Tag: suspense fiction

Swallows

Kathryn3 Comments

Natsuo Kirino’s 2022 novel Swallows follows an impoverished young woman who becomes a surrogate birthmother for a high-performing couple on the cusp of middle age.

Riki works a full-time temp job as a receptionist at a general hospital, but she can only barely make rent in an aging apartment building in Tokyo. Her parents back in Hokkaido don’t have any money, and she’s completely on her own after leaving a toxic romantic relationship. Her best friend at work, Teru, isn’t doing much better, especially not with an unreliable boyfriend who pressures her to do sex work on the side so she can pay the interest on his debts. 

To raise money, Teru registers to sell her eggs under the auspices of a Japan-based fertility service, and she attempts to persuade Riki to join her. Riki is tired of eating bargain convenience store food, wearing third-hand Uniqlo clothing she buys online, and being harassed by the shitty men who live in her garbage apartment building – so she agrees.

Riki’s application attracts the interest of a company representative who thinks she’d be the perfect fit for a married couple looking for a surrogate birthmother, Motoi and Yuko Kusaoke. Riki has doubts about this situation, which is only dubiously legal to begin with, but the Kusaokes offer her a life-changing amount of money. Once Riki has signed a contract, the husband, Motoi, becomes overbearing in his need to control Riki’s private life; and, to spite him, she has casual sex before receiving his sperm. When she becomes pregnant with twins, she can’t be entirely sure that Motoi is the father. To make matters even more complicated, Yuko feels more sympathy for Riki than she does for her husband, and she’s considering ending the marriage.

Swallows is more suspenseful than you might suspect. Who is the father of the children? Will Motoi and Yuko separate? Will Riki carry the pregnancy to term? And, if she does… what then?

Despite its strong forward momentum, the narrative pacing of Swallows is uneven. The story takes a while to get going, and the opening in particular feels like a series of political talking points in an essay about economic precarity in contemporary Japan, especially in relation to young women. Moreover, perhaps because the author is using the characters to present an argument, they seem to change their position every time a new circumstance arises. While it’s fair to harbor ambiguous feelings about a major life decision, this back-and-forth drags down the middle third of the novel, which feels about fifty pages too long.

Still, Kirino isn’t wrong about the challenges facing young women in Japan, nor is she exaggerating the absurdities surrounding fertility treatments and procedures. I’ve been watching these discussions evolve in academic circles for the past decade, and it’s cathartic to see Kirino come out swinging as she demonstrates the effects that abstract political policies can have on real people. Even as someone who doesn’t live in Japan and isn’t interested in pregnancy, I was still captivated by the human drama played out on the stage of individual lives.

For me, the star character of Swallows is Ririko, Yuko’s friend who works as a professional artist specializing in erotic shunga paintings. Ririko is asexual, aromantic, and only interested in sex as a visual motif in her art. As such, her perspective on romance and pregnancy feels original and refreshing, especially in contrast to the constant waffling of the other characters. 

In addition, the scenes with Ririko are where Lisa Hoffmann-Kuroda’s translation shines especially brightly, as Ririko’s rough language (especially concerning sex) is humorous and colorful without ever stumbling into the realm of coarse or cringe.

Ririko’s family owns a small suburban hospital, and she operates a studio on the property. After Yuko introduces her to the now-pregnant Riki, Ririko invites her to live in the hospital while doing light part-time work as her administrative assistant. This portion of the novel is almost utopian, as Riki is cared for in her pregnancy by what is essentially a commune – a community of (mostly elderly) people who provide companionship and support while Riki does untaxing but important work in exchange for room, board, and a small salary. 

I really enjoyed this part of Swallows not just because of the warm and cozy vibes (by which I mean the fourth-act narrative cooldown necessary to heighten the impact of the fifth-act narrative resolution), but also because I appreciate that Kirino offers a practical and viable solution to the very real issues pertaining to economic precarity that dissuade so many women from even considering pregnancy.

Swallows might be an interesting book to pair with Sayaka Murata’s novel Vanishing World; but, without getting into why Vanishing World’s treatment of pregnancy and Japan’s demographic shift is so disappointing, I have to admit that I infinitely prefer Kirino’s speculative but still grounded application of utopian imagination.

Even if you’re not interested in the topic of pregnancy in Japan, you might be surprised by how much suspense the author manages to generate with the question of whether or not the protagonist will carry her pregnancy to term. Swallows isn’t one of Kirino’s most plot-focused or psychologically astute novels, perhaps, but I still flew through this book, which keeps the reader guessing until the literal last page. Which is fantastic, by the way. Good for her.

とんこつ Q&A

KathrynLeave a comment

とんこつ Q&A collects four stories by Natsuko Imamura, the author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Each of these stories is built on a cute and wholesome premise that develops in a dark and strange direction.

