Tailspin and Other Stories by Pat Matsueda, Review by Steve Heller

Tailspin and Other Stories by Pat Matsueda

Review by Steve Heller

Publishers: El León Literary Arts and Mānoa Books

Publication Date: 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9873718-6-2

Pages: 36

A Little of Everything: Bringing Life into Focus 

by Blurring Boundaries in Art

Tailspin and Other Stories by Pat Matsueda blends fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, autobiography, photography, watercolor painting, pencil sketches, graphic design, and legal documents into an impressive linguistic and visual collage.  The combination reveals a life lived in the moment but haunted by the past.  While the dominant mode of this unusual book is narrative, its construction is modular, emphasizing how experience is rooted in our senses and constructed by the interaction between memory and imagination.  Reading this book will sharpen the reader’s perception of how we humans attempt to make sense of our lives.

The title story is introduced by a facing page that appears to be simultaneously a photograph and a mostly gray watercolor rendering of a scene not long after sunset in a commercial parking lot.  A crack of low yellow light along the horizon creates the effect of a sepia tone, suggesting that what is pictured represents the past as well as the present.  This impression sets the mood for the eponymous story “Tailspin,” which is also set at dusk.  From the beginning, “Tailspin” distinguishes the words spoken aloud by the story’s first-person narrator from that of the man she is speaking to, Yukio, by representing the narrator’s part of the dialogue with a sepia-toned font:

Yukio and I arranged to meet at an open-air coffee bar two blocks from Honolulu Harbor.  It was dusk, when pau-hana traffic filled the streets and lights etched their colors on the silver air.  I spoke first.

“As I said on the phone, these three things happened around the same time: the Maui woman disappeared in L.A.; Trump was elected; and my cat went blind.  All within a few days of each other.”

“I see.”  He sounded dubious.  “And the timing is what makes you think they’re connected.”

“They are connected.  I don’t just think they’re connected.”

“Let’s start with the woman.”

“OK.”

The different colored fonts are not in any respect necessary to distinguish between the two speakers, but that is not their ultimate role in the story.  The narrator eventually admits that two events, the death of her blind cat and the disappearance of the Maui woman (which led the missing woman’s father to commit suicide), eventually made the narrator feel guilty for her lack of compassion as a feeling person in the world.  What Trump’s first election to the office of President made her feel is unexplained, but most readers will infer that, for whatever reason, the narrator feels guilty about that as well.  As Yukio, an investigator speaking to the narrator only as a friend, presses her about why she feels guilty for both her cat and a woman she never knew, the story eventually begins to share some of the narrator’s unspoken thoughts in reddish brown typeface as well.  Speaking of the father’s suicide, which tragically preceded his daughter’s safe reappearance, the narrator tells us: 

“However, the last time the family heard from her, she said she’d had a spiritual awakening and would be heading to New York after all.  She was with a stranger that the police later tracked down and found to be harmless.  Other texts, though, caused the family alarm.”

“Yes, it was the presence of these unknown others that caused the family to think she’d been kidnapped or trafficked.”

Yukio and I sat in silence as the last of the silver slipped from the sky.

Both the narrator’s sepia-toned observation and the verbal image it creates recall the opening photograph, reminding the reader of the role sensory experience plays as we piece together our lives in the form of stories and thereby form our sense of morality.  

This theme is eventually reinforced by a priest named Wilhelm, who overhears the narrator’s conversation with the investigator and offers her the following advice:

“The body is one of God’s great mysteries.  When we first encounter it in intimacy with our beloved, we think it perfect and want to possess it.  We adore it, worship it.  When it falls ill, we want to believe it is within our power to heal it.  We say our prayers, resort to our beads, ask the doctors for help, try to recover the body we once knew.  But our love and the doctors’ skill are limited and sometimes they cannot save the beloved.  Unable to accept it, some of us seek to die with our beloved in order to remain with them.”

At this point, fiction and autobiography merge, narrator becoming author, fusing invention with actual life, rendered once again in sepia tones:

 I want to go with her . . . I remembered clearly my sister saying these words when our mother died at the age of sixty.  We were in our thirties, but my sister’s plea had shaped her woman’s voice into a child’s.  And all who heard it—I and the paramedics who answered the call for an ambulance—were silenced by the profound and painful sincerity of it.  It’s not often that the heart is so insistent.  And now my sister too has died, and I’m the only one left.

I looked at Wilhelm as he stood and bowed slightly before lifting his hand in farewell.  How odd these two meetings—one arranged, the other accidental.  As I walked to my car, I looked up at the depthless night, marveling that humans ever saw patterns in stars drifting, traveling, and falling from the sky.

The theme of how the texture of experience shapes the stories of our lives is most overtly expressed in “My Mother’s Story,” a nonfiction narrative that begins with a series of sepia photographs of the author’s younger sister Kathy, their mother, and the author herself when she and Kathy were young girls.  In prose, verse, pictures, legal documents, and a multi-colored pencil drawing, “My Mother’s Story” both narrates and substantiates the lives of the author, her sister, and their mother, Yoshiko Shigenobu, born in Japan and later naturalized as Suzzan Yoshiko Matsueda.  Among many other things, the narrative’s mixed means of expression tell the story of Suzzan Yoshiko’s marriage to Donald Matsueda, “a brutal husband who often struck my mother, an alcoholic, a gambler, and a womanizer who left my mother for someone he had gotten pregnant.”  The account of Suzzan Yoshiko’s death years later parallels that of the narrator’s mother at the end of “Tailspin.”

The way in which this remarkable book reveals how form is content—and how the texture of experience shapes our lives—is perhaps best expressed by the opening stanza of the poem “Mockingbird,” contained in “My Mother’s Story” and dedicated to the author’s mother:

I sing

and the past sings back

and the present is changed.

I bring my face to the mirror

The mirror into which Pat Matsueda gazes in these pages reveals moments that are poignant, horrific, enlightening, and undeniably true.

Pat Matsueda is a poet and prose writer whose latest publication is Tailspin and Other Stories. From 1992 to 2022, she was the Managing Editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, a literary publication of the University of Hawai‘i Press.  She lives in Honolulu.

Steve Heller’s newest novel, Return of the Ghost Killer, is forthcoming from Regal House Press in early 2027.  Steve is the former Chair of Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and past President of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP).  He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

20 May 2026