Daisuke Shen’s debut story collection, Vague Predictions and Prophecies, was recently released by Clash Books. It’s a staggering assemblage of lushly-rendered futurism, horror, religious myth, and formally innovative literary fiction. When reading their work, I often feel that I’m being encouraged to furnish a new kind of narrative theater in my mind, a stage where almost anything can happen, where dramatic tension is both strengthened and resolved by factors beyond the purview of most writers.
I met Daisuke Shen once at a bagel shop in a strip mall in Greenville, SC, not far from where we both grew up. This was about a year ago. I don’t know what it meant to Daisuke, but for me it was a meaningful kind of overlap: breakfast near my hometown with a writer whose work I admire.
Now that Vague Predictions and Prophecies is here, I asked Daisuke to answer a few questions about the book via google doc, a reversal of their interview with me last year. Here’s our conversation.
Parker Young: Daisuke, your stories are full of these beautiful, surprising shifts in the nature of reality. Like a maximalist Brian Evenson, you tend to bring your characters, and by extension your readers, on a quest to understand what kind of story they’re really in. Did you know the rules in advance, or find them in the midst of composition?
Daisuke Shen: That is a really high honor, Parker. Thank you for saying that. I think that it’s interesting because Evenson’s characters grapple with the same kind of agonizing tension that my own do. They want to understand the kind of story they’re in, but upon gaining understanding, they grow horrified, and want to create a different story altogether—and thus it becomes this never ending cycle, a game wherein you set up traps for yourself to fall into, hoping that each time you’ll realize something new about yourself down there in the dark.
In terms of rules, I think my largest and most abiding rule for stories is that they are almost all desperate in nature. I don’t think there’s any point in me telling a story, no point in anyone wanting to listen to one, that doesn’t have a degree of desperation to it. I’m telling you a story because I need for you to listen, I need someone to understand what’s going on inside of me, that sort of thing. I want for all of it to feel necessary for everyone involved—the characters and readers come away changed from the encounter. If a story feels like one that’s pleasant enough but doesn’t have that desperation behind it, then I need to tinker with it some more.
Stories like “Machine Learning,” “Damien and Melissa,” and “Good Route, Bad Route” address the complex and sometimes disturbing ways technology is used to make contact with others across impossible distances. What is it about technology that makes genuine connection difficult, and do you see any exceptions or glimmers of hope?
I have been thinking recently about the way I use my phone vs. my computer. I actually despise my phone most of the time, because it’s something I came to associate at a young age with the idea of social media/texting/fun when in fact there’s all of this information available right in front of us, at our fingertips. I use my computer for work, mostly. I vastly prefer reading physical books, I enjoy using a typewriter (the Pomera DM100, gifted to me by a wonderful student). I dislike things that are multi-purposed, for instance, Instant Pots. I’d rather something serve a singular purpose because it makes it easier to focus on the task at hand, which is a bit ironic in light of these next thoughts.
Everything these days is presented with such urgency—deadlines, relationships, and most of all, an end to our loneliness. Communication becomes a never-ending performance wherein we fit ourselves into neat little packages: I exist before you in this eternal moment, without beginning or end. I’m your friend from online who you talk to about films, or I work for you remotely despite never having seen you or heard your voice, or I’m a beauty influencer who you follow on YouTube. And to an extent we are happy to fit within these roles, too. But it also makes us lazy, uncurious, and fearful of examining ourselves as well as others.
I love the texture of these stories—they’re a bit wild, overgrown in an organic way, lush with surprising turns and details. Do you work quickly to achieve this effect, or do the stories need time to evolve?
I don’t know if I work quickly these days, but I definitely did during the time that I wrote these stories. The quickness is a matter of impatience on my part to figure out the ending, as well as a recognition that ultimately, I don’t get the final decisions in what my characters choose to do with their lives or where they want to go.
There are, however, a couple of stories in this collection that I spent much longer on than others. “Pleasantries” was written in a couple of hours, as was “The Pasture.” But “The Rabbit God,” “Machine Translation,” and “Vague Predictions and Prophecies” were ones I tinkered with quite a bit. Mostly because I didn’t feel sure of their directions at the time, going back to what I said about urgency earlier on, and I really hate the idea of wasting people’s time.
