She’s a Ghost

The Ghost of Suzuko | By Vincent Brault | Translated by Benjamin Hedley | Baraka Books, 2022

What do ghosts, presumably incapable of influencing events among the living, do in the world of fiction? Well, in fact, plenty. They establish a setting as Gothic, allowing the characters who still breathe no peace, floating on the mist that surrounds the crumbling ancestral castle or the ominous forest. They spurn characters to avenge their deaths, demanding from beyond the grave that justice be enacted on their behalf. They loom over their murderers, driving them to madness with guilt. They keep spooked readers awake at night, lurking by their bedsides. They are Shakespearean. They are folkloric. They are the threats in bedtime stories to make children behave. On occasion they even act as comic relief, executing clownish antics like juggling their own dismembered body parts and popping up through the floorboards. And, as in French-Canadian author Vincent’s Brault’s third novel, The Ghost of Suzuko, they manifest another character’s grief. 

Expertly translated by Benjamin Hedley from French to English, The Ghost of Suzuko follows Vincent, an expatriate Montrealer who is named after his creator and has migrated back to 2018 Tokyo, seeking to begin afresh after the traffic accident death of his girlfriend Suzuko. The change of scene change does not, however, alleviate the effects of his trauma over her untimely demise. In fact, the opposite occurs. Suzuko’s ghost begins to appear around the city and persists even as Vincent pursues a new paramour, an irresistible free spirit with colorful eyelids named Kana. Vincent becomes obsessed with Kana’s eyelids, but it’s Suzuko’s image that maintains a hold over his psyche: “There. Right outside the tall windows. The way she moves, that’s her alright. Wool gloves on her hands. Her hips, her shoulders. So fine.” 

There is a literary trope known as The Lost Lenore, in which a dead woman appears in a story as an emotional nucleus for a male hero. In The Ghost of Suzuko, Brault subverts this formula. It does tell the story of a man who still loves a woman who has died, but he does not simply miss her or be haunted by her. The Ghost of Suzuko invites readers to follow its main character through the full turbulent experiences of denial, despair, and reluctant acceptance that develops on the standard tragic-romance ghost story. The mourning period, not the ghost, is the true horror of the tale.

The story begins with Vincent attending a house party, hosted by an old friend of Suzuko’s and his. Exhausted, intoxicated, and vulnerable, he’s unable to refuse a request to honor his dead lover with a speech at the gallery that exhibited her performance art. In his grief, he has not yet accepted the fact of her death. “Oh Ayumi, please don’t talk about Suzuko in the past tense. It breaks my heart,” he begs his acquaintance. Another concerned friend admonishes Vincent for moving back into the apartment he shared with Suzuko when they were a couple. Vincent almost intentionally sets himself up to be tortured by Suzuko’s ghost. 

And so he is. Suzuko’s ghost is sporadic but chooses her appearances carefully. Vincent spots her at landmarks; not Tokyo’s landmarks, but their landmarks. Museums. Buildings. Dimly lit bars. Gardens. Shopping streets. The places where they spent time together. Her ghost is not frightening, or disfigured by decomposition, but perfectly intact in her human form, remaining recognizable to the overly receptive Vincent, who develops a habit of looking for her wherever he goes. She’s an expected recurrence. A semi-scheduled specter, which not even the arrival of her replacement Kana can dislodge.

“Suzuko,” says Vincent during a moment of debilitating loneliness, when no friends or love interests are around to distract him. “Now would be a good time to show yourself on one of these street corners, I tell myself. But there’s nothing but hollow forms. Cutouts of her body appearing at times in the light. Dark shapes. A void. Impressions of what’s missing. The presence of absence.” Suzuko does not appear on command. Ghosts rarely do. 

The Ghost of Suzuko blends magical realism and Japanese mysticism—a genre that depicts, with affection, Japan’s abundant culture of spirituality and the occult. The setting is modern, rife with dazzling technology and infrastructure—specialized “love hotels,” a convenient labyrinth of subways that usher characters from scene to scene—but the story’s supernatural elements descend from centuries of legend and tradition. 

The ghost’s appearances are normal and leave the texture of everyday life largely undisturbed. Rather than flee from Suzuko’s ghost in terror, Vincent briskly pursues it through the streets of Toyko, his hopes for a reunion deflating upon her disappearance, since the ghost has the tendency to vanish at his approach. It won’t allow itself to be captured. “It’s alright, I’ll still catch up to her,” says Vincent. “She’s only about twenty meters ahead of me. But when I get to the corner there’s no one in sight…” At one point he and his friend calmly discuss the ghost in a sake bar. By their tone, you’d think they were discussing a minor inconvenience—a rat infestation, or a broken appliance that cannot be fixed. “Look,” says his friend. “I just want to help you out a little. Seeing Suzuko in the streets, that’s not normal. And you’re feeling earthquakes where there are none.” The ghost sightings are an issue that Vincent needs to resolve, not a new aspect of his daily routine that he should accept and embrace. He’ll be better and healthier, insists his friend, only when he stops seeing Suzuko. 

