Naomi Ishiguro is the author of Escape Routes a playfully magical and unsettling collection of short stories out this month. A blend of fairy tale allure deeply rooted in reality, these tales of imagination, traps and ultimately freedom completely captured me while I read them. I was lucky enough to meet up with Naomi at a glitzy coffee shop in London that neither of us were dressed for. Naomi was good enough to let me follow up our conversation with questions about her new and magical collection of stories.
Molly Aitken Naomi, what was the first spark of an idea for Escape Routes and what was the first story you wrote?
Naomi Ishiguro ‘The Flat Roof’ was the first story I wrote. I came up with an early draft years ago while living in a tower block in London which had – you guessed it – a flat roof. It wasn’t until quite a long time after that I started thinking of writing a whole collection. I moved to Bath in my early 20s to work at an indie bookshop (Mr B’s Emporium, definitely worth a pilgrimage for those who haven’t been), and having spent my whole life up to that point in London the city’s closeness to the natural world felt utterly magical to me, as did having things on my doorstep that seemed straight out of a fairytale, like the Two Tunnels Greenway, for instance: two disused railway tunnels, running through beautiful hillside, which have been transformed into a cycle and running path, and also into a kind of immersive musical art installation. In finding myself so suddenly in such a different environment to the one I was familiar with, I felt quite like one of the characters in my stories – launched out of the London grind into a place filled with sparks of everyday magic. It was really that whole experience that inspired me to start writing the collection.
MA Some of the stories, like ‘Wizards’ and ‘Shearing Season’, are seen through the eyes of a child. Do you feel children have a different, more magical perspective on the world?
NI Obviously kids have a completely different perspective on the world. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily more magical though… I just think childhood is such an interesting time to write about, in that it’s when a person’s sense of self is most likely to be in flux, and at its most fragile in some ways, at its most resilient in others, and generally at its most open to the possibility of change.
I also love the way that because kids are (obviously) constantly encountering things for the first time, they’re actively expecting to see new things in the world every day. Really, if the Escape Routes stories do anything, I’d like them to remind readers of how it felt to have that sense of openness, and also remind people of that resilience in the face of change that does so often come with childhood. I’d love if the stories could take people back to a time in which they were used to being surprised and transformed by the process of encountering new things in the world.
MA Throughout the collection, there was a sense of cities being a trap and the countryside offering freedom, particularly in ‘Heart Problems’ and ‘Accelerate!’. Why do you think this is such a powerful image and message?
NI I can only hope it’s a powerful message. It’s certainly something very close to my heart, as someone who grew up in London, and who was only passingly aware of things like the cycle of the seasons, or of how many different animal, insect, bird and plant species there still are out there in spite of the ecological crisis. Leaving London in my twenties and having a bit of a crash course in the natural world honestly felt like freeing myself from a particularly poisonous worldview. It was as if a new part of my mind had been unlocked, and my whole perspective on the world – and on the way humans exist within it – altered to become something which I hope is much more real, healthier, and better-informed. I do absolutely think that that’s a very real kind of freedom that the countryside can offer – the freedom to see things more clearly, maybe. Hopefully this perspective-shift is something readers will be able to relate to. I do also think it’s just generally so important for us all to keep questioning the priorities and values that are so enshrined in all these extreme urban models of living, and to ask whether those ways of life is can actually bring us any real freedom or happiness at all.
MA Although the natural world offers freedom, it is also volatile and unknown. Could you elaborate on the double standard of freedom in the collection?
NI There’s a version of the idea of freedom which involves being untethered, and without obligations, commitments or familiarity. More often than not, this kind of ‘freedom’ also necessarily involves being without a support network, and without any of those ties which keep many of us grounded in society and generally looked-after. While writing these stories I was thinking a lot about John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and the hugely sad story it tells of what happened to Christopher McCandless. It seemed to me like such a horrible irony – that someone could sever all ties and literally walk out of his comfort zones in an effort to find a kind of ‘pure’ freedom, only to end up in a new unforeseen trap.
In a lot of my stories, the characters’ efforts to free themselves from all earthly ties end in a kind of dissolving of self – in a sublimation of their individual lives and personal identities into the natural world. That’s kind of how I interpret that Into the Wild narrative, too, in that the logical conclusion of that kind of search for freedom seems to be a kind of collapsing of one’s sense of self into something impersonal: something much bigger than any human individual, that can transcend all ties, traumas and emotional obligations. That kind of dissolution of self is, of course, just a hair’s breadth away from death – which could be a type of freedom in itself, but only the most tragic kind. So yes, there’s definitely a double-standard to the way I write about freedom in the collection in that regard.
