Toward a Gameic World

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Ben Whaley’s 2023 monograph Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games presents four case studies of how the virtual narratives of Japanese video games encourage engagement with social and political issues in the real world. Drawing on Katherine Isbister’s 2016 How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, as well as a wealth of other recently published work in the burgeoning field of Game Studies, Whaley positions “engagement” as one of the primary means by which a video game conveys its message to the player.

“As I use it in this book,” Whaley explains in the Introduction, “‘engagement refers to a game’s capacity to evoke actual feelings of overcoming, guilt, complicity, or shared connection from a fictional experience of trauma.” The resulting study is not only a fascinating reading of key texts in the emerging canon of Japanese video games, but also a convincing argument for how Japanese games are able to engage transcultural audiences in political concerns ranging from youth precarity to environmental disasters.

The first chapter, “Limited Engagement,” asks interesting and culturally relevant questions about the politics of representing disaster in its discussion of the conversation surrounding the Disaster Report series of action-adventure games. Representations of apocalypse are often critiqued as being “disaster porn” meant to titillate viewers, but this chapter offers an alternate interpretation of the effects that experiencing such stories can have on individual players, as well as broader currents of historical memory.

“If mass-scale disasters conveyed in newspaper photos and YouTube videos represent collective narratives that run the risk of flattening the individual victims and individual narratives,” Whaley writes, “then video games like Disaster Report offer players the potential to rebuild some of this context by hearing lost voices, inhabiting lost bodies, and experiencing lost narratives, if only in virtual space.” In other words, the player engagement demanded by video games can serve as a means of presenting environmental disasters not as an abstract concept, but as a personally meaningful concern. The controversial Disaster Report series of games thus facilitates empathy for real-life survivors while also providing an education on disaster preparedness and survivor outreach.

The book’s fourth chapter, “Connective Engagement,” focuses on how social connections are modeled by the networked gameplay elements of The World Ends With You, a 2007 RPG set in an urban fantasy version of Shibuya. The game’s protagonist is a socially isolated teenager who suffers from depression and seems well on his way to becoming a hikikomori. While it’s easy enough to tell a story about a young person finding friendship, it’s much harder to break out of a toxic spiral of isolation in real life. The narrative of The World Ends With You acknowledges this challenge, and its gameplay cleverly models what this process actually entails.

Whaley demonstrates that, in addition to helping socially withdrawn players feel seen and recognized, the game’s networked features have the potential to encourage players to actively seek out other people in physical space, as wireless connections between Nintendo DS consoles are meaningfully rewarded within the world of the game. With its sensitive cultural study, this chapter is an antidote to sensationalistic accounts of mental health in Japan, as well as a welcome contribution to the ongoing scholarship concerning how online engagement in the communities surrounding networked games can positively affect the mental health of young people (and not-so-young people) who would otherwise feel alienated and alone.

Where the empathy of this book falls short is in the second chapter’s discussion of the 2011 visual novel / puzzle game Catherine. Catherine is a deeply misogynistic and openly transphobic video game, and critical responses to its story and characters have been mixed. While Catherine’s almost comically misogynistic treatment of its cisgender female characters is questionably open to argument and interpretation, the way the game handles a prominent transgender character is unequivocally hateful and extremely distressing. It’s therefore odd to see Catherine presented as a model of empathy.

My recommendation to readers would be to skip this chapter entirely. The author isn’t writing with malice; rather, it can often take many years to research, assemble, and publish an academic book, and scholarship that felt fresh a decade ago sometimes ages poorly. I will admit that I’ve occasionally found myself in a similar situation when I look back at my own work. This is simply the danger of writing about contemporary political issues, but it’s no reason not to create scholarship that’s relevant to the current moment.

Without sacrificing the quality of its research, Toward a Gameic World is accessible to general-audience video game fans interested in sustained critical analysis. (I didn’t mention the book’s third chapter in this review, but Metal Gear Solid fans are in for a special treat.) The book is also accessible to scholars who know little about video games but want to incorporate them into their classes. I think the first chapter on depictions of environmental disasters, “Limited Engagement,” would make an especially excellent reading for undergraduates. Whaley also offers many strong examples of how to integrate online conversations into academic literature reviews and textual analysis.

