Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:We
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Japanese
Born in Los Angeles, raised in Japan. * http://www.akashicbooks.com/author/tomoyuki-hoshino/ * http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/hoshino
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2001005710
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2001005710
HEADING: Hoshino, Tomoyuki
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PERSONAL
Born July 13, 1965 in Los Angeles, CA.
EDUCATION:Waseda University, B.A., 1988. Studied in Mexico, 1991-1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, essayist, and guest commentator for newspapers and journals. Worked formerly as a journalist for Sankei, as a subtitles writer for Latin American and Spanish films 1996-2000, and as a creative writing professor at Waseda University 2004-2007.
AVOCATIONS:Watching soccer. Playing soccer.
AWARDS:Bungei Prize, The Last Gasp, 1997; 13th Yukio Mishima Prize, The Mermaid Sings Wake Up, 2000; Noma Literary New Face Prize, Fantasista, 2003; Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, Ore Ore, 2010.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tomoyuki Hoshino is a writer, essayist, and guest commentator for newspapers and journals. Hoshino was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1965, but his family moved to Japan when he was two. Hoshino received his bachelor’s degree from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, in 1988. Following graduation, he worked as a journalist for Sankei, a conservative Japanese newspaper. After two years he moved to Mexico to study abroad. He spent the majority of the years between 1990 and 1995 in Mexico.
In 1995 he moved back to Japan and worked as a translator, translating Spanish-language films into Japanese. He began publishing novels in Japanese in 1997. Hoshino taught creative writing at Waseda University from 2004-2007. In addition to writing books, Hoshino writes short stories and essays and provides sports commentary for newspapers and journals.
Lonely Hearts Killer
Lonely Hearts Killer takes place in an island country. Following the death of the young emperor of the island, the country has fallen into despair. What begins as a few faithful followers falling into bedridden depression quickly develops into a nationwide phenomenon.
The story is divided into sections, each told from the perspective of a different narrator. The first section focuses on Shoji Inoue, a young unemployed filmmaker. Shoji was not affected by the events, but he becomes fascinated by the countrywide grieving phenomenon. As he films the resulting desperation, he is involved in a critical turning point. Two men respond to the event by committing suicide on camera, resulting in another nationwide chain reaction of individuals taking their own lives.
The narration then switches to Iroha, a woman who was connected to the two men who committed suicide. From a mountain residence where she has retreated to avoid scorn due to her relation to the men, she provides another perspective on the situation. A reviewer on the website Tony’s Reading List described the book as “dystopian in a detached, literary way.”
We, the Children of Cats
Hoshino’s collection, comprised of five short stories and three novellas, ranges in subject matter from economic globalization to the malleability of gender and identity. Michael A. Morrison in World Literature Today described the book as a show of Hoshino’s “unwavering integrity of his uncompromising vision and his willingness to trust and challenge his readers.”
In the first story, “Paper Woman,” a writer seeks to embody paper, typifying words themselves and not their meaning. In “Chino,” a privileged Japanese tourist travels to South America to seek out an escape from his national and cultural identity. In “Air,” the characters embark in drastic identity transformations.
Hoshino’s stories create familiar yet otherworldly realities, with a touch of real-world critique. A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that, through the stories, Hoshino is able to “offer a bit of political commentary on the uglier aspects of nationalism.”
Me
The beginning of Me paints a world identical to our own. The reader is introduced to protagonist Hitoshi Nagano, a camera salesman, sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant. Out of boredom, Hitoshi steals the cell phone of his coworker. Later, while Hitoshi is investigating the contents of the phone, the mother of the real owner calls. Hitoshi picks up and pretends he is Daikichi Hiyama, his coworker, and proceeds to scam the man’s mother out of a sum of money.
What begins as a story of trickery quickly devolves into a bizarre alternative reality. When Hitoshi returns to his apartment, he finds the old woman he has just swindled at his home cooking for him, convinced that he is indeed her son and she his mother. Over the next few days everyone around him seems to play into this reality, leaving Hitoshi unsettled and confused. Seeking answers, he goes to his real family home. There, his mother rejects him and he finds what appears to be an identical impersonator pretending to be him.
Hitoshi chooses to accept this new reality, acquiescing to his new identity as Daikichi. However, as the days pass he discovers that he has not simply switched identities with another man. Instead, there are numerous versions of him, or “ME”s showing up all over Tokyo. Hitoshi initially befriends his doubles, but as time progresses and more and more of the populace turns into imitations of him, mistrust and chaos take over.
As the story becomes more bizarre, the significance of each individual version of Hitoshi loses independent importance, resulting in violence and casual murder. A contributor to Publishers Weekly described the book as a “highly plotted, absurd world where normally shocking movements are rendered as reportage, depicted with the same emotional weight as casual conversations.”
As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Hitoshi’s enemies come from within just as much as from outside of himself. A reviewer on Tony’s Reading List wrote that the book is a critical commentary on Japanese society, noting that it is an “excellent take on the problems of Japanese society, looking at what it means to play your role in the community while keeping a sense of individuality.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 11, 2010, review of Lonely Hearts Killer, p. 33; April 24, 2017, review of Me, p. 63.
ONLINE
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (January 24, 2018), John Whittier Treat, review of Me.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 24, 2018), review of We, the Children of Cats.
Tony’s Reading List, https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/ (June 18, 2013), review of We, the Children of Cats; (August 19, 2013), review of Lonely Hearts Killer; (July 27, 2017), review of Me.
World Literature Today Online, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ (January 24, 2018), Michael A. Morrison, review of We, the Children of Cats.*
Tomoyuki Hoshino
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tomoyuki Hoshino (星野 智幸 Hoshino Tomoyuki, born July 13, 1965) is a Japanese writer. Born in Los Angeles, he accompanied his family back to Japan before he was three years old. He attended Waseda University and worked for a while as a journalist after graduating in 1988. He spent the better part of the years 1990-5 living in Mexico before returning to Japan, where for a time he worked translating from Spanish-language movies into Japanese. In 1997 he published his first novel The Last Gasp, for which he was awarded the Bungei Prize. He won the 13th Yukio Mishima Prize for his second novel The Mermaid Sings Wake Up, which was published in 2000. He won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Fantasista in 2003. Other works include The Poisoned Singles Hot Springs (2002), Naburiai (2003), Lonely Hearts Killer (2004), Alkaloid Lovers (2005), The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy (2006), The Story of Rainbow and Chloe (2006), and the collection We the Children of Cats (2006). His short story "Sand Planet" was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize for 2002 *[1].
