggins, I was just rewatching a bit of Friday Night Lights last night and crying, because that’s what happens anytime I watch that thing.
  Oh, my god, I am just watching FNL for the first time ever, right now. I’m on season three.
  Oh, sweet lord.
  I read Nico Alvarado’s Tim Riggins poems before I even saw the show! They are why I downloaded it. [Laughs.] I’m the first person to ever watch network television because of a poetry chapbook.
  Your prose in Pull Me Under is very natural, and could be described as straightforward, fairly simple. I liked that about the novel, and I was wondering if you read out loud while you write.
  Not while I write, no, though I hear the words in my head. I read aloud when I revise. It helps me notice what rhythms and words I’m overusing. I have a list.
  A list! Would you be willing to share any part of it?
  Yes … off the top of my head, I need to search manuscripts for “then,” “after all,” “though,” “seems,” “almost,” “somehow,” “slightly,” and “bright.”
  My editor also noticed that I invoked blueberries far more than is reasonable in one draft of the novel. “Just.” I’m an editor, and I adore cutting words. It’s very satisfying. People hate revision, but I think it’s the most fun part of writing other than the epiphanies we talked about earlier.
  You edit for Electric Literature. I’m always impressed by people who can both write and edit: how do you balance the two?
  I’ve always done freelance editing to make a living. I enjoy working with clients who are, by and large, professionals in other fields, and who just wanted to write a novel to try it out. Those clients have a lot of fun writing, and have no real ego about it, which is refreshing. As for the literary magazine editing work, I guess the way I think of it is, editing creates balance in my writing life.
  Doing my own writing is an internal struggle, going inside myself. Editing is an opening up. I love working with writers who often have such different life experiences and worldviews from myself. We’re working together to make sure they tell their story as best they can. It can be tough to be behind a screen all day, though. Some days I go to the post office and forget how to speak to the person behind the counter because I’ve been in my head for a full day or two.
  You studied cognitive science in college. I often think there isn’t enough good fiction with science in it, or math, and I enjoyed Rio’s flourishes of medical knowledge. Did you ever think you’d become a scientist?
  Yes, I wanted to be an astronomer, then a physicist, and I took those classes. Then I found cog sci, which was asking the questions I was most interested in: How do brains work? And emotion? What makes people people? I got really into music cognition, in particular the way the brain processes emotion with regard to autobiographical memory and those “special songs” that can transport us with two notes.
  While I was interested in the questions cog sci was asking, I found I was a shitty scientist! I got this wonderful grant from Northwestern to run an experiment on music and emotion and memory, and we did it, the results were pretty good, but I remember thinking the whole time: if only the results were more like this, or this participant had said that, it would make a better story. Key words being: Make a better story. I love science, but what I’m most interested in is stories, and I will always fudge the facts to make you cry. Science and writing are both ways to get to truth; I just feel like I can get there faster with fiction.
  You also studied music, which is central to this book. We’ve talked in the past about a shared love of karaoke: What are your go-to songs? Do you prefer private-room or public karaoke?
  [Laughs.] I love this question! Okay, first of all, definitely private box. As for go-to songs, it depends on the crowd. In Japan, I would go to the karaoke box alone and sing for hours, and I would sing the cheesy songs I’d loved as a teenager: Mariah Carey, Céline Dion, that kind of stuff. With a group, I try to make it fun. I like to rap to Ludacris’s “Area Codes,” or Snoop Dogg. If someone wants a duet, I’ll go “Jackson” or “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
  I’ll sing pretty much anything.
  ¤
  R. O. Kwon’s first novel, Heroics, is forthcoming from Riverhead. She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow.

• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University - https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/kelly-luce

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  Photo by Tony RinaldoPhoto by Tony Rinaldo
  KellyLuce
  2016–2017
  Evelyn Green Davis Fellow
  Independent Writer
  Fiction
  Outside (A Novel)
  Kelly Luce is a fiction writer. She is the author of the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail: Stories (A Strange Object, 2013) and of Pull Me Under: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
  During her time at the Radcliffe Institute, she is researching and writing a novel around the themes of female homelessness, incarceration and childbirth, and prenatal memory.
  Her story collection won the 2013 INDIEFAB Editor’s Choice Prize Fiction and was a finalist for book awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers’ League of Texas. She's a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned a BA in cognitive science, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers, where she earned an MFA in fiction and screenwriting. She has received support from the Jentel Artist Residency Program, the Kerouac Project, the MacDowell Colony, and Ragdale.
  2016–2017 Radcliffe Institute Fellows
  This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
  Photo by Tony Rinaldo

• Kelly Luce Home Page - http://kellyluce.com/kelly-luce/

  About the Author
  Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (A Strange Object, 2013), which won Foreword Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, and the novel Pull Me Under, out November 1, 2016 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She grew up in Brookfield, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in cognitive science, she moved to Japan, where she lived and worked for three years. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Ragdale Foundation, the Kerouac Project, and Jentel Arts, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Salon, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, and other publications. She received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin in 2015 and lives in Charlestown, MA. She is a Contributing Editor for Electric Literature and a 2016-17 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she is working on her next novel.

  Represented by Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown, LTD

• Michigan Quarterly - http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2016/11/on-pull-me-under-an-interview-with-kelly-luce/

  QUOTED: "When I living in Japan, I learned about the phenomenon of kireru, which means “to snap.” The concept of snapping and committing violence under pressure isn’t foreign to us, but the people who were snapping — namely, young children, including girls — surprised me. I was teaching junior high at this time, and I wondered whether any of my students, cheery or well-behaved on the surface, were capable of this."
  "So the book was born from a question: what would have to happen in a child’s life for her to do this? And as I started to answer that question, Chizuru (Rio) was born."

  On “Pull Me Under”: An Interview with Kelly Luce

  by Lauren PrastienNov 16, 2016in Interviews
  At the beginning of Kelly Luce’s novel Pull Me Under, twelve-year-old Chizuru Akitani fatally stabs her bully, Tomoya Yu, with a letter opener from her teacher’s desk. Retained for the entirety of her adolescence in a juvenile detention center and disowned by her father, Chizuru sets about the difficult work of reinventing herself: she picks up running and loses the weight that attracted Tomoya Yu’s ridicule, she attempts to grapple with events of the day she snapped.

  Granted the opportunity to leave Japan to attend college in Colorado, Chizuru relinquishes her citizenship and leaves the event that has defined her personhood for the majority of her life, far across an ocean. In the intervening years, Chizuru changes her name to Rio, becomes a nurse and starts a family unaware of her past. Her life becomes jigsaw puzzles and playdates, her greatest concern whether or not her family will relocate to a tacky suburban community called Tuscany Terrace. That is, until her father, Living National Treasure violinist Hiro Akitani, passes away and Rio returns to Japan for the first time in twenty years.

  At turns searing and sincere, Luce explores the implications of identity and the weight of secrecy. Pull Me Under explores and dismantles the trope of “woman with a dark secret resists suburbia and its trappings” that usually manifests in unfortunate, infantilizing “Girl” thrillers — Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, etc. — books that represent their female protagonists less as dark, complicated labyrinths, and more like guns with the safety off: impulsive, immature, desperate with bitterly predictable inner lives.

