Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a feminist novel about the self-liberation of Japanese sex workers in the early twentieth century. It’s also a vibrant window into a different world and a true pleasure to read. Murata’s work has won almost every major Japanese literary prize, and Juliet Winters Carpenter has crafted a beautiful translation of her writing.
A Woman of Pleasure is set in 1903 in the adult entertainment district of Kumamoto, where the fifteen-year-old Ichi has been sold by her impoverished family to a high-ranking brothel. While she apprentices under a senior geisha, Ichi also attends literacy classes run by a retired entertainer named Tetsuko.
Ichi’s honest yet playful diary entries are interspersed between third-person accounts of her everyday life, the mundanity of which comprises the bulk of the novel. Despite the unfairness of her situation, Murata portrays Ichi with sympathy and dignity, as well as with a welcome touch of light humor.
While the last fifty pages of the book describe how the women at Ichi’s establishment decide to exercise their legal right to leave, the majority of the story explains – very gently – why they would choose to do so. For a contemporary reader, there’s a lot to be upset about, but Murata never degrades her characters or their agency in shaping the course of their lives.
A Woman of Pleasure reminds me a great deal of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic novel The Makioka Sisters. Despite several startling and high-tension incidents, the book doesn’t have much of a plot. This is to its benefit, I think, as what’s interesting about Ichi’s story would be ruined by melodrama. Murata’s project is first and foremost to celebrate the essential humanity of the women who lived in a different era, but she also presents a compelling demonstration of how normal, ordinary people are capable of powerful political action.
Mizuki Tsujimura’s Yami-hara is a collection of four disturbing stories about toxic social dynamics connected by a fifth chapter about the sinister force at the center of each of the conflicts. Although Yami-hara eventually reveals itself as supernatural horror, it’s entirely possible to read this linked story collection as a viciously cutting work of social satire.
The “yami-hara” of the title means “shadow harassment,” a term that indicates ostensibly benevolent behavior employed in such a way as to target a victim with gaslighting, self-doubt, and eventual social ostracization. Because there’s nothing technically “wrong” with the bullying, it’s not only tolerated but also actively facilitated by the broader community.
The first story, “New Student,” is about a toxic romantic relationship between two high schoolers. Straight-A student and class representative Mio is thrilled when her crush offers to walk her home from school, but his “protection” quickly escalates to constant texts and accusations that she isn’t taking their relationship seriously. Mio has trouble talking about her discomfort with her friends, because isn’t this just what boyfriends do? Isn’t this what she wanted? And what reason does someone who presents herself as “perfect” have to complain? Shouldn’t she be happy?
The fourth story, “Group Leader,” is an even better example of shadow harassment. In a class of elementary school students, there’s an obnoxious rich kid named Toranosuke who constantly causes trouble and gets away with it. A seemingly friendly but very intense boy named Niko transfers into the class but has little patience for the rich kid’s nonsense. Niko therefore volunteers to spend time with Toranosuke after school to help him study.
Toranosuke soon becomes the target of the “help” of the entire class, clearly against his will. No one does anything to prevent this, because none of the students are technically doing anything wrong. Isn’t it good to help someone study? Especially since Toranosuke was having trouble to begin with? And wouldn’t it be wrong, actually, to tell his classmates to leave him alone? Isn’t this for Toranosuke’s own good?
The third story is about “secret” workplace harassment that everyone sees, while the second story is about the lowkey passive-aggressive harassment between the women who live in the same posh apartment complex. This latter story, “Neighbor,” is particularly disturbing in its exploration of the many ways adult women can be evil to one another.
Speaking personally, I don’t think the final chapter that ties everything together is necessary. While it’s amusing to think that this sort of bad behavior is caused by literal monsters, nothing that any of the characters do is all that out of the ordinary.
Regarding the chapter about workplace harassment, I’ve unfortunately seen variations of this exact situation any number of times with my own eyes. It would be lovely if a troubled but handsome teenage exorcist could show up and fix everything, but real life is never so simple. After all, it’s notoriously difficult to confront abusers who are clever enough to keep their harassment in the shadows, especially when the larger community tacitly supports them.
Yami-hara is by the same author who wrote Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a YA novel that explores the concept of bullying from the genre angle of escapist fantasy. Unlike Lonely Castle in the Mirror, however, Yami-hara is quite bleak in its outlook. If I hadn’t already been familiar with the author’s work, I’m not sure it would have occurred to me that these two books were written by the same person.