He has published many short stories and essays, both fiction and non-fiction. He also writes guest commentaries for newspapers and journals on sports (especially soccer), Latin America, politics, nationalism, and the arts. His short story "Chino" has been translated into English by Lucy Fraser, and is now part of his short story collection "We, the Children of Cats" (2012), published by PM Press and otherwise translated by Brian Bergstrom; his novel Lonely Hearts Killer has been translated into English by Adrienne Hurley and likewise published by PM Press.
Hoshino travels frequently and has participated in writers' caravans with authors from Taiwan, India, and elsewhere. In 2006, his critique of Ichiro Suzuki's remarks at the World Baseball Classic were considered controversial by some, and so have some of his other writings related to Japanese nationalism, the emperor, sexuality, bullying, and Japanese society. Also in 2006, the literary journal Bungei dedicated a special issue to Hoshino and his work. He teaches creative writing at Waseda, his alma mater. In January 2007, he was nominated again for the Akutagawa Prize, this time for Shokubutsu shindanshitsu [Plant Medical Examination Room].*[2]
In 2011, Hoshino won the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize for his novel Ore Ore (2010), which explores the meaning of identity in the postmodern world. The title takes its name from the first-person Japanese pronoun ore (俺 'I' or 'me'). Early in the novel, the narrator engages in a kind of scam known in Japan as a ore-ore sagi (俺俺詐欺 'me-me scam'), in which he calls up an older person, pretends to be a relative, and tries to get the person on the other end of the phone line to send money. In the novel, the narrator finds himself unwittingly pulled into the life of the person whose identity he has fraudulently assumed, at the same time that someone else assumes his identity. This starts a chain-reaction of identity-stealing that extends to the edges of society, creating an increasingly surreal and dangerous world in which no one is exactly who they seem. The novel has been translated as ME by Charles De Wolf for Akashic Books.
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More from Hoshino
Born in Los Angeles in 1965, Tomoyuki Hoshino returned to Japan with his family before his third birthday and spent the next twenty-three years living in the greater Tokyo-Yokohama area. After graduating with a degree in literature from Waseda University in 1988, he worked for two years as a journalist for the conservative Sankei newspaper. He left that job and Japan to study abroad in Mexico from 1991-92. After briefly returning to Japan, he received a Mexican government scholarship and resumed his studies in Mexico, where he stayed until August of 1995. From 1996-2000, he tried his hand at writing subtitles for Latin American and Spanish films.
His debut novel The Last Gasp was published in 1997 and awarded the Bungei Prize. His second novel The Mermaid Sings Wake Up was published in 2000 and awarded the Mishima Prize. In 2003, he was awarded the Noma Bungei award for Fantasista, a collection of three novellas. His other book-length works include Naburiai (1999), The Poisoned Singles Hot Springs (2002), Lonely Hearts Killer (2004), Alkaloid Lovers (2005), A Worussian-Japanese Tragedy (2005), The Tale of Rainbow and Chloe (2006), We, Kittens (2006), The Examination Room for Plants (2007), Dokushin (2007), Mugendô (2007), and Suizoku (2009).
From 2004-2007, he taught creative writing at Waseda University. He continues to write short stories, novels, and novellas, as well as essays and guest commentaries for newspapers and journals on topics ranging from sports to politics. In 2006, the literary journal Bungei dedicated a special issue to Hoshino's writing that includes interviews, commentaries by other writers and critics, and the short story “No Fathers Club.”
In addition to his time in Mexico, Hoshino has traveled widely throughout Latin America, as well as Spain, Taiwan, Korea, the U.S., England, and India. He has participated in Writers' Caravans with authors from India and Taiwan, and he continues to forge ties with his literary counterparts elsewhere in Asia in particular. His fiction has won him the admiration of notable figures such as the celebrated Korean poet Ji-woo Hwang, who urged Hoshino to continue writing literature with "great depth of feeling."
Hoshino is also an avid soccer fan and amateur player whose commentaries on the game (including the politics of the 2002 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by Korea and Japan) have attracted a following independent of his fiction.
He maintains a blog (in Japanese) at http://hoshinot.exblog.jp/ and the website Hoshino Tomoyuki Archives at http://www.hoshinot.jp/.
Check out translator Brian Richard Bergstrom reading from Tomoyuki Hoshino's We, the Children of Cats:
Purchase Link
We, the Children of Cats
Author: Tomoyuki Hoshino
Translated by: Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser
Publisher: PM Press/Found in Translation
ISBN: 978-1-60486-591-2
Published August 2012
Format: Paperback
Size: 8 by 5
Page count: 288 Pages
Subjects: Fiction/Literary Collection
$20.00
A man and woman find their genders and sexualities brought radically into question when their bodies sprout new parts, seemingly out of thin air…. A man travels from Japan to Latin America in search of revolutionary purpose and finds much more than he bargains for…. A journalist investigates a poisoning at an elementary school and gets lost in an underworld of buried crimes, secret societies, and haunted forests…. Two young killers, exiled from Japan, find a new beginning as resistance fighters in Peru….
These are but a few of the stories told in We, the Children of Cats, a new collection of provocative early works by Tomoyuki Hoshino, winner of the 2011 Kenzaburo Oe Award in Literature and author of the powerhouse novel Lonely Hearts Killer (PM Press, 2009). Drawing on sources as diverse as Borges, Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, Kenji Nakagami and traditional Japanese folklore, Hoshino creates a challenging, slyly subversive literary world all his own. By turns teasing and terrifying, laconic and luminous, the stories in this anthology demonstrate Hoshino’s view of literature as “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…a novel’s words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between these two feelings.” Blending an uncompromising ethical vision with exuberant, free-wheeling imagery and bracing formal experimentation, the five short stories and three novellas included in We, the Children of Cats show the full range and force of Hoshino’s imagination; the anthology also includes an afterword by translator and editor Brian Bergstrom and a new preface by Hoshino himself.
