Rendering Truths
Review of Sachiko Murakami’s Render (2020)
By Tom Nakasako
It is tempting to label Sachiko Murakami’s Render (2020) a work of confessional poetry, but to do so would be a mistake. It would be too simple, too easy, because what Murakami achieves in her collection is much more than a confession. The term “confession,” with its religious and legal connotations, presumes that there is a truth, or a certain level of truth, to a particular narrative. In Render, Murakami is not in the business of truth. Rather, she uses poetry and language to interrogate the truths, untruths, and half-truth-half-untruths inherent to all narratives we form.
The collection opens with many definitions of the verb “render,” ranging from the scientific to the legal to the linguistic. With these various meanings in mind, Murakami sets out to render her reality communicable—to attempt to translate addiction and abuse and all her lived experience into language. Her approach is poetic and geographic; in five sections, Murakami maps the terrain of childhood, dreams, bodies, and memories. Real and oneiric geographies overlap, as in “Mind Map of the Rendered World,” which Murakami notes “traces the path of the darkest night of my addicted life through dreams I later had in recovery” (127). Downtown Vancouver is infused with fantastical imaginings: there is a dragon to be slain at Cambie Street Bridge; strangers must be slept with on Comox Street; parents appear mercurially on street corners.
“Field Research” and “The Big One: Field Notes” continue to toy with the geographical, transforming poetry into an observational, scientific affair. The latter’s opening line reads “Searched Google Earth to locate the exact spot: came up against limits.” This, Murakami tells us, is borrowed from her notes during somatic therapy sessions. The speaker attempts to explore an unknown geography—somewhere imagined, remembered, or dreamt—while reality pushes against her, imposing its own limits. Yet, later in the poem, the speaker enters into a relationship “where the imagined body / feels real pain” (74). The body holds knowledge that the mind cannot access, and this spills over into dreams, imaginations, and poetry. It is not that the real and imagined are impenetrable, but that their boundaries are fluid; their conditions of possibility change, ebbing and flowing in open cycles.
Render takes the cycle as a paradigm. The collection progresses through five sections, yet circles back upon itself, as when Murakami visits and revisits the fear of death in “Thanatophobia I,” “Thanatophobia II,” and “Thanatophobia III” in the first three sections. Death transforms from a specter to a bystander to a companion without ever losing relevance. In other poems, Murakami investigates the nature of cycles: familial cycles, cycles of relapse and recovery, and recurring dreams. In “January,” cyclicity manifests formally; the poem hinges on its eighth line, “a childhood that looms in every second guess” (106), before doubling back to invert the seven preceding lines, rearranging the words into novel configurations. Thus, the poem opens with “Today you make use of silence” and ends with “make use of your silence today.” Murakami uses this bent form to trace the same path twice, surveying two sides of an unknown metaphysical divide—perhaps before and after, or here and there, or conscious and subconscious.
A similar structure is employed in “The Field of Artists’ Renditions.” The first three stanzas are perfectly mirrored by the last three, again hinging on a single line, the image “of birch branch, held breath” (58). In the third stanza, a man’s face is described and a light charcoal sketch produced. In the fifth, first a sketch is produced and then “Sometime later, I describe a man’s face.” Action and reaction are inverted, and knowledge is held as both a precondition and a result. The truth, we are led to believe, must exist somewhere in-between.
In “Two Truths and a Lie,” Murakami delivers fifteen succinct statements on the nature of drug addiction and the creative act of writing poetry. One in three statements, the reader is led to assume, is a lie: “Cocaine is its own poetry, if by poetry you mean a skillfully crafted web of lies. I / transcribed my lies as poetry. Every word of this is a lie” (62). The reader is left to determine which of Murakami’s statements are truths and which are falsehoods, an inherently impossible task. One understands, however, that Murakami is there alongside the reader, wading through words and memories in search of certainty—looking for a way to articulate what has happened to her mind and body.
Towards the end of the collection, in “That Feeling When,” Murakami writes, “I follow one word / through to the next and then / suddenly I’m in the future / and I have no idea / where I am” (114). Once again, this linguistic and mnemic instability is made geographical, as Murakami’s speaker wonders not who they are or what has happened to them, but where they are. Memory, Murakami claims, is unreliable, but language can lead astray. The poem that the speaker follows is an unstable rendering of narrative, yet narrative is but a rendering itself, an approximation of reality. Despite the tenuity of truth and language, in the tortuous journey from lived experience to poetry, nothing is lost—only added. Murakami embraces the vulnerability inherent to memory and the possibility inherent to dreams, thereby injecting her poetry with ambiguity and potential. Rather than rejecting instability, Render settles into it, recognizing that the impulse to reduce lived experience to truth, fact, or logical narrative is not only exhausting, but an impossible task.
Works Cited
Murakami, Sachiko. Render. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020.
11 May 2026