Lonely Hearts Killer

by Tomoyuki Hoshino

  October 7

  AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR Q & A

  The following questions and answers were exchanged over email between January of 2007 and November of 2008.

  Hurley: Before PM embraced this novel, it took us a while to find a publisher for the English translation. Along the way, we found a few professionals in the U.S. publishing world who loved the first chapter, but were bothered by the ending. We even were asked to change the ending or publish only the first chapter. I was shocked to learn that some noted contemporary Japanese writers have agreed to have the endings of their works changed for the U.S. (and by extension English-language) marketplace. While I shared my frustrations and thoughts on all this with you and we both refused such changes, I never asked you what it felt like for you to be faced with that kind of response and request.

  Hoshino: It felt like Iraq or Iran.

  “The Middle East is really selling now!”

  “Well, let’s see.... You’re right. It sure is. But Iraq is a little hard to understand. I think it will sell better if you change Iraq. Can you change Iraq?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, I’m serious. Change it.”

  It felt like that. I’m very glad my work wasn’t changed.

  (Continued)

  “I changed Iraq, but it’s still not selling that well.”

  “Maybe you didn’t change it right. Yes, that’s it. It would have been better if you’d changed Iran. Try changing Iran.”

  “But if we go that far, it’s not really going to be the Middle East anymore.”

  “It’s okay. As long as it sells. Alright then? Let’s change Iran.”

  Hurley: My students and I like to discuss what doesn’t appear in this novel, like the U.S. (Perhaps our inquiries are structured by the arrogance of U.S. imperialism and its claims to universal relevance.) Aside from the aquarium scene from The Lady from Shanghai, almost no mention is made of anything related to what my students call “the Western world,” and they like to speculate, “where did it go?” After all, much of the modern and contemporary Japanese literature they encounter invokes “the West” more overtly. In writing a novel that addresses questions of borders, sovereignty, migration, and security involving nations, what did the absence of the U.S. mean for you? Does the U.S. empire have to disappear (or be abolished) before the Japanese emperor system can?

  Hoshino: Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata wrote a number of “Japanese” works. Foreign (especially Western) readers experienced these works as “very Japanese” and proclaimed you could find “Japanese beauty” in them. This was to be expected. Mishima and Kawabata depicted images of Japan that Western eyes wanted to see.

  But Japanese readers who were aware of such assessments followed suit, saying these works were written with a sense of “Japanese beauty that even a Westerner could admire” and that “Japan had the kind of culture written about in these novels.”

  This was how value judgments about “Japaneseness” were shaped.

  Foreign readers who only find value in the first chapter of this novel must still have those Western eyes.

  Paradoxically, foreign readers today seem to respond to Japanese literature with a lot of “American-ness” as universal and, at the same time, as “Japanese.” Perhaps “Japanese” novels subtly and gently exoticize American problems.

  When I read that sort of novel, I feel like I’m reading fantasy fiction and wonder, “Where is this tale from?”

  I didn’t intend to eliminate American references from Lonely Hearts Killer. It’s not explicit, but I think of it as covered by America’s shadow. The effort to put out the nationalist fire in the first chapter is also an effort to get out from under the shadow of America. After all, Japan’s reality after the end of World War II and ever since the American Occupation has been that of “America above the Emperor.”

  Hurley: Your novels have helped me think about the deleterious effects of “unification.” The word is so often used to describe something we are supposed to see as positive, as is the case with the various efforts to unify North and South Korea (divided primarily because of the U.S.), but you really spell out the dangers inherent in attempts to create a unified sense of national, cultural, gender, or ethnic identity. What kinds of resistance have you met when expressing your thoughts on the unification of a national or any other identity or ethos?

  Hoshino: In the spring of 2006, the World Baseball Classic was held in the United States. Japan won and people across the country were excited. But the excitement took on a very nationalistic character because the leader of the Japanese team, Ichirô Suzuki, made multiple statements that were heavily loaded with nationalism.

  So I wrote an essay for a newspaper about the discriminatory content of Ichirô’s words and how the Japanese society that was so fired up by them seemed very aggressive to me. Now, I know to expect a certain amount of bashing for taking on a charismatic figure like Ichirô. I was in fact bashed quite a bit on the internet.

  I wasn’t actually trying to criticize Ichirô so much as throw some cold water on the fanatical fire. I thought it was important to point out that some people didn’t share in the enthusiasm. Otherwise, it could look like every Japanese person was expected to be elated over the victory, and if you weren’t excited, you weren’t really Japanese. Eventually, people who had doubts would disappear altogether.

  I am afraid of individual violence, but the violence of a fanatical group is much more frightening to me. People who distinguish what’s wrong from what’s right disappear when everyone turns to violence. That kind of group is formed with a sense of “unity.” And that “unity” sets up some fictional enemy against whom the aggression builds.

  Unification is homogenizing. Everyone must be the same, and differences can’t be tolerated. That is to say, the aggression directed at “something different” or “something that isn’t the same” escalates. Words like unification and assimilation might evoke an image of different people living side by side together, but in reality, I think what we see is a society fiercely intolerant of even the tiniest differences.