Praise
“These wonderful stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish, co-mingling daily reality with the envelope pushed to the max and the interstice of the hard edges of life with the profoundly gentle ones.” —Helen Mitsios, editor of New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan and Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan
“Like a heat shimmer on a summer’s day, Hoshino Tomoyuki’s stories tantalize and haunt. From 'Paper Woman' to 'A Milonga for the Melted Moon,' Hoshino writes of people stranded between poles of reality and dream—with each option as uncertain as the other. Wonderfully translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will be required reading.” —Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan and translator of Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
“What feels most striking and praiseworthy about Hoshino’s work is how he deals with ambiguity—not as a fusion of multiple meanings, nor as their simple coexistence, nor as symbolic of meaning’s absence; rather, he deftly weaves these concepts together and then, in the space between them, makes his escape.” —Maki Kashimada, award-winning author of Love at 6000° and The Kingdom of Zero
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Lonely Hearts Killer
By Tomoyuki Hoshino
Translated by Adrienne Carey Hurley
ISBN: 978-1-60486-084-9
Published November 2009
Format: Paperback
Size: 8 by 5
Page count: 288 Pages
Subjects: Fiction
$15.95
“I don’t want to go so far as to say such-and-such was the deciding factor. Only that it’s too late now. From this point onward, we have no choice but to rebuild our relationships anew. For that to happen ... I’ve written it so many times that I’m not rehashing it yet again.”
What happens when a popular and young emperor suddenly dies and the only person available to succeed him is his sister? How can people in an island country survive as climate change and martial law are eroding more and more opportunities for local sustainability and mutual aid? Where can people turn when the wildly distorted stories told on the nightly news are about them? And what can be done to challenge the rise of a new authoritarian political leadership at a time when the general public is obsessed with fears related to personal and national “security”? These and other provocative questions provide the backdrop for this powerhouse novel about young adults embroiled in what appear to be more private matters – friendships, sex, a love suicide, and struggles to cope with grief and work. Lonely Hearts Killer compels readers to examine the relationship between state violence and interpersonal brutality while pointing toward ways out of the escalating terror. PM Press is proud to bring you this first English translation of a full-length novel by the award-winning Japanese author Tomoyuki Hoshino.
For excerpts from the author/translator Q&A, click here.
Praise
“Since his debut, Hoshino has used as the core of his writing a unique sense of the unreality of things, allowing him to illuminate otherwise hidden realities within Japanese society. And as he continues to write from this tricky position, it goes without saying that he produces work upon work of extraordinary beauty and power.”
--Yûko Tsushima, award-winning novelist
“Reading Hoshino’s novels is like traveling to a strange land all by yourself. You touch down on an airfield in a foreign country, get your passport stamped, and leave the airport all nerves and anticipation. The area around an airport is more or less the same in any country. It is sterile and without character. There, you have no real sense of having come somewhere new. But then you take a deep breath and a smell you’ve never encountered enters your nose, a wind you’ve never felt brushes against your skin, and an unknown substance rains down upon your head.”
--Mitsuyo Kakuta, award-winning novelist
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The Latest News:
Hidden for 100 Years: Kanno's Secret Message from Prison
Many dedicated and wonderful people are working hard on contributions for the PM Press documentary history of anarchism in Japan. The following news (from a major corporate news outlet) comes as we prepare to mark the 100th anniversary of the High Treason Incident (which I discuss briefly in the translator's introduction to Lonely Hearts Killer). Many thanks to Daigo Shima, a Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at McGill University, for his speedy and expert translation. Note that people's names in the article appear as they would in Japanese, with the surnames first.
Brent Lue translates Tomoyuki Hoshino for the PM Press Blog!
Tomoyuki Hoshino writes about Israel's attacks on Gaza, Prime Minister Aso, differential power, marriage, the Academy Awards, bailouts, instinct, genetics, and more!
Quitting America
Tomoyuki Hoshino writes about the U.S. presidential elections.
Tomoyuki Hoshino on governments, nationalism, and happiness
Why do we have governments that only make us unhappy?
Tomoyuki Hoshino on the death of Kenji Nagai
Kenji Nagai, a photojournalist, was killed during the protests in Burma last September. Hoshino compares the responses to Nagai's death to the bashing of Japanese aid workers and journalists taken hostage in Iraq.
Who is Tomoyuki Hoshino?
PM Press will soon be bringing folks who read English, but who don't read Japanese their first chance to read one of Tomoyuki Hoshino's novels.
Highlights from Tomoyuki Hoshino's Online Journal
In his online journal, Tomoyuki Hoshino addresses a wide range of political, social, literary, and cultural concerns and questions. The following journal entries were translated by Brent Lue, who is currently working on a translation of Hoshino’s first novel, The Last Sigh (or The Last Gasp or The Last Breath) – Saigo no toiki. Brent is an undergraduate student in East Asian Studies and Economics at McGill University. He is an expert baker, is active in musical theater, and is 19 years old.
Tomoyuki Hoshino on Nationalism and Baseball
If you click here, you can read the original Japanese essay by Hoshino that appeared in the Tokyo Newspaper on April 3, 2006. The following is Jodie Beck's translation of that essay. Jodie Beck is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at McGill University. Ms. Beck is specializing in contemporary Japanese fiction, and her research interests include globalization, neoliberalism, nationalism, and gender studies.For readers (like me) who don't follow baseball, Ichirô Suzuki is a famous and popular player from Japan who currently is an outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, a Major League baseball team in the United States. For readers unfamiliar with the Yasukuni Shrine controversy, please check out this essay for a brief introduction.
What Others Are Saying...
Reviews
We, the Children of Cats: Tony's Reading List
We, the Children of Cats: Experiments in Manga
We, the Children of Cats: The Complete Review
We, the Children of Cats: Publishers Weekly
We, the Children of Cats: The Japan Times
We, the Children of Cats: Junbungaku
We, the Children of Cats: Nihon Distractions
The Anarchy of Translation: Haiku Soru
Lonely Hearts Killer: Metropolis
Lonely Hearts Killer: American Leftist
Mentiones
Longlisted for 2013 Best Translated Book Award Fiction
We, the Children of Cats: A Review
by Ash Brown
Experiments in Manga
April 10th, 2013
The first story, 'Paper Woman', gives us an insight into Hoshino the writer, right from the very start:
"As I've continued my professional writing career, I've come to think of it as 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. One could say that a novel's words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between those two feelings. Which is why a novel should never be seen as a simple expression of an author's self."
p.1 'Paper Woman'
This idea of transformations is an important one for Hoshino. In fact, in this story, the transformation is a very unusual and literal one...
