(May 2017)
Japanese ghosts will fuck you up.
Not, you understand, because of anything you did. Not because you dared to sleep
overnight in the abandoned mansion on the hill; not because you spent money you
didn’t have on a relic from a store which appears to now no longer exist; not
because you defiled their graves or threatened their ancestors or made a pact with
the devil. This is not about you—Japanese ghosts are not here to be tools for the
benefit of your moral education, to teach you about hubris or respect or the
proper order of things—this is about what they
want, and what they want is to get revenge everlasting and fuck shit up, and
they’re doing all right on both counts, thank you very much.
Clear? Good, because about three-quarters
of the way through Otaro Maijo’s hot mess of a novel there is what initially
appears to be a very adeptly crafted mittel-European ghost story. (From here on
out I shall, if you care, be spoilering the hell out of this book, because there’s
really no way to talk about it properly otherwise.) Kerstin, Hejdanatt, and their
other childhood friends go searching for Kerstin’s lost brother in the Western
Forest, heedless of warnings about the monster that lurks within. They are
drawn deeper and deeper into the shifting, complicit darkness of the woodland,
and find themselves being threatened with awful tortures in their own voices. So far, so Hansel and Gretel (if slightly more
goth). Rather than finding a trail of breadcrumbs and a gingerbread cottage,
however, Kerstin has to watch as invisible hands dismember the other children
one by one, before she rides on Hejdnatt’s eviscerated corpse and comes face to
faces with a vast, multi-limbed monstrosity constructed from the still animate body
parts of her friends and her brother. Then it eats her.
The writing for the thirty-two pages of “The
Forest” is genuinely good. Not superlative, but good: believable narrative voice,
effective pacing, disconcerting shading to terrifying imagery. There is such a
contrast between this chapter and the rest of the book that I half wonder
whether the rest is supposed to be taking the piss, because the rest is
everything that this section is not. In fact, I increasingly suspect this to be
the case.
The first hundred pages of this
two-hundred-page novel introduce us to Aiko, our narrator. She is a
seventeen-year-old schoolgirl leading a life of casual violence and even more
casual sex. More specifically, she is a rather sheltered, adult man’s idea of a
seventeen-year-old schoolgirl leading a life of casual violence and even more
casual sex—which is to say, utterly ridiculous. A Manic Yankii Dreamgirl whose
internal monologue is in an idiolect that no teenager has ever used anywhere,
and who indulges in all those moral panics the popular press likes to have about
degenerate youth but which later turn out to have been little more than
products of a lazy hack’s overly febrile imagination (my personal favourite
variation of which remains “Rainbow Parties”). Underneath her spuriously ‘edgy’
exterior, of course, she just wants to be loved by the good guy at school,
despite being quite thoroughly friendzoned by him. This makes Aiko unhappy. It’s
not nice, is it Aiko, being ignored by someone you fancy? How do you like being
dismissed by the object of your affection, Aiko? You’ll sleep with everyone
else but not with him, won’t you, Aiko? THE BOOT’S ON THE OTHER FOOT NOW, ISN’T
IT AIKO? HOW DO YOU LIKE IT AIKO? HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES ALISON? AIKO. I MEAN
AIKO.
Ahem.
Anyway, there’s clearly a large degree of
projection going on here, both for the author and (by design) the
reader. Aiko claims to love of the kind of movies that make up the standard late-nineties
hipster-bro canon—The Big Lebowski, Pulp
Fiction, Caged Heat—but consistently misremembers them,* and at one point
detours to share a bizarrely specific pasta recipe, seemingly just to
demonstrate that the author knows how to cook (as all right thinking men
should). To say that these things sound out of character would be to imply that
there was a character for them to sound in
in the first place, which would be inaccurate: copious swearing does not a
personality make.** Aiko is a hollow vessel into which rejected (and never
rejected because they never plucked up the courage to ask) ‘nice guys’ can
spill the juices of their collective discontent and thwarted desire; an empty
receptacle for the spent frustrations of nerdish bad-girl hate-wank fantasies
everywhere.
