Who Goes There?

He was not the most prolific writer, but Michael Bishop was one of the most eye-catching new authors to come out of the post-New Wave period, debuting in 1970 and spending the rest of that decade making a name for himself. I had been meaning to get more into him, but unfortunately I did not get much of a chance while he was alive. Bishop died in November last year, leaving the field just slightly emptier. “The Samurai and the Willows” is one of Bishop’s most acclaimed stories, having solidified this by placing first in the Locus poll for Best Novella. It’s part of a series—a fact I genuinely had forgotten about prior to reading it, which would go to explain my confusion with some details in the world he constructs. Bishop is clearly hunting big game here, intellectually, and while I have a few qualms with this story I have to admit it also left me with a lot to think about.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was anthologized by Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Sixth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), and… that’s it? It was collected in the fix-up “novel” Catacomb Years, which has all the stories in that series along with interludes. I know it was reprinted in a couple more recent Bishop collections, but Bishop had the tendency to revise his works decades after the fact and “The Samurai and the Willows” was no eception. We’re reading the magazine version.

Enhancing Image

First, about the worldbuilding, because context is important and if you’re going into this story then you should know a little about the future Bishop creates here first. “The Samurai and the Willows” is one entry in an episodic series about a future Atlanta that, for some reason, is domed “surfaceside” and has several underground levels. This story here is set on Level 9, which as you can imagine is a good deal underground. Simon Fowler is a 38-year-old man of at least half Japanese descent (on his mother’s side), a “samurai without a sword” who runs a floral shop, and is cubical mates with Georgia Cawthorn, an 18-year-old black “Amazon” who clearly has ambitions that involve moving out of the catacombs. They have nicknames for each other: Simon is Basenji and Georgia is Queequeg. If you know your Moby Dick then congratulations, Bishop has already planted an idea in your head in the first couple pages. I’ll be calling these characters by their nicknames henceforth since it’s clear to me Bishop wants us to understand them on a symbolic level. There’s a good deal of symbolism at work in “The Samurai and the Willows,” and not all of it is obvious.

This is a short novella, only about 19,000 words, so in the threeway tug-of-war between plot, character, and worldbuilding, something has to give; in this case it’s plot that draws the short stick, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Bishop drops us off at the deep end of what already seems like a fully developed Atlanta of 2046 (and no, there’s no way major cities across the US would become domed go partly underground within seventy years of the story’s publication), with characters who usually do not explain the obvious to each other for the reader’s benefit. There’s some blatant exposition thrown in, but this is pretty much all through the third-person narration as opposed to what characters are saying. Basenji has been living like this for many years and Georgia doesn’t even really have memories of life before the dome. It’s never said explicitly why cities have become “Urban Nuclei,” with the honeycomb structure, but it’s implied that an environmental catastrophe has rendered much of the world unwelcoming to human habitation; at least that’s what I assume is happening. There are several questions about the background of this story that go unanswered.

(You may be wondering why I bothered mention Basenji and Queequeg’s ages at the start. All I can say is get ready for a tangent in the spoilers section, it’s gonna be awesome I promise.)

So what’s the plot? Kind of a trick question. Basenji is a florist who also happens to keep a diary, plus a lot of guilt over something that is not revealed to us until very deep into the story. There’s clearly some unspoken sexual tension between Our Heroes™, but this is put aside momentarily as a third wheel enters the picture: Ty, who happens to be around the same age as Queequeg (I think a year or two older) and has the same job as her. (I find it curious that Basenji, or rather Bishop, gives a black woman the name of a Polynesian man, even calling her a harpooner. There’s something to be said about the racial and cultural politics here, but I’m putting a pin in all that for a second. [Yes, I understand the possible symbolism of naming her Georgia, given the setting.]) There’s evidently a generation gap at play: Basenji has memories—or at least a dconnection via his parents—of life before everything changed, and now he has to play nice with people two decades his junior, who were born and raised to understand a city that has changed radically even from our understanding of it in 2024. The point is that this is not an action narrative; the world is not at stake; rather this is the story of one man coming to terms with his personal demons.

Like I said, Basenji keeps a diary, where he does what you normally do in a diary, but he also dabbles in poetry. Early on we get a telling note in said diary about Yukio Mishima, who of course was probably the most famous Japanese author in the west at the time. I’m not gonna tell you the whole story, because you can look it up yourself and anyway he was quite the character, but Mishima was something of a paradox: he was a hardcore conservative, to the point where he wanted Japan to its pre-World War II imperial era, but he was also gay, never mind an artist in the truest sense. Was Mishima a samurai who wanted to be an artist, or an artist who wanted to be a samurai? A similar question could be asked of Basenji. As you know, if you know his story at all, Mishima committed seppuku—ritual suicide—and this is actually something that preoccupies Basenji’s mind: the idea of giving up one’s life for the sake of honor. His beliefs, we come to find, are a sort of Christian-inflected Shintoism; not cleanly falling into either camp, but if you’ve read the story then you know what I mean. Basenji has an albatross around his neck, so to speak, and his relationship with Queequeg and Ty will involve him throwing off that albatross.