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
by Ash Brown
Experiments in Manga
April 10th, 2013
As Bergstrom's illuminating afterword asserts, transformation is the key to We, the Children of Cats. Some of the stories are more realistic (some are even based on or inspired by actual events) while others are more fantastic, but they all deal with transitions, growth, and changing identity in some way. Hoshino's writing style tends to be discursive and his stories aren't always particularly straightforward, but his imagery is powerful and poetic. Every once in a while there would be a thought, idea, or phrase that would momentarily floor me. After reading We, the Children of Cats, even I felt changed or transformed in some nearly indescribable way. We, the Children of Cats isn't an easy collection, at times it can be difficult and even troubling, but I am glad that I put in the effort needed to truly appreciate it.
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
by M.A.Orthofer
The Complete Review
February 21, 2013
The lesson Hoshino of the opening story learns is that: "novels are already meaningless, that their meaning has always been illusory." Nevertheless, Hoshino the writer continues to write -- if not to find meaning so at least to capture and present, at least momentarily, the illusory.
With its very different stories -- of varying length (several are, after all, even billed as novellas) and intensity -- the collection can feel a bit unwieldy and is perhaps best read intermittently, rather than in one go. Nevertheless, We, the Children of Cats is an interesting collection, and certainly a good introduction to an interesting writer.
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
Pubishers Weekly
November 2012
Nearly every character in Hoshino's uneven collection of short stories and novellas yearns to escape the boundaries of their gender, national identity, or, in many cases, their own flesh. Hoshino is an avowed lover of magical realism, and the transformative, dream-like aspects of that genre wield a heavy influence on this work. In "Paper Woman," a writer, with the help of her husband, strives to become like paper—able to contain words but not their meaning—only to meet with tragic consequences. In "The No Fathers Club," dead fathers return to life in the overactive imaginations of a group of outsider school children. With all the symbiosis and osmosis going on in Hoshino's tales, a kind of post-gender eroticism bubbles up, with some characters sprouting new genitalia and fusing with their partners during trysts, while others switch genders so frequently it becomes pointless to try to keep track of who's who. Hoshino manages to offer a bit of political commentary on the uglier aspects of nationalism as well as Japan's harsh treatment of its indigent population following WWII, but the insistent imbalance between what's attainable and what's beyond reach fails to make the collection a satisfying whole. (Nov.)
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
By Gianni Simone
The Japan Times Online
October 21, 2012
In the end, by refusing to passively accept conventional truths regarding sexual, cultural and national identity, and inciting in both his characters and readers this revolutionary desire to change, Hoshino's work becomes more political than any open social criticism or ideologically charged novel.
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
by Will E
Junbungaku: Japanese Literary News and More
September 7th, 2012
t’s a powerful question, a universal one, and so whether his stories take place in Japan or in Latin America or in a dreamland, Hoshino is adept at striking that raw nerve. Hoshino offers no pat answers, but the way he explores the question has led me to believe he is one of the best authors writing in Japan today. His work demands to be translated and read. Let’s provide the audience for Hoshino that the Paper Woman so desperately craved.
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We, the Children of Cats: A Review
Nihon distractions: Readings in translated Japanese Literature
July 14, 2012
Finishing these stories and novellas is like stepping back from a vista where the world has briefly appeared in it's truer or more original and realigned form, shot through with dynamic paradoxes and an unerring ambition to challenge, taking uncharted routes and reconfiguring truths that do indeed lodge themselves in the reader, unreservedly recommended, my thanks go to PM Press.
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Lonely Hearts Killer
By James Hadfield
Metropolis
February 11, 2010
This is a demanding, messy piece of work, ripe with narrative ambiguities. Subsequent events such as the 2008 Akihabara massacre and the demented media blather over Noriko Sakai have lent it added prescience, resulting in a novel that—let’s not beat around the bush—is more compelling than anything I’ve reviewed in the past year.
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Lonely Hearts Killer
American Leftist Review
February 3, 2010
By contrast, Mokuren challenges the emerging social Darwinism in an editorial entitled, I Won't Kill, and rightists direct their rage towards her and the residents of her retreat center. Her challenge, and the violent rightist response to it, becomes the center of a media circus, reducing her attempt to emotionally reach people into yet another form of entertainment. If there is a moral to Hoshino's postmodern fable of alienation and impotence, it is that before there can be a political revolution, there must first be a social one within our hearts and minds. Or, even more, a social one renders the need for a political one superfluous.
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Tomoyuki Hoshino was born in 1965 in Los Angeles, but moved to Japan when he was two. He made his debut as a writer in 1997 with the novella The Last Gasp, which won the Bungei Prize. His novel The Mermaid Sings Wake Up won the Mishima Yukio Prize, and Fantasista was awarded the Noma Literary New Face Prize. His other novels include Lonely Hearts Killer and The Tale of Rainbow and Chloe. ME is his latest novel.
Tomoyuki Hoshino
Tomoyuki Hoshino was born in 1965 in Los Angeles, but moved to Japan when he was two. After graduating from college, he worked as a journalist at one of Japan’s major newspapers, then went to Mexico for further study and fell in love with soccer and Latin America. He made his debut as a writer in 1998 with the novella Saigo no toiki (Last Gasp), which won the Bungei Prize. In 2000, he established his reputation as a serious literary writer with the novel Mezameyo to ningyo wa utau, which won the Mishima Yukio Prize. Fantajisuta was awarded the Noma Prize for New Writers in 2003. Hoshino employs a highly original style that subverts and plays with unconventional scenarios. His other works include the novels Ronri hatsu kira (Lonely Hearts Killer) and Niji to Kuroe no monogatari.
Print Marked Items
Me.
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Me
Tomoyuki Hoshino, trans, from the Japanese by Charles De Wolf. Akashic, $15.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN
978-1-61775-448-7
Hoshino (The Mermaid Sings Wake Up) draws inspiration from the "It's me" telephone scams that prey
mostly on Japan's elderly, opening with mischievous Hitoshi Nagano as he takes the cell phone of Daiki
Hiyama and (posing as Daiki) asks the young man's mother for 900,000 [yen]. Hitoshi explains that the wire
is to pay a debt to a friend, and then gives her his actual name and bank account. Three days later, Daiki's
mother appears in Hitoshi's home and, calling him Daiki, treats Hitoshi as if he is her son. From this point,
the ordinary life of the characters transforms, as Hoshino leads readers on a psychological and philosophical
journey in which the value of individualism is questioned and tested in escalating absurdist measures. When
Hitoshi visits his old home, he finds another young man living as his parents' son and is treated as an
imposter by his mother. The novel is most successful during Hoshino's riffs on parents obsessed with
making sure their children achieve respectable vocations and marriages, value children more for their lack
of individualism than for their unique talents and eventually losing sight of their adult children's identities.
