HAIKYO BUNGAKU: Queen of the Scene

On Kanehara Hitomi's "Snakes and Earrings" and "Meets the World"

Under consideration:

Snakes and Earrings by Kanehara Hitomi (Hebi ni piasu)

Meets the World by Kanehara Hitomi (Mitsu za warudo)

Kanehara Hitomi is a name which I first encountered a few years ago when I read her afterword to Usami Rin’s Idol, Burning. Almost all Japanese paperbacks come with an afterword written by a like-minded author; these are usually rather shallow puff pieces, like an extended blurb, no longer than five pages at most and usually uninsightful. The majority of them remind me of Japanese variety TV shows, which always feature a panel of celebrities whose job it is to react to the actual content of the show in a way that will encourage a heightened reaction from the audience, something like front-facing canned laughter. I’ve read many “explanations” which were desperate attempts to make a limp, fleshless novel seem like more than the sum of its parts. But Kanehara’s afterword was different. She wrote about Idol, Burning in a way which actually did deepen the my understanding and appreciation of that book, adding real-world context while also contributing elements of her own life and thought. Unlike so many of these afterwords, Kanehara Hitomi’s reading of Idol, Burning left an impression on me, and so, after I had finished my essay on Kobayashi Hideo and went looking for the next author to profile in this series, I decided to finally give her a chance.

When she won the Akutagawa Prize for her debut work Snakes and Earrings in 2003, at the age of 20, Kanehara was the second-youngest to ever do so (her co-winner, Wataya Risa, was younger than her by a year). Today she is a fixture on Japan’s literary stage. Several of her books have been turned into films and her new releases are covered in major newspapers. When I picked up a copy of the literary mag Bungakukai just to see what was inside, I opened it and found Kanehara’s face on the first page. What she had written was neither a story nor an essay, but an assessment of the winner of Bungakukai’s prestigious newcomer’s prize, for which she is a judge. To call her a celebrity would perhaps be an overstatement, but she certainly sits high in the court of contemporary Japanese fiction.

Two of her novels, Snakes and Earrings and Autofiction, have been translated into English, though it has been nearly twenty years since the latter of those two (Autofiction) came out, and both appear to have fallen out of print. In the span of time since the English publication of Autofiction, Kanehara has published eighteen novels and short story collections. Compared to similar authors such as Kawakami Mieko or Murata Sayaka, she has not enjoyed much recognition in English.

To summarize her style: over the course of her 22 years as a writer, Kanehara has drawn up leagues of depressed, disaffected, and self-destructive women and has often done so in a way that may-or-may-not be autobiographical. Her writing also treats a variety of Japan’s social problems, usually those related to womanhood. And there is a claustrophobia to her plots which derives from foregone conclusions. The past doesn’t matter half as much as the future, and yet the future is more or less determined.

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Rui, the protagonist of Snakes and Earrings, is a strong example of this fatedness. She never tells the reader about her past and shows little interest in the pasts of those she meets. She defines herself entirely by what she intends to do (split her tongue, get a tattoo, die) and never considers much in the way of alternatives. Her attitude towards all of these is like that of Yeats’ Irish Airman towards his own fate: in balance with the pre-empted pain of her life, a pre-empted death. The novel is dominated by the feeling of one thing sliding into the next, one brush with violence or death that becomes another, and another, until it seems there is no way out, and the way in is equally unclear.

Snakes and Earrings is a novel or perhaps novella (the Akutagawa Prize is given for “short to mid-length fiction”) which centers around body modification and features bouts of violence, a crushing atmosphere, and a gyāru protagonist who is the sort of person to bump into a child while walking in the street and think, “I don’t want to exist in this world […] at the end of the day, I want to burn my body in complete darkness[…] If there is a way, I would like to be a citizen of the underground, and live where the sunlight cannot reach, a place where the laughter of children and love serenades cannot reach.”

