Archipelago of the Sun

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani)

The first book I read in 2025 was Suggested in the Stars, which is the second book in a trilogy by Tawada (I’d read the first book back in 2022), so it feels fitting that I closed the year out with this one, which is the third of the trilogy. This was also interesting to read after having recently read Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders: in that novel, one of the characters is a grad student getting a PhD in literature, and that character spends some time thinking about the structures of stories and the artificiality of plot arcs: “The only structure that really approximates our lives as we know them is the episodic, the picaresque, the travelogue.” And Archipelago of the Sun is definitely an episodic travelogue, in which the six characters from the previous books are on a mail boat hopping from port to port on the Baltic Sea, trying to get to Japan, where two of the characters are from and which may or may not have disappeared. Near the end of the book, Hiruko, one of the Japanese characters, thinks about the experience of being “on a journey without knowing where we were going or how we’d get there,” which of course is what life is.

As with the other two books in the trilogy, each chapter in this one consists of first-person narration by one of the characters; some characters get more than one chapter, while others just get one, but all of the chapters are a delight, and themes of identity and language recur throughout the book, as they did in the previous two volumes. The idea of home and homeland come up a lot in this one, and as with the other books, myth and legend keep popping up too. I love the associative flow of the conversations the characters have, like when a view of chalk cliffs leads to a conversation that starts with blackboards and ends up with them considering the number of suicides per year in various countries at various times, or when a slice of pineapple on a dessert plate leads to a string of images it makes Hiruko think of, followed by a conversation about her feelings about being called “you” versus being called by her name.