Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,189

words of what became The Orphan’s Tales.

It was a strange, long, inchoate summer. But out of it came everything else.

Three Days in the Archetype Mines

Fast forward a year and I had just gotten married, just moved to Japan, just gotten a fluffy yellow dog and a house in the suburbs of Yokosuka. I was installed in it like any housewife of 1957, meant to wait for my Naval officer husband to come home at infrequent intervals and entertain myself.

I wrote Yume no Hon as an entry for the Blue Lake Books 3-day Novel contest. The thing I remember most about those three days was that Blue Lake required someone else to sign a form certifying that you had written your manuscript in three days as per the rules—and I didn’t have anybody. My husband was at sea and I had no friends. I called the only other person in town I knew, who happened to have been my high school sweetheart, years ago. He’d joined the Navy, too. He signed the form and we had nothing to say to each other.

Yume is a novel of loneliness first and foremost. A hymn or paean to being alone—though it does not praise it. It seeks for the light and the hollows in solitude, solitude being what I possessed in abundance. I had discovered the strange, gorgeous names of the Heian calendar, and as I watched those times of year come in Japan, an utterly other calendar than the one I, California girl, was used to, I began to think of Ayako, and how she might dwell within those seasons, in and among and beside them.

I have occasionally referred to Yume as the suicide note I never delivered on. How’s that for an introduction to a poetic little novella? Well, so it goes. It is the work of a person profoundly not alright, a person living a Betty Friedan life in a post-Paglia universe, a white woman living in Japan, a twenty-three year old who saw no end to the isolation and sameness of the life she had chosen for herself. It is all of those things, and it is also a novel of feminine archetypes, of Pele and Tiamat and Isis and the Sphinx, all of whom live in a broken old hermit named Ayako, as they live in all of us or they wouldn’t be archetypes. How those archetypes want us to survive, and to survive in us, how they evolve and force us to evolve. It deals in physics, the physics of infinite paths and worlds and states of being, infinite ways of being here and yet not-here.

In my life I have often been accused of being deliberately obscure in my writing, of meaning nothing, of being pretty for pretty’s sake. Perhaps you can see that all the things I write about, and am still writing about, have always seemed vitally immediate to me. They are not even truly metaphors. Ayako is her dream. There is no difference. And everything she dreamed was everything I could not process outside of fiction. What it meant to be alone. What it meant to be a woman. What it meant to make choices I imagined a better woman would not make. I have always been a confessional writer, and if anything can be said of the period of my work covered by this collection it is that this was my most confessional time. I had not yet learned how to tell anyone else’s story, only to drape silk and history over my own. Of course, perhaps we never really do anything else.

This is, at its purest essence, a book of choices, and the punchline, if such a thing applies, is that they are all taken eventually. That literally, not metaphorically, we life every life, and some of those are lava-goddesses and some of those are husks that used to be human, clinging to a mountainside. It is a book that helped me live.

I lost the contest.

When, ultimately, Yume no Hon was published, we decided to print two editions, one red and one blue. Given that the novel deals with light and physics as much as dreams and myth, I chose to separate the book along the light spectrum. It seemed to me to say that this one book could be any book, any path taken, any choice, any author, any reader. We have chosen to print the blue version here.

Some 170 words are different between the two editions, and to make it easier