60 pages • 2 hours read
Karen Tei YamashitaThrough the Arc of the Rain Forest
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 6, Chapters 27-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: "Return"
Chapter 27 Summary: "Typhus"
Lourdes learns about her children’s kidnapping and is overwhelmed with guilt. She wonders if she could have been prevented it if she hadn’t left for the Matacão to find Kazumasa and stayed to work for Radio Chico. Hiroshi consoles Lourdes and recognizes she doesn’t love him; Hiroshi accepts they weren’t meant to be together. He observes how much Lourdes cares about her children and Kazumasa and regrets his own greed and obsession with wealth. He refocuses his energy, away from business and toward finding his cousin.
Elsewhere, obsessed feather cultists believe that through meditation they can fly, aided by the spirit of birds. People leap from buildings, clutching bird feathers in their fists, and die. Cultists rationalize that the failed flights are a sign the earth is upset about the treatment of the birds of the world: “It was a clear sign of revenge, a message to the human animal that the destruction of so many beautiful birds without proper ritual and payment to their spirits would no longer be tolerated” (158-159).
Mané mourns the dead, heartbroken that people are using feathers in such a dangerous way. Making matters worse, a terrible epidemic of typhus breaks out across the Matacão. Many die, mostly working class, and the world is slow to respond until the disease effects rich and powerful. Mané’s two youngest children fall victim to the disease. Mané and Angustia reunite and weep for their children, and Mané contracts typhus soon after. On his death bed, Mané wails: “It was as if all the pain, irritation and emotions so carefully absorbed by the once-indefatigable feather had suddenly released themselves in a cursed torrent” (162). Stricken by disease and failure, Mané dies. Admirers of Mané’s all over the word send their sympathies. Chico Paco attends Mane’s funeral and notices the morticians put black shoes on his corpse. Chico remembers how his belated mentor proudly walked barefoot his whole life, and the sight of Mané’s covered feet saddens him.
Chapter 28 Summary: "Carnival"
Held hostage, Gislaine tricks her captors into thinking Rubens needs constant care. Her brother plays along, and they brainstorm ways to escape. Elsewhere, amid the epidemic, Radio Chico stays busy trying to help the suffering people. Believing the spread of typhus to be a sign of the end times, people journey to the Matacão and repent for their sins, often harming themselves. Simply seeing the flagellations hurts Chico. He knows hope is more important now than self-harm. Desperate to improve morale, Chico schedules the opening of Chicolándia on Carnival, a festive time in Brazil before Lent. To coincide with the opening of the park, Chico begins another pilgrimage, planning to arrive back at the Matacão during the grand opening. Gilberto also plans something special. He eyes a canon and parachute and plans to launch himself to surprise Chico on the night of the grand opening.
Kazumasa and the ball learn about Rubens and Gislaine’s ransom. Kazumasa’s understanding of his emotions completely blooms. They rush to the Matacão, Kazumasa all the while thinking, “Yes, he admitted to himself, he loved Lourdes” (168). As their mission commences, the ball spots undercover GGG personnel. They’re being followed but press on anyway. Now, everyone moves toward Chicolándia.
At the amusement park, Kazumasa and the ball find Rubens and Gislaine being held by two armed men. Kazumasa willingly surrenders himself and the ball for the children’s wellbeing. The ball senses Chico nearby, enjoying the festivities and searching for Gilberto. As Kazumasa surrenders to the men, he sees the glint of a withdrawing gun. He drops to the ground to avoid being shot, and the bullet strikes Chico in the chest. Witnesses bombard the shooter and beat him. Dying, Chico looks up, and sees an angelic figure:
Confetti dripping from his golden head, Chico Paco lifted his hands as if to protest the massacre, but it was to wave at the sight of a distant glow, the silken silver wings of an angel emerging among the crack and spray of sky lit by gunpowder (171-72).
The chapter ends as Chico Paco dies from his gunshot wound.
Chapter 29 Summary: "Rain of Feathers"
A charred body falls from the sky. It’s Gilberto, scorched and dead from being blasted out of the canon. Gilberto’s falling body was the angel Chico saw in his dying moments. Across the Matacão, others suffer strange symptoms, succumbing to frenzied dancing, unable to stop. The story jumps ahead to summarize the aftermath. Research reveals that the natural magnetism of the plastic feathers made from the Matacão can cause hallucinations, explaining the strange behavior during Carnival.
The outbreak of typhus is linked to a microscopic louse, rickettsia: “Rickettsia were microorganisms that traveled via a minute species of lice, which in turn traveled via feathers, which, of course, traveled via birds and, of late, humans” (173). Because of the popularity of feathers, the typhus spread quickly across human populations. Authorities demand birds be given an insecticide called DDT, which, counterintuitively, kills the birds more than the lice. Desperate for action, the government still chooses to use DDT. Planes fly across the Matacão and surrounding towns, bombing the area with poison to kill the lice. The resulting fumes kills everything it touches: animals, insects, people.
Batista pleads with Michelle to convince J.B. to use his resources to save the birds. Michelle replies, “I have tried. He’s still convinced that artificial plastic feathers are the answer” (175). Michelle herself is torn up by the loss of so many birds, and Batista pledges to do what he can. He confronts government officials, but no one is willing to help him. In a last desperate act to save his pigeons from the DDT, Batista opens their cages and shoos them away. Some take off, but many simply return to their home, as they have been trained to do. Batista’s birds, as well as the many wild and rare birds of the forest, try to escape the fumes from the planes, but die and fall from the sky, creating a rainfall of feathers.
