Customer Reviews

Snakes and Earrings

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Akutagawa Prize named after the prominent short story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke has been awarded to whoever is considered the top new talent in Japanese literature for over the past seventy years. Past recipients include the literary heavyweights Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo and more popular writers such as Murakami Ryu and Yu Miri. In 2003 two young women were awarded the prestigious award: Kanehara Hitomi, born August 8, 1983, and Wataya Risa, born February 1, 1984.

Although both novels have been translated into French, English reading audiences only have Kanehara's work available in English. Hopefully Wataya's work will be soon available in English as well, so we can see why the book caused such a stir.

Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings details the life of nineteen-year-old Nakazawa Lui. A bleach-blonde hostess who desires to have her tongue split like her boyfriend Ama's. After having her tongue pierced by Shiba-san, Lui desires to get a massive tattoo depicting a dragon and a Kirin. Instead of money, Shiba-san wants Lui to sleep with him. Although she has a boyfriend, Lui, entranced by the tattoo, willingly sleeps with Shiba-san who gets his jollies from choking the young woman. He also repeated informs her that he wants to kill her. Her boyfriend has also stated that he desired to be the one who killed her because he could not stand the thought of someone else doing so. Between two bloodthirsty men, Lui spends the rest of her time drinking, increasing the size of the hole in her tongue by inserting lower gauged studs, and working. Things seem to be in a repetitive cycle until the day Ama kills a member of the Yakuza, however, does Lui really care if something happens to Ama, an individual whose real name she does not even know?

Supposedly the main theme of Kanehara's 120-page novella is how well do individuals truly know each other. However, in my opinion, the theme is handled pretty heavy-handedly. Instead of coming out through character interaction, the theme is usually stated by Lui. "I don't know how old he is." I don't know where he works." And it is normally left at that until it is mentioned again. This theme is also common in the later works of Murakami Haruki; however, it is unfair of me to compare the works of a 56-year-old writer to those of a 22-year-old one.

Filled with kinky sex, one wonders if the novel struck more of a chord with readers because a young female author, she was 19-20 when she wrote the book, wrote on such matters than the actual literary merits of the book. However, being that Snakes and Earrings has been the best-selling Akutagawa prize-winning novel since Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue, it has created a few waves. Yet it remains to be seen if the novel and Kanehara have true staying power.

Many of us were taught in English class that the theme of most novels can be understood as either "man against man," "man against nature" or "man against himself." And we are told that by the end of the novel, the main character should experience growth as a result of one of the above struggles. But post-modern realism does not concern itself with the convention of protagonist growth. A good example of such a novel is SNAKES AND EARRINGS, the award-winning first novel by Japanese author Hitomi Kanehara.

People always think that nineteen-year-old Lui Nakazawa, the narrator of SNAKES AND EARRINGS, is an orphan, but her parents are alive and well. There is "no trouble" in her family, she says, but her own destructive actions prove otherwise.

"Barbie-girl" Lui meets the tough-looking Ama in a Tokyo club and is drawn to his forked tongue. He explains the painful and bloody process to her, and she decides she too wants a forked tongue. Soon, Lui and Ama are an item, and she moves in with him. Before long she is also involved with the sadistic tattoo artist Shiba and then witnesses Ama beat a man to death (giving her the man's teeth as a token of his love for her). Lui seems ambivalent toward both Ama and Shiba and ponders such sad thoughts as who she would let kill her if she decided she wanted to die.

However, it is Ama who dies, the victim of horrific torture and rape, and finally Lui shows the emotion that surely has been just under the surface for a long time. But is she mourning for Ama himself or the loss of the idea of him? And if she really loved him, why does she choose to build a relationship with the man who surely killed him?

Kanehara's novel is short, 120 pages in a small hardback format, but it packs a powerful punch. Lui's story is one of disturbing alienation both from herself and those around her. No wonder everyone assumes she is an orphan; she seems rootless and needy. Lui's search for emotional feeling and connection is painful to read about because the closest she is able to come is with physical pain and practically anonymous interactions with people. After Ama goes missing she realizes that she didn't know anything about this man she was living with: she didn't know his real name, where he worked, if he had a family --- she only knew about his body and that he seemed to care for her.

Still, the point may be that Lui has not given up looking for emotional depth in the face of the emptiness she feels and experiences. That is, she is not quite yet a lost cause. But the reader senses that she is close to giving up on herself and the world. Lui does not grow or change over the course of the novel; she merely experiences as she moves from one tragic situation to another.

Kanehara's literary voice is raw and honest. SNAKES AND EARRINGS is a tale full of murder, sadism and body modification. It is a graphic, disturbing and scathing commentary on Japanese youth culture. Yet it is, in its way, enthralling and definitely powerful. It is not a novel for everyone in that it is unconventional and may even seem lurid to some readers. But for adventure readers, it is recommendable, especially as it is the first work from Kanehara, who has a promising career ahead of her.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

I am still in awe. I picked this book up by accident and read it in one day. It's such a raw, sexy, quick read with such interesting characters.

