November 4, 2022
Ezra’s Ghosts, by Darcy Tamayose
It took me this long to pick up Darcy Tamayose’s Ezra’s Ghosts because of the line in an otherwise rave review in Publisher’s Weekly that said, “Tamayose’s experimental story structures and tight focus on academia make for a collection that will likely put off casual readers.” I thought this book was going to be difficult, but it wasn’t. It was interesting, and richly intelligent, and strange and surprising, but it was also gripping, and full of suspense. I read it as part of the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon last weekend, and it was just the best pick, pages flying by.
The eponymous Ezra is a Canadian prairie city, the book comprising four different stories set around there. In the first, the shortest, an academic returns from a research trip to China—his focus is on the Ryukyu Islands, where Okinawa is located—in early 2020, and finds his pregnant partner acting strangely aloof. The second story is about another academic, a professor, who finds herself in the afterlife following her murder in which the wrong person is put away for the crime, the murderer goes unpunished, and her family members steep in their despair. In the third story, on an isolated farmstead, a grieving journalist encounters a man, an immigrant from Japan in the early 1900s, who, at 130 years, claims to be the oldest person in the world, all the while dead birds are falling down from the sky in curious weather. And finally, in the last story, we’re taken more than 20 years into the future as the partner of the academic in the first story visits Paris against a backdrop of violence and chaos to which she’s become somewhat inured.
For someone who doesn’t know who Derrida is, I loved this book an awful lot, finding it gripping, pulsing. I loved its insistence on mutability, on the arbitrariness of borders, the Japanese-Canadian writer raised on the Prairies can write about an Island chain in the East China Sea, about ghosts, about missing and murdered Indigenous women, and blend critical theory with elements of murder mystery.
Ezra’s Ghosts was terrific and not a chore at all.
