Prairie Ostrich
by Tamai Kobayashi,
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 200 pages, $19.95
ISBN: 9-780864-926807
Egg Murakami, a precocious eight-year-old, struggles to make sense of a world gone awry in Tamai Kobayashi’s first novel, Prairie Ostrich. Not only does Egg have to cope with being bullied at school, but also she has to face a family in pieces after the death of her older brother, Albert. The Murakami family has an ostrich farm, and that’s not the only thing that separates them from their neighbours in Bittercreek, Alberta. They are the sole Japanese family for miles, and it’s 1974. Prejudice flourishes.
In her grief, Egg’s mother attempts to find solace in alcohol, and her father has moved into the barn. Kathy, Egg’s seventeen-year-old sister, tries to look out for her, but Kathy has some serious challenges of her own as she’s in love with her friend Stacey and wants to leave home as soon as possible.
Kobayashi gives Egg some help apart from her sister: the girl loves to read, and her school librarian, Evangeline, a young woman with her own secrets, provides some respite for Egg, allowing her to use the library as a refuge. Fiction plays a huge role in Egg’s life, in particular Charlotte’s Web and Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, which Kathy reads to Egg—with altered endings.
The novel is told in third-person, focussed on Egg and how she thinks. The child’s perspective is a powerful tool for seeing the world, and as Egg is so smart, the point of view does not feel limited. Rather, the view from an eight-year-old, admittedly an immensely perceptive one, illuminates aspects that adults may miss.
One of the main strengths of the novel is an excellent sense of place and time. References to popular culture abound: The Six Million Dollar Man and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and pop music figure largely in Egg’s life. She is captivated by science, and her curiosity compels her to try to understand things, some she cannot because she is too young. But even in the months of the novel’s setting, we see her gather information and start to piece together the tragedy of her brother’s death and the truth of what really happened.
The symbolism in the novel may be a bit overdone, the name “Egg,” for example, or “Bittercreek,” but Kobayashi does an excellent job of creating a child’s world and showing how a child understands both more and less than many people assume. And the overall theme in strong: loneliness afflicts everyone on some level, and the novel makes a strong case for the alleviation of suffering through love.