  Through her sparse, precise prose, Luce fortunately spares us, presenting instead a realistic, powerful rendering of trauma and womanhood. Rio’s darkness — characterized by Luce as a “black organ” — lends beautifully to both the empathy and the tension of the novel. Its suspense found me white-knuckling my way through the last seventy or so pages of the book.

  Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Luce about Pull Me Under, the phenomenon of kireru, writers who [don’t] run, and Vatican astronomers.

  *

  How was this book born? Did you conceive of Rio as a character first, or were you more interested about writing about a character in her particular circumstances?

  When I living in Japan, I learned about the phenomenon of kireru, which means “to snap.” The concept of snapping and committing violence under pressure isn’t foreign to us, but the people who were snapping — namely, young children, including girls — surprised me. I was teaching junior high at this time, and I wondered whether any of my students, cheery or well-behaved on the surface, were capable of this. So the book was born from a question: what would have to happen in a child’s life for her to do this? And as I started to answer that question, Chizuru (Rio) was born.

  What’s interesting about Rio — you know, besides the whole stabbing her classmate thing — is that she spends the entire novel as a liminal figure no matter which space she’s in. It’s in part due to her background, being half-Japanese, but extends into her American experience in subtler ways: her resistance to the pull of suburbia, for instance. When moving past her childhood and the incident, what was your process of imagining and forming Rio into an adult, removed from the incident by distance and time?

  I wrote the scenes of her as a child first, for the most part, and those scenes are where I looked for clues as to how she would be as an adult. There are certain characteristics about a person that don’t change, and they manifest pretty early. I wanted to figure out those true-self traits first, before I began to imagine how her childhood experiences and trauma affected her personality and way of being in the world. Not because our experiences don’t affect us, but I hate when books try to explain every a character’s every action with a one-to-one correlation between said action and past trauma. Not everything we do has a direct precursor or even reasonable explanation.

  I knew Rio had always been strong-willed and compulsive, a bit like her father, which both helped her and held her back. Her will to keep running and get in shape turns into a lifelong hobby/obsession with trail running, for example, but that same willpower is the tool she uses to keep her family in the dark about her past, to create and sustain a new narrative and identity for herself in America after leaving Japan. But then there are the things she can’t control in this new narrative, namely, the people in it that she loves — her husband and her daughter. Imagining her relationships with them are what I think guided me most in creating her adult self.

  Yes! I so appreciated that the threads of her trauma were not so obvious or direct. It’s interesting that you gave Rio her obsession with running — The Atlantic had a whole article about authors who run last year, where they attempted to find some kind of a correlation. Do you run?

  No, I hate running. I mean, I don’t mind doing it if I’m playing a game or chasing something — namely, a frisbee (I play Ultimate) but I get super bored just jogging aimlessly. My mind rebels. Distance running is also shitty for your knees, and I want to keep mine as long as possible.

  The people I know who are hardcore runners are all masters of discipline, at least compared to me. Maybe they’re also the type of writers that write every day, on a schedule — which I do not. I think Rio is like that, though. She has to be disciplined in order to keep her life together, keep her secret safe.

  You said you worked on this novel on and off for eight years (something I cannot help but notice, as I transcribe this interview, might be its own distance sport), was there anything you read that informed your work on it?

  I didn’t really try to curate my reading, though, or be precious about my reading diet as I wrote my own book. A few books I loved that may or may not have influenced the novel (though I suppose everything we love influences us) are Suzanna Jones’ The Earthquake Bird, which is just a perfect literary and psychological mystery set in Japan with a gorgeous voice and killer love story. And my friend Andy Couturier’s A Different Kind of Luxury, a beautiful accounting of the ways people in Japan’s countryside are living fulfilling, sustainable lives. Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories were never far from my side. I also listen/listened to a lot of violin concertos and Japanese music — artists like Pizzicato Five, Kishi Bashi, Angela Aki (who is from Tokushima, where the novel is set), Kaguyahime, Cornelius, and Takako Minekawa.

  Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. If I can ask, what are you working on now?

  I’m working on my next novel. It’s still early in the process, but it involves female homelessness, prenatal memory, the so-called conflict between science and faith, and a Franciscan brother who is an astronomer at the Vatican. (Yes, the Vatican has astronomers, and quite an amazing observatory!)

  *

  Pull Me Under is out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Find out more about Luce’s work at kellyluce.com, or follow her on Twitter @lucekel.

QUOTED: "This novel about identity, family, bullying, and violence never loses its center. Readers will empathize with Rio."

Luce, Kelly. Pull Me Under
Pamela Mann
Library Journal. 141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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* Luce, Kelly. Pull Me Under. Farrar. Nov. 2016. 272p. ISBN 9780374238582. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374715090. F

Luce's debut novel (after the short story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail) begins in a juvenile detention center in Japan after Chizuru Akitani, a hafu (half-Japanese/half-American) middle-school student, kills her bully. Her American mother had recently committed suicide, leaving Chizuru in the care of her father, a world-renowned violinist more interested in his music than his daughter. Following her release from the center, Chizuru changes her name to Rio and moves to the United States to attend college, where she studies to become a nurse. She soon marries and has a daughter, but her peaceful middle-class life is disrupted when a package from her recently deceased father arrives at her home in Boulder, CO. Rio travels to Japan for his funeral, where she meets up with Ms. Danny, her favorite teacher from middle school. In Luce's world there is no such thing as coincidence, and the two women embark on a pilgrimage. This chance meeting forces Rio to come to terms with her past in ways Chizuru never could have imagined. VERDICT This novel about identity, family, bullying, and violence never loses its center. Readers will empathize with Rio, a complex, angry yet sympathetic character.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

QUOTED: "Understated yet emotionally gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman's search for identity."

Spotlight on first novels
Booklist. 113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p28.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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[...]

Pull Me Under. By Kelly Luce. Nov. 2016.272p. Farrar, $26 (9780374238582).

Luce follows her hit story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2013), with a debut novel about secret lives and selfhood. The daughter of a respected Japanese classical-music composer and an American woman who committed suicide, Rio Silvestri, a nurse, now lives in Boulder with her loving husband, teenage daughter, and a passion for long-distance running. When she receives a package containing artifacts and the news that her father has died, Rio faces the dark past she has spent her life running from: as a teenager living in Japan, she murdered a school bully and was sent to an institution for disturbed youth. Having hidden her shameful history from her family, Rio now travels alone to her father's funeral in Japan to face all that she left behind. Striking an unlikely friendship with her high-school English teacher, Rio explores ancient temples and forgotten memories on a journey to discover courage and renewed affection for those she loves. Understated yet emotionally gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman's search for identity.--Jonathan Fullmer

QUOTED: "Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it, though a structure heavy on flashback undercuts too much of the drama."