Toward a Gameic World takes the serious cultural topics addressed in a key selection of video games and, with sensitivity and grace, transforms their analysis into a surprisingly entertaining and enjoyable discussion. One might even say that it’s quite an engaging read.

She and Her Cat

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She and Her Cat collects four interlinked short stories about women and their cats. Though these stories are bittersweet, their gentleness is a source of comfort and encouragement.

The stories in She and Her Cat were written by Naruki Nakagawa, who’s mainly known as a screenwriter for science fiction anime from the mid 2000s, and the concept is based on the 1999 short indie film (which you can watch on YouTube here) created by the international superstar anime director Makoto Shinkai. I think it’s fair to say that the original short film is a representative example of the iyashikei “comfort” genre of anime, which Patrick Lum describes as “designed to be as comfy and mellow as can be.” This book, which Nakagawa wrote in his late forties, similarly uses young female characters to create a sense of living in a world where a brighter future is always possible.

The first story is a direct adaptation of Shinkai’s original short animation. A young office worker named Miyu brings home a kitten who’s been left outside in the rain in a disintegrating cardboard box. Miyu is growing apart from both her boyfriend and her best friend, and she feels as though she’s no longer able to understand the nuances of other people’s feelings. Thankfully, her new cat Shiro loves her unconditionally, and he’ll always be there for her.

The second story is about an art student who can’t find the motivation to apply to a university-level Fine Arts program, and the third is about an aspiring manga artist who was unable to make her debut and became a hikikomori after the death of her writer, who also happened to be her childhood friend. Both women find the courage to pull themselves out of their depression and take the first few steps forward – with the help of their cats, of course.

In the last story, a childless middle-aged woman finds herself alone after caring for her husband’s parents only to be left by her husband himself. As she gets older, so too does the boss of the neighborhood stray cats, and she ends up adopting him. Around the same time, her nephew has a quiet breakdown at his first job out of college, and the woman ends up sheltering him too. In return, he eagerly learns the non-corporate life skills she shares, and he naturally begins to help her manage the household. While it’s always rewarding to nurture a mutually loving and beneficial relationship with a cat, this story reminds the reader that kindness can exist between humans as well.

The narrative viewpoint of these stories alternates between the cats and their human companions. When the cats aren’t expressing their undying love for the human ladies in their lives, they’re off on their own adventures in the neighborhood, doing as cats do. Even more than the human characters, the cats have strong personalities and know what they’re about.

Comforting Japanese books about cats are currently enjoying a small cultural moment, and She and Her Cat is among the best of them. As you might expect from a book written by a professional screenwriter, each “scene” is fairly short, which makes for a quick and engaging read. Nagakawa maintains the distinctive narrative voice associated with Makoto Shinkai’s films, and Ginny Tapley Takemori conveys this straightforward gentleness perfectly in translation. In the English edition, each story is prefaced by a gorgeous full-page illustration by Rohan Eason, which only adds to the book’s charm. Exactly like the creatures it celebrates, She and Her Cat is light, nimble, and filled with character. 

Memento Bento

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Memento Bento is a 65-page chapbook created by the Italian artist Alessandra Criseo. The chapbook, which is structured like an annotated sketchbook, chronicles Criseo’s trip to Japan with her partner Andreas in April and May of 2014. Over the course of two and a half weeks, the pair visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Yokohama.

At the time, Criseo was working in London as a freelance character designer and concept illustrator for video game development studios. Criseo’s primary interest in Japan lay in its culture of cuteness, and the pages of Memento Bento are filled with sketches of clothing, characters, and street fashion. This fascination with cuteness is supplemented by photos of cute food, such as strawberry-themed pastries and the popular Tokyo Banana souvenir cakes.

Despite her stay in the popular tourist destinations of Kyoto and Nara, Criseo cares less about traditional Japanese architecture and handicrafts than she does about common urban cityscapes and mundane everyday objects. “I love taking the train. [It’s] one of the pleasures of life, especially in a country with such pretty houses as this one,” she writes next to an ink drawing of herself sketching on a commuter train.

Along with the urban tangle of telephone poles and power lines, Criseo is also fascinated by vending machines, instant ramen packaging, toilets, umbrellas, disposable cameras, and the uniquely non-aerodynamic shapes of domestic Japanese automobiles. Having submerged herself in the visual clutter of Japan, Criseo writes that she’s not looking forward to returning to the “boring and gray” monotony of London.

