Inhabiting Unconditional Possibility:
The Mermaid as Revolutionary
This collection begins and ends with stories that use one of Hoshino’s favorite recurring figures: the mermaid. In “Paper Woman,” the initial conversation between the fictional Hoshino and Paper gets off to a rocky start, but finds its footing when “Hoshino” mentions that he has written a story called “The Mermaid Myth.” Paper recounts her own past as the girlfriend of a boy with a mermaid fetish, which led her to grow her hair out and dress in costume for him. The culmination of this conversation shifts the discussion to a slightly different register, as Paper mulls over why mermaids make such compelling figures: “It’s the impossibility. But it’s also a gender issue, I’d say. These days there are all sorts of people who are neither man nor woman, or who are mixed racially, and it seems like it wouldn’t be too huge a leap to think about humans mixing with animals, or even mixing with plants and trees. We can imagine these things precisely because of the times we live in. Mermaids are simply ahead of their time. It makes their sorrow all the more palpable.”
In the last novella in this collection, “A Milonga for the Melted Moon,” this mixing becomes as literal as it can, with the two protagonists made of light not only mirroring each other but constantly trading qualities (clothing, gender, voice). Hoshino switches the first person narration fluidly from one to the other until it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between them, forcing the reader into a moment-by-moment registering of sensation from within the space where they bleed together. But this euphoric rush of constant transformation and interpenetrating identities is haunted throughout by the emblem of the real in the form of a mermaid—seen early on as a carving into a railing signifying Réal’s ominous approach and then at the end as a doll carried by Réal and placed on the body of one of the protagonists as he extinguishes her in his shadow.
But beyond the literal use of mermaid imagery in these stories (and in his novels, such as The Last Sigh, with its swimming revolutionary protagonist, and 2000’s Open Your Eyes, the Mermaids Sing, to name just two), one can see how the mermaid provides a conceptual model for the transformational, revolutionary desire Hoshino’s fiction articulates in general. As the quotation from “Paper Woman” illustrates, the mermaid is a figure caught between two modes of being—not quite human, not quite fish; able to inhabit both the land and the sea, but completely at home in neither place. In this sense, all of the main characters in the stories in this collection are mermaids of one sort or another, caught up in a flight from the “real” circumstances of his or her life and attempting to imaginatively move beyond them, to become other in some way and ending up in an ambiguous place of mitigated, incomplete transformation.
For example, Joe, the narrator of “The No Fathers Club,” takes part in the communal imaginative leap of first No Ball Soccer and then the titular No Fathers Club in order to open up his stultifying everyday existence and rediscover his “passion.” And it works—he enters into a series of intense relationships, first with Yōsuke, then Kurumi, and above all with his new “father made of air.” But this endeavor is enabled by a shared commitment to imagine a father—a necessarily doubled and incomplete commitment, as there is a careful parsing of these young people both from those around them who still have fathers and take their existence for granted and from the fatherless who lack the nerve to create them from a whole cloth. What unites club members is not the imaginary fathers but the commit to imagining them, and the uneasy vacillations between Joe believing in his imaginary father and his understanding that his father is imaginary become more jarring as father becomes more real, culminating in the crisis point signified by the father slapping him during an argument. Moments like these abound in Hoshino’s work—moments when the boundary between the real and the imaginary becomes suddenly blurred for the reader as well as the characters in the story. Did Joe imagine the slap and the resulting injury? Did he slap himself? And yet, asking these kinds of questions seems to violate the experience of the story in the same way that the No Fathers Club member who asks about the circumstances of Kurumi’s anecdote about her father educating her about sex violated the rules of the club. Unwittingly, the reader, too, has become a member of the No Fathers Club at this point and, like Joe, is slapped into consciousness of this fact.
