I'm not very familiar with Japanese fiction having read only three or four books by Kazuo Ishiguro, but several friends swear by it, especially Haruki Murakami's novels.
Yesterday I started and finished a Japanese novella that made me think that it's about time I paid more attention to other writers from that country.
The book is Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara and it won her Japan's top literary prize (at age 20). It's about Lui, a Barbie-girl who meets Ama, a literally fork-tongued punk, and is introduced to the pleasures and pains of body piercing, tattooing and pervy sex via his tattoo-artist friend Shiba.
Shiba is a sadist and this suits self-destructive Lui just fine. Her inability to connect emotionally and honestly compels her to form near-anonymous and degrading relationships with these similar disenfranchised and emotionally bereft youths and from Shiba and the nipple-fixated Ama she gets an ample helping of agonising sex, which she faces and even solicits with an odd mixture of nonchalance and breathless anticipation.
Things get violent and sick, but personally speaking, I was too fascinated and to stop reading.
It's not written for teenagers but I can imagine teens being absolutely riveted by this book. Not only is it easy to read (the language is simple, stark and blunt yet vivid, evocative and forceful), it describes stuff that's thoroughly kinky and forbidden, thus endlessly, deliciously, compellingly appealing.
However, I'm not sure if I'd encourage my children (if they were teenagers) to read it. If they really wanted to I'd want a lot of discussion before and after. At very least the sex and violence, explicit as they are, are not at all gratuituos and that's much, much more than I can say of a lot of the coyly titillating rubbish on the Young Adult Fiction shelves these days.
I would like to contradict you on the statement: 'It's not written for teenagers but I can imagine teens being absolutely riveted by this book.' WRONG. I am a teenager and I had a massive culture shock reading that book! Even till now, I can still remember the nasty hardcore sex in it! Gah! The horror. I'm just wondering how did the author win the prestigious award. I feel as though she won it because she manage to write about a story so violent and vivid that no one else could've imagine it. But that's my point of view anyways.
Posted by: Atikah | Friday, February 16, 2007 at 22:16
Hi Daphne,
Love your column. Keep up the good work.
Just a note on Kazuo Ishiguro. He's not considered Japanese fiction. The Brits have claimed him as their own and, in fact, his writing hardly reflects anything Japanese and is extremely Brit in tone and manner.
Check out Junichiro Tanazaki's Quicksand for excellent noir, Japanese-style!
Cheers,
Mindy
Posted by: Mindy | Monday, August 01, 2005 at 14:16