Pull Me Under
Publishers Weekly. 263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Pull Me Under

Kelly Luce. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-23858-2

In Luce's (Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail) debut novel, a Japan-born mother leaves her family in Colorado and travels back to Japan to attend the funeral of her estranged father, a world-renowned violinist. As a girl, Rio Silvestri fatally stabbed a bully at school, a crime whose shame led her to move to the United States, change her name, and keep her identity a secret from her husband and daughter. The novel's first two acts deal directly with Rio's slow exhumation of her past, including a reunion with Ms. Danny, her teacher at the time of the murder. After accompanying Ms. Danny on a revealing spiritual pilgrimage, Rio, unable to prove her identity, is arrested by Japanese authorities at her childhood home. Her imprisonment brings her American family to Japan, where her past is finally laid bare. Set mostly in the countryside, Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it, though a structure heavy on flashback undercuts too much of the drama. But the final act is the novel's strongest and most confident, weaving the book's threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Nov.)

QUOTED: "Rio's inner turmoil ... too often comes to feel like an Emotional Journey set to strings."

Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce
John Williams
The New York Times. (Dec. 1, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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[...]

Pull Me Under

By Kelly Luce264 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Kelly Luce's first novel (which follows an acclaimed collection of stories, ''Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail'') is set mostly in Japan, and it wastes no time grabbing our attention. It begins with a prologue in which Chizuru, the 12-year-old daughter of a famed Japanese violinist and an American mother, stabs a boy in her class to death with a letter opener. Sent to a juvenile detention center for several years, she is eventually asked to renounce her Japanese citizenship and moves to the United States, where she changes her name to Rio and enrolls in college. She marries and has her own daughter, hiding her history from her new family. When Rio's estranged father dies, she visits Japan and reunites with an old teacher.

In flashbacks, Ms. Luce vividly describes the bullying in Rio's childhood that led to her breaking. But the current-day trip to Japan, which makes up the bulk of the novel, is marked by more pat and maudlin plot twists. Characters sometimes speak their feelings in direct cliches (''I feel like I don't know anything anymore. I need to process all this.''), and Rio's inner turmoil, which is certainly the stuff of high drama, too often comes to feel like an Emotional Journey set to strings.

Mann, Pamela. "Luce, Kelly. Pull Me Under." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 86. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371177&it=r&asid=3e8c385f5fdfbf9fbca22e7f3b673433. Accessed 11 May 2017. "Spotlight on first novels." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 28+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771279&it=r&asid=7db3930eadd5c8069af840369ddaacba. Accessed 11 May 2017. "Pull Me Under." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444496&it=r&asid=df8ed70c63d99cba8fbda60ed5b3213e. Accessed 11 May 2017. Williams, John. "Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce." New York Times, 1 Dec. 2016, p. C4(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472236009&it=r&asid=7cd4ef030043db759f30b5058b05fd70. Accessed 11 May 2017.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/499654963/coming-to-terms-with-a-bloody-past-in-pull-me-under
  Word count: 1027

  QUOTED: "it takes far too long for us to learn about the more serious bullying Chizuru endures. It makes sense that Luce might want to build tension, but by the time we learn Chizuru's fuller story, readers have lost the delicate threads that connect this troubled young woman with her powerful adult self."
  "Some of the writing about Rio's self-punishment through gross-motor exercise is the most interesting in the book. Luce fully understands the pleasure-pain dynamic involved in pushing yourself past limits."

  Coming To Terms With A Bloody Past In 'Pull Me Under'

  November 2, 20167:00 AM ET
  BETHANNE PATRICK
  Pull Me Under
  Pull Me Under
  by Kelly Luce

  Hardcover, 264 pages purchase

  I have some problems with Kelly Luce's new book, Pull Me Under, and I'll get to those. But first I want to say that this is a suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in the past few years. Note there's no use of "girl" in the title, even though a great deal of the book concerns the childhood and adolescence of one. We learn about that girl's darkest secret on Page 1, in a 1988 "excerpt" from "Kyoto Wow! English-language news magazine, October 14, 1988." It seems on that day, in the Japanese city of Tokushima, a 12-year-old girl named Chizuru Akitani showed up in her school's staff room covered in blood that she said was not her own.

  Rio Silvestri, that powerful female protagonist, narrates her own story, including the years in which she was known as Chizuru Akitani, daughter of Living National Treasure violinist Hiro Akitani. And Rio, we will learn quickly, calls her heart "the black organ." She's got issues, serious issues, that caused her to leave the Japan where she grew up for education and adult life in Colorado. And she spent ages 12 through 20 at Kawano Juvenile Recovery Center for that blood-spattered incident that occurred just a month after her beloved mother, Elana, killed herself.

  Elana, a beautiful and gifted artist, happened to be Anglo-American — so Chizuru was known throughout elementary and middle school as hafu, meaning half-breed. Worse, she was overweight, and her classmates called her names like "Fatty Potato." One of my problems with this unusual and affecting novel is that it takes far too long for us to learn about the more serious bullying Chizuru endures. It makes sense that Luce might want to build tension, but by the time we learn Chizuru's fuller story, readers have lost the delicate threads that connect this troubled young woman with her powerful adult self.

  ... this is a suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in the past few years.
  Bethanne Patrick
  When we meet the reinvented Rio, her celebrated father has died and left her an unusual legacy consisting of his violin bow, a banknote folded into an origami crane, and a letter written in Japanese she can no longer decipher. A registered nurse, Rio is happily married to a doctor named Sal, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter named Lily. But she still has issues, and she tells us that she keeps them and her "black organ" under control through running. Not just any running; Rio isn't jogging through a series of holiday 5K races. She's pushed beyond marathons to do "ultras," endurance courses that can involve 60 miles or more. Some of the writing about Rio's self-punishment through gross-motor exercise is the most interesting in the book. Luce fully understands the pleasure-pain dynamic involved in pushing yourself past limits:

  "You can't run 50 kilometers nonstop. No one can. So you have to build in periods of walking ... It took me a long time to give in to the fact that I would have to walk briefly in order to run farther. The hardest part was intellectual; an ultra is purely physical, the reason I had gotten into running in the first place. This was about getting my mind to a place where it knew when to listen to its body but also when to pat its head like a good, obedient child."
  So much about this passage resonates after you've read Pull Me Under. Rio has been running from Japan, from Chizuru's deeds, and from her own self for so long that she's gotten her mind to a place where it behaves like the good, obedient child her home culture wanted. (There's a chilling passage when Chizuru is "allowed" to leave for college in the United States; a Japanese judge tells her that she is "an expense to this nation ... Thus far in life all you have done is take ... But what have you given back?")

  That resonance is what I found most difficult about the middle section of the book, in which Rio reunites with her beloved teacher "Ms. Danny," an expatriate Kiwi. Danny's plan to make an 80-temple pilgrimage hike pulls Rio in — and it might have made for a truly scary denouement. Instead, Luce pulls the story back and makes it about a flip side of death. While that scenario is moving, it never properly connects back to the original death in the book, that of Rio's mother.

