Autofiction

Hitomi Kanehara, 2006 [David James Karashima, 2007]

(April 2014)

Try as I might I cannot get it out of my head that Kanehara is, at least partially, the real-life inspiration for Fuka-Eri in 1Q84. And that, you’ll understand, creates all sorts of associations and images in my head, very few of which are anything other than uncomfortable.

It’s not like Autofiction isn’t difficult to get a hold on in the first place, either. At only 200 (small) pages it’s a very compact little novella (or whatever they’re called now. Novelette? Noveltini? Fun-size Novel?), and there’s a lot of curious stuff going on with the nature of fiction and the meta-narratives authors bring to bear as they write their worlds and, to a certain extent, themselves. Kanehara teases us with hints that this might be at least semi-autobiographical only to muddy the waters completely and deliberately by having her narrator (Rin, a high-school dropout author like Kanehara herself) openly lying about her biography when asked to write it.

              ‘It’s all a lie, of course,’ I add.

              ‘I thought so.’

              We both laugh and I down my champagne.

We then progress backwards through the narrator’s formative years (a structural trick which would have been perhaps more diverting if I hadn’t just reread Use of Weapons) in order to find out exactly what real/fabricated incidents have caused this real/fabricated character to end up so damaged.

Because she is damaged, and this is why it’s hard to talk this book up as anything more than an interesting exercise in metafictional identity: it’s just impossible to care about Rin or what happens to her. The best unreliable narrators have this slow-build offness about them – early on they’re just plausible enough that you want to believe them later when the more blatant untruths come tumbling out – but Rin goes from 0 to Psycho in less than 3.5 pages. Her entire character is posited on being hysterically unhinged, and that doesn’t leave much for the reader. It’s not, of course, necessary to like every character, but some sort of connection is necessary and there just wasn’t any here for me. You need some kind of a way in to the character or the story. I’ve seen Kanehara compared to Ryu Murakami before, and I can certainly see that there are some similarities, but Murakami at least remembers to throw in some jokes every once in a while. Some would have been very welcome here to leaven the on occasion frankly tedious drunken introspection that’s sometimes thrust upon us for page after page. The constant musings on suicide and rape don’t come across as shocking so much as dull. I guess there’s an argument to be made that in presenting this milieu in such an uncritically detached manner it’s rendered all the more shocking – the horrific through being rendered mundane becomes even more terrifying – but that doesn’t work either.

Her daddy didn’t love her, basically, and while I wouldn’t wish to belittle the damaging effects that may have on real people in the real world, it doesn’t work as a narrative hook in Autofiction no matter how much Kanehara might try to co-opt some of the patina of true-life to provide some interest. I can’t entirely dismiss this book, as there is always that through-going tension between the real and the fictional and how we chose to perform our identities for ourselves and others, but without that frankly there’s not much here. Misery meta-memoir clearly isn’t my thing.