The title story is about a woman with social anxiety who creates a written script to help her navigate her job as a server at a small diner called Tonkotsu. Her efforts are aided by the recently widowed owner and his young son, who teaches the narrator to speak in Osaka dialect like his late mother.

The narrator’s script gradually expands beyond professional dialogue into everyday pleasantries, and she ultimately becomes a ghostwriter for the diner owner’s new wife. This scenario seems like a perfect set-up for a sweet and gentle romantic comedy, but it gradually becomes more disturbing as the narrator cheerfully crafts the diner owner’s new wife into a living doll.  

The three other stories in the collection are about middle school bullies whose punishment is far worse than their crime, an aggressively clueless wife who gets away with murder, and a very sketchy coworker. Imamura’s prose is smooth but cuts like a knife, and the situations she crafts are never what they seem. I wouldn’t say that these stories have twist endings, necessarily, but the way their wholesome coziness slowly sinks into social horror is fascinating to watch.

The Woman in the Purple Skirt

KathrynLeave a comment

Japanese Title: むらさきのスカートの女 (Murasaki no sukāto no onna)
Author: Natsuko Imamura (今村 夏子)
Translator: Lucy North
Publication Year: 2019 (Japan); 2021 (United States)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pages: 216

The Woman in the Purple Skirt begins as a charming set of observations about a woman who lives in a quiet neighborhood. It soon becomes clear, however, that there is something creepy about the narrator, who calls herself The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan.

The specificity of the narration raises many questions. Why is the narrator so obsessed with the Woman in the Purple Skirt? How is she able to observe her so closely? Is she stalking this woman? Or is she perhaps talking about herself in third person? Is she making up a fantasy version of herself, or is she projecting her personality onto a real woman? If so, why? Who is the Woman in the Purple Skirt? Who is the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan?

The Woman in the Purple Skirt isn’t suspense, necessarily, and it’s certainly not the “thriller” that the publisher seems to be trying to market it as, but the experience of reading this story is unsettling. The novella won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which is awarded to work from emerging writers that pushes boundaries and has a certain air of being “literary.” Despite the stylish chick lit cover of the American edition, the plot of The Woman in the Purple Skirt is almost depressingly mundane.

After a series of temp jobs that she quits after only a few days, the Woman in the Purple Skirt finds employment as member of the cleaning staff at an upscale hotel. She seems to be having an affair with one of her supervisors, and rumors spread that her salary is disproportionately high. At the same time, certain imbalances in inventory cause her coworkers to suspect that she is stealing. As the atmosphere at work becomes more hostile, the woman’s relationship with her supervisor also deteriorates. Meanwhile, the narrator, who is also a supervisor on the hotel’s cleaning staff, continues to glide through the life of the Woman in the Purple Skirt like a shadow.

This story is banal, but the subtle uncanniness of the narration forces the reader to view these normal events in normal lives with a sense of unease. The prose is sparse, the language is simplistic, and the affect is almost completely flat. Lucy North’s translation is reminiscent of Raymond Carver, especially in terms of dialog. Like Carver’s short fiction, the themes that emerge from beneath the placid surface of the narration are distressing: economic precarity, alienation, and the dangers of aging without a social network or financial safety net.

Despite its engagement with contemporary social issues, there’s nothing about The Woman in the Purple Skirt that requires specialist cultural knowledge, as the experience of struggling with loneliness while making minimum wage is equally shitty everywhere. I’d recommend this novella to anyone who enjoyed (or was at least moved by) Convenience Store Woman, as well as anyone concerned with urban anomie who entertains doubts about the ethics of low-wage work.

Because of the intriguing questions it raises and the unfortunate relatability of the discussion it’s likely to inspire, I would also recommend The Woman in the Purple Skirt as a text in a class on contemporary Japanese fiction. In addition, I think the novella might work well as a text for upper-level Japanese language classes, as its polished yet accessible prose evades the deliberate opacity of most Akutagawa Prize-winning work. Imamura has a field day with the narrative ambiguities made possible by the Japanese language, so it might be interesting to read the original side-by-side with North’s translation, which makes a number of tough decisions that nevertheless read as smooth and effortless.

Acclaimed author Natsuko Imamura’s first work to appear in English translation is short enough to be read in the span of an hour, but it’s worth spending time with. It’s difficult to say that a book as genuinely creepy as The Woman in the Purple Skirt is an enjoyable read, but the novella is a darkly shining jewel of literary fiction that invites and rewards analysis and introspection.

