A girl with her writing machine
My toothache and reading Kanehara Hitomi
Imagine a girl whose attention is fixed on the screen of her [cell phone] with its pearly tint and smooth texture, its beckoning light, and its weight, neither too heavy nor too light, all held in the palm of her hand and designed to give her the confidence she needs . . . With this machine, the solitary girl writes messages, a diary, or captions to accompany her phone photos, and there is always the task of re-reading them all, while she is on the move, on the train, on the bus, or while waiting for these. She has access to an instantly cozy private space — a room of her own — within the vastness of the public space . . . The girl with her machines is heavily engaged in reading and writing her small narratives, which are exclusively about her Self . . . A girl with her writing machine can put together her small narratives in a particular way to produce a particular Self, and through this process she becomes a speaking agent and gains the power of authorship.
— “A girl with her writing machine” by Rio Otomo on Kanehara Hitomi’s Amebic (2005), published in the collection Girl Reading Girl in Japan (2010)
I have a toothache. It’s a wisdom tooth, I think. Mine have never come and gone quietly. They intrude on the small, dark cavern of my mouth, all aggression, making themselves loud with pain; they pick fights, crowd out the meek, deferential teeth that were already there. Wisdom demands recognition, I suppose, and my body must crave wisdom as much as I do, willing to suffer anything for even the wrong kind. On Wednesday, when the pain was unbearable, I wrote in my notebook that there are times when “I don’t feel like a person if I’m not also a pristine body.”
What a night to fall asleep reading Snakes and Earrings, the controversial 2004 Akutagawa Prize winner about a young woman’s single-minded pursuit of body modification, sadomasochistic relationships and substance abuse in the hope that these may, on the contrary, make her a person. “[E]verything seemed pretty distant to me,” Lui, the novel’s disaffected 19-year-old protagonist, narrates. “The thoughts in my head. The scene in front of my eyes. The cigarette I was holding between my middle and index fingers. It was as if I was looking down at myself from some faraway place. There was nothing for me to believe and nothing for me to feel . . . [T]he only feeling with the power to kick me back to life was the feeling of acute pain.” In the bleak haze of her life, she chooses pain again and again. For these characters, only the physical is truly real — nothing else seems quite so reliable. Two bloody teeth yanked out of a gangster’s skull become a grotesque token of love; the allure of a sprawling, ornamental tattoo and a split tongue stand in for a formless identity.
Blonde Lui is perceived by others around her to be a gyaru, the defiant, uniquely Japanese girl tribe I touched on in a piece I wrote here a month ago, making for some interesting localization hurdles. Watching the 2008 film adaptation, a leaden affair that even director Ninagawa Yukio’s more high-minded affectations couldn’t save (a Werner Herzog homage for the opening sequence, seriously?)1, there’s a funny dissonance between the weight of the word chosen to replace it in the English subtitles — bimbo — and the indifferent tone with which it’s deployed. The tattoo artist with whom Lui begins an affair wonders aloud if “bimbos” normally get tongue piercings, and her only friend states with grave solemnity that the pair have “pledged a lifelong bimbo alliance.”2 David James Karashima opted for “Barbie girl” in his 2005 English translation, a choice that hits the right note in moderation, even if gyaru on the whole more closely evoke the spirit of Bratz, but becomes more unnatural with every character who utters it. In one glaring misstep, Lui’s tatted-up punk of a boyfriend professes that he would throw aside his own values and become a “Barbie boy” for her if she asked. Sigh. Whatever. It was a time before “I’m Just Ken.”
In all fairness, a gyaru is a bimbo in the eyes of many, and wherever Lui rejected the label in the text, perhaps so, too, did her author. After dropping out of high school in her freshman year and living on the streets, Kanehara Hitomi first published Snakes and Earrings in a literary magazine, Subaru, at the age of 19, where it won an award. The following year, it received the Akutagawa Prize, one of the highest honors in Japanese literature, in a move that both divided public opinion and invited their judgment. “Kanehara created a ‘commotion’ by showing up to the otherwise staid Akutagawa Prize ceremony in grand fashion: high heels, short skirt, designer handbag, colored contacts, multiply pierced ears, and dyed hair,” the late scholar David Holloway wrote of her infamous entrance.3 He continued:
In contrast to the modestly dressed and demure nineteen-year-old Wataya Risa, with whom she shared the Akutagawa Prize, and whose outfit caught the eye of nobody, Kanehara came off as a rebel, an antibookworm, a diva. It was as though Kanehara — whom [scholar] Mark Driscoll . . . suggests had, at the award ceremony, the aura of ‘a hybrid of fashion model and adult video actress’ — was there by accident, having wandered off the streets of Shibuya, where such attire is common, and stumbled into the middle of a celebration of Japan’s most promising literary talent.
The cruelty of this assessment was not without merit from the perspective of the media, which “offered [her] up as all body” and sought to tie her own life experiences, including self-harm, into the graphic sexuality depicted in the novel, reducing her to a flashy pony whose only trick amounted to vaguely autobiographical shock value. An interview with the novelist Hanamura Mangetsu, conducted through Kanehara’s publisher to promote the release of the book, was given the lurid title of “Between S and M.” Hanamura broke the ice by telling her about a gig he used to have interviewing porn actresses, whom he invariably made cry by “pressing them about their families and so forth.” To this, Kanehara only laughed: “I wonder how I’ll fare.”
As the years have worn on and the focus of her writing has shifted from youth to complex examinations of motherhood, the fervor around her work has simmered. No longer a waifish bad girl to admonish or objectify, and uninterested in representing anyone but herself (“I don’t see myself speaking for my generation. I’m just writing what I feel,” she told The Guardian circa the English publication of Snakes and Earrings), she’s become slippery, evasive, in the hands of the public.