The heterodox and chaotic aesthetic often decried by older observers of Japan is a source of fascination and delight for Criseo. As an artist and professional designer, Criseo has translated her study of Japanese commercial design to her own clothing and stationery, which she distributes through her independent label, Mezzolume.

When I wrote about Ryōko Nagara’s recent manga about the local material culture of Sapporo (here), I was reminded of how many visual representations of Japan created by Europeans (such as Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter) often emphasize “Shōwa retro” objects and spaces. In a time when the speed and productivity demanded by neoliberal capitalism leave many people anxious and exhausted, there’s a certain appeal to old and “useless” things, which artists like Criseo present as visually charming and emotionally compelling.

If you’re interested, you can order an English-language edition of Memento Bento (here), and you can follow Alessandra Criseo on Instagram (here).

北国ゆらゆら紀行

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Ryōko Nagara’s Kitaguni yura-yura kikō (北国ゆらゆら紀行) is an episodic travelogue manga that follows a young woman named Tsukiko who left her job to return to her hometown of Sapporo.

Tsukiko is too burnt out to resume full employment, and her savings are running low. Her friend Chitose invites her to move into a Shōwa-era sharehouse co-rented with her flatmate Kensuke and Kensuke’s girlfriend Miwa. Their landlord, a world traveler who no longer lives in Japan, says that Tsukiko can stay if she can manage to clean up all the junk in the spare room.

As Tsukiko recovers from her recent life changes, she and Chitose explore Sapporo at a leisurely pace. Chitose is a writer who aspires to create a magazine celebrating the city’s regional culture. For the time being, she posts articles on her blog and creates zines. Chitose brings Tsukiko along while she scouts for material at small local stores and restaurants. When they’re not out and about, the two women dig through the cardboard boxes left behind by the landlord and uncover all sorts of treasures, from vinyl records to unique Hokkaido woodcrafts. 

In my review (here) of Tomoko Shibasaki’s short story collection A Hundred Years and a Day, I touch on the phenomenon of “analog nostalgia,” the fascination with tangible media and the objects of an earlier era. Shibasaki’s collection dwells in a gentle sense of decay, but Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is marked by its youthful energy. As they stroll through beautiful streets lined with old houses and enjoy lively conversations over local cuisine in charming restaurants, it’s clear that Tsukiko and Chitose are thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Despite the fun she has with Chitose and her friends, Tsukiko suffers from depression and anxiety. The tiny apartment she occupies at the beginning of the manga is filled with trash, and she loses track of time while doomscrolling late at night. When Tsukiko considers the possibility of finding a new job, she imagines herself as a defenseless egg yolk sweating and apologizing while surrounded by menacing shadows.

When she invites her friend to move into her sharehouse, Chitose gives Tsukiko something tangible to hold. The manga’s emphasis on analog media, from Chitose’s printed zines to the old Walkman and cassette tapes that Tsukiko digs out of the landlord’s cardboard boxes, isn’t just simple nostalgia. Rather, it’s a concrete solution to a distressingly amorphous problem.

As the anonymous author of one of my favorite video game blogs writes (here) regarding the appeal of retro media, “We weren’t meant to live in an endless feed.” The rituals required by analog media once “gave life a shape that wasn’t constant images on a screen to choose from,” and these rituals serve as an anchor in the flow. Kitaguni yura-yura kikō doesn’t glorify the past or fetishize commodified nostalgia. Instead, tangible objects serve as a visual shorthand for places and relationships that don’t vanish when you close an app.

I don’t mean to suggest that Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is an introspective character study. More than anything, it’s a sweet and gentle travelogue, and it’s very charming. This manga makes me want to visit Sapporo and take long walks and eat delicious food. Still, I appreciate the subtext of the story, which is about readjusting to life lived at a slower pace while relearning how to have a meaningful connection with the place you live, the people who share the space with you, and your own embodied existence.  

或るバイトを募集しています

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Aru baito o boshū shite imasu (或るバイトを募集しています) is a collection of eight short horror stories conveyed in the form of documentary-style found footage. Each story is prefaced by a listing for a part-time job that seems a little strange, or perhaps too good to be true.

The most representative of these jobs is a request to make an offering of flowers at a certain empty lot between midnight and 1:00am every night. An aspiring comedian who needs the money and keeps late hours takes the job and carries it out faithfully. He never sees anything strange, but something about the job still feels off.