Give it a try

All the other reviews pretty much hit on the theme of this book, but I felt I had to point out the ending, which is probably one of the most cop-out and contradictory endings I've ever seen in a book. The feelings Lui has when she discovers what happened to Ama are described in detail, and then within the space of maybe 2 pages, she has totally changed her mind and the book just ends abruptly. The rest of the book was fascinating and maturely written, the ending seems like it was written in five minutes by a angsty and confused teenage girl, which I guess it was, but a MAJOR disappointment when compared with the rest of the book.

How does a disaffected, suicidal nineteen year old so wholly alienated from the world that she is able to feel only in a sado-masochistic relationship reconcile to the conventional world? How can such a person retreat into what Dickens in _Little Dorritt_ dubs "a life of modest usefulness"? The answer seems to be: by loving her boyfriend's possible murderer, with whom she has betrayed him but who turns out to possess the same basic, caring impulses as she.

Hitomi Kanchara's 25,000 word novella is tightly organized and cleverly turned. I almost believe it. However, questions nag: What does Lui do with the transformed Shiba-san and herself now that she has sloughed off her old self? What values does her recovery imply? Are they a true dramatic answer to the bracing punk ethos that animates the first hundred pages? The atrophied sex life of the heroine and her new consort is symptomatic of a potential anomie as bad as the nihilism of the opening.

Ms. Kanchara sidesteps the confrontation toward which she has been leading, covering up the evasion by paradox. The march to nothing that drives the first hundred pages requires either a further extension toward death or a more filled-in affirmation. Unlike _L'Histoire d'O,_ to which _Snakes and Earrings_ bears superficial resemblance, this story of nihilism goes on a little long (it could end with the discovery of Shiba-san's potential treachery) or not long enough (if the author could imagine the life after the death of Ama.)

Still, it's a diverting fifty minute read.

Hitomi Kanehara's, "Snakes and Earrings," for most people will either be a 'hated it' or 'loved it!' experience.

If raw, explicit sexuality in your leisure reading doesn't make you uncomfortable then this may book may be worth your while - especially when considering that it shouldn't take more than 1 hour for the average reader to finish. Just keep in mind that at times the imagery and description conjured can be shockingly racy.

Also, much has been made of the fact that Ms. Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize (Japan's top literary award) at the ripe age of 20 for this slender work, so some of you may be curious about this work based on that merit alone. For this reason alone I would recommend giving this work a try as long as you don't find the subject matter too objectionable.

This novella deals with the subjects of sadism and the meaning of life, which is as unlikely a pairing as any, but somehow works.

I found the story to be utterly odd, definitely explicit and vulgar for much of the 120 pages, but also containing unexpected beauty on every page.

I don't think it's fair to make completely black and white assumptions about this edgy book, because it gives one plenty to think on.

This is a diverting sizzler, but I did not feel it had anything much to do with social reality in Japan today. The only placename in the book is Shinjuku, and the family background of the protagonists is not even sketched. The isolation of the characters is less a reflection of an alleged underground milieu, than of the fact that they are simply creatures of sexual fantasy, not rounded novelistic characters. After their wild sado-masochistic antics the story has nowhere to go but to a slick trick ending, ungrounded in what precedes, and an equally ungrounded shift into soft sentimental tones as the two survivors in the gruesome threesome seem to foresee some sort of married life together. The author is in the funky tradition of Tanizaki, the postwar nikutai (body) writers, Mishima, the young Oe, etc. Will she develop into a substantial novelist? Hard to say. But let's hope she never loses her crackling tempo.

Amazing.

This book left me flabbergasted, my head feeling like it was just thrown into a toilet bowl, my jaw dropped on my chin, and amazed at everything that just happened. I walked away stunned just as the main character.

I read this book in one day, practically from when I picked it up till the evening. It's everyday vernacular and short sentances/paragraphs/sections make it easy to read, easy to swallow, and easy to pause when you need to look away and take a breath, which you will.

It is a dark perverse story about a 19 year old Japannese barbie girl, her journey into the world of body modification, and follows the torrid affair between her two lovers.

It is gory in the detail, the author does not hide detail. Thank god she doesn't embellish too much either, but it's just enough, and straight forward enough so that there is no confusion as to what is happening. I would reccommend this book to most of my friends, but not to someone who wants a nice soft novel to make their plane ride pass faster. It will rock you, will push your limits of what you are used to, make you question yourself if you were in the situation, and will leave you feeling totally exhuasted at the end of the day.

It is a mind f*ck.
Not for the faint at heart.

I think if you liked books like <u>Geek Love</U>, dark comedies, you will enjoy this book. Though not a comedy (some might laugh), it is definitely on the darker side and hits home to those angsty years we all had in our teens.

The book starts out with the main character, Lui, wanting to get a split tounge. Written from her point-of-view, she goes on to talk about her relationship with her boyfriend Ama, and a tatoo artist named Shiba, and the facination she has with split tounges and tatoos. As the story goes on she becomes more and more depressed with her life and the point of it all. Since she is the one telling the story you can really feel what she is feeling, and it's facinating to see the emotional places she takes you.
Throughout the book she continues to put larger studs in her tounge as to prepare it to be split. This ends up being a sort of reference to where she's at physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I won't ruin the ending but I guarentee it will be a suprise and that you will read it more that once.
Truly an amazing book, I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for something a bit different, and something that will remain with you after finishing it.