Despite the anime-style illustration on the book’s cover and the “handsome teenage exorcist” plotline that emerges at the end of the story, I wouldn’t classify Yami-hara as YA fiction. This is a very smart and very sharp horror novel that requires the reader to think critically about all of the characters while rarely providing a sympathetic viewpoint.
Although the story contains no explicit violence or assault, I can’t deny that parts of Yami-hara are deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, it feels refreshingly cathartic to see a taboo subject like shadow harassment discussed openly and with such a high degree of sensitivity. If nothing else, I was morbidly fascinated by the panoply of bad behavior on display in this book, and I’d recommend Yami-hara to any fan of social horror looking for a strange and unique story that’s specific enough to be intriguing but relatable enough to be introspective – often painfully so.
Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning is only 115 pages long, but this masterfully translated literary novella paints a vibrant portrait of a young woman’s search for community in online fandom.
School has always been tough for Akari, whose dyslexia makes writing Chinese characters by hand extremely difficult. Akari has no problem typing, however, and she pours all of her energy into a fanblog devoted to her oshi Masaki, an actor and member of a popular boy band. During the summer, Akari works as many shifts as she can pick up at her part-time job so that she can buy Masaki’s merch and attend his concerts.
Akari’s world begins to fall apart when Masaki punches an overeager fan, thus becoming the target of intense social media discourse. Akari, who has found friendship and personal fulfilment in her fandom, can’t help but take this abuse personally. To make matters worse, when she returns to high school, she’s informed that she’s failed her junior year.
Usami is unflinching in her portrayal of online cultures, and she’s refreshingly honest about the adverse effects that flamewars can have on vulnerable people seeking support in fandom communities. Akari is never presented as pathological, and the members of her family offer support despite not really understanding the life she leads online. If there’s a villain in this story, it’s the Japanese education system, which refuses to accommodate Akari’s learning style while constantly pressuring her to “try harder.”
Usami’s writing shines during the quiet scenes of loneliness Akari experiences as she watches her communities crumble apart in real time. While it’s easy to mock the intensity of pop star fandom, Akari’s story helps the reader to understand how the power of a dream can keep a teenager moving forward, especially when they feel that their paths are limited in the offline world. Akari is a beautifully unique and well-realized character, but her failed attempts to find meaning and belonging carry much broader implications concerning how Japanese society views difference and disability.
The English translation of the book includes short essays by the author and her translator Asa Yoneda, as well as short statements from the cover designer (surrealist photographer Delaney Allen) and the illustrator (comic artist Leslie Hung). The novel’s story stands on its own, but it’s a pleasure to read about the inspirations of the writers and artists who brought it to life.
Natsuko Imamura’s Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks collects three short literary thought experiments that go to strange places. Each of the characters is missing something essential, and where that lack ultimately leads them is impossible for the reader to predict.
Asa, the eponymous “girl who turned into a pair of chopsticks,” has trouble getting other people to accept any sort of food that she’s touched with her hands. Meanwhile, Nami, the “Girl Who Wanted to Get Hit (and Eventually Succeeded),” is strangely unable to be touched by other people at all. Asa’s quest to understand what makes other people perceive her as unclean has fantastic consequences that become humorous in their absurdity, while Nami’s desire to be touched sinks her into a dark mire of self-harm.
In my favorite of the three stories, the protagonist of “A Night to Remember” claims to have spent fifteen years laying around and doing nothing after graduating from school. This woman is so lazy, in fact, that she spends the majority of the story casually slipping across the ontological boundary that separates human and animal. If “A Night to Remember” were a story about a cat, it would be super cute, but the narrator is definitely a person. The resulting uncanniness is superb.
It’s fitting that the collection’s Afterword is contributed by Sayaka Murata, the author of Convenience Store Woman and Life Ceremony. “These stories give the reader another way of seeing,” Murata writes, “transfiguring what you should be seeing, and sometimes contaminating it.” Like Murata, Imamura refuses to allow the reader to take “common sense” for granted. The stories in The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks thereby offer a glimpse into a strange world where socially acceptable normality doesn’t apply. Imamura’s visions are playfully surreal, occasionally upsetting, and never boring.