And so, at the end of the story, as Joe attempts to reconcile the two realities he’s been inhabiting (with father and without), the reader is also torn between taking his side in abandoning the fantasy of the imagined father and feeling this abandonment as a kind of fundamental betrayal, as Kurumi evidently does. During their final confrontation, it becomes clear that what disturbs Kurumi is not that Joe is willing to abandon their shared fantasy but that he misunderstands the quality that allowed it to be shared—the commitment to the act of fantasizing itself. The “thinness” of Joe’s desire at the end consists less of his inability or unwillingness to believe that his imaginary father is real but his self-serving willingness to abandon his father once he fulfills Joe’s immediate need for him. As she puts it: “All you ever really wanted was to say goodbye to your father. He disappeared before you could do that, so you forced him to come back and let you perform some sort of farewell ceremony with him. Now that’s done, so you don’t have any use for him anymore and you feel like you’re your ‘own man.’”
Here, the story reveals its thematic continuity with seemingly dissimilar stories like “Chino.” “The No Fathers Club” ends with Joe realizing too late that the process of imagination by which he created his father affected more than him alone. It created a community that included those with whom he entered into the fantasy, including not only Kurumi and other members of the club but the imaginary father himself. In “Chino,” the fictional “Tomoyuki Hoshino” fantasizes that he can escape the burden of First World ennui by taking on the glamour of the revolutionary, but finds out through his encounter with Maki that this rather self-serving fantasy also has consequences. To become other than oneself is not a simple process of escape via an alternate identity. The ethical component of Hoshino’s work demands that this process never veer into simple appropriation. Taking on the identity of another risks becoming a process not of liberatory community building but touristic exploitation. In “The No Fathers Club,” Joe helps to create a community of alternate fatherhood with the other club members, and when he abandons this, he reduces his participation in the community to a symptom of his individual lack of normative self-sufficiency, itself just another fantastical narrative, as Kurumi points out: “And what, exactly, is a self-sufficient individual?”
Fantasy, in Hoshino’s world, always involves more than one person and always has consequences and ethical limits. “Sand Planet” spells this out perhaps the most explicitly, showing Yoshinobu fantasizing the connection between the school poisoning incident, the inhabitation of green zones by large numbers of homeless people, and the postwar experiment with Latin American immigration as a way to get at a “truth” more meaningful than the “lies” that keep these stories isolated from each other. Hoshino as author encourages us as readers to contemplate these things in conjunction, thus allowing these conventionally disparate narratives and phenomena to resonate in unexpected ways. But the story also dramatizes the potential violence of interposing oneself into these histories and forcing one’s personal investment in them to stand as their ultimate “truth.” Contemplating the old man performing his show alone in the woods, Yoshinobu thinks about these “words that wanted so badly to be said but refused so violently to be told.” And at the very end of the novella, Yoshinobu violates this stricture when he publishes his own version of the story in the newspaper. The culmination of becoming other in the story takes place as Yoshinobu performs the old man’s show alone in the woods, saying the words without imposing them on anyone else; and it is directly after that, when he sees that the children he forced into the fabricated “truth” he wove into his newspaper article have begun to tell their own story
, that he realizes the violent appropriation and imposition his article represents.
