The Book of Form and Emptiness

Benny Oh, the teenage boy referred to in the title of the prologue and the novel’s protagonist, addresses the readers of this book. He encourages them to accept that all things, including books, are able to communicate. He explains the nature of Made things, or objects that have been crafted by humans and have absorbed the emotions of those humans. Once a person accepts that there are voices inside all things, how that person interacts with the voices can be “Music or madness. It’s totally up to you” (4). Benny explains that Made things in particular can have polyphonic voices as a result of several humans having contributed to their design and production.

The Book, which will become The Book of Form and Emptiness, begins by narrating in third-person limited voice the first time that Benny Oh hears the voices of things. Benny Oh lives in San Francisco with his family. The Book attributes Benny’s ability to hear these voices to the grief that Benny and his mother, Annabelle, feel after his father, Kenji’s, death.

Kenji is a jazz musician who, after returning home from a gig, is too high to enter his home and falls asleep in the alley. Crows begin landing on him and obscure his body, and a delivery truck driver accidentally runs over Kenji since the driver cannot see that there is a person in the road. The noise of the birds flaying away wakes Benny and Annabelle.

Though Annabelle attempts to save Kenji, he dies on the way to the hospital. She is overcome with grief and is unfamiliar with funeral arrangements, especially since Kenji’s grandparents were Buddhist and he himself had spent years at a Zen Buddhist monastery. She lets the funeral director make the decisions for the wake. Kenji’s bandmates and fellow musicians attend the wake and begin playing soft jazz music at the commemoration. Afterward, Kenji’s bandmates carry his coffin to the crematorium. Benny stays outside with them listening to their music until he hears a strange, soft voice reaching out to him from inside. When he goes in, he realizes it is his father’s voice speaking to him moments before Kenji is cremated.

The next day, Annabelle and Benny take the bus to collect Kenji’s ashes. Annabelle suggests that they plan to build a Buddhist altar on which to keep Kenji’s ashes, believing that her late husband might still be a Buddhist. While talking, Benny absent-mindedly rearranges the word magnets on the fridge, not knowing that Kenji left the words arranged in a poem for Annabelle. When Benny realizes this, they reconstruct the poem together.

The Book continues narrating how Benny and Annabelle deal with the immediate aftermath of Kenji’s death. Benny becomes emotionally withdrawn and spends much of the summer sleeping. When he begins seventh grade in the fall, his teachers discuss Benny’s problems with focusing in class with Annabelle, but the school counselor believes his behavior is normal for a child who is grieving. Annabelle is most concerned about Benny being bullied for being mixed-race, as Kenji is Japanese and Korean. The Book does not state Annabelle’s race or ethnicity, but it notes that Annabelle feels anxious because to others, Benny does not look like her son.

Annabelle works monitoring print news sources for clients that subscribe to specific news themes though she once studied Library Science and continues to aspire to work in a library. As print media sources are being phased out of her company, she receives news from her supervisor that a new computer, modem, and office equipment will be delivered to her. She will work from home monitoring digital news sources for the same clients.

To make room for her new office, Annabelle moves clutter from the living room into Kenji’s closet. She still intends to build an altar for his ashes, but for now, she keeps the box on a shelf in the back of her closet. She becomes entranced by Kenji’s clothes still sitting in his closet, spends a few minutes smelling them and remembering him, then decides she can make a memory quilt out of his t-shirts.

Benny interrupts the Book’s narration to complain that the Book never spoke about how his parents met. He requests that the Book do this for him and for the readers, explaining that he assumes books know everything. He acknowledges that he must listen to whatever the Book narrates as “you’re my book, I have to pay attention. It’s either that or go crazy again” (27). Though the Book itself, in the Epigraph to the novel, argued that Books have to start somewhere, Benny insists that the Book do its “job” and start at the beginning.

Before narrating the story of how Annabelle and Kenji met, the Book addresses Benny directly and states: “Stories never start at the beginning” (28): Stories are only ever told from a place in the future, regardless of the point of view used to narrate them.

In 2000, Annabelle is a student in library school and dating Joe, a mediocre jazz musician. One evening, they visit a jazz club where Joe pressures Annabelle to get on stage and sing “Mein Liebling,” a classic, romantic jazz song. Annabelle is mortified but tries to sing anyway. Kenji, watching the performance, begins playing his clarinet to support her, and the two pull off the performance. Annabelle leaves Joe behind and spends the night with Kenji. They are enamored with each other, and Annabelle in particular is struck by how comfortable she feels with Kenji considering her history of her stepfather’s sexual abuse. Kenji believes their connection is en, a Japanese concept for fated lovers.