A young woman named Kiyose was recently promoted to the position of manager at an independent café. She devotes her love and attention to the business, but all is not well. One of her employees is a constant source of frustration, and she hasn’t spoken to her long-term boyfriend Matsuki since they had an argument about how Kiyose should handle the situation.
One day, Kiyose randomly gets a call from the hospital informing her that Matsuki is in a coma. The nurse in charge of his care informs her that she’s the closest thing he has to a next of kin, so she dutifully goes to confirm his identity. During her visit, Kiyose learns that Matsuki suffered a head injury sustained under mysterious circumstances, and his only other visitors are two unrelated people she’s never met.
川のほとりに立つ者は initially seems as though it’s going to be a mystery about crime, but it’s actually a character drama about living with invisible disabilities, specifically ADHD and dyslexia. As Kiyose begins digging into Matsuki’s life, she learns that, despite being alienated from his uptight family of professional calligraphers, Matsuki was teaching an adult with dyslexia how to write so that he could pass letters to a woman trapped in an abusive housing situating.
The novel’s title is taken from the proverb 川のほとりに立つ者は水底に沈む石の数を知り得ない, “Those who stand on the river’s shore can never know the number of stones under the water.” After learning about the discrimination faced by Matsuki’s friend, however, Kiyose begins to understand how unfair it is to tell someone with a disability that they’re just being lazy and irresponsible. She realizes that she was being cruel to her employee, who had come out to her as having ADHD, and she resolves to make her café a more accessible and welcoming space while being kinder to the people in her life.
Although her work hasn’t yet been translated into English, Haruna Terachi is a prolific writer who has won a number of literary prizes since her debut in 2014. This is my first encounter with Terachi’s writing, and I enjoyed this short novel, especially the chapters that were narrated from Matsuki’s perspective. I also found it satisfying to watch the mysteries presented at the beginning of the story slowly unravel. That being said, I was unsatisfied with the novel’s conclusion that the solution to systemic discrimination falls on individuals, who simply need to “walk at the same pace” as people with disabilities.
Still, it’s always good to see sympathetic stories about disability – especially invisible disability – and I appreciate Terachi’s pushback against the toxic misconception that disabled people simply aren’t trying hard enough. Along with people interested in the experience of living with disability in contemporary Japan, I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for a fast-paced and wholesome character drama driven by hidden secrets brought to light.
The Night of Baba Yaga is two hundred pages of violence, torture, and rape. All of the novel’s descriptions of violence, torture, and rape are graphically explicit; and again, there are two hundred pages of them. I enjoyed this book, but it’s not for everyone.
The bulk of The Night of Baba Yaga is set in Tokyo in 1979. A 22yo street brawler named Yoriko Shindo is pressed into the service of a notorious yakuza crime syndicate whose boss has ordered her to become the chauffeur for his precious only daughter, a prim-and-proper college student named Shoko. The yakuza boss assumes that, because Shindo is female, she won’t attempt to romance Shoko, but of course the two women fall in love and help each other escape the family.
I’d like to say that The Night of Baba Yaga is a love story, but it’s more of a series of fight scenes occasionally broken by scenes of torture and rape. The novel begins and ends with Shindo getting the shit beaten out of her, and most of the gaps in the fighting are created by the aforementioned torture and rape. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. The Night of Baba Yaga is what it is, which is a lesbian BDSM hurt/comfort fantasy in which male characters enact hurt so that female characters can provide comfort. Aside from the brief comfort scenes, there’s not much romantic chemistry or character development.
The Night of Baba Yaga is empowering for the woman who wrote it, no doubt, and I get the sense that there will be queer readers (such as myself) who will be amused to see this sort of openly horny fantasy in print. The Night of Baba Yaga isn’t empowering for any of the characters, however. Short interstitial chapters jump ahead in time, but I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a happy ending. Not in this sort of story. The tragedy is so over-the-top it’s Shakespearean.
Personally, I thought the ultraviolence was a lot of fun. The action is so gory and exaggerated that it’s difficult to take seriously, and The Night of Baba Yaga feels silly and campy in the same way that Takashi Miike movies like Ichi the Killer do. If you (like me) are a fan of the horror movie mindset that inspires you to cheer with delight when somebody’s hand gets chopped off, The Night of Baba Yaga delivers.
