75 pages • 2 hours read
Ruth OzekiThe Book of Form and Emptiness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Crows
The crows that live near Annabelle and Benny’s house, as well as the crow that instigates Aikon’s first visit to a Buddhist temple, are a motif of change in The Book of Form and Emptiness. Each time a crow appears in a scene, immense change happens for the characters, such as Kenji’s death, Annabelle’s fall down the stairs, and Aikon becoming a Buddhist monk. Aikon herself believes that the crow that stole her tiara and led her to the temple was a bodhisattva, or an enlightened being dedicated to helping guide others along their spiritual path. Furthermore, the crows protect both Kenji and Annabelle when they fall near the house, covering them with their own bodies until the moment another character—the delivery truck drive and No-Good, respectively—arrive and instigate a drastic change.
Crows are intelligent, and the novel shows them to be empathetic, as well as mysterious. Their involvement in key moments of transformation for the characters hints at the novel’s magical realism, in which the crows are symbolic guides for the characters, particularly Aikon and Annabelle. The gifts they bring Annabelle when she feeds them represent their emotional connection to her and Kenji. No-Good’s interpretation of the crows as attracted to the trash around Annabelle’s house shows that not everyone can see the symbolic, mysterious aspects of the world.
Trash
Annabelle’s job at the news-monitoring agency results in an “archive” of first print clippings and then “bags full of unrecyclable disks” (180). She keeps these in trash bags throughout the house, which exacerbates the house’s unlivable conditions. These trash bags and their news-related contents are a symbol for the accumulating social, environmental, and political conflicts discussed in The Book of Form and Emptiness. That this trash accumulates first inside the house suggests that such a symbol of societal instability reaches into the domestic lives of each citizen, impacting their daily lives and relations with one another.
Trash and waste come in other forms, such as environmental, socioeconomic, political, and materialistic. Politics as waste is linked directly to Annabelle’s job that literally turns the news of current events into waste materials. The destruction that happens during the protests and the environmental waste of human-made disasters, such as the tsunami caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, feature in the novel as large-scale examples of pollution. Ozeki presents Tidy Magic as the antidote to Annabelle’s hoarding and the general problem of accumulating material goods, but there is no formula for “decluttering” on a mass scale. How society can do this is one of the main questions the novel explores.
Fridge Magnets
As a symbol of Kenji’s continued presence in Annabelle and Benny’s home, the fridge magnets that inexplicably arranged themselves into new poems represent the novel’s theme of grief. Each time Annabelle notices a new poem, she is at her lowest emotional state or in need of reassurance from her late husband. How and why the fridge magnets move contributes to the novel’s representation of Annabelle and Benny’s conflicting coping styles, as the pair often devolves into an argument when the subject is brought up by Annabelle.
The fridge magnets force the reader to consider the supernatural. The novel is a work of magical realism in that its strange and uncanny occurrences are not always explained. Things, such as the fridge magnets, can have mysterious or mundane explanations; they can represent everyday actions or be proof of the otherworldly. By not providing a clear explanation, Ozeki invites the reader to hold multiple, contradictory explanations simultaneously.
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By Ruth Ozeki
