Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree is a book I return to again and again, not because it offers easy answers, but because it gives honest shape to experiences that are otherwise difficult to express. The story follows a young girl moving through her world, drifting from one disorienting, melancholic scene to another. There is little dialogue, no comforting narrative arc, only a quiet unfolding of moments that echo the weight of sadness, alienation, and confusion. Yet in each scene, often hidden and easily overlooked, is a small red leaf—a symbol of hope, fragile but persistent, waiting to be discovered. It is not the kind of hope that dismisses despair but one that grows in spite of it, like a stubborn shoot breaking through concrete.
One of the most haunting images from the book is the enormous fish looming between city buildings. Its sheer absurdity stops me. It is not a creature of water, yet here it is in the dry world of sidewalks and fire hydrants, pressing against brick and window. The people in the scene seem unaware of its presence, walking by as though nothing were out of place. This is where Tan’s art intersects with a long tradition of absurdity in both literature and visual art. From Kafka’s Gregor Samsa waking as an insect, to Magritte’s bowler-hatted men raining from the sky, to Beckett’s figures waiting endlessly for Godot—absurdity unsettles us, stripping away the ordinary logic of our world so that deeper truths might emerge.
Albert Camus once wrote, “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Tan’s city-fish seems to embody exactly this tension—the clash of everyday routine with an inexplicable presence that cannot be explained away. Kafka’s protagonists move through similar landscapes, where, as he put it, “there is infinite hope, but not for us.” Absurdity leaves us disoriented, but in that disorientation, something honest is revealed: that our search for meaning takes place in a universe that may not answer us back.
For me, this resonates in a deeply personal way. There are many times when I have felt small in a vast and bewildering world, like the child in Tan’s story. The fish, to me, is the looming weight of anxiety or despair, inexplicable yet undeniably present. It feels larger than life, impossible to ignore, and yet the rest of the world carries on as if it were not there. Beckett’s characters speak to this same condition: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” That paradox has always struck me as both crushing and liberating: the acknowledgement of despair alongside the insistence on persistence.
And yet, just as in Tan’s book, despair is never the whole story. In the same way that a tiny red leaf recurs on every page, I have learned to find hope in small, unexpected moments. Kierkegaard once observed that “the most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” And yet, even within such pain, he also pointed toward the possibility of faith and renewal. For me, that renewal often takes root not in dramatic transformations but in the smallest of things: a single bird cutting across the sky. The sudden perfume of flowers after rain. The soft weight of a cat curled into my lap, purring with such steady insistence that it feels like an anchor to the present. These are not grand answers to existential questions, but they are real, and in their simplicity, they remind me that beauty persists even when I am blind to it.
The Red Tree ends with the girl waking to find her room illuminated by the presence of the leaf, now full and brilliant, filling the page with its color. For me, this is the quiet truth of absurdity: though the world is strange, bewildering, and at times unbearably heavy, it is also capable of giving back unexpected gifts. Camus argued that the proper response to the absurd is not resignation but revolt—the choice to live fully, to seek joy and meaning, even when life offers no ultimate explanation. In that sense, the red leaf is not simply a symbol of hope given to us, but also of hope we choose to notice, to cultivate, to insist upon. If we attend closely—even to what feels absurd or unsettling—we may discover that hope was always there, waiting for us to claim it as our act of defiance.