Birth Canal

A dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature that explores what it means to be a woman - whoever you are, wherever you are, and whenever it is in history and time.

In today's Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies' Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and made to be a comfort woman. Years later, Arini - the thread that connects these two - travels to the Netherlands to share her mother's dark past with a researcher.

During the American occupation of Japan in WWII, an American war photographer falls in love with Hanako, the wife of a traumatised former soldier, but can't escape his own darkness. And in present-day Osaka, a young Indonesian woman, Dara, haunted by her past and struggling to conceive, becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.

Through these interconnected narratives, Dias Novita Wuri explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.


'The ground beneath the reader is constantly shifting ... Birth Canal jumps in time and moves between places of security and insecurity, hiding and transit, literal and metaphorical light and dark ... In the end, this extraordinarily accomplished and profound novel, translated from Indonesian by the author, is about how difficult love can be, and how precious.'
-Linda Jaivin, The Saturday Paper

'Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri is a rising literary star. Her novella Birth Canal writhes with talent compressed into a forceful and beguiling suite of interconnected stories ... Wuri's gift for metaphor is matched by a supple and sidewinding narrative construction that follows women across time and place.'
-The Sydney Morning Herald

'Birth Canal was written with a dripping golden pen. Captivating and devastating, the stories of these women are told with truth and love.'
-Laura McPhee-Browne