But Hoshino does not mean his work to simply be a set of cautionary tales warning his readers of the dangers of appropriation. Far from it—the opening of fissures in time and space he sees as the purpose of fiction consists of allowing for this “looseness” of identity, providing the medium for the imaginative leaps that allow us to inhabit states of being beyond our own. But there is always a risk in this endeavor, one that constitutes his critique of the postmodernism he also finds so liberating. The risk is that in becoming other, one tames it, turns it unitary and static and simply a function of one’s previous self. The flux of identity should not be considered simply a serial inhabitation of various static identities; this is the position of the tourist, the appropriator, the egotist unaware of his or her privilege. Instead, to become other is to attempt to become a part of the fluidity of the alternate position, to recognize that this will always be an incomplete process, but that this makes it no less necessary as a politics of being. Elsewhere in the conversation with Rieko Matsuura, Hoshino mentions that he has always admired the groundbreaking cycle of novellas on the theme of female-female desire she wrote called Natural Woman: “Just as you attempted to show in Natural Woman, I wanted to show the same sort of minor quality. I am a man, so I attempted to think of it as a man, tried to write on the theme of the ‘Natural Man,’ if you will. And the result of this is to write as an Unnatural Man, to expand the purview to becoming catlike, or plantlike.”12
This discussion was sparked by Matsuura explaining that her favorite of Hoshino’s stories is “We, the Children of Cats,” particularly the way the two main characters question what makes a natural woman or man. Matsuura emphasizes the way the story opens up gendered expectations that gain their coercive force from being thought of as natural, such as the expectation that the couple, now that they’re married, should be trying to have a child. Hoshino sets up the story as an array of different ways this issue plays itself out through the situations of the different characters. Masako is afraid that she may physically be unable to have children, while the narrator is afraid of his own “unnatural” manhood, since he can’t imagine having a child at all. Masako’s friends Kasumi and Ryū are in the midst of a negotiation of surrogate parenthood, Kasumi unsettled by the circumvention of coupledom and marriage this demands and Ryū seeming to celebrate the very unnaturalness of his position as a gay man who wants a child to raise alone, hoping to replicate this unnaturalness into the future through his arranging to have a child this way. But, as Hoshino’s comments hint, there is a range of perfectly natural but inhuman modes of reproduction and family-making in the story as well: the propagation of plants through the cultivation of cuttings in the kitchen, as well as the adoption of the couple by Soccer, the stray cat, who slips in and out of the apartment on his own terms. How do the human and inhuman reflect and inform each other? Can the catlike or plantlike be modes of community and reproduction that are as natural as (or more natural than) those debated by the humans in the story?
In “Air,” the most recent of the stories included in this collection, the question of identity as something that can be alternately “loose” or constricting comes to the fore. The experience of otherness undergone by Tsubasa and Hina disrupts their gender and sexual identities, leading both to think of themselves as suddenly belonging to a “sexual minority” of some sort. But when they attend the Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, they feel alienated by the way the parade presents identity as fully formed and coherent, which is not how they are experiencing their own senses of difference from the norm. Hoshino allows them to find each other at the parade, and their signs of difference, the phantasmatic bodies that had been sensed only secretly, now become mutually sensed, summoned into existence like an erotic version of the game of No Ball Soccer that begins “The No Fathers Club.” In their communion, they summon an alternate body that encompasses both of them, joining them in a way that again resonates with the human yet moves beyond it: flesh and blood transformed into air, a phallus hollowed out, now a conduit of song and breath. And the story ends on a hopeful note, its protagonists disappearing from a “real” existence that would force them back apart into the female/male, gay/straight, majority/minority binaries they have opened their bodies to escape.
But whether the categories that Hoshino renders fluid divide genders, races, classes, nationalities, or even species, they retain their political charge from the play of fluidity against the power relations that work to fix these categories into rigid permanence. Hoshino’s fiction shows an affinity for flux that works against conventional narrative coherence, but this is a necessary part of his project—the structures that “shut down” time and space in our everyday lives take the form of narratives that justify the exercise of state power by demonizing dissidence, that code compulsory heterosexuality as “natural,” that assume the nation-state to be the default unit of identity and cultural difference, and so on. Hoshino’s fictions create openings and resist closure, a textual analog to the in-between-ness that emerges as the emblem of ethical being in figures like the mermaid. They force the reader to become other as well, to inhabit this in-between space of transformation that resolves into neither tourism nor projection.
Which is not to say that nationally inflected Japanese identity does not concern him. Indeed, stories like “Sand Planet” place such issues in the forefront through the use of images that overtly invert and subvert the symbols of the Japanese state. The song sung by Misao, the old man in the woods, replaces the word kimi in the real anthem, which signifies the Emperor, with the word kimin , which literally means “the abandoned” or “thrown-away,” and which I translate as “the Forsaken.” The image of the Japanese flag dyed red literalizes, as the character Yayoi mentions, a real Meiji-era martial song taught to school children that uses the image of the flag’s white field dyed red with the blood of enemies. By reintroducing this image into the supposedly pacifist, demilitarized postwar atmosphere of Japan, the implication is that Japan, as a nation, is still built upon the blood of those it sacrifices to fuel its prosperity, be they Japanese or not (while also opening the question of whether, when Misao returns to Japan brandishing this flag, he is even exactly “Japanese” himself anymore).