When he does research about the location, he can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Another entertainment industry professional explains that the job is probably a strategy to lower the land value. The comedian’s employer wants to buy the land and assumes they’ll be able to get it at a steep discount if it becomes known in the neighborhood as a “stigmatized property” (as explained by Business Insider here). 

The comedian does his best not to think about it too hard. When he finally gets a gig and fails to make his nightly offering, he leaves the studio only to find that an unknown number has called several times. When he checks his voicemail, a mysterious woman speaks to him through static, saying, “The flowers from yesterday have withered. Why didn’t you come tonight? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here?”

Slightly outdated media and technology are a recurring theme in the collection, and this isn’t the only story about creepy messages left on an answering machine. Other stories revolve around physical media like VHS tapes, DVDs, and handwritten letters. When it comes to creepy found objects, I get the sense that there’s a certain air of uncleanliness that clings to the physical media of a prior century.  

Along with the spookiness of the stories, I enjoyed the rationalizations for why each strange job might exist. If I had to guess, I’d say that this collection is partially inspired by the recent discourse surrounding yami baito, or “shady part-time jobs” (which the BBC did a podcast about here). In real life, yami baito involves organized crime organizations using aboveground job postings on social media to recruit young people for illegal activities such as cash withdrawal fraud and stripping copper wiring from abandoned houses. Still, it’s not too difficult to imagine an entirely different shadow world seeking to prey on the living with the offer of easy money.

More than social commentary, however, Aru baito dwells in the realm of internet creepypasta. The collection’s author, Kurumu Akumu, has spent the past several years sharing short and spooky stories on various platforms, including YouTube (here), Note (here), and Twitter (here). Aru baito reflects the found footage nature of creepypasta by presenting its stories in a variety of formats, such as interviews, screenshots of text conversations, blog comments, and so on. The unusual formatting is a lot of fun, making the book feel like a file folder of cursed printouts.

Kurumu Akumu’s work reminds me of the mockumentary-style horror of Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, but Aru baito has no connecting narrative, nor does it make any attempt at portraying psychological realism. Instead, the reader feels as if they’re encountering real urban legends in the wild, and the lack of context heightens the eerie feeling of looking at something that shouldn’t be seen. Aru baito is an unsettling collection that blends the horror of cursed analog media with the eerie plausibility of urban legends, leaving readers with the lingering sense that some part-time jobs are better left unfilled.

ツミデミック

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Michi Ichiho’s Tsumidemic (ツミデミック), which won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2024, collects six stories about the atmospheric strangeness of the Coronavirus pandemic. While everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere, Ichiho wonders, what sort of intriguingly antisocial behavior might have been enabled by isolation?

The opening story, Chigau hane no tori (違う羽の鳥), has all the grim fascination of a viral urban legend. Yūto moved to Tokyo only to drop out of college, and now he works as a barker for a bar in Shinjuku. Unfortunately, business isn’t going well due to the pandemic. During another eerily quiet night, Yūto sees someone he knew back from middle school in Osaka, Nagisa Inoue. This is a shock, as Nagisa is supposed to have committed suicide by jumping onto the train tracks. As she and Yūto get drinks together, Nagisa explains her devious plot to flee from the grasp of her overbearing mother, which was far from a victimless crime. Yūto is no saint himself, and he inadvertently reveals why he immediately recognized someone he never talked to when they were classmates.

Romansu (ロマンス☆) is about a bored housewife named Yuri who develops a serious online gambling addiction of an unusual nature. Yuri hasn’t been able to find a new job since she left her previous position to give birth to her daughter, and the pandemic isn’t helping. She channels her frustration into a food delivery app called Miideri, which she treats like a gacha game. Will the person who makes her next delivery be one of the handsome men rumored to be employed by the service? While gambling on the slim possibility that a prince will arrive at her door bearing a bag from McDonald’s, Yuri attracts the unwanted attention of an unhinged delivery driver who has read exactly the wrong message into her frequent orders.

