Through the nine linked stories in this striking debut collection, Taiwanese author Terao Tetsuya examines the toll of competition, striving, and success on the lives of several tech geniuses as they drift between Taiwan and Silicon Valley.
The stories in Spent Bullets are defined by both disassociation and darkness, a tension that demarcates the lives of the characters. They are high achievers on the fast track to high-level tech careers after graduating from National Taiwan University, a trajectory Tetsuya himself followed, but they are profoundly, existentially depressed. In "Healthy Sickness," one brilliant logician, Hsiao-Heng, is unable to sustain a relationship and leaps from a building. Another, Jie-Heng, whose character casts a shadow across all the stories, is so deeply suicidal that his death seems preordained; he is unable to feel anything, even during the sadomasochistic sexual experiences he often seeks out. All the stories' unidentified narrators follow a similar path, constantly searching for meaning--or perhaps feeling--in their relentless march to the top of their field. To achieve this, they engage in increasingly risky behaviors, whether through drugs, sex, or self-harm. Ultimately, as the narrator of "Some Kind of Corporate Retreat" states, they come to see "the powerlessness of determination in the face of emotion."
Spent Bullets is not always an easy read, and some scenes are genuinely shocking. But Tetsuya's spare, dreamlike prose combined with Kevin Wang's expert translation make it a mesmerizing experience and one that, as Tetsuya writes in the afterword, "triggers both pain and joy." --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor