But Hoshino’s project is not to straightforwardly “correct” conventional media narratives about current events. Instead, his alternative worlds, with their uncannily simultaneous proximity and distance from “real life” (for example, his renaming MRTA “MARTA,” his setting of revolutionary action at “Santo Domingo University” rather than the real National University of San Marcos in Lima, and so on), exude an dreamlike atmosphere that condenses and plays out in alternative form various elements of the news stories that constitute the average person’s perception of the “reality” lying beyond the borders of immediate experience. This makes both these condensations and the “news” and “incidents” they index seem equally unreal, equally the product of dreamwork and imagination. The reader is thus encouraged to read the story-behind-the-story, to ask “meta-level” questions about why these stories are told the way they are and what other ways these stories might be told. What might juvenile criminals from a First World nation like Japan have in common with revolutionaries in Latin America? What does it mean to think of both as “broken” (hajikareta, which can also be translated as “bounced out” or “cast off”), a term that evokes the violence of a crazy-making world system that “breaks” people psychologically and materially by coding as personal failings the effects of the institutionalized disempowerment of specific groups—the young, the poor, the rural, the indigenous, the migrant, the dispossessed?
This approach also animates “Sand Planet,” which is based on Hoshino’s own experience working as a newspaper reporter in the late 1980s. Hoshino’s beat as a reporter was the Urawa region north of Tokyo where “Sand Planet” is set, and, like “Treason Diary,” well-known news events like the 1998 Wakayama Poison Curry Incident and the 1999 Columbine high school shooting incident in the United States form a paratextual landscape against which the fictional incidents within the narrative unfold. “Sand Planet” also incorporates the very real history of Japan encouraging the migration of poor or unemployed rural people to the Dominican Republic in the immediate postwar period, letting this history inform its portrayal of the growing numbers of homeless people in present-day Japan. The migration was a ploy on Japan’s part to rid itself of its unemployed (and, as Hoshino implies in the story, potentially revolutionary) population after the devastation of World War II decimated the economy; it was part of a broader immigration of Japanese people into Latin America at this time, including to Brazil and Peru (though those two countries had prewar histories of government-sponsored
Japanese immigration, unlike the Dominican Republic).6 This little-known moment in Japanese postwar history is folded into the story in layers, disrupting the stultifying day-to-day travails of a beat reporter as it emerges in a variety of forms—poetry, memory, performance, hallucination, haunting. Correspondingly, these forms break up the very surface of the text itself, changes in typeface, indentation and the like creating jagged interventions into the smooth, conventional realism of the narrative present. This throws the reader off-balance, creating a seeming dichotomy between reality and dream that implies, by the end, that the truth lies in the latter rather than the former, or, more precisely, in the space of interaction between the two. As with “Treason Diary,” “Sand Planet” forces the reader to reconsider the foundations of everyday reality and the narratives conventionally used to give it meaning. As the protagonist tries to write an article about the school poisonings through conventional journalistic means, he finds himself constantly dissatisfied: “it seemed like lies slipped in no matter how he tried to write it.” The dreamlike encounter with the old man in the forest catalyzes the protagonist’s renewed search for a truth that can knit together the disparate incidents happening around him and create meaning more profound than the “lies” found on the surface of the facts.
Saying that fiction is the only medium through which a tiny crack in the everyday can be opened up is not quite the same thing as saying that it is only in fantasy that truth lies. Hoshino’s stories are often joyous explorations of the alternative spaces that can open up through fantasy and dream, but this joy is as frequently as not leavened with a melancholy ambiguity, a realization of a certain limit within the process of transformation. The stories in this collection almost always end with their protagonists either stranded in a space between two states of being or disappearing completely. Even “Milonga,” which takes place entirely within a world of flux, ends with the intrusion of a character representing the “real” (named, not coincidentally, “Réal,” echoing the protagonist’s journey “beyond Ilusión to a village called Realidad” in “Chino”). The real within that story is signified by Réal being the only character who throws a true shadow, a shadow that blocks the fluidity of identity and existence literalized within the story as the silver fluid flowing in the veins of both protagonists that binds them to the river they travel along. The implication is that this silver fluid is the light reflected by that river’s shining surface in concentrated form, and an identity created through reflection cannot exist alone; as the title of the story implies, the characters exist as partners in dance, itself a transformation of music into visible movement. So it is appropriate that the dissolution of identity at the end is portrayed not as pain or nothingness, but as an experience of isolation: “I was all that remained here, and I was alone.” Tellingly, the journey to the village of Realidad described in “Chino” also ends in an encounter with profound isolation, as the protagonist finds himself refused in his attempts to connect with Maki, who herself exists in a state of self-imposed isolation due to the violence that severed the connection between her and the surrounding villagers.
