Journeying through “How High We Go In the Dark” – a constellation of mourning

If asked, I could say that “How High We Go In the Dark” by Sequoia Nagamatsu is one of the most beautiful science-fiction books I’ve read lately. Or maybe, without having to make a hierarchy of it – an exquisite, deeply emotional, profoundly relational book. Its fragmented shape, as a novel made up of short-stories, is an excellent way to tell the story of a world-changing pandemic: collectively. No character is central, each life is just as worthy* as another. If there was a main character, though, it would be either the virus, or death, because there is no story that isn’t pierced by the pain of loss, that isn’t struck by grief in some way. One could even say this book is a study of mourning, an ode to life with its sticky closeness to an ever-coming end. 

I will look into each story shortly – beware, some spoilers ahead.

The book begins with “30,000 years beneath a eulogy”, a story about a father who’s just lost his daughter, Clara, in a scientific expedition. He follows her footsteps in the Arctic, uncovering a (possibly) deadly virus – a very believable, relevant premise, although note that the author started writing the book years ago, before the massive climate protests of 2019 and the COVID pandemic. In the next story, the pandemic is already in its midst, and we are thrown into a “City of Laughter”, a place where children (who are first affected) are taken to die “happily”. We zoom in on a man who works there and falls (somewhat hopelessly) in love with Dorrie, whose son, Fitch, is infected. In “Through the Garden of Memory” we are in a hospital ward and encounter an adult being sick, vaguely related to a child who went to the previous death park. It’s unclear exactly what happens to him, however, it seems that the virus puts people who are affected in a similar mind-space, connecting them. In “Pig Son” we meet Fitch’s father, a famous scientist who works to breed pigs capable of growing multiple human organs. His experiments go ‘too far’, creating a mutation in a pig who learns to speak human. In a somewhat tragi-comic situation, the pig ends up being a substitute for his son – in much the same way his organs are a substitute for human organs. Sadly, the story doesn’t sufficiently explore animal agency and the pig’s life takes a background place in front of human needs and desires. In all the ways – symbolically, relationally and materially – the pig is made to exist for human characters. 

“Elegy Hotel” takes us to the death corporations of the future, where rituals are re-made to face up to the task of massive dying, and companies fill in to make a profit out of whatever they can. Another male character, a sort of an average, “disappointment-to-his-parents” son, accounts the comings-and-goings of working there. “Speak, Fetch, Say I love you” goes further into a future where robot dogs are usual companions, often carrying the memories and voices of lost ones. This feat is both heartbreaking and heart-warming. Yet again, we have non-humans answering humans’ needs, in a hybrid cyborg form, resembling animality, but entirely inorganic. “Songs of your decay” delves into an unusual love story between a married scientist and her dying patient – it is weird, sweet, and aching, like the whole of this book, and one of the few stories narrated by a woman. In “Life around the event horizon” we are already in a future which doesn’t seem too far away, with “rising sea levels, California burned to a crisp every year, plague wards filled with patients”, but is. A scientist (Yamato, brother of the Elegy Hotel worker) has discovered “the singularity” in his own brain, and soon, interstellar travel will be possible. It is the one story I feel was cut too short, without sufficiently developing his relationships to his son or partner.  

“A gallery a century, a cry a millennium” takes us onto a voyage of light-years, with a crew who is chosen to carry forth the possibility of humanity and find a habitable planet somewhere in the universe. Within it we find the wife and niece of the scientist in the first story, as well as Dorrie and Val (a character from Elegy Hotel). The story is told in letters, fragments of planet descriptions and narration from the wife’s, an artist, perspective. It is one of my favorite stories, I think, because it wraps up so much of what has already happened, and so much of the hope and pain humanity carries with itself when dreaming of other worlds: 

“I’ve been populating an imaginary town with the faces of those the crew has lost and plan to fill the skies with all the planets we find along the way that will be both beautiful and deadly, or simply not quite right for us. If I stare long enough at our paintings, I can almost forget that everything we remember about our time on Earth will soon be ancient history.” (p. 194)

“The Used-to-be Party” is written as an email from a neighbor asking for re-kindling human connection, after the pandemic has slowly receded. “Melancholy nights in a Tokyo cafe” uncovers the lives of misfits, with a precariously housed main character who falls in love, through a virtual cafe, with a mother whose child is dying, and who is estranged from her family. We are confronted not only with the lives directly taken by the virus, but also those which are forever damaged by government’s lacking social services. “Before you melt into the sea” follows another venture-capitalist company profiting off death by providing specific, and special, post-mortem services. “Grave friends” introduces us to a neighborhood in Niigata City which formed new rituals to respond to mass-death: communal graves: 

“It seemed like everyone was walking either to or from a funeral. Death had become a way of life.” (p. 271)

“The scope of possibility” wraps up all of the stories in a tight bundle, with the personal, hundreds-of-years span of the story of an extraterrestrial being, a sort of world-maker/breaker who is taught from early childhood that “We become everything we pass until we become the thing we created” (p. 275). The entity has lived many human lives, playing an almost central part in the story of humanity, but alas we only find this out at the end. Does it really matter for each human who lived and died, that it was, in part, because of this being? We find her (them?) in the first story, as the dead scientist, Clara, and later, as Yamato’s brilliant partner, yet only in the end the dots are connected, the origin of the virus revealed, and the truth of the tattoo uncovered. 

I love the cover version I got to read, the Bloomsbury dark paperback, with embossed splashes and golden yellow circles whose meaning one only finds at the end. It is very fitting for a novel that is, in part, very real, and in part, filled with the unknown, with heartache and the agony of loss. As a person who is deeply in awe at the way short stories can tell you everything you need to know in such few words, I was fascinated by this book’s ability to draw connections across well-crafted narratives. In retrospect, I realize that the one main theme of the book, besides death/grief, is family, and specifically the child/parent relationship, which is one of the main drivers of the stories. Both familial and romantic relationships are portrayed as full of pauses, echoes and missing pieces, a longing for something else, a desire for connection that rarely happens. 

Most characters are Japanese or Japanese-American, most are men, and all seem to be heterosexual. In fact, the book is so cis-heteronormative, that even the supernatural beings are organized (reproductively and family-wise) just like human beings. If I were to find a fault with this book, it would certainly be this one – the projection of a traditional nuclear family reproductive structure into celestial entities is just too salient in a science-fiction book which, otherwise, seems to understand the clutches of capitalism and ecological disaster. Another loud silence in this book is the unheard voice of non-human animals. Much too often, all that is non-human is put in service to humans. Only non-human extraterrestrials can escape this condition, which seems almost like a tragic fate for earthlings. 

Ultimately, I just wish I could read it as science-fiction, but so much of it feels true, feels impending, happening, somewhere soon, if not already-happened. Which makes it all the more heart-breaking. A wreckage of this ruined Earth, “How High We Go In the Dark” is an oddly poetic collection of stories, told through multiple voices and perspectives, reminding the reader that pandemics and the climate crisis are not about the I, but the us. 

PS. * stands for the non-human animals. In Pig Son, this is transparent. Within it, the life of a scientific subject (a pig) bred for organ transplant is quickly changed when he learns to speak some form of human language. But the pig who speaks (human) is, ultimately, not afforded a life much different than the rest of his species. Even worse, the pig himself desires to give his life to humans – he seems to have no inherent will to live, as if anthropocentrism seeped into his own thinking as well. The portrayal of non-human animals as self-sacrificing for us, humans, is a constant appearance in numerous stories, and one that is easy to fall into (I myself have). Resisting it in story-telling is part of re-shaping literature away from its deeply speciesist bias.