Author: Soramimi Hanarejima

We need the dystopias she is adept at crafting—need them to serve as compelling cautionary tales now that nothing else does. But she much prefers to render quotidian moments of splendor and serendipity. She doesn’t want to put herself through the harrowing gauntlet of making ruined worlds and dramatizing bleak circumstances.

“That just takes too much out of me,” she told me. “You only see the final product. But creating it means I have to think about the countless horrifying ways it could be. I have to learn about—not just encounter—all the terrible things the finished work will contain. It’s like you get to visit a town in the county I was living in. A place I didn’t even want to pass through.”

We left it at that.

Now, with every season, the state of our world is of course only getting exponentially worse, the rifts in reality widening to the point that once solid certainties are crumbling into oblivion. I haven’t seen her for months and probably won’t for many more. She’s no doubt hard at work, making the nightmare that can wake us up into taking action. I imagine that she’s taken up residence in a region she abhors, roaming towns full of awful things to find the one with exactly the kind of streets she must guide us down, taking us calmly from one terror to another.