But this all makes the stories sound a lot more introspective and miserable than they really are, honestly. Please don’t let my rambling put you off reading!
MA The symbol of birds appears in many of the stories. What attracted you to this image in particular?
NI Obviously birds are just generally very useful universal symbols for freedom and flight. More specifically though the preponderance of birds in this collection is probably down to the fact that ‘The Flat Roof’ was the first of these stories I wrote, and I literally wrote it surrounded by birds, sitting on the flat roof of the block of flats where I lived. I was particularly drawn to the idea that while the birds and I were momentarily sharing the same physical space, the birds would obviously have such a different view of the city from my human perspective. I love the idea that while birds can travel huge distances and see the world on a similar scale to humans, they move through the world without any human sense of ownership or trespass, or of borders, states, or immigration rules.
I also love Old English poetry – the really old stuff from before the Norman Conquest – and birds often show up in those poems as images of a soul freed from the earthly shackles of material existence – something which obviously relates to that Into the Wild idea of freedom again, and that ascetic negating of self. I often use birds as an externalisation of a character’s yearning for that kind of release. I like how framing that yearning in the context of earthly yet distant things, like birds, can make it seem all at once almost tangible, and yet still impossibly unattainable.
I also love the image of a murmuration of starlings as an analogue for a short story collection, in that a murmuration involves a number of individual, separate parts working together to form an almost ghostly image of a wider, greater whole.
MA Most of the stories are firmly rooted in the real world with just a hint of magic. This combining offers characters a moment of transformation. What do you think this type of fiction can offer readers in today’s often confusing world?
NI Probably not a massive amount! I mean, we certainly need a lot more than a set of short stories to help navigate the world right now… But yes, if anyone reads the stories and is reminded of a time in their lives when they believed change was possible, and believed in the possibility of transformative miracles both personal and political, then I’ll be delighted. For me, magic in books works best when it puts us back in touch with a sense of wonder. Wonder in general is so underrated. It sounds impossibly cheesy but I really do believe it expands our capacity for empathy, and helps us dream of better worlds.
MA The collection is woven together by three linked fairy tales about a rotten kingdom. What about this story did you feel tied all the others together?
NI I just liked the idea of weaving all the stories together into a fairy tale framework, as hopefully the effect is to cast all the other more real-world stories as fairy tales or fables too. I also liked the idea of those three more overt fairy tales acting as a kind of Gothic mirror to the other more ‘normal’ stories, with the images of birds in the ‘normal’ stories reincarnating as rats in the mad gothic ones.
Those three fairytales also have the overall narrative shape of a ‘coming of age’/ ‘assuming responsibility for a bewildering and broken world’, and I wanted that thread running through the whole book, as all the stories are really in some way about young people figuring these things out in various ways.
MA I hear you’re working on a novel. Can you tell us anything about it?
NI Yes! It’s coming out with Tinder Press in the late spring of 2021, and I’m very excited about it indeed. I don’t want to say too much, but it’s much more social realist than Escape Routes, and it’s basically about two friends from very different worlds who meet by chance on a common as young teenagers. The novel then follows them into adulthood, and looks at the difficulty of maintaining friendships across the vast social divides that exist in Britain today.
MA And finally, you used to be a bibliotherapist at Mr B’s Emporium. Can you offer our readers any uplifting and magical recommendations?
NI What a wonderful question! It’s more sci-fi than magical, but I loved The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – it’s like space anthropology, and it’s really so nice to see someone speculating about what it might be like to actually live alongside alien species as opposed to just writing about going to war with them. Generally, it’s a lovely, warm, emotionally-intelligent novel that will restore your faith in humanity via outer-space adventures.
Tenth of December by George Saunders is also always a fantastically wacky collection to come back to whenever you’re in need of a boost – especially the title story. It’s a great story to read in these turbulent political times, and a reminder that even when everything seems personally bleak, humans are still wonderfully capable of being better, and of dragging themselves out of the apathy of personal despair to come to the rescue of those who need them. For anyone who hasn’t read George Saunders yet, he mixes bizarre, surreal and often almost magical-realist elements of storytelling with characters who feel very human indeed, and who I promise you’ll fall for instantly. His books can find the hopeless optimist in anyone.
I’d also recommend ‘October Tale’ – a short story by Neil Gaiman, from his collection Trigger Warning. It’s a lovely subtle fairy tale about a genie and a woman who illustrates children’s books. It’s a perfect bedtime story for adults, and one that I’m sure will send anyone to sleep feeling utterly warm and fuzzy at the sheer wondrous magic of perfect storytelling.