In Hoshino's dystopia, identities are fluid and any one is as good as another. The novel pushes this idea into
a highly plotted, absurd world where normally shocking movements are rendered as reportage, depicted
with the same emotional weight as casual conversations. Hoshino's ambitious novel is pleasingly
uncomfortable. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Me." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 63. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250784/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=db2c4f77.
Accessed 8 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250784
Lonely Hearts Killer
Publishers Weekly.
257.2 (Jan. 11, 2010): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lonely Hearts Killer Tomoyuki Hoshino, trans, from the Japanese by Adrienne Carey Hurley. PM Press
(IPG, dist.), $15.95 paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-60486-084-9
Something feels lost in translation in Hoshino's parable-like tale of intrigue set in a conformist island nation
that bears a striking resemblance to Japan. After the popular young emperor dies and is replaced by his lessthan-competent
sister, two alienated young men post online a personal/political manifesto and participate in
a murder-suicide that sparks wave after wave of copycat murder-suicides. Narration is then assumed by
Iroha, a young woman who was connected to both men and is now hidden away at a mountain retreat
because she fears for her life and wants to avoid the public scorn stemming from her relationship with
originators of the murder-suicide trend. Unfortunately, the prose is achingly dull, and the narrative's lack of
focus prevents readers from connecting. Clearly, there's supposed to be symbolic and satirical significance,
but the lack of clarity--both in the writing and the concept is deadly. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lonely Hearts Killer." Publishers Weekly, 11 Jan. 2010, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A216630980/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aaf517b9.
Accessed 8 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A216630980
We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino
FICTION
Author: Tomoyuki Hoshino
Translator: Brian Bergstrom and Lucy Fraser
Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser, tr. Oakland, California. PM Press (IPG, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781604865912
We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino“My wish is for the words in these stories to . . . lodge themselves within the bodies of all of you.” By thus concluding his introduction to this collection, Tomoyuki Hoshino throws down the gauntlet: reader, you have been warned.
Since the publication of his first novel in 1997, Hoshino has won multiple major awards, culminating in the 2011 Ōe Kenzaburō Literary Award for Ore Ore (2010). Yet only in 2009 was one of his novels published in English, when PM issued Ronrii haatsu kiraa (2004) as Lonely Hearts Killer.
A nearly nihilistic tale of rebellion and revolution, Lonely Hearts Killer overtly engages hot-button geopolitical issues—climate change, authoritarianism, and the culture of fear—as well as social issues particular to modern Japan—majoritarian pressures to conform and the suicide cult among young Japanese.
The stories in We, the Children of Cats are more interior, intimate. “Chino” fuses economic globalization with Japan’s crisis of national identity in the character of a young Japanese man who flees to “a small country below Mexico” to eradicate all “Japaneseness” from his being. The title story examines Japan’s predicted steep population decline via the disintegration of an already dysfunctional relationship. Masako’s family press her and her husband, Naru, to start a family, arguing the long-standing tradition that a woman’s primary responsibility is to marry and then bear and raise her husband’s children. But Masako stridently believes in her right to decide whether to ever have children.
Some collections can be equally appreciated regardless of the sequence of reading their contents. Not this one. Read in the order presented, the five short stories teach us how to understand Hoshino’s fictions and prepare us for the three novellas to follow.
In the first story, “Paper Woman,” Hoshino embeds ideas and images he will subsequently develop. The narrator, writer “Tomoyuki Hoshino,” states his credo: writing fiction 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. . . . A true experience of reading is always located in the territory where these two forms of consciousness intermingle.”
In the last short story, “Air,” Hoshino brings, with disturbing ex-plicitness, his key theme of transformation to the physiological machineries of gender in the human body. As the psyches, obsessions, and bodies of his two characters merge, Hoshino frequently and without alerting us switches point of view between them, thereby involving us with the story’s core issue, the mutability of identity and gender. Then, with carefully controlled ambiguity, he leaves the ending open to multiple interpretations.
In his preoccupation with modification of body and being, Hoshino shares an affinity with cinema’s poet of imperfect transformations, David Cronenberg, in films such as Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), and The Fly (1986). Hoshino also reminds me of Cronenberg in the unwavering integrity of his uncompromising vision and his willingness to trust and challenge his readers.
In a blog entry, Hoshino wrote, “The power of words to break apart the violence of the majority, to vivify the position of the minority, lies not only in the words themselves but also in their context and their emotional core.” This power surges through each fantasia of failed transformation in this remarkable collection.
Michael A. Morrison
University of Oklahoma
July 27, 2017
‘ME’ BY TOMOYUKI HOSHINO (REVIEW)
While everyone has a minor identity crisis from time to time, most people are pretty aware of who they are and where they’re from. However, in the latest work to appear in English from Japanese writer Tomoyuki Hoshino (no stranger to outlandish concepts), we encounter a society where the idea of the individual identity has become rather blurred. You see, it’s not just that people are struggling to remember who they really are – it’s more that they’re not really sure if they’re an individual at all…
*****
ME (translated by Charles De Wolf, review copy courtesy of Akashic Books) begins normally enough at a McDonald’s, where Hitoshi Nagano, a bored camera sales assistant, decides on a whim to swipe the mobile phone of the office worker sitting next to him. Later, when he’s browsing voice messages on the stolen device, the real owner’s mother calls, and before he knows it, Hitoshi has assumed the identity of Daikichi Hiyama and scammed ¥900,000 from his ‘mother’. However, the stunt backfires when he returns to his apartment the following day to find the old woman cooking and cleaning – for him.
Somehow, Nagano/Hiyama has slipped into a world where he has become the man he stole from, and over the next few days, everyone around him plays along, constructing a new identity for him. Confused and unsettled, he decides to pay one of his rare visits to the family home, only to be rejected by his mother and told to get lost by someone who looks very familiar. And that’s where it all starts to get *really* weird.
ME took out the 2011 Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, and having read one of Ōe’s more off-beat works recently (The Pinch-Runner Memorandum), I can see why the great man admired Hoshino’s book. It’s an excellent take on the problems of Japanese society, looking at what it means to play your role in the community while keeping a sense of individuality. However, in Hoshino’s trademark style, what starts off as a story based in reality very quickly pushes the envelope in terms of everyday life, soon taking us into far more speculative territory.