Hoshino uses a variety of metaphors for the transience of the everyday. In “Sand Planet,” for example, the protagonist floats in a pool and feels a sudden disconnection from anything real:
I’m on a set somewhere, surrounded by manufactured oceans, manufactured plains. That’s all nature actually is to me, just a series of sensations recreated in rooms. Even my own self is just a recreation, an illusion. Everything I touch and know to be myself is just the product of a brain that’s no more than just another illusion itself. Not the grand illusion of life’s endless cycle. This self of mine is no everlasting soul able to pass through cycles of reincarnation—it’s the empty shell made and remade with every cycle, an infinite illusion.
The Buddhist nature of these meditations on the “cycles of reincarnation” is overt, but of a piece with the world made of reflected light in “Milonga” and with the passages between illusion and reality found in the other stories in the collection as well. It is less a moment of Hoshino showing his hand (and thus indicating that one should read all of his works through a Buddhist lens, for example) than him employing a variety of modes through which to explore the organizing paradox at the heart of his fiction. This paradox states that the world is made of fabrications and illusions that are more fluid than they may at first seem, but also states that there are truths that lie behind these fluctuations, truths that are not precisely transcendent but rather something more like conditions of possibility for that very fluidity.
Therefore, the idea that there are parts of life that are eternal and others that are ephemeral does not translate into a traditional metaphysics that locates truth in the transcendent and distortion in the contingent. The “meta-level” questions opened up by the medium of fiction for Hoshino concern themselves not with transcendent truths but with the way the interactions between different modes of representing reality produce a kind of truth that emerges as phantasmagoric irruption. Hoshino’s stories produce these irruptions through a variety of techniques: the creation of alternative versions of “incidents” produced within the contemporary media; the folding together of histories conventionally held apart; the disruption of the literary text itself, such as the disorienting switches between first-person narrators in “Air” and “Milonga” or the various discursive variations found in “Sand Planet”; and a profligately allusive approach to literary creation th
at forces the reader to actively translate between various modes of writing and the literary traditions they draw upon: the Latin American magical realism of García Márquez, the confrontational political early fiction o f Kenzaburō Ōe, the rewriting of the Japanese literary tradition from a minority position found in Kenji Nakagami and the Resident Korean author Yang-ji Lee, the gamesmanship and intellectual rigor of Borges and Nabokov, the rich folkloric archive of Japan, and so on.
When Hoshino himself speaks of his writing, he phrases it as a balancing act between building upon the work of those who inspire him and expressing something that he only reluctantly calls a distinct “identity.” In a published conversation with fellow author Rieko Matsuura (The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, 1994; English translation 2009), Hoshino puts it this way:
Before the postmodern age [of 1980s Japan], the idea that if something wasn’t original it was worth nothing was very strong. And within this environment that was telling me “Express the uniqueness within yourself!”, that seemed to value originality above all, I found myself at every turn faced with the fact that to express what I wanted to express, I needed to borrow from things that already existed—this happened to me all the time, even as a child. When I made a friend, we’d become very close. I’d be influenced by my friend to an inordinate degree, until we almost became the same person. Indeed, I’m secretly rather good at imitations (laughs). And perhaps that part of me comes out strongly in my fiction…. But after [the postmodern 1980s], in the ‘90s, everything changed again: I’d accrued more life experiences at an individual level, and that ‘80s way of thinking, that, whatever you do is fine type of thinking, I noticed that it was a view held most strongly by the already privileged. Those most blind to the privilege supporting them were the ones most loudly proclaiming, “Interiority and identity are just illusions!” and minorities and the like who were already suffering from being deprived of identity were doubly deprived, and even identity arising from one’s very minority status was suppressed or forbidden from serious consideration. And so, I began to feel a need to break with the postmodernism that had previously freed me…. I had no intention of returning to the cult of originality, but I did want to capture a sort of loose form of identity, an identity that was not an identity, something that was not necessarily coherent and was always already in constant flux—and I thought that through fiction, I could express this sort of thing.7
Here Hoshino demonstrates both his commitment to a politics of transformation and his acknowledgment of its risk. Every story in this collection describes a shift in identity of some sort, either a literal one or a shift in a character’s perception; indeed, one could say that Hoshino’s fiction asks if there’s a real difference between the two. The flux of consciousness and a constantly changing identity may be two ways of saying the same thing, and by taking that as a premise rather than an endpoint, Hoshino asks the reader to go further than the exposure of identity as illusion that characterizes the typical “postmodern” literature that he speaks of in the above quotation. For it is not enough to simply say that identity or consciousness is an illusion and leave it at that—Hoshino’s world is not a free-for-all without consequences.