The translator, Sam Bett, has done an amazing job. Fight scenes are notoriously difficult to write, yet the translation is snappy and remarkably fast-paced. The character voices aren’t “natural” by any means, but they’re pitch-perfect for the genre. When it comes to descriptions of rape and violence, Bett doesn’t pull any punches. It’s an incredible translation, and I am in awe.
I’ve seen social media reviews hailing The Night of Baba Yaga as “an inspirational queer romance,” and it 100% most definitely is not that. Nobody does any learning or growing in this story, which has exactly zero social commentary. Rather, The Night of Baba Yaga is an adrenaline-laced lesbian power fantasy about being the most badass fighter you can be until you die. If you’re not the target audience, The Night of Baba Yaga probably isn’t for you. Like Wolverine, it’s the best at what it does, and what it does isn’t very nice. This short and compulsively readable novel gets in, gets messy, and gets what it came for.
Saō Ichikawa’s ハンチバック (Hunchback), which won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for emerging writers, is about a woman with a congenital spinal condition who lives in a group home and posts her secret desires and frustrations on Twitter. It’s an amazing story and a brilliant piece of writing.
The protagonist, Shaka Izawa, has been provided for by her wealthy parents. Although she doesn’t need the money, Shaka works as a freelance writer, mainly penning reviews for stores and restaurants she’ll never be able to visit in person. She also writes explicit erotica, a selection of which opens the novella.
Hunchback is written in a playful and accessible style, but it asks serious questions about disability. Why shouldn’t Shaka create erotica? Why shouldn’t she experience desire? Why shouldn’t she have sex? These questions become less abstract when one of Shaka’s caretakers discovers her secret writing account, and she presents him with a proposition – she’ll pay him to have sex with her.
I was so intrigued by Shaka’s story that I read Hunchback (which is ninety pages long) in one sitting. Ichikawa’s description of the daily life of someone with severe mobility impairments is honest yet compassionate, and her anger at Japanese society’s ingrained ableism is powerful and resonant.
Maru Ayase’s short magical realist novel The Forest Brims Over is about a young woman named Rui whose husband is a famous writer. Fed up with the words her husband puts in her mouth in his fiction, Rui swallows a handful of seeds that sprout from her body, gradually turning her into a forest.
Despite its fantastic premise, the story is firmly grounded in the psychological realism of the authors and editors who treat women as nothing more than literary symbols to be exploited for sales and awards. In the first four chapters, Rui’s transformation inspires significant shifts in the lives of the people in her husband’s literary circle. In the fifth and final chapter, we finally get to see Rui’s own perspective, and it’s brilliant.
I sympathize with Rui, whose every word is stolen from her by the literary professionals who conspire to confine her existence to a page of pulped paper. If Rui can’t speak in the language of the cultural elite, she’ll find another way of expressing herself, and the vast and mysterious array of life she produces is infinitely more vibrant than her husband’s formulaic literary fiction.
Rui’s husband may have the privilege of publishing award-winning books made of dead wood, but she is the roots and the leaves and the flowers and the wind. The Forest Brims Over is much more subtle and nuanced than perhaps I’m making it seem, but I personally found it joyful and liberating to be reminded that there’s much more room to grow outside the walls built by literary gatekeepers.
Tomoko is only twelve years old when she loses her father to cancer. To learn to support herself, Tomoko’s mother attends a dressmaking school in Tokyo, where she lives in a student dorm. From 1972 to 1973, Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt in Ashiya, an upscale suburb between Osaka and Kobe. Her uncle is the president of an international soft drink company, and his house is extravagantly large and quite grand. Tomoko’s cousin Mina lives a charmed life marred only by her asthma, which is serious enough to necessitate frequent hospital visits.
Mina’s grandmother Rosa emigrated from Germany in 1916, and the family’s house is filled with beautiful things, from foreign furniture and luxurious cosmetics to exotic Christmas paraphernalia to a room covered in Islamic tiles and used for a holistic health treatment called “light bathing.” Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the house is Mina’s pet, an aging Liberian pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko who carries Mina to school every morning. The household is managed by Yone-san, an elderly woman who is ostensibly Rosa’s maid but can more properly be called her companion and life partner.