The key to the novel is the narrator’s discovery that not only does his identity seem to have changed, but also that there are other people around that don’t just look like, but almost definitely are, him. He finds the first of these people when he visits his parents’ home, or what he believes to be his parents’ home. With the young man he encounters there assuming the identity of Hitoshi Nagano, he is content to stick with his new persona, Daikichi (Daiki) Hiyama, and a student the new Hitoshi encounters becomes the third member of their small group of MEs (as they call themselves).
There’s far more to the similarities than a physical resemblance, however, and the three new friends are delighted to discover that they get along so well, each sharing the others’ interests and frustrations. After a fun day together, the narrator begins to dream of a society of MEs:
I slouched in my seat and fell into a reverie. In it, I was working for the Our Mountain branch of Megaton. All of my coworkers were MEs, as were the customers. All the thousands living there – no, the tens of thousands – were MEs too. With those colleagues I enjoyed perfect mutual understanding, our teamwork resembling a beautifully performed symphony, as knowing all our customers’ hopes and expectations, we sold them the ideal cameras at just the right price – clerks and clients basking in happiness.
p.118 (Akashic Books, 2017)
A society of like-minded souls, each looking out for the interests of others – a utopian idyll?
Erm, no… Anyone who has tried another of Hoshino’s novels in English, Lonely Hearts Killer, will suspect that the tranquility won’t last too long, and the second half of the novel turns Daiki’s utopian dream into a dystopian nightmare. Quickly, the number of MEs begins to increase, soon spreading from young men to women, older people and even babies, and the more there are, the less they want to interact with those like them. Far from opening up to each other, the MEs experience a lack of mutual trust, hiding away in order to avoid giving in to violent tendencies, or becoming the victim of others’ outbursts. The trouble with this is that if you think like everyone else, you’re probably going to do exactly what they do (and go where they go, too…).
It’s hard not to take ME as an allegorical take on Japanese society, with the spread of the MEs critiquing a homogenous society. The narrator realises too late the downside to his dreams of togetherness:
I felt that I no longer knew a single human being. Who were my friends, my colleagues, my mother, my father, my siblings? I had no idea, and thus I was equally ignorant of my own identity. For all of them, their contours were composed of unconnected dotted lines. I was simply and wholeheartedly a ME. Outdoor, indoors, in a train or in a car, all that I surveyed was ME, ME, ME. Among ourselves we were inflicting wounds, erasing each other. (p.162)
In a clever twist on real life and the competitiveness of contemporary society, it’s not the outsiders that are under threat in the world of Hoshino’s novel, but the insiders. Those who are not MEs are simply ignored while the abundance of MEs means that keeping your head down is no longer an option – it’s attack or be attacked…
It’s a little lazy to assign influences in a review, but it’s hard to look past names like Ōe and Kōbō Abe when reading Hoshino’s work, and there are hints of the two Murakamis too in the casual Americanised manner (Haruki) and the writer’s desire to destroy Tokyo from time to time (Ryū). However, Hoshino has a style all of his own, and what works best in ME is the way in which the story never stops developing. It would have been easy for the writer to simply take the initial premise as the impetus for the story and then explain how and why the switch happened. Instead, he continues to develop the worldview, with the society he’s describing crumbling before we’ve even got to grips with it, and by the end of the novel our sense of ‘story’, ‘narrator’ and ‘identity’ have been seriously challenged.
I’d never heard of Akashic Books before being made aware of this book, but I’m very happy that they decided to bring it out. Literary fiction with a speculative bent, it’s a novel I highly recommend, and there’s a lot to like about the finished product apart from the story itself. There’s a translation of Ōe’s comments on awarding his prize, a short word from De Wolf about a few Japanese terms (although there’s little here that will confuse the average reader) and an excellent cover that ties together the idea of text messages, the iconic Tokyo crosswalks and the theme of the book. If you click on the photo I took and look very carefully, you might notice something rather interesting. You see, it’s not always easy to stand out from the crowd…
ME: A Novel (Translated by Charles De Wolf)
Image of ME: A Novel
Author(s):
Tomoyuki Hoshino
Release Date:
June 6, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Akashic Books
Pages:
256
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
John Whittier Treat
Tomoyuki Hoshino, born 1965, is one of Japan’s more compelling younger writers, but he remains virtually unknown abroad. Translator Charles De Wolf and Akashic Books now help to remedy this with Hoshino’s award-winning novel ME, originally published in Japan in 2010 under the title Ore ore.
The imaginative story of a rather unimaginative camera salesman, ME features Hitoshi Nagano; his troubles begin with his impulsive theft of a cell phone from another customer at a McDonalds. They end with a post-apocalyptic future for everyone in Japan.
ME can be read as an allegory for the lives of that listless, ambitionless generation of Japanese young people we are told distinguishes the economic juggernaut postwar Japan once was from the failed nation it is now, after decades of economic stagnation and catastrophes both natural and manmade. The time frame of the novel is unclear—Nagano has a Walkman and a cell phone—but it is surely set in Japan’s extraordinarily discouraged present-day moment in history.
His saga narrated in Hoshino’s workman-like prose, Nagano soon finds his identity duplicated and exchanged with an increasingly number of strangers who at first physically resemble him but, in time, as the “proliferation” “accelerates,” come to include the whole world. As indicated by the inordinate amount of time he and his fellow “MEs” spend in MacDonald’s—“MacDonald’s was my true home,” “a sanctuary”—his life is dull, routine, and unfulfilling, a series of riding and changing trains here and there only to have unsatisfying encounters wherever he is headed.
“[T]he other MEs were no different from me, or rather, we were all the same,” Hoshino writes. “Like me, they didn’t know where to go and were unsure of their identity.” Passages such as this may mark the novel as a familiar chronicle of adolescent angst, except these people are not teenagers—they are grown-ups, albeit stalled like children in what Nagano comes to recognize as an exit-less “farce” played out in the endlessly rote schedules of first family, then school and finally work.
Like most Japanese fiction chosen to be translated today, ME is quirky. People turn into animals (Nagano becomes a sardine at one point), have supernatural powers, and eventually descend into cannibalism.
In an afterword written by Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, who awarded the novel his eponymous prize, Ōe praises Hoshino because his work reminds him so much of the Absurdist fiction left us by his late friend, Abe Kōbō.
But ME is not, in the end, any new incarnation of Face of Another or Woman in the Dunes. Abe’s novels were philosophically absurd with lessons for us in the real world. In contrast Hoshino’s ME is simply nihilistic, with a rushed and unconvincing quasi-happy ending appended to it. People die—are murdered—in Hoshino’s novel as a society made up of none but other MEs becomes unmanageable. But death has no power to affect the reader because we have no human attachment to the human replicants that run wild over an already demoralized Japan. There is, in other words, no alternative to the lives and demises of Hoshino’s people.
