“I want you to take me away from this city.” I was starting to fade.
“Please understand. It’s impossible. Even if you remained alive, you could never leave. I’m blocking the light, burying you along with the city,” the man seemed to laugh as he said this. Particles of darkness invaded my body, tickling as they penetrated. Or, rather, it was my body itself that was fragmenting, dissolving into the dark.
“Hold this and sleep in peace.”
The man set the stuffed mermaid on my chest. As I raised my arms to embrace it, I realized I was gripping something in my right hand. Unable to see anything within the darkness of your shadow, I traced its form with the fingers of my left hand as I held it in front of my uncomprehending eyes before recognizing it at last as your knife.
I had lost the strength in my right arm already, and the knife lay on my chest. The mermaid fell away. My chest grew hard and strong, a muscled plateau. I tried to see the man, but my right eye ached, blinded. I imagined the silvery fluid that ran from it as it flowed beyond the shadow’s edge. I tried again to look up at the man. All I saw was darkness, all I heard was a sound like the wingbeat of an enormous bird. Occasionally I would see a tiny flash of light but that was it. Where had you gone? I was sure that I had really touched you. That I had really kissed you. The echo of your lips on mine was all I had now, and it was enough. Something flashed again. I reached my left hand up to grab it. Complex, refracted light needled my left eye. It glittered silver, a knife covered in fine engravings as if tattooed. I could hear the light. It sounded like velvet ripping, like a hollow tree trunk pounded, like plucked strings, like singing: yira yira yira. My left hand lost its strength and fell, dropping the knife. It rocked back and forth, clattering as if against a wooden floor. I was all that remained here, and I was alone.
In memory of Antonio Agri
Afterword: The Politics of Impossible Transformation
The first short story in this collection, “Paper Woman,” opens with an extended meditation on the nature of literature. The protagonist, who shares his name with the author, laments that people no longer read novels “as if printing the words on the interiors of their bodies.” For the Tomoyuki Hoshino of the story, this unwillingness defeats the purpose of literature for both the reader and the writer. Literature, he explains, is “an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible.”
By his own account, “Paper Woman” was the first short story (as opposed to novella) Hoshino wrote after making his debut in 1998 with the Bungei Prize–winning The Last Sigh (Saigo no tōiki), and the musings embedded within it ring Rosetta-like, providing a key for decoding the themes he pursues in a body of work characterized by otherwise wildly divergent experiments in style and form. The drive to become something other than oneself is both an aesthetic and ethical demand for Hoshino, articulating a definition of writing as art and of this art’s purpose among other modes of human expression and activity. The figures, images, and situations that recur within his works dramatize moments of transformation that act not only as resonant incidents within the stories but as instances of metafictional commentary on the activity of writing that produced them. Hoshino invites his reader to follow him in this process of becoming other, of rendering otherness inhabitable without flattening or domesticating it. The promise is joyful, but also demanding—not only is the reader expected to be willing to “print” these words within her or his body, but the joy of transformation is indivisible from the despair felt when the attempt to transform inevitably reaches its limit. To inhabit these stories is to inhabit a space that, while ephemeral and illusory (a mirage, a heat shimmer), nonetheless marks the reader with evidence of this passage between joy and its opposite. “One could say that a novel’s words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between these two feelings,” explains the fictional “Hoshino” of “Paper Woman,” but as the rest of the stories in this collection demonstrate, it is an apt description of the experience of reading the literature of the real Hoshino as well.
Modern Japanese Literature’s “End,”
Hoshino’s Beginning
Hoshino made his literary debut at thirty-two, relatively late in life (at least by the standards of the youth-obsessed Japanese publishing world) and at a time when some of the most influential voices in the critical establishment were busy declaring Japanese literature to be over. Most famous of these was Kōjin Karatani, the author of the now-standard The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980; English translation 1993). Having defined the beginnings of modern Japanese literature in this examination of the early Meiji Era (1868–1912) politics of confessional “naturalism,” Karatani declared the “end” of modern Japanese literature in a 2004 essay published in the journal Waseda Bungaku, the text of a speech he’d been giving for a few years previous and which he subsequently expanded into a book the following year.