  However, the novel's ending, in Japan, and with a family that gives new meaning to "the kindness of strangers," does connect to Rio's running and to her body in a satisfying way. While we know that Rio is fit and shapely from running (one of her friends tells her "you've got that line," referring to her quadriceps), we don't know much about how she looks — and that's perfect, because she is not concerned with being pretty or attractive. Rio Silvestri has learned to live in her body, not just use it as an escape mechanism. She and Sal and Lily wind up not pulled under, but bound more tightly together by Rio's clear look at her troubled past.

  Bethanne Patrick is a freelance writer and critic who tweets @TheBookMaven.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-books-pull-me-under-kelly-luce-20161031-story.html
  Word count: 980

  QUOTED: "The book starts strong, thanks in part to the force of the premise, which feels propulsive and fresh."
  "Luce knows how to end her story, and does so satisfyingly. It is similar to the procession of a good, long hike, in which the middle is the part one has to get through to get to the triumphant end."

  Kelly Luce's 'Pull Me Under' tells of the darkness inside

  Trine Tsouderos
  Chicago Tribune
  The premise of Kelly Luce's new novel, "Pull Me Under," is promising: Twelve-year-old Japanese girl kills her bully after being pushed too far, spends her teen years in a detention center and then, upon release, flees to the U.S. with a new name. She tells nobody of her dark past, and does little to confront it herself, until events conspire to force her to revisit this dark event.

  The book starts strong, thanks in part to the force of the premise, which feels propulsive and fresh. The narrator is Chizuru Akitani, who renames herself Rio Silvestri in the U.S., and she describes the darkness within her that led her to grab a letter opener and stab her tormentor.

  I noticed at a young age — four years old, five — a dark presence in my chest, a blackness, clinging to the back of my heart. Mostly, the thing lay dormant and I could put it out of my mind. But occasionally it swelled like an infected gland. … My anger was an organ. I feared this black organ.

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  This feels so original, this concept of a girl, in particular, living with a deep anger within her. Chizuru/Rio's description of this as a "black organ" is vivid and macabre. She describes feeling the organ within her, giving her "visions of hurting the person who hurt me" — the bully she eventually kills. "I was not in control of my body," she says.

  We learn some reasons that could explain her murderous action, besides the "black organ." Her American-born mother had killed herself just weeks before. Her father, a globally celebrated violinist, is distant, has a cruel streak and travels frequently. The boy she killed had been relentless in his bullying, picking on her for her weight and for her half-Japanese, half-American identity.

  There were many reasons for Chizuru/Rio to snap, and yet Luce, to her credit, does not simply explain away the murder. Instead, she points to this darkness within Chizuru/Rio as an important contributing factor, creating a deeper, more complex portrait of the character as a child, and later as an adult who struggles to control this inner force.

  Kelly Luce (Kevin Zamani / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  This leads the reader to wonder about the narrator, who is speaking as the adult Rio, a mother, a nurse, a wife, living in Boulder, Colo. Her voice is reasonable, she seems to be a reliable narrator, and yet the reader knows that she killed someone as a child and that she still has this darkness inside. The intimacy of the writing — the book reads like a memoir — makes this realization a slightly creepy, unnerving one. Will she snap again, one wonders?

  She tries to reassure us: "Maybe it's age, maybe it's something else, but I'm not as excitable as I once was. The black organ, soothed into submission by my running, retreated even further once Lily was born. It's still there though, and I sense it now, just behind my heart."

  The story is propelled by the death of her father, which prompts her to return to Japan as an adult and confront her past. It is here that the story loses steam, and turns into something that will remind some readers of "Wild," author Cheryl Strayed's memoir of confronting her troubled past by strapping on an enormous backpack and walking most of the Pacific Crest Trail. It is as if Luce knew how to start her novel and how to finish it, but wasn't sure how to fill in the middle, which follows Chizuru/Rio on a pilgrimage on which she, like Strayed, unspools details about her life and begins to come to terms with it.

  My journey is not easy but I am making it. Every step feels like a small victory — over pain in my neck and shoulders, over fatigue, over what we saw in the paper. I am a pilgrim. For the first time since Lily was born, I feel as if there is some movement in my life, not just lateral motion but expansion.

  Where we are heading, of course, is toward Chizuru/Rio's final reckoning with her past by spilling her secret to her husband, who has no idea he married a woman who killed someone in her youth. As Chizuru/Rio says, "a good life lived with a secret was nothing compared with a good life lived without one." Luce knows how to end her story, and does so satisfyingly. It is similar to the procession of a good, long hike, in which the middle is the part one has to get through to get to the triumphant end.

  Trine Tsouderos is a freelance writer.

  'Pull Me Under'

  By Kelly Luce; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $26

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kelly-luce/pull-me-under/
  Word count: 423

  QUOTED: "a potentially interesting story sapped of interest by slow pacing and lack of character development."

  PULL ME UNDER
  by Kelly Luce
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  Debut novel from the award-winning author of the story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2013).

  Rio Silvestri is a nurse living in Boulder, Colorado. She has a husband, Sal, and a daughter, Lily. Sal and Lily both know that Rio grew up in Japan and that she’s estranged from her father. What they don’t know is that, before she changed her name, Rio was Chizuru Akitani, daughter of the world-famous violinist Hiro Akitani. Nor do they know that, when she was 12 years old, Chizuru Akitani killed one of her classmates. When Hiro dies, Rio decides to go back to Japan for his funeral. While there, she discovers new truths about her father—and herself—and her carefully constructed life begins to unravel. For a book about murder, rage, and explosive family secrets, this novel is shockingly dull. The story moves at a plodding pace, all sense of momentum undercut by Luce’s apparent inability to distinguish telling details from narrative clutter. For example, there’s a whole paragraph devoted to “Sal’s famous blueberry-mint vinaigrette,” but Rio remains, throughout, a cipher. Momentous events occur, but the protagonist doesn’t really change, and readers will end the novel with no better sense of who or what Rio is—or who or what Chizuru was—than they had at the beginning. It emerges that Chizuru was an unhappy child, bullied at school and neglected by her father. Her mother, a free-spirited American artist, killed herself. But not every child who suffers adversity becomes a killer. Rio refers to the “black organ” inside her, which is a lovely metaphor but in no way illuminating. And the redemptive note on which the novel ends feels unearned—not in a moral sense but aesthetically—and disingenuous, self-help platitudes from a solipsistic heroine who has learned nothing from her journey.

  A potentially interesting story sapped of interest by slow pacing and lack of character development.

  Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-374-23858-2
  Page count: 272pp
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 16th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/11/pull-me-under-by-kelly-luce/
  Word count: 1075

  PULL ME UNDER BY KELLY LUCE
  REVIEWED BY ALLEGRA HYDE
  November 17th, 2016

  “What if there was a fork in the road a long time ago, and I took the wrong path?” asks Rio Silvestri, the narrator of Kelly Luce’s debut novel, Pull Me Under. Rio’s question is a fundamentally human one: would my present be better if not for my past? In Luce’s hands, the answer is a nuanced dance across many decades and between two countries. Rio must reconcile her fraught childhood in Japan as Chizuru Akitani—an infamous juvenile delinquent—with her painstakingly constructed life in America. Pull Me Under offers a lush map of one woman’s journey through the ramifications of her choices and the nature of forgiveness.

