And if a computer virus allowed us to access the digital files of a deceased loved one?

Writer, illustrator, and professor of synophonic literature, Wu Ming-Yi (Taoyuan, Taiwan, 1971) publishes a collection of six short stories in which humans, nature, and technology invade other worlds and confirm their interdependence. Wu Ming-Yi's literature has been labeled magical realism for the way it seamlessly links human and non-human experiences. In this sense, The Land of Bitter Rain (Chronos) questions anthropocentrism and suggests that humans must learn to communicate through non-human and more effective languages and perspectives. Translated by Mireia Vargas-Urpí, the book features illustrations of animals by the author himself.

Looking through the mirror of the stories in The Land of Bitter Rain, the reader meets a host of conflicted characters, many of whom have suffered hardships or traumas throughout their lives. These wounded humans find new energy and challenges in a natural world that speaks to them in a very different way than the human world. In parallel, technological metaphors of nature — such as virtual reality and "cloud" computing — recreate worlds with their own balms and dangers, such as a virus that can analyze the content of the cloud, create user profiles, and give other people access to these profiles. A computer virus, the Esquerda, allows access to the digital files of a deceased loved one, with all that this entails in terms of loss of privacy.

Nature is not just a setting

Wu Ming-Yi constructs each story like a contained breath, a chamber where silence is not absence but matter, a substance that envelops you until it forces you to truly listen. There is a way of looking, in this author, that seems to trace things with the fingertips: a humble but stubborn gaze. The stories advance with a kind of gentle tremor, as if each character learned to coexist with what they cannot name. The scarce and bitter rain, a symbol that seeps through the entire book, becomes a thread of desire: they wait for it to arrive, to cleanse them, to explain them. But Ming-Yi plays against expectations: instead of giving them rain, he offers them fissures. And it is in these cracks that the most poignant moments appear, when the reader realizes that nature is not a stage but an organism that breathes with them and, at times, against them.

The rhythm of Ming-Yi's narrative is of an almost mineral precision: sentences that are pared down until only the essential remains. And, suddenly, an explosion of imagery, a metaphor that shakes the desert dust and leaves you with eyes full. It is this contrast — austerity and light, dryness and tenderness — that gives the collection an addictive texture. As if Ming-Yi wrote in layers, letting the reader discover the hidden water that runs beneath the earth. The land of bitter rain is, at its core, a ritual of dispossession: learning to be less in order to see more. Ming-Yi imposes no morality; he lets nature, with its fierce patience, do the dirty work. And it is precisely this silent respect, this way of narrating that does not seek to conquer but to listen, that makes the book an intimate and persistent artifact. When you finish it, you have the feeling that the world continues to speak to you in a low voice. That there is a thirst that is not quenched, and that, perhaps, the grace is to keep walking while you eternally wait for the rain.