I don’t think I’d ever want to write something that feels completely and totally containable—in that case, it probably means I’ve failed the story in some way. Life doesn’t make sense to us, disastrous and uncomfortable events happen suddenly, and without warning. It only makes sense, then, that stories should do the same.
Your stories often borrow elements from horror and science fiction (and even at times, I’d argue, religious texts). What’s most appealing about these genres to you as a writer? How do you know what elements of genre fiction to borrow and what to discard?
That’s a really interesting question. One time, I visited my friend Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s class, and some of her students asked me how I arrived at the genre, or how I decide to add speculative elements to my work. But they simply emerge this way. It really surprised me when I first began speaking with people about this collection, how often they referred to it as horror. I hadn’t really thought of my writing in that way, and it was only when going over the final edits for the stories that I realized how messed up some of them are.
But to answer your questions, there were two books I read when I was younger, around ten or so, that I really loved: Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits, and The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. It was only when I was older than I began realizing that people not only separated fiction into categories, but sometimes even disparaged these genres of sci-fi, speculative fiction, and so on as somehow being lesser than what we term literary fiction. But where is the divide, really, at the end of the day? I might even say some of your stories fit into the speculative category, because they’re interested in the odd and ephemeral distortions of reality. I’m not very concerned with genre. At the end of the day, we are all are prying at the same opening, even if we use different tools to accomplish this task.
The fragile nature of memory causes a lot of problems for people in this book. What is it about memory that creates such compelling stakes in fiction?
Memory is so, so malleable. Emotions can so easily twist fact, and sometimes, most of the time, it’s subconscious. But there are also people in this world who will try to twist your understanding of what’s occurred in order to maintain control over a situation. As a child, the truth was usually somewhere behind the surface of things. So I guess that’s how I originally found my way into writing, to keep a record for myself of my life and what actually happened.
One of my favorite memories, one of the really good memories I have as a kid, is when me and my friend Sachi used to ride on this really huge metal slide in the summers. And I can recall the heat of the rollers underneath the mat that scalded my hands. Though I can’t relay to you all of the details I saw that day, so many miles above the ground, I know that there was certainly a pond with a brown wheel overturning water, and ducks floating on its surface, and the gymnasium we would hang out in when we were bored, and a farmer’s market selling cucumbers and tomatoes, rice and ice cream, and a river blooming with pink lotus flowers and tadpoles. But what happened during the rest of that day, when I wasn’t on the slide? What happened in the lives of everyone else in town that day, how would they remember that same day from their point of view? Memories are foundations, they serve as frameworks, but it’s when you overlay them with information borrowed from other people, their emotions, that things grow complex.
I think that’s a beautiful crystallization of what these stories do. The impossible complexity of all these overlapping experiences and memories, the irrepressible human instinct to straighten it all out. It’s no wonder the protagonist in “The Chariot Awaits” develops a dark fixation on seeing into the future, exerting some control over the flow of experience.
Now it seems like I’m driving us right into that classic question that ends so many artist interviews, so I’ll just go ahead and ask it. What’s next for you? Or, if you prefer, what’s your relationship with prognostication?
To first answer your question in regards to prognostication: I think I told you this once, but I teach your story “(911)” to my students sometimes. I’m always walking around with lines from different stories or poems or songs I like floating around in my head, one of which is from the ending of your story:
“It’s hard to explain, I said, but it seems to me that the less likely I am to receive good news, the more fervently I desire it.”
But the funny thing is that I often misremember it as:
“It’s hard to explain, I said, but it seems to me that the less likely I am to receive bad news, the more fervently I desire it.”
Secondly, I am not sure what to call whatever it is I am currently working on. I supposed it might turn out to be a novella or a novel. When I woke up this morning, I realized that what I find so disorienting and scary about working in the longer form, rather than short stories, is the idea of life continuing. Although I’ve lived on this earth for thirty years now, I found myself surprised at the realization that there are times during which life will not be thrilling in some way—whether that be complete devastation or manic happiness. If I am being completely honest, Parker, I always imagined my life would be much shorter. But I continue living, and as I live, I must allow for my work to grow as well—to move through time in a different way than it has in the past.
Parker Young’s debut short story collection, Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, is out now from Future Tense Books. His work has appeared in Always Crashing, Juked, No Contact, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.
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