oph3lia

Description
In Aya Ogawa’s airy, occasionally lovely Oph3lia, three modern women—a voluntarily mute Japanese woman in New York, a troubled Korean girl in a Catholic girls’ school and a Spanish interpreter freaking out in Tagalog—find events pushing them past their coping abilities. These stories braid and bleed into one another, with long sections in multiple languages. Ogawa’s graceful scenes inevitably stumble when someone quotes Shakespeare; her attempts to hew to a theme stick out like a hawk on a handsaw. But Ogawa herself has something in common with the genuinely nuts: She must not unwatch’d go.