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excerptA small private park that Akiko has transformed into a scene from The Tale of Genji extends beyond the house; it has a broad path that leads to the public trails, thickets, a wetland, a lake.
I run from our house into the public land in the mornings, often alone, in the early light. I can run for over an hour without hearing the hum of city traffic. This early in the day, there is something more than royal about this domain: it is mythical. I run toward the past—not my own past, mind you, but a distant, primal past. A past in which my own infancy, or the current lousy state of affairs, or even the great city beyond the bluff—is unimaginable. Today when I return to the house, I see the lights are on in Akiko’s studio. This means I will find a thermos of fresh green tea waiting for me on the kitchen counter. A sweet gesture, considering how evasive I am with her. Akiko has come to confuse my evasiveness with a retiring nature. In her words, I am “the silent type.” My silence conceals a wealth of worlds best left undisclosed. We have been together ten years. Long enough for my idiosyncrasies to have faded into invisibility. Akiko, too, has faded. She is the white noise I have come to depend upon and possibly cannot live without. Akiko is witchy, clairvoyant. Her astonishing dreams are astute, surgical. They keep me on my toes. This marriage of ours puts us both at risk. She is in danger because I lie incessantly and the habit of these lies has blunted her gift and confused her. Love has caused her to distrust her own intuitions. Yet I am in danger also, because I cannot help but offer her clues. It is inevitable that sooner or later I will falter, offer one clue too many and in this way bring us both down. When I fall, she will fall with me. Perhaps this is a comfort of a kind. |
reviews
“Sex and psychosis are indistinguishable in this killer new novel from Ducornet. . .[A]s fascinating as it is dirty and dark, . . .the plot is impossible to resist.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Pick up a book by the award-winning Ducornet, and you know it will be startling, elegant, and perfectly formed—like netsuke, those miniature Japanese sculptures used to fasten the cord of a kimono. This latest, an unflinching meditation on the twinned drives of lust and destruction, is no exception. . .Writing about a satyr-psychiatrist could be so predictable, but Ducornet makes her characters real and scary beneath the ruminative, quietly observant prose. Highly recommended for literate readers.” — Library Journal
“An enticing, fast-moving exploration of one man’s obsession with his calculated power and unhinged desires.” — Booklist
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”— The New York Times
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor. . .This story has some fascinating insights and no-holds-barred language.” — New York Journal of Books
“Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke is a slim but powerful novel. This dark psycho-sexual tale of a psychoanalyst’s downward spiral is crisply written, engrossing, and impossible to forget, and has me searching out other works by Ducornet.”— Large-Hearted Boy
“'When the very air of one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air,’ ponders the narrator of Port Townsend author Rikki Ducornet’s brief, fervent novel Netsuke. . .Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.” --The Seattle Times
“The almost eerie tale of a dicey, bisexual psychoanalyst gone mad.”— Washington City Paper
“[A] finely crafted object of a novel. . .Ducornet weaves a complex tapestry of various and repeated colors, textures, and designs. . .The total effect is simply remarkable, an austere yet somehow lush beauty. At times this chilling tale seems neo-gothic, reminiscent of the work of Patrick McGrath, though much more compact. Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container. . .[W]e are simultaneously repulsed and entranced as the disturbing but gorgeous story accelerates to its foregone conclusion.”— Rain Taxi
“Dark, yet enlightening. Rikki Ducornet’s writing is beautifully disturbed, off-putting and brilliant. . .Rikki Ducornet uses the loathsome character as a vehicle to explore interesting points about the intersection between humanity and animal instinct.”— Twin Cities Daily Planet
“[Netsuke], just released on Coffee House Press, is a classic example of Ducornet’s desire to explore darkness. . .To this writer, the psyche is a most magnetic frontier.”— Peninsula Woman
“Ducornet is a very good writer, and she crafts a marvelous and disturbing story. . .If you can stomach the bleak view of intimacy (“A moment’s bliss and then: the mule brays”), this novel is amazing. For fans of Chuck Palahniuk.”— Hey Small Press
“Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet’s passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon’s knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets.” — William Gass
“[Ducornet] writes novels in delicate, precise language. . .[Netsuke] is an introspective study of the life of a bad man—or is he a man who just keeps making bad decisions?—who can’t stop abusing his power.”— The Stranger
“Judging by her new novel, [Ducornet] has not lost ground. . .Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall. . .Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too.”— The Boston Globe
“Netsuke is a little masterpiece, a gem of a psychological novel. Because the doctor’s mental condition is unstable, his actions are unpredictable, lending an uncertainty to the plot which keeps the story taut and exciting. And the ending is unpredictable, though in context makes perfect sense. Very highly recommended.”— Lisa Guidarini, NBCC
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.” — Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.” — Forrest Gander
“Pick up a book by the award-winning Ducornet, and you know it will be startling, elegant, and perfectly formed—like netsuke, those miniature Japanese sculptures used to fasten the cord of a kimono. This latest, an unflinching meditation on the twinned drives of lust and destruction, is no exception. . .Writing about a satyr-psychiatrist could be so predictable, but Ducornet makes her characters real and scary beneath the ruminative, quietly observant prose. Highly recommended for literate readers.” — Library Journal
“An enticing, fast-moving exploration of one man’s obsession with his calculated power and unhinged desires.” — Booklist
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”— The New York Times
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor. . .This story has some fascinating insights and no-holds-barred language.” — New York Journal of Books
“Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke is a slim but powerful novel. This dark psycho-sexual tale of a psychoanalyst’s downward spiral is crisply written, engrossing, and impossible to forget, and has me searching out other works by Ducornet.”— Large-Hearted Boy
“'When the very air of one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air,’ ponders the narrator of Port Townsend author Rikki Ducornet’s brief, fervent novel Netsuke. . .Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.” --The Seattle Times
“The almost eerie tale of a dicey, bisexual psychoanalyst gone mad.”— Washington City Paper
“[A] finely crafted object of a novel. . .Ducornet weaves a complex tapestry of various and repeated colors, textures, and designs. . .The total effect is simply remarkable, an austere yet somehow lush beauty. At times this chilling tale seems neo-gothic, reminiscent of the work of Patrick McGrath, though much more compact. Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container. . .[W]e are simultaneously repulsed and entranced as the disturbing but gorgeous story accelerates to its foregone conclusion.”— Rain Taxi
“Dark, yet enlightening. Rikki Ducornet’s writing is beautifully disturbed, off-putting and brilliant. . .Rikki Ducornet uses the loathsome character as a vehicle to explore interesting points about the intersection between humanity and animal instinct.”— Twin Cities Daily Planet
“[Netsuke], just released on Coffee House Press, is a classic example of Ducornet’s desire to explore darkness. . .To this writer, the psyche is a most magnetic frontier.”— Peninsula Woman
“Ducornet is a very good writer, and she crafts a marvelous and disturbing story. . .If you can stomach the bleak view of intimacy (“A moment’s bliss and then: the mule brays”), this novel is amazing. For fans of Chuck Palahniuk.”— Hey Small Press
“Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet’s passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon’s knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets.” — William Gass
“[Ducornet] writes novels in delicate, precise language. . .[Netsuke] is an introspective study of the life of a bad man—or is he a man who just keeps making bad decisions?—who can’t stop abusing his power.”— The Stranger
“Judging by her new novel, [Ducornet] has not lost ground. . .Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall. . .Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too.”— The Boston Globe
“Netsuke is a little masterpiece, a gem of a psychological novel. Because the doctor’s mental condition is unstable, his actions are unpredictable, lending an uncertainty to the plot which keeps the story taut and exciting. And the ending is unpredictable, though in context makes perfect sense. Very highly recommended.”— Lisa Guidarini, NBCC
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.” — Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.” — Forrest Gander