Rinkō (憐光) is narrated by the ghost of a high school student named Yui who, strangely enough, can’t recall how she died. Having materialized back into the world fifteen years after her death, Yui finds herself confused and alienated by the loneliness of the Tokyo streets and train stations during the pandemic. She therefore returns home to her mother’s house in the country. Her arrival coincides with a memorial visit from her friend Tsubasa, who is accompanied by their old homeroom teacher, Sugita. As Yui eavesdrops on their conversation, she learns that she died after mysteriously falling into a river during a rainstorm. Sugita knows what Yui was doing and where she was going, and Tsubasa wants him to know that she knows, too.

The collection takes a slightly more positive turn in the fourth story, Tokubetsu enkosha (特別縁故者), in which Kyōichi, the unemployed and impecunious father of a young son, attempts to weasel himself into the good graces of an elderly man whom he suspects is a money hoarder. Kyōichi, an affable himbo who has no business scamming anyone out of money, volunteers for the daily task of picking up a takeout lunch from one of the many bentō stores in the neighborhood. The old man knows exactly why Kyōichi approached him, and he resents him for not pursuing his ambition to enter the food service industry. Harsh words are exchanged; but, when push comes to shove, even a relationship built on ulterior motives is better than living alone as an elderly shut-in during a pandemic.

Shukufuku no uta (祝福の歌) is about a happily married middle-aged man facing a new direction in his life. Despite being a high school student, his daughter is pregnant, and she intends to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the man’s mother seems to be entering the permanent brain fog of senile dementia. His daughter, who has been gossiping with the other mothers in her grandmother’s apartment building, gets the sense that there’s something else going on. With any luck, it’s a problem that can actually be solved.

Sazanami Drive (さざなみドライブ) follows the IRL meetup of five people who connected on Twitter after their lives were disrupted by the pandemic. As they drive out to the country in a minivan, they share their stories of abandonment and alienation. Little do they know that one of their number has a secret agenda. He’ll do whatever it takes to disrupt the group’s grim plan for the trip – and hopefully save their lives in the process.

As indicated by the book’s title, the two themes guiding this collection are “crime” and “the pandemic.” Each of the characters is hiding something, and the reader never knows where anyone’s true intentions lie. Michi Ichiho, who began her writing career as an author of BL romance novels, isn’t unduly focused on creating mimetic fiction, and the scenarios are improbable at best. Still, the twist at the end of each story is a lot of fun, and the fantastical plot elements accurately convey the feeling of just how weird and unreal everything felt during the pandemic.

It appears that the English-language publication rights for this collection are currently up for grabs (more info here). Tsumidemic is a fast-paced and emotionally cathartic book, and it would benefit from a tone-sensitive translation that renders Ichiho’s dialogue-filled writing into snappy, Stephen King style prose. I hope someone picks it up.

Hunchback

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Saou Ichikawa’s 2023 novella Hunchback is a striking work of fiction and a major contribution to the literature of disability. Ichikawa’s brutally honest depiction of her disabled protagonist’s physicality is magnetically compelling and thrusts the reader into a world where the conveniences of the able-bodied cannot be taken for granted.  

Shaka is a resident of Group Home Ingleside, a private care facility established by her wealthy parents. Shaka owns the facility, and she collects income from several rental properties in the investment portfolio she’s inherited. In addition, she’s sitting on a trust fund so large that it has to be distributed across several banks.

Despite her wealth, Shaka’s disability confines her to a small studio apartment. While working on a PhD in Disability Studies, Shaka amuses herself by vent-posting on Twitter in between sessions of writing hardcore pornography. She donates her income to the food banks that serve unhoused people, sometimes directly and sometimes in the form of bulk orders of seasoning. Even homeless people deserve food that tastes good, she reasons.

Even as she emphasizes with the disadvantaged, Shaka describes the reality of her own physicality in painstaking detail. Because of muscular atrophy, she’s unable to breathe on her own. Due to social distancing during Covid, leaving the care facility is out of the question. Her PhD coursework is entirely online, and she digitizes academic texts with the aid of a book scanner, as it’s impossible for her to hold heavy books for long periods of time.

And why shouldn’t we have digital copies of books, Shaka demands. When the literati bemoan the digitalization of the written word, who does that benefit, exactly? Shaka’s litany of complaints against the ableism of academia is one of the many currents of anger that drive Hunchback forward. Shaka’s anger breaches the surface at regular intervals, forcing the reader to think critically about the entrenched ableism of the world many of us take for granted.