The Book interrupts the narration to briefly lament books’ inability to feel sensations and emotions. “We rely on you to embody us” (36), as Books live vicariously through the characters they narrate.

Returning to the story of Annabelle and Kenji, the Book narrates how they conceive Benny a year later. Annabelle quits library school and switches jobs to the media-monitoring agency for a better paycheck. Kenji takes a job in a jazz ensemble and resolves to quit smoking marijuana. They rent a duplex; their neighbor and landlord is Mrs. Wong. Soon after the move, Benny is born.

Benny tells the Book that he now hears voices that feel like they come from a time before he existed. When he tells this to his counselor, she responds that being newly sensitized to subtle phenomena is often “what grief can do to you” (41). For the first year after his father died, Benny only heard his father’s voice coming from the box of ashes, until it grew too faint for him to hear. Benny moves the box of ashes to his own bedroom next to a lunar globe that Kenji gave him: Both Benny and Kenji bonded over their fascination of the moon. Soon, Benny begins to hear the voices of things through his dreams as Kenji’s voice fades away.

The Book states that “sometimes it’s hard to tell where a parent’s book ends and a child’s book begins” (43). The Book resumes narrating Benny’s story and a dream he has of a beautiful celestial girl who descends from the sky, reaching out to him. Upon waking, Benny realizes that he has ejaculated and goes to the bathroom to wash his underwear and pajama pants. While doing so, he begins hearing small voices that he cannot interpret. He accidentally steps on a Christmas ornament and hears the shards of glass screaming in pain. He returns to bed still hearing indistinct voices of random objects around the house.

Benny wakes the next morning to find the voices silent. He pours himself a bowl of cereal but finds that Annabelle has forgotten to get milk; Kenji always did the grocery shopping. Frustrated, Benny takes the city bus to school. He hears more voices of objects he passes on the way. Throughout his day, Benny hears bursts of quiet voices that seem to be coming from just over his shoulder, at other times from inside himself.

Annabelle is distracted by her job and her hours being cut, and she does not notice that Benny is behaving differently. Her supervisor offers to lay her off so that she can collect unemployment, but Annabelle worries about their health insurance. Since she has started working from home, she needs to keep an archive of the news material she monitors. She stores old newspaper clippings, disks, and other materials in garbage bags that begin to clutter the house. Annabelle takes some of the bags to the curb for garbage collection and explains to her landlady Mrs. Wong that the garbage is from her job.

Annabelle takes the bus to buy groceries for dinner and pick up milk for Benny. She becomes distracted by the possibility of buying new crafting supplies and decides to stop at Michael’s. While shopping, a book seems to jump off the shelf and into her cart: Tidy Magic, written by Aikon, a Zen Buddhist monk. Annabelle believes this to be a sign from Kenji and buys the book.

In an aside to the reader, the Book explains that it takes great strength of will for one of them to jump off a shelf and present itself to a potential reader.

Annabelle spends so much time in Michael’s that she decides to get takeout for dinner and have Benny pick up milk after school. She takes the bus back home and walks through the alley where Kenji died. Annabelle notices a small rubber duck sitting on a pile of picture frames. She picks up the duck but is stopped from taking it by a young woman who emerges from a nearby dumpster. The young woman, Alice, claims she is an artist, and that Annabelle is taking part of her installation. In the end, she insists that Annabelle take the duck with her.

Benny is disappointed when Annabelle returns home without milk. He notices the rubber duck and asks to keep it, as there is something indescribable about it that attracts him. Annabelle offers him the takeout; they eat on her bed as the kitchen table is too cluttered with laundry, shopping bags, and objects that Annabelle has recently bought. They listen to jazz while eating, thinking silently about Kenji. Annabelle talks about making the memory quilt out of Kenji’s t-shirts but notices that Benny has been freezing his movements every couple of minutes: He is listening to the voices he now hears but still cannot understand. He asks for Kenji’s old pair of high-quality headphones, which Annabelle suggests might be in the closet. She attempts to connect with Benny again by scratching his back in the way that Kenji used to when he was a child, but Benny snaps at her that she is doing it wrong.

After hearing the Book narrate his mother’s concern for him and guilt at being unable to fill the space Kenji left behind, Benny expresses his regret at being mean to her. Because he was so young, he was unable to cope with his grief in any other way. Benny now realizes that the voices began speaking to him more earnestly when they realized that he could hear them: “Probably we trained each other” (68). He explains the difference between the voices of Made things, which carry the emotions of the humans who crafted them, and Unmade things, which tend to be quieter. Though he can hear the voices, he is unwilling to label himself a translator or “ambassador” that can interpret the voices and represent their interests to other people.