A friend and I recently drove mostly local out to Tarragon Theatre from Mississauga, braving the wet evening cold to make it to our seats early. Patrons trickled in with an air of good humour and cheer – beers, wines, and concession snacks in hand. The eeriness of the set made for great anticipation for two people who don’t always like to have expectations of the shows they see.

Withrow Park, named after the park on the cusp of east-end Toronto, written by Morris Panych and brought to the stage by Jackie Maxwell and crew, had the audience’s attention for an hour and 45 minutes including an intermission. Arthur (Benedict Campbell) and Janet (Nancy Palk), a divorced elderly couple live together with Janet’s sister Marion (Corrine Koslo). When a stranger, Simon (Johnathan Sousa), shows up at their door, they debate the authenticity of his story (he’s new to the neighbourhood) and take turns trading remarks about his charm and trustworthiness.

As the quips go back and forth within the walls of the house overlooking Withrow Park, where public mischief can be seen by the characters from inside its windows, tensions seep through the narrative, foregrounding Arthur’s sexuality and Marion’s struggles with her mental health, lonelinesses and a xenophobia that creeps into the shroud of humour. Is Simon’s presence a dream? What distinguishes reality from delusion or wishful thinking? Who will care for you when you need it most?

You can feel the elevated mood fizzle and sink, drift upward again like wind in a shaft, then settle again. A deceptively complex play – which takes place in the seniors’ downstairs living room and foyer of their house but involves an intricate set of props and cues – Withrow Park winds its way into the soul through laughter, and once there, meditates on the fickleness of life: regrets, capricious romances, circuitous paths, and the uncertainty time brings as it moves unevenly forward.

Withrow Park has been extended until December 10, 2023 at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

“When I think of a Taeko Kōno story,” writes Gabe Habash in a Paris Review article, “I picture a glass filling with liquid.” He’s writing about Kōno’s short story collection, Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, translated by Lucy North and republished by New Directions in 2018. “As the story reaches its end, the glass is filled to the brim,” he writes. “But in the final moment, the liquid spills over the side and lands on the surface below. That new plane, something that we hadn’t even considered before, is now—surprisingly yet inevitably—stained.”

From time to time, I revisit Habash’s review, if not for that picture of the glass and its liquid, then for the way it calculates the peculiar, unfinished endings of the stories in Toddler Hunting. The first story, “Night Journey,” is illuminated by what is later referred to in another story as an “unusual excitement.” There’s the familiarity of a couple bantering back and forth about what to do on a starry night, and then leaving the relative safety of their home to check up on their friends, who are due to visit but don’t show up. It’s suspense that fills this glass, and a sense of an ominous ending until it arrives: “Fukuko realized that she’d been in a particular mood for some time now, a mood that would keep her walking beside Murao into the night, walking on and on until they became the perpetrators—or the victims—of some unpredictable crime.”

Habash’s review is strong for all the characteristics of a good review: descriptive, observant, and committed to unravelling what exactly is at the core of the stories taken as a collection, and one story in particular. “How could these last seven pages of night wandering be so frightening?” he asks. “It’s because we don’t get an answer for why this is happening. … The original goal of the story—to spend time with Utako and Saeki and, we assume, switch partners—has been disrupted, forcing Fukuko and Murao in a different direction. But what are they hoping to find?”

The language of the stories is so remarkably strange and candid at the same time, that it reads as if it must have always been translated. It must have changed hands but been of its own volition at the same time. The wandering tenses of the story seem perfect extensions of the moods they convey. The simple past tense will slide into the past perfect, and then the subjunctive, in sentences that are sharp as much as they elide into winding staircases. The stories each have their own “present,” in which events unfold willingly and without much fuss, and a more objective standpoint from which the events are observed, often by a narrator or an interior voice of a main character.

In “Theater,” for example, this ironic aloofness casts a shadow over the seemingly mundane events of the story in which a woman becomes fascinated with a hunchback and his beautiful wife. “Hideko soon became a frequent visitor at the house of the hunchback and his wife. She devoted herself to becoming their friend. She had never met a real man or woman before, she relized. Compared to them, anyone else was just a generic human being.” In the title story, “Toddler Hunting,” Akiko, an “unmarried woman past thirty” who detests young girls and adores little boys, confronts her disturbing obsessions: “Little boys inhabited such an infinitely wholesome world—Akiko always had the impression that it restored and purified her. … Little boys went along with her in her games—sometimes they almost seemed to egg her on.”

Habash credits Kōno with writing with the intent to subvert the traditional idea that wives in Japan were submissive to their husbands. Indeed, in many of the stories, there is the unspoken sense that masculine power is being subverted and reconfigured in eerie ways. There is an eroticism underlying some of the stories, such as “Toddler Hunting” and “Night Journey,” in which the narrator knows something that the characters don’t about themselves, something which is revealed to the reader in due time and usually involves their malleable sexuality. Many of the protagonists are unmarried women, no doubt also a sign of rebellion in the times the stories were written, between 1961 and 1969. As Habash writes, “In Kōno’s stories, in which sex, power, and desire are all intertwined, the desire of the protagonists, all of them women, is so powerful that it topples their lives and their carefully constructed circumstances.”