Natsuko Imamura’s novella This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? is about a neurodivergent preteen girl who’s neglected by her family and bullied at school. Though Amiko herself is quite charming, Imamura asks serious questions about the society that denies her support and understanding.
Amiko is ten years old and extremely friendly, but she has trouble fitting in. She speaks and behaves like someone much younger, and she often wanders away from class to read manga in the library. Her classmates avoid her when they can, but she’s oblivious to her alienation and remains cheerful and outgoing.
When her mother (who is actually her stepmother) has a miscarriage, Amiko does her best to comfort her, but her well-intentioned efforts are misinterpreted as malicious by both of her parents, who begin to neglect her. Without anyone to feed or bathe her, Amiko goes slightly feral, and she spends her early teenage years in almost total social isolation despite still attending school every day.
To protect Amiko from bullying, her older brother Kota toughens up, eventually joining a gang so that his reputation can shield his little sister. Kota loves Amiko and does his best to care for her, but he doesn’t have the emotional resources to deal with his clinically depressed stepmother or the lack of concern demonstrated by his workaholic father.
By the time she’s fifteen, Amiko still hasn’t matured, and she can barely read or write. She has trouble communicating and expressing herself, and she takes to singing made-up songs loudly and off-key whenever the mood strikes her. Torn between a child he can’t understand and a wife who never leaves the bed so that she’ll never have to see her stepdaughter, Amiko’s father sends her to live with her grandmother in the countryside.
The walkie talkies that Amiko’s parents give her as a gift at the beginning of the story are a chillingly direct analogy for her situation – she’s transmitting, but nobody’s responding. On a broader level, you can’t help but wonder why nobody ever reaches out to help Amiko or her parents.
This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? is narrated from a limited third-person perspective that shows the world as Amiko might see it, and Amiko is so happy and good-natured that it’s easy to skim through this short novella without really understanding the profound anger that Natsuko Imamura is expressing through the story. Amiko is a sweet and happy-go-lucky girl, but I could almost feel the author writing with clenched teeth.
I’ve seen multiple reviews of this novella (and its 2022 cinematic adaptation Amiko) that shy away from identifying Amiko as being on the autism spectrum, maintaining instead that she transcends labels. I feel like a bit of critical thinking might be necessary here. Specifically, does not labeling Amiko as autistic help her (or her family) in any way? Because it sure seems like the lack of a formal diagnosis has resulted in nothing but neglect and abuse. On the other hand, would a greater awareness of neurodiversity, as made concrete through an imperfect but still useful label, perhaps help Amiko’s community understand and support her?
I enjoyed Imamura’s novel The Woman in the Purple Skirt, whose meaning also dwells in the seemingly empty spaces of what its alienated and unreliable narrator doesn’t say. Just as the label of “autistic” would presumably make life much easier for Amiko, I imagine that a formal diagnosis of “schizophrenia” would probably help the Purple Skirt narrator get the help she needs. Imamura’s project in these two stories is not to normalize neurodivergence, necessarily, but to demonstrate that neurodivergent people aren’t abnormal. It’s only when neurodivergent people are denied community support and resources that unfortunate things happen.
This isn’t to say that This Is Amiko is didactic or unpleasant. It’s actually quite lovely, and I hope it doesn’t make me sound like a bad person to say that I genuinely enjoyed this book. Still, Natsuko Imamura is staging a serious critique through what may initially seem like a light and breezy story, and it’s important not to ignore the subtext.
Kudos to Hitomi Yoshio (and her seven-year-old daughter) for creating a fantastic translation of the distinctive narrative voice of this novella, and much love to Pushkin Press for bringing it to a wider audience. I’ve got my fingers crossed that Imamura’s 2017 novel Hoshi no ko (Child of the Stars), which is something of a sibling to This Is Amiko, finds a home in translation too.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 