  Hurley: I love the setting of the second and third chapters. The remote mountain lodge calls up images not only of idyllic mountain resorts, but also of the Aum movement’s headquarters, the Chichibu Rebellion of 1884, the Umemura Rebellion in Hida, the Asama Sanso Incident, and especially (at least to me) United Red Army (Rengô sekigun) figures such as Hiroko Nagata. But the setting’s significance isn’t limited to Japanese histories and contexts. Iroha’s use of the phrase “reservation,” themes of self-governance and autonomy, and the title of the final chapter, drawing on Luis Buñuel’s 1951 film Subida al cielo, invoke multiple landscapes and histories. Where did your own journey into the mountains of Lonely Hearts Killer begin and what do the mountains mean to you?

  Hoshino: My first clue for the secluded mountain setting for Iroha and the others came from Buñuel’s film Subida al Cielo (“Ascent to Heaven” in Japanese). The mountain reaching up to heaven is a threshold place that carries an image of death mixed with utopia. In the first chapter, Mikoto et. al. develop the vision of everyone dying for a utopian society. Ascension or “Ascent to Heaven” is the name for precisely this vision. However, the people holed up on the mountain are Iroha and others who commit to living and try to distance themselves, running away from Mikoto et. al.’s vision. I wanted to put the brakes on the escalation, and this ironical situation effectively neutralized the vision of death and utopia

  That was the impetus for the mountain, which also relates to an image in the third chapter. You ascend from the mountain and migrate to a different place; but even though you cross the border, you aren’t entering the world of the dead, but moving to another kind of life. I set up the mountain as that kind of three-dimensional threshold. Iroha and the others are definitely holed up on the mountain, but the mountain isn’t a dead-end. Depending on your changing perspective, it links to a different latitude or culture. Before they were sur
rounded, they had the possibility of coexistence, not “unification.” Underlying that possibility is an image of a reservation with autonomy. I think the groups of rebels who historically entrenched themselves in the mountains had similar visions.

  One other factor was Japanese mountain worship. In Japanese animism, each mountain is a different god. With the arrival of the emperor system, they were forcibly unified. However, in this novel the people who look like okami (“Majesties”) “come down” from the mountaintop. In other words, they stop being okami. They abdicate “unification.”

  Hurley: The most heated arguments in my classes usually focus on Mokuren and what her “real job” is. Some students see her as an opportunist whose money is made through human trafficking. Others interpret her as working to place people in strategic industries and positions on the “mainland” and in the “Island Nation” for more revolutionary purposes. Still others see her work as a much less dramatic form of labor recruitment and placement consulting. As an educator, I revel in the room you’ve left for my students to pursue these different interpretive lines. This may be an unfair question, but what did you want her “real job” to be?

  Hoshino: As the writer, it makes me very happy that they come up with so many interpretations about Mokuren. I also want the reader to think about Mokuren’s way of looking at the world. I’m still thinking about it. So I don’t have an answer.

  I entrusted the interpretation to the reader because thinking about Mokuren’s meaning is connected to thinking about how we can break through this impasse in our actual world. That’s why I felt very strongly that I wanted people to see possibilities in Mokuren. It thrills me to think she is plotting something with a magnificent vision of overcoming the nation. But because that possibility isn’t fantasy, it involves considerable risk too. Becoming a cold opportunist is one such risk. I want us to imagine the many risks and think about how we might work with the possibilities.

  Hurley: You often explore grief and death in your work. Lonely Hearts Killer begins with a moment of collective grief, but we also encounter a more intimate grief in Iroha’s visits to Yellow Hell Spring. In both cases, you invite readers into feeling states with your characteristic detailed descriptions of atmosphere, location, sights, and sounds. To be honest, I often felt depressed when translating such sections, and many of my students have felt depressed while reading the novel too. And yet, many of us ultimately experience the novel as hopeful and as holding onto possibilities. As a writer, do you feel a responsibility to engender hope? Are we simply inserting our own yearnings into how we interpret the ending of this novel, for example?

  Hoshino: The interpretation behind this question is precisely the kind of reading I’d hoped for. I wanted readers to experience the sadness Iroha feels as if it were their own, and I wrote it in a way that is laden with sensory descriptions to invest some immediacy in it, as if it was happening here and now.

  As far as the meaning of the third chapter goes, I basically want readers to think about it for themselves, but for my part, I wrote it with the intention of making it a very hopeful ending. To reach that hope, I had to start with very deep depression and navigate through a great deal of negative feelings. People who embrace powerfully positive feelings are at the same time people who also have known what it’s like to feel helplessly or hopelessly negative. You can’t get to real hope by ignoring or denying the negative. People who are numb can’t feel hope or happiness either. We can experience the real value of hope to the extent that we engage negative events or feelings head-on, whether inside us or in society.