  Pull Me Under opens with a news clipping from Kyoto Wow!, an English-language news magazine: “Twelve-year-old Chizuru Akitani, Japanese-American daughter of acclaimed violinist and Living National Treasure Hiro Akitani, walked into the staff room of Ishii Elementary, covered with blood and clutching a letter opener.” The blood belonged to Tomoya Yu, Chizuru’s relentless bully, whom she had killed in outburst of frustration. Chizuru is sent to Kawano Juvenile Recovery Center. Despite the absence of familial support—with her mother lost to suicide and her father to his famed musical career—Chizuru finds some solace after years of struggling with her weight and cultural perceptions of her mixed-race heritage. Gardening and exercise help her soothe what she calls the “black organ” responsible for her violent outburst. At twenty, through a lucky scholarship fluke, she is admitted to UC Boulder. By this time Chizuru’s father has all but disowned her, and she is ready to leave her Japanese citizenship and even her name behind. Enter: Rio.

  For a while, Rio’s new life is postcard perfect. She trains to be a nurse. She sheds “Akitani” for “Silvestri” when she marries an Italian puzzle-enthusiast named Sal, and together they have a daughter. Rio’s husband knows little about her life in Japan and nothing of Tomoya Yu. Rio tells herself marriage “is about finding someone who understands the right things without digging up the wrong ones.” After all, Sal is “a Good Husband, a bona fide family man,” who wants more children and dreams of moving into a pristine planned community called Tuscany Terrace. Rio’s secret, however, continues to color her thoughts. She is wary of Tuscany Terrace, perceiving in the community a phoniness that echoes back her own. “I told [Sal] you can’t buy into the neighborhood of perfect lives,” Rio says, well aware that while she has masked her former self, she hasn’t escaped Chizuru and her accompanying guilt.

  Luce’s first-person narration moves gracefully between memory, reflection, and present action, revealing Rio’s evolving psychological state in elegant and accessible turns. For instance, after learning about her father’s death via a parcel sent by his lawyer, Rio reflects upon the fact that she cannot interpret the map of Tokushima Prefecture, where her father’s wake will take place. Nor can she read her father’s parting letter to her, written in Japanese. “I’ve accomplished the goal that drove me for years: leaving that life behind,” she says. “But I don’t feel proud… I feel like someone’s pointed out a hole in my favorite sweater.”

  Kelly Luce
  Kelly Luce

  The parcel draws Rio back to Japan. She is hungry for reconnection and anxious about what she will find. Chizuru Akitani is still very much remembered in Japan and, for a short while, Rio is like a spy in her own homeland. She has a new identity; she is fully grown and fit. At her father’s funeral service, however, she encounters Daniela Townshend, a New Zealand native and her former English teacher. The encounter marks an intrusion of Rio’s past into Chizuru’s present, destabilizing the theater of Rio’s placid new identity. A theme of performance runs throughout Pull Me Under: Rio performs the role of saintly wife and mother, her father performs as an elite violinist, and even Daniela is described as reminiscent of a children’s theater director. Notions of performance and privacy also emerge in the elements of Japanese culture Luce interweaves throughout the narrative. Social interactions, for instance, are described as alternating between two concepts: “Honne is what you really think and feel; tatemae is the face you show to the world.”

  Rio’s façade becomes increasingly fragile with each passing day spent in Japan. Sal, waiting for her return to America, wonders why she keeps extending her stay. Rio isn’t the only one keeping a secret, however. The more she learns about her father, and about Daniela, the angrier she becomes about the circumstance surrounding the incident that has shaped the course of her life. After confronting her once-revered English teacher, Rio asks “Why are people so obsessed with forgiveness?” She sees vulnerability in exoneration. “Unforgiveness is its own power,” she proclaims, perhaps equating the difficulty of walling of one’s life to a form of strength.

  The irony is that Rio ultimately seeks forgiveness herself, both from Tomoya Yu’s parents and from her family. At the heart of Pull Me Under is the question of whether Rio’s loved ones will still love her back once they know her secret. Down the path not taken is Rio’s “phantom me,” a woman whose “life is not tangled in knots, because she made the hard decision to tell the truth when she first had the chance.” For Rio, unraveling those knots means revealing her whole self and coming to terms with what she has done, even when the world cannot.

  How do we seek redemption, Luce asks, for an unredeemable act? Rio shows us the full scope of a woman’s life: a single violent incident and the choices made in the aftermath. Pull Me Under is a heart-wrenching, devastating read, in part because all of us, at least in some small way, possess a “black organ”—a sense of darkness threatening to make itself known. In this dazzling debut novel, Luce reminds us that life is often as much about becoming the person we want to be, as it is about understanding the person we have always been.

• Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/three-scenarios-in-which-hana-sasaki-grows-a-tail-by-kelly-luce/
  Word count: 745

  QUOTED: "Luce’s choice to present the narrative in the form of vignettes showcases the power brevity can render within the narrative arch in juxtaposition to the psychological implications of physical change and one’s identity."
  "Readers familiar with speculative fiction will find that Luce’s collection extends the genre’s boundaries into narrative realms that linger in the mind well after the page is turned."

  A Review of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows A Tail by Kelly Luce
  Dianca London Potts

  (New York, NY: A Strange Object, 2013)

  Continuing in the tradition of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s dark fairytales, the jaded yet occasionally hopeful romanticism of Miranda July, and the magical realism of Karen Russell and Ramona Ausubel, newcomer Kelly Luce crafts narratives that are as fantastical as they are emotively true in her debut story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows A Tail. Luce possesses a rare gift for creating worlds where readers are challenged to view the strange as ordinary and the ordinary as curious. The world of Hana Sasaki is one inhabited by the ghosts of lost little boys with cameras who visit fountains where wishes are cast with coins tossed by the living (“Wishes”). Her stories paint portraits of men and women whose capacity for love can be calculated by machines (“Amormeter”) and where for “one night only, for sale at cost, everything you’ve ever lost” can be found including your own heart (“Reunion”). Luce’s collection of stories embodies the complexities of intimacy, desire, and belonging. Each protagonist’s encounter with absence, loss, and love reflects the universal experience of being and human connectedness.

  In ”Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” an adolescent boy encounters a widow whose toaster foretells death while the loss of a sibling in “Rooey” is experienced through a gradual metamorphosis from sister to brother that haunts the reader well after the story’s end. Each page will leave you, like the grieving sister of “Rooey,” in a personal space similar to “where the eyes rest when you’re thinking in the dark, [where] whispers answer.” Readers will be left with a sensation best articulated through the voice of the adolescent narrator of “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” as he witnesses the implications of a breeze blowing through the hilltops of his village. “The stalks moved slightly in a breeze I couldn’t feel revealing and concealing slivers of blue that formed words faster than I could read them, a marvel for anyone who cared to look.”