And Misao’s adoption of the persona of “Urashima Tarō” in his performance alludes to one of the oldest folk tales in Japan, included in an eighth century text, the Nihongi, and passed down in various versions ever since. The tale tells of a fisherman named Urashima who catches a magic turtle and spares its life, whereupon it transforms into a beautiful goddess. They fall in love and she brings him to the world of the gods, high in the sky (later versions relocate this world to the Palace of the Dragon King, located beneath the sea). After a while, though, he grows homesick for the mortal world and decides to return, despite the divine beings’ entreaties for him to stay. When he does return, he finds that time runs differently in the divine world and years and years have gone by; in desperation, he opens a box that his goddess-wife had given him as a keepsake but cautioned him not to open. It turns out that she herself is in the box, but because he’s opened it, she drifts away, marooning him forever in a former home that no longer remembers him. “When he dried his tears, he sang about her far, cloud-girdled realm,” the tale ends, “But the clouds hid her paradise from him and left him nothing but his grief.”13
Misao’s retelling of the story of his migration to the Dominican Republic and return to Japan uses this tale as a template, but again inverts it. The “divine kingdom” of the Dominican Republic and the pastoral prosperity promised to the poor farmers enticed to move there turns out to be a salt-sown wasteland, and then the representatives of the divine Japanese Emperor (the Japanese word for ambassador, taishi is one horizontal stroke from the word for angel, tenshi refuse the settlers reentry as well, leaving him abandoned to lament in the woods. Hoshino writes the word “Urashima” not with the conventional character
for ura (which, incidentally, is also the ura in Urawa, the area where the old man performs his show in the woods), but a homophonous character, that means “backside.” This reinforces the idea that Japan and the Dominican Republic are on opposite sides of the earth, and the irony of the embedded retellings of the story of their relation is the interchangeability of which island is the true “backside” of the earth. When Misao returns to Japan, he finds himself excluded and doubly dispossessed, and he longs to return to the place he now feels more at home: the island to which at first he felt he’d been exiled. This fits into the larger metaphoric structure of the novella whereby the images of death recycled into new life continually undermine the existing structures that stand for established power and fixed identity. The emphasis on rocks breaking down into sand and then cultivated into fertile soil works against, to take one example, the image of the moss-covered boulder symbolizing the eternal nature of the Emperor and the Japanese state found in the national anthem.
It seems important, though, to remember that even in “Sand Planet,” Misao does not identify as suddenly Dominican, but rather as part of a larger collectivity of kimin: the forsaken, the dispossessed, the discarded. Hoshino distinguishes himself from the kind of opposition to the nation-state that inadvertently reinforces its centrality, which is why it differs from Karatani’s notion of an oppositional—yet still national—political literature. As in “Treason Diary” and “Chino,” the divisions between First World and Third World are presented in “Sand Planet” as two sides of the same coin (like the “lighter-than-air aluminum one-yen coin” that the protagonist of “Chino” longs to distance himself from even as it “buoys” his travels), but the emphasis is on the in-between spaces of passage between these positions. “Sand Planet” dramatizes this in moments like the performance in the woods that reads like a moment of pure witness to Misao’s travels and travails between two sides of the world, or the fantastical penetration of the earth dreamed by Yoshinobu that unites Japan and the island of Hispaniola along the same axis, a root driven into the ground that suddenly transforms into a route, a conduit for connection (this also echoes the phallus-as-flute in “Air”). In “Treason Diary,” Yukinori attempts to write and rewrite a new self in the Spanish-language diaries he keeps, using the “invisible third hand” of his non-native Spanish. And in “Chino,” the protagonist ends up in neither Ilusión nor Realidad, but facedown in the dirt (and in inadvertent sexual union with it, recalling “Sand Planet”) somewhere between the two, his embarrassing erection bespeaking of his still-present desire toward revolution, even as he acquiesces to the impossibility of joining the guerillas.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 27