The darkness inside
In debut novel, a woman tries to hide her past
Americans believe in fresh starts and new beginnings, cleaning out and starting over, living free and unburdened by the weight of the past. But it’s never that simple or complete; no one can simply shed a former self like a too-tight sweater or slough it off like a layer of skin. How much of the past — even the ugly parts — can we leave behind without losing who we are?
Author Kelly Luce tangles with this question in “Pull Me Under,” a novel that straddles the line between two countries, two cultures and a woman with two lives and two names.
Rio Silvestri has a husband, a daughter and a rewarding career as a nurse. She grew up in Japan, where her father was a famous violinist — but since she attended college in Colorado, she has wanted nothing more than an average American life.
The past, though, won’t stay in place. After all, Rio Silvestri is only one of her names. Until she was 20, Rio was Chizuru Akatani, the girl who used a letter opener to murder her sixth-grade classmate.
“‘Mixed-race child of Living National Treasure snaps and kills her bully!’ — it was all over the news.” At the age of 12, Chizuru committed a sensational crime, one she remembers in flashes.
From the age of 4 or 5, she’d sensed “a dark presence” in her chest, “a blackness, clinging to the back of my heart.” Usually it lay dormant inside her, but when she got angry or hurt, “it swelled like an infected gland.”
That’s what happened when Tomoya Yu, a boy in her class, started calling her “Fatty Potato” and putting tacks in her chair. He showed no mercy to Chizuru, who was still reeling from her mother’s suicide. Pushed to her limit one afternoon, Chizuru snapped and grabbed the first sharp object she could find. When she walked out of the classroom, Tomoya was dead and she was covered in blood.
Chizuru served eight years in a “juvenile recovery center,” where her father visited her exactly once and never returned. When she turned 20 and was free, she moved to the United States, changed her name to Rio and tried to cut all ties with her past. The “black organ” inside her went quiet, pushed down deep by the comforts of American life.
Now, when her own daughter is 12, Rio’s father dies, and she returns to Japan alone to attend the funeral.
Most of the novel’s action happens here, on Rio’s solo journey to a home that never felt like home. She begins to piece together the puzzle of her childhood — and to realize that her secret could never have stayed secret forever.
This is Luce’s first novel, though she has previously published a collection of short stories. She has said that with “Pull Me Under,” she wanted to explore the phenomenon of kireru, a Japanese word meaning “to cut or snap” that is used to describe children and teens who commit sudden, unexplained violent crimes. When Luce spent a handful of years living in Japan, she was mystified by a rash of kireru crimes.
But “Pull Me Under,” like its protagonist, is about more than kireru. Luce offers a thoughtful look at the struggle to bridge two cultures, not belonging entirely to one or the other. And she presents a solid portrait of a damaged, imperfect character struggling to reconcile the woman she is with the girl she used to be.