[Note: I read a lot of literary journals. When i find a really phenomenal short story in one of them, I do a short write-up of adoration here.]

“Dialogues of Departure” appeared in the last issue of Tin House, and its the strongest of many strong stories in there (I also loved Kevin Wilson’s “No Joke, This is Going to be Painful.”)

The plot, about a Canadian teaching English in Japan, feels fresh. The story is not the standard Westerner’s feeling of Tokyo alienation and bewilderment. If anything, it’s the narrator’s realization that he feels so at-home in this foreign world because he lived out such a solitary rootlessness in his old life.

For me, what made the story so stellar is one minor plot element, present throughout but suddenly becoming hugely relevant in the end. The narrator buys a second-hand phrase book for learning Japanese, and is amused by the macabre lexicon that frequently pops up: in an early lesson, alongside key words like “pencil” and “store,” is the word “corpse.” Later on he finds additional eerie phrases and sentences whose value, to a Western traveler, seems minimal. “Child massacre,” and detailed dialogue about hunting for children through the rubble of a recent bombing (the actual examples are hilarious, but I can’t quote any because I gave the journal away to a writer friend… because I liked the story so much I had to pass it on). In the end, we learn that the book had caused a scandal - it was written by a professor who had been jailed for pacifism during World War Two, and subsequently dismissed from his university post during the American Occupation for his public stance that Japan was the victim - not the aggressor - and that foreigners were a corrupting influence in Japan and should not stay. His book on Japanese for English speakers becomes a weirdly eloquent protest, as well as an illustration of the way that the overwhelming weight of history stands between people who come from different countries.

The writing and the story are flawless, but it’s this artful device that, for me, makes “Dialogues of Departure” so haunting, and effective.

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