Then again, she never promised anything different, even as far back as that first big award. “If I had had more confidence in myself, maybe I would have worn something more formal — like a dress or something,” Kanehara was later quoted in the press about the look that made her an icon. “But I didn’t, so I left the house like usual.”
What does qualify as self-harm? Kanehara seems to recognize it for what it is, which is any rejection of the self. The immediate ramifications of my poor health always make me feel saintlike and responsible: I drink water; I go to bed early. I think, “I will go to the doctor, and they will fix this problem, and then I can start over fresh and be good. It’ll be just like having a new body.” Such optimism is both naïve and powerless against my worse habits. The thing that makes me a docile patient is the same thing that makes me terrible at living — I simply let anything and everything happen to me, uninspired to react or choose. I only ever clean up my act under threat of scrutiny.
But in Kanehara’s novels, as in her own life, choice — whether good or bad, healthy or unhealthy — is everything. In the opening paragraph of her essay “Aiguille,” she sets the scene on an at-home lip piercing gone wrong: “The sight of my bloody latex gloves, the needle, the jewelry cruelly waiting there on a piece of kitchen roll — it all oddly calmed me. The reality that I had done something, that I had shed blood, was satisfying in its own way.” She pierced herself, she wrote, “as if it were proof that I have responsibility for my own mind, for my own body.”
Reckless decisions are as much a form of escape as making no decision at all, and Kanehara admits she becomes fixated on tattoos and piercings when she feels most consumed by more dangerous thoughts. Sitting for a Skype interview with Buzzfeed Japan while still in France, where she moved for the health of her children following the 2011 Tohoku disaster, she mused, “I think I’m dodging [the desire for self-harm] by going towards the pain.” In “Aiguille,” she contemplates self-destruction’s seductive lure over herself and others after learning of several recent suicides:
When I went home that evening, I searched online for piercing jewelry and bought two each of segment rings, circular barbells, and labrets in different sizes. If I didn’t keep on doing something, doing what I believed in, I felt I might succumb to the window’s temptations. All the decisions I’d made up to this point were for the same reason. Dropping out of school, cutting myself, my eating disorder, all the drugs, my alcohol dependence, piercings, my writing, coming to France and leaving France, too, all of it was to keep myself away from the window. Without it all I would fall. Be smashed against the ground. I’d turn into mere pulp.
What is it that keeps me from the window? That same inertia, I think. I’m like something heavy and round and made of steel, I thought months ago, when the life that had begun to move hit a standstill again. When I roll, I roll reliably, albeit inefficiently. Once I stop rolling, I am very difficult to get rolling again. It requires so much effort. So many people putting their entire weight behind something determined not to budge.
Wednesday turned into Thursday and I woke up at three in the morning, restless with nerves. I bided my time until I could start making phone calls. (The dentists around here open late and close whenever possible.) I took a shower and ate soup. I read the rest of my book and thought about what it meant to have a river inside yourself. Later, once the sun had risen and fallen and I’d settled everything that needed settling, I started writing this, fingers on the seafoam keyboard, river lapping at my feet.
I’ve been trying to change the way I think about my writing. The monetized internet has poisoned me: my head is full of branding, niches, value propositions. There’s a man with a notepad in his hand, smartly dressed and eyebrows drawn, who tells me just the facts, pen poised in midair. When I turn around, there’s a girl holding a diary to her chest, fluorescent lights gleaming off the lock and reflecting in wide, round eyes. What I’ve realized about myself is that I have to go where my impulse takes me. I cannot do anything on a timetable. I can’t tell you what is good or bad or important right now. But I can tell you when I’ve felt something and what made me feel it. Does that matter anymore? Does that hold any weight, is it tradable as currency? I read Kanehara and the girls on here who have the right idea and it feels real enough to me.
On Friday, at loose ends, I spent the afternoon cleaning my fountain pens. Sweet tools of self-expression, friends who help me speak. I named the first few and then gradually stopped. They were French names — I’m not sure why. Francoise, Delphine. Maybe I wanted them to take me away to a storybook Paris, where I’d speak fluently the language my tongue has never quite fit around. Maybe I’d be a better version of myself there. Even Kanehara might’ve thought the same thing once. Kanehara, I imagine, would tell me I’d be the same person there as I’ve ever been anywhere.
The inks in my drawer have been boring me for weeks now. My color palette has always been dour and subdued, and it’s never felt limiting until recently. I dipped my favorite marbled green pen down the neck of a bottle I’ve rarely used, rich maroon coating the nib when I pulled it back out. Oxblood. Yes, this will do. Hours later, when I came back to my desk, the rust-spattered paper towel left abandoned there felt like a premonition of things to come.
Yesterday morning, while I poured all my energy into finishing, writing in the moment, not lingering, I paused to top up the ink in my pen. The sight of red traveling up the syringe I use for my inks sent an odd rush through me, somehow childish and carnivorous at the same time. I overfilled and the ink splashed down onto my hands, stained the fingertips iron oxide. The best reader enjoys the prick of an unseen thorn as they thumb a petal, too lost in the soft, velvet beauty of the rose to see it, and knows the cuts on the hands of the one who planted it there. Counterintuitive as it may seem to me right now, if I want to live, I’m going to have to spill a little blood.
I know in my heart that Mika would’ve understood the assignment.
This is, admittedly, an incredible piece of dialogue in translation. No notes.
All quoted excerpts in this section that are not my own translation come from Holloway’s excellent essay “The Unmaking of a Diva: Kanehara Hitomi’s Comfortable Anonymity“ in Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History (2018).