Chie in Orbital: Character Analysis of Samantha Harvey's Japanese Astronaut

Overview of Chie in Orbital — Grief in Microgravity, List-Making, and the Weight of Family History — Chie is one of six crew members aboard the International Space Station in Samantha Harvey's Orbital, and the novel's most sustained portrait of grief in microgravity. A Japanese astronaut whose mother dies early in the mission, Chie processes her loss through the list-making habit she developed as a child, through a photograph her mother gave her before launch, and through the strange consolation of orbiting the planet that now stands in for the parent she has lost. Her arc traces how a person can carry a family history of survival—her grandfather survived the Nagasaki bombing while her grandmother did not—into a life of deliberate risk and achievement. The novel's orbital perspective and borderlessness theme finds its most personal expression in Chie, whose grief is inseparable from the view of Earth below. Her story asks what it means to be held by a planet, and to lose the person who first held you, while circling that planet at seventeen thousand miles per hour. For a full overview of the novel's structure and crew, see the main Orbital study guide.