Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks Book Review

by Catalina Bonati

3.75/5 stars

Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks by Natsuko Imamura (2024) is a collection of three short stories that delve into the weird and the unusual. Two of these stories start in early childhood and revolve around being shunned in school and becoming a social outcast due to strange (in)abilities. These stories are funny, dark, and at times tense and are in the realm of magical realism.

The first story, which is the titular story, is about Asa, a girl who cooks and bakes and somehow no one, not even dogs or fish, will eat her cooking. This has a toll on her mental health and she becomes a troubled child who is sent to live at a correctional facility. After a particular event, Asa passes away and turns into a tree, which is cut down and turned into chopsticks. Asa embraces her new life as a pair of chopsticks that endlessly feeds the owner. This story is funny, sad, and dark, and towards the end it is cute and heartwarming. The premise is original and touches upon school bullying and lack of family care.

The second story, “Nami, Who Wanted to Get Hit (And Eventually Succeeded)” is about Nami, a young girl in daycare who cannot get hit by anything. People throw acorns at her, dodgeballs, cans, and water balloons, and she is never hit. This causes her to be ostracized at school and to develop a self-harming tendency of punching herself in the face, which causes her to be interned. She develops a toxic relationship with someone at the hospital, which leaves her pregnant and alone in an apartment. Her son Nanao spends his days trying to prevent her from hitting herself, from standing next to a basketball game, from walking though storms to be hit by objects in the wind. They are eventually separated and Nami tries to find to Nanao by overcoming her inability to get hit. This story is strange and has an interesting premise. It starts out funny and lighthearted but it turns dark and violent relatively quickly. The ending is a bit strange and disjointed and not entirely satisfying.

The third story, “A Night to Remember,” is the most bizarre of all. A woman (or perhaps a cat) acts strangely like a cat and this is how the people around her treat her. On a night where she is shooed outside, she comes across a man-cat named Jack and follows him to his home, where his human takes care of them both and they decide to get married. She leaves Jack’s home in order to let her family know of this development, but is later unable to carry out this cat-marriage. This is the only story which is narrated in the first person, which works to keep the reader in the dark as to whether the narrator is human or an animal. Right until the end, it is hard to tell what kind of creature the main characters exactly are, which makes the story immensely interesting.

This collection is entertaining, funny, and tense, where everything is literal and the characters’ struggles are relentless. Imamura’s prose is direct and unembellished, the same as her plot structure which is lineal without tangents. Her iteration of magical realism is surreal within the mundane and is based on the alienation of young girls and women within Japanese society, particularly within school. Her characters are unique and honest with themselves and they have a desperate desire for belonging which seems to come at a high price. These stories have themes that are dark, but Imamura’s storytelling gives them an amusing and at times lighthearted tone. There is also an afterword written by novelist Sayaka Murata. This collection is recommended for readers of the weird, of magical realism, for readers who enjoy child narrators and for readers of short books, as this collection is less than 200 pages.

You can read our review of This is Amiko, Do You Copy? also written by Natsuko Imamura here.