In its second half, the novel depicts Vincent and Suzuko when both were alive. This solid human Suzuko fills in and eclipses the sentimentalized version of her that has been channeled and understood only through memories, conversations, and ghostly sightings. Given Vincent’s state of affliction in the book’s first half, his reliability as a narrator is suspect in the second. But he’s our only source. 

Arai Suzuko, a fascinating and eccentric artist, does not get to represent herself, and Vincent’s version of her may be one of idolization, with limited insight into either her own thoughts or faults. She was a strange and individualistic woman, with an obsession of carving a place for herself in among the creative celebrity class with unorthodox public artistic performances, and I, as a reader, regret that I wasn’t offered more entrance into the workings of her mind. Suzuko exists through Vincent alone, almost in stiff preservation—an ironic state of being for her, since her profession in life was taxidermy. In this manner, she remains a traditional “Lost Lenore.” 

It was the 19^th century American writer Edgar Allen Poe who popularized the literary figure of The Lost Lenore, which still continues to fascinate readers and form the basis of contemporary works like The Ghost of Suzuko. Brault’s protagonist is even a writer-scholar like Poe’s, and both depict the shadowy omnipresence of a beloved dead woman, venerated to the point of sainthood. In “The Raven,” the reader learns nothing about who Lenore was as a person. She exists solely to fuel the scholar’s suffering. Nothing more is said about her other than her name, that she was a beautiful maiden, and that she was loved deeply by a man. Here’s Poe: 

“Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Nameless here for evermore.”

The Lost Lenore, outliving Poe as his scholar outlives his Lenore, recurs now as a literary device even beyond classic literature, in comic book series and films. Peter Parker mourns Gwen Stacy. In Pixar’s Up, Carl longs for Ellie. Even the iconic Star Wars villain Darth Vader draws sympathy; he lost his own love, Padme. It’s hard not to feel for him at times, even as he extinguishes entire civilizations. What the Lost Lenore does for all these characters is spurn them to action. Peter Parker fights villainy to honor Gwen Stacy. Carl goes on the adventure he and Ellie never had, and Darth Vader seeks revenge.

Suzuko’s ghost inadvertently forces Vincent to confront his heartbreak, driving him to face the remainder of his life and attempt to broker peace between his devotion to her memory and his own imperative to rebuild his life from the point of her passing. He is a writer so—naturally—he attempts to accomplish this by writing a book: “This book I write with her. Without her. I feel lost, alone, distraught. Tons of images in my mind. Intermittent. Sentences, one, then another. Syncopated. Her name often. Her name everywhere. In every word. In every landscape. In the depth of the screen. In the thickness of the pages. Suzuko.” His concentration is muddled by melancholy, and so his project has limited success. What little writing about Suzuko he does accomplish is left private. 

As much as the feminist-cultural movement dislikes and rallies against killing off female characters to evoke male angst and character development, the trope reliably invites the audience to grieve along with the hero (or villain). Who in their lifetime hasn’t lost something or someone vital to their happiness before? And who hasn’t done damage to themselves and others in retaliation? Vincent pounds away on his laptop and isolates himself in the apartment he shared with Suzuko. He lashes out at his friends. He gets drunk in seedy bars. He leaps impulsively into an affair with another woman whom he barely knows. And he relives his time with Suzuko in his head, constantly and involuntarily, frozen in time. 

Brault’s method of haunting lacks the romanticism of Poe’s—a distinction which likely reflects contemporary attitudes toward mental afflictions, which are now less likely to be depicted as whimsical or even aspirational. Never at any point is Suzuko’s ghostly company established as something artistically splendid, despite Vincent’s worship of Suzuko’s memory and their shared experiences. Vincent is not a “suffering artist.” He’s just suffering. His sadness does drive him to write but, at the same time, cripples him creatively. And unlike Poe’s scholar, Vincent at least has a support system. His aforementioned friends frequently chastise him for clinging to Suzuko, and he seems to perceive his own self-sabotage. 

It remains unclear whether Vincent really grows through his bewildering experiences with his Lost Lenore, or if he is doomed to be forever cemented emotionally at the time of Suzuko’s death, like Poe’s scholar under the mocking caw of a raven. Vincent is not ready to move forward and begin to fully heal. Not yet. He will be haunted by Suzuko for the rest of his life. “Neighborhood after neighborhood. Bike paths. Along the canals. The cemeteries of Aoyama and Yanaka. Dark trees and dead grass. Every route we ever took together. Suzuko and I.” The grief may metamorphose into new forms or fade into something slightly less debilitating. But from the desperate and tenacious way he speaks about his Suzuko, his Lost Lenore, and remembers her, it is clear she will always haunt him, wherever he goes. ▩