In Origins, Karatani demonstrates how turn-of-the-nineteenth-century “modern” confessional literature played an important, and troublingly complicit, role in articulating a newly defined sense of Japanese subjectivity amid the Meiji government’s assertion of itself as an imperial power commensurate with its European colonial peers. In “The ‘End’ of Modern Literature,” he argues that during the course of the 1990s and 2000s, the status of Japanese literature eroded to the point that it can no longer play such a role, for good or for ill, in the creation of what it means to be Japanese. Literature has moved steadily out of the mainstream culture and become bound to the articulation of minority voices or the output of “subcultures,” like otaku fandoms centered on manga, animation, or other mass cultural forms. In other words, modern literature’s implication in “mainstream” Japanese history, its power to advance (or resist) expansionist prewar colonial policies or post–World War II capitalist development has reached its terminus in the present neoliberal order that has wrested literature from its privileged space within national consciousness and reduced it to just another commodity that articulates nothing beyond the price consumers are willing to spend on it. Literature has “completed its purpose,” Karatani declares, and is now indistinguishable from any other commodity in a global marketplace. It therefore may reach beyond the boundaries of the Japan-as-nation (as is the case with otaku-targeted “light” literature, which is popular with the international otaku community), but this very property also limits its influence to market segments corresponding not with a “mainstream” Japan but to various subcultures and special interests within it.1
Karatani’s claims are continuous with the larger flow of left-leaning cultural criticism in Japan, which came out of a post–World War II moment of intense critical reflection on the legacy of Japanese imperial fascism that led to the tragedies and horrors committed in the name of the Emperor during the war. Writers such as Kenzaburō Ōe and Kenji Nakagami are celebrated within this body of work for their openly political fiction, which challenged the status quo by exposing these elements of the past and militating against their continued, if disavowed, presence within the rapid capitalistic expansion of the 1960s and 1970s. Much literary criticism coming out of this discourse prizes literature insofar as it articulates a countercultural consciousness that opposes and attempts to remake the mainstream national culture of Japan. This brand of reading literature politically frequently focuses on issues defined by the idea of Japan as a unique nation—analyses of the Emperor system, for example, or “unique” features of the Japanese family or social system. Karatani’s interventions in the 1980s and 1990s focus on how the modern nation-state form that was instituted in the late 1800s affected the way people thought of themselves as individuals and as members of a nation, tracing this history through an analysis of canonical literature and its role in shaping that discourse. Indeed, he and his contemporaries show how the concept of “canonical” or “pure” literature itself emerged at the same time the idea of literat
ure as a “national” art form did, in the process demonstrating how implicated modern literature has been in systems of power as a nationally mediated mode of cultural legitimacy. And in the case of Karatani’s close association with and promotion of Nakagami in the 1970s and 1980s, this critical effort helped to add a vital and oppositional political voice to the postwar literary edifice by exhorting the countercultural power of his writings, effectively changing the nature of Japan’s literary canon by helping add a writer like him to it.
There is a limit to this way of defining the political potential of literature, however. Due to its emphasis on the nation as the governing unit of politics and culture, opposition registers within this kind of analysis solely through its relation to the mainstream. The Meiji Period is interesting for Karatani, for example, because it is a historical moment that installed certain writers and certain kinds of writing as “modern” and “Japanese,” and he sees in this moment the possibility for other kinds of writing to have been installed this way instead. It was a moment of unfulfilled possibility, when different alternative national literatures could have won out and affected the then-emergent discourses on Japanese-ness and perhaps resulted in a different Japan. The despair articulated in his declaration of modern Japanese literature’s “end” in 2004 finds its root in Karatani’s perception that it is no longer through national literature, however alternative, that this kind of political change can be effected. Karatani urges his audience to no longer “think through literature”; rather, they should “separate from literature, and then think” of effective ways to combat the deleterious effects of global capital.
