60 pages • 2 hours read
Karen Tei YamashitaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The story is narrated in the first-person by a sentient sphere, often referred to as the ball. The novel opens with the ball coming back to the living world in the form of a memory; the result of a monthly ritual in Brazil where the citizens remember the dead. As a memory, the ball tells its life story, which revolves around several main characters.
A young boy, Kazumasa Ishimaru, plays on the shore of a beach in Japan. A thunderbolt strikes the water, throwing debris everywhere and striking the boy in the head. The object that hit Kazumasa—the ball—now perpetually hovers above his head. Kazumasa’s mother worries how others will react to Kazumasa’s strange new condition. Kazumasa, on the other hand, takes comfort in the ball’s orbit around him. As the years pass, others in Kazumasa’s town come to accept the sphere, and he lives a happy childhood.
Kazumasa graduates high school and gets a job working for the railway system in Japan. He begins as a lowly ticket attendant, but he soon discovers the ball can detect deteriorating rails on the track. He is promoted to “Superintendent of Track Maintenance and Repairs” (6) and travels across Japan, saving countless lives with his special ability. The railway system becomes privatized and sold in sections by several companies, and a device replaces Kazumasa. He reluctantly takes a smaller job servicing a single railway system in Tokyo. Disillusioned by his diminished purpose, Kazumasa discovers “he felt weary, and his ball, too, seemed to hang sadly over his nose. It was time for a change” (7).
Emboldened with courage thanks to the ball’s companionship, Kazumasa leaves for Brazil. His cousin Hiroshi—who years ago relocated to Brazil himself—helps Kazumasa get a job for the “São Paulo Municipal Subway System” (9). Kazumasa settles into his new life, rents an apartment, and starts to look out his balcony and watch his neighbors.
Kazumasa’s neighbor, Batista Aparecida Djapan, is a colorful character; sociable and street smart. Batista is intensely jealous of his wife, Tania, who loves Batista but is annoyed with his possessiveness. One day, Batista comes home with an injured pigeon and sets out nursing it back to health. In caring for the pigeon, Batista stops lingering at bars, and Tania delightedly feels “The pigeon was the child they could never seem to have. What a difference a simple bird made to their lives now” (12).
Batista devotes himself to pigeon keeping so intensely that Tania resents the pigeon. She takes the bird with her on a bus ride and releases it far away from their apartment. She returns home and discovers the pigeon flew back home. Tania feels guilty for what she did and confesses and apologizes to her husband. Batista forgives Tania, and the bond between them strengthens. They take weekend trips with their bird, releasing the pigeon and letting it fly home carrying messages. Their neighbors watch the pigeon come home with excitement. The chapter ends as Kazumasa continues to soak in his new home, while the ball senses that disparate forces around the world will soon converge in Brazil at a place called the Matacão.
Mané de Costa Pena, a native of the Amazon, performs various jobs around the jungle to support himself and his family. Mané adapts to whatever catastrophe comes his way. When his farmland burns, he fishes and taps rubber and collects nuts. Government officials offer more land to Mané, which he accepts, only to have a storm destroy his home. Beneath the soil, the storm reveals “neither rock nor desert, as some had predicted, but an enormous impenetrable field of some unknown solid substance stretching for millions of acres in all directions” (14). The strange surface comes to be known as the Matacão and television reporters interview Mané.
The Matacão’s origins remain a mystery, but it nevertheless becomes an attraction for tourists. American companies arrive. Mané and his wife, Angustia, make a living working at the construction sites and hotels that emerge. All the while, despite how often his life is thrown into turmoil, Mané keeps calm and accepts each situation for what it is. His tranquility comes from feathers, which he swears can be used to remedy countless ailments: “It was like those copper bracelets everyone used for rheumatoid arthritis: if it didn’t help, it sure didn’t hurt” (16).
As the Matacão develops as a tourist site, more reporters tour the strange anomaly. Once again, reporters interview Mané, who is barefoot and impoverished. This time, he pitches the importance of feathers. Unbeknownst to him, his life will change forever because of his statement.
In New York, a company, GGG, is abuzz from top to bottom. Executives hold a lavish meeting with a dessert course while union members strike outside. Administrative assistants scurry back and forth. The accounting department outlines future fiscal plans. Researchers try to predict the buying habits of consumers. It is a relatively normal day in the business world.
Before its position as a global company, GGG began as a humble business, founded by the couple Georgia and Geoffrey Gamble: “GGG was one of those business miracles springing from a small one-computer office with two pushbutton phones into a multimillion-dollar operation with one hundred thousand employees in branch offices across the nation” (18). Georgia and Geoffrey enjoy the initial success but other stockholders vote them out. The couple doesn’t lament being voted out, having sensed that outcome after taking the company public. As Georgia and Geoffrey leave the GGG offices for the last time, Geoff holds a mysterious card which “was more than the missing microchip in a personal computer—it was the pea under twenty-three mattresses in the bed of a princess, the missing product” (18). Despite the card’s value, Geoff feels that GGG will carry on without the information on the card. He tears it in half and throws the card into a gutter drain.
Back in the GGG offices, the development resources research and viability department is in desperate need of a new hire.