  Hurley: As serious, sobering, and often heart-breaking as this novel is, it is also quite funny. I don’t think of you as a “comic” writer and yet some parts are absolutely hilarious. What has enabled you to find the humor in patriarchy, xenophobia, policing, and even personal anguish, for example? And how do you stay funny without making light of human suffering or surrendering to the maudlin (or self-indulgent)?

  Hoshino: In situations where what’s right in front of you—whether it’s human beings, the earth, the universe, or anything else no matter what it is – is completely destroyed, I think people are more likely to find it hilarious than hideous or horrifying. The most extreme actions don’t scare people so much as crack them up. However, things like the great massacres that come with war or “ethnic cleansing” fundamentally differ from what I mean by “complete destruction” in that they are nothing more than selfish endeavors for personal advantage and vile economic interests. I don’t think there’s an exception when the baseness underwriting such vile actions gets blown to smithereens; that destruction also produces laughter. I think it would be nice if the humor or silliness aimed for in my novel is something like that.

  Hurley: None of the main characters in Lonely Hearts Killer are clearly anarchists. Yet it can be read as an anarchist novel. (I like to read it that way.) Does this bother you?

  Hoshino: It makes me happy. If these characters are anarchists, then I suppose I am an anarchist too.

  Hurley: You don’t shy away from exploring the limits and possibilities of gender identity and sexual expression in your work. But you don’t simply celebrate alternative sexualities and difference. Gender and sex are rarely if ever easy in your work. It seems like the most authentic questions of desire and connection you explore have nothing to do with prescribed gender roles and even transcend or are unrelated to conventional notions of sexual intimacy. And, honestly, men aren’t usually very attractive in your works either. When clichéd images of patriarchal or macho sexuality appear in your work, they seem ridiculous. This makes your work radically different from two (male) Japanese writers to whom you are sometimes compared: Yukio Mishima and Kenji Nakagami. All this leads me to my next (loaded) question: how do you see yourself as a man, as Japanese, and as a writer?

  Hoshino: I’m an oddball on each count, but I could engage myself through my work on novels. I’m heterosexual, but I dropped out of the prescribed image of the everyday hetero male. What’s “normal” for the hetero male is not normal for me; it’s a role that takes effort to play (of course, there’s a cumulative aspect, but…). But I’m also not female or transgender. There is no place for my sexual identity within the existing categories. But that doesn’t mean I plan to develop a new and appropriate category for myself. That’s because categories intended to make discrimination or oppression visible can serve necessary political purposes. In reality, individual people are bound to have subtle differences in their various gender identities. At least that’s how I see it. If you have a billion people, it’s fine to have a billion sexual identities. I’m not trying to categorize anything, and so I want to treat gender identity as hard to describe in my work in order to show how routinely vague and flooded with microscopic differences it is.

  The same goes for national identity. I grew up in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, so I’ve been influenced by the customs of those times and that place too. My concept of values and how I think about things are definitely inextricably linked to those times and that place. But that’s completely different from having a national identity that involves thinking “I’m a Japanese.” Just like I didn’t have to end up conforming to the hetero male standard even though I was born a heterosexual male, it doesn’t mean I have to adhere to the standard of a Japanese person just because I was born to Japanese parents, have Japanese citizenship, or was raised in Japan. I used to try to hide the fact that I was born in the U.S., had American citizenship too, and was told from my childhood that I was also American. Since I only lived in the U.S. until I was two and a half, I don’t have any memories of America. But even though by appearance, language, and behavior I’m not different from other Japanese people, I was documented as simultaneously Japanese and American. This was a complex. It’s what made me a “Japanese” drop out. I didn’t have a national identity where I believed and never doubted I was a Japanese person. Rather, I felt like someone who simply happened to have Japanese citizenship. In this
way, I turned into someone who doesn’t see identity in hard and fast terms, which is why I think words are so important to me.

  Regardless of whether or not it’s conscious, majorities are made up of people who put a lot of faith in “conformity.” So the language there basically functions to “conform” and “discipline.” By contrast, the ultimate minority is the individual. The words of the individual are monologues that don’t conform or discipline. A complete and total monologue is for oneself and not for communicating with another. Novels, poetry, and languages bring monologues into the social language fraught with “conformity” and transform them into something that can be communicated. If we didn’t have the language of novels or if they were obliterated in a way that made them inaccessible, we’d be smothered by society’s words of “conformity” and “discipline.” All we’d be left with would be a society without any more individual words or individual difference, like a gigantic machine. People would vanish. This is not an extreme characterization. I feel like we’re getting closer and closer to that kind of world, which is why I want to keep sallying forth the words of novels.

  So, I don’t really think of myself as a writer. It doesn’t matter if it’s sexual identity or national identity; all single individuals have their own unique and loose identities, and for any of us to be able to hold onto our own words on a day to day basis, we need the language of literature. People who express themselves even when their words are different are all poets and writers. I don’t think literature has any authority or privilege beyond that.

  Translated by Adrienne Carey Hurley

  The Q&A will continue on the PM Press website at: http:// www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/Hoshino

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