It is the strength of regret and the inescapable power of her memories of her actions that lead her to try to change her destiny and that of her fellow silkworm girls, and take revenge on the agent. Kitsune gets sick-”malfunctions”-and begins to “reel backwards,” unable to stop thinking about the agent to whom she sold herself. Though the women enter the factory with names and hometowns, they’re soon covered in a white fur, “blanking all into sisters.” The narrator is the only one of these girls who signed her own contract with the recruitment agent-the only one who willingly drank the tea that effects the transformation to silkworm. It’s not for nothing that these girls call the factory where they are enslaved the “Nowhere Mill.” Physical geography is less important than the cartography of the mind. Even after experiencing the horrors of the transformation, the narrator, when speaking of her work, finds it difficult to “weed the pride from voice.” Part of the brutalization of this factory labor is the inculcation of imperial propaganda. no time at all to meditate on what I was becoming-a secret, a furred and fleshy silk factory.” Both Japan and the women industrialize: indeed, “the bells and whistles are in bodies.” So pernicious and dehumanizing are these jobs that the women become the institution itself the narrator, Kitsune, says, “I had no limbo period. Just as “all Japan is undergoing a transformation,” so too are the women sold by their fathers into service and then brutally transformed into “reelers,” hybrid creatures that are half woman, half silkworm. “Reeling for the Empire,” perhaps the most compelling story in the collection, is set in Japan circa 1844. But her real subject matter here (as in an earlier book of stories and a novel, Swamplandia!, that was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer) is storytelling-specifically the role of memory at the intersection of personal and national histories and the ways in which stories can both harm and heal. In her new collection of stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Karen Russell continues her exploration into the fantastical with characters including the eponymous bloodsuckers, human silkworms, and dead U.S. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.

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Vampires in lemon grove summary