A reporter interviews Mané at his home, where he shows them his feather collection. Mané advocates for the use of feathers, whose healing benefits he discovered himself. Quieting the skeptics, Mané uses one of his feathers to ease the pain of the reporter’s ear. Elsewhere in Brazil, Kazumasa watches Mané’s interview on television while his maid, Lourdes, prepares his food. There is something special about the Matacão, but Kazumasa is unsure what it might be. The ball and Lourdes know the Matacão is a peculiar place.
Across the country, in the seaside town of Ceará, a 19-year-old boy, Chico Paco, sees the same television special and believes the Matacão is holy. Chico spends his days fishing and helping his neighbors—Dona Maria Creuza, and her disabled grandson, Gilberto—who lost his ability to walk after contracting an unknown disease. Maria prays to Saint George for a miracle: if Gilberto can walk again, she will journey 1,500 miles to the Matacão and erect a shrine in Saint George’s honor. To her joyous surprise, Gilberto begins to walk again, but Maria recognizes neither she nor Gilberto are strong enough to make the journey. Chico steps in, offering to take Maria’s place: “Chico Paco promised to do this because of his childhood friend Gilberto, and because somehow, this miracle must also be meant for Chico Paco himself” (24). Chico Paco sets out on his journey.
Jonathan B. Tweep, or J.B., applies for a job at GGG. J.B. has a peculiar fondness for paper clips and prefers jobs that don’t involve managing or supervising, preferring to avoid attention. He speaks with a receptionist, who refers him to an interviewer, and he is taken aback when both women appear and sound very similar, sporting red hair and speaking in high-pitched voices.
J.B. speaks with the interviewer and thinks back on his eclectic job history. He’s done everything from being a pickpocket to flipping burgers to working on a factory assembly line. J.B.’s sporadic job history stems from a unique character trait. He has a third arm. J.B. knows his third arm gives him many advantages, which he readily accepts, and as such, he finds himself jumping from one job to the next, always looking for something new; an actual challenge. Something is different about GGG, however: “Somehow, J.B. had a feeling, a sensation felt in his third arm, that GGG had something to offer him that no other company before had been able to and that he, of course, had something unique to offer GGG” (27).
The interview goes well. The interviewer is impressed with J.B.’s incredible typing speed. GGG is an equal opportunity employer and have no issue with J.B.’s additional appendage. If anything, they are keener to hire him. J.B. meets the interviewer’s supervisor, who looks nearly the same but with an even higher-pitched voice. As he’s led into another room, J.B. imagines meeting higher-ranked employees within GGG, picturing them to be similar in appearance with higher and higher pitched voices.
Aptly called Part 1: "The Beginning," the first six chapters introduce the main characters that the story will continue to jump back and forth between. Each chapter introduces a new main character, provides backstory, and gives each person a goal to kickstart the story. Kazumasa seeks change after his responsibilities as a railway inspector diminishes, motivating him to move to Brazil. Batista and Tania constantly bicker, but love one another, and find a new hobby in training their adopted pigeon to deliver messages back to their home. Mané Pena’s television interview about feathers sets up intrigue, as the ball knows it will change Mané’s life forever, but the reader is unsure how yet. Chico Paco takes on a holy quest to satisfy Dona Maria’s prayer, and J.B. gets a new job for GGG in New York. The exception is Chapter 4, which tells the backstory of GGG’s founding. While GGG is not a human, it becomes one of the most important entities in the novel, making a dedicated chapter to its origin appropriate. By alternating between chapters immediately, Yamashita queues the reader as to how the novel is structured and that there will be an ensemble cast of characters. Lastly, by having an international assortment of characters, Yamashita begins to build toward her theme of global interconnectedness.
By having an omniscient ball narrate the story, Yamashita can employ foreshadowing. As Kazumasa acclimates to Brazil, the ball teases the reader with information Kazumasa does not know: “Kazumasa had no idea at the time how this simple pastime of staring out his window on the tenement scene below might affect his own future. These things I knew with simple clairvoyance” (13). That the ball is recalling its life’s story also allows Yamashita to utilize hindsight. The ball thereby serves as an all-knowing fly on the wall, able to narrate the story in third person and first person, while additionally adding cinematic tension by alluding to future events the other characters are unaware of.
The first six chapters also establish the tone and style of the story. Chapter 1 sees Kazumasa struck on the head, waking up to find a ball orbiting his cranium. A strange and peculiar opening to say the least. The oddness of the beginning immediately tells the reader that Through the Arc of the Rain Forest will use magical elements to tell its story. J.B.’s third arm, too, is a fantastical character trait that Yamashita uses to characterize J.B. as a person that is capable and bores easily. Yamashita doesn’t explain why J.B. has a third arm, but he accepts it, and the people around him come to as well.
Regarding setting, the Matacão is a strange and unexplained world wonder, smooth and hard in a rain forest where such an environment is unlikely to exist. Both with characters and the setting, Yamashita utilizes fantastic elements without explaining the logic behind them, making the story classifiable as magical realism and speculative. Tonally, the story employs moments of wit and satire. In Chapter 4, while the executives have their meeting, the ball provides the perspective of lower staff: “The janitors and the mail couriers drank cokes and ate chocolate chip cookies during quarterly reports and cheered on the opposing teams—smokers vs. nonsmokers” (16). Staff turning executive meetings into a sporting event is a humorous image. By providing a comical scene like this early, Yamashita shows the reader this is a heightened world, prone to exaggerations and humor. By the end of Part 1, the reader understands this is a magical and, at times, funny place.