Tokyo Decadence

Kathryn3 Comments

Tokyo Decadence

Title: Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories by Ryu Murakami
Author: Murakami Ryū (村上 龍)
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Publisher: Kurodahan Press
Publication Year: 2016
Pages: 280

Tokyo Decadence contains fifteen stories drawn from five of Murakami Ryū’s collections published between 1986 and 2003. As translator Ralph McCarthy explains in his acknowledgments, he has been translating his favorite Murakami stories since the late 1980s, and now he’s finally able to publish them thanks to the blessing of the author and the encouragement of Edward Lipsett of Kurodahan Press.

The first story in Tokyo Decadence, “Whenever I Sit at a Bar Drinking Like This,” has a passage at the beginning that reads as follows:

It’s probably safe to say that everyone sitting here is looking for some sort of sin tonight. The circumstances are different for each, of course, but everyone has the same general destination in mind. No one gets drunk in order to raise their moral standards.

It’s probably safe to say that no one opens a collection of Murakami Ryū’s short fiction in order to raise their moral standards. If you’re looking for some sort of sin, you’ve found yourself the right book. All of the stories in Tokyo Decadence are surprising and unique, but they all move toward the same general destination – sex and drugs and blood and tears.

This first story takes the form of an elaborate fetch quest across the seedy underbelly of Shinjuku in which the protagonist must exchange promises for favors. His goal is to get one of his former lovers to testify in court that they were sleeping together so that another of his former lovers doesn’t claim common law marriage and sue him for divorce. The point seems to be that people are terrible and selfish creatures, but it’s a lot more fun arriving at this conclusion than you’d expect.

The second story, “I Am a Novelist,” involves another strange situation in which a man posing as a bestselling writer gets a girl at a hostess club pregnant. When her manager insists that he meet the young woman, she quickly admits he’s not the person she slept with, but the writer still takes her out to dinner. She tells the writer that she’s a fan of his work, so he tries to get her to fall in love with him instead of his impersonator. It doesn’t work (obviously), and the novelist ends up finding out that he was just a minor character in someone else’s story.

In other stories, a trucker loses his wife and his job and becomes a host at a gay club, a guy with no self-esteem invades a woman’s home and smashes her television, and a young prostitute buys herself a topaz ring to remind herself of a musician whose world she can never enter. In “Penlight,” a call girl with serious issues talks about her imaginary friend to a guy she meets at a bar, who is interested in her body, but in the way you think (unless you happen to be thinking of horrific murder and cannibalism). A few of these stories are drawn from Murakami’s 1988 collection Topaz, which became the basis for the 1992 film Tokyo Decadence, which was directed by the author and banned in a handful of countries precisely because it’s the sort of movie you’d expect to have been directed by the author.

If you’ve read Murakami’s work before, you know what to expect. Since all of these stories are twenty pages or less, however, there’s no slow buildup to the carnage. That being said, the violence is tempered with irony, black humor, and intriguing characterizations that elevate the stories above simple splatterfests.

In contrast, the three stories drawn from the 1995 collection Ryu’s Cinematheque are vaguely autobiographical.

In “The Last Picture Show,” the 18-year-old narrator is living in Kichijōji and trying to make it big with his blues band. His upstairs neighbor, who is obviously a yakuza, wants to pay him to pick hydrangea leaves in Inokashira Park to dry and then sell as marijuana to American soldiers. In “The Wild Angels,” the 18-year-old narrator has started a relationship with a woman who works as a hostess, which makes him feel like less of a man, so he starts shooting heroin. In “La Dolce Vita,” the college student narrator hooks up with an older woman who lives in Yokosuka and gets her drugs from the American army base, which doesn’t end well.

To me, these coming-of-age stories were nowhere near as interesting or amusing as the murder stories, but they provide an interesting picture of the 1970s that serves as a counterpoint to the stories of the other Murakami; these stories forgo nostalgia in favor of an emphasis on the grittiness and despair and self-indulgent navel gazing of fringe counterculture.

The last third of Tokyo Decadence eases up on the drug use but maintains its focus on sex and emotional violence. Some of the stories reference each, and I got the sense that I was only being glimpses into a larger narrative. I dearly wish we lived in a world in which Ralph McCarthy was able to publish his translations of entire Murakami collections instead of selected stories, but each piece included in Tokyo Decadence shines brightly enough on its own merits that the reader is not disappointed by the relative lack of context.

I thoroughly enjoyed Tokyo Decadence. The collection portrays the Japan of the bubble and postbubble decades as a place where anything in your wildest dreams and darkest nightmares could happen. Murakami’s fiction is a love letter to the infinite possibilities of urban life delivered with style and panache. Just be warned – Tokyo Decadence is not for the faint of heart.

Tokyo Decadence will be released on March 15, 2016. A complete table of contents can be found on its page on the Kurodahan Press website.

Review copy provided by the noble and selfless people at Kurodahan Press.