You may think I’m laying this particular
metaphor on a little thick (for want of a better phrase), but the book
literally begins with a guy trying to come on Aiko’s face. It opens in media jizz as she fucks an awkward
classmate, essentially for the lolz. Thanks to his undisclosed bukkake plans, she
regrets this almost instantly, kicks him in the head, and leaves. The following
morning she tries to get one step ahead of the rumour mill by knocking seven
shades out of the school queen bee in the girls’ lavatories, but is pulled back
from the brink of GBH by the intervention of Yoji, the object of her unrequited
adoration. It turns out that the girls just wanted to talk to Aiko because Sano,
her splash-happy paramour of the night before, has been kidnapped and she was
the last person seen talking to him. This has added urgency because the “Round-and-Round
Killer” is at large, having butchered some neighbourhood triplets, and the
denizens of an online message board called the Voice of Heaven have decided to
track down the killer by beating up junior high school students for reasons or
something. In amongst all this chaos, meanwhile, Aiko skips school and attempts
to persuade Yoji over to her place to enjoy her “cute Triumph bra and panties,”
but the deposed queen bee turns up instead and brains her with a sledgehammer.
That’s the first half. So far so B-List
Grindhouse movie, but then it gets really weird. The second part of the book, spanning
some ninety pages, concerns the visions Aiko has while in a coma. First she
encounters a load of unfashionably retro Japanese celebrities and, gloriously, the
(then) governor of Tokyo and (still) right wing nutjob Shintaro Ishihara,
before being tempted to cross the River Styx by Sano’s ghost and rescued by a
combination of her dearheart Yoji and a heretofore minor supporting character
(of whom more later). This is all very odd. Next comes her alter ego Kerstin’s
adventures in “The Forest”, and finally she experiences some sort of astral
bodyshare with the Round-and Round Killer as he attends the funeral of his
victims’ father and then kills himself in turn.
The final part—“Jump-Start My Heart”—covers the last twenty pages, and explains the title in more detail for those
of us with insufficient knowledge of the Buddhist pantheon or who lacked the
wit to google it. Asura, it turns out, are multi-limbed, multi-faced demigods
who embody all the more primal urges: lust, pride, envy, anger, etc. Yuji falls
for the now widowed mother of the murdered triplets, and Aiko in turn develops feelings
for Tansetsu, that minor character who helped rescue her from the Styx.
Shit, shit, shit!
Now part of me is even thinking that it might be nice to do
it with this totally weird guy.
That represents my best effort at a plot
summary, in as much as there is anything like a plot to summarize. At the end
of your initial reading you come away having had a hell of a ride, slightly irritated,
very confused, and with a nagging sense that you’ve missed something
significant. This is prompted by two things: Firstly, the contrast between the
obvious writing ability displayed in the Kerstin section, and it’s absence
elsewhere; and second, what appears to be the massive plot hole wherein, despite
it being common knowledge that Aiko was the last person to have contact with a kidnapping
victim (one whose parents receive a toe and ransom demand in the mail, no
less), during the two or three days over which the first half of the novel takes
place she is never once contacted by the police.
Asura
Girl is seemingly set in contemporary Tokyo, not
some overtly dystopian police-free future—Yoji threatens to call the cops when
he discovers a couple dogging in a park (at one point there’s a couple dogging
in a park, did I mention that?) and they eventually rock up during the funeral
at the end—so it’s not like they don’t exist, it’s not like they don’t
generally do their jobs. Jobs which don’t seem to include finding poor Sano,
who after offering his siren call in Aiko’s coma vision, disappears from the
narrative altogether. These aren’t just plot holes, these are entire plot
strands that were only half woven to begin with, then seemingly abandoned
entirely.
It seems. It appears. I keep using variations
of those words because Aiko has no compulsion about throwing us through some very
sharp perceptual U-turns; going, for example, from weeping floods of tears at
Yoji’s rejection (“You idiot! Yoji! You asshole! I’m bawling my eyes out here
and you don’t even notice. Asshole!
