Tag: short stories

Bødy

Kathryn2 Comments

Bødy

Title: Bødy
Japanese Title: 躯 (Karada)
Author: Nonami Asa (乃波アサ)
Translator: Takami Nieda
Publication Year: 2012 (America); 1999 (Japan)
Publisher: Vertical
Pages: 192

If body horror makes you squeamish, you probably shouldn’t read this book.

If body horror fascinates you, you have come to the right place. Surgery, needles, public bathing, erectile dysfunction, heart attacks, concussions – Nonami Asa’s Bødy has it all.

Bødy collects five short stories, which are all about forty pages long. Each of these stories centers around the body-related neurosis of its protagonist. The short stories in Bødy remind me of the short stories of Patricia Highsmith (particularly those in The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder and Little Tales of Misogyny) in that they feature tongue-in-cheek accounts of terrible things happening to people who probably deserve them. In “Blood,” a man who gets off on injuring others learns that he can also get off on injuring himself. In “Whorl,” a man planning on dumping his girlfriend is dumped by her after some mishaps involving an experimental treatment for baldness. In “Jaw,” a man consumed by his training to become a boxer is ultimately defeated by his own physical regimen. The opening story, “Navel,” is about a mother and her two daughters who blow through their savings in order to undergo a series of cosmetic surgical procedures. The last laugh, however, is on the husband and father who doesn’t notice that they look any different until it’s too late.

Although the tone of Bødy is far from jovial, it never takes its subject matter too seriously. With an escalating series of bad things happening to weak-willed and pathetic people, the humor in Bødy is as black as it gets. As soon as the reader thinks that things can’t get any worse for the characters, things get worse in the worst possible way. As a result, these stories are horrifying and fascinating at the same time.

Humor usually works best when the butt of the joke is in a position of power or otherwise represents the status quo, and an element of discomfort tends to creep in when the character being ridiculed truly is a victim. For this reason, the story “Buttocks” stands out for me as the most disturbing story in the collection.

Hiroe, the former queen bee teenage protagonist of “Buttocks,” suffers severe culture shock after she leaves her home in the country to attend a high school in Tokyo. She lives in a dorm, where she has trouble physically and mentally adjusting to a communal lifestyle. She didn’t want to leave home in the first place, her friends from middle school won’t talk to her anymore, and she learns that the only reason she’s able to live in Tokyo is because her father made a large donation to her school. When one of the other girls living in the dorm calls her fat, Hiroe develops an eating disorder. The reader, who is given intimate knowledge of Hiroe’s mindset and methods, sympathizes with the bulimic Hiroe’s improved self-image and sense of renewed control over her life. It actually seems as if the story will have a happy ending before Hiroe collapses and is revealed to be terrifyingly unhealthy. As her parents carry her out of the dorm, Hiroe overhears the same girl who had mocked her for having hips like a duck whispering how creepy she is now that she looks like a skeleton.

Hiroe may have bullied another girl in middle school, but she didn’t deserve this, and the punch line of “Buttocks” is chilling. In this story, the narrative pattern that characterizes the stories in Bødy is less tragicomic and more genuinely upsetting. It’s easy to laugh at the chauvinist pigs of the first three stories in the collection, but the teenage protagonists of the last two stories are genuine victims of forces beyond their control who receive no sympathy from other characters and turn to desperate measures in an attempt to exert some small measure control over their lives. The emotional range Nonami achieves within these stories is remarkable, as is the skill with which she treads the line between amusement and discomfort.

Nonami Asa is a fantastic writer, and I’m happy that more of her work is appearing in translation. She’s primarily known for her detective fiction in Japan, and Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation of The Hunter is an good example of her gritty hardboiled style. Nonami’s other novel in translation, Now You’re One of Us, is creepy gothic horror that features the black humor and body horror of Bødy without the blunt, cringe-inducing needle-in-your-eye imagery. If you can handle literature with genuinely dark themes, it’s hard to go wrong with Nonami Asa, and Bødy is an excellent introduction to the writer’s work.

The Word Book

Kathryn6 Comments

Title: The Word Book
Japanese Title: 単語集 (Tango-shū)
Author: Kanai Mieko (金井美恵子)
Translator: Paul McCarthy
Publication Year: 1979 (Japan); 2009 (America)
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Pages: 148

The pink cover of this small paperback might lead one to think that it’s a short collection of chick lit. While it’s true that Kanai Mieko is female, and while it’s true that she has often been classified as a “women writer,” The Word Book is just about as far away from chick lit as you can get. The twelve short stories in this collection are perhaps not so much “stories” as they are prose poems, or perhaps even essays written in the form of short stories. Kanai’s language is gorgeous, and the way she presents her ideas is fascinating. The stories themselves are very loosely structured and don’t follow established narrative patterns.

Kanai’s preoccupation in The Word Book is the writing self, or the self who is speaking, or telling a story. Many of the narrators in this collection are writers, and many of them are trying to explain something that happened in the past. Kanai almost fetishizes her narrators as they write about writing and constantly question their ability to tell a story. Perhaps it happened like this, perhaps it happened differently. Who is writing? Who is telling the story? Is the narrator of the story the same person as the protagonist of the story? Many of these stories have multiple narrators within the span of less than ten pages. A reader is faced with two choices – to either puzzle out who the narrators are and what their relationship to one another might be, or to let the narrative flow wash over him or her and simply accept that the narrator of a story is never a stable or unquestionable entity.

In that each of Kanai’s stories resembles something of an intellectual puzzle, I am reminded of Borges’s Labyrinths. In that Kanai’s stories are filled with a multitude of unreliable narrators who may or may not actually be the same person, I am reminded of Faulkner, especially As I Lay Dying. However, since Kanai is still able to infuse her stories with a sense of place and beauty, I am reminded of Furui Yoshikichi (Ravine and Other Stories, translated by Meredith McKinney), another Japanese writer of mysterious short fiction.

An interesting aspect of Kanai’s prose that I think is undeniably characteristic of her and no one else, however, is her play on gender. Kanai is a woman, but all of her narrators are men. To be more precise, Paul McCarthy has translated all of her narrators as men. I have only read a handful of Kanai’s stories in the original Japanese, but it is my impression that the writer takes full advantage of the ability of the Japanese language to not differentiate gender. Why does Kanai write with exclusively male narrators? Or are her narrators all men? Is she intentionally writing within a masculine narrative realm? If this book did not have a pink front cover and an “about the author” blurb on the back cover, would the reader even know that the author of this collection is a woman? Does it matter?

Meta-textual issues aside, I really enjoyed reading The Word Book because of its narrative sophistication, dreamlike atmosphere, and poetic touch. To illustrate what I like so much about this book, I would like to end with a passage from a story entitled “Fiction:”

But after awhile, I changed my mind: my guest’s words were as vague as they were clear, spoken by one who expresses by looks or by his whole weak body the scintillating talent of a born poet. Realizing this, I trembled with envy. Bitter as it was to admit, I was envious of those empty words, not understood even by the man who uttered them, those empty words that shone with a soft, rose-colored radiance. Words such as these, shining words bathed in a soft, rose-colored radiance, precisely because of their emptiness lusted after a shameless ecstasy of the sort one can only experience in dreams. And I thought, feeling a kind of despair, “Long ago my words, too, trembled violently in this shining, soft, rose-colored radiance.”