  Delicately coupling Japanese lore and American pop culture alongside the anxiety of postmodernity’s wake, Luce’s prose is refreshingly sincere, witty, and imaginative. “The Blue Demon of Ikumi” is a simultaneous retelling of an ancient legend of a beautiful woman who came from the sea and the portrait of a man and his lover. It is at its core nostalgic, yet fails to be merely sentimental. Luce’s expansion of legends and cultivation of new myths prove her prowess as a storyteller. This is most evident in “Wisher,” “The Blue Demon of Ikumi,” “Reunion,” and “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” each story revitalizing the ancient with the new.

  The collection’s namesake “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail” does the same in episodic vignettes depicting the protagonist’s changes from child to woman, from human to something else. Illustrating the span of years of this experience within a few pages, Luce’s choice to present the narrative in the form of vignettes showcases the power brevity can render within the narrative arch in juxtaposition to the psychological implications of physical change and one’s identity. In a world where school girls disappear in karaoke parlors and where ashes fall from the sky like snow, weird occurrences are formative, its what makes us who we are. Readers familiar with speculative fiction will find that Luce’s collection extends the genre’s boundaries into narrative realms that linger in the mind well after the page is turned.

  | | |

  Dianca London Potts is an MFA student at the New School for Fiction. Her words have been featured in APIARY Magazine, New Wave Vomit, and The Big Takeover.

  Kelly Luce‘s story “Rooey” was originally published in TLR’s Spring 2010 issue, How To Read Music. “Rooey” is also available to read instantly from TLR Online by going here.

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2013/11/19/reviews/lauren-friedlander/three-scenarios-in-which-hana-sasaki-grows-a-tail-kelly-luce/
  Word count: 689

  QUOTED: "The dialogue is sparse and minimal, pared down to the essentials, just like Luce’s masterful storytelling."
  "This small but mighty debut has a quiet power that’s hard to shake. ... You will surely carry Hana Sasaki’s multitude of peculiar, jewel-like facets inside your head weeks after you turn the final page"

  November 19, 2013
  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail – Kelly Luce

  by Lauren Friedlander

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail[A Strange Object; 2013]

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is not only the first collection from Austin-based writer Kelly Luce, but also the first book from Austin’s new independent press, A Strange Object. This revelatory debut that orbits around Japanese themes has been compared to the work of Haruki Murakami, but it has considerably more heart. It also evokes Karen Russell with similar deftness when handling the adolescent voice in all its heartbreaking transparency. I would happily suggest that Luce contributes as much to the contemporary renaissance of the short story in her first work as Russell, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders have with their recent masterpieces.

  In an interview with the Rumpus, Karen Russell describes short story collections as a singular way to “come at some of the same themes and preoccupations from different angles, sort of like turning the facets of a little jewel.” In Hana Sasaki, motifs recur as blips on a radar, subtly flickering in the reader’s subconscious, especially apparent when the collection is read ravenously as a whole. In subsequent stories, a unique word is reused in another character’s mouth. A quotidian image is re-seen by other eyes. A tail repeatedly sprouts out of a different girl’s backside. These repetitions function not as an overwrought device to tie the stories together thematically, a trap so easy to fall into. Instead, they evoke a multitude of dimensions and alternate realities. The reader is forced to ponder how much these stories exist in the same universe. Are they in fact aspects of parallel worlds, past lives? Such is the mysterious and haunting intrigue of Hana Sasaki.

  Compact and economical, it is hard not to consume Hana Sasakiall at once as a light but satisfying meal. Its simple construction allows for bright truths to emerge from the page, unencumbered by showiness. Between stories of a death-divining toaster and the titular tail of Hana Sasaki herself, Luce elegantly walks the tightrope between magical realism, the supernatural, and the strange in the everyday. Alienation, love, fate, and magic are major pillars of her tales, and Japan is the perfect overarching pattern. Americans are placed in Japan; Japanese into America; square pegs coming to grips with round holes. Communication is fraught, whether it’s the problem of the correct usage of the word ‘broken’ vs. ‘broke’ in “Pioneers,” the misspelled Clam Island in “Cram Island,” or the quantifiable capacity to express love in “Amorometer.” The dialogue is sparse and minimal, pared down to the essentials, just like Luce’s masterful storytelling.

  “Rooey” stands out as the most complex and personally bewildering piece, as well as one of the longest. However, it wouldn’t have quite the same impact without being flanked by world-building and aura-enhancing stories, ranging from three-page slices of life to lengthier surrealistic scenes. “Rooey” puts all of Luce’s greatest strengths in a blender and presses ‘pulverize.’ The result is an intensely moving but confounding story about a young woman grappling with her brother’s death, becoming increasingly obsessed with the girlfriend he left behind. With simple but meticulous storytelling, this piece blurs the lines of identity in the face of wrenching trauma. I re-read the last page, composed only of three sparse sentences, over and over and over, completely floored.

  This small but mighty debut has a quiet power that’s hard to shake. If you’re like me, you will surely carry Hana Sasaki’s multitude of peculiar, jewel-like facets inside your head weeks after you turn the final page

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/three-scenarios-in-which-hana-sasaki-grows-a-tail/
  Word count: 645

  QUOTED: "Precise, thorough, stirring studies in character make these stories of Japanese culture a magical experience."
  "Those interested in Japanese culture, or who simply wish to enjoy a magical exploration of memory and motivation, will delight in this eloquent book of short stories."

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail

  Reviewed by Aimee Jodoin
  June 27, 2014

  Precise, thorough, stirring studies in character make these stories of Japanese culture a magical experience.

  Traversing the profound with a delicate, often humorous voice, Kelly Luce uses the setting of Japan in her short story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, to analyze loss, marriage, and pervasive hopes. Her precise and stirring use of language makes this an extraordinary debut.

  Each of the characters in these ten stories—some cynical, some compassionate, some dissociated—shares an experience that was life-altering in some way. Several stories are narrated from a future point of view, providing the speaker with a sense of quiet insight into their experience while remaining detached from any trauma or otherwise difficult emotions.

  In “Ash,” for instance, an American ex-pat details her encounter with the Japanese legal system, bringing in symbolism when she mentions the volcanic ash that covered the city like dust on the day of her arrest. This odd tone of nostalgia and the selectivity of memory is also present in “Cram Island,” as a man remembers his high school girlfriend’s best friend and wonders what happened to her after a haunting experience they shared. “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” too, deals with the effects of time, as the young narrator helps Ms. Yamada destroy her toaster, which prophesizes peoples’ deaths. Luce evocatively uses symbolism and imagery as she describes how the woman baptizes the toaster and herself in beer to wash away original sin and make them pure.

  The stories feel connected even as they vary thematically. The characters in each story come from different life stages and narrate diverse experiences. The thread running through this collection is the setting of Japan. Luce, having lived in the country for three years, incorporates Japanese motifs and occasional gentle humor to offer a strong sense of place.