Chapter 30 Summary: "Bacteria"
In the ensuing chaos of the Chicolándia shooting, Kazumasa and the ball are surprised to be saved by J.B., who spots them from his helicopter. He picks them up and takes them back to his penthouse. Michelle, the triplets, and her exotics birds, are all gone. When Michelle heard GGG discovered the origins of the Matacão—that it’s a dense toxic collection of human trash—she left J.B. once and for all. Michelle’s decision to leave with their newborn children devastates J.B.
Kazumasa and the ball reach a hideout attached to Hiroshi’s karaoke bar. Kazumasa and Lourdes see each other at last and embrace passionately. Their tender reunion is tarnished, however, by the deteriorating condition of the ball. The ball hypothesizes that it’s weakness comes from “the fact that so many things were now made of Matacão plastic; anything built or devised within the last several years might no doubt have been created out of Matacão plastic. My energies were conceivably dispersed” (179). The ball droops, and does not spin perfectly, as it once did. Tiny holes appear across its surface, as if it’s being eaten from the inside out. Kazumasa tends to the ball in its dying days and is devastated one morning when he wakes up and finds the ball gone completely.
Chapter 31 Summary: "The Market"
Kazumasa holds a vigil in remembrance of the ball. Back at the Matacão, plastic eating bacteria overtakes the strange surface. Chicolándia crumbles into ruin. Throughout the world, everything made with Matacão plastic corrodes and deteriorates. Chaos ensues. GGG, the company’s hand in everything, tailspins into failure. Only J.B. chooses to stay at the GGG offices at the Matacão. He observes the vacant offices, misses his wife, and looks to his third arm, atrophying, and knows “that he would have to leave the Matacão if he wanted to save his extra appendage” (182).
Still staring at his third arm, J.B. considers his next business venture. The arms business, he thinks. Specifically, specially made clothes and accessories for people with three arms. J.B. smiles at the idea of his next successful business. He then jumps from the twenty-third floor of the GGG building to his death, slamming into the surface of the decaying Matacão.
Chapter 32 Summary: "The Tropical Tilt"
Chico and Gilberto’s bodies are transported to their seaside home. A great procession, Chico’s mother among them, carries their coffins across the Matacão and throughout Brazil, and they are laid to rest by the ocean they both loved growing up.
Batista, guitar in hand, journeys to Mané Pena’s former farm. Some children—who managed to survive both the typhus epidemic and the poisonous fumes from the airplanes—play nearby. With the Matacão gone, craters and valleys take its place. Batista takes in the entirety of his surroundings: “Now that the Matacão had disappeared, the children remained, habitually meeting in what was now an enormous pit” (184). In the distance, getting closer, Batista sees the unmistakable shape of his wife, Tania. The husband and wife reunite at last.
After grieving the loss of the ball, Kazumasa heals and “In this newfound sense of anonymity, Kazumasa’s old happiness about love and life in Brazil began to return” (184). He buys a farm and moves there with Lourdes, Rubens, and Gislaine. They settle into a happy life growing fruit and vegetables. The final section leaps ahead in time, to an undisclosed period. Sections of the world remain barren and desolate. Skyscrapers and office buildings have rusted. The ball alludes to mother nature returning, but never as it once was. The memory that brought back the ball is now finished. Whose memory exactly remains a mystery, and the story ends.
Part 6, Chapters 27-32 Analysis
Part 6, subtitled "Return," appropriately returns characters back to each other: Mané reunites with his wife, Kazumasa and the ball see Lourdes and her family again, and Tania and Batista embrace at last. Although Chico dies, his body returns to his hometown. The public’s perception of Chico as an angel also suggests his death could be him returning to God. Conversely, J.B.’s atrophying arm tells him he must leave the Matacão, but he doesn’t go, instead leaping to his death; he fails to return to where he came from.
Lastly, the old forest returns. At the story’s conclusion, the ball narrates “The old forest has returned once again, secreting its digestive juices, slowly breaking everything into edible absorbent components” (185). As the world suffers an intense ecological and economic collapse, our time with the characters ends. The ball’s memory concludes, and nature has an opportunity to reclaim lost territory. Throughout the novel, the subtitles and sectioning of chapters have created frameworks that scaffold the story. In Part 6, each plot line involves some form of return. After, nature has a chance to do the same.
Tonally, Part 6 is somber. Strangers around the world mourn Mané but being buried with shoes on his feet sours the memorial service for Chico, who knew him better than most. Chico’s death, too, is a horrible accident. When his body reaches his hometown, Chico’s mother “thought sadly that her son should never have left this place” (183), elevating the heartbreak of the scene. J.B.’s selfish and apathetic behavior finally gets the best of him, leaving him alone, and later, dead. Of the main cast of characters, over half of them die, even the narrator itself. Events across the world at large also contribute to the tragedy of Part 6. Countless bird species go extinct, the impact of which hits even harder when seen through the perspective of Batista and Michelle, both of whom dedicated their lives to birds. The Matacão deteriorates and poisons, destroying buildings and people alike. In the end, many of the characters are dead, and the world they navigated is left in ruins. Concluding the story this way helps Yamashita make the story a cautionary one. While most of the characters don’t act with ill intent, they nevertheless pay heavy prices for not fully considering the weight of their actions.
Despite the somber elements, the novel avoids outright bleakness and cynicism. Kazumasa and Lourdes are together, and their life on the farm shows that living cohesively with nature is key to longevity and happiness. Batista and Tania—who have spent most of the novel apart—are likewise together again. The old forest’s return provides hope as well. In the closing lines, the ball describes nature’s reclamation, but remarks, “But it will never be the same again” (185). While the world can never go back to the way it was, some version of life persists. Yamashita is mindful to show how human activity harms the planet, but by giving at least a few characters happy endings, she avoids ending the novel on a bleak note, instead choosing a bittersweet one.