Instead, his idea of recombining borrowed elements to create his fiction resembles something more like the “task of the translator” as laid out by Walter Benjamin (it is worth noting that Hoshino, after quitting his job at the newspaper, spent the early 1990s living off and on in Mexico and then, upon his permanent return to Japan, became a translator himself, creating subtitles for Spanish-language films shown in Japan). “It is the task of translator,” writes Benjamin, “to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work.”8 Benjamin’s over-arching point is that translation is not an imitation of an original but a recreation of it from the ground up within a new language and context, which means that it must recapture on its own terms the initial impetus that made the original something that had to be written in the first place. The resulting work, the translation, is the “afterlife” of the original, produced through the interaction between the translator as a kind of ultimate reader of the original and the original itself, a process of ideal reading that resembles that described in Hoshino’s “Paper Woman” as a wavering between the euphoria of becoming other and the despair at one’s inevitable failure to do so; the resulting work is the pattern of scars left by the words the author-as-translator printed on the interior of his or her body.
Hoshino’s fiction may thus be seen most precisely, perhaps, as an act of translation, a meeting of disparate “originals” borrowed from various literary traditions, real-life incidents, personal experiences, etc., that produces through their interaction something like the “pure” language Benjamin writes of, identifiable within the texts themselves as transformational desire.
The plot of “Paper Woman” illuminates this in its allusion to the legend of “Earless Hōichi” in the game played between Paper and the narrator. “Earless Hōichi” is a legend known best as it was retold by Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan, a collection of “Stories and Studies of Strange Things” published in 1904. Hearn is a complex figure in the English and Japanese language literary worlds, spending his time refining a talent for translating local legends and “weird” stories into atmospheric prose wherever he found himself (New Orleans, the Philippines, etc.). But it was when he moved to Japan near the end of his life that he found the material for his most lastingly popular works, the collections of adapted Japanese tales that circulated first in their original English and, after being translated back into Japanese after his death, in Japan. Hearn’s versions of these stories, including “Earless Hōichi,” persist as their most well known versions in Japan; Masaki Kobayashi adapted “Hōichi” and three other Hearn tales to make his 1965 film Kwaidan, which in turn inspired, at least in part, Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book, the “British movie” Hoshino slyly alludes to in “Paper Woman.”9
Hoshino’s retelling of “Earless Hōichi” in “Paper Woman” may also allude to Hearn’s translation process as reported after his death by his widow, Setsu Koizumi, in her memoirs.10 She describes Hearn asking her to act out parts of the legends he was adapting, “studying her every gesture, insisting on the exact intonation of every word.”11 A similar act of bodily “translation” forms the center of “Paper Woman,” the titular character’s desire to become paper meshing (at least at first) with the narrator’s writing process, until they are inseparable. And the story of Earless Hōichi is itself a story about storytelling: Hōichi is a blind biwa minstrel, famed for the quality of his musical retellings of old legends. He is summoned one night to sing ballads retelling the famed sea battle in the straits of Shimonoseki that culminated in the death of the boy Emperor Antoku that marked the end of Japan’s classical period; soon it becomes clear that these summons have been issued by the spirits of the warriors who died in that battle. To protect him from this dangerous bewitchment, the priest of the temple where Hōichi lives orders him to be stripped and a holy sutra inked upon his naked body, which will render him invisible to the unholy spirits of the dead. And when the spirits come for him that night, he is indeed invisible—save for his ears, which the priest’s acolytes had mistakenly left untouched by their brushes. The spirits grab these ears and rip them from Hōichi’s body, freeing him from the bewitchment. He goes on to attain great fame as a performer whose singing entrances even the dead, but he can never shake his new name, borne from the scars that were the price of this fame: “Earless Hōichi.”
Blind and then earless, Hōichi’s body is an ideal conduit for the stories of the dead, enough so that the dead themselves attempt to claim him so that they can hear their own exploits recounted back to them. The priest wrests Hōichi’s body from their clutches by inscribing it with words of his own, words that bind Hōichi to the temple instead of the cemetery. Caught between these two realms, Hōichi is both
bridge and boundary, his body marking the divide between them even as it provides the way for the stories of the dead to inhabit the world of the living when he sings. Similarly, in “Paper Woman,” Paper longs to transform her body into an ideal inscriptive surface, yet every inscription becomes troubled by impermanence, dissolving into its disarticulated constituent parts only to recombine and dissolve again, endlessly. Her body is a vessel for a desire that seems to demand its own dissolution even as it seeks to provide an ideal surface for the self-expression of others. This desire is the “loose” identity Hoshino speaks of—a desire to shed one’s qualities and become other, which is always frustrated by the way this otherness becomes a new quality, a new identity. And so the grounding for the politics of identity one can read into Hoshino’s work seems located here, in the desire itself, and not in the completion of this or that process of transformation—this is where the joy resides, and the despair, but also the political edge.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 26