Despite being engaged in a life of the mind, Shaka has one dream – to become pregnant and then get an abortion. While she’s not particularly interested in the fantasy sex she narrates in her shallow and disposable smut stories, there’s something about the particular physicality and “human-ness” of pregnancy that she finds intriguing.

A golden opportunity falls into Shaka’s hands when a young male caretaker named Tanaka reveals that he’s been stalking her on Twitter and secretly reading her erotic fiction. Unfortunately, Tanaka is the worst sort of incel. Not only can he not get a girlfriend, he only became a caretaker because he couldn’t cut it in the corporate world. In his eyes, he’s just as failed by society as Shaka – who, he snaps, enjoys wealth most people could never dream of.

Out of mutual hatred, Shaka and Tanaka orchestrate a tryst. As you might imagine, it doesn’t end well. Suffice it to say that, if you’re looking for an uplifting message, you won’t find it here.

The end of Hunchback mirrors its beginning, with a prolonged description of a sexual encounter. The book’s closing scene is ostensibly narrated by Tanaka’s sister, who takes on a sense of personal responsibility for her brother’s crime of murdering a disabled woman in a care facility by literally choking her to death with his cum. 

I can’t help but suspect that this is once again Shaka writing erotica, albeit with a slightly more literary bent. The scenario is still improbable, but now she’s writing more for herself, fleshing out the characters (so to speak) by imbuing them with personalities and backstories.

Her encounter with Tanaka may have been an abject failure, but Shaka still desires “human” experiences and contact with the broader world. After all, writing – even writing erotica – is about so much more than coming up with a story and posting it online. Shaka never becomes a softer or kinder person, nor would I want her to. What she gains is motivation to be more present in the outside world as she sharpens her insight and hones her craft. 

Ichikawa writes based on her own experience as a disabled person, and Shaka’s voice is focused, specific, and driven. Shaka’s narration pulls the reader through the story with sharp observations and darkly comedic drama, and the steady forward momentum is just as entertaining as it is compelling. In many ways, Hunchback reminds me of Convenience Store Woman, and I’d recommend this book to readers who are receptive to unexpected charm and aren’t afraid to have their comfortable perceptions of reality challenged.

May You Have Delicious Meals

Kathryn5 Comments

Junko Takase’s 2022 novella May You Have Delicious Meals is a small human drama about workplace bullying. It’s also a critique of Japanese corporate culture that simultaneously pokes holes in the iyashikei “comfort” reading meant to help people deal with stress. Contrary to what bestselling Japanese novels about cats and coffee shops would have you believe, it turns out that lovingly prepared homemade food cannot, in fact, fix a toxic workplace environment.

Ashikawa is a sweet young woman who transferred to a branch office in Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo, after facing harassment at her previous post. Due to her lingering trauma, Ashikawa has requested a reasonable accommodation – that she not be expected to work overtime. To make up for the inconvenience to her coworkers, she regularly brings homemade desserts to share with the office.

Ashikawa is not the hero of this story. In fact, her perspective is entirely absent.

The majority of the novella is narrated from the point of view of Nitani, Ashikawa’s secret boyfriend. Nitani has allowed Ashikawa to latch onto him, but he has no respect for her at all. He hates sweet food, and he thinks Ashikawa’s baking hobby is annoying. The only reason he tolerates her is because she seems like the sort of attractive and agreeable woman that a man in his position should be dating.

Nitani is friendly with an older female colleague named Oshio. Oshio resents Ashikawa, whom she feels gets special treatment. Why should Ashikawa have a lighter workload and be spared stressful job responsibilities just because she bakes cookies?

During a late-night drinking session, Nitani and Oshio decide to bully Ashikawa, resolving to throw away her desserts uneaten in trash cans that everyone can see. Oshio gives up on this bullying fairly early on, but she still ends up taking the blame when other people at the office surreptitiously start to join in. No one ever suspects Nitani, least of all Ashikawa herself.

I get the feeling that Penguin might be attempting to market May You Have Delicious Meals as a social comedy, but this is misleading. All of the characters are unpleasant, and the situation is deeply awkward. Takase’s story contains sharp social critique, but it’s not funny. Perhaps this novella might be described as cringe comedy, except without the comedy; it’s just cringe.

Nitani is a piece of work, and I hate him. He’s super gross. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably encountered this exact type of guy – someone who hates women but still expects them to sleep with him. Takase’s portrayal of this species of greasy slimebag is immaculate.  