The story would be a cautionary tale, except for that we don’t know what else anyone could possibly do. In some of his earlier novels, unfortunately not translated, Hoshino—who unlike most Japanese writers had a cosmopolitan upbringing (he was born in Los Angeles and lived in Mexico)—was far more serious and perceptive in interrogating the rules in modern life that bind us only to extinguish our spirit. But ME reads like some kind of fairy tale, like the one in which a princess kisses a frog and makes him a prince, though here it is closer to the other way around. Unfortunately Tomoyuki Hoshino’s ME may add to the overseas readers’ impression that contemporary Japanese fiction is inevitably not for adults, but for our high-school children who have always found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to find a place they belong. But in real life, as we know from our own experience, they eventually do, and that is where the actual story begins.
John Whittier Treat's most recent book is the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House. He is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University and has also taught at Univesity of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas, Seoul National University, and Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
June 18, 2013
‘WE, THE CHILDREN OF CATS’ BY TOMOYUKI HOSHINO (REVIEW)
This year was a bad one for J-Lit in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with no Japanese book on the longlist for 2013. Over in the US though, one Japanese work did make it onto the (very) longlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the American equivalent of the IFFP, so with Japanese Literature Challenge 7 upon us, I thought it would be a good chance to check it out – mainly to see if the BTBA judges knew what they were doing 🙂
*****
Tomoyuki Hoshino’s We, the Children of Cats (translated by Brian Bergstrom and Lucy Fraser, review copy from publisher PM Press) is a collection of the writer’s assorted short works. It offers us five short stories and three novellas (although one of the novellas is only 32 pages long), enough for the reader to get a good overview of Hoshino’s style and themes.
The first story, ‘Paper Woman’, gives us an insight into Hoshino the writer, right from the very start:
“As I’ve continued my professional writing career, I’ve come to think of it as 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. One could say that a novel’s words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between those two feelings. Which is why a novel should never be seen as a simple expression of an author’s self.”
p.1 ‘Paper Woman’ (PM Press, 2012)
This idea of transformations is an important one for Hoshino. In fact, in this story, the transformation is a very unusual and literal one…
Another thing we find out about Hoshino from this collection is his fascination with all things Latin-American. Whether it’s a privileged tourist searching for something worth living for (‘Chino’), a dangerous teen sent to Peru to avoid trouble with the law (‘Treason Diary’), or a bizarre, tango-influenced novella in an unnamed, imaginary city (‘A Milonga for the Melted Moon’), the writer returns to stories of tropical lands, with guerillas, dancing, poverty and football of the round-ball variety. While it would be easy to ascribe Murakami influences to Hoshino’s stories, in this case García Marquez is probably a more likely source.
Many of the stories look at outsiders fleeing from rigid, dull Japanese society, and a couple look at the idea of ‘Japaneseness’. The young man in ‘Chino’ knows that his attempts to transform into a Latino freedom fighter are doomed from the start:
“No matter how dirty I might look, I knew my travels were buoyed on that lighter-than-air aluminum one-yen coin. A mode of travel little better than drifting and staring: never to touch down, never to make contact with other worlds, never to dive right in. I knew my body stank of yen, and would show me up as an outsider wherever I went.”
‘Chino’ (p.37)
On the whole though, Hoshino is more interested in minorities than bored rich kids. ‘Air’ takes a magical look at gender identity, describing a man and a woman who both fall somewhere in the middle of traditional binary gender descriptions. Forced to keep their ‘irregularities’ secret, they eventually find each other (at a GLBT Mardi-Gras-type event), culminating in a gender-bending climax which leaves both in a new state.
Interestingly, several of the stories are based (rather loosely) on real-life incidents, with Hoshino providing an alternative take on facts. The novella ‘Sand Planet’, the longest piece in the collection, uses the story of Japanese settlers in the Dominican Republic, and a mass curry poisoning at an elementary school (a news event I remember very well from my time in Japan!), to create a fabulous story of a journalist attempting to make sense of his life. The events of ‘Treason Diary’ are also based in fact, as the two main characters were suggested by two teen criminals whose families spirited them out of the country…
As fascinating as the true(ish) stories are though, it is Hoshino’s imagination and style which catch your attention. From the frankly bizarre ‘The No Fathers Club’, a piece in which the eponymous club is suggested by a strange sport called no-ball soccer, to the mind- (and gender-) bending events of ‘A Milonga for the Melted Moon’, the writer creates incredible, uncanny landscapes. The latter story is the strangest (and best) in the collection, and it is a difficult tale to follow at times, mainly because of the constant switch in perspective between the two main characters, a man and a woman who switch clothes, viewpoints and bodily fluids (and if you think you know what that means, you don’t…).
It really is a question of where one person ends and the other begins, and the language used reflects this. At times, words and sentences melt into one another, and the image created is of a slightly off-kilter world, recognisable but foreign:
“You and I both, as we walk this earth, are nothing more than shadow sculptures carved from light. Everyone here is just light thrown by the city in the sky as it shines in the night. This city is so filled with light the night shines like the midday sun, the silver from the sky as it falls on the surface of the river builds up and combines with the new light falling from the sky, the proof is in the way the light comes not just from the sky but from the ground beneath our feet: no shadows trouble the surfaces of this city. Instead they hang suspended, unmoored from the ground, and eventually turn back into birds, back into people.”
‘A Milonga for the Melted Moon’ (p.186)
The final story of the collection is fifty pages of elegant confusion and madness, and it’s brilliant 🙂
While two translators are listed, Brian Bergstrom does most of the heavy lifting (Lucy Fraser’s ‘Chino’ is the exception), and he also provides a wonderful thirty-page essay on the stories to complete the book. This afterword discusses Hoshino’s influences and fascination with Latin America, and also examines each of the stories in turn, teasing out common themes. It’s an addition which helps the reader to understand where Hoshino is coming from, and another example of the kind of extras which can make a great book even better (if only all publishers of translated fiction did this…).