Ironically, the same Waseda Bungaku issue that begins with Karatani’s essay asserting the end of literature’s sociopolitical relevance ends with the results of a survey of literary figures who have been asked for their thoughts on two hot-button political issues of 2004: the deployment of Japanese armed forces to aid the UN force in Iraq and a possible revision to the Japanese constitution that would render them a conventional military rather than the Self-Defense Force they have been since the end of the American Occupation in 1952. Hoshino was one of the literary figures who responded substantially (as opposed to Haruki Murakami, for example, who sent a fax stating that “as a matter of principle” he “does not respond to surveys”), and within this response, one can see how a contemporary writer might address the issues raised by Karatani’s rather dispiriting essay.
Indeed, Hoshino’s opening sentence reads like a direct response to Karatani’s closing one. “My fundamental stance,” he writes, “is that to apprehend the issues arising at the meta-level from such an inquiry—that is, how is it that these issues have taken the form of questions like ‘Should the Self-Defense Force be deployed abroad?’ or ‘Should the Constitution be revised?’, and what is the mentality of those (myself included) who accept such questions at face value?—I must think through them by writing fiction.”2 He goes on to distinguish between these meta-level inquiries and his immediate personal reactions (“I have a website where I can write freely about those”),3 which he claims are formed as much out of his lack of knowledge of the fundamental issues involved as anything else. As an individual, he is against both the deployment of Self-Defense Forces to Iraq and the revision of the Constitution because neither question seems to have been formulated with regard to the fundamental issues lying beneath them. What is a military? What role should it play, if any? What is the history of the Constitution’s creation and how has that affected subsequent Japanese history? For Hoshino, these vital questions fall by the wayside as the public sphere grows obsessed with questions of deployment and revision in isolation.
So what is literature’s role in pursuing underlying issues of the age? Hoshino takes the opportunity offered by the survey to offer an answer: “Fiction is neither a medium from which to expect immediacy nor a method for effecting change to the social system in an easily observable form; at best, it signifies little more than the driving of a tiny wedge. And yet, the tiny fissure so created also signifies the sole impediment left to the total shutdown of time and space.”4
In this sense, Hoshino’s answer to Karatani’s challenge seems to be that fiction cannot be reduced to its historical implication in the mainstream articulation of Japanese national subjectivity. To do so would be to expect from it the ability to directly change the social system in easily observable ways and constantly be disappointed. Karatani suggests that neoliberalism has robbed literature of its power to affect the mainstream and therefore we must “separate” from it to change society, but Hoshino here implies that the ascription of this power to literature arises from mistaking literature’s historical positioning within larger power structures for something inherent in literature itself.
Hoshino’s literary endeavors are not simply an extension of the more forthright political musings found in his essays and on his website, but are instead explorations taking advantage of a medium that allows a fundamentally different type of questioning to take place. The importance of writing fiction for Hoshino lies not in the sheer number of people who might read it or in whether the “right” people approve or argue about it, but because it allows the possibility for both author and reader to inhabit a different world—a different time and space—from the one conventionally available to us. A novelist’s words chip away at this conventional world and a “tiny fissure” opens up, allowing those stifled by the closed circuits formed by the routines and regimes of everyday life to breathe a different, freer air. And in this sense, to read Hoshino is to read a literature unafraid to be “minor”—that in fact finds its purpose there. Whereas Karatani dismisses the rise of “minority” literature in postwar America as the beginning of the “end” of modern literature there (“Starting in the 1970s, black, and then Asian-American, women writers and the like began to emerge. And indeed, their endeavors were literary, but not the kind of thing that could affect society as a whole.”), Hoshino asserts literature’s ability to allow readers and writers to inhabit minor or otherwise excluded or unthinkable positions as precisely what allows literature to affect “society as a whole”—one story, one reader, one word, one fissure at a time.5
Literature as Transformation: Between
Ilusión and Realidad
It would not be too bold to say that every story in this collection narrates a transformational movement, and usually more than one (or one that takes place on several levels at once). Some are explicitly such, like the quest to “become paper” undertaken by the title character in “Paper Woman,” or the passages between modes of gendered embodiment experienced by the two protagonists of “Air.” Others are more metaphorical, embedded within narratives told in a more or less realist mode, such as the Japanese protagonist’s attempts to shed his First World privilege and become a revolutionary Latin American guerrilla in “Chino” or the testing of the limits of one member of a couple’s ability to see the world from the other’s point of view found in “We, the Children of Cats.” And in some stories, like “A Milonga for the Melted Moon,” not only the characters but the entire world of the story exist in a state of constant, dreamlike flux, the prose gliding freely between points of view and frames of reference in an uncanny re-creation of the titular Latin American dance (as well as paying homage to the magical realism found in Latin America’s literary tradition, which is similarly preoccupied with shapeshifting and synesthesia). These transformative movements run along lines of unexpected affinity and longing, and may be said to be one of the major “fissures” Hoshino’s writing opens up in the surface of the everyday, and thus constitutes a major part of its meaning and politics.