Oshio is much more relatable. Even though she’s not the primary viewpoint character, I still feel that this is her story. Oshio is critical of Japanese workplace culture, but she grits her teeth and deals with the unpleasantness of overtime, useless paperwork, angry phone calls, and branch office transfers. If she weren’t doing the work, she reasons, it would be unfair to the person forced to pick up her slack. Still, her coworkers aren’t her family, and she resents Ashikawa for cluelessly attempting to blur the necessary line between personal and professional.   

In the end, Oshio has the right of it. No matter how friendly a workplace pretends to be, the pretense of comradery isn’t going to stop the bullying and scapegoating that arise from stress and overwork. The ice-cold “fuck all y’all” speech Oshio gives at the end of the book isn’t quite theatrical enough to be cathartic, but still. Good for her.

Meanwhile, Ashikawa’s “happy ending” is chilling. I’m sure that circumstances seem rosy from her perspective. The person whom she assumes is the office bully has been vanquished, and her romantic relationship with her coworker is openly acknowledged by everyone in the office. Since the reader has seen these developments through Nitani’s hateful eyes, however, we’re painfully aware that Ashikawa is delusional about how the people around her actually feel.

May You Have Delicious Meals is the polar opposite of feel-good books about food and friendship. Reading Junko Takase’s prickly little workplace drama makes you feel awful, and that’s the point. It’s bleak, it’s disheartening, and it’s a brilliant piece of writing. I have nothing but appreciation for May You Have Delicious Meals, which is a much-needed antidote to the mindlessness and absurdity of the current trend of cutesy Japanese comfort novels.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

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Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the quiet end of the world. Despite its postapocalyptic setting, the story is gentle. The author’s background as a biology teacher shines through her writing as she imagines the diverse forms that humans and their societies might take in the far distant future.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is structured as a collection of fourteen stand-alone stories that gradually form a larger narrative, and the reader is encouraged to put together a history from bits and pieces of individual lives. We never see the full picture, however, and I imagine that assembling a concrete timeline would take careful detective work.

This isn’t a plot-driven story that can have “spoilers,” necessarily, but any description of the book’s premise is going to contain analysis and speculation. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is one of the most intriguing works of speculative fiction that I’ve read in years, and this is partially due to its fragmented structure. You may want to venture into the collection on your own before reading any reviews, this one included.

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Still with me? Let’s go!

Over the millennia, the number of people on the planet has steadily decreased, and the last remaining humans live in isolated settlements of various sizes. In order to ensure harmony, the settlements are discretely managed by “watchers” who have been cloned and genetically engineered to fulfil their duty. Unlike regular humans, watchers grow up in small communities with “mothers” that are all physical manifestations of the same AI.

Everyone takes this arrangement for granted, but their “normal” is not the same as ours. Whether a story is told from a first-person or third-person point of view, the reader can only see the world from a limited perspective. It can be difficult to understand what’s going on at first, but the opportunity to surf successive waves of strangeness is a major part of this book’s charm.     

My favorite story is “Testimony,” which is delivered as a statement to a watcher by one of the new phenotypes of humans to emerge from centuries of genetic isolation. A small number of people are born with the ability to photosynthesize, and the joy they take from the sunlight and changing seasons affects their behavior in surprising ways. If enlightenment exists, these people have attained it; and honestly, it sounds really nice.             

Not all of the future human phenotypes are so peaceful or self-assured, however, and other stories have a bit more conflict. Still, with one notable exception, there’s no violence in this book. If there are wars and explosions, they happen entirely offscreen. Like the watchers and mothers, it’s the reader’s job simply to observe the biology, ecology, and culture of the future.

On the front cover of the American edition, Kawakami is billed as the author of People from My Neighborhood, a loosely connected series of magical realist flash fiction that’s an excellent comparison for Under the Eye of the Big Bird. To me, Under the Eye of the Big Bird also feels like a natural development of Kawakami’s debut short story, Kamisama, in which the narrator has a lovely afternoon picnic with a literal bear. The bear, being a bear, is clearly nonhuman, but no one seems to be bothered by this. The same casual acceptance of difference pervades Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which invites the reader to imagine the mundane everyday reality of the final days of the human race.