Drop Dead! Do you hear me, Yoji? DROP DEAD!”), to barely three pages later
forgetting about them almost completely:
I remember I had been crying, but I couldn’t
remember why anymore.
Why should I when the tears weren’t
even real?
Even within the “real life” of Aiko’s conscious
world, it’s clear that she is not a reliable narrator. Those words—“the tears
weren’t even real”—are given pride of place in closing out one of the early
subsections, so it’s not like we can say we weren’t warned. It would probably
be wise not to trust much of what she says at all.
So if we can't trust what the narrator tells us, who can we trust? Who knows? There’s
Tenetsu, Aiko’s final crush who, I should probably mention, is a psychic, an oddball,
a full grown adult, and, even better,
a fairly obvious author insert. He basically turns up for no reason other than
to advance the plot, is about the same age as Maijiro would have been while
writing the book (twenty seven), and, just to clinch the deal, claims to have
manifested as Shintaro Ishihara in Aiko’s vision. Ishihara, before he entered
politics, was a novelist whose most (in)famous book was about amoral youth,
sex, and violence.
Which brings us, eventually (and via a hat tip to a throwaway line by someone far smarter than me), to A
Clockwork Orange, another cult movie I saw long ago, but also a novel which
had been languishing unread on my bookshelves for quite a while. It too
features an author insert character—Burgess thinly disguising himself as F.
Alexander—as well as many other similarities with Asura Girl: structural (Act 1: Lashings of ultraviolence and the
old in-out in-out; Act 2: Involuntary exposure to horrific visions; Act 3:
Rebirth and rehabilitation, of a kind***), and thematic (e.g. the interest both
protagonists have in unexpected, “classy” art forms). I mean, there are obviously
some major differences (a teen argot that actually works, for one), but what I
hadn’t appreciated about Burgess’s book was just how moral, how religious, it is, and how that would
bear comparison to Maijo’s work in regards to the parsing of Christian and
Buddhist traditions.
I’m not convinced that Asura Girl is meant to be a straight reworking of A Clockwork Orange, though I wouldn’t be
surprised to find the movie was a major influence. The real interest lies in in
the arcs of their fall and redemption narratives: how both protagonists go
through awful experiences only to end up slightly older but in much the same
places as before; how their personal choices influence their reinventions; how voluntary
or involuntary their choices might have been; how much growing is involved in growing up.
Never
underestimate the Buddha …
My
God doesn’t punish people like the Christian god, or scold them or test them.
He just waits, with infinite compassion, for people to achieve enlightenment …
Just like you get tired of playing the same character all the time in a
computer game, you eventually get tired of being bad; and when you’re really
tired of it, when you’re fed up with it completely, you might end up doing
something just a little bit good.
Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might
be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one
of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little
chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle
on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like
walking, O my brothers …
And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round
and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chellovech, like old Bog
Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milk-bar) turning and turning and turning a
vonny grahzny orange in his giant rookers.
Christian ghosts, Christian gods, will fuck you up out of spite, or
malice, or some warped concept of ‘love,’ but it will be personal and it will
be interventionist and it will be about you.
Japanese ghosts and gods will fuck you up through sheer indifference. This, I
think, is a large part of what Asura Girl
is ultimately reaching for, but reformation and reinvention are not resolution,
and asking questions is not enough if you can’t trust the questioner to be
genuinely interested in answers. Asura
Girl provides an adolescent eruption of concepts, philosophy, blood, and spunk that is hot and sticky enough you can’t not be slightly piqued (in all
senses of the word). However, in the absence of a reliable narrative voice (or
one that is at least reliably unreliable), or much else in the way of mature,
measured thrust, it succeeds fully neither as a dialogue with other texts nor
on its own terms. Taking creative risks is better than playing it safe, certainly,
but the thing about risks is that by definition, and as here, sometimes they
don’t quite pay off.
Asshole asshole asshole mega asshole!
* These scattergun recollections are actually
very funny, but, and here’s the rub, only if you actually know the originals
fairly well.
**I know; I’ve tried.
***These are hardly the only two stories to
follow this pattern, of course.
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