Now, as for the whole fact that this is a narrative with three main characters, none of whom are white, and one of whom explicitly takes after a non-Anglo culture. Would it have been preferable if “The Samurai and the Willows” had been written by someone with actual Japanese heritage? Probably. The problem is that whenever we say this about a work of art we basically make up a hypothetical instead of criticizing the thing itself. “What if this story had been written by a completely different person?” It doesn’t really solve anything. What matters is the question of whether Bishop handled the material with delicacy. I’m not an expert on Japanese culture, no matter how many hours of anime I’ve watched, so I can’t say with certainty. I will say that Basenji’s characterization didn’t make me cringe, although I have to admit Queequeg did, if only because her accent is laid on rather thick; there were times where I struggled to understand what she was saying. There is one other thing about Queequeg that bothers me, but it has less to do with cultural sensitivity and more certain decisions made late in the story that I can’t readily make sense of.

There Be Spoilers Here

Basenji and Queequeg have an almost-encounter one night, but nothing happens—for the moment. After Banenji has passed out Queequeg decides to take a peek at his diary, as you do. This incident, weirdly enough, does not come up later: Queequeg never admits to going through his belongings and so Basenji never finds out about it. It does serve the function of making Queequeg respect her cubical mate more, since it had been established earlier that the two were kind of on uneasy terms. She likes his poetry, even if she doesn’t understand all of it. It’s quite possible that it’s this incident that makes her care for him, at least in a way. We soon learn that Queequeg and Ty are gonna get married, although it’s ambiguous how much they actually care for each other. They’re clearly sexually into each other, but the shotgun wedding routine might be more for financial reasons than anything. Given Ty’s status, marrying and moving in with him would give Queequeg a good reason to leave the catacombs. As for Basenji, he would have to find a new cubical mate within a time limit or else get evicted. Well that sucks. Queequeg is screwing over Basenji a little bit, but it’s for a totally understandable reason, and anyway Basenji is happy for her.

Then, right before the wedding day, Basenji and Queequeg have a one-night stand. This is pretty strange. I assume Queequeg is cheating on Ty, but neither party acts like adultery is being committed, so that despite his overactive conscience Basenji doesn’t seem to mind it. Maybe they’re in an open relationship; it’s not made clear. Of course, social norms have to have changed a great deal in this bizarro 2046 where Atlanta is basically a police state (even classic rock music is prohibited), but Bishop leaves something to the imagination with how human relationships work here. And then there’s the age gap. It could be worse; I’m just saying that in the ‘70s there was this period of loosened censorship on genre SF writing, which overall was to good effect but which sometimes also resulted in authors being a little too permissive in some ways. You’d think the new freedom writers had would mean more positive depictions of, say, homosexuality and non-monogamous relationships, and we did see some of that; but we also got one too many stories where people in the thirties and forties are having sexual relationships with high schoolers. (I love John Varley’s early work, but he was a little too fond of putting full-grown adults in precarious situations with teenagers.) I’m not sure of this, but I imagine if one were to revise this story decades later changing the sex scene between Basenji and Queequeg would be a high priority. After all, it’s not even necessary for the story’s climax.

It has to do with Basenji’s mom. Remember that Basenji takes a lot of pride in his Japanese heritage; he associates the beforetimes with his mom’s home country. Basenji seems to have a case of post-nut clarity, because after having sex with Queequeg he makes a confession—that he had put his ailing mother in an experimental nursing home, as part of a deal. She was aging prematurely, and she would die there. It’s not the worst thing a person could do (although putting one’s parents in a nursing home never sits right with me), but it’s been dogging Basenji’s mind for years now, and once he confesses to Queequeg he finds a kind of tranquility. Having articulated what he sees as his greatest failure, and with the possibility of losing his cubicle on the horizon, he has given himself permission to commit suicide. He passes on his floral shop to Queequeg and Ty, as newlyweds, in a passing-of-the-torch moment. We aren’t told directly Basenji kills himself, but context clues at the very end imply he did, after having come to terms with himself. Honor kills the samurai. It’s a good ending, even if I wish Bishop hadn’t used an unearned sex scene to get to this point.

A Step Farther Out

I like novellas. A lot. I like them as a length because you can fit a whole world into fifty to a hundred pages, with some room left for character development. “The Samurai and the Willows” is light on plot but heavy on worldbuilding, character, and themes. It’s a dense fifty pages that somehow feels incomplete, possibly because Bishop had by this point already written a few stories in the same setting. There are some questions raised in the story itself that go unanswered, and these might be resolved in other stories. The setting could use some filling out, is what I’m saying. But if your story makes me hungry for more in the same series then surely you must’ve done something right. We’ll be returning to the domed and semi-underground Atlanta at some point not too far into the future, rest assured.

See you next time.