I’ll admit that I felt the chilling touch of existential dread at a few points during the book; but, as in any encounter with real difference, this initial sense of discomfort is important. The gentle strangeness of Under the Eye of the Big Bird encourages the reader to confront their biases, and it also lends weight to the narrative theme of human extinction. Instead of presenting the apocalypse as a standard dystopian superhero story, Kawakami allows the reader to take all the time and space they need to consider whether it would really be so horrible if the people we currently think of as “human” were to slowly disappear from the earth.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the end of the world, but it’s also one of the kindest and most hopeful works of speculative fiction I’ve had the pleasure to read. Reading this book for the first time was a unique experience, but the impact of its stories linger even after their novelty fades.

Okareta basho de abaretai

Kathryn2 Comments

Emuko Asai began posting essays online in 2021. She never considered herself to be a writer, she says, but the enthusiastic support she received from thousands of readers inspired her to keep sharing her stories. Asai’s 2024 collection 置かれた場所であばれたい (Okareta basho de abaretai) is a clear demonstration of the appeal of her essays, which inject a healthy dose of good humor into the trials and tribulations of everyday life.

Okareta basho de abaretai follows a loose timeline from Asai’s girlhood to her current career as a professional in the field of early childhood education. Although I get the sense that the staunchly pseudonymous Asai grew up in an upper middle-class family, the path she followed to adulthood was anything but standard. To me, Asai reads as having mild learning impairments, and she frequently makes jokes about her terrible grades and how much she hated studying. Since she was never going to meet expectations, Asai always figured that she might as well enjoy herself and have a good time.

One of my favorite essays is Miko no arubaito (Part-time job as a shrine maiden) which is about the weekend Asai worked at a large Shinto shrine during the rush over the New Year holiday. Just like her normal part-time job at a bakery, her duties involved standing behind a counter and helping people pay for their purchases. Amusingly, Asai had a bit of trouble with code-switching between secular and religious settings, which resulted in several comedic exchanges with confused patrons.

( As an aside, Miko no arubaito would be an excellent reading assignment for a Japanese language class, especially since its humor is dependent on a knowledge of the taigū hyōgen set expressions used by service workers. )

Asai’s most popular essay on social media is Yasashii uragiri (A gentle betrayal), which is about a written test given by her high school Home Economics teacher. This story will probably be familiar to American Millennials, many of whom were exposed to a variation of this test at some point in secondary education. Over the course of the essay, we follow Asai’s progress through the exam, which presents a lengthy series of detailed instructions. The last item on the list is, of course, “Don’t write anything. This is a test of whether you read the directions before starting work.”

Although Asai presents this story as little more than an amusing anecdote, I get the feeling that this experience was probably crucial in her decision to become a teacher. Many of Asai’s experiences with education seem confrontational at best (and downright depressing at worst), so it would make sense that she had a positive response to a teaching strategy that fostered independent thought and prioritized practical application.

In later essays, Asai describes her own goals as a teacher while challenging herself to accommodate different learning styles. Perhaps the best example is Sensei-tte, dare no koto (Who are you calling Teacher?), in which Asai attempts to help a 4yo child overcome his refusal to sit down and draw with crayons. It turns out that what the boy really disliked was having his pictures compared to the drawings of his best friend, who displays a small measure of artistic talent. Asai readily admits that she herself can’t draw, but what she can do (using an age-appropriate version of the Two Cakes! meme) is to help this little kid realize that his work is just as valuable as his friend’s.

Lest you think Asai has grown soft, however, she follows this essay with one titled Unchi somurie (Poo Sommelier), which is about how she possesses the rare but useful ability to tell which of her young charges has shit themselves at school. 

Emuko Asai’s essays read a bit like David Sedaris, albeit without the cutting edge of Sedaris’s characteristic meanness. Her work isn’t wholesome, necessarily, nor is there an absence of irony. Rather, Asai expresses a type of radical good humor that occasionally borders on passive-aggressive sweetness but always mellows out into a chill attitude of c’est la vie – or YOLO, as the case may be. If nothing else, it’s always amusing to follow the unexpected progression of the author’s thoughts as she relates episodes of her life that probably would have been traumatic for someone without her incredible store of gentle good humor. 

You can follow Emuko Asai on Twitter (here), and you can read her essays online on Note (here). The most recent posts are only accessible to subscribers, but her older essays are free to read. My recommendation would be her story about her Home Economics test, Yasashii uragiri, which you can find under its original title (here).