When Rui meets Ama at a club in Tokyo, she is immediately drawn to his split tongue. She begins living with Ama, though she doesn’t have any strong affection for him, and dreams of undergoing the months-long process of splitting her own tongue. (Rui is somewhat experienced in the world of body modification, having already enlarged several of her ear piercings from the standard 16-gauge size to the more noticeable 2-and-4 gauge sizes.) Ama soon introduces Rui to Tsuba, owner of the body modification shop Desire, who pierces her tongue and also becomes a second lover for Rui. As Rui modifies her body further and further, increasing the size of her tongue piercing and receiving a large tattoo on her back, she begins to feel with greater certainty that either Ama or Tsuba, both of whom have violent tendencies, will kill her. Most of the novel passes in unease as Rui continues to assure the reader that will she will find upon completion of her split tongue is nothing but death. “Once the tattoo was completed and my tongue was fully split, what would I think?” Rui asks herself near the book’s climax.

“If I had lived a normal life, these aspects of myself would most likely have never changed, yet I had grown and developed them myself. Perhaps I had disobeyed God, maybe it was a kind of egotism. But I have always lived without owning, caring for, or blaming anything. And I am sure that, in the future, there will be no meaning for my split tongue or for my tattoos, either.”

This is the acidic prose of Snakes and Earrings which eats through Rui’s inner world. I was reminded of what little I’ve read of Dazai Osamu, and No Longer Human would indeed be a good description of what Rui wants out of body modification. By covering herself in meaningless tattoos and piercings, she is able to express (literally, press out of herself by means of pain) a lack of meaning which has always been with her her. Towards the end of the book, when it becomes clear that piercings and tattoos will not be enough, she grows even more self-destructive. She stops eating and becomes dependent upon alcohol. Meanwhile her thought process becomes more and more unclear to her, leading to a greater sense of meaninglessness. She appears directly descended from Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Camus’ Meursault, though her break is not with the world, rather with herself. In this aspect, Snakes and Earrings is like many startling debut novels which nonetheless attain critical and commercial success: it borrows an easily recognizable progression, that of the existential victim, and uses it as a pedestal upon which to present the raw power of the author’s language.

Impressive though Snakes and Earrings is, it sometimes allies itself too closely to its narrator’s ambivalence, especially after Ama, the only character who Rui feels any kind of love for, disappears. Kanehara relies on over-the-top expressions of violence, including a few eye-rollingly grotesque images in the book’s closing pages, which blur the line between her thematic use of violence and juvenile shock value. Some of the dialogue is a little on the nose (Tsuba: “To give people life, God must be a sadist.”). But a debut from a writer barely out of her teens which deals with themes like this would, in most instances, be unreadable, and Snakes and Earrings is far from that. In 2003 much was made of its subject and the age of its author, but more than two decades later Snakes and Earrings is still a fine addition to the “pure literature” tradition which the Akutagawa Prize celebrates. It is a study of a kind of person who has probably always been in the world, and will always be in it, despite their strong desire to be anywhere but here.

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Idol, Burning, that novel which introduced me to Kanehara through her afterword, is a book about the Japanese pop-cultural phenomenon of oshi. Oshi is the “Idol” in Idol, Burning, and has some overlap with the term aidoru, the field of Japanese entertainment centering on young male and female talents who sing, dance and act while performing parasocial relationships with their fans. Oshi has a more diffuse and personal meaning, but could be translated as something like a favorite celebrity or fictional character with whom a person feels a strong parasocial bond. In her afterword, Kanehara writes about how most young people in Japan now confess to having an oshi, especially since the pandemic. “Many modern people,” she writes, “are living in a world which is like a kite with its thread cut, and without realizing it they idolize someone because they are in need of something to tie them to the world, to the everyday, to life.”

Kanehara added her own volume to a growing genre of oshi literature with 2022’s Meets the World, a book which is in some ways the exact opposite of Snakes and Earrings. Its protagonist Yukari, is, unlike Rui, neither depressed nor dissociative. She keeps no torturous love affairs, knows no sadistic men. Instead Yukari is a nerd and resolutely single. At 27 years old everything in her life is oriented around her fanaticism for a boys-love manga about anthropomorphized cuts of meat titled Meat is Mine. (Her oshi, for those who may be wondering, is Tomo-san, the Tri-Tip character.)

However, given that more and more of her Meat is Mine friends are getting married and having families, Yukari grows anxious about her own prospects and starts to attend mixers. The novel begins in the wake of a disastrous night out with other young singles which has in turn leads Yukari to find herself drunk and alone in the middle of Kabukicho, Tokyo’s most dangerous neighborhood. It is here that she meets and is saved by Rai, a cabaret worker.