I loved this collection, and I’m very glad I decided to check it out. Having also received a copy of Hoshino’s novel, Lonely Hearts Killer, from the publisher, he might well turn out to be my next new favourite J-Lit writer. If you’re in the market for well-written, fantastical literary fiction, this one is for you
We, the Children of Cats
Tomoyuki Hoshino, edited and trans. from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, with an additional trans. by Lucy Fraser. . PM (IPG, dist.), $20 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-60486-591-2
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Nearly every character in Hoshino's uneven collection of short stories and novellas yearns to escape the boundaries of their gender, national identity, or, in many cases, their own flesh. Hoshino is an avowed lover of magical realism, and the transformative, dream-like aspects of that genre wield a heavy influence on this work. In "Paper Woman," a writer, with the help of her husband, strives to become like paper—able to contain words but not their meaning—only to meet with tragic consequences. In "The No Fathers Club," dead fathers return to life in the overactive imaginations of a group of outsider school children. With all the symbiosis and osmosis going on in Hoshino's tales, a kind of post-gender eroticism bubbles up, with some characters sprouting new genitalia and fusing with their partners during trysts, while others switch genders so frequently it becomes pointless to try to keep track of who's who. Hoshino manages to offer a bit of political commentary on the uglier aspects of nationalism as well as Japan's harsh treatment of its indigent population following WWII, but the insistent imbalance between what's attainable and what's beyond reach fails to make the collection a satisfying whole. (Nov.)
MONDAY, 19 AUGUST 2013
'Lonely Hearts Killer' by Tomoyuki Hoshino (Review)
After the previous success of Tomoyuki Hoshino's short-story collection, We, the Children of Cats (from PM Press), I was eager to try another of the writer's books. Today's choice is a novel, which makes a nice contrast, allowing me to see which genre suits him better. So, how does Hoshino fare in the longer form?
*****
Lonely Hearts Killer (translated by Adrienne Carey Hurley, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a novel which could almost be called dystopian in a detached, literary way. After the death of the young Emperor (called Majesty throughout the novel), the 'Island Nation' nosedives into a communal depression, with many people unable to even get out of bed. While many of those 'spirited away' had no strong feelings about the royal family, it seems that the event has acted as a catalyst, causing people all over the country to collapse under the stress of their everyday lives.
Although Shoji Inoue, a young unemployed filmmaker, wasn't affected by the event, he becomes fascinated by the reasons behind the nationwide downward spiral. He gets to know one of the 'spirited away', his friend's partner, Miko, and becomes obsessed with his thoughts on the phenomenon. It's a phase which may simply have passed away into history, if only Inoue hadn't made sure that nobody would be moving on with their lives in a hurry...
Lonely Hearts Killer is told in three parts and voices. In the first,we learn about the death of his young Majesty, and the aftermath of the traumatic event, through Shoji's eyes. In the middle section, his friend Iroha continues the story, trying to come to terms with Shoji and Miko's deaths and the chaotic situation Japan finds itself in as a result. Finally, Mokuren, Iroha's friend, finishes off the story after Iroha does something foolish. Both Iroha and Mokuren comment on the actions and thoughts of the previous part; in his introduction, Hoshino invites the reader to speculate in turn about Mokuren...
It's a frightening story, but one which is eminently believable. A depressing event triggers mass depression and soul-searching in a country which is already in the grip of a downward spiral. With an ageing population and a depressed economy, there is little hope for the future - and in a society where suicide is not as stigmatised as it is in Christian countries, death is always an enticing option. Even the weather joins in, cherry blossoms blasted off the trees by giant dust storms (perhaps symbolic of Hoshino's rejection of 'typical' J-lit conventions), and the reader is treated to the eery sight of Tokyo as a ghost town, with the streets emptied of people.
In deciding to take their lives, Inoue and Miko spark a revolution. Death suddenly seems preferable to hanging around in a grey country waiting to die - and if you're going to go, why not take someone else with you? Suddenly, everyone needs to be careful out on the streets:
"People were overreacting if someone just brushed up against their shoulder or arm on the train. They would shove or even brandish a weapon at whoever had inadvertently done the touching, and the number of such cases resulting in bloody brawls had increased. And sometimes simply walking in the same direction as another person even in a residential neighborhood would end in trouble. The upshot of all this was a widespread aversion to other people and rampant paranoid hostility in crowded places."
p.128 (PM press, 2009)
All of a sudden, it seems that nowhere is safe, and no-one can be trusted.
A major theme involves films, with Shoji and Iroha obsessed with reproducing what they see on camera, putting layer upon layer, copy upon copy until the original is distorted, unrecognisable (an irony in a country where the traditional idea of reproduction has virtually come to a halt). Shoji's existence has, fairly literally, been a life on film, a fact which doesn't always please him:
"Accompanying the growth of my catalogue of filmed images are occasional moments when I feel very sad at the thought that the substance of my worth, what matters about me is contained in the volume of a disc." (p.13)
Iroha is also obsessed with filming wherever she goes, and it is her film of Miko, films of films, an endless hall of digital mirrors, which causes the initial cracks in Shoji's facade.
And what are the 'love suicides' plaguing the country if not a series of copies...
Of course, this copy-cat culture is a distorted one, and the people need a strong leader to stand up and tell them to get on with their lives and stop worrying about death. Initially, however, the royal successor (Her Majesty) is unable to do so. In a worrying power vacuum, the gap is then filled by a politician - one who has shown himself to be a bit of an opportunist and, perhaps, morally suspect. Just like real life then...
What's it all about? Good question :) It's certainly, in part at least, a stand against ultra-nationalism (something which is always a concern in Japan - I remember the men in black vans with loudspeakers distinctly...). It's also a reflection (no pun intended) of a real sense of depression in Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun has been eclipsed by close-to-zero economic growth and a rapidly ageing population. In the book, few children are being born - the 'one child' policy which is introduced is meant to *stimulate* the birth rate, not control it! The novel also highlights the danger of group-think, showing that there are risks in marginalising minorities in a culture of nationalistic homogenisation. Then again, it might be about something else entirely :)
Once you've finished the novel (as in We, the Children of Cats), there are some added extras. There's a great Q & A between the author and the translator, and a translator's introduction which provides background information about the novel. This contains some useful analysis of the book (which certainly makes it easier to write a convincing review!). Now, if only more publishers could find the time to do this...
Lonely Hearts Killer is a fascinating story with a good translation, and it's a book that is well worth checking out. It's not always easy to get your head around what Hoshino is trying to say, but it's certainly a welcome change to some of the cherry-blossom-tinted (or blood-soaked) J-Lit around at the moment. Do try it :)
Posted by Tony Malone at 04:00
Labels: Japan, PM Press, Review, Tomoyuki Hoshino