Motoya
Yukiko 本谷有希子. Irui kon’intan 異類婚姻譚. Kōdansha, 2016.
This
won the 154th A-Prize, for late 2016. Actually, it was co-recipient, with Takiguchi
Yūshō’s book.
Motoya
was born in 1979. She’s been writing
since 2004, and has already won the Mishima Prize; this is her fourth story to be a finalist for
the A-Prize. She’s a bit of an unusual
choice, being so well established as a writer already…
The
title story is the winner. It’s a
first-person narration in the voice of a young housewife we know as
San-chan. The primary relationship it
deals with is that with her husband, unnamed;
we also meet her younger brother Senta and his girlfriend Hakone, and an
older neighbor lady named Kitae.
Let’s
cut to the chase. At the end of the
story, San-chan’s husband turns into a peony.
To be specific, a yamashakuyaku 山芍薬, Paeonia japonica. It turns out to be his fondest wish, and she
takes him and plants him in the forest.
Some of the committee members compare her stuff (this is all I’ve read)
to medieval setsuwa, the magical transformation here fitting into the same
category as those you find in folktales.
And there certainly is something prodigiously symbolic about it. The title nods in the direction of a
traditional mode, too: “Interspecies
marriage story,” a semi-technical literary-history term for a particular
category of setsuwa or other traditional tale.
The
interspecies aspect of the marriage begins long before he turns into a flower,
though. We join them when they’ve been
married for about four years, and she’s starting to notice that, when he’s at
home and not thinking about it, his facial features disorganize
themselves. Droop, melt, go funny – as
if he’s no longer human. This is a story
about marriage anxiety, and pretty clearly San-chan is anxious about who or
what she’s married to. It’s the “not
thinking about it” part that really matters here. From the outset, her husband had announced
that he’s the type of guy who doesn’t want to think about anything when he’s at
home. His evening routine is to come
home, sit on the sofa, drink a highball, and watch three hours of comedy on
TV. Later he gets addicted to an iPad
game. Still later, to making deep-fried
foods, which he forces San-chan to eat.
The husband is, in a word, a total shlub, but while his behavior is kind
of stereotypical, Motoya’s description of him isn’t. Rather than rendering him as a kind of sitcom
bad hubby, she has him speaking in strangely soft, feminine language, and
interacting with her in an exaggeratedly nonconfrontational way. He’s not an authoritarian, but rather a big,
good-natured baby; it’s creepy,
intentionally so. And so when his
features start to drift, it’s just an outward confirmation of the deep
strangeness at the heart of this guy. We
don’t expect him to turn into a flower, though;
an animal, maybe, but a flower is a surprise. It’s appropriate, though, given that he’s
kind of the ultimate expression of the herbivore male trope.
What
scares San-chan more than her husband’s transformation is the possibility that
it’s happening to her, too. Somebody
comments to her that she and her husband are starting to look alike, and she
becomes mildly obsessed with the possibility.
By the end she starts to feel her features rearranging, too. But she doesn’t become a flower – instead,
there’s a weird role-reversal passage at the end where she’s drinking a
highball and watching TV, he’s cooking for her, and then the flower. It’s marriage anxiety, as I say, and if part
of that is the fear that you’ve married something fundamentally, inalterably,
unknowably different from yourself, another part of it is the fear that you’re
losing your individual identity, being subsumed into your partner’s being. That’s here, too.
There’s
an important subplot concerning cats. The
neighbor Kitae has a cat that has lost urinary control – it pees all over the
house. No treatment, no change of
environment, no consultation does any good, so eventually she decides to
abandon the cat in the woods. San-chan
drives her there; later she goes back to
leave her husband the peony in the same place.
Kitae’s angst over abandoning the cat stands in stark contrast to
San-chan’s emotional distance – Kitae loves her cat more than it seems San-chan
has ever loved her husband. Her husband,
in a rare communicative moment, suggests that she married him because she knew
she could recede into the life of a homemaker, more than anything.
I was
less plussed about this story than the above summary may suggest. As an examination of marriage anxieties it’s
pretty memorably horrifying. And
yet… This particular constellation of
gender relations seems pretty archaic, even for Japan. Not that couples like this don’t exist, but the
story’s concerns seem a bit old. And if
you’re going to invoke setsuwa, it might be a good idea to make sure your
writing is as pithy and eloquent as setsuwa tend to be. This isn’t.
There
are three omake stories in the book. The
first, “ ‘Inutachi’ ＜犬たち＞” (“ ‘Dogs’ “), has the unnamed narrator spending
the winter in a cabin belonging to a friend, on a mountain above a
village. The narrator makes friends with
some wild (?) white dogs that visit the cabin regularly, but when she visits
the village she finds that everybody is afraid of dogs – they seem to blame
dogs for local disappearances. Later,
during a blizzard, the narrator saves one of the dogs, which has fallen down
her well. As she does, she seems to hear
the dogs saying, “She’s passed.” In a
few days, when she goes down to the village, she finds it empty, as if
everybody just disappeared. She’s not
upset about this – always antisocial by nature, her childhood wish was for
everybody to just disappear like this one morning. She goes back up to the cabin and goes on
like before. Then she notices that she’s
growing white fur.
The
second, “Tomoko no baumkuchen トモ子のバウムクーヘン” (Tomoko’s baumkuchen), is very
short. The titular housewife has a
breakthrough or breakdown while making baumkuchen for her little kids. In an instant, for no discernible reason, she
flashes onto the essential absurdity of her life – it’s like she’s standing in
a wasteland that used to be a game show, but the host and the audience are all
gone, and the machine just keeps spitting out questions at her. She wanders around her house recognizing
nothing, as if it’s all been replaced by simulacra, or always has been. She snaps out of it by going back to her
baking as if nothing was wrong, but the feeling never quite leaves her. The baumkuchen seems meant to suggest
Tomoko’s own layers – as if this knowledge was always there, this anxiety over
her life, but buried beneath other layers of consciousness. It’s a simple story, but deep and intense.
The
third, “Wara no otto 藁の夫” (Straw husband) also deals with marriage
anxiety. Tomoko (written the same; no
indication if it’s the same character) is married to a man made of straw. No explanation of how such a thing is
possible, but a little description of how it works. No face, but he wears clothes (running gear,
in the story), drives, and talks.
Tomoko’s family and friends warned her against marrying a straw man, but
he was so kind… The story breaks down
into two halves. In the first half
they’re running in the park – he’s coaching her, as she’s just starting
out. It seems idyllic. In the second half, she accidentally maybe
nicks his new BMW, and he throws a tantrum.
As he sulks and scolds her, teeny-tiny musical instruments start
spilling out from inside him, until he’s all empty. Then he apologizes, she stuffs them back into
him, and they go running again – but not before she has fantasized setting fire
to his straw and watching him burn.
As
often happens to me, I found the bonus stories to be a little more satisfying
than the prize story; in this case they
persuaded me to lighten up a bit on Motoya’s choice of theme. The pervasive sense of alienation and anxiety
within interpersonal relationships, mainly marriage, is something she really
does well. As for the surrealist aspects
– I can see what she’s getting at in most cases. I'm not sure I felt that she was getting at
things with surrealism that she couldn’t get at in other ways, or that the
surrealism brought a power that realism couldn’t have brought. I don’t know if I felt it was necessary or
particularly delightful…
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