Rai is not the main character of Meets the World, but she is closer to Kanehara’s type, a depressed and ambivalent floater. One of the first things she tells Yukari is that she believes she isn’t meant to exist in this world, that her real, de facto mode is nonexistence. Yukari, fueled first by indebtedness and then by genuine friendship, makes it her mission to save Rai. She moves in with Rai in order to keep an eye on her and comes up with plenty of strategies for restoring her will to live, but in the end, Rai is determined. She disappears while Yukari is away at a Meat is Mine event, and none of Yukari’s attempts to contact her get through.

Yukari is quite upset by Rai’s disappearance. The long denouement shows Yukari’s grieving process, comprised mainly of conversations with Rai’s friends, who are now Yukari’s. Bits of cliched wisdom are spread throughout the final pages in much the same way that gruesome violence was scattered throughout Snakes and Earrings. “If Rai is alive inside you,” Rai’s ex-boyfriend counsels Yukari, “that means she’s alive. Rai, especially in the state that she’s in now, shouldn’t be thought of as a physical existence, but a concept, a thought, or something like that.” The idealization of relationships as a means of riding out their unpredictability becomes Yukari’s primary concern. In time she moves on from Rai, at least somewhat.

Meets the World is an attempt at something lighter for Kanehara, at least light in comparison to Snakes and Earrings. Much of Yukari’s fujoushi personality is comically exaggerated, such as in the way she cannot make it through a conversation without finding connections between the subject at hand and Meat is Mine. Not once in her life has Yukari, like Rui, entertained the notion of becoming a “citizen of the underground.” Kanehara’s attempt at writing someone from beyond her usual range is to be commended — she is a writer in the middle of a successful career with no commercial pressure forcing her to try new things — and she faces the challenge head-on.

But Yukari never really adheres to Kanehara’s world, and this dissonance becomes all the more apparent in the book’s more somber second half, where Kanehara’s attempts to mix musings on the nature of the parasocial oshi relationship and Yukari’s relationship with Rai fail to cohere. One gets the feeling that Kanehara’s imagined reader is meant to be reassessing the difference between social and parasocial connection and concluding that there is hardly any at all, that pixels on a screen may indeed be, at least for some people, sufficient, and that most of our “real-world” relationships are already based in fantasy anyway. Yet given the fact that the vehicle for this reassessment, Yukari, is a caricature by design her revelations are imbued with her own unbelievability.

“Like a water-breathing fish and a land-locked mammal, [Rai and I] shared a time in our lives together, and then returned to being alone,” Yukari says. The kind of solipsism implied by this analogy provides both comfort and pain. It allows her to forgive herself for not saving Rai, but it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that, according to this way of thinking, saving Rai was impossible from the outset. This radical commitment to not knowing the other — in Yukari’s words, that “in the end, all relationships are one way streets” — is an interesting and prickly notion, and Kanehara gives it some real thought, often contrasting Yukari’s conscious attempts to adopt this point of view against scenes of emotional outburst. But in the end, Kanehara selects a note which is all too clear, sweet, and carefree. It is impossible, while living, to fully accept that one is only oneself, and that many of our relationships do, in time, turn into illusions. Judging by the quality of the writing that touches on this theme, I suspect Kanehara is aware of this.

But Kanehara seems to be at a point in her career where a reassessment of everything, including what she and the audience knows, is underway. She is searching for a second wind, but it is not to be found in this book. In an interview, she described Meets the World as a “pop” novel, and to be certain the forcedly upbeat ending is the result of a generic decision on her part which simply did not need to be carried out so thoroughly.

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While researching for these reviews, I came upon a video by a literary YouTuber who briefly referred to Kanehara Hitomi as being upstream of the modern Japanese genre of pure literature. Reading both Snakes and Earrings and Meets the World, I could see how this could be the case. Kawakami Mieko and Usami Rin have clearly been influenced by her in creating their female protagonists, and Kanehara’s focus on strangeness and the body may have had a hand in preparing Japanese readers for Murata Sayaka, who goes leagues deeper. Meets the World is clearly a work by someone who, if no longer at the cutting edge of their scene, is certainly at the top of its hierarchy. Though my appreciation of her work is rather cool — I liked Snakes and Earrings, but can only take so much of that kind of thing — there is certainly a readership awaiting her in English. The only question is how much longer they will be kept waiting.

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