Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction can be found in such places as Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. In 2021, she was finally translated into Japanese. Like Smoke, Like Light is her debut collecton of short fiction.

Like Smoke, Like Light by Yukimi Ogawa

Publishers Weekly Best Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror title of 2023

A monster wearing the stolen dress of a deceased mother agrees to help the woman's orphaned son. A girl whose blood can cause hallucinogenic visions makes a daring escape from the merchants who traffic her. In a society where people are prized for their jewel-hued skins—indigo, silver, amber, emerald—one girl endures brutal bruises to shine brightest of all, while another, her eyes sealed inside a featureless helmet, risks death to retrieve colors from the outside world. In the future of that culture, one where androids serve with brimming resentment and artificially altering one's skin color can be a crime, the most ordinary in appearance can prove the best detectives, and the most subtly effective rebels. On a far distant space station, another android encounters a goddess humans forgot.

Like Smoke, Like Light, the debut collection of short fiction from Japanese author Yukimi Ogawa, gathers seventeen tales that Locus Magazine has described as constructed in a "wild—but still grounded, feeling more like SF than fantasy—fashion." As novelist and poet Francesca Forrest writes in her introduction, "Ogawa is a remarkable light in the science fiction and fantasy firmament," who "writes unsettling stories that are by turns horrifying and touching." This book "give us space and time to think about how we really feel about tricky questions—like what makes a monster" and how loving families can be found when one accepts "the forms they choose to wear."

CURATOR'S NOTE

Like Smoke, Like Light brings together for the first time the mind-bending concoctions of Tokyo author Yukimi Ogawa, who though a native of Japan composes all her stories in English. Yukimi blends the folklore of her country, especially that of the yōkai, or legendary monsters, with characters and settings from mystical pasts and even far-flung, high tech futures. Publishers Weekly declared this book one of the best of 2023. There's nothing else like it. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "Ogawa's debut collection of 17 speculative shorts stuns with its delicacy … There's a gorgeous fluidity to these tales that makes them hard to pin down, as they often end somewhere very different from where they began. Harkening back to the oldest folk and fairy tales and raising pointed questions about how humans value and devalue each other, this is a showstopper."

    – Publishers Weekly, starred review

  • "The seventeen stories collected in her debut collection, Like Smoke, Like Light, are written with a lyricism, sophistication, and vibrant imagination that speaks to a writer in complete control of her craft … shows off Ogawa's vivid imagination, her compassion, and her desire for a fairer world."

    – Locus

  • "Inventive, fantastical, and original; Ogawa transforms mythology, ghost stories, and the tropes of science fiction into fresh, new visions."

    – A. C. Wise, Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy award-nominated author of The Ghost Sequences
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Excerpt from

"Rib"

How convenient, this loose-fitting thing called a kimono. When the sky was not light enough to see me properly, not dark enough for people to feel too alarmed, that was the time of day I'd walk around among humans. I loved the thrill. Just waiting for the Darkest Hour, doing nothing was too boring.

"Momma?"

These days people were getting more and more stupid, not paying enough attention, even at twilight time. No one seemed to be too disturbed by the presence of a woman a little too thin, hiding her face completely in a cloth.

"… Momma?"

I could freely walk around and sniff in the air smelling of dinners and baths. Of lives.

"Moooooooomma?"

And who was this stupid child calling to?

I turned around, careful not to show too much of my face, careful what little skin I had be shadowed completely under my head-cloth.

There, a boy, six or seven years old the way he looked, was staring at me. I furrowed my non-existent brows and demanded, "What?"

"Momma." The boy smiled and sighed.

Stupid boy. It was time to learn a lesson. "Little apricot," I said, slowly tugging at my head-cloth. "Are you sure your momma looks like … this!"

I threw back my head-cloth to reveal my face, hands (previously hidden in my sleeves) and all, that were all bones, bones, bones. I had the grace to arrange a dead woman's hair on my bare skull like a wig, though. The skeleton woman was supposed to scare the life out of living people she didn't like, and now, look what I got here: birds fluttering away, children standing dumbstruck; soon grownups would start to notice, start to scream. And of course, that was the way I expected the boy to react.

Amidst the chaos of scared things the boy widened his eyes, then gaped a few times. Then he said, "Sorry. You are so much more beautiful than my momma."

* * *

We sat on a bench by the riverside, near a bridge and in its shadow. I had bought two sticks of rice dumplings, and let him eat them all. The money had come from the sleeve of the last man I had slept with, of course.

The boy licked the sticky syrup off the sticks and his fingers. He wiped his fingers on his kimono, and sat straight, looking very happy.

"What was your name again?" I asked him.

"Kiichi. You really are forgetful, aren't you?"

"Kiichi. Whatever. And you really think I'm beautiful?"

"Have you even forgot—"

"Oh, shut it." I waved a hand and sighed. A skeleton woman was supposed to look beautiful only to those whom she had enchanted. Scaring people was only a recreation at best. What we wanted was a human's strength, and a little money to make life easier. All the while I was thinking, the boy, Kiichi, was staring at me. I turned sharply at him. "What?"

"Why are you wearing my momma's kimono?"

I looked down. "Oh … because … I stole it from your mother!" I tried scaring him again, just in case.

But Kiichi chuckled. "Oh, I thought so. Momma's been dead for almost a full year."

I touched my hair unnecessarily, not knowing what to do with my hands. I had raised them up trying to scare him. "Where's your papa?" I asked him at length.

The boy shook his head. "Long dead. I never knew him."

I looked up, and saw the sky already darkened. "Then where's your home?"

"Why are you wearing my momma's kimono?"

I turned to him again. "Don't answer a question with another question."

"But you haven't answered my question."

Oh well, he had a point. "I was hanging around just near the cemetery," I said, the first "I" more a sigh than word. "One night someone came and dumped a body. A woman. I wanted a new kimono so I just borrowed it from her. In the morning the temple took care of the body… . Hey." I shifted and faced the boy. "That doesn't sound like your momma had been offered a proper service, does it?"

He reached out and fidgeted with my sleeve. "Which temple is she at?"

"Well." I tugged it violently out of his hand. "I think it was the one halfway up the sloping road towards the hill in the west."

"I see. Thanks."

"Are you going to talk to them?"

"It's nice to have a place to visit and pray."

I wasn't sure about this. "Good luck," I said anyway.

"Thanks."

Without looking at my face again, he walked away.

* * *