Hoshino’s works frequently explore alternative versions of the everyday world. “Treason Diary,” for example, is recognizably inspired by a series of incidents that made the news in Japan and internationally during the late 1990s. The two young men with violent pasts in the story are based on the perpetrators of two famous incidents that gripped the Japanese public sphere at
that time and lead to a panic about depraved acts committed by the younger generation (even as the overall rate of juvenile crime was trending downward). First is the 1997 Shônen A (or “Boy A”) Incident, in which a fourteen-year-old boy was found to have committed a series of attacks on younger children, resulting in two deaths and one major injury; his use of a baroque pseudonym to sign the letter he left with the decapitated head of one victim and those he later sent to the media and police, as well as the extensive diaries that were found in his room after his arrest and published in the mainstream press, make him an obvious basis for the character of Kiyoto. The subsequent “Butterfly Knife Incident,” in which a young boy killed his English teacher at school with a knife that resembled one used in a popular television drama at the time, resembles the situation of the narrator, Yukinori. The details of the incidents differ in ways large and small from how they are portrayed in the story, however, marking Hoshino’s critical distance from (rather than sensationalist replication of ) the media narratives he plays upon. Further, he places both boys in Peru, allowing their stories to play out in a context removed from the national media narratives their real-life counterparts find their stories embedded within—and frequently distorted to suit, especially in the sense that within Japan, these narratives of savagely criminal youth were marshaled by the state to justify revisions to the Juvenile Law that lowered the age of possible criminal prosecution of minors from sixteen to fourteen in 2000, then to “around twelve” in 2008.
Hoshino further distances his narrative from conventional understandings of juvenile crime as individual or generational monstrosity by allowing his young offenders to pursue a path not of successful or unsuccessful assimilation back into Japanese society, but political resistance. The attack on the Japanese Ambassador’s Residence that forms the climax of “Treason Diary” connects these Japanese figures of juvenile crime to the real-life siege of the Residence in Peru by members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, from December 17, 1996, to April 22, 1997. Hoshino thus creates an alternative version of the world that allows him to make connections between simultaneous media “incidents” that are rendered otherwise unthinkable by the way they were presented to the public at the time. Conventional accounts of juvenile crimes emphasized the grotesque particulars of the crimes and thus created a sense of these young men as bearers of “unimaginable” forms of consciousness. Their narratives were thus politically neutralized, unable to signify anything beyond a sense of growing, inscrutable menace from a generation that had been “indulged” by a system of laws that fostered anonymous rehabilitation rather than public punishment. On the other hand, the siege of the Ambassador’s Residence in Peru was presented as an act of terrorism motivated by the radical but obscure politics of the MRTA that callously put innocent Japanese lives in danger, a media narrative that disallowed any consideration of the MRTA’s position or the possible legitimacy of their struggle against the totalitarian policies favoring the very rich that characterized the regime of Peru’s then-president, Alberto Fujimori. This allowed the eventual storming of the Residence by government troops to be framed as a justified and even happy outcome, the violence of the situation placed on the shoulders of the resistance fighters even as they were executed without trial and, in some cases, after their voluntary surrender.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 25