Tomoko’s aunt is attractive, elegant, and kind. Her uncle is handsome, friendly, and good-natured. The family’s groundskeeper and driver, Kobayashi, is a sweet and patient man whom everyone loves. The entire family welcomes Tomoko with style and grace, and she quickly becomes fast friends with Mina. The opening chapters of Mina’s Matchbox unfold almost like a Studio Ghibli movie, and I couldn’t help envisioning the characters in the style of When Marnie Was There.
To add to the magical atmosphere, Mina is thoroughly charming. She reads well above the level of a sixth grader and asks Tomoko to check out books from the local library like Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. Mina conveys her comments on these books to Tomoko, who shares them with the gentle young librarian she fancies.
Meanwhile, Mina has a crush on a deliveryman for her father’s company who drops by the house every week. During each visit, he gives Mina interesting matchboxes that he picks up on his rounds. Inspired by the graphics printed on the boxes, she writes short stories on paper that she uses to adorn the inside of the small containers she uses to store her collection. These stories are often fables about animals or other small creatures, and Tomoko loves them.
Mina’s Matchbox is a Yoko Ogawa novel, so it goes without saying that all is not well. Quiet tensions flow underneath the family’s beautiful surface, which is marred by the infidelity of Tomoko’s handsome uncle. To give herself a sense of purpose, Tomoko’s aunt combs through magazines searching for typos so that she’ll have an excuse to send letters of complaint. Mina’s older brother writes to the family from Switzerland but never mentions his father. In her devotion to Rosa, Yoneda-san almost never leaves the house and is frightened by everything outside of her immediate sphere of influence.
Nothing bad happens, and this definitely isn’t the sort of novel where the sick child dies. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that both Mina and Tomoko go on to live happy lives. Aside from subtle but meaningful character development, Mina’s Matchbox doesn’t have much in the way of plot.
Regardless, this isn’t a slow novel. The pacing is excellent, and I finished the book quickly. In fact, I would have liked to spend more time with it. Every sentence is perfect, and each paragraph is a joy. Despite the child protagonists, Mina’s Matchbox has all the nuance of an adult perspective and steadfastly refuses to engage in melodrama. Reading this novel is like sitting outside and enjoying the sunshine on a warm spring day, and it’s a pleasure to follow the gradual progression of the small stories surrounding Mina and Tomoko as recounted in Ogawa’s impeccable prose.
Shinya Tanaka’s prizewinning novella Cannibals is a harrowing story of how poverty enables a cycle of abuse and assault. The writing and translation are beautiful, but the book is often difficult to read.
In the brutally hot summer of 1988, a 17-year-old boy named Toma is forced to confront the blood he’s inherited from his father, who beats his stepmother and sleeps with various women in their working-class neighborhood along the banks of a polluted river.
To his disgust, Toma realizes that he, too, receives gratification from physical violence, and he struggles to process what this means. Meanwhile, tensions at home threaten to reach a breaking point when Toma’s stepmother confides that she intends to leave his father.
The neighborhood river is never far from the story, and Tanaka’s virtuoso description of its eventual flood is incredible; the violence of the rushing waters is a necessary cleansing and catharsis.
The damage caused by the flood also serves to deny any complacency with violence that the reader may have developed through identification with the narrator. Still, I can’t help but feel that perhaps the author may have taken this violence too far for my own taste, especially as a reader who tends to be critical of how visceral depictions of assault often obfuscate thematic resonance through shock.
Cannibals is a prime example of what feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno has termed “men’s literature” (as opposed to the more commonly used expression “women’s literature”), which delves into specifically gendered issues that may not by sympathetic to a wider audience. The problem I once had with books like Cannibals is that there were so many of them in translation, especially in relation to the exclusion of similarly disturbing stories written by women. Now that there’s a greater diversity of Japanese fiction in English translation, it’s easier to read something like Cannibals on its own terms instead of seeing the explicit misogyny of the characters as a reflection of the implicit sexism of the publishing industry.
In the end, I think Cannibals might be better suited to a college-level literature class than pleasure reading, at least for most people. Without the context of the masculinity narrative of the 1980s that Tanaka is pushing back against in a frankly heroic style, there’s a danger of Cannibals coming off as almost voyeuristic of working-class poverty and sexual violence. Regardless, I appreciate this novella, and I’m grateful it’s been skillfully translated and lovingly published in a beautiful paperback edition with a striking cover design.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 