  Luce presents the main character of every story both precisely and thoroughly. For example, in “Rooey,” Luce puts the narrator’s relationship with her recently deceased younger brother, Rooey, in a clear light. First, she dreams Rooey is a shark, and only when she lets him attack does she wake up, saying, “That giving in is a release so powerful I find myself sitting up in bed, heaving. That giving in is the saddest feeling in the world.” Next, describing the jealousy she feels at Rooey getting more attention from their mother, she says, “Tearing through the water on the final leg of a race, I would think of them watching me and I would for a moment be the focus; I would fill that tiny space between them.” And third, Rooey gets a job and works hard to earn enough money to buy his first car, while the narrator had gotten a hand-me-down when she was his age, to which she confesses, “He was a hard kid to resent, and for that, I have to admit, I resented him even more.” These scenes paint a picture not only of Rooey and the narrator but also their relationship, a tricky task that Luce accomplishes with skill and eloquence through her exact word choice. In so few words, Luce says so much.

  Those interested in Japanese culture, or who simply wish to enjoy a magical exploration of memory and motivation, will delight in this eloquent book of short stories.

  Foreword Rating
  5 Hearts
  2013 INDIES Winner
  Editor's Choice Prize Fiction

• Japan Times
  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/10/26/books/book-reviews/three-scenarios-in-which-hana-sasaki-grows-a-tail/#.WRRzxtIrI2w
  Word count: 358

  QUOTED: "Any reader who has experienced moments of discombobulation in Japan will relate. Even if you don’t, you’re still likely to find yourself entangled in the tales of Hana Sasaki."

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail
  BY ANDREW LEE
  STAFF WRITER
  OCT 26, 2013 ARTICLE HISTORY PRINT SHARE
  I like well designed books and often choose what I read by its cover — despite the well-known adage, I am rarely disappointed. Yuko Shimizu’s illustration on the front of “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail” immediately drew me in — the red-lipped, naked girl with long black hair and matching tail hinting at the oddities within.

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, by Kelly Luce, A Strange Object
  “Three Scenarios” is a collection of 10 short stories set in, or with a connection to, Japan and is perhaps an odd choice for Austin, Texas-based publisher A Strange Object to choose as its first book.

  The author, Kelly Luce, lived in Japan for three years and clearly picked up a liking for classic Japanese folk tales as many of her stories feel like they are updated fables. There’s the young wife with a mysterious past who may or may not be the “Blue Demon of Ikumi”; “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” which has the power to predict the way a person will die; the guilt-ridden sister in “Rooey” who transforms into her dead brother after he is killed by a shark; and the titular Hana Sasaki who casually washes the long black hair of her tail with shampoo.

  In her stories Luce manages to effortlessly capture both what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan and to write in a believable way from the perspective of a native. Her characters are lonely housewives, school kids and outsiders — gaijin, hāfu, otaku — and somewhat melancholic, yet any reader who has experienced moments of discombobulation in Japan will relate. Even if you don’t, you’re still likely to find yourself entangled in the tales of “Hana Sasaki.”

• Bookslut
  http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2013_12_020429.php
  Word count: 999

  QUOTED: "Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a pleasing read, one that hits highs and lows and shows skilled attention to clever detail. Kelly Luce makes her mark by creating a world that gives her access to deep emotional truth and offers her the opportunity to tell stories that are interesting and fresh."

  DECEMBER 2013

  HEATHER PARTINGTON
  FICTION

  THREE SCENARIOS IN WHICH HANA SASAKI GROWS A TAIL BY KELLY LUCE

  Kelly Luce's debut collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, is a pleasing mix of fantasy and delicate, intricate description, a tiny volume bursting with stories representing a deft sense of timing, imagination and wit. Luce sets these tales in Japan, in a slightly alternate reality that pushes boundaries of what is possible, and offers winking suggestions about what might have been.

  Luce's characters are real, familiar. Or are they? There is the literal play on tails and the tale in "The Blue Demon of Ikumi," equal parts story about a honeymooning couple and mystical water demon legend. This idea of the tail surfaces again in the title story, "Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail," which itself is another wink at the idea of interpretation. Luce plays with language and meaning, and she lets us in on her fun.

  It is the variation of these stories, though, the balance of humor and sadness and structure that make Hana Sasaki such a pleasure to read. The world of Luce's characters is one where toasters can foretell a character's death and the "Amorometer" can measure one's "lovingcapacity." In the hands of a lesser writer, perhaps these contrivances would feel trite. It is a testament to Luce's storytelling that her imaginative writing underscores a deeper kind of emotional truth for her characters, rather than trivializing it. Luce's use of magical realism engenders a kind of emotional truth that feels more real than perhaps a strict literal truth.

  Death and grief play as much of a part in her collection as love, and the balance of emotion that runs throughout the book lend it gravitas. In "Rooey," a tale about the transformative powers of death and guilt, Luce opens with the line, "Since Rooey died, I'm no longer myself." On its face, the line is a passing glance, the kind of thing most of us say as a throwaway, but Luce thrives in subtlety.

  While the deacon said things like, "The Lord takes first whom he loves best" and "To die young is a blessing," images of that day slideshowed through my mind -- Rooey's head, just above the water, snapping back on his neck, Rooey's eyes wide and black as he looked at me the last time, while I treaded water a few feet away. I wondered if he knew he was dying, that when he closed his eyes on the pain, they would never reopen. I thought of this as the deacon droned, as my mother's pale jaw clenched and unclenched, her eyes like ice -- she had not cried yet -- and I stood up in the pew and whispered � "Bullshit."

  Rather than just exploring death and its aftereffects, this story asks the reader questions about the blurry line between empathy and sympathy, about "taking on" the guilt of something versus becoming something entirely different out of grief. "Rooey" is just one example of how Luce shines, particularly in carrying a hint of mysticism to the end of a story.

  Luce's characters are often caught in situations where they're confronted with loss, or with their displacement or imprisonment in situations that they cannot control. Relationships are strongholds, but they are also sometimes bonds that can't be escaped. In "Ash," Luce writes of a character who is falsely imprisoned for bike theft, and held captive until she signs a false confession. Upon her release, she meets a woman, Eiko, who says, "There's a lot that's unexplainable. When you feel alone, so many things become possible."

  "Yes, I can do anything," she thinks, "even things that I don't want to do." "Ash" is a story of displacement, of Americans living in Japan for a year and of one woman's brief imprisonment. But the way this experience sticks with her and changes her family is indicative of how Luce's other characters are shaped by moments, too. In "Pioneers," "The Blue Demon of Ikumi," and "Amorometer," Luce also explores this idea of the connections between us, and what keeps us where we are. Luce seems to want us to consider how we keep a hold on each other, and why.

  "Amorometer" plays on this idea of connection, mixing allusions to Anna Karenina with the magic of a machine that can read one's capacity to love. Aya leaves her hometown to meet Shinji: "Aya had insisted on coming to Tokyo. The person she was hoping to become could not exist in Iida; she could only transform with distance. And though it terrified her to think of herself lost on the streets of an unfamiliar place, she felt certain that once she arrived, she could be anyone she wanted."

  Though the allusions to Tolstoy give the story an undercurrent of foreboding, it is ultimately Aya's transformation -- like that of Luce's other characters -- in a world just slightly different from reality that strikes the deepest chord.

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a pleasing read, one that hits highs and lows and shows skilled attention to clever detail. Kelly Luce makes her mark by creating a world that gives her access to deep emotional truth and offers her the opportunity to tell stories that are interesting and fresh.

  Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce
  A Strange Object
  ISBN: 978-0989275914
  135 pages

• Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-three-scenarios-in-which-hana-sasaki-grows-a-tail/
  Word count: 493

  The Masters Review Blog

  FEB
  11
  Book Review: Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail
  Three+Scenarios+in+Which+Hana+Sasaki+Grows+a+TailThree Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a notable debut on two platforms. It is the first short story collection from writer Kelly Luce, whose sensibility and prose rings brilliant on the page. It is also the first book from publisher A Strange Object, co-founded by publishing veterans Callie Collins and Jill Meyers. Luce and her publishers have aligned a lovely and startling collection of short stories that readers will devour. I absolutely did. I fell in love with this book.

  Luce crafts fiction that draws you in and disarms you. Clean and subtle prose gives way to magical worlds, and a playful quality connects the two, moving readers along in an easy, effortless way. All but one of the stories in this collection takes place in Japan, where Luce lived for some time. There is a strong sense of physical landscape to these stories, but it is the emotional topography that is navigated so well. Luce’s works peaks to a great truth: grief, love, belonging—even existential dread. Her collection is both otherworldly and yet firmly rooted, and it is this balance that makes enjoying her writing so easy.

  In “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” a town is confronted with a device that tells you how you’re going to die. In “The Blue Demon of Ikumi” a man reconciles the strange relationship developing between him and his new wife, while the legend of a blue demon haunts their honeymoon. In “Cram Island” a girl vanishes from a karaoke studio and the theories behind her disappearance range from the dark to the truly unfathomable. In the book’s titular story, we watch three tails emerge.

  The only piece in the collection that doesn’t take place in Japan is “Rooey,” a story about a girl who loses her brother in a shark attack. Luce guides us through this piece in a practical way: “Here’s a story: two people are in trouble and the wrong one dies. There’s been a cosmic mix-up, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and they all live sadly ever after. The end.” And with this: “Mom hasn’t touched up her strawberry blonde dye job since the attack; her grief is lengthening.” The heartache is identified, but there is a secret not yet revealed, which Luce delivers in a beautiful way.

  Many of Luce’s stories end like “Rooey,” with conclusions that are abrupt yet satisfying. Her collection feels like an assortment of intimate portraits: beautifully rendered, imaginative, authentic, and clean. She is a terrific writer. I cannot wait to see more of her work.

  Author: Kelly Luce

  Publisher: A Strange Object

  by Kim Winternheimer

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-1027-three-scenarios-hana-sasaki-tail-kelly-20131027-story.html
  Word count: 1003

  Review: 'Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail' by Kelly Luce
  Kelly Luce
  Portrait of author Kelly Luce. (Russell O. Bush, A Strange Object)
  Amy Gentry
  "The tail is three inches long, and gleams silver with a lavender tinge, one end thin and flyaway, the other thick as rope." That would be Hana Sasaki's tail, and it is one of four tails, not three, despite the title of Kelly Luce's debut story collection, "Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail." The fourth tail belongs to a woman named Saki who may or may not be the same woman as the Hana Sasaki in the title story. But tails are not the strangest things growing in Luce's stories, set in Japan and threaded through with a quiet, off-kilter surrealism.

  This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

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  Luce, a native of the Chicago suburbs and a finalist for the 2012 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Short Story Award, lived in Japan for three years, first as an English teacher with the JET Programme in Kawasaki, then for an additional two years in Tokushima. Only one of the stories, "Ash," is based directly on her experiences there — an American is arrested and held without charges for several days in a Japanese prison, something that happened to Luce. However, all of the stories, whether told from the point of view of Japanese or American characters, are suffused with the floaty, slightly numbed-out sensorium of the expatriate, in which any random detail can take on a numinous glow: the sound of frogs trilling in rice paddies, the "heavy golden dust" from a volcano's hiccup, even the baked-on handle of a doughnut at a chain store in a train station.

  Setting magical realism in a distant country can seem too easy, and stories like "Ms. Yamada's Toaster," in which the appliance in question predicts the manner of one's death by toasting Japanese kanji onto pieces of bread, riff gently on Western desires for a mist-shrouded land populated with spirits. Yet Luce undermines the impulse to fetishize by constantly shifting the grounds around the concept of foreignness, reminding us that "the Japanese slang for foreigner [is] outsider" and then demonstrating just how many different ways one can be on the outside: within a group of friends, at a job, in a marriage.

  In "The Blue Demon of Ikumi," even one's own country can become charged with foreignness by the presence of a new person: "The air smelled of fish, but the breeze tasted faintly sweet, like ice cream. Masa felt content; this was not something he would have noticed before meeting Saki." Masa, a middle-aged Japanese widower, has just married Saki, a thirtysomething hafu — ethnically half-Japanese, half-white — whose rejection of Japanese tradition both arouses and disturbs him. Saki perversely chooses an ill-omened day for the wedding and refuses to see their relationship as fated, despite Masa's constant search for auspicious signs, insisting, "People don't find each other. They just happen to each other."

  The tail, when it appears in this story, is a reminder that no matter how close you feel to a loved one, they remain as foreign as another species, an otherness no beautiful symbolism can erase. The body is the sum total of our experiences, and we were none of us born yesterday; Saki, a modern woman, certainly wasn't. "I just told you I grew a tail, and you're more concerned about how many men I've screwed?" cries Saki, but for Masa, they are facets of the same deception.

  In "Pioneers," an American husband tries to wrench his wife, Yumiko, free of the Japanese traditions he sees as stifling. Where Masa wants his marriage to be a blessed and fated union, Lou wants a self-determined, individualistic relationship with Yumiko, sealed by the perfect fresh start: a baby. Instead, Obon, the festival of the dead, looms, along with their second childless wedding anniversary. "She saw him catch sight of the calendar, its red circles like imploring eyes. She imagined its voice, a whisper: Don't you want to know what the lucky days are this month?" The cultural divide here is a metaphor for more unsettling differences. If it's impossible to surmount the divisions between people who love each other, why try?

  Luce delivers a heartbreaking answer in "Rooey," the only story set in America. Maxine, a young journalist, blames herself for the bloody accident that claimed the life of her artistic teenage brother, Rooey. Wallowing in survivor's guilt, she wears her brother's favorite T-shirt, sleeps on his bed, and obsesses over his obsessions, which included cars, Japanese manga, and his Japanese-American girlfriend Lily. In life, Rooey yearned to be Japanese; now, Maxine yearns to be him, a self-eradicating fantasy that gives a devastating double meaning to the opening line: "Since Rooey died, I'm no longer myself."

  The longing to inhabit the skin of the other, is, of course, a metaphor for the writing of fiction itself, a drag performance in which we step into our characters' dirty clothes and stare at their bedroom ceilings and try to have their thoughts.

  Luce has created a collection in which the donning of soft skins, naked or furred, is both an act of love and an expression of the unremitting strangeness of the self.

  Amy Gentry is a writer, performer and blogger.

  "Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail"

  By Kelly Luce, A Strange Object, 135 pages, $14.95

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