Mono No Aware: Ken Liu’s ‘The Paper Menagerie’

“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?”

So, The Paper Menagerie is one of the most soul-searingly immersive, devastating, and galvanising books I have ever read, a collection of historical, contemporary, and futuristic science fiction and fantasy short stories featuring some of just the most lyrical prose and certainly the most dizzyingly visionary concepts ever penned.

I’ve learned more about Chinese and Japanese history in this single fiction book than I did in the entire preceding quarter-century of life combined. I had encountered the quite frankly inconceivable horrors of the Rape of Nanjing and Unit 731 in several similarly fictionalised storylines in R.F. Kuang’s groundbreaking The Poppy War, but I had absolutely no knowledge of the brutal joint American-ROC covert operations against the PRC during the Cold War, the fate of anyone accused of having ties to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the sheer extent of violence across the subsequent decade including the Guangxi Massacre, the treatment of the Chinese immigrant community in 1870s gold-rush Idaho culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, nor the 10-day Yangzhou Massacre of 1645 and how its rediscovery centuries later was a small but seismic factor in precipitating the fall of imperial China in 1912 when the Qing dynasty collapsed before the revolutionaries who had established their ideology in Tokyo and would one day become the republicans who would flee to Taiwan in 1949.

Alongside these viscerally affecting historical short stories, each of which are also suffused with the fantastical, are several which are undoubtedly among the finest works of SFF fiction (and indeed fiction full stop) I’ve ever read, a phrase which bears repeating.

Favourites include ‘Good Hunting’, ‘The Literomancer’, and the eponymous ‘The Paper Menagerie’, but four in particular scooped up every November 5th London skyline since 1605 and transported them straight into my soul: ‘State Change’, ‘An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition’, ‘The Waves’, and ‘Mono No Aware’.

All seven of these easily blasted past former gold medallist Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Star’ on my still fledgling favourite short stories podium, but ‘State Change’ especially is I think an utterly perfect example of the form and one which is also radically uplifting and empowering. ‘An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition’ and ‘The Waves’, though unrelated, for me act as a duology – the former made me weep while the latter is I think the most imaginative work of art in any medium I’ve consumed yet (even more symphonically enrapturing than Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time). As for ‘Mono No Aware’, which is something of an alternate Armageddon, and can be intoxicatingly accompanied by ‘No Time for Caution’ from the score of Interstellar, its pages positively vibrate with the tidal wave of hope and humanity reserved for the very grandest of space operas.

This book has effortlessly immortalised itself on my all-time favourites shelf. From mind-bending Black Mirror-esque police procedurals and dystopian adventures of ragtag insurgencies and alternate timelines, to sprawling historical epics fused with shamanism and breakneck tales of silkpunk demon hunters and interstellar arks, the sheer breadth and depth of Ken Liu’s storytelling is at once bewitchingly interconnected and relentlessly original. If it was transmuted into a song it would be the title track from Oblivion.

In short, the whole thing is akin to being fired through the eye of a microscope into the crystalline vista of a snowflake and I’ll carry it with me forever.

“But at the end, as a closing, there will be a recording of compressed memories that will not be very logical: the graceful arc of whales breaching, the flicker of campfire and wild dancing, the formulas of chemicals making up the smell of a thousand foods, including cheap wine and burned hot dogs, the laughter of a child eating the food of the gods for the first time. Glittering jewels whose meanings are not transparent, and for that reason, are alive. And so we read this, my darling, this book she wrote for you before she left, its ornate words and elaborate illustrations telling fairy tales that will grow as you grow, an apologia, a bundle of letters